King Lear

by Shakespeare, William

And fire us hence like foxes. Wipe thine eyes;

  The good years shall devour them, flesh and fell,

  Ere they shall make us weep. We’ll see ‘em starved

  first. (20-25)

  Lear’s death, upon one ground or another, is artistically inevitable. Try to imagine his survival; no further argument will be needed. The death of Cordelia has been condemned as a wanton outrage upon our feelings and so as an aesthetic blot upon the play. But the dramatic mind that was working to the tune ofAs flies to wanton boys, are we to th’ gods,

  They kill us for their sport, (4.1.36-37)

  was not likely to be swayed by sentiment. The tragic truth about life, to the Shakespeare that wrote King Lear, included its capricious cruelty. And what meeter sacrifice to this than Cordelia? Besides, as we have seen, he must provide this new Lear with a tragic determinant, since “the great rage ... is kill’d in him,” which precipitated catastrophe for the old Lear. And what but Cordelia’s loss would suffice?

  We have already set Lear’s last scene in comparison with his first; it will be worth while to note a little more particularly the likeness and the difference. The same commanding figure; he bears the body of Cordelia as lightly as ever he carried robe, crown and scepter before. All he had undergone has not so bated his colossal strength but that he could kill her murderer with his bare hands.I kill’d the slave that was a-hanging thee.

  ‘Tis true, my lords, he did, (5.3.276-77)

  says the officer in answer to their amazed looks. Albany, Edgar, Kent and the rest stand silent and intent around him; Regan and Goneril are there, silent too. He stands, with the limp body close clasped, glaring blankly at them for a moment. When speech is torn from him, in place of the old kingly rhetoric we have only the horrible, half humanHowl, howl, howl, howl! (259)

  Who these are, for all their dignity and martial splendor, for all the respect they show him, he neither knows nor cares. They are men of stone and murderous traitors; though, after a little, through the mist of his suffering, comes a word for Kent. All his world, of power and passion and will, and the wider world of thought over which his mind in its ecstasy had ranged, is narrowed now to Cordelia; and she is dead in his arms.

  Here is the clue to the scene; this terrible concentration upon the dead, and upon the unconquerable fact of death. This thing was Cordelia; she was alive, she is dead. Here is human tragedy brought to its simplest terms, fit ending to a tragic play that has seemed to out-leap human experience. From power of intellect and will, from the imaginative sweep of madness, Shakespeare brings Lear to this; to no moralizing nor high thoughts, but just toShe’s gone for ever.

  I know when one is dead and when one lives;

  She’s dead as earth. Lend me a looking-glass;

  If that her breath will mist or stain the stone,

  Why, then she lives. (261-65)

  Lacking a glass, he catches at a floating feather. That stirs on her lips; a last mockery. Kent kneels by him to share his grief. Then to the bystanders comes the news of Edmund’s death; the business of life goes forward, as it will, and draws attention from him for a moment. But what does he heed? When they turn back to him he has her broken body in his arms again.

  MAYNARD MACK

  From King Lear in Our Time

  I turn now to a closer scrutiny of the play. In the remarks that follow I shall address myself primarily to three topics, which I believe to be both interesting in themselves and well suited to bring before us other qualities of this tragedy which stir the twentieth-century imagination. The first topic is the externality of Shakespeare’s treatment of action in King Lear, the second is the profoundly social orientation of the world in which he has placed this action; and the third is what I take to be the play’s dominant tragic theme, summed up best in Lear’s words to Gloucester in Dover fields: “We came crying hither.”

  As we watch it in the theatre, the action of King Lear comes to us first of all as an experience of violence and pain. No other Shakespearean tragedy, not even Titus, contains more levels of raw ferocity, physical as well as moral. In the action, the exquisite cruelties of Goneril and Regan to their father are capped by Gloucester’s blinding onstage, and this in turn by the wanton indignity of Cordelia’s murder. In the language, as Miss Caroline Spurgeon has pointed out, allusions to violence multiply and accumulate into a pervasive image as of “a human body in anguished movement—tugged, wrenched, beaten, pierced, stung, scourged, dislocated, flayed, gashed, scalded, tortured, and finally broken on the rack.”1

  Miss Spurgeon’s comment tends to formulate the playFrom King Lear in Our Time, by Maynard Mack, © 1965 The Re-gents of the University of California. Used by permission of the University of California Press, Berkeley, California.

  ‘Shakespeare’s Iterative Imagery (1935), p. 342.

  in terms of passiveness and suffering. But the whole truth is not seen unless it is formulated also in terms of agency and aggression. If the Lear world is exceptionally anguished, it is chiefly because it is exceptionally contentious. Tempers in King Lear heat so fast that some critics are content to see in it simply a tragedy of wrath. Unquestionably, it does contain a remarkable number of remarkably passionate collisions. Lear facing Cordelia, and Kent facing Lear, in the opening scene; Lear confronting Goneril at her house with his terrifying curse; Kent tangling with Oswald outside Gloucester’s castle; Cornwall run through by his own servant, who warns Regan that if she had a beard he’d “shake it on this quarrel”; Edgar and Edmund simulating a scuffle in the first act, and later, in the last act, hurling charge and countercharge in the scene of their duel; the old king himself defying the storm: these are only the more vivid instances of a pattern of pugnacity which pervades this tragedy from beginning to end, shrilling the voices that come to us from the stage and coloring their language even in the tenderest scenes. The pattern gives rise to at least one locution which in frequency of occurrence is peculiar to King Lear— to “outface the winds and persecutions of the sky,” to “outscorn the to-and-fro contending wind and rain,” to “outjest his heart-struck injuries,” to “outfrown false Fortune’s frown.” And it appears as a motif even in that pitiful scene at Dover, where the old king, at first alone, throws down his glove before an imaginary opponent—“There’s my gauntlet, I’ll prove it on a giant”—and, afterward, when the blind Gloucester enters, defies him, too: “No, do thy worst, blind Cupid, I’ll not love.” So powerful is this vein of belligerence in the linguistic texture of the play that pity itself is made, in Cordelia’s words, something that her father’s white hair must “challenge.” Even “had you not been their father,” she says in an apostrophe to the sleeping king, referring to the suffering he has been caused by his other daughters, “these white flakes did challenge pity of them.”

  It goes without saying that in a world of such contentiousness most of the dramatis personae will be outrageously self-assured. The contrast with the situation in Hamlet, in this respect, is striking and instructive. There, as I have argued in another place, the prevailing mood tends to be interrogative.5 Doubt is real in Hamlet, and omnipresent. Minds, even villainous minds, are inquiet and uncertain. Action does not come readily to anyone except Laertes and Fortinbras, who are themselves easily deflected by the stratagems of the king, and there is accordingly much emphasis on the fragility of the human will. All this is changed in King Lear. Its mood, I would suggest (if it may be caught in a single word at all), is imperative. The play asks questions, to be sure, as Hamlet does, and far more painful questions because they are so like a child‘s, so simple and unmediated by the compromises to which much experience usually impels us: “Is man no more than this?” “Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?” “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life And thou no breath at all?” Such questionings in King Lear stick deep, like Macbeth’s fears in Banquo.

  Yet it is not, I think, the play’s questions that establish its distinctive coloring onstage. (Some of its questions we shall return to
later.) It is rather its commands, its invocations and appeals that have the quality of commands, its flat-footed defiances and refusals: “Come not between the dragon and his wrath.” “You nimble lightnings, dart your blinding flames into her scornful eyes!” “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!” “Thou shalt not die; die for adultery, no!” “A plague upon you, murderers, traitors, all! I might have sav’d her ...” In the psychological climate that forms round a protagonist like this, there is little room for doubt, as we may see from both Lear’s and Goneril’s scorn of Albany. No villain’s mind is inquiet. Action comes as naturally as breathing and twice as quick. And, what is particularly unlike the situation in the earlier tragedies, the hero’s destiny is self-made. Lear does not inherit his predicament like Hamlet; he is not duped by an antagonist like Othello. He walks into disaster head on.

  This difference is of the first importance. King Lear, to follow R. W. Chambers in applying Keats’s memorable phrase, is a vale of soul-making,6 where to all appearances the will is agonizingly free. As if to force the point on our attention, almost every character in the play, including such humble figures as Cornwall’s servant and the old tenant who befriends Gloucester, is impelled soon or late to take some sort of stand—to show, in Oswald’s words, “what party I do follow.” One cannot but be struck by how much positioning and repositioning of this kind the play contains. Lear at first takes up his position with Goneril and Regan, France and Kent take theirs with Cordelia, Albany takes his with Goneril, and Gloucester (back at his own house), with Cornwall and Regan. But then all reposition. Kent elects to come back as his master’s humblest servant. The Fool elects to stay with the great wheel, even though it runs downhill. Lear elects to become a comrade of the wolf and owl rather than return to his elder daughters. Gloucester likewise has second thoughts and comes to Lear’s rescue, gaining his sight though he loses his eyes. Albany, too, has second thoughts, and lives, he says, only to revenge those eyes. In the actions of the old king himself, the taking of yet a third position is possibly implied. For after the battle, when Cordelia asks, “Shall we not see these daughters and these sisters?” Lear replies (with the vehemence characteristic of him even in defeat), “No, no, no, no!” and goes on to build, in his famous following lines, that world entirely free of pugnacity and contentiousness in which he and Cordelia will dwell: “We two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage.”

  Movements of the will, then, have a featured place in King Lear. But what is more characteristic of the play than their number is the fact that no one of them is ever exhibited to us in its inward origins or evolution. Instead of scenes recording the genesis or gestation of an action—scenes of introspection or persuasion or temptation like those which occupy the heart of the drama in Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth—King Lear offers us the moment at which will converts into its outward expressions of action and consequence; and this fact, I suspect, helps account for the special kind of painfulness that the play always communicates to its audiences. In King Lear we are not permitted to experience violence as an extemalization of a psychological drama which has priority in both time and significance, and which therefore partly palliates the violence when it comes. This is how we do experience, I think, Hamlet’s vindictiveness to his mother, Macbeth’s massacres, Othello’s murder: the act in the outer world is relieved of at least part of its savagery by our understanding of the inner act behind it. The violences in King Lear are thrust upon us quite otherwise—with the shock that comes from evil which has nowhere been inwardly accounted for, and which, from what looks like a studiedly uninward point of view on the playwright’s part, must remain unaccountable, to characters and audience alike: “Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?”

  The relatively slight attention given in King Lear to the psychological processes that ordinarily precede and determine human action suggests that here we are meant to look for meaning in a different quarter from that in which we find it in the earlier tragedies. In Hamlet, Shakespeare had explored action in its aspect of dilemma. Whether or not we accept the traditional notion that Hamlet is a man who cannot make up his mind, his problem is clearly conditioned by the unsatisfactory nature of the alternatives he faces. Any action involves him in a kind of guilt, the more so because he feels an already existing corruption in himself and in his surroundings which contaminates all action at the source. “Virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock but we shall relish of it.” Hence the focus of the play is on those processes of consciousness that can explain and justify suspension of the will. In Othello, by contrast, Shakespeare seems to be exploring action in its aspect of error. Othello faces two ways of understanding love: Iago’s and Desdemona‘s—which is almost to say, in the play’s terms, two systems of valuing and two ways of being—but we are left in no doubt that one of the ways is wrong. Even if we take Iago and Desdemona, as some critics do, to be dramatic emblems of conflicting aspects in Othello’s own nature, the play remains a tragedy of error, not a tragedy of dilemma. “The pity of it, Iago” is that Othello makes the wrong choice when the right one is open to him and keeps clamoring to be known for what it is even to the very moment of the murder. The playwright’s focus in this play is therefore on the corruptions of mind by which a man may be led into error, and he surrounds Iago and Desdemona with such overtones of damnation and salvation as ultimately must attend any genuine option between evil and good.

  King Lear, as I see it, confronts the perplexity and mystery of human action at a later point. Choice remains in the forefront of the argument, but its psychic antecedents have been so effectively shrunk down in this primitivized world that action seems to spring directly out of the bedrock of personality. We feel sure no imaginable psychological process could make Kent other than loyal, Goneril other then cruel, Edgar other than “a brother noble.” Such characters, as we saw earlier, are qualities as well as persons: their acts have consequences but little history. The meaning of action here, therefore, appears to lie rather in effects than in antecedents, and particularly in its capacity, as with Lear’s in the opening scene, to generate energies that will hurl themselves in unforeseen and unforeseeable reverberations of disorder from end to end of the world.

  The elements of that opening scene are worth pausing over, because they seem to have been selected to bring before us precisely such an impression of unpredictable effects lying coiled and waiting in an apparently innocuous posture of affairs. The atmosphere of the first episode in the scene, as many a commentator has remarked, is casual, urbane, even relaxed. In the amenities, exchanged by Kent and Gloucester, Shakespeare allows no hint to penetrate of Gloucester’s later agitation about “these late eclipses,” or about the folly of a king’s abdicating his responsibilities and dividing up his power. We are momentarily lulled into a security that is not immediately broken even when the court assembles and Lear informs us that he will shake off all business and “unburthen’d crawl toward death.” I suspect we are invited to sense, as Lear speaks, that this is a kingdom too deeply swaddled in forms of all kinds—too comfortable and secure in its “robes and furr’d gowns”; in its rituals of authority and deference (of which we have just heard and witnessed samples as Gloucester is dispatched offstage, the map demanded, and a “fast intent” and “constant will” thrust on our notice by the king’s imperious personality); and in its childish charades, like the one about to be enacted when the daughters speak. Possibly we are invited to sense, too, that this is in some sort an emblematic kingdom—almost a paradigm of hierarchy and rule, as indeed the scene before us seems to be suggesting, with its wide display of ranks in both family and state. Yet perhaps too schematized, too regular—a place where complex realities have been too much reduced to formulas, as they are on a map: as they are on that visible map, for instance, on which Lear three times lays his finger in this scene (“as if he were marking the land itself,” says Granville-Barker), while he describes with an obvious pride its tidy catalogue of “shadowy forests” and
“champains,” “plenteous rivers and wide-skirted meads.” Can it be that here, as on that map, is a realm where everything is presumed to have been charted, where all boundaries are believed known, including those of nature and human nature; but where no account has been taken of the heath which lies in all countries and in all men and women just beyond the boundaries they think they know?

  However this may be, into this emblematic, almost dream-like situation erupts the mysterious thrust of psychic energy that we call a choice, an act; and the waiting coil of consequences leaps into threatening life, bringing with it, as every act considered absolutely must, the inscrutable where we had supposed all was clear, the unexpected though we thought we had envisaged all contingencies and could never be surprised. Perhaps it is to help us see this that the consequences in the play are made so spectacular. The first consequence is Lear’s totally unlooked-for redistribution of his kingdom into two parts instead of three, and his rejection of Cordelia. The second is his totally unlooked-for banishment of his most trusted friend and counselor. The third is the equally unlooked-for rescue of his now beggared child to be the Queen of France; and what the unlooked-for fourth and fifth will be, we already guess from the agreement between Goneril and Regan, as the scene ends, that something must be done, “and i’ th’ heat.” Thereafter the play seems to illustrate, with an almost diagrammatic relentlessness and thoroughness, the unforeseen potentials that lie waiting to be hatched from a single choice and act: nakedness issues out of opulence, madness out of sanity and reason out of madness, blindness out of seeing and insight out of blindness, salvation out of ruin. The pattern of the unexpected is so completely worked out, in fact, that, as we noticed in the preceding chapter, it appears to embrace even such minor devices of the plot as the fact that Edmund, his fortune made by two letters, is undone by a third.