King Lear

by Shakespeare, William

  What is the nature of the resistance offered by the feminine Other in King Lear? On the one hand, it is a matter of malice: Goneril and Regan are selfish beasts who wish their father ill. On the other hand, it is a matter of pure separateness. Cordelia, as we have seen, is guilty of nothing but being a separate person from her father, of having her own social role to play. In many ways the resistance Cordelia offers is more interesting. Cordelia simply resists Lear’s claim to be the sun around which everything revolves. The mere presence of another inviolable person is enough to shatter Lear’s identity. The tragic hero wants to be the only star in the sky.

  The feminine Other creates drama by resisting the hero, but also by being endlessly desirable to him. The desire of the hero for women and the world keeps him both alive and vulnerable; it keeps open the possibility of both suffering and fulfillment. A comparison between Lear and Gloucester will illustrate the point. Gloucester, who has sons instead of daughters, loses his capacity for desire and with it both his vulnerability to his experience and his chance of happiness. He tries to kill himself, is rescued by Edgar, feels suicidal again when he witnesses Lear’s madness, urges Oswald to kill him, and finally is parked by Edgar in “the shadow of this tree” (5.2.1). “A man may rot even here” (8), he tells Edgar when Edgar returns. Since Edgar and Gloucester are in the middle of a battle there is no time for an elaborate response. “Men must endure / Their going hence, even as their coming hither,” Edgar tells his father briefly. “Ripeness is all. Come on.” Gloucester gets up and plods on. “And that’s true, too,” he says. (9-11) Nothing makes much difference to him anymore. Lear, by contrast, dies upon a wish. “Do you see this?” he asks urgently, bent over the dead Cordelia’s head. “Look on her,” he cries, tortured by hope. “Look, her lips, / Look there, look there.” (5.3.312-13) Lear’s feelings stay alive to the end of the play.

  As many people have noticed, there is a sexual component to Lear’s desire for his daughters. When Lear is hurt by Goneril and Regan, he denounces them as if he were their lover, not their father:The fitchew, nor the soilèd horse, goes to ’t

  With a more riotous appetite.

  Down from the waist they are Centaurs,

  Though women all above:

  But to the girdle do the gods inherit,

  Beneath is all the fiend’s.

  There’s hell, there’s darkness, there is the sulphurous pit,

  Burning, scalding, stench, consumption; fie, fie, fie!

  (4.6.124-131)

  Why does Lear blast women for their sexual appetites rather than for their cruelty? Goneril and Regan are in fact unfaithful wives, but Lear doesn’t know that, and anyway they haven’t betrayed him sexually. But in Shakespeare’s mind any wound that really matters is felt as a sexual wound. Sexual vulnerability, like sexual desire, is archetypal for Shakespeare. Lear’s connection to his daughters is like a sexual connection in that it keeps sending him back for more. Finally Gloucester has had enough of life itself, but Lear can always think of something else to want from his daughters. First he wants flattery, then revenge, then recognition, kindness, forgiveness, companionship—whatever he can get. Beaten and cornered by his enemies, he comes up with yet another fantasy of being sustained by his daughter’s love:Come, let’s away to prison:

  We two alone will sing like birds i‘th’cage:

  When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down

  And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live,

  And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh

  At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues

  Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too,

  Who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out,

  And take upon’s the mystery of things,

  As if we were God’s spies. (5.3.8-17)

  Lear is sometimes taken to task for this speech. It shows, according to a certain school of literary criticism, that Lear still hasn t learned his lesson, still thinks his desires are all-important, still can’t face reality. But is it a tragic hero’s job to learn his lesson, or is it his job to stay alive and kicking to the end of the play? Gloucester learns his lesson, but who cares what happens to him? Only Edgar. We lose interest in Gloucester when he loses interest in the world.

  Women in King Lear are congruent with the tie that binds us to life itself. As the feminine Other, women are in- violably separate from the masculine Self, and they are as active and aggressive in creating the plot as the hero himself. Taken together, the three sisters range from one end to the other on the scale of human moral behavior; and if the feminine is, as so often in fiction by men, schizophreni- cally split up into good and evil, it must be admitted that so is everything else in the play. Edgar and Edmund are almost as deeply divided as Cordelia and her sisters. It is a play about extremes—of wealth and poverty, wisdom and folly, heights and depths. As individual characters the women in this play are very partial portraits; but as components of the feminine Other they do add up. Only when I refuse the role of Other altogether, only when nothing will satisfy but a female version of the Self, do I refuse to shelter the female portion of my identity with Shakespeare’s women. At that point, if I’m smart, I take a break from Shakespeare and pick up Middlemarch.

  JOHN RUSSELL BROWN

  Staging Violence in King Lear

  Incoherent and physical reaction to violence is almost the rule in King Lear. The suffering of Gloucester is prolonged, unremitting, and often silent. His interrogation and blinding are carried out by Regan and Cornwall with a precise verbal marking of physical brutality which is reminiscent of the much earlier Titus Andronicus: “Upon these eyes of thine, I’ll set my foot” and “Out vile jelly! / Where is thy lustre now?” (3.7.69, 84—85). They provoke Gloucester’s defiance and condemnation, but when he is finally thrust out of doors the blinded man is silent. Finding Edgar to guide him to Dover, he does not recognize his son’s voice and so stumbles forward uncertainly, even when supported and shown the way; he is at anyone’s mercy, and when he meets Lear, whom he recognizes by his voice, he cannot communicate with him. Eventually, after crying out “Alack, alack the day!” (4.6.183), he briefly begs to be killed by Oswald. When this crisis is over he does speak at greater length, envying the king for being mad:... how stiff is my vile sense,

  That I stand up, and have ingenious feeling

  Of my huge sorrows! Better I were distract:From John Russell Brown, British Academy Annual Shakespeare Lecture, “Violence and Sensationalism in the Plays of Shakespeare and Other Dramatists,” 21 April 1994, published in Proceedings of the British Academy 87 (1995): 101-18, used by permission of the author and of the British Academy.

  So should my thoughts be severed from my griefs,

  And woes by wrong imaginations lose

  The knowledge of themselves. (284-89)

  When drums foretell battle he submits without words to being led away, and we can only guess at his feelings and “imaginations.” When first brought before Regan and Cornwall, Gloucester had seen himself as “tied to the stake” like a bear which has to “stand the course” of being baited by fierce dogs trained for the job (3.7.55): now, in the last battle, he is like one of the blind bears who were kept as more special attractions, to be tied to a stake and then whipped—only Gloucester remains motionless of his own free will by the tree or shrub to which he has been led. Edgar tells him to “pray that the right may thrive” (5.2.2) and then leaves. Now all that happens is “Alarm and retreat within,” and even that will be in sound only if the noise of battle is heard from off stage as the Folio text directs. As the action of the entire play hangs in the balance, all that the audience is shown is a worn-out old man, who can see nothing and do nothing, and does not even understand who has brought him to where he is. Does Gloucester react at all as the sound of battle rises and dies away? We do not know, because Shakespeare has withheld all further words and stage-directions. All we are shown is the long-suffering body and sightless eyes.

  T
his reliance on physical action was extraordinary and risky, as three considerations show. First, we know that the whipping of a blind bear in Paris Garden, not far from the Globe Theatre, was:performed by five or six men standing circularly with whips, which they exercise upon him without any mercy, as he cannot escape because of his chain; he defends himself with all his force and skill, throwing down all that come within his reach and are not active enough to get out of it, and tearing the whips out of their hands, and breaking them.7

  No one approaches to whip Gloucester and this blind victim provides no entertainment. So what does this audience think, or do?

  Secondly, consider productions of King Lear in present-day theatres where the hunched figure of Gloucester sits in a carefully chosen place, carefully cross-lit. Lights dim progressively, and a vast backcloth may redden to represent the off-stage battle; or perhaps carefully drilled soldiers with implements of war cross and recross in front of Gloucester; and all this time, appropriate music and semi-realistic sound will work on our minds with changing rhythm, pitch, and volume. The audience will sit in the dark, their eyes and ears controlled completely by the play’s director working with a team of highly trained technicians. Then consider in contrast a performance at the Globe Theatre where the light on stage could not be changed or the sounds of battle orchestrated for maximum effect and meaning, and where all was what it happened to be as the play was revived for that one day only. The audience members, in the same light as the stage, were free to withdraw attention, move around (many were standing), and talk among themselves. The actor playing Gloucester had nothing to help him attract attention and not a word to say, as he sat alone with his eyes shut; he could have had only the vaguest idea of how long it would be before Edgar returned. The elaborate speeches of Titus Andronicus, holding the sufferer still and controlling the audience’s thoughts, and the pyrotechnics of Pyrrhus’s speech in Hamlet, are both missing. So too are the searching words of Romeo or Juliet, which simultaneously presented and veiled the horror of teenage suicide. Gloucester gains or loses attention because he is there, victim of violence and of his son’s inability to speak to him of his presence and his love. The audience would have paid attention to Gloucester or not as they chose, and would have understood for themselves, or not. One might come to feel very alone, sitting in an audience which did not see what you saw, or did not care; then suffering would seem to exist in a disregarding world. If one sat in audience equally moved by what was silent on stage, then you might wonder if some words had been forgotten or if no words were the only possible response. Shakespeare has presented the consequences of violence so that the audience has to shoulder responsibility for its own reactions.

  Thirdly, we should remember how mutilated old men are shown on television or film. Briefly they fill the screen in arresting and horrific images, and then disappear before attention can flag, leaving no trace behind; and that effect is created, not as part of the continuous performance of a play, but as something cunningly arranged, for that moment, by makeup artist, costume designer and fitter, the people in charge of set, lights, and sound, and, most significantly, by cameramen and editor. The result is no more than a few seconds of overwhelming horror or pathos, instead of being one part of a sustained performance by an actor who in some real ways has been living in the role. In the theatre, an actor represents the lived experience of violence, rather than achieving, with other people’s help or hindrance, a moment or two of sensational effect.

  SYLVAN BARNET

  King Lear on Stage and Screen

  In 1808 Charles Lamb wrote an essay that has become infamous, “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, Considered with Reference to Their Fitness for Stage Representation.” The most controversial portion runs as follows:To see Lear acted—to see an old man tottering about the stage with a walking-stick, turned out of doors by his daughters in a rainy night, has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting. We want to take him into shelter and relieve him. That is all the feeling which the acting of Lear ever produced in me. But the Lear of Shakespeare cannot be acted. The contemptible machinery by which they mimic the storm which he goes out in, is not more inadequate to represent the horrors of the real elements, than any actor can be to represent Lear.... The greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension, but in intellectual: the explosions of his passion are terrible as a volcano; they are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that sea, his mind, with all its vast riches. It is his mind which is laid bare.... On the stage we see nothing but corporal infirmities and weakness, the impotence of rage.

  Many play readers and theatergoers have tested Lamb’s response against their own; those who believe that even the best production of a play (if the play is great literature) is reductive have sided with Lamb; others, who believe that a play—even the greatest play—is essentially a script that achieves its fullest life only in performance, have dismissed him. The view of this second group is summed up in Ezra Pound’s assertion: “The medium of drama is not words, but persons moving about on a stage using words.” But those who hold this view, and censure Lamb, should remember that Lamb never saw enacted a version of Shakespeare’s King Lear that we would call acceptable. This statement requires some explanation, but first we should glance at the little that is known of productions in Shakespeare’s day.

  Although King Lear almost surely originally was performed at the Globe Theatre, the earliest recorded performance is at the court of King James I in Whitehall Palace, London, on December 26, 1606. A few references to the play during the first seventy-five years of its existence assure us that it was occasionally acted, but tell us nothing about how it was performed or how it was received. Performances of Lear ceased when civil war broke out in England in 1642 (the theaters were soon closed by Act of Parliament), but after Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660 the theaters were reopened, and we know that Lear was among the plays acted in the 1660s. If it evoked comment, however, the comment is lost; Samuel Pepys, the English. diarist and the source for some of our sharpest glimpses of the theater in that period, does not mention Lear. In any case, in 1681 Nahum Tate presented his adaptation of the play in London, an adaptation that was to hold the stage for more than a century and a half.

  In his dedication, Tate says that he found in Shakespeare’s Lear a heap of jewels unstrung and unpolished, yet so dazzling in their disorder that I soon perceived I had seized a treasure. ‘Twas my good fortune to light on one expedient to rectify what was wanting in the regularity and probability of the tale, which was to run through the whole a love betwixt Edgar and Cordelia....

  And so, as Shakespeare had freely rewritten the old anonymous play of King Leir, Tate now rewrote Shakespeare’s play. He made changes throughout, for example modifications in Lear’s curses, but the verbal changes seem small when compared with structural changes:1) Tate manufactured a love interest for Edgar and Cor-

  delia (Edgar, by the way, in this version saves Cordelia from

  an attempted rape by Edmund) and therefore eliminated the

  King of France;

  2) he deleted the Fool;

  3) he added a happy ending, keeping Lear, Cordelia, and

  Gloucester alive, and marrying Cordelia and Edgar.

  This version persisted on the stage throughout the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth. Thus, even when David Garrick played Lear in 1756 with “restorations from Shakespeare,” i.e. with the restoration of some of Shakespeare’s lines, he nevertheless followed Tate in dropping the Fool, and in retaining not only Tate’s love affair between Cordelia and Edgar but also Tate’s happy ending. (For a detailed yet readable study of Garrick’s version of Lear, see Kalman A. Burnim, David Garrick, Director.) From 1768 to 1773 George Colman’s more faithful version was performed at Covent Garden, but this version, too, though adhering fairly closely to Shakespeare’s first four acts, omitted the Fool and apparently made some sort of alteration in the ending. In 1823 Edmund Kean used much of Shakespeare’s fifth act�
��but only for two performances, after which he returned to Tate’s happy ending. In 1826 Kean and Robert W. Elliston restored the tragic ending—but they nevertheless kept the love story and omitted the Fool. Not until 1838, in William Macready’s production, were all three of Tate’s basic changes eliminated. That is, Macready eliminated the love story, restored the Fool (though he assigned the role to a woman) and restored the tragic ending. But it should be mentioned that even though Macready restored most of Shakespeare’s lines, his version was still in some ways indebted to Tate; for example, he kept Gloucester alive at the end, and he retained Tate’s telescoping of the scene in the hovel (3.4) with a corrupted version of the scene in the farmhouse (3.6).

  With this background, then, perhaps we can better appreciate Lamb’s position, expressed, one recalls, in 1808. Here is Lamb surveying the revisions—that is, the play in the form in which it was acted in his day:The play is beyond all art, as the tamperings with it show: it is too hard and stony; it must have love-scenes, and a happy ending. It is not enough that Cordelia is a daughter; she must shine as a lover too. Tate has put his hook in the nostrils of this Leviathan, for Garrick and his followers, the show-men of the scene, to draw the mighty beast about more easily. A happy ending—as if the living martyrdoms that Lear had gone through—the flaying of his feelings alive, did not make a fair dismissal from the stage of life the only decorous thing for him.