The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  “Break, heart, I prithee break!”

  Citing the O-groans added to the Folio version of Hamlet, Leggatt argues that Hamlet, “like Lear, will[s] his own death,” doing literally what Ophelia earlier imagined him doing:

  He rais’d a sigh so piteous and profound [Ophelia says]

  As it did seem to shatter all his bulk

  And end his being.

  Life-shattering sighs: Lear’s death in the Quarto, Leggatt suggests, is similarly “not something that happens to him but something he does.” Suicide by sighs.

  Not so in the Folio version of Lear, Leggatt maintains. In the Folio, he says, Lear is not focused on himself and ending his being through suicidal sighs; instead “Lear’s focus on Cordelia is much stronger and his own will and self-consciousness are more suppressed. He does not control his death and does not even seem aware that it is coming, so little does he care about himself …” In other words the Folio’s “Look her lips,/Look there …” is about her heart. The Quarto’s “Break, heart,” is about his.

  It’s an interesting contrast, but is it the only contrast, is it the most important contrast between the two endings? I’m not sure, but Leggatt has a schematic notion, into which he wants to fit this contrast between Lear’s last words in the Quarto and his last words in the Folio.

  To oversimplify somewhat, Leggatt sees a correlation, a thematic coherence in the Folio revisions, the ones leading up to Lear’s last words. He sees these Folio alterations, the ones he regards as “considered second thoughts,” giving us a Lear in the Folio who is more in control up till the end: “The Lear of Q is more a creature of impulse, less reflective and less in control [than the Folio Lear]. This means that in each case the death scene reverses the main pattern: in Q an unreflective Lear comes to clarity and asserts control over his own death; in F a commanding, thinking, assertive Lear surrenders himself in his total focus on Cordelia, and his language moves beyond meaning into an inarticulate sound [the dying fall of “Look there, look there …” fading into silence]. Each Lear is reversed at the point of death.”

  Well, there’s no doubt he’s presented us with a neat pattern, or imagined one, at the very least. It’s a noble attempt to give classic Newtonian symmetry to something that may have more in common with the positional uncertainty, the both/and resonating ambiguity of post-Newtonian theory.

  One flaw is that—even if you accept his binary assumptions about the two versions of the play before the final words—that does not mean that there are only two possible ways the final words can spin what has come before. Or that there are only two ways to characterize the Lear of the last words: controlled or out of control.

  This reduces the dazzling array of ambiguities each ending offers, and the array of relationships between the two endings available, some of which are more interesting and less symmetrical than Leggatt’s control versus out-of-control and subsequent last words “reversal” schematics. It makes everything too simple, too pat. It replaces the often unbearable pleasures of undecidability with the comforts of certainty.

  Having suggested Leggatt may have been too schematic in “How Lear Dies” I don’t want to rule out all conjectures about the implications of Lear’s last words and the way they change from Quarto to Folio. Especially since I have a conjecture of my own.

  “SMILING EXTREMITY OUT OF ACT,” OR WHAT DOES

  PERICLES TELL US ABOUT THE ENDING OF LEAR?

  My conjecture grows out of a feeling that if Shakespeare wanted to “rewrite,” in the sense of reconceive, the ending of Lear he could have done it less ambiguously. Because there is a sense in which he did “rewrite” the ending of Lear in what seems to be a remarkably explicit and unambiguous way at the climax of what is regarded as the earliest of the Late Romances, Pericles.

  Could a comparison between the father-daughter recognition scene in Lear, one of the last of the tragedies, and the one in Pericles, probably the first of the Late Romances, suggest something about the way Shakespeare revised or rewrote? Could it dramatize the way Shakespeare’s vision of the world changed in the interval between the last tragedies and the first romances? The way in which the Late Romances are, in great and small ways, his way of re-writing the tragedies in a redemptive key?

  It was something I first considered when the New York Shakespeare Festival asked me to write the program essay for Brian Kulick’s production of Pericles at the Joseph Papp Public Theater. In rereading Pericles I was transfixed by the reunion scene and its echoes of Lear. The whole play has echoes of Lear in a new key.

  Pericles was written—or cowritten (Brian Vickers, in the latest, most persuasive version of this argument, makes the case that one George Wilkins, author of a prose Pericles saga, wrote most of the first two acts)—not long after Lear.

  Lear is said to have been performed as early as 1605 or 1606, and Pericles is now thought to have been written in 1607 or 1608. And yet there is a world of difference between the plays of the late tragic period, including Lear, Macbeth, Coriolanus and Timon of Athens, and the world of the Late Romances, the sequence of plays beginning with Pericles and continuing with The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline and The Tempest.

  In some ways the wandering prince, Pericles, is Shakespeare’s Odysseus, and like The Odyssey the play is about the struggle for return and reunion. The plot sends Pericles reeling around the Mediterranean, from one disturbing, but largely disconnected, episode to another. By the fifth act his wife Thaisa has apparently died in a storm at sea; he believes his daughter Marina dead too. In his grief, Pericles has become, in a way akin to Lear, Shakespeare’s Job.

  When his ship reaches its final harbor Pericles is disintegrating, his berth virtually a floating bier. There is little to distinguish Pericles from the dying Lear. And little to distinguish his daughter, Marina, from Lear’s daughter, Cordelia. Unbeknownst to Pericles Marina has survived the tempest at sea and grown into an iconic figure of mercy like Cordelia. Loving and forgiving, Marina is a spiritually redemptive figure (forced to take shelter in a brothel, her radiant innocence somehow transforms its customers into humane protectors).

  Circumstances have at last brought Marina to her father’s side, just as it seems he is about to die of melancholy or commit suicide by sighs.

  The shipboard reunion scene that follows, tentative, skeptical, then tender and overwhelming, is to my mind one of the most powerful and beautiful in all Shakespeare. It is almost as if it were set down amidst the somewhat chaotic plot of Pericles from another play. Almost as if its heightened language were lifted intact from Lear. Indeed from another sphere, another spiritual dimension than we’ve seen before in Pericles. In fact the scene reaches a climax when Pericles, finally convinced that Marina—the daughter he thought dead—has been restored almost miraculously to him, actually hears what he describes as “the music of the spheres.”

  I think the Pericles reunion scene, some 150 lines, has suffered from being set late in a play that is rarely produced or read because of its irregularities, its uneven quality and the belief by many scholars that the first two acts were not even written by Shakespeare. And so a scene that might otherwise achieve the recognition of some of the celebrated scenes in Lear or Romeo and Juliet is hardly known, rarely referred to, a rare exception being the T. S. Eliot poem “Marina.”

  But the reunion scene in Pericles comes in the last act, one almost universally credited to Shakespeare, and in addition to its lovely emotional intensity, the scene is rife with explicit echoes and redemptive rewrites (one might say) of lines, of scenes, in the last two acts of Lear.

  There is that moment in act 4 of Lear in which the King, exhausted by madness, has fallen into a deep sleep and awakens to find he is in the kind custody of his daughter, who has returned to England at the head of an army to rescue him and reunite his divided kingdom.

  “Pray do not mock me,” Lear pleads, heartbreakingly, when he sees his daughter, but can’t believe his eyes.

  I am a very foolish fond old man …


  I fear I am not in my perfect mind.

  Methinks I should know you …

  Yet I am doubtful …

  Do not laugh at me,

  For (as I am a man) I think this lady

  To be my child Cordelia.

  It may be the most deeply moving moment in Lear. It’s hesitant, this recognition, questioning, then tentatively joyful. It is followed by Lear’s abject apology to Cordelia:

  LEAR: I know you do not love me, for your sisters

  Have (as I do remember) done me wrong:

  You have some cause, they have not.

  CORDELIA: No cause, no cause.

  Those words: “No cause, no cause.” I am not the first to say they may represent the most sublime compression of compassion, grace and forgiveness in all Shakespeare. (Is there another instance in literature where four words carry such weight, such release?)

  It’s a fusion of lovingness and forgiveness that makes the imminent denouement at the close of the final act—Cordelia’s death in Lear’s arms—all the more shattering.

  Lear’s hesitancy in believing his good fortune in awakening to his daughter’s loving gaze is mirrored and mocked by the cruel fortune of imagining, in his dying words (in the Folio), that his daughter is once again alive to gaze at him.

  Now consider the echoes in Pericles of those two linked scenes from Lear.

  “Methinks I should know you,” an awakening Lear says to his daughter Cordelia.

  “… thou lookest/Like one I loved indeed,” says an awakened Pericles to his daughter Marina.

  And then the language of Pericles seems to point to the final act of Lear:

  “Yet thou dost look,” Pericles says to Marina, “Like Patience gazing on kings’ graves, and smiling/Extremity out of act.”

  “Kings’ graves”: the bitter ends of tragedy.

  Smiling extremity out of act: a remarkably resonant locution. “Smiling extremity out of act” even suggests a theatrical connotation: the extremity of a play is its last act, the act that determines whether it will feel tragic or redemptive.

  “Smiling extremity out of act”: that is how Shakespeare’s Late Romances in effect “revise” the tragedies that precede them—they smile the terminal extremity out of the last act. Smile the extremity into some miraculous act of redemption and promise.

  And indeed, the echoes in Pericles’ father-daughter reunion almost explicitly reflect Lear’s last moments holding the dying or dead body of Cordelia—the extremity that can’t be smiled out of Lear’s last act.

  After Marina tells Pericles her name and that she was a daughter of a king, he wonders if she’s a living being—“… are you flesh and blood?/Have you a working pulse …”—with the same apprehension with which Lear holds a feather to Cordelia’s lips to see if she has breath (in both the Quarto and the Folio). One searches for breath, the other for a pulse, evanescent signs of life.

  Lear is asking if Cordelia lives and breathes. His daughter does not, Pericles’ daughter does. The fact that they both ask that desperate question, that both fathers seek signs of life in their daughters, makes the parallelism of the scenes hard to ignore.

  But Pericles still can’t believe such a redemptive denouement can be possible, that the apparition of a living daughter he thought dead isn’t a delusion like Lear’s “Look her lips …”

  It must be a dream, Pericles insists, a delusion: “This is the rarest dream that e’er dull’d sleep/Did mock sad fools withal.”

  The way Lear’s last delusion mocked him as a terminally sad fool? But Pericles’ “rarest dream”—beautiful locution, no? an echo of Bottom’s “most rare vision,” is it not?—is no delusion.

  Finally Pericles experiences it fully, experiences at last what A. C. Bradley attributes to Lear in the final lines the Folio gives the dying king—an ecstatic vision of bliss:

  … this great sea of joys rushing upon me [Pericles exclaims]

  O’erbear the shores of my mortality,

  And drown me with their sweetness.

  Instead of Lear dying of sighs with his daughter, we have Pericles near-drowning in sweetness with his. Something he experiences as “o’er-bearing”—in a sense, unbearable.

  In a moment, “wild in his beholding” (another lovely locution), Pericles is finally convinced he recognizes his daughter. Finally convinced, he hears the “music of the spheres.” As Bradley’s Lear sees a vision of Cordelia ascending to heaven.

  But—and here’s the point of my conjecture—in a way this Pericles scene could be taken as a refutation of Bradley’s blissfully redemptive interpretation of the final Folio words of Lear. The Pericles recognition scene suggests that when Shakespeare wants to make a redemptive father-daughter reunion scene he doesn’t need it to rest perilously, ambiguously, on what is read into it, making it radically undecidable. He can heighten the drama of the resolution—incorporate the dashed hopes and doomed expectations of the tragedies by enclosing them within a stirringly redemptive framework. He can celebrate redemption unambiguously in the Late Romances. He could have made us believe, share in Lear’s last imagined communion with Cordelia; believe it was no delusion. He may not have been ready to, not unambiguously, in the tragedies.

  Indeed in Pericles, especially in Marina, he seems to want to redeem all his tragic heroines at once. She becomes, I once wrote, “all the lost heroines of Shakespearean tragedy—Ophelia, Desdemona, Cordelia—risen from their untimely graves and given radiant life again.” In Marina’s first words in Pericles she speaks of strewing the green with violets and marigolds, which echoes Ophelia’s despairing near-dying words about withered violets: “I would give you some violets, but they wither’d all when my father died.” It echoes Desdemona’s weeping “willow song” in a redemptive key.

  Ophelia’s violets bloom again in Marina’s hands. Both Ophelia and Marina weave garlands; Ophelia’s help drag her down to death, Marina places garlands upon a grave, the grave of her mother, who turns out, miraculously, to be alive, figuratively turning the graves of Cordelia, Ophelia and Desdemona into places of rebirth.

  Marina embodies the grace we’re given—occasionally, unpredictably, unmeritably for the fates we’re forced to suffer; for the way injustice seems to single out those who most deserve to be blessed. As does Cordelia in Lear, especially when Lear tells us if she lives it will “redeem all sorrows.” In other words, should a miracle occur and Cordelia live, it would represent a spiritual trumph of a higher order—the way Marina’s reunion with her father does. But Cordelia does not live. Lear remains a tragedy, whatever inscrutable vision (“Look there, look there …”) passes before Lear’s dying eyes. A tragedy awaiting the scene in Pericles that will belatedly offer recompense.

  When thinking about the recognition scene in Pericles, it occurred to me to wonder: Was this why it was so drawn out, why Pericles first believed then disbelieved, then thought he was in a dream: “This is the rarest dream that e’er dull’d sleep/Did mock sad fools withal”?

  Before he will allow himself to believe his daughter has been miraculously restored to him, the half-mad Pericles requires proof after proof it is his daughter, tests hope against doubt, beyond the point when it should be clear to all—even him—this is his daughter. Could it be that the need to prolong—so conspicuously—this doubt and disbelief comes not merely from the exigency of Pericles but from the double duty it does in “rewriting,” reenvisioning the final scene in Lear? To prolong the doubt, to savor it, to wring out every unbearably heartbreaking moment of unbelief, raises the stakes for the Romantic ending. Will this scene, like Lear’s last one, dash the hopes so pitifully raised once again by a doubting father? Or fulfill them?

  The more prolonged and excruciating the doubt in Pericles, the better to redeem and recuperate the unbearable loss at the close of Lear.

  In other words you might say the reunion scene in Pericles presents us with such an explicit revision of the end of Lear, it suggests Shakespeare did not intend the close of Lear as a moment of
ecstatic bliss and unbearable joy, but as a denial of the redemptive ending he would in effect give Pericles. A denial with just enough ambiguity to raise impossible hopes, and thus doubly dash them. Just my conjecture, but again an example of how suggestive the contemplation of textual variation can be. How perplexing and suggestive the problem of Lear’s dying words can be. I don’t claim to have resolved the problem. I want to emphasize how problematic it is. But as the British philosopher Simon Blackburn put it, of particularly recalcitrant problems in the philosophy of mind: “The process of understanding the problem is itself a good thing.”

  * Although a recent reference to my story in a volume of textual scholar essays (Textual Performances, edited by Lukas Erne and Margaret Jane Kidnie) refers to it as a “hot topic even in The New Yorker.” Scholars’ views of what constitutes a “hot topic” in the world outside the academy may reflect a certain insularity.

  Chapter Five

  The Great Shakespeare

  “Funeral Elegy” Fiasco

  In which the question “What do we mean by ‘Shakespearean’?”

  becomes front-page news.

  Perhaps the elegy fiasco, scandal, whatever you wish to call it, should be thought of as a Shakespearean comedy. To compare it to The Comedy of Errors might be too obvious. In some ways—and perhaps it’s the Peter Brook effect—it could be compared to the Dream.

  The love potion in this case was the overfond intoxication, the starry-eyed vision, that the prospect of a “new” Shakespearean work produced when it was dropped into the eyes of the Shakespeare studies publishing-industrial complex.