King Lear

by Shakespeare, William

  (Regan credits her with what, if we prefer our Shakespeare modernized, we might literally translate into “giving the glad eye.”) But this silent business of the earlier scene is important and must be duly marked if the arrival of the two together and Edmund’s turning back to avoid meeting Albany, the “mild husband,” is to have its full effect. For the first and last of their spoken love-making, excellently characteristic as it is, consists of Goneril’sOur wishes on the way

  May prove effects....

  This trusty servant

  Shall pass between us: ere long you are like to hear,

  If you dare venture in your own behalf,

  A mistress’s command. Wear this; spare speech;

  Decline your head: this kiss, if it durst speak,

  Would stretch thy spirits up into the air.

  Conceive, and fare thee well. (4.2.14-24)

  and Edmund’s (“Spare speech,” indeed!)

  Yours in the ranks of death! (25)

  —all spoken in Oswald’s presence too. It is, of course, not only excellent but sufficient. The regal impudency of the woman, the falsely chivalrous flourish of the man’s response—pages of dialogue might not tell us more of their relations; and, of these relations, is there much more that is dramatically worth knowing? The point for the producer is that no jot of such a constricted dramatic opportunity must be missed.

  For the whole working-out of this lower issue of the play the same warning stands true; an exact and unblurred value must be given to each significant thing. The interaction of circumstance and character is close-knit and complex, but it is clear. Keep it clear and it can be made effective to any audience that will listen, and is not distracted from listening. Let us underline this last phrase and now make the warning twofold. In working out a theme so full of incident and of contending characters Shakespeare allows for no distraction of attention at all, certainly not for the breaking of continuity which the constant shifting of realistically localized scenery must involve. The action, moreover, of these later scenes is exceptionally dependent upon to-ings and fro-ings. Given continuity of performance and no more insistence upon whereabouts than the action itself will indicate, the impression produced by the constant busy movement into our sight and out again of purposeful, passionate or distracted figures, is in itself of great dramatic value, and most congruous to the plot and counterplot of the play’s ending. The order for Lear’s and Cordelia’s murder, the quarrel over Edmund’s precedence, Albany’s sudden self-assertion, Regan’s sickness, Edgar’s appearance, the fight, his discovery of himself, Goneril’s discomfiture, the telling of Kent’s secret, Regan’s and Goneril’s death, the alarm to save Lear and Cordelia—Shakespeare, by the Folio text, gets all this into less than two hundred lines, with a fair amount of rhetoric and incidental narrative besides. He needs no more, though bareness does nearly turn to banality sometimes. But unless we can be held in an unrelaxed grip we may not submit to the spell.

  He has kept a technical master stroke for his ending:

  Enter Lear with Cordelia in his arms.

  There should be a long, still pause, while Lear passes slowly in with his burden, while they all stand respectful as of old to his majesty. We may have wondered a little that Shakespeare should be content to let Cordelia pass from the play as casually as she seems to in the earlier scene. But this is the last of her, not that. Dumb and dead, she that was never apt of speech—what fitter finish for her could there be? What fitter ending to the history of the two of them, which began for us with Lear on his throne, conscious of all eyes on him, while she shamed and angered him by her silence? The same company are here, or all but the same, and they await his pleasure. Even Regan and Goneril are here to pay him a ghastly homage. But he knows none of them—save for a blurred moment Kent whom he banished—none but Cordelia. And again he reproaches her silence; for Her voice was ever soft,

  Gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman. (5.3.274-75)

  Then his heart breaks....

  THE CHARACTERS AND THEIR INTERPLAY LEAR

  But it is upon Lear’s own progress that all now centers, upon his passing from that royal defiance of the storm to the welcomed shelter of the hovel. He passes by the road of patience:No, I will be the pattern of all patience;

  I will say nothing, (3.2.37-38)

  of—be it noted—a thankfulness that he is at last simplya man

  More sinn’d against than sinning ... (59-60)

  to the humility ofMy wits begin to turn.

  Come on, my boy. How dost, my boy? Art cold?

  I am cold myself. Where is this straw, my fellow?

  The art of our necessities is strange

  That can make vile things precious. Come, your

  hovel... (67-71)

  and, a little later yet, mind and body still further strained towards breaking point, to the gentle dignity, when Kent would make way for him—to the more than kingly dignity ofPrithee, go in thyself: seek thine own ease.

  This tempest will not give me leave to ponder

  On things would hurt me more. But I’ll go in:

  In, boy; go first. (3.4.22-25)

  Now comes the crowning touch of all:I’ll pray, and then I’ll sleep. (27)

  In the night’s bleak exposure he kneels down, like a child at bedtime, to pray.Poor naked wretches, wheresoe‘er you are,

  That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,

  How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,

  Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you

  From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en

  Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;

  Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,

  That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,

  And show the heavens more just. (28-36)

  To this heaven of the spirit has he come, the Lear of unbridled power and pride. And how many dramatists, could they have achieved so much, would have been content to leave him here! Those who like their drama rounded and trim might approve of such a finish, which would leave us a play more compassable in performance no doubt. But the wind of a harsher doctrine is blowing through Shakespeare. Criticism, as we have seen, is apt to fix upon the episode of the storm as the height of his attempt and the point of his dramatic defeat; but it is this storm of the mind here beginning upon which he expends skill and imagination most recklessly till inspiration has had its will of him; and the drama of desperate vision ensuing it is hard indeed for actors to reduce to the positive medium of their art—without reducing it to ridicule. The three coming scenes of Lear’s madness show us Shakespeare’s art at its boldest. They pass beyond the needs of the plot, they belong to a larger synthesis. Yet the means they employ are simple enough; of a kind of absolute simplicity, indeed.

  The boldest and simplest is the provision of Poor Tom, that living instance of all rejection. Here, under our eyes, is Lear’s new vision of himself.What! have his daughters brought him to this pass? Could‘st thou save nothing? Did’st thou give them all? (63-64)

  Side by side stand the noble old man, and the naked, scarce human wretch.

  Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou ow‘st the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Ha! here’s three on’s are sophisticated. Thou art the thing itself; unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. Off, off, you lendings! Come, unbutton here.

  (105-111)

  Here is a volume of argument epitomized as only drama can epitomize it, flashed on us by word and action combined. And into this, one might add, has Shakespeare meta- morphosed the didactics of those old Moralities which were the infancy of his art.What, hath your grace no better company? (145)

  gasps poor Gloucester, bewailing at once the King’s wrongs and his own, as he offers shelter from the storm. But Lear, calmness itself now, will only pace up and down, arm in arm with this refuse of humanity:—nor will he seek shelter without him. So they reach
the outhouse, all of his own castle that Gloucester dare offer. What a group! Kent, sturdy and thrifty of words; Gloucester, tremulous; the bedraggled and exhausted Fool; and Lear, magnificently courteous and deliberate, keeping close company with his gibbering fellow-man.

  They are in shelter. Lear is silent; till the Fool—himself never overfitted, we may suppose, in body or mind for the rough and tumble of the world—rallies, as if to celebrate their safety, to a semblance of his old task. Edgar, for his own safety’s sake, must play Poor Tom to the life now. Kent has his eyes on his master, watching him—at what new fantastic trick? The old king is setting two joint-stools side by side; they are Regan and Goneril, and the Fool and the beggar are to pass judgment upon them.

  The lunatic mummery of the trial comes near to something we might call pure drama—as one speaks of pure mathematics or pure music—since it cannot be rendered into other terms than its own. Its effect depends upon the combination of the sound and meaning of the words and the sight of it being brought to bear as a whole directly upon our sensibility. The sound of the dialogue matters almost more than its meaning. Poor Tom and the Fool chant antiphonally; Kent’s deep and kindly tones tell against the higher, agonized, weakening voice of Lear. But the chief significance is in the show. Where Lear, such a short while since, sat in his majesty, there sit the Fool and the outcast, with Kent whom he banished beside them; and he, witless, musters his failing strength to beg justice upon a joint-stool. Was better justice done, the picture ironically asks, when he presided in majesty and sanity and power?

  But what, as far as Lear is concerned, is to follow? You cannot continue the development of a character in terms of lunacy—in darkness, illuminated by whatever brilliant flashes of lightning. Nor can a madman well dominate a play’s action. From this moment Lear no longer is a motive force; and the needs of the story—the absolute needs of the character—would be fulfilled if, from this exhausted sleep upon the poor bed in the outhouse, he only woke to find Cordelia at his side. But Shakespeare contrives another scene of madness for him, and one which lifts the play’s argument to a yet rarer height. It is delayed; and the sense of redundancy is avoided partly by keeping Lear from the stage altogether for a while, a short scene interposed sufficiently reminding us of him.

  His reappearance is preluded—with what consonance! —by the fantastically imaginative episode of Gloucester’s fall from the cliff. There also is Edgar, the aura of Poor Tom about him still. Suddenly Lear breaks in upon them. The larger dramatic value of the ensuing scene can hardly be overrated. For in it, in this encounter between mad Lear and blind Gloucester, the sensual man robbed of his eyes, and the despot, the light of his mind put out, Shakespeare’s sublimation of the two old stories is consummated. No moral is preached to us. It is presented as it was when king and beggar fraternized in the storm and beggar and Fool were set on the bench of justice, and we are primarily to feel the significance. Yet this does not lack interpretation; less explicit than when Lear, still sane, could read the lesson of the storm, clearer than was the commentary on the mock trial. It is Edgar here that sets us an example of sympathetic listening. His asides enforce it, and the last one:O! matter and impertinency mixed,

  Reason in madness! (4.6.176-77)

  will reproach us if we have not understood. The train of fancies fired by the first sight of Gloucester, with its tragically comicHa! Goneril with a white beard! (97)

  (Goneril, disguised, pursuing him still!) asks little gloss.They flattered me like a dog.... To say ‘Ay’ and ’No’ to everything I said! ... When the rain came to wet me once and the wind to make me chatter; when the thunder would not peace at my bidding; there I found ‘em, there I smelt ’em out Go to, they are not men o’ their words: they told me I was everything; ‘tis a lie, I am not agueproof.

  (97-107)

  Gloucester’s dutifulIs’t not the king? (109)

  begins to transform him in those mad eyes. And madness sees a Gloucester there that sanity had known and ignored.

  I pardon that man’s life. What was thy cause?

  Adultery?

  Thou shalt not die: die for adultery! No:

  The wren goes to‘t, and the small gilded fly

  Does lecher in my sight.

  Let copulation thrive; for Gloucester’s bastard son

  Was kinder to his father than my daughters

  Got ’tween the lawful sheets. (111-18)

  Gloucester knows better; but how protest so to the mere erratic voice? Besides which there is only the kindly stranger-peasant near. A slight unconscious turn of the sightless eyes toward him, a simple gesture—unseen—in response from Edgar, patiently biding his time, will illuminate the irony and the pathos.

  Does the mad mind pass logically from this to some uncanny prevision of the ripening of new evil in Regan and Goneril? Had it in its sanity secretly surmised what lay beneath the moral surface of their lives, so ready to emerge?

  Behold yon simp‘ring dame,

  Whose face between her forks presages snow,

  That minces virtue and does shake the head

  To hear of pleasure’s name.

  The fitchew, nor the soilèd horse, goes to’t

  With a more riotous appetite. (120-25)

  But a man—so lunatic logic runs—must free himself from the tyrannies of the flesh if he is to see the world clearly:Give me an ounce of civet; good apothecary, sweeten my imagination. (132-33)

  And then a blind man may see the truth of it, so he tells the ruined Gloucester:Look with thine ears: see how yond justice rails upon yond simple thief. Hark, in thine ear change places, and, handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? Thou hast seen a farmer’s dog bark at a beggar? ... And the creature run from the cur? There thou might‘st behold the great image of authority: a dog’s obeyed in office. (153-57, 159-61)

  It is the picture of the mock trial given words. But with a difference! There is no cry now for vengeance on the wicked. For what are we that we should smite them?

  Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand!

  Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thine own back;

  That hotly lusts to use her in that kind

  For which thou whip‘st her. The usurer hangs the

  cozener.

  Through tattered clothes small vices do appear;

  Robes and furred gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold,

  And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks;

  Arm it in rags, a pigmy’s straw doth pierce it. (162-69)

  Shakespeare has led Lear to compassion for sin as well as suffering, has led him mad to where he could not hope to lead him sane—to where sound common sense will hardly let us follow him:None does offend, none, I say, none. (170)

  To a deep compassion for mankind itself.

  I know thee well enough; thy name is Gloucester:

  Thou must be patient; we came crying hither:

  Thou know‘st, the first time that we smell the air

  We wawl and cry. I will preach to thee: mark....

  When we are born, we cry that we are come

  To this great stage of fools. (179-82, 184-85)

  This afterpart of Lear’s madness may be redundant, then, to the strict action of the play, but to its larger issues it is most germane. It is perhaps no part of the play that Shakespeare set out to write. The play that he found himself writing would be how much the poorer without it!

  The simple perfection of the scene that restores Lear to Cordelia one can leave unsullied by comment. What need of any? Let the producer only note that there is reason in the Folio’s stage direction:

  Enter Lear in a chair carried by servants.

  For when he comes to himself it is to find that he is royally attired and as if seated on his throne again. It is from this throne that he totters to kneel at Cordelia’s feet. Note, too, the pain of his response to Kent’s In your own kingdom, sir.

  Do not abuse me. (4.7.76-77)

  Finally, Lear must pass from the scen
e with all the ceremony due to royalty; not mothered—please!—by Cordelia.

  Cordelia found again and again lost, what is left for Lear but to die? But for her loss, however, his own death might seem to us an arbitrary stroke; since the old Lear, we may say, is already dead. Shakespeare, moreover, has transported him beyond all worldly issues. This is, perhaps, why the action of the battle which will seemingly defeat his fortunes is minimized. What does defeat matter to him—or even victory? It is certainly the key to the meaning of the scene which follows. Cordelia, who would “out- frown false fortune’s frown,” is ready to face her sisters and to shame them—were there a chance of it!—with the sight of her father’s wrongs. But Lear himself has no interest in anything of the sort.No, no, no, no! Come, let’s away to prison:

  We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage:

  When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down,

  And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live,

  And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh

  At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues

  Talk of court news. (5.3.8-14)

  He has passed beyond care for revenge or success, beyond even the questioning of rights and wrongs. Better indeed to be oppressed, if so you can be safe from contention. Prison will bring him freedom.

  Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia,

  The gods themselves throw incense. Have I caught

  thee?

  He that parts us shall bring a brand from heaven,