King Lear and his Tragic flaw

William Shakespeare, King Lear (1604-5?)

Introduction:

Genre: dramatic tragedy, a genre Marlowe's and Shakespeare's plays helped

to codify with their dramatic structure (a "rise and fall" plot eventually split
into five acts like Lear), their use of blank verse (unrhymed iambic
pentameter), for serious passages, their parallel plotting of major and minor
characters in mirroring/intersecting actions, and their meditation upon
serious philosophical themes in the style of classical Greek tragic drama,
newly accessible to non-Greek-speakers in Humanist vernacular translations.
However, Lear also resembles the "history plays" in that it derives from
English chronicle histories and concerns itself with their main themes of
political wisdom, the rights and duties of subjects and kings, the courtier's
skills, and the accidents of fate. (Note the quarto [1608] version called it a
"History" and the First Folio of 1623 called it a "Tragedy." Could its author and
audience have changed their minds about its true purposes?)

Form: blank verse for high matters, prose for court banter and naturalistic
"behind the scenes" dialogue, and tetrameter or trimeter verse for songs,
including much of the speech of Lear's famous fool, pithily named "Fool."

Characters: Lear and his daughters (Goneril, Regan and Cordelia), the
daughters' suitors (Dukes of Cornwall, Albany and Burgundy, and the King of
France), Lear's courtiers (the Earls of Kent and Gloucester, Gloucester's sons
Edgar and Edmund, Curan, and unnamed knights), and the servants of
Cornwall, Goneril, Edmund, Cordelia, and Lear, the most important of which
is the Fool.

Summary: Lear, an aging pagan king of ancient Briton, seeks to divide his
kingdom among his daughters and their suitors according to a test of how
well they can express their love in words. Cordelia, famously unable "to
speak and purpose not," tells the unadorned truth about her love and Lear
furiously disowns her, giving all to the rhetorically sophisticated,
unprincipled, Regan and Goneril, and their husbands, the equally treacherous
Duke of Cornwall and the more noble Duke of Albany. They quickly run afoul
of Lear's savage temper and eject him from court to wander the heath in a
storm with the Fool as his courtier. Meanwhile, Gloucester's illegitimate son,
Edmund, launches a coup by convincing his father that legitimate son, Edgar,
seeks to murder him. The wrong boy is banished, and Edmund joins the
daughters by turning in his own father as a "traitor" and secretly courting
both women, despite their "marriages." Kent and Gloucester try to serve
Lear, but Lear's mad insistence upon his patriarchal authority and the sisters'
tyrannical government make Lear's service deadly. Gloucester, too, suffers
from the "Father's Syndrome," and he learns only through incredible pain and
suffering to express the humility which all humans owe each other in an
uncaring and violent universe. Things do not end well, but hey, it's a
tragedy! Your job is figure out why Shakespeare, at the peak of his career,
feels it imperative that James I, the court, the citizens of London and all
Great Britain, and you should witness it. If you get the right answer, it could
save your life.

Issues and Research Sources:

1) "Dramatic tragedy" as a genre: We've seen a form of tragedy before

in "Maldon"'s heroes' zealous defense of the fallen Byrtnoth and their
families' honor before the Viking onslaught, but that was a song intended to
be sung to their descendants, honoring the fallen and condemning the
memories of those who ran away, saving their lives but losing their honor
forever. The poem makes sure of both outcomes, and is the social
mechanism by which the final tallies of behaviors under the code of honor
were accounted. Dramatic tragedy is not a song in the ear, but a living action
performed before our eyes by persons whose skills vividly convince us to
accept them as raging pagan kings, brain-addled fools, and poisonously
rebellious princesses, even though all of them are mere men, not even
"gentlemen" (and certainly not women!), and all are liveried servants of
nobles like the Lord Chamberlain, the Admiral of the Fleet, or the King,
himself. Like artists supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the
dramatic actor and author worked under political authority in a tense social
space within which both the crown's agendas and those of the commons
were given expression. Haunting it all (even today) were the specters of
Oedipus, Clytemnestra, Antigone, and the phallus-waving satyrs of the Greek
stage, with whose traditional apparatus the Elizabethan playwrights crafted a
new kind of theatre in Early Modern English. Don't take its existence for
granted. Why did the culture spend so much treasure and time to produce
such spectacles of cruelty and horror? What are tragedy's limits, and how
can we tell when a play has exceeded them? (Samuel Johnson thought this
play did.) What are we to get from reading such a play as a required
element of Goucher's English Major, and how might it be different if we
watched a live performance of it? What must the reader's imagination
provide and what is it likely to miss?

2) Dual plots and genre: The tragedy Marlowe gave the English already
had found its typical balance of high style and comic interludes which make
the return of tragic action so shocking when it happens. This use of "comic
relief" to build and release dramatic tension may have roots in drama as old
as Aeschylus' use of Orestes' nurse, prattling about cleaning his diapers
when he was a baby, just as the young man has entered the palace to kill his
mother in obedience of his murdered father's vengeful Furies (the second
play of the Orestia: The Libation Bearers). However, both Marlowe and
Shakespeare (like Aeschylus) have thematic purposes afoot in those comic
scenes, and it's important not to lose sight of the authors' guileful skill while
we're laughing. Look especially at the mix of characters from act to act, as
the socially "low" characters become mingled with their "betters" and the
moral/political chaos intensifies. Does the play have "unity of action," that
famous Aristotelian neo-classical value, and if so, how are the dual plots
unified? (The other neoclassical "unities" were character [i.e., tight focus on
one], place [in the most famous cases, only one], and time [again, in the
most famous cases, a single day].)

Those who see Marlowe as a "precursor" to Shakespeare, a true

"upstart" whose short career didn't enable him to develop dramatic tragedy
to its most sublime perfection (i.e., the Shakespeare worshipers) ought to
compare their use of spectacular violence. Look at the scene in which the
Horse Courser pulls off Faustus' leg in comparison with Cornwall's barbarous
optical "surgery" on Gloucester, perhaps the most notorious instance of such
violence in Shakespeare (though not in Elizabethan-Jacobean theatre--ask
Jeff Myers!). Each poet uses violence against the body symbolically, just like
Sophocles did when Oedipus blinded himself, but unlike the Greek poet, they
obeyed no tacit prohibition against showing such violence on stage. Compare
that with the modern debates upon the uses and effects of violence in
modern cinema and television--are there good reasons for showing it, and
can it be abused?

3) Modern and Jacobean responses to characters: The play has been

thought imperfect because of the ferocity of Lear's rage, the bleak
hopelessness of his end, and the absence of any reward for the good
characters, though the bad are punished. Aristotle taught, and the English
neoclassicists believed, that tragedy was the fall of a great man from high
social position into catastrophe through some kind of common human flaw.
Tragic audiences are supposed to identify with the protagonist's plight, and
to be moved to pity and terror at his fate. However, some might argue that
we can't easily identify with Lear because of his outrageous temper, his cruel
testing of his daughters, and his arrogant inability to accept facts (e.g., his
strange debate with Kent about the cause of Kent's being put in stocks,
II.4.11-24). Others find Cordelia too prim and coldly virtuous to arouse strong
sympathies as she shares her father's doom. Readers who react this way
tend to read Regan and Goneril with a touch of sympathy as daughters
driven to savage reaction by their father's behavior, and they sometimes find
Edmund's choice of Machiavelian villainy understandable in light of
Gloucester's crude jesting about the Edmund's mother and the boy's bastard
birth. Edgar, like Cordelia, seems at first too gullible, too confident in his own
secure state in the world, and in need of being shaken up. Does the king's
pagan violence tempt us to imagine the enormities we might be capable of if
not restrained by our democratic civility? Could the daughters' claims of
motivation perhaps remind us of our own capacity for self-justification in
quarrels when familial rivalries and our own egos urge that defense? Could
the Edgar-Edmund problem be a reflection of our own discomfort with
goodness and our inability to forgive the casual indignities of ordinary life,
treasuring up our outrage until time offers opportunity for revenge?
Jacobean audiences would have been likely to react more to Regan's,
Goneril's, Cornwall's, and Edmund's open espousal of Machiavellian political
logic. The Jacobean theater was fond of watching as the deceptive, ruthless
"machiavel" laid traps for unwary characters who espoused more
traditionally "noble" values like loyalty, love, honor, and trust. While the
machiavels usually were brought down by the end of the fifth act, the heart
of the play was given over to watching them behave badly, but successfully,
destroying the society around them. What does this mean about the social
forces at work in early seventeenth-century London? How the courtiers or
city folk might be motivated to flock eagerly to such dramas? Can you see
anything in modern entertainment history which resembles this
phenomenon?

4) The Fool and word-play: The play's plot forces us to see language as
an unstable and unreliable medium for transmission of truths. Many
characters succeed by misrepresenting reality in language, or by bending
language far from literal truthfulness through the use of irony, paraphrase,
metaphor, and simile. Everything seems to depend upon the quality of the
interpreter's insight, especially in cases when the speaker is lying or making
foolish errors. From Act I Scene 1, even relatively wise judges of character,
like Kent and Gloucester, make dangerous errors, calling both noble Albany
and the treacherous Cornwall equally worthy of Lear's trust (3-5) and calling
Edmund "proper" (15). The Fool, protected by his role as folly's exemplar,
and Edgar in his disguise as Tom o' Bedlam, work language like a game of
puns, nonsense and intentional misunderstandings, meanwhile managing to
tell the truth when professed "truth-speakers" like Kent and Cordelia are
unable. See, especially, the Fool's dialogue with Kent when the latter is in
stocks (II.4.40-84). Shakespeare goes beyond these naturalized distortions of
language by plot when he charges the dialogue with strange repetitions and
substitutions, like the quintuple repetitions of "Nothing" and "Never" in
scenes with Lear and Cordelia (I.187-90 and V.3.308). The Fool is the central
figure in this linguistic distortion, but Edgar must join him to evade detection
and death which would result if he were to use his normal idiom. Thus, clear
speaking becomes dangerous to all but fools, and distorted speech becomes
more common than clarity as a direct consequence. This raises important
questions about language's limitations, and the "bond" (to use Cordelia's
term) under which we use language. Lying and flattery are commonplace,
today as in 1605. Absolute truthfulness, even when the truth does needless
harm, is a standard few would recommend. The society we live in and the
people who dwell there with us are constructed by the language we use, and
to the degree that we deviate from truth we create false realities, traps, and
lures with unexpected consequences. To further explore this problem, look
for instances in which "politeness" or "proper speech" codes are invoked to
silence a truthful speaker, or those in which beautifully adorned speech is
suspected of treasonous deception. Can you find instances in which truth
and falsehood are mingled? Edmund is especially good at this--might it be a
linguistic symptom of his birth-condition?
5) Pagan characters on a Christian stage: None of Shakespeare's
audience would have considered openly espousing even the mildest of
doubts about the truth of revealed Christian religion. Christopher Marlowe
was investigated by the Star Chamber Court (sort of the FBI and HUAC,
combined) merely on the rumor that he made statements in favor of atheism
and homosexual love. However, Humanism and English translations had
exposed a larger audience of English readers to the wisdom of Greek and
Roman pagans whose polytheism we see reflected in Lear's use of oaths to
Apollo and Jupiter (e.g., I.1.161, 180). How would the Christian English
audience understand the world-view of a pagan king, and what difference
does that make in the plot? Some authors manage to invoke Christian
themes like charity, divine providence, sin, and final judgment after death,
by drawing upon pagan notions from various sources which early Christian
thinkers found compatible with their doctrine. Though Cordelia and Edgar get
to articulate some of these "Christianizing" pagan notions, they do not
succeed in Lear's world. In effect, we're shown the reigning moral doctrines
of Shakespeare's time as they spectacularly fail to control anarchy and evil.
Does this increase our capacity to identify with Lear if we are atheists or
agnostics or believers in another religion, or does it diminish it if we are
Christians?

6) Playing Lear at Court, at the Globe, or at Blackfriars? -- By the time Lear

was first produced, Shakespeare had three possible stages in mind. The
play's premiere was before the royal court, but the open-air stage at the
Globe would have been the great popular venue for those who could afford
only one or two pennies admission, and the upscale, indoor theater at
Blackfriars would have offered a radically different environment from either
the respectful austerity we might imagine at James I's court, or the rowdy
populist environment of the Globe. Click here for a 1-minute video in which
Maynard Mack (Yale U.) uses a model to illustrate the Globe's stage position
relative to its audience. (Link requires Goucher network firewall access via
VPN or on-campus use.) Click here for Annina Jokinen's Luminarium web
page illustrating and explaining the Blackfriars' indoor theater. During
several periods in its history as a playhouse, this former monastery hosted a
theater company of child-actors who competed with the adult troupes
performing at the outdoor theaters. Performance at Blackfriars would have
closely resembled court performances. Think about how this intensely
intimate setting would influence staging of any scene in this play.

7) Why do we love Edmund?-- OK, you may hate him, but many readers
report his refreshing directness about his ambition and his willingness to do
whatever he must to succeed reminds him of modern anti-heroes who, born
disadvantaged but struggling to better themselves, turn society upside down
to get what others were born possessing. Audience affection for Edmund
may be mingled with severe disgust when he betrays his brother and father,
but even in his dying moments he seems capable of turning to the good
(making him "round" rather than a purely flat Machiavellian). Contemporary
audiences might have seen in him a very familiar type of person they had
met at court; one we met in a previous reading where he seemed an
admirable sort. Castiglioni/Hoby's The Courtier. Count Canossa says: "so
shall our Courtier steal this grace from them that to his seeming have it, and
from each one that parcel that shall be most worthy praise . . . [And] there
were some most excellent orators which among other their cares enforced
themselves to make every man believe that they had no sight in letters, and
dissembling their cunning, made semblant their orations to be made very
simply, or rather as nature and truth made them, than study and art, the
which if it had been openly known would have put a doubt in the people's
mind, for fear lest he beguiled them. You may see then how to show art and
such bent study taketh away the grace of everything" (578, 579). How might
Edmund's career be understood as a commentary upon the courtly practice
Stephen Greenblatt has called "Renaissance self-fashioning"? Which are the
characters who cannot "self-fashion" while appearing to be "natural," and do
you see any who learn to do so in the course of the play? Do you see any
who try to "self-fashion" but are detected in the act of doing so? What is the
penalty for that failure to self-fashion or that detection in this play? For a
consummate display of Edmund's sprezzatura, see Act 1, Scene 1, when this
bastard son responds graciously to his father and to Kent just after hearing
his mother publicly described as sexually pleasing and hearing his own
future dismissed as a life of permanent exile.

8) Why does Kent hate Oswald?--While serving Lear in disguise as "Caius"

after his banishment in I.1, Kent often subject's Goneril's servant, Oswald, to
verbal and physical abuse. In fact, Kent's dislike of Oswald drives him to
titanic rages similar to those Lear suffers from when thwarted by his
daughters. Many a scholar has worked to decode the masculine/feminine
and father/daughter language with which Lear reveals his psychological
loathing of Goneril's and Regan's behavior, but few pay similar attention to
Kent's language when insulting Oswald. Even in his first insults ("base
football player"??), Kent invokes "estate" (ME) or "class" (ModE) values to
denigrate the servant for acting "above his station." Especially in the
extended "flyting" or "doin' the dozens" speech in II.2, and in his
interrogation by Albany, Kent describes Oswald in ways that expose
courtiers' anxieties about social mobility. Think about Hoby's translation of
Castiglioni, especially Count Canossa's strategy for "stealing graces" from
one's superiors, as a recipe by which a low-born man like Oswald might hope
to rise, by service, to the heights of the aristocracy. Edmund actually
accomplishes this feat, for a while. What exactly are the behaviors with
which Kent attempts to associate Oswald, and what makes them socially
shaming for an upwardly mobile courtier-servant? If you are interested in
Shakespearian English insults, it's a skill you can learn with practice.
Performers at "Renaissance Faires" routinely learn to produce these learned,
paraphrastic insults according to forumlae.

King Lear‘s misjudgement

The main plot

Lear is king of Britain. He is an old, highly successful warrior king. (War is an

institution that we despise, just as Shakespeare clearly despised it. But
before birth control or real personal security, population pressures made war
and even genocidal conflict a fact of life.) Like Hamlet and Othello, we are
impressed with him because of what others say about his background. (You
can find examples. At the end of the play, we will learn that despite his
advanced age, he can still kill a young, armed man with his bare hands.) King
Lear has decided to retire and to divide his kingdom among his three
daughters and their husbands. His stated intention is to prevent future
conflict. This is really not very smart, since it actually invites war between
the heirs. Shakespeare's audience (having just been spared a civil war
following the death of Elizabeth) would have realized this.
King Lear has staged a ceremony in which each daughter will affirm her love
for him. Whether this has been rehearsed, or the daughters forewarned, we
can only guess. Goneril and Regan may have been embarrassed. Goneril
says she loves her father more than she can say. King Lear thanks her and
gives her Third Prize. Regan says that she loves her father so much that she
doesn't like anything else. King Lear thanks her and gives her Second Prize.
Cordelia says that she loves her father exactly as a daughter should. King
Lear goes ballistic and disinherits her, and banishes the Earl of Kent for
speaking in her defense. First Prize is divided between the other two
daughters.

You can decide whether King Lear is showing early signs of mental illness (as
his other daughters think), or whether he just wanted an excuse to give
Cordelia the best share of the kingdom and she just spoiled it. Cordelia has
been courted by the Duke of Burgundy and the King of France. Burgundy
says he will not marry a woman with no property. France is more clever. He
swears that he loves Cordelia, and marries her. This is an obvious plan to
make a claim on the British throne, and Shakespeare's audience would have
realized this. We'll see the proof later. France may or may not be sincere in
loving Cordelia. We won't know.

As the basis of his retirement agreement, King Lear has stipulated that he
will live alternately with his daughters, who will support him and 100
followers. When he leaves, Goneril and Regan express their understandable
concern about hosting a mentally-imbalanced father and his personal army.

King Lear goes to live with Goneril. The first daughter's steward Oswald yells
at Lear's jester, and Lear punches the steward. Goneril decides to assert
control. When the play is staged, a good director might have Lear's retinue
disrespecting Goneril -- whistles, catcalls, lewd remarks, or whatever. Kent
returns in disguise to serve Lear, and we meet the jester ("Fool"). For some
reason, just like Kent, the jester is loyal to the king, even though you can find
hints that the king has not always been kind to the jester. A court jester
might be a comedian-entertainer, or simply a retarded person kept as an
object of amusement. Lear's jester is specially privileged to speak the truth,
which he does ironically

Oswald is rude to Lear, and one of Lear's knights makes an indignant speech
about the king not being cared for properly. (This knight, and all the others,
will soon abandon their king.) Lear yells at Oswald, Kent trips Oswald, and a
scene ensues in which Goneril demands that Lear reduce the number of his
followers -- evidently to 50. Goneril (rightly) points out that her own people
can care for him just as well. (There's a subtlety here. In the original story,
the daughters send the knights away, i.e., refuse to pay to support them.
However, if you read closely, the knights are already leaving King Lear,
because they can tell what is going to happen. The king is showing lapses in
judgement, and has no way of forcing his daughters to honor their promise to
support him. In a time of warlords, soldiers will desert when the leader shows
signs of being unable to lead and/or guarantee their salaries.) Lear curses
Goneril and departs for Regan's. He sends Kent before him, and Goneril
sends Oswald.

Regan and her husband have gone to visit the Earl of Gloucester, and when
Kent and Oswald meet at the Earl's castle, Kent picks a fight and Regan's
husband puts him in the stocks. This is a serious breach of protocol, and
when Lear arrives, he is furious. (Kent's difficult phrase "Nothing almost sees
miracles but misery", by its context, seems to mean that when things seem
to be going really badly, it's common to receive unexpected, seemingly-
miraculous help.) Goneril arrives and Lear curses her again. Regan says she
will allow him only 25 followers. Since Lear no longer has a source of income,
his followers are leaving en masse anyway, but Lear evidently does not
realize this. Lear says he will return to Goneril, but now she will not even
allow 25, and the daughters re-enact the fairy-tale plot by alternately
reducing the numbers, and asking "Why do you need even one follower,
when we can care for you ourselves?" Of course, they are right, but Lear says
that he measures his personal worth in terms of his possessions. "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." Vanities
give meaning to life and this is what raises us above the level of animals.
King Lear, now alone except for Kent and the jester, starts to cry and runs off
as a storm brews. The daughters lock him out of the castle to teach him a
lesson.

Lecturers who enjoy talking about "The Elizabethan World Picture", in which
orders of nature reflect human law and its breakdown, will tell you that the
ensuing storm mirrors the chaos in Britain. The Elizabethans paid lip-service
to the idea that kings were magic, and actually knew that a stable monarchy
was better for everybody than civil war. (Lawful democracy would be devised
later.) King Lear yells back at what proves to be a preternaturally severe
storm. His whole retinue has abandoned him except the jester, who begs
Lear to go apologize to his daughters and seek shelter, and Kent, who sends
to Dover, where the French army has landed in expectation of a British civil
war. Even though the jester pretends to be foolish, he always knows exactly
what is going on, and what's more, he is loyal to the old king. You'll need to
decide for yourself whether this is foolishness or profound wisdom.

In the first storm scene, which is difficult, Lear is going crazy. He: first calls on
the power of the storm to sterilize the human race; then accuses the storm
of taking sides with his daughters against his dignity and being their
degraded slave; then, realizing that people have deceived him, says the
storm must be "the gods" 's way of finding and punishing secret evildoers,
and that he is "a man more sinned against than sinning”; then comments,
"my wit begins to turn", i.e., he realizes he is going crazy -- in literature,
becoming insane is often a metaphor for changing the way you look at
yourself and the world; notices the jester is cold, and comments that he is
also cold; this is the first time Lear has been responsive to the needs and
concerns of someone else; accepts Kent's suggestion to take shelter in a hut.

Already inside the hut is "one of the homeless mentally-ill." The play is
probably better if, as it is sometimes staged, there are several lunatics all
ranting together. (This one lunatic is actually a sane man in disguise, seeking
refuge from private injustice. The "extras" who served as knights in the first
and second act and who will be in the battle scenes at the end can be the
extra lunatics.) When he sees the hut, and before seeing the lunatic(s), King
Lear realizes that what is happening to him now is what he has allowed to
happen to the poor throughout his reign. "Oh, I have taken too little care of
this." He suddenly realizes that his luxuries have been maintained at the
expense of his poorest subjects, and that justice is only now being served on
him.

When he sees the lunatic(s), Lear cracks, and says he/they must have given
everything to their daughters and been turned out also. But the onset of
madness confers a deeper insight. Lear sees in the naked lunatic someone
who has taken nothing wrongfully from anyone, and is the essential human
being. Saying that "unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare,
forked animal as thou art," the king rips off his clothes.

In the third storm scene, King Lear holds a trial of his two daughters,
evidently mistaking a stool for Goneril, something else (I've seen a chicken
used) for Regan, and so forth. In one Royal Shakespeare Company
production, the king mistook a pillow that the jester was holding for Regan,
and stabbed the jester to death through the pillow. The good Earl of
Gloucester comes and urges Kent to take the king (who has passed out) to
Dover, since his daughters' people are planning to kill him. At the end, Kent
tells the jester to follow Lear. As often played, Kent discovers the jester to be
dead. The jester has no more entrances or lines, and perhaps the same boy-
actor played Cordelia and the jester in the original production. You can read
more about Robert Armin, the beloved comedian who played Shakespeare's
jesters at the time, elsewhere online.

Kent and Lear reach Dover and Cordelia, who loves him. Cordelia
accompanies an invading French army. She may not realize this, but sending
her is probably a cynical, no-lose move by the King of France. If his forces
win and kill the other heirs, he is now also King of Britain. If his forces lose,
the heirs will kill Cordelia and he will be rid of a wife who is no longer of any
political value. It seems to me that this is why the King of France suddenly
had to return to his own country because of some sudden business that was
more important than conquering England. Uh huh. He has left his wife either
to do it for him, or be killed. (Shakespeare's English audience mostly did not
like the French. Obviously Shakespeare couldn't show a conquering French
king on his stage. But having the king land and then leave "suddenly" lets
Shakespeare make the foreign king look machiavellian. You'll have to decide
about this for yourself.)

Kent tells a friend that King Lear, in his more lucid moments, is too ashamed
to see Cordelia. The king reappears in a field where the Earl of Gloucester
lies, his eyes having been gouged out by Regan and her husband. King Lear
is now crowned and decorated with weeds and wild flowers. He wavers
between hallucinations and accurate perception. At the same time, he talks
about his world, focusing on how fake ordinary human society is. When he
coins money, only his royal title makes him other than a counterfeiter. People
pretend to be modest and virtuous, but even the animals commit adultery.
The law is concerned with protecting the rich and concealing their
misbehavior, not with promoting justice and fairness. Regan and Goneril
have played and humored him. He learned the truth only in the storm. He
says that "when we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of
fools." Cordelia's people come to bring him back to their camp, and they
chase him down.

We next see King Lear asleep under the care of Cordelia. He awakes, and
thinks -- correctly -- that he recognizes her. But he thinks that they are both
dead. "Thou art a soul in bliss, but I am bound upon the wheel of fire, that
mine own tears do scald like molten lead." Cordelia kneels, Lear tries to do
the same (as in the older play), but Cordelia prevents him. Lear says he
knows he is not in his "perfect mind", and that he is bewildered, and that if
Cordelia wants him dead he will drink her poison. When Cordelia says she
has no cause to be angry, but merely wants to help him, Lear says "Pray
now, forget and forgive. I am old and foolish."

King Lear is not about wrongs being righted. If Shakespeare were a

Hollywood writer, his king might have returned to rulership and ("having
learned to be sensitive, and that it is all right to cry") become a champion for
the poor in his own country and set up a social agency to deal effectively
with other dysfunctional families. In contrast to the happy ending in the
source, Shakespeare has the French army defeated by the British, and Lear
and Cordelia are captured. King Lear looks forward to happy time with his
daughter in prison, merely laughing at the rest of the world. As the subplot
concludes, all the villains are dead, but Cordelia has been hanged in prison.
King Lear kills the hangman with his bare hands. He comes onstage, carrying
Cordelia's body and howling. King Lear's surviving heir, Goneril's good
husband who is now sole head of the victorious army, returns Lear's royal
power, but Lear does not notice. Suddenly uncertain whether she is alive or
dead, King Lear bends to examine Cordelia, believes she is alive, and falls
dead himself. The good survivors see the passing of a man who was larger
than life.

The secondary plot

King Lear's story is paralleled by the story of the Earl of Gloucester. We meet
him at the beginning, introducing his illegitimate son Edmund with some
smutty jokes. We do not need to see Edmund's face to imagine how often
this must have happened, and how Edmund's feelings must have been hurt
by it. Edmund soliloquizes that he is as talented and as loved as his
legitimate brother Edgar, and that the accident of his birth is unjust. He
professes allegiance to "nature" rather than law or love, and decides that he
will try to gain control of the earldom by removing his father and brother.

Edmund takes a minute to ridicule astrology. We can ask ourselves whether

Edmund is simply making fun of superstition, whether he is talking about
"self-empowerment" like a 1990's person, whether he is disavowing a role for
heaven (God, the supernatural, transcendent values, the ideals of religion,
whatever) in his life, or whether he is denying their reality altogether. Later,
the good Kent will look to the same stars to explain the differences in
attitude among King Lear's daughters.

Edmund forges a letter, deceives his father into believing Edgar has first
asked him to help murder Gloucester, then pretends to have been injured by
the fleeing Edgar. Gloucester declares Edgar an outlaw and Edmund his heir.
Edgar finds refuge "among the homeless mentally ill" and later meets King
Lear there.

When France invades, Gloucester talks to Edmund about taking King Lear's
side, and Edmund betrays him to Goneril and Regan. Edmund shows an
incriminating letter to Regan's husband and pretends to be uncertain about
whether his father is a traitor. "True or not," is the cynical reply, "it hath
made thee Earl of Gloucester." Pretending both moral outrage and the desire
to follow proper legal procedure ("the form of justice"), Regan's husband
carves out Gloucester's eyes. He stomps one eyeball flat on the ground for
fun, but is stabbed to death by one of his own horrified servants, who is
killed in turn by Regan's backstab. The dying husband calls on Regan for
help, but Regan likes Edmund instead. As the scene is usually staged, she
merely walks off and lets him die. The director may even have her stab
Cornwall again herself.

Gloucester's servants tend his wounds and Edgar leads him, without
revealing who he is, to Dover, where he meets Lear and laments his
foolishness. Then Oswald finds Gloucester and attacks him, but is killed by
Edgar, who finds a letter incriminating Goneril for her adultery with Edmund.
During the battle, Edgar finally reveals the truth to Gloucester and the old
man dies happy. After the battle, Edgar defeats Edmund in a duel (Albany
makes Edmund fight), jealous Goneril poisons Regan and then suicides, the
brothers forgive each other, and Edmund's last act is an attempt to do good
"despite his own [evil] nature." He calls -- too late -- for Lear's and Cordelia's
lives to be spared.

The subplot seems to have been inspired by an episode in Sidney's Arcadia

about the King of Paphlagonia. Many details match, including the good son
persuading the blinded father not to jump to his death off a cliff.

Some commentators, including Edgar, have seen Gloucester's physical

torture as punishment for his sexual sin. Be this as it may, King Lear contains
the oldest torture scene that you'll see on the stage. Sensitive Victorians cut
it from production. Even by today's movie standards, it is a shocker.

Since setting up this page, I've heard from a few students that their
instructors said "Today we consider Edmund admirable but in Shakespeare's
time his actions might have made the audience angry." I am not making this
up. Evidently Edmund is admirable because he has a grievance and talks
about illegitimate sons being discriminated against, and is some kind of
nature-worshipper. This overshadows the way he treats everybody around
him. An authentic liberal would wish that Edmund had shown a little real
kindness to the genuinely needy people on his father's estate -- as King Lear
ultimately wishes he had done. Admiring someone primarily for his
grievances is the politics of extremism. Feel free to speak up in class. Your
decent-minded classmates will appreciate it.

Themes and Image Patterns

Who is it that can tell me who I am? -- King Lear

Nature

The Elizabethans believed, or pretended to believe, that the natural world

reflected a hierarchy that mirrored good government and stable monarchy.
This is a common enough idea in old books from various cultures. Even our
scientific age talks both about "laws of nature" and "good government
through good laws", although of course we know the essential difference.

Shakespeare's era contrasted "nature" and "art" (i.e., human-made

decorations, human-made luxuries and technologies, human-made artistic
productions), just as we talk about "essential human nature" contrasted to
"culture". Shakespeare's era also contrasted "natural" and "unnatural"
behaviors; the latter would include mistreating family members, opposing
the government, and various sexual activities not intended for procreation.

King Lear deals with how children and parents treat each other, whether
human society is the product of nature or something we create so as to live
better than animals do, and whether human nature is fundamentally selfish
or generous. Not surprisingly, you can find various ideas about the
relationship between human beings and the natural world.

You already know that 57 different animals are mentioned in the play.
Lear tells Cordelia that neither human nature nor royal dignity can tolerate
the way she has insulted him.

Lear tells the King of France that "nature is ashamed" to have produced a
child like Cordelia, whose lack of love is so contrary to nature. King Lear
expects people to be naturally virtuous, in other words, to tell him the lies he
wants to hear.

The King of France suggests that Cordelia has “tardiness", i.e., that
sometimes it's natural to be inarticulate. France sees nature as the source of
human frailties, rather than vice.

Edmund begins, "Thou, Nature, art my goddess." Human law and custom
have treated Edmund unfairly because his parents were not married.
Edmund intends to look out for himself, like an animal. Edmund sees nature
as the opposite of human virtue.

Stupid Gloucester, deceived by Edmund, considers Edgar's supposed plot to

murder him to be contrary to nature ("unnatural", "brutish").

Gloucester believes in astrology. Gloucester thinks that the eclipses, which

result from natural causes, still have unnatural effects, causing the
breakdown of human society. Edmund doesn't believe in astrology. He says
he was born rough and self-centered, and that the stars had nothing to do
with it. Later, Kent believes the stars must account for the inexplicable
differences in people's attitudes. Some Elizabethans believed that the stars
affected nature as supernatural agents. Others believed that they were
powerful natural forces.

Edmund remarks that Edgar's nature is gentle and naive, and (at the end)
that he will do one last good deed "in spite of mine own nature." This
reminds us of the ongoing scientific and political controversies over how
much of an individual's behavior is genetically programmed, how much is
learned and conditioned, and how much one is responsible. ("Nature vs.
nurture"; "innate vs. cultural"; and so forth.)

King Lear, thinking of Cordelia's "most small fault", laments the way it
scrambled his mind ("wrenched my frame of nature from its fixed place").

King Lear also calls on "nature" as a goddess, to punish Goneril with

infertility, or else give her a baby that grows up to hate her ("a thwart
disnatured torment").
Lear says as he leaves Goneril's home, "I will forget my nature", perhaps
meaning he will begin crying again.

Gloucester jokes that Edmund is "loyal and natural". The latter means both
"illegitimate", and that he cares for his own flesh-and-blood as a son should.
Regan's husband speaks of Edmund's "nature of such deep trust", i.e., his
trustworthy character is inborn.

Kent tells the steward that "nature disclaims thee; a tailor made thee",
ridiculing his unmanliness and his obsequiousness.

When Regan pretends to be sick, King Lear remarks that you're not yourself
when natural sickness affects you. "We are not ourselves when nature, being
oppressed, commands the mind to suffer with the body." There's a
foreshadowing here.

Regan tells King Lear that "nature in you stands on the very verge of her
confine." In other words, you're getting too old to make your own decisions,
and Regan's behavior is only that of a good, natural daughter.

We've already seen ("allow not nature more than nature needs...") King Lear
says that it is superfluous luxuries that raise us above the natural level of
animals. He will soon change his mind.

Kent and the other basically good characters see the treatment of Lear and
Gloucester as unnatural. Albany says to Goneril, "That nature which
condemns itself in origin cannot bordered certain in itself" -- i.e., if you
mistreat your own parent, what kind of person must you be? Writers who talk
about the Elizabethans believing in cosmic hierarchy and so forth will see a
moral warning against deviating from nature: If you have violated nature by
being less than generous to your parent, your self-centeredness will grow
and you will become morally worse than an animal.

King Lear calls on the storm to "crack nature's moulds" and end the human
race.

Kent urges King Lear to seek shelter, since "man's nature cannot carry the
affliction nor the force" and "the tyranny of the open night's too rough for
nature to endure."
King Lear, crazy, asks whether Regan's hard-heartedness is the result of
natural disease or chemistry or something perhaps cultural or perhaps
supernatural. "Is there any cause in nature that makes this hardness?"

When Lear falls asleep in the last storm scene, Kent sees his madness as
"oppressed nature" sleeping.

Cordelia is said to "redeem nature from the general curse" brought by the
other two daughters. With people like Cordelia in the world, one could not
say the human race is generally bad by nature.

The physician calls sleep "our foster-nurse of nature." Readers may

remember Macbeth, who after committing the "unnatural" crime of killing a
king becomes an insomniac.

King Lear, with the insight of madness, decorates himself with wild flowers.

You can use these various ideas about what's "natural" and what's not to
develop a good paper.

Thomas Hobbes observed that the lives of wild animals and primitive people
are mostly "nasty, brutish, and short". Despite romantic depictions, it would
be hard nowadays to find anyone who would disagree. Nowadays, most
people believe that culture is something that we invent so that we can fall in
love, create works of art and music, remember the past, and enjoy a
reasonable prospect of good health, personal security, and choosing our own
paths through life. If most of us no longer believe that a king's sovereignty
mirrors the harmony of a well-run natural world, we can still find fundamental
human issues treated in King Lear.

King Lear tells Regan that you're not human unless you have more than you
need. ("Allow not nature more than nature needs...") Then in the storm, King
Lear cries out that only the poorest person, who owes nothing to anyone (not
even the animals), is truly human ("... the thing itself.") Which do you think is
right?

In I.iv., King Lear himself introduces the question, "Who am I?" in the passage
that begins "Doth any here know me?..." and ends with "Who is it that can
tell me who I am?"

And if you want to keep it very simple, just notice this. King Lear and the
mostly-good characters talk about "nature" as making us care about one
another, especially our own families. Edmund talks about "nature" as making
us care only about ourselves.

Who is right? I can't tell you. You have a lifetime to decide for yourself.

And so forth...

Many people approaching King Lear decided Edmund is their favorite

character. Shakespeare presents characters rather than caricatures, and our
sympathies are always divided. Edmund is charming, clever, and clear-
headed (when others are not). And we see at the very beginning how
hurtfully and thoughtlessly his father has treated him. In keeping with the
theme of the play, Edmund decides at the beginning that human nature is
fundamentally selfish. And Edmund decides to act accordingly. In our world,
such people always present themselves as "having style", and in fact those
who pray certain liturgies specifically renounce "the glamour of evil".
Edmund treats others horribly. Yet at the end, Edmund finds the decency he
thought he didn't have, and tries to do good "in spite of [his] own nature."
I've seen this sort of thing in real life, and perhaps you have too. There's a
good paper right here.

Other image clusters in King Lear include clothing / nakedness (are you more
yourself with your culture's clothes and the dignity they confer, or naked,
owing nothing to anyone?), fortune (is what happens to us dumb luck,
predestined, or whatever?), justice (many different ideas), and eyesight /
blindness / hallucination (a blinded character and a hallucinating character
both perceive things more clearly; the play asks "Does human nature make
us care only for ourselves, or for others?", our natural eyes may not give us
the best answer.)

And there's the recurrent theme of nothing. Cordelia can add nothing to her
sisters' speeches. Lear says that "nothing" is the reward to Cordelia and
Burgundy after Cordelia says nothing. Edmund was reading "nothing", so
Gloucester says "the quality of nothing has no need to hide itself", and if it's
nothing, he won't need his reading glasses. Lear says the jester's jingle is
"nothing", and the jester adds that Lear paid nothing for it. Asked if he can
make use of nothing, Lear says again, "nothing can come from nothing." The
jester calls Lear a zero without a preceding figure, or "nothing." Deprived of
his identity, Edgar is "nothing". The storm makes "nothing" (should this be
"knotting?") of Lear's hair. But in the storm, Lear first decides to "say
nothing", then admires the poor man who owes nothing to any other creature
as the true human being. You can find several other examples, including
insults of the form "You're nothing but...". But King Lear's speech on owing
nothing ends the image cluster. Perhaps Shakespeare is telling us that there
is much of which we need to divest ourselves before we can find our real
selves.

What Shakespeare Could Not Say Openly?

Meantime, we shall express our darker purposes. -- Lear

You'll need to decide for yourself about what follows.

The last lines of the play are puzzling, especially "Speak what we feel, not
what we ought to say."

In Shakespeare's era, custom required that the first and last lines of a scene
be given to the highest-ranking character on stage. The Quarto gives these
to Albany (who is a duke, outranking an earl). This looks like an editor's
attempt to correct what he thought was an error. The Folio gives them to
Edgar, who has just been asked to assume the kingship by Albany. Giving
Edgar a final word along with Kent and Albany seems right.

I think I understand what Edgar is saying.

At the time of someone's death, Shakespeare's contemporaries (and most of

ours) will tell you that the survivors "ought to say" some conventional piety.
Edgar says, "Let's just tell the truth. This happened. This is sad."

Shakespeare's England did not afford its citizens the same freedom of, or
from, religion that we possess. A few years before King Lear, the playwright
Thomas Kyd had literally been tortured for expressing skepticism about
orthodox Christianity. Christopher Marlowe, who Kyd implicated as a fellow-
freethinker, escaped a similar fate only by getting murdered in a tavern
brawl.

Characters in King Lear often talk about "the gods" (the setting is pagan
Britain); "God" is mentioned only once by King Lear, who fantasizes
(unrealistically) that he and Cordelia will be allowed to live and look at
ordinary people without being involved "as if we were God's spies".
Hypocritical Edmund pretends that he's warned Edgar of "the gods'" wrath,
King Lear swears by Apollo and Jupiter (and Kent, as a bitter joke, swears by
Jupiter's wife Juno), and of course Gloucester says that the gods play with us
as boys play with flies, killing us for fun. Edgar says (to Edmund, but for the
benefit of the simple, good Albany) that "the gods are just", and that
Gloucester was punished for an episode of nonmarital sex by having his eyes
gouged out. This is obviously not justice.

In the most puzzling scene in the play, Edgar pretends to escort the blind
Gloucester to the white cliffs of Dover, where Gloucester intends to jump to
his death. Edgar tells him he is at the summit, Gloucester jumps, and faints.
Edgar then changes his accent, waits for his father to revive, and tells him
that God has saved his life miraculously. Of course this is a lie, but it helps
Gloucester find emotional peace. Shakespeare changed his source material --
in the original, the son merely talks the father out of suicide.

Edmund didn't believe in astrology, but he considered him a product of

nature. Edgar's skeptical expression is kinder but seems even deeper.

It seems to me that Shakespeare is saying, as clearly as he can, what many

people in his own day must have believed secretly. There is no God. The
comforts of religion are make-believe. Nor are we good by nature, or through
our laws and customs. The only hope for human beings is that we can be try
to be decent and generous with one another.

Whether or not you agree (and I do not), this deepest message explains for
me why the "cosmic" tragedy of King Lear still speaks to us so powerfully.

To include this page in a bibliography, you may use this format:

Friedlander ER (2003) Enjoying "King Lear" by William Shakespeare Retrieved

Dec. 25, 2003 from http://www.pathguy.com/kinglear.htm