And Cordelia merely murmurs:
No cause, no cause.
Every time I hear that exchange, specifically every time I hear “No cause, no cause,” I feel something akin to that same sweet shock I felt at the forgiveness epilogue of Brook’s Dream.
There’s Lear still unforgiving of his other daughters, but telling Cordelia she has cause to be unforgiving to him, he knows he has done wrong to her. And all she says is “No cause, no cause.”
Of course there is cause, but nothing he’s done is unforgivable, nothing he has done is “cause” enough, is cause anymore.
No cause, no cause. There seems to be no cause indeed—if one just gazes at the words on the page—why “no cause” should be the cause of such a powerful effect. One almost needs to see and hear a great actress murmur, “No cause, no cause.”
No cause: forgiveness suspends the old laws of cause and effect. Cause has been uncaused. Causality, the entire weight of the past, the way we got to here, here with all our regrets and regrettable acts, has been abolished.
No cause: you hear inverse echoes of it in Othello who, on his way to murder Desdemona, speaks obsessively to himself: “It is the cause. It is the cause.” The obscurity and impersonality of “it”: almost a declaration of the dehumanized deadliness of causality.
No cause, no cause: one of the few moments that come close to having that impact on me is from the Dream, when the aristocratic couples are all mocking the plebeian players and their mangled version of Pyramus and Thisby, and Theseus tells them to stop their railing and forgive: “The best in this kind are but shadows …”
I always get a chill when I hear that. What is it but a blessing that forgives us, the shadows in the audience, for the private sense of insubstantiality we (well, some of us) sense about ourselves. For our own clumsy attempts to “personate” ourselves. Something we feel—okay, I feel—about the provisional nature of our selves. The self we’re all pretending to be, or not to be. None of us has cause to feel shame at our insubstantiality, the line forgivingly assures us.
And then there is that moment I’d never thought deeply about before until reading Peter Brook’s Berlin lecture, the one where he talks about splitting open any line of Shakespeare and in doing so, releasing infinite energies.
The line he chose to split open was a line about forgiveness. The one at the close of The Tempest. This is what Brook said about that particular line in that lecture (reprinted as Evoking Shakespeare):
“These are the last words of The Tempest, maybe the last words Shakespeare ever wrote.” (Yes, there are plays perhaps written later, but Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen were written with coauthors, so it is fair to say, with one quibble as we’ll see, that “these are the last words Shakespeare ever wrote.”)
Those “last words” are Prospero’s remarkably violent plea to the playgoers for forgiveness:
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be reliev’d by prayer,
Which pierces so, that it assaults
Mercy itself, and frees all faults.
Listen to what Brook says, delivering with offhand authority a stunning conjecture about the physicality of Shakespeare’s writing process, especially as it relates to the phrase “assaults mercy”:
“… you can always see in Shakespeare’s writing that as he writes, when his hand comes back to the beginning of a new line there is always a special force. You feel it in the actual texture of the writing, that the end of the phrase is like an upbeat in music that’s leading to—what?—suspense.”
It’s Peter Hall’s pause, Kermode’s “threshold of comprehension,” Peter Brook’s “suspense.”
“And the word that follows ‘assaults,’ ” Brook adds, “is ‘mercy.’ ”
Perhaps that is at least part of what distinguishes the pleasures of forgiveness: the suspense over whether pardon will be given, mercy shown, faults forgotten, penance accepted, sins remitted, flaws mended, ill deeds undone, repentance rewarded.…
And the welcome relief from suspense, from suspension, when it is. Especially when it becomes more than forgiving a debt, but giving a blessing, a benediction: “No cause, no cause.” The highest degree of forgiveness, but not the only one. Forgiveness comes in many forms and degrees, and that relationship—between the forgiver and the forgiven—turns out to be as important a dyadic relationship in Shakespeare as lover and beloved, ruler and ruled, father and daughter.
Curiously—this is the quibble I mentioned—Brook makes a minor omission when he says the lines he quotes might have been the “last lines” Shakespeare wrote. He omits the last two lines that follow the ones he quotes, the true, literal “last lines” of the play. They too are part of Prospero’s plea for forgiveness, but they turn attention back from the forgiven to the forgiver:
As you from crimes would pardon’d be,
Let your indulgence set me free.
Perhaps Brook omits this two-line tag because, for Brook, this makes forgiveness not unmerited mercy, not something that is given with “no cause,” but rather because it invokes a cause, a logic. A rationale for forgiveness that is less humble and selfless. Perhaps Brook’s omission reflects a trace of the Socinian heresy. An antipathy to a tit-for-tat doctrine of salvation: God demanding a price to forgive man.
Forgive us, because we too would want to be forgiven. It’s the difference between “love thy neighbor as thyself” and love thy neighbor, no matter what, love thine enemy, with “no cause” but love itself. Coleridge spoke of Iago’s “motiveless malignity,” Cordelia offers causeless forgiveness, motiveless magnanimity.
Or perhaps Prospero’s last two lines are not less selfless, perhaps he’s generous in welcoming the forgiver into the circle of those who will come to value, to experience the pleasure of being forgiven. Something akin to the doctrine of “the happy Fall”: that it was better that Adam and Eve sinned and fell and were punished, because it made their forgiveness, their redemption sweeter, the God who granted it more full of grace.
It’s also curious how often and how awkwardly the moment of forgiveness can seem forced into the play. The moment for instance near the close of As You Like It when we’re told the bad brother of Duke Senior happens to come upon an “Old Religious Man” and after a little conversation, gives up his bad behavior (and his kingdom) to his brother, in order to devote himself to a life of prayer. Shakespeare doesn’t even make a gesture at giving us some realistic “explanation,” some moral evolution on the part of the evil brother, that would make him so vulnerable to the power of a little talk with the “Old Religious Man.”
It’s as if Shakespeare is signaling us that this is a gratuitous act on his part, injecting forgiveness almost like a “trespasser” into the play, emphasizing its unpredictability. The absence of a gesture at explanation is itself a gesture that suggests the arbitrariness of forgiveness, which can suddenly show up anywhere, in almost anyone.
Yes, forgiveness is one of those “ideals,” but one of the most complex and contentious for all its ostensibly gentle demeanor.
Just as there was often an argument over pleasure, the fact that there was tension, even suspense over forgiveness in so many Shakespearean plays didn’t seem an accident. Think of the multilayered complexity of the moment of suspense and suspended forgiveness in Hamlet—the moment when Hamlet comes upon Claudius kneeling in prayer.
For Claudius it’s a moment when he tries but fails to find forgiveness, or as he puts it, “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below.” Is this a genuine attempt to ask forgiveness (if his thoughts remain below), genuine regret, or does it suggest the hollowness of mere words?
Hamlet, who has come to kill Claudius, spies surreptitiously on this moment, sees only Claudius on his knees praying, dreads the idea that Claudius might have asked and received forgiveness, absolution, decides not to kill him with the flower of repentance on him, thereby sending him to heaven, rather than hell.
One of the great moments of moral complexity in lit
erature, another moment of suspension in fact. One that reflects and deflects the memory of Pyrrhus’s sword suspended over doomed Priam’s head. And perhaps the biblical memory of Abraham’s knife suspended over Isaac. (A Socinian moment, you might say, in the Old Testament.)
The dilemma of forgiveness is transposed to Hamlet’s mind and soul. And in a strict sense Hamlet fails the forgiveness test. He seeks to spare Claudius’s life and (ultimately) send him to hell rather than kill him and send his (apparently) repentant soul to heaven. Do we condemn Hamlet for knowingly sending to hell a soul he might—or feared he might—have saved by killing the body?
The complexities of forgiveness: it seemed a Shakespearean obsession that I wanted to examine further.
First, just to see whether my sense of its prevalence was an illusion, I checked the words “forgive,” “forgiven” and “forgiveness” in The Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare. “Forgive” appears in one of those three guises 95 times in 32 out of 37 plays by my count. But then there are 220 instances of “mercy” or “merciful.” Forms of the word “pardon” appear more than 300 times. Of course the raw numbers tell us nothing of context or distinction or degree, but they indicate a presence.
The complexity of the question is suggested by contrasting Peter Brook’s attention to Prospero’s final lines, his epilogue plea to us, with the kind of forgiveness, if you can call it that, Prospero offers the treacherous brother who deposed him and cast him adrift at sea to die. Toward the end of the fifth act Prospero tells his brother:
For you, most wicked sir, whom to call brother
Would even infect my mouth, I do forgive
Thy rankest fault—all of them; and require
My dukedom of thee, which perforce, I know
Thou must restore.
If there were a spectrum of forgiveness, this would fall at the extreme end, wouldn’t it? Just as vengeance can be a double-edged sword, forgiveness can be a double-edged word. Here it’s a grudging forgiveness, but one that reminds us forgiveness can be dyadic, the forgiven and the forgiver in an unstable relationship where at times (as here) the forgiver lacks—seems to need—forgiveness himself for his failure to offer true mercy.
Contrast this with the complex, self-aware forgiveness that Prospero offers to Caliban, who tried to rape his daughter and led a rebellion to depose him. “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine,” he says of Caliban. Forgiveness as a kind of “acknowledgment” of one’s own defect, Caliban as an aspect of Prospero’s own self he gives recognition to. Forgiveness as self-recognition. That’s where the drama in the recognition scenes such as the ones in Pericles and Lear comes from: the dawning recognition that forgiveness is possible.
I wondered if there could be said to be an evolution in the complexity of forgiveness in the course of the plays.
Shakespeare’s first comedy, perhaps his first play, The Comedy of Errors, closes with the almost too simple moment of forgiveness between the slave-twins:
We came into the world like brother and brother;
And now let’s go hand in hand, not one before another.
Simple, but from the beginning, something deeply affecting about it.
On the other hand, at the end of Love’s Labor’s Lost we find a kind of punitive forgiveness. The frivolous, mendacious behavior, the oath-breaking wooing the four lords have engaged in, can be forgiven, but only after they spend a year redeeming themselves. Rosalind tells Berowne that to earn redemption he must work with “the speechless sick” and dying: “… your task shall be,/With all the fierce endeavor of your wit,/To enforce the pained impotent to smile.”
To which Berowne replies, in one of those suddenly intense lines so characteristic of forgiveness moments: “To move wild laughter in the throat of death?/It cannot be, it is impossible.”
“To move wild laughter in the throat of death”: what a line! Impossible, perhaps. That’s the point, says Rosalind, his “idle scorns” are likely to fail and when they do, “throw away that spirit,/And I shall find you empty of that fault,/Right joyful of your reformation.”
His forgiveness is dependent on performance of a kind of community service—actually his recognition of his failure and subsequent humility—and his “reformation” shall be her joy, part of the joy being the anticipation of the pleasure of bestowing forgiveness.
If it is found in the comedies, although often in a harsher key for the most part than I imagined, it’s found in the tragedies as knowledge that comes too late if at all.
Forgive me if you feel I’m going on too much about forgiveness, but there’s something pleasurable about the evident pleasure Shakespeare takes in bestowing and withholding it.
EDMUND IS BELOVED!
Consider one obscure and one famous—or notorious—moment of forgiveness.
The obscure moment was brought to my attention by Brian Kulick, the talented American Shakespearean director. I was talking to him about the two-endings-of-Lear problem when he brought up a surprising moment near the close of Lear that had struck him recently.
It’s the moment in the chaos of the fifth act when the villainous Edmund, defeated in battle, lies dying and then, as the stage direction has it, “The bodies of Goneril and Regan are brought in.”
Both women have, of course, in addition to cutting off their father, Lear, and casting him out into the storm, connived to cheat on their husbands with Edmund. Goneril has poisoned her sister and rival for Edmund, Regan, and then killed herself after learning Edmund was dying.
Brian Kulick said he was struck by the first line of Edmund’s reaction to the spectacle of the bodies of the two women being carried in, the bodies of the two dead women who committed murder and suicide out of love for him.
Facing his own doom as well, Edmund looks upon them and says, “Yet Edmund was belov’d!”
It’s one of those lines I’d overlooked, but when looked over closely can be taken in a number of different ways. I’d always seen it as a moment of black humor, Edmund able somehow to make a sarcastic joke at the spectacle of death he’s responsible for. An actor can play it with sneering cynicism. Edmund unrelenting in his nihilism. Especially if one reads it with the two lines that follow:
Yet Edmund was belov’d!
The one the other poison’d for my sake,
And after slew herself.
A kind of perverse satisfaction at the dire consequences of his manipulations. That’s how I’d seen it when I’d paid attention to it, which I rarely did. And yet, Brian Kulick said, it struck him that it could also be read with a sense of wonder: “Yet Edmund was belov’d!”, spoken with a slow, meditative, dawning sense of wonder that even a self-confessed blackhearted creature such as himself, with nothing but contempt for ideals such as love, is somehow deeply affected by the idea that he, of all people, was “belov’d.”
It sounded unlikely at first, but I’ve found that directors like Kulick often come up with remarkable, unpredictable close readings. And in Kulick’s favor it may be said that within a few lines Edmund undergoes one of those miraculous conversions such as the one in As You Like It, effected by the sudden materialization of “the Old Religious Man.”
“I pant for life,” the dying Edmund says, but “Some good I mean to do,/Despite of mine own nature.”
And he proceeds to disclose what he has withheld before: what he has done with Cordelia and Lear and the fact that he’s given orders for Cordelia to be executed, her death, in one final Machiavellian twist, to be made to look like suicide.
Suddenly he wants to help save her life from his own fatal command. He gives his sword to be taken to her place of captivity as his “token of reprieve” to those he ordered to carry out the execution, and urges haste.
And so with his dying words and act he seeks—too late—to save Cordelia’s life. Again, an all-too-miraculous conversion, conspicuous irrelevance, or if not irrelevant, conspicuous in its unlikelihood.
“Yet Edmund was belov’d!” Beloved by whom exactly? Yes, by the
two dead women he connived with. But beloved, perhaps, by his creator, by Shakespeare. (He is one of his great eloquent schemer-characters.) Beloved enough perhaps to be given a line that at least ambiguously shows the possibility that even someone as professedly anti-sentimental as Edmund could be moved by love. Moved to redeem himself and attempt to “reprieve” Cordelia from her fate. It recalls Peter Brook extolling Shakespeare’s “generosity” to his characters.
In giving Edmund that line, Brian Kulick contended, Shakespeare was giving a character one thought one knew an utterly surprising, deeper dimension. He is, if not forgiven, endowed with an unexpected touch of humanity “despite [his] own nature.”
Despite his own nature, but it then becomes his own nature, doesn’t it? And so we find ourselves spiraling into the self-contradictory but more complex vision of Edmund this act of authorial forgiveness provokes. It’s another one of those lines that split open, releases infinite energies.
GRACE AT LAST
And then there is the one most obvious moment of forgiveness in Shakespeare, one that for some reason I’d always resisted. Perhaps because it was so obvious, or so it seemed. That moment in The Winter’s Tale when the statue of Hermione, supposedly driven to death twenty years earlier by her jealous husband Leontes, comes to life. And forgives him.
I had resisted it because it had become such an icon of theatrical Shakespeare. The staging of that moment, a statue come to life, was often the centerpiece of a director’s career, the triumphal flourish of a Shakespearean actress, always written about as if we must be spellbound by its beautiful mystery.
I’d long resisted this allegedly miraculous moment of forgiveness because of what I thought of as the generic imperative that made it less miraculous, more expected. When I say “generic imperative” I’m talking about the way The Winter’s Tale is one of the Late Romances, and Shakespeare’s Late Romances, from Pericles through Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, all end with miraculous redemptions and moments of reunion and forgiveness.
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