Meantime, as we look back over the first scene, we may wonder whether the gist of the whole matter has not been placed before us, in the play’s own emblematic terms, by Gloucester, Kent, and Edmund in that brief conversation with which the tragedy begins. This conversation touches on two actions, we now observe, each loaded with menacing possibilities, but treated with a casualness at this point that resembles Lear’s in opening his trial of love. The first action alluded to is the old king’s action in dividing his kingdom, the dire effects of which we are almost instantly to see. The other action is Gloucester’s action in begetting a bastard son, and the dire effects of this will also speedily be known. What is particularly striking, however, is that in the latter instance the principal effect is already on the stage before us, though its nature is undisclosed, in the person of the bastard son himself. Edmund, like other “consequences,” looks tolerable enough till revealed in full: “I cannot wish the fault undone, the issue of it being so proper,” says Kent, meaning by proper “handsome”; yet there is a further dimension of meaning in the word that we will only later understand, when Edgar relates the darkness of Edmund to the darkness wherein he was got and the darkness he has brought to his father’s eyes. Like other consequences, too, Edmund looks to be predictable and manageable—in advance. “He hath been out nine years,” says Gloucester, who has never had any trouble holding consequences at arm’s length before, “and away he shall again.” Had Shakespeare reflected on the problem consciously—and it would be rash, I think, to be entirely sure he did not—he could hardly have chosen a more vivid way of giving dramatic substance to the unpredictable relationships of act and consequence than by this confrontation of a father with his unknown natural son—or to the idea of consequences come home to roost, than by this quiet youthful figure, studying “deserving” as he prophetically calls it, while he waits upon his elders.
In King Lear then, I believe it is fair to say, the inscrutability of the energies that the human will has power to release is one of Shakespeare’s paramount interests. By the inevitable laws of drama, this power receives a degree of emphasis in all his plays, especially the tragedies. The difference in King Lear is that it is assigned the whole canvas. The crucial option, which elsewhere comes toward the middle of the plot, is here presented at the very outset. Once taken, everything that happens after is made to seem, in some sense, to have been set in motion by it, not excluding Gloucester’s recapitulation of it in the subplot. Significantly, too, the act that creates the crisis, the act on which Shakespeare focuses our dramatic attention, is not (like Lear’s abdication) one which could have been expected to germinate into such a harvest of disaster. The old king’s longing for public testimony of affection seems in itself a harmless folly: it is not an outrage, not a crime, only a foolish whim. No more could Cordelia’s death have been expected to follow from her truthfulness or Gloucester’s salvation to be encompassed by a son whom he disowns and seeks to kill.
All this, one is driven to conclude, is part of Shakespeare’s point. In the action he creates for Lear, the act of choice is cut loose not simply from the ties that normally bind it to prior psychic causes, but from the ties that usually limit its workings to commensurate effects. In this respect the bent of the play is mythic: it abandons verisimilitude to find out truth, like the story of Oedipus; or like the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, with which, in fact, it has interesting affinities. Both works are intensely emblematic. Both treat of crime and punishment and reconciliation in poetic, not realistic, terms. In both the fall is sudden and unaccountable, the penalty enormous and patently exemplary. The willful act of the mariner in shooting down the albatross has a nightmarish inscrutability like Lear’s angry rejection of the daughter he loves best; springs from a similar upsurge of egoistic willfulness; hurls itself against what was until that moment a natural “bond,” and shatters the universe. Nor do the analogies end with this. When the mariner shoots the albatross, the dark forces inside him that prompted his deed project themselves and become the landscape, so to speak, in which he suffers his own nature: it is his own alienation, his own waste land of terror and sterility that he meets. Something similar takes place in Shakespeare’s play. Lear, too, as we saw earlier, suffers his own nature, encounters his own heath, his own storm, his own nakedness and defenselessness, and by this experience, like the mariner, is made another man.
LINDA BAMBER
The Woman Reader in King Lear
When adults show children how to read a map, they say, “Here is your street (or state or nation),” and the habit of finding ourselves on the map persists when we are grown up. When travelers return with pictures of Cairo or Barcelona, they say, “That’s the hotel we stayed in, there,” as if it explained the picture. If a work of fiction is a map of its own world, the first question we ask of it is, “Where am I in here?” or “Who is like me?” This question is unsophisticated but important, because it shapes our most basic responses. Only when we have answered it do we know whom to love and hate and what to hope for.
For women the problem of locating ourselves in literature is complicated by the fact that so much of the literature of the past is written by men. Who is “like me” when the character offered as a version of the self is a man? When I began to read the great literature of the past I never thought to ask this question. My (excellent) teachers were almost all men, and I read stories and poems and plays by men without noticing the difference. In the end you could say I imprinted to a different species. I thought I was a man, just as Tarzan thought he was an ape. Of course, I also knew I wasn’t. But my responses to literature were confused by an identity problem generated for me by literature itself.
In King Lear, the character who is “like me” is of course King Lear. Lear is passionate, articulate, capable of growth, capable of catastrophic error, important to himself and to everyone else in the play. He claims he is “more sinned against than sinning,” and that’s how I feel,Copyright © 1986 by Linda Bamber, used by permission of Linda Bamber.
too. But King Lear is a man while I am a woman. When I identify with him, an important part of my identity, my femininity, is homeless. If the King Lear world is organized around a man, what is the status of women in it? Are women important in this world, or are they (fictionally) second-class citizens? If I can find satisfactory answers to these questions I am free to identify with Lear as much as I can; otherwise, identifying with Lear means denigrating a part of myself.
The best solution would be finding an alternative, female home in the play. Is there a woman character who represents us as well as Lear himself? If so, we could breathe a sigh of relief and simply graph the play as an ellipse (which has two focal points) instead of a circle. But authors—women as well as men—tend to represent “us” much more fully in characters of their own sex than in characters of the opposite sex, and Shakespeare is no exception. In King Lear the women are either more or less than human. Goneril and Regan are too bad to live, much less to represent us, and Cordelia is perfect. The evil sisters present no temptations to the woman reader, but it is worth dealing in some detail with the problems of identifying with perfection.
Cordelia is never selfish or aggressive; when she hurts her father it is only because she is separate from him, not because of a failure of love:Good my lord,
You have begot me, bred me, loved me. I
Return those duties back as are right fit,
Obey you, love you and most honor you.
Why have my sisters husbands, if they say
They love you all? Haply, when I shall wed,
That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry
Half my love with him, half my care and duty.
Sure I shall never marry like my sisters,
To love my father all. (1.1.97-106)
This is the only moment in the play in which Cordelia asserts herself, and even here she is not so much asserting herself as mediating between the claims of her father and the claims of her future
husband. Her characteristic gestures are of selfless love. No matter how well I think of myself, I would never go so far as to say that she is “like me.”
Cordelia’s perfection is maintained in this play by her silence. First she refuses to speak the self-serving language of flattery; next she listens in silence when her father disinherits her. “The barbarous Scythian,” he tells her,Or he that makes his generation messes
To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom
Be as well neighbored, pitied, and relieved,
As thou my sometime daughter. (118-22)
The next voice to speak is not Cordelia’s but Kent’s. It is Kent who protests the injustice and craziness of Lear’s behavior, Kent who is angry and blunt in Cordelia’s defense:Be Kent unmannerly
When Lear is mad. What wouldst thou do, old man?
Think‘st thou that duty shall have dread to speak
When power to flattery bows? To plainness honor’s bound
When majesty falls to folly. (147-51)
Why is it Kent who speaks aggressively to Lear rather than Cordelia? Possibly because in the world of King Lear an angry woman risks losing our sympathy, even when anger is so clearly required that another character must be enlisted to supply it. Nor is it only anger that Cordelia notably fails to express. Later in the play, when she receives the news of Lear’s misery, she feels a great deal but says very little. The whole description of her behavior turns Cordelia into a kind of icon of grief, precious as a jewel but inarticulate. She controls her emotions, reigns “queen / Over her passion,” cries a few silent tears, which part from her eyes “as pearls from diamonds.” “Made she no verbal question?” Kent asks the Gentleman, who replies,Faith, once or twice she heaved the name of “father”
Pantingly forth, as if it pressed her heart;
Cried, “Sisters! Sisters! Shame of ladies! Sisters!
Kent! Father! Sisters What, i’ th’ storm? i’ th’ night?
Let pity not be believed” There she shook
The holy water from her heavenly eyes,
And clamor moistened: then away she started
To deal with grief alone. (4.3.26-33)
Cordelia’s inarticulateness, the fewness and brokenness of her words at times of great emotion, is her glory. Lear’s glory, by contrast, is to express his feelings fully, variously, and without restraint. The price of Cordelia’s perfection seems to be her renunciation of language, and in the medium of poetic drama, this is a heavy price to pay. Cordelia may be as valuable, even as lovable as Lear, but there is simply not enough of her to balance the enormous pull of our sympathy to him. She doesn’t represent me because often she isn’t even there.
There is no single woman character, then, who represents me in the play. But if we group the three sisters together and call them something like “the feminine” or “the Other” (as opposed to Lear, who represents “the Self”), we can find a kind of rough sexual justice in King Lear. Women are important here not as I am important to myself but as the outside world is important to me. They are like the rock on which the hero is broken and remade; they are the thing outside the Self that cannot be controlled and cannot be renounced. “The Other” is equal to the tragic hero as the second term in a dialectic is equal to the first. Women play the role of “the Other” not only in King Lear but in all Shakespeare’s plays. In all four genres—comedy, history, tragedy, and romance—the nature of the feminine reflects the nature of the world outside the Self. Before returning to King Lear it is worth pausing to consider how this works.
In the comedies, the world outside us is manifestly reliable and orderly, a source of pleasure rather than a threat—and so is the nature of the feminine. In As They Liked It, Alfred Harbage has made a statistical survey of Shakespeare’s characters, dividing them by groups into good and bad. The highest percentage of good characters in any group is the percentage of good women in the comedies: 96 percent good, 4 percent bad. The possibility of betrayal in this world is very slight. The women will not betray the men, the comic world will not betray its central characters, the playwright will not betray our expectations of a happy ending. The world of Shakespearean comedy is fundamentally safe and its women are fundamentally good. We are free in this world to play, to court danger in sport. Sometimes it seems as though the games have gotten out of hand: Oberon’s cruel love games in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shylock’s murderous bond in The Merchant of Venice, and Orsino’s threat to Cesario’s life in Twelfth Night—all these give us some bad moments. But an invisible hand unravels everything and we enjoy the thrill of danger without its deadly consequences. Similarly, the women problem is raised only to be dismissed. We are titillated with reminders that women might be unfaithful; the cuckoldry jokes of Much Ado About Nothing and Portia’s ring trick in The Merchant of Venice remind us of what could happen. But it never does. The women are as transparently faithful as the plot is transparently comic. We are always on our way to the happy ending, to marriage, to the love of good women.
In the romances, the world is a much more serious place—not, as in the tragedies, because it may betray us—but because it may be lost altogether. The protagonist of a Shakespearean romance loses his whole world; Pericles, Leontes, and Prospero live for a time in the absence of everything they care for. But although the world may be lost, it may also be found; and of course the most obvious property of the feminine in this genre is also its tendency to come and go. It is notable that in The Winter’s Tale the two male characters who disappear from Sicilia, Mamillus and Antigonous, disappear for good. It is the women characters, Perdita and Hermione, who return. In Shakespearean romance, the feminine is infinitely valuable, capable of being utterly lost but capable also of miraculous self-renewal. Again, the nature of the feminine is congruent with the nature of the world outside the Self.
The feminine in the history plays is more difficult to characterize briefly than it is in the comedies and romances; perhaps it is best described as unproblematic. The feminine Other may be unambiguously hated, as Joan is in 1 Henry VI; cheerfully courted, as Katherine is in Henry V; or cleverly used to further a career, as Queen Elizabeth is in Richard III. But whatever role she plays, she never offers any metaphysical complications, never raises issues of identity for the masculine Self. Emotions toward women are unconfused; the feminine Other does not call the masculine Self into question. Similarly, the world outside the Self in the histories is simple compared to the world of the tragedies. Because it is almost wholly a political world, it, too, offers few metaphysical or psychological problems. The world divides up smartly into friends and enemies; everyone is playing the same game, however nastily. In tragedy, by contrast, the world becomes murkier, the masculine-historical enterprise loses its cen- trality, friends and enemies become hard to distinguish from each other, and the feminine becomes a problem.
In Shakespearean tragedy, the world outside the Self seems to thicken. It becomes hard to make out. It is not necessarily evil, although it may be evil; in any case, it causes so much suffering that it will at certain moments at least appear evil. It is a world that is separate from us who inhabit it; it will not yield to our desires and fantasies no matter how desperately we need it to do so. This means that in tragedy, recognition—anagnorisis, the banishing of ignorance—is a major goal. We question the tragic universe to discover its laws, since they are what we must live by. The worlds of comedy and romance, by contrast, are shaped by our hearts’ desires; and in history, we are busily remaking the world to suit ourselves.
The feminine in the tragedies can be similarly defined in terms of evil, obduracy, and the problem of anagnorisis. First of all, women in the tragedies constitute the single group in which Harbage finds more bad than good: 58 percent bad and only 42 percent good. Like the world outside the Self, the feminine causes suffering, appears evil, and may actually be evil. And like the world outside the Self, women in the tragedies are notably separate from us, governed by their own laws whether their natures are good o
r evil. The hero can only recognize them for what they are or fail to do so. The effort to control them is useless; neither the feminine Other nor the world outside the Self is within our power in Shakespeare’s tragedy.
The idea of a congruence between women and the world can be taken even further. In King Lear, as in Othello, the world outside the hero is starkly divided between good and evil, and so are the principal women characters—Goneril, Regan, Cordelia, and Desdemona. In Hamlet and Antony and Cleopatra, by contrast, the outside world is a mixture of good and bad; it is hard to tell manly strength from mindless ambition, and restraint may be confused with weakness. The women in these two plays are similarly a confusing mixture of good and evil, and finally may be neither. We never know the extent of Gertrude’s guilt, or whether Cleopatra, if offered better terms, would have sold out to Caesar. But we know all along that Desdemona and Cordelia are perfectly good and Goneril and Regan vile beasts. In Lear and Othello, kindness and constancy are to be found in their purest forms, as are their opposites, cruelty and malice.
It is time to return to my original question. Am I content with the role played in King Lear by the wandering portion of my identity, the part I cannot invest in King Lear? On the whole, I think I should be. For one thing, I am flattered to think that I may be capable of such thrilling modulations between good and evil as exist in the world of King Lear. It makes me interesting to myself. Identifying with the intensely problematic world outside the hero gives me another way of participating in the major questions of the play, questions about the violent extremes we find within ourselves and in our experience. More importantly, I am content to identify with the world outside the hero because the dialectic between King Lear and the outside world is what creates the satisfactions of tragedy. It is when Lear cannot get what he wants from the outside world that he becomes interesting. We do not really want the tragic world to yield to the hero’s desires; we want to see what happens to him when his suffering cracks him open, and he goes out on the heath to become something new. There, thanks to the resistance offered by the tragic world, we are in the presence of exciting possibilities. The hero may triumph over his losses; naked, he may be more splendid than he appeared when he was clothed. Or, like Coriolanus, the hero of one of the Roman plays, he may collapse. Both the risk and the possibility of Shakespearean tragedy depend on the Otherness of the tragic universe to the masculine Self. In identifying with the world outside the hero, I am identifying with something as powerful in creating the drama as the hero himself.
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