Possessed by Memory

by Harold Bloom

  Act 3, Scene 4

  This rich rhetoric, for which nothing in Edgar’s life as a young nobleman could have prepared him, is accompanied by an extraordinary ability to coin aphorisms. The one I always linger on is “He childed as I fathered,” where the reference is to the King. Both “childed” and “fathered” are Shakespeare’s own coinings, and Edgar employs them to sum up much of the pathos of the tragedy. He does not mean just that Goneril and Regan cast out Lear while Gloucester casts out his true son. Instead those five words “He childed as I fathered” make little reference to Goneril and Regan but only to the dark parallel between Lear/Cordelia and Edgar/Gloucester. There is only love among those four, and yet the love itself results in tragedy. What Edgar understands is that love is anything but redemptive; in the cosmos where he wanders, there is neither justice nor mercy, and love itself bewilders through the excess of the fathers and the recalcitrance of the children Cordelia and Edgar, who need and want love, but are more adept at returning it than at knowing how it should be received.

  Edgar’s purgative suffering is totally antithetical to Edmund’s charming contemplation of what might be called a double date with those two monsters of the deep, Goneril and Regan:

  To both these sisters have I sworn my love,

  Each jealous of the other as the stung

  Are of the adder. Which of them shall I take?

  Both? One? Or neither? Neither can be enjoyed

  If both remain alive. To take the widow

  Exasperates, makes mad her sister Goneril,

  And hardly shall I carry out my side,

  Her husband being alive. Now then, we’ll use

  His countenance for the battle, which being done,

  Let her who would be rid of him devise

  His speedy taking off. As for the mercy

  Which he intends to Lear and to Cordelia,

  The battle done, and they within our power,

  Shall never see his pardon; for my state

  Stands on me to defend, not to debate.

  Act 5, Scene 1

  This is so delicious as regards the two fatal sisters that we almost forgive Edmund his insouciant disregard for anything that can be judged humane restraint. He disarms us by an audacious verve in expressing a total candor. The enigma of why someone with no affect and no desire for pleasure should plot so superbly to seize and maintain absolute power is surrogated to us for whatever understanding we can attain. Bastardy seems Edmund’s own expedient for explaining away his drives and motives. How different this is from the Bastard Faulconbridge, who admirably inherits the better qualities of his father, Richard Lionheart. And yet Edmund proves capable of his final astonishing change through self-overhearing:

  Yet Edmund was beloved:

  The one the other poisoned for my sake,

  And after slew herself.

  Act 5, Scene 3

  It may be that the clue to Edmund’s drive is his total capacity for self-otherseeing, in which he almost rivals Hamlet. Power over others comes so easily to him because he ceaselessly beholds everyone else on stage with the same clarity he brings to his own presentation of himself. There is an aesthetic splendor, terrifyingly sublime, in such total freedom from illusion. Contrast Edgar’s suffering and bewilderment at his disillusion with regard to Edmund’s treachery and his own gullibility. Ultimately, I find Edgar far more fascinating than Edmund, but at the cost of our own bewilderment.

  The Fool and Cordelia: Love’s Martyrdom

  KENT This is nothing, fool.

  FOOL Then ’tis like the breath of an unfee’d lawyer, you gave me nothing for’t. [to Lear] Can you make no use of nothing, nuncle?

  LEAR Why no, boy; nothing can be made out of nothing.

  FOOL [to Kent]. Prithee tell him, so much the rent of his land comes to; he will not believe a fool.

  LEAR A bitter fool.

  FOOL Dost thou know the difference, my boy, between a bitter fool and a sweet one?

  LEAR No, lad, teach me.

  FOOL That lord that counselled thee to give away thy land,

  Come place him here by me; do thou for him stand.

  The sweet and bitter fool will presently appear,

  The one in motley here, the other found out there.

  LEAR Dost thou call me fool, boy?

  FOOL All thy other titles thou hast given away; that thou wast born with.

  KENT This is not altogether fool, my lord.

  FOOL No, faith, lords and great men will not let me; if I had a monopoly out, they would have part on’t; and ladies too, they will not let me have all the fool to myself, they’ll be snatching. Nuncle, give me an egg and I’ll give thee two crowns.

  LEAR What two crowns shall they be?

  FOOL Why, after I have cut the egg i’the middle and eat up the meat, the two crowns of the egg. When thou clovest thy crown i’the middle and gav’st away both parts, thou bor’st thine ass on thy back o’er the dirt. Thou hadst little wit in thy bald crown when thou gav’st thy golden one away. If I speak like myself in this, let him be whipped that first finds it so.

  [Sings.] Fools had ne’er less grace in a year,

  For wise men are grown foppish,

  And know not how their wits to wear,

  Their manners are so apish.

  LEAR When were you wont to be so full of songs, sirrah?

  FOOL I have used it, nuncle, e’er since thou mad’st thy daughters thy mothers; for when thou gav’st them the rod and putt’st down thine own breeches,

  [Sings.] 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.

  Prithee, nuncle, keep a schoolmaster that can teach thy fool to lie; I would fain learn to lie.

  LEAR An you lie, sirrah, we’ll have you whipped.

  FOOL I marvel what kin thou and thy daughters are. They’ll have me whipped for speaking true, thou’lt have me whipped for lying, and sometimes I am whipped for holding my peace. I had rather be any kind o’thing than a fool, and yet I would not be thee, nuncle. Thou hast pared thy wit o’both sides and left nothing i’the middle. Here comes one o’the parings.

  Enter Goneril.

  LEAR How now, daughter? What makes that frontlet on?

  Methinks you are too much of late i’the frown.

  FOOL Thou wast a pretty fellow when thou hadst no need to care for her frowning. Now thou art an O without a figure; I am better than thou art now. I am a fool, thou art nothing. [to Goneril] Yes, forsooth, I will hold my tongue; so your face bids me, though you say nothing. Mum, mum!

  He that keeps nor crust nor crumb,

  Weary of all, shall want some.

  [Points to Lear.] That’s a shelled peascod.

  Act 1, Scene 4

  This long passage can be read as defining the Fool and his sense of betrayed love. Though he is an uncanny being whose age and foreground cannot be discerned, the Fool nevertheless has a filial love for and dependence upon Lear. His fury rises out of the vertigo of a betrayed ontological security. Suddenly those not exactly maternal daughters are Lear’s guardians, and the poor fool is an outcast like the King himself. Uncanny forces are let loose by the Fool’s vindictive wit. An unwilling martyr to his love for Lear, the Fool drives Lear into madness.

  * * *

  —

  Cordelia, beloved by the Fool, is saintly in her refusal to blame her father, and her recalcitrance is altogether different from the Fool’s childlike panic. He is memorable as a kind of chorus to Lear’s sparagmos and doubles the wild cognitive music of Edgar’s playing Tom o’ Bedlam. Cordelia, however, is the most admirable personage in the tragedy, which makes her terrible deat
h unbearable:

  Enter Lear with Cordelia in his arms [followed by the Gentleman].

  LEAR Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones!

  Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so

  That heaven’s vault should crack: she’s gone for ever.

  I know when one is dead and when one lives;

  She’s dead as earth.[He lays her down.]

  Lend me a looking-glass;

  If that her breath will mist or stain the stone,

  Why then she lives.

  KENTIs this the promised end?

  EDGAR Or image of that horror?

  ALBANYFall, and cease.

  LEAR This feather stirs, she lives: if it be so,

  It is a chance which does redeem all sorrows

  That ever I have felt.

  KENTO, my good master!

  LEAR Prithee, away!

  EDGAR’Tis noble Kent, your friend.

  LEAR A plague upon you murderers, traitors all;

  I might have saved her; now she’s gone for ever.

  Cordelia, Cordelia, stay a little. Ha?

  What is’t thou sayst? Her voice was ever soft,

  Gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman.

  I killed the slave that was a-hanging thee.

  Act 5, Scene 3

  The dialectic of self-otherseeing, in which disavowal and affirmation oscillate, culminates in Lear’s death:

  LEAR And my poor fool is hanged. No, no, no life!

  Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life

  And thou no breath at all? O thou’lt come no more,

  Never, never, never, never, never.

  [to Edgar?] Pray you undo this button. Thank you, sir.

  O, o, o, o.

  Do you see this? Look on her: look, her lips,

  Look there, look there! [He dies.]

  Act 5, Scene 3

  A. C. Bradley interpreted this correctly: the great king dies of delusional joy and not of grief. And yet—is it delusional? Lear has moved into an apocalyptic realm where desire acknowledges no limits. Though I continue to believe, with my late friend William Elton, that this is a pagan play for a Christian audience, who are we to question what the majestical Lear sees?

  The Fool simply vanishes from the play, an absence Shakespeare cannot be bothered to explain. Cordelia is destroyed in an apotheosis that is intolerable. We end with Edgar abandoning self-otherseeing:

  EDGAR 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.

  Exeunt with a dead march.

  Act 5, Scene 3

  Disavowal has exiled affirmation.

  King Lear:

  Authority and Cosmological Disorder

  HANNAH ARENDT observed that authority was neither an ancient Greek nor a Hebrew concept but was Roman in origin. For the Romans it meant augmenting the foundations of their society and customs. Though the drama of King Lear is set in pre-Roman Britain, it nevertheless relies upon the idea of order enshrined in Ciceronian and related sources.

  When Kent, disguised as Caius, presents himself for service to Lear, he tells the King, “You have that in your countenance which I would fain call master.” When Lear replies, “What’s that?,” Kent offers the one word: “authority.” In the extraordinary confrontation with the blinded Gloucester in act 4, scene 6, Lear bitterly disavows authority:

  LEAR What, art mad? A man may see how this world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears. See how yon justice rails upon yon 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?

  GLOUCESTER Ay, sir.

  LEAR And the creature run from the cur—there thou mightst behold the great image of authority: a dog’s obeyed in office.

  Thou, rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand;

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

  Thou hotly lusts to use her in that kind

  For which thou whipp’st her. The usurer hangs the cozener.

  Through tattered clothes great 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 does pierce it.

  None does offend, none, I say none. I’ll able ’em;

  Take that of me, my friend, who have the power

  To seal th’accuser’s lips. Get thee glass eyes,

  And like a scurvy politician seem

  To see the things thou dost not.

  Lear, endlessly eloquent, here transcends himself. I hardly know a more devastating repudiation of authority than “a dog’s obeyed in office.” And yet, whether he is incisive or insane, he remains the very image of authority: King, Father, God. Oscillating between overt disavowal and involuntary self-affirmation, Lear incarnates the self-otherseeing which he can never know.

  It is generally accepted that Lear possesses instinctive authority to a degree more capacious than any other Shakespearean protagonist. When he goes down, the cosmos falls with him. Kent cries out, “Is this the promised end?” And Edgar laments, “Or image of that horror?” Albany completes the litany with “Fall, and cease.”

  Why do we accept, whether as auditors or as readers, these apocalyptic pronouncements? Lear is the self-dethroned ruler of pre-Roman Britain, hardly a world empire. But, then, the Biblical Solomon, for all his magnificence, reigned over as small a kingdom. There are hints enough that Lear is Shakespeare’s version of Solomon, an immensely old monarch, except that Solomon is as wise as Lear is foolish. After the death of Solomon, his kingdom fell apart under his son Rehoboam, who provoked a rebellion by the ten northern tribes, which came together as the separate kingdom of Israel. That left only the little kingdom of Judah for Rehoboam to misrule. Lear, after dividing Britain between Goneril and Regan, possesses nothing. “Nothing” is one of the refrains beating through this vast drama, frequently counterpointed against the word “Nature.”

  It is the range and intensity of Lear’s pathos that justify the play’s final vision, in which the entire world goes down with him. His greatness is a sublime oscillation between rage and love, and we begin to wonder if he knows the difference. But is that not a valid description of the Yahweh of the Hebrew Bible, whose love for the Jewish people scarcely can be divided from the appearance of rage? Shakespeare, who anticipated everything, persuades his audience that the death of Lear is also the death of God. And even that is not the whole of it. Authority, the ultimate attribute of fatherhood, falls away into the abyss that ends this great drama. James Joyce’s Stephen touches his own forehead and says it is in there he must slay the king and the priest. Always and invariably Shakespeare’s involuntary disciple, Joyce repeats the wisdom that Lear can neither incarnate nor know. No writer has ever been so subtle as Shakespeare in not divulging his own beliefs or disbeliefs. And yet this most majestic of all his plays brings us to a threshold where God, the Father, and the King cease together.

  Macbeth:

  Triumph at Limning a Night-Piece

  PART OF THE MYSTERY of Shakespeare is that he would seem to have invested something of his own intellectual consciousness in Hamlet, while reserving for Macbeth a prophetic quality peculiar to Shakespeare’s own fantasy-making power. Hamlet might participate in such a power, but Macbeth is wholly its creature. If Hamlet is a tragedy of thought, then Macbeth is a tragedy of the imagination.

  * * *

  —

  It is difficult to decide whether the proleptic element in Macbeth i
s preternatural or not:

  MACBETH [Aside.] Two truths are told,

  As happy prologues to the swelling act

  Of the imperial theme.—I thank you, gentlemen.—

  [Aside.] This supernatural soliciting

  Cannot be ill; cannot be good:—

  If ill, why hath it given me earnest of success,

  Commencing in a truth? I am Thane of Cawdor:

  If good, why do I yield to that suggestion

  Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair,

  And make my seated heart knock at my ribs,

  Against the use of nature? Present fears

  Are less than horrible imaginings.

  My thought, whose murther yet is but fantastical,

  Shakes so my single state of man,

  That function is smother’d in surmise,

  And nothing is, but what is not.

  Act 1, Scene 3

  This is the beginning of that savage process by which Macbeth perpetually leaps the gap between anticipation and accomplishment. No sooner does he imagine a crime he might perform than he is on the other shore, contemplating his act of violence as though it were not his own. The projected murder of Duncan emanates from a realm that excludes the will, because imagination renders redundant all volition.

  Macbeth is well aware of his proclivity for second sight and has no hesitation in yielding to it, even though there is a certain reluctance in his eloquent “And nothing is, but what is not.” That reluctance is an element that slowly abandons him as he journeys into the interior of darkness. He moves on from an oscillation between self-disavowal and reaffirmation until his entire consciousness is flooded by a metaphysic of nothingness.