Macbeth

Act Four, Part One

By Dennis Abrams

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Act Four:  Desperate for information about the future, Macbeth visits the Witches.  He is warned about Macduff but also told that “none of woman born/Shall harm Macbeth.” Hearing that Macduff has escaped to England, Macbeth orders that his wife and children be killed. In England, Malcolm falsely describes himself to Macduff as dissolute and unfit to be King; when Macduff recoils, Malcolm knows him to be loyal to Scotland. The two men are discussing the campaign against Macbeth when news arrives that Macduff’s entire family has been brutally slaughtered.

Baffled and panicked by Banquo’s ghost, Macbeth heads out once again to the Sisters – this time in search of answers.  What the finds there though, instead of the appealing certainties of before, is a series of dark riddles.  Though “none of woman born/Shall harm Macbeth,” the Witches chant, Macduff is still a threat; though Macbeth has nothing to fear until “Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill…come against him,’ the last vision he sees depicts a sequence of Banquo’s descendants stretching out ‘to th’ crack of doom,’ as Macbeth shouts out.  From these mixed assurances, as equivocal as anything else in this most equivocal of plays, Macbeth manages to construct for himself a kind of comfort – after all, if you can’t conceive of your forest rising up against you, what do you have to be worried about? What is a talisman protecting you against anyone “of woman born” if not a guarantee of immortality?  What the Witches offer Macbeth is the certainty that his mind is the only limit:  he only need imagine it to be true.

But unfortunately for Macbeth, his brain is, as he tells his wife, “full of scorpions”….

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From Van Doren:

Meanwhile, however, another element has gone awry, and it is one so fundamental to man’s experience that Shakespeare has given it a central position among those symbols which express the disintegration of the hero’s world. Time is out of joint, inoperative, dissolved. ‘The time has been,’ says Macbeth, when he could fear; and ‘the time has been,’ that when the brains were out a man could die, and there an end. The repetition reveals that Macbeth is haunted by a sense that time has slipped its grooves; it flows wild and formless through his world, and is the deep cause of all the anomalies that terrify him. Certain of those anomalies are local or specific: the bell that rings on the night of the murder, the knocking at the gate, the flight of Macduff into England at the very moment Macbeth plans his death, and the disclosure that Macduff was from his mother’s womb untimely ripp’d. Many things happen too soon, so that tidings are like serpents that strike without warning. ‘The King comes here tonight,’ says a messenger, and Lady Macbeth is startled out of all composure: ‘Thou ‘rt mad to say it!’ But other anomalies are general, and these are the worst. The words of Banquo to the witches:

If you can look into the seeds of time,

And say which grain will grow and which will not,

plant early in the play a conception of time as something which fulfills itself by growing – and which, the season being wrong, can swell to monstrous shape. Or it can have no growth at all; it can rot and fester in its place, and die. The conception wavers, like the courage of Macbeth, but it will not away. Duncan welcomes Macbeth to Forres with the words:

I have begun to plan thee, and will labour

To make thee full of growing.

But Macbeth, like time itself, will burgeon beyond bounds. ‘Nature’s germens’ will

     tumble all together,

Even till destruction sicken.

When Lady Macbeth, greeting her husband, says with excited assurance:

Thy letters have transported me beyond

This ignorant present, and I feel now

The future in the instant,

she cannot suspect, nor can he, how sadly the relation between present and future will maintain itself. If the present is the womb or seed-bed of the future, if time is a succession of growths each one of which lives cleanly and freely after the death of the one before it, then what is to prevail wills scarcely be recognizable as time. The seed will not grow; the future will not be born out of the present; the plant will not disentangle itself from its bed, but will stick there in still birth.

     Thou sure and firm set earth,

Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear

Thy very stones prate of my whereabout,

And take the present horror from the time,

Which now suits with it,

prays Macbeth on the eve of Duncan’s death. But time and horror will not suit so nearly through the nights to come; the present moment will look like all eternity, and horror will be smeared on every hour. Macbeth’s speech when he comes back from viewing Duncan’s body may have been rehearsed and is certainly delivered for effect; yet he best knows what the terms signify:

Had I but died an hour before this chance,

I had liv’d a blessed time; for, from this instant,

There’s nothing serious in mortality.

He has a premonition even now of time’s disorders; of his own premature descent into the sear, the yellow leaf; of his failure like any other man to

      pay his breath

To time and mortal custom.

‘What, will the line stretch out to the crack of doom?’ he cries when Banquo’s eight sons appear to him in the witches’ cavern. Time makes sense no longer; its proportions are strange, its content meaningless. For Lady Macbeth ins her mind’s disease the minutes have ceased to march in their true file and order; her sleep-walking soliloquy recapitulates the play, but there is no temporal design among the fragments of the past – the blood, the body of Duncan, the fears of her husband, the ghost of Banquo, the slaughter of Lady Macduff, the ringing of the bell, and again the blood – which float detached from one another in her memory. And for Macbeth time has become

     A tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

Death is dusty, and the future is a limitless desert of tomorrows. His reception of the news that Lady Macbeth has died is like nothing else of a similar sort in Shakespeare. When Northumberland was told of Hotspur’s death he asked his grief to wait upon his revenge:

For this I shall have time enough to mourn.

(Henry IV, 2-1, 136)

And when Brutus was told of Portia’s death he knew how to play the stoic:

With meditating that she must die once,

I have the patience to endure it now.

But Macbeth, drugged beyond feeling, supped full with horrors, and tired of nothing so much as of coincidence in calamity, can only say in a voice devoid of tone:

She should have died hereafter;

There would have been a time for such a word.

There would, that it, if there were such a thing as time. Then such words as ‘died’ and ‘hereafter’ would have their meaning. Not now, however, for time itself has died.”

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From G. Wilson Knight:

“I have indicated something of the imaginative atmosphere of this play. It is a world shaken by ‘fears and scruples.’ It is a world where ‘nothing is but what is not.’ I have emphasized two complementary elements: (i) the doubts, uncertainties, irrationalities; (ii) the horrors, the dark, the abnormalities. These two elements repel respectively the intellect and the heart of man. And, since the contemplating mind is then powerfully unified in its immediate antagonism, our reaction holds the positive and tense fear that succeeds nightmare, wherein there is an experience of something at once insubstantial and unreal to the understanding and appallingly horrible to the feelings: this is the evil of Macbeth. In this equal repulsion of the dual attributes of the mind a state of singleness and harmony is induced in the recipient, and it is in respect of this that Macbeth forces us to a consciousness more exquisitely unified and sensitive than any of the great tragedies but its polar opposite, Antony and Cleopatra. This is how the Macbeth universe presents to us an experience of pure evil. Now, these two peculiarities of the whole play will be found also in the purely human element. The two main characteristics of Macbeth’s temptation are (i) ignorance of his own motive, and (ii) horror of the deed to which he is being driven. Fear is the primary emotion of the Macbeth universe: fear is at the root of Macbeth’s crime. I shall next notice the nature of those human events, actions, experiences to which the atmosphere of unreality and terror bears intimate relation.

The action of the play turns on a deed of disorder. Following the disorderly rebellion which prologues the action we have Macbeths’ crime, and the disorder which it creates:

Confusion now hath made his masterpiece!

Most sacrilegious murder hath broke ope

The Lord’s anointed temple, and stole thence

The life o’ the building.

Duncan’s murder and its results are felt as events of confusion and disorder, as interruptions of the even tenor of human nature, and are therefore related to the disorder symbols and instances of unnatural behavior in man or animal or element throughout the play. The evil of atmospheric effect interpenetrates the evil of individual persons. It has so firm a grip on this world that it fastens not only on the protagonists, but on subsidiary persons too. This point I shall notice before passing to the themes of Macbeth and his wife.

Many minor persons are definitely related to evil: the two – or three – Murderers, the traitors, Cawdor and Macdonald, the drunken porter, doing duty at the gate of Hell. But the major ones too, who are conceived partly as contrasts to Macbeth and his wife, nevertheless succumb to the evil down-pressing on the Macbeth universe. Banquo is early involved. Returning with Macbeth from a bloody war, he meets the three Weird Sisters. We may imagine that the latter are related to the bloodshed of battle, and that they have waited until after ‘the hurly-burly’s done’ to instigate a continuance of blood-lust in the two generals. We must observe that the two generals’ feats of arms are described as acts of unprecedented ferocity:

Except they meant to bathe in reeking wounds,

Or memorize another Golgotha,

I cannot tell.

This campaign strikes amaze into men. War is here a thing of blood, not romance. Ross addresses Macbeth:

Nothing afeard of what thyself didst make,

Strange images of death.

Macbeth’s sword ‘smoked with bloody execution.’ The emphasis is important. The late wine of blood-destruction focuses the inward eyes of these two to the reality of the sisters of blood and evil, and they in turn urge Macbeth to add to those ‘strange images of death’ the ‘great doom’s image’ of a murdered and sainted king. This knowledge of evil implicit in his meeting with the three Weird Sisters Banquo keeps to himself, and it is a bond of evil between him and Macbeth. It is this that troubles him on the night of the murder, planting a nightmare of unrest in his mind: ‘the cursed thoughts that nature gives way to in repose.’  He feels the typical Macbeth guilt: ‘a heavy summons likes like lead’ upon him. He is enmeshed in Macbeth’s horror, and, after the coronation, keeps the guilty secret, and lays to his heart a guilty hope. Banquo is thus involved. So also is Macduff. His cruel desertion of his family is emphasized:

Lady Macduff:

His flight was madness; when our actions do not,

Our fears do make us traitors.

Ross:

     You know not

Whether it was his wisdom or his fear.

Lady Macduff:

Wisdom! to leave his wife, to leave his babes,

His mansion and his titles in a place

From whence himself does flee?

For this, or from some nameless reason, Macduff knows he bears some responsibility for his dear ones’ death:

Sinful Macduff,

They were all struck for thee! Naught that I am,

Not for their own demerits, but for mine,

Fell slaughter on their souls. Heaven rest them now!

All the persons seem to share some guilt of the down-pressing enveloping evil. Even Malcolm is forced to repeat crimes on himself. He catalogs every possible sin, and accuses himself of all. Whatever be his reasons, his doing so yet remains part of the integral humanism of this play. The pressure of evil is not relaxed till the end. Not that the persons are ‘bad characters.’ They are not ‘characters’ at all, in the proper use of the word. They are but vaguely individualized, and more remarkable for similarity than difference. All the persons are primarily just this: men paralyzed by fear and a sense of evil and in outside themselves. They lack will-power: that concept finds no place here. Neither we, nor they, know of what exactly they are guilty: yet they feel guilt.

So, too with Lady Macbeth. She is not merely a woman of strong will: she is a woman possessed – possessed of evil passion. No ‘will-power’ on earth would account for her dread invocation:

Come, you spirits

That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,

And fill me from the crown to the tow, top-full

Of direst cruelty!

This speech, addressed to the ‘murdering ministers’ who ‘in their sightless substances wait on nature’s mischief’ is demonic in intensity and passion. It is inhuman – as though the woman were controlled by an evil something which masters her, mind and soul. It is myserious, fearsome,  yet fascinating: like all else here, it is a nightmare thing of pure evil. Whatever it be it leaves her a pure woman, with a woman’s frailty, as soon as ever its horrible work is done. She faints at Macbeth’s description of Duncan’s body. As her husband grows rich in crime, her significance dwindles: she is left shattered, a human wreck who mutters over again in sleep the hideous memories of her former satanic hour of pride. To interpret the figure of Lady Macbeth in terms of ‘ambition’ and ‘will’ is, indeed, a futile commentary. The scope and sweep of her evil passion is tremendous, irresistible, ultimate. She is an embodiment – for one mighty hour – of evil absolute and extreme.

The central human theme – the temptation and crime of Macbeth – is, however, more easy of analysis. The crucial speech runs as follows:

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 murder 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.

These lines, spoken when Macbeth first feels the impending evil, expresses again all those elements I have noticed in the mass-effect of the play: questioning doubt, horror, fear of some unknown power; horrible imaginings of the supernatural and ‘fantastical;’ an abysm of unreality; disorder on the plane of physical life. This speech is a microcosm of the Macbeth vision: it contains the germ of the whole. Like a stone in a pond, this original immediate experience of Macbeth sends ripples of itself expanding over the whole play. This is the moment of the birth of evil in Macbeth – he may have had ambitious thoughts before, may even have intended the murder, but now for the first time he feels its oncoming reality. This is the mental experience which he projects into action, thereby plunging his land, too, in fear, horror, darkness, and disorder. In this speech we have a swift interpenetration of idea with idea, from fear and disorder, through sickly imaginings, to abysmal darkness, nothingness. ‘Nothing is but what is not’: that is the text of the play. Reality and unreality change places. We must see that Macbeth, like the whole universe of this play, is paralyzed, mesmerized, as though in a dream. This is not merely ‘ambition’ – it is fear, a nameless fear which yet fixes itself to a horrid image. He is helpless as a man in a nightmare: and this helplessness is integral to the conception – the will-concept is absent. Macbeth may struggle, but he cannot fight: he can no more resist than a rabbit resists a weasel’s teeth fastened in its neck, or a bird the serpent’s transfixing eye. Now this evil in Macbeth propels him to an act absolutely evil. For, though no ethical system is absolute, Macbeth’s crime is as near absolute as may be. It is therefore conceived as absolute. Its dastardly nature is emphasized clearly: Duncan is old, good; he is at once Macbeth’s kinsman, king, and guest; he is to be murdered in sleep. No worse act of evil could well be found. So the evil of which Macbeth is at first aware rapidly entraps him in a mesh of events: it makes a tool of Duncan’s visit, it dominates Lady Macbeth. It is significant that she, like her husband, is influenced by the Weird Sisters and their prophecy. Eventually Macbeth undertakes the murder, as a grim and hideous duty. He cuts a sorry figure at first, but, once embarked on his allegiant enterprise of evil, his grandeur grows. Throughout he is driven by fear – the far that paralyses everyone else urges him to an amazing and mysterious action of blood.  This action he repeats, again and again.

By his original murder he isolates himself from humanity. He is lonely, endures the uttermost torture of isolation. Yet still a bond unites him to men: that bond he would ‘cancel and tear to pieces’ – the natural bond of human fellowship and love. He further symbolizes his guilty, pariah soul by murdering Banquo. He fears everyone outside himself but his wife, suspects them. Every act of blood is driven by fear of the horrible disharmony existent between himself and his world. He tries to harmonize the relation by murder. He would let ‘the frame of things disjoint, both the world suffer’ to win back peace. He is living in an unreal world, a fantastic mockery, a ghoulish dream: he strives to make this single nightmare to rule outward things of his nature. He would make all Scotland a nightmare thing of dripping blood. He knows he cannot return, so determines to go o’er. He seeks out the Weird Sisters a second time. Now he welcomes disorder and confusion, would let them range wide over the hearth, since they range unfettered in his own soul:

…though the treasure

Of nature’s germens tumble all together,

Even till destruction sicken; answer me

To what I ask you.

So he addresses the Weird Sisters. Castles, palaces, and pyramids – let all fall in general confusion, if only Macbeth be satisfied. He is plunging deeper and deeper into unreality, the severance from mankind and all normal forms of life is now abysmal, deep. Now he is shown Apparitions glassing the future. They promise him success in terms of natural law; no man ‘of woman born’ shall hurt him, he shall not be vanquished till Birnam Wood comes against him. He, based firmly in the unreal, yet thinks to build his future on the laws of reality. He forgets that he is trafficking with things of nightmare fantasy, whose truth is falsehood, falsehood truth. That success they promise is unreal as they themselves. So, once having cancelled the bond of reality he has no home: the unreal he understands not, the real condemns him. In neither can he exist. He asks if Banquo’s issue shall reign in Scotland: most horrible thought to him, since, if that be so, it proves that the future takes its natural course irrespective of human acts – that prophecy need not have been interpreted into crime: that he would in truth have been King of Scotland without his own ‘stir.’ Also the very thought of other succeeding and prosperous kings, some of them with ‘twofold balls and treble sceptres’ is a maddening thing to him who is no real king but only monarch of a nightmare realm. The Weird Sisters who were formerly as the three Parcae, or Fates, foretelling Macbeth’s future, now, at this later stage of his story, become the Erinyes, avengers of murder, symbols of the tormented soul. They delude and madden him with their apparitions and ghosts. Yet he does not give away, and raises our admiration at his own undaunted severance from good. He contents for his own individual soul against the universal reality. Nor is his contest unavailing. He is fighting himself free from the nightmare fear of his life. He goes on ‘till destruction sicken’: he actually does ‘go o’er,’ is not lost in the stream of blood he elects to cross. It is true. He wins his battle. He adds crime to crime and emerges at last victorious and fearless:

I have almost forgot the taste of fears:

The time has been, my senses would have cool’d

To hear a night-shriek; and my fell of hair

Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir

As life were in’t; I have supp’d full with horrors;

Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts,

Cannot once start me.

Again, ‘Hang those that talk of fear!’ he cries, in the ecstasy of courage. He is, at least, ‘broad and general as the casing air.’”

This will appear a strange reversal of the usual commentary; it is, however, true and necessary. Whilst Macbeth lives in conflict with himself there is misery, evil, fear: when, at the end, he and others have openly identified himself with evil, he faces the world fearless: nor does he appear evil any longer. The worst element of his suffering has been that secrecy and hypocrisy so often referred to throughout the play. Dark secrecy and night are in Shakespeare ever the badges of crime. But at the end Macbeth has no need for secrecy. He is no longer ‘cabin’d, cribb’d, confined, bound in to saucy doubts and fears.’ He has won through by excessive crime to a harmonious and honest relation with his surroundings. He has successfully symbolized the disorder of his lonely guilt-stricken soul by creating disorder in the world, and thus restores balance and harmonious contact. The mighty principle of good planted in the nature of things then asserts itself, condemns him openly, brings him peace. Daylight is brought to Macbeth, as to Scotland, by the accusing armies of Malcolm.”

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So what are you all thinking?  About the play?  About Macbeth?  About the witches and fate?  Share with the group!

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6Ebfe90aeQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMbB2PHBXmg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AkTJtGTu78

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqQWmpW46J8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfT8Pf8OwYQ

My next post:  Tuesday evening/Wednesday morning – Act Four of Macbeth

Macbeth

Act Four, Part Two

By Dennis Abrams

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Why is Macbeth seemingly cursed?  Why do people in (and out) of the theater refer to it as “The Scottish Play?”

David Garrick as Macbeth and Hannah Pritchard as Lady Macbeth (1760)

It is, perhaps, inevitable that a tragedy that lends witchcraft such an important role (let alone one that takes place almost entirely at night), Macbeth has long been associated with malign theatrical forces. Legend has it that that the curse began during an early run when a  boy actor named Hal Berridge died while playing Lady Macbeth.  Although the story is probably apocryphal – no Berridge appears in any theatrical records – his ghost has proved exceedingly difficult to exorcise: scholars have recently discovered a child who was christened “Henry Berredge” in July 1593 – making him, at least according to some, just the right age for the part.

Even so, it seems unlikely that Macbeth earned its reputation for woeful luck until 1772 and the great Irish actor Charles Macklin.  Macklin’s at the time innovative approach to the play – stripping out comic roles and using “authentic” Scottish costume – caused friction in rehearsals, and early performance were anxious and hesitant.  They became even more so during the fourth performance, when the audience, stoked by supporters of Macklin’s acting rival David Garrick, began to riot.  Although he gamely played through to the end, Macklin was fired soon afterwards.  An even worse riot – in fact one of the worst in New York’s history – occurred in 1849 when the English tragedian, William Charles Macready, attempted (for the second time) to appear as Macbeth at the Astor Place Opera House.  Opposing him were the supporters of his former friend, but now arch-rival actor, Edwin Forrest.  Whipped into a frenzy by rabble-rousing nationalists, an estimated 20,000 people hit the streets and, as the play began, threw paving stones and other debris at the theater. Eventually the National Guard had to be called in, and in the ensuing chaos, more than 30 people were shot dead and close to 200 were injured.

In the twentieth century, the curse gained a number of high-profile victims. An early casualty was the Russian pioneer of “method” acting, Konstantin Stanislavsky: when his Macbeth had a memory lapse during the dress rehearsal, the prompter failed to deliver his cue – and was discovered dead in his box – a grim omen that actually closed the show.  Laurence Olivier’s 1937 staging at the Old Vic was also beset by a long list of woes including sets that didn’t fit, a director who had to be replaced at the last minute after a car crash, and a near-miss for Olivier himself, who narrowly escaped being crushed by a stage weight. And when Lillian Baylis, the Old Vic’s founder died during the final preparations, it seemed that the curse had truly taken hold.

Thirty years later, when Peter Hall was staging the play with Paul Scofield and Vivien Merchant, he urged his actors to ignore the superstitions – and was promptly awarded with a vicious case of shingles. The show had to be postponed, and when it finally opened, was judged a failure despite its cast. But, even those disasters pale in comparison to Oldham Rep’s 1947 production.  A few nights into the run, the climactic fight between Antony Oakley’s Macduff and Harold Norman’s Macbeth seemed more realistic than usual, and as the curtain fell, it became painfully clear why – Norman had been stabbed in the chest, and died soon afterwards.

So perhaps naturally unwilling to take on the curse, most actors simply obey the rules.  They never refer to Macbeth by name in a theater or quote from the text, except, of course when performing it (acceptable euphemisms include “The Scottish Play”). If the rules are broken, the offender must leave the building, turn around three times, then spit or swear.  But, as I’ve read, the curse sometimes surfaces in the oddest of places, as actor-manager Donald Wolfit discovered during a touring version of Macbeth in the 1940s.  Angry about his low wages, a young actor playing a Messenger decided to make a few last minute changes to the script in order to make his feelings known.  So instead of announcing Lady Macbeth’s sudden death to Wolfit’s King, he walked on stage and declared, “My lord, the Queen is much better…and even is now at dinner.”  It might well have been the only time in his career that Wolfit was at a loss for words.

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Garry Wills, in Witches & Jesuits:  Shakespeare’s Macbeth, had more to say about the curse.  I strongly disagree with his explanation of what the curse actually is, but it’s still well worth reading:

“If Macbeth is such a great tragedy, why do performances of it so often fail? Its unhappy stage history has created a legendary curse on the drama. Superstitious actors try to evade the curse by circumlocution, using ‘the Scottish play’ at rehearsals to avoid naming it, Macbeth. Even great actors and actresses – John Gielgud and Glenda Jackson, to name just two – have been unable to make the play work. Some have hesitated to direct the play, or refused roles in it, from a knowledge of its dismal record. Adaptations of it can be more successful than the original – Verdi’s opera, Kurosawa’s movie (Throne of Blood), Orson Welles’s abbreviated film phantasmagoria.

Just what is the curse on Macbeth? Anecdotes accumulate about mishaps in the staging. But accidents plague all forms of theater. Heavy scenery is moved hastily in cramped and ill-lit spaces Actors fight careful but risky duels, often half-blinded by spotlights or atmospheric murk. Sniffles are passed around in the confluence of backstage, onstage, and auditorium airs, variously cooled or heated (or both at the same time). Actors get laryngitis; stand-ins forget stage business and confuse their fellows. Cues are mistaken. Props break.

Since many people, from stage technicians to financial backers, spend their whole careers in the theater, they are bound to die at some time – and on one notices what play they were connected with tat the moment. But when Lilian Baylis, the legendary manager of the Old Vic Theatre in the 1930s, died, her troupe was putting on Macbeth, so people talked of the curse. Laurence Olivier twisted his ankle on the opening night of his 1955 Macbeth and had to restrain the leaps essential to his interpretation. But he injured himself in several other plays, notably Coriolanus, and nobody called those plays cursed.

The inevitable problems of any production have taken on special menace with Macbeth because actor after actor is frustrated by the seemingly unplayability of the piece. Elizabeth Nielsen claimed: ‘No actor since Shakespeare’s time seems to have made a name for himself playing the part of Macbeth.’ Kenneth Tynan agreed: ‘Nobody has ever succeeded as Macbeth.’ By critical consensus there seems to have been only one entirely successful modern performance of the play, Olivier’s in 1955. And even Olivier had failed to bring the play off in his first attempt (done in 1938, the ‘cursed’ Lilian Baylis production.)  [MY NOTE:  This book was written well after the McKellan/Densch production we’ve been watching, and, I hope, enjoying.)

Where failure is so common, it is important to see why the exception worked. Reviewers were disappointed, in 1955, during the play’s opening scenes, usually the most successful. Olivier seemed to lack some of his normal energy – his patented kinetic jolt – in the ‘surefire’ encounter with the witches, or in the scenes before and after Duncan’s murder. This is precisely where Macbeth and his wife fuel each other’s resolution in some of the most intense exchanges Shakespeare ever wrote.

But Olivier began to soar in the banquet scene, where the Macbeth of most productions starts falling apart. Olivier’s Macbeth, who made his low-intensity first choices of evil in a hesitating way, rouses himself to accept his fate heroically. Instead of cringing before the ghost’s repeated apparition, Olivier manned himself to leap on the banquet table and run at the ghost, sword drawn, in an exaltation of defiance. Some crazed enlargement of this Macbeth makes him grow toward his doom, climaxed with the frenzied duel that ends the play.

However one judges Olivier’s interpretation of the play as a whole, he had identified its real problem, the way it sputters toward anticlimax in most presentations of Acts Four and Five. Macbeth and his wife, whose interchanges are the best parts of most productions, are never seen together in those final acts. His wife, in fact, is seen only once, in the brief (but effective) sleepwalking scene. The play seems to dissipate its pent-in tensions as it wanders off to England, brings in new characters (Lady Macduff and her child, Hecate and her train), deals at tedious length with the question of genuine Scottish heirs, and substitutes the pallid moral struggle of Malcolm with Macduff for the crackling interplay of Macbeth and his Lady.

Even Olivier did not make most of these later scenes interesting in themselves. But people sat through them with a sense of purpose, waiting to see what new mad heights Macbeth would reach in his climb toward heroic criminality. Olivier solved the play’s problem by turning Macbeth into Tamburlaine. It was a very Marlovian reading of Shakespeare. It had the advantage of keeping the hero alive outside the claustrophobic whispering scenes of the first act. Better a cosmic hero than a closet drama. Even Tamburlaine is preferable to Raskolnikov. Actors like Gielgud or Paul Scofield turned the first half of the play into Crime and Punishment, and then had nowhere to go with the second half.

This explains why the adaptations of Macbeth succeed, in our time, better than the original play. They cut away or cut down all the inert stuff toward the end. Verdi’s opera spends less time on both the final acts than on Act One alone (the murder of Duncan). Verdi excised the Lady Macduff scene, Malcolm’s testing of Macduff, the dealings with the English court (with its king who heals by touching), and the Siwards (father and son). Kurosawa and Welles observe roughly the same proportion between a lingered-on first half of the play and a drastically reduced second half.

The effect of thus ‘frontloading’ Macbeth is to shear away any larger social context for the protagonist’s strugglings. Verdi was explicit about the intimacy he desired for the Macbeths, even in the extrovert form of opera. He chose to do the opera when he did because he lacked the singers for a larger dramatic ensemble. None of his music drama has so much sung whispering, to be done in a ‘hollow’ voice (voce cupa). The whole play is absorbed, so far as possible, into Macbeth’s inner state – as it is in Welles’ film, where surreal stones and caves are projections of his own anfractuous mental scenery. ‘The inner truth is that these [witches’] shapes are himself – his own desires, his own ambition.’ Inner truth – mainly Macbeth’s but also his wife’s – is what many people want or expect from the play. ‘Outer truths’ fall away; they distract when they do not detract from the inner quest.

The result is a lopsided play, dead in the most embarrassing places, toward the end, where the action should accelerate and the interest be intensified. A frontloaded play is a back-crippled play. That is the real curse. Olivier overcame this structural defect by a personal tour de force. He wrenched the audience’s attention out of its old patterns, redistributing the emphases, achieving equilibrium by making the first scenes less absorbing than they can be. He made the ‘crippled’ part of the play scramble and skip, overcoming its inertia with his own prodigious energies, harbored for this late explosion. When that individual feat is removed, all the faults of the play remain.

But are they faults? I shall adopt, as a working hypothesis in this book, the view that Shakespeare was not a bungler, that he did not fill the second half of his play with matter of no interest to his audience…the first thing is to ask what effects Shakespeare was aiming at for his own audience.”

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For Wills, the play can only truly be understood in its historical context, when looked at other plays written in the same year, all in reaction to The Gunpowder Plot.  I don’t quite buy it, but the book is still of interest.  You can purchase a copy  here.

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From Garber, continuing from her point that as the play continues, “Blood is now a river in which [Macbeth] wades, ‘[s]tepped in so far,’ not a sea in which he might wash. The bloody hands have become an abstract concept – ‘these hangman’s hands’ – and Macbeth  moves downward toward the spectacle of the painted monster on the pole.”

“But not so Lady Macbeth. Where Macbeth leaves off the language of blood, she picks it up. Where Macbeth forgets to worry about his bloody hands, which will the ‘multitudinous seas incarndarine,’ Lady Macbeth becomes for the first time obsessed with her own ‘filthy witness.’ Gilt has turned to guilt, and with the guilt and the blood she catches, as well, Macbeth’s sleeplessness, so that the audience finds her at the beginning of act 5 wandering, like the ghost of old Hamlet, three nights in her chamber. ‘Out, damned spot; out, I say…Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?…Here’s the smell of the blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.’ Her feverish and poignant hand-washing, onstage, has several powerful effects: reminding the audience of Macbeth’s futile hand-washing gestures immediately after the murder; indicating for the first time an interior dimension of feeling – we could call it conscience – in the previously obdurate Lady Macbeth; and evoking not only Shakespeare’s earlier play Julius Caesar, but also the biblical scene of hand-washing in which Pontius Pilate attempts to wash his hands of the blood of Christ (Matthew 27:24).

Duncan’s principal symbols were light and fertility. In the sleepwalking scene these are reversed, so that we have not fertile blood, progeny, but spilt blood, death; not day but night; not sleep but wakefulness; not natural light but artificial light. Banquo has said of a starless night sky, ‘There’s husbandry in heaven,/Their candles are all out.’ By contrast Lady Macbeth ‘has light by her continually. ‘Tis her command.’ She cannot bear the darkness. Shortly we will hear her husband compare human life to a ‘brief candle,’ echoing Othello’s ‘Put out the light, and put out the light.’ This is the light that Lady Macbeth clutches as she moves restlessly through the night, confessing to her horrified onstage audience, the Doctor, and the waiting gentlewoman, truths we already know, but which will be brought home to us anew by their visible horror. This is another dramatic function of the play-within-the-play; it enables the audience in the theater to participate in an emotion that prior knowledge would otherwise have dulled or diminished. The characters onstage are shocked; in response, we are shocked all over again. As the Doctor says, ‘I think, but dare not speak,’ just as Malcolm and Donalbain did not dare to speak, just as the offstage audience, by convention, is mute.

Lady Macbeth’s doctor is, as well, part of another overarching pattern in this brilliantly designed play, for he is one of two doctors in Macbeth, and the other doctor serves the English court. Written and performed for a king whose political project was to unify Scotland and England, Shakespeare’s play increasingly undertakes to distinguish between the two landscapes and polities. As the play progresses, England begins to appear as a redemptive land different both from the barren heath of the witches and the unnatural blood-drenched Scotland of the usurping Macbeth. If Duncan is an Edenic figure who projects his own innocence onto others and is thus vulnerable to attack, England’s king, Edward the Confessor, is a patently holy personage who cures evil. In historical fact, he was the first to cure a disease described as the ‘king’s evil,’ scrofula (swollen glands in the neck). ‘[A]t his touch,’ says the English Doctor, ‘Such sanctity hath Heaven given his hand,/They presently amend.’ ‘Presently’ means ‘immediately,’ right away; the sick are instantly cured by the royal touch. (This practice of curing the king’s evil by the laying on of hands continued for centuries. James did it; Charles II was said to have touched ninety-two thousand persons; the last person supposedly ‘touched’ in England was Samuel Johnson, the great Shakespeare editor and dictionary maker, touched by Queen Anne in 1712, when he was only thirty months old.) By framing his play about medieval Scotland with a mention of the healing touch of the English king, the playwright is able to underscore a crucial opposition. Macbeth’s bloody hand brings death; Edward’s holy hand brings life and health. Scotland is a land diseased and sick, needing a physic to purge it. ‘Bleed, bleed, poor country!’ cries Macduff, and Malcolm adds: ‘[E]ach day a gash/Is added to her wounds.’

In the fifth act of the play the language of disease is everywhere. Macbeth asks the Scottish doctor to ‘cast the water of my land’ and ‘purge it.’ Lady Macbeth is ill, and her husband demands, impatiently, ‘Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased…?’ But the ‘king’s evil’ that afflicts Macbeth is not so easily cured, because he is himself the sickness in the state, the disease that must be purged. And the physicians to whom he takes his questions and requests are finally not doctors, but witches, brewing their own infernal medicines – once again, the literal counterparts of the metaphorical poison administered by Lady Macbeth (‘Hie thee hither,/That I may pour my spirits in thine ear.’)  [MY NOTE:  Not unlike Claudius pouring the poison into Hamlet’s father’s ear…]

When Macbeth comes to the witches’ cave, where fire burns and cauldron bubbles, he is a figure very like Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, seeking forbidden knowledge and demanding answers to the secrets of the future. ‘How now, you secret, black, and midnight hags,’ he salutes them imperiously. ‘What is’t you do?’ And they reply, ‘A deed without a name.’ That Macbeth wants to know its name is part of his vaulting ambition. ‘Seek to know no more,’ they caution, and his replay is ‘I will be satisfied. Deny me this,/And an eternal curse fall on you!’ This is a familiar sin, wishing to know a sacred name that cannot be pronounced. And the curse falls – the curse has in fact already fallen – on Macbeth.

This remarkable scene recalls another preoccupation of the court of James I, for not only was James a descendant of Banquo and a scholar of witchcraft, he was also, with the rest of the royal family, an aficionado of the contemporary art form known as the court masque. These aristocratic entertainments included elements of dance and spectacle, and often turned on a contrast between the antimasque, representing disorder, and the masque proper, emblematic of renewed order. Ben Jonson’s Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue (1618) featured an antimasque of pygmies and a masque of knights; the same author’s The Masque of Queens (1609) presented an antimasque of witches and other Vice characters, and a second masque of the audience, nobility that would banish the witches. The principle actors and dancers in the masque proper were often noble or royal personages; James wife, Queen Anne, and his son Prince Henry were frequent participants. At the end of the masque came the dance known as the revels, in which (noble) actors and (noble) audience danced together in an image of harmony, breaking down the barriers of ‘fiction’ and ‘reality.’ The King himself, when in the audience, was a key figure, seated on a raised platform known as ‘the state,’ his viewpoint always the dominant axis. We should recall, too, that the play Macbeth was presented in front of James and his brother-in-law, King Christian IV of Denmark (Queen Anne’s brother). The embedded antimasque of witches, singing songs and chanting spells and recipes as they dance around the cauldron, ushers in the element of spectacle so central to the structure of the masque, in this case the three apparitions: the armed head, the bloody child, and the child crowned, with a tree in his hand. Each apparition, though it seems to connote disorder and thus to confirm Macbeth’s designs, ultimately will be revealed as an aspect of order. Macbeth, trapped by the apparitions’ riddles, fails to comprehend their messages, and the final demonstration, the show of eight kings and Banquo, the last king carrying a mirror or magic glass, brings the spectacle out to the audience, reflecting the face of King James as the lineal successor of Banquo’s blood. This mirror trick performs a kind of visual ‘revels,’ uniting onstage and offstage performers. (Notice that the line is all-male, and does not include James’ mother, Mary, Queen of Scots.)

In one way, then, the final scene of the witches, ending in a dance described as an ‘antic round,’ is a fragment of, or a quotation from, a court masque, a pattern predicting order. In another, however, it is closely tied to the central tension between good blood and bad blood, lineage and murder. Consider again the nature of the three apparitions that constitute the magic spectacle. The armed head is Macbeth’s bloody head, which will be cut off by Macduff and offered in the final scene to Malcolm: ‘Behold where stands/Th’usurper’s cursed head.’  The bloody child is Macduff, untimely ripped from his mother’s womb. And the crowned child with a tree in his hand is Malcolm, Duncan’s elder son – soon to be the new King – at whose instructions the soldiers hew down branches and bring Birnam Wood, a ‘moving grove,’ to Dunsinane. In fact, these images of apparent unnaturalism turn out to be natural after all, symbols of health rather than sickness, temporary and necessary inversions of nature brought about so that order may be restored.  But in them we have, as well, a visual summary of both kinds of ‘blood.’ The images of children that clustered at the play’s beginning return here in a different form, and these fruitful ‘men-children,’ Malcolm and Macduff, are figures that defeat and replace the tragic images of slaughtered infants, including the horrific murder of Macduff’s ‘pretty chickens and their dam.’ The play suggests that we have been witnessing a kind of massacre of the innocents, like the slaughter by Herod of all the newborn boys in Bethlehem to prevent one of them from becoming the Messiah. Macbeth, likewise fearing for his throne, tries to bring about the murders of the men-children Malcolm and Donalbain, and of Banquo’s son Fleance. But the crowned child, Malcolm, the Prince of Cumberland, survives and rules. As if to give further support to this victory of the child, the play presents near its close two more brief images of heroic children, both slaughtered, but in a noble cause. Lady Macduff’s unfortunate son, who dies trying to protect his mother, and Young Siward, whose father welcomes his death in battle as a ‘fair death’ that makes the son ‘God’s soldier.’ These are yet more slaughtered innocents, and their deaths can be traced back, in the teleology of unfolding dramatic action, to Lady Macbeth’s opening boast that she would have ‘dashed the brains out’ of her nursing infant to fulfill a vow of single-minded ambition.

But if some children die, others survive. One reason Malcolm survives is that he both resembles his father, Duncan, and differs crucially from him. Duncan – Shakespeare’s Duncan, if not history’s – was innocent and unwary, willing to find the mind’s construction in the face. Malcolm will be cagier, more watchful, like Prince Hal in the Henry IV plays. In the scene that presents his supposed confession of sins to Macduff, Malcolm tests his listener, showing a ‘false face’ not to deceive but to adjudicate and to prove. His claims of lechery and avarice are false, but they serve a purpose, showing a young king more capable of perceiving evil than his father was – or, indeed, than is Macduff, whose response to the quick reversals of the scene is surely one of the most bathetic in Shakespeare: ‘Such welcome and unwelcome things at once/’Tis hard to reconcile.’ The scene is crucial for the play, even if its tone is sometimes awkward. Malcolm will be a better king than Duncan, at least according to the ground rules of early modern statecraft.”

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So I’m curious…who do you think is right?  Do the last acts of the play suffer in comparison to the earlier ones as Wills argues?  Or, as Garber insists, do the scenes play a crucial role in the structure and meaning of the play?  Share your thoughts!

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZbJPgmzkN8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvjy1nStllc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nXs48OjT70&list=PL48F56B9E75C222EB&index=4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tF_AgZvNB0I&list=PL48F56B9E75C222EB&index=1

Our next reading:  Macbeth, Act Five

My next post:  Thursday evening/Friday morning

Enjoy.

Macbeth

Act Five, Part One

By Dennis Abrams

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Act Five:  Back in Scotland, Lady Macbeth has been sleepwalking and raving about the various murders.  By the time Malcolm’s forces are marching on to Dunsinane, carrying branches from Birnam Wood to disguise their approach. Macbeth – convinced that the Witches have predicted his invincibility – refuses to acknowledge the threat until he hears that Lady Macbeth is dead and that Birnam Wood is, indeed moving toward him.  He fights on, eventually coming face to face with Macduff (you knew that was going to happen, didn’t you?) who he learns was delivered by C-Section and thus, technically, was not of woman born. Macduff succeeds in killing him and presents his head to Malcolm, hailing him as the new King of Scotland.

It is Lady Macbeth, as the Doctor comments to a servingwoman – who first knows what she should not.  And while Lady Macbeth is the first victim of that knowledge, the unexpected announcement that his wife is dead – it seems like suicide although the play leaves the verdict open – initiates one of the greatest speeches in all of Shakespeare, a speech in which Macbeth pictures himself staring into the abyss. “She should have died hereafter,” he mutters,

There would have been a time for such a word.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day

To the last syllable of recorded time,

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death.

Life is, he concludes, “a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/Signifying nothing.’ Endlessly repetitive, it is also ultimately futile, a stuttering and staggering sequence of tomorrows, an empty riff on the biblical assurance that life has value as “a tale that is told.”

As the tragedy hurls towards its inevitable conclusion, the sequence of horrors Macbeth has performed – Duncan’s murder, Banquo’s death, the slaughter of Macduff’s wife and children – turn decisively against him. In a bizarre spin on the very perversion of nature for which Macbeth is responsible, Birnam Wood DOES rise up against him, in the form of Malcolm’s and Macduff’s soldiers carrying branches in the hope of confusing enemy scouts. But Macbeth reserves its biggest twist for last.  Confident of immortality, Macbeth vows to fight until “from my bones the flesh be hacked,” slaying Young Siward and then facing Macduff undaunted.  When the pair meet in combat, Macbeth taunts, ‘Thou losest labour…I bear a charmed life” But Macduff’s reply stops him dead:

     Despair thy charm,

And let the angel whom thou still hast served

Tell thee Macduff was from his mother’s womb

Untimely ripped.

Macduff boasts that he was delivered via Caesarean section – a dangerous last-ditch operation in seventeenth-century England (let alone feudal Scotland), and one that almost always resulted in the death of the mother.  The revelation, then, is fitting unreal (a word that that fittingly appeared for the first time in this play), and in it Macbeth recognizes a bitter irony. “Accursed be the tongue that tells me so,” he gasps,

For it hath cowed my better part of man;

And be these juggling fiends no more believed,

That palter with us in a double sense,

That keep the word of promise to our ear

And break it to our hope.

By his “better part” Macbeth must mean his courage – we know as well as he does that anything else that was good has long since disappeared. The circumstances of Macduff’s death have sentenced him to death, the Witches’ “promise” proved worthless. And like so much else in the play, Macbeth realizes that his “hope,” too, signifies absolutely nothing.

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From Bloom:

“I come back, for a last time, to the terrible awe that Macbeth provokes in us. G. Wilson Knight first juxtaposed a reflection by Lafew, the wide old nobleman of All’s Well That Ends Well, with Macbeth:

Lafew:

They say miracles are past, and we have our philosophical persons to make modern and familiar, things supernatural and causeless. Hence it is that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge, when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear.

Wilbur Sanders, acknowledging Wilson Knight, explores Macbeth as the Shakespearean play where most we ‘submit ourselves to an unknown fear.’ My own experience of the play is that we rightly react to it with terror, even as we respond to Hamlet with wonder. Whatever Macbeth does otherwise, it certainly does not offer us a catharsis for the terrors it evokes. Since we are compelled to internalize Macbeth, the ‘unknown fear’ linally is of ourselves. If we submit to it – and Shakespeare gives us little choice – then we follow Macbeth into a nihilism very different from the abyss-voyages of Iago and of Edmund. They are confident nihilists, secure in their self-election. Macbeth is never secure, nor are we, his unwilling cohorts; he childers, as we father, and we are the only children he has.

The most surprising observation on fear in Macbeth was also Wilson Knight’s:

‘Whilst Macbeth lives in conflict with himself there is misery, evil, fear; when, at the end, he and the other have openly identified himself with evil, he faces the world fearless: nor does he appear evil any longer.’

I think I see where Wilson Knight was aiming, but a few revisions are necessary. Macbeth’s broad progress is from proleptic horror to a sense of baffled expectations, in which a feeling of having been outraged takes the place of fear. ‘Evil’ we can set side; it is redundant, rather like calling Hitler or Stalin evil. When Macbeth is betrayed, by hallucination and foretelling, he manifests a profound and energetic outrage, like a frantic actor always fated to miss all his cues. The usurper goes on murdering, and achieves no victory over time or the self. Sometimes I wonder whether Shakespeare somehow had gotten access to the Gnostic and Manichaean fragments scattered throughout the Church Fathers, quoted by them only to be denounced, though I rather doubt that Shakespeare favored much ecclesiastical reading. Macbeth, however intensely we identify with him, is more frightening than anything he confronts, thus intimating that we ourselves may be more dreadful than anything in our own worlds. And yet Macbeth’s realm, like ours, can be a ghastly context:

Old Man:

Threescore and ten I can remember well;

Within the volume of which time I have seen

Hours dreadful, and things strange, but this sore night

Hath trifled former knowings.

Ross:

Ha, good Fahter,

Thou seest the heavens, as troubled with man’s act,

Threatens his bloody stage: by th’ clock ‘tis day,

And yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp

Is ‘t night’s predominance, or the day’s shame,

That darkness does the face of earth entomb,

When living light should kiss it?

Old Man:

‘Tis unnatural.

Even like the deed that’d done. On Tuesday last,

A falcon, towering in her pride of place,

Was by a mousing owl hawk’d at and kill’d.

Ross:

And Duncan’s horses (a thing most strange and certain)

Beauteous and swift, the minions of their race,

Turn’d wild in nature, broke their stalls, flung out,

Contending ‘gainst obedience, as they would make

War with mankind.

Old Man:

‘Tis said, they eat each other.

Ross:

They did so, to th’ amazement of mine eyes,

That look’d upon ‘t.

This is the aftermath of Duncan’s murder, yet even as the play’s opening a wounded captain admiringly says of Macbeth and Banquo: ‘they/Doubly redoubled strokes upon the foe:/Except they meant to bathe in reeking wounds,/Or memorize another Golgatha,/I cannot tell –‘ What does it mean to ‘memorize another Golgotha?’ Golgotha, ‘the place of skulls,’ was Calvary, where Jesus suffered upon the cross. ‘Memorize’ here seems to mean ‘memorialize,’ and Shakespeare subtly has invoked a shocking parallel. We are at the beginning of the play, and these are still the good captains Macbeth and Banquo, patriotically fighting for Duncan and for Scotland, yet they are creating a new slaughter ground for a new Crucifixion. Graham Bradshaw aptly has described the horror of nature in Macbeth, and Robert Watson has pointed to its Gnostic affinities. Shakespeare throws us into everything that is not ourselves, not so as to induce an aesthetic revulsion in the audience, but so as to compel a choice between Macbeth and the cosmological emptiness, the kenoma of the Gnostics. We choose Macbeth perforce, and the preference is made very costly for us.

Of the aesthetic greatness of Macbeth, there can be no question. The play cannot challenge the scope and depth of Hamlet and King Lear, or the brilliant painfulness of Othello, or the world-without-end panorama of Antony and Cleopatra, and yet it is my personal favorite of the high tragedies. Shakespeare’s final strength is radical internalization, and this is his most internalized drama, played out in the guilty imagination that we share with Macbeth. No critical method that works equally well for Thomas Middleton or John Fletcher and for Shakespeare is going to illuminate Shakespeare for us. I do not know whether God created Shakespeare, but I know that Shakespeare created us, to an altogether startling degree. In relation to us, his perpetual audience, Shakespeare is a kind of mortal god, our instruments for measuring him break when we seek to apply them. Macbeth, as its best critics have seen, scarcely shows us that crimes against nature are repaired when a legitimate social order is restored. Nature is crime in Macbeth, but hardly in the Christian sense that calls out for nature to be redeemed by grace, or by expiation and forgiveness. As in King Lear, we have no place to go in Macbeth, there is no sanctuary available to us. Macbeth himself exceeds us, in energy and in torment, but he also represents us, and we discover him more vividly within us the more deeply we delve.”

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From Van Doren:

“Duncan was everything that Macbeth is not. We saw him briefly, but the brilliance of his contrast with the thane he trusted has kept his memory beautiful throughout a play whose every other feature has been hideous. He was ‘meek’ and ‘clear’ and his mind was incapable of suspicion. The treachery of Cawdor bewildered him:

     There’s no art

To find the mind’s construction in the face.

He was a gentleman on whom I built

An absolute trust

– this at the very moment when Macbeth was being brought in for showers of praise and tears of plenteous joy! For Duncan was a free spirit and could weep, a thing impossible to his murderer’s stopped heart. The word ‘love’ was native to his tongue; he used it four times within the twenty lines of his conversation with Lady Macbeth, and its clear beauty as he spoke it was reflected in the diamond he sent her by Banquo (II,i,15). As he approached Macbeth’s castle in the late afternoon the building had known its only moment of serenity and fairness. It was because Duncan could look at it and say:

This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air

Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself

Unto our gentle senses.

The speech itself was nimble, sweet, and gentle; and Banquo’s explanation was in tone:

     This guest of summer,

The temple-haunting marlet, does approve,

By his loved masonry, that the heaven’s breath

Smells wooingly here; no jutty, frieze,

Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird

Hath made his pendent bed and procreant candle.

Where they most breed and haunt, I have observ’d

The air is delicate.

Summer, heaven, wooing, and procreation in the delicate air – such words suited the presence of a king who when later on he was found stabbed in his bed would actually offer a fair sight to guilty eyes. His blood was not like the other blood in the play, thick and fearfully discolored. It was bright and beautiful, as no one better than Macbeth could appreciate:

Here lay Duncan,

His silver skin lac’d with his golden blood

 – the silver and the gold went with the diamond, and with Duncan’s gentle senses that could smell no treachery though a whole house reeked with it. And Duncan of course could sleep. After life’s fitful fever he had been laid where nothing could touch him further (III,ii,22-6). No terrible dramas to shake him nightly, and no fears of things lest they come stalking through the world before their time in borrowed shapes.

Our memory of this contrast, much as the doings of the middle play work to muffle it, is what gives power to Malcolm and Macduff at the end.

Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell.

Scotland may seem to have become the grave of men and not their mother; death and danger may claim the whole of that bleeding country; but there is another country to the south where a good king works miracles with his touch. The rest of the world is what it always was; time goes on; events stretch out through space in their proper forms. Shakespeare again has enclosed his evil within a universe of good, his storm center within wide areas of peace. And from this outer world Malcolm and Macduff will return to heal Scotland of its ills. Their conversation in London before the pious Edward’s palace is not an interruption of the play; it is one of its essential parts, glancing forward as it does to a conclusion wherein Macduff can say, ‘The time is free,’ and wherein Malcolm can promise the deeds of justice, ‘planted newly with the time,’ will be performed ‘in measure, time, and place.’ Malcolm speaks the language of the play, but he has recovered its lost idiom. Blood will cease to flow, movement will recommence, fear will be forgotten, sleep will season every life, and the seeds of time will blossom in due order. The circle of safety which Shakespeare has drawn around his central horror is thinly drawn, but it is finely drawn and it holds.”

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And from Frank Kermode:

“In his despair, Macbeth sees no way to go but forward into more crime. III.vi is a ‘choric’ comment: Lennox and ‘another Lord’ have seen through Macbeth’s lies, compare his evil deeds with ‘pious Edward,’ the ‘holy king’ of England, and fear for the state of Macduff. As Act IV begins, we have more equivocal prophecies. The Sisters summon their ‘masters,’ who allow him no comment as they warn him of Macduff. They assure him that no man born of woman can harm him (a prophecy that is of course equivocal, for it turns out that Macduff’s was a Caesarian birth – though we should also remember the earlier equivocations about manhood) and give him the false idea that Birnam Wood cannot come to Dunsinane. ‘Show his eyes, and grieve his heart,’ cry the witches, and the masters produce the Show of Kings, the Banquo line, the Stuart line, stretching out ‘to th’ crack of doom.’

The rest of the piece is now preordained. Macbeth forgets about ‘understood relations’ and turns on Time, which he will frustrate by crowning his thoughts with acts, abolishing the interval between them – ‘be it thought and done.’ No more struggles with conscience, with the prospect of judgment. Lady Macduff and her children die at once. Then follows the long and curious lull of IV .iii, where Macduff and Malcolm, in England, test one another, and there is more evidence of the virtues of the good King Edward. This is rather generally, and I think correctly, thought a blemish on the play, certainly its least-well-written scene. It comes nearest to the tone of the rest with Macduff’s response to the news of his family’s slaughter. Malcolm urges Macduff to be a man:

Malcolm:  Dispute it like a man.

Macduff:    I shall do so;

But I must also feel it as a man…

…

O, I could play the woman with mine eyes…

…

                 if he scape,

Heaven forgive him too!

Malcolm:  This tune goes manly.

These are at once remembered: ‘The night is long that never finds the day. But for Lady Macbeth, night and day are now one: she ‘watches’ while she sleeps. A little water has not cleared her of the deed of murder. It may be ‘time’ to be rid of the spot of blood, the smell of blood; useless now to reproach her husband (‘Fie, my lord, fie, a soldier, and afeard?’, ‘Look now to pale.’ ‘What’s done cannot be undone.’)

This superbly planned and written scene is her last. The rest of the play concerns the overthrow of Macbeth. At first he is still deceived by equivocation: ‘The spirits that know/All mortal consequences,’ have given predictions he wrongly takes to be assurances. But he is made to express his awareness of the disaster already on him: ‘I have liv’d long enough; my way of life/Is fall’n into the sear, the yellow leaf,’ and the rewards of kingship he had sought so urgently are denied him. The Doctor cannot cure him, or his stricken land. ‘The time approaches.’ He has lost the power to feel even fear, having ‘supp’d full with horrors.’ The death of the Queen leaves him unmoved:

She should have died thereafter;

There would have been a time for such a word.

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day…

It is as if he is at last confronting the mere successiveness of time, the senseless days, one after another, that end only in death, a lifeless progress, so different inspirit from the thrills of that original interim. Only now does he ‘begin/To doubt th’ equivocation of the fiend/That lies like truth.’ The last proof of it is Macduff, not of woman born: ‘Such a one/Am I to fear, or none.’ The news of Macduff’s birth ‘hath cow’d my better part of man’ and at last shown him that he has dealt with ‘juggling fiends/That palter with us in a double sense.’ Even in this extremity Macduff talks of ‘th’ time’ and is allowed to say ‘the time is free.’ In Malcolm’s triumphant concluding speech, the word ‘time’ occurs three times.

It is surely impossible to deny that certain words – ‘time,’ ‘man,’ ‘done’ – and certain themes – ‘ blood,’ ‘darkness’ – are the matrices of the language of Macbeth. In the period of the great tragedies these matrices appear to have been fundamental to Shakespeare’s procedures. One might guess they took possession of him as he did his preparatory reading. That they are thereafter used with conscious intention and skill seems equally certain. They are one aspect of the language of the plays that show deliberation – more, in some ways, than their plotting, which, however skillful, can sometimes be somewhat careless. In these echoing words and themes, these repetitions that are so unlike the formal repetitions of an earlier rhetoric, we come close to what were Shakespeare’s deepest interests. We cannot assign them any limited significance. All may be said to equivocate, and on their equivocal variety we impose our limited interpretations.”

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And finally, from G. Wilson Knight:

“Whilst Macbeth lives in conflict with himself there is misery, evil, fear: when, at the end, he and the others have openly identified himself with evil, he faces the world fearless: nor does he appear evil any longer. The worst element of his suffering has been that secrecy and hypocrisy so often referred to throughout the play. Dark secrecy and night are in Shakespeare ever the badges of crime. But at the end Macbeth has no need for secrecy. He is no longer ‘cabin’d, cribb’d, confined, bound in to saucy doubts and fears.’ He has won through by excessive crime to an harmonious and honest relation with his surroundings. He has successfully symbolized the disorder of his lonely guilt-stricken soul by creating disorder in the world, and thus restores balance and harmonious contact. The mighty principle of good planted in the nature of things then asserts itself, condemns him openly, brings him peace. Daylight is brought to Macbeth, as to Scotland, by the accusing armies of Malcolm. He now knows himself to be a tyrant confessed, and wins back that integrity of soul which gives us:

I have lived long enough: my way of life

Is fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf…

Here he touches a recognition deeper than fear, more potent than nightmare. The delirious dream is over. A clear daylight now disperses the imaginative dark that has eclipsed Scotland. The change is remarkable. There is now movement, surety and purpose, colour: horses ‘skirr the country round,’ banners are hung out on the castle walls, soldiers hew down the bright leaves of Birnam. There is, as it were, a paean of triumph as the Macbeth universe, having struggled darkly upward, now climbs into radiance. Though they oppose each other in fight, Macbeth and Malcolm share equally in this relief, this awakening from horror. Of a piece with this change is the fulfillment of the Weird Sister’s prophecies. In bright daylight the nightmare reality to which Macbeth has been subdued is insubstantial and transient as sleep-horrors at dawn. Their unreality is emphasized by the very fact that they are nevertheless related to natural phenomena: they are thus parasitic on reality. To these he has trusted, and they fail. But he himself is, at the last, self-reliant and courageous. The words of the Weird Sisters ring true:

Though his bark cannot be lost

Yet it shall be tempest-toss’d.

(I.iii.24)

Each shattering report he receives with redoubled life-zest; and meets the fate marked out by the daylight consciousness of normal man for the nightmare reality of crime. Malcolm may talk of ‘this dead butcher and his fiend-like queen.’ We, who have felt the sickly poise over the abysmal deeps of evil, the hideous reality of the unreal, must couch our judgment in a different phrase.

The consciousness of nightmare is a consciousness of absolute evil, presenting an heightened awareness of positive significance which challenges the goldenest dreams of blissful sleep: it is positive, powerful, autonomous. Whether this be ultimate truth or not, it is what our mental experience knows: and to deny it is to deny the aristocracy of mind. The ‘sickly weal’ of Scotland is in the throes of this delirious dream, which, whilst it lasts, has every attribute of reality. Yet this evil is not a native of man’s heart: it comes from without. The Weird Sisters are objectively conceived: they are not, as are the dagger and ghost, the subjective effect of evil in the protagonist’s mind. They are, within the Macbeth universe, independent entities; and the fact that they instigate Macbeth directly and Lady Macbeth indirectly tends to assert the objectivity of evil. This, however, is purely a matter of poetic impact: the word ‘absolute’ seems a just interpretation of the imaginative reality, in so far as an immediate interpretation only is involved. Its implications in a wider system might not be satisfactory. But, whatever be the evil here, we can say that we understand something of the psychological state which gives these extraneous things of horror their reality and opportunity. And if we are loath to believe in such evil realities, we might call to mind the words of Lafeu in All’s Well That Ends Well:

They say miracles are past; and we have our philosophical persons, to make modern and familiar things supernatural and causeless. Hence is it that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge, when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear.

A profound commentary on Macbeth. [MY NOTE:  As others have observed!} But, though the ultimate evil remains a mystery, analysis of the play indicates something of its relation to the mind and the actions of men.

Such analysis must be directed not to the story alone, but to the manifold correspondencies of imaginative quality extending throughout the whole play. The Macbeth vision is powerfully superlogical. Yet it is the work of interpretation to give some logical coherence to things imaginative. To do this is, it is manifestly not enough to abstract the skeleton of logical sequence which is the story of the play: that is to ignore the very quality which justifies our anxious attention. Rather, relinquishing our horizontal sight of the naked rock-line which is the story, we should, from above, view the whole as panorama, spatialized: and then map out imaginative similarities and differences, hills and vales and streams. Only to such a view does Macbeth reveal the full riches of its meaning. Interpretation must thus first receive the quality of the play in the imagination, and then proceed to translate this whole experience into a new logic which will not be confined to those superficialities of cause and effect which we think to trace in our own lives and actions, and try to impose on the persons of literature. In this way, we shall know that Macbeth shows us an evil not to be accounted for in terms of ‘will’ and ‘causality’; that it expresses its vision, not to a critical intellect, but to the responsive imagination; and, working in terms not of ‘character’ or any ethical code, but of the abysmal deeps of a spirit-world untuned to human reality, withdraws the veil from the black streams which mill that consciousness of fear symbolized in actions of blood. Macbeth is the apocalypse of evil.”

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A lot to think about…whose criticism do you agree with?  Do you think Act Four and Five were disappointing or do they work as Van Doren says they do? (I’m inclined to agree with him, as opposed to Kermode.)  Is Macbeth “incited” by the Witches?  Share your thoughts with the group!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1KAhaochP8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryKwenFtHY0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FO9B2S2uS9U

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGooB7CovCA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s67YD5CUH_g

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tF_AgZvNB0I&list=PL48F56B9E75C222EB

My next post:  Sunday evening/Monday morning:  Final thoughts from Garber, Booth, and more!

Macbeth

Act Five, Part Two

By Dennis Abrams

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The world is still deceived with ornament.
In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt,
But, being seasoned with a gracious voice,
Obscures the show of evil?
The Merchant of Venice, 3.2.80 Bassanio

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I’d like to start with a couple of notes about the sleepwalking scene:

First:  Given the play’s preoccupation with “dark,” I found it fascinating that Lady Macbeth’s gentlewoman says about the taper, “Why, it stood by her. She has light by her continually, ‘tis her command.”  Obviously, at this point in the play, whether it is light or dark, Lady Macbeth is afraid of the dark.

Second:  Compare Lady Macbeth’s “Here’s the smell of the blood still, all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand,” which links crime (the smell of blood, the hand that cannot be sweetened), with Macbeth’s line in Act 3, 1.58, ‘Thence to be wrenched with an unlineal hand,” and of course, “Will all Neptune’s ocean wash this blood/Clean from my hand? No: this my hand will rather/The multitudinous seas incarnardine,/Making the green one red,” as well as Angus’ line in Act Five.2.17, “His secret murders sticking on his hands.”  And then go back to her words to Macbeth after the murder:  “Go get some water/And wash this filthy witness from your hand.”

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From Garber:

“How does Macbeth resolve its central problem of evil and of the nature of ambition? The play presents the audience and reader with not one but two final visions, in a way that we have come to see as characteristic of the playwright. There is a final catastrophe for the tragic hero, and a redemptive and unifying moment for the new King and his court, with audience emotion torn between the options of character and state. Lady Macbeth, tortured by nightmares, follows, ironically, her doctor’s advice, and ministers to herself: her death is a suicide, but she has, in a sense, died long before. Indeed the sleepwalking scene is another version of a ‘ghost’ scene, the restless and tortured spirit vainly seeking repose.

And what of Macbeth? Perhaps significantly, in this remarkable play, Macbeth’s final attendant is an officer by the name of Seyton. The editor of the Arden Macbeth, Kenneth Muir, gives a quotation from a work of genealogy to establish that the Seytons were hereditary armor bearers to the Kings of Scotland, so that there is ‘a peculiar fitness in the choice of this thane,’ and then comments, in his own voice, ‘One critic suggests wildly that Shakespeare intended a quibble on Satan. Muir thus is able to equivocate between the tame and the wild, the ‘peculiar fitness’ of ‘Seyton,’ and what Muir implies is the arrant unsuitability of ‘Satan,’ without naming the critic who had the temerity to make such a proposal. Yet by citing and derogating the temerity of this anonymous critic, he can have things both ways; if the suggestion were really so ‘wild,’ he need not have mentioned it at all. And – although I am not his anonymous critic – I find myself very tempted by the ‘Satan’ reading, which re-links the play’s last moments with the morality play tradition out of which it clearly comes, and provides, were it to be considered seriously, yet another specter for Macbeth to (mis)interpret. In any case, the calls for Seyton precede and bracket one of the play’s great set pieces:

Macbeth:

     Seyton! – I am sick at heart

When I behold – Seyton, I say! – This push

Will cheer me ever or disseat me now.

I have lived long enough. My way of life

Is fall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf,

And that which should accompany old age,

As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,

I must not look to have but in their stead

Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath,

Which the poor heart would fain deny and dare not.

Seyton!

Like “Othello’s occupation’s gone,’ this is a soldier’s lament for the ordinary pleasures of company and fellowship. Life for Macbeth has ceased to hold either sensation of meaning. His wife dies because of too much feeling,  he because of too little. And his famous speech on time, ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,’ is a rejection of time, a rejection of history and of the learning experience of either life or art:

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

Hamlet had asked Horatio, ‘In this harsh world draw thy breath in pain/To tell my story.’ Othello requested that his horrified audience ‘[s]peak of me as I am.’ Macbeth alone rejects the tale, and its recuperative powers. For him the image of the world is not redemptive but a stage and a delusion. We are only actors, and bad actors, who, in Hamlet’s phrase, ‘out-Herod Herod,’ and the patterns we make on earth are finally meaningless, signifying nothing. ‘Nothing,’ that resounding term from King Lear, marks the space of the zero and the cipher. Macbeth, whose borrowed robes – his actor’s costume – have become ‘a giant’s robe/Upon a dwarfish thief,’ now sees himself as the miscast victim of a play he never wrote and never understood. His final downward metamorphosis is, fittingly, into a dumb show for others:

Macduff:

We’ll have thee as our rarer monsters are,

Painted upon a pole, and underwrite

‘Here may you see the tyrant.’

Yet Macbeth’s despairing perception of nihilism in the world around him is, ironically, one thing that shows him to be profoundly human. Like Richard III he is gallant in his final warlike spirit, doomed and joyous.

The play does not reject this tragic vision of walking shadows and poor players, but rather leaves them with us as a necessary antidote to the smug confidence that all the world’s a stage; that acting, disguise, and transformation are saving activities; that theater is a redemptive force. But the play’s real recuperation, its real recovery, comes only partly through Macbeth’s personal confrontation with mortality and ending, and partly through Malcolm’s public assurance of order and continuity. In his final speech, so parallel in its way to Edgar’s in King Lear, or indeed to Richmond’s in Richard III, Malcolm regains the Duncan language that has for so long been absent from the play, the language of fertility: ‘What’s more to do/Which would be planted newly with the time.’ Time for him is not an ending or a meaningless jumble of syllables, but a new beginning, a part of redemptive history. Macbeth has been turned imaginatively into a dumb how, a monster, literally a demonstration or warning, the ‘show and gaze o’th’ time.’ That is to say, although his tale may have signified nothing to him, it signifies volumes to us.

For Malcolm, however, another kind of transformation is also at hand – a political one. ‘My thanes and kinsmen,’ he says, ‘Henceforth be earls, the first that ever Scotland/In such an honour named.’ Henceforth be earls. There are to be no more thanes, and thus there will be no more destructive cycle, one treasonous Thane of Cawdor replacing another, and so on, ad infinitium. This is the pattern of cycle, and of an unredeemed history, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. But for Malcolm’s world, and for that of King James, cycle is to be replaced by transcendence, by ‘the grace of Grace.’ Thanes become earls, Scotland becomes part of England, as James achieves the union of Scotland and England with his ascension to the English throne in 1603 (although the union was not formalized until the legislative Act of Union of 1707). The fallen land becomes the land of the holy king who cures and saves.

It is a pleasing and redemptive vision, one that finds its emblematic counterpart in the play in that magic glass, held up in the show of eight kings, reflecting King James and his descendants to the end of time. And yet the play will not let us rest with this comforting vision, despite the sense of victory on the battlefield and in the court. In Roman Polanski’s 1971 film, produced in the wake of the senseless slaughter of Polanski’s wife, actress Sharon Tate – then eight months pregnant – by the Charles Manson gang in 1969, the play ends with a bitter return to cycle, as Duncan’s second son, Donalbain, seeks out the witches and their prophetic instruction. It is all about to begin again.

At the last, I think, we cannot help but here again the knocking of the damned soul at hell’s gate. For Macbeth, whatever else it is, remains the sublimest and most ‘modern’ of morality plays. And to the redemptive vision of Malcolm we need continually to oppose the treadmill language of Macbeth – the speaker like Sisyphus rolling his stone patiently to the top of the hill, only to have it roll down again, eternally; like Ixion bound to his wheel of fire, revolving in hell, eternally – the treadmill language of the damned and living soul who is Macbeth, his life sentence (at once opinion, judgment, utterance, and aphorism) meted out syllable by syllable:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day

To the last syllable of recorded time,

And all our yesterday’s have lighted fools

The way to dusty death…”

From Stephen Booth, King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition, and Tragedy:

“I submit that the tragedy of the play Macbeth is not the character Macbeth, and that it does not happen on the stage. The tragedy occurs in the audience, in miniature in each little failure of categories and at its largest the failure of active moral categories to hold the actions and actors proper to them. An audience undergoes it greatest tragedy in joining its min to Macbeth’s both in his sensitive awareness of evil and his practice of it. Like Macbeth, it knows evil. But, even in the last two acts when Malcolm is repeatedly proffered as a wholesome substitute for Macbeth, it persists in seeing the play through Macbeth’s eyes the audience itself is unable to keep within the category dictated by its own morality, even though its moral judgments of characters and their actions are dictated entirely by that morality.

There is an obvious but inadequate reason why our sympathy with Macbeth has the intensity implied by that word’s etymological roots in Greek words for ‘together’ and ‘to experience’ (‘to feel,’ ‘to suffer,’ ‘to undergo’): we see things from Macbeth’s point of view – in the metaphoric sense of see – because, for most of the play’s length, Macbeth is in fact the principal conduit through which we are informed of events and their progress. The same, however, is true of Richard in Richard III and Iago in Othello; audiences’ relations with them are close (and disturbing to think about after the fact), but, where we never lose our identities as observers of Richard and Iago, to be audience to Macbeth is virtually to be Macbeth for the duration of the performance. (That this is so is demonstrated by the fact that it has occurred to so many commentators to deny it – to argue that we do not identify ourselves with Macbeth as they never would never bother to argue – or imagine a need to argue – that we do not identify ourselves with Richard or Iago.)

The reason for the morally improbable spiritual fusion between the virtuous and high-minded audience and the wicked, morally shallow Macbeth is, I think, that until Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene (V.i), Macbeth and the audience are (with the possible and fascinatingly perverse exception of the comically philosophical Porter) the only major parties to the play who see or feel the magnitude of the situations and events the play presents. Although Macbeth’s superbly vivid imagination reaches no further than ‘stick-and-carrot’ moral economics, Macbeth is the only character in the play who is our size.

Even the witches behave as if Macbeth, his crimes, and his fortune were on the same scale with those of the tempest-tossed sailor ‘to Aleppo gone, master o’ th’ Tiger.’ And the events of the play never evoke more from Banquo than gentlemanly musings. Duncan sounds hardly more than bemused at Cawdor’s treachery; he immediately resumes his complacent confidence in social order. Banquo and Duncan sum up their radical blandness in their slow, luxuriously fatuous commentary on the salubrious climate at Macbeth’s castle. As to Lady Macbeth: waking, she treats any challenge as a limited problem in logistics. Macduff, who responds passionately, if unimaginatively, to Duncan’s murder, is thereafter principally noteworthy for absenting himself from one place or another. In IV.iii, the “England’ scene where he hears and responds to the news that his wife and children have been slaughtered, Macduff has and takes his one opportunity to command the full attention of the audience. But, even then, that generally debilitating scene is contrived in such a way to emphasize Macduff’s passivity and impotence.

It is, however, Malcolm whom IV.iii treats most harshly.

Having mentioned IV.iii, the only slow scene in the play, and come to Malcolm in my list of characters whose scale of response is inferior to Macbeth’s and the audience, I want to pause and look at both that scene and Malcolm in detail. Together they provide means for more fully developing the idea of the audience’s tragic loss of its comfortable confidence in the limits of its own potential.

Early in the play – in his forthright, personal greeting to the bloody sergeant who earlier had helped him battle (I.ii.3-5), and in the largemindedness of his account of Cawdor’s death – Malcolm shows signs of just the sort of spiritual energy he would need if he were to separate the audience’s soul fro Macbeth’s Malcolm does not speak again, however, until after his father’s murder:

Macduff: Your royal father’s murdered.

Malcolm:     O, by whom?

I have yet to hear an actor sufficient to overcome the inherent silliness of ‘O, by whom?’ – a response from which no amount of gasping and mimed horror can remove the tone of small talk.

Malcolm speaks twice more before he and Donalbain are left alone onstage to close II.iii with their plans for flight. After ‘O, by whom?’ his next speech (II.iii.115-16) is an all-but-overt comment on Shakespeare’s tactic in rendering our potential hero theatrically impotent: ‘Why do we hold our tongues,/That most may claim this argument for ours?’ Donalbain’s answer, though its substance is hardly heroic, is vigorously phrased. Malcolm contents himself with tacking a final phrase to Donalbain’s syntax – or, rather, Shakespeare contents himself with making Malcolm weak, not just weak in terms of his dramatized situation but, unlike Donalbain, theatrically weak: Shakespeare makes Malcolm a role in which no actor has a chance of capturing our attention. Malcolm does not appear again until IV.iii, where Shakespeare entirely undoes him by making his presence painful to his moral allies, the audience.

Malcolm’s behavior in IV.iii is the most perverse element in a perverse scene. Malcolm is obviously perverse in vilifying himself to test Macduff’s political idealism, but the perversity that concerns me here is not so much the character as of the characterization. An irritating character – one who irritates his fellow characters as Polonius, Hotspur, and Juliet’s Nurse do – is neither necessarily nor usually irritating to an audience. Shakespeare, however, makes the honorable, purposeful Malcolm a theatrical irritation. His first lengthy speech in the scene (lines 8-17: ‘What I believe, I’ll wail/What know, believe; and what I can redress,/As I shall find the time to friend, I will…’) is not only bombastic in substance but bombasted out with syntactical stuffing (like ‘As I shall find the time to friend,’ which keeps a generally hollow sentence from reaching its hollow close).

As the speech progresses – and in the speeches that continue from it (lines 18-24, 25-31) – Malcolm’s style is grating in its lack of economy: he both offers us luxurious appositives for phrases that need no clarification and uses elliptically foreshortened constructions that save time at the expense of an audience’s ease of understand (consider, for example, ‘and wisdom,’ a particularly crabbed ellipsis for ‘and it may be wise,’ in ‘and wisdom/’To offer up a weak, poor, innocent lamb.’ Then, when he comes to self-slander (which, though odd, could have been interesting to listen to), Malcolm’s syntax is maddeningly contorted, and his pace tortuous. For instance, he spends several slow, unnecessary lines making it difficult for Macduff and the audience to be entirely certain they know who it is he is talking about:

Malcolm:

     But, for all this

When I shall tread upon the tyrant’s head

Or wear it on my sword, yet my poor country

Shall have more vices than it had before,

More suffer, and more sundry ways than ever

By him that shall succeed.

Macduff:

What should he be?

Malcolm:

It is myself I mean…

Malcolm thereupon invites Macduff to debate his claim to villainy greater than Macbeth’s. Malcolm’s response to Macduff’s case for Macbeth’s superior villainy piles specifics on for emphasis and thereby delays the progress of the scene. No quantity of alternative adjectives and nouns can fill up the cistern of Malcolm’s lust to dilate upon particulars:

     I grant him bloody,

Luxurious, avaricious, false, deceitful,

Sudden, malicious, smacking of every sin

That has a name. But there’s no bottom, none,

In my voluptuousness. Your wives, your daughters,

Your matrons, and your maids could not fill up.

The cistern of my lust…

Detailed demonstration of Malcolm’s syntactic perversity and the lack of expository economy in the several speeches by which he finally exhausts Macduff’s patience and prepares the way for the speech in which he ponderously takes back all he has said against himself would be as tedious as the scene is. That is less true of the scene’s more obviously frustrating second movement.

Ross, who enters a scene that has been previously concerned entirely with establishing identities, is unrecognized by Malcolm, who identified him smartly for Duncan in I,ii, and who here adds a little more gratuitous bulk and gratuitous delay to the scene by nattering about his brief difficulty in recognizing Ross. Ross is understandably unwilling to deliver the crushing news he brings Macduff. And, when Ross does at last approach the painful topic of Macduff’s family, Macduff has to coax the information from him. Ross’s well-intentioned reticence thus stretches out his own anguish and Macduff’s; it also heightens our sense of the horror of Macbeth’s crime and of the pathos of Macduff’s situation. Above all, Ross’s reticence also heightens the already aggravated lesser agony the scene inflicts on us as an audience.

Ross delays doing what we assume or suspect he has come on stage to do, and Shakespeare provides conversational accidents that help Ross delay and make our frustration as audience – comparable – on its lesser scale – to Macduff’s. For example, when Macduff encourages Ross to speak further about his wife and children (‘Be not a niggard of your speech. How goes’t?’), Ross’s answer seems on its way to telling Macduff his family is dead; ‘When I came hither to transport the tidings/Which I have heavily borne, there ran a rumor/Of…’ But the rumor is not the one we guess (and, as it at last turns out, rightly guess) Ross has heard – the rumor that Macduff’s castle has been surprised and his wife and babes savagely slaughtered. Ross will not get to that rumor for another twenty tortuous lines. The rumor he reports here is ‘Of many worthy fellows that were out’ – a rumor he pursues through a thicket of syntactically snarled modification (Which was to my belief witnessed the rather/For that I saw the tyrant’s power afoot’), to emerge at an exhortation to Malcolm to invade Scotland promptly. Ross’s speech takes us back to a matter settled in the first half of the scene and leaves us further from the report we expect than we were ten lines earlier, when Macduff asked specifically about his wife and children.

Obviously, it is theatrically splendid that Shakespeare should so manipulate Ross’s compassionately intended, but effectively tortuous, reticence that in evokes an audience response parallel with the response it evokes from Macduff in the fiction. However, without denying the theatrical energy the delay generates, it is also true that the experience of those lines is unpleasant for an audience – unpleasant in very much the way any scene is when it drags.

What is more, Shakespeare develops the socially and emotionally awkward exchange between Ross and Macduff in such a way that it resembles the work of a clumsy playwright. Not only does Macduff have to prod Ross, but he does so in lines that lack verisimilitude and seem prompted b y the despair of a writer who does not know his trade. Ross has said that the words he has to speak are too painful to be heard: Macduff responds:

     What concern they,

The general cause or is it a fee-grief

Due to some single breast?

Shakespeare’s handling of Ross’s delay also generates and prolongs a petty but real agony of understanding for us – for us who saw the slaughter but do not immediately know whether Ross knows what we know. Ross left the previous scene while Lady Macduff and her children were indeed ‘well at peace’ – were still alive and in good health. We do not know how to respond to Ross’s answers when he tells Macduff that this family is ‘well.’ Is this the traditional pious equivocation by which, because they are at rest and free of worldly cares, ‘we use/To say the dead are well’ (Antony and Cleopatra II.v.32-33), or is Ross merely reporting what he ignorantly believes to be simple fact, or is he insisting upon a quibbling distinction between the news he has heard and the now-superseded facts he knows at first hand? We are obliged to wait to find out.

To conclude this account of IV.iii, it should suffice to say that, when, immediately after IV.ii has closed on Lady Macduff’s offstage cry of “Murder,’ we are presented with Macduff and Malcolm, we are thereby promised a scene that will show us Macduff’s response to his private griefs and tell us what practical plans and hopes Malcolm and Macduff have for opposing Macbeth. The scene fulfills its promise, but in so frustrating a way that, from the beginning of the scene onward, an audience’s experience includes impatience. Malcolm and Macduff are and remain our allies, but in the morally insignificant terms of our likes and dislikes as audience to an entertainment they are – because this scene is – irritating to us.

In three scenes between Iv.iii and the death of Macbeth – V.ii, V.iv, and V.vi – Shakespeare gives us further opportunities to think of the action from the point of view of Malcolm, Macduff, and their army of liberation; he makes each of those opportunities uninviting. The scenes not only delay us in our certain progress toward the play’s inevitable conclusion: they are, like IV.iii, slow in themselves.

The first of the three, V.ii, serves an expository purpose: Menteith, Angus, Caithness, and Lennox inform us that Malcolm’s invading army will soon reach Dunsinane and that Macbeth has fortified it against a siege. The scene also teases us with matter-of-fact references to Birnam Wood as the place where the Scottish patriots are to join forces with Malcolm. We know from all previous literary experience that the comfortable impossibilities the witches presented as the only threats to Macbeth will occur (just as the first people to hear the stories of Oedipus and of Rumplestiltskin presumably ‘knew’ that Oedipus would murder his father and marry his mother and that the miller’s daughter would somehow manage to spin gold from straw). Act V, scene ii both activates our eagerness to find out how Birnam Wood will manage to do the impossible and, because the scene meanders for twenty extra lines, frustrates our desire. In the first speech of V.ii we hear that ‘revenges burn’ in Malcolm, Siward, and Macduff, but there is no fire in the placid chat of the thanes who tell us so; note, for instance, the ironically leisurely anaphoric use of Now’s in Angus’s speculative account of Macbeth’s state of mind:

Now does he feel

His secret murders sticking on his hands.

Now minutely revolts upbraid his faith-breach.

Those he commands move only in commend,

Nothing in love. Now does he feel his title

Hang loose upon him, like a giant’s robe

Upon a dwarfish thief.

Our next chance to defect from emotional commitment to Macbeth comes in V.iv, which follows the pattern of V.ii. The business of the scene is finished during its first seven lines:

Siward:

What wood is this before us?

Mentieth:

The Wood of Birnam.

Malcolm:

Let every soldier hew him down a bough

And bear’t before him. Thereby shall we shadow

The numbers of our host and make discovery

Err in report of us.

The scene goes on for another fourteen lines, concluding with Siward’s word-heavy commendation of finality:

     The time approaches

That will with due decision make us know

What we shall say we have and what we owe.

Thoughts speculative their unsure hopes relate,

But certain issue strokes must arbitrate –

Towards which advance the war.

               Exeunt, marching

The last of the three scenes that offer us a chance to think of the battle from the viewpoint of the forces of virtue is V.vi, a scene ten lines long that does its scarcely necessary business in its first line (‘Now near enough. Your leafy screens throw down’), and then spend itself on prebattle formalities and rhyming rant. Such formalities and rant are usual before Shakespearean battles and are usually effective in generating excitement. Here the prophesied approach of Birnam Wood and the approach of one member of the army – Macduff – matter, but the army and its affairs are dramatically irrelevant to a climax for which the terms have been firmly established as supernatural Shakespeare may have had extradramatic purpose in these scenes; for instance, a Jacobean audience probably found political edification in the play’s insistence upon the family tie between the English Siward and his Scottish nephew Malcolm; but, dramatically, Shakespeare’s expense of attention on Siward must always have been an unwelcome diversion for audiences.

The whole paradox I have been demonstrating – the paradox of audiences’ dual contrary allegiances in  Macbeth – is mirrored in a summary example provided in the issue of the speed at which the play moves. Macbeth moves so quickly and is therefore so short that scholars used to speculate carelessly on a lost ‘full’ text of the play – a text of which the Macbeth we have was assumed to be only a mutilated relic. Such scholars may, of course, have been right, but the historically evident power the play has over audiences and the contribution speed makes to that power suggest that brevity was probably always the soul of the play.

Like Macbeth and the servant who outdistances him as they gallop ahead to bring Lady Macbeth news of Duncan’s imminent arrival, the events of the play move at breakneck speed. I bring the matter up here because audiences like speed and because scenes with Macbeth never drag. As I have already suggested, the only exception to the rule of haste are the scenes that focus on Macbeth’s virtuous victims and adversaries. In the theater, speed is good and slowness is bad. In the story of Macbeth as staged by Shakespeare, virtuous characters and virtuous actions move slowly; speed is characteristic of the play’s evil actions and their actors. What an audience approves in one dimension of its experience is at perfect odds with what it approves in another. One might say of an audience to Macbeth what Oswald says of Albany in King Lear: ‘What most he should dislike seems pleasant to him;/What like, offensive.’

Given what I have been saying…the following lines from Macbeth might well be describing the audience that hears them:

But cruel are the times when we are traitors

And do knot know ourselves; when we hold rumor

From what we fear, yet know not what we fear

But float upon a wild and violent sea

Each way and move.

(IV,ii, 18-22)

The trouble with such a neat and summary critical conclusion is that, though it is just, it can, like my whole disquisition on the audience’s tragically double orientation, seem to imply that audiences take conscious note of, and are actively upset by, the conflict between the locally active values they exercise from moment to moment as consumers of a dramatic product and the larges ones from which our culture traditionally evaluates human behavior. Obviously, nothing of the sort occurs. Audiences like attending Macbeth; we pay to back and see it again when we can. For audiences, their times in the theater with Macbeth show no signs of feeding the need to say ‘Great thing of us forgot’ about their temporarily mislaid priorities. IN fact, they do not mislay their moral priorities. Those priorities coexist comfortably with equally powerful, lesser, local, special ones during an effectively miraculous experience of practical paradox. That, indeed, is my point. I still claim validity for the hyperbolically stated proposition that the tragedy of plays like Macbeth occurs in the audience; but the tragic experience of audiences, though real, is not only bearable but as easily managed as flies are by the gods.

This is, thus, the proper point at which to reintroduce the distinction between our perceptions of artistically unmediated tragedy in ordinary experience and our experience of dramatic tragedy. Those plays that we agree belong to the category tragedy – those that strike us as having the particular but hard-to-particularize quality we call ‘tragic’ and for which we are so grateful – are plays that admit into a comfortable mental experiences responses that ordinarily would put us in a quandary – plays that admit such responses without disturbing our equanimity, or even our complacence, and admit them without denying or diminishing their virulence.

Like every work of art – from the humblest drawing or tune or sentence to Michelangelo’s David, Beethoven’s fourteenth quartet, or Pride and Prejudice – a dramatic tragedy is an enabling act. And, as we value works of art in proportion to the magnitude of the comprehensive power they confer upon us, so we traditionally give particularly high value to tragedy and the highest to successful tragedies. The glory of such a play as Macbeth is in its power as an enabling act – one by which we are not merely relieved of physical involvement in the dangerous events enacted before us (that minor felicity, after all, is ours whenever we see newsreels of disasters), but by which we are also genuinely – though temporarily, as we would be if we be if we were superior to the sovereign fact of the human condition – superior to the helpless relativism in which the human mind is trapped and by virtue of which the human mind ordinarily requires itself to recognize one of the set of terms in which a perceived fact operates and to ignore or deny the others.

For the length of Macbeth, we are creatures so free of psychological dependence upon our fragile, dikelike belief in limits that our minds are not only comfortable but graceful in conditions that would ordinarily drive us mad to define our positions. For the length of Macbeth we are like superhuman beings, creatures capable of being mentally comfortable with infinite possibility. No wonder we enjoy ourselves.”

I’ll finish up with Booth in my final post on Macbeth, Tuesday evening.

 —————————————–

And finally and completely switching gears, I just finished reading a very cool book by the playwright Ken Ludwig entitled “How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare.”  Very informative, he shows how to teach your kids to memorize passages from various plays and how to introduce them to the texts themselves – for those of you with kids, it’s highly recommended.  As a taste, here’s from one of the later chapters, on Macbeth:

Passage 13

Macbeth’s Conscience

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death, Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more: it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

(Act V, Scene 5, lines 18-28)

After A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, and Romeo and Juliet, I thought the best way to keep my children excited about Shakespeare was to expose them to something entirely different. No more Mr. Nice guy. It was time to beg bloody. (My daughter liked the ideas as much as my son did.)

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,

This is the first line of a soliloquy spoken by Macbeth at the end of the play that bears his name. When the play begins, Macbeth, a lord of ancient Scotland, is fighting to protect his country from a rebellion. Just after the final, bloody battle, Macbeth encounters three witches who prophesy that he will one day become King of Scotland.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day.

As you tell your children the story, keep repeating these opening lines of the soliloquy until they become second nature.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

The witches’ prophecy ignites ambitious thoughts in Macbeth, and soon, with the help of his wildly ambitious, ruthless wife, Macbeth has murdered Scotland’s rightful king, Duncan, and seized the throne for himself. Once Macbeth becomes king, Duncan’s heirs begin to suspect that Macbeth was the murderer. In response, Macbeth begins a reign of terror, murdering everyone he considers a threat to his position.  This includes Macbeth’s fellow soldier Banquo (who the witches prophesied would found a line of kings and is therefore a threat to Macbeth’s future), as well as the wives and children of Macbeth’s political enemies.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

From the beginning, Macbeth is harrowed by his conscience. His mounting sense of remorse causes him to become delusional. First he sees a dagger floating in the air, leading him to Duncan’s bedchamber; then he sees the ghost of Banquo sitting at a feast. Are these visions real, or are they products of Macbeth’s fevered mind? Is there a difference? What is the dividing line between imagination and reality? Does it matter if something is real to the senses as long as we perceive it to be real?

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death.

….

The first line of the soliloquy is simplicity itself. Because the line is in iambic pentameter, which has five beats, the word and is necessarily emphasized, both times, at least a little bit. This gives the line a heavy, plodding rhythm, as if the word tomorrow was trudging along to its destruction.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

The word tomorrow in this case has a single, strong beat: toMORrow.

ToMORrow and toMORrow and toMORrow

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time.

For Macbeth at this point, life is a meaningless succession of tomorrows. For how long will those tomorrows creep forward? Forever. To the very last syllable of recorded time.

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death.

What does this mean – all our yesterdays? And how can yesterdays light the way for fools to follow? This raises an interesting aspect of Macbeth that is not necessarily evident on a first reading: The language of the play, in addition to being powerful, is also frequently ambiguous. Shakespeare does this deliberately, and he does it to add a sense of mystery, murkiness, and danger to the story. This technique is explained by Shakespeare scholars Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine:

‘Each of Shakespeare’s plays has its own characteristic language. In Macbeth one notices particularly the deliberate imprecision of some of the play’s words. Macbeth’s lines ‘If it were done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well/It were done quickly’ not only play with the imprecise verb ‘done’ but also refer to some unnamed ‘it.’…We hear it again and again in Lady Macbeth’s [speeches[. The sense is clear, but the language seems deliberately vague, deliberately flowery, as if designed to cover over the serpent under it. In reading Macbeth, one must sometimes be content to get the gist of the characters’ language, since in such lines as ‘the powers above/Put on their instruments’ no precise ‘translation’ exists.

So if at times your children find the language of Macbeth to be slightly confusing, don’t let that trouble them. What I often say to my children, particularly when we’re going to see a performance of Shakespeare, is that they shouldn’t worry if they don’t understand every word, or even every full speech. They should let the language roll over them, the way waves roll over you in the ocean. There will always be time to analyze later.

     Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow;

Shakespeare often compares life to a lighted candle. And a walking shadow is a kind of ghost, isn’t it? The way Banquo became a ghost in the play.

     a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more.

A poor player means an actor. As we’ll discuss in a later chapter, Shakespeare frequently uses actors and the theater as metaphors in his work. Struts is also a good word. It suggests that Life is an actor who gets to strut around the stage thinking well of himself. This is reminiscent of another speech, in Shakespeare’s Richard II, where a king is about to die and he compares death to a tiny actor in the brain:

For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground

And tell sad stories of the death of kings…

          For within the hollow-crown

That rounds the mortal temples of a king

Keeps Death his court, and there the antic [jester] sits,

Scoffing [at] his state and grinning at his pomp,

Allowing him [the king] a breath, a little scene,

To monarchize, be feared, and kill with looks,

Infusing him with self and vain conceit,

As if this flesh which walls about our life

Were brass impregnable.

[MY NOTE:  Still one of my favorite speeches.  And think about how far Shakespeare traveled and changed as a writer after writing that…]

Similarly, for Macbeth, life is

     A tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

Could Shakespeare have written anything more bleak, more filled with despair and hopelessness? I don’t believe so. it is reminiscent of the twentieth-century works of Samuel Beckett, plays like Knapp’s Last Tape and the ironically titled Happy Days, that view man’s lot as one of absurd nothingness.

[MY NOTE:  As we move on King Lear, I’m going to be relying heavily on Jan Kott, who was the first to see the link between Lear’s universe and Beckett’s in plays like Endgame. And my last post on Macbeth will include his extraordinary essay on the play.]

…………

One of the central puzzles of the play involves how we feel about Macbeth’s violent end. Here is a man who murdered at will out of blind ambition, killing a kinsman, a guest, and a king, yet something about him makes us feel that he was possessed of a great spirit, with the potential for another, better life. Is it the language of his speeches? His affection for his wife? His struggles with his conscience? Or did he have no choice in life? Were his evil deeds the product of Fate, or his wife, or his occupation as a soldier? These are questions you should discuss with your children.”

———————————-

This is a wonderful clip:  Ian McKellen analyzing “Tomorrow and  tomorrow and tomorrow…”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGbZCgHQ9m8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LDdyafsR7g

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YGf_goOoDk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZnaXDRwu84

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcvh35RcoXA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-XTgC34IQQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPLrSUE5ROs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Fmy34qVdwo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMyfSQQamIA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4sFviGnHXg

Thoughts?

My next post:  Tuesday evening/Wednesday morning — final thoughts on Macbeth, with the help of Stephen Booth and Jan Kott

Macbeth

Act Five, Part Three

By Dennis Abrams

———————————–

To conclude Stephen Booth’s look at Macbeth from King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition, and Tragedy:

 “I said earlier that an audience to Macbeth cannot keep itself within the category dictated by its own morality, even though its moral judgments are dictated entirely by that morality. The achievement of the play is that it enables its audience to endure the experience of such potential in itself.

By ‘experience of such potential,’ however, I do not mean – as I might seem to mean – ‘experience of recognizing such potential.’ I suggest, indeed, that the triumphant mental superiority I postulate for audiences to Macbeth is possible only because they are oblivious to the logical conflict in their responses and to their achievement tolerating its irresolution.

If audiences were led to take conscious notice of the inconsistency in their evaluations of Macbeth or of Malcolm, they would presumably set about rationalizing their situations in an effort to make their responses with one another by, for example, insisting that their thinking be governed by the indisputable precedence proper to the large, moral terms in which we must condemn Macbeth and cherish Malcolm – terms by comparison to which the transitory, local, merely theatrical terms in which Macbeth pleases and Malcolm displeases us are too petty to bother about.

Since the clash between two powerful, urgent, differently based sets of judgments remains only potential, an audience’s experience of Macbeth contains – has wrapped within its fabric – a token experience of being able to cope with conflicts comparable to those our minds cannot cope with, those that cannot be placed and managed in a single frame of reference. In Macbeth, as in the few other great tragedies that give us the special joy Macbeth gives us, our token experience of superiority to dependence on the mental machinations by which we customarily define and redefine the thus diminished elements of experience and make it manageable is particularly persuasive because it occurs in company with contemplation of a dramatize story full of events and situations that are in fact beyond the mental control of the characters they involve. The experience of Macbeth testifies to its audience’s mental capacity to survive mental challenges as demanding as the ones that overwhelm Macbeth – and overwhelm Lady Macbeth, and on a lesser scale, Macduff, Lady Macduff, and their mentally self-confident, mentally foolhardy little boy.

Perhaps the grounds for the high value I put on unobserved conflict will be clear if I introduce two lesser conflicts involved in (wrapped up within) Macbeth, conflicts comparable to our conflicting judgments on Macbeth and Malcolm only in going unobserved.

The play enables its audiences wholly to miss the glaring but invisible ludicrousness of the double standard by which Macbeth evaluates supernatural predictions. He takes those favorable to his hopes as revelations of unalterable fate; thus he announces his confidence that he is immune to danger from all persons born of woman and that he is safe until Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane. On the other hand, he assumes that he has it within his power to prevent the seed of Banquo from growing to be kings. Our minds also live comfortably with unexploited irony in the fact that Macbeth, who has reason to fear Macduff and Banquo’s children, succeeds in murdering Banquo and Macduff’s children.

Although anyone’s schoolroom experiences will suggest that the stuff of ironies has effect only as it is observed to be so, I submit that the raw materials from these two unobserved ironies do more for us by being unobserved than they would if the playwright had pointed them up and insisted that we notice them. An irony differs radically from the raw materials that compose it and are composed within it. In formulating an irony we bring its elements under control and remove most of their energy – exactly the disconcerting energy that impels us to master conflicting facts in a neat paradoxical assertion by which they take on a fixed, composite, single identity, albeit identity as an anomaly. Irony derives from collision and a collision give psychologically palpable unity to the colliding forces, which we can comprehend in relation to the point at which they collide.

Because Macbeth evokes conflicting responses that could but do not collide in our consciousnesses, and because it includes and omits to exploit logical inconsistencies in its characters’ behavior, the experience of seeing or reading Macbeth is experience of an object that is under constant pressure from within – an object full of volatile elements always ready to meet and explode.

Macbeth makes us able to sit unperturbed in the presence of mutually antipathetic facts of a sort that in ordinary experience put our minds in panic when we so much as suspect they coexist. The play can give us our unwonted tolerance for unresolved energy because, although limitless in effectively numberless dimensions, Macbeth is limited in at least as many more.

The limits – the reasons by which the play assures us that, however open-ended it may be, it is also a three-hour object whose elements so pertain to one another that it has thinglike identity, a beginning, a middle, and an end that are not arbitrary – are achieved in patterns of substantive incidentals so insistent and so profuse that our minds are emboldened to accept irresolution in the large matters that concern us and to which we devote our attention.

The events depicted in Macbeth, are not complete, not a closed unit with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Similarly, an audience’s experience of Macbeth is of truth beyond the limits of categories. That experience, which I think is what we are labeling when we use the word ‘tragedy,’ is made bearable by a vehicle, the fabric of the play, which has limits, has pattern, and is insistently man-made. The patterns of the play are made by the very elements whose disjunction takes the mind beyond the usual limits of its tolerance. Some of them I have already touched on; others have been the stuff of modern criticism for the last fifty years: things like image patterns in clothes, drink, babies, and blood; echoes of one situation in another, resemblances of characters to one another; recurrent themes; and so on.

I will, however, mention one such pattern. A good emblem for the failure of categories in Macbeth would be ‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair’ at the end of scene i. An echo of that statement occurs as Macbeth’s first line at the beginning of scene iii: ‘So foul and fair a day I have not seen.’ The paired consonantal sounds in ‘fair’ and ‘foul’ make a surprisingly sustained, complex alliterative pattern that runs across the whole play, a nonsignifying pattern in far, fear, free, file, fail, fall, fool, false, a quietly sustaining pattern that is only literally full of sound and fury and that, though it signifies nothing, helps a sane human mind experience tragedy – live with essentially unmediated truth – and survive. What Macbeth does for us – what successful dramatic tragedy does for us – is like what the word ‘tragedy’ does for real-life tragedies: it gives local habitation and a name to the most terrifying of things, ‘a deed without a name’ (IV.i.49), without denying its namelessness, its incomprehensibility, its indefinition.”

————————–

And finally, I’d like to conclude our close reading of Macbeth with one of my favorite Shakespeare critics, and a writer who deeply effected my reading of the plays:  Jan Kott.  By his reading, reading the plays through his own specific twentieth-century perspective, he opens them up, yanking them from their era, and makes them startlingly of our own.

MACBETH or DEATH-INFECTED

What bloody man is that?

(Macbeth, 1,2)

The Grand Mechanism of Richard III operates also in Macbeth, perhaps even more brutally. Having suppressed a rebellion, Macbeth is placed near the throne. He can become a king, so he must become a king. He kills the rightful sovereign. He then must kill the witnesses of the crime, and those who suspect it. He must kill the sons and friends of those he has killed. Later he must kill everybody, for everybody is against him:

Send out moe horses, skirr the country round;

Hang those that talk of fear. Give me mine armour.

In the end he will be killed himself. He has trod the whole way up and down the grand staircase of history.

The plot of Macbeth does not differ from those of the Histories. But plot summaries are deceptive. Unlike Shakespeare’s historical plays, Macbeth does not show history as the Grand Mechanism. It shows it as a nightmare. Mechanism and nightmare are different metaphors to depict the same struggle for power and the crown. But the differing metaphors reflect a difference of approach, and, even more than that, different philosophies. History, shown as a mechanism, fascinates by its very terror and inevitability. Whereas nightmare paralyses and terrifies. In Macbeth history, as well as crime, is shown through personal experience. It is a matter of decision, choice, and compulsion. Crime is committed on personal responsibility and has to be executed with one’s own hands. Macbeth murders Duncan himself.

History in Macbeth is confused the way nightmares are; and, as in a nightmare, everyone is enveloped by it. Once the mechanism has been put in motion, one is apt to be crushed by it. One wades through nightmare, which gradually rises up in one’s throat.

Says Macbeth:

    …I am in blood

Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more,

Returning were as tedious as go o’er.

History in Macbeth is sticky and thick like a brew or blood. After a prologue with the three witches, the action proper begins with Duncan’s words:

What bloody man is that?

Everyone in this play is steeped with blood; victims as well as murders. The whole world is stained with blood. Says Duncan’s son, Donalbain:

There’s daggers in men’s smiles; the near in blood,

The nearer bloody.

Blood in Macbeth is not just a metaphor; it is real blood flowing out of murdered bodies. It leaves its stains on hands and faces, on daggers and swords.

Says Lady Macbeth:

A little water clears us of this deed.

How easy it is then!

But this blood cannot be washed off hands, faces, or daggers, Macbeth begins and ends with slaughter. There is more and more blood, everyone walks in it; it floods the stage. A production of Macbeth not evoking a picture of the world flooded with blood, would inevitably be false. There is something abstract about the Grand Mechanism. Richard’s cruelties mean death sentences. Most of them are executed off stage. In Macbeth, death, crime, murder are concrete. So is history in this play; it is concrete, palpable, physical and suffocating; it means the death-rattle, raising of the sword, thrust of the dagger. Macbeth has been called a tragedy of ambition, and a tragedy of terror. This is not true. There is only one theme in Macbeth: murder. History has been reduced to its simplest form, to one image and one division: those who kill and those who are killed.

Ambition means in this play the intention and planning of murder. Terror means the memory of murders that have been committed and fear of new crimes that are inevitable. The great and true murder, with which history begins, is the murder of a king. Then the killing has to go on, until the killer is himself killed. The new king will be the man who has killed a king. This is the pattern of Richard III and other ‘royal dramas,’ as well as of Macbeth. The huge stem-roller of history has been put in motion and crushes everybody in turn. In Macbeth, however, this murder-cycle does not possess the logic of a mechanism, but suggests rather a frighteningly growing nightmare.

Macbeth:

…What is the night?

Lady Macbeth:

Almost at odds with morning, which is which.

Most scenes take place at night; at all hours of the night, in fact: there is late night, midnight, and small hours of the dawn. Night is ever-present, invoked and recalled obtrusively – by metaphors: ‘O, never/Shall sun that morrow see!’ by means of action: servants carry torches, light them and put them out; by sudden prosaic statements of facts:

And when we have our naked frailties hid,

That suffer in exposure, let us meet…

(II, 3)

It is a night from which sleep has been banished. In no other Shakespearean tragedy is there so much talk about sleep. Macbeth has murdered sleep, and cannot sleep any more. In all Scotland no one can sleep. There is no sleep, only nightmares.

…When in swinish sleep

Their drenched natures lie as in a death…

Not only Macbeth and Lady Macbeth struggle with this uneasy sleep, which does not bring forgetfulness, but daytime thoughts of crime. It is the same sort of nightmare that torments Banquo.

A heavy summons lies like lead upon me,

And yet I would not sleep. Merciful powers,

Restrain in me the cursed thoughts that nature

Gives way to in repose!

Both sleep and food have been poisoned. In Macbeth’s world – the most obsessive of all worlds created by Shakespeare – murder, thoughts of murder and fear of murder pervade everything. In this tragedy there are only two great parts, but the third dramatis persona is the world. We remember the faces of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth more readily, because we see more of then than of the others. But all faces have the same grimace, expressing the same kind of fear. All bodies are just as tormented. Macbeth’s world is tight, and there is no escape. Even nature in it is nightmarishly impenetrable and close, consisting of mud and phantoms.

Banquo:

The earth hath bubbles, as the water has,

     …Whither are they vanish’d?

Macbeth:

Into the air, and what seem’d corporal melted

As  breath into the wind.

Witches in Macbeth are part of the landscape and are formed of the same matter as the world. They squeak at crossroads and incite to murder. The earth shivers as if in fever, a falcon has been pecked to death in flight by an owl, horses break out of enclosures in a mad rush, fighting and biting one another. In the world of Macbeth there is no margin left for love, or friendship; not even for desire. Or rather, lust too, has been poisoned with the thought of murder. There are many dark issues between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Each great Shakespearean character has many aspects, and lends himself, or herself, to more than one interpretation. In this particular union, in which there are no children, or they have died, Lady Macbeth plays a man’s part. She demands that Macbeth commit murder as a confirmation of his manhood, almost as an act of love. In all Lady Macbeth’s speeches there returns the same obsessive theme:

     …From this time

Should I account thy love.

………………….

When you durst do it, then you were a man;…

These two are sexually obsessed with each other, and yet have suffered a great erotic defeat. But this is not the most important factor in the interpretation of the tragedy, although it may be decisive for the two principle actors’ interpretation of their parts.

There is no tragedy without awareness. Richard III is aware of the Grand Mechanism. Macbeth is aware of the nightmare. In the world upon which murder is being imposed as fate, compulsion and inner necessity, there is only one dream: of a murder that will break the murder cycle, will be the way out of nightmare, and will mean liberation. For the thought of murder that has to be committed, murder one cannot escape from, is even worse than murder itself.

Says Macbeth:

If it were done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well

It were done quickly. If th’ assassination

Could trammel up the consequence,…

…that but this blow

Might be the be-all and the end-al here,

But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,

We’ld jump the life to come.

The terrorist Chen in Malraux’s Condition Humaine utters one of the most terrifying sentences written in the mid-twentieth century: ‘A man who has never killed is a virgin.’ This sentence means that killing is cognition, just as, according to the Old Testament, the sexual act is cognition; it also means that the experience of killing cannot be communicated, just as the experience of the sexual act cannot be conveyed. But this sentence means also that the act of killing changes the person who has performed it; from then on he is a different man living in a different world.

Says Macbeth after his first murder:

     …from this instant

There’s nothing serious in mortality;

All is but toys, renown and grace is dead;

The wine of life is drawn,…

Macbeth has killed in order to put himself on a level with the world in which murder potentially and actually exists. Macbeth has killed not only to become king, but to reassert himself. He has chosen between Macbeth who is afraid to kill, and Macbeth who has killed. But Macbeth who has killed is a new Macbeth. He not only knows that one can kill, but that one must kill.

Edmund:

….Know thou this, that men

Are as the time is. To be tender-minded

Does not become a sword.

……….

Captain:

I cannot draw a cart, nor eat dried oats;

If it be man’s work, I’ll do’t.

The above fragment is taken from King Lear. Edmund orders assassins to hang Cordelia in prison. Murder is man’s work. What can a man do? This Nietzschean question has been put for the first time in Macbeth.

Lady Macbeth:

…Art thou afeard

To be the same in thine own act and velour

As thou art in desire?

……………………………..

Macbeth:

Prithee, peace!

I dare do al that may become a man.

Who dares do more is none.

Lady Macbeth:

     What beast was’t then

That made you break this enterprise to me?

This dialogue takes place before the murder of Duncan. After the murder Macbeth will know the answer. Not only can a man kill; a man is he who kills, and only he. Just as the animal which barks and fawns is a dog. Macbeth calls the assassins and orders them to kill Banquo and his son.

First Murderer:

We are man, my liege

Macbeth:

Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men,

As hounds and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs,

Shoughs, water-rugs, and demi-wolves are clipt

All by the name of dogs.

……………………………………

Second Murderer:

     We shall, my lord,

Perform what you command us.

This for Macbeth is one end of experience. It can be called the Auschwitz experience.’ A threshold has been reached past which everything is easy: ‘All is but toys;…’ but this is only part of the truth about Macbeth. Macbeth has killed the king, because he could not accept a Macbeth who would be afraid to kill a king. But Macbeth who has killed cannot accept the Macbeth who has killed. Macbeth has killed in order to get rid of a nightmare. But it is the necessity of murder that makes the nightmare. A nightmare is terrifying just because it has no end. ‘The night is long that never finds the day.’ (IV, 3) The night enveloping Macbeth is deeper and deeper. Macbeth has murdered for fear, and goes on murdering for fear. This is another part of the truth about Macbeth, but it is still not the whole truth.

In its psychology, Macbeth is, perhaps, the deepest of Shakespeare’s tragedies. But Macbeth himself is not a character, at least not in the sense of what was meant by a character in the nineteenth century. Lady Macbeth is such a character. Everything in her, except craving for power, has been burnt out. She is empty, and goes on burning. She is taking her revenge for her failure as lover and mother. Lady Macbeth has no imagination; and for that reason she accepts herself from the outset, and later cannot escape from himself. Macbeth does have imagination, and from the moment of the first murder he asks himself the same sort of question that Richard III has asked himself:

     …To be thus is nothing,

But to be safely thus.

From the first scenes onwards Macbeth defines himself by negation. To himself he is not the one who is, but rather the one who is not. He is immersed in the world as if in nothingness; he exists only potentially. Macbeth chooses himself, but after every act of choice he finds himself more terrifying, and more of a stranger. ‘…al that is within him does condemn/Itself for being there.’ (V, 2) The formulas by which Macbeth tries to define himself are amazingly similar to the language of the existentialists. ‘To be’ has for Macbeth an ambiguous, or at least, double, meaning; it is a constant exasperating contradiction between existence and essence, between being ‘for itself’ and being ‘in itself.’

He says:

     …and nothing is

But what is not.

In a bad dream we are, and are not, ourselves, at the same time. We cannot accept ourselves, for to accept oneself would mean accepting nightmare for reality, to admit that there is nothing but nightmare, that night is not followed by day.

Says Macbeth after the murder of Duncan: ‘To know my deed, ‘twere best not know myself.’ (II, 2) Macbeth recognizes that his existence is apparent rather than real, because he does not want to admit that the world he lives in is irrevocable. This world is to him a nightmare. For Richard ‘to be’ means to capture the crown and murder all pretenders. For Macbeth ‘to be’ means to escape, to live in another world where:

Rebellion’s head rise never…

…..and our high-plac’ed Macbeth

Shall live the lease of nature, pay his breath

To time and mortal custom.

The plot and the order of history in Shakespeare’s Histories and in Macbeth do not differ from each other. But Richard accepts the order of history and his part in it. Macbeth dreams about a world where there will be no more murders, and all murders have been forgotten; where the dead will have been buried in the ground once and for all, and everything will begin anew. Macbeth dreams of the end of nightmare, while sinking in it more and more. He dreams of a world without crime, while becoming enmeshed in crime more and more deeply Macbeth’s last hope is that the dead will not rise:

Lady Macbeth:

But in them Nature’s copy not eterne.

Macbeth:

There’s comfort yet! They are assailable.

Then be thou jocund.

But the dead do rise. The appearance at the banquet of murdered Banquo’s ghost is one of the most remarkable scenes in Macbeth. Banquo’s ghost is visible to Macbeth alone. Commentators see in this scene an embodiment of Macbeth’s fear and terror. There is no ghost; he is a delusion. But Shakespeare’s Macbeth is not a psychological drama of the second half of the nineteenth century. Macbeth has dreamed of a final murder to end all murders. Now he knows: there is no such murder. This is the third and last of Macbeth’s experiences. The dead do return. ‘The sequence of time is an illusion…We fear most the past that returns.’ This aphorism by S.J. Lec has something of the atmosphere of Macbeth:

If charnel houses and our graves must send

Those that we bury back, our monuments

Shall be the maws of kites.

Macbeth, the multiple murderer, steeped in blood, could not accept the world in which murder existed. In this, perhaps, consists the gloomy greatness of this character and the true tragedy of Macbeth’s history. For a long time Macbeth did not want to accept the reality and irrevocability of nightmare, and could not reconcile himself to his part, as if it were somebody else’s. Now he knows everything. He knows that there is no escape from nightmare, which is the human fate and condition, or – in a more modern language, the human situation. There is no other.

They have tied me to a stake, I cannot fly,

But bear-like I must fight the course.

(V, 7)

Before his first crime, which was the murder of Duncan, Macbeth had believed that death could come too early, or too late. ‘Had I but died an hour before this chance,/I had liv’d a blessed time;…’ Now Macbeth knows that death does not change anything, that it cannot change anything, that it is just as absurd as life. No more, no less. For the first time Macbeth is not afraid. ‘I have almost forgot the taste of fears.’ (V, 5)

There is nothing to be afraid of any more. He can accept himself at least, because he has realized that every choice is absurd, or rather, that there is no choice.

…..Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

In the opening scenes of the tragedy there is talk about the Thane of Cawdor, who had betrayed Duncan and become an ally of the King of Norway. After the suppression of rebellion he was captured and condemned to death.

…..Nothing in his life

Became him like the leaving it. He died

As one that had been studied in his death

To throw away the dearest thing he ow’d

As ‘twere a careless trifle.

The Thane of Cawdor does not appear in Macbeth. All we know of him is that he has been guilty of treason and executed. Why is his death described so emphatically and in such detail? Why did Shakespeare find it necessary? After al, his expositions are never wrong. Cawdor’s death, which opens the play, is necessary. It will be compared to Macbeth’s death. There is something Senecan and stoic about Cawdor’s cold indifference to death. Faced with utter defeat Cawdor saves what can still be saved: a noble attitude and dignity. For Macbeth attitudes are of no importance; he does not believe in human dignity any more. Macbeth has reached the limits of human experience. All he has left is contempt. The very concept of man has crumbled to pieces, and there is nothing left. The end of Macbeth, like the end of Troilus and Cressida, or King Lear, produces no catharsis. Suicide is either a protest, or an admission of guilt. Macbeth does not feel guilty, and there is nothing for him to protest about. All he can do before he dies is to drag with him into nothingness as many living beings as possible. This is the last consequence of the world’s absurdity. Macbeth is still unable to blow the world up. But he can go on murdering till the end.

Get on your nightgown…

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OK.  I was originally going to end there.  But I found this reading late last night (I’m so immersed in Shakespeare), and thought it was fascinating.  From Terry Eagleton’s William Shakespeare:

“Even those who know very little about Shakespeare might be vaguely aware that his plays value social order and stability, and that they are written with an extraordinary eloquence, one metaphor breeding another in an apparently unstaunchable flow of what modern theorists might call ‘textual productivity.’ The problem is that these two aspects of Shakespeare are in potential conflict with one another. For a stability of signs – each word securely in place, each signifier (mark or sound) corresponding to its signified (or meaning) – is an integral part of any social order: settled meetings, shared definitions and regularities of grammar both reflect, and help to constitute, a well-ordered political state. Yet it is all this which Shakespeare’s flamboyant punning, troping and riddling threaten to put into question. His belief in social stability is jeopardized by the very language in which it is articulated. It would seem, then, that the very act of writing implies for Shakespeare an epistemology (or theory of knowledge) at odds with his political ideology. This is a deeply embarrassing dilemma, and it is not surprising that much of Shakespeare’s drama is devoted to figuring out strategies for resolving it.

To any unprejudiced reader – which would seem to exclude Shakespeare himself, his contemporary audiences and almost all literary critics – it is surely clear that positive value in Macbeth lies with the three witches. The witches are the heroines of the piece, however little the play itself recognizes the fact, and however much the critics may have set out to defame them. It is they who, by releasing ambitious thought in Macbeth, expose a reverence for hierarchical social order for what it is, as the pious self-deception of a society based on routine oppression and incessant warfare. The witches are exiles from that violent order, inhabiting their own sisterly community on its shadowy borderlands, refusing all truck with its tribal bickerings and military honours. It is their riddling, ambiguous speech (they ‘palter us with in a double sense’) which promises to subvert this structure: their teasing word-play infiltrates and undermines Macbeth from within, revealing in him a lack which hollows his being into desire. The witches signify a realm of non-meaning and poetic play which hovers at the work’s margins, one which has its own kind of truth; and their words to Macbeth catalyze this region of otherness and desire within himself, so that by the end of the play it has flooded up from within him to shatter and engulf his previously assured identity. In this sense the witches figure as the ‘unconscious’ of the drama, that which must be exiled and repressed as dangerous but which is always likely to return with a vengeance. That unconscious is a discourse in which meaning falters and slides, in which firm definitions are dissolved and binary oppositions eroded: fair is foul and foul is fair, nothing is but what is not. Androgynous (bearded women), multiple (three-in-one) and ‘imperfect speakers,’ the witches strike at the stable social, sexual and linguistic forms which the society of the play needs in order to survive. They perform a ‘deed without a name,’ and Macbeth’s own actions, once influenced by them, become such that ‘Tongue nor heart/Cannot conceive nor name.’ The physical fluidity of the three sisters becomes inscribed in Macbeth’s own restless desire, continually pursuing the pure being of kingship but at each step ironically unraveling that very possibility. ‘To be thus is nothing,/But to be safely thus.’ Macbeth ends up chasing an identity which continually eludes him; he becomes a floating signifier in ceaseless, doomed pursuit of an anchoring signified:

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more; it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

He is reduced to a ham actor, unable to identify with his role.

As the most fertile force in the play, the witches inhabit an anarchic, richly ambiguous zone both in and out of official society: they live in their own world but intersect with Macbeth’s. They are poets, prophetesses and devotees of a female cult, radical separatists who scorn male power and lay bare the hollow sound and fury at its heart. Their words and bodies mock rigorous boundaries and make sport of fixed positions, unhinging received meanings as they dance, dissolve, and re-materalize. But official society can only ever imagine its radical ‘other’ as chaos rather than creativity, and is thus bound to define the sisters as evil. Foulness – a political order which thrives on bloodshed – believes itself fair, whereas the witches do not so much invert this opposition as deconstruct it. Macbeth himself fears the troubling of exact definitions: to be authentically human is, in his view, to be creatively constrained, fixed and framed by certain precise bonds of hierarchical allegiance. Beyond these lies the dissolute darkness of the witches into which, by murdering Duncan, he will catapult himself at a stroke. To transgress these determining bonds, for Macbeth, is to become less than human in trying to become more, a mere self-cancelling liberty:

I dare do all that may become a man;

Who cares do more is none.

To much inverts itself into nothing at all. Later Ross will speak of ‘float[ing] upon a wild and violent sea,/Each way and none,’ meaning that to move in all directions at once is to stand still.

Lady Macbeth holds the opposite view: transgression, the ceaseless surpassing of limits, is for her the very mark of the human:

When you durst do it, then you were a man;

And to be more than what you were, you would

Be so much more the man.

She herself crosses the strict divide of gender roles and cries out to be unsexed, flouting Angelo’s paternalistic advice to Isabella in Measure for Measure:

     Be that you are,

That is, a woman, if you be more, you’re none…

Like most of Shakespeare’s villains, in short, Lady Macbeth is a bourgeois individualist, for whom traditional ties of rank and kinship are less constitutive of personal identity than mere obstacles to be surmounted in the pursuit of one’s private ends. But the witches are hardly to be blamed for this, whatever Macbeth’s own jaundiced view of the matter. For one thing they live in community, not as individual entrepreneurs of the self; and unlike the Macbeths they are indifferent to political power because they have no truck with linear time, which is always, so to speak, on the side of Caesar.

The Macbeth’s impulse to transgress inhabits history: it is an endless expansion of the self in a single trajectory, an unslakable thirst for some ultimate mastery which will never come. The witches’ subversiveness moves within cyclical time, centered on dance, the moon, pre-vision and verbal repetition, inimical to linear history and its imperial themes of sexual reproduction. It is such lineage – the question of which particular male will inherit political power which they garble and confound in their address to Macbeth and Banquo, as well as in their most lethal piece of double-talk of all: ‘none of woman born shall harm Macbeth.’ Like the unconscious, the witches know no narrative, but once the creative dissolution they signify is inflected within the political system, it can always take the form of a ‘freedom’ which remains enslaved to the imperatives of power, a desire which merely reproduces, sexually and politically, the same old story and the same oppressive law. There is a style of transgression which is play and poetic non-sense, a dark carnival in which all formal values are satirized and deranged; and there is the different but related disruptiveness of bourgeois individualist appetite, which, in its ruthless drive to be all, sunders every constraint and lapses back into nothing. Such ambition is as self-undoing as the porter’s drink, provoking desire but taking away the performance: unlike the fruitful darkness of the witches, it is a nothing from which nothing can come.”

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And that is it for Macbeth.  What did you all think?  If you’ve read it before, how did your reading of the play change?  If you’ve never read it…what did you think?

For me, this time around, the complete darkness permeating the play became clearer, as did the way Shakespeare uses words and language to link it all together.  I think that this time I SAW so much more than I ever had.  My favorite critics?  I love Kott, Bloom, of course, and at the last, I thought Eagleton’s take on the witches was fascinating…and made as much “sense” of them (can they ever be made sense of?) as anybody has.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_IH0EH2Oak

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My next posts:

Thursday evening/Friday morning:  Sonnet #138

Sunday evening/Monday morning:  My introduction to our next play, the one that is in my opinion the very greatest of them all, King Lear.

Shakespeare Sonnet #138

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYFymOqLjXc

SONNET 138

When my love swears that she is made of truth
I do believe her, though I know she lies,
That she might think me some untutor’d youth,
Unlearned in the world’s false subtleties.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
Although she knows my days are past the best,
Simply I credit her false speaking tongue:
On both sides thus is simple truth suppress’d.
But wherefore says she not she is unjust?
And wherefore say not I that I am old?
O, love’s best habit is in seeming trust,
And age in love loves not to have years told:
Therefore I lie with her and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flatter’d be.

Another perspective:

The sonnet continues the contradictions of the previous one. In 137 his heart believes one thing, (that she is his alone), but knows that it is not true, while his eyes also, seeing a certain fact, refuse to acknowledge that it is true. Here the poet insists on believing something which he knows to be untrue. The poem hinges on the various meanings of ‘to lie’: the obvious one of telling untruths, and the less direct one of deceiving oneself; ending with a a third meaning of ‘to sleep with’, ‘to have sex with’. This gives the more realistic motivation for lover and beloved behaving as they do to each other, and lying in their hearts for comfort and pleasure’s sake.

The opening line sets the scene by suggesting that there is a need to patch up the loving relationship, the woman having to swear that she is true, implying that doubt has arisen, and the poet having to pretend that he is younger than he is for fear of losing her. The basis for love is therefore flawed and the love between them mirrors the flaws in their characters. Nevertheless they seem to reach a plateau of relative contentment, and can almost enjoy the game of deception.

This sonnet and 144 were both printed in The Passionate Pilgrim, a collection of 20 poems which appeared in 1599, published by William Jaggard. It is generally thought to have been a pirated edition, unauthorised by Shakespeare, although the title page claims that it is “By W. Shakespeare.” Three lyrics from Love’s Labours Lost are included in the collection, the other poems being of uncertain authorship, although it is thought that some of the others might well be by him (e.g. Crabbed age and youth / Cannot live together.). Below is the version of 138 that appears in Jaggard’s book. Opinion is divided as to the relative merits of each version, but many commentators think that the Q version is an improved re-working of the original 1599 (or earlier) version.

When my love sweares that she is made of truth,
I do beleeue her (though I know she lies)
That she might thinke me some vntutor’d youth,
Vnskilful in the worlds false forgeries.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinkes me young,
Although I know my yeares be past the best :
I smiling, credite her false speaking tounge,
Outfacing faults in loue, with loues ill rest.
But wherefore sayes my loue that she is young ?
And wherefore say not I that I am old :
O, Loues best habit’s in a soothing toung,
And Age in loue, loues not to haue yeares told.
  Therefore I’le lye with Loue, and loue with me,
  Since that our faultes in louve thus smother’d be.

The 1609 Quarto Version

WHen my loue ſweares that ſhe is made of truth,
I do beleeue her though I know ſhe lyes,
That ſhe might thinke me ſome vntuterd youth,
Vnlearned in the worlds falſe ſubtilties.
Thus vainely thinking that ſhe thinkes me young,
Although ſhe knowes my dayes are paſt the beſt,
Simply I credit her falſe ſpeaking tongue,
On both ſides thus is ſimple truth ſuppreſt :
But wherefore ſayes ſhe not ſhe is vniuſt ?
And wherefore ſay not I that I am old ?
O loues beſt habit is in ſeeming truſt,
And age in loue,loues not t’haue yeares told.
Therefore I lye with her,and ſhe with me,
And in our faults by lyes we flattered be.

From David West:

 When my love swears that she is made of truth,

I do believe her though I know she lies,

That she might think me some untutored youth,

Unlearned in the world’s false subtleties.                           4

Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,

Although she knows my days are past the best,

Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue,

On both sides thus is simple truth suppressed.                 8

But wherefore says she not she is unjust?

And wherefore say not I that I am old?

O, love’s best habit is in seeming trust,

And age in love loves not to have years told.                 12

Therefore I lie with her and she with me,

And in our faults by lies we flattered be.

She says it is true and, though I know she lies,

I believe her to make her think me a young innocent.

Thinnking she thinks me young although she knows I’m not,

I believe her lies. Each of us is suppressing the truth.

Why not admit it? She knows the best dress for love is pretence of loyalty,

and I want to conceal my age.

So we lie together flattering each other by our lies.

1-4 No one swears they are true unless doubts have been rasied. The Black Lady goes further. She swears ‘that she is made of truth,’ implying that she has never been unfaithful, although in Sonnets 134-7 S has raged about her infidelities. He knows she is lying, but in an act of deliberate self-deception he decides to believe, hoping to persuade her he is young and inexperienced. The older man (in 1609 he was 45) is touchy about his age. ‘Untutored youth’ and ‘unlearned’ are the language of education.

5-8 He keeps up this calculated self-deception, although he knows it does not deceive his mistress, and the folly of all this is audible in ‘believe…know…think…thinking…thinks…knows…credit,’ a great falsework of ABCCCBA. He believes her although he knows she lies, vainly thinking she thinks, although she knows. Similar but glibber tangles appear AW 2.1.157 ‘But [I] know I think and think I know most sure,’ and in Thom Gunn’s poem ‘Carnal Knowledge,’ ‘You know I know you know I know you know.’

Deception continues in line 7, where ‘simply’ suggests naivety (he is not naïve but scheming), and in line 8, where ‘simple truth’ is plain truth. Polyptoton is the repetition of a word in a different form. Here it is repetition in a different form and a different meaning, polyptoton with a twist demonstrating the treachery in the subject matter. ‘Simple’ has yet a third common meaning. What is simple is single, not composite or complex, and in 8 Shakespeare, the arch-contraster, opposes ‘simple’ to ‘both.’

Each is lying, she in pretending to be faithful, he in pretending to be young. This is a demonstration of lies at the heart of love. But there are lies and lies. Her lie is an act of betrayal, his is a harmless attempt to pose as a gullible youngster. He sees through her lie but subscribes to it as a tactic of continuance – a willed suspension of disblief.

9-12 ‘Why does she not admit she is unjust?’ She is unjust to him in the sense that she is untrue, picking up the argument from the first line. The same word is used again of truth in love, and again it rhymes with ‘trust,’ in PP (The Passionate Pilgrim) 18,19-22:

Serve always with assured trust,

And in thy suit be humble true

Unless thy lady prove unjust

Press never thou to find a new.

‘Why does she not admit she lies?’ in 9; ‘Why do I not admit that I do the same?’ in 10. The answer to 9 comes in 11 and the answer to 10 comes in 12. No aging lover likes to have his age ‘told,’ which may carry two meanings of the word, ‘revealed’ and ‘counted’ (see 30.1). But what is the answer to line 9? Why does she not admit that she is false? If trust means confidence, reliance, line 11 is no answer. She is not lying because she wishes to seem to trust her lover. The explanation is that ‘trust’ could be used to mean fidelity, honesty, as in RJ 3.2, 86 ‘There’s no trust, no faith, no honesty in men.’ The best habit love can wear is a habit, a dress, of apparent honesty. She knows she looks her best if she pretends to be faithful.

The language of natural speech gave drama to lines 2-6. A similar technique represents the idiom of lovers’ recriminations in 9-10, when ‘wherefore says she not’ is followed not by ‘wherefore say I not,’ but by ‘wherefore say not I,’ an effect like the minute variation in 54.12, 58.12, 115.10, and 13, and 124.4. Again S weighs the balance against his mistress. He does not want her to know his age. She does not want to admit she has a troop of lovers.

13-14 After the balanced lines 9-12, the interplay of persons becomes denser, ‘I…her…she…me’ in 13, before the two join in ‘out’ and ‘we’ in line 14. The last three sonnets have carried a cataract of obscenities and risqué puns, which make it impossible to read this final couplet as though it refers only to falsehood. They flatter each other with their lies as they lie together making love, the wit and the picture sharpened by an early sense of the word ‘flatter,’ to touch or stroke lightly and caressingly (see 33.2). The wit carries a supercargo of bitterness.

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My next post:  An introduction to King Lear, Sunday evening/Monday morning

Enjoy.  And enjoy your weekend.

King Lear

An Introduction

By Dennis Abrams

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We are now, I think, at the peak of Mount Shakespeare.  King Lear has long had a reputation as the ultimate in tragedy – this tale of a difficult father driven mad by the cruelty of his children asks more probing questions of its audiences that many commentators have felt equipped to provide.  A.C. Bradley thought Lear was “Shakespeare’s greatest achievement’; William Hazlitt said that it was “the best of all Shakespeare’s plays’; G. Wilson Knight was so in awe of it that he spoke of ‘the Lear universe.’

But on the other hand, many readers (and playgoers) have found the darkness, brutality, and sheer imaginative of this rawest of all tragedies way too much to handle – Tolstoy called it “unnatural,” (I’ll get more into Tolstoy and Lear later); Charles Lamb complained that “the Lear of Shakespeare cannot be acted,’ and even Bradley qualified his praise by saying that “it seems me to be not his best play” (at least in terms of theatrical performance). This overwhelming bleakness might explain why Shakespeare’s own version (or versions) of the play disappeared from the stage for nearly 200 years; replaced by a sentimental rewrite by Restoration dramatist Nahum Tate, who somehow managed to wrench a happy ending from the brutal wreckage of the original.  Even so, today, three centuries after Tate, Lear seems more in tune with the pessimism and emptiness of our era than any other Shakespeare play:  Jan Kott (who I will rely on heavily) completely changed the way we read the play by comparing it to Beckett and Ionesco’s theatre of the absurd, commenting that in Lear, ‘the abyss, into which one can jump, is everywhere,’ while emphasizing that “Lear, above all others, is the Shakespearean play of our time.”

DATE

Probably written in 1605, although the first recorded performance of Lear took place on December 26, 1606, at the court of King James I.

SOURCES

Shakespeare’s most obvious source was an anonymous play performed by the  Queen’s company, The Chronicle History of King Lear and His Three Daughters (not published until 1605). The Duke of Gloucester subplot is taken from Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, and some of Poor Tom’s language comes from a viciously anti-Catholic pamphlet (1603) by Anglican cleric Samuel Harsnett. Michel de Montaigne’s Essays also seem to have been fresh in Shakespeare’s mind at this point.

TEXTS

Here’s where it gets interesting.  And complicated.  Two distinct versions of the play exist. The first was printed in quarto in 1608; and seems to represent an early version; the 1623 First Folio includes a different text, seemingly revised by Shakespeare after performance.  (There’s also a second quarto, published in 1619.)

For along time it was assumed that all three versions derived from a single lost authorial manuscript, and editors from the eighteenth century on cobbled them together as best they could.  But it’s now thought that the Q texts were probably an early version of the play, with the Folio representing a revision made a few years later. The Folio loses around three hundred lines and adds another hundred, and because it is has more dramatic punch, it has been argued that these changes were made post-performance.  Linguistic and stylistic tests support the belief that Shakespeare made the additions (as well as the cuts) so what these two sets of texts seem to offer is a rare insight into the ways he wrote and rewrote for the theater.

For our purposes, I’m going to be relying on the Pelican version (which is a conflation of quarto and folio), but if any of you would like to use a different version (the Oxford edition, includes both the quarto and folio texts), you’ll find it a fascinating experience.

As we work our way through the plays, I’ll try to cover differences in the texts when important.

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From Harold Bloom:

“King Lear, together with Hamlet, ultimately baffles commentary. Of all Shakespeare’s dramas, these show an apparent infinitude that perhaps transcends the limits of literature. King Lear and Hamlet, like the Yahwist’s text (the earliest in the Pentateuch) and the Gospel of Mark, announce the beginning and the end of human nature and destiny. That sounds rather inflated and yet merely is accurate; the Iliad, the Koran, Dante’s Comedy, Milton’s Paradise Lost are the only rival works in what still could be called Western tradition. That is to say that Hamlet and King Lear now constitute either a kind of secular scripture or a mythology, peculiar fates for two stage plays that almost always have been commercial successes.

The experience of reading King Lear, in particular, is altogether uncanny. We are at once estranged and uncomfortably at home; for me, at least, no other solitary experience is at all like it. I emphasize reading, more than ever, because I have attended many stagings of King Lear, and invariably have regretting being there. Our directors and actors are defeated by this play, and I begin sadly to agree with Charles Lamb that we ought to keep rereading King Lear and avoid its staged travesties. That pits me against the scholarly criticism of our century, and against all the theater people that I know, but in this matter opposition is true friendship. In the pure good of theory, the part of Lear should be playable; if we cannot accomplish it, the flaw is in us, and in the authentic decline of our cognitive and literate culture. Assaulted by films, television, and computers, our inner and outer ears have difficulty apprehending Shakespeare’s hum of thoughts evaded in the mind. Since The Tragedy of King Lear well may be the height of literary experience, we cannot afford to lose our capability for confronting it. Lear’s torments are central to us, almost to all of us, since the sorrows of generational strife are necessarily universal.

Job’s sufferings have been suggested as the paradigm of Lear’s ordeal; I once gave credence to this critical commonplace, but now find it unpersuasive. Patient Job is actually not very patient, despite his theological reputation, and Lear is the pattern of all impatience, though he vows otherwise, and movingly urges patience on the blinded Gloucester. The pragmatic disproportion between Job’s afflictions and Lear’s is rather considerable, at least until Cordelia is murdered. I suspect that a different biblical model was in Shakespeare’s mind: King Solomon. I do not mean Solomon in all his glory – in Kings, Chronicles, and obliquely in the Song of Songs – but the aged monarch, at the end of his reign, wise yet exacerbated the supposed preacher of Ecclesiastes and of the Wisdom of Solomon in the Apocrypha, as well as the putative author of the Proverbs. Presumably Shakespeare was read aloud to from the Bishops Bible in his youth, and later read the Geneva Bible for himself in his maturity. Since he wrote King Lear as a servant of King James I, who had the reputation of being the wisest fool in Christendom, perhaps Shakespeare’s conception of Lear was influenced by James’s particular admiration for Solomon, wisest of kings. I admit that not many among us instantly associate Solomon and Lear, but there is crucial textual evidence that Shakespeare himself made the association, by having Lear allude to the following great passage in the Wisdom of Solomon, 7:1-6.

I myself am also mortal and a man like all other, and am come of

him that was first made of the earth.

And in my mother’s womb was I facioned to be flesh in ten moneths: I was broght together into blood of the sede of man, and by the pleasure that cometh with slepe.

And when I was borne, I received the comune air, and fel upon the earth, which is of like nature, crying & weeping at the first as all other do.

I was nourished in swaddling clothes, and with cares.

For there is no King that had any other beginning of birth.

All men then have no entrance unto life, and a like going out.

[Geneva Bible]

That is the unmistakable text echoed in Lear’s shattering sermon to Gloucester:

Lear:

If thou wilt weep my fortunes, take my eyes,

I know thee well enough, thy name is Gloucester,

Thou must be patient, we came crying hither:

Thou know’st the first time that we smell the air

We wawl and cry. I will preach to thee: mark.

[Lear takes off his crown of weeds and flowers.]

Gloucester:

Alack, alack the day!

Lear:

When we are born, we cry that we are come

To this great stage of fools.

(IV.vi.174-81)

After Solomon the kingdom was divided, as it was by Lear. Yet I don’t think that Shakespeare in part founds Lear upon the aged Solomon because of the catastrophes of kingdoms. Shakespeare sought we tend now not to emphasize in our accounts of Lear: a paradigm for greatness. These days, in teaching the play, I begin by insisting on Lear’s foregrounding in grandeur, because my students are unlikely at first to perceive it, patriarchal sublimity now being not much in fashion. Lear is at once father, king, and a kind of mortal god: he is the image of male authority, perhaps the ultimate representation of the Dead White European Male. Solomon reigned for fifty years, and was James I’s wished-for-archetype: glorious, wise, wealthy, even if Solomon’s passion for women was not exactly shared by the sexually ambiguous James. Lear is in no way a portrait of James, Shakespeare’s royal patron in all likelihood sympathized but did not empathize with the kingdom-dividing Lear. But Lear’s greatness would have mattered to James: he too considered himself every inch a king. I think he would have recognized in the aged Lear the aged Solomon, each in their eighties, each needing and wanting love, and each worthy of love.

When I teach King Lear, I have to begin by reminding my students that Lear, however unlovable in the first two acts, is very much loved by Cordelia, the Fool, Albany, Kent, Gloucester, and Edgar – that is to say, by every benign character in the play – just as he is hated and feared by Goneril, Regan, Cornwall, and Oswald, the play’s lesser villains. The play’s great villain, the superb and uncanny Edmund, is ice-cold, indifferent to Lear as he is even to his own father Gloucester, his half-brother Edgar, and his lovers Goneril and Regan. It is part of Shakespeare’s genius not to have Edmund and Lear address even a single word to each other in the entire play, because they are apocalyptic antitheses: the king is all feeling, and Edmund is bare of all affect. The crucial foregrounding of the play, if we are to understand it at all, is that Lear is lovable, loving, and greatly loved by anyone at all worthy of our own affection and approbation.”

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From Mark Van Doren:

“’To judge of Shakespeare by Aristotle’s rules,’ said Pope,’ ‘is like trying a man by the laws of one country who acted under those of another.’ But if the truth about poetry is everywhere the same, and if Aristotle’s analysis of the art was sound, he will tell us as much about Shakespeare as he told us about Sophocles. He tells us a great deal about ‘King Lear’ when he remarks that tragedies have a beginning, a middle, and an end. The first scene of ‘King Lear’ is a beginning, but all the rest is end. The first scene of ‘King Lear’ is a beginning, but all the rest is end. The initial act of the hero is his only act; the remainder is passion. An old and weary king, hungry for rest, banishes the one daughter who would give it to him and plunges at once into the long, loud night of his catastrophe. An early recognition of his error does not save him. The poet does not wish to save him, for his instinct is to develop a catastrophe as none has been developed before or since. Henceforth King Lear is a man more acted against than active; the deeds of the tragedy are suffered rather than done; the relation of events is lyrical instead of logical, musical instead of moral. Such a play, if it is destined like this one to become the most tremendous of poems, must enrich itself with magnificent and immediate effects, with sensational tempest and intolerable tortures. It must incur the risk of seeming monstrous rather than terrible; it must have villains of enormous size – Edmund, Regan, Goneril – and it must give them the hearts of wolves. Edmund is Iago with a club and stilts, and Lear’s dog-hearted daughters, scowling with their thunder-brows, are like no other women in Shakespeare or the world. Such a lay must also, since it cannot order its events by intellect or law, deal heavily in sound. It must suggest, as “King Lear’ does, an analogy with the complexest imaginable music. ‘King Lear’ had to be a symphony to be anything at all; though only a giant’s genius could have built it into the symphony it is. It’s movement is not spearlike as ‘Hamlet’s’ is, a single curve of speed; it is glacial, inexorable, awful, and slow, pushing everything before it as its double front advances over Britain from west to east, from Lear’s island palace to the cliffs of Dover.”

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From Frank Kermode:

“It is curious that this play, which it is surely impossible for anyone who cares about poetry to write on without some expression of awe, should offer few of the local excitements to be found, say, in the narrower context of Measure for Measure. The explanation must be that the subjects of King Lear reflect a much more general, indeed a universal tragedy. In King Lear we are no longer concerned with an ethical problem that, however agonizing, can be reduced to an issue of law or equity and discussed forensically. For King Lear is about suffering represented as a condition of the world as we inherit it or make it for ourselves. Suffering is the consequence of a human tendency to evil, as inflicted on the good by the bad; it can reduce humanity to a bestial condition, under an apparently indifferent heaven. It falls, insistently and without apparent regard for the justice they so often ask for, so often say they believe in, on the innocent; but nobody escapes. At the end the punishment or relief of death is indiscriminate. The few survivors, chastened by this knowledge, face a desolate future. The play demands that we think of its events in relation to the last judgment, the promised end itself, calling the conclusion an image of that horror. (V.iii.264-65).

Apocalypse is the image of human dealings in their extremity, an image of the state to which humanity can reduce itself. We are asked to imagine the Last Days, when, under the influence of some Antichrist, human beings will behave not as a rickety civility requires but naturally; that is, they will prey upon themselves like animals, having lost the protection of social restraint, now shown to be fragile. The holy cords, however ‘intrinse,’ can be loosened by rats. Gloucester may be credulous and venal, but his murmurings about the state of the world, which do not move Edmund, reflect the mood of the play: ‘in cities, mutinies; in countries; discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond crack’d ‘twist son and father…We have been the best of our time.’ (I.ii.107-12). The voices of the good are distorted by pain, those of the bad by the coarse excess of their wickedness.”

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From Stephen Booth:

“The tragedy of Lear, deservedly celebrated among the dramas of Shakespeare, is commonly regarded as his greatest achievement. I submit that King Lear is so because it is the greatest achievement of his audience, an audience of theatrically unaccommodated men. If an audience’s achievement in surviving the harrowing experience of King Lear could ever reasonably have been doubted, it has been taken for granted since this superbly forthright note on King Lear in Samuel Johnson’s edition of Shakespeare: ‘I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia’s death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor.’ If my sensations could add anything to Johnson’s, I might relate that I myself first read the last scenes of King Lear while undergoing a sophomore survey course in which I was taking on a full semester’s reading in the last twenty-four hours immediately preceding the final examination; it was about three o’clock on a spring afternoon, and I sat in a chair in a stuffy library and cried. I had already read a pound and a half of certified masterpieces that day; I read as much before dawn; but with this one exception I was moved by nothing beyond the sophomoric ambition to become a junior. Further testimony to the singular power of the last scenes of King Lear is presumably unnecessary…”

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From G. Wilson Knight:

“It has been remarked that all the persons in King Lear are either very good or very bad. This is an overstatement, yet one which suggests a profound truth. In this essay I shall both expand and qualify it: the process will illuminate many human and natural qualities in the Lear universe and will tend to reveal its implicit philosophy.

Apart from Lear, the protagonist, and Gloucester, his shadow, the subsidiary dramatic persons fall naturally into two parties, good and bad. First, we have Cordelia, France, Albany, Kent, the Fool, and Edgar. Second Goneril, Regan, Burgundy, Cornwall, Oswald, and Edmund. The exact balance is curious. It will scarcely be questioned that the first party tends to enlist, and the second to repel, our ethical sympathies in so far as ethical sympathies are here roused in us. But none are wholly good or bad, excepting perhaps Cordelia and Cornwall. Our imaginative sympathies, certainly, are divided: Albany is weak, Kent unmannerly, Edgar faultless but without virility, there is much to be said for Goneril and Regan, and Edmund is most attractive. There is no such violent contrast as the Iago-Desdemona antithesis in Othello. But the Lear persons are more frankly individualized than those in Macbeth; [My note:  Bloom makes the same point as well.] though the Lear universe is created on a highly visionary plane, though all the dramatic persons are toned by its peculiar atmosphere, they are, as within that universe and as related to the dominant technique, clearly differentiated. King Lear gives one the impression of life’s abundance magnificently compressed into one play.

No Shakespearean work shows so wide a range of sympathetic creation: we seem to be confronted, not with certain men and women only, but with mankind. It is strange to find that we have been watching little more than a dozen people. King Lear is a tragic vision of humanity, in its complexity, in its interplay of purpose, its travailing evolution. The play is a microcosm of the human race – strange as that word ‘microcosm’ sounds for the vastness, the width and depth, the vague vistas which this play reveals. Just as skilful grouping on the stage deceives the eye, causing six men to suggest an army, grouping which points the eye from the stage toward the unactualized spaces beyond which imagination accepts in its acceptance of the stage itself, so the technique here – the vagueness of locality, and of time, the inconsistencies and impossibilities – all lend the persons and their acts some element of mystery and some suggestion of infinite purposes working themselves out before us. Something similar is apparent in Macbeth, a down-pressing, enveloping presence, mysterious and fearful: there it is purely evil, and its nature is personified in the Weird Sisters [MY NOTE:  Unless you subscribe to Booth’s reading that the sisters are the true heroes of Macbeth.] Here it has no personal symbol, it is not evil, nor good; neither beautiful nor ugly. It is purely a brooding presence, vague, inscrutable, enigmatic; a misty blurring opacity stilly overhanging, interpenetrating plot and action. This mysterious accompaniment to the Lear story makes of its persons vague symbols of universal forces. But those persons, in relation to their setting, are not vague. They have outline, though few have colour: they are like near figures in a mist. They blend with the quality of the whole. The form of the individual is modified, in tone, by this blurring fog. The Lear mist drifts across them as each in turn voices its typical phraseology; for this impregnating reality is composed of a multiplicity of imaginative correspondencies in phrase, thought, action throughout the play. that mental atmosphere is as important, more important sometimes, than the persons themselves; nor, till we have clear sight of this peculiar Lear atmosphere, shall we appreciate the fecundity of human creation moving within it. King Lear is a work of philosophic vision. We watch, not ancient Britons, but humanity, not England, but the world. Mankind’s relation to the universe is its theme, and Edgar’s trumpet is as the universal judgment summoning vicious man to account. In Timon of Athens, the theme is universalized by the creation of a universal and idealized symbol of mankind’s aspiration, and the poet at every point subdues his creative power to a clarified, philosophic, working out of his theme. Here we seem to watch not a poet’s purpose, but life itself: life comprehensive, rich, varied. Therefore the clear demarcation of half the persons into fairly ‘good,’ and half into fairly ‘bad,’ is no chance here. It is an inevitable effect of a balanced, universalized vision of mankind’s activity on earth. But the vision is true only within the scope of its own horizon. That is, the vision is a tragic vision, the impregnating thought everywhere being concerned with cruelty, with suffering, with the relief which love and sympathy may  bring, with the travailing process of creation and life. In Macbeth we experience Hall; in Antony and Cleopatra, Paradise; but this play is Purgatory. Its philosophy is continually purgatorial.”

And finally, from Garber:

“King Lear has often, and rightly, been regarded as a sublime account of the human condition. Words like ‘timeless’ and ‘universal,’ so often used as virtual synonyms for ‘Shakespeare,’ here find a fitting place. In the twentieth century in particular the celebrity of the play soared. [MY NOTE:  Much more about this as we go on.]  After the emergence of existentialism in philosophy, Lear’s ruminations on ‘being’ and ‘nothing’ seemed uncannily apt. The plays of Samuel Beckett – especially Endgame and Waiting for Godot – seemed to rewrite King Lear in a new idiom, and critical books like Maynard Mack’s ‘King Lear’ in Our Time and Jan Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary, stressed the way the play voiced the despair and hope of a modern era. Yet this extraordinary play, in part a poignant and disaffected family drama, in part the political story of Britain’s union and disunion, bears as well explicit markers of the time in which it was written, and the time in which it was set. As we have seen with other Shakespeare plays that engage chronicle history, these three crucial time periods – the time the play depicts, the time of its composition, and the time in which it is performed or read – will always intersect.

That a play depicting the dismemberment of ancient Britain by the willful act of the old King Leir should have relevance to the stage of King James’s time is far from surprising. Shakespeare’s play was written around 1605, and in the period 1604-1607 James VI and I, King of Scotland and of England, was attempting to persuade Parliament to approve of the union of Scotland and England into one nation. It was James who first used the term ‘Great Britain’ to describe the unity of the Celtic and Saxon lands (England, Scotland, and Wales.) In his accession speech to Parliament on March 19, 1603, James had compared the union of Lancaster and York achieved by his ancestor Henry VII to the even more important ‘union of two ancient and famous kingdoms, which is the other inward peace annexed to my person.’ His language concerning civil and external war, and the remarkable metaphor of marriage and divorce that concludes this passage, are closely relevant to the dramatic action of King Lear. ‘Although outward peace be a great blessing,’ James wrote in ‘On the Union of the Kingdoms of Scotland and England,’

‘yet is it far inferior to peace within, as civil wars are more cruel and unnatural than wars abroad. And therefore [a] great blessing that God has with my person sent unto you, is peace within, and that in a double form. First, by my descent, lineally out of the loins of Henry VII, is reunited and confirmed in me the union of the two princely roses of the two houses of Lancaster and York, whereof that King of happy memory was the first uniter, as he was also the first ground-layer of the other peace…

But the union of these two princely houses is nothing comparable to the union of two ancient and famous kingdoms, which is the other inward peace annexed to my person…Has not God first united these two kingdoms, both in language, religion, and similitude of manners? Yes, has he not made us all one island, compassed with one sea, and of itself by nature so indivisible, as almost those that were borderers themselves on the late borders, cannot distinguish nor know or discern their own limits? These two Countries being separated neither by sea, nor great river, mountain, nor other strength of nature…

And now in the end and fullness of time united, the right and title of both in my person, alike lineally descended of both the Crowns, whereby it is now become like a little world within itself, being entrenched and fortified round about with a natural, and yet admirable strong pond or ditch, whereby all the former fears of this nation are quite cut off. The other part of the island being ever before now, not only the place of landing to all strangers that were to make invasion here, but likewise moved by the enemies of the State, by untimely incursions, to make enforced diversions from their conquests, for defending themselves at home, and keeping sure their back door, as then it was called, which was the greatest hindrance and let that ever my predecessors of the nation had in disturbing them from their many famous and glorious conquests abroad. What God has conjoined then, let no man separate…’

In his speeches James regularly referred to the misfortunes that had brought disunion on early Britain – that is, the Britain of King Leir. James’s scheme of union would repair this ancient breach, correct this old mistake. Shakespeare’s play thus has a direct and pertinent topicality to the political issues of his day, a topicality few in his contemporary audiences could miss, although many viewers today will need to be reminded of this historical context. Likewise, the figure of Edgar, disguised as ‘Poor Tom,’ the madman, or ‘Bedlam beggar’ (from the Hospital of Saint Mary at Bethlehem in London that was used to house the insane), was an example of the kinds of ‘masterless men’ who roamed Britain’s towns and forests at this time, vagabond, often homeless and out of work, men whose very existence was viewed by the monarch as a threat to civil order and authority. Queen Elizabeth’s ‘Homily Against Disobedience and Willful Rebellion’ (1570), which she ordained to be proclaimed in the churches, had cautioned explicitly against the marauding of masterless men.

 King Lear focuses at once on patriarchy and paternity, on the interaction between the role of the king and the role of the father. For Shakespeare’s time the idea of fatherhood was central to notions of governance, and the Bible taught, in the imagery of Saint Paul, that the structure of the family household should take the same form as the political structure. Thus the relationship of parents and children, fathers and daughters, and fathers and sons dominates the action. (We may notice that King Lear has no queen, nor the Duke of Gloucester a duchess.) For twentieth- and twenty-first-century readers and viewers living in nonmonarchial cultures, the notion of kingship may function as a metaphor, so that Lear is viewed primarily as a father, the head of a household, the father of daughters, his kingship receding into a notional world of fairy tale and nightmare.

One further prefatory observation is necessary before we turn to the plot and language of King Lear. As a result of textual investigations at the end of the twentieth century, many recent Shakespeare editors have concluded that there are two extant viable versions of the play. The History of King Lear, published in quarto form in 1608, which is considered to be the play as Shakespeare first wrote it, and The Tragedy of King Lear, published in the First Folio (1623) with revisions so substantial as to make it, in effect, a different play. Among the many differences between these versions are the presence in the Quarto of the mock trial scene in which the mad Lear rails at his ‘counselors,’ the Fool and ‘Poor Tom;’ the presence in the Quarto, only, of the ‘[s]unshine and rain at once’ passage; and the famous final lines, ‘We that are young…’ which are given to Edgar in the Folio and to Lear’s son-in-law Albany in the Quarto. In previous editions, until quite recently, editors followed a long-standing practice of blending the two texts, as is done with other plays where there are both quarto and folio versions, choosing the ‘best’ readings for each line and scene. Contemporary editorial decisions are more radical, in attempting to restore (or ‘un-edit’), the texts as they would have been known to readers and actors of Shakespeare’s time. The problem for modern readers and acting companies is that many people ‘know’ a version of Lear that, while it may not accord with the most advanced editorial decision making, nonetheless includes things that we are very reluctant to omit or change, however ‘impure’ the results from a scholarly perspective. In my observations on King Lear I will continue to include all scenes and passages that have become customarily associated with the play over the years, using the Folio as my primary source and indicating, when appropriate, for interested readers, when a scene appears only in the Quarto. My general philosophy about Shakespeare’s plays – as will already, I hope, be clear – is that they are living works of art that grow and change over time, not museum pieces that must only be preserved in some imagined state of purity (or petrification). Every production is an interpretation; world events and brilliant individual performances alike have shaped and changed these plays, so that they are ‘Shakespearean’ in their protean life, not restricted to some imagined (and unrecapturable) terrain of Shakespeare’s ‘intention’ or control. A final note on the Quarto/Folio question for Lear will underscore the issues with which I began, since the Quarto text calls itself a ‘history,’ and the Folio, a ‘tragedy.’ Plainly, as we have already seen, King Lear is both, and the elements of history intersect with the elements of tragedy to produce what the poet William Butler Yeats finely called an ‘emotion of multitude.’”

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Ready to start?  You have no idea how excited I am to be reading Lear.  And a head’s up – we’re really going to take our time with this one (if that’s OK with all of you) – I want to make sure to get this right.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gjed4hCuCfw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvA_gUDGKik

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PY9Hg-UofMo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UWldAzUroY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbbfDntoRRk

Our next reading:  King Lear, Act One

My next post:  Tuesday evening/Wednesday morning

Enjoy.

King Lear

Act One, Part One

By Dennis Abrams

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MAJOR CHARACTERS

King Lear of Britain

Goneril, Lear’s oldest daughter

Duke of Albany, Goneril’s husband

Regan, Lear’s second daughter

Duke of Cornwall, Regan’s husband

Cordelia, Lear’s youngest daughter

Duke of Burgundy, Cordelia’s first suitor

King of France, Cordelia’s second suitor

Earl of Kent, a follower of Lear (later disguised as Caius, a servant of the King)

Earl of Gloucester

Edgar, Gloucester’s legitimate son, and his eldest (later disguised as “Poor Tom”)

Edmund, Gloucester’s illegitimate and younger son

Old Man, a servant of Gloucester

Curan, a courtier

Fool in Lear’s service

Oswald, Goneril’s steward

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Act One:  King Lear wishes to divide his kingdom among his three daughters, according to whoever loves him most. Goneril and Regan speak sycophantically (kiss his ass to put it bluntly) and are rewarded, but his younger (and favorite) daughter Cordelia refuses to flatter him.  Angered by her response, Lear rejects her and gives her share to her sisters – with whom he now intends to spend his time now that he’s “retired.”  Despite Cordelia’s loss of royal favor, the King of France agrees to marry her, but when Kent tries to defend her, Lear banishes him. Meanwhile, Gloucester’s illegitimate son Edmund is planning to frame his brother Edgar and steal his land; he shows Gloucester a forged letter supposedly revealing Edgar’s plans to kill him.  At Goneril’s castle, the new domestic arrangements, are, not surprisingly, not working: Lear and what remains of his retinue are accused of being too rowdy, so he departs in a rage for Regan’s palace, along with the Fool and a disguised Kent.

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If you look at it one way, King Lear is all about politics.  It begins with a ruler’s casual resignation from power, and ends in catastrophe when rival factions tear his company apart.  And there’s good reason to think that the earliest audiences for this play – particularly on St. Stephen’s Night 1606 (December 26, the day after Christmas) when the audience for this new play included King James I, the king who had brought Scotland and England into a somewhat uneasy political union for the first time would have seen its relevance.  Read as a warning to rulers, King Lear’s message is stark: power is yours, but so are the gravest of responsibilities. People’s lives, the lives of what the play calls the “poor naked wretches” who make up the commonwealth, matter. And it is only by being driven mad that King Lear realizes that truth, but one of the play’s man tragedies is this: by then it is too late, his kingdom has already vanished.

King Lear brings the political and the personal together, and it addresses not only politicians but ordinary mortals as well; it shows that who has power matters, and that problems afflicting a country’s rulers can have terrifying consequences. Shakespeare makes the story of what happens “when majesty falls to folly,’ as King Lear’s Kent so bluntly puts it, the epicenter of his tragedy. It famously opens with Lear’s declaration that it only by displaying “love” towards him (a love that has to find its way into polished words) that his daughters can be rewarded with political power, a share in the kingdom he is so recklessly and thoughtlessly breaking up. With the court crowded around, King Lear  begins, “Tell me, my daughters –“

Since now we will divest us both of rule,

Interest of territory, cares of state –

Which of you shall we say doth love us most,

That we our largest bounty may extend

Where nature doth with merit challenge?

Lear’s first mistake is to divide his realm; his second is to mix “love” with politics, and to completely misinterpret speeches describing love for the real thing. Two of his daughters, the devious Goneril and Regan, effortlessly perform as Lear requires, declaring their commitment “beyond what can be valued,” as Goneril describe it. But Lear’s third child, Cordelia is not prepared, and in fact is incapable of flattering her father, and her punishment is severe:  her inheritance is cut off and she is left with no dowry with which to attract a husband.

The 40-year old Shakespeare, at this stage in his career a veteran of at least thirty major plans, probably found the skeletal story of Lear early in his career. It seems that he had links with an Elizabethan company who performed a play called The Chronicle History of King Leir and His Three Daughters in the early 1590s, when it seems likely that he was training as an actor. This old play is different from the new one in countless ways – Shakespeare cleaned up the plot and made innumerable changes – but it contains the story of a father and his daughters and the breakdown of the relationship between them, ingredients that the playwright would use to construct one of the most disturbing and shocking tragedies ever written.

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From Marjorie Garber:

“The play begins by instantiating a vision of social order. A trumpet is sounded, and a coronet is borne into the state chamber, and then there follows in order of rank and precedence, the powers of the state: King Lear, his sons-in-law, the Dukes of Albany and Cornwall; and his daughters in the order of their ages. (‘Albany’ is the ancient and literary name of Scotland; ‘Cornwall,’ of the southwest of England. Together these sons-in-law demarcate the Britain Lear is shortly to dismember.) Elaborate, ornate, imperial – as a madder and a wiser Lear will later declare, ‘Robes and furred gowns hide all’ – the scene before us is one of opulent magnificence and insistent order. It is a scene, above all, of ‘accommodated man,’ of humanity surrounded with wealth and power, robes and furs, warmth, food, and attendants – the radical opposite of the victim the play’s third act will supply, when Lear will tell the naked and tattered ‘Poor tom,’

[T]hou art the thing itself. Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.

(3.4.96-97)

Unaccommodated man, and accommodated man. As the play begins the audience is confronted with kingly power in all its majesty, mankind apparently accommodated with everything it can imagine or desire. At the center of this world is the King. And yet, when the King begins to speak, we are at once made uneasy, if we are listening closely: ‘Meantime we shall express our darker purpose.’ In a play in which one of the central images will be sight and blindness, this is already a warning signal. What is the King’s darker purpose? Nothing less than the division of the kingdom, the willful creation of disorder:

     Know that we have divided

In three our kingdom, and ‘tis our fast intent

To shake all cares and business from our age,

Conferring them on younger strength while we

Unburdened crawl toward death…

But this is contrary to everything that we know about kingship. It is clear not only from the precepts and practice of Elizabeth and James but also from very Shakespearean example that the ideal for rulers demands unity, not division, a single king, a strong ruler, and one who is prepared to choose a public life over a private one. Whether the king is Henry V or Julius Caesar, this principle holds; that the King should understand that the obligation is to hold together the state and unify its people. Yet here we have a king who intends to violate every single one of these proven precepts – who will attempt the physically and regally impossible, inviting his eldest daughters, ‘this crownet part between you, and who will also seek to escape the inescapable burden of morality ‘to ‘[u]unburdened crawl toward death,’ as if had regressed to the posture and position of a child.

Moreover, the entire scene has the quality of a fairy tale, and indeed of a well-rehearsed fairy tale: the king, the three daughters (two older and cruel, the youngest loyal, pure, and misunderstood) – there are no surprises here. We know and expect that the elder daughters will be wicked flatterers, the youngest their victim. Their joint business will be the division of the kingdom.

This is a purposeful fall, a fall by choice. The map is already present, the lands partitioned, awaiting the completion of the ritual as if the king has designed and planned it. Lear is testing what should need no test: the quality of nature and what is ‘natural.’ The whole play that follows will deal with this vexed question, of nature and of the ‘natural child.’ What is a natural child”? Is nature what Alfred, Lord Tennyson, would call ‘Nature, red in tooth and claw,’ the nature of pelican daughters, dog-hearted daughters, cannibals, and competitors? Or is nature a state akin to grace, a pattern of plentitude and order, like the lands the Lear of this opening scene has in his keeping: ‘With shadowy forests and with champaigns riched,/With plenteous rivers and wide-skirted meads.’ Nature as the kingly emblem of fertility, order, harvest, and grace. Which?

Lear:

     Tell me, my daughters –

Since now we will divest us both of rule,

Interest of territory, cares of state –

Which of you shall we say doth love us most,

That we our largest bounty may extend

Where nature doth with merit challenge?…

This is hubris, overweening pride, and presumptuousness, not only a violation of Lear’s responsibilities as King and man, but also a tempering with the bonds of nature, as his youngest daughter, Cordelia, well knows. And the replies of the two elder daughters, Goneril and Regan, to this love test have a rehearsed quality, a smooth deceptive flow. The whole scene is stylized and formal, until Cordelia breaks its frame. Goneril’s answer is apparently unequivocal:

Sir, I love you more than words can wield the matter;

Dearer than eyesight, space, and liberty…

Eyesight, space, and liberty – all key themes in the play, all elements of which Lear and his fellow sufferer Gloucester will be bereft by the play’s end.

A love that makes breath poor and speech unable.

And Regan adds,

I am made of that self mettle as my sister,

And prize me at her worth. In my true heart

I find she names my very deed of love –

Only she comes too short…

Notice ‘prize,’ ‘worth,’ ‘deed’ – all economic terms, which should alert us to the true nature of the elder daughter’s thoughts. Words, these sisters say, cannot express their feelings. ‘I am alone felicitate/In your dear highness’ love,’ Regan concludes.

Having expended words in saying that they have no words, the sisters receive their segments of the dismembered kingdom. Then it is Cordelia’s turn to speak:

Lear:

Now our joy,

Although our last and least…

……………………….

          what can you say to draw

A third more opulent than your sisters?  Speak.

Cordelia:

Nothing, my lord.

Lear:

Nothing?

Cordelia:

Lear:

Nothing will come from nothing. Speak again.

Cordelia:

Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave

My heart into my mouth. I love your majesty

According to my bond, no more nor less.

Cordelia – whose name comes from the word for ‘heart’ (the Latin cor, cordis) – declares that she loves her father according to the bond of parent and child. This is the quintessence of the ‘natural.’ But Lear, whose language, like that of his elder daughters, has been sprinkled throughout the scene with legalisms, with cares and business, interest of territory, worth, deeds, and property, mistakes the natural for the unnatural, the bond of love for the bond of financial contract:

Lear:

So young and so untender?

Cordelia:

So young, my lord, and true.

Lear:

Let it be so. Thy truth then be thy dower…

If love is measureable by ‘merit,’ by property and ‘wroth,’ then Cordelia’s natural claim of a bond begs no dowry, no reward. ‘H]er price is fallen, as Lear will shortly and bitterly tell her suitors. The inexpressible and immaterial is reduced to the merely material.

Like Desdemona before her, Cordelia gives voice to the choice of a husband over a father:

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.

Her word ‘plight’ here is typically rich deployment of Shakespearean word economy: a husband will take on the risk together with the betrothal, the ‘trothplight.’ Both words are from the same root, meaning ‘pledge’ or ‘danger.’ But Lear will not be moved: ‘Thy truth then be thy dower’ (‘Nothing will come of nothing.’). And, to the loyal supporter who would intervene: ‘Come not between the dragon and his wrath.’

In this opening scene, in Cordelia’s despairing counsel to herself – ‘What shall Cordelia speak? Love and be silent’ – we have the beginning of a highly significant dramatic and performative mode in Shakespeare, what might be called the rhetoric of silence. Some things cannot be said, cannot be given words. To abjure language in such cases is not a refusal of speech, like Iago’s final words, but rather an acknowledgment of the limitations of language, and the place of the ineffable or the unutterable. The modest and silent claim of a love according to her bond will distinguish Cordelia’s language, and her silence, throughout the play. Like Hamlet in the court of Claudius, dismayed by a falseness of ceremony and the role-playing all around him, Cordelia refuses to play the game, refuses to involve herself in playacting and willful deception. While Hamlet makes use of theatricality as a trap, Cordelia occupies what might be called the vanishing point of theatricality. We may think that Cordelia’s rigidity here is too pure a gesture, that she could bend, could compromise – but she, like her sisters, is her father’s daughter, stubborn and proud. Her motive in this moment seems plainly to disclaim artifice, to assert, again, something that in her understanding needs no assertion: the true and natural relationship between parent and child. But once disrupted, this ‘bond’ is not restored until tragedy has overtaken both Lear and Gloucester.

Cordelia’s rhetoric of silence will continue throughout the play, and will reach what is perhaps its most striking point when she herself becomes a condition of nature, at the point in act 4 (scene 17 in the Quarto text) when, beholding the ruined King, she will appear, in the words of an anonymous gentleman onlooker, like ‘[s]unshine and rain at once,’ split between smiles and tears, incapable of speech because of her love and pity. But we will also see the tragic limitations of her silence, the capacity of silence to be radically misunderstood, and the way in which Cordelia overcomes it and returns to speech.

At this point in the play, however, Cordelia’s silence is an antidote to the unfeeling hypocrisy of Goneril and Regan, the ‘glib and oily art’ of their glozing speech. Silence, enacted on the stage, also resists the Machiavellian twofacedness of Edmund, that master rhetorician. When Lear in the latter part of the play is reduced to strings of repetitions (‘Howl, howl, howl, howl!’ as he discovers Cordelia’s dead body; or ‘Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill’; or closer to the theme of ‘nothing’ ‘Never, never, never, never, never’), we experience another version of the rhetoric of silence, the acknowledgement of the unutterable, the literally unspeakable. Like the syntactical breakdown of Othello’s language in the scene of his swooning fit, Lear’s repeated iterations of the same word over and over again, without subject tor object, and without any rhetorical gesture of control, mark the very limit of language as communication.

From the first scene on, other characters will seek to evade the prevailing duplicity of language in yet another way, by disguising their voices. Thus Kent becomes the country man “Caius,’ whose plainness of speech is so irritating to the Duke of Cornwall, and who puts on a mockingly courtly language to try to expose the follies of flattery and verbal ‘accommodation’ (‘Sir, in good faith, in sincere verity,/Under th’allowance of your great aspect,’ and so on). The servile language he mocks resembles that of Osric, the foppish courtier in Hamlet, whose words were so fashionably contorted they required translation. In a similar way Edgar, eschewing the ornate duplicities of the court, becomes not only ‘Poor Tom,’ the ‘Bedlam beggar’ with his nonsensical jingles and visions of fiends, but also the rustic with the strange dialect who pretends to rescue the blind Gloucester at the bottom of Dover ‘cliff.’ Gloucester almost recognizes his disguised son by his voice – ‘Methinks thy voice is altered;’ ‘Methinks you’re better spoken’ – and is hastily corrected by Edgar: ‘You’re much deceived. In nothing am I changed/But in my garments.’ Since Gloucester is blind, he cannot see that Edgar’s garments, alone, remain unchanged throughout the scene.

The dark side of the rhetoric of silence, the language of limitation and the limitation of language, is that great yawning chasm of ‘nothing’ that pervades the play, emanating from the remarkable and encyclopedic first scene. ‘Nothing will come of nothing’ is Lear’s threat, based on his interpretation of Cordelia’s silence. And ‘Nothing will come of nothing’ will become Lear’s own living epitaph in the acts and scenes to come. ‘Nothing’ – the opposite of ‘everything,’ of ‘accommodation.’

‘They told me I was everything; ‘tis a lie, I am not ague-proof,’ says Lear near the close of his tragedy. (4.5.102). Both Lear and Gloucester will make the mistake of taking themselves for everything. Both are tortured  by that haunting word ‘nothing’ until they become nothing. Later in the first act Lear’s Fool will ask his master, ‘Can you make no use of nothing, nuncle?’ and will be told, Why no, boy, Nothing can be made of nothing.’ But nothing is what Lear has left himself, in divesting himself of kingdom and power. As the Fool points out, referring to the new Arabic numbers that were replacing Roman numerals, the innovation of the nought, the figure zero, from the Arabic word ‘cipher,’ meaning ‘empty,’ ‘Now thou art an O without a figure. I am better than thou art, now. I am a fool; thou art nothing.’

When he pretends to protect his father by theatrically ‘concealing’ a piece of paper, the bastard Edmund claims that he is reading ‘nothing,’ which is true, since what he has in his hand is a false letter he himself has fabricated to implicate his legitimate brother, Edgar. But Gloucester, like Lear, will fall into the trap. ‘The quality of nothing hath not such need to hide itself,’ he objects. The paper must be something. And so Gloucester make something of it, getting from Edmund the ‘auricular assurance’ that so closely resembles Iago’s equally deceiving ‘ocular proof’ in Othello – evidence, in fact, of nothing at all. Gloucester ironically praises his son’s behavior as that of a ‘[l]oyal and natural boy’ (2.1.83). Gloucester means ‘according to nature,’ but a ‘natural’ son (from the Latin filius naturalis and Middle French fils naturel) was an illegitimate child, born outside of marriage. Shortly we will see the legitimate son, Edgar, stripped of his rightful place and forced for safety’s sake to change his identity into that of the beggar ‘Poor Tom,’ declare, ‘Edgar I nothing am’ (2.2.178). We could read this as ‘I am not Edgar’ but also ‘As Edgar, I am nothing.’ The play moves remorselessly from its first scene of ‘everything’ (accommodation, luxury, comfort, and security) toward a clear-eyed and scarifying contemplation of ‘nothing.’ And the immediate cause is Lear’s own lack of self-knowledge.

At the close of the opening scene the audience hears Goneril and Regan, who have flattered their father grossly throughout the public ceremony of the love test, now speak of him privately as a senile fool. ‘You see how full of changes his age is,’ says Goneril, and Regan is quick to agree: ‘Tis the infirmity of his age; yet he hath ever but slenderly known himself.’ She is not entirely wrong, if Lear can commit the action with which he opens the play, the irreversible action that calls down his tragedy upon him. ‘Only we shall retain/The name and all th’addition to a king.’ To retain ‘only the name,’ the title without the power, is of course impossible. Kent, the loyal friend and vassal, is to Lear in this play what Horatio is to Hamlet, what Banquo is to Macbeth – an index of normality, a foil for the excesses of the tragic hero. Kent calls the abdication folly, and the rejection of Cordelia madness, and he addresses, directly and firmly, the question of retaining ‘only the name’:

     Royal Lear,

Whom I have ever honoured as my king,

Loved as my father, as my master followed,

As my great patron thought on in my prayers –

‘Royal Lear,’ ‘king,’ ‘father,’ ‘master,’ ‘patron’ – these are the necessary social roles and costumes of accommodated man, and Lear rejects them all, earning Kent’s blunt anger. ‘Be Kent unmannerly/When Lear is mad. What wouldst thou do, old man?’ and, ‘To plainness honour’s bound/When majesty falls to folly.’ Thus once again in this great opening scene we hear a note that will be sounded repeatedly. Lear is already mad here, although not yet in the sense of the frantic disorientation that will overtake him by the third act. He is metaphorically, though not yet literally, mad. And he is no longer King, patron, royal Lear. Instead he has become simply – and impotently – an ‘old man.’  The same pointed reduction will take place again at the end of act 2, when Gloucester refers to Lear with customary respect as ‘the King’ – ‘The King is in high rage’ (2.2.459) – and Cornwell and Regan dismiss him merely as the ‘old man.’ For in stripping himself of these necessary roles, and the powerful trappings of kingship, Lear also strips himself of dignity, fear, respect – and friends. ‘Out of my sight!’ he rails at Kent, and Kent, again prophetically, answers, ‘See better, Lear’ (1.1.155-56). Lear’s moral blindness is as absolute in this opening scene as Gloucester’s physical blindness will be later in the play, and Lear divests himself not only of his kingdom, his daughter Cordelia, and his roles as King and father, but also of those other crucial roles as master and patron, for he divests himself of Kent. The faithful Earl of Kent is banished, his banishment ordained to take place on the sixth day, with a resonance of the banishment of Adam from Eden. He departs with: ‘Thus Kent, O princes, bids you all adieu; /He’ll shape his old course in a country new.’ Like Celia in As You Like It going forth into the Forest of Arden (‘Thus go we in content/To liberty and not to banishment’), or Coriolanus defiantly rejecting Rome (‘I banish you’ [emphasis added]), Kent claims the comparative liberty of exile, when oppression and injustice inhabit the court; ‘Freedom lives hence, and banishment is here.’ With the division of the kingdom and the rejection of Cordelia and Kent, Lear’s Britain undergoes a fall. (Kent returns immediately in the disguise of a common man, doffing his exalted rank. ‘How now, what art thou?’ the King will demand of him, and he will respond simply, ‘A man, sir.’

All appearance of order and rank has disappeared. The great emblematic procession that trailed across the stage – king, nobles, daughters, dependents – is broken up, disrupted. Such a procession, a visual icon of royal power, would have been clearly recognizable to Shakespeare’s audience as the sign of contemporary – early modern – sequence and succession, however situated the events of the play might be in the history of early Britain. The sumptuous trappings of civilization are revealed as fictive coverings, and the play’s innate primitivism, which goes even further back than Norman or Celtic Britain, begins to reveal itself. This is not, after all, a civilized world. It is a world of monster, cannibals, and heraldic conflict. ‘Come not between the dragon and his wrath,’ Lear commanded Kent as Kent tried to intervene on behalf of Cordelia (1.1.120). Lear is both the dragon, the sign of Britain from Norman times onward, and the wrathful king – a king who thinks he has the power of an angry god. No sooner does he say this than the play is flooded with images of unnatural monsters, monsters that feed upon themselves and their young:

     The barbarous Scythian,

Or he that makes his generation messes

To gorge his appetite…

(1.1.114-116)

Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend,

More hideous when thou show’st thee in a child

Than the sea-monster –

(1.4.220-222)

How sharper than a serpent’s tooth is it

To have a thankless child…

(1.4.251-252)

Humanity must perforce prey on itself,

Like monsters of the deep.

(Quarto, 16.48-49)

Lear and others now begin to speak of pelican daughters; of tigers, not daughters; of dog-hearted daughters; of sharp-toothed unkindness, like a vulture; of nails that flay a wolfish visage. A whole cluster of monsters is summoned up, in effect, by Lear’s initial action in dividing his kingdom, and in wishing to do what no human being and certainly no king can do: to unburdened crawl toward death.

This marvelous, panoramic opening scene, then, poses almost all the issues and introduces almost all the images that will serve to focus the play. yet the Lear plot is only one of the two major plots that intertwine in King Lear. What we have been calling the ‘opening scene’ is framed by two episodes that involve the key figures of Gloucester and his bastard son Edmund. The play is designed with a very clear symmetry: two old men, each with a loyal child he mistakenly considers disloyal (Cordelia and Edgar), and disloyal children or a child he at first thinks loyal and natural (Goneril, Regan, and Edmund). In fact, one Restoration editor, Nahum Tate, dissatisfied with the tragic ending of the play, rewrote it to conclude with a marriage between Cordelia and Edgar. And lest we think this a curious aberration of those times, we should note that the Tate version of the play, ‘reviv’d with alterations,’ to quote his title page, held the stage from 1681 to 1838, as the ‘improv’d version of King Lear, correcting the barbarisms of Jacobean times.

The symmetries provided by these two plots, the Lear plot and the Gloucester plot, are not merely dynastic or structural. Lear, whose error is a mental error, the error of misjudgment in dismembering his kingdom, is punished by a mental affliction, madness. Gloucester, whose sin is a physical sin, lechery, is punished in the play by a physical affliction, blindness. As Edgar says bitterly to Edmund, ‘The dark and vicious place where thee he got/Cost him his eyes’ (5.3.162-163). The blinding of Gloucester is also, of course, a literal evocation of this imagined justness of punishment, an eye for an eye. The manifold mythic and literary associations of blindness, from Oedipus to Freud, link that condition with sexual knowledge, with castration, and with ‘insight.’ (As Gloucester will observe ruefully, underscoring the paradox, ‘I stumbled when I saw.’)

The play presents two different paradigms of biblical suffering, juxtaposed and paralleled. Lear is a Job-like character, a man who has everything (family, wealth, honor) and loses everything. The mock trial in scene 13 (in the Quarto only) restages the story of Job and his comforters, here played by the tragically inadequate figures of the Fool and ‘Poor Tom.’ We hear Lear, like Job, quest perpetually for patience: ‘You heavens, give me that patience, patience I need” (2.2.437); ‘I will be the pattern of all patience.’I will say nothing.’ (3.2.36-37); ‘I can be patient, I can stay with Regan,/I and my hundred knights’ (2.2.395-393); ‘I’ll not endure it’ (1.3.5) – and then, two acts later, ‘Pour on, I will endure’ (3.4.18). But if Lear is a Job, quick to anger and quick to rail against heaven, Gloucester is a more passive and accepting Christian sufferer, a man who is willing to believe that ripeness is all, that men must endure their going hence, even as their coming hither. As if to emphasize the degree of his abnegation, Gloucester begins to speak of the ‘kind gods’ from the moment his eyes are put out.

The latter part of King Lear places an increasingly heavy emphasis on this emblematic Christian theme in language and in staging. Cordelia is arguably the real ‘Christ figure’ in the play, speaking of her ‘father’s business’ and making her final appearance in a gender-reversed Pieta, held in the arms of a grieving Lear. Some productions of the play have also emphasized Edgar’s evident Christ-like qualities; in Peter Brook’s film (1971) Edgar is stabbed in the side with a spear as he cries out at the spectacle of death (‘O thou side-piercing sight!’). Yet as with all Shakespearean evocations of allegory, whether religious, mythological, or political, the Christian undertones and overtones in Lear work best when they are allowed to augment the dramatic action rather than displace it. The power of King Lear and its place in our cultural imaginary depend above all, at least for a modern audience, upon its depiction of a human story of love, suffering, and loss.

The gods mentioned in this play are as various as the mythological strains that underpin it. The first mentions are of pagan gods; Lear swears by Apollo and appeals to ‘the thunder-bearer’ and to ‘high-judging Jove’ (2.2.392, 393). In 1606 Parliament passed ‘An Act to Restrain Abuses of Players’; it stipulated that ‘no person or persons…in any stage play, interlude, show, maygame, or pageant’ might ‘jestingly or profanely speak or use the holy name of god or of Christ Jesus, or of the Holy ghost or of the Trinity.’ Thus, swearing by the name of the Christian God was forbidden by law. Nonetheless the play moves inexorably toward the contemplation of a Christian solution. The pagan gods become at various times kind gods, clearest gods, just gods – or, in one of the play’s most famously despairing lines, gods as ‘wanton boys.’

In fact, what we have in King Lear are not only two modes of suffering and two kinds of godhead but also two conceptions of tragedy that are cited explicitly and made to play against each other. Familiar from earlier Shakespearean history plays, and notably from Richard III, these two modes can be described, in shorthand terms, as cyclical and linear, or as ‘medieval’ and ‘early modern.’ As we have often noticed, one popular pattern for tragedy, as exemplified in the kinds of medieval literary works called ‘falls of princes,’ was that of the wheel of Fortune. Life was imagined – and often depicted in woodcuts and engravings – as a great wheel. Each man’s and each woman’s life reached a point of greatest height, greatest prosperity, from which he or she would, ultimately, fall.

We hear a great deal about this kind of tragedy in King Lear. The disguised Edgar speaks of what it is like to be ‘at the worst,’ at the bottom of Fortune’s wheel, only to find that, since he can say he is at the bottom, he is not yet really there. (He is in fact immediately confronted with the spectacle of his blinded father, and is moved to observe, ‘I am worse than e’er I was’ (4.1.26). This is another clear example in the play of the rhetoric of silence, the unutterability of extremes in emotion.) Likewise the disguised Kent, finding himself ignobly place in the stocks – a punishment that angers his master, Lear, because it is an insult, a disregard of rank – resigns himself to the necessity of patience: ‘Fortune, good night;/Smile once more; turn thy wheel’ (2.2.157-158). Lear’s Fool, too, believes in this kind of cycle. He sees that his own prospects are dependent upon the vagaries and vicissitudes of Fortune: ‘Let go thy hold when a great wheel runs down a hill, lest it break thy neck with following; but the great one that goes upward, let him draw thee after’ (2.2.238-240). And as he lies dying at the end of the play even the bastard Edmund, who had cynically observed, ‘The younger rises when the old doth fall’ (3.3.22), accepts with fatality his reversal of fortune: ‘The wheel is come full circle. I am here.’ (5.3.164).

This notion of Fortune’s wheel is omnipresent in the play, but it is consistently in tension with another pattern, one often associated with Christianity, but also with tragedy in its classical form: the idea of the fortunate fall. ‘The gods throw incense on our sacrifices;’ individual human suffering and human loss are only aspects of the quest for a larger knowledge of the nature of humanity and mortality. Thus the idea of exemplary sacrifice – Christ died for the sins of mankind – is sutured to the dramatic action, at the same time that it is naturalized and humanized. Both Lear and Gloucester ‘die’ in the play – indeed each dies not once but twice, and each is ‘reborn.’ Gloucester believes that he has leapt from Dover ‘cliff’ and has been miraculously preserved to life; Lear in the fourth act dies out of his madness and into fresh garments, out of the grave and into the world again. When they die a second time – when they die ‘for real,’ so to speak – is the second (literal) ‘death’ likely to be any more final than the first (symbolic) one? The play itself is ‘reborn’ (today we often say ‘revived’) each time it is performed. One of the functions of Jacobean tragedy is to take this exemplary and educative form: to present us with great figures who die for our sins and make mistakes that could be ours, and whose tragedies take place so that ours will not, or need not. Literary tragedy is in this formal sense a scapegoat, substitute, or safety valve. Its cultural value is not only aesthetic but also ameliorative and apotropaic, warding off danger.

But the tragedy of King Lear begins at the other end of the scale, not with the supernatural but with the natural. As we have seen, Cordelia’s claim of a natural ‘bond’ between parent and child is juxtaposed to an image of the ‘natural’ in its most anarchic and destructive form, in the person of Edmund, the natural, or bastard, son of the Duke of Gloucester. Edmund’s villainy is not equated with his bastardy, although the range of meanings of ‘natural’ offers an effective amplification of the serious rumination on the nature of ‘nature’ throughout the play. Philip Falconbridge, the ‘Bastard’ in King John, is that play’s martial and patriotic center, far more heroic than his conservative (and ‘legitimate’) brother, Robert. The great speech on ‘bastardy’ and baseness should rather be compared to Richard of Gloucester’s comparably energetic speech on ‘deformity’ at the beginning of Richard III. In both cases the Machiavellian speaker seduces the audience, using his supposed deficiency as both a rhetorical excuse for aberrancy and a gauntlet thrown down daringly to challenge the status quo. Edmund is a close relation of Iago [MY NOTE:  Much more on Edmund from Harold Bloom in later posts] and of Richard III in his contempt for what he regards as passive sentimentalism. Like them he is a Machiavel and Vice figure, a character who draws strength from his own contrariness. Not for him the old-fashioned view that ‘our stars’ govern our behavior: ‘I should have been what I am had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing’ (1.2.119-121). He revels in disorder, takes pleasure in anarchy. In the early part of the play, when all around him other characters either begin to doubt their own identities or feel it prudent to conceal them, Edmund alone is never doubtful. His masterful manifesto is addressed to  Nature, the goddess he elects as the patroness of natural children, the children of disorder:

Thou, nature, art my goddess. To thy law

My services are bound. Wherefore should I

Stand in the plague of custom and permit

The curiosity of nations to deprive me

For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines

Lag of a brother? Why ‘bastard?’ Wherefore ‘base,’

When my dimensions are as well compact,

My mind as generous, and my shape as true

As honest madam’s issue? Why brand they us

With ‘base,’ with ‘baseness, bastardy – base, base’ –

Who in the lusty stealth of nature take

More composition and fierce quality

Than doth within a dull, stale, tired bed

Go to th’ creating a whole tribe of fops

Got ‘tween a sleep and wake? Well then,

Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land.

Our father’s love is to the bastard Edmund

As to th’ legitimate. Fine word, ‘legitimate.’

Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed

And my invention thrive, Edmund the base

Shall to th’ legitimate. I grow, I prosper.

Now gods, stand up for bastards!

The language of energetic and entrepreneurial ‘prosperity’ (‘I grow, I proper’) seems to counter, and to replace, the repressive economics of Lear’s love test (‘deeds,’ ‘worth, ‘etc.). It is almost as if Lear’s rejection of the ‘true’ daughter, Cordelia, has brought forth this outburst, so that prosperity now resides not among the orderly processes of rule and kingship but instead in a celebration of the anarchy of sex and law. The next invocation to Nature we hear will be Lear’s curse called down upon Goneril: ‘Into her womb convey sterility.’ (1.4.240).

Nature goes from pure fecundity to agent of barrenness, and we might notice here how very quickly it is that Lear, too, falls. Even within that emblematic first scene his fall from love to wrath is astonishingly swift, and the conference of the disaffected daughters afterward confirms the audience’s misgivings. By the end of the first act the King is nothing but an ‘Idle old man,/That still would manage those authorities/that he hath given away!’ (Quarto, 3.16-18) – at least in Goneril’s view. Lear is now for the first time joined onstage by his Fool. It is no accident that the fool appears just at the moment when Lear has begun to act like a fool.  We will see shortly the degree to which this sublime Fool acts as a mirror for the King. Lear’s self-stripping, of lands, of friends, of his treasured daughter, is now converted into a stripping by his elder daughters,, so that he is, for the first time in the play, (and, again, quite early), reduced to a tragic quest for self – all the more tragic because it is performed as a piece of unbecoming foolery, a piece of mumming, what Goneril calls one of his ‘new pranks”:

Does any here know me? This is not Lear.

Does Lear walk thus, speak thus? Where are his eyes?

……………………………………

     [Ha], waking? ‘Tis not so.

Who is it that can tell me who I am?

‘Lear’s shadow,’ replied the Fool. Eyes, speaking, and waking are all familiar and indicative themes, and from this point the play will proliferate not only images of this kind but also insistent questions of identity. Goneril, the resistant audience to this poignant scene, is determined to strip her father of half his attendant knights, and it is this issue that calls down upon her his curse, delivered at the end of Act I. Again, this must seem early to us, in view of the pattern of the usual tragic fall. Here is Lear:

Hear, nature; hear, dear goddess, hear:

Suspend thy purpose if thou didst intend

To make this creature fruitful.

Into her womb convey sterility.

Dry up in her the organ of increase,

And from her derogate body never spring

A babe to honour her…

Lear wishes upon his eldest daughter a fate that will leave her not only without a child but also without an heir. Since she has inherited part of his kingdom, this is a wish that, if granted, would bring to an end the rule he has granted her. One of the many connotations of the word ‘nothing’ in this period was a slang reference to the female sexual organs (compare Hamlet’s lines on the ‘no thing’ that lies ‘between maids’ legs). Thus Lear’s intemperate words to Cordelia (‘Nothing will come of nothing’) are now transposed into his physical curse upon Goneril – that nothing (no child) should come of her ‘no thing.’)

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrTUW8iz7Gc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aprnQoOqWwY

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And that’s what Marjorie Garber had to say about Act One – thoughts?

My next post:  Thursday evening/Friday morning – more on Act One.

King Lear

Act One, Part Two

By Dennis Abrams

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A couple of things to watch for and think about:

1.  Patterns of verbal imagery in the play, including those related to seeing, blindness and insight; the use of terms like “nothing,” and of fools and folly; the use of verbs pertaining to violence like “pierce,” “stamp,” ‘fret,” ‘pluck,” “strike” and “blister,” as well as the many reference to animals (Spurgeon, pages 338-44 is strong on this) which related to the reduction of man to animals.

2.  The contrast between plain speech and rhetoric, and the gap that can exist and be exploited between words and intentions.

3.  The many examples of words beginning with the prefix “un” ; note, for example, the way in which the play begins with Kent remarking of Gloucester’s adultery, “I cannot wish the fault undone,” and ends with Lear crying, “Pray you undo this button.’

4.  To Jacobean audiences, Cordelia’s one word response to her father, “Nothing,” would have been astonishingly shocking.  An appropriate way for a princess to address her father can be seen in a letter that the newly-married Princess Elizabeth wrote to her father, James I, from Canterbury, days before she left the country in April 1613.  In it she makes no mention of the husband, Prince Frederick of Bohemia, that she had married in February, instead, she bemoans “the sad effects of separation,” and that she may never again see her father.

‘My heart, which was pressed and astounded at my departure, now permits my eyes to weep their privation of the sight of the most precious object, which they could have beheld in the world.’

She goes on to wish that she could “show to your majesty with what ardent affection she is and will be, even to death, Your majesty’s very affectionate, very humble, and very obedient daughter and servant.’

5.  No information is provided us, but it seems likely, doesn’t it, that Goneril and Regan are somewhat older than Cordelia?  But what happened to Mrs. Lear?

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From Tony Tanner:

“’Now thou art an O without a figure’ – this is the Fool, desperately trying to get Lear to realize the folly of what he has done: ‘thou hast parted thy wit o’ both sides and left nothing i’ the middle…I am better than thou art now: I am a Fool, thou art nothing.’ (I, iv, 191-200).  Under Iago’s ministrations Othello became an ‘O’ in the course of the play. Lear makes himself ‘nothing’ at the start with no visible prompting or provocation. The play veritably starts with the eruption of, or into, nothingness and the word reechoes throughout the opening scenes.

Cordelia:  Nothing, my lord.

Lear:  Nothing?

Cordelia: Nothing.

Lear:  Nothing will come of nothing.

Lear repeats the word a number of times. Then Gloucester, very much a parallel figure for Lear, finds Edmund reading something. He asks him what it was.

Edmund:  Nothing, my lord.

Gloucester:  No? What needed then that terrible dispatch of it into your pocket? The quality of nothing hath not such need to hide itself. Let’s see. Come, if it be nothing, I shall not need spectacles.

The play will be preoccupied with problems of seeing and right vision, and given what happens to his eyes, his words carry a terrible proleptic irony. Shortly after, Lear is repeating himself to the Fool who asks him ‘Can you make no use of nothing, Nuncle?’ ‘Why, no, boy, Nothing can be made of nothing.’ (I, iv, 135-6). When Edgar, a little later, decides to disguise himself as Poor Tom he says ‘Edgar I nothing am’ (II, iii, 21). The word becomes increasingly ominous and it is as we are watching the world of the play being infiltrated with ‘nothingness’ – indeed, actively serving to install it, a world literally an-nihil-ating itself. It is a spectacle about to freeze you – a world, turning, returning, itself to ‘nothing.’

There was a well-known Elizabethan Morality play called The Three Ladies of London (1584) The three ladies in question are – Conscience, Love, and Lucre, and they are variously beset and besought, importuned and rejected by characters such as – Dissimulation, Fraud, Simony, Simplicity, Usury, Hospitality, Sincerity, and so on. Lucre enjoys a good deal of success and boasts of turning Conscience out of house and home. In King Lear, too, we find many unjust banishings and harsh shuttings out. Sincerity has fallen on bad times for, as she complains, it is the flatterers who love from the teeth forward who enjoy worldly success – and there could hardly be a better way to describe what Goneril and Regan are doing in their opening speeches to their father. Exactly like Cordelia, Sincerity prefers to ‘see and say nothing’ rather than attempt to match the dissimulators. Lucre’s only gift to Sincerity is a Parsonage called St. Nihil – and Nihil is nothing. It is Lear’s gift to Cordelia. It becomes pretty well the gift to Lear’s family, and of his realm to itself.

I am not arguing for a specific source for the play. [In his footnote:  As I indicated, I do not intend to go into sources, but – briefly. There was an old folk tale in which a daughter tells her father that she loves him as much as salt. This makes him very angry until she explains that she means he is essential to her life. The story enters literature in the twelfth-century History of Geoffrey of Monmouth. In the sixteenth century it becomes part of British history and is told by John Higgins in the 1574 edition of A Mirror for Magistrates, by Warner in Albion’s England (1586), by Holinshed, and by Spenser in Book II of The Faerie Queene (1590). Shakespeare probably knew all of these. The most important thing to know, perhaps, is that in Holinshed Cordelia successfully restores her father to the throne and then succeeds him for five years – though she then commits suicide when imprisoned by her enemies…] Rather, I want to draw attention to the importance of the exchanges in the opening scene. Cordelia who is indeed Sincere and has a Conscience can only ‘see and say nothing’ in the presence of so much Dissimulation and Fraud. But how has this situation come about? Like Othello, Lear asks for the wrong sort of evidence; asks disastrously the wrong questions. He asks for ‘auricular assurance’ of his daughters’ love as Othello had asked for ‘ocular proof’ of his wife’s unfaithfulness. But you can no more ‘hear’ love than you can ‘see’ honour. Worse, he asks in terms of quantity. ‘Which of you shall we say doth love us most?’ He hands himself over to rhetoric and easily manufactured hyperboles. In a matter of how many knights he can bring with him to his daughters’ houses, when Goneril says to him ‘disquantity your train’ (I, iv, 255)  she is in fact speaking his language. He is still trying to quantify love when Regan wants to reduce his train by another half: he turns to Goneril – ‘Thy fifty yet doth double five-and twenty,/And thou art twice her love’ (II, iv, 258-9). The sisters rapidly reduce his permitted train to zero. ‘What need one?’ says Regan, which provokes the searing response:

O reason not the need! Our basest beggars

Are in the poorest things superfluous,

Allow not nature more than nature’s needs,

Man’s life is cheap as beast’s. Thou art a lady:

If only to go warm were gorgeous

Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear’st,

Which scarcely keep thee warm.

(II, iv, 264-9)

Many of the questions and preoccupations of the play are compacted in these lines, but let us return to the opening scene.

Lear’s initial fault is exposed in Gloucester’s opening words when he refers to ‘the division of the kingdom’ (I, i, 4). Almost immediately we see this made literal when Lear takes a map and divides the realm into three. It is a deed of horrifying irresponsibility and introduces ‘division’ into every unit of the society – family, court, realm. His explanation of what he is doing would have been even more shocking to the Elizabethans:

Meantime we shall express our darker purpose.

Give me the map there. Know that we have divided

In three our kingdom; and ‘tis our fast intent

To shake all cares and business from our age,

Conferring them on younger strengths, while we

Unburthened crawl toward death…

(Since we shall divest us both of rule,

Interest of territory, cares of state)

(I, i, 38-53)

By ‘darker’ he here means simply ‘hidden’ but it is an ominous word coming from a king, and, indeed, from this initial act there will spread a darkness over the realm until by the end ‘all’s cheerless, dark and deadly’ (V, iii, 293). That a king, the great hub of the social wheel, the maintainer of unity and order, should suddenly express the wish to ‘shake’ off cares and ‘crawl,’ like a child or a wounded animal, toward death, is almost terrifying if only because he should represent – indeed embody – stability, concord (not ‘division’), the inexorable responsibilities involved in positions of power, and duties firmly discharged and unquestioningly upheld. He wants to keep the ‘name’ of king, but leave the ‘execution’ of his duties to others – a fatal attempt to divide word from thing. It as though the lynch-pin should withdraw itself from the wheel, the corner-stone rebel from its place in the structure of the church. No wonder the scene ends with a sense of dissolution and scattering. ‘Kent banished thus? And France in choler parted?/And the king gone tonight” (I, ii, 24-5 – emphasis added). The ‘division’ has started, initiating an atmosphere marked by rapid, furtive, untimely, and uncertain movement. The plotters turn up at odd times which surprise even themselves – ‘out of season threading dark-eyed night.’ Lear ‘calls to horse, but will I know not whither.’ The French army creeps into England ‘on secret feet.’ Gloucester and Kent grope around the heath looking for Lear. Everywhere there is a sense of midnight flight and fumbling which is either conspiratorial or desperate. All seems uncertain and unnerved. ‘The images of revolt and flying off!’ (II, iv, 88). Movement is no longer coordinated, harmonious, ceremonially managed; rather it is madly centrifugal – as though all things were being whirled off their right paths.

Shakespeare was clearly fascinated by what might happen if the great central maintaining principle of social order was withdrawn, or withdrew itself – he had tried the great experiment shortly before in Measure for Measure. It allows him to explore, dramatically, the question – what is human nature when it is, as it were, unchecked in all directions: when all the bonds have ‘cracked’ and the rats have bitten ‘the holy cords atwain/Which are too intrince t’unloose’ (II, ii, 76)? Lear’s sudden abdication leaves a vacuum where there should be a majestic and irresistible principle of order, custom, and degree. And in that vacuum, the deep realities of human nature are afforded a dark arena in which to play themselves out. Majesty has fallen to folly, power has bowed to flattery, as Kent says – and indeed by the end of the play Lear will have bowed, fallen, knelt, and crawled in dead earnest. (It is a very sadistic play. People stumble, kneel, fall; are tripped, elbowed, shoved, kicked, and tortured. I will just note here that, in this play, it is the victims, the sufferers, the thrust-out and kicked-along, the blinded and maddened who, at intolerable cost, achieve true vision. By contrast, the perception of the evil characters seem to shrink progressively until by the end we have the image of Goneril and Regan ‘squinting’ at each other.) Wishing only to shake off his cares, shrug off his burdens, ‘divest’ himself of rule, Lear discovers that there is no stopping the divesting, and he will be stripped of his knights, his house, his clothes, his very reason – and finally of Cordelia. His terrible fate lies coiled and nascent in his own opening words.

‘The King falls from the bias of nature,’ says Gloucester (I, ii, 121). The last time Shakespeare used that metaphor was in Twelfth Night when Sebastian tells Olivia: ‘So comes it lady, you have mistook;/But nature to her bias drew in that’ (V, I, 259-60).  The metaphor is from bowling and Sebastian is saying that, although Olivia was mistaken when she married him – because of course she thought she was marrying Cesario – she has in fact swerved back to nature’s proper course in marrying him, because Cesario is, of course, a woman – Viola. For her to have married a woman would have been to ‘fall from the bias of nature.’ To be sure, Lear has not contracted a homosexual marriage, but, more generally, the image suggests that, in nature, there is a right way for things to go, and a wrong way, and Lear has taken the wrong way. How nature may ‘err from itself’ (to take an image from Othello, III, iii, 227) is a matter to which I will return. But Lear has fallen from the ‘bias of nature’ by his division of the realm, his abdication, and – worst of all – his disastrous misjudgment of Cordelia. To Burgundy he says ‘her price is fallen’ (more quantification – Lear is assessing her in Iagoish money terms whereas, like Desdemona, she is a jewel), and dismisses her as ‘little seeming substance’ (I, I, 199-200). He describes her as unnatural (‘a wretch whom nature is ashamed/Almost t’acknowledge hers’ – I, i, 214), strips of her dowry, and strangers her with an oath. He is not only completely wrong, but has totally inverted true values – Cordelia is all substance and no seeming, and is (along with Kent and Edgar and, for the most part, Albany), the most steadfastly ‘natural’ character in the play (there are problems in such an assertion to which I will return). No wonder Kent says ‘See better, Lear’ (I, i, 160). Lear is going to have to travel a hard and painful road to learn to penetrate the seeming and mere show of things and discern true reality – ‘the thing itself.’ He will suffer greatly, indeed unendurably, before he draws back to ‘the bias of nature.’

The King of France finds Lear’s behavior incredible, and finds it most strange that;

The best, the dearest, should in this trice of time

Commit a thing so monstrous to dismantle

So many folds of favor…

When he learns of what her ‘fault’ consisted, he is happy to take her as she stands – metaphorically naked, like traditional pictures of truth. I will return to ‘monstrous,’ but want here to concentrate on that phrase – ‘dismantle so many folds of favor.’ When Cordelia departs her last words are (to her sisters):

The jewels of our father, with washed eyes

Cordelia leaves you. I know you what you are…

More proleptic –  by which I mean anticipatory – ironies. Cordelia is the ‘jewel’ of her father, and her ‘washed eyes’ and tears will be of extreme importance later in the play. Finally she says:

Time shall unfold what plighted cunning hides,

Who covers faults, at least shame them derides.

To this I must add the words of Isabella when she thinks she is not going to receive any justice at the hands of the Duke of Vienna (in Measure for Measure):

Then, O you blessed ministers above,

Keep me in patience, and with ripened time

Unfold the evil which is here wrapp’d up

In countenance.

(V, i, 115-19)

‘Unfold’ became a very important word for Shakespeare. It is one of the first verbs in Hamlet:

Bernardo:  Who’s there?

Francisco: Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself.

Thus the play opens, and it is a long ‘unfolding’ that is to come. In Othello it occurs at least four times. Desdemona says ‘To my unfolding lend your prosperous ear’ (I,iii,245), and ‘This honest creature doubtless/Sees and knows more, much more, than he unfolds’ (III,iii,242-3). Emilia talking about her husband Iago, though she doesn’t yet know it, says ‘O heaven, that such companions thou’dst unfold,/And put in every honest hand a whip/To lash the rascals naked through the world’ (IV, i, 141-3). Iago himself, expert folder, has a worry – ‘the Moor may unfold me to him’ (V,i,21). Cunning is ‘plighted’ (pleated, enfolded); evil is ‘wrapped up,’ and, ultimately, only ‘ripe time’ (also used in this play) can do the unfolding (the ‘blessed ministers’ are hardly to be relied on). This suggests that once evil has been released – made its ‘wasteful entrance’ – no human agent can arrest it, it must simply exhaust itself. In time. It is thus in this play where even Edmund cannot stop the murder of Cordelia he himself ordered. He is not – in time. Our acts get away from us. ‘Unfolding’ implies exposure, revealing, revelation, and, as we say, the story ‘unfolds’ in front of our eyes in the theatre. By the end of the play we too see them – all of them – ‘what they are.’”

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From Frank Kermode:

“Apocalypse is the image of human dealings in their extremity, an image of the state to which humanity can reduce itself. We are asked to imagine the Last Days, when, under the influence of some Antichrist, human beings will behave not as a rickety civility requires but naturally; that is, they will prey upon themselves like animals, having lost the protection of social restraint, now shown to be fragile. The holy cords, however, ‘intrinse,’ can be loosened by rats. Gloucester may be credulous and venal, but his murmurings about the state of the world, which do not move Edmund, reflect of the mood of the play, ‘in cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond crack’d ‘twist son and father…We have seen the best of our time.’ The voices of the good are distorted by pain, those of the bad by the coarse excess of their wickedness.

The rhetoric of the play is accordingly more explicit, less ambiguous, except – and it is admittedly a large exception – in the apparent unreason of the Fool and Poor Tom and the ravings of the mad King, where the imaginations of folly flood into the language and give it violent local color. These wild linguistic excursions come later; the opening scene is in cool, even bantering prose, but as always in Shakespeare, it achieves much more than mere exposition. Coleridge understood its depth; the opening conversation between Gloucester and Kent makes it plain that Lear has already arranged the ‘division of the kingdom’ before the ceremony in which he formally announces it, which was therefore intended to be less the declaration of a secret intention (‘our darker purpose’) than a self-gratifying charade. Lear can already be seen as imperious and selfish; we discover that even giving his kingdom away is a selfish act. And immediately we are offered a critical view of the other main sufferer, Gloucester, and his relations with his natural son, Edmund. Gloucester treats Edmund’s birth as an occasion for bawdy joking and does not explain why, unlike his legitimate brother, Edgar, he should have been so long absent or why ‘away he shall again.’ All this has much to do not only with their characters but with the nature of the ensuing action as it depends on the folly of Gloucester and the ingenious unregenerate wickedness of Edmund.

Such economical writing is perhaps no more than should be expected of a dramatist in his prime. The ceremonial love competition that follows of course requires verse. The verse of the daughters Goneril and Regan has to be formal, manifestly insincere. Goneril is using what rhetoricians called ‘the topic of inexpressibility,’ standard fare in the eulogy of kings and emperors – ‘I love you more than words can wield the matter,/Dearer than eyesight…A love that makes breath poor, and speech unable…’ Regan follows with the well-established topical formula that Ernst Curtius calls ‘outdoing,’ or the ‘cedat-formula’ – ‘let her yield’; her sister has expressed Regan’s sentiments quite well, ‘Only she comes too short.’ Cordelia, coming third in order of praising, would have a hard task, but shuns this competition, meaning nevertheless to outdo her sisters by exposing their rhetorical falsity. She would prefer to be silent, but the only way to announce that intention is to speak about it, which she does. She does not come out of the archaic and artificial contest well, defeated by the genuineness of her love, as France recognizes; but she is far from passively yielding:

Lear:…what can you say to draw

A third more opulent than your sisters’? Speak.

Cor:  Nothing, my lord.

Lear:  Nothing?

Cor: Nothing.

Lear: Nothing will come of nothing, speak again.

She does speak again, but virtually only to say nothing. Here rhetorical formulae are used for a dramatic purpose. The rage of the King confirms that he cannot be temperate in the absence of ceremony; the love he seeks is the sort that can be offered in formal and subservient expressions, and he therefore rejects the love of Cordelia and of Kent. The rest of the scene is equally well contrived. The style of personal pronouns is worth attention: Lear is almost always, regally, ‘we,’ until he loses his temper with his daughter, when he uses ‘I.’ Kent is truly ‘unmannerly,’ freely addressing the King as ‘thou’: ‘What wouldest thou do, old man?…Reserve thy state,/And in thy best consideration check/This hideous rashness.’

Lear has already given away everything except an imaginary possession: ‘Only we shall retain/the name, and all th’ addition to a king.’ The word ‘addition’ seems to have interested Shakespeare. It can refer to ‘honours, prerogatives, titles’ – as when, in Othello, Cassio, after his disgrace, reacts to Iago’s calling him ‘lieutenant’ by saying he is ‘The worser that you give me the addition/Whose want even kills me.’ In Lear there is a way of looking at people as if they were simply basic human beings, naturally naked, wretches whose standing as more than that depends on their additions, without which they might be indistinguishable from Poor Tom: ‘unaccomodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, fork’d animal…(III.iv.106-8). Not only honours but clothes are ‘additions’: splendid in the case of Goneril and Regan, though meant for ostentation of rank rather than warmth; deemed unnecessary by Lear, who tries to take his off in the storm and at the moment of death; fraudulent in the case of corrupt judges, as we see in Lear’s extraordinary tirade: ‘Robes and furr’d gowns hide all’ (IV.vi.164). Clothes are emblems of ‘addition’ – what is added, out of pride or wickedness, to the natural man.”

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And finally, for the weekend, a bit more overview of the play, from Harold Bloom:

“No one would regard The Tragedy of King Lear as a Shakespearean aberration: the play develops out of aspects of Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, and Othello, and clearly is prelude to aspects of Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and Timon of Athens.  [MY NOTE:  I’ll accept Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra, but I’m close to positive that Timon came before Lear.]  Only Hamlet, of all the plays, seems more central to Shakespeare’s incessant concerns than King Lear is, and in their ultimate implications the two works interlock. Does Hamlet love anyone as he dies? The transcendental aura that his dying moments evoke, our sensation of his charismatic freedom, is precisely founded upon his having become free of every object attachment, whether to father, mother, Ophelia, or even poor Yorick. There is only one mention of the word father by Hamlet in all of Act V, and it is reference to his father’s signet, employed to send Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to extinction. The only reference by Hamlet to his father the person is when he speaks of Claudius as having killed ‘my king’ and whored his mother. Hamlet’s farewell to Gertrude is the not very affectionate ‘Wretched Queen, adieu!’ There is, of course, Horatio, whose love for Hamlet brings him to the verge of suicide, from which Hamlet save him, but solely for the purpose of having a survivor who will clear his wounded name. Nothing whatsoever that happens in the tragedy Hamlet gives love itself anything except a wounded name. Love, in any of its modes, familial or erotic or social, is transformed by Shakespeare, more than any other writer, into the greatest of dramatic and aesthetic values. Yet more than any other writer, Shakespeare divests love of any supposed values of its own.

The implicit critique of love, by Shakespeare, hardly can be termed a mere skepticism. Literary criticism, as I have learned from Dr. Johnson, is the art of making the implicit finely explicit, and I accept the risk of apparently laboring what may be to many among us quite obvious, once we are asked to ponder it. ‘We cannot choose whom we are free to love,’ a celebrated line of Auden’s, may have been influenced by Freud, but Sigmund Freud, as time’s revenges will show, is nothing but belated William Shakespeare, ‘the man from Stratford’ as Freud bitterly liked to call him, in support of that defrauded genius, the Earl of Oxford. There is love that can be avoided, and there is a deeper love, unavoidable and terrible, far more central to Shakespeare’s invention of the human. It seems more accurate to call it that, rather than reinvention, because the time before Shakespeare had his full influence upon us was also ‘before we were wholly human and knew ourselves,’ as Wallace Stevens phrased it. Irreparable love, destructive of every value distinct from it, was and is a Romantic obsession. But the representation of love, in and by Shakespeare, was the largest literary contamination that produced Romanticism.

A.D. Nuttall, more than any other twentieth-century critic, has clarified some of the central paradoxes of Shakespearean representation. Two of Nuttall’s observations always abide with me: Shakespeare is out ahead of us, illuminating our latest intellectual fashions more sharply than they can illuminate him, and Shakespeare enables us to see realities that may already have been there but that we would not find it possible to see without him. Historicists – old, new, and burgeoning – do not like it when I add to Nutall the realization that the difference between what Shakespeare knew and what we know is, to an astonishing extent, just Shakespeare himself. He is what we know because we are what we knew: he childed as we fathered. Even if Shakespeare, like all of his contemporaries and like all of ours, is only a socially inscribed entity, histrionic and fictive, and so not at all a self-contained author, all the better. Borges may have intended a Chestertonian paradox, but he spoke a truth more literal than figurative: Shakespeare is everyone and no one. So are we, but Shakespeare is more so. If you want to argue that he was the most precariously self-fashioned of all the self-fashioned, I gladly will agree. But wisdom finally cannot be the product of social energies, whatever those are. Cognitive power and an understanding heart are individual endowments. Wittgenstein rather desperately wanted to see Shakespeare as a creator of language rather than as a creator of thought, yet Shakespeare’s own pragmatism renders that a distinction that makes no difference. Shakespeare’s writing creates what holds together language and thought in a stance that neither affirms nor subverts Western tradition. What that stance is, though, hovers still beyond the categories of our critiques.

Social domination, the obsession of our School of Resentment, is only secondarily a Shakespearean concern. Domination maybe, but that mode of domination is more personal than social, more internal than outward. Shakespeare’s greatest men and women are perpetually doom-eager not because of their relation to state power but because their inner lives are ravaged by all the ambivalences and ambiguities of familial love and its displacements. There is a drive in all of us, unless we are Edmund, to slay ourselves upon the stems of generation, in Blake’s language. Edmund is free of that drive, but he is caught in the closed circle that makes him another of the fools of time. Time, Falstaff’s antagonist and Macbeth’s nemesis, is antithetical to nature in Lear’s play. Edmund, who cannot be destroyed by love, which he never feels, is destroyed by the wheel of change that he has set spinning for his victimized half brother. Edgar, stubborn sufferer, cannot be defeated, and his timing becomes exquisite the moment he and Gloucester encounter the bullying Oswald.

The best principle in reading Shakespeare is Emerson’s: ‘Shakespeare is the only biographer of Shakespeare, and even he can tell nothing, except to the Shakespeare in us.’  I myself deviate a touch from Emerson, since I think only Shakespeare has placed the Shakespeare in us. I don’t believe I am that horrid thing, much deprecated by our current pseudo-Marxist Shakespeareans, an ‘essentialist humanist.’ As a gnostic sect of one, I blink at a supposed Shakespeare who is out to subvert Renaissance ideology or who hints at revolutionary possibilities. Essentialist Marxists or feminists or Franco-Heideggerians ask me to accept a Shakespeare rather in their image. The Shakespeare in me, however placed there, shows me a deeper and more ancient subversion at work – in much of Shakespeare, but in the four high tragedies or domestic tragedies of blood in particular.

Dostoevsky founded Svidrigailov and Stavrogin upon Iago and Edmund, while Nietzsche and Kierkegaard discovered their Dionysiac forerunner in Hamlet, and Melville came to his Captain Ahab through Macbeth. The nihilist questers emerge from the Shakespearean abyss, as Freud at his uncanniest emerged. I do not offer a nihilistic Shakespeare or a Gnostic one, but skepticism alone cannot be the origin of the cosmological degradation that contextualizes the tragedies King Lear and Macbeth. The more nihilistic Solomon of Ecclesiastes and the Wisdom of Solomon tells us, in the latter, Apocryphal work, that ‘we are borne at all adventure, and we shall be hereafter as though we had never been.’ The heretic Milton did not believe that God had made the world out of nothing, we do not know what Shakespeare did not believe. Lear, as charted by W.R. Elton, is neither an Epicurean materialist nor a skeptic; rather he is ‘in rejecting creation ex nihilo a pious pagan but a skeptical Christian,’ as befits a pagan play for a Christian audience. Lear, we always must remind ourselves, is well past eighty, and his world wears out to nothing with him. As in Macbeth, an end time is suggested. The resurrection of the body, unknown to Solomon, is also unknown to Lear…”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGKGzBWWCuU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mJdk5kOcds

And, I usually don’t recommend recordings, but this one, if you can find it, is pretty extraordinary.  Gielgud is Lear.  Enough said.

My next post:  Sunday evening/Monday morning – last post on Act One, including our intro to Jan Kott.

Enjoy.  And enjoy your weekend.

King Lear

Act One, Part Three

By Dennis Abrams

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A couple of things of interest:

1.  I talked in my introduction to Lear about the fact that there are really two different versions of the play:  the Quarto and the Folio.  Act One, scene 4, lines 217-222 show a good example of the differences.

Lear:

Does any here know me? Why, this is not Lear.

Does Lear walk thus, speak thus? Where are his eyes?

Either his notion weakens, or, his discernings are

lethargied – Ha! sleeping or walking? Sure ‘tis not

so. Who is that can tell me who I am?

Fool:

Lear’s shadow.

“Lear’s shadow.”  In the Quarto, it is Lear who speaks those words. The Quarto version is in effect simpler, since it is Lear who calls himself a shadow, or semblance in contrast to the real person.  But in giving the words to the Fool, the Folio is automatically more complex: does the Fool mean both that he is Lear’s shadow (or the mirror-image in which Lear may see himself as a fool), AND that Lear has become a shadow of his former self, a mere appearance of a king lacking authority? In Quarto, Lear is immediately aware of a split within himself, which in Folio is only observed (or mentioned in) the Fool’s acerbic comments.

2.  In Lear’s speech to Albany, “Hear, Nature, hear, dear goddess…” note how it recalls Edmund’s appeal to nature, “Thou, nature, art my Goddess…” but with a difference; Lear invokes Nature as a creative force, but his horrible curse would, indeed, make nature unnatural (or disnatured, 275) which aligns him with Edmund.

From Stephen Booth:

“An audience’s experience of King Lear persistently reflects its characters experience of the events depicted in it. The play makes its audience suffer as audience; the fact that King Lear ends but does not stop is only the biggest of a succession of similar facts about the play. The parallel between tests of the audience’s theatrical endurance and the trials of the characters is illustrated by the two limp little speeches that intervene between Edgar’s account of his father’s death and his postscript on Kent. The first is by Edmund, and its lifelessness evokes a sense of unwarranted continuation:

This speech of yours hath moved me,

And shall perchance do good; but speak you on –

You look as you had something more to say.

[V.iii.200-02]

In the second speech Albany explicitly takes up the threat of ‘more’:

If there be more, more woeful, hold it in,

For I am almost ready to dissolve,

Hearing of this.

Edmund’s speech both is and promises a burdensome and superfluous appendage to the audience’s immediate theatrical experience; Albany protests the threat of augmentation but, of course, protests it in the dimension of the dramatized events rather than that of the dramatization.

Almost from the beginning, both the characters and the audience of King Lear must cope with the fact that the idea of the ultimate is only an idea, a hope, a working convenience.

The first speeches of King Lear are full of comparatives (‘had more affected the Duke of Albany,’ ‘no dearer in my account,’ ‘know you better,’ ‘darker purposes,’ ‘no less loving son’). Lear introduces the superlative (‘which of you shall we say doth love us mot’) and triggers an inflation in language and in its aspirations. Goneril begins her answer with comparatives and progresses toward the absolute (I.i.55-61); Regan outdoes her (‘she comes to short…I profess/Myself an enemy to all other joys’ – 72-73). Cordelia’s ‘Nothing’ is the ultimate among ultimates; it makes retreat to relativism futile:

Cordelia:    …I love your Majesty

According to my bond, no more nor less.

Lear:  How, how, Cordelia? Mend your speech a little…

On the other hand, the realm of the absolute is paradoxically wanting in substitutes for the relative but serviceable sureness (definition, limitation, finality) available in the comfortable confines of comparison. Cordelia can say nothing ‘to draw/A third more opulent’ than her sisters, but she does say ‘Nothing’: she cannot literally ‘love and be silent’ – any more than Lear’s hyperbole (‘I disclaim all my parental care,’ ‘we have no such daughter’) can literally obliterate Cordelia’s daughterhood or remove her from the category ‘daughter’ in his speeches. Moreover, Cordelia does attempt to measure her love for Lear. The terms of her speech are relative (‘That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry/Half my love with ‘ – 101-2); the speech his, in fact, an overt rejection of absolutes (‘Sure I shall never marry like my sisters,/To love my father all’ – 103-104). But the rejection is itself an absolute, an absolute that collapses when she assents to Lear’s response, ‘But goes thy heart with this?’ Heart in Lear’s question is potentially a precise synonym for love in Cordelia’s ‘carry half my love with him,’ but love (affection) in Cordelia’s phrase is not synonymous with heart in Lear’s question (a question that means ‘But do you really mean what you have just said?’). Cordelia does and does not contradict herself; her absolute allegiance to relativism is final, definitive, absolute – but only relative to the contextually, and thus tenuously determined meaning of words.

That was a very abstruse example, offered only to suggest the depth to which the impossibility of finality permeates the play. For a simpler but equally incidental example, consider IV.vii.61, the line in which Lear specifies his age with absolute and absolutely ineffectual precision: ‘Fourscore and upward, not an hour more or less’…

Lear’s confident reservation of a hundred knights exemplifies a fruitless quest for definition of another sort. His initial scheme and his later dream of retirement in a walled prison exemplify yet another. The play is full of such quests, and the lines I quote for other purposes will include all the evidence one could wish. I prefer to turn my attention to the audience’s similar efforts and frustrations. Those, too, come in many sizes and shapes. Take, for example, the experience of listening to the speech in which Lear first mentions the hundred knights. First, he makes an apparently absolute donation of everything (‘I do invest you…’); then, after he has nothing, he tacks on his provisos:

Peace, Kent!

Come not between the dragon and his wrath.

I loved her most, and though to set my rest

On her kind nursery. – Hence and avoid my sight! –

So be my grave my peace as here I give

Her father’s heart from her! Call France. Who stirs!

Call Burgundy, Cornwall, and Albany,

With my two daughters’ dowers digest the third;

Let pride, which she calls plainness, marry her.

I do invest you jointly with my power,

Preeminence, and all the large effects

That troop with majesty. Ourself, by monthly course,

With reservation of an hundred knights,

By you to be sustained, shall our abode

Make with you by due turn. Only we shall retain

The name and all th’ addition to a king. The sway,

Revenue, execution of the rest,

Beloved sons, be yours; which to confirm,

This coronet part between you.

I have quoted the whole speech because it is also the first of the many instances where Lear leaps suddenly from one topic to another. The first four speeches of King Lear are an orderly, efficient, and symmetrical introduction to two distinct plot lines in the play; the two plots are never distinct again, and from the time of Kent’s first attempt to interrupt Lear, no two things are ever distinct again. The scenes in which Lear’s mind pounces upon one and then another topic are only exaggerated manifestations of the audience’s constant difficulty in knowing where one topic ends and another begins.”

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From G. Wilson Knight:

“In this essay I shall analyze certain strata in the play’s thought, thus making more clear the quality of the mysterious presence I have noticed as enveloping the action; and in the process many persons and events will automatically assume new significance. The play works out before us the problems of human suffering and human imperfection; the relation of humanity to nature on the one hand and its aspiration toward perfection on the other I shall note (i) the naturalism of the Lear universe, using the words ‘nature’ and ‘natural’ in no exact sense, but rather with a Protean variation in meaning which reflects the varying nature-thought of the play; (ii) its ‘gods’; (iii) its insistent questioning of justice, human and divine; (iv) the stoic acceptance by many persons of their purgatorial pain; and (v) the flaming course of the Lear-theme itself growing out of this dun world, and touching at its full height a transcendent, apocalyptic beauty. These will form so many steps by which we may attain a comprehensive vision of the play’s meaning.

The philosophy of King Lear is firmly planted in the soil of earth. Nature, like human life, is abundant across its pages. Lear outlines the wide sweeps of land to be allotted to Goneril:

Of all these bounds, even from this line to this,

With shadowy forest and wide champains rich’d,

With plenteous rivers and wide-skirted meads,

We make thee lady.

We have the fine description of Dover Cliff:

The crows and choughs that wing the midway air

Show scarce so gross as beetles; half way down

Hangs one that gathers samphire, dreadful trade!

From this elevation:

     the murmuring surge,

That on the unnumber’d idle pebbles chafes,

Cannot be heard so high.

And, from below, ‘the shrill-gorged lark so far cannot be seen or heard’ (iv, vi, 59). Lear is ‘fantastically dressed with wild flowers’ (iv, vi, 81). And we hear from Cordelia that

     he was met even now

As mad as the vex’d sea; singing aloud;

Crown’d with rank fumiter and furrow-weeds,

With burdocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo-flowers,

Darnell and all the idle weeds that grow

In our sustaining corn.

(Iv, iv, 1)

The references to animals are emblematic. The thought of ‘nature’ is as ubiquitous as that of ‘death’ in Hamlet, ‘fear’ in Macbeth, or ‘time’ in Troilus and Cressida. The phraseology is pregnant with natural reference and natural suggestion; and where the human element merges into the natural, the suggestion is often one of village life. The world of King Lear is townless. It is a world of flowers, rough country, tempestuous wind, and wild, or farmyard, beasts; and, as a background, there is continual mention of homely, countrified customs, legends, rhymes. This world is rooted in nature, firmly as a Hardy novel. The winds of nature blow through its pages, animals appear in every kind of conte4xt. The animals are often homely, sometimes wild, but neither terrifying nor beautiful. They merge into the bleak atmosphere, they have nothing of the bizarre picturesqueness of those in Julius Caesar, and do not in their totality suggest the hideous and grim portent of those in Macbeth. We hear of the wolf, the owl, the cat, of sheep, swine, dogs (constantly), horses, rats and such like. Now there are two main directions for this animal and natural suggestion running through the play. First, two of the persons undergo a direct return to nature in their purgatorial progress; second, the actions of humanity tend to assume contrast with the natural world in point of ethics. I shall notice both these directions.

Edgar escapes by hiding in ‘the happy hollow of a tree’ (Ii, iii, 2), and decides to disguise himself. He will

…take the basest and most poorest shape

That ever penury, in contempt of man,

Brought near to beast; my face I’ll grime with filth;

Blanket my loins; elf all my hair in knots;

And with presented nakedness outface

The winds and persecutions of the sky.

The country gives me proof and precedent

Of Bedlam beggars, who, with roaring voices,

Strike in their numb’d and mortified bare arms

Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary;

And with this horrible object, from low farms,

Poor pelting villages, sheep-cotes, and mills,

Sometime with lunatic bans, sometime with prayers,

Enforce their charity.

(II, iii, 7)

The emphasis on nakedness open to the winds; on man’s kinship with beasts; on suffering; on village and farm life; on lunacy; all these are important. So Edgar throughout his disguise reiterates these themes. His fantastic utterances tell a tale of wild country adventure, in outlying districts of man’s civilization, weird, grotesque adventures…”

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From A.D. Nuttall, “Shakespeare The Thinker”:

Harrowing Hell:  King Lear:

“When students are asked when Shakespeare thought King Lear reigned in England they usually say, ‘Early Middle Ages?’ This is not a good shot. Holinshed’s Chronicle, Shakespeare’s principle source, places Lear’s accession to the throne in anno mundi 3105. Anno mundi (‘in the year of the world’) is a system of dating that counts years from the original creation. Unfortunately Holinshed is confused about the relation of anno mundi dating to the B.C./A.D system. In Book ii, chapter 6, Holinshed says that after Lear’s death, Cordelia became queen in anno mundi 3155 and adds that this was fifty-four years before the founding of Rome. Since we have an accepted date for the foundation of Rome (754 B.C.), this means that Cordelia became Queen in 808 B.C., and that the creation book place in 3963 B.C.  At the beginning of the following chapter Holinshed, the son of Cunedag, began in anno mundi 3203 and explains that this was fifteen years before the foundation of Rome. The date of creation, we notice with dismay, has slipped back by some nine years to 3972 B.C. There are other wobbles elsewhere. The nearest synchronism of these dates – and they are not so far apart as to be utterly unmanageable – places Lear’s reign in the later ninth and early eighth centuries B.C.  The earlier account in Geoffrey of Monmouth provides no dates but says that Lear ruled for sixty years after Bladud the aeronaut, a contemporary of Elijah. This gives the rough dating, 820-760 B.C. These numbers chime eerily with the dates of the reign of George III, 1760-1820, who was thought to be mad and identified closely with Lear. So Lear is a figure of primeval antiquity, long before the Middle Ages, long before the birth of Christ, long before Julius Caesar or Coriolanus, long before Aristotle or Sophocles.

Shakespeare, one may safely bet, would not have engaged in arithmetical calculation when he read Holinshed, but he certainly took in the fact that Lear belongs to very early history. He is aware that this is a pre-Christian world. That is why Lear swears ‘by Apollo’ – a pagan oath. King Lear is one of the chronicle plays, and the 1608 Quarto describes it as a ‘true chronicle history,’ but the editors of the 1623  Folio placed it not with the histories but with the tragedies. We all now think of it as a different kind of play from Richard III or Henry V. Are we wrong? The Folio editors may simply have made a mistake, or else they made a critical decision and the designation of this play as tragedy is no mistake. Of course the categories are not mutually exclusive. As we have seen, Richard II can be called a tragedy with perfect propriety. But they are distinct. Tragedy is all to do with pity and fear (Aristotle’s terms, but they apply after his time). History is all about the evolution of England. One aspect or the other may carry greater weight in a given case. It may well have been evident to the editors when they came to King Lear that they were dealing with work of a different order. They were looking at the greatest tragedy ever written.

Pedantic precision over dates is not Shakespeare’s line. But there is in King Lear a strange preoccupation with mathematics. It is a play about the breaking down of a king who descends into madness, learns charity, but then loses the daughter he loved most. These emotional heights and depths are married in the bloodless sphere of mathematics. Has Shakespeare made a mistake, in choosing to interweave, in this most humane, most passionate of plays, a strand of pure numerical abstraction? Surely, it might be said, this can only weaken the tragedy. But King Lear is also about the fear of madness. The very incongruity of the mathematics can work as a bat squeak of hysteria within the complex chords of the major action. We sense the mind breaking free from its moorings. The extremes represented verbally by ‘all’ and ‘nothing’ can both be converted to the sign ‘0.’ David Wilbern has noticed, behind the word ‘nothing’ that reverberates through the play, a pun on ‘hole’ and ‘whole’ (the round world)  both represented by the figure ‘0.’ As early as Henry V one can find Shakespeare thinking half-humorously about the odd union of nullity and multiplying power in the zero, in that Arabic notation that had by Shakespeare’s time virtually ousted the old Roman numerals. In the Prologue he describes the Globe Theatre (‘Globe’ = ‘the round world’) scornfully as ‘this wooden O’ and then interjects a curious apology: ‘ O, pardon! since a crooked figure may/Attest in little place a million’ (lines 15-16). In King Lear the interest in the exponent power of zero falls into the background, and Shakespeare’s imagination is instead engaged  by the notion of a nothingness that is universal and therefore equal to all. In Act I, Scene iv, the Fool says to Lear, ‘Thou art an 0 without a figure…Thou art nothing’ (I,iv.192-4).  Earlier in the same scene the Fool, living dangerously, calls the King fool and adds,

     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.

Together with putting over his moral lesson that the King has made a dreadful mistake in resigning his power, the Fool must fool around with circles. A crown is one kind of circle:

Within the hollow crown

That rounds the mortal temples of a king

Keeps Death his court.

(Richard II, III.22.160-2)

The bald head of the old King is suddenly abstract, another kind of circle. The egg is nothing. In scoring tennis we say ‘Thirty love’ for ‘Thirty nil’; ‘love’ here is a corruption of French l’oeuf, ‘the egg,’ ‘zero.’ The Fool sees that these circles may be filled or empty. Eat the boiled egg and you have two half-shells, empty roundels. These ragged, scraped-out circlets later become the gouged eye-sockets of Gloucester – ‘bleeding rings’ (V.iii.190). Shakespeare links Gloucester back to the image of the egg by having the third servant say that he will fetch egg-white to treat Gloucester’s wounded face (III.vii.106), and by having Edgar say that if Gloucester were to throw himself from the (imagined) height of Dover Cliff, he would be smashed ‘like an egg’ (IV.vi.51).  Lear’s nothingness becomes, entropically, the final nothingness of the universe in the words of the blinded Gloucester when he meets the King (by this stage in the play truly mad): ‘O ruin’d piece of nature! This great world/Shall no wear out to nought.’ (IV.vi.134-35)

The mathematical obsession shows elsewhere, sometimes in what could be mistaken for a mere accident of phraseology – ‘all th’ addition to a king’ (I.i.136) – sometimes in more evidently painful contexts. When Lear speaks of shedding the addition to a king – that is, of resigning all the grand apparatus of practical sovereignty to a king as part of his retirement plan – he gives a mathematical form to a sentiment expressed earlier, with serious tragic import, by Richard II, when he presided over his own dethroning: ‘Now mark me how I will undo myself.’ (IV.i.203). Sometimes the line of mathematical reasoning is in contradistinction to the world of human compassion. When the unloving daughters, Goneril and Regan, with cruel relish gradually subtract persons from Lear’s retinue, they end with the words, ‘What need one?’ (II.iv.263). Here mathematical calculation is emblematic of inhumanity. Lear’s answer is strong: ‘O, reason not the need! our basest beggars/Are in the poorest thing superfluous/’ (II.iv.264-65). Even a destitute woman, sleeping rough, will have about her some object of ‘sentimental value,’ something not rigidly calculated as necessary to survival.

But Cordelia, the good daughter, is also given to mathematical calculation. At the beginning of the play Lear embarks upon what he has obviously planned as a happy family occasion. He has a map of England already divided in three, a part for each daughter, with the best part reserved for Cordelia, who indeed deserves it. Each daughter is to say how much she loves her father and because Cordelia is the most loving of the three she will easily earn her share. It all goes wrong. Cordelia will not play. She is clear that she cannot possibly offer all her love to her father:

Why have my sisters husbands, if they say

They love you all? Happily, when I shall wed,

That lord whose plight shall take my hand shall carry

Half my love with him, half my care and duty.

The King is appalled by this and so in a way is the spectator in the theatre. Surely it is only the wicked who quantify love in this way? Cleopatra will say, later, ‘There’s beggary in the love that can be reckon’d’ (Antony and Cleopatra, I.i.15).

Lear’s plan for the day had a fairy-tale simplicity in easy accord with the uncritical simplicity of his own mind. Now fairy-tale founders upon human complexity. It is often said that Cordelia answers as she does because she is a truth-teller. But she is not invited to lie. The question is, ‘Which of you loves me most?’ The true answer to this, from Cordelia, is ‘I do – by far the most.’ Cordelia feels acutely what Lear has not even noticed: that if she speaks warmly of her love where it is known that warm words will obtain a huge reward, her declaration will be infected in advance by a presumption of mercenary intent. Brilliantly, Shakespeare makes Goneril employ the ‘inexpressibility topos’ in her speech to Lear: ‘Sir, I love you more than words can wield the matter.’ (I.i.55). Now, even to say, “I cannot express my love’ (Cordelia’s position) will also be tainted by the rhetoric of self-interest. Indeed she does say, ‘I cannot heave/My heart into my mouth’, but she must say this to herself, not to the King.

It is made clear that the stilted tone of Cordelia’s words to her father gives a wholly misleading impression of the love she really feels. Can we say then that she lies when she says that half her love will go to her husband? Is she talking nonsense when she says she loves according to her bond, ‘no more nor less?’ We think of the phrase, ‘Not a penny more, not a penny less.’ There is no easy answer. In Holinshed’s Chronicle, Cordelia says, ‘If you would more understand of the love that I beare you, assertaine your selfe, that so much as you have, so much you are worth, and so much I love you, and no more.’ In Shakespeare’s play by this point realistic psychology has taken over completely from primitive story. In Holinshed’s Chronicle the logic of fairy-tale still holds. The words of Holinshed’s Cordelia have magical, prophetic force. Lear is being told by a voice that is in a way superhuman that he must look into his own heart and discover what he lacks. In Shakespeare, this secondary level of prophetic import is present too, but in an uneasy relationship with the character of Cordelia, now fully humanized.

Perhaps we are to suppose that the young woman, Cordelia, disabled by embarrassment, nevertheless clings (because of her habitual truthfulness) to a cooler version of the situation, setout now according to the very different test of justice. The difficulty is that if she were to say challengingly to Lear, ‘How much love do you deserve?’ as her counterpart virtually does in the Chronicle, the implied Olympian censoriousness would be intolerable. So Shakespeare avoids the frontal accusation. Instead he makes her clutch at an impersonal mode, an escape from the hotly personal situation in which her father had placed her, by referring to justice. This can then work in the play in alliance with the mathematical language of reduction and annihilation that follows. The Chronicle’s Cordelia says that Lear must ‘assertaine him selfe’ and Shakespeare reminds us that the King ‘hath ever but slenderly known himself.’

When Goneril and Regan subtract ‘all the addition’ of Lear’s state they are wicked. When Cordelia, almost against her will, pitches King Lear into an abyss of negation she is part of a mythic logic. Lear must be broken down before he is remade. When Lear invites her to speak on her own behalf she answers famously with a single word, ‘Nothing.’ Now Lear, confronted by what must seem to him a moral impossibility, wildly attempts to re-run time itself (though his words are made less crazy by the fact that the daughters are being asked to lay on a performance of filial love). ‘Let’s cancel that,’ says Lear, ‘And start again,’ or, in his own words, ‘Nothing will come of nothing, speak again’ the disyllable uttered by Cordelia has a resonance  beyond its immediate conversational context. A black hole opens in the fabric of the play. Lear falls through the hole into a dark counter-world of continuing subtraction, a reduction now authorized by the moral movement of the drama itself. He passes from the upper-class England of the map – good-hunting here, good fishing there (‘with…forests…rich’d,/With plenteous rivers.’) – to an under-nation of wretched poverty and madness, where beggars are driven by dogs from filthy farm-yards and people hammer nails into their arms to extort charity (IV .vi.154-55, II.iii.16). When Richard II undid himself and ceremonially discarded the outer signs of royalty; he was half-able to enjoy the process of his own unmasking. Lear, mad on the heath, tears off his clothes in an agony of spirit, straining to reach the ‘poor  bare fork’d animal’ that lies beneath (III.iv.107).”

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And finally, as promised, our first look at Jan Kott:  “King Lear or Endgame”

King Lear. Dost thou call me fool, boy?

Fool. All thy other titles thou hast given away;

that thou wast born with. (King Lear, I, 4)

We are all born mad. Some remain so. (Waiting for Godot) II)

 The attitude of modern criticism to King Lear is ambiguous and somehow embarrassed. Doubtless King Lear is still recognized as a masterpiece, beside which even Macbeth and Hamlet seem tame and pedestrian. King Lear is compared to Bach’s Mass in B Minor, to Beethoven’s Fifth and Ninth Symphonies, to Wagner’s Parsifal, Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, or Dante’s Purgatory and Inferno. But at the same time King Lear gives one the impression of a high mountain that everyone admires, yet no one particularly wishes to climb. It is as if the play had lost its power to excite on the stage and in reading; as if it were out of place in our time, or, at any rate, had no place in the modern theatre. But the question is: what is modern theatre?

The apogee of King Lear’s theatrical history was reached no doubt in the romantic era. To the romantic theatre King Lear fitted perfectly; but only conceived as a melodrama, full of horrors, and dealing with a tragic king, deprived of his crown, conspired against by heaven and earth, nature and men. Charles Lamb might well laugh at early nineteenth-century performances in which a miserable old man wandered about the stage bare-headed, stick in hand, in an artificial storm and rain. But the theatre was soon to attain the full power of illusion. Diorama, scene changes effected by means of new stage machinery, without bringing the curtain down, made it possible suddenly, almost miraculously, to transform a Gothic castle into a mountainous region, or a blood-red sunset into a stormy night. Lightning and thunder, rain and wind, seemed like the real thing. It was easy for the romantic imagination to find its favourite landscape: gloomy castles, hovels, deserted spots, mysterious and awe-inspiring places, towering rock gleaming white in the moonlight.[i][1]  King Lear was also in keeping with the romantic style of acting, since it offered scope for sweeping gestures, terrifying scenes, and violent soliloquies, loudly delivered, so popular with Kean and his school. The actor’s task was to demonstrate the blackest depths of the human soul. Lear’s and Gloster’s unhappy fate was to arouse pity and terror, to shock the audience. And so it did. Suffering purified Lear and restored his tragic greatness. Shakespeare’s King Lear was the ‘black theatre’ of romanticism.

Then came the turn of the historical, antiquarian and realistic Shakespeare. Stage designers were sent to Rome to copy features of the Forum for sets to Julius Caesar. Crowds of extras were dressed in period costume. Copies were made of medieval dress, renaissance jewelry, Elizabethan furniture. Sets became more and more solid and imposing. The stage was turned into a large exhibition of historical props. A balcony had to be a real balcony, a palace – a real palace, a street – a real street. Real trees were substituted for the old painted landscape.

At that time attempts were also made to set King Lear in a definite historical period. With the help of archaeologists, Celtic burial places were reconstructed on the stage. Lear became an old druid. Theatrical machinery was more and more perfect, so that storm, wind and rain could drown the actors’ voices more and more effectively. As a result of the odd marriage between new and perfected theatre techniques with the archaeological reconstruction of a Celtic tomb, only the plot remained of Shakespeare’s play. In such a theatre Shakespeare was indeed out of place: he was untheatrical.

The turn of the century brought a revolution in Shakespearian studies. For the first time his plays began to be interpreted through the theatre of his time. A generation of scholars were busy on patiently recreating the Elizabethan stage, style of acting and theatrical traditions. Granville-Barker in his famous Prefaces to Shakespeare showed, or at least tried to show, how Lear must have been played at the Globe. The return to the so-called ‘authentic’ Shakespeare began. From now on the storm was to rage in Lear’s and Gloster’s breast rather than on the stage. The trouble was, however, that the demented old man, tearing his long white beard, suddenly became ridiculous. He should have been tragic, but he no longer was.

Nearly all Shakespeare’s expositions have an amazing speed and directness in the way conflicts are shown and put into action, and the whole tone of the play is set. The exposition of King Lear seems preposterous if one is to look in it for psychological verisimilitude. A great and powerful king holds a competition of rhetoric among his daughters as to which one of them will best express her love for him, and makes the division of his kingdom depend on its outcome. He does not see or understand anything: Regan’s and Goneril’s hypocrisy is all too evident. Regarded as a person, a character, Lear is ridiculous, naive and stupid. When he goes mad, he can only arouse compassion, never pity and terror.

Gloucester, too, is naive and ridiculous. In the early scenes he seems a stock character from a comedy of manners. Robert Speaight compares him to a gentleman of somewhat old-fashioned views who strolls on a Sunday along St James’s Street complete with bowler hat and umbrella.[ii][2] 1 Nothing about him hints at the tragic old man whose eyes will be gouged out. It is true that Polonius in Hamlet is also a comic figure, who later is stabbed to death. But his death is grotesque, too, while Lear and Gloucester are to go through immense suffering.

Producers have found it virtually impossible to cope with the plot of King Lear. When realistically treated, Lear and Gloster were too ridiculous to appear tragic heroes. If the exposition was treated as a fairy tale or legend, the cruelty of Shakespeare’s world, too, became unreal. Yet the cruelty of Lear was to the Elizabethans a contemporary reality, and has remained real since. But it is a philosophical cruelty. Neither the romantic, nor the naturalistic theatre was able to show that sort of cruelty; only the new theatre can. In this new theatre there are no characters, and the tragic element has been superseded by the grotesque. The grotesque is more cruel than tragedy.

The exposition of King Lear is as absurd, and as necessary, as in Durrenmatt’s Visit is the arrival at Giillen of multi-millionaires Claire Zachanassian and her entourage, including a new husband, a couple of eunuchs, a large coffin, and a panther in a cage. The exposition of King Lear shows a world that is to be destroyed.

Since the end of the eighteenth century no other dramatist has had a greater impact on European drama than Shakespeare. But theatres in which Shakespeare’s plays have been produced, were in turn influenced by contemporary plays. Shakespeare has been a living influence in so far as contemporary plays, through which his dramas were interpreted, were a living force themselves. When Shakespeare is dull and dead on the stage, it means that not only the theatre but also plays written in that particular period are dead. This is one of the reasons why Shakespeare’s universality has never dated.

The book devoted to ‘Shakespeare and the new drama’ has not yet been written. Perhaps it is too early for such a book to appear. But it is odd how often the word ‘Shakespearian’ is uttered when one speaks about Brecht, Durrenmatt, or Beckett. These three names stand, of course, for three different kinds of theatrical vision, and the word ‘Shakespearian’ means something different in relation to each of them. It may be invoked to compare with Durrenmatt’s full-bloodedness, sharpness, lack of cohesion, and stylistic confusion; with Brecht’s epic quality; or with Beckett’s new Theatrum mundi. But everyone of these three kinds of drama and theatre has more similarities to Shakespeare and medieval morality plays than to nineteenth-century drama, whether romantic or naturalistic. Only in this sense can the new theatre be called anti-theatre.

A striking feature of the new theatre is its grotesque quality. Despite appearances to the contrary, this new grotesque has not replaced the old drama and comedy of manners. It deals with problems, conflicts and themes of tragedy, such as: human fate, the meaning of existence, freedom and inevitability, the discrepancy between the absolute and the fragile human order. Grotesque means tragedy rewritten in different terms. Maurice Regnault’s statement: ‘the absence of tragedy in a tragic world gives birth to comedy’ is only seemingly paradoxical. The grotesque exists in a tragic world. Both the tragic and the grotesque visions of the world are composed as it were of same elements. In a tragic and grotesque world, situations are imposed, compulsory and inescapable. Freedom of choice and decision are part of this compulsory situation, in which both the tragic hero and the grotesque actor must always lose their struggle against the absolute. The downfall of the tragic hero is a confirmation and recognition of the absolute; whereas the downfall of the grotesque actor means mockery of the absolute and its desecration. The absolute is transformed into a blind mechanism, a kind of automatons. Mockery is directed not only at the tormentor, but also at the victim, who believed in the tormentor’s justice, raising him to the level of the absolute. The victim has consecrated his tormentor by recognizing himself as victim.

In the final instance tragedy is an appraisal of human fate, a measure of the absolute. The grotesque is a criticism of the absolute in the name of frail human experience. That is why tragedy brings catharsis, while grotesque offers no consolation whatsoever. ‘Tragedy,’ wrote Gorgias of Le6ntium, ‘is a swindle in which the swindler is more just than the swindled, and the swindled wiser than the swindler.’ One may travesty this aphorism by saying that grotesque is a swindle in which the swindled is more just than the swindler, and the swindler wiser than the swindled. Claire Zachanassian in Durrenmatt’s Visit is wiser than Ill, but III is more just than she is. Ill’s death, like Polonius’s death in Hamlet, is grotesque. Neither Ill, nor the inhabitants of Gullen, are tragic heroes. The old lady, with her artificial breasts, teeth and limbs, is not a goddess, she hardly even exists, she might almost have been invented. III and the people of Gullen find themselves in a situation in which there is no room for tragedy, but only for grotesque. ‘Comedy’ – writes Ionesco in his Experience du theatre – ‘is a feeling of absurdity, and seems more hopeless than tragedy; comedy allows no way out of a given situation.’

The tragic and the grotesque worlds are closed, and there is no escape from them. In the tragic world this compulsory situation has been imposed in turn by the Gods, Fate, the Christian God, Nature, and History that has been endowed with reason and inevitability.

On the other side, opposed to this arrangement, there was always man. If Nature was the absolute, man was unnatural. If man was natural, the absolute was represented by Grace, without which there was no salvation. In the world of the grotesque, downfall cannot be justified by, or blamed on, the absolute. The absolute is not endowed with any ultimate reasons; it is stronger, and that is all. The absolute is absurd. Maybe that is why the grotesque often makes use of the concept of a mechanism which has been put in motion and cannot be stopped. Various kinds of impersonal and hostile mechanisms have taken the place of God, Nature and History, found in the old tragedy. The notion of an absurd mechanism is probably the last metaphysical concept remaining in modern grotesque. But this absurd mechanism is not transcendental any more in relation to man, or at any rate to mankind. It is a trap set by man himself into which he has fallen.

The scene of tragedy has mostly been a natural landscape. Raging nature witnessed man’s downfall, or.-c- as in King Lear played an active part in the action. Modern grotesque usually takes place in the midst of civilization. Nature has evaporated from it almost completely. Man is confined to a room and surrounded by inanimate objects. But objects have now been raised to the status of symbols of human fate, or situation, and perform a similar function to that played in Shakespeare by forest, storm, or eclipse of the sun. Even Sartre’s hell is just a vast hotel consisting of rooms and corridors, beyond which there are more rooms and more corridors. This hell ‘behind closed doors’ does not need any metaphysical aids.

Ionesco’s hell is arranged on similar lines. A new tenant moves into an empty flat. Furniture is brought in. There is more and more furniture. Furniture surrounds the tenant on all sides. He is surrounded already by four wardrobes but more are brought in. He has been closed in by furniture. He can no longer be seen. He has been brought down to the level of inanimate objects, and has become an object himself.

In Beckett’s Endgame there is a room with a wheel-chair and two dustbins. A picture hangs face to the wall. There is also a staircase, a telescope and a whistle. All that remains of nature is sand in the dustbins, a flea, and the part of man that belongs to nature: his body.

Hamm. Nature has forgotten us.

Clov. There’s no more nature.

Hamm. No more nature! You exaggerate.

Clov. In the vicinity.

Hamm. But we breathe, , we change! We lose our hair, our teeth! Our bloom! Our ideals!

Clov. Then she hasn’t forgotten us. (p. 16)[iii][4]

It can easily be shown how, in the new theatre, tragic situations become grotesque. Such a classic situation of tragedy is the necessity of making a choice between opposing values. Antigone is doomed to choose between human and divine order; between Creon’s demands, and those of the absolute. The tragedy lies in the very principle of choice by which one of the values must be annihilated. The cruelty of the absolute lies in demanding such a choice and in imposing a situation which excludes the possibility of a compromise, and where one of the alternatives is death. The absolute is greedy and demands everything; the hero’s death is its confirmation.

The tragic situation becomes grotesque when both alternatives of the choice imposed are absurd, irrelevant or compromising. The hero has to play, even if there is no game. Every move is bad, but he cannot throw down his cards. To throw down the cards would also be a bad move.”

More to come…

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nwysi0MMX54

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRc49mytN_Y&list=PL2F54A72AB1C36182

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjEl_lI379A

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjEl_lI379A

Our next reading:  King Lear, Act Two

My next post:  Tuesday evening/Wednesday morning

Enjoy.

King Lear

Act Two, Part One

By Dennis Abrams

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Act Two:  Edmund tells Edgar of their father’s anger and persuades him to flee, at which point Edgar decides to disguise himself as a beggar.  Meanwhile, Kent has attacked Goneril’s steward Oswald and is put in the stocks by Regan and Cornwall; Lear and the Fool discover him there and demand to know why he has been punished, and although Regan and Cornwall release him, they refuse to allow Lear to stay with them unless he dismisses his entire retinue. When Goneril arrives and also refuses her father access, Lear leaves in a fury, bitterly vowing to contend with the wilderness instead.

Even though politics is in a sense the “plot” of King Lear (and one of the elements that makes it a masterwork) it is the appalling (and appallingly human) story of a man driven to madness that gives this tragedy its unique heartstopping intensity.  The King is often reminded that he is too old, that as Regan so callously puts it, “Nature in you stands on the very verge/Of his confine” (2.2.320-1), and as the play develops Lear begins to worry that he will topple over into madness. Though at first it is simply his political actions that are described as “mad” (Kent makes that point quite forcefully in the very first scene), it soon becomes clear that the threat to Lear’s sanity is quite real.

Shakespeare makes madness in all its forms one of the play’s largest concerns. At first it is rooted in Lear’s terrible anger, which foreshadows his mental collapse. Lear’s infamous rant against the storm, delivered as Goneril and Regan make it clear that they are no longer prepared to house the ageing King (their father) along with his rowdy knights, brings his bitter wrath (in the most Biblical of senses) to a head. Declaring his intention to “abjure all roofs” and confront “the enmity o’th’ air” (2.2.381-3) rather than stay with such heartless children, Lear will soon rage at the world and its forces in one of the play’s most memorable images…

To continue with Marjorie Garber:

“The character of Goneril is a strong sketch for Lady Macbeth: ruthless, ambitious, purposeful, and thwarted, married to a man – the Duke of Albany – whom she considers weak and womanish. Maleness and femaleness are in the succeeding scenes made into warring factions: the daughters become ‘unnatural hags,” anticipating the Macbeth witches, and the King fears lest the feminine aspects of his own persona emerge to betray him (‘women’s weapons, water drops,’ ‘this mother,’ Histerica passio’). Lear’s ‘nature’ here is not wholly unlike Edmund’s – a destructive goddess, earthy, chthonic, dark, and contrary to order.

Yet Lear holds on to some hope. Perhaps Goneril is the only wicked child. Perhaps Regan will be loyal and natural. No: Regan and her husband, the Duke of Cornwall, will not even speak to Lear, although he now claims the privileges of title he impatiently waived with Kent: ‘The King would speak with Cornwall; the dear father/Would with his daughter speak’ (2.2.266-267). And what is Regan’s view, when at least he gains an audience?

O sir, you are old.

Nature in you stands on the very verge

Of his confine. You should be ruled and led…

(2.2.311-313)

As the blind Gloucester will be ruled and led. Once again the desperate Lear is driven to mummery, to acting out, as he kneels and plays out, to Regan, the scene he has refused to act in front of Goneril:

     Ask her forgiveness?

Do you but mark how this becomes the house?

[Kneeling]’Dear daughter, I confess that I am old.

Age is unnecessary. On my knees I beg

That you’ll vouchsafe me raiment, bed, and food.’

(2.2.317-321)

‘Age is unnecessary.’ The issue of necessity is growing on Lear, rivaling for the first time the commonplaces of luxury and privilege. But Regan is unmoved by his distress. She is angry rather than sympathetic at his curse upon her sister, and the inexorable, remorseless stripping of Lear continues. We may acknowledge, parenthetically, the likelihood that Lear’s knights are riotous, as the daughters’ claim; that Lear fails to keep them in order; that having abdicated his authority he has given his daughters some faint justification for their complaints. This will make his situation more poignant rather than less. If he does need their succor, their refusal is all the more heartless.

Goneril would let him keep only fifty knights. Therefore, he says,

I can be patient, I can stay with Regan,

I and my hundred knights.

‘Not altogether so,’ says Regan.  In fact, not so at all:

     What, fifty followers?

Is it not well? What should you need of more…?

……………………………….
I entreat you

To bring but five and twenty…

But Lear has not yet learned his lesson. He is still mathematical, still legalistic, and he turns back to Goneril (it is a truly terrible scene):

Thy fifty yet doth double five and twenty,

And thou art twice her love.

‘[T]hou art twice her love’ – as if love could be quantified [MY NOTE:  See more on this in my previous post], and as if the ritual love test of the opening scene could retain any purpose and value. Yet still the sisters chip away at his retinue:

Goneril:

Hear me, my lord.

What need you five and twenty, ten, or five,

To follow in a house where twice so many

Have a command to tend you?

Regan:

What need one?

Lear’s reply, one of the great speeches in this great play, shows how quickly, and how low, he has fallen in these first two acts:

O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars

Are in the poorest thing superfluous.

Allow not nature more than nature needs,

Man’s life is cheap as beast’s. Thou art a lady

If only to go warm were gorgeous,

Why, nature needs not what thou, gorgeous, wear’st,

Which scarcely keeps thee warm. But for true need –

You heavens, give me that patience, patience I need.

You see me here, you gods, a poor old man,

As full of grief as age, wretched in both.

If it be you that stirs those daughters’ hearts

Against their father, fool me not so much

To bear it tamely. Touch me with noble anger,

And let not women’s weapons, water-drops,

Stain my man’s cheeks. No, you unnatural hags,

I will have such revenges on you both

That all the world shall – I will do such things –

What they are, yet I know not; but they shall be

The terrors of the earth. You think I’ll weep,

No, I’ll not weep…

‘I’ll not weep.’ Like Macduff, Lear thinks of weeping, the show of emotion, as a woman’s weakness. His cry is still the old cry of revenge. But in a brilliant moment of Shakespearean stagecraft the stage direction takes over from him, and shows Lear, once again the limits of language. (‘And let not woman’s weapons, water-drops…’):

No, I’ll not weep. I have full cause of weeping,

Storm and tempest

But this heart shall break into a hundred thousand flaws

Or ere I’ll weep. – O Fool, I shall go mad!

Eyes and weeping, tears, have been with us since Cordelia cautioned her sisters, in that crucial first scene, that she was leaving them with ‘washed eyes’ – her eyes cleansed by weeping, able to see more because they wept. Now Lear, crying out that he will not weep, sees the storm and tempest weep for him, and beseeching the gods to fool him not, calls out in the same breath for his Fool. And the tempest begins in earnest. This is stagecraft of the highest order – here the inner man has come together with the world he inhabits. The King is in high rage, and the storm rages about him. There is no difference between Lear and his tempest, it is within him and without him; he is its cause. He is now ready, and the audience is now ready, for the third act of his tragedy, perhaps the single most extraordinary act of any Shakespearean play.

We have seen that King Lear proceeds by analogy and comparison. Lear is compared to Gloucester. Edmund to Goneril and Regan, Goneril and Regan to Cordelia, Edgar to Edmund, and so on. Situations seem to fan out and become general. In the same way, the play draws dramatic strength from juxtaposition of scene to scene, phrase to phrase, to form a kind of node of meaning, a fulcrum. For example, in act 2, scene 2, the audience sees the spectacle of Kent in the stocks, demoted from his accustomed rank, concealing his real identity, and Kent speaks of the extremity of his position. ‘Nothing almost seems miracles/But misery,’ he says. ‘Fortune, good night;/Smile once more; turn thy wheel.’ The very next thing the audience sees and hears, in act 2, scene 3, is Edgar, newly disguised, also forced to abandon his identity and his rank, also mistreated, also at what he then imagines will be his lowest point, his ‘worst’ – although  both Edgar and Kent will learn again and again that there is worse to come. The play’s design thus presents two low points, two stripped, denuded men, two disguises and two confirmations and a dramatic effect is achieved by juxtaposition.”

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Two from Frank Kermode – the first from The Sense of a Beginning, which I think is extraordinary:

“In King Lear everything tends toward a conclusion that does not occur; even personal death, for Lear, is terribly delayed. Beyond the apparent worst there is a worse suffering, and when the end comes it is not only more appalling than anybody expected, but a mere image of that horror, not the thing itself. The end is now a matter of immanence; tragedy assumes the figurations of apocalypse, of death and judgment, heaven and hell; but the world goes forward in the hands of exhausted survivors. Edgar haplessly assumes the dignity; only the king’s natural body is at rest. This is the tragedy of sempiternity; apocalypse is translated out of time, into the aevum. The world may, as Gloucester supposes, exhibit all the symptoms of decay and change, all the terrors of an approaching end, but when the end comes it is not an end, and both suffering and the need for patience are perpetual.”

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And to continue from Shakespeare’s Language:

“Enid Welsford, in her valuable book on the Fool, founding the action of this tragedy ‘the great reversal of the Saturnalia.’ The Saturnalia was classical Rome’s winter festival, remembered in the Christian Twelfth Night, when masters and servants changed places and a mock-king or boy-bishop ruled for a day over an upside-down world. Hear Lear, stripped of additions and in his dotage, ‘discovers…what the evil have known from their cradles…that in this world there is no poetic justice.’ The Renaissance, like St. Paul, found much value in folly, and Erasmus, who wrote a famous book about it, also recorded the adage ‘Kings and fools are born, not made, ‘which Shakespeare may have recalled when he has Lear ask, ‘Dost thou call me fool, boy?’ and receives the reply ‘All the other titles thou hast given away, that thou was born with.’ (I.iv.148-50, Quarto only).

Some understanding of the history and privileges of the Fool is essential to understanding King Lear; he is a perpetual reminder of Carnival, of the commentary on grandees allowed by custom to the humble. The Fool is both loyal and bitter; his master has reduced himself absurdly to a fool’s role, and the Fool is now the source of wisdom, fantastically delineating a world turned upside down. The proper additions of the Fool include a coxcomb, and the Fool offers his to the King to take the place of a crown.

Among the additions Lear vainly wants to keep are his hundred knights, but they are reduced to none by the savage calculations of Goneril and Regan. In the opening scene he has amused himself with calculations: how much love is due from her, how much from her, what exactly their rewards will be. He bargains with Burgundy: as a result of new calculations, ‘her [Cordelia’s] price is fallen. In his turn he hears the Dutch auction conducted by his daughters: what need has he of a hundred knights, indeed of fifty, even of five-and-twenty, even, finally of one? Lear joins pathetically in the bargaining ‘fifty yet doth double five and twenty./And thou art twice her love’ ‘O, reason not the need1’ he cries; to reduce a man to no more than what he need, he remarks prophetically, is to make his life as ‘cheap as beast’s’. For this is the moment when the storm is first heard; Lear is to find himself totally unprovided for, with shelter fit only for an animal. Now, more and more, the text begins to be full of animals – the bear, the lion, the wolf; and the King’s life, without additions, is truly as cheap as a beast’s.

The Gloucester plot is introduced immediately after the departure of Cordelia. First Edmund invokes nature as his goddess, a goddess who despise such human, social contrivances as primogeniture. His argument contests the legitimacy of legitimacy in a purely natural world. But there is more at stake than the ambition of the bastard. At the very outset of his scheming he and Gloucester have a perfectly motivated exchange on the subject of nothing:

Gloucester:

What paper were you reading?

Edmund:

Nothing, my lord.

Gloucester:

No? What needed then that terrible dispatch of it into your pocket? The quality of nothing hath not such need to hide itself. Let’s see. Come, if it be nothing, I shall not need spectacles.

Much of the poetry in the play depends on these echoes or repetitions; here ‘nothing’ is associated with seeing, sight, and the loss of it, which Gloucester is soon to suffer. Edmund plays his trick on the foolish old man and on his brother, whose fault is ‘foolish honesty.’ The scene is followed at once by another in which we see Goneril’s contempt for her father (‘Old fools are babes again’) and another displaying the loyalty or foolish honesty of Kent, who is at once stripped of his additions and reduced to the status of a servant.

There are so many significant juxtapositions and encounters in the play that one might overlook the importance of Kent’s assault on another servant, Goneril’s steward Oswald, who has been told to insult the King. Their relationship is brief and violent. Kent comes across Oswald again in II.ii and provokes him to fight. Prevented by Cornwall, he characterizes his opponent in words that apply to all the evil persons in the play and to many in anybody’s acquaintance:

     Such smiling rogues as these,

Like rats, oft bite the holy cords a-twain

Which are t’ intrinse t’ unloose…

The figure is of rats biting through the complicated knots that bind together families, friends, societies; they cannot be untied and are destroyed by the evil gnawing of vermin. Shakespeare nowhere else used ‘intrinse,’ but it is a mistake to emend the word to ‘intrench’ as some editors have done; that reading loses the idea of bonds that are visible and owe their integrity to their complexity. The lines are applied immediately to Oswald, the sycophantic evildoer, but they apply with equal force to the wicked daughters and Edmund. The basic idea lingered in Shakespeare’s mind: Cleopatra asks the asp “With thy sharp teeth this knot intrinsicate/Of life at once untie’ (Antony and Cleopatra, V.ii.304-5). Both words seem to be of Shakespeare’s invention. But in the lines from Lear the knot intrinse or intrinsicate (perhaps, as has been suggested, a blend of ‘intrinsic’ and ‘intricate’) is made up of holy cords (the word ‘holy’ is missing from Q1, but I guess it was present in a lost original; it carries so much of the sense of the simile.)

Immediately after the scene in which Kent first accosts Oswald, another loyal dependant of the King, the Fool, makes his first entrance (I.iv.94). This is something of a crisis, for from now on the play develops a dialect of folly and madness, to be heard in counterpoint with the language of an evil that remains horribly sane. The Fool’s significant first gesture is to offer his coxcomb to the King; then he sings, and the King tells him the song is ‘nothing’; and the pair have a dialogue on the nature of nothing (128-33). The King has divided his wit in two, like an egg cut in half, and given both sides away, leaving nothing in the middle. He is a ‘sheal’d peascod.’ The Fool is insistent: ‘Thou hadst little wit in thy bald crown when thou gav’st  thy golden one away’ (162-63; note his privileged singulars, ‘thou’ and ‘thy’). When Goneril insults him, Lear asks, ‘Does any here know me? This is not Lear…Where are his eyes?…Who is it that can tell me who I am?’ (Here one notes a strain, only later perceptible, on the use of the word ‘eyes’; Lear’s question is nothing one could expect: ‘Who am I?’ Where are my eyes?’ is surely, on reflection, strange.) “Lear’s shadow,’ replies the Fool: shadow, being the opposite of substance (an antithesis I have noted earlier as a favourite theme of Shakespeare’s), is therefore a form of nothing. One could compare Donne’s calling a shadow ‘an ordinary nothing’ in the ‘Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day.’ Lear is already thus drastically reduced.

The language of excess and folly allow the intrusion of images and ideas that do not seem immediately relevant but are essential to the fabric of the play. After his frantic curse on Goneril, dismissed by her as ‘dotage,’ Lear threatens to pluck out his eyes (301-2), and the mild Albany wonders how far his wife’s ‘eyes may pierce.’ The Fool asks Lear a riddle: ‘why one’s nose stand i’ th’ middle on ‘s face?,’ the answer to which is ‘to keep one’s eyes on either side’s nose, that what a man cannot smell out, he may spy into.’ (I.v.19-23)

Now, in Act II, comes the disastrous gathering at Gloucester’s house of the daughters and their husbands, with Kent and Lear arriving later. The plot of Edmund (‘Loyal and natural boy’) against Edgar is afoot. Regan’s wicked opening question to Gloucester was much admired by Coleridge: ‘What, did my father’s godson seek your life?’ Here the supposed crime of Edgar is, as it were, by association exclusively attributed to Lear, his godfather. The periphrastic trick of identifying guilt by tracking kinship reminds one of Hamlet: ‘your husband’s brother’s wife’ is an incriminating way of specifying the Queen his mother. Here the language of Regan, as always, characterizes her as without mercy, cold and cunning. That of Lear, in reply to the Fool’s tauntings, introduces his first thought and fear of madness.”

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And finally for today, from Northrop Frye:

“When you start to read or listen to King Lear, try to pretend that you’ve never heard the story before, and forget that you know how bad Goneril and Regan and Edmund are going to be. That way, you’ll see more clearly how Shakespeare is building up our sympathies in the opposite direction. The opening scene presents first Gloucester and then Lear as a couple of incredibly foolish and gullible dodderers (Gloucester’s gullibility comes out in a slightly later scene). Gloucester boasts about how he bog Edmund in way that embarrasses us as well as Kent, and we feel that Edmund’s treachery, whatever we think of it, is at any rate credibly motivated. Even at the end of the play, his simple phrase ‘Yet Edmund was beloved,’ meaning that Goneril and Regan loved him at least, reminds u s how intensely we can feel dramatic sympathy where we don’t necessarily feel moral sympathy.

As for Lear and his dreary love text, it’s true that Goneril and Regan are being hypocrites when they patter glibly through the declarations of love they are required to make, but we shouldn’t forget that it’s a genuine humiliation, even for them, to have to make such speeches. At no time in the play does Lear ever express any real affection or tenderness for Goneril or Regan. Of course loving Goneril and Regan would be uphill work, but Lear never really thinks in terms of love: he talks about his kindness and generosity and how much he’s given them and how grateful they ought to feel. He does say (publicly) that Cordelia was always his favorite, and that certainly registers with the other two, as their dialogue afterward shows. But they don’t feel grateful, and nobody with Shakespeare’s knowledge of human nature would expect them to. Then again, while they’re not surprised that Lear acts like an old fool, even they are startled by how big a fool he is, and they realize they have to be on their guard to stop him from ever having the power to do to them what he’s just done to Cordelia. The hundred knights Lear insists on could easily start a palace revolution in such a society, so the hundred knights will have to go.

In the first two acts, all Lear’s collisions with his daughters steadily diminish his dignity and leave them with the dramatic honours. They never lose their cool: they are certainly harsh and unattractive women, but they have a kind of brusque common sense that bears him down every time. A hundred knights would make quite a hole in any housekeeper’s budget, and we have only Lear’s word for it that they’re invariably well behaved. If we look at the matter impartially, we may find ourselves asking, with the daughters, what all the fuss is about, and why Lear must have all these knights. When Regan says,

This house is little: the old man and ‘s people

Cannot be well bestow’d.

what she says could have a ring of truth in it, if we forget for the moment that she’s talking about Gloucester’s house, which she and Cornwall have commandeered. Every move that Lear makes is dramatically a flop, as when he kneels to Regan, intending irony, and she says ‘these are unsightly tricks,’ which they assuredly are. The same thing is true of some of Lear’s allies, like Kent and his quarrel with Oswald that lands him in the stocks. It is not hard to understand Kent’s feelings about Oswald, or his exasperation with the fact that Goneril’s messenger is treated with more consideration than the king’s, but still he does seem to be asking for something, almost as though he were a kind of agent provocateur, adopting the strategy of Goneril’s ‘I’d have it come to question.’

It is not until the scene at the end of the second act, with its repeated ‘shut up your doors,’ that our sympathies definitely shift over to Lear. Regan says, ‘He is attended with a desperate train,’ meaning his fifty (or whatever their present number) knights, but they seem to have sloped off pretty promptly as soon as they realized they were unlikely to get their next meal there, and Lear’s ‘desperate train’ actually consists only of the Fool. When we catch her out in a lie of that size we begin to see what has not emerged before, and has perhaps not yet occurred to them: that ‘his daughters seek his death,’ as Gloucester says. It is during and after the storm that the characters of the play begin to show their real nature, and from then on we have something unique in Shakespeare: a dramatic world in which the characters are, like chess players, definitely black or white: black with Edmund, Goneril, Regan and Cornwall; white with Lear, Cordelia, Edgar, Gloucester, Kent and eventually Albany.

Perhaps the best way of finding our bearings in this mammoth structure is to look for clues in the words that are so constantly repeated it seems clear that they’re being deliberately impressed on us. I’d like to look at three of these words in particular: the words ‘nature,’ ‘nothing’ and ‘fool.’

To understand the word ‘nature,’ we have to look at the kind of world view that’s being assumed, first by Shakespeare’s audience, they by the characters in the play. The opening words of Edmund’s first soliloquy are ‘Thou, Nature, art my goddess,’ and later in the first act Lear, beginning his curse on Goneril says: ‘Hear, Nature, hear; dear goddess, hear.’  It seems clear that Edmund and Lear don’t mean quite the same thing by the goddess Nature, but I think Shakespeare’s audience would find this less confusing than we do.

At that time most people assumed that the universe was a hierarchy in which the good was ‘up’ and the bad ‘down’ these ups and downs might be simply metaphors, but that didn’t affect their force or usefulness. At the top of the cosmos was the God of Christianity, whose abode is in heaven; that is, the place where his presence is. The lower heaven or sky is not this heaven, but it is the clearest visible symbol of it. The stars made, as was then believed, out of a purer substance than this world, keep reminding us in their circling of the planning and intelligence that went into the Creator’s original construction.

God made a home for man in the garden of Eden, which, like the stars, was a pure world without any death or corruption in it. But Adam and Eve fell out of this garden into a lower or ‘fallen’ world, a third level into which man is born but feels alienated from. Below this, a fourth level, is the demonic world. The heaven of God is above nature; the demonic world of the devils is below it; but the important thing to keep in mind that the two middle levels both form part of the order of nature, and that consequently ‘nature’ has two levels and two standards. The upper level, the world symbolized by the stars and by the story of the garden of Eden, was man’s original home, the place God intended him to live in. The lower level, the one we’re born into now, is a world to which animals and plants seem to be fairly well adjusted: man is not adjusted to it. He must either sink below it into sin, a level the animals can’t reach, or try to raises himself as near as he can to the second level he really belongs to. I say ‘try to raise himself,’ but he can’t really do that: the initiative must come from above or from social institutions. Certain things – morality, virtue, education, social discipline, religious sacraments – all help him to raise his status. He won’t get back to the garden of Eden: that’s disappeared as a place, but it can be recovered in part as an inner state of mind. The whole picture looks like this to the audience:

1.  Heaven (the place of the presence of God), symbolized by the sun and moon, which are all that’s left of the original creation.

2.  Higher or human order of nature, originally the ‘unfallen’ world or garden of Eden, now the level of nature on which man is intended to live as continually as possible with the aid of religion, morality, and the civilized arts.

3.  Lower or ‘fallen’ order of physical nature, our present environment, a world seemingly indifferent to man and his concerns, though the wise can see many traces of its original splendor.

4.  The demonic world, whatever or wherever it is, often associated with the destructive aspects of nature, such as the storm on the heath.

When we speak of ‘nature’ it makes a crucial difference whether we mean the upper, human level of nature or the environment around us that we actually do live in. Many things are ‘natural’ to man that are not natural to anything else on this lower level, such as living under authority and obedience, wearing clothes, using reason, and the like. Such things show that the proper ‘natural’ environment for man is something different from that of animals. But when Edmund commits himself to his goddess Nature, eh means only the lower, physical level of nature, where human life, like animal life, is a jungle in which the predators are the aristocracy. When Lear appeals to the goddess Nature to curse Goneril, he means a nature that includes what is peculiarly natural to man, an order of existence in which love, obedience, authority, loyalty are natural because they are genuinely human; an order in which ‘art,’ in all its Elizabethan senses, is practically indistinguishable from nature. Goneril is being cursed because her treatment of her father is ‘unnatural’ in this context.

But we shouldn’t assume that Edmund knows clearly that he is talking about a lower aspect of Nature, or that Lear knows clearly that he is talking about a higher one. Such categories aren’t clear yet in a pre-Christian world. In the Lear world there is no actual God, because there is only the Christian God, and he has not revealed himself yet. Very early, when Kent stands out against Lear’s foolish decision, Lear says, ‘Now, by Apollo’ and Kent answers:

Now, by Apollo, King

Thou swear’st thy Gods in vain.

Lear retorts by calling him ‘miscreant,’ unbeliever. A parody of this discussion occurs later, when Kent is in the stocks. And just as the divine world is hazy and mysterious, so is the demonic world. King Lear is in many respects the spookiest of all the great tragedies, and yet nothing explicitly supernatural or superhuman occurs in it: there is nothing to correspond to the Ghost in Hamlet or the witches in Macbeth. Five fiends inhabit Poor Tom, but we don’t believe in his devils, and wouldn’t even if we didn’t know that Poor Tom is really Edgar. To Shakespeare’s audience, the Lear world would look something like this:

1.  World of impotent or nonexistent gods, which tend to collapse into deified personifications of Nature or Fortune.

2.  Social or human world with the elements the more enlightened can see to be essential to a human world, such as love, loyalty, and authority. In particular, the world represented by Cordelia’s and Edgar’s love, Kent’s loyalty, Albany’s conscience, etc.

3.  World of physical nature in which man is born an animal and has to follow the animal pattern of existence, i.e., join the lions or eat well, or the sheep and get eaten.

4.  A hell-world glimpsed in moments of madness or horror.

As an example of what I’m talking about, notice that one of the first points established about Edmund is his contempt for astrology. If we ignore the question of ‘belief’ in astrology, for ourselves or for Shakespeare or his audience, and think of it simply as a dramatic image revealing character, we can see that of course Edmund would dismiss astrology: it has no place in his conception of nature. Astrology was taken seriously in Shakespeare’s day because of the assumption that God had made the world primarily for the benefit of man, and although the original creation is in ruins, we can still many evidences of design in it with a human reference. The stars in the sky are not just there: they’ve been put there for a purpose, and that’s why the configurations of stars can spell out the destinies of men and women.

Similarly, there are links, however mysterious and fitful, between nature and human events, at least on the top social level. Comets, earthquakes and other natural disturbances don’t just happen: they happen at crucial times in human life, such as the death of a ruler. Not necessarily a Christian ruler: there were, as we saw, such portents at the time of the murder of Julius Caesar. So Lear has some ground for expecting that the order of nature around him might take some notice of his plight and of his daughters’ ingratitude, considering that he’s a king. But one thing the storm symbolizes is that he’s moving into an order of nature that’s indifferent to human affairs. His madness brings him to the insight: ‘They told me I was everything: ‘tis a lie; I am not ague-proof.’ With his abdication, whatever links there may be between the civilized world and the one above it have been severed.

It should be clear from all this that the question ‘What is a natural man?’ has two answers. On his own proper human level it is natural to man to be clothed, sociable and reasonable. When Goneril and Regan keep asking Lear why he needs all those knights, the first part of his answer, in the speech beginning ‘Oh, reason not the need,’ is a quite coherent statement of the fact that civilized life is not based simply on needs. But in this storm world that Lear is descending into, what is natural man like? Lear has hardly begun to formulate the question when Poor Tom appears as the answer to it. ‘Didst thou give all to thy daughters?’ Lear asks, still preoccupied with his own concerns. But we’re getting down now to the underside of the Goneril-Regan world:

Poor Tom, that eats the swimming frog, the toad, the tadpole, the wall-newt and the water; that in the fury of his heart, when the foul fiend rages, eats cow-dung for sallets, swallows the old rat and the ditch-dog; drinks the green mantle of the standing pool…(III.iv.132ff.)

The imagery creates a world more nauseating than Hamlet ever dreamed of. ‘Is man no more than this?,’ Lear asks. In a way Poor tom is a kind of ghastly parody of free man, because he owes nothing to the amenities of civilization. Lear is reminded that he still has at least clothes, and starts tearing them off to be level with Poor Tom, but he is distracted from this. He says in a miracle of condensed verbal power: ‘Thou art the thing itself.’ He has started at one end of nature and ended at the other, and now his downward journey has reached a terminus. Perhaps one of Edgar’s motives in assuming his Poor Tom disguise was to provide a solid bottom for Lear’s descent. Before or behind him is the chaos-world portended  by the storm: the world of the furies and fiends that Edgar is keeping Lear protected from, just as he protects Gloucester later from the self-destructive ‘fiend’ that wants to hurl him over a cliff.”

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How’s everybody doing so far?

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clyX26QMw1g

My next post:  Thursday evening/Friday morning:  King Lear, Act Two, Part Two

Enjoy.

King Lear

Act Two, Part Two

By Dennis Abrams

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To start, a bit about the Fool.  It’s the changes in the Folio that affect the Fool more than other character in the play.  And in fact, his dramatic importance in the play seems somehow much greater than his actual role, which is limited to about 225 lines in six scenes; 54, or almost one quarter of his lines, are changed in F.  But while critics in general do agree on his importance (Bloom talks about him in the excerpt below), they differ enormously in their conception of the character, as do theater directors. He may be seen as half-witted, a natural whose wisdom is a form of instinctive clairvoyance, or as a sage rationalist, shrewd and thoughtful; he can be seen as a boy (Lear addresses him as such, and he calls Lear “nuncle”), as a mature perhaps even elderly man (after all, he calls Lear “boy” too in Q); or even as an androgynous youth, perhaps a kind of alter ego for Cordelia – in the productions in 1990 by the Royal Shakespeare Theater and the English Renaissance Company, the Fool was played by an actress (Emma Thompson in the ERC production). He has been portrayed as embodying the conscience of the King, as a voice of social protest, and as a court fool who ultimately “shrivels into a wretched little human being on the soaking heath:” (Bayley). Two famous interpretations of the Fool couldn’t be more different.  In 1982, Antony Sher played him as ‘a clown – a Charlie from the late Victorian circus with Dan Leno boots, a Grock violin, and a red button nose on the length of elastic.” (Shrimpton). He was a skilled entertainer, an artist who enjoyed both cross-talks with Lear and an easy rapport with the audience.  But in his notable film version, Grigroi Kozintsev (1970), removed “from the role of the Fool everything that is associated with clownery,” and portrayed him as a youthful village idiot, costumed as a beggar with a shaved head.

I’ll get into this more in later posts…

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From Bloom:

“King Lear is Lear’s play, not Edmund’s, but as I’ve continued to say, it is also Edgar’s play, and ironically the later Edgar is Edmund’s unintended creation. The sullen or assumed humor of Tom O’Bedlam is the central emblem of the play: philosopher, fool, madman, nihilist, dissembler – at once all of these and none of these. There is a horror of generation that intensifies as the tragedy grows starker, and Edgar, harsher as he proceeds, shares it with Lear. Nothing sweetens Edgar’s imagination of sexuality, whereas Edmund, icy libertine, is deliciously indifferent. ‘Which of them shall I take?/Both? one? Or neither?’ A double-date with Goneril and Regan might faze even King Richard III or Aaron the Moor, but it is second nature to Edmund, who attributes his vivacity, freedom from hypocrisy, and power of plotting to his bastardy, at once provocation to his pride and to some uneasiness of spirit:

     Why brand they us

With base? with baseness? bastardy? base, base?

Who in the lusty stealth of nature take

More composition and fierce quality

Than doth, within a dull, stale, tired bed,

Go to th’ creating a whole tribe of fops,

Got ‘tween asleep and awake?

[I.ii.9-15)

That is Edmund in his ‘fierce quality,’ not the mortally wounded man who has the continued accuracy to say, ‘Tis past, and so am I.’ Edgar, at that moment, takes an opposite view of that ‘lusty stealth of nature’:

The Gods are just, and of our pleasant vices

Make instruments to plague us;

The dark and vicious place where thee he got

Cost him his eyes.

[V.iii.169-72]

The dying Edmund accepts this, but it can be judged very disconcerting, since that ‘dark and vicious place’ does not appear to be an adulterous bed  but is identical with what Lear stigmatizes in his madness:

Down from the waist they are Centaurs,

Though women all above:

But to the girdle do the Gods inherit,

Beneath is all the fiends’: there’s hell, there’s darkness,

There is the sulphurous pit, burning, scalding,

Stench, consumption.

[IV.vi.123-28]

[MY NOTE:  Keep in mind Northrop Frye’s view of “nature” from my last post.]

Admirable son of Gloucester and admirable godson of Lear, approved avenger and future king, Edgar nevertheless emerges impaired in may respects from his long ordeal of abnegation. Not least of these impairments is his evident horror of female sexuality, ‘the dark and vicious place.’ A high price has been exacted for the long descent into the sullen and assumed humor of Tom O’ Bedlam. The cost of confirmation for Edgar is a savage wound in his psyche, but the entire play is more of a wound than the critical tradition has cared to acknowledge. Feminist critics, and those influence by them, at least address themselves to the rhetoric of male trauma and hysteria that governs the apparent misogyny of Lear’s drama. I say ‘apparent’ because the revulsion from all sexuality by Lear and by Edgar is a mark for an even more profound alienation, not so much from excessive familial love as from bewilderment by such love. Edmund is brilliant and resourceful, but his prime, initial advantage over everyone else in the play is his total freedom from all familial affect, a freedom that enhances his fatal fascination for Goneril and Regan.

Are Shakespeare’s perspectives in Lear incurably male? The only woman in the play who is not a fiend is Cordelia, whom some recent feminist critics see as Lear’s own victim, a child he seeks to enclose as much at the end as at the beginning. Such a view is certainly not Cordelia’s perspective on her relationship with her father, and I am inclined to credit her rather than her critics. Yet their sense of being troubled is an authentic and accurate reaction to a play that divests all of us, male and female auditors and readers alike, of not less than everything. Dr. Johnson’s inability to sustain the murder of the virtuous Cordelia is another form of the same reaction. When Nietzsche said that we possess art lest we perish of the truth, he gave a very equivocal homage to art, and yet his apothegm is emptied out by King Lear, where we do perish of the truth. The Freudian, witty oxymoron of ‘family romances’ loses its wit in the context of King Lear, where familiar love offers you only a choice between destructions. You can live and die as Gloucester, Lear, and Cordelia do, or as Goneril, Regan, and Edmund so, or you can survive as Edgar does, a fate darker than that of all the others.

The noun value in Shakespeare lacks our high-mindedness: it means either an ‘estimation’ of worth, or a more speculative ‘estimate,’ both being commercial terms rather bluntly carried over into human relations. Sometimes I think that our only certain knowledge of the man Shakespeare is that his commercial shrewdness rivaled or overtopped every other author’s, before or since. Economy in Shakespeare extends to the noun love, which can mean ‘lover’ but also means ‘friends,’ or a ‘kind act,’ and sometimes for love’s sake means ‘for one’s own sake.’ Johnson wonderfully tells us that, unlike every other dramatist, Shakespeare refuses to make love a universal agent:

‘but love is only one of many passions, and as it has no great influence upon the sum of live, it has little operation in the dramas of a poet, who caught his ideas from the living world, and exhibited only what he saw before him. He knew, that any other passion, as it was regular or exorbitant, was a cause of happiness or calamity.’

Johnson speaks of sexual love, rather than familial love, a distinction that Shakespeare taught Freud partly to void. Repressed incestuous desire for Cordelia, according to Freud, causes Lear’s madness. Cordelia, again according to Freud, is so darkly silent at the play’s opening because of her continued desire for her father. Certainly the family romance of Sigmund and Anna Freud has its effect in these rather too interesting weak misreadings. Lear’s excessive love transcends even his attachment to Cordelia: it comprehends the Fool and others. The worship of Lear by Kent, Gloucester, Albany, and most of all his godson Edgar is directed not only at the great image of authority but at the central emblem of familial love, or patriarchal love (if you would have it so). The exorbitant passion or drive of familial love both in Lear and in Edgar is the cause of calamity. Tragedy, at its most exorbitant, whether in Athens or at the Globe, must be domestic tragedy, or tragedy of blood in both senses of blood. We don’t want to come away from a reading or performance of King Lear murmuring to ourselves that the domestic is necessarily a tragedy, but that may be the ultimate nihilism of this play.

….

Leo Tolstoy raged against King Lear, partly because he accurately sensed the drama’s profound nihilism, but also out of creative envy, and perhaps, too, he had the uncanny premonition that Lear’s scenes upon the heath would approximate his own final moments. For those who believe that divine justice somehow prevails in this world, King Lear ought to be offensive. At once the least secular and yet the least Christian of all Shakespeare’s plays, Lear’s tragedy shows us that we are all ‘fools,’ in the Shakespearean sense, except for those among us who are outright villains. ‘Fools’ in Shakespeare can mean ‘dupes,’ ‘beloved ones,’ ‘madmen,’ ‘court jesters,’ or most of all, ‘victims.’ Lear’s suffering is neither redeemable nor redeemed. Carefully stationing his play nine centuries before Christ (the time of Solomon), Shakespeare knows he has a (more or less) Christian audience, and so give them a pagan, legendary king who loses all faith in the gods. If you were King James I, you could be provoked by King Lear to the idea that Christian revelation was implied as a deep human need by the hopelessness of Shakespeare’s play. But I think that skeptical Jacobeans (and there were more such than modern criticism concedes) could be stimulated to just the opposite conclusion. Faith is absurd or irrelevant in regard to this dark vision of reality. Shakespeare, as always, stands apart from such reductiveness, and we cannot know what he believed or disbelieved, and yet the burden of King Lear allows us finally only four perspectives: Lear’s own, the Fool’s, Edmunds, Edgar’s. You have to be a very determined Christianizer of literature to take any comfort from this most tragic of all tragedies. The play is a storm, with no subsequent clearing.

Lear himself is Shakespeare’s most sublime and most demanding character. Hamlet is incommensurate with us, because he is both charismatic and superbly intelligent, and yet we at least comprehend our distance from Hamlet. Lear, beyond us in grandeur and in essential authority, is still a startlingly intimate figure, since he is an emblem of fatherhood itself. Outrageously hyperbolical, insanely eloquent, Lear nevertheless always demands more love than can be given (within the limitations of the human), and so he scarcely can speak without crossing into the realms of the unsayable. He is thus Hamlet’s contrary: we feel that Hamlet says everything that can be said, much more than we can say, whoever we are. Lear overwhelms us, by Shakespearean design, because he somehow succeeds in saying what no one else, not even Hamlet, ever could say. From his first words (‘Meantime, we shall express our darker purpose’) through his last…he cannot speak without disturbing us. Lear’s rhetorical power itself largely renders Cordelia mute and recalcitrant. ‘Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave/My heart into my mouth.’ Upon the malevolences Goneril and Regan, it has the contrary effect: everything they speak is stilted, pompous, hollow, false, quite hateful, as we see in Goneril’s ‘A love that makes breath poor and speech unable’ and Regan’s ‘I am alone felicitate/In your dear highness’s love.’

Lear’s verbal force almost always preempts all spontaneity of speech in others. The exception is his Fool, the uncanniest character in Shakespeare, and the third, with Ophelia and Lear, in the play’s true family, its community of love. In Hamlet, the prince’s authentic family ties are to Yorick, in the past, and to Horatio, in the play’s present time. One function of Lear’s Fool is precisely that of Hamlet’s Horatio: to mediate, for the audience, a personage otherwise beyond our knowing. Hamlet being too far beyond us, and Lear being blindingly close. Much of what we know in Hamlet we receive from Horatio, just as the Fool similarly humanizes Lear, and makes the dread king accessible to us. Horatio survives Hamlet, much against his own will. The Fool bewilderingly vanishes, another Shakespearean ellipsis that challenges the audience to reflect upon the meanings of this strangest of characters. A fascinating presence that provokes Lear further into madness, the Fool becomes an absence still provocative, though then to the audience, not to the king. The Fool, again like Horatio, is a chorus, which is to be something other than a character in a play. You could remove the Fool and Horatio and not alter much in the way of plot structures, but you would remove our surrogates from these plays, for the Fool and Horatio are the true voices of our feelings. Horatio loves Hamlet; his only other attribute is a capacity for surmise, of woe or of wonder. The Fool loves Lear and Cordelia, and he is loved by them; otherwise he is an amazing blend of bitter wisdom and witty terror. Horatio is a comfort to us, but the Fool drives us a little mad even as he pushes Lear further into madness, so as to punish the King for his great folly. Shakespeare uses the Fool in many ways, and one of them clearly involves Erasmus’s preference for folly over knowing. Blake may have been thinking of Lear’s Fool in the Proverb of Hell: ‘ If the Fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise.’

Lear loves him and treats him as a child, but the Fool is of no determinate age, though clearly he will not grow up. Is he altogether human, or a sprite or changeling? His utterance differ sharply from those of any court fool in Shakespeare; he alone seems to belong to an occult world. Yet his acute ambivalence toward Lear, founded upon an outrage at Cordelia’s exile and Lear’s self-destructiveness, is one of Shakespeare’s crucial inventions of human affect. We do not encounter the Fool until Scene iv of the play, when Lear notes his two-day absence and is told, ‘Since my young Lady’s going into France, Sir, the Fool hath much pined away.’ ‘Nothing will come of nothing: speak again,’ Lear’s earlier warning to Cordelia, echoes in the Fool’s questioning of Lear (‘Can you make no use of nothing, Nuncle?’) and in the king’s reply (‘Why no, boy, nothing can be made out of nothing.’) These are pagans speaking, yet they almost seem to mock the Christian doctrine of creation out of nothing. ‘Thou hast pared thy wit o’both sides, and left nothing i’ th’ middle,’ one of the Fool’s most reverberatory observations, holds the kernel of the play’s troubles; Lear fails to maintain the middle ground of his sovereignty, by dividing Cordelia’s central portion between Goneril’s northern realm and Regan’s southern tyranny. Lear, who was everything in himself, is now nothing:

Lear:

Does any here know me? This is not Lear:

Does Lear walk thus? speak thus? Where are his eyes?

Either his notion weakens, his discernings

Are lethargied – Ha! waking? ‘tis not so.

Who is it that can tell me who I am.

Fool:

Lear’s shadow.

From nothing, Lear rises to madness, spurred to it by the Fool’s continuous taunts:

Lear:

O me! my heart, my rising heart; but, down!

Fool:

Cry to it, Nuncle, as the cockney did to the eels when she put ‘em i’ the’ paste alive; she knapp’d ‘em o’th’coxcombs with a stick, and cried ‘Down, wantons, down!’ ‘Twas her brother that, in pure kindness to his horse, buttered his hay.

Lear’s madness is much debated: his revulsion from Goneril and Regan becomes an involuntary horror of female sexuality, and the king appears to equate his own torments with female elements he senses in his own nature. In the best commentary on this difficult matter, Janet Adelman (in her Suffocating Mothers, 1992) goes so far as to say that Shakespeare himself rescues a ‘threatened masculinity’ by murdering Cordelia. On that argument, subtle and extreme, Flaubert does the same to Emma Bovary, and even the protofeminist Samuel Richardson violates his Clarissa Harlowe into her suicidal decline and demise. Adelman is the most accomplished and formidable of all those who now emphasizes Lear’s culpability for his disasters. I find it a curious irony that feminist criticism has taken up the Fool’s ambivalence toward Lear, and in doing so has gone beyond the Fool, who after all never ceases to love the King. To feminist critics, Lear is a man more sinning than sinned against. If you really cannot see Goneril and Regan as monsters of the deep, then it must be that your ideology constrains you to believe all men are culpable, Shakespeare and Lear included. But we are back in the fundamental dilemma of School of Resentment criticism of Shakespeare, whether feminist, Marxist, or historicist (Foucault-inspired). The contextualizations are never distinctly appropriate to Shakespeare; they do as well or as badly for minor writers as for major, and if the governing designs are feminist, then they work equally well or badly for all male writers whatsoever. That Shakespeare, another mere male, is also afflicted by fantasies of maternal origin in no way helps explain how and why King Lear is arguably the most powerful and inescapable of literary works. The Fool remains a better critic of Lear than all later resenters of the king, because he accepts Lear’s sublimity and uniqueness and they cannot.

From the Fool’s perspective, Lear indeed is culpable, but only because he was not patriarchal enough to accept Cordelia’s recalcitrance at expressing her love. On that view, Lear is condemned for having forsaken his own fatherhood: to divide his kingdom and betray royalty authority was also to abandon Cordelia. The Fool’s visionary terror is neither antifeminist nor feminist; it is curiously Nietzschean in that it, too, insists upon the image of fatherhood as being the necessary middle ground that alone can keep origins and ends from turning into each other. And the Fool is accurate, certainly in regard to Lear’s fall into division and despair, and also in his terror that the cosmos centered upon Lear itself undergoes degradation with the king. Precisely apocalyptic in his forebodings, the Fool ironically is understood only by the audience (and Kent) but almost never by Lear, who listens yet never hears, and cannot identify himself with the bungler the Fool evokes. Yet what drives the Fool? Once Lear has divided Cordelia’s portion between Goneril and Regan, it is simply too late for warnings and admonishments to make any pragmatic difference, and the Fool knows this. Ambivalence runs wild in the Fool: yet punishing Lear by increasing his madness can do no good, except to drama itself:

Fool:

If thou wert my Fool, Nuncle, I’d have thee beaten for being old before thy time.

Lear:

How’s that?

Fool:

Thou shouldn’t not have been old till thou hadst been wise.

Lear:

O! let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven;

Keep me in temper; I would not be mad!

The Fool and Lear sing trios with the undertaker, in this great spiritual chorus of things falling apart. When a Gentlemen tells Kent, at the start of Act III, that the Fool labors to outjest Lear’s heart-stricken injuries, we feel that this is wrong. As Kent leads Lear and the Fool to a hovel-shelter from the storm, Shakespeare allows the Fool a prophecy premonitory of William Blake:

This is a brave night to cool a courtezan.

I’ll speak a prophecy ere I go:

When priests are more in word than matter,

When brewers mar their malt with water;

When nobles are their tailors’ tutors;

No heretics burn’d, but wenches’ suitors;

When every case in law is right;

No squire in debt, nor now poor knight;

When slanders do not live in tongues;

Nor cut-purses come not to throngs;

When usurers tell their gold i’th’field;

And bawds and whores do churches build;

Then shall the realm of Albion

Come to great confusion:

Then comes the time, who lives to see’t,

That going shall be us’d with feet.

The prophecy Merlin shall make; for I live before his time.

[III.ii.79-95]

Weird and wonderful, this exuberant chant transcends Lear’s anguished situation and the Fool’s childlike fury. Who is the Fool to utter this, and what inspired Shakespeare to such an outburst? After his prophesying, the Fool ceases to madden Lear, and becomes touchingly waiflike, until soon enough he mysteriously vanishes from the play. Shakespeare probably thought he was parodying Chaucer in the opening lines of the Fool’s verses, and directly quoting the same passage (wrongly ascribed to Chaucer) in lines 91-92, yet he goes well beyond parody into an obliquely powerful condemnation of a Jacobean England where priests, brewers, nobles, and tailors are all condemned. This goes along merrily enough, and the ‘great confusion’ of an Albion where matters are righted is genially ironic, ensuing in the grand anticlimax of Englishmen employing their feet for walking: ‘This prophecy Merlin shall make, for I live before his time’ concludes a fine chant of nonsense, while associating the Fool with Merlin’s magic. Though trapped in Lear’s endgame, the Fool is also free of time, and presumably drifts out of the play into another era…”

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And finally from the book Living with Shakespeare; a bit from British actor Tobias Menzies’ essay “Method and Madness”

“I worked with Rupert [Goold] again as Edgar in his production of King Lear, which starred the late Pete Postelthwaite. It was certainly a type of production that’s more in fashion in Germany, for instance, than it is in England. One of the most thrilling productions of Hamlet I’ve seen in recent years was a German production that came over from the Schaubuhne in Berlin. While doing the play, they were also playing with the fact that there was an audience there, using us to illuminate the play, which is a play that is so much about what is true and what is not. There were moments which were completely naturalist – obeying the dramatic unities, if you like – but then they would flip that and comment on the fact that we were all in a theatre, participating in this make-believe. It felt incredibly modern. Seeing that, I thought that I’m not sure that we’ve quite got to that point of playfulness with Shakespeare in England. Maybe it’s because it’s our language, and maybe because in German it’s in translation and so they feel they have more license. The play felt dangerous. It was anarchic, You weren’t quite sure what was going to happen next, and I think that in our production of Lear, Rupert was pushing at that door.

I think there’s a potential pitfall of working on Shakespeare, certainly in our country, where he’s our premier poet, is that one is too reverential. That attitude can affect the playing of it, and when I’ve watched Shakespeare I’ve always responded to something a little more visceral, a little more instinctual. When these industries grow up around Shakespeare they can entomb it in some way, and I’m not sure that it’s helpful; for example, the academia that has built up around Shakespeare studies. That’s not to deny that some of it is very interesting, but I think that if you’re too slavish with the scholarship, it can get in the way when you’re trying to perform Shakespeare, trying to bring it alive for our times. Sometimes you read notes on a play that make a statement on a character, but as an actor you know that whether or not the character is like that depends on how you say those lines. Shakespeare has been so enduring because he can be interpreted in so many different ways. You never tire of seeing Hamlet, for instance, because in a way each Hamlet is different depending on what each person brings to it, the different strands he draws out.

In Lear, for example, when Edgar is accused of intending to kill Gloucester, he flees the court and finds himself alone on the heath. He decides to pretend to be mad, and to become Poor Tom – and there are many ways of interpreting that decision. I felt that this choice was an instinctual, almost animal decision, not an intellectual one; that it would be through his body and through the physical reality of debasing himself that he would arrive at some sort of release, some sort of understanding. When Edgar heads onto the heath, it’s an exploration of the wild, of the human being as creature: in the middle of that great storm, all the normal, civilizing accoutrements don’t help you. For one of my physical models, I looked at a young Iggy Pop. I wanted Poor Tom to have that anarchic punkiness, to explore that wildness. One of the main challenges of playing Edgar was the very physicality of it. I was in the pouring rain every night, and I was cold, and got ill. So it was also about keeping fit, keeping healthy, not getting sick. There’s a difference between theorizing a play, and actually performing in it.

I’ve played Hamlet and Edgar, both characters that assume madness and then, as a result of their experiments with madness, learn about themselves and those around them. The idea of madness meant different things in Shakespeare’s time than it does in our own, for it had an existential dimension. I explored these larger ideas of madness through wildness. That’s how I accessed Edgar: through the expression of the wild, of freedom, of becoming a creature as Edgar debases himself to that animal place – a person who could say and do anything, a less medicalised, more existential idea of what is to be mad.

One of the hardest movements in Edgar’s journey is that first decision to turn himself into Poor Tom:

     Whiles I may scape,

I will preserve myself, and am  bethought

To take the basest and most poorest shape

That ever penury in contempt of man

Brought near to beast; my face I’ll grime with filth,

Blanket my loins, elf all my hairs in knots,

And with presented nakedness outface

The winds and persecutions of the sky.

           …Poor Turlygod, poor Tom!

That’s something yet: Edgar I nothing am.

It’s a difficult pivot. It happens so quickly, and it’s such a bizarre thing to do. Having seen it played a number of times before I did it, I had always disliked and struggled with Edgar being too wimpy. Poor Tom is usually portrayed as this weak, pitiful creature, and he is all those things – ‘Poor Tom’s a-cold,’ he repeats again and again, stripped down to nothing and covered with mud. But he’s not just that. What is his attitude toward it? I felt, in a paradoxical way, that to debase himself like that is an aggressive thing to do. It’s kind of like saying, ‘You see what you’ve done?’ It is a weirdly backward way of punishing the people who have done it to you. It’s to outwardly demonstrate the fear and the anger and the hurt; and it’s not a passive or feeble thing to do.  It’s actually violent.

The trope of madness allows Shakespeare to explore so much, in both Lear and Hamlet. When Hamlet ‘goes mad,’ suddenly the possibilities of what he can think and feel and talk about really widen. With Lear, the meeting between Poor Tom and Lear is pivotal to Lear’s journey, ‘First let me talk with this philosopher,’ he says, and then tears off his clothes in imitation. You could argue that the meeting of Poor Tom on the heath is the moment Lear goes mad.”

More on this next week when we start Act Three

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wH9BuJMNUP8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4-fQbVohQ4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrAYq7MuV5k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T2MYlY7HkY

My next post:  Sunday evening/Monday morning – final thoughts on Act Two

Enjoy.  And enjoy your weekend.

King Lear

Act Two, Part Three

By Dennis Abrams

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For my Sunday evening post, and before we dive into Act Three (perhaps the pinnacle OF the pinnacle that is King Lear), I thought we should step back a bit and take a look at how the play itself has been seen over the years – how it climbed up the “hit parade” of Shakespeare’s plays to where it is now – seen as his greatest achievement.

As you all know, I’m very much impressed with Marjorie Garber’s reading of Shakespeare, as found in her book Shakespeare After All.  There’s another book of hers, Shakespeare and Modern Culture which I find equally impressive – a collection of essays with the basic premise “that Shakespeare makes modern culture and that modern culture makes Shakespeare.”

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From her essay, “King Lear:  the Dream of Sublimity”

“As far back as the late eighteenth century, Hamlet had been considered as perhaps the ‘greatest’ of Shakespeare’s plays, and certainly as his most popular tragedy. Coleridge said so in England, Goethe said so in Germany. But in the middle of the twentieth century, a shift occurred in the public consciousness of two of Shakespeare’s plays, Hamlet and King Lear. This shift was clearly and cogently noted in a 1993 book by R.A. Foakes called Hamlet versus Lear.

Foakes argued that the primacy of Hamlet changed at mid-century in part because of a change in how audiences understood King Lear. When Lear was read as a play about redemption, and particularly Christian redemption, it had a host of fervent admirers, but it nonetheless stood apart from the experience of many. In the late 1950s and ‘60s, Foakes contended, the ‘meaning’ of Lear for audiences and readers began to change in response to cataclysmic world events like the exploding of the hydrogen bomb, political turmoil in Eastern Europe and Cuba, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and the start of the Vietnam War. The play then ‘became Shakespeare’s bleakest and most despairing vision of suffering, all hints of consolation undermined or denied.”

In support of his thesis Foakes presented three lists: a list of critics who called Hamlet Shakespeare’s ‘best’ or ‘greatest’ play, or at least his greatest tragedy; a list of other critics (some as early as the nineteenth century or the first years of the twentieth) who made similar claims for King Lear; and a list of major events of the period 1954-65, beginning with the explosion of the H-bomb on Bikini Atoll and the consequent spread of nuclear fallout to Japanese fishing  boats and to islanders in the region, and ending with the first bombing of North Vietnam and the Watts riots in Los Angeles. His claims are not causal but relational; the world, or at least the world of Shakespeare readers, directors, and students, was ready for a new Lear, or receptive to the Lear that they now found and made.

Had he continued his list beyond 1965, Foakes might have listed two more tragic American assassinations, those of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.; as well as the growth of the counterculture and the 1967 ‘Summer of Love’; the intensification of both the Vietnam War and resistance to it, and the ‘events of 68’ in France, Prague, and around the world. ‘Never trust anyone over thirty’ was a saying that emerged out of the Free Speech movement at the University of California, Berkeley, in the mid-sixties, but its resonances continued through the next several years, in politics, generational conflict, music, and popular culture.

How can we calibrate and document the reasons why King Lear rose on the Shakespearean stock market in the middle of the twentieth century? In doing so we will see that the trend was not ‘universal’ (to use yet another one of the words of high praise characteristically applied to both Hamlet and Lear as well as to Shakespeare himself). Praise for the relevance and moral power of King Lear was not usually, if ever, linked to any dispraise of Hamlet. It was rather, as Foakes claimed in the last sentence of his book, that in his view, and the view of several other critics at the time, King Lear, ‘speaks more largely than the other tragedies to the anxieties and problems of the modern world.’

We should not, from the perspective of the first decade of the twenty-first century, that there has been a certain, perhaps inevitable, fluctuation in the market, with high-school and college students, particularly, returning to a closer identification with Hamlet than with Lear. Fueled by the spate of new action-oriented Hamlet films starting Mel Gibson and Kenneth Branagh – not to mention the ‘slacker Hamlet’ played by Ethan Hawke in director Michael Almeredya’s version, filmed in 2000 – younger viewers find it easier to identify with Hamlet than to find a place for themselves within King Lear. When I met with a group of secondary school teachers to discuss the presentation of Shakespeare in the classroom, several of them mentioned that Lear was a difficult play to teach. Although the instructors responded to the play’s bleakness and sublimity, the students tended to find it somewhat estranging. If their mode of reading is not existential or allegorical, the plight of the old king may strike them as distant from their own concerns, and none of the younger generation – Edmund or Edgar, Goneril, Regan, or even Cordelia – is so readily available as a transferential ‘hero.’

The role of Hamlet in the formation of modern culture seemed to have been predicated on one of several scripts, like personal identification, as in Coleridge’s ‘I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may so’; biographical detection, as in psychoanalyst Ernest Jones’s claim that ‘the play is almost universally considered to be the chief masterpiece of one of the greatest minds the world has known. It probably expresses the core of Shakespeare’s philosophy and outlook on life as no other work of his does’; or allegorical extrapolation, as in Emerson’s famous declaration in his ‘American Scholar’ address that ‘the time is infected with Hamlet’s unhappiness, — ‘Sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.’’ When Emerson made this observation in 1837, it was already something of a truism – a commonplace phrase that would be recognized by his listeners. (Indeed he went on to say that things were in fact not ‘so bad,’ that the time was ‘a very good one,’ in which literature was responding to the ‘topics of the time,’ the complex political and social needs of the ear.)  But the sentiment continued to be expressed for the next hundred years and more.

For Georg Brandes, the Danish critic, author of an influential study of Shakespeare published in English translation in 1902, Hamlet was emblematic of ‘the typical modern character, with its intense feeling of the strife between the idea and the actual world.’ Notice the recurrence of this word ‘modern,’ which seems almost reflexively to have come to indicate something of the affinity critical observers felt with Hamlet as a character. They recognized themselves, as well as their times, in him.

In Europe, especially, this overthinking, underacting Hamlet was considered a version of the irresolution of political intellectuals, whose ideas could not be translated into action – and it was but a short step to identifying the malaise of an entire nature in this way. Foakes notes that ‘Germany is Hamlet’ was the beginning of a poem written in the mid-nineteenth century, and both Poland and Russia had moments of thinking of themselves, explicitly, as Hamlet. In France, Mallarme saw Hamlet as a kind of ghost, tormented with the necessity of having to appear. The French poet and dramatist Paul Claudel reflected on Mallarme’s observations: ‘With Hamlet their appeared a theme…which waited two centuries to find an atmosphere it could develop in the attraction to Night, the penchant for unhappiness, the bitter communion between the shadows and this anguish of being mortal.

‘Hamlet’ became cultural code for ‘a troubled, indecisive, or capricious person (OED). A character in Eugene O’Neill’s play A Moon for the Misbegotten (written in the period 1941-43) confides that ‘suddenly, for no reason, all the fun went out of it, and I was more melancholy than ten hamlets.’ Not only was ‘a Hamlet’ moody, though; he was often ineffectual, rendered immobile by too much consideration. The shorthand notion of Hamlet as a delayer who misses his moment has continued in political discourse throughout the twentieth century and to the present day. Thus, for example, Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State, George P. Schultz, cautioned that ‘We cannot allow ourselves to become the Hamlet of nations, worrying suddenly over whether and how to respond.’

To a certain extent this version of the modern Hamlet has been recuperated by actors and critics who have made him into an action hero in a time of inaction. In this view, it was the time that was out of joint, not the hero. If Olivier’s Hamlet was, famously, ‘a man who could not make up his mind,’ he was, nonetheless, a heroic figure, struggling against a corrupt world.

In any case, though, whether heroic or neurasthenic, athletic or languorous, thinking too much of just thinking, Hamlet became a byword, a figure for intense (even overintense) subjectivity – personality, individuality, consciousness.

But this has never been the case with King Lear. For all its use of soliloquy, and Lear’s impassioned and brilliant speeches in act 3, the play of King Lear, which has been interpreted in a wide range of ways over time, has come for us to signify something else that is modern: the emptiness, illogic, terror, and absurdity of the modern condition. The play has been read in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as an existential allegory, as a social treatise, as a philosophical statement: an icon of modern life, not of modern man.

Some earlier critics had already elevated Lear above Hamlet. William Hazlitt, the Romantic critic, for example, expressed the opinion that King Lear ‘is the best of all Shakespeare’s plays,’ basing his argument, interestingly, in part on a claim of sincerity: ‘it is the one in which he was most earnest.’ For Hazlitt ‘the Lear of Shakespeare cannot be acted,’ since ‘the greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension, but in intellectual, and if we read the play rather than watch an actor in the role, ‘we see not Lear, but we are Lear.’ A.C. Bradley, in his Oxford lectures on Shakespearean tragedy, expressed the view that Lear was ‘Shakespeare’s greatest achievement’ (although he thought it ‘not his best play’):

‘King Lear has again and again been described as Shakespeare’s greatest work, the best of his plays, the tragedy in which he exhibits most fully his multitudinous powers; and if we were doomed to lose all his dramas except one, probably the majority of those who know and appreciate him best would pronounce for keeping King Lear.

Yet this tragedy is certainly the last popular of the famous four. The ‘general reader’ reads it less often than the others, and though he acknowledges its greatness, he will sometimes speak of it with a certain distaste.’

Hamlet, by contrast, is several times described by Bradley, admiringly, as ‘the most popular of Shakespeare’s tragedies on our stage’ and as the play that is highest in ‘general esteem.’ But popularity was only one gauge. In trying to explain why and how King Lear could be Shakespeare’s ‘greatest’ without being his ‘best play,’ Bradley had telling recourse to the comparison with other arts. He says that Lear is ‘greater than’ Hamlet, Othello, or Macbeth, and the ‘fullest revelation of Shakespeare’s power’ (‘I find that I am not regarding it simply as a drama, but am grouping it in my mind with works like the Prometheus Vinctus and the Divine Comedy and even with the greatest symphonies of Beethoven and the statues in the Medici Chapel.’)

As we will see, this intuition, linking King Lear to the profoundest achievements of Dante, Beethoven, and Michelangelo, speaks not only to the language of suffering, but also to the question of sublimity. IN fact the story of King Lear in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries offers a striking example of the intersection between timeliness and timelessness that has been a hallmark of Shakespeare’s persistent modernity since Ben Jonson eulogized him as ‘not of an age, but for all time.’ In the case of King Lear, this meant not so much an ‘identification’ with the hero’s dilemma, as with the way in which the hero’s consciousness of catastrophe became a cultural mise-en-scene.

From the 1960s on, King Lear held price of place among Shakespeare’s ‘greatest’ plays, at least in the view of many. In its first edition, in 1962, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, the basic canonical textbook for college English majors across the United States, printed only two plays by Shakespeare: Henry IV, Part 1 and King Lear (not Hamlet). In 1975 the Yale English scholar Maynard Mack published a short book called King Lear in Our Time, based upon lectures he had given at Berkeley in the previous year. At the same time there appeared for the first time in English translation another, equally influential book that also put King Lear at its center, the Polish writer Jan Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary. Kott’s interpretation became vastly important for the itinerary of King Lear in the theater and on film from the sixties on. In both of these books – books which could not; in other ways, be more different – the word ‘our,’ a classic shifter (whose time? whose contemporary?) signals both a problem and a market for modernity.

But the story begins much further back.

When Dr. Samuel Johnson, the Shakespeare editor dictionary maker, poet, and moralist, came to edit the scene of Cordelia’s death for his edition of 1765, he added a personal note in his edition: ‘I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia’s death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor.’

Johnson’s shock was, we might think, salutary and indicative of the play’s power – but for critics, writers, and audiences in the years before this, the death of Cordelia was a major flaw, and one that could be, and was, corrected. Shakespeare was a great poet, no doubt, but he lived in a barbarous age, and his works could be ‘improved’ according to modern taste – the modern taste of the Restoration, the last years of the seventeenth century. Shakespeare died in 1616; the First Folio of his plays was published, by friends in 1623, ‘according to the true and perfect copies’ of the plays he had left them; in 1681, only half a century later, Nahum Tate had rewritten the play, as Shakespeare would have written it had he only known how to do so. From 1681 until 1838, some 150 years, only Nahum Tate’s King Lear was performed on the English stage. You could read Shakespeare’s play, but you could not see it performed. Hazlitt and Keats read Shakespeare, but they saw Shakespeare as rewritten by Tate.

What kinds of ‘improvements’ did Nahum Tate make? Well, centrally, he invented what he clearly felt lay close beneath the surface: a love affair between Cordelia and Edgar. Cordelia thus consciously ‘tempts’ her father to leave her no dowry, so that Burgundy will refuse to marry her, and she will be free to pursue a relationship with Edgar. (Both the King of France and the Fool are eliminated completely from the plot, since the first seemed superfluous, and the second, indecorous.)

Cordelia is indeed fairly crafty. She at first refuses Edgar, so as to test his love for her, driving him to the device of disguising himself so that he may prove his love and be of potential service to his lady. (This is also what Kent does in Shakespeare’s play, disguising himself as a common man so as to serve the exiled and broken King.) In Tate’s version, Cordelia is abducted by ruffians at the behest of Edmund, who plans to rape her. She is rescued by the disguised Edgar, who then can reveal his real identity, and the lovers exit, satisfactorily, together. At the end of the play Lear, who has been sleeping in his prison with his head in Cordelia’s lap, rouses himself when soldiers come to kill her, dispatches two of them, and holds on valiantly until Edgar and Albany come to rescue them. The play, in short, has become a melodrama – very effective theater, though not the play Shakespeare wrote.

Nevertheless, Tate’s version was ‘Shakespeare’ on the English stage for a century and a half, until the great actors and theater managers of the middle of the century restored Shakespeare’s words and actions. William Macready was the first, in 1838, and from that time Shakespeare’s play displaced Nahum Tate’s. The Fool, banished as coarse and grotesque – the very elements that would make him a perfect figure for twentieth-century modernity – returned to the play, but initially, for Victorians, more like a sprite than a sage. (Maynard Mack reminds us that this was the time of Peter Pan.)

And what about Lear himself? For a long time on the nineteenth-century stage he was almost a kind of Polonius – a doddering lunatic, an ‘old man teetering about the stage with a walking stick,’ as Charles Lamb said. The majestic actor Edmund Kean, wrote Hazlitt, “driveled and looked vacant.’ The magnificent language of the play, the towering speeches, the enormous pathos of conception and experience, were often turned into something like bathos instead. It was only gradually that the change was perceived, a return to the region of the sublime.

The later nineteenth century, and the early twentieth century, insulated itself in a way from the raw emotions produced by the play by overproducing it – elaborate stage sets, caves, huts, storms mechanically evoked, where the noise of the stage machines overwhelms the actor and the voice, leaving nothing to imagination – and also by situating the play in deep time – at the time of Stonehenge, or early Britain, with a kind of resolute primitivism. That was then; this is now. The language of the play permits an early modern as well as an ancient British ambiance – ‘robes and furred gowns hide all,’ says Lear.

….

On the eve of World War II, in 1938, W.B. Yeats published a poem called ‘Lapis Lazuli’ about the transformative emotion of tragedy. In the central stanza, Hamlet and Lear are yoked together as, implicitly, the greatest or most canonical figures in Shakespeare’s works:

All perform their tragic play,

There struts Hamlet, there is Lear,

That’s Ophelia, that Cordelia;

Yet they, should the last scene be there,

The great stage curtain about to drop,

If worthy their prominent part in the play,

Do not break up their lines to weep.

They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay;

Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.

All men have aimed at, found and lost;

Black out; Heaven blazing into the head:

Tragedy wrought to its uttermost

Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages,

And all the drop scenes drop at once

Upon a hundred thousand stages,

It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.

A drop scene is an alternative term for what is more usually called, in the theater, a drop or act-drop – that is, the painted curtain lowered on the stage between acts to shut off the audience from a view of the stage. But the term ‘drop scene’ was also used, as early as the mid-nineteenth century, in explicitly political and cultural contexts, to mean the final scene of a drama in real life. And ‘blackout’ another technical term from theater, means ‘the darkening of a stage during a performance,’ or ‘a darkened stage.’ But by 1938 the term was also frequently used in Britain to describe the compulsory extinguishing or covering of lights at night to protect against air raids. (Pilots, both German and Allied, also sometimes suffered ‘blackouts’ of consciousness because of sharp turns in the air or fast acceleration.)

So in Yeats’ poem, all Europe is a stage. Everyone is a Shakespearean character, whether he or she knows it or not. ‘There struts Hamlet, there is Lear/That’s Ophelia, that’s Cordelia.’  Both on and off the stage we are actors, and we hold to our parts. ‘If worthy their prominent part in the play/[They] do not break up their lines [i.e. come out of character] to weep.’ Art is cognate to life; it anticipates it and scripts it. And art in this vision is even ameliorative – ‘gaiety transforming all that dread.’ Art is what we are trying to save the world for. As well as what may, unwittingly, save it.

Tragedy wrought to its uttermost

Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages,

And all the drop scenes drop at once

Upon a hundred thousand stages,

But this vision, so close upon apocalypse of a kind – the glimpse of an Ireland and a Britain caught between terrifying modernity and elusive transcendence – is still offered at the level of high art. ‘Tragedy’ is an aesthetic category, and, indeed, a saving one.

What happened to King Lear in the 1960s and after, what propelled it past Hamlet into the top place in the pecking order of Shakespeare’s plays was the way, precisely, that it combined the affective sublime (Lear and Cordelia) with the bathetic grotesque (the Fool, the blinding of Gloucester). In other words, the very thing that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries objected to – a certain indecorum, a certain excessiveness, a certain nihilism – was what made the play so modern, and so devastating. A few lines stand as suggestive signposts:

Kent’s ‘Is this promised end? followed by Edgar’s ‘Or image of that horror?’

Edgar’s ‘I would not take this from report; it is,/And my heart breaks at it.’

Lear’s ‘Howl, howl, howl, howl!’

And the final lines of the play: ‘[W]e that are young,/Shall never see so much, nor live so long.’

Against the array of world-disrupting events that took place in the late fifties and sixties, King Lear came to look, perhaps, all too familiar. Even the tensions between father and outspoken daughter had their local resonances. Poor Tom and the Fool seemed very familiar characters. The bleakness of the Lear landscape was like the bleakness of an atomic winter – or the bareness of a stage.

Her is the voice of William Butler Yeats again, this time as essayist, commenting on what makes a play work. Yeats was a brilliant modern playwright, very involved in staging as well as in the text. His own plays are very spare, as are the plays of Samuel Beckett. But what he found so exciting and successful about Shakespeare was what he called ‘emotion of multitude.’

‘The Shakespearean Drama gets the emotion of multitude out of the subplot which copies the main plot, much as a shadow upon the wall copies one’s body in the firelight. We think of King Lear less as the history of one man and his sorrows than as the history of a whole evil time. Lear’s shadow is Gloster, who also has ungrateful children, and the mind goes on imagining other shadows, shadow beyond shadow till it has pictured the world.’

It is never the case that ‘influence’ goes only one way. The terrifying developments on the world stage, from the atom bomb to the Korean and Vietnam wars, were certainly contributory causes to the new view of King Lear, but so, equally, were the New Theater and anti-theater then being developed and staged in Paris, New York, London, and other places around the world. The fifties and sixties were also a time of enormous creativity and growth in theater, from the so-called Theatre of the Absurd to the kind of conceptual art event, improvised performance, or situation known as a ‘happening.’ The term happening was coined by the artist Allan Kaprow, whose first exhibition in this mode – an ‘event’ of eighteen ‘happenings’ – took place in 1959. The term enjoyed a lively currency for the next decade. As for ‘Theatre of the Absurd,’ a label that is sometimes contested, its invention has been credited to the theater critic Martin Esslin, who used it as the title of a 1962 book on playwrights like Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, and Harold Pinter.

This was King Lear time – or one of its times. We have seen that Bradley and Hazlitt and in fact many others, like Keats, thought of King Lear as Shakespeare’s crowning achievement one hundred and almost two hundred years ago. But to the cold war generation and the postwar art world, the play seemed like a prescient vision of the present moment. And, importantly, it was not so much because of the pathos of its title character (or his daughter), but because of the worldview the play seemed to body forth – a bleak, bombed-out landscape of nihilism. In fact the characters that seemed most ‘modern’ and familiar to this contemporary world were not the kings, dukes, or courtiers, but the Fool, Poor Tom (the disguised Edgar), and the mutilated Gloucester, stumbling across the stage, perched on what he thinks is the top of Dover Cliff without the use of his eyes, persuaded into a pratfall (falling from flat stage to flat stage), which is a comic gesture and not a tragic one. Chaplin’s Little Tramp was the social and sartorial model here, a ragged figure who faced each new and unexpected task with aplomb, and without self-pity.

How did King Lear come to be both the icon of Shakespearean greatness for the mid- to late twentieth century and, at the same time, the most ‘modern’ modernist, and indeed postmodern of Shakespearean plays?

There is, of course, never an answer to ‘how’ something like this happens. But history, politics, and theater were becoming, perhaps had already become, versions of one another. And in this case, perhaps surprisingly, the spark that lit the fire was a book of literary criticism.”

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And that book was, of course, Jan Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary.  More, then, from Kott’s essay on King Lear, picking up from last Sunday’s post:

It is this situation that Durrenmatt’s Romulus finds himself in. He is the last emperor of a crumbling empire. He will not alter the course of history. History has made a fool of him. He can either die in a spectacular fashion, or lie on his bed and wait to be butchered. He can surrender, compose. speeches, or commit suicide. In his position as the last Roman emperor, every one of these solutions is compromising and ridiculous. History has turned Romulus into a clown, and yet demands him to treat her seriously. Romulus has only one good move to make: consciously to accept the part of a clown and play it to the end. He can breed chickens. In this way the historical inevitability will have been made a fool of. The absolute will have been flouted …

Antigone is a tragedy of choice, Oedipus a tragedy of ‘unmerited guilt’ and destiny. The gods loyally warn the protagonist that fate has destined him to be a patricide and his own mother’s husband. The hero has full freedom of decision and action. The gods do not interfere; they just watch and wait until he makes a mistake. Then they punish him. The gods are just, and punish the hero for a crime he has indeed committed, and only after he has committed it. But the protagonist had to commit a crime. Oedipus wanted to cheat fate, but did not an~ could not escape it. He fell into a trap, made his mistake, killed his father and married his mother. What is to happen will happen.

The tragedy of Oedipus may, perhaps, be posed as a problem belonging to the game theory. The game is just, i.e. at the outset both partners must have the same chances of losing or winning, and both must play according to the same rules. In its game with Oedipus Fate does not invoke the help of the gods, does not change the laws of nature. Fate wins its game without recourse to miracles.

The game must be just, but at the same time must be so arranged that the same party always wins; so that Oedipus always loses.

Let us imagine an electronic computer which plays chess and calculates any number of moves in advance. A man must play chess with an electronic computer, cannot leave or break the game, and has to lose the game. His defeat is just, because it is effected according to the rules of the game; he loses because he has made a mistake. But he could not have won.

A man losing the chess-game with an electronic computer, whom he himself has fed with combinatorial analysis and rules, whom he himself has ‘taught’ to play, is not a tragic hero any more. If he plays that chess-game from the moment he was born until he dies, and if he has to lose, he will at most be the hero of a tragi-grotesque. All that is left of tragedy is the concept of ‘unmerited guilt’, the inevitable defeat and unavoidable mistake. But the absolute has ceased to exist. It has been replaced by the absurdity of the human situation.

The absurdity does not consist in the fact that man-made mechanisms are under certain conditions stronger, and even wider, than he. The absurdity consists in that they create a compulsory situation by forcing him into a game in which the probability of his total defeat constantly increases. The Christian view of the end of the world, with the Last Judgement and its segregation of the just and the unjust, is pathetic. The end of the world caused by the atomic bomb is spectacular, but grotesque just the same. Such an end of the world is intellectually unacceptable, either to Christians or to Marxists. It would be a silly ending.

The comparison between fate’s game with Oedipus, and a game of chess with an electronic computer, is not precise enough. An automatic device to play chess, even if it could compute any number of moves, need not win all the time. It would simply more often win than lose. But among automatic devices that really exist one could find a much better example. There is a machine for a game similar to tossing coins for ‘heads or tails’. I put a coin on the table the way I like, with ‘heads’ or ‘tails’ on top. The machine does not see the coin, but it has to predict how I have put it. If it gives the right answer, it wins. I inform the machine whether it has given the right answer. I put down the coin again, and so on. After a time the machine begins to win by giving the right answers more and more often. It has memorized and learned my system; it has deciphered me, as it were. It foresees that after three ‘heads’ I will put down two ‘tails’. I change the system, and play using a different method. The blind machine learns this one too, and begins to win again. I am endowed with free will and have the freedom of choice. I can put down ‘heads’ or ‘tails’. But in the end, like Oedipus, I must lose the game.

There is a move by which I do not lose. I do not put the coin on the table, I do not choose. I simply toss it. I have given up the system, and left matters to chance. Now the machine and I have even chances. The possibility of win and lose, of ‘heads’ or ‘tails’ is the same. It amounts to fifty-fifty. The machine wanted me to treat it seriously, to play rationally with it, using a system, a method. But I do not want to. It is I who have now seen through the machine’s method.

The machine stands for fate, which acts on the principle of the law of averages. In order to have even chances with fate I must become fate myself; I must chance my luck; act with a fifty-fifty chance. A man who, when playing with the machine, gives up his free will and freedom of choice, adopts an attitude to fate similar to that which Durrenmatt’s Romulus adopted with regard to historical necessity. Instead of putting the coin with ‘heads’ on top a hundred times in succession, or ‘heads’ and ‘tails’ in turn, or two ‘tails’ after ten ‘heads’, he would just toss the coin. That kind of man most certainly is not a tragic hero. He has adopted a clownish attitude to fate. Romulus is such a man.

In modern tragedy, fate, gods and nature have been replaced by history. History is the only framework of reference, the final authority to accept or reject the validity of human actions. It is unavoidable and realizes its ultimate aims; it is objective ‘reason’, as well as objective ‘progress’. In this scheme of things history is a theatre with actors, but without an audience. No one watches the performance, for everybody is taking part. The script of this grand spectacle has been composed in advance and includes a necessary epilogue, which will explain everything. But, as in the commedia dell’ arte, the text has not been written down. The actors improvise and only some of them foresee correctly what will happen in the following acts. In this particular theatre the scene changes with the actors; they are constantly setting it up and pulling it down again.

Actors are often wrong, but their mistakes have been foreseen by the scenario. One might even say that mistakes are the basis of the script, and that it is thanks to them that the action unfolds. History contains both the past and the future. Actors from previous scenes keep coming back, repeating old conflicts, and want to play parts that are long since over. They needlessly prolong the performance and have to be removed from the stage. They arrived too late. Other actors have arrived too early and start performing a scene from the next act, without noticing that the stage is not yet ready for them. They want to speed up the performance, but this cannot be done: every act has to be performed in its proper order. Those who arrive too early are also removed from the stage.

It is these parts that nineteenth-century philosophy and literature considered tragic. For Hegel the tragic heroes of history were those who came too late. Their reasons were noble but one-sided. They had been correct in the previous era, in..!he preceding act. If they continue to insist on them, they must be crushed by history. The Vendee was for Hegel an example of historical tragedy. Count Henry in Krasinski’s Undivine Comedy is a Hegelian tragic hero.

Those who came too early, striving in vain to speed up the course of history, are also history’s tragic heroes. Their reasons, too, are one-sided; they will become valid only at the next historical phase, in the succeeding act. They failed to understand that freedom is only the conscious recognition of necessity. Consequently they were annihilated by historical necessity, which solves only those problems that are capable of solution. The Paris Commune is an example of this kind of historical tragedy. Pancrace in the Undivine Comedy is a tragic hero of history thus conceived.

The grotesque mocks the historical absolute, as it has mocked the absolutes of gods, nature and destiny. It does so by means of the so-called ‘barrel of laughs’, a popular feature of any funfair: a score of people or more try to keep their balance while the upturned barrel revolves round its axis. One can only keep one’s balance by moving on the bottom in the opposite direction to, and with the same speed as, the barrel’s movement. This is not at all easy. Those who move too fast or too slow in relation to the barrel’s movement are bound to fall. The barrel brings them up, then they roll downwards trying desperately to cling to the moving floor. The more violent their gestures and their grip on the walls, the more difficult it is for them to get up, and the more funny they look.

The barrel is put in motion by a motor, which is transcendental in relation to it. However, one may easily imagine a barrel that is set in motion by the people inside it: by those who manage to preserve their balance and by those who fall over. A barrel like this would be immanent. Its movements would, of course, be variable: sometimes it would revolve in one direction, sometimes in the other. It would be even more difficult to preserve one’s balance in a barrel like this: one would have to change step all the time, move forwards and backwards, faster or slower. In such an immanent barrel many more people would fall over. But neither those who fall because they move too fast, nor those who fall because they move too slow, are tragic heroes. They are just grotesque. They will be grotesque even if there is no way out of this immanent barrel. The social mechanism shown in most of Adamov’s plays is very much like the barrel of laughs.

The world of tragedy and the world of grotesque have a similar structure. Grotesque takes over the themes of tragedy and poses the same fundamental questions. Only its answers are different. This dispute about the tragic and grotesque interpretation of human fate reflects the everlasting conflict of two philosophies and two ways of thinking; of two opposing attitudes defined by the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski as the irreconcilable antagonism between the priest and the clown. Between tragedy and grotesque there is the same conflict for or against such notions as eschatology, belief in the absolute, hope for the ultimate solution of the contradiction between moral order and everyday practice. Tragedy is the theatre of priests, grotesque is the theatre of clowns.

This conflict between two philosophies and two types of theatre becomes particularly acute in times of great upheaval.  When established values have been overthrown, and there is no appeal to God, Nature, or History from the tortures inflicted by the cruel world, the clown becomes the central figure in the theatre. He accompanies the exiled trio – the King, the nobleman and his son – on their cruel wanderings through the cold endless night which has fallen on the world; through the ‘cold night’ which, as in Shakespeare’s King Lear, ‘will turn us all to fools and madmen’.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smEtnQ6NLYU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LQSTPaMB4s

Our next reading:  King Lear, Act Three

My next post:  Tuesday evening/Wednesday morning

King Lear

Act Three, Part One

By Dennis Abrams

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Act Three:  Lear appears with the Fool, raging against the storm and his daughters’ cruelty. Kent arrives and tries to persuade them to shelter in a nearby hovel, where the Fool finds Edgar, disguised and feigning madness.  Lear, now genuinely mad, takes pity on him. Gloucester – though forbidden to do so – seeks out Lear and offers to house him.  Meanwhile, Edmund has informed Cornwall (Regan’s husband) of his father’s contact with France. Gloucester is captured and his eyes are gouged out, but a servant who defends him fatally wounds Cornwall.

It doesn’t get much better than this.  Lear, declaring his intention to “abjure all roofs,” and confront “the enmity o’ th’ air” rather than continue to stay with his heartless children, rages at the cosmic forces in one of the play’s, if not all of literature’s most memorable images. “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!” he cries,

     Rage, blow

You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout

Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!

You sulph’rous and thought-executing fires,

Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts,

Singe my white head; and thou all-shaking thunder,

Strike flat the thick rotundity o’th’ world,

Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once

That makes ungrateful man.

[3.2.1-9]

Lear turns the storm raging around him into a symbol of his own suffering, but though addressing these elemental forces he is not in control of them, and the destruction they cause will in the end seem directed against him alone.

The storm scene is Shakespeare’s invention, as is Lear’s companion on the heath, his faithful albeit in some ways equally mad Fool. Lear’s Fool (as we’ve seen, he has no other name) is, like his equivalents in Twelfth Night and All’s Well, used as commentator on the play’s events, “licensed” or granted leave, by his position – as many Fools were in the real-life households of real-life Nobles – to ridicule those in authority and say things that others could (or would) not. In King Lear, the humor is bleak almost beyond belief, and the wisecracks of the Fool, bizarre as they often seem, never stray far from the subject of his own master’s folly – “Can’st tell how an oyster makes his shell?” the Fool asked, mock-innocently, back in Act One:

Lear:  No.

Fool:  Not I either, but I can tell why a snail has a house.

Lear:  Why?

Fool:  Why, to put ‘s head in, not to give it away to his daughters and leave his horns without a case.

“If thou were my fool, nuncle,” the Fool continues, “I’d have thee beaten for being old before thy time…Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise.” His bitter punchline seems to echo Regan’s curt conclusion early on that for all her father’s advancing years, “he hath ever but slenderly know himself,” but the Fool’s counsel is ignored by the King, who seems perpetually unable to hear those who have the most concern for his welfare.

Lear’s progress to self-knowledge is halting, and before he gains any further insight he will become, starting in Act Three, through his madness, an utterly different person.  His distress – like ours, witnessing it – is intense.  But he is far from the only character to suffer during the course of the play; in King Lear, terrible pain touches nearly everyone. Lear’s experience is shadowed by that of one of his courtiers, the Duke of Gloucester, who falls prey to a plot by his illegitimate son Edmund to disinherit his brother Edgar, who as Gloucester’s lawful offspring stands to inherit his father’s land. The parallels with Lear and his children are obvious, and when the Machiavellian Edmund managed to convince Gloucester that it is Edgar who has turned against him, Gloucester frets that the world itself is falling apart. Reflecting on the King’s own behavior, Gloucester anxiously exclaimed, “These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us:”

Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide; in cities, mutinees; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond cracked ‘twixt son and father. This villain of mine comes under the prediction: there’s son against father. The King falls from bias of nature: there’s father against child. We have seen the best of our time.

Gloucester sees, correctly I think, that if families are torn apart, the state itself will follow, and he notes that what he delicately (and politically savvy) calls the King’s “bias of nature” (his temperament, though we might think of his developing insanity) has the capacity to destroy everything in his path.  But sadly, at the same time, Gloucester fails to understand (or to see) how his own “bias” towards Edgar has been overcome by Edmund, who, resembling Iago and Richard III (although perhaps even more cold-blooded), who revels in his ability to convince others of his own goodness while plotting to ensnare them all.  And in this play Gloucester will be made to suffer terribly for his error: when Edmund informs on his father, revealing that he has been in contact with the forces of Cordelia and the King of France, plotting to invade Britain and recapture it, Gloucester is captured by Goneril, Regan and Cornwall and as punishment his eyes are gouged out. He pays for his metaphorical blindness in the bloodiest and most grotesquely literal of ways. In this his plight is not unlike that of his son Edgar, who is forced to run and decides that his only chance for survival is to disguise himself as an insane beggar, a refugee from the “Bedlam” madhouse. The irony of his disguise becomes starkly obvious when the pretend madman meets Lear, the real one, on the stormy heath. King Lear turns the most lurid of nightmares into reality.

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From Garber:

“A similar effect [dramatic effect achieved by juxtaposition] develops in the structure of act 3, Lear’s remarkable confrontation with nature and with human nature. At the end of act 2 we heard dire warnings of the storm that is about to come. After Lear’s proud and pitiful boast, ‘No, I’ll not weep,’ and the immediately ensuing ‘Storm and tempest,’ the act closes with Cornwall’s ironically prudent advice to Gloucester, who has expressed his desire to go out to succor the distraught King, ‘Shut up your doors, my lord,’ Cornwall says, ‘Tis a wild night./My Regan counsels well. Come out o’th’ storm.’  One again, with artful juxtaposition, the next exchange we hear is in a way the answer to this – an answer, this time, by contrast rather than similitude. ‘Who’s there besides foul weather?’ asks the disguised Kent, and a gentleman replies, ‘One minded like the weather,/Most unquietly’ (3.1.1-3). Weather has become something that cannot be shut out. We onlookers cannot ‘come out of the storm,’ for it is all around us, and within us, as it is all around Lear and within him. ‘This tempest in my mind,’ he will call it. The human condition in the play is now the equivalent of ‘foul weather,’ and is, like the loyal gentleman, ‘minded like the weather,/Most unquietly.’

This is a kind of dramatic point it is easy to miss when a play is divided into discrete acts for performance.  In a modern production an interval or intermission might separate Kent’s remarks in act 3, scene I, from Cornwall’s in act 2, scene 2. But in Shakespeare’s time the plays would have been performed straight through, without a break. In the case of King Lear, the inexorability of deprivation and suffering increases the dramatic tension to a point where we in the audience – like Edgar, like Kent – can hardly bear what we see before our eyes. Act 3 (in the Folio) begins in the open air with a scene of generosity and charity that stands in brutal opposition to the isolated scenes that are shortly to come. Kent and the gentleman meet and speak of the King’s exposure to the elements – of how he ‘tears his white hair,/While the impetuous blasts, with eyeless rage,/Catch in their fury and make nothing of’ (Quarto, 8.6-8. ‘[E]yeless rage’; ‘nothing,.’ And we hear of how he ‘[s]trives in his little world of man to outstorm/The to-and-fro conflicting wind and rain’ (Quarto 8.9-10). Lear is now a microcosm, a ‘little world of man.’ What confronts us, the spectators in the theater, is the inner agony of a man’s soul played out as if it were some immense and tragic metaphor writ large upon the landscape, so that we can see it and share it.

At this point the King who was the emblem of all earthly comforts is exposed to the elements. The place in which he finds himself is an articulated metaphor, the counterpart of his state of mind, on the one hand, and of his fallen status in polity and society, on the other. Since the early eighteenth century editors have situated these scenes on a heath, an open space of land. (As the critic Henry Turner notes, neither the Folio nor the Quarto specifies a ‘heath,’ although that designation, aligning the scene with a windswept wasteland familiar in British topography, and possibly with the also wild and eerie heath in Macbeth, has by now become conventional.) As if to underscore the inner nature of the storm, Lear himself disclaims any real physical discomfort: ‘I am cold myself,’ he admits, but

     This tempest in my mind

Doth from my senses take all feeling else

Save what beats there…

(3.4.17-19)

And:

     In such a night

To shut me out? Pour on, I will endure,

In such a night as this!..

(3.4.17-19)

The play picks up a familiar Shakespearean topos, the journey from civilization to a place of wilderness and apparent unreason – a pattern often used in the comedies and also, as m any critics have noted, in the genre of pastoral. Lear’s heath is no Forest of Arden. It is a place of transformation and change, but the change it produces is a stripping away, not an augmentation of magical powers, love, agency, or wit.  The heath is a reversal of the condition of ‘civilization,’ a version of Hobbesian nature, the nature of a life that is ‘nasty, brutish and short’ – a place in which the only dynamics that count are those of will and power. This is Lear’s ‘little world of man,’ not only a philosophical microcosm but also a psychological landscape.

It is important to bear in mind, though, that at the beginning of act 3 Lear himself does not see this larger and more ‘transcendent’ picture. He is still the King – stripped though he may be of daughters, knights, land, and power. As he enters his own ‘landscape of the mind,’ the one thought in his mind is that he can control it. He will try to invoke and direct Nature (‘Hear, nature…’). Nature, with a small or a large N, is for him not yet a metaphor of his condition, but rather an instrument of his wrath, something he can use:

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow,

You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout

Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!

You sulph’rous and thought-executing fires,

Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts,

Singe my white head; and thou all-shaking thunder,

Strike flat the thick rotundity o’th’ world,

Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once

That makes ungrateful man.

Lear is here demanding – commanding – the destruction of the world. ‘Germens’ are seeds (compare ‘germination’); to spill the germens that make up the interior of the earth, to crack the molds, is to destroy life and all its possibilities. ‘Rumble thy bellyful; spit, fire; spout, rain.’ Lear continues.

     Here I stand your slave,

A poor, infirm, weak and despised old man,

But yet I call you servile ministers,

That will with you two pernicious daughters join

          …’gainst a head

So old and white as this. O, ho, ‘tis foul!

(3.2.14, 18-23)

We may notice how Lear seems to age, onstage, in his own self-description. The rain and wind are false flatters, who have deserted and weakened him to flock to the side of Goneril and Regan. And yet he feels himself still the King, bereft of power that should rightly still be his. Lear is now victim rather than victor; acted upon, not actor or director; no longer the center of the court, the kingdom, or the world. In a way this is the consummate Shakespearean metaphor, an individual confronting his own radical limitations – or, to use Lear’s word, his own ‘necessities.’ That resonant word ‘need’ has echoed throughout the play (‘What need you five and twenty?’; ‘What need on?’; ‘O , reason not the need!’; ‘But for your true need –/You heavens give me that patience, patience I need’).  Now,. in extremis, he finds necessity suddenly not in a roster of one hundred knights, nor in power or rich clothing, but in a bale of straw:

     Where is this straw, my fellow?

The art of our necessities is strange,

And can make vile things precious…

Among the ‘vile things’ he will come to value and to cherish are people as well as straw.

The storm scene is a learning experience for Lear and for his audiences, as it was for his time. The optimism of the sixteenth-century humanists, as expressed in Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man, placing man so confidently just below the angels, is frayed or lost here, at the beginning of a new, perhaps more skeptical, century. Human beings are vile things that necessity – need, not luxury – makes precious. The ‘heath’ and the storm, then, are effectively understood – and performed – as projections of Lear’s mental situation upon a larger screen, at once nature and theater.

But King Lear is not completely alone in the storm, although he speaks, at first, with no apparent concern for anyone but himself: ‘I am a man/More sinned against than sinning’ (3.2.58-59). With him is his Fool. It is for the Fool, and not for himself, that Lear seeks the comforting haven of necessary straw. And who, or what, is Lear’s Fool? Who is this most evocative of all Shakespearean clowns and motleys? Above all, perhaps, the Fool, both in his professional position as ‘allowed fool’ in the court and in his specific role in Shakespeare’s play, is an aspect of Lear himself. Repeatedly in earlier acts the Fool has artfully and poignantly demonstrated that the King is a fool, just as Feste, his comic prototype in Twelfth Night, proved the Countess to be a fool. Thus the Fool will say to the King:

That lord that counseled 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:  Doest 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.

(Quarto, 4.123-134)

The Fool is a mirror, as the wasteland and the storm are mirrors, reflecting back at Lear his own concealed image. He is in this sense all too truly ‘Lear’s shadow,’ at once a reflected image, a delusive semblance or vain object of pursuit, a symbol, prefiguration, foreshadowing, or type; an attenuated remnant, a form from which the substance has departed; a spectral form, a phantom; a parasite or today; a companion whom a guest brings without invitation; even, in the most modern, and anachronistic connotation, a spy or detective who follows a person in order to keep watch on his movements (OED). The professional duty of the ‘licensed fool’ in the period was to say things that were otherwise forbidden, to reveal painful, humbling, and cosmic truths – in short, to do that which a later age would call speaking truth to power. The role of the fool was to reflect and epitomize the folly of the world around him, and in essence to draw it off, or neutralize it. thus the Fool gives Kent – disguised as ‘Caius’ – advice about following only a master whose fortunes are on the rise, and this exchange follows:

Kent:  Where learned you this, Fool?

Fool:  Not i’th’ stocks, fool.

(2.2.252-253)

Which is the fool, which the sensible man? Or, as Lear will put it, alluding to a familiar game for children, ‘change places, and handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?’ (4.5.144-145). Handy-dandy: Guess which hand holds the prize. The fool speaks often in h andy-dandy, in inversions, reversals, and conundrums. He exemplifies, in part, the aspect of King Lear that has turns its back on his own kingly nature, the Lear who cut his crown in half and gave its meat away.

We have noticed that the Fool appears in the play only at the point when Lear has begun to act like a fool. The fool of the play’s opening scenes is the Mad Lear before he is mad. As one of the King’s knights tells us, speaking of the banishment of Cordelia from the court, ‘Since my young lady’s going into France, sir, the fool hath much pined away.’ A disputed stage tradition holds that the parts of the Fool and Cordelia were played by the same boy actor. She departs and he appears; when he leaves (‘And I’ll go to bed at noon’ [3.6.39]), she shortly reappears by Lear’s side. Lear’s final, agonized observation, ‘And my poor fool is hanged,’ although it refers to Cordelia, may, according to this view, have evoked as well associations with the other fool so dear to the King. Some critics have found this theory more like fictive poetic justice than like stage-historical fact, suggesting that instead of a boy player the celebrated comic actor Robert Armin would have played the Fool’s part. But the Fool/Cordelia argument, whatever its historical merits or demerits, points to a linguistic commodity (both are Lear’s fools) and to a common social role of comfort and rebuke.

The Fool of this play is also related to the fool of biblical tradition as described by Saint Paul in a passage from 1 Corinthians that can as well be applied to the figure of Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: ‘But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and god hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty;/And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are’ (1 Corinthians 1:27-28). Foolish things, weak things, base things, things which are despised, things which are not. Lear’s own folly; his weakness, and Gloucester’s; Edmund’s baseness and the baseness of Goneril and Regan; things which are despised (Lear and ‘Poor Tom’); things which are not (madness and nothing; ‘An O without a figure’; ‘This is not Lear’) bring to nought things that are. The Fool is this kind of holy fool, and he exemplifies the biblical paradox that underlies so much of the play. For Lear, throughout the earlier acts obsessed with rank, obsessed with order and precedence, infuriated because his ‘man’ the disguised Kent, was humiliated in the stocks, though not yet concluding that stocking is an indignity to any man – this same Lear will say to his Fool (in the Folio text of the play), ‘In, boy; go first.’ The Fool is to precede the King into the hovel, into the shelter, away from the storm. The passage that lies behind this is the celebrated line from the Gospel according to Saint Matthew: ‘many [that are] first shall be last; and the last [shall be] first’ (Matthew 19:30). Again the verse comes alive in dramatic action: the first shall be last (Lear, the King, Gloucester, the Duke, the briefly triumphant evil daughters and Edmund); the last shall be first (Cordelia, ‘our last and least’; Edgar; the Fool).

But if Lear’s Fool is this kind of biblical fool, he is also the biblical fool of the Psalms, and especially of Psalm 14: ‘The fool hath said in his heart, [There is] no God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, [there is] none that doeth good.’ In a play that has so much to say about sex and bastardy and illicit lust, the Fool is the principal taunting voice of corrupt sexuality: ‘Marry, here’s grace and a codpiece – that’s a wise man and a fool’ (3.2.39-40). A fool’s costume often included an exaggerated codpiece, as if to emphasize that a man could be governed either by his mind and judgment or by his body and its desires. It is Lear’s Fool who evokes the image of the ‘cockney’ and the live eels she put in her pie; suppressing these unruly phallic symbols, she ‘knapped’ em o’th’ coxcombs with a stick, and cried ‘Down, wantons, down!’’  Edgar as “Poor Tom” will speak of doing the deed of darkness, of Pillicock on Pillicock Hill; Gloucester and Lear will return, over and over again, to images of sex and lechery. But is the Fool who above all gives wry voice to this aspect of the human animal, the ‘natural man.’

In the iconography of the medieval and early modern periods the Fool was often to be found in company with Death, as in Hans Holbein’s ‘The Idiot Fool’ in his Dance of Death series. Sometimes the fool is Death in disguise, a skull wearing the traditional cap and bells that were part of the costume of the court jester; at other times he mocks Death or is heedless of him. In Richard II death is explicitly an ‘antic,’ or fool, in King Richard’s despairing account:  ‘For within the hollow crown/That rounds the mortal temples of a king/Keeps Death his court; and there the antic sits,/Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp.’ (Richard III 3.2.156-159). Bearing in mind this very consistent association, we can see Lear’s Fool as the death he carries with him, an acknowledged, and sometimes unwitting, memento mori for a king.

And yet at the same time the Fool, precisely because he is, in extremis, the representative of the body and of self-preservation, becomes the voice of common sense and practical wisdom. His response to the storm, to the tempest that Lear will locate in his own mind, is to urge the King to avoid it, to come out of the storm – which is to say, to avoid self-confrontation; not to look inside himself, at his failures and his pretensions and his tragic hubris. To avoid having the tragic experience at all. ‘Good nuncle, in, ask thy daughters blessing. Here’s a night pities neither wise men nor fools’ (3.2.11-12). But Lear is a wiser fool than this, and he chooses to brave the elements, the neutral, not unkind, rain and thunder, rather than to turn back, a craven and defeated man, to the safety of the house. This is, after all, what makes him a tragic figure and a hero – that he confronts and chooses the tragic experience.  [MY NOTE:  Really?  I’m not really sure about that…]  He asks the question ‘Who is it that can tell me who I am?’ and he answers it with Kent’s answer, ‘A man, sir.’

In short, the Fool is a figure of infinite value in the court world, where he reminds Lear by wit and gesture, indeed by his very existence, of Lear’s own potential for folly. But when the play moves from a chronicle of royal folly and paternal misjudgment to a parable of the human condition, the Fool’s own radical limitation is shown. And when Lear is finally convinced that he himself is a fool, the character called Fool disappears from the play, uttering his final, riddling words (found only in the Folio text): ‘And I’ll go to bed at noon. ‘I’ll go to bed at noon’ was a proverbial phrase, meaning ‘I’ll play the fool, too.’ And Jack-go-to-bed-at-noon was the folk name for the flower purple goat’s-beard, or salsify, which closes at midday. The Fool will leave in the middle of the play (‘at noon’). He is no longer needed. He has done his job of mirroring the folly that is in every man, and particularly in Lear. There is no more he can do. His place is taken for the rest of the play by Cordelia, who represents not contempt for mankind’s limitations but hope for redemption: allegorically, if the Fool is a codpiece, Cordelia – as we have noted from her name – is the heart. Whether or not the same actor played both parts, the larger ‘part’ played by this most intimate companion and closest confidant can be seen to be of a piece. When Lear cries out at the death of Cordelia ‘And my poor fool is hanged,’ the world ‘fool’ takes on its conventional meaning as ‘child,’ but the resonance of that other ‘poor fool’ (as well as of “Poor Tom’) remains.

The Fool, then, is part of Lear’s learning process on the heath, in the storm, and I think it is useful to look at the entirety of the third act as a tightly knit sequence that functions as a learning process at the same that it exhibits onstage Lear’s interior world of self-knowledge, what he called his ‘little world of man.’ The Fool is with him from the first, and from the first the Fool has realized that Lear has been a fool: in dividing his kingdom, in rejecting his beloved daughter Cordelia; even in failing to heed that instinct that had made him ‘more affect’ – that is, prefer – the Duke of Albany to the Duke of Cornwall.

But the King and the Fool are not alone for long. The Fool urges Lear to go in, and provokes him with another song, another riddle, so that Lear, clinging to the last bits of his sanity, is moved to speak out against the forces that assail him:

No, I will be the pattern of all patience.

I will say nothing.

(3.2.37-37)

As if drawn forth from the recesses of his inner consciousness, there now appears onstage, in this dreamlike, ever nightmarish scene, the play’s pattern of all patience, Kent, whose anger was real but whose loyalty and patience were greater; who sought to serve authority and therefore returned in disguise to serve his king, even going with good grace to the stocks in that service. The sudden appearance of Kent/Caius upon the heath sets the expectation that underlies everything that is to take place in this great third act, everything that makes up its dramatic pattern, because that pattern is the logic of psychological generation, things called up in the mind. We could imagine the storm scenes as one vast, articulated soliloquy in which no one actually appears but King Lear – and aspects of his own persona given life by his words. This would be a cinematic way of performing these scenes, or a ghostly one, true to the spirit of the events and their placement.

First his mind summons the Fool, and then the ever-patient Kent. Now, moved by the storm’s fierceness, Lear’s mind begins to ruminate on those sufferers he had never before imagined, sufferers who are always out in storms like these. Strikingly, he speaks not of them but to them, addressing them directly in their absence, in a speech that is part apostrophe and part invocation:

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,

That bide the pelting of this pitless storm,

How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,

Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you

From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en

Too little care of this. Take physic, pomp,

Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,

That thou mayst shake the superflux to them

And show the heavens more just.

(3.4.28-36)

It is clear from the last line that Lear still believes he can control the elements, the world outside him, as well as the world inside him. It will take his immersion in madness to convince him that he can do neither, and that the heavens may not be just. But this invocation to the poor naked wretches with their ‘looped and windowed raggedness’ (an unsurpassable description of tattered clothing and bony limbs) conjures its own living visual metaphor, a human equivalent of the barren wasteland itself. The naked Edgar, dressed in rage, pricked with nails and sticks, is summoned symbolically by Lear’s words, and now appears from within the hovel where he has been hiding. Lear, looking at this stripped, barren piece of humanity, has only one question, only one thought: ‘Didst thou give all to thy two daughters/And art thou come to this?…Couldst thou save nothing? Wouldst thou give e’m all?’ (3.4.47-59, 60). ‘He hath no daughters, sir,’ Kent intercedes gently, rationality correcting madness. But Lear knows better. He has recognized in “Poor Tom” a living emblem of his own condition. This could happen only in the inner world of the storm. It is madness, but madness with method in it.

Moments before, Lear had spoken of shaking the ‘superflux’ to wretches such as these. I tis a word the play’s audience has heard before, in his ‘reason not the need’ speech (‘Our basest beggars/Are in the poorest thing superfluous’), and we will hear it again in the heartfelt cry of the blinded Gloucester, questing for justice: “Heavens deal so still./Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man…feel your power quickly./So distribution should undo excess,/And each man have enough’ (4.1.60-65). But the King’s concern with superflux and caretaking (‘O, I have ta’en/Too little care of this’) soon shifts to an identification with the ‘thing’ that is ‘Poor Tom.’ We have three terms now, not two: ‘everything,’ ‘nothing,’ and ‘the thing itself.’ Lear tells the disguised Edgar,

[T]hou art the thing itself. Unaccomodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. Off, off, you lendings! Come, unbutton here.

(3.4.95-98)

In the midst of the storm Lear begins to tear off his clothes, to ‘unbutton,’ as he will finally be able to do in the play’s last scene – there, significantly, with a prayer, not a command (‘Pray you, undo this button’). But in penetrating to the identity of ‘the thing itself,’ Lear – like Hamlet regarding the skull of Yorick – faces the heart of his own mystery. This ‘thing’ is humanity – the king as well as the beggar, a poor, bare, forked animal. The language of stripping we have encountered from the play’s first moments here reaches its culmination and will carry us through until that time, in a very different mood, when the King will awaken from sleep, in fresh garments, in the fourth act of the play. Lear’s encounter with “Poor Tom” is a central recognition scene, one different from but not really secondary to that stunning recognition scene between Lear and Cordelia in act 4. Here one man looks at another and sees himself. Lear looks at ‘Poor Tom’ and sees Lear. At this point in the play, are they two distinct characters? Are they two different people? It is the power, the aesthetic of theatrical representation, of the play itself – like ‘the thing itself’ – that renders this matter of identity and fictive representation, if not an unaskable, at least an unanswerable question. Nowhere in literature is allegory more effectively naturalized. (Lear’s recognition of ‘Poor Tom” as ‘the thing itself,’ a ‘thing’ that is also an estranged version of himself, points forward to Prospero in The Tempest, who will say of his rebellious servant, the enslaved monster Caliban, ‘This thing of darkness I/Acknowledge mine.’)

So Lear evokes first Kent, and with him, the virtue of patience; and then Edgar, and the recognition of barren, stripped humanity. The Fool, whose only comment on the latest manifestation is ‘’Tis a naughty night to swim in,’ now begins to wish for creature comforts, for warmth and rest, like the practical fool he has become. ‘Now a little fire in a wild field were like an old lecher’s heart – a small spark, all the rest on’s body cold’ (3.4.99-101). From this fanciful simile of inappropriate sexual desire comes the next spectral manifestation, for immediately the Fool calls out, ‘Look, here comes a walking fire.’ This animate will o’-the-wisp is the Duke of Gloucester, coming with a torch to seek his king and guest. Gloucester has already been established in the play as the ‘old lecher,’ the sporting begetter of the bastard Edmund. Now he has come, bearing a little fire in the darkness, to offer fealty and hospitality if he can.

Gloucester and Edgar (the latter still, of course, disguised as ‘Poor Tom’) both see mirrors of their own condition in Lear, even as he finds mirrors in them. Gloucester says, ‘Our flesh and blood, my lord, is grown so vile/That it doth hate what gets it’ (3.4.129-130). For his part, Edgar, masking his language as well as his person from his father by uttering incomprehensible shrieks of madness, spells, riddles, and the names of fiends, finds a cognate lesson in Lear. ‘He childed as I fathered,’ he remarks, aside, to the audience (Quarto 13.99). This is one of those moments in King Lear that open up toward the sublime, as the speaker’s generalizations on human nature begin to approach the condition of aphorism. It is for perceptions like these, and not for its commentary on seventeenth-century monarchy or the plight of early modern mendicants, that the play is regarded as one of Shakespeare’s most magnificent achievements.

Edgar now begins to assume a necessary mediating role in the play, a role he will retain as the tragedy deepens, as events become even more unbearable, even more unspeakable. Edgar as onlooker, as onstage audience and as our confidant, offers a point of perspective from which the audience in the theater can watch and share the appalling proceedings before us. For with the arrival of Gloucester, the storm’s transformation is almost over, and Lear is mad.

Over and over again we heard him cry out against the onset of madness: ‘O, let me not be mad, not mad, sweat heaven!’ (1.5.41); ‘Keep me in temper, I would not be mad’ (42); ‘I prithee daughter, do not make me mad’ (2.2.383); ‘O Fool, I shall go mad!’ (451). In the very first scene of the play we heard Kent say, ‘Be Kent unmannerly/When Lear is made,’ and now Gloucester says to the disguised Kent, ‘thou sayst the King grows mad; I’ll tell thee, friend,/I am almost made myself’ (3.4.148-149). So is Edgar. So are we. In fact, Lear’s madness now becomes itself an emblem, a touchstone, for the madness that afflicts so many others in the play. And this madness is a condition we have seen before in Shakespeare. Hamlet feigned madness (or was it feigned?). And what of Othello? And Ophelia? And Lady Macbeth? What is this disease of madness, and what is its function in drama?

Most evidently, and perhaps most importantly, madness permits the maddened victim to speak the truth, like a licensed fool, and be disbelieved. A madman or madwoman is a sublime version of a fool – in the confines of theater. He or she can echo the prevailing madness of the world, speaking through the onstage audience to an audience in the theater, asserting, proclaiming, or establishing contestatory and unwelcome ‘truths’ about the human condition…”

Obviously a lot to think about here.  And while I agree with her (or see her point) in a lot of things, I’m not sure that I’m willing to go so far as to say that the storm is a “projection” of Lear’s psyche rather than a reflection, or that he “calls forth Kent”…thoughts?

I’d like to conclude today’s post with this observation from Kenneth Tynan, from his 1977 profile of actor Ralph Richardson, discussing whether Richardson had the “vocal firepower for the ‘Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks’ aria on the storm-blasted heath’:

“…the point, nearly always forgotten, about this speech is that Lear is not attacking the storm or trying to shout it down. Its fury confirms his misanthropy: he is on its side.  Played thus (as I have yet to see it played), the speech would be well within Sir Ralph’s compass.”

Thoughts?

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jn9V3gtwMrc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jU9guI4GTxo

I’ll have much more on Act Three in at least my next two posts:  Thursday evening/Friday morning, and  Sunday evening/Monday morning.  Too much for you all?

King Lear

Act Three, Part Two

By Dennis Abrams

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From Tony Tanner:

“But of course foldings and pleatings and wrappings directly evoke clothing, and not for nothing are Goneril and Regan ‘gourgeously’ arrayed. There is much changing of clothes in the play. Edgar abandons his court clothes for a beggar’s rags, then finally appears as a knight in armour.  Cordelia dislikes Kent’s necessary disguises. Lear himself sheds his crown, then his clothes, marks his uttermost descent into sheer nature by dressing in weeds, and is finally ‘arrayed’ in ‘fresh garments’ at Cordelia’s command. There is a feeling that while clothes change, people do not – ‘in nothing am I changed/But in my garments’ says Edgar to his father (IV, vi, 8-9) – though people can certainly regress and degenerate. Clothes can indeed cover evil and cunning, but clothes are also the very mark of the human, and the ‘folds of favor’ can be the signs of an achieved and functioning civilization. This play ‘dismantles’ these folds as well, and in addition to exposing evil it lays bare the human body. Denudation is a deep theme of the play. Let us call it the spectacle and exploration of the ‘disaccommodation’ of man. Literally – the Fool warns Lear of the folly of having given away his crown, thus risking exposure. He calls him a ‘shelled peascod’ and he is contrasted with the oyster and snail who at least have the wisdom to carry their shells with them. In fury at the inhospitality of his daughters, Lear says, ‘I abjure all roofs, and choose/To wage against the enmity o’ th’ air’ (II, iv, 207), and Act II ends with the sinisterly repeated order – ‘Shut up your doors.’ Directionless, Lear rushes wildly off into the heath where nature itself is at its most naked – ‘For many miles about/There’s scarce a busy’ (II, iv, 300-301). Stripped of crown, palace and followers – his ‘folds of favor’ – Lear moves towards complete denudation. But the exposure brings the beginning of insight. When he tells the Fool to precede him into the hovel, he calls him ‘You houseless poverty’ and follows this by considering – perhaps for the first time – ‘poor naked wretches whereso’er you are,’ wondering

How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,

Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you

From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en

Too little care of this!

(III, iv, 30-33 – emphasis added_

Lear is becoming aware of basic, deprived conditions not thought about or cared for in the palace. But it is the sight of Edgar with his ‘uncovered body’ which provokes Lear to the final stripping.

Is man no more than this?…Thou art the thing itself; unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. Off, off you lendings! Come, unbutton here. [Tearing off his clothes]

(III, iv, 105-11 – emphasis added)

The ‘thing itself’ was precisely what he could not see in the first scene, since he had put himself in the thrall of ‘seeming.’ Now we get the feeling that the terrible ‘disaccommodation’ which Lear has undergone has brought him – shatteringly – to true vision, even at the expense of what Edgar calls ‘the safer sense’ (i.e., sounder, saner – IV, vi, 81). Which is perhaps – in Lear’s case – just what it costs. But in his ‘madness,’ he breaks through to those piercing insights into and through the whole fabric of society – ‘a dog’s obeyed in office’ (IV, vi, 160):

Through tattered clothes small vices do appear;

Robes and furred gowns hide all…

(IV, vi, 166-7)

Lear has been brought to see through all the pleats and wraps and folds. Well might Edgar say wonderingly – ‘Reason in madness!’ (IV, vi 177).

France things Cordelia must have committed something ‘monstrous’ to ‘dismantle so many folds of favor.’ We shortly get an echo of this when Gloucester, too credulously accepting Edmund’s account of Edgar’s treachery, says, ‘He cannot be such a monster.’ (I, ii, 11). The word occurs quite frequently, but most importantly in Albany’s rebukes to Goneril.

Thou changed and self-covered thing, for shame

Be-monster not thy feature.

(IV, ii, 62-3)

He calls her ‘barbarous, degenerate’ and says:

If that the heavens do not their visible spirits

Send quickly down to tame these vile offenses,

It will come,

Humanity must perforce prey on itself,

Like monsters of the deep.

(IV, ii, 46-50)

Heaven sends down no spirits, visible or invisible, in this play, and humanity – visibly – preys upon itself. Let me add this, from Troilus and Cressida:

And appetite, a universal wolf,

So doubly seconded with will and power,

Must make perforce a universal prey,

And last eat upon itself.

(I, iii, 121-4)

Just noting the recurrence of the word ‘perforce,’ let us stay for a moment with the repeated word ‘prey,’ usually used to refer to animals that hunt and kill other animals. The extraordinary proliferation of animal imagery and references to animals has often been noted. These references include – dog, cur, rats, monkeys, ant, eels, vulture, wolf, frog, toad, tadpole, newt, mice, foxes, cats, greyhound, worms, adders – this list is by no means exhaustive. The general feeling is that the human world is being rapidly taken over by animals – palaces seem to be repossessed by dogs and foxes and snakes and other low, mean, snapping and sliding animals. There is no sense of magnificent animal energy, rather of things that prowl and creep and slither – sharp-toothed yet devoid of valour and glamour. One of the horrors of the play is the sense of the fading away of the human while such animals scurry and leap and slip into the play from every side. But it is the humans who are reverting – degenerating – to animals. Goneril and Regan end up as ‘adders’ squinting at each other. Edmund turns out to be a ‘foul-spotted toad.’ The relapse, or regression is, we feel, to some prior stage of evolution when things had but recently crawled out of the mud. These animals are not fine enough to be man’s competitors; they are rather his mean ancestors. Yet how quickly they can repossess his world – how easily he can re-become them. So near is the ditch; so easy is the fall back into the slime. It is the copious listing of such encroaching and invading animals, or animalized humans, that gives such agonizing force to Lear’s final complaint against the universe:

[MY NOTE:  I’m going to skip over this so I don’t ruin it for you…]

…This is a world in which rats retain all their mean, scurrying activity while Cordelia is hanged…

It is, indeed, monstrous, and there are number of people in the play who effectively regress to the condition of preying animals or, worse, ‘be-monster’ themselves. As I have indicated, the ‘monstrous’ is the non-natural, and we are again confronted in this play, as never before so horrifyingly, with the profound and insoluable problem of how nature can produce the unnatural – anti-nature. Kent points to the problem:

     It is the stars,

The stars above us, govern our conditions;

Else one self mate and make could not beget

Such different issues.

(IV, iii, 33-6)

Star-governed or not, how can Cordelia and Goneril and Regan issue from the same womb? (the play opens with the description of a pregnant belly  — ‘she grew round-wombed’ – and the play will precipitate a deep exploration of what the ‘thick rotundity’ of nature can bring forth.) Why should one daughter draw to the bias of nature and the others fall from it? And what is the bias of nature? This is what Albany says to Goneril:

     I fear your disposition:

That nature which contemns its origin

Cannot be bordered certain in itself;

She that herself will sliver and disbranch

From her material sap, perforce must wither

And come to deadly use.

(IV, ii, 31-6)

Again – perforce; by force, of necessity. It will happen whether we will it or not, with or without visible or invisible spirits, irrespective of the stars. This is the belief, or perhaps we should say – the hope. And note: Albany’s image. To ‘sliver and disbranch’ means to cut off from the main trunk, and introduces the idea that Goneril has perversely, unnaturally, stripped herself away from the true source of life.  In her treatment of her father, she certainly ‘contemns’ her origin, and she does wither and came to deadly use.’ She, in her turn, has despised Albany’s ‘milky gentleness,’ and here counters by calling him ‘milk-livered man!’ (IV, ii, 50). (In Macbeth, we hear of the ‘milk of human kindness’ – there is a ‘great abatement of kindness’ in King Lear – and the ‘sweet milk of concord.’) Milk and sap evoke the nourishing, nurturing, generative and gentle aspects of nature. Natural nature. Evil is often rendered or figured as a state of desiccation in Shakespeare; conversely, there is a beneficent, life-promoting – milk and sap – force in nature which it is possible, even more natural, to remain attached to and keep in touch with. It is often associated with a benign moistness, and this is the importance of Cordelia’s tears. They provoke an anonymous Gentleman to a description of astonishing beauty:

     You have seen

Sunshine and rain at once; her smiles and tears

Were like a better way: those happy smilets

That played on her ripe lip seemed not to know

What guests were in her eyes, which parted thence

As pearls from diamond dropped.

(IV, iii, 18-24)

Rain, tears (and note that they are ‘guests’ in her eyes: when Cornwall and Regan put out Gloucester’s eyes in his own house, among other things, they are hideously disfiguring and transgressing the sacred rules of hospitality and the guest-hose relation, as Gloucester impotently complains); pearls, diamond – here surely, irresistibly, are the true and enduring values. These are aligned with – spring from – the gentle and restorative virtues of nature – ‘our foster-mother of nature is repose,’ says the Doctor, indicating the nursing side of nature (IV, iv, 12) – which Cordelia invokes and summons as she seeks to cure and heal her mad father:

     All blest secrets

All you unpublished virtues of the earth,

Spring with my tears! be aidant and remediate

In the good man’s distress!

(IV, iv, 15-18)

These tears are, indeed, ‘holy water from her heavnly eyes’ (IV, iii, 81). The ‘unpublished virtues of the earth’ may mean, specifically here, secret remedial herbs, but the words have an infinitely larger resonance. After all the predatory cruelty and viciousness we have witnessed, Cordelia’s tears demonstrate and remind us that there is ‘a better way.’  The earth does have ‘virtues’ even if it does produce monsters. Cordelia is not an angel or a divinely appointed agent of redemption. She is – we must feel this – the truly, uncorrupted human: dutiful, kind, honest, ‘heavenly true,’ respectful of her origin and all the bonds and obligations that branch from it – nature most natural. But she is murdered and Lear is on a ‘wheel of fire’ of mental anguish and dies of unsustainable grief. What of ‘nature’ now? It is not visibly ‘aidant and remediate’ – not at all. And it is Shakespeare who murders Cordelia, which is more than legend and chronicle ever did.

When Albany hears Lear cursing Goneril with terrible rage, he asks – ‘Now, gods that we adore, whereof comes this?’; to which Goneril replies – ‘Never afflict yourself to know the cause’ (I, iv, 297-8). Whereof comes a father’s maddened rage; whereof comes a daughter’s cruelty and ingratitude; whereof comes whatever it is that drives a man to pull out another man’s eyes – whence ‘ruins wasteful entrance?’ If we asked Iago such questions, we know what he would say, or rather what he wouldn’t. Goneril’s last words offer an eerie echo of Iago’s…[MY NOTE:  Skipping a bit so as not to give stuff away…]

‘Demand me nothing,’ ‘Never afflict yourself to know the cause,’ ‘The laws are mine,’ Othello starts his long speech as he enters Desdemona’s bedroom to kill her – ‘It is the cause, it is the cause’…he will not ‘name’ it, but his repetition of the word is immensely suggestive. ‘Cause’ has, at least, two senses. In natural science it is assumed that every ‘effect’ has a ‘cause.’ You cannot actually see causes – they have to be inferred or deduced. This way the laws of nature are discovered and established. The apple falls and the cause is gravity. Of course there is scope here for any number of problems, both scientific and philosophic. Causes may be multiple or untraceable: one cause is the effect of a prior cause, and so on. But the word was also used to refer to a matter (case, cause), which someone feels entitled to take to law. It could be that in his entranced invocations, Othello is hoping (asserting) that he has both natural and human law on his side. But we have seen how his legal improvisations are a gross travesty of the law. Lear improvises a grotesque parody of a courtroom, in the farmhouse where Gloucester leads him from the heath.

I will arraign them straight.

[To Edgar] Come, sit thou here, most learned justice.

(III, vi, 21-2)

‘Let us deal justly,’ says Edgar, and Lear starts the proceedings. ‘Arraign her first’ (III, vi, 46) meaning Goneril. Staying with the word ‘arraign’ for a moment, it is worth noting that it occurs in almost the last words of Goneril when she defies her husband, Albany: ‘The laws are mine, not thine:/Who can arraign me for’t?’ To ‘arraign’ is to bring to trial, and her words suggest a complete collapse of the legal structure. How legitimates itself is always potentially a problem – is it simply a way of rationalizing and preserving the status quo, with all its inequalities? Goneril reveals here that she recognizes no law except her own – adapting a good phrase of Melville’s, we can say that her conscience has become simply ‘a lawyer to her will.’ She is beyond ‘arraigning.’ Lear himself moves to a perception of the manifold injustices concealed by ‘law’: ‘see how yon justice rails upon you simple thief. Hark in thine ear: change places, and, handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?’ (I, vi, 154-6). Back to the farmhouse and the imaginary ‘trial.’ Having arraigned Goneril in the form of a ‘joint stool,’ Lear moves on to Regan: ‘Then let them anatomize Regan. See what breeds about her heart. Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?’ (III, vi, 75-7).

One could see this as the question of the play. Is there a cause in nature for the effect which is Regan’s hard heart. Or is the effect itself the cause – hearts are causes, and her heart is like that because it is like that. Chilling. Lear spend a lot of the play aiming his deranged anger at his daughters – as though they are to blame for everything. Like many tragic heroes (like Othello in this), Lear resists and fights against self-knowledge until almost the end, and, it must be remembered, it was Lear’s initial actions which permitted, arguably encouraged, the emergence and release of evil, even if it was already latently there, ‘wrapped up in countenance.’ To that extend, he is responsible. Only after he has been exposed to a maximum of inner and outer buffeting can he kneel and say to Cordelia – ‘I am a very foolish, fond old man’ (IV, vii, 60). And then:

I know you do not love me; for your sisters

Have, as I do remember, done me wrong.

You have some cause, they have not.

Cordelia:  No cause, no cause.

The calm, generous gentleness of Cordelia’s words awaken thoughts of a side of nature which has been systematically and brutally erased in the course of the play, but which is serenely above arguments about causes. It is the cause, it is the cause? No cause, no cause. It is the better way. Let them anatomize Cordelia. See what breeds about her heart. Is there any cause in nature that makes these gentle hearts? I think we have to give the Emilia answer. They are not ever gentle for the cause, but gentle for they’re gentle.

Edmund, of course, despises law from the start – ‘Fine word, ‘legitimate’’ (I, ii, 18). Cornwall, determined to punish Gloucester, has an attitude toward the law more like Goneril’s.

Though well we may not pass upon his life

Without the form of justice, yet our power

Shall do a court’sy to our wrath, which men

May blame, but not control.

(III, vii, 25-8)

This is another way of saying – ‘the laws are mine.’ He will twist the ‘forms of justice’ to satisfy his ‘wrath,’ as he does in the horrifying improvised trial and torture scene the follows. There is a lot of anger in this play – Lear’s rage, awesome in its excess, cosmic in its reach, as well as Cornwall’s and Regan’s sadistic wrath.

To be in anger is impiety;

But who is man that is not angry?

(III, v, 57)

Thus Timon of Athens. And there is another kind of anger – call it righteous indignation – which must be seen as justified and part of the fully human. As Kent says: ‘anger hath a privilege.’ When Cornwall is bent on putting out Gloucester’s eye, a servant – one of those usually voiceless, deferential, obedient appendages of the court – says:

    Hold your hand, my lord!

I have served you ever since I was a child;

But better service have I ever done you

Than now to bid you hold.

Cornwall is incredulous at such insubordination, but the servant persists with the thrilling line – ‘Nay, then, come on, and take the chance of anger,’ and although Regan stabs him in the back he has in fact killed Cornwall. The play with father turning against his child, then brother plots against brother; in due course husband and wife fall out (Albany and Goneril), and here the servant turns on his master. All the bonds are ‘cracking.’ But in this case it is a matter of the triumph of humanity over hierarchy. Evil has reached such a pitch that even the lowliest man – if he is still human – cannot sit idly by and watch. The cruelty of dukes can stir the anger of a serf. In a curious way, it is the hinge moment of the play. It occurs literally just about at mid-point, and in fact it marks the beginning of the end for the evil plotters. They have done much damage and will do more, but increasingly and in turn they ‘come to deadly use.’ Thus far, the tide of evil has gathered force and swept along unopposed. Now there is a physical reaction. Not words of horror but a deed of anger. And not by Albany, or Kent, or Edgar, but an anonymous servant, a serf ‘thrilled with remorse,/Opposed against the act’ (V, ii, 723). That the agent who precipitates the turn, initiates the slow (too slow for Cordelia) self-correcting process of nature, is part of the grim power of the play. Outraged reaction to, and taking preventative issue with evil, comes not from above, but from below, socially one of the lowest of the low.”

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And from Stephen Booth:

“…I am arguing that the greatness of Lear derives from the confrontation it makes with inconclusiveness – that the greatness of King Lear (in the metaphoric sense of ‘greatness’) derives, at least in part, from its greatness (in the literal sense of ‘greatness’), its physical extent, its great duration. King Lear is not the longest of Shakespeare’s play, but, in ways comparable to those by which he makes Polonius, who does not speak much, seem always to be talking, and makes the verbose Coriolanus seem tightlipped, Shakespeare uses great and demonstrable technical skill to stretch his audience out upon the rack of this tough play.

The way of our escape and Lear’s are one. We want Lear to die, just as, almost from the beginning, we have wanted the play to end. That does not mean that we are unfeeling toward Lear or that we dislike the play: watching King Lear is not unlike waiting for the death of a dying friend; our eagerness for the end makes the friend no less dear. In his first speech Lear promises to die: he will, he says, ‘Unburdened crawl toward death’ (I.i.41); for the progress of the play, crawl becomes the operative word. Even while the plot still offers, indeed promises, the happy ending the story has in all tellings previous to Shakespeare’s,  Lear’s death is our only way out of a play that has been ready to end since it began. By its kind, the story of Lear and his three daughters promises a happy ending in which the virtuous youngest daughter proves herself so and the parent sees his error; but the play refuses to fulfill the generic promise inherent in its story.

After scene i the story of Lear and his daughters lacks only three quick steps to its conclusion: Goneril will show her colors; Regan will show hers; and Cordelia will prove true. Scene ii delays the predictable advance by opening up an echoing situation in Gloucester’s family. In scene iii we see Goneril obviously preparing to do her duty by literary genre; in scene iv she does it. Lear now sees her as we see her, curses her, says, ‘Away, away!’ and exits (I.iv.280). Goneril has played out her part, and Lear is done with her. Four lines later Lear comes back onstage: ‘What, fifty of my followers at a clap?/Within a fortnight?’ Both the re-entrance and the new indignity Lear suffers are extra; the fact that Lear discovers the new and unexpected wrong offstage and discovers it to us only obliquely heightens our sense that the five-line resumption of his curse on Goneril (290-95) is excessive. It is theatrically excessive. We cannot pause to reason its need, and we do not grumble like Polonius listening to the player, but as Lear curses on, doing again what was over and done with, we endure the slow passage of time like criminals in the stocks.  When King Lear, the character, says ‘I’ll assume the shape which thou dost think/I have cast off for ever’ (300-301), his hollow threat echoes the action of King Lear, a play that persists in resuming completed incidents and relapsing into past circumstances. In terms of our real experience, the experience of watching a play, we are, like Lear, oppressed beyond reasonable limits, even though the oppression is scaled to a three-hour stay at the theater.

It takes Shakespeare about twenty minutes to get us to Regan and the next necessary step; ;but, when it does come, it is, appropriately, an intensified repetition of Lear’s confrontation with the elder wicked sister. In II.iv.84-115, we are presented with an echo of Goneril’s feigned sickness (I.iv.49) and with a variation on Oswald’s negligence and refusal to come when Lear calls for him. (I.iv.43-54, 75-79). Then, when Regan is on the point of teleological fulfillment, Enter Goneril (II.iv.184) – and we take a half step back in our progress toward Cordelia, just when we seemed about to complete a step forward.

Similarly, Lear’s meeting with Cordelia, which does not occur until IV.vii, is systematically delayed from IV.iii onward. (One reason, perhaps a main reason, why the meeting of Lear and Gloucester in Iv.vi is so moving is that it is narratively superfluous.)

A complete index of phenomena that avoid available means of concluding would note that Edgar and Kent continue to masquerade well after need has passed, and would include the curious fact that Lear’s madness remains an impending event of the hear future long after we have concluded that he is mad; but exhaustive demonstration is probably unnecessary. I will, however, discuss the part of King Lear that perennially prompts critics to talk about endurance: Lear’s night on the heath.

Forty-five lines into III.ii, Lear’s first scene in the storm, Kent says this:

     Since I was man,

Such sheets of fire, such bursts of horrid thunder,

Such groans of roaring wind and rain, I never

Remember to have heard. Man’s nature cannot carry

Th’affliction nor the fear.

`No audience that has both heard Lear described in III.i as ‘contending with the fretful elements’ and seen him do so at the beginning of the scene needs Kent’s iterative and iteratively structured testimony to the horrors of the night and of Lear’s situation. I think the power of the storm scenes derives not from the events portrayed but from contemplation of those events in combination with a real trial of our own endurance. Lear’s agony and the audience’s are totally different both in scale and kind, but they have the same remedy: Lear must ‘come out o’th’storm’ (II.iv.304), must enter the hovel.

In his next speech after evaluating the storm, Kent tells us about the hovel (and does so in a scene that has so far been crowded with language of shelter, coverings, and roofs):

Gracious, my lord, hard by hear is a hovel;

Some friendship will it lend you ‘gainst the tempest.

Repose you there…

Lear agrees immediately and with an unusual constancy of general focus:

     My wits begin to turn.

Come on, my boy. How dost, my boy? Art cold?

I am cold myself? Where is this straw, my fellow?

The art of our necessities is strange,

And can make vile things precious. Come, your hovel.

Poor fool and knave, I have one part in my heart

That’s sorry yet for thee.

The Fool sings a song; Lear says, ‘True, boy. Come, bring us to this hovel,’ exits with Kent, and, once the Fool concludes the seventeen-line prophecy with which he lengthens the scene, III.ii is over.

The next time we see Lear, Kent, and the Fool is in III.iv; they are still outdoors. The scene begins thus:

Enter Lear, Kent, and Fool:

Kent:

Here is the place, milord. Good my lord, enter.

The tyranny of the open night’s too rough

For nature to endure.

Storm still

Lear:

     Let me alone.

Kent:

Good my lord, enter here.

Lear:

     Wilt break my heart?

Kent:

I had rather break mine own. Good my lord, enter.

Lear continues to rage, echoing the manner he abandoned when he agreed to seek the hovel and stressing his need of shelter (‘In such a night/To shut me out! Pour on; I will endure’). Kent again urges Lear to enter the hovel – exit the stage and thereby end the scene. Kent gets Lear’s attention. Lear says he will not go in; then says he will; then send the Fool in (‘In, boy; go first’) and resumes his address to the whirlwind. One character, the Fool, has at last achieved shelter, but that achievement is counterproductive; the stage does not begin to empty but to fill. The Fool discovers Poor Tom; both come out into the storm; Gloucester arrives to second Kent’s urging; Lear continues to delay (‘First let me talk with this philosopher’). Finally, 175 lines from Kent’s ‘Here is the place’ and a quarter-hour after a hovel hard by was offered to the expectations of the audience, Lear goes in.

James Thurber’s account of the Get-Ready Man is a fitting epigraph for an essay on King Lear: the Get-Ready Man was on the right track, but his prediction was really only wishful thinking – wishful thinking raises to assertion by a confidence in limits that can be maintained only by fanatics. Every time King Lear is performed, the theater knows moments far more disquieting than the ones the Get-Ready Man shaped for the cultural elite of Columbus, Ohio.”

Obviously, much more to come…

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlD49HkBR1g&list=PL7DBCA9DCF7E207C0&index=6

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKHCLPhMTbI&list=PL7DBCA9DCF7E207C0&index=7

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy_um6kOaUo&list=PL7DBCA9DCF7E207C0

My next post:  Sunday evening/Monday morning, more on Act Three.

Enjoy.  And enjoy your weekend.

King Lear

Act Three, Part Three

By Dennis Abrams

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I’d like to talk a bit more about Lear’s (and my) beloved Fool before we say goodbye to him.

In the Quarto the Fool’s role ends with his participation in the trial held by the now mad King Lear of his daughters; not so in the Folio, which gives the Fool an exit line “And I’ll go to bed at noon,” said in response to Lear’s mad topsy-turvy, “we’ll go to supper i’ the morning”; a proverbial phrase meaning “I’ll play the fool as well.”  Nothing more is heard of him until the end of the play (although he is glimpsed helping to carry away the sleeping Lear at the end of scene six), when n Lear’s last speech the ambiguous line “And my poor fool is hanged” refers most obviously to Cordelia (who we know has been hanged), but also (intentionally?) recalls the Fool as well.  No explanation is given for the Fool’s disappearance, a matter which some have found troubling.  In the highly regarded production by Adrian Noble (Royal Shakespeare Theater, 1982), the Fool (Antony Sher) was accidentally stabbed to death by a mad Lear (Michael Gambon) as he retreated downstage in an attempt to escape the king’s fit of rage during the “trial” of his daughters.  (I think I would have disliked seeing this a great deal).  By contrast, Grigori Kozintsev keeps the Fool alive until the end of his 1970 film version. The film ends, fittingly, with a close-up of Edgar, but for Kozintsev the Fool becomes especially important as symbolizing the continuation of life in the sound of the pipe he plays:

‘Rags, and the soft sound of the pipe — the still voice of suffering. Then, during the battle scenes, a requiem breaks out, then falls silent. And once again the pipe can be heard. Life — a none too easy one — goes on.’

But if directors worry about the disappearance of the Fool, I honestly doubt whether anyone watching a performance is troubled by it. Lear has gone mad, and can no longer relate to the wit of the Fool. In fact, the action moves in a different direction with the blinding of Gloucester in 3.7, and Lear himself is offstage for roughly five hundred lines in the Quarto (and four hundred or so in the Folio, which makes some substantial cuts between 3.7 and 4.6). When Lear returns in 4.6, he seems to have become, in (or through) his madness, something of a seer, with something of the Fool’s wisdom, and seems to play the role of the fool in relation to Gloucester. In Act I, Lear and the Fool maintain in their dialogue something of the cross-talk act of the music-hall tradition (a tradition which one can see in the work of Samuel Beckett — more on that below), in which one partner in a double act plays the “feed” or straight man to the other; as he goes mad, and is engrossed by Poor Tom in Act 3, Lear loses this close bantering relationship with the Fool, and 4.6 establishes a new cross-talk act in which Gloucester has become the “feed” to Lear, who more or less takes over something of the role of the Fool, though not, of course, his function as professional entertainer.

It is, I think, in his role of professional entertainer and “feed” to Lear, in Act 1 especially, that the Fool serves, with his generalizing rhymes and songs and direct address to the audience at the end of 1.5, as a connector between the audience and the…titanic figure of the old King, who is so absolute in his authority, peremptory in his actions, and, as we’ve seen, given to uncontrollable outbursts of violent rage. The Fool may be thought of, maybe, as a lightning conductor, earthing the power of Lear’s majesty, and humanizing him. In these early scenes Lear plays straightman to the Fool, whose intellectual superiority in seeing so clearly what the consequences of dividing the kingdom will be brings out the aspect of folly in what King Lear has done. “Now thou art an O without a figure; I am better than thou art now. I am a fool, thou art nothing.”This function of the Fool in the early scenes can be effective no matter how the role of the Fool is played. It is a function that loses its importance when Goneril and Regan make clear the truth of the Fool’s perceptions in Act 2 and a function that is no longer necessary when Lear goes mad. Thus in Acts 2 and 3 the Fool’s comments are directed more to other characters such as Kent, or to everyone (including the audience), and his rhymes and songs usually have a generalizing force expressing a kind of folk-wisdom. In act 3 he is more concerned to persuade Lear to take shelter from the storm than to mock him.  After 3.6 the Fool has no function, and it understandable (although regrettable from at least my point of view) that Shakespeare should let him drop from sight.

And while I should say something about the blinding of Gloucester…words fail me.

From Harold Bloom:

“A decade or so back, I had to defend Lear against the dislike of many of my women students, but that time is past. Feminist critics will be unhappy with the mad old king for perhaps another decade. I suspect they will make fewer converts in the early twenty-first century, though, since Lear is very much a fit protagonist for the millennium and after. His catastrophe doubtless sends him into rages within the mother within. Nevertheless, he is aware of his need to ‘sweeten’ his ‘imagination’ – the return of Cordelia heals him, and not through mere selfishness. It isn’t Shakespeare who destroys Cordelia [MY NOTE:  Booth disagrees with that], but Edmund…and he is anything but Shakespeare’s surrogate. I will argue that Edmund is a representation of Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare’s troublesome forerunner and rival, whose influence effectually ended much earlier, with the advent of the Bastard Faulconbridge, Bottom, Shylock, Portia, and overwhelmingly, Falstaff. Marlowe returns brilliant as Edmund, but as a shadow strongly controlled by Shakespeare, and so Lear’s antithesis, who cannot even speak to the magnificent king. Edmund fascinates; he outIagos Iago, being a strategist rather than an improviser. He is the coldest personage in all Shakespeare, just as Lear is emotionally the most turbulently intense, but Gloucester’s Bastard is madly attractive, and not just to the infatuated Goneril and Regan, who die for him. Properly played, he is the sublime of Jacobean villains, icily sophisticated and frighteningly disinterested for a Machiavel who would have secured supreme power but for Edgar’s triumphant return as accuser and avenger. Edmund and Edgar are the most interesting set of brothers in Shakespeare…each is the other’s undersong, I will keep the play’s ultimate hero in mind as I consider its principal villain. Edmund outplots everyone in the play, easily duping Edgar, but the purgatory of Edgar’s impersonating Tom O’Bedlam and of guiding his blinded father produces an implacable champion whose justice cuts down Edmund with inevitable ease as the wheel comes full circle. The interplay of Edmund and Edgar strikingly becomes the dialectic of Lear’s fate (and of England’s) more than of Gloucester’s, since Edgar is Lear’s godson and involuntary successor, while Edmund is the point-for-point negation of the old king.

One need not be a Goneril or a Regan to find Edmund dangerously attractive, in ways that perpetually surprise the unwary reader or playgoer. William R. Elton makes the suggestion that Edmund is a Shakespearean anticipation of the seventeenth-century Don Juan tradition, which culminates in Moliere’s great play (1665). Elton also notes the crucial difference between Edmund and Iago, which is that Edmund paradoxically sees himself as overdetermined by his bastardy even as he fiercely affirms his freedom, whereas Iago is totally free. Consider how odd we would find it had Shakespeare decided to present Iago as a bastard, or indeed given us any information at all about Iago’s father. But Edmund status as natural son is crucial, though even here Shakespeare confounds his age’s expectations. Elton cites a Renaissance proverb that bastards by chance are good but by nature bad. Faulconbridge the Bastard, magnificent hero of The Life and Death of King John, is good not by chance, but because he is very nearly the reincarnation of his father, Richard Lionheart, whereas the dreadful Don John, in Much Ado About Nothing, has a natural badness clearly founded upon his illegitimacy. Edmund astonishingly combines aspects of the personalities of Faulconbridge and Don John, though he is even more attractive than Faulconbridge, and far more vicious than Don John of Aragon.

Though Edmund, unlike Iago, cannot reinvent himself wholly, he takes great pride in assuming responsibility for his own amorality, his pure opportunism. Don John in Much Ado says, ‘I cannot hide what I am,’ while Faulconbridge the Bastard affirms, ‘And I am I, howe’ev I was begot.’ Faulconbridge’s ‘And I am I’ plays against Iago’s ‘I am not what I am.’ Edmund cheerfully proclaims, ‘I should have been that I am had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.’ The great ‘I am’ remains a positive pronouncement in Edmund, and yet he is as grand a negation, in some other ways, as even Iago is. But because of that one positive stance toward his own being, Edmund will change at the very end., whereas Iago’s final act of freedom will be to pledge an absolute muteness as he is led away to death by torture. Everything, according to Iago, lies in the will, and in his case everything does.

In Act V, Scene iii, Edmund enters with Lear and Cordelia as his prisoners. It is only the second time he shares the stage with Lear, and it will be the last. WE might expect that he would speak to Lear (or to Cordelia), but he avoids doing so, referring to them, only in the third person in his commands. Clearly Edmund does not wish to speak to do Lear, because he is actively plotting the murder of Cordelia, and perhaps of Lear as well. Yet all the intricacies of the double plot do not in themselves explain away this remarkable gap in the play, and I wonder why Shakespeare avoided the confrontation. You can say he had no need of it, but this drama tells us to reason not the need. Shakespeare is our Scripture, replacing Scripture itself, and one should learn to read him the way the Kabbalists read the Bible, interpreting every evidence as being significant. What can it tell u s about Edmund, and also about Lear, that Shakespeare found nothing for them to say to each other?

Edmund, for all his sophisticated and charismatic charm, inspires no one’s love, except for the deadly and voracious passions of Goneril and Regan. And Edmund does not love them, or anyone else, even himself. Perhaps Lear and Edmund cannot speak to each other because Lear is bewildered by the thwarting of his excess of love for Cordelia, and by the hatred for him of Goneril and Regan, unnatural daughters, as he must call them. Edmund, in total contrast, hardly regards love as natural, even as he grimly exults in being the natural son of Gloucester. But even that contrast hardly accounts for the curious sense we have that Edmund somehow is not in the same play as Lear and Cordelia.

When Goneril kisses Edmund (Act IV, Scene ii, line 22), he gallantly accepts it as a kind of literal kiss of death, since he is too grand an ironist not to appreciate his own pledge: ‘Yours in the ranks of death.’ Still more remarkable is his soliloquy that closes Act V, Scene i:

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 enjoy’d

If both remain alive: to take the widow

Exasperates, makes made 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.

So cool a negativity is unique, even in Shakespeare. Edmund is superbly sincere when he asks the absolutely open question ‘Which of them shall I take?/Both? one? or neither?’ His insouciance is sublime, the questions being tossed off in the spirit of a light event, as though a modern young nobleman might ask whether he should take two princesses, one, or none out to dinner? A double date with Goneril and Regan should daunt any libertine, but the negation named Edmund is something very enigmatic. Iago’s negative theology is predicated upon an initial worship of Othello, but Edmund is amazingly free of all connection, all affect, whether toward his two adder-or sharklike princesses, or toward his half brother – or toward Gloucester, in particular. Gloucester is in the way, in rather the same sense that Lear and Cordelia are in the way. Edmund evidently would just as soon not watch his father’s eyes be put out, but this delicacy does not mean that he cares at all about the event, one way or the other. Yet, as Hazlitt pointed out, Edmund does not share in the hypocrisy of Goneril and Regan: his Machiavellianism is absolutely pure and lacks an Oedipal motive. Freud’s vision of family romances simply does not apply to Edmund. Iago is free to reinvent himself every minute, yet Iago has strong passions, however negative. Edmund has no passions whatsoever, he has never loved anyone, and he never will. In that respect, he is Shakespeare’s most original character.

There remains the enigma of why this cold negation is so attractive, which returns us usefully to his absolute contrast with Lear, and with Lear’s uncanny Fool. Edmund’s desire is only for power, and yet one wonders if desire is at all the right word in connection with Edmund. Richard III lusts for power; Iago quests for it over Othello, so as to uncreate Othello, to reduce the mortal god of war into a chaos. Ulysses certainly seeks power over Achilles, in order to get on with the destruction of Troy. Edmund is the most Marlovian of these grand negations, a will to power with no particular purpose behind it, since the soldier Macbeth does not so much will to usurp power as he is overcome by his own imagination of usurpation. Edmund accepts the overdetermination of being a bastard, indeed he overaccepts it, and glorifies in it, but he accepts nothing else. He is convinced of his own natural superiority, which extends to his command of manipulative language, and yet he is not a Marlovian rhetorician, like Tamburlaine, nor is he intoxicated with his own villainy, like Richard III and Barabas. He is a Marlovian figure not in that he resembles a character in a play by Marlowe, but because I suspect he was intended to resemble Christopher Marlowe himself. Marlowe died, aged twenty-nine, in 1583, at about the time Shakespeare composed Richard III, with its Marlovian protagonist, and just before the writing of Titus Andronicus, with its Marlovian parody in Aaron the Moor. By 1605, when King Lear was written, Marlowe had been dead for twelve years, but As You Like It, composed in 1599, is curiously replete with wry allusions to Marlowe. We have no contemporary anecdotes connecting Shakespeare to Marlowe, but it seems quite unlikely that Shakespeare never met his exact contemporary, and nearest precursor, the inventor of English blank-verse tragedy. Edmund, in the pre-Christian context of King Lear, is certainly a pagan atheist and libertine naturalist, as Elton emphasizes, and these are the roles that Marlowe’s live exemplified for his contemporaries. Marlowe the man, or rather Shakespeare’s memory of him, may be the clue to Edmund’s strange glamour, the charismatic qualities that make it so difficult for us not to like him.

Whether or not an identification of Marlowe and Edmund is purely my critical trope, even as trope it suggests that Edmund’s driving force is Marlovian nihilism, revolt against authority and tradition for revolt’s own sake, since revolt and nature are thus made one. Revolt is heroic for Edmund, whether as consort either to Regan or to Goneril, or as solitary figure, should they slay each other…”

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From Frank Kermode:

“From this moment on, the language of King Lear has such force and variety that to give a convincing account of it seems close to impossible. Lear rages, and his rage is rant:

   And thou, all-shaking thunder,

Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ th’ world!

Crack nature’s moulds, all germains spill at once

That makes ingrateful man!

Nature is again to take his part against his ‘unnatural’ daughters; again the plea is for sterility, anything rather than the kind of vitality they display. The next appeal is to justice, which it was once his prerogative to dispense; now it will come, if at all, from elsewhere. It is at the disposal of the criminal, the perjured, the incestuous; the elements have become the ‘servile ministers’ of his daughters, [MY NOTE:  THIS makes sense!] and the punishments fall on him, even though he is ‘More sinn’d against than sinning.’ The sheer noise of Lear’s speeches is a necessary prelude to his sudden turning in compassion to the Fool, and later to Poor Tom. The shouting of the King and the barbed chatter of the Fool accompany this recognition of what it is to be cold and poor, to be at the bottom level of nature. The tone changes in the lines beginning ‘Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are,/That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm’ (III.iv.28-29); and Lear sends the Fool before him into the hovel. There they find Poor Tom. It is superbly apt that Lear imagines Tom’s troubles to have come from the ingratitude of his daughters, a punishment for his having begotten them.

Once more the theme is justice. Edgar-Tom provides a vision of unjust luxury; he has been a fine courtier, but now, without shoes and clothes and perfume, his is an image of destitution: ‘here’s three on ‘s are sophisticated. Thou art the thing itself: unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, fork’d animal as thou art.’ And Lear begins to tear off his own clothes: “Off, off, you lendings! Come, unbutton here.’

This scene is in prose and yet it is poetry of the highest quality. Shakespeare had mastered the device of allowing a pattern of language to irrupt into violent dramatic action. This shedding of ‘additions’ or ‘lendings’ is an instance. Another, equally extraordinary, is the tearing out of Gloucester’s eyes, for which all the references to eyes and to sight and to ‘nothing’ might have prepared us, save that the sheer violence of the act, and of all anger displayed – Cornwall’s cold and Regan’s sadistically excited – makes us, even four centuries later, turn our heads away from the sight.

The crazy chatter of Tom is now heard together with the lament of the newly arrived Gloucester:

Gloucester:  Our flesh and blood, my lord, is grown so vild

That it doth hate what gets it.

Edgar:  Poor Tom’s a-cold.

The themes intertwine as it were musically; the cruelty of children, the unsheltered life of unaccommodated man. Gloucester himself says his wits are crazed. Lear believes that Edgar has shown himself to be a philosopher, a student of thunder, one who is so close to being the thing itself that he will understand other elemental phenomena.

The play now maintains a double movement: the craziness on the heath and the treachery of Edmund, with the cruel calculations of Cornwall, indoors. The next scene on the heath (III, vi) presents an image of mad justice in the fantasy trial of Goneril and Regan. (This is only in the Folio, but it is hard to believe that this amazing scene, so much of the very substance of the work, was an afterthought.) The ‘justicers’ are a Fool (dealing with equity rather than unmitigated justice) and a Bedlam maniac (‘Thou robed man of justice.’ ‘Let us deal justly,’ says Tom. Lear, now quite mad, still in his babblings, does not stray far from the obsessive language of the play. ‘Is there any cause in  nature that makes these hard hearts?’ [It is a philosophical question, like inquiring into the cause of thunder]…You, sir, I do not like the fashion of your garments.’ As Lear sinks into sleep, the Fool makes his last quip and disappears from the play.

The action proceeds with another trial, this time the interrogation and punishment of Gloucester. In the midst of this obscene horror the words ‘justice’ and of course ‘eyes’ and ‘seeing’ are repeated again and again, even with an echo of the Fool’s earlier joke about the use of the nose to separate the eyes. The vile jellies are trampled on, and Gloucester, now an ‘eyeless villain,’ must ‘smell/His way to Dover.’ In the end, there are compassionate servants to bring him ‘flax and whites of eggs’ for his bleeding face; but only in Q. Whether or not this passage existed only in the Quarto, or in a lost archetype, it would seem that some hand, not willing to forgo absolute cruelty, removed in. In Peter Brook’s unforgettable 1962 production, it was omitted, not on textual grounds, but because ‘a note of sympathy’ was not wanted in ‘This Theater of Cruelty.’”

Which makes this seem like a perfect opportunity to segue back into Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare and Modern Culture where, as we left her last week, she was about to discuss Jan Kott and Peter Brook…

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“Polish critic Jan Kott’s book Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1964) had an enormous influence on the director Peter Brook. Martin Esslin’s introduction to the American edition of Shakespeare Our Contemporary ends by praising Brook’s production of Lear as ‘by now generally acknowledged as one of the finest Shakespearean performances within living memory.’ Paul Scofield’s portrayal of the title character struck audiences with a new force.

Here is Esslin’s account:

In that production a play which had been regarded as unactable for many generations came to life with tremendous impact, and as a highly contemporary statement of the human condition. And this because it was presented not as a fairy-tale of a particularly stubborn story-book king, but as an image of aging and death, the waning of powers, the slipping away of man’s hold on his environment: a great ritual poem on evanescence and mortality, on man’s loneliness in a storm-tossed universe.

‘Great ritual poem’ and ‘man’s loneliness’ both seem terms bound to another era, although they had powerful resonances then, and still carry some effect today. But that the play is a ‘highly contemporary statement of the human condition’ seems itself a highly contemporary statement.

From the time of the 1960s, King Lear was read, produced, and thought of as a bleak and despairing play. [MY NOTE:  I find it even more unbelievable that there was a time when it wasn’t thought of as “a bleak and despairing play.”] The idea of sublimity, long associated with the play of King Lear, was now connected to the idea of modernity. And that connection made the mid-twentieth century the age of Lear.

Samuel Beckett’s Endgame and Acts Without Words were performed together at their premiere in London in 1957. It was Jan Kott who had the idea of comparing them to Shakespeare’s play, in a chapter called ‘King Lear or Endgame.’ In each the tragic and the grotesque coexist, and exchange places without warning.

Kott took somber note of the new theater then emerging in postwar Europe. ‘[B]uffoonery,’ he claims, is not only a philosophy, it is also a kind of theatre. To us it is the most contemporary aspect of King Lear. And again, ‘In Shakespeare clowns often ape the gestures of kings and heroes, but only in King Lear are great tragic scenes shown through clowning.’

Both the tragic and the grotesque vision of the world [Kott writes] are composed as it were of the same elements. In a tragic and grotesque world, situations are imposed, compulsory, and inescapable. Freedom of choice and decision are part of this compulsory situation, in which both the tragic hero and the grotesque actor must always lose their struggle against the absolute. The downfall of the tragic hero is a confirmation and recognition of the absolute, whereas the downfall of the grotesque actor means mockery of the absolute and its desecration.

The absolute is transformed into a blind mechanism, a kind of automaton. Mockery is directed not only at the tormentor, but also at the victim who believed in the tormentor’s justice, raising him to the level of the absolute. The victim has consecrated his tormentor by recognizing himself as victim. ‘In the final instance,’ Kott continues, ‘tragedy is an appraisal of human fate, a measure of the absolute. The grotesque is a criticism of the absolute in the name of frail human experience. That is why tragedy brings catharsis, while grotesque offers no consolation whatever.’ But it is not always easy to distinguish the tragic from grotesque. Lear with his Fool, or mumming in front of an unresponsive and unamused Goneril and Regan, is always, it seems, precariously balanced between majesty and folly, grandeur and the ‘new pranks’ of which Goneril accuses him. Yet it was the story of the blind Gloucester, as much or more than that of the mad Lear, that seemed perhaps most emblematic of the modern condition. But the most sublime and most grotesque play within the play is the scene on ‘Dover Cliff,’ where Gloucester, blinded onstage by the unspeakable cruelty of Cornwall, encounters (and does not recognize) his disguised and loyal son.

[MY NOTE:  This section is going to get into Act Four – I think it will give you an interesting way in if you haven’t read it yet, but if you prefer reading it “on your own”, skip the next few paragraphs – I’ll insert another note when it’s safe to start reading again.]

Gloucester: Dost thou know Dover?

Edgar:  Ay, master.

Gloucester:  There is a cliff, whose high and bending head

Looks fearfully in the confined deep.

Bring me but to the very brim of it,

And I’ll repair the misery thou dost bear

With something rich about me. From that place

I shall no leading need.

(4.1.71-78)

He intends, of course, to commit suicide – to kill himself by leaping from Dover Cliff into the sea.

A few scenes later Edgar and Gloucester reappear onstage, not, of course, actually at Dover Cliff, but on a flat piece of open land. Edgar is pretending that they are climbing to the cliff top:

Gloucester:  When shall we come to the top of that same hill?

Edgar:  You do climb up it now. Look how we labor.

Gloucester:  Methinks the ground is even.

Edgar: Horrible steep.

Hark, do you hear the sea?

Gloucester:  No, truly.

Edgar:  Why, then, your other senses grow imperfect

By your eyes’ anguish.

Gloucester:  So may it be indeed

Methinks thy voice is altered and thou speakest

In better phrase and matter than thou didst.

Edgar:  Y’are much deceived, in nothing am I changed

But in my garments.

Gloucester:  Methinks y’are better spoken.

Edgar:  Come on, sir; here’s the place. Stand still.  How fearful

And dizzy ‘tis, to cast one’s eyes so low!

The crows and choughs that wing the midway air

Show scarce so gross as beetles. Halfway down

Hangs one that gathers sampire, dreadful trade!

Methinks he seems no bigger than his head.

The fishermen, that wlak upon the beach,

Appear like mice; and yound tall anchoring bark,

Diminished to her cock: her cock, a buoy

Almost too small for sight. The murmuring surge,

That on the unnumbered idle pebble chafes

Cannot be heard so high. I’ll look no more,

Lest my brain turn, and the deficient sight

Topple down headlong.

This is a consummate Shakespearean ‘unscene’ – entirely conjured up by language, even though it seems terrifyingly real.

‘Set me where you stand,’ says Gloucester, and the disguised Edgar says:

Give me your hand. You are now within a foot

Of th’ extreme verge. For all beneath the moon

Would I not leap upright.

And aside to the audience, he says:

Why do I trifle thus with his despair

Is done to sure it.

When Gloucester does ‘leap upright,’ of course, he jumps, or falls, from flat ground to flat ground. In the Peter Brook production Gloucester faints, and thus ‘awakens’ thinking he is at the bottom of the cliff. He is met ‘there,’ and ‘discovered,’ by Edgar, still in disguise, still not recognized by his blind father, now assuming yet another vocal disguise:

Edgar:  Yet he revives –

What are you, sir?

Gloucester:  Away, and let me die.

Edgar:  Hadst though been aught but gossamer, feathers, air,

So many fathom down precipitating,

Thou’dst shivered like an egg; but thou dost breathe;

Hast heavy substance, bleed’st not, speak’st; art sound.

…………………………………..

Thy life’s a miracle. Speak yet again.

Gloucester:  But have I fallen, or no?

Edgar:  From the dread summit of this chalky bourn,

Look up a-height; the shrill-gorged lark so far

Cannot be seen or heard. Do but look up.

Gloucester:  Alack, I have no eyes.

Kott’s existential view of the Dover Cliff is at the same time hypertheatrical: ‘[T]he Shakespearean precipice at Dover exists and does not exist. It is the abyss, waiting all the time. The abyss, into which one can jump, is everywhere.’ He understands, too, what ‘pure theatre’ is – that is, theater that is emblematic, symbolic, iconic, and self-referential, not referring (merely) to the ‘outside,’ to historical events or human characteristics – ‘The white precipice at Dover performs a different function. Gloucester does not jump from the top of the cliff…For once, in King Lear, Shakespeare shows the paradox of pure theatre.’ And he sees, very clearly, that the connection between blindness and insight is ‘read’ by Beckett: ‘Edgar is leading the blind Gloucester to the precipice at Dover. This is just the theme of Endgame; Beckett was the first to see it in King Lear, he eliminated all action, everything external, and repeated it in skeleton form.

[MY NOTE:  Feel free to jump back in here…]

The scene in Endgame that comes closest to the Dover Cliff scene is the one of stasis rather than action. The blind man, Hamm, sits in a wheelchair and receives descriptions form his sighted servant (or son), Clov, who describes the room, the stage, the world outside the stage set’s two windows, and finally the toy dog that is said to regard him as a master.

Hamm:

Where is he?

Is he gazing at me?

As if he were asking me to take him for a walk?

Or as if he were begging me for a bone.

Leave him like that, standing there imploring me.

The toy dog is black. ‘He’s white, isn’t he?’ asks Hamm, and Clov replies, ‘Nearly.’

Hamm:  What do you mean, nearly? Is he white, or isn’t he?

Clov:  He isn’t.

The ‘endgame’ is the last set of moves in a game of chess, when there are only a few pieces left. One of the most common is that of king and pawn. When Hamm says ‘Me–/–to play’ he is recognizing or acknowledging that fact.

Hamm, whose name has been associated with everything from Hamlet to ham actors, is ‘like King Lear…a ‘ruined piece of nature.’’  His wheelchair is his throne. ‘Hamm who cannot get up, and Clov who cannot sit down.’ Kott cites what he calls the ‘Endgame of King Lear.

Lear:  Read

Gloucester:  What, with the case of eyes?

……..

Lear:  What, art mad? A man may see how this world goes without eyes. Look with thine ears.

(4.6.140-47)

But perhaps most Beckettian of all encounters in Shakespeare’s play takes place when the made Lear meets the blind Gloucester and Gloucester says, ‘O, let me kiss that hand!’ To which Lear replies, ‘Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality.’

Kott put the question of King Lear and the grotesque together with horrible developments in European politics. But the fact that the play had affinities with the grotesque had been noticed by critics as well, perhaps most importantly in G. Wilson Knight’s essay ‘King Lear and the Comedy of the Grotesque,’ published in a collection called The Wheel of Fire (1930). Wilson Knight’s phrase ‘the wheel of fire’ is taken from Lear: King Lear’s anguished speech to Cordelia, when he awakens and thinks he has been dead – a death he longs for:

You do m e wrong to take m out o’ th’ grave.

Thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound

Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears

Do scald like molten lead.

The ‘wheel of fire’ is Ixion’s wheel; his punishment in hell, to be bound to an ever-whirling wheel. It was not Ixion, however, but another classical icon of eternal punishment who was to become the model for mid-century philosophical speculations about the absurdity of modern life. The Myth of Sisyphus, published in 1940 (‘amid the French and European disaster’) by the French-Algerian writer Albert Camus, became the talismanic book of a generation. ‘There is but one truly serious philosophical problem,’ the book declared forthrightly, ‘and that is suicide.’

Sisyphus was determined to roll a rock up a steep hill for all eternity. When the rock was almost at the top, it rolled down again, and Sisyphus had to begin his task all over again. Sisyphus is Camus’ hero, a man for whom happiness and the absurd are inseparable. The absurd ‘makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men,’ Camus declared. ‘The struggle toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’ This is the famous last sentence of the book.

The idea of the absurd was, in the period, on many philosopher’s minds. Camus’s friend Sartre was intrigued by it, and so was Soren Kierkegaard. For Camus, the absurd, and existential philosophy more generally, were tied to the concept of ‘the leap,’ an image that calls to mind the grotesque stage ‘leap’ of the blind Gloucester, a leap that, in the theater, requires him to jump – grotesquely, absurdly – from flat stage to flat stage. ‘There are many ways of leaping, the essential being to leap,’ is how Camus will describe ‘the leap’ for existentialists. But ultimately Camus himself will say, apropos of what he calls ‘plain suicide’ (as distinct from ‘philosophical suicide’): ‘The leap does not represent an extreme danger as Kierkegaard would have it. The danger, on the contrary, lies in the subtle instant that precedes the leap. Being able to remain in that dizzying crest – that is integrity and the rest is subterfuge.’

We’ve already seen Jan Kott’s view of ‘the leap’ in King Lear: ‘The Shakespearean precipice at Dover exists and does not exist. It is the abyss, waiting all the time. The abyss, into which one can jump, is everywhere.’ The fact that Gloucester ‘does not jump from the top of the cliff’ became, for him, an example of ‘the paradox of pure theatre.’

Camus worked for much of his life in the theater, and the Myth of Sisyphus, a work of French philosophy, makes easy and regular reference to phrases from Hamlet and turns at key moments to King Lear, and indeed to Gloucester. ‘Take Shakespeare, for instance,’ he writes.

Never would King Lear keep the appointment set by madness without the brutal gesture that exiles Cordelia and condemns Edgar. It is just that the unfolding of that tragedy should thenceforth be dominated by madness. Souls are given over to the demons and their saraband. Now fewer than four madmen: one by trade, another by intention, and the last two through suffering – four disordered bodies, four unutterable aspects of a single condition.

One by trade – the Fool. Another by intention – the disguised Edgar as Poor Tom. The last two through suffering – Lear and Gloucester. And of Gloucester specifically, Camus writes, ‘In that short space of time [the actor] makes [him] come to life and die on fifty square yards of boards. Never has the absurd been so well illustrated or at such length.’

The actor, in fact, is one of Camus’s types of the absurd man:

[H]is vocation becomes clear: to apply himself wholeheartedly to being nothing or to being several. The narrower the limits allotted him for creating his character, the more necessary his talent. He will die in three hours under the mask he has assumed today. Within three hours he must experience and express a whole exceptional life. That is called losing oneself to find oneself. In those three hours he travels the whole course of the dead-end path that the man in the audience takes a lifetime to cover.

This passage brings us back to Endgame. Here there certainly is no ‘leap,’ since Hamm can’t stand and Clov can’t sit, and when Clov takes his ladder over to the window what he sees (even through the telescope) is ‘zero.’ The stage set, with its windows high on either side and the wheelchair/throne in the middle, might be imagined to look like the inside of a human head, the eyes on either side (seeing, like Hamm’s eyes, nothing). The first line of the play is a last line, Clov’s: ‘Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished.’ The last line of the play is Hamm’s, as he has become finally, like Lear in the first act of his play, stripped of all possessions and relations: father, dog, whistle, Clov. Only the bloody handkerchief remains: ‘You…remain.’

When we look and listen closely to the play, the resonances are there. Hamm, as king, wants to make sure his chair is in the center, the very center. ‘Am I right in the center?’ ‘I’m, more or less in the center?’ ‘I feel a little too far to the left.’ ‘Now I feel  little too far too the right.’ ‘I feel a little too far forward.’ ‘Now I feel a little too far back.’ All this time, Clov is moving the chair.

Beckett’s favorite line in the play was said to be the exchange between Hamm and Clov about Nagg, Hamm’s father, who is in one of the dustbins:

Hamm:  What’s he doing?

Clov:  He’s crying.

Hamm:  Then he’s living.

It takes no stretch at all to recall here Lear’s ‘When we are born we cry that we are come/To this great stage of fools’ (4.7.176-77). There’s something of Lear and Cordelia here, too, again eviscerated of content.

Hamm’s question-and-answer game with Clov ends with Hamm’s expression of (apparent) pleasure: ‘I love the old questions. Ah, the old questions, the old answers, there’s nothing like them!’ But Clov doesn’t have the right answers, any more than Cordelia did at the beginning of King Lear.

Hamm:  Why do you stay with me?

Clov:  why do you keep me?

Hamm:  There’s no one else.

Clov:  There’s nowhere else.

Hamm:  You’re leaving me all the same.

Clov:  I’m trying.

Hamm:  You don’t love me.

Clov:  No.

Hamm:  You loved me once.

Clov:  Once!

Later in the play, Hamm demands of Clove ‘A few words…from your heart’ – and gets a toneless rambling narrative that ends with the notion that ‘the words that remain…have nothing to say.’ And Hamm repeats the word ‘Nothing’ as Clov prepared to depart. The short and funny exchange about Nature (‘Nature has forgotten us/there’s no more nature./…But we breathe, we change!/…Then she hasn’t forgotten us’) rivals, in its spareness, the eloquent invocations to an unresponsive Nature – and to truth – throughout Shakespeare’s play.”

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So what do we think so far?  Thoughts?  Impressions?

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv-F5TZajMs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jt-NqdTX4D4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsDc8R4rEWY

Our next reading:  King Lear, Act Four

My next post:  Tuesday evening/Wednesday morning

Enjoy

King Lear

Act Four, Part One

By Dennis Abrams

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Act Four:  Edgar finds his blinded father who – not recognizing his son – asks to be taken to Dover to commit suicide.  Edmund, Goneril and Oswald enter, discussing Albany’s inaction. Goneril gives Edmund a love token; Albany appears and accuses Goneril of cruelty towards her father.  Meanwhile, Cordelia, now leading a French army, has landed in Britain. Goneril’s and Regan’s armies separately prepare for battle. Near Dover, Gloucester attempts to throw himself off a cliff but Edgar arranges it so that his father is in fact on level ground. When Gloucester fails to die, Edgar pretends to be a stranger, and convinces him that he has in fact jumped and survived. When Oswald appears, delivering a message from Goneril to Edmund, Edgar kills him. At the French camp, Cordelia and Kent are reunited, and Lear is carried in, asleep.  He awakens and recognizes Cordelia.

The sense that the most horrific things imaginable are being acted out for real (Cornwall stepping on and squishing Gloucester’s eyeball?) dominates the experience of seeing or reading King Lear, but as always, Shakespeare retains the ability to surprises his audiences (and readers). One of the tragedy’s most poignant albeit strangest moments occurs in Act 4, when Gloucester decides that, now blind (and realizing how badly he treated Edgar), his only option is to commit suicide. Encountering a man calling himself “Poor Tom” (in fact, his disguised, badly treated son Edgar), he asks to be led to a cliff at Dover so that he can throw himself off into the sea. And instead of revealing himself, Edgar agrees to show him the way: it is as if the play will not let them be reconciled so easily (see Booth on Shakespeare’s delaying tactics in Lear) and so the two undergo a seriously bizarre charade in which Edgar persuades his father that they have arrived at Dover, then tells him to jump. As Edgar well knows, Gloucester is nowhere near a cliff, and ends up throwing himself merely onto the ground. But this is not the end of Edgar’s charade:  now pretending to be a mere passer-by, he attempts to convince his father that he has in fact fallen, and has survived only by the unlikeliest of miracles. ‘Hadst thou been aught but gossamer, feathers, air,’ he tells the incredulous Gloucester,

So many fathom down precipitating

Thou’dst shivered like an egg. But thou dost breathe

Hast heavy substance, bleed’st not, speak’st, art sound.

Ten masts a-length make not the altitude

Which thou has perpendicularly fell.

Thy life’s a miracle.

Yet the ‘miracle’ is entirely of Edgar’s doing, and it is also cruelly absurd, a unreal pre-echo of the mystical transformation and revelations that, as we’ll see, close Shakespeare’s final plays, and – some have thought – the playwright’s mocking expose of the triviality of his own craft. ‘Why do I trifle thus with his despair/Is done to sure it,’ says Edgar, but it is not clear that performing this ritual has done anything of the kind, or granted Gloucester any touch of happiness. Later on Edgar finally reveals himself, and father and son are reconciled, but it is somehow tragically fitting that the joy of the reunion – the joy of discovering love – ends tragically. ‘I asked his blessing,’ Edgar tells Albany long after the event,

    and from first to last

Told him our pilgrimage; but his flawed heart –

Alas, too weak the conflict to support –

‘Twist two extremes of passion, joy and grief,

Burst smilingly.

(5.3.187-91)

It is not true, as some have said, that King Lear is loveless or cold; the problem is that explores the difficulty of communicating that love.  (Or, perhaps it’s just that the universe of Lear is loveless and cold…)  Lear mistakes Cordelia’s love for arrogance; Kent has to pretend that he is someone else in order to convince Lear of his faithfulness; Gloucester’s misplaced love ends in physical torture; and both Goneril and Regan inexplicably (and at the same time perfectly), fall in love(?) with Edmund, a doomed passion that he uses and ultimately and chillingly betrays. Even so, when Cordelia and France’s army finally arrives in Britain, it seems as if further tragedy might somehow be averted. Lear is found and taken in – and – in contrast to the fractured meetings between Edgar and Gloucester – father and daughter are movingly reunited. Kneeling in front of Lear, Cordelia prays, ‘O look upon me, sir.’

And hold your hands in benediction o’er me.

You must not kneel.

Lear:       Pray do not mock.

I am a very foolish, fond old man.

Fourscore and upward,

Not an hour more nor less; and to deal plainly,

I fear I am not in my perfect mind.

Methinks I should know you, and know this man;

Yet I am doubtful, for I am mainly ignorant

What place this is; and all the skill I have

Remembers not these garments; nor I know not

Where I did lodge last night.

Though confused, Lear does eventually recognize Cordelia and for the moment his insanity seems to dissolve. Touching her weeping eyes and finding them “wet” he is brought into physical contact with his child – a moment we’ll see echoed in The Winter’s Tale, when it is touch that alerts Leontes to his wife’s survival – as well as with his own plight. It might be said that just as his experiences on the heath teach him what it is to suffer, in this reconciliation, the King learns for the first time what it is to love.

The moment is so moving and precious, that it is difficult not to interpret it as a sign of Lear’s redemption, but if that is in fact true, Shakespeare will not grant him any lasting peace.

—————————————

From Garber:

“Most evidently, and perhaps most importantly, madness permits the maddened victim to speak the truth, like a licensed fool, and be disbelieved. A madman or madwoman is a sublime version of a fool – in the confines of theater. He or she can echo the prevailing madness of the world, speaking through the onstage audience to an audience in the theater, asserting, proclaiming, or establishing contestatory and unwelcome ‘truths’ about the human condition:

Lear:  They told me I was everything; ‘tis a lie, I am not ague-proof.

(4.5.102)

Gloucester:  O, let me kiss that hand!

Lear:  Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality.

(4.5.125-126)

Lear:  When we are born, we cry that we are come

To this great stage of fools.

(4.5.172-173)

As Edgar, ever the audience’s eyes and ears onstage, remarks,

[aside]  O, matter and impertinency mixed –

Reason in madness!

(4.5.164-165)

Edgar is the spokesman for (as he says in the play’s last lines in the Folio text) ‘[w]e that are young.’ For the survivors, for those who must go on. And Edgar cannot believe, or bear, what he sees.

The King’s madness is also a forum for social criticism, a final indictment of a handy-dandy world. In the latter part of act 3 the mad King stages a trial (this trial scene appears only in the Quarto, as scene 13). The scene is part ironic truth, part social satire, and part the final unmasking of ‘justice,’ as always limited and inadequate. From this moment the play will move deliberately toward the hope for mercy as contrasted with justice. The trial judges are to be ‘Poor Tom’ – ‘the robed man of justice,’ naked and hunted – and the Fool, his ‘yoke-fellow of equity,’ whose only equity is that all men are fools. The prisoners on trial are joint-stools, and the scene onstage is heartrending. A king without a throne rails at joint-stools, real or imagined, without occupants. There is a bitter little joke embedded in this scenario, since the phrase ‘Cry you mercy, I took you for a joint-stool’ appears often in this period as a proverbial expression of disparagement. When in the course of the trial scene in King Lear the Fool offers this very phrase as an insult to (the absent) Goneril, he is speaking, in literal fact, to a piece of furniture, reversing the usual gesture, in which a wooden ‘person’ is called a thing. (A comic version of this familiar insult can be found in The Taming of the Shrew [2.1.196]). The Fool thus offers his backhanded apology to a stool (‘Sorry, I took you for a stool’), and his mordant wit may recall the puncturing critique of other Shakespearean literalists, like the gravedigger in Hamlet (‘Upon what ground?’ Hamlet demands of him, and he replies, ‘Why, here in Denmark’). But the scene is rawly painful, and Edgar weeps as Lear had wept (Edgar: ‘My tears begin to take his part so much/They mar my counterfeiting.’ The storm now inhabits and afflicts them all. ‘Sir,’ says Kent, ‘where is the patience now/that you so oft have boasted to retain?’ But the King is mad, and the Fool of practical wisdom departs the play.

As if at a lull in the storm, we hear now that ‘Oppressed nature sleeps’ (Quarto, 13.86). Notice that is not the King but ‘[o]pressed nature’ that is the figure here. The inner and outer worlds of the play, and of the title character, have collapsed into one another, even as the characters of this third act have echoed and exemplified not only themselves but also parts of Lear. In fact, the madness now rages not only on the hearth or in the wilderness but in the court. For – and this is crucial for the dramaturgy of the central act – act 3 is structures so that indoor scenes set in ‘civilized’ courtly spaces intercut the scenes of the King and the storm. Scenes 3,5, and 7 of the act, scenes between Edmund and Gloucester; Edmund and Cornwall; and Edmund, Cornwall, Regan, and Goneril are full of the language of inversion: ‘I like not this unnatural dealing’; ‘Most savage and unnatural’; ‘The younger rises when the old doth fall.’ And, perhaps most strikingly, Cornwall’s chilling remark to Edmund: ‘[T]hou shalt find a dearer father in my love.’

In every one of those scenes we hear about the unnatural; on the heath, in the storm, we see it in action. Edmund’s two betrayals – of Edgar and of Gloucester, scene 3 and 5 – are even more unnatural than the scenes of madness and nakedness we have been witnessing. And these two modes of presentation, metaphoric and literal, will come together in the act’s final scene, the scene of the blinding of Gloucester, another scene whose subject is ‘justice’ [‘an eye for an eye’), juxtaposed to Lear’s mock trial. Technically, dramaturgically, it is extremely difficult for Shakespeare to keep building this act upward, toward climax after emotional climax: the storm, the King’s outbursts, his madness, Edgar’s tears, ‘[o]ppressed nature sleeps.’ And yet this scene sustains rather than breaks the image and horror. The event it portrays – the onstage blinding of a helpless man – is itself dreadful, and it is almost always unbearable to watch, the audience ‘blinded’ by horror and disgust, tempted to close its eyes against the violation. But what increases the horror even further is the banality of the setting, a domestic interior.

Twice Gloucester reminds his torturers that this is his house: ‘You are my guests’; ‘I am your host.’ Their behavior abuses the canons of hospitality vital for a culture, and a landscape, in which houses are separated from one another by swaths of unfriendly and depopulated terrain.  (We [saw] a similar violation, and a similar disregard, in the murder of King Duncan when he is the houseguest of the Macbeths.) Like the King thrust out of his own kingdom, Gloucester is thrust from his own home, after being tortured there. Using a figure of speech that has been present throughout the play, Gloucester has told Regan that he sent the King to Dover

Because I would not see thy cruel nails

Pluck out his poor old eyes…

He vows to see ‘[t]he winged vengeance overtake such children.’ Once again, the ‘safely’ figurative becomes the appallingly literal. ‘See’t shalt thou never,’ Regan replies – and they pluck out his eyes.

Two significant things take place in this appalling scene. The first is the attempted rescue of Gloucester by Cornwall’s servant, who gives his master a fatal wound but is instantly killed himself. This nameless servant provides not only a model of hospitality and decency but also an example of a good rebellion against nature and social order, a moral and healthy rebellion against a father figure, very like Cordelia’s rebellion against her father, Lear. ‘I have served you ever since I was a child,’ the servant says to Cornwall. ‘But better service have I never done you/Than now to bid you hold.’ Cordelia and Kent made much the same appeal in the love test of the opening scene. Here a servant not only holds to it, but dies for it.

The second event of significance occurs at the moment of Gloucester’s torture, when blinding becomes enlightenment. Like Clarence in Richard III, Gloucester calls out for the person he thinks will save him, in this case his own son Edmund, and is told, succinctly, ‘Thou call’st on him that hates thee.’ ‘O, my follies!’ he cries. ‘Then Edgar was abused./Kind gods, forgive me that, and prosper him.’ these ‘[k]ing gods,’ plural and unspecified, evoked at the moment of maximum pain and suffering. We might also notice Gloucester’s word ‘follies’; he knows that he, too, has been a fool.

In the third act of King Lear, Lear’s moment of madness is also his moment of sanity: ‘See better, Lear.’ Gloucester’s moment of blindness is also his moment of insight: ‘I am almost made myself’; ‘I stumbled when I saw.’ The metaphors of acts I and 2 – madness, blindness, storm and rage, fools and folly, and the omnipresent metaphor of ‘nothing’ – are all performed on the stage in act 3, translated simultaneously into action and emblem. With ‘washed eyes, like Cordelia and Edgar, the spectators in the theater have seen these figures come to life on the stage. We have seen it happen, and we have seen it survived, as the suffering audience has also survived it. [MY NOTE:  Again, see Booth.]  what is truly remarkable is that the play can continue to build from this achievement, this recognition, so that the succeeding scenes grow even richer in power, and more acutely painful.

With a superbly ironic juxtaposition, characteristic of the design of this play throughout, the next act opens with Edgar, still disguised as ‘Poor Tom,’ convinced that he, like the audience, has now endured ‘the worst’:

     To be worst,

The low’st and most dejected thing of fortune,

Stands still in esperance, lives not in fear.

The lamentable change is from the best;

The worst returns to laughter…

If he finds himself at the bottom of Fortune’s wheel, he has at least the advantage of knowing where he is. No unexpected reversal can throw him lower. Hope (‘esperance’) is thus kindled by a sense of having lived through the most difficult moments: ‘The worst returns to laughter.’ No sooner has he spoken these words, however, than he sees before him the spectacle of Gloucester, blind and halting, led by an Old Man: ‘But who comes here?/My father, parti-eyed?’ Gloucester is poorly led in a literal sense, since his guide is a poor old man of the country, not a nobleman. But he is also a living emblem of that poor leading that has brought him, like Lear, to the devastation of the heath/wasteland in the first place. ‘O, sir, you are old,’ said Regan to her father, the King. ‘You should be ruled and led.’ The handy-dandy world in which children lead parents (‘The younger rises when the old doth fall’) is now in full view. Gloucester was led by Edmund’s lies, by his ‘auricular assurance’; Lear, by his own obstinacy and that of his daughters. And Gloucester, a walking emblem of this interior blindness, cries out for his true son: ‘O dear son Edgar…Might I live to see thee in my touch/I’d say I had eyes again.’ Now Edgar is confronted with a kind of tragedy more immediate and personal than ever before, and he begins to realize, and to convey to the audience, his sense that the essence of tragedy may lie not in spectacle but in identification:

O gods! Who is’t can say ‘I am at the worst’?

I am worse than e’er I was.

…………………………….

And worse I may be yet. the worst is not

So long as we can say ‘This is the worst.’

‘So long as we can say ‘This is the worst.’’ Again, the rhetoric of silence marks the limits of human endurance. As always in Shakespeare, where language is the index of full humanity, speech and communication are bounded by the unutterable and inexpressible. To control language, to produce even a sentence as despairing as ‘This is the worst,’ is to know that something more can be endured: ‘worse I may be yet.’ Thus there was a crucial difference, in her replay to Lear, between Cordelia’s saying ‘nothing’ and saying nothing.

Edgar’s response is crucial to an understanding of his role, for as we have already seen, he is the appalled spectator to sights that appall us, the go-between who mediates between actors and audience. As he will be our final link, in the play’s final lines (in the Folio edition), to the spectacle that is the tragedy of King Lear. As he watches what is perhaps the play’s ultimate icon of tragic inconsequence, the encounter on the fields near Dover of the mad King and the blind Duke, Edgar again gives voice to what many spectators in the theater – or readers of the play – may be thinking and feeling:

I would not take this from report: it is,

And my heart breaks at it.

This sentiment is close to the heart of the tragic experience, and it has led generations of writers, critics, and audiences to wonder whether there is any redemption in King Lear, anything beyond suffering but endurance, and more suffering.

For Shakespeare as playwright – rather than, say, philosopher or theologian – the challenge was both technical and metaphysical. How does the playwright move beyond the ultimate tragic confrontation, past the moment when a trusted dramatic character says he has seen ‘the worst’ and then realizes that ‘worse I may be yet.’? After the heartrending meeting of blind man and madman, where can the play go, and how can he take the audience with it?

Shakespeare achieves this further growth, and is able to make his play move even beyond the unspeakable moments of tragedy, by a deliberate recourse to two other dramatic modes he has at his command: comedy and romance. He turns to romance, because it is the mode of transformation and rebirth, and comedy because it is a built-in safety valve for tragic emotions, just as we sometimes laugh uncontrollably when confronted with news that is shocking or traumatic. Both in comedy and in romance there is also the possibility of a saving estrangement, making ‘victims’ appear ultimately invulnerable. The cat in the cartoon does not show signs of pain when he falls off the roof or crashes through the windowpane. Comedians Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, faced with impossible adversity, emerge unscathed.

One small but significant example of this kind of ‘escapist’ comic behavior comes in the fifth act, when Albany, Goneril’s husband, solicits Edmund on behalf of his own wife, ironically contradicting her sister Regan’s claim, ‘If you will marry,’ he says to his sister-in-law, ‘make your loves to me./My lady is bespoke.’ Goneril is engaged to Edmund, says Albany. I know I am a cuckold, or that she would like to make me one. To this unexpected sign of liveliness in a husband she has clearly dismissed as tamely inconsequential Goneril replies, ‘An interlude!’ An interlude was a comic play, old-fashioned, broad in its humor – a good modern translation of her riposte would be ‘What a farce!’

For a more extended and moving example of how the mode of comedy functions to adjust the tension of a scene in a tragedy, consider the adventures of the disguised Edgar and the blinded Gloucester on Dover ‘cliff’ – in some ways a paradigm of the way the play depicts the barren condition of the universe:

There is a cliff [says Gloucester] whose high and bending head

Looks fearfully in the confined deep.

Bring me but to the very brim of it

And I’ll repair the misery thou dost bear

With something rich about me. From that place

I shall no leading need.

Notice how the language of this passage subtly anthropomorphizes the cliff. Its ‘head,’ high and bending, ‘[l]ooks’ on the water of the English Channel as he himself can no longer do. The disguised Edgar, remembered by his blind father only as ‘the naked fellow’ he met before, in the stormy night, takes his arm and leads him not to the cliff top but to a flat field near Dover. And here is played out a scene that constantly and perilously approaches the condition of comedy or farce. A later era would coin the term ‘black comedy’ for this kind of tonal dissonance, but the Dover ‘cliff’ scene is more pathos than satire:

Gloucester:  When shall I come to th’ top of that same hill?

Edgar:  You do climb up it now. Look how we labour.

Gloucester:  Methinks the ground is even.

Edgar:   Horrible steep.

Hark, do you hear the sea?

Gloucester:  No, truly.

Edgar:  Why, then your other senses grow imperfect

By your eye’s anguish.

…………………………………

Give me your hand. You are now within a foot

Of th’extreme verge. For all beneath the moon

Would I not leap upright.

The entire scene takes place, we need to recall, on a perfectly level piece of stage. The blind man teeters on the edge of what he imagines to be a hellish drop. It is an extremely risky moment in the theater. And then he jumps, and falls. What keeps this jump, this fall from level ground to level ground, from being wholly and broadly comic? The scene is grotesque – it is, in a way, a mere pratfall. How does it manage to avoid the ridiculous? How is the audience prevented from laughing at this spectacle? What gives it dramatic significance, and makes it work?

The answer lies at least partly in the effectiveness of Edgar’s language as he conjures up the image of the infinite distance below, an image that emphasizes everything the play has been saying to this point about human insignificance:

Come on, sir, here’s the place. Stand still. How fearful

And dizzy ‘tis to cast one’s eyes so low!

The crows and choughs that wing the midway air

Show scarce so gross as beetles. Halfway down

Hangs one that gathers samphire, dreadful trade!

Methinks he seems no bigger than his head.

The fishermen that walk upon the beach

Appear like mice, and yon tall anchoring barque

Diminished to her cock, her cock a buoy

Almost too small for sight…

Here a human being is seen through the wrong end of a telescope: tiny, puny, insignificant and futile, clinging to a cliff for survival and for sustenance. This essential tragicomic moment, a jump from nowhere to nowhere, from flat ground to flat ground, is rendered – instead of being slapstick – very close to sublime. In a sense the cliff is real, and it stretches below us all.

So, too, Gloucester’s salvation is real, though not in the sense in which he understands it. In yet another one of his many voices, Edgar greets the blind man as if had fallen from a great height and is now, miraculously, alive at the bottom of the cliff:

Hadst thou been aught but gossamer, feathers, air,

So many fathom down precipitating

Thou’dst shivered like an egg. But thou dost breathe,

Hast heavy substance, bleed’st not, speak’st, art sound.

…………………….

Thy life’s a miracle. Speak yet again.

Like so many others in the play, this scene is a variant of a resurrection (‘Thy life’s a miracle’), and a resurrection in which once again the sign of being alive is language (‘Speak yet again’; ‘thou…speak’st, art sound’). In short, language in this scene continues to shift away from the literal and specific toward the general and the metaphorical. Gloucester’s physical fall leads to a spiritual rise, not only a symbolic resurrection but, equally important, a lifting of his spirits. Just as Gloucester arrived at psychological insight through physical blindness, now we find that he has subliminally associated Edgar with ‘Poor Tom’ (though he will not know they are the same person until the instant of his death):

I’th’ last night’s storm I such a fellow saw

Which made me think a man a worm. My son

Came then into my mind…

At this point, too, Edgar begins to address Gloucester as ‘father,’ using the term in its general sense of ‘honored old man’: ‘Well pray you, father’; ‘Sit you down, father’; ‘Come, father, I’ll bestow you with a friend.’ The complimentary address has its roots in family feeling: to call a stranger ‘father’ is to treat him with the respect and affection due one’s own parent. In bringing together, yet again, the metaphorical and the literal, Edgar is able to employ both usages, one enabling him to keep his disguise (to Gloucester), and the other enabling him to cast it aside (to us).

The scene at Dover ‘cliff,’ then, is an essentially comic device turned to the service of tragedy, a mistake that is not a mistake, a fall that is not inglorious and ludicrous but glorious and lifesaving. (‘Give me your hand. You are now within a foot/Of th’extreme verge.’) The episode averts the pitfalls of comedy not only through its suggestive language, which grows ever stronger in the direction of archetype and symbol (‘man’ and ‘father’ and ‘son’), but also because of a more specific and emblematic archetype, the story of the blind man Jesus restored to sight, from the Gospel according to Mark:

And he took the blind man by the hand, and led him out of the town; and when he had spit on his eyes, and put his hands upon him, he asked him if he saw ought. And he looked up, and said, I see men as trees, walking. After that he puts his hands upon his eyes, and made him look up: and he was restored, and saw every man clearly.

Mark 8:23-24

‘Look up,’ says Edgar. ‘Do but look up’ – and Gloucester is restored, not magically to sight, but to an interior vision of the truth. More than once in this act Edgar’s language reminds us that he is not only a spectator but also a sufferer. ‘O thou side-piercing sight!’ he cries when he sees the mad King crowned with flowers, and Shakespeare’s audience would be invited to think not only of heartache, but also of Christ’s side pierced by the soldier’s spear.

But perhaps more important for King Lear as a whole than these Christological associations is the key gesture of the Dover ‘cliff’ scene, a gesture we have seen before and will see again in this play, the gesture implicit in Edgar’s gentle invitation, ‘Give me your hand,’ as when Jesus took the hand of the blind man and led him to sight. The taking and losing of hands has been an insistently meaningful gesture in this play since the opening scene, when Burgundy refused to take Cordelia by the hand without her father’s promised dowry – a hand not taken, a broken bond. Another bond was broken when Edmund forged Edgar’s ‘hand,’ his handwriting, in the letter given to Gloucester, and thereby robbed him of his birthright. The theft of Edgar’s birthright by his brother Edmund might well remind a Bible-reading audience of the story of Jacob and Esau, a story that also involves the substitution of one ‘hand’ for another. Jacob deceived his blind father, Isaac, and stole his elder brother’s birthright by covering his hands with hairy kidskins, and the blind Isaac said to him, ‘The voice [is] the voice of Jacob, but the hands [are] the hands of Esau,’ and he gave him his blessing. In the same way, Lear is appalled by the unholy bond between his elder daughters, who have joined against him: ‘O Regan, will you take her by the hand?’ We find images of hands putting eyes out; of ‘filial ingratitude./Is it not as this mouth should tear this hand/For lifting food to’t?’; of Edmund as more convenient for Regan’s hand than for Goneril’s; of bloody hands, and hands in gesture of the clasped hand of friendship, and the healing act of laying on of hands. ‘Give me your hand,’ says the gentleman to Kent as they part in the storm to look for Lear. ‘Give me thy hand,’ says Kent to the frightened Fool as he encounters ‘Poor Tom’ – ‘Give me thy6 hand. Who’s there?’.

No fewer than three times in one scene (4.5), Edgar says to the blind Gloucester, ‘Give me your hand’ – at the beginning of the scene and at the end. Cordelia seeks Lear’s hands in the benediction, but Lear is not sure these are his hands. The most poignant of all the play’s interchanges about the hand comes, of course, in that terrible scene that Edgar ‘would not take…from report,’ but must report,’ but must believe because he has witnessed it, the meeting of the blind Gloucester and the mad Lear, the latter dressed in wildflowers, on the fields near Dover:

Gloucester:  O, let me kiss that hand!

Lear:  Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality.

The hand here becomes the emblem of humanity, of the bare human condition, and of the need for touch, contact, kinship, and love. A play that began with a scene about the taking of Cordelia’s hand in marriage culminates in this terrible act of homage and humility. Once again, in act 5, scene 2, we will hear Edgar urge Gloucester, ‘Give me thy hand,’ as he hastens him from the battle that Lear’s forces have lost. But the tragic emblem of the hand as naked mortal bond is most acute in this meeting on Dover field, from which Lear, that ‘ruined piece of nature,’ the ‘natural fool of fortune,’ exits running, and from which Gloucester is led away by Edgar’s hand once again.

We have said that the play progresses by pairings, by analogies and juxtapositions. The relationship between Gloucester and Edgar, father and son, is clearly constructed in a way parallel to the relationship between Lear and Cordelia, father and daughter. In the play’s final acts Cordelia begins, like Edgar, to speak in a language that Shakespeare’s Christian audience would associate with the Bible and specifically with the life of Jesus (for Cordelia, like Edgar and the Fool, as previously mentioned, is at moments in this play an avatar of Christ). ‘O dear father,/It is thy business that I go about’, she cries out while he sleeps, echoing Christ’s words to Mary and Joseph: ‘How is it that ye sought me? wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?’ But where the unbearable tragedy of Gloucester resolved itself, in a dramatic shift of genres, into a scene that was almost black comedy and grotesque, the scene on Dover ‘cliff,’ the play’s treatment of Cordelia and Lear turns another way to escape the crushing burden of tragedy. That way, the path of romance, fantasy, poetry, and dream will be the path of the future for Shakespearean dramaturgy; and will manifest itself in the brilliant achievement of several of his late plays, from Pericles (which resembles Lear in many ways) to The Tempest.

The Quarto text, the Historie of King Lear, contains one of the loveliest manifestations of this kind of poetry, the lyric passage in which a gentleman reports to Kent about Cordelia’s grief. (the passage is omitted from the Folio, perhaps because it was thought to slow down the action.) The gentleman says:

     Patience and sorrow strove

Who should express her goodliest. You have seen

Sunshine and rain at once; her smiles and tears

Were like, a better way. Those happy smilets

That played on her ripe lip seemed not to know

What guests were in her eyes, which parted thence

As pearls from diamond dropped. In brief,

Sorrow would be a rarity most beloved

If all could so become it.

Quarto, 17.17.24

Cordelia cried out once or twice, he tells Kent, and ‘shook/The holy water from her heavenly eyes,’ and ‘then away she started/To deal with grief alone.’ Importantly, this scene is reported to us, rather than shown us. It belongs in the category of what I have been calling Shakespearean ‘unscenes’ (Another scene of this kind will take place in the fifth act of The Winter’s Tale, when the offstage reunion of a father and his long-lost daughter will be disclosed, in short bursts of information, by a group of courtiers.)  By having the scene of Cordelia’s grief reported rather than shown, Shakespeare makes possible descriptions such as that of hear tears falling from her eyes like ‘pearls from diamond dropped,’ so she becomes virtually an art object, made of precious and eternal jewels. Since the speaker is an anonymous gentleman with no defined character – he exists only to deliver this speech – the picture that he draws is convincing and moving, without any personality or attitude to get in the way. A speech like this becomes a lyric emblem removed from dramatic tension, creating a moment of powerful contemplation.

The most striking single image in this passage is the description of Cordelia’s passionately mixed feelings: her smiles and tears were like ‘[s]unshine and rain at once.’ We will hear a very similar phrase later, in Edgar’s description of the death of Gloucester, who is likewise town by conflicting emotions: ‘his flawed heart –/..’Twist two extremes of passion, joy, and grief,/Burnt smilingly’ Cordelia’s ‘[s]unshine and rain at once’ make her into an aspect of the weather, an aspect of nature, like the King in the storm. But where he is a ‘ruined piece of nature,’ Cordelia is nature as redemptive sign. For what happens in nature when sunshine appear at once is a rainbow, the emblem of God’s covenant with Noah that ‘the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh.’ Cordelia does not live to see such a new world, but the compelling description of her condition as like sunshine and rain at once paves the way for not only a new kind of Shakespearean drama – the romances – but also for whatever promise, or covenant, is held out for the spectators of this play.

The language of romance and transformation is powerfully present in the scene of Lear’s awakening, act 4, scene 7, the scene that follows what has seemed to be the tragic nadir, the meeting of the two old men on the field near Dover. The King is now asleep – the healing sleep denied to kings afflicted by conscience from Richard III to Macbeth – but his is no ordinary slumber. ‘In the heaviness of sleep/We put fresh garments on him,’ says the doctor who attends this ceremony of transformation. Lear is a ‘child-changed father’, both changed by his children and changed into a child. His early wish to ‘[u]burdened crawl toward death’ is a sign of his ambivalence. We could say that he desired to be mothered by his daughters, only to discover that, like the fabled pelican, these ‘pelican daughters’ feed on blood and may kill their ‘young’ (On the other hand, the ‘Pelican in Piety,’ the image of the pelican piercing her breast to feed her children, was also a symbol of Jesus. Like so many images in King Lear, this one cuts both ways, and presents itself in both a fallen and a redeemed version in the play.) This is Lear’s ‘resurrection scene,’ as the aftermath of Gloucester’s fall from Dover ‘cliff’ was his. Again the ministrant is a loving child, who seeks the father’s hand in benediction. The King’s awakening is accompanied not only by fresh garments but also by music, which becomes, as we will see, a traditional ceremonial feature of scenes of ‘rebirth’ in the romances. (In this way, the scene looks ahead to the awakening of Thaisa from her coffin in Pericles; the awakening of the supposedly dead ‘Fidele’ – the disguised Imogen – in Cymbeline; and the statue scene in The Winter’s Tale.)

This scenario, the extraordinarily powerful and moving reconciliation between parent and child, is absolutely central to the dramaturgy of late Shakespearean drama. Yet Lear at first thinks he’s in hell, among the damned:

You do me wrong to take me out o’th’ grave.

Thou art a soul in bliss, but I am bound

Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears

Do scald like molten lead.

As the recognition scene unfolds, however, hope begins to arise in him; perhaps he is alive, perhaps there is something better to come. The poignancy of this moment is extreme, and we may notice that it is, in many ways, a restaging of the love test in the play’s opening scene. It begins, however, not with the King’s majesty, but with his humanity, and his desire, contrary to every rule of order and precedence, to humble himself before his daughter:

Lear:

I know not what to say.

I will not swear these are my hands. Let’s see:

I feel this pin prick. Would I were assured

Of my condition.

Cordelia [kneeling]

O, look upon me, sir,

And hold your hands in benediction o’er me.

You must not kneel.

Lear:

Pray, do not mock.

I am a very foolish, fond old man,

Fourscore and upward,

Not an hour more or less; and to deal plainly,

I fear I am not in my perfect mind.

Methinks I should know you, and know this man;

Yet I am doubtful, for I am mainly ignorant

What place this is; and all the skill I have

Remembers not these garments; nor I know not

Where I did lodge last night. Do not laugh at me,

For as I am a man, I think this lady

To be my child, Cordelia.

Cordelia:

And so I am, I am.

Lear:

Be your tears wet? Yes, faith. I pray, weep not.

If you have poison for me, I will drink it.

I know you do not love me; for your sisters

Have, as I do remember, done me wrong.

You have some cause; they have not.

Cordelia:

No cause, no cause.

In contrast to the opening scene, it is Lear who now knows not what to say. He now kneels, he now emphasizes his basic and unadorned humanity: ‘I feel the pin prick’; ‘I am a very foolish, fond old man.’ The exchange is heavily weighted with negatives: ‘I am doubtful’; ‘I am mainly ignorant;’ ‘the skill I have/Remembers not these garments; nor I know not where I did lodge’; ‘Do not laugh at me’; ‘I know you do not love me.’ In effect, Lear asks the same question he demanded of her long ago: Do you love me? And once again Cordelia asserts, as she did then, the natural bond of parent and child toward which the play has, all the time, been leading. But she, too, has learned something, and now is not silent. Crucially, she speaks, and in speaking avoids the ambiguity or supposed equivocation that has led to misunderstanding – and to tragedy. ‘No cause, no cause.’ Her affirmation itself comes as a negative. Something can come of nothing. Love is not a matter of pretty speeches, nor of ‘cause,’ that legal word to which Othello clings, so desperately and futilely, at the end of his tragedy. (‘It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul.’) Love is a bond that transcends both rhetoric and the law, but it requires expression and communication, voiced or unvoiced. The fourth act of the play closes on this redemptive vision, and even the agonizing events to come cannot render this scene anything but central to the lessons of the play.”

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUGeQd6J968

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tf2s8EAG89I

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfEKppxEl7Y

Sorry if today’s post went on too long, but…there’s a lot to say.  In my next post on Act Four, we’ll look at Bloom, who calls the meeting between Lear and the blinded Gloucester the “poetic center of the play,” at Kermode, and much more.

King Lear

Act Four, Part Two

By Dennis Abrams

————————————–

From Harold Bloom:

“If we could speak of a poetic rather than dramatic center to the tragedy, we might choose the meeting between the mad King Lear and blind Gloucester in Act IV, Scene vi, lines 80-195. Sir Frank Kermode rightly remarks that the meeting in no way advances the plot, though it may well be the summit of Shakespeare’s art. As playgoers and readers, we concentrate on Lear and Gloucester, yet Edgar is the interlude’s chorus, and he has set the tonality of Act IV, in its opening lines, with their keynote in ‘The lamentable change is from the best;/The worst returns to laughter.’ The entry of the blinded Gloucester darkens that desperate comfort, compelling Edgar to the revision, ‘the worst is not/So long as we can say ‘This is the worst.’’ It will be the worst only when ‘the worst’ is already dead in our hearts. Gloucester, blinded and cast forth, is a paternal image suggestive enough to reilluminate even Lear’s outcast madness. Madness and blindness become a doublet profoundly akin to tragedy and love, the doublet that binds together the entire play. Madness, blindness, love, and tragedy amalgamate in a giant bewilderment.”

………………………………………………

“Lear’s language achieves its apotheosis in his astonishing exchanges with the blinded Gloucester (Act IV, Scene vi, lines 86-185), after the mad king enters, ‘fantastically dressed with wild flowers.’ These hundred lines constitute one of Shakespeare’s assaults on the limits of art, largely because their pathos is unprecedented. After Gloucester recognizes Lear’s voice, the king chants an attack upon womankind so extreme that he himself calls for balm to sweeten his diseased sexual imagination.

     Ay, every inch a king:

When I do stare, see how the subject quakes.

I pardon that man’s life. What was thy cause?

Adultery?

Thou shalt not die: die for adultery! No:

The wren goes to’t, and the small gilded fly

Does lecher in my sight.

Let copulation thrive; for Gloucester’s bastard son

Was kinder to his father than my daughters

Got ‘tween the lawful sheets. To’t, Luxury, pell-mell!

For I lack soldiers. Behold yond simp’ring dame,

Whose face between her forks presages snow;

That minces virtue, and does shake the head

To hear of pleasure’s name;

The fitchew nor the soiled 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! pah, pah!

Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary,

To sweeten my imagination.

There’s money for thee.

Shakespeare, hardly a hater of women, risks this extremity precisely because Lear’s trouble authority has foundered where he thought it most absolute: in the relationship with his own daughters. Goneril and Regan have usurped authority; their nature is akin to Edmund’s idea of nature, rather than Lear’s, and so the mad king’s revulsion is from nature itself, not an idea but the fundamental fact of sexual difference. Shakespeare’s audience, women and men alike, jocularly accepted the slang of ‘hell’ for the vagina, but Lear may have startled even those happy to be entertained by the representation of madness. No exorcism applied only to women could solve Lear’s difficulties, every old man, as Goethe shrewdly wrote, is King Lear, exorcised by nature itself. ‘Sweeten my imagination’ is the deepest pathos of this passage, because it manifests the same Lear who soon proclaims to Gloucester, ‘There than might’st behold/The great Image of Authority:/A dog obey’d in office.’

This Lear is mad only as William Blake was mad, prophetically, against both nature and society. Edgar, agonizing at his godfather’s sufferings, cries, ‘Reason in madness,’ but that is not necessarily the audience’s perspective. Again as with Blake, Lear’s prophecy fuses reason, nature, and society into one great negative image, the inauthentic authority of this great stage of fools. We enter crying at our birth, knowing with Lear that creation and fall are simultaneous. This realization [continues] in Macbeth, where again the action takes place in the world that ancient Gnostics called the kenoma, or ‘emptiness.’ What can fatherhood be in the kenoma?  Mirrors and fatherhood alike are abominable, according to the modern gnostic Borges, because both multiply the images of men and of women. Lear’s terrible wisdom, far from being patriarchal, is as anti-patriarchal as the Wisdom of Solomon and as Ecclesiastes, whose ‘vanity’ is similar to the ‘emptiness’ of the Gnostics. ‘Nothing begets nothing’ could be the pragmatic motto of fatherhood in Lear’s play. Only Cordelia could refute that despair, and Lear also prophesies the drama’s great darkness when he emerges from madness to see Cordelia and to say, ‘You are a spirit, I know; where did you die?’

———————————

From Kermode:

“The suitability of this play for such a [Theatre of Cruelty] is well suggested in IV.i, when Edgar congratulates himself on having fallen so deep into misery that he can fall no further, at which point his eyeless father enters and Edgar understands that as long as we are capable of saying we are ‘at the worst’ we have not yet reached that point: ‘the worst is not/So long as we can say, ‘This is the worst.’’  This might be the motto of the play, an unrelenting study in protraction; patience, which is continually recommended, is defeated by fortune, by nature, by the indifference of heaven to justice. Gloucester’s famous observation ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods,/They kill us for their sport’ is often contradicted by other characters, including Albany, Cordelia, and eventually Gloucester himself, but in the context it carries conviction. When father and son have met, the old countryman brings to the naked tom ‘the best ‘parel that I have.’ He provides him with additions. There is something rather terrifying about the way in which, having created this nightmarish scenario, Shakespeare continues his clinical insistence on a linguistic subplot: ‘Tis the time’s plague, when madmen lead the blind’ …’the best ‘parel’…’naked fellow’…’Poor Tom’s a-cold’…’Bless thy sweet eyes, they bleed.’ Much of the effect of King Lear seems to me to arise from its own unsparing cruelty, which can sometimes seem to be an almost sadistic attitude to the spectator, an attitude enhanced by the coolness with which we are manipulated, forced to deal with a pain that does not hinder the poet from playing his terrible games.

The strongest hints that goodness can survive these trials come from Kent and, more strikingly, Albany; easily put down by his wife, Goneril, in the early scenes, Albany can now tell her she is ‘not worth the dust which the rude wind/Blows in [her] face’ (IV.ii.30-31). This fine speech reminds us of another Shakespearean style, the one in which an initial idea makes itself more complex in its expression:

That nature which contemns its origin

Cannot be bordered certain in itself.

She that herself will sliver and disbranch

From her material sap, perforce must wither,

And come to deadly use.

(32-36)

The sentiment is fairly clear in the first two lines, this is another excursion into the semantics of ‘nature’; and the second line carries the implication that Goneril’s contempt for her progenitor must be a kind of self-contempt which she will be unable to control. The remaining lines move silently to the image of the family as a tree; in destroying her father she must destroy herself, here represented as vegetation ruining itself; the ‘deadly use’ may be the equivalent of being burned. Goneril finds this ‘foolish,’ and Albany follows her contemptuous remark with the famous speech that ends:

If that the heavens do not their visible spirits

Send quickly down to tame these vild offenses,

It will come,

Humanity must perforce prey on itself,

Like monsters of the deep.

(46-50)

These lines are missing from the Folio and the cut is attributed by some to ‘authorial revision.’ The cut again diminishes any confidence that evil will be overthrown, and it certainly makes a difference to the character of Albany, but he is voicing a sentiment and a mood that are found throughout the play. A little later Lear takes Cordelia to be a visible ‘spirit’, another bleak, insane error. Albany is soon to say that the fate of Cornwall demonstrates that there are ‘justicers’ above, another remark that is stronger in the Folio, where the earlier pessimistic utterance is cut; but the concurrent lamentation for Gloucester’s eyes (72 twice, 81, 88, 96) restores the mood of despair and horror. There is something appalling about the thought of an author who will submit his characters and his audiences to such a test.

IV.iii is the scene, already mentioned, that was cut from the Folio text. In IV.iv we see something of the Cordelia that is log when the scene is excised. The lines ‘O dear father,’/It is thy business that I go about’ (23-24) inevitably recalls Luke 2:49: ‘I must be about my Father’s business.’ The echo is very bold, but probably without the allegorical significance sometimes attributed to it, for Lear is not God, and Cordelia could not save him, even if, absurdly, he would in that case have needed to be saved. Once again the effect is of a sort of authorial savagery; irony is too civilized a word for it.

Regan and Oswald are again at their horrible worst in IV.v (‘It was great ignorance, Gloucester’s eyes being out,/To let him live.’ Iv.vi is probably the cruelest and paradoxically the most beautiful scene in Shakespeare. Nowadays a comparison with Samuel Beckett seems inevitable. First there is the wild moment when Edgar leads his father to the edge of an imaginary cliff top and vividly describes to the blind man the nonexistent drop beneath him. Here the energy of the verse goes into imagining the scene: the birds are below them, and ‘Half way down/Hands one that gathers sampire, dreadful trade!’ Once more one feels that this trick, using great poetic resources is cruel; the scene must look either absurd or deeply shocking. One notices that Edgar insists on the ‘eyes’ anguish,’ on the act of casting down one’s eyes, on ‘the deficient sight,’ even as he is demonstrating what to see. He also contrives to mention his change of ‘garments.’ The obsession with additions and with vision is not peculiar to Edgar; he is serving the play as a whole. When he takes on his second role as the man who comes to the aid of Gloucester on the beach, he again stresses the vastness of the cliff face: ‘Do but look up./Alack, I have no eyes.’ Edgar tells his father that he has been preserved from a devil by ‘the clearest gods,’ a lie in the serviced of filial piety, followed by a plea for patience in circumstances that will make patience less and less useful or possible.

The hopelessness of patience is at once demonstrated when Gloucester encounters the mad King. The thread of sense in Lear’s ravings is his memory of kingship (‘they cannot touch me for coining’) and forfeited power, along with the ingratitude of his daughters. The King, accustomed to being the agent of justice, now finds he is human, and since man’s life is now known to be as cheap as beast’s, he concludes that crimes such as lechery should not be punished. But the great speech turns into a disgusted rejection of sexuality, stronger even than Iago’s. There follows an amazing passage in which the topics of the King’s mortal body, the authority of kings, justice, nature, clothes (additions), lust, eyesight, nothingness, and apocalypse are all introduced.

Glou:  O, let me kiss that hand!

Lear:  Let me wipe it first, it smells of mortality.

Glou:  O ruin’d piece of nature! This great world

Shall so wear out to nought. Dost thou know me?

Lear:  I remember thine eyes well enough. Dost thou squiny at me?

No, do they worst, blind Cupid, I’ll not love. Read thou this challenge;

mark but the penning of it.

Glou:  Were all thy letters suns, I could not see.

…

Lear:  Read.

Glou:  What, with the case of eyes?

Lear:  O ho, are you there with me? No eyes in your head, nor

money in your purse? Your eyes are in a heavy case, your purse in a

light, yet you see how this world goes.

Glou:  I see it feelingly.

Lear:  What, art mad? A man may see how this world goes with no

eyes. Look with thine ears…

Lear speaks prose and Gloucester verse. The prose is appropriate in the same way as Poor Tom’s; this is ‘matter and impertinency mix’d,/Reason in madness!’, which also resembles in some ways the Fool’s, for Lear is now, with the privilege of madness, playing a fool’s role, being ‘The natural fool of fortune.’ The dreadful emphasis on blindness is the prime mark of Lear’s madness and the play’s cruelty, but nothing could be more sanely calculated than this dialogue. At one point Lear takes over the talk, curses authority in disgusted verse, and advises Gloucester, ‘Get thee glass eyes,/And like a scurvy politician, seem/To see the thing thou dost not’ – after which he tries to remove his boots, and does remove his ‘natural’ crown of wildflowers and weeds; they have helped to cover the naked wretch. Offering Gloucester his eyes, Lear counsels him to be patient, for the world is so designed that endurance of sorrow is required from the moment of birth.

Gloucester, now acquainted with apparently inescapable demands for patience, is willing to call the gods ‘ever-gentle’ a view of them inconsistent with the arrival of Oswald, in search of Gloucester’s ‘eyeless head.’ Edgar dispatches this ‘post unsanctified/Of murtherous lechers,’ and Gloucester ends the scene wishing he could be as mad as the King.

     Better I were distract,

So should my thoughts be sever’d from my griefs,

And woes by wrong imagination lose

The knowledge of themselves.

This coiled sequence is characteristic of Shakespeare in this period: If I were mad, I should be unaware of my huge sorrows – that is the simple sense, but the idea grows complicated: thoughts and griefs are severed, as if one could experience griefs as griefs without being aware of them. That idea is then rephrased ‘wrong imaginations’ are crazy fantasies, which disable the holder of them from knowing about his woes.

When we think of Shakespeare’s imagination at its most incandescent, as perhaps we do in the foregoing dialogue between Gloucester and Lear, it is well to remember that the more normal business of playwriting can also be intellectually challenging; indeed, it habitually is so in Shakespeare, from Hamlet on. Cruelty is always a matter of a poet’s calculation, like Cornwall’s or Regan’s. Dr. Johnson said he could hardly beat to read Lear to its conclusion, and Keats spoke of having to burn through the ‘fierce dispute/Betwixt damnation and impassioned clay.’ Somewhere in our heads we have, as Johnson quite expressly had, a desire that some justice will prevail, that Cordelia should be allowed ‘to perish in a just cause, contrary to the natural ideas of justice, to the hope of the reader, and, what is yet more strange, to the faith of the chronicles.’ For although several versions of Cordelia survive in chronicles and other poems, including the old King Leir, on which Shakespeare drew, no Cordelia except his is murdered. Johnson seems to be expressing dismay at a cruelty inflicted on him personally, and I think he is not alone in feeling like that. There is a cruelty in the writing that echoes the cruelty of the story, a terrible calculatedness that puts one in mind of Cornwall’s and Regan’s. Suffering has to be protracted and intensified, as it were, without end.

The Book of Job, which was so obviously in the playwright’s mind, ends with Job’s patience rewarded and his goods restored; Lear has no such restoration. It is the imagery of torment proper to representations of the Last Judgment that we might find parallels; they envisage an endlessness of torture and are often beautiful. It is the play itself that is an ‘image of that horror.’

The King is captured and in friendly hands; the ‘kind gods’ appear to have relented; he sleeps and has been clothed in ‘fresh garments.’ Music plays (but only in the Quarto), and in Shakespeare music is often a signal of peace and reconciliation, as in The Merchant of Venice and Pericles. Here it is meant to  be a restorative, and is followed by the blissful recognition scene of Lear and Cordelia. It has extraordinary beauty, resembling the recognition scene in Pericles, which is an exercise in that mode of a virtuosity that betokens long research. There is forgiveness and mutual benediction, and no real reason to think they are not final; but of course they are not.”

—————————

And finally, from Tony Tanner, continuing from his discussion of the servant attacking Cornwall, and the issue of “taking preventative issue with evil, comes not from above, but from below, socially one of the lowest of the low.”

“This raises the question of whether there is anything or anyone above in this world. There are many references to divinities and the gods (always ‘gods,’ generic and plural; there is no reference to ‘God’ as there is in Macbeth; there is no monotheism in this play). We have invoked – Hecate, Apollo, Jupiter, Juno; we have ‘heavens’ with their ‘visible spirits,’ ‘the stars above,’ ‘dearest gods,’ ‘ever-gentle gods,’ Fortune, Jove, even ‘fairies.’ We are told ‘the gods are just,’ ‘the gods are clear’ and pious references are made to ‘gods that we adore.’ When Albany hears of the servant’s killing Cornwall his reaction is:

This shows you are above,

You justicers.

(IV, ii, 78-9)

‘Thou, Nature, art my goddess’ – Edmund’s opening words, of course. But when Lear curses his ungrateful daughters, he, too divinizes Nature. ‘Here, Nature, hear; dear Goddess hear.’ What do these people believe? Are they pagans, pre-Christians, or what? (It is curiously hard to get a sense of the date and time of the action, even the place. No Elsinore, no Venice, no towns at all. In one of the oddest lines of the play the Fool says ‘This prophecy Merlin shall make, for I live before his time.’ It almost feels as though we are in pre-history.) Certainly, the very proliferation of divinities invoked makes it impossible to believe that these people live within any stable belief-system. There is a famous moment as the unbearable last scene comes to a climax:

Albany:  The gods defend her!

(Enter Lear, with Cordelia in his arms.)

If these gods are ‘justicers’ it is of the most inscrutable sort. Russel Fraser wants to say – ‘The Gods dispense justice. But they do not dispense poetic justice.’ He fastens on the fleeting presence of a vocabulary of ‘redemption’ in this play:

     Thou hast one daughter

Who redeems nature from the general curse

Which twain have brought her to.

(IV, vi, 208-10)

The ‘twain’ could be Goneril and Regan – or Adam and Eve. Robert Heilman finds some of Lear’s late speeches ‘permeated with Christian feeling’ – full of contrition, self-abasement, renunciation – and, in general, detects ‘a pervading consciousness of deity…a largely unconscious, habitual reliance upon divine forces whose primacy is unquestioned.  He points out that Edmund, Goneril, Regan, Cornwall, and Oswald never invoke gods (unless as public gesture) and never pray; while Cordelia, Kent, Albany, Edgar – and Lear – all pray. But Stephen Greenblatt thinks that, although people may pray, the gods never answer – which perhaps means there are no gods to answer. ‘King Lear is haunted by a sense of rituals and beliefs that are no longer efficacious, that have been emptied out. The characters appeal again and again to the pagan gods, but the gods are utterly silent. Nothing answers to human questions but human voices…’ These are not entirely unreconcilable positions. There seems to be a good deal of vague, instinctive piety – conventional? desperate? – in the play, but there is certainly not the slightest hint of divine response or intervention. If anything, Albany might have said ‘This shows you are below, you justicers’ – nature does seem slowly to correct and re-regulate itself, and it is thus appropriate that the first agent in the process is a figure with the lowliest social status in the play. There is also, perhaps, what Frank Kermode calls ‘a self-limiting factor in the nature of evil.’ If it happens that evil finally withers and exhausts itself, and that a few of the good characters are left alive – just – then it happens ‘per-force’ and not per-Jove or Jupiter or any other spirits or, indeed, fairies.”

Personally, I side with Greenblatt on this.  What are your thoughts so far?  Redemption?  Gods?  Anything and everything else?

And as a weekend bonus (and to keep it short so you all can catch up…)

This from Hazlitt:

We wish that we could pass this play over, and say nothing about it. All that we can say must fall far short of the subject; or even of what we ourselves conceive of it. To attempt to give a description of the play itself or of its effect upon the mind, is mere impertinence: yet we must say something.—It is then the best of all Shakespear’s plays, for it is the one in which he was the most in earnest. He was here fairly caught in the web of his own imagination. The passion which he has taken as his subject is that which strikes its. root deepest into the human heart; of which the bond is the hardest to be unloosed; and the cancelling and tearing to pieces of which gives the greatest revulsion to the frame. This depth of nature, this force of passion, this tug and war of the elements of our being, this firm faith in filial piety, and the giddy anarchy and whirling tumult of the thoughts at finding this prop failing it, the contrast between the fixed, immoveable basis of natural affection, and the rapid, irregular starts of imagination, suddenly wrenched from all its accustomed holds and resting-places in the soul, this is what Shakespear has given, and what nobody else but he could give. So we believe.—The mind of Lear, staggering between the weight of attachment and the hurried movements of passion, is like a tall ship-driven about by the winds, buffeted by the furious waves, but that still rides above the storm, having its anchor fixed in the bottom of the sea; or it is like the sharp rock circled by the eddying whirlpool that foams and beats against it, or like the solid promontory pushed from its basis by the force of an earthquake.

And finally…

By John Keats

My next post:  Sunday evening/Monday morning – more on Act Four.

Enjoy.  And enjoy your weekend.

King Lear

Act Four, Part Three

By Dennis Abrams

 ————————————

Before we dive into Act Five, I thought a few “lighter” pieces to start with might be in order…

First, from Living With Shakespeare, James Earl Jones’ take on Lear:

“Lear starts out as an issue of King Lear’s will and his reason. He has lost his reason to begin with, and he is just acting on his will: his will to be king, and his will to retire the way he wants to retire. He’s like a grumpy old man who wants everything his way. Does he want to divide his kingdom equally? No, he wants to sponge off his daughters, one after the other. But without his reason, his will alone can defend him for only so long against the rise of his own tragic confusion.

Lear utters that chilling plea ‘O, let me not be mad’ – but how would that be worse than what’s already happening? He is already in the grip of his confusion, which is that he doesn’t know where the fault lies, and that he doesn’t want to accept the responsibility himself. Lear never goes mad; what he suffers from are severe exhaustion and exposure. [MY NOTE:  Really?]  He never loses his mind; he gains his awakening. This occurs on the heath, which is a moonscape devoid of all the comforts of humanity where nature hammers the characters out into what they really are and breaks them down into the elements, the bare essentials. He starts calling Edgar ‘philosopher’ because he sees that in the simplicity of a man who has nothing, whose ass is hanging out of his clothes, there is wisdom. ‘Is man no more than this?’ he asks. ‘Consider him well. Thou ow’st the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume,’ and then determines, ‘Thou art the thing itself: unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.’ Lear wants that wisdom, and then he starts gaining that wisdom – which is what he needed all along. Lear goes on to the wisdom he finds only by acknowledging that, in contrast with his previous indulgences as king, there are poor people out there in the storm who are freezing to death.

Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are,

That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,

How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,

Your lopped and windowed raggedness, defend you

From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en

Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp,

Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,

That thou mayst shake the superflux to them

And show the heavens more just.

That recognition replaces him in society; it repositions him in humanity. A man is king when he finally learns to accept responsibility for his own actions, and his own life, and if there’s any lesson Lear learns in this play it’s what it means to rule, and to fail to rule, over himself.

Lear accepts his responsibility early enough to save his own character; but the tragedy must play out.”

—————————————-

And from the same book, by Royal Shakespeare Company Director of Voice Cicely Berry, “King Lear in Retrospect”:

“I was truly delighted when, in 1988, I had the opportunity to direct King Lear. Tony Hill was Head of Education at the Royal Shakespeare Company at the time and I was Head of Voice, and he asked me if I would like to direct a Shakespeare play which would be performed in The Other Place, and around which we could arrange a number of open workshops. These workshops would focus on Shakespeare’s language and would be practical, with those attending participating in the work. I agreed – a little nervously.

The idea was two fold; first, to see what would happen when a play was directed beginning from an awareness of the language of the text; second, to then perform such a piece specifically with a school’s audience in mind. The project spoke to two sides of my love of the work I do: exploring and developing the use of the voice in communicating Shakespearean poetic thought, and sharing Shakespeare with both acting professionals and young people. I had got to know Tony Hill in the early 1980s when the Company had started their annual visits to Newcastle, and where I led workshops for schools and youth centers. One of these was Backworth Youth Center, which was run by Tony; we worked together well and became close friends. Later, when the Company started up its education programme, Tony was asked to head the department which he did – and our work was able to develop accordingly. The King Lear project was an important test of this – and I think it worked.

Because I feel so strongly that we cannot understand Shakespeare fully until we inhabit the language in our bodies as well as our minds, I looked on this as a great opportunity to test my beliefs in a full production of the play. It was a way of testing out the strategies and exercises I had developed doing such workshops in schools, colleges, and youth centers in order to enrich student’s understanding of the text, and thus their understanding of the character. I was then also working with professional actors at the RSC and elsewhere who had not done this work in rehearsal before: the production was very successful, and I felt it proved my point. The work was thereafter taken seriously as part of the rehearsal process.

The production was to be staged in the old Other Place, I say old, because it had been a tin shed which housed theatre costumes and which was converted into a studio theatre by Buzz Goodbody in 1974. With both her vision and her strong political beliefs, Buzz created a space for both modern and classical work, which would change the actor/audience relationship, and create an environment in which the audience could feel a part of the work itself –  it was affectionately known as the ‘Tin Hut.’ In 1989 it was deemed unsafe and so was pulled down. The new TOP (The Other Place) building was unveiled in 1991, but in spite of its facilities and its elegance, it does not have quite the ambience of that original ‘other’ place.

Looking back, I realize that my choice of King Lear was an ambitious one, to say the last’ but my reason at the time for choosing it was that the language offered such wonderful possibilities not only for the actors to work on and discover, but also to share with those coming to the workshops. I wanted to approach the play by speaking first, and listening to the movement and texture of the language, before coming to conclusions about character, place, and relationships. I wanted to hear where the language takes us.

….

Having decided on the play, my next thought was to ring Edward Bond to find out his vision of the play. I believe that every play has a centre image, an idea, a feeling, around which the play revolves, and of course Edward Came up with his unique vision; he said something like this: ‘It is a play where people are getting on and off trains with a lot of luggage.’ And that became my centre image.

….

I think King Lear is probably the greatest play ever written; I am sure I am not alone in this. But to me it is also a great Marxist play, for I do not believe it is a play about Lear getting old and losing his wits – that makes it sentimental. I believe Lear goes on a journey from first being ruler of a kingdom, then being rejected by his daughters, through madness on the heath, to finally realizing that he is but a man – like any other – and that he has not fulfilled his duty as a man.

Here are four key speeches which illustrate this. First, his opening speech as the King in Act 1, Scene 1:

Meantime we shall express our darker purpose.

Give me the map there.

(Kent or an Attendant gives Lear a map)

     Know that we have divided

In three our kingdom, and ‘tis our fast intent

To shake all cares and business from our age,

Conferring them on younger strengths while we

Unburdened crawl toward death.

Next, in Act 2, Scene 2, after Goneril and Regan have both disempowered him by denying him his followers, he knows he must take action in order to find himself again:

     I will do such things –

What they are yet I know not, but they shall be

The terrors of the earth! You think I’ll weep:

No, I’ll not weep: I have full cause of weeping,

(Storm and tempest)

But this heart shall break into a hundred thousand flaws,

Or ere I’ll weep. O fool, I shall go mad!

Thirdly, on the heath with Kent and the Fool in Act 3, Scene 4, as he experiences the full force of the storm, he sends the Fool into the hovel:

In, boy, go first. –

             You houseless poverty –

Nay, get the in. – I’ll pray, and I’ll sleep.

(Exit the Fool)

Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are,

That bide the pelting of this pitless storm,

How shall your boundless heads and unfed sides,

Your lopped and windowed raggedness, defend you

From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en

Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp,

Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,

That thou mayst shake the superflux to them

And show the heavens more just.

Here, the realization of what poverty really means, and his own failure in attending to it, becomes apparent to him.

Lastly, a little later in the scene, after Edgar has entered disguised as Poor Tom, Lear says to him:

Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou ow’st the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Ha? Here’s three on’s are sophisticated. Thou art the thing itself: unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor bare, forked animal as thou art. Off, off, you lendings! Come, unbutton here. (Tears off his clothes)

And so he embraces his own nakedness, his own situation of having nothing.

There are two other lines which always remain with me:  Lear’s

Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?

and Edgar’s

The worst is not

So long as we can say ‘This is the worst.’

But the centre line of the play for me has to be Gloucester’s words

So distribution should undo excess,

And each man have enough.

So how to make this huge play work in a small studio space, with limited resources and a very limited rehearsal time: that was my journey. We had to create the world through the language. I am just going to set out two instances of the work we did.

The first was this: at the end of the second week, after we had worked on each scene, and although the actors did not know their lines completely, I asked them to run the play through to clarify their own story line, and to work out their particular characters’ journeys. But I asked them to do it in a very special way: with the help of our resourceful Stage Management, each actor had a lot of luggage, cases, and boxes, etc., and I asked them to work through the play in the order of their own scenes. If scenes in the play were played simultaneously in time, then they were played simultaneously in the space, but at no time could they leave the building – they had to keep on the moving carrying their luggage around the space. As you will obviously gather, this strategy was inspired by Edward Bond’s words. At the same time I gave each actor a simple task to do at some time during the run: for instance, I asked the Fool to tell at least two jokes out to the audience while running the play.

The result was chaotic, but in a very positive way, for with it came a great sense of the urgency of the play. King Lear was thrown off centre stage, and scenes kept erupting all over the place. At one point Cordelia, played in Stratford by Maureen Beattie, drove off in her Fiat with the King of France, and when she returned she sent letters to Kent via the Stage Manager. This may seem absurd, but it most definitely made her aware of her distance from Lear and her need to make contact with him. I also wanted us all to get a sense of the land and the spaces they had to travel between castles, and also of the nameless inhabitants of that land. The actors became totally immersed in their own story through the play, and we were made aware of the extraordinary dynamic of that journey and of the distance traveled. That awareness stayed with them throughout rehearsal.

Perhaps the key work was done on the storm, which evolved through the whole rehearsal period. It started like this: as Lear began his speech to the storm

Blow winds and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow…

the actors would surround him and throw the words back at him. But as we got further into rehearsal it got rougher, for, as well as bombarding him with words, perhaps sentences from their own characters, they would also throw light objects at him to represent twigs and leaves etc., so that the story was palpable to Lear, both by the noise around him, and by the words in his own head. It became a storm both inside and outside himself.

Tim Olivor, who was our Sound Designer, recorded all this: sometimes the words were whispered, sometimes shouted, and he remembers that at one point when he was recording, an actor sneezed, and this became the noise which accompanied the blinding of Gloucester. The recorded sounds were distorted, either by slowing them down or speeding them up. Tim was extremely imaginative in the way he worked all this, and in the subliminal way it was used throughout the play: he was also able to give a ‘sound’ presence to the hundred knights.

Now, for the design, Chris Dyer wrote at the time:

‘The design ‘idea’ came after the main staging had been decided on. What should the map be? Why not draw it on the floor? Seems a good idea and a rough drawing was done. It then became obvious that what should happen is for the pieces of map to break and fall apart, creating different layers and planes.’

And that is exactly what happened. The cement stage floor broke into three pieces, and it was quite literally an earth-shifting moment, for it took us right into the world of the heath: it also spoke vividly of the divided nation and the broken world of Lear’s mind. No image could have expressed this more potently.”

I’m not sure if I would have loved or hated this production, but it sounds fascinating, nonetheless.

———————————-

From actor Brian Cox, from the same book, from his essay “I Say it is the Moon,” talking about psychological states and changes caused by shifts in “order”:

“Even King Lear deals with a psychological state similar to that in the high romances of As You Like It and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, because the order is out of whack. Lear makes bad decision after bad decision, beginning with dividing his kingdom and then giving it away, and for him the world turns upside-down. He has been thrust out of the patriarchal order he created, he sustained, and in which he was at the top. It was a bad decision, but it was a generous decision – and at the same time it was a self-indulgent decision, coming from the desire to retire in ease and revelry, with no cares of governance, and no responsibility for his people. Moreover, though, it was also an understandable decision, because he’s a man who is coming to the end of his life. He can see his intimations of mortality, and the one thing that has been missing in his life and that he is desperate for is an affirmation of love. He knows that he has not been a great father and he is trying to make amends, and although his youngest daughter does love him despite his bad parenting, she doesn’t say it. You can’t ask people to say that they love you, since they either do or they don’t, and you can’t buy their love either, since it’s not a commodity – but those are the lessons he has to learn. His decision to divide his kingdom was therefore also made out of his need for love.

Cordelia sees what her father is doing, but it’s not a conversation to be had at a formal gathering. She knows he’s overturning the order, and making it unnatural, both in governance and in his family, and she can’t agree – she can’t bend to it. Katherine [MY NOTE:  In The Taming of the Shrew] can, but she’s in a comedy – hers is a problem play, yet at least it’s one with a reasonably happy ending. Cordelia ends up dead, and Lear ends up dead, and it’s because they can’t survive the upending of power based on an unnatural bargain that results in a state of madness, both social and personal. Edgar can survive – he becomes king at the end – but the only way he can survive is by pretending to be even madder than the world itself.  [MY NOTE:  Yes.]  You have to make decisions, you have to think on your feet, you have to keep up with changes when changes are needed and there are tough times. Edgar becomes Poor Tom, Rosalind becomes Ganymede, and the shrew Katherine becomes the good wife – and they make it out of the chaos they’re in with a clearer understanding and better ability to live with the necessary orders of the world.”

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From the same book, from Camille Paglia’s essay “Teaching Shakespeare to Actors”:

“King Lear too opens with characters entering midconversation: the Earls of Gloucester and Kent are sharing worrisome political rumors when the subject takes a personal and indiscreet turn. Each production of Lear must decide how much, if any, of this humiliating talk is heard by Gloucester’s bastard son, the embittered and soon malevolent Edmund. Some show of overfamiliar, leaning-in body language seems implied in Gloucester’s lines, as he tastelessly boasts to Kent about the ‘good sport’ had with a nameless pretty wench at Edmund’s accidental conception. Kent’s discomfort at this coarse sniggering is blatant, as he vainly tries to restore a dignified tone. Ideally, the audience should probably read the body language of Gloucester and Kent exactly as Edmund is reading it: Gloucester’s bumptious insensitivity met by Kent’s embarrassed unease. Before we have even heard Edmund speak, therefore, we already have a clue about the formation of his sociopathic character, hardened by routine discrimination and abuse – a prime example of Shakespeare’s prescient anticipation of modern social psychology.

…..

Nationalism, customarily portrayed today as a crucible of war, imperialism, and xenophobia, is a positive value in Shakespeare. Nation-states had emerged in the Middle Ages as a consolidation of dukedoms, an administrative streamlining that, at its best, expanded trade, advanced knowledge, and reduced provincialism. This progressive movement of history is the major theme of King Lear, where Lear’s foolish choice to divide his kingdom (which he does not possess but holds in trust) plunges it backward toward chaos and barbarism, reducing the king himself to a nomad battered by the elements. Unless they know European history well, most American actors rarely notice the nationalistic motifs in Shakespeare. In Lear, for example, the invasion of Britain by France – even though it promises rescue by the forces of good (Cordelia is now the queen of France) – creates patriotic conflicts for a British audience that Americans will not feel.”

——————

From the same book, from actor Tobias Menzies’ essay “Method and Madness,” continuing his comparison of madness in Lear and Hamlet.

“…at the end of Lear, Edgar is left behind, on the blasted heath, if you will. No bright light is being extinguished at the end of Lear, whereas a radiant light is being extinguished at the end of Hamlet. Hamlet is like a star, burning out. The texture of the tragedy at the end of Lear is very different from that at the end of Hamlet: there is nothing elegiac or redemptive about the end of Lear.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Shakespeare was a real magpie in terms of stealing from personalities he knew in his life. Obviously he was a person who moved through different strata of society. Like a real Renaissance man, he seems to have had a handle on life from the tavern to the court and everything in between. For example, Polonius, in Hamlet, is a fantastic realization of a bumptious old man, and even if Shakespeare wasn’t that himself, he certainly knew who that sort of person was, and must have spent time around that sort of person to come up with such a loving portrayal. It’s almost like he’s looking through that set of eyes, and that’s true of so many of his characters.

The idea of seeing as another sees, or trying to see where another can no longer see, is central to Lear. When Edgar meets his father, Gloucester, on the heath he responds in a very esoteric way. His father has been blinded, and he wants to die. Edgar then creates an imaginative and psychological journey for his father in which he will pass through death, in which he will believe that he has thrown himself from a cliff and that he has survived. Through that, Edgar hopes to lead his father to a more benign acceptance of his fate. It’s incredibly strange. When we were doing that, [director Rupert Goold] was interested in sucking all the sentimentality from that scene, to have Edgar set up an existential laboratory in which he says, ‘I’m going to lead my father through this set of experiences, and see how he responds.’ Edgar is trying to lead his father out of despair, but rather than using kindness he uses a rigorous existentialism. Edgar does not comfort his father; he does not say, ‘Dad, don’t worry, I’m here. I’m your son. Everything’s going to be fine.’ Instead he says, ‘You want to die, and rightly so. Terrible things have happened to you.’ The proposition is that the only real cure is to actually look at what it is to die, and so Edgar creates this existential experiment.

Just before Edgar meets his father, he mocks the heavens:

     Welcome, then,

Thou unsubstantial air that I embrace!

The wretch that thou hast blown unto the worst

Owes nothing to thy blasts.

This is a brazen statement of self-realiziation against the fates. And then he meets his blinded father, and he has that incredible line, ‘the worst is not/So long as we can say ‘This is the worst.’”

What I get from that moment is that he realizes that you have to go through life: you never escape it. You have to go through experience: you can’t go around it. In Peer Gynt, a voice cries, ‘Go roundabout, Peer!’ and he responds, ‘No, through.’ There’s no getting out of pain and suffering. That idea goes to the very heart of Shakespeare’s play. There’s something in it that’s quasi-religions, in a way. ‘Thy life’s a miracle,’ says Edgar. To live is to endure, to suffer, and at the same time it’s also a blessing. You suffer, and you have go through to the end of your suffering before you turn the corner, or before you can shuffle off this mortal coil. As Edgar says, ‘Men must endure/Their going hence, even as their coming hither:/Ripeness is all.’”

[MY NOTE:  Echo of Hamlet’s “The readiness is all?”]

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And finally, a bit more from Marjorie Garber’s essay on Lear in Shakespeare and Modern Culture:

“The word ‘absurd’ comes from a root that means inharmonious or deaf, insufferable to the ear. Remember Edgar and Gloucester in the Dover Cliff scene:

Edgar:  Hark, do you hear the sea?

Gloucester:  No, truly.

Edgar:  Why, then, your other sense grow imperfect

By your eyes’ anguish.

And the mad Lear to the blind Gloucester at the end of act 4: ‘A man may not see how this world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears.’

In Endgame, Beckett has a little joke about this, too, in the conversation between the two aged parents stuck in the ashbins:

Our sight has failed.

Yes.

Can you hear me?

Yes.

………………………………………..

Our hearing hasn’t failed.

Our what?

Our hearing.

Throughout the play we hear questions like Kent’s ‘Is this the promised end?’ and Edgar’s ‘Or image of that horror?’ – but here without any context:

What’s happening?

Something is taking its course.

We’re not beginning…too…too…mean something?

But perhaps the most powerful refrain in the play is Hamm’s constant call for his painkiller. Is it time yet? Not yet. Is it time yet? Not yet. Is it time yet? Not yet. And finally it is time…and there is no more painkiller.

Lear’s play starts with passion, and ends with compassion:

Kent:

He hates him much

That would upon the rack of this tough world

Stretch him out longer.

Hamm’s play starts and ends with the notion that it is his move. ‘Me –/–to play’ are his very first words, and we hear them again near the close:

Hamm:

Cover me with the sheet.

No? Good.

Me to play.

And Act Without Words ends without words: ‘He does not move…He looks at his hands.’

They, too, smell of mortality.

King Lear and Endgame are both concerned with stripping, divesture, and loss. Lear’s discovery that mankind is a ‘bare, forked animal’ – ‘the thing itself’ – les at the heart of this comparison.

These lines come in the storm scene, act 3, scene 4, when Lear confronts Poor Tom (the disguised Edgar) and asks him not who he is, but who he has been. Edgar replies with a speech right out of the social satire of the time: ‘A servingman, proud in heart and mind, that curled my hair, wore gloves in my cap, served the lust of my mistress’ heart, and did the act of darkness with her…Wine loved I deeply, dice dearly, and in woman, out-paramoured the Turk.’ This is a social critique of the excesses of the court – Lear, the made Lear, penetrates to the essential human animal behind the social, erotic, and cultural veneer: ‘Poor Tom’ is, says Lear, better off as he is than as he was: ‘thou art the thing itself. Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.’

And Lear now tries to emulate this state of ‘unaccommodation’ tearing off his own clothing: ‘Off, off, you lendings! come unbutton here.’

In Beckett’s Endgame, not only are the characters pared down to the essentials of living – Hamm, Clov, Nagg, and Neil in their ashbins – but also the stage, and indeed the language of the play, is reduced, or expanded, to ‘the thing itself’ – unadorned, bare, forked (mildly ridiculous), and, paradoxically, therefore ennobled.

Lear’s recognition of Poor Tom as a version of himself – a poor, bare, forked animal – was anticipated by his encounter with his daughters Goneril and Regan at the end of act 2, in that terrible scene where they begin, mathematically, to strip him of his knights and entourage. Lear had wanted a ‘reservation’ of one hundred knights – that is, to keep one hundred knights for his own private service even as he prepared to abdicate his throne.

In act 2, scene 2, Goneril tells Lear that he can indeed come to her household for a time, but only if he dismisses ‘half your train,’ keeping only fifty knights. The desperate Lear looks about him for comfort, and turns to the other daughter, Regan: ‘I can be patient, I can stay with Regan,/I and my hundred knights.’

‘Not altogether so,’ says Regan. In fact, not so at all. Regan agrees with her sister. ‘What, fifty followers?’/Is it not well? What should you need of more?’ She continues:

If you will come to me –

…I entreat you

To bring but five-and-twenty. To no more

Will I give place or notice.

So Lear turns back to Goneril:

   I’ll go with thee;

Thy fifty yet doth double five-and-twenty.

And thou art twice her love.

Goneril:

Hear me, my lord.

What need you five-and-twenty, ten, or five?

To follow in a house where twice so many

Have a commend to tend you?

Regan:

What need one?

This methodical – and mathematical – stripping is what leads immediately then, to Lear’s great speech about necessity, and thus to the storm scene:

O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars

Are in the poorest things superfluous.

Allow not nature more than nature needs,

Man’s life is cheap as beast’s. Thou art a lady;

If only to go warm were gorgeous,

Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear’st.

Which scarcely keeps thee warm. But, for true need –

You heavens, give me that patience, patience I need!

In this magnificent speech, his invocation to the gods, his imprecations on his daughters, and his pledge not to weep are followed by the stage direction ‘Storm and tempest,’ as nature weeps for him, and he leaves the stage with the Fool – ‘O fool, I shall go mad.’

While much attention at mid-century was devoted to the existential Lear, the Lear of conscious absurdity in an already grotesque world, another strand of political thinking was directed at the play’s social and economic relevance to the present day.  When the political scientist Marshall Berman came to write his book All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, he read the lines about ‘unaccommodated man’ from King Lear in the context of a passage of Marx from the Communist Manifesto about stripping and nakedness:

‘The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe…The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and turned the family relation into a pure money relation…In place of exploitation veiled by religious and political illusions, it has put open, shameless, direct, naked exploitation.’

For Berman, this passage seemed directly to invoke King Lear. ‘The dialectic of nakedness that culminates in Marx,’ he wrote, ‘is defined at the very start of the modern age, in Shakespeare’s King Lear. For Lear, the naked truth is what a man is forced to face when he has lost everything that other men can take away, except life itself. We see his voracious family, aided by his own blind vanity, tear away the sentimental veil.

Existentialist critics had focused on Lear’s madness and, especially, on the scene of Gloucester’s ‘leap.’ Marxist and social critics pointed toward another key moment – Lear’s realization, in the midst of the storm, that he was now suffering as others in his land had long suffered.

Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are,

That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,

How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,

Your loop’d and windowed raggedness defend you

From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en

Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;

Expose yourself to feel what wretches feel,

That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,

And whos the heavens more just.

To many in the sixties and seventies, these lines seemed to describe a disparity between rich and poor, privileged and underprivileged, that spoke of ‘now’ rather than ‘then.’ Berman, writing in the wake of these concerns, made the link to theory and to Marx. ‘Shakespeare is telling us,’ Berman says, ‘that the dreadful naked reality of the ‘unaccommodated man’ is the point from which accommodation must be made, the only ground on which real community can grow.’ This is Shakespeare applied, as if he were himself writing a manifesto. ‘Marx’s hope is that once the unaccommodated men of the working class are ‘forced to face…the real conditions of their lives and their relations with their fellow men,’ they will come together to overcome the cold that cuts through them all..’ Thus ‘one of the Manifesto’s primary aims is to point the way out of the cold, to nourish and focus the common yearning for communal warmth.’

Berman is interested, but somewhat skeptical. ‘It isn’t hard to imagine alternate endings to the dialectic of nakedness,’ he suggests, endings far less ideal or idealized. And he speculates, too, about the changes that modernism has brought:

‘The nature of the newly naked modern man may turn out to be just and mysterious as that of the old, clothed one, maybe even more elusive, because there will no longer be any illusion of a real self underneath the masks. Thus, along with community and society, individuality itself may be melting into the modern air.’

The final phrase is again from Marx (‘all that is solid melts into air’) but it could, of course, come from Shakespeare, from The Tempest: ‘Our revels now are ended,/These our actors/As I foretold you, are all spirits,/And are melted into air, into thin air.’

Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, first performed in 1957, had become a modernist classic. Its hypertheatricality, its spareness, its ferocious humor, and its combination of philosophical abstraction and residual pathos made it an iconic work for its time. A decade and a half later, when the British playwright Edward Bone came to write his own Lear, the darkness remained, but the dramatic mode shifted into something much closer to Grand Guignol, or to the horror film – or to the news of the world.

Endgame was a kind of astringent philosophical redaction of the essence of King Lear. The characters in Beckett’s play do not bear the same names as those in Shakespeare’s. In fact the name of the central figure, Hamm, has led some critics to associate him with Hamlet rather than with Lear. Yet the visions, or blindnesses, of King Lear and Endgame brought them, at mid-century, into a compelling relationship with each other. Beckett derealized the ‘bare, forked animal’ that Lear noticed in the storm and recognized not only as Poor Tom, or the Fool, but also as himself. The language of Beckett’s play is minimal, its resonances vast. Its mode, we might say, is allegorical, but it is an allegory of a state of mind, not of a narrative. It performs a condition. Something that, if the phrase had not been made banal by overuse, we might call ‘the human condition.’ It performs, that is to say, a condition very like the condition encountered in, and by, Lear. Or by, at least, the King Lear staged and performed (and then filmed) by Peter Brook – a Lear that had been, of course, inspired and motivated by Brook’s own encounter with Jan Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary and its key chapter, ‘King Lear or Endgame.’ So that, in a nice reversal of literary history, critics could come to say things like this: ‘Brook’s production reclaimed Shakespeare’s text for a post-Holocaust age by highlighting (often grotesquely) its bleakest, most Beckettian aspects.’ Shakespeare has thus become Beckettian.”

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So gang…your thoughts?  What do you think of the play?  The commentary?  Share your thoughts with the group!

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryjcgaq29W4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3iozRU7UT0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgLh3ejVT2M

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FLucXHs0rg

Our next reading:  King Lear Act Five

My next post:  Tuesday evening/Wednesday morning.

Enjoy.

King Lear

Act Five, Part One

By Dennis Abrams

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Act Five (Spoiler Alert!):  Regan, also in love with Edmund, demands to know whether or not he has any feelings for Goneril, but he denies everything. As Goneril and Albany plan war with France, the disguised Edgar hands Albany Goneril’s love letter and demands to fight Edmund in a one on one combat after the battle. The British forces destroy the French, and Lear and Cordelia are captured and imprisoned. Albany, having since read Goneril’s letter, accuses Edmund of treason, and Edgar, once again in disguised, but this time as a mysterious knight, fights his brother, only revealing his identity (and that their father Gloucester has died) after Edmund is mortally wounded. Just as the news arrives that Goneril has poisoned Regan and killed herself over Edmund, Edmund confesses that Lear and Cordelia are to be executed on his orders.  Albany orders their immediate release, but it is too late:  Lear enters, carrying Cordelia’s body, and died, demented by grief.

Now, at last, events rush forward.  The long awaited battle between the French army and those of Edmund and the two sisters is both rapid (it is placed almost entirely off stage) and brutal: the invading forces are crushed, and Cordelia is captured along with her father.  Now, at this point, Shakespeare’s audiences, at least those who were familiar with the older version of the story, would have been expecting a happy ending, and would probably have been disconcerted.  After Edmund is fatally wounded by Edgar in single combat, it seems as though, the play will right itself one last time: overtaken by a last-minute conversion (but why?), the dying Edmund reveals that his ‘writ/Is on the life of Lear and on Cordelia’ and a messenger is sent to save them before it is too late.  The question of whether it is too late is one that Shakespeare refuses to answer, and the suspense is, possibly more horrific than anything in else in a play filled with horror.  The image of Lear limping on stage, clutching Cordelia’s lifeless body is one of those moments in Shakespeare that leave one struck with a combination of horror, pity, awe…Lear at first thinks she is dead but then, grief gives way to frantic hope:

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…

She’s dead on earth. Lend me a looking glass.

If that her breath will mist or stain the stone,

Why, then she lives.

‘Is this the promised end?’ Kent asks, and we are surely meant to share his bewilderment. Holding a ‘ looking-glass’ to the mouth of the living, breathing actor playing Cordelia can only intensify the confusion, and despite Lear’s initial certainty (‘She’s dead on earth’) a few second later he is convinced that she is still breathing. But, when it becomes apparent that this hope is mere fantasy, the shock of her loss, strung out until the last moment, is almost unspeakable. Lear expresses it in a series of plain monosyllables, among the last words he has:

     No, no, no life?

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

And thou no breath at all?

‘Never, never, never, never, never,’ he concludes (one of the most heartbreaking lines I know of in all of literature), an empty jangle that says everything and nothing.  Nothing (as we get back to that again) makes sense, and it’s with that terrifying thought that King Lear dies, and, except for Kent and Edgar’s last mournful and despairing words, King Lear ends.

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From Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All:

“Yet in a Shakespearean universe there is no such thing as an abdicated king. The play has experimented with comedy and romance [MY NOTE:  See last week’s post Act Four, Part One], but it must return to history and to tragedy, and tragedy is remorseless. It allows no mistakes, and permits no reversals. And Lear has made his mistake. Now we hear him plead with Cordelia to seclude herself with him, away from the world. Her instinct is confrontation, his, retirement:

Cordelia:

Shall we not see these daughters and these sisters?

Lear:

No, no, no, no. 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 thee forgiveness; and so we’ll live,

And pray, and sing, and tell old tales…

His proposal is that they retreat into a world of art, spectatorship, romance, and ritual, reliving and restaging their reunion:

Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia,

The gods themselves throw incense.

But Lear’s fantasy here is not really far from those other places of retirement from the world figured in Shakespeare plays as nunneries, monasteries, and ‘little academes.’ Retreat from the public arena, from governance and power, for this King is tantamount to symbolic death, as we have already seen in our discussion of the Fool, in many ways King Lear is a play about the acceptance of death.

The play has all along been a process of interlocking plots, cross-relationships: the Lear plot and the Gloucester plot, the mad King and the blind Duke, two old man and their faithless and faithful children. The final scene offers yet another kind of interlocking, presenting two playwrights and actor-managers seeking to occupy the same stage. The competing texts might be called ‘The Play of Edmund’ and ‘The Play of Edgar,’ or ‘The Play of Time’ and ‘The Play of Timelessness.’ For the plays of Edmund and Edgar are already plotted, already in rehearsal. They are plays that embrace opposite philosophies.

Edmund’s play is a power play, a play of power excised. Like all of Shakespeare’s uncompromising realists (Iago and Richard III, Prince Hal and Octavius Caesar), Edmund is a believer in now, and in personal power and influence. His instructions to his captain could well be Prince Hal’s:

Edmund:

Know thou this: that men

Are as the time is. To be tender-minded

Does not become a sword…

His campaign is ruthless. He hardly cares which of the two sisters kills the other to get him. To him, as to the other Machiavels (Iago, Richard, arguably even Hal), women are a political asset rather than a sexual or emotional goal. It is Edmund who jokes mordantly on his deathbed – and theirs – using the familiar ‘die’ pun: ‘all three/Now marry in an instant.’ Edmund’s design is simple enough. No sooner has Lear spoken of going with Cordelia peacefully to prison, like birds in a cage, than Edmund sends a letter, a written text, commanding their execution. His script requires that they be killed before any of the others have time to protest; he will then take power and become the king. But he reckons without that medieval view of tragedy in which, oddly, he believes more than anyone else in King Lear; his modernity is also his fatalism. And he will accept, finally, the verdict of retribution: ‘The wheel is come full circle. I am here.’ This is Edmund’s play; in tune with the Renaissance tragedy of intrigue, a play of politics and of psychology, of men ‘as the time is.’

But what is Edgar’s play? We could say it is the play of apocalypse, of timelessness – an apocalypse played out, yet again, naturalistically rather than supernaturally. Once again, in yet another disguise, Edgar appears onstage, and presents himself to the Duke of Albany, the ranking political figure in the court. ‘’If any man of quality or degree within the lists of the army will maintain upon Edmund, supposed Earl of Gloucester, that he is a manifold traitor, let him appear by the third sound of the trumpet.’  And the trumpet sounds three times. At the last sound of the trumpet there appears a masked figure with no name and no face, declaring, ‘Know, my name is lost.’ Like Hamlet, and like so many heroes of biblical and medieval saga, he has come to reclaim his name (‘My name is Edgar, and thy father’s son.’) At the close of the play, as we will see, Edgar is able to reclaim not only his place but also his rightful style of speech, when he appears to challenge his brother Edmund in combat. “[T]hy tongue some say of breeding breathes,’ Edmund will declare, accepting the challenge from this anonymous champion as coming from a man of rank, and thus a worthy opponent.

Once again, there is a biblical shadow to the scene that cannot be ignored: the sounding of the trumpet on the day of resurrection. ‘We shall not all sleep,’ writes Saint Paul, ‘but we shall be changed, In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed’ (I Corinthians 15:51-52). Two passages from the Book of Revelation are also highly relevant: the mention of ‘a white horse; and he that sat upon him was called Faithful and True;…and he had a name written, that no man knew, except he himself’ (Revelation 19:11-12), and the revelation itself, ‘I…heard behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet, saying I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the Last’ (Revelation 1:10-11). The first and the last – echoing ‘the last shall be first,’ a principle text for the action and logic of this play.

‘Let’s exchange charity,’ says Edgar to Edmund, who now lies dying. (‘[W]e shall be changed.’) And even Edmund is moved now for the first time to speak of good: ‘Some good I mean to do/Despite of mine own nature.’ Nature, the reigning goddess of the play’s first four acts, is in part vanished in act 5, in favor of something like grace – or so it seems. And then with a characteristic reversal comes that dramatic stage picture, the inverted Pieta, the father, King Lear, holding his dead daughter in his arms. Once again we hear the language of apocalypse: ‘Is this the promised end?’ ‘Or image of that horror?’ ‘Fall and cease.’ The horrified spectators, Kent and the others, ask whether they are witnessing the end of the world, or only a bitter anticipation of that final catastrophe. As Kent says, ‘All’s cheerless, dark, and deadly.’

Lear has lost Cordelia, and Cordelia is all he has of the human bond that makes life possible. Now he in turn acknowledges the loss of language, the loss of breath, and pleads for his own final stripping toward the grave:

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

And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more.

Never, never, never, never, never.

[To Kent] Pray you, undo this button. Thank you, sir.

Edgar calls on him, as he called on Gloucester, to ‘[l]ook up, my lord,’ and Kent cries out,

    O, let him pass. He hates him

That would upon the rack of this tough world

Stretch him out longer.

The image is that of torture, the rack a common implement for the stretching of the body from wrists to ankles. We may note that the rack was an instrument of fifteenth-through-seventeenth-century punitive practice, not of the supposedly more barbarous early Britain of the historical King Leir. Kent calls for the body to ‘pass’ from one world to the next, a common phrase still in use as a ‘polite’ euphemism for dying. But the word ‘pass’ here also carries the sense of ‘password.’ Kent asks that the gate be opened, and the King permitted to go through.

The principals are all dead now: Cordelia and her sisters; Edmund; Gloucester and Lear. Kent, still faithful to ‘authority,’ speaks in the metaphor of the tragic journey that has been familiar since Hamlet:

I have a journey, sir, shortly to go:

My master calls me, I must not say no.

At the last, as he has been all along, Edgar is our representative on the great stage of fools. The Quarto, as we have noted, gives the final lines of the play to the Duke of Albany, the surviving son-in-law of the King. Fittingly, if we want to press the point at all, this is the version titles the Historie – rather than the Tragedie – of King Lear; the heir speaks for history, the hero for tragedy. The Folio version presents Edgar as the speaker, and the speech itself, like Edgar, addresses the onstage and offstage audiences at once:

The weight of this sad time we must obey

Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.

The oldest hath born most. We that are young

Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

Order has been restored. ‘We that are young’ – the we here means all audiences, at any time, not just the survivors of the Lear court, or the spectators of Jacobean England. ‘We’ must ‘[s]peak what we feel,’ like Cordelia, and Kent, and the Fool – not just what we ‘ought to say.’ ‘We’ shall never see so much as the blind Gloucester saw, nor live so long as these characters live, beyond their onstage deaths, in the play that tells their story.

Lear himself is greater at the close of the play than at the beginning. His growth from error to acknowledgement of his poor, stripped nature, to repentance and a humble kneeling before Cordelia, is an upward progression as well as a downward one. He is greater on his knees than on his throne. Cordelia, too, grows and changes from act 1 to act 4, as we see from the two scenes in which she is asked to answer her father, to account for unaccountable love. Her death, which resembles the deaths of Desdemona and Duncan, deaths that extinguish impossible purity, is as the play present it something to learn from as well as to mourn.

We are left, each of us, with Kent’s question and with Edgar’s. Is this the promised end, or image of that horror? Is it a vision so unbearable as to hold out no hope for the future? Or is it, deliberately, an image: a copy, likeness, picture, shadow, similitude – an imitation in the strong Aristotelian sense – a symbol, an emblem, a sign? In essence, is there any redemption in this play of love, power, deception, and loss, of ‘ripeness is all’? The play poses this question, but will not answer it. The question remains open; it is not foreclosed, even in the direction of nihilism. Ultimately it is the same question Lear asked of Cordelia. Every production seeks its own response, according to the bond of theater.”

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From Harold Bloom:

“’But what if excess of love/Bewildered them until they died?’ Yeats asks in his ‘Easter, 1916.’ Whatever that meant in regard to MacDonagh and MacBride, and Connolly and Pearse, Yeats’ question is appropriate to Lear himself. Love, whether it be Lear’s for Cordelia, or Edgar’s for his father, Gloucester, and for his godfather, Lear, is pragmatically a waste in this most tragic of all tragedies. Lust does no better; when the dying Edmund muses that in spite of all, he was beloved, his sudden capacity for affect superbly surprises us, but we would choose another word rather than ‘beloved’ for the murderous passion of Goneril and Regan.

In Hamlet’s play there is a central consciousness, as there is in Macbeth’s. In Othello’s play, there is at least a dominant nihilist. But Lear’s play is strangely divided. Before he goes mad, Lear’s consciousness is beyond ready understanding; his lack of self-knowledge, blended with his awesome authority, make him unknowable by us. Bewildered and bewildering after that, Lear seems less a consciousness than a falling divinity, Solomonic in his sense of lost glory, Yahweh-like in his irascibility. The play’s central consciousness perforce is Edgar’s, who actually speaks more lines than anyone except Lear. Edmund, more brilliant even than Iago, less of an improviser and more a strategist of Evil, is further into nihilism than Iago was, but no one – hero or villain – can be dominant in Lear’s tragedy. Shakespeare, contra historicists old and new, burns through every context, and never more than in this play. The figure of excess or overthrow never abandons Shakespeare’s text; except for Edmund, everyone either loves or hates too much.

Edgar, whose pilgrimage of abnegation culminates in vengeance, ends overwhelmed by the helplessness of his love, a love progressively growing in range and intensity, with the pragmatic effect of yielding him, as the new king, only greater suffering. Edmund, desperately attempting to do some good, despite what he continues to insist is his own nature, is carried off stage to die, not knowing whether Cordelia has been saved or not. No formalist or historicist would be patient with my asking this, but in what state of self-knowledge find himself as he dies? His sense of his own identity, powerful until Edgar overcomes him, wavers throughout the long scene of his dying Lear and Edgar have shared enormous bewilderments of identity, which appear to be further manifestations of excessive love. Shakespeare’s intimation is that the only authentic love is between parents and children, yet the prime consequence of such love is only devastation. Neither of the drama’s two antithetical senses of nature, Lear’s or Edmund’s, is sustained by a close scrutiny of the changes the protagonists undergo in Acts IV and V. Edgar’s ‘ripeness is all’ is misconstrued if we interpret it as a Stoic comfort, let alone somehow a Christian consolation. Shakespeare deliberately echoes Hamlet’s ‘The readiness is all,’ itself an ironical reversal of Simon-Peter’s sleepiness provoking Jesus’ ‘The spirit is ready, but the flesh is weak.’ If we must endure our going hence even as our coming higher, then ‘ripeness is all’ warns us how little ‘all’ is. Soon enough, as W.R. Elton observed, Edgar will tell us ‘that endurance and ripeness are not all.’ His final wisdom is to submit to ‘the weight of this sad time,’ a submission that involves his reluctant assumption of the crown, with the ghastly historical mission of clearing a Britain overrun by wolves.

Love, Samuel Johnson once remarked, is the wisdom of fools and the folly of the wise. The greatest critic in our tradition was not commenting on Lear’s tragedy, but he might as well have been, since his observation is both Shakespearean and prudential, and illuminates the limitations of love in the play. Edgar has become wise when the play ends, yet love is still his folly by engendering his inconsolable grief for his two father. The great stage of fools has only three survivors standing upon it at the end: Kent willing soon will join his master, Lear, while the much shaken Albany abdicates his interest to Edgar. The marriage between Albany and Goneril would have been more than enough to exhaust a stronger character than Albany, and Kent is only just barely a survivor. Edgar is the center, and we can wonder why we are so slow to see that it is, except for Lear, Edgar’s play after all. Lear’s excessive love for Cordelia inevitably sought to be a controlling love, until the image of authority was broken, not redeemed, as Christianizers of this pagan play have argued. The serving love of Edgar prepares him to be an unstoppable avenger against Edmund, and a fit monarch for a time of troubles, but the play’s design establishes that Edgar’s is as catastrophic a love as Lear’s Love is no healer in The Tragedy of King Lear; indeed, it starts all the trouble, and is a tragedy in itself. The gods in King Lear do not kill men and women for their sport; instead they afflict Lear and Edgar with an excess of love, and Goneril and Regan with the torments of lust and jealousy. Nature, invoked by Edmund as his goddess, destroys him through the natural vengeance of his brother, because Edmund is immune from love, and so has mistaken his deity.

Dr. Johnson said that he could not bear Act V of the play because it outraged divine justice and so offended his moral sense, but the great critic may have mistaken his own reaction. What the drama of King Lear truly outrages is our universal idealization of the value of familial love – that is to say, both love’s personal and love’s social value. The play manifests an intense anguish in regard to human sexuality, and a compassionate despair as to the mutually destructive nature of both paternal and filial love. Maternal love is kept out of the tragedy, as if natural love in its strongest form would be too much to bear, even for this negative sublimity. Lear’s queen, unless she were a Job’s wife, laconically suggesting that Lear curse the gods and die, would add an intolerable burden to a drama already harrowing in the extreme.

Hazlitt thought it was impossible to give either a description of the play itself or of its effect upon the mind. Rather strikingly, for so superb a psychological critic, Hazlitt remarks, ‘All that we can say must fall short of the subject; or even of what we ourselves conceive of it.’ Hazlitt touches on the uncanniest aspect of Lear: something that we conceive of it hovers outside our expressive range. I think this effect ensues from the universal wound the play deals to the value of familial love. Laboring this point is painful, but everything about the tragedy of Lear is painful. To borrow from Nietzsche, it is not that the pain is meaningful but the meaning itself becomes painful in this play. We do them wrong to speak of Lear’s own permutation as being redemptive, there can be no regeneration when love itself becomes identical with pain. Every attempt to mitigate the darkness of this work is an involuntary critical lie. When Edgar says of Lear, ‘He childed as I father’d,’ the tragedy is condensed into just five words.

Unpack that gnomic condensation, and what do you receive? Not, I think, a parallel between two innocences (Lear’s and Edgar’s) and two guilts (Lear’s eldest daughters’ and Gloucester’s) because Edgar does not consider his father to be guilty. ‘He childed as I father’d’ has in it no reference whatsoever to Goneril and Regan, but only to the parallel between Lear-Cordelia and Edgar-Gloucester. There is love, and only love, among those four, and yet there is tragedy, and only tragedy, among them. Subtly, Edgar intimates the link between his own rugged recalcitrance and Cordelia’s. Without Cordelia’s initial recalcitrance, there would have been no tragedy, but then Cordelia would not have been Cordelia. Without Edgar’s stubborn endurance and self-abnegation, the avenging angel who strikes Edmund down would not have been metamorphosed out of a gullible innocent. We can wonder at the depth and prolongation of the self-abasement, but then Edgar would not have been Edgar without it. And there is no recompense; Cordelia is murdered, and Edgar despairingly will resign himself to the burden of kingship.

Critics have taken a more hopeful stance, to argue for redemptive love, and for the rough justice visited upon every villain in the play. The monsters in the deep all achieve properly bad ends: Edgar cudgels Oswald to death, the servant, defending Gloucester, fatally wounds Cornwall, Goneril poisons Regan, and then stabs herself in the heart; Edgar cuts Edmund down, as the audience knows Edgar is fated to do. But there is no satisfaction for us in this slaughter of the wicked. Except for Edmund, they are too barbaric to be tolerated, and even Edmund, fascinating as he is, would deserve, like the others, to be indicted for crimes against humanity. Their deaths are meaningless – again, even Edmund’s, since his belated change fails to save Cordelia. Cordelia’s death, painful to us beyond description, nevertheless has only that pain to make it meaningful. Lear and Gloucester, startlingly, both die more of joy than of grief. The joy that kills Lear is delusional: he apparently hallucinates, and beholds Cordelia either as not having died or as being resurrected. Gloucester’s joy is founded upon reality, but pragmatically the extremes of delight and of anguish that kill him are indistinguishable. ‘He childed as I father’d’: Lear and Gloucester are slain by their paternal love; by the intensity and authenticity of that love. War between siblings; betrayal of fathers by daughters and by a natural son; tormented misunderstanding of a loyal son and a saintly daughter by noble patriarchs; a total dismissal of all sexual congress as lechery: what are we bequeathed by this tragedy that we endlessly moralize? There is one valid form of love and one only: that at the end, between Lear and Cordelia, Gloucester and Edgar. Its value, casting aside irrelevant transcendental moralizings, is less than negative: it may be stronger than death, but it leads only to death, or to death-in-life for the extraordinary Edgar, Shakespeare’s survivor of survivors.”

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And to conclude today’s post, from Frank Kermode’s Shakespeare’s Language:

“In the midst of the happenings that are to bring disaster there occurs a brief scene that is a minimum of the play’s intentions. Edgar brings his father to a shelter and goes off to fight: ‘If ever I return to you again, I’ll bring you comfort.’ Nothing is heard except the sound of battle. Gloucester is alone and silent on the stage, using his ears as eyes, as Lear has told him to. Then Edgar returns, but with no comfort: ‘King Lear hath lost, he and his daughter ta’en.’ He offers a hand, tries to drag his father away; but Gloucester has had enough: ‘No further, sir, a man may rot even here.’ Edgar than speaks the famous lines: ‘What, in ill thoughts again? Men must endure/Their going hence even as their coming hither,/Ripeness is all.’ Come on’ – to which Gloucester replies, ‘And that’s true too.’

Edgar uses the obvious point that his father must leave his refuge just as he arrived at it, to make a more general stoical point about death. ‘Ripeness is all,’ though much quoted, is not an unambiguous piece of wisdom; is the ripeness of time referred to, or the preparedness of the sufferer? Edgar wants to hurry away; his ‘Come on’ may strike a note of impatience at the old man’s ‘ill thoughts.’ And Gloucester, trailing off, seems to treat the observation as a mere platitude. What is certain is that he waited in the shadow of his tree for good, conclusive news and comfort, and got neither. That is the way Lear works.

The King himself, a prisoner with his daughter (V.iii), now vainly imagines a happy ending, while Cordelia imagines they have reached the worst, not having heard Edgar’s lesson in Iv.i. Lear is given the kind of fantastic poetry Shakespeare had long known the trick of; Lear’s thoughts are on the court he has lost; he cannot hope to have another, but he remembers, in a gently satirical way, the customary talk of courtiers: ‘Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out’ – only with this addition: he and his daughter will

     take upon ‘s the mystery of things

As if we were God’s spies; and we’ll wear out

In a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones,

That ebb and flow by th’ moon.

Here the simplicity of the beginning (‘We two alone will sing like birds in a cage’) gives way to more compacted language, with its hints of a wider frame of discourse. And Lear continues with even more intellectual force and originality:

He that parts us shall bring a brand from heaven,

And fire us hence like foxes. Wipe thine eyes;

The good-years shall devour them, flesh and fell

Ere they shall make us weep!

The biblical image of foxes attacked or flushed out by fire (Judges 15:4-5) is combined with the obscure ‘the good years’ (‘the good’ in Q), never properly explained but seemingly a disease; the relations between these items are no longer those of demented association; the King is not fully sane, but no longer raving.

The rest of the story concerns Edmund’s fatal move to kill Cordelia and the King, the love lives of Regan, Goneril, and Edmund, and the fuller emergence of Albany as the man in charge. Edmund dies at his brother’s hand, Edgar tells his brother’s story, Goneril and Regan die, and with all this going on, everybody forgets about Lear and Cordelia until it is too late. The King enters with his daughter in his arms, thinking she is dead, wondering if she still breathes. Amidst the pathos of this ending the King complains about his eyes (V.iii.280), asks for a button to be undone so that he can once more shed an addition. Within these intensities the words ‘see’ and ‘look’ resound, the latter four times in Lear’s last ten words.

This is the craftiest as well as the most tremendous of Shakespeare’s tragedies. One can imagine awestruck colleagues wondering what the author…could possibly do next. There is a finality about Lear; it even instructs us to think that.”

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Obviously I’m going to have more posts on Lear (two at least), but…what are your thoughts?  How do you read it?  Is there any sense of potential redemption?  (For me, there’s none.  It’s bleak on top of bleak.)  Do you have any questions/topics you’d like me to cover?  Please…share with the group!

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MpGb0nJ3eM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60-v635ZRzs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ff0vFSXlGzs

My next post:  Thursday evening/Friday morning