Shakespeare's Style

by Maurice Charney

  Shakespeare’s calumniators—Apemantus in Timon of Athens, Thersites in Troilus and Cressida, and Lucio in Measure for Measure—are mostly unpleasant truth-speakers. But what about Lucio? There is no way to confirm what he says about the duke in the play, although he is right on the mark about the icy Angelo. Is the duke a whoremonger, or at least someone who “had some feeling of the sport; he knew the service, and that instructed him to mercy” (3.2.120–21)? That is one of the interpretive puzzles of the play, but at least it complicates the duke’s role and prevents us from seeing him as a god-given savior whose clever bed-trick clears up all difficulties in the action.

  Lucio refuses to provide bail for Pompey, who is being sent to prison. It is remarkable how lighthearted he is in his rejection of his seeming friend: “No, indeed, will I not, Pompey, it is not the wear. I will pray Pompey, to increase your bondage. If you take it not patiently, why, your mettle is the more. Adieu, trusty Pompey. ‘Bless you, friar’” (3.2.74–77). “Wear” is a clothing image, meaning “it is not in the present fashion,” as in Jaques’s admiring image for the clown Touchstone in As You Like It: “Motley’s the only wear” (2.7.34). At the end of the play, Lucio is similarly noncommittal and unmotivated about his gross slanders of the duke, who asks with real feeling: “Wherein have I so deserved of you, / That you extol me thus?” (5.1.504–5). Lucio doesn’t have plausible explanation but says only: “’Faith, my lord, I spoke it but according to the trick” (5.1.506–7). This is an odd use of the word “trick,” meaning “custom, habit, or fashion.” Lucio doesn’t seem to want to justify himself, although what he does to soften the duke’s compassion and restrain the wild excesses of Angelo promotes the best interests of the audience and the play.

  Is Lucio just acting for his own amusement, like Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or the Vice-derived villains of Shakespearean tragedy, like Aaron in Titus Andronicus? But Lucio does act purposively on behalf of the play when, for example, he encourages Isabella in her pleas to Angelo for her brother’s life. Claudio is convinced that his sister will be successful:

  for in her youth

  There is a prone and speechless dialect

  Such as move men; beside, she hath prosperous art

  When she will play with reason and discourse,

  And well she can persuade. (1.2.185–89)

  There is already something suggestively erotic in Claudio’s speech. Lucio undertakes to persuade Isabella to convince Angelo to spare her brother. His opening line is startling in its irreverence: “Hail virgin—if you be” (1.4.16).

  In act 2, scene 2, Lucio is active in encouraging Isabella to be more passionate in her discourse with Angelo. One may well ask whether Lucio is the effective cause for Angelo’s falling in love with Isabella. He repeats, “You are too cold” (2.2.45, 56), and says “Ay, touch him; there’s the vein” (2.2.71). He eggs her on when he thinks she is getting warmer: “That’s well said” (2.2.110), and “O, to him, to him, wench! He will relent; / He’s coming; I perceive’t” (2.2.125–26). One wonders what Isabella would do without Lucio cheering her on.

  Lucio is obviously a truth-speaker in his account of the cold and hard-hearted Angelo:

  Some report a sea maid spawned him; some, that he was begot between two stockfishes [dried cod]. But it is certain that when he makes water his urine is congealed ice; that I know to be true. And he is a motion generative [masculine puppet]; that’s infallible. (3.2.109–13)

  The absent duke is quite different: “Ere he would have hanged a man for the getting a hundred bastards, he would have paid for the nursing a thousand. He had some feeling of the sport; he knew the service, and that instructed him to mercy” (3.2.118–21). The duke protests vigorously: “I never heard the absent duke much detected for women; he was not inclined that way” (3.2.124–25). This doesn’t, of course, mean that the duke is a homosexual. Lucio claims to be an intimate friend of the duke, but he slanders him gratuitously nevertheless: “A very superficial, ignorant, unweighing fellow” (2.2.142). Lucio seems to have no particular direction in his comments, since he both praises and insults the duke almost at the same time.

  When Lucio exits, the Duke expresses his bewilderment in some sententious observations:

  No might nor greatness in mortality

  Can censure ‘scape; back-wounding calumny

  The whitest virtue strikes. What king so strong

  Can tie the gall up in the slanderous tongue? (2.2.185–88)

  The duke obviously thinks well of himself, but he has no comprehension of Lucio, who is garrulous in his mixed praise and scorn. There is no getting rid of him. As he exclaims to the Friar: “I am a kind of burr; I shall stick” (4.3.180).

  At the climax of the play in act 5, scene 1, Lucio seems unstoppable in his efforts to dominate the discourse. His calumny flows freely against the duke disguised as a friar: “Why, you bald-pated, lying rascal, you must be hooded, must you? Show your knave’s visage, with a pox to you. Show your sheep-biting face, and be hanged an hour. Will’t not off?” (5.1.354–58). It is at this point that Lucio pulls off the friar’s hood and discovers the Duke.

  What follows then for Lucio seems anticlimactic. The duke is particularly enraged and says he cannot pardon him, but, according to the formulas of mercy entailed by measure-for-measure, Lucio escapes with only having to marry Kate Keepdown, the whore he has got with child. He protests energetically: “Marrying a punk, my lord, is pressing to death, whipping, and hanging” (5.1.524–25), but the duke is adamant: “Slandering a prince deserves it” (5.1.526).

  In the Haroun al-Rashid story that underlies Measure for Measure, there is always a near certainty that the story of the disguised ruler who surveys his kingdom will end badly. This is similar to tales of the husband who disguises himself in order to see whether his wife is faithful, on the model of patient Griselda. Measure for Measure doesn’t end badly, but there is a certain absurdity in the testing of Angelo, since the duke already knows that Angelo has behaved badly in refusing to marry Mariana. The play is much more about the testing of the duke. In this enterprise, Lucio has a valuable role to play. Although he is a calumniator, Lucio hints at inadequacies in the duke’s humanity. He shouldn’t pretend to be cold like Angelo to test the integrity of his kingdom. Besides, he should have had enough sense not to appoint Angelo as a moral arbiter. Lucio is there for us to ask essential questions about the duke’s role.

  Chapter 24

  Madness in King Lear

  Madness in Shakespeare provides a useful stylistic device for changing a character, providing him or her with a new inwardness and a much wider range of emotions. In Titus Andronicus, for example, Titus is highly distracted by the misfortunes he has suffered, but not quite mad. His perturbations endow him with new insight into the malign reality that surrounds him. He feels his sorrow deeply, and he serves as a model—in language also—for King Lear, written many years later. Ophelia, too, is transformed by madness into someone different from the obedient daughter of Polonius. She suddenly reveals herself as a more expressive, lyrical, erotic young woman. Her character is, as it were, opened up. The same is also true of Lady Macbeth, who, in her madness, exhibits an acute and painful awareness of her complicity in murder. At the end of Macbeth, she can no longer say, as she did after the murder of Duncan, “A little water clears us of this deed: / How easy is it then!” (2.2.66–67).

  Similarly, in King Lear, the king in his madness comes to understand things about “Poor naked wretches” (3.4.28) that he ignored before:

  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. (3.4.32–36)

  Lear’s madness—or incipient madness here—serves to expand and deepen his role from the petulant father’s love contest in the first scene.

  Lear’s madness doesn’t come upon him all at once. It pro
ceeds by a series of recognizable steps. The first mention of the king’s potential madness is in Kent’s courageous rebuke of his rejection of Cordelia: “be Kent unmannerly / When Lear is mad. What wouldst thou do, old man?” (1.1.146–47). The seeds of Lear’s eventual madness are already evident to Kent. The king is subject to “flattery,” he has fallen to “folly,” he is guilty of “hideous rashness” (1.1.149, 150, 152). Kent sees a fatal outcome from Lear’s casting off the daughter he loves the most. At the end of this same scene, Goneril and Regan are convinced that their aging father is growing senile. Goneril says: “He always loved our sister most, and with what poor judgement he hath now cast her off appears too grossly” (1.1.292–93), and Regan supports her sister: “‘Tis the infirmity of his age, yet he hath ever but slenderly known himself” (1.1.294–95). These comments in act 1 prepare us for Lear’s eventual madness.

  In act 1, scene 4, the Fool berates Lear on his folly, which has precipitated him into second childhood:

  thou mad’st thy daughters thy mothers; for when thou gav’st them the rod and putt’s down thine own breeches,

  Then they for sudden joy did weep

  And I for sorrow sung,

  That such a king should play bo-peep,

  And go the fools among. (1.4.163–69)

  The Fool persists in his satirical attack on Lear’s misguided decision to give Goneril and Regan all and Cordelia nothing: “Thou hadst little wit in thy bald crown when thou gav’st thy golden one away” (1.4.155–56). The Fool pursues this theme relentlessly in his dialogue with the king. It is not until the next scene that the Fool prods Lear into an explicit recognition of his folly: “O let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven! I would not be mad. Keep me in temper, I would not be mad” (1.5.43–45). Lear’s incipient madness is already evident from the beginning of the play.

  By act 2, scene 2, Lear’s passionate grief has intensified. After he discovers Kent in the stocks, put there by the cruel Cornwall, he can hardly control his outburst: “O, how this mother swells up toward my heart! / Hysterica passio, down, thou climbing sorrow, / Thy element’s below” (2.2.246–48). Hysteria, familiarly called “the mother,” was considered a disease of women that arose from the womb and caused a sense of suffocation in the throat. Lear, once assured of his own judgment, now feels that grief has overwhelmed him and he is choking. The mother is a “climbing sorrow.” That is why Lear says to the Fool: “O me, my heart! My rising heart! But down!” (2.2.310). Lear is invoking the mother, rising from the womb and suffocating him, to descend to its rightful place below.

  There are further mentions in this scene of Lear’s oncoming madness, as he exclaims to Goneril: “Now I prithee, daughter, do not make me mad: / I will not trouble thee, my child. Farewell: / We’ll no more meet, no more see one another” (2.2.407–9). When Regan also rejects him and he is cast out onto the barren heath, the king forswears tears, which are a woman’s prerogative, and vows to avenge his wrongs:

  No, I’ll not weep. Storm and tempest.

  I have full cause of weeping, but this heart

  Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws

  Or e’er I’ll weep. O fool, I shall go mad. (2.2.472–75)

  This leads to Lear’s direct perception on the heath that his “wits begin to turn” (3.2.67). This is close to what Kent says in a later scene: “His wits begin t’unsettle” (3.4.158).

  The point is that Lear doesn’t go mad all at once. Even on the heath, he is in the process of going mad. As Gloucester puts it: “the King grows mad” (3.4.161). Lear himself is aware that his mind is grievously affected by his sorrows: “this tempest in my mind / Doth from my senses take all feeling else, / Save what beats there, filial ingratitude” (3.4.12–14). It is significant that Lear himself understands that his preoccupation with the cruelty of Goneril and Regan will render him lunatic:

  O, Regan, Goneril,

  Your old, kind father, whose frank heart gave you all—

  O, that way madness lies, let me shun that;

  No more of that. (3.4.19–22)

  But, of course, Lear has no way of shunning the bitter reality in which he is enveloped.

  The king is not fully mad until act 4, scene 6, and it is interesting that this is the only scene in the play that shows him so. There is a conclusive stage direction from the Quarto: “Enter LEAR mad” (4.6.80). When he is approached by a Gentleman and two attendants from Cordelia, he says meaningfully: “Let me have surgeons, / I am cut to the brains” (4.6.188–89). Lear’s discourse in this scene is scattered and wandering, like that of Lady Macbeth. He speaks distractedly in prose, jumping from subject to subject in matters that preoccupy him:

  No, they cannot touch me for coining. I am the King himself . . . Nature’s above art in that respect. There’s your press-money. That fellow handles his bow like a crow-keeper: draw me a clothier’s yard. Look, look, a mouse: peace, peace, this piece of toasted cheese will do’t. (4.6.83–89)

  When he meets Gloucester, his speech becomes more focussed: “Ha! Goneril with a white beard? They flattered me like a dog and told me I had the white hairs in my beard ere the black ones were there” (4.6.96–98). When Gloucester asks: “Is’t not the King?” Lear replies “Ay, every inch a king” (4.6.106). He is preoccupied with justice and hypocrisy in some of the most eloquent speeches in the play: “Let copulation thrive” (4.6.112) and “Robes and furred gowns hide all” (4.6.161).

  He seems to recognize the blind Gloucester: “I remember thine eyes well enough. Dost thou squiny [squint] at me? / No, do thy worst, blind Cupid, I’ll not love. / Read thou this challenge, mark but the penning of it” (4.6.132–35). And later: “If thou wilt weep my fortunes, take my eyes. / I know thee well enough, thy name is Gloucester” (4.6.172–73). Is Lear already recovering his sanity (as he will do in later scenes)? As Edgar says, aside: “O matter and impertinancy mixed, / Reason in madness” (4.6.170–71). Stylistically, his madness allows Lear to speak with a new intensity and inwardness about the state of the world.

  Once he is rescued by Cordelia and her attendants at the end of act 4, scene 6, the next scene is devoted to his restoration. Cordelia is optimistic as she prays to the gods to “Cure this great breach in his abused nature; / Th’untuned and jarring senses, O, wind up / Of this child-changed father” (4.7.15–17). Cordelia’s musical images are acted out in the music that is played to cure Lear’s “jarring senses.” We think of the importance of music in the statue scene in The Winter’s Tale (5.3); Paulina actually says to the statue: “Music, awake her: strike” (5.3.98).

  We saw the mad Lear in the previous scene enter “crowned with wild flowers” (4.6.80 s.d.). Now Cordelia’s attendants have “put fresh garments on him” (4.7.22). When he awakes, he speaks hesitantly as if he is not in this world:

  You do me wrong to take me out o’the grave.

  Thou art a soul in bliss, but I am bound

  Upon a wheel of fire that mine own tears

  Do scald like molten lead. (4.7.45–48)

  His restoration is gradual. He no longer speaks in the intense, emotional discourse of the previous scene. His diction is simple, and his tone declarative:

  Pray do not mock me.

  I am a very foolish, fond old man,

  Fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less;

  And to deal plainly,

  I fear I am not in my perfect mind. (4.7.59–63)

  Notice that in this context he doesn’t speak in the persona of the king. In the same direct style, he comes to recognize his lost child: “Do not laugh at me, / For, as I am a man, I think this lady / To be my child Cordelia” (4.7.68–70). Cordelia matches his speech when she acknowledges her presence: “And so I am, I am” (4.7.70). Cordelia’s Gentleman speaks as an insightful psychologist:

  the great rage

  You see is killed in him, and yet it is danger

  To make him even o’er the time he has lost.

  Desire him to go in. Trouble him no more

  Till further
settling. (4.7.78–82)

  So, Lear, although he is now sane, is still in a delicate condition. It is interesting that in Shakespeare only Lear and the Jailer’s Daughter in The Two Noble Kinsmen are cured of their madness.

  Edgar in King Lear assumes the role of Poor Tom, a mad Bedlam beggar, to escape from his brother Edmund’s plot against his life:

  While I may scape

  I will preserve myself, and am bethought

  To take the basest and most poorest shape

  That ever penury in contempt of man

  Brought near to beast. (2.2.176–80)

  Bedlam beggars “Enforce their charity” “Sometime with lunatic bans [curses], sometime with prayers” (2.2.191, 190). Edgar, the feigned madman, is set against King Lear, who is going mad; it makes for a significant contrast, especially in act 3, scene 4 on the heath.

  Edgar is convincing in his role as the mad beggar tormented by fiends. Lear conceives him as a fellow sufferer: “Didst thou give all to thy two daughters? And art thou come to this?” (3.4.48–49). He sees in Poor Tom an image of his own debased condition:

  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. Unaccomodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. (3.4.101–6)