Leon Garfield's Shakespeare Stories

by Leon Garfield

  “I am sorry, madam, I have hurt your kinsman,” said another Cesario, stepping forward like a reflection without a glass.

  “One face, one voice, one habit, and two persons!” whispered Orsino, staring from one Cesario to the other.

  “How have you made division of yourself?” wondered Antonio.

  “Most wonderful!” sighed Olivia, when she had determined which was her husband and which was not.

  Then brother and sister embraced one another and wept with joy.

  “Boy,” said the Duke to his page, when at last Sebastian and Viola stood apart, “thou hast said to me a thousand times thou never shouldst love woman like to me.” The sight of so much fondness had swelled his tender heart, and the untangling of so much distress into so much love had made him long to have a part in it. “Give me thy hand,” he said to Viola, “and let me see thee in thy woman’s weeds.” She gave him her hand and he pressed it to his lips. Suddenly he loved her, for he knew that she loved him; and there’s nothing so awakens love as love itself.

  Only Malvolio still languished in darkness. The letter he had written was brought to Olivia, who, when she read it, took pity on the poor man and commanded his immediate release. He came, crumpled and dishevelled, with straw in his hair, for the chamber in which he had been locked was none of the cleanest. Bitterly he accused his mistress of having misled him, and showed her the letter that had set his madness on. She took the paper and studied it. She shook her head: the hand was not hers. “Alas, poor fool, how have they baffled thee!” she said, with a gentle shake of her head when she had divined who had been the authors of Malvolio’s fall.

  The steward glared about him. The general happiness of pairs and pairings warmed him into no better utterance than: “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you!” Then he stalked away.

  But Malvolio’s departure cast no gloom on the company; for his injuries had been to his pride and not to his heart; and so were not fatal.

  Then Viola, who had gained the love of Orsino and hung upon his arm, and Olivia, who had gained the love of Sebastian, and hung upon his arm, and Antonio who had regained his purse and his faith in the gratitude of friends, and all at a single stroke, strolled away in a golden pattern of plaited arms and inclining heads.

  Feste alone remained behind. He gazed after the happy ones, and, seating himself cross-legged on the ground, sang one of his sweet sad songs:

  “When that I was and a little tiny boy,

  With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,

  A foolish thing was but a toy,

  For the rain it raineth every day.”

  Though he was my lady’s Fool, he was the wisest of all. He was paid to play the Fool; the rest of the world did it for nothing.

  King Lear

  Long, long ago, before even there were churches, there ruled a king of Britain whose name was Lear. He had three daughters; and when he grew old and longed to have done with the burden of governing and enjoy only the pleasures of being a king, he resolved to divide his kingdom between his beloved children, and keep only the crown for himself. Accordingly, he summoned them to his palace, and there, in the solemn council chamber, before all the dukes and lords and knights who could be crammed inside, he asked his daughters how much they loved him; for so much should they receive.

  The eldest born spoke first: Goneril, Duchess of Albany, a great lady whose marble beauty melted into fondness as she told the world how much she loved her father. She loved him better than anything in the wide universe.

  “Dearer,” she declared, “than eyesight, space or liberty!” Then, with a rush and a rustle of wide skirts, she mounted the steps to the throne as a dark cloud ascending, and kissed her father’s hand.

  The old King, in his stiff robes like Time preserved in gold, gazed down at his kissed hand. What father owned a child as dear as Goneril! Proudly he stared across the crowding coronets that dipped and bobbed admiringly, a sudden breeze rippling a sunlit sea. Smiles stretched every face . . . except for one! The Earl of Kent was frowning; and his plain face, in that tapestry of smiles, made an ugly rent.

  Next to speak was Regan, Duchess of Cornwall, second in birth but by no means second in beauty. Her cheeks were stained with roses and her marvellous gown was feverish with pearls. How much did she love the King, her father?

  “I am made of that self metal as my sister,” she cried. “I find she names my very deed of love; only she comes too short . . .” Then she too mounted to the throne and kissed her father, not on the hand but on his withered cheek.

  King Lear nodded, and touched the quickly given kiss as if it might fly away; and the web of wrinkles round his eyes glimmered as if with dew. What father owned a child as precious as Regan! Again the golden tide of coronets rippled with admiration; and again the Earl of Kent looked sour. Then at last that plain blunt man smiled. It was the turn of Cordelia, the youngest born, to speak.

  In plain white gown, with no gold but her hair, and no jewels but her eyes, she stood before her father as her sisters had done, to offer him love in exchange for a third of the kingdom. Her face was grave and steady; and she said nothing.

  “What can you say to draw a third more opulent than your sisters?” urged the King fondly, for Cordelia was dearest to his heart; and what father ever owned a child as true as Cordelia! “Speak.”

  “Nothing, my lord,” she said.

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing.”

  They stared at one another, he, bewildered into anger, and she, steadily, but with a thundering heart. She knew the world was watching her, and she felt her sisters’ sharply inquiring eyes. She knew what was expected of her, but she would not, could not, submit. She loved her father as a daughter should, truly and with clear eyes. She could not swear, as her sisters had done, that she adored him as a god.

  King Lear stood up, and the golden tide before him whispered and shrank back. Stretched smiles withered; the elder sisters slid their looks sideways; the youngest stared straight ahead. The King put his hand to his brow. There was a place that burned and burned, as if it would scorch his brain. It was the place that Cordelia might have kissed. He saw uneasy courtiers, with frightened faces, cowering back like cattle before a threatened storm.

  But there was one who stood firm, as if he cared nothing for the King’s wrath: the Earl of Kent. Yet his face, too, showed fear; but it was the fear that, if the storm broke, it would destroy father, child, King and kingdom alike. When private men act in anger, only private places tremble; but with kings, the whole world is shaken into pieces.

  The King’s eyes blazed, and his voice was thunderous. The storm had broken and the kingdom rocked with its violence. The Earl of Kent was swept aside, flung from the kingdom by instant banishment, for daring to step between the King and the object of his rage. Cordelia herself, not knowing whether she was waking or dreaming, swayed before the thunderbolts that were hurled at her from the throne. Her inheritance, her dowry, and even her father’s love were stripped from her, leaving her trembling and naked of all that should belong to the daughter of a king. Then she was cast away. Two men had courted her: the Duke of Burgundy and the King of France. Contemptuously she was offered to them, with the nothing she had offered her father. Burgundy shrugged his shoulders and turned away; but France saw differently. He took her gladly, for, to him, her true heart and her honest soul were dowry enough.

  Breathing deeply, the King turned to Goneril and Regan, the daughters who had been dutiful, and divided Cordelia’s inheritance between them. It was done. He had given up his power. He kept nothing back, but the crown itself and a following of a mere hundred knights. He relinquished even his palace; for with two such loving children, what need had a father of another house? Henceforward and till the end of his life, he would divide his time equally between the two he had so liberally endowed.

  “Love well our father,” said Cordelia, as she parted from her sisters.

  “Prescribe not us our duty,” came the cold reply.r />
  Lately there had been eclipses of the sun and moon. A great darkness had fallen over the land, and beggars and wandering madmen had crept fearfully under bushes and into holes in the ground. Then had followed ruin and disorder everywhere, even in the royal palace, where the maddened King had banished Kent and cast off the good Cordelia. Surely the world was coming to an end! King against subject, father against child . . . and now, child against father! The Earl of Gloucester, another aged father in that motherless kingdom of Lear, on returning to his castle, learned that Edgar, his elder son, was plotting to kill him. Edmund, the younger, had told him, had even shown him a letter, written in Edgar’s hand, in which the foul plot was as clear as day—if ever day was as dark as such a deed!

  “O villain, villain!” groaned the Earl wringing his hands in dismay. “Unnatural, detested, brutish villain!”

  Then Edmund, clever, handsome Edmund, laid a comforting hand upon his father’s sleeve, and went in search of Edgar, to warn him, brother to brother, that their father, for some unknown cause, was in a violent passion with him, that Edgar’s very life was in danger, and that, until Edmund could bring the Earl to reason, it would be best if Edgar fled.

  Edgar, as noble and as foolishly honest in his way as Cordelia had been in hers, trusted his brother and believed his every word. Horribly bewildered and distressed, he ran from his father’s house like a thief.

  Edmund smiled as he watched him go. He despised and envied his brother, who was legitimate and so would inherit everything. He himself was merely the offspring of his father’s casual lust, and would get nothing unless he shifted for himself. “Let me,” he murmured softly, “if not by birth, have lands by wit.” He himself had written the letter and invented the plot.

  King Lear rode through the night. High upon a huge dark horse, the ancient King, cloaked and hooded in furs and heavy velvet, galloped across heath and common, through startled village and frightened hamlet, with his hundred knights streaming after, and a queer little patched figure, with face as white as paint, clinging to his back like a tattered hump. It was his Fool, his beloved Fool, who mocked at his madness, jeered at his folly, and yet was a thousand times more dear to him than any child. Goneril hated him; but her hatred was as a candle beside the furnace of hatred that raged within Lear against his eldest born.

  She had scorned him! She had diminished him! She had told her servants to be insolent with him! She had commanded him to halve the number of his followers! He was no more than a tedious, noisy old man, and she had driven him out with her contempt. In scarce two weeks the great love she had professed, while she stood before the throne, had dwindled into such cold ash! He had cursed her; for did ever a father own a child as vile as Goneril!

  But there was always Regan, beloved Regan, who had sworn that her love for him had ever been greater than Goneril’s. So it was to Regan that he was galloping so fiercely—not to her palace, for she and the Duke of Cornwall had gone from there and were now with the Earl of Gloucester. This was strange, for he had sent a messenger to warn her of his coming; and still she had gone. He found excuses for her, as a father would, good excuses . . . but why had his messenger, who had gone after her, not been sent back?

  The Earl of Gloucester’s castle reared up against the grim sky like a black thought in a dark mind. Outside the heavy, bolted doors, sat a man, patient and quiet, with his legs imprisoned in a stout wooden gaol. He had been there all day. He was the King’s messenger, and he had been set, as if he were a common vagabond, in the stocks.

  The Duke and Duchess of Cornwall had ordered it, even though the Earl of Gloucester had protested that it was an insult to the King to treat his messenger with such disrespect. But the fellow had been brawling. He had soundly thrashed one Oswald, steward to the Duchess of Albany, who had come with a message from sister to sister. It would have been an insult to Goneril, who valued Oswald even above her husband, the mild-mannered Duke, if her servant’s attacker was not severely punished. So the King’s messenger had been put in the stocks; and there he sat, with nothing but philosophy for comfort and company.

  He was a roughly dressed, roughly bearded, roughly spoken fellow who was new to the King’s service; yet when he had seen how Goneril had treated her father, he had been as indignant as if he had served and loved the old King for all his life. He sighed and smiled ruefully. He had indeed served and loved King Lear for all his life; but, in humble clothes and with bristled cheeks, the King had never known him. He was a good man whose rough disguise showed up, rather than hid, his blunt nature. He was the banished Earl of Kent who had come back to watch over his beloved master.

  He had sent letters to Cordelia in France, telling how matters stood in the kingdom, how the land was in worse disorder than ever, how the Dukes of Albany and Cornwall were at odds with one another; and that her father suffered. It gave Kent no pleasure to see how his warning had come true. His only comfort, as he sat with aching legs and aching heart, was news he had had that a French army had landed at Dover with Cordelia in its midst. He shifted in his confinement and whistled to keep up his spirits. Soon, now, King Lear’s distress would be relieved.

  The Earl of Gloucester had also learned of the French landing, and had guiltily hidden away the letter for fear of the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall’s seeing it. The old Earl’s life seemed in as ruinous a state as the kingdom itself. Edgar, his eldest son, had been proved treacherous beyond all doubt, had fled, and was being hunted down. The King’s messenger was in the stocks outside his own doors; and the Earl seemed no longer to be master in his own house. Wherever he looked, he saw the Duke’s armed servants; wherever he wandered, he was confronted by the sharp Duke and the sharper Duchess, till he felt like an intruder everywhere. They seemed even to have supplanted him in the affections of his last consolation, Edmund his faithful son. Edmund was a good deal more with the Duke and Duchess than with his father, the Earl.

  Then, like a storm on horseback, came the King! With his wild white hair and his wild white beard flying round his flushed face, like the sun in winter, he demanded to speak with the Duke of Cornwall and his wife, who had dared to put his man in the stocks! Wretchedly, the Earl carried the King’s command to his mighty guests; and still more wretchedly came back with their cool answer. The King stared at him in amazement.

  “Deny to speak with me! They are sick! They are weary! They have travelled all the night!” he shouted. “Fetch me a better answer!”

  “My dear Lord,” ventured Gloucester, caught between the anger of his old master and the fierceness of his new, “you know the fiery quality of the Duke.”

  “Vengeance! Plague! Death! Confusion!” roared the King. “Fiery! What quality?” and sent Gloucester back once more, to fetch the Duke and Duchess.

  At last they came, and the King’s man was set at liberty; but the King scarcely noticed his going. His daughter had come to him, his beloved Regan; and what father owned a child as precious as Regan? His heart overflowed with love for her, and eagerly, he began to pour out, in tumbling words, like a hurt child to a fond mother, the cruelty he had suffered at the hands of her sister.

  She stopped him. “I cannot think,” she said coldly, “my sister in the least would fail her obligation.”

  The King faltered, swayed a little, as if the wind had caught him; and stared. Had he heard aright? And was this Regan, his warm, fond Regan, standing before him, this stony Duchess with her granite Duke? No, it could not be Regan; nor was it Regan’s voice that was now so cruelly telling him that he was old and near to death, and that he was no longer fit to be master even over himself; that Goneril had been right to check and shrink him, and that he should go back and, on his knees, beg her forgiveness! It could not be Regan, and therefore he would not curse as he had cursed Goneril. It was some monster in Regan’s shape, for this daughter would never have forgotten the love she’d sworn nor the gratitude she owed. She was not like Goneril.

  “O Heavens, if you do love old men,” he cried out, wit
h a sudden rush of anguish, “send down and take my part!”

  Goneril had come. With brilliant eyes and wind-red cheeks from travelling, she had rustled to her sister’s side, and now they stood together against the old, old man. Then, while the Earl of Gloucester trembled, and the Fool turned his frightened acorn face from side to side, the two daughters, with cold, indifferent looks, and words of colder reason, crushed their father’s heart and blasted his brain.

  Despairingly, he rushed from one to another. He would stay with Regan, he and his hundred knights! No. Regan shook her head. Five and twenty was the utmost she would allow. Then he would stay with Goneril! Goneril had allowed him fifty, and that was twice Regan’s love! No. Goneril shook her head. He had no need of five and twenty, or even ten, or five. Then Regan smiled. “What need one?” she said.

  The world grew dark. Black clouds rolled and piled up in the sky, and faint lightnings began to throw up strange configurations, like monstrous, glaring faces, and huge clenched fists.

  The old King was mad. He was shouting and raving and cursing his children.

  “Unnatural hags, I will have such revenges on you both that all the world shall—” He clutched his head as if his brains would fly out. “I will do such things, what they are, yet I know not, but they shall be the terrors of the earth!” Suddenly he turned to his thin Fool, who was all that remained to him of his old royalty. “O Fool!” he wept, “I shall go mad!” Then, together, King and Fool rushed away into the coming storm.

  Unmoved, his daughters watched him go.

  “ ’Tis his own blame,” said one.

  “I’ll receive him gladly,” said the other, “but not one follower.”