by Emma Smith
The German critic and translator August Schlegel led the way (German scholars were the pioneers in the serious reappraisal of Shakespeare’s works, giving rise to the claim of ‘unser [our] Shakespeare’). For Schlegel, King Lear had the sublime natural force of a huge waterfall or thunderstorm. It delineates ‘a fall from the highest elevation into the deepest abyss of misery, where humanity is stripped of all external and internal advantages and given up a prey to naked helplessness’. In this play, Schlegel wrote, ‘the science of compassion is exhausted’. The English essayist William Hazlitt drew a direct analogy with nature: ‘the mind of Lear … is like a tall ship driven about by the winds, buffeted by the furious waves, but that still rides above the storm, having its anchor fixed in the bottom of the sea; or it is like the sharp rock circled by the eddying whirlpool that foams and beats against it, or like the solid promontory pushed from its basis by the force of an earthquake’. For the poet S. T. Coleridge, lecturing on Shakespeare as Napoleon prepared his disastrous invasion of Russia, King Lear shows how its author had ‘read nature too heedfully not to know … that to power in itself, without reference to any moral end, an inevitable admiration and complacency appertains, whether it be displayed in the conquests of a Buonaparte or Tamerlane, or in the foam and the thunder of a cataract’. For the Romantics, then, natural forces are key to the scale and effect of King Lear. Their critical reappraisals serve as a microcosm of Romanticism’s radical revisionism: the idea of the sublime is an absolute value, in the monumental and awesome scale of nature unconstrained by petty social notions of morality and justice.
King Lear has thus transitioned in the critical imagination, from being a play morally and aesthetically deficient and in need of remedy to a play too awesomely big in its vision to trouble with such bourgeois concerns. Asking why Cordelia has to die at the end of King Lear would be for Coleridge like asking the thunderstorm if it would mind keeping the noise down a bit.
In this whistle-stop tour of responses to King Lear we stop next in the early twentieth century, where critics redrew the play’s ethical coordinates to produce a play that was recognizably Christian in sympathy. If for the Romantics Lear’s sublime imagination was its own justification, for A. C. Bradley, lecturing at the University of Oxford at the turn of the twentieth century, the effect was more clearly didactic. Bradley argued that the play’s ending ‘unlike those of all the other mature tragedies, does not seem at all inevitable. It is not even satisfactorily motived. In fact it seems expressly designed to fall suddenly like a bolt from a sky cleared by the vanished storm.’ We all desire that Lear should enjoy ‘peace and happiness by Cordelia’s fireside’ – but that is denied him. And Bradley argues that this is because of the play’s particular depiction of a wild and monstrous world – and its particular interrogation of what makes its world so wild and monstrous. Noting that ‘references to religious or irreligious beliefs and feelings are more frequent than is usual in Shakespeare’s tragedies’, Bradley discusses the way in which the play forces on its characters the question ‘What rules the world?’ The play’s final outcome, Bradley argues, is ‘one in which pity and terror, carried perhaps to the extreme limits of art, are so blended with a sense of law and beauty that we feel at last, not depression and much less despair, but a consciousness of greatness in pain, and of solemnity in the mystery we cannot fathom’.
In a reading of the play which has become almost commonplace, Bradley argues that King Lear is thus not fundamentally pessimistic. Rather, it depicts the transformative powers of torment. Because Lear recovers some of his former sympathy, ‘there is nothing more noble and beautiful in literature than Shakespeare’s exposition of the effect of suffering in reviving the greatness and eliciting the sweetness of Lear’s nature’. Bradley suggests an alternative title: ‘The Redemption of King Lear’, declaring that ‘the business of “the gods” with him was neither to torment him nor to teach him a “noble anger”, but to lead him to attain through apparently hopeless failure the very end and aim of life’. Bradley interprets Lear’s dying words, as he looks for vital signs on the body of Cordelia, as a final ‘ecstasy’ of ‘unbearable joy’ because he thinks his beloved daughter is still alive. For Bradley, Lear’s heart, like that of the parallel ‘foolish, fond old man’ Gloucester, ‘burst smilingly’.
Bradley’s book Shakespearean Tragedy is perhaps the most influential work of twentieth-century Shakespearean criticism, and this redemptive King Lear has cast a long shadow. A more explicitly Christian framework was elaborated in the following decades by G. Wilson Knight, who understood the play’s depiction of suffering as part of a ‘purgatorial progress … to self-knowledge, to sincerity’. For Wilson Knight, ‘at the end the danger of evil-doers is crushed. The good forces, not the evil, win: since good is natural, evil unnatural to human nature.’ We might demur: it is surely a pyrrhic victory (the good forces may have won but they are also, save the colourless Edgar, dead), but the Christian idea that death is not the final end is also invoked. For Wilson Knight, the play emerges as an allegory of redemption through love, encouraging us to endure life’s vicissitudes and to look to a life after death rather than pleasure on earth.
History, though, is at Wilson Knight’s shoulder. The critical impulse to harmonize the play into a theologically consistent parable of human salvation was being chased down by a more unflinching eye for human savagery. Post-war critics tended to see King Lear less as the antidote to human suffering and more as its instruction manual, a play deliberately and resolutely depicting the terrible emptiness of the modern world. Work by Barbara Everett and W. R. Elton in 1960 converged on the conclusion that attempts to create meaningful and life-affirming understanding out of King Lear’s horrors were self-deluding and wilful misreadings of a play which had taken every opportunity systematically to snuff out hope and optimism. And so criticism of the play turned from the spiritual to the materialist.
Jan Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary (also cited in the chapters on A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Hamlet) did much to influence British Shakespearean theatre directors such as Peter Brook. The title of Kott’s chapter makes clear his Beckettian interpretation: ‘King Lear or Endgame’. Kott takes an existentialist view of the tragedy as the absurdist machinations of a world drained of providential intent. If for Wilson Knight King Lear is a kind of bad-weather Pilgrim’s Progress, for Kott it is a blank verse Waiting for Godot: inevitably, Godot never arrives, and the time between the curtains is filled with absurdist humour, violence, abjection and grim bonding. Only in the mid-twentieth century could this play, long suspected of being unperformable, actually find its place on the stage, because Kott argues that it has now found its moment: ‘neither the romantic nor the naturalistic theatre was able to show that kind of cruelty; only the new theatre can. In this new theatre there are no characters, and the tragic element has been superseded by the grotesque. The grotesque is more cruel than tragedy.’ By realigning the play with the grotesque rather than with the morally overdetermined genre of tragedy, Kott is able to develop his view of a deterministic, mechanistic universe: ‘In the world of the grotesque, downfall cannot be justified by, or blamed on, the absolute. The absolute is not endowed with any ultimate reasons; it is stronger, and that is all. The absolute is absurd.’ ‘All that remains at the end of this gigantic pantomime is the earth – empty and bleeding. On this earth, through which a tempest has passed leaving only stones, the King, the Fool, the Blind Man and the Madman carry on their distracted dialogue’: the characters of the play lose their individuality to a kind of Tarot card fatalism.
For Kott, Lear is a play of the European avant-garde theatre of Beckett and Ionesco. It has found its time in the coincidence of its ethical and representational modes with the existentialist procedures of mid-century modernism. For Jonathan Dollimore, however, writing in the 1980s, King Lear emerges as ‘above all, a play about power, property and inheritance’. Dollimore dismisses questions of pity, suffering and redemption as absolutist or
religious mumbo jumbo, ideological state apparatuses that repress us. In the end, Dollimore argues that the play endorses Edmund’s sceptical view that ‘men / Are as the time is’ (5.3.31–2) – that there are no transcendences, only material circumstances. To focus on King Lear himself is to buy into an individualist ideology that obscures and mystifies a more social critique. Dollimore is on the side of the sceptical Edmund, scornful of the old (critical) order and its superstitious investment in cosmic order (‘the excellent foppery of the world’ (1.2.107), Edmund puts it, that ‘we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars, as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treacherers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence, and all that we are evil in by a divine thrusting-on’ (1.2.109–14)). His King Lear decisively undermines any such comforts.
Spending some time on the critical reception of King Lear shows how critics engage with the question of how bleak the play is on their own historical, cultural and aesthetic terms. They get the Lear they need, rewriting as necessary through adaptation, criticism and also through performance. But they – and we – are not the only ones doing the rewriting. Shakespeare not only takes his source materials by the scruff of the neck in order to produce this play, he also seems to have returned later to King Lear to tweak, rework and to revisit his concluding lines in particular.
It’s often pointed out – Dr Johnson mentioned it in his disapproval of Cordelia’s fate – that Shakespeare’s historical and other sources do not end in the way his play does. As for most of Shakespeare’s works, there is already established a well-known story and part of what is well known about it is that it has a happy ending: reinstating Lear to his throne, to be succeeded by Cordelia. The play’s first audiences would probably have been expecting at least Cordelia’s survival and perhaps also Lear’s too. The wreckage of these plots in the play’s hectic final scenes must have been bewildering. Kent’s ‘Is this the promised end?’ (5.3.237) takes on a meta-theatrical quality.
So the ending of King Lear is a prominent act of rewriting, and it is itself rewritten. King Lear exists in two early and distinct texts, printed in 1608 and in 1623. They are different in hundreds of small, and scores of larger, ways. Over the last forty years or so, King Lear has become the Shakespearean test case for the now widely accepted theory that Shakespeare revised his own plays. It may seem strange that scholarship has been so resistant to this completely normal aspect of writerly craft: what author doesn’t work on subsequent drafts and then rework his or her writing? (Ernest Hemingway rewrote the end of A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times. ‘What was it that had stopped you?’ an interviewer asked him. ‘Getting the words right,’ replied Hemingway drily.) But the adulatory reports from Shakespeare’s fellow actors (which are, of course, part of a sales pitch for an expensive retrospective volume of his collected plays, the 1623 First Folio) that ‘his mind and hand went together: And what he thought, he uttered with that easiness, that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers’ came to be seen as literal evidence for Shakespeare’s divinely inspired genius. That Shakespeare did not revise his works was held as a tenet of Shakespearean editing until the 1970s. But the idea that the two early texts of King Lear represent authorial revision is now a commonplace, and most critics surmise from internal evidence that the Folio text represents Shakespeare’s revision, probably undertaken in 1610. Interestingly, that means that Shakespeare reworks his play alongside other, happier versions of the ruler and his daughter story, in, for example, The Winter’s Tale or The Tempest. If you look at a modern collected edition, you may well see that King Lear is not one play but two, often distinguished by their early titles: ‘The History of King Lear’ and ‘The Tragedy of King Lear’.
Now, textual differences are like lamp posts to canine Shakespearean critics, who can snuffle around happily for pages savouring the gamey presence or absence of a comma, or a changed pronoun (watch me). These are generally pretty arcane pleasures for most readers and theatregoers, and so I venture into this territory with some trepidation. Many of the changes between the editions are tiny – and that shows us both how small changes can have significant cumulative effects on the mood of the play, and how attentive Shakespeare was to the detail of his own work. The point here, though, is that the reworking of the ‘Tragedy’ might seem, on aggregate, to create a bleaker view of humanity than the ‘History’. Shakespeare’s revisions, that’s to say, make his play sadder. One example of this might be the detail around Gloucester’s torture at the end of Act 3. Gloucester is blinded onstage in a horrific scene of brutality, leaving him describing his world as ‘all dark and comfortless’ (3.7.85) as he is thrust out to ‘smell / His way to Dover’ (94–5). The ‘History’ has a short but telling sequence that is later cut. In this version, two servants prepare to care for the wounded Gloucester, calling for ‘flax and whites of eggs / To apply to his bleeding face’, and praying ‘heaven help him!’ (3.7.99.8–9). It’s a moment of tenderness: not everyone is indifferent to Gloucester’s suffering, and servants behave with more decency than their masters. Without this, the play has no corrective to its own cruelties.
It’s in the play’s final lines, though, that revision really focuses our question of bleakness. There are a number of differences here between the early texts. The later version gives a stage direction indicating that Lear dies on the line ‘Look there. Look there!’ (5.3.287): what is he looking at, and how does this connect to the moment of his death? Perhaps this conforms to Bradley’s interpretation that Lear dies in a rush of joy (but given that Cordelia is not, in fact, alive, does a misapprehension by Lear at this point make the ending of the play more, or less, sad?). The ‘History’ has no stage direction for Lear’s death. We do not know whether he dies of his own volition: he is given the line ‘Break, heart, I prithee, break’ (5.3.288), in this version, which the later text reallocates to Kent, responding to his master’s death. Another speech – the play’s final one, in which it echoes the crisis of speech, truth and flattery with which the play began – is also transposed between speakers. The play in both versions ends:
The weight of this sad time we must obey;
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most; we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.
(5.3.299–302)
But what difference might Shakespeare have wanted to point up by changing his mind about speakers: the Duke of Albany, Lear’s son-in-law and the play’s most senior survivor in the play’s first version, and Edgar, the sole survivor of the wronged younger generation, in the second?
So Shakespeare is the first of the long history of literal and figurative rewriters of King Lear. His saddest play has prompted extraordinary spiritual, philosophical and artistic efforts to ameliorate its desolation, and the history of those interventions is a cultural history of just what it is we want from our tragic art: comfort, exhilaration or dissection.
CHAPTER 16
Macbeth
Like the English army bearing the cut boughs from Birnam Wood to Macbeth’s castle, let’s approach Macbeth by stealth, and via an intermediary: Robert Burton. Burton was a scholar and writer who wrote a couple of dull academic plays but is best known for one great encyclopaedic work, The Anatomy of Melancholy, first published in 1621.
At first glance, Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy and Shakespeare’s Macbeth could not be more different. Burton’s epic of malaise is swollen, epic and digressive; Macbeth is lean and streamlined, the shortest of Shakespeare’s tragedies. It seems from Burton’s own vast library, donated to the Bodleian in Oxford after his death in 1640, that, while he read playwrights, including Ben Jonson, Thomas Kyd and John Webster, his preferred Shakespeare reading was narrative poetry: he owned copies of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. It’s hard to imagine, though, that Hamlet and other passionate tragedies
weren’t on his melancholy reading list. Macbeth, in particular, shares with The Anatomy of Melancholy the distinctly Renaissance project to investigate the human mind, and a curiosity about the causes and explanations for feelings and behaviours. Burton organizes his compendious treatise in ways that can help lay out the terrain for the more oblique discussion of causation in Macbeth.
Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy is really a textbook in the modern discipline of psychology. He begins with a diagram of the structure of his book which lays out melancholy’s potential causes – what medical science would call its aetiology – in a kind of rudimentary flow diagram. The first causes of melancholy are divided between supernatural and natural, and these divisions branch off into other options: supernatural causes might denote God or the devil (‘or mediately, by magicians, witches’), whereas natural causes could be primary or secondary. Primary natural causes are ‘as stars’, as proved by horoscopes; secondary natural causes could be congenital (including heredity, old age or temperament), or contingent. Burton includes among various headings here: experiences in infancy and childhood, scoffs, calumnies and bitter jests, loss of liberty, poverty and want, and ‘a heap of other accidents, death of friends, loss, etc.’ Physiological causes of melancholy could be internal, including diet (top tip: keep away from melons and ‘slimy fish’), or from outside: too much study, strong passions, anger or ambition. Because Burton’s aim is to cover the range of possible explanations and lines of causation, he is capaciously inclusive rather than discriminating and argumentative. A single phenomenon, melancholy exists at the intersection of ancient wisdom and contemporary medical science. This is a worldview in which the influence of the stars, or of witches, coexists with a nascent understanding of hereditary factors in disease, and where diet and other forms of self-medication are alternatives to divine diktat as explanations for illness.