Introduction To King Lear

Introduction to King Lear 12/23/10 8:49 AM
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English 366: Studies in Shakespeare
Speak What We Feel: An Introduction to King Lear

[A lecture prepared for English 366: Studies in Shakespeare, by Ian Johnston of Malaspina-University College, Nanaimo, BC.
This text is in the public domain, released July 1999. It was last revised November 11, 1999]
[Note that references to King Lear in the following text are from the Conflated Text version of the play in the Norton
Shakespeare]
Introduction
Anyone setting out to deliver a lecture on King Lear begins with a sense of inadequacy:
How is one to capture properly this amazingly complex and powerful vision of human
life? It's clear that anything I say here is going to be seriously inadequate. That's true, of
course, about any lecture on Shakespeare (or on any other work of great literature), but
for obvious reasons the issue is particularly acute with King Lear. So I am here not going
to attempt anything like a comprehensive introduction. What I offer are a few remarks
to encourage you to recognize some general things in this play, so that your next reading
of it may be more rewarding. I am not here, any more than anywhere else, offering what
I take (or anyone else should take) as a final word.
Some Obvious Points
In King Lear, as in so many great works of literature, many of the most important
elements are the most obvious, and we should not, for the sake of exploring particular
complexities, lose sight of these elements.
First and foremost, King Lear is the story of an old man who moves from a position of
enormous power, status, wealth, responsibility, social complexity, and security step by
step into a terrible isolation from his fellow human beings, his family, and nature itself,
suffers horribly from the stripping away of his entire identity, goes mad as a result of his
experience, recovers briefly, and then becomes insane again in the moment before his
death. In no other work of fiction (not even in Oedipus or Macbeth) do we witness a total
transformation from such magnificence to total despair rendered with such emotional
intensity. That intensity is heightened by the fact that Lear's story is underscored
throughout by the similar experiences of the Duke of Gloucester.
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Second, King Lear is in many respects a relatively simple story, and its structure has some
obvious similarities with old folk takes ("Once upon a time, there was an old man who
had three daughters. Two of them despised him, but the youngest one loved him very
much. One day he decided to test their love. . . . And so on). This apparent simplicity is
brought out also in the elements of a morality play surrounding the King. The forces of
good and evil are grouped around him in almost equal numbers, and the action of the
play can be viewed as a struggle for the life of the old man, since to a large extent these
rival groups define themselves by their attitudes to the suffering king. These elements
give the particularity of Lear's unique narrative a much wider and more timeless quality.
What we are dealing with here is not just a single old man (important as that point of
view is), but with human beings generally.
Third, the central struggle in the play (other than the main one going on in Lear's own
mind) is between people who see their relationship with Lear and with others from
different perspectives. Those who seek to assist Lear and strive to combat the forces
who wish to abuse him (e.g., Kent, Cordelia, the Fool, Edgar, Gloucester, and eventually
Albany) are motivated principally by a traditional sense of love, respect, and allegiance--
a complex set of virtues summed up in the important terms "bond" and "ceremonious
affection." These people see themselves as defined in large part by their significant
relationships with other people, especially with Lear himself.
The other group is made up of those who serve primarily themselves, whose attitude
towards others is largely determined by their desire to use people for their own self-
advancement (e.g., Regan, Goneril, Cornwall, Edmund, Oswald). For them, traditional
notions of the importance of bonds are illusions, outmoded conventions standing in the
way of their individual desire for power. Thus, they are ready to violate established
bonds (like those between a father and child or between a husband and wife or between
a king and subject) in order to pursue their own agendas. In the context of the
vocabulary we have been using for other plays, these characters are recognizably
Machiavels.
Fourth, by the end of the play, the opposing forces have largely annihilated each other.
Those remaining have very little to say. Unlike the end of other Shakespearean tragedies,
there is no clear and confident voice of authority directing things (e.g., Fortinbras,
Malcolm), and there is no attempt to sum up what has happened or to offer any sort of
a tribute to the dead hero. We will be looking later at different interpretative possibilities
with the closing moments of King Lear, but if we simply confine our attention to the
text, there is little sense of a communal coming together at the end with hopes for a
healthy regeneration. Whatever the action adds up to is thus left for us to figure out.
The Denial of an Easy Moral Understanding of King Lear
Given the strongly allegorical basis to the groupings of characters in the play, it might be
tempting to see the most important feature of King Lear as the illustration of some sort
of "lesson" as the working out of some theme or other. This approach, it should be
clear from our dealings with other plays, I would like to avoid at all costs, since (as I
have repeatedly stressed) Shakespearean tragedy at its finest cannot be reduced to some
easy moral summation, some statement about the "meaning" of what we have just
witnessed.
Now, one interesting feature of King Lear is that the author seems to have gone out of
his way to make any such tendency to moralize the story difficult to carry out. And one
obvious (and interesting) way he does that is to have particular characters in the story
offer their own moral evaluations of what they are going through (or putting others
through). These evaluative statements attempt to invoke some simple moral explanation
to account for what is going on. Here is a sample of what I mean:
O, sir, to willful men,

The injuries that they themselves procure
Must be their schoolmaster. (3.1.296-298)
As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;

They kill us for their sport. (4.1.57-58)
This shows you are above,

You justicers, that these our nether crimes
So speedily can venge! (4.2.79-81)
It is the stars,
The stars above us, govern our conditions: (4.3.31-32)
Men must endure

Their going hence, even as their coming hither;
Ripeness is all. (5.2.9-11)
The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices

Make instruments to plague us. (5.34.169-170)
These moral generalizations attempt to place the sufferings that are going on into some
conventional framework of justice. The sayings range from a sense that the gods are
irrationally cruel ("They kill us for their sport") to a sense that there is a providential
justice at work in events, to a call for Stoical resignation. But the point is, I think, that
they all fail to capture the totality of our experience of what is going on. We recognize
such moments for what they are: attempts to rationalize the emotional suffering that is
going on, to place it in some familiar conceptual framework. But we also recognize the
inadequacy of such quick and easy moral summations of events, for the action going on
here simply is too complex, ironic, and particular to be contained by a short formula.
The pattern of these moments is designed to put pressure on us to recognize that,
however we make sense of this play, we are going to have to attend to its detailed
particularity and complexity, which will not be fitted easily into the usual simple moral
categories upon which we rely most of the time.
This point becomes explicit in the closing lines of the play (spoken by Edgar or Albany,
depending on the edition you are using):
The weight of this sad time we must obey;

Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most; we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long. (5.3.322.325)
All one can do, these lines suggest, is seek to honour one's own deepest feelings about
the drama we have witnessed. At such times whatever our moral framework of belief
(what "we ought to say") must give way before the genuine expression of our
imaginative sympathies, which may well be difficult to formulate clearly.
With this insight in mind, I shall avoid trying to offer a rational explanation of what King
Lear is "about." Instead I will offer some separate observations of things which, it
strikes me, are central to any reflections about this play.
The Issue of Lear's Identity: The Descent Into Madness
At the start of the play King Lear has rich, powerful, and complex social identity. He is
both king of his country and patriarch of his family, the lynch pin which holds together
the structure of the society, which the opening scene presents to us in full formal
splendour. Everyone looks to him as the source of order and meaning in the society.
The opening scene of this play, like the opening scene in Richard II, serves to give us a
full visual symbol of the society united in a shared vision of what matters in the human
community. This is the only time in the play where such a vision of the human
community stands in working order in front of us. Before the first scene is over, it has
already started to fracture.
Lear himself is very powerfully aware of his importance. His vision of himself is
perfectly satisfied because the world gives back to him the image of himself that he has,
an image which he obviously likes a great deal, because his chief purpose at this stage is
to hang onto it. Lear's sense of himself is clear enough if we ask ourselves just what he
is doing in this opening scene. Officially he is transferring the power and the
responsibilities of the throne onto his children: he is resigning. We are not given an
explicit reason other than that Lear wants to spend the rest of his life free of the cares
which come with the position of king. He has carefully arranged an unnecessary ritual in
order to celebrate his own importance.
But in surrendering the position, Lear has no intention of ceasing to be treated as if he

is, in fact, still the king: He is not going to alter his identity:
Only we still retain

The name, and all the additions to a king. . . (1.1.135-136)
Lear clearly believes that his identity as king is something separable from the actions,
duties, and responsibilities which are required of a king (i.e., from his social actions), just
as he thinks his authority as a father is something separable from the duties of a father.
This suggests initially a very limited understanding, not only of the people he is dealing
with, but also of how the society he has been in charge of (or indeed, any society or
family) is held together. Cordelia invokes the term "bond," and we shall have more to
say about the word later on. Lear's sense of social or family bonding seems clearly to be
that the bonds work in one direction only, that is, they indicate what people owe him.
And he assumes by reflex that such one-way bonding can continue once he ceases to
discharge the duties of king. So initially there is a strong sense that Lear's identity, his
sense of himself, rests on no firm understanding of other people and his relationships to
them.
Some critics make much of the fact that Lear's decision to divide up the kingdom is a
sign of foolishness (symbolized by the division of the crown between Albany and
Cornwall) and the fact that the ritual Lear sets up before granting the various allocations
of territory (which have been decided in advance) is designed totally to reinforce his
powerful ego. But neither of these actions in itself need lead to disastrous consequences,
and no one seems to object to them.
The real cause of the sequence of events which leads ultimately to Lear's death is Lear's
inability to tolerate any view of himself except the one he himself has. What's important
is not that he quarrels with Cordelia for spoiling his self-flattering court pageant but the
way he quarrels with her. The extraordinary speed and violence of his response tell us at
once that we are witnessing here an enormously powerful ego which simply cannot
accept any external check on his sense of how he should be treated because of who he
is.
We know from the actions of France (who is the only one on stage equal in social status
to Lear) and Kent (who speaks very bluntly and stops only when Lear charges him on
his "allegiance") and from the remarks of the sisters at the end of the scene, that Lear is
making an enormous misjudgment. But we also realize clearly enough that at this point
that Lear simply cannot hear or see anything which does not fit his own conception of
himself. The strength of this solitary ego manifests itself in the extraordinarily powerful
and brutal images with which Lear expresses his anger at Cordelia's refusal to play along
with his game:
The barbarous Scythian,

Or he that makes his generation messes
To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom
Be as well neighbored, pitied, and relieved,
As thou my sometime daughter. (1.1.116-119)
The language here and the emotions it expresses are so incommensurate to the surface
events which have prompted it, so in excess of the cause, that there can be only one
explanation: Lear is so passionately wrapped up in a particular conception of himself
that he simply explodes emotionally when any form of a challenge (however politely
framed) from any quarter manifests itself.
The anger here launches the story, which, from this point on, focuses (among other
things) on the stripping away of all those things that Lear has always relied upon to
reinforce his sense of his own importance, of his identity, until he is left alone, naked,
and mad running through nature away from all society. Because Lear cannot tolerate
Cordelia's apparent failure to live up to what he requires from her for his own self-
gratification, he unleashes a chain of events which ultimately removes everything from
him which reassures him who he is.
It's in the context of this step-by-step loss of his earlier identity (or the external
manifestations of it) that the question of Lear's hundred knights becomes a central issue.
The hundred knights are not, in themselves, at all necessary to Lear's daily routine and
comforts (as the sisters point out, quite correctly). But they are essential to his sense of
his identity as the leader, the person to whom others defer and give allegiance. They are
there to give back to him the image of himself he wants to maintain.
Regan and Goneril are quite correct to resent Lear's huge retinue and to sense that their
father is gripped by a self-image which has no accurate perception of the new reality.
Depending upon how the knights behave in any production of the play, the audience
can see the truth in their objections. In Brook's famous film of King Lear, the behaviour
of Lear and his knights is disgraceful; they spend all their time making a great deal of
noise, eating and drinking (or demanding more), and in general throwing the palaces into
turmoil. So it's not necessarily the case that denying Lear his knights makes the two
sisters bad people. Here again, what matters (as we shall see later) is how they handle the
issue.
Lear's story is a tragedy because, faced with external circumstances which increasingly
do not support his vision of himself, Lear refuses to compromise. He will not listen to
what the fool is telling him, he resists his own growing awareness that he might have
made a mistake, and, most important, he will not adjust his desires or his conduct to fit
what his daughters are prepared to do for him. He would sooner take on the natural
world alone and endure the enormous suffering that brings upon him than compromise
with his sense of himself in the face of political realities.
This characteristic makes him, of course, a passionately egocentric, loud, and in many
respects unsympathetic character. But what redeems him is the quality of his passion
and his willingness to suffer. He has launched himself on a voyage exploring what it
means to be a human being once one strips away all the extras that help to tell him what
he is. That's not his conscious purpose, of course, but that is the direction in which the
logic of his passions leads him. He is not going to compromise his sense of himself to
suit the world; he'd sooner reject the world or, more immediately, move away and create
his own.
That impetus pushes Lear out into the storm. To return to the castle would be to
concede defeat, to admit he no longer is King Lear (as he sees himself), because he
would be living by conditions imposed by someone else. Instead he will try to impose
his sense of himself on the elements of nature. If he cannot find justice in his family and
in his kingdom, he will seek it from the gods:
Let the great gods,

That keep this dreadful pother o'er our heads,
Find out their enemies now. Tremble, thou wretch,
That hast within thee undivulgéd crimes,
Unwhipped of justice. Hide thee, thou bloody hand;
Thou perjured, and thou simular of virtue
That are incestuous. Caitiff, to pieces shake,
That under covert and convenient seeming
Hast practiced on man's life. Close pent-up guilts
Rive your concealing continents, and cry
These dreadful summoners grace. I am a man
More sinned against than sinning. (3.2.47-58)
At this stage, Lear sees the storm as a possible manifestation of divine anger at the way
he has been treated. He is searching for a sign from the gods that he is right. His stance
is (to us) absurd (although we have probably all known some old men with a similar
tendency to scream at the world if they don't get their way), but his sense of outrage is
so powerful, he is filled with such a passionate self-pity, that he is, like Job, demanding
justice from the chaos of natural forces all around him, seeking an answer from God.
But there's more to Lear's passion here than his demand for justice. He is also fighting a
war against himself, against the growing awareness that he, too, might be a sinner.
Earlier, he has given some brief signs that a sense of his own culpability is growing
within--for example, the cryptic statement "I did her wrong--" (1.5.20), and his
repeatedly expressed sense that he may be starting to lose his mind indicates that his
rage at the storm is, in part, an increasingly desperate demand for something to protect
his own sense of his identity as king-victim against the corrosive effects of a new
awareness of his own responsibilities. His extraordinarily powerful language is his
attempt to compensate for a lack of physical power to bring his vision of justice upon
those who have offended him as well as his attempt to project his personality out into
the world so he will not have to deal with his inner doubts, which make him very afraid,
because they force him to rethink who he is.
In this regard, it is significant that, the moment before he goes mad, Lear for the first
time stops thinking about himself and calling attention to his own sense of injustice.
Instead for the first time he expresses some genuine feeling for the sufferings of others:
Poor naked wretches, whereso'er you are,

That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall our houseless heads and unfed sides,
You looped and windowed raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en
Too little care of this! (3.4.29-34)
That final sentence is something we have not heard from Lear before, an assumption of
responsibility, a piece of unprompted self-criticism. But this hint is not something that
leads, as it might in a comic character, to some growth in his understanding, for the
instant later he goes mad. It's as if he can no longer hang onto the identity he has been
defending for so long and he has nothing to put in its place or is incapable of seeing
what he might put in its place.
The sight of Edgar disguised as Poor Tom, the naked madman, drives Lear beyond any
sense of a sane identity. Having no place in which to find a suitable reflection of
himself, Lear throws himself on the insanity of the world. He asked for justice from
nature, and it threw a madman in his face.
Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou owest the worm no
silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, that cat no perfume. Ha! Here's
three on's are sophisticated! Thou are 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) (3.4.95-101)
The act of tearing off his clothes (which, as we shall discuss, Lear repeats at the very
end of the play) is the forcible rejection of the last element of civilized life which gives
him a sense of who he is and where he belongs. It signifies, among other things, Lear's
inevitable surrender to the torment in his mind which has desperately been seeking for
some reassurance. Having found none, he acknowledges the absurdity of the world by
joining it, not as the result of reflecting upon what he might have learned and
consciously deciding, but because he cannot hang onto any reliable indication of who he
is. This formulation may be too neat, however, for there is a sense that the tearing off of
his clothes and the leap into madness is something willed. He makes the decision to go
mad (which, in itself, may be a sign of madness), thus retaining control over his own life
(rather like Oedipus determining to punish himself by gouging out his eyes and
banishing himself from the city). Since he feels as if the world has gone insane and since
Lear always responds instantly to his most powerful feelings, he commits himself to the
full isolation of insanity.
The fact that the sight of Edgar in disguise prompts the action is interesting. Perhaps
there's a sense that Lear recognizes in Poor Tom the nearest image of himself, an
"unaccommodated man," that is, a man without any mark of society upon him, for he
lacks the most basic of all the things which help to tell us who we are, clothing and
organized speech.
Just as the order in the natural world is rendered absurd by the storm, so the order in
the social world is rendered absurd by the absence within it (for Lear) of any vestige of
justice, any of that order, ceremonious affection, allegiance, and mutuality which define
us in terms of our relationships with others. Lacking the customary social components
of his identity, Lear loses any sense of who he is and, consequently, surrenders his grip
on reality.
The situation, however, is more complex than this, because, of course, Poor Tom is not
really mad and Kent is not really who is appearing to be. And Gloucester is doing what
he can to assist. In other words, the social relations necessary to foster a rich identity are
present. For Kent truly loves Lear, as does the Fool, and Gloucester has a firm sense of
love and duty to the old king. Edgar, too, is only pretending to be mad as a way of
protecting himself. So, in a sense, the very thing that Lear most needs are readily
available to him.
The problem is that he not attuned to recognize these qualities in others (as the repeated
metaphors of seeing and blindness remind us). His old identity only enables him to see
what he wants to see. What doesn't fit doesn't enter his consciousness, and he dismisses
it, drowns it out, or doesn't listen to it sufficiently to recognize what he later comes to
understand when he wakes up in Cordelia's camp. Act III of King Lear is a vision of
world gone mad, not because there is no significant love or trust or courage or virtue in
the world, but because King Lear himself is not at this stage equipped to recognize
those things. He has tried so hard to impose his will on the world and received no
response other than the meaningless storm, that he determines to join it.
A high point of Lear's initial madness comes in 3.6, in the mock trial scene, in which the
mad Lear, the apparently mad Edgar, the disguised Kent, and the Fool set up a court of
justice to arraign and try Regan and Goneril, while the storm rages outside the hovel.
On the page a good deal of this scene makes little sense, and it certainly loses much of
its impact. But we should see its point readily enough. In the world Lear has entered,
the world of unaccommodated man, human beings reduced to the minimal humanity of
their naked bodies, justice becomes absurd. The demand for justice may be as powerful
as ever, but the process by which one seeks it out and the language appropriate to that
have become a cruel farce or a meaningless game which simply prolongs the suffering
of the players (it's possible to see in Act 3 of King Lear an anticipation of the Theatre of
the Absurd, in which a central concern is the often cruel games people invent simply to
convince themselves they are passing the time appropriately).
The intense psychological cruelty of this absurd farce is powerfully underscored by the
next scene, one of the most painful in all English theatre, the gouging out of
Gloucester's eyes. This, too, is a "justice" scene, in the sense that someone is being
judged and punished. The scene is not played out in the midst of the storm by a bunch
of isolated social outcasts, but the physical cruelty of the arbitrary punishment matches
the psychological absurdity of the scene in the hovel. Lear's madness leaves him
incapable of dealing with reality, but this scene insists that reality itself has become
equally mad, equally unjust, equally cruel. The punishment of Gloucester is carried out
in the name of policy by important political officials in a measured and calculated way in
the name of self-interested "policy," for there is no passionate personal animosity
involved here. And it has been made possible by a son's betrayal of his father. It is a
vision of life every bit as arbitrary and absurd as the punishment the inner and outer
storms are inflicting on Lear (or, rather, which Lear is bringing down upon himself in
the storm).
The full terrible absurdity of both of these stories comes together in 4.6, when the blind
Gloucester, immediately after his attempted suicide, meets the solitary Lear "fantastically
dressed with wild flowers." Lear at this stage is still evidently completely mad, having
lost all faith in any sense of order, meaning, or stablity in the world, obsessed with the
intimate connection between evil and female sexuality and the total perversion of justice
everywhere.
Yet Gloucester recognizes him (from his voice) as the king, and Lear acknowledges that
title ("Aye, every inch aking!" 4.6.105), but for him the very notion of kingship has
become absurd; there is no significant place any more for what a king represents and
carries out, so he refuses Gloucester's offer to kiss his hand and torments Gloucester
about the loss of his eyes (even though he does admit at last that he recognizes
Gloucester). The possibility of sharing something with Gloucester, of acknowledging
Gloucester's love and loyalty or even sympathizing with his obvious suffering (and
perhaps being acknowledged in return) Lear rejects in a passionate frenzy against the
injustice of the world.
Here it's as if Lear, reduced to nothing but his overpowering sense of betrayal and loss,
can come up with only one way of dealing with the world: "Then, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill,
kill." What will not answer to his sense of who he is and how the world ought to be can
only be destroyed. Rather than destroy within himself the egocentric will which
demands that the world answer to him, Lear prefers to will the destruction of the world.
By why is it that Lear cannot see Gloucester and accept him as an extraordinary victim?
In a well known essay on this play, Stanley Cavell suggests that all of Lear's actions,
from the very opening to the end of the play, stem from a desire to avoid shame, to
avoid accepting the world (rather than demanding it answer to him), because accepting
the world would mean that he would have to allow the world to recognize him for who
he is. Lear's persistent refusal to express love and let others (especially Cordelia) express
their love openly and honestly (which is something quite different from wanting the
world to perceive him as a beloved father and king, the motivation for the opening
staged ritual) stems from something he senses about himself and does not wish to reveal
to the world. Cavell further suggests that Lear's extraordinary rage at seeing Gloucester
comes from his being confronted directly with a consequence of his own attempts to
avoid shame. This is not simply a matter of the mutilation of Gloucester but also a
merging of Gloucester's and Lear's characters. In a sense, Cavell argues, Gloucester is
for Lear an image of what Lear has done to himself. (See "The Avoidance of Love: A
Reading of King Lear" in Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare)
Whether we accept Cavell's argument or not, it is clear in this extraordinary scene that
Lear is still far too preoccupied with his own agenda, with discharging his passionate
anger out into the world, to pay attention sympathetically to anything going on in the
world. The way in which he teases Gloucester about the loss of his eyes may be more
than just the effects of madness (an expression which explains nothing); the black
humour functions as a protection for Lear. So long as he can joke about Glouchester's
condition, he does not have to do anything about it and can, with increasing
desperation, protect himself. He has to push away Gloucester's offer to pay allegiance in
order to make that possible; if he lets Gloucester too close he may have to really look at
him and reveal to Gloucester who he really is and acknowledge that to himself, as well.
The Forces of Evil
Lear, of course, does not himself willingly bring down upon his head the forces which
drive him out into the heath. His fault (if that is the right word) is to create a situation
where others can give rein to their desire to promote their own individualistic interests,
their quest for power, against the normal bonds which restrain them. Lear is not the
source of the immediate forces which create his enormous suffering, but he is
responsible for giving those who oppose him an opportunity to act successfully against
him and his followers.
King Lear thus is the culmination of a frequent Shakespearean theme, the idea that the
forces of evil require for their operation the willed neglect or ignorance of or
carelessness about the responsibilities which sustain justice in the human community. It's
as if, to invoke the image of order in Ulysses's speech on degree, the collapse of the
moral order which sustains normal life always begins with an important lapse in the
responsiblity of those charged with maintaining it. This lapse may come from
selfishness, ignorance, an egotistical preoccupation with one's own importance, or any
other such cause. The important point is that once that occurs those whom the moral
order normally can deal with have opportunities to violate the traditional rules.
However, the vision of evil here is different in some respects. Evil in King Lear is not a
metaphysical presence, as it is in Macbeth, nor is it some personification of the Devil
loose in the land, as in Richard III. One of the most reverberating issues in this play is
the sense that evil is something normal, residing in the hearts of people all around us,
those on the surface indistinguishable from ourselves, people whom we would have no
reason to suspect of being capable of evil acts and who, were circumstances different,
might very well not turn to evil.
Regan and Goneril, after all, are not witches. Their most distinctive characteristic is, in
some ways, their normality. They are ambitious women who have waited a long time to
receive the power which is to be their inheritance. And once they have the power, they
are anxious to use it for their own immediate self-interest. No special opprobrium
attaches to them for telling their father how much they love him. What they say is
obviously an exaggerated lie, but they are playing a game which he has set up. And, as I
have mentioned above, their objections to Lear's retinue are (or can be seen as) largely
justified. One can even have some sympathy for their sense that if they turn their father
loose with all those knights, there may be some political trouble.
The source of their evil is an absence of love or respect for their father, both as a father,
a king, and a human being. Lear may very well be a difficult person to deal with--a
strong egotist with excessive demands. But Regan and Goneril, once they have power,
have no further interest in Lear as a person. He is simply a nuisance. We do not need to
demonize this attitude, because Lear clearly is a nuisance. But the casual way in which
they rationalize away their neglect of him speaks volumes. They set their own interests
above those of anyone else, including their father. This does not spring from any
particular desire to hurt their father. It is simply an expression of their pre-eminent
concern for their own interests, a concern which enables them to treat anyone who has
nothing they want as an object. But the habit, once initiated, leads step by step to
conduct of extreme cruelty (like the putting out of Gloucester's eyes) and his
banishment to Dover.
Regan and Goneril thus represent a particular vision of evil as stemming from a self-
interested quest for power and self-interest which simply ignores any limits which an
attention to traditional "bonds" might require (other than a duplicitous pretense to
honour such bonds when it serves their interests). This origin is common enough; that it
leads logically enough to uncommonly cruel conduct is something this play makes us
contemplate.
Edmund's attitude is precisely the same. He is not a diabolically evil person, a devil
incarnate like Richard of Gloucester. And he has no specific agenda. He is a
recognizably normal person who wants to get on the world and who is prepared to
abandon ancient communal traditions in order to secure an advantage for himself. He's
not all that interested in being cruel to others or killing them just for sake of hurting
others, but he's not going to let any traditional notions of obligation, respect, virtue, or
bonding prevent him from making what he can of his opportunities.
Edmund's soliloquy at the opening of 1.2 repays close scrutiny, because it indicates his
basic attitude to life. For him the idea of "Nature" signifies a world without legitimacy.
One is entitled to whatever one can gain by one's wits. He relishes the notion of being a
bastard because that is the most obvious manifestation of his commitment to denying
traditions. For him, as for Regan and Goneril, there is no standard of virtue which
determines the value of one's life. People are what they are, and that is simply a
compound of desires and talents to seize opportunities. The prose soliloquy at the end
of the scene brings this point out very explicitly:
This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in
fortune, often the surfeit of our own behavior, we make guilty of our
disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains by
necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers, by
spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced
obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine
thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whore-master man, to lay his goatish
disposition to the charge of a star! My father compounded with my mother
under the dragon's tail, and my nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it
follows, I am rough and lecherous. Fut! I should have been that I am, had
the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing. (1.2.109-
122).
This prose soliloquy indicates Edmund's sense of the total absence of a controlling
metaphysical or moral component to human life. Human beings are what they are--and,
in Edmund's view, they are anything but admirable, simply one more greedy animal with
a "goatish disposition." That being the case, his task, as he sees it, is to create for himself
out of the materials at hand his own life to suit his individualistic desires.
This, for most of us, is such a natural stance, that we don't initially have too much
trouble in seeing the logic of Edmund's position. He wants to fashion his own life,
rather than being held back by traditional customs which have labeled him unfit or
ineligible to attain the sort of life he wants for himself. He sees himself as just as
intelligent and able as his older brother and therefore is not willing simply to concede
that the customs which will make his brother a duke while leaving him on the sidelines,
just because he was born illegitimately fourteen months later than Edgar, should have
any bearing on what he chooses to do.
Edmund expresses himself with a rough and candid vigour tinged with self-deprecating
humour and a cynical intelligence which is (at first) quite attractive. We can feel in this
character something of the same intimacy with the audience as we felt in Richard of
Gloucester. In a play which features such characters as Lear and Gloucester, so out of
touch at first with the living heart of the bonds which link human beings, so complacent
about their own patriarchal authority, Edmund's response does not lack some
justification.
And it's important to note that Edmund (unlike Richard of Gloucester or Macbeth) does
not have his eye fixed on any final goal. He wants to stir things up so that he can
improvise his way to a better position, which for him means attain more power and
prestige. As he says, "Let me, if not by birth, have lands by wit;/ All with me's meet that
I can fashion fit" (1.2.167-169). He has no particular desire to injure his father or his
brother; he just wants them out of his way, so he can be what he wants to be. His later
complicity in the torturing of his father is a logical extension of this attitude to life, not
part of his original desire to mutilate Gloucester. But his willingness to betray his father
indicates just how much he sees other people merely as instruments to be manipulated
to his own ends.
As mentioned above, Regan and Goneril are much the same. It's not that they bear any
special animosity against Lear. They are not seeking revenge or anything like that. They
just want him out of the way so that they can create their own lives, without the need to
attend to Lear's demands. Like Edmund, they have some justification for this attitude
initially, for Lear is in some ways really difficult to deal with. But the logic of their self-
interest leads to conduct which most of us reject (that fact that we may at first have
some sympathy or admiration for Edmund, Regan, and Goneril, which is later cancelled
out when we see the consequences of that attitude more clearly, is one way Shakespeare
forces us to recognize, not just the normality of evil, but also the superficial
attractiveness of the attitude which can lead to it).
I'm stressing this point in order to underline the presentation of evil in this play. Part of
the disturbing power of King Lear comes from the fact that Edmund, Goneril, Regan,
and Cornwall are at first so normal in their vision of themselves and their actions. We all
know people like them, and we can even feel some genuine sympathy for how they
initially behave. What this play forces us to consider, however, is where this
individualistic, aggressive self-fashioning stance logically leads. Everything that Edmund
and the sisters do in this play is quite consistent with their initial attitude, so that we are
invited to consider how the grossest of evils arise out of something we see all around us
and perhaps even feel from time to time in ourselves.
In the twentieth century we have become familiar with his vision of evil, largely as the
result of World War II, in which horrific evil was organized, carried out, and justified by
ordinary people, who often began by simply wanting to "get ahead." The best known
example is Adolf Eichmann, for whom Hannah Arendt, in her study of his trial
(Eichmann in Jerusalem), coined the phrase "The Banality of Evil." The frequent attempt
to demonize such individuals, that is, to make them as abnormal and unnatural as
possible, is one indication of how uncomfortable we are with the notion that they are
recognizably normal.
The Forces of Goodness
The way in which Shakespeare here anchors the origins of evil in certain practical,
common attitudes with which we are all familiar applies also to much of his treatment
of those who seek to oppose Edmund, Goneril, Regan, and Cornwall. The play, in other
words, explores the normality or, one might say, the banality of goodness, by which I
mean that opposition to evil comes from recognizably normal sources all around us..
Before looking at this in more detail, however, we need to acknowledge that in Cordelia
we have a symbol of traditional goodness, unambiguously and clearly presented to us.
Cordelia's name and some of her utterances (and normally also her appearance) suggest
that we are to see her, in large part, as the purest form of Christian love in action. She
loves her father unreservedly and acts immediately to relieve his suffering, an action
which costs her her life. In that sense, King Lear offers us an vision of traditional
goodness as an ideal, based on a firm acknowledgment of the essential bonding between
human beings, especially between parents and children. She is in the moral realm what
Richmond is in the political realm in Richard III.
But what I want particularly to call attention to here is that in this play other people
work against the forces of evil in quite a different manner. They are not unambiguous
symbols of goodness, but much more naturalistically rendered human characters who
have to wake up to their moral responsibilities and act on them. And in this play, such
action really matters.
Take, for example, one of my favorite characters in all of Shakespeare, a man whose
brave and suicidal actions have a decisive effect on the final outcome. He does not even
have a name, but when his moment comes he embodies for us the normality of
goodness. I refer to Cornwall's First Servant in 3.7 who steps forward to intervene in
the blinding of Gloucester:
Hold your hand, my lord:

I have served you ever since I was a child;
But better service have I never done you
Than now to bid you hold. (3.7.73-76)
He is a lowly servant, without any power other than his own person, and he has been a
servant all his life, trained to obey his master. But he cannot stand by and see his master
so degrade himself. He recognizes what everyone in the room knows: that what is going
on here is deeply wrong. But he doesn't rationalize away the danger or remain silent,
neutral on the sidelines, or give in to his fear. He acts to intervene. The action costs him
his life and does not save Gloucester's eyes. But his brave moral stance has its effects,
for he wounds Cornwall so badly that the latter is not around for the battle at the end of
the play.
Let me remind you of how when we looked at Richard III I called attention to the moral
evasions of many characters in that play, a pattern which suggests that Shakespeare
wants us to witness how the success of evil in the world relies upon the cowardice,
ignorance, and self-interest of others who are in a position to stand up against it. This is
a similar moment, except that here the anonymous First Servant acts to prevent what his
moral sense cannot tolerate.
Moments like these remind us that the moral vision in Shakespeare's plays so often is all-
encompassing. We may be dealing for most of the time with kings, dukes, and various
nobles, but the issues which fracture the human community do not leave anyone on the
sidelines. Innocence or neutrality is never enough. Whatever our role, however low we
may be in the power structure, we still have a moral role to play if we choose to do so.
We see this point made very explicit in the play by the very interesting role played by
Albany, Goneril's husband. Initially he seems politically and morally confused and
ignorant, and his wife dismisses him as a weak person. Events take place around him
which he does not appear fully to understand, and Goneril clearly wields the power in
the relationship. But we see him wake up to his moral responsibilities. He does not let
the injustice he witnesses around him dull his moral sense; nor does he evade the issues.
Throughout the play, his development is marked by a steady moral growth until he is, at
the end, a transformed individual who has played a decisive part in dealing with the evil
in the kingdom.
Other characters like Edgar and Kent also manifest an active commitment to goodness,
at considerable risk to themselves and with much ingenuity. Their conduct, together
with that of the people I have just mentioned, suggests that there is nothing automatic
about good overcoming evil in this world. There is no providential system of history
here which will guarantee that harmonious order is restored eventually, no controlling
divine justice which will right all wrongs if we are only patient. Instead there is the vision
that evil can be resisted only if active, intelligent, brave, and resourceful people are
prepared to put their lives on the line to counter the spreading triumphs of those who
want to use other people as instruments for their own power seeking. Where such
people come from there is no way of telling. What turns one man into Cornwall or
Oswald and another into Albany or Kent? There is no magic formula about it, nor any
divine assistance.
In this connection, it might be worth noting that Cordelia, the idealized vision of
goodness in the world, fails. She not only fails to defeat those who are working against
her father, but she loses her life in the attempt. The battle in King Lear is speedily
concluded, Cordelia and Lear are seized, and taken away (more about this later). There
seems to be here perhaps a deliberate emphasis on the fatal weakness of mere idealized
virtue, virtue as some ideal at work in the world, virtue as a symbolic embodiment of
the highest Christian values. For the really effective work of combating the evil is
carried out by much more naturalistically rendered characters, like the First Servant,
Edgar, and Albany.
King Lear as an Allegory
I have been stressing the naturalistic elements of King Lear, and I began this lecture by
reminding us that the most important thing about this play is that it is the story of the
suffering of one particular old man. Thus, I am not encouraging a view which interprets
this play primarily as an allegory, a vision in which the illumination of the clash of
concepts is a more important issue than the particular human conflicts presented.
However, King Lear has attracted allegorical interpretations. And it is easy to see why.
The fairy-tale nature of much of the story, the clearly positioned groups of "good" and
"bad" people around Lear, and the constant reference to words like "bond," "allegiance,"
"nature," and to questions of the self invite some consideration of allegorical
possibilities.
For instance (and I am here looking very cursorily at some ideas suggested by J. F.
Danby), if we choose (for the moment) to subordinate the particularity of the characters
to the major conceptual concerns of the play, we can see here as a major component of
the play at least two rival versions of human life working against each other. The one we
might label the traditional communal Christian view, which stresses faith, hope, and
charity (that is, mutual love) built upon the sense of a human society held together by
"bonds." A human life most fully realized lives up to the responsibilities of those bonds
which tie together the family and the larger social group. Such a view stresses the
essential roles of giving and receiving spontaneously and honestly and confers upon
individuals a rich sense of a social identity where each person's place in a hierarchical
order is publicly recognized and honoured.
Over against this view is what we might call the new individualism manifested in
Edmund, Regan, Goneril, and Cornwall. This sees the good life for human beings as
principally a matter of shaping one's future to fit one's own sense of oneself. We need
not rest on what the community tells us we are; instead, we may actively seek to change
what we are by applying our wit to alter our given circumstances as opportunities arise.
The clash between these two groups hinges on the different interpretations of the word
"nature." For the first group, nature is an ordered moral construct in which the signs of
the constellations and the actions of the heavens are manifestations of structure in
which human societies participate. Its faith is based on an inherent divinely sanctioned
system of meaning in the world (that sense of order which Ulysses appeals to in his
speech on degree in Troilus and Cressida). The second sees no moral order in the world.
What the world is will be what we make of it for ourselves. The first view sees the good
life as essentially a matter of service to traditional ideals; the second sees the good life as
an aggressive assertion of one's own individuality.
It is possible to locate this debate historically. And some have argued that Shakespeare's
age, the early 17th century, was a time in which the rising energies of individualism and
capitalism were challenging the older order in a contested vision of political and social
life and that Shakespeare's play is, in part, a debate between these two competing visions
(between, if we wish to put names onto the debate, the rival visions of Hooker and
Hobbes).
If we want to view the play in this manner, and the text of the play invites us to do so in
part (how important we make this conceptual level of the play is open for debate), then
we may well wonder about whether the play leads us to any firm conclusion. Does
Shakespeare take sides in this dispute or resolve it in any firm way?
My sense from the text is that his treatment of such a thematic concern is part of the
play's power, especially the power of its bleaker possibilities. Even if we say, as we
might, that there is a sense of nobility and traditional warmth in the vision of the old
order, in its ceremonious affections and firm sense of community, it is clear here that
the old order is insufficient because some of its most important members do not live up
to its demands. They are blind (that central metaphor is, of course, crucial) to their own
obligations, insensitive to the complex dynamics of human interaction, and tyrannically
addicted to their own power. Gloucester can joke in public about the "sport" he had in
conceiving a bastard son and talk about how he has kept him away from court life, and
Lear can rage at Cordelia for not playing the role he has determined for her in his self-
flattering game. Like Richard II before them, they have an insufficiently intelligent and
sensitive appreciation for the demands of virtue on which the old order rests and thus
inevitably contribute to fostering a situation in which that old order falls apart.
The new order, in its turn, once self-assertive individualism has room to maneuver,
breaks all customary ties, creates temporary alliances for power, and ends up with
everyone pursuing his or her own agenda. In the process, sisters murder sisters, sons
betray their fathers, and the quest for power leads to its inevitable conclusion, self-
destruction.
King Lear offers no sense of a permanently established natural order from which human
beings can devise some sense of how they ought to behave towards each other, how
they ought to live their lives. When Lear goes out to seek justice in the storm, nature
answers with an unintelligible and threatening tempest, from which the only sane thing
to do is to huddle down in the nearest hovel and pass the time playing absurd games.
Unlike the power of nature in As You Like It, which offers a place full of sunshine and
fertility where people can discover in a newly invigorating way who they really are and
what relationships matter most to them, nature in King Lear is harsh and unresponsive to
human beings' search for a reassuring moral order. In the Forest of Ardenne, the
courtiers, through conversation and song, repair themselves so that they can return to
society to lead better lives. On the heath, where there is no conversation only howls of
anger and pain, the only thing Lear learns is that life, reduced to its basic elements, is
insane.
Nature and Female Sexuality
Before moving to consider in some detail the ending of the play, I would like to raise an
obvious but deeply ambiguous element in the play, the emphasis on (perhaps even the
obsession with) female sexuality as a key element in Lear's rage. This issue emerges
unmistakably in Lear's passionate denunciations of his daughters and seems even to
extend beyond that to include all women in general. What we are to make of this, I'm
not sure, but that it's a key element in the play is surely unquestionable.
To begin with, we note that neither Lear nor Gloucester is married: there is no female
partner in their families, and their firmly patriarchal male control thus does not have to
answer to any countervailing female presence. Gloucester can therefore joke easily and
crudely about the "sport" he had in making Edmund, and Lear can assert his
dominating sense of himself from a position of total male control.
Lear's initial rage is generated by a young woman, his daughter Cordelia, because she
speaks up for herself. Many critics have speculated about her motivation, but that seems
to me a rather pointless exercise. What Cordelia is doing, as her asides make clear, is
speaking her own mind, declaring her own understanding of how she should live her
life. This challenge to Lear's ego exerts its effect not just because it demolishes his tidy
little self-gratifying ritual but also because it's coming from a young woman, who is also
his child. The rage is the reflex power of a male ego that will not accept unwelcome
responses from children, women, or subordinates.
His rage at Cordelia, which summons up the horrific vision of parents eating their own
children, begins with an invocation to "the mysteries of Hecate," and that's an
interesting allusion, because it is precisely the mysteries of that enigmatic and powerful
female goddess of the moon, a graphic symbol of the female principles at work in the
cosmos, that Lear is least in touch with. So there's a powerful irony that he should
invoke such a figure in the very process of demonstrating just how incapable he is of
even imagining such a presence.
His denunciation of Cordelia, however, is, in some respects, mild compared to the
tirades he launches against Goneril and Regan and, beyond them, against women
generally. Here the emphasis is explicitly sexual. He wants their femininity and fertility
blasted away, as if that is somehow the source of the problem and therefore a suitable
punishment for not answering to his wishes.
Hear, Nature, hear! dear goddess, hear!

Suspend they purpose, if thou didst intend
Top make this creature fruitful!
Into her womb convey sterility!
Dry up in her the organs of increase;
And from her derogate body never spring
A babe to honor her! (1.4.252-266)
And at the height of his madness in the storm, at the very centre of Lear's destructive
rage is a violent sense of the sexuality of women (especially of Regan and Goneril) as
the source of all the evil which is tormenting him:
Behold yond simpering dame,

Whose face between her forks presages snow;
That minces virtue, and does shake the head
To hear of pleasures name;
The fitchew, nor the soiléd 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's the sulphurous pit, burning, scalding,
Stench, consumption! Fie, fie, fie! pah! pah! (4.6.115-126)
Locating hell in a woman's sexuality, seeing in women's sexual organs the devil's home
and the source of all the hypocrisy introduces a powerfully disturbing sense of how
much Lear's ego, that hard masculine shell he has encased himself in, rests on a fear of
what he cannot understand. The very process of summoning up the image seems to
drive him into even deeper agony (as the closing words indicate). As Joyce Carol Oates
has pointed out, there's no particular reason to locate the source of Regan's and
Goneril's betrayal of him in their sexuality. Their treatment of him springs much more
from their masculine qualities (if we can use that term), than from any deeply rooted
source of evil unique to women's sexual life. So Lear's passionate desire to see in their
sexuality the source of his torments (and the world's evil) links the suffering in this play
to a significantly displaced understanding of women. There's a sense that Lear, unable to
understand, accept, or control female sexuality, releases all his pent-up hatred of the
world on that, for precisely that reason.
Now, we should be used to this in Shakespeare by now, especially from our reading of
Hamlet. For in that play, Hamlet repeatedly generalizes from his emotional distress a
sweeping and often harsh indictment of women's sexuality (which presumably is the
source of his violence against Ophelia and Gertrude). But, in comparison with Lear, we
might want to argue that Hamlet has more understandable grounds. For Gertrude, his
mother, now sleeps with Claudius. But this does not apply to Lear, who is, one assumes,
beyond the age where savage sexual jealousy (of the sort which later affects Regan and
Goneril) is an important element in his life. The fact that the female sexuality he is
objecting to so violently belongs to his daughters (and thus is directly linked to the
future of his family) makes the denunciation all the more striking.
We might also want to think for a moment about how different Macbeth and Lady
Macbeth are in this respect. They give every indication of understanding very well the
importance of sexuality as a creative force in the natural process of things. There is a
sense in which they might very well be a sexually compatible couple. That's why, in
planning the murder, Lady Macbeth has to pray to be "unsexed" and Macbeth has to go
against his sensitivity to the natural processes of life in order to steel himself for the
murder. And unlike Hamlet and Lear (and Othello), Macbeth does not express his tragic
suffering in terms which set women's sexuality up as the source of his torment. In that
sense, he seems to have a maturer sense of sexuality than the others, even if he sacrifices
that sense to attain his goals. For the fact that the close union of Macbeth and Lady
Macbeth falls apart after the murder of Duncan is one of the many painful
consequences of their desire to be unnatural. And there's a deep irony in the fact that
after that prayer to violate nature, Macbeth cannot abide the thought of Banquo's
descendants will get the crown.
If we further recall the language of some of the Dark Lady sonnets, those astonishingly
passionate denunciations of sexuality ("lust") as the source of the spiritual torment of
the speaker, we can better understand why most interpreters want to date them at about
the same time as the tragedies and why others see a need for some important
biographical event which might trigger such a pronounced shift (especially in
comparison with As You Like It).
What we are to make of this I am not sure. But it strikes me that the violence against
particular women (verbal and physical), the death of so many women, even those
entirely innocent (like Ophelia, Desdemona, Cordelia, and Lady Macduff), and the
absence of any women at the end of so many of the tragedies (other than the witches in
Macbeth) establish a strong link between the tragic vision of life and self-assertive and
distinctively male ego. One point at the very ending of King Lear which seems to
emphasize this possibility is the way that the play brings back the bodies of Regan and
Goneril (who have died offstage), so that the final image insists upon the deaths of all
the women in the family.
There may be other reasons for bringing back the dead bodies (to present a reminder of
the opening scene, for example, or to lend a corrosive irony to Edmund's dying words
about how he was "beloved"), but the firm insistence on what this tragedy has cost in
the multiple killings of women introduces gender issues which are hard to ignore.
The Ending of King Lear
I have many times suggested that King Lear offers us a particularly bleak view of human
existence. It shakes our assumptions in many of the most cherished illusions we hang
onto in order to confer significance on our lives. But I don't want to conclude this
lecture before looking in more detail at the ending, for there is an important and
interesting critical debate about how to read the ending of the play. Is it, in fact, as I
have described it, or are there some more optimistic and life-affirming possibilities?
Without exploring many alternatives, I would like to consider some of the material in
the closing moments of this play which feeds this debate. The central point concerns
Lear's "regeneration," his waking up a transformed person in the arms of Cordelia. Here
he is apparently very different person from the loud egoist of most of the play. He begs
for forgiveness and has a genuine sense of that important virtue, humility. There is
clearly a sense here that Lear has discovered or rediscovered his capacity to love and to
recognize in that bond the most important element of life.
Thus, when he and Cordelia are captured and sent off to prison, he accepts the event
because now being with Cordelia, sharing their love together, is far more important than
any question of justice or injustice in the world. His poetry on this occasion is
memorable. In response to Cordelia's practical question, "Shall we not see these
daughters and these sisters?" Lear replies,
No, no, no, no! Come, let's away to prison.

We two alone will sing like birds i'the cage.
When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness. So we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too,
Who loses and who wins; who's in, and who's out;
And take upon 's the mystery of things,
As if we were Gods' spies; and we'll wear out,
In a walled prison, packs and sects of great ones,
That ebb and flow by the moon. (5.3.8-19)
How are we to read these lines? On the one hand, they seem to indicate a transformed
understanding within Lear, some transcendent awareness of new priorities which place
human love, "bonds," far above the meaningless power political world of the court with
which Lear has been so obsessed. They invite us to think that Lear's suffering has at last
given him a magnificent insight into something of enormous and lasting value.
On the other hand, the speech is also a turning away from any practical action to deal
with their present situation (after all, Cordelia's question is a request to sort out what
they should do next). So we can also read the speech as one more illusion Lear is
constructing in order to keep control of his life. The enormous distance between the
metaphysical power he is here claiming for himself ("As if we were Gods' spies") and
the reality of his situation is underscored by Edmund's line immediately following this
speech, "Take them away," a curt manifestation of the real power at work in the world.
So if we want to see in this speech some important earned insight into the nature of life,
we also have to recognize that it's an insight that takes no account of what needs to be
done and is, in fact, impotent in the face of armed antagonism, in the face of the
historical facts of his situation.
There may well be a suggestion here of a theme we have met already (particularly in
Hamlet) and are going to encounter again, namely, that love and politics are mutually
incompatible. For politics of the modern sort requires an ethic like that of Polonius.
And if Lear goes to negotiate with the sister, he will have to descend to their level and, if
he is to be successful in any way, to adopt the Machiavellian tactics which guide the
world in which the sisters live. Such a world crushes the spontaneous giving on which
the highest forms of love depend. On the other hand, to say, as Lear does here, that
love is the higher priority and to turn one's back on one's political situation is to leave
one totally vulnerable to those who make politics their first and only priority. So even if
we see Lear's awareness here as full of a visionary understanding of the mystery of love,
there's a powerful irony underneath that declaration, a tone which insists upon the fact
that such insight comes at the high price of political impotence.
And whatever Lear has learned about life is insufficient to sustain him, once Cordelia is
killed. He may have thought his newly discovered sense of love would enable him to
transcend the world of politics and rest finally on some deeper understanding of the
world, but whatever he has learned cannot cope with the sudden destruction of the
object of his love. And so his newly found mental equanimity collapses, and he returns
just before his death into a fit of insanity, seeing in Cordelia's death the denial of any
significance to human life:
No, no, no life!

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!
Pray you, undo this button. Thank you, sir.
Do you see this? Look on her, look her lips,
Look there, look there! (5.3.304-310)
And he dies in a mad fit, tearing off his clothes (the same gesture which signaled the
onset of his insanity in the storm), still trying to convince himself that Cordelia cannot
be dead. He thought he had come to some new awareness, but that insight is removed.
The mystery of life is not so benevolent as Lear thought it might be (and as we may
have been seduced into thinking by the beauty of Lear's declaration of love). Hence, the
hope of a significant transforming insight is cancelled, and we are left in ambiguous
doubt. The remaining characters say very little, and there is no clear assumption of
authority by anyone. Kent's comment salutes Lear's death as something to be welcomed:
Vex not his ghost. O, let him pass! He hates him much
That would upon the rack of this tough world
Stretch him out longer. (5.3.312-314)
That image of Lear's life as a torture session does not encourage us to build much hope
upon Lear's earlier declaration of love for Cordelia (of the sort which might be fostered
if Kent had said something like "Well, at least he found love again before he died"). If
the survivors see nothing of value in what has taken place, we are not given any
encouragement to find something on which to build any final reassuring insight.
If the text leaves us little to build any hope upon, the staging of the final moments of
King Lear can indicate something to us of where this human community goes from here.
And if you ever witness a production of this play, on stage or film, it is worth paying
close attention to the final movement. You need to be particularly attentive to whether
or not the Fool is present and what he is doing.
The Fool: Dead or Alive?
Lear's Fool is one of the most interesting characters in the play, and his presence in the
ending will exercise an important interpretative effect. In the text, the Fool apparently
disappears in 3.6 with the cryptic final line, "And I'll go to bed at noon" (3.6.78). From
the text, he does not seem to reappear. One standard historical explanation for this is
that the character playing the Fool also plays the role of Cordelia, and since she is about
to reappear, the Fool has to disappear. This, of course, is not an issue for modern
productions, where the roles are hardly ever doubled. And so the question arises: What
has happened to the Fool?
Lear's comment near the very end, "And my poor Fool is hanged!" (5.3.304) is normally
taken as a reference to Cordelia, although there are those, like Goddard, who maintain
that this is a reference to the Fool. So the text is quite ambiguous on the fate of the
Fool, and anyone mounting a production of the play will have to decide.
Why should this matter? Well, it matters, in large part, because it's important for us to
know whether the qualities that the Fool brings into the play survive or not. And to
assess the importance of this point, we need to consider some aspects of the character's
role in the play.
The Fool has no power other than his language. He is attached to Lear by a strong
bond, although he knows that honoring this bond is physically dangerous, for he is fully
aware of the consequences of what Lear is doing in his dealings with his daughters and
his headstrong rush away from the castle into the storm. As a fool, his role is to provide
a stream of riddling verbal commentary on the action, to expose the truth under the
words of others. But his commentary is curiously bitter and sad. He knows that his
words are ineffective; they may express important truths, but they will never penetrate
Lear's consciousness or do much to change the situation as it unfolds. At a time when
the ruling facts of life are clashes of power (military and natural), the Fool's language has
no significant effect on the action. The professional manipulator of language counts for
very little when so many others are twisting words to suit their own purposes.
But words are all he has. Faced with the destructive collision of the rival groups and the
ensuing suffering and chaos, the Fool does what he can to transform the harshness of
events to some form of linguistic play, not because he has any solution to offer but
simply because that's his way of dealing with suffering. So long as one can talk and
make jokes (even bitter ones) about experience, one can, to an extent, endure that
experience. The sadness of the Fool comes from his awareness of the inadequacy of his
language to do anything more than hold back the chaos momentarily and of the
necessity of making the attempt, because to stop talking would be to surrender to the
meaninglessness of the storm. As Edgar observes, "the worst is not/ So long as we can
say 'This is the worst'" (4.1.27-28).
The Fool is significantly the only source of music in the play. And we should recognize
by now that music plays a really important role in Shakespeare's style as a symbol for
human creativity, hope, and joy. The Fool's songs, like his jokes, are sad, riddling, and
thin (nothing like the robust harmonious group singing in As You Like It), but they
express at least the human attempt to impose some ordered and creative meaning on the
chaotic flux of life, to salvage something from the absurdity of history. They offer us in
symbolic form a vision of an impulse upon which it might be possible to construct
something valuable. So long as there is music, human feeling will find ordered
expression and seek to communicate that to others (at least, that is the hope brought out
by music).
That is why the fate of the Fool at the ending of this play matters. His death adds to the
quantity of needless suffering which has extinguished love, community, and possibilities
for beauty and meaning. The music is over, and nothing rests but the silence of total
destruction. His survival, especially if he is given a pivotal role in the closing moments,
sets quite a different tone.
Here I want to refer to two film versions of King Lear, both very famous and both very
different. The first one, by Peter Brook (which is available at Van Isle Video on
Northfield Road) provides a really stark vision of the play. The ending of Brook's
version is a scene of desolation, with the survivors (no women among them) huddled
together facing a harsh bleak landscape and no sense of where any form of regeneration
is to come from. The landscape around them is chillingly hostile. The ending really
brings out how the destruction of that original unity has left no remnant from which
something healthy might spring. There is no Fool present. He has been destroyed
alongside all the others. What remains is absurdity.
The second film is the version of the celebrated Russian director of Shakespeare in film,
Grigori Kozintsev (a film which incidentally had its North American premiere in
Vancouver in 1971, at a Shakespeare conference which I attended). Kozintsev has,
throughout the film, associated the Fool with music, specifically with playing a small
wooden flute. In the closing moments of the film, we hear the Fool playing his music
above the desolation, and as he plays, we see the crowds of people (including,
significantly, women) slowly and tentatively start to pick up things and move towards
the beginning of some reconstruction.
Incidentally, the music in this film (composed by Shostakovitch) is truly memorable, one
of the most eloquent reminders in the history of Shakespeare film production of the
importance of music in shaping and sustaining a particular interpretative mood.
This final image of the common people initiating a process of rebuilding has important
implications for the political sense we take from this play (something I will not be
discussing in any detail). For it suggests that the old order of patriarchal feudalism has
now gone. Most of its leading members are dead or about to die, and the few remaining
(Edgar and Albany) are so isolated that there is no rich social hierarchy for them to
repair. The aggressive self-serving individuals are also dead. Hence, the future of the
community is going to be in the hands of the people, the ones who earlier in the film
looked to the imposing figures of the court for security and guidance. Such a vision
would, of course, accord well with any Marxist view that this play envisions the
destruction of both the feudal aristocracy (which lacks any intelligent sense of virtue)
and the new individualism (which turns everyone loose against everyone else). Any hope
for the future thus rests with the common people working, as they are here, together, in
harmony.
At the presentation of his film, Kozintsev spoke eloquently about how his vision of Lear
had been shaped by the experience of the siege of Leningrad, the site of particularly
painful and sustained suffering in World War II. And, as I recall, he referred to how a
sense of the recuperative powers of humanity, as presented in King Lear, had sustained
him during that horrific time. In the light of that, his subsequent comments on the
music in the closing moments of his film were particularly significant. And I can think
of no better last word for this lecture than the reflections of this wise artist on
Shakespeare's most famous fool:
Symbols change. The Fool's cap and bells have long since gone out of
fashion. Perhaps the Fool's foolery isn't quite what it used to be either? I
imagined a paradoxical situation. The Fool is laughed at, not because he is
foolish, but because he speaks the truth. He is the one who shams idiocy--
no longer a court comedian but an urchin taken from among the most
humble. The least significant tells the most mighty that he's a fool because
he doesn't know the nature of his own daughters. Everyone laughs--but it
is the truth.
For these people nothing is funnier than the truth. They roar with laughter
at the truth, kick it like a dog, hold it on a leash and make a laughing stock
of it--like art under a tyrannical régime. I am reminded of stories about
how, in a Nazi concentration camp, an orchestra of prisoners was got
together. They were forced to play outside in the compound. They were
beaten so that they would play better. This was the origin of the Fool-
musician--a boy taken from an orchestra composed of men condemned to
death.
This was the origin of the particular tone of the film, its voice. In King
Lear, the voice of human suffering is accorded more significance than the
roar of thunder. Working on the score with Dmitri Shostakovitch, I
dismissed the idea of dignified fanfares and the roll of drums. We were
carried away by ideas of a completely different kind of instrumentation--the
sound of a wooden pipe, which the Fool has made for himself. I'd asked
for the film titles to be written on coarse, torn sacking. This linkage of
ideas acted as kind of key. 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. Its voice in King Lear is a very quiet one, but its sad,
human quality sounds distinctly in Shakespeare's work. (from "'Hamlet' and
'King Lear': Stage and Film," in Shakespeare 1971: Proceedings of the World
Shakespeare Congress Vancouver, August 1971 [Toronto: U. of Toronto Press,
1972]: 190-199).
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Introduction To King Lear

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Introduction to King Lear 12/23/10 8:49 AM

English 366: Studies in Shakespeare

Speak What We Feel: An Introduction to King Lear

Some Obvious Points

The Denial of an Easy Moral Understanding of King Lear

O, sir, to willful men,

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;

This shows you are above,

Men must endure

The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices

The weight of this sad time we must obey;

The Issue of Lear's Identity: The Descent Into Madness

But in surrendering the position, Lear has no intention of ceasing to be treated as if he

Only we still retain

The barbarous Scythian,

Let the great gods,

Poor naked wretches, whereso'er you are,

The Forces of Evil

The Forces of Goodness

Hold your hand, my lord:

King Lear as an Allegory

Nature and Female Sexuality

Hear, Nature, hear! dear goddess, hear!

the source of all the evil which is tormenting him:

Behold yond simpering dame,

The Ending of King Lear

No, no, no, no! Come, let's away to prison.

No, no, no life!

Stretch him out longer. (5.3.312-314)

The Fool: Dead or Alive?

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