These are some questions and observations whittled down and altered from my full commentary on King Lear. They may prove useful for participating in class discussion. If you want to view the full questions and commentary set, just follow the relevant links in the sitewide menu bar above.
Shakespeare, William. King Lear. Folio with additions from the Quarto. (The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies, 3rd ed. Combined text 764-840.)
ACT 1
Act 1, Scene 1. (764-71, Gloucester introduces his “natural” son Edmund to Kent; King Lear unfolds his retirement plans; Regan and Goneril compete for the King’s favor, while Cordelia refuses to flatter him; Kent tries to temper Lear’s rage but gets exiled; France chooses dowerless Cordelia after Burgundy refuses her; Regan and Goneril take counsel how to deal with their irrational father.)
Kent and Gloucester agree that it had seemed most likely the King would favor Albany over Cornwall. But now they aren’t so sure, so the play opens with a note of uncertainty that becomes ominous later when we realize how much better a man Albany is compared to Cornwall. (764, 1.1.1-6)
Gloucester jokes about his “natural” son Edmund, who “came something saucily to the world before he / was sent for” (765, 1.1.20-21), yet to a beautiful mother, so that “the whoreson must be acknowledged” (765. 1.1.22).
King Lear enters promising to make plain his “darker purpose” (765, 1.1.34) and demanding a map of Britain. He has decided to divide his kingdom into thirds among his daughters, and “shake all cares and business” (765, 1.1.37) from his aged shoulders. He will rid himself of these cares, he says, “Conferring them on younger strengths, while we / Unburdened crawl toward death” (765, 1.1.38-39).
Lear’s intention is “that future strife / May be prevented now” (765, 1.1.42-43). The King apparently means to assist the process of generational renewal, passing on matters of state in a fair and public way to younger family members: each daughter will receive a third. The only question is how opulent that portion will be, and even this seems already to have been decided. Lear will wrest for himself the space necessary to practice the art of dying well, ars moriendi. [1]
The King seems sincere, but this whole scheme is too tidy: does anyone really plan to die so rationally? Even an elderly man of some eighty years such as King Lear?
The question of authority is a main item in King Lear. Kent may be responding in part to the King’s unwise demotion of Cordelia, but his line “Reserve thy state, / And in thy best consideration check / This hideous rashness” (768, 1.1.147-49) refers equally to his shock at the notion of an absolute king’s decision to divest himself of unitary power.
Indeed, Lear seems confused: he goes off on a private mission while at the same time trying to retain the symbols and privileges of his authority. The King’s “natural body” is wearing down, and one can feel only empathy for him on that account, but what about his political or corporate body, the one that isn’t capable of death and that “embodies” the nation itself? [2]
Can King Lear abandon his responsibilities the way he does, without causing a disaster? He has given up the “power, / Preeminence, and all the large effects / That troop with majesty” (767, 1.1.127-29). Another way of stating this is that he has ceded the “sway, / Revenue, execution of the rest” (767, 1.1.133-34) aside from what he retains, which he specifies as “The name, and all th’addition to a king” (767, 1.1.133), which addition [3] is apparently to be embodied in the person of the stipulated “hundred knights” (767, 1.1.130).
Lear makes a distinction between the name and pomp of kingship and the executive, effectual power of a king. So how does he expect to give away all his power and yet hold on to the “addition” of a king? Do the symbols, privileges and name mean anything, apart from power?
With respect to Cordelia, Regan and Goneril, what does Lear want? He himself is playing a role that he cherishes—that of a loving father—and so he wants a public declaration of their affection for him as a loving father. We may call this flattery, but to Lear, it’s probably more like an authentic, sanctioned display of both flattery and true love at the same time: his daughters should be able to praise him highly, talk his virtue to the skies, and mean every word of it.
The public and private in Renaissance kingship were of course inextricable; royal absolutism of King James’s sort always cast the King as “the father of his people,” and James’s model was the scriptural patriarchs. He believed his subjects owed him the reverence due to a father. [4]
In practice, as Shakespeare surely understood, the intertwining of public and private in powerful families makes for a great deal of coldness, sterility, and alienation, even in settings beyond the monarchy.
Lear has no trouble demanding in the form of public spectacle what would for most families be a purely private display of affection. Perhaps this isn’t entirely unreasonable on his part. Neither are Goneril and Regan necessarily to be blamed for giving the old man what he wants.
Why can’t Cordelia perform even better than did Regan and Goneril, bearing with her father and making a generous allowance for his weaknesses? Isn’t it sometimes acceptable to be a little insincere when regard for another person’s feelings requires it? Even if there’s an austere beauty in the figure of Cordelia speaking truth to power, she is as brittle and abrupt as her father.
Cordelia tells the stunned Lear that she won’t play his game: “Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave / My heart into my mouth” (766, 1.1.89-90). She can’t verbally express the genuine affection she feels for her father. Cordelia isn’t capable of flattery; she lacks Prince Hal’s ability to say to a joker like Falstaff, “For my part, if a lie may do thee grace / I’ll gild it with the happiest terms I have.” [5]
Learning to be a good ruler involves play-acting and feigning to be what one is not. [6] Cordelia, however, sees both monarchy and marriage as consisting of specifiable bonds and reciprocal obligations. So when Lear demands that she declare her “love,” she understands the term in something like the sense of “obligation, duty, attention.” Obviously, a woman who marries must balance her duties as a wife with her duties as a loyal daughter.
It may be, however, that Lear’s demand isn’t as all-encompassing as Cordelia supposes, and it’s fair to ask how she could rule a kingdom if she is incapable of satisfying the King’s request for affectionate flattery. As Regan later says, “‘Tis the infirmity of his age, yet he hath ever but slen- / derly known himself” (771, 1.1.288-89), and Goneril chimes in with “The best and soundest of his time hath been but / rash” (771, 1.1.290-91). To be a “royal” is to be a politician.
In sum, Regan and Goneril are not deceived: Lear’s supposed retirement is not really a surrender but a shifting of responsibility. He will almost certainly continue to play the tyrant.
Lear’s conduct after giving away power is anything but responsible: he prances about with his hundred knights, behaving like a medieval “lord of misrule.” [7] His residence with either daughter, it seems, would inevitably create a public perception that they are not in charge. Lear wants to retain far more authority than he has any business keeping.
Lear is partly a tragedy about the terrors of growing old, of feeling slighted, neglected, weak, and useless as we make way for the young. Knowing that we must do so when the time comes doesn’t make doing it any easier. In this way, in King Lear as in other of Shakespeare’s plays that involve monarchy, “a king is but a man.” [8]
This broader, more existential frame may account for the play’s fairy-tale quality. We see the disintegration of a “foolish, fond old man” (829, 4.7.56) who doesn’t understand the nature of genuine affection or the power he has been wielding all his life. Cordelia, too, may appear to be a Cinderella figure: surrounded by evil sisters, she cannot make her inner virtue known to the authorities who determine her fate. At least the King of France discerns Cordelia’s purity (770, 1.1.248-55).
Lastly, we find that however badly King Lear has behaved, loyalty to him is not quite dead. The banished Kent says he will pursue his “old course in a country new” (768, 1.1.185). As it turns out, the “country new” is Britain itself. Lear’s refusal of responsibility has created a new dispensation of power, radically transforming the nation he once led into a cauldron of anarchy and unrestricted desire for gratification and self-advancement. If the truly good and loyal Kent would serve the King, he must disguise himself as chaos consumes his master.
Act 1, Scene 2. (771-75, Gloucester’s “natural” son Edmund shows his contempt for the prevailing notions about “legitimacy” and plots to unseat his legitimate brother, Edgar; he turns the old man against Edgar by forging a letter confessing the latter’s supposed desire to murder his father and inherit his title; he then informs Edgar of his father’s wrath.)
This scene begins with Edmund’s soliloquy (771-72, 1.2.1-22), the upshot of which is that Edmund believes he has all the right qualities to rule his own house, and lacks only “legitimacy.” By contrast, King Lear has given his power away and yet expects to hang on to his legitimacy: Lear stands upon rank as if it in itself constituted inner virtue and fitness to rule, whereas the more practical Edmund sees this legitimacy as “the curiosity of nations” (771, 1.2.4).
All the same, Edmund is obsessed with what others think of him: he repeats the word “legitimate” several times, and can’t seem to let it go. [9] A most unhealthy selfishness—”I grow. I prosper” (772, 1.2.21)—also drives him on. Edmund demands that the gods should ally themselves not with custom but rather with natural, material qualities and ripeness for rule.
Gloucester has been taken aback by the King’s strange behavior, which to him seems unnatural—a view that makes him susceptible Edmund’s scheming. In a world turned upside down, what could make more sense than that a man’s legitimate son should betray him?
Edmund declares his father’s belief in astrology “the excellent foppery of the world” (774, 1.2.107) and insists, “All with me’s meet that I can fashion fit” (775, 1.2.162). He will trust in his dark vision of nature as a place that rewards the most savage and cunning predator. Tennyson described this kind of nature as “red in tooth and claw.” [10] Edmund is a human predator, and Lear has given him an opportunity to use his predatory skills.
This is not to say that Lear has made Edmund what he is. Rather, he has given him an opportunity to thrive. If legitimate authority doesn’t know itself, this is what happens.
Lear initially assumes too easily that there is an automatic concordance between the two “bodies” of a king—the perishing and erring mortal one and the immortal and immaterial political or corporate one: he makes unwise decisions and then is surprised to find that his all-too-human decisions have deranged his kingdom. Others in this play see more clearly the Machiavellian point that the exercise of power generates its own authority .
Act 1, Scene 3. (775-76, Goneril grows impatient with Lear and his hundred knights, whose residence with her has grown troublesome; she instructs the steward, Oswald, on how best to put the retired King in his place.)
Goneril is alarmed at the King’s disorderly conduct. She complains that “His knights grow riotous” (775, 1.3.6), and devises a stratagem whereby Oswald will make the King feel his weakness. Goneril calls Lear an “Idle old man, / That still would manage those authorities / That he hath given away! (775, 1.3.15.1-3, Quarto ed.) The old king must learn his new place.
Act 1, Scene 4. (776-83, Kent appears in Lear’s camp disguised as “Caius”; Kent humiliates Oswald for speaking disrespectfully to Lear; the Fool reminds Lear that he was unwise to relinquish power; Goneril threatens Lear over his riotous conduct, telling him to act his age and dismiss half of his knights. Lear curses Goneril and begins to regret his ill treatment of Cordelia; Goneril again demands that he dismiss half his knights; Lear rages, weeps, and threatens to take up his kingship again; throughout, Albany tries to calm the King and moderate Goneril’s severity, but to no avail.
Kent begins to serve the King, professing to the old man that he really is what he seems to be—a trusty middle-aged servant who knows authority when he sees it, which quality he says he “would fain call master” (777, 1.4.25).
The Fool, we are soon told, has “much pined away” (777, 1.4.66) since Cordelia went to France. He is Cordelia’s ally in a more straightforward way than he is Lear’s since, after all, castigation of the King’s errors is part of the Fool’s responsibility.
Kent earns his keep by giving Oswald a rough education in rank, or “dif- / ferences” (771, 1.4.80-81). Lear’s own words begin to speak against him: he had said to Cordelia, “nothing will come of nothing” (766, 1.1.88), and now the Fool responds to a similar utterance by Lear—“nothing can be made out of nothing” (778, 1.4.121)—with “so much the rent of his land comes / to” (778, 1.4.122-23).
Lear has given away not only the executive function of his office, but even the title, according to the Fool, and now retains only the title of “fool” that he was born with. The Fool says the King split his crown in two and gave it to his daughters (779, 1.4.130-33). The implication of this remark is that power is indivisible and cannot be handled in this way. “[T]hou gav’st them the rod and / putt’st down thine own breeches” (779, 1.4.143-44), says the Fool, drawing a clear picture of Lear’s childishness.
The Fool calls Lear nothing when he says, “Now thou art an O without a figure” (780, 1.4.161), and this application may remind us of Hamlet’s similar mockery—”the king is a thing,” says Hamlet, “of nothing.” [11] and [12].
Lear soon begins to ask key questions about identity. ”Are you our daughter?” he asks Goneril (780, 1.4.188), and she tells him to “put away / These dispositions, which of late transport you / From what you rightly are” (780, 1.4.190-92). Finally, Lear asks, “Who is it that can tell me who I am?” (780, 1.4.199) and is answered by the Fool with “Lear’s shadow” (780, 1.4.200).
When Goneril tells him he ought to be surrounded by men who sort with his condition, Lear swears her off. His judgment of Goneril is that she should one day “feel / How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child” (782, 1.4.255-56). But the question of proportion comes into play: what Goneril has done outstrips anything Cordelia may have done.
The first mention of “plucking out eyes” occurs when Lear addresses Goneril as follows: “Old fond eyes, / Beweep this cause again, I’ll pluck ye out / And cast you with the waters that you lose / To temper clay” (783, 1.4.271-74). Such imagery haunts the action of King Lear: it will soon become evident that a characteristic of the worst human beings in this play is their tendency to literalize and act upon what others can scarcely imagine.
Lear now transfers his faith to Regan, and threatens to reassume the majesty he has cast off. Goneril refers to her husband Albany’s “milky gentleness” (783, 1.4.313) as ill-suited to the times. His sententiae, such as “Striving to better, oft we mar what’s well” (783, 1.4.318), don’t bode well for his ability to manage power, as far as she is concerned. [13]
Act 1, Scene 5. (783-84, Still at Albany’s castle, Lear sends Kent ahead with a letter for Regan at Gloucestershire, where she and Cornwall reside; the Fool converses with Lear while they prepare to visit Regan; by now, Lear begins to see that he has mistreated Cordelia, and is afraid that he will go mad.)
Lear sends Kent to Gloucestershire with a letter intended for Regan. He begins to see that he has done Cordelia wrong (783, 1.5.20), and his anger shifts to Goneril and her “Monster ingratitude” (784, 1.5.33).
The Fool points out something Goneril had said earlier: “Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been / wise” (784, 1.5.37-38). Lear is out of joint with the seven ages of man [14] —he has never really attained to wisdom to suit his years, so he is unprepared to practice the art of dying. Now he fears madness (784, 1.4.39-40), and his kingdom is paying the price.
ACT 2
Act 2, Scene 1. (784-87, Edmund’s deceptive scheme sends Edgar fleeing from the family castle; Edmund dupes Gloucester into condemning Edgar and making Edmund his heir; Regan and Cornwall show up at Gloucester’s castle, hear about Edgar’s alleged misdeeds, and invite Edmund into their service.)
Edmund completes his villainy against Edgar, even engaging in a mock fight with him to facilitate his legitimate brother’s escape. (784-85, 2.1.19-32) Gloucester promptly makes Edmund his heir (786, 85-87).
Cornwall takes a liking to Edmund for his “virtuous obedience” (787, 2.1.114-18), and by the end of the scene, Edmund accepts a commission to serve the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall. The affinities of the wicked now become apparent. “Truth,” as far Edmund and his ilk are concerned, is whatever enhances your prospects.
Act 2, Scene 2. (787-91, Kent arrives with Lear’s letter for Regan outside Gloucester’s castle, only to run into Oswald, who bears a letter from Goneril for Regan; Kent nearly gets into a fight with this dishonest character, but ends up in the stocks for it when Cornwall arrives and doesn’t like his blunt self-defense; Gloucester protests against this insult, but to no avail; Kent tells Gloucester that Cordelia knows of the king’s distress.)
In this counterpoint-style scene, Kent recognizes Oswald for the knave he is, unlike Gloucester with his evil son Edmund. Kent’s putdown “Nature disclaims in thee: / a tailor made thee” (789, 2.2.48) is a classic. Oswald is, after all, a man of artifice who gilds the ugly, base version of nature upheld by Edmund, Goneril, Regan, and Cornwall.
Still, Kent gets himself into a fix in this scene when he finds it impossible to explain his hatred for Oswald to Cornwall (763, 2.2.63ff). Cornwall orders that the stocks be brought (790, 2.2.118). Gloucester can do no more than protest that the King has been insulted through this treatment of his servant. Kent mentions that he has a letter from Cordelia: she is aware of the King’s distress (791, 2.2.148-61).
Act 2, Scene 3. (766-766, The exiled Edgar takes on his Bedlam Beggar disguise, declaring himself no longer legitimate Edgar but “Poor Tom,” who will henceforth remain exposed to the raw elements.)
Edgar disguises himself as Poor Tom the Bedlam Beggar, who will “with presented nakedness outface / The winds and persecutions of the sky” (792, 2.3.11-12). His model of the natural man comes from neglected humanity in the English countryside. [15]
Poor Tom is not a mere negation when he says, “Edgar I nothing am” (792, 2.3.21), which means “I am no longer Edgar.” Poor Tom will be the “something” that rescues Edgar from being “nothing,” He will also serve as a or model of the natural man for King Lear in the storm.
Act 2, Scene 4. (792-99, at Gloucester’s castle, Lear is enraged to see his servant Kent in the stocks and himself refused an audience with Regan and Cornwall; when they finally consent, he rails at both Regan and Goneril. The sisters whittle Lear’s dignity down to nothing, telling him that he no longer needs retainers and that if he fails to comply, they will refuse to take him in; Lear curses both Regan and Goneril, invokes civility and decorum to no avail, weeps, and implores the gods; angry and baffled, he departs into the terrible storm, and his three adversaries shut the doors.)
Lear is outraged when he sees Kent in the stocks, and becomes increasingly obsessed with this slight. Gloucester’s remark that Cornwall has been “informed” (794, 2.4.92) of the “fiery” (794, 2.4.87) Duke’s demands drives him to an incredulous, “Dost thou understand me, man?” (794, 2.4.93) But his summons to Regan and Cornwall sounds pathetic: “Bid them come forth and hear me, / Or at their chamber door I’ll beat the drum / Till it cry sleep to death” (794, 2.4.111-13).
This intemperance earns Lear only the Fool’s mocking tale about a Cockney woman’s attempt to quiet live eels as she stuffed them into a pie (794, 2.4.116-19). Lear is at the mercy of his passions, which have no outlet in action. He is also at the mercy of other, more powerful people’s passions: Cornwall, Regan, and Goneril. His suffering is now inevitable.
Any number of culinary blogs from the UK will tell us, by the way, that eels continue to writhe half-an-hour or more after they have been dispatched. Apparently, killing an eel is a messy and distressing affair. Similarly, while buttering a horse’s hay might seem like gastronomic kindness, it isn’t—horses don’t like buttered hay. In this regard, the Fool’s proverbial witticisms refer to his own manner of telling Lear the truth. Like Hamlet, he must be “cruel to be kind.”
From Regan, Lear gets only the following counsel: “O sir, you are old; / Nature in you stands on the very verge / Of his confine. You should be ruled and led / By some discretion that discerns your state / Better than you yourself.) (795, 2.4.139-43). Her further advice is that Lear should go back to Goneril and apologize to her.
It would be difficult to strip an elderly man of his dignity more cruelly than this, and already we sense the change in attitude that marks a leap from ordinary meanness to the “hard hearts” beyond anything we had thought possible—Lear will ask about this in Act 3, Scene 6. [16]
For now, however, the King still believes there is a difference between Regan and Goneril: to Regan he says, “Thou better know’st / The offices of nature, bond of childhood, / Effects of courtesy, dues of gratitude: / Thy half o’th’ kingdom hast thou not forgot, / Wherein I thee endowed” (796, 2.4.170-74).
The phrase “offices of nature” indicates that to Lear, nature is something civil and beneficent—it is to be identified not with the unadorned natural elements but instead with the properly functioning family unit and its civility and decorum. This same belief on Lear’s part was no doubt at work in his seemingly naïve demand in Act 1, Scene 1 that his three daughters should vie to demonstrate their love for him.
Lear’s expectations notwithstanding, Regan’s request is along the same lines as her previous remark: “I pray you, father, being weak, seem so” (796, 2.4.195). Then comes the reverse bidding war between Regan and Goneril over the number of knights Lear is to be allowed, ending with Regan’s question, “What need one?” (798, 2.4.258)
Lear offers his a remarkable comeback: “Oh, reason not the need! Our basest beggars / Are in the poorest thing superfluous. / Allow not nature more than nature needs, / Man’s life is cheap as beast’s” (798, 2.4.259-62). Humanity must not, he insists, be reduced to mere necessity; we are creatures of excess, artifice, symbol, and decorum. Nature as a concept enfolds these qualities.
Then Lear addresses a contradictory prayer to the gods, asking for both patience and anger. He is soon to rage in the storm, [17] but for the moment he denounces his two present daughters as “unnatural hags” and declares almost comically, “I will do such things— / What they are, yet I know not, but they shall be / The terrors of the earth!” (798, 2.4.275-77) At this point, Lear seems to have arrived at a nearly complete mental and spiritual breakdown: he can only rage, weep, and complain bitterly about the cruelties visited upon him.
Regan’s pitiless sententia [18] to the worried Gloucester is her justification for exiling Lear into the storm: “O sir, to willful men, / The injuries that they themselves procure / Must be their schoolmasters. Shut up your doors …” (799, 2.4.297-99). It’s true that the unwise learn, if at all, only by sad experience—a fundamental point in Christian-based tragedy—but decency should have instructed Regan that this is not the time for such prating. Her cruel excess (along with that of Edmund, Goneril, and Cornwall) is the demonic inverse of the generous excess Lear had invoked in exclaiming, “O, reason not the need!”
At this point in King Lear, there seems to be no middle ground between these two extremes—between what is almost infinitely above nature and what is a great deal more savage than nature. The patience and acceptance that Edgar will promote to Gloucester (and that loyal Kent has been practicing) may go some way toward building a bridge, but it will not be enough to avert tragedy.
In Act 2, families are sundered, and like affines itself with like. Lear brings up the issue of the heavens, asking the gods, “If you do love old men, if your sweet sway / Allow obedience, if you yourselves are old, / Make it your cause: send down and take my part” (796, 2.4.183-85). Which side, then, if any, will the gods take in this great confrontation between one group of sinners (Lear included) and another, far worse, group?
Lear’s “O, reason not the need!” outburst in Act 2, Scene 4 offers us an excellent opportunity to understand what goes wrong and why. The king may be telling us something important here. Shakespeare seldom, if ever, sanctions reducing humanity to “need” (i.e., mere necessity) or some bedrock version of human nature.
Humans are the artificial animals: there’s always excess to deal with. There is generous, life-affirming excess, and there is cruel, destructive excess, and every human being is capable of manifesting either kind.
What is meant by generous excess? It involves kindness liberally bestowed upon others. This is not much different, perhaps, than the Christian Latin term “caritas” (charity, generosity, manifesting love for others, etc.) To list some of the main indicators, we might include the following: empathy, accommodation and regard for others’ frailties, eccentricities, and modes of insight; a drive towards the amelioration and enhancement of life; linguistic creativity, sophistication, and play; fancifulness and imagination; due regard for adornment, decorum, and civility, etc.
What is meant by cruel excess? As with the previous term, we might gloss it initially with the Christian Latin term “cupiditas” (covetousness, greediness). This consists of almost anything flowing from an immoderate regard for oneself and one’s desires (which may itself flow from profound emptiness and insecurity): thus, self-aggrandizing, narcissistic, predatory behavior; intolerance and lack of empathy; hunger for ever more power for power’s sake; a perverted, depraved, or brutishly literal imagination; dishonesty and corruption in language and manners; disregard or contempt for decorum and civility, etc.
In King Lear, the tragedy is deepened by the fact that the destabilizing event that leads to cruel excess on the part of the play’s worst characters comes initially from an otherwise innocent interaction between its most estimable characters—Lear and Cordelia. What happens between them is a misunderstanding that nevertheless opens the way to unbearable suffering and death.
What Lear wants—a display of affection—isn’t wrong, but when he meets resistance, he abandons the work of accommodation that makes it possible to keep the scale leaning towards generous excess. Cordelia is kind, but she is also too brittle, too earnest (and perhaps still too immature or inexperienced) to flatter her father. Lear is too vain to understand why Cordelia can’t give him the performance he requires. In his enfeebled, confused state, his most beloved daughter’s behavior frightens and enrages him; it contracts his soul.
In this play’s tragic universe, there’s nothing immediately available to bring the respective positions of Lear and Cordelia closer, so we head straight down to anarchy, a cauldron of primal lust for sex, attention, and power in which only characters like Edmund, Goneril, Regan, and Cornwall thrive and others are crushed.
ACT 3
Act 3, Scene 1. (799-800, Kent hears from a Gentleman that Lear and the Fool are alone out in the raging storm. Kent informs the Gentleman that the French are even now coming to England. Albany and Cornwall have fallen out, and are following events in France.)
Kent’s question when Lear is abandoned to the “fretful elements” (799, 3.1.4) isn’t about grand political theory or power, it is about who is attending the frail old man: he should not, thinks Kent, be left alone and at the mercy of the weather. (In a less tragic universe, this “back to basics” concern would be the beginning of a restoration.) The Gentleman informs him that only the Fool is with Lear, “labour[ing] to out-jest / His heart-struck injuries” (799, 3.1.9-10). That is a generous way of describing the Fool’s job here—we know him to be a teller of discomfiting truths. But it isn’t comfort that brings characters insight in this tragic play.
Albany and Cornwall have fallen out by this time (799-800, 3.1.18-22), and both men are following events in France to determine their own response.
Kent excuses the King’s fall into insanity, attributing it to the “bemadding sorrow” (800, 3.1.22.8 Folio) caused by Regan and Goneril. He gives the Gentleman a ring to bring to Cordelia since he knows she will recognize it as his own.
Act 3, Scene 2. (800-02, Lear rages in and against the storm, even as the Fool, who continues to accuse his master of foolishness, urges him to go back to Regan and Goneril for shelter; Kent finds Lear and says he will force his way into a hovel that has thus far begrudged the King shelter; the Fool utters an anachronistic prophecy.)
The storm that pelts Lear is partly a metaphor for his internal discord, for the howling madness in the King himself. As the Fool has told him, he has turned his daughters into domineering mothers, [19] the opposite of what he wanted to do: his cares have only increased, and “dying well” seems only a remote possibility. Nonetheless, the old man clings to life, trying to maintain control and to hold on to Cordelia. Even after he has cast away his power and his dearest child, he remains obsessed with both.
What we have in King Lear, it seems, is in part the tragedy of growing old and being unable to deal with the changes and the loss that must come. [20] Lear is a death-denier in spite of his claims otherwise, and his daughters represent perpetuity to him. This denial may be in part what’s behind Lear’s raging in the storm, and even at the storm, as he does in the utterance that begins, “I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness; / I never gave you kingdom, called you children …” (800-01, 3.2.16-17). [21]
As Lear’s rage rolls onward and takes aim at the “great gods, / That keep this dreadful pudder o’er our heads …” (801, 3.2.49-50), his insight is summed up in the grand claim, “I am a man / More sinned against than sinning” (801, 3.2.59-60). This intense realization seems to go beyond any specific grievance; it sounds like an indictment of the universe, or of the gods themselves.
With these words, Lear claims that he feels his “wits begin to turn” (802, 3.2.67), and shows compassion enough for Poor Tom to accept an offer of shelter, though he himself won’t go in yet.
The Fool first sings a quatrain adapted from Feste’s concluding song in Twelfth Night, the refrain of which is “For the rain it raineth every day.” [22] The point for Lear’s Fool appears to be that no one can avoid life’s tribulations, so accommodation to them is unavoidable.
He then takes his leave from the scene with a speech beginning, “I’ll speak a prophecy ere I go” (802, 3.2.79-80). The substance of this strange, parodic performance is in part that when everything is perfect and just, “Then shall the realm of Albion come to great confusion” (802, 3.2.91). As the Norton endnote below points out, Shakespeare was playing upon the famous lines called “Chaucer’s Prophecy,” as reprinted in Puttenham’s treatise The Arte of English Poesie. [23]
Shakespeare was also familiar with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century CE text Historia Anglicana, so he probably knew Book VII of that work, which consists of the alleged prophecies of the Arthurian magician, Merlin. Those prophecies are full of ominous warnings and are consistent with the sense of doom that hangs over Arthurian legend. The Fool may be importing something like that sense of doom from this source. [24]
It may also be that Shakespeare considered such temporally and logically confusing words to be the most appropriate way to assess the value of the Fool’s discursive strategy in King Lear: that of caustic, if at times garbled, truth-telling to the powerful. In any event, within a few scenes, we shall encounter the Fool for the last time, as he disappears forever in Act 3, Scene 6.
Act 3, Scene 3. (802-03, Gloucester informs Edmund that he means to go help Lear; he also mentions an incriminating letter he has received concerning France and Cordelia’s imminent invasion of England; when Gloucester leaves, Edmund decides to betray his father to Regan’s husband, Cornwall.)
Gloucester complains to Edmund that when he tried to relieve the old King’s distress, his guests took over his castle and ordered him not to speak of Lear further. Gloucester is heartbroken, but determined to act, and he has received a letter telling him about the French invasion to come. He welcomes this as the means to take revenge on the King’s behalf. Edmund immediately decides to betray his father, chortling, “The younger rises when the old doth fall” (803, 3.4.22).
Act 3, Scene 4. (803-07, Lear, Kent, and the Fool arrive at the hovel; there, they discover “Poor Tom” already sheltering; Gloucester soon finds them and takes them to a nearby house.)
As Lear’s angry conversation with the elements in Act 3, Scene 2 suggests, [25] the storm is also a natural phenomenon not reducible to the King’s inner disharmony. In this capacity, the “hurricano” is beyond his control, like the decay of his own body.
The King calls the storm the “physic” of pomp (804, 3.4.34), the only setting that allows him, as a half-naked octogenarian, to make contact with what is common to all human beings. He has learned something in this storm that exceeds his inward tempest: as in other Shakespeare plays, “the king is but a man,” [26] no matter what the courtiers or the theory of kingship may say.
It’s good that Lear isn’t alone for long in the tempest—the Fool is with him for a time, as are Kent and Gloucester, and it’s the setting where he meets Poor Tom, who plays for Lear a significant role as a touchstone for common humanity. Lear is entirely convinced by Edgar’s “madman” act, and says upon studying Poor Tom, “Thou art the thing / itself. Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, / bare, forked animal as thou art” (805, 3.4.96-98), the very lowest level to which a man may sink.
Still, when Lear begins to strip off his clothing to achieve unity with Poor Tom, the Fool steps in and repeats to the King the same observation he has just made: “Prithee, nuncle, be contented. ‘Tis a naughty night to / swim in” (805, 3.4.100-01). To put things simply, it isn’t good for a human being to be “out in the storm” permanently—shelter must be sought from storms and from raw human nature itself. We must return to a more “accommodated” model of humanity so that we can abide rather than be destroyed.
Poor Tom, for all his wild talk about devils, [27] already knows this himself, as towards the end of his raving, he says simply, “Tom’s a-cold” (807, 3.4.159). When Lear calls Edgar “the thing itself,” he is in fact looking at a man’s artistic construction, a willed madness that Edgar has probably begun to cast off already, as we will see him declare forcefully at the end of Act 3, Scene 6: “Tom, away” (784, 3.6.55.9, Folio). Lear may not understand Tom’s situation fully, but he gathers insight from his interactions with him.
Act 3, Scene 5. (807, Edmund betrays his father Gloucester to Cornwall, revealing the former’s determination to help Lear and his knowledge about French preparations to invade Britain; Cornwall creates Edmund the new Earl of Gloucester.)
Edmund fiendishly betrays Gloucester to the Duke of Cornwall. He exposes Gloucester’s determination to come to Lear’s aid as well as his knowledge about the French movements as they prepare to invade Britain and rescue Lear. Cornwall is delighted with Edmund’s readiness to betray his own father, and presently makes Edmund the new Earl of Gloucester.
Edmund is in full “evildoer” mode at present, but later he will find that he can’t permanently jettison the trappings of convention: security requires order, it requires adherence to a social contract.
Act 3, Scene 6. (808-10, now fully insane, Lear subjects Regan and Goneril to a mock trial in absentia, with the tribunal consisting of himself, Poor Tom, the Fool, and Kent; Gloucester returns to tell them that Lear’s enemies even now plot his death and that Kent must at once lead the old King to Cordelia in Dover.)
We come to the “trial scene,” with Lear, the Fool, Kent, and Poor Tom serving as judge and jury against empty stools substituting for the defendants, Goneril and Regan. Goneril is charged with having “kicked the poor King / her father” (809, 3.6.15.30-31 Folio). Before that matter can proceed, Lear puts Regan to the test: “And here’s another whose warped looks proclaim / What store her heart is made on” (809, 3.6.15.35-36 Folio).
At this point one of the daughters (the text doesn’t say which) escapes from the courtroom. It may be Goneril who has escaped, though, since Lear soon returns to his previous mention of the composition of Regan’s heart. The King’s horror at a cruelty beyond what he had thought possible wells up: “Then let them anatomize Regan, see what breeds about / her heart. Is there any cause in nature that makes these / hard hearts?” (809, 3.6.34-36)
Nobody offers an answer, and by this time the emotional stamina of the “justicers” has given out. Lear is counseled to get some rest, the Fool says cryptically, [28] “And I’ll go to bed at noon” (809, 3.6.42), and Gloucester reports that Lear’s death is being planned by his enemies. Kent must, he says, immediately lead the King to Cordelia at Dover.
As for “Poor Tom,” it’s time for him to cast away his disguise, at least to himself for now. Seeing the King, his “better,” suffering so piteously has led him to make this decision: as he says, “How light and portable my pain seems now, / When that which makes me bend makes the King bow …” (810, 3.6.55.7-8 Folio). Not much was done during the trial to convict Goneril and Regan, but the self-declared sentence on the Bedlam Beggar is, “Tom, away” (810, 3.6.55.9 Folio).
Act 3, Scene 7. (810-13, Cornwell sends agents to capture the “traitor” Gloucester; Cornwall sends Edmund and Goneril to warn Albany that the French have landed in Britain; with Regan egging him on, Cornwall blinds Gloucester; a servant mortally wounds Cornwall and is then himself killed by Regan; Gloucester is cast out of the castle, helpless; the remaining servants lament and say they’ll lead Gloucester to Poor Tom, who can guide him thereafter.)
In this horrifying scene, Gloucester is interrogated by Cornwall and then blinded in the most gruesome manner imaginable.
Cornwall gives orders for Gloucester to be arrested for treason and brought to his own castle, where he will be harshly interrogated. Soon, the old man is captured and led into the castle. Gloucester can scarcely believe how uncivilly he is being treated in his own home, but Cornwall had already justified his cruelty while waiting for him to arrive: he knows that he can’t instantly put Gloucester to death without an actual trial, but all the same, he says, “our power / Shall do a court’sy to our wrath, which men / May blame but not control” (811, 3.7.25-27).
When challenged as to why he conducted the King to Dover, Gloucester realizes that he has no choice but to declare his opposition to Cornwall, Regan, Goneril and their confederates: he says bravely, “Because I would not see thy cruel nails / Pluck out his poor old eyes, nor thy fierce sister / In his anointed flesh stick boarish fangs” (811-12, 3.7.56-58).
To Gloucester, this kind of phrasing and imagery represents the worst thing he can imagine, and it is purely metaphorical. Not so for Regan, who has been interrogating him. Neither is it a difficult leap for Goneril, who, before departing to search for Gloucester and bring him to his castle, had uttered her preference prior to the current exchange: “Pluck out his eyes” (810, 3.7.5). For the likes of Regan, Goneril, and Cornwall, the literal punishment of eye-gouging seems entirely appropriate: it is imaginable, sayable, and seamlessly doable.
Shakespeare doesn’t spare us, his audience, either. Sophocles didn’t allow his audience to see Oedipus blind himself with pins from the dress of his mother-wife Jocasta—the dreadful act was reported to the audience, not shown. Shakespeare, however, serves up the sickening spectacle in the goriest way he can. When Gloucester cries out, “I shall see / The wingèd vengeance overtake such children” (812, 3.7.65-66), Cornwall answers him, “See’t shalt thou never” (812, 3.7.67) and promptly stomps out one of the helpless man’s eyes.
Regan drives Cornwall on to complete the terrible blinding scene with “One side will mock another: th’other too” (812, 3.7.71). Even after the outraged First Servant mortally wounds Cornwall for what he has already done and is killed immediately afterward by Regan, the Duke insists on finishing things, and utters the unforgettable lines while plucking out Gloucester’s remaining eye, “Out, vile jelly! / Where is thy luster now?” (812, 3.7.83-84) This is the lowest point in the play, the bottom of the pit of cruel excess into which Lear’s initial error of banishing Cordelia has made it possible for others to descend.
Regan exults over the hapless Gloucester, and orders the blinded earl tossed unceremoniously from his castle, saying, “Go, thrust him out at gates, and let him smell / His way to Dover” (812, 3.7.94-95). Cornwall now realizes how badly wounded he is, and the remaining two servants lament Gloucester’s treatment. They decide to follow after him and offer what little medical help they can, but mainly to put him into Poor Tom’s keeping.
ACT 4
Act 4, Scene 1. (813-15, a suicidal Gloucester asks Edgar the way to Dover cliffs; Edgar agrees—as Poor Tom, for the moment—to take him there.)
The scene opens with Edgar—now as his proper self—musing on the ways of the world: “The lamentable change is from the best, / The worst returns to laughter” (813, 4.1.5-6). This formula admits the tragic dimension of life, but also opens the way to a comic appreciation of its woundings. There is a “worst,” thinks Edgar, and from that nadir there’s nowhere to go but up.
Just then, Edgar catches sight of the blinded Gloucester being helped shakily along by an old tenant of his estate. The wounded earl tells this tenant to leave him alone, for he doesn’t believe the man can help further. Edgar now sees that he was mistaken: “the worst is not / So long as we can say, ‘This is the worst’” (814, 4.1.28-29).
As for Gloucester, he has abandoned any notion of a just moral order. He declares, “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods: / They kill us for their sport …” (814, 4.1.38-39). Edgar, who still believes that the gods are just, must again bring his father round to patience, to acceptance of his predicament. But Gloucester seeks only death (815, 4.1.71-76), and as “Poor Tom,” Edgar consents to lead the way to Dover’s cliffs.
Act 4, Scene 2. (815-17, Goneril and Edmund show up at Albany’s castle. Goneril tells Edmund to go back to Cornwall; Albany asserts himself, reproaching Goneril for her mistreatment of Lear; a messenger reports on the blinding of Gloucester, the death of Cornwall, and Edmund’s treachery against his father; Albany vows to avenge Gloucester.)
At the scene’s opening, in conversation with the Steward and Edmund, Goneril reveals her contempt for Albany, who is incensed at her abusive treatment of the King. Finally, Albany asserts his virtuous will, saying, “O Goneril, / You are not worth the dust which the rude wind / Blows in your face” (816, 4.2.30-32). But Goneril doesn’t care—she is too busy thinking passionate thoughts about Edmund: “Oh, the difference of man and man!” (816, 4.2.26).
But Albany is not to be gainsaid, and he calls Goneril a “tiger,” a “devil,” and a “fiend” (816, 4.2.32.10 Folio, 36-37). He realizes that the anarchic violence in which she and her sister are participating must be stopped or it will destroy the kingdom: “Humanity must perforce prey on itself / Like monsters of the deep” (816, 4.2.32.19-20 Folio). If others will not help Gloucester, Albany will.
Act 4, Scene 3 (817-19, Kent and a Gentleman confirm how much Cordelia’s love for her distressed father: it’s this love that has impelled her to return to Britain with the French army; Lear is currently at Dover, and has partly recovered his wits, but still won’t consent to see Cordelia because he is too ashamed of the wrong he has done her.)
Kent hears news a Gentleman about Cordelia’s situation, and asserts the traditional view that “It is the stars, / The stars above us, govern our conditions. / Else one self mate and make could not beget / Such different issues” (818, 4.3.33-36 Quarto). That is, else how could such differences be between three sisters of the same king? Lear, it is said, is in Dover and somewhat recovered, but he is still too ashamed of what he has done to Cordelia to see her.
Act 4, Scene 4. (817-19, Cordelia commands that a search party locate Lear, and solicits medical help for him; she also confirms that she is ready to do battle with the British.)
Cordelia, meantime, voices her devotion to her father in the language of the Gospels: “It is thy business that I go about” (819, 4.4.23), she says, echoing Christ in Luke 2:49. [29] Cordelia also says that she is ready to take on the British army that is marching against her (793, 4.4.23-30).
Kent is moving towards casting off his “Caius” disguise, but not just yet. (792, 4.3.52-53)
Act 4, Scene 5. (819-20, Regan grills Oswald about Edmund and Goneril, and confesses to him that she means to marry Edmund; Regan enlists Oswald to discourage Goneril from vying with her for Edmund’s affection.)
Regan shows her jealousy over Goneril’s desire for Edmund, and tries to enlist Oswald: “My lord is dead; Edmund and I have talked, / And more convenient is he for my hand / Than for your lady’s” (820, 4.5.30-32). Oswald is also told that he should kill Gloucester, lest he incite the people to compassion (820, 4.5.37-38). So we now know that Regan and Goneril are involved in a primal struggle for Edmund’s sexual attentions.
Act 4, Scene 6. (820-27, Edgar pretends to help Gloucester jump off of Dover’s high cliff; Gloucester believes he has jumped, and faints; Edgar, now assuming the identity of a peasant, claims the gods saved Gloucester’s life; Lear speaks with Gloucester, sharing his insights about human frailties and misdeeds; when Cordelia’s search party approaches, Lear runs away; Oswald enters and tries to murder Gloucester, but Edgar kills him first, and discovers on his person a letter from Goneril to Edmund confirming a plot to kill Albany.)
Near the play’s beginning, the Earl of Gloucester had abandoned Edgar over Edmund’s lies. The father credulously believed that the world had been turned upside down, and his fear of betrayal made him supremely susceptible to it. Now Gloucester is in suicidal despair.
Edgar, now dressed as a rustic, does for Gloucester what Cordelia could not do for her father: he graces his way forward with a lie: “You are now within a foot / Of th’extreme verge” (821, 4.6.27). Some may take Edgar’s maintenance of his rustic disguise as excessive, but in this play, extreme actions counter states of extreme error. Extreme, too, is Edgar’s dizzying description of the cliffs and the drop-off at Dover’s edge, which helps to pull in not only Gloucester but us.
Edgar’s project for Gloucester is a remedy that Lear’s rash behavior has helped to make necessary, although we shouldn’t blame him too harshly for others’ downward spiral. Regan, Goneril, Cornwall, Edmund, and Oswald are responsible for their own misdeeds. There is some comedy in this scene since Gloucester’s fall is only onto the stage’s bare planks, and it comes right after his bracing declaration, “O you mighty gods! / This world do I renounce, and in your sights / Shake patiently my great affliction off” (821, 4.6.37-38).
The old man’s fake descent turns out to be a fortunate fall. [30] With yet another of Edgar’s stellar efforts to make Gloucester believe his survival is a miracle, he gets the patience he needs: “Henceforth I’ll bear / Affliction till it do cry out itself, / ‘Enough, enough,’ and die” (822, 4.6.77-79).
Now patient, Gloucester is confronted with a flower-decked Lear, who apparently hasn’t recovered his wits after all. Edgar calls him “a side-piercing sight” (823, 4.6.87), adding a Christ-like aura to our vision of Lear as a suffering, dying, universal man. Lear asks if Gloucester is “Goneril with a white beard” (823, 4.6.97), and reproves his former ministers: “They told me I was everything. ‘Tis a lie, I am not ague-proof” (823, 4.6.104-05).
Everywhere Lear looks, he sees selfishness and demonic sexuality at the base of things: “Let copulation thrive” (823, 4.6.112), he bellows, and declares of women, “Down from the waist they are centaurs …” (823, 4.6.122). This rant culminates in a dark vision of systemic injustice and hypocrisy, beginning with “the great image of authority”: namely, “a dog’s obeyed in office…” (823, 4.6.153, see 152-66). The worst offenders, says Lear, are the authorities, who are supposed to enforce the laws and yet do not themselves obey them.
Lear’s vision is as strong as that of the Romantic prophet William Blake, who writes in “London” from his 1795 Songs of Experience, of a speaker who can hear “How the chimney-sweeper’s cry / Every blackening church appals, / And the hapless soldier’s sigh / Runs in blood down palace-walls.” [31] The King has finally accepted the Fool’s offer of the title “Fool,” in the sense of someone who is empowered to voice insight into his own and others’ follies.
Lear’s eloquence peters out in an exhausted, enraged repetition of a single word: “And when I have stol’n upon these son-in-laws, / Then kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill!” (825, 4.6.180-81) As so often in tragedy, genuine insight comes at the cost of one’s power to make anything right again.
The sixth scene ends with Edgar putting an end Oswald, who has stumbled upon Gloucester and tried to kill him for the prize Regan has offered (826, 4.6.219-22). In Oswald’s purse he discovers Goneril’s treasonous letter to Edmund, imploring him to kill Albany (827, 4.6.253-59). Edgar again calls Gloucester “father,” and although this does not amount to a full revelation of his identity, it seems to comfort the elder, and with that Edgar leads him to shelter.
Act 4, Scene 7. (827-30, in the French camp, Cordelia welcomes Kent; Lear finally awakens with a doctor’s aid, and recognizes Cordelia; expecting only hatred, the King instead receives love and loyalty from the current Queen of France, and the two reconcile.)
Cordelia now knows Kent’s true identity even though he is still dressed as “Caius,” and thanks him for his efforts on Lear’s behalf. All the same, Kent will keep his “Caius” disguise for now.
Awakened by his doctor, Lear begins to recover his wits, but not without misgivings: he says to Cordelia, “You do me wrong to take me out o’th’ grave. / Thou art a soul in bliss, but I am bound / Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears / Do scald like molten lead” (828, 4.7.41-44).
When Cordelia seeks his benediction, Lear begs her instead, “Pray, do not mock me. / I am a very foolish, fond old man, /…. / Methinks I should know you …” (829, 4.7.55, 61). He fully understands the wrong he has done her—something he had begun to sense earlier, even as far back as the first act, when he spoke the single line, “I did her wrong.” [32]
Lear expects anything but love from Cordelia, whom he now recognizes, but she tells him gently that there is “No cause, no cause” (829, 4.7.73) why she should not love him. Lear had to seek into the cause of his other daughters’ “hard hearts,” [33] but for Cordelia’s loyalty needs no dissection or interrogation. As Portia says in The Merchant of Venice, Act 4, Scene 1, “The quality of mercy is not strained”—it is not to be compelled. [34] So, too, love and loyalty should require no explanation.
ACT 5
Act 5, Scene 1. (830-31, Albany combines his army with Regan and Edmund’s forces to fend off the French invasion; disguised, Edgar shows Albany the letter purporting his death, and says he will bring forth a champion to defend the truth of this letter in combat; the triangulation death-match between Edmund, Regan, and Goneril intensifies: Edmund considers his options regarding marriage to either woman, and fixes his intent to have Cordelia and Lear executed in the British forces defeat the French.)
Albany joins his forces with those of Regan and Edmund in order to defeat the French invaders.
Meanwhile, Edmund, Goneril, and Regan are locked in a struggle for erotic and political supremacy as they prepare to fight Cordelia’s rescuing force. Regan interrogates Edmund sharply about his attraction to Goneril. (830, 4.7.9ff)
Edgar in disguise delivers to Albany the letter he found on Oswald revealing the plot against the life of Albany. In defense of its truth, says, Edgar, he will provide a chivalric contestant if victory smiles on the British (804, 5.1.40-46). Albany promises to read the letter.
Edmund plays both women against each other (831, 5.1.47-51), and plans to use Albany while the fighting is going on, and then dispose of him afterwards (831, 5.1.54-61).
Act 5, Scene 2. (832, fighting rages between the British and the French forces; the French are defeated, and Gloucester lapses into despair, but Edgar counsels endurance.)
The battle takes place, and the French are defeated. Lear and Cordelia are taken prisoner, and Gloucester has fallen into despair. Edgar is disappointed to find his father so depressed, and counsels him, “Men must endure / Their going hence even as their coming hither; / Ripeness is all” (832, 5.2.9-11).
Act 5, Scene 3. (832-40, Edmund casts Lear and Cordelia into prison and secretly orders their execution; Albany denounces Edmund and Goneril for their treasonous plotting, and asks for the champion Edgar promised; Edgar formally accuses Edmund and defeats him; Edgar reveals his identity and describes Gloucester’s death. A messenger conveys the deaths of Regan (poisoned by Goneril) and Goneril (by suicide); Kent enters in hope of finding Lear; Edmund, dying, confesses to ordering Lear and Cordelia’s murder, but it’s too late to save them: Lear arrives holding the dead Cordelia in his arms, and dies as he grieves. Albany asks Kent and Edgar to rule, but the final dispensation seems uncertain.
The French forces lose the battle, and Edmund captures Lear and Cordelia. Lear’s reconciliation with Cordelia is brief: “Come, let’s away to prison: We two alone will sing like birds i’th’ cage …” (805, 5.3.8-10, see 8-19). The old King predicts that he and Cordelia will participate in God’s mysterious knowledge of all things, knowing the ins and outs of his secret dispensation of affairs and men. As far as Lear is concerned, this knowledge places them above even the most highly stationed mortals (832, 5.3.18).
This eloquence is of no interest to Edmund, who cuts off Lear’s exalted utterance with a harsh command: “Take them away” (832, 5.3.19). Political and military events have outstripped the process whereby Lear has discovered his mistakes and recovered his identity and his affiliation with Cordelia. Edmund’s blunt order completes the triumph of literalism and matter-of-fact depravity over legitimate power, virtue, and (here) prophetic discourse.
Lear is rehumanized and endowed with new insight into what is right and wrong, what is human and what is not. But he and Cordelia present a threat to Edmund, so they must go.
Things aren’t simple for Edmund, either. Albany holds him in contempt and refuses to recognize him as an equal, which bodes ill for Edmund’s hopes to wield power in the new dispensation. His presence in the army camp provokes a life-and-death struggle between Goneril and Regan for his love (833-34, 5.3.55-75), and after he refuses to turn over the prisoners Lear and Cordelia (833, 5.3.44-52), Albany arrests him and Goneril for “capital treason” (835, 5.3.77). No sooner is this declared than Albany challenges Edmund (834, 5.3.84-87), and Edgar shows up to fight him in single combat.
Edmund, worshiper of nature though he may be, is now trapped into securing his ill-gotten gains, his newfound legitimacy as bestowed upon him first by Gloucester and then by Cornwall. He must accept Edgar’s challenge if he means to wield power in a newly settled order, and ends up hearing in his defeat the legitimate son’s pious declaration that “The gods are just and of our pleasant vices / Make instruments to plague us: / The dark and vicious place where thee he got / Cost him his eyes” (836, 5.3.162-65).
Edgar reports to Albany that Gloucester has died of grief. Regan, meanwhile, has been poisoned by Goneril, who then takes her own life after she sees Edmund gravely wounded (837-38, 5.3.199-202).
In dying, Edmund shows some insight: “all three / Now marry in an instant” (838, 5.3.203-04), and tries to redeem himself by revealing his decision to execute Lear and Cordelia. (838, 5.3.218-22)
Edgar reclaims the honor of his title and avenges Edmund’s betrayal of Gloucester, and to some extent he has reasserted the principle of a divine moral order. But the Gloucester and Lear plots do not come together: Lear and Cordelia have run out of time, and Edmund’s repentance cannot save Cordelia from being hanged or Lear from dying of grief: “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!” And the old King dies, believing at the end that Cordelia has shown signs of life. (840, 5.3.282-84)
In the anonymous source play The True Chronicle History of King Leir (now sometimes attributed to Thomas Kyd), [35]Cordelia and Lear survive, and in Nahum Tate’s 1681 revival, [36] the King and Cordelia survive, as does Gloucester. Neoclassical critics and audiences in particular found the actual Shakespearean ending an intolerable violation of representational ethics: the good must be rewarded, and the wicked must be punished. [37]
In Cordelia’s death, the justice of the heavens is not at all apparent. It is true that vice is thoroughly disgusting in King Lear, but virtue is by no means shown triumphant. We must endure the old king’s “going hence” in unbearable agony and near incoherence. [38]
By the end of Shakespeare’s play, nobody really wants to rule Lear’s blighted kingdom anymore. Albany asks both Kent and Edgar to take the reigns of power together, but Kent issues what sounds like a verbal suicide note. Evidently, sole responsibility will be left to Edgar, but his concluding lines are oddly unsatisfying as a summation: “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” (840, 5.3.299-302).
If the play has been a quest for the restoration of authority, Edgar is hardly the quester who heals the Fisher King and makes the waters flow, as in the legend that T. S. Eliot used for his poem The Waste Land. [39] But Shakespeare’s play is, of course, a tragedy and not a romance. What it may teach us, in the end, is consonant with what many tragedies from the time of Aeschylus onward have taught; namely, that the deepest kind of insight into humanity does not accompany the workings of earthly power. But what of the insight in King Lear? What is it?
In the end, Edgar can’t do much more than repeat the truism voiced earlier by his father, Gloucester, who derived from his superstitions the notion that better days have been. There’s no easy accommodation, no magical reconciliation, no middle ground to occupy—just a pair of departed royal visionaries and a remnant of confused and disillusioned people repeating unconvincing truisms. The play’s characters have tried various different strategies of accommodation while recognizing the constrictions of nature, mortality, political power, and language, but no satisfying arrangements have emerged for maintaining civility and community.
Finally, even though King Lear has pagan trappings, it seems best to treat it as tinged with Christian principles, and it seems that within this framework, tragedy is constituted by the enormous gap between wisdom and felicity. Much human suffering is preventable, but at the deepest level, sorrow and loss are the only true teachers. At this level, even a great man like Lear is the “natural fool of fortune.” [40]
As for the play’s titled Fool, he had helped keep Lear away from self-pity, and had kept us from over-pitying the king. With his insouciant songs and verses, the Fool stands for something like artistic redemption. He knows that Lear is willing to listen to the truth in an eccentric form, unlike Regan and Goneril, whose disregard for his art stems from their own obscene literalism and savagery. Still, comfort is always, like Poor Tom, “a-cold” in King Lear: the Fool has to disappear, leaving Lear to face the impossibility of ever setting things right.
Edition. Greenblatt, Stephen et al., editors. The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies + Digital Edition. 3rd ed. W. W. Norton, 2016. ISBN-13: 978-0-393-93860-9.
Copyright © 2012, revised 2025 Alfred J. Drake
ENDNOTES
[1] See, for example, William Perneby’s 1599 treatise, A direction to death: teaching man the way to die well, that being dead, he may live ever ….This text is representative of the ars moriendi genre in English. As the main speaker says, “a man is to prepare himselfe to die ere euer hee comes to die, because the greatest worke a man hath to finish in this worlde, is to die….” London: Thomas Man, 1599. Oxford Text Archive. Accessed 3/21/2024.
[2] Kantorowicz, Ernst. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology. Princeton UP, 2016. Orig. published 1957. ISBN-13: 978-0691169231.
[3] The Norton note on pg. 767 glosses this term “addition” as “prerogatives.”
[4] Regarding the theory of the divine right of kings, see King James I’s Basilikon Doron. (EEBO U-Mich.)
[5] Shakespeare, William. The History of Henry the Fourth. Aka The First Part of Henry the Fourth. In The Norton Shakespeare: Histories, 3rd ed. 629-95. See 694, 5.4.151-52.
[6] Sir Thomas Wyatt’s writings show the struggle to maintain honesty in the court of Henry VIII, or any royal court. His poetry often takes it up as a theme, and his advisory letters to his sons are eloquent and heartfelt: In one of them, he writes, “if you will seem honest, be honest; or else seem as you are. Seek not the name without the thing ….” See the HiddenCause blog’s 8/4/2013 excellent article on Wyatt, “Renaissance Humanism comes to English letters: Wyatt, ‘I am as I am’.” Accessed 7/29/2024.
[7] On the “lord of misrule” tradition in medieval times, see “Medieval Misrule and Mayhem.” (english-heritage.org.uk.) Accessed 7/29/2024.
[8] Shakespeare, William. The Life of Henry the Fifth. Folio. In The Norton Shakespeare: Histories, 3rd ed. 790-857. Henry V, in disguise, says to the common soldier Bates, “I think the King is but a man, as I am” (830, 4.1.98).
[9] We will see later that Edmund’s undoing will stem from this concern for that which he seems most to despise. If he wants to take up a position within the new social and political dispensation in Britain, he cannot ignore that demands made upon his honesty and legitimacy.
[10] Before composing In Memoriam A.H.H., the Victorian author Alfred Tennyson had become acquainted with the work of Sir Charles Lyell and other pre-Darwinian natural scientists. See In Memoriam A. H. H.See in particular poems LV-LVII (that is, 55-57).
[11] Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Second Quarto with additions from the Folio. In The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies, 3rd ed. Combined text 358-447. See 416, 4.1.27, 29.
[12] Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Second Quarto with additions from the Folio. In The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies, 3rd ed. Combined text 358-447. See 435, 5.1.192-93.
[13] Machiavelli’s advice to the Medici rulers in The Prince would be more welcome to Goneril. See The Prince. (Gutenberg e-text.) Accessed 7/29/2024.
[14] Shakespeare, William. As You Like It. In The Norton Shakespeare: Comedies, 3rd ed. 673-731. Jaques’s “Seven Ages of Man” speech occurs at 696-97, 2.7.139-66: “All the world’s a stage ….”
[15] On the origin of the Poor Tom figure, see Daniel P. Mason’s article “Tom of Bedlam.” In The American Journal of Psychiatry, 171, Number 12. Dec. 1, 2014. (psychiatryonline.org). Accessed 7/29/2024. See also BBC.com’s “How Bedlam became London’s most iconic symbol.” Accessed 7/29/2024.
[16] The King says, “Then let them anatomize Regan, see what breeds about / her heart. Is there any cause in nature makes these / hard hearts?” (809, 3.6.70-72)
[17] Mentioned in the stage directions as “storm and tempest” after 798, 2.4.278.
[18] Sententia, pl. sententiae, are pithy sayings and summations, often taken from an ancient or otherwise respected source. Polonius’s advice to Laertes in Hamlet, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be …” is one example. See Wikipedia’s article Sententia. Accessed 7/29/2024.
[19] At 779, 1.4.142-43, when Lear asks him why he now sings so often, the Fool says, “I have used it, nuncle, e’er since thou mad’st thy daugh- / ters thy mothers.”
[20] Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Second Quarto with additions from the Folio. In The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies, 3rd ed. Combined text 358-447. See 343, 1.2.104, where Claudius says to the Prince that reason’s “common theme / Is death of fathers ….”
[21] See Calderwood, James. Shakespeare and the Denial of Death. U Mass. Press, 1988. ISBN-13: 978-0870235825. See also Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death. Free Press, 1997. ISBN-13: 978-0684832401. Orig. published 1974.
[22] Shakespeare, William. Twelfth Night, or What You Will. In The Norton Shakespeare: Comedies, 3rd ed. 743-97. See the play’s concluding song at 797, 5.1.375ff.
[23] Norton’s footnote 1 on pg. 802 points out that the parody is leveled against the “Prophecy” often attributed by Early Modern readers with Chaucer: “When faith failes in Priestes sawes, / And Lords hestes are holden for lawes, / And robberie is tane for purchase, / And lechery for solace / Then shall the Realme of Albion / Be brought to great confusion. See George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie. (Gutenberg e-text.) Accessed 7/27/2024. On the issue of the Fool’s speech and critical/editorial tradition, see Misha Teramura’s 2019 article, “Prophecy and Emendation: Merlin, Chaucer, Lear’s Fool.”
[24] See Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Anglicana, Book VII. (Sacred-texts.com.) Accessed 7/27/2024.
[25] See King Lear 800-801, 3.2.1-9, 14-24.
[26] Shakespeare, William. The Life of Henry the Fifth. Folio. In The Norton Shakespeare: Histories, 3rd ed. 790-857. Henry V, in disguise, says to the common soldier Bates, “I think the King is but a man, as I am” (830, 4.1.98). This passage was also quoted in an earlier endnote.
[27] See Samuel Harsnett’s 1603 treatise A Declaration of Popish Impostures, Ch. 10 and Ch. 14.
[28] These are the Fool’s final words in the play. Apparently, he has said and done all that he can.
[29] The Norton editors point out the borrowed line in footnote 4 , pg. 819. See also Luke 2:49. (biblegateway.com, 1599 Geneva Bible.)
[30] Felix culpa tradition. Most famously, in his Enchiridion VII, Augustine writes, “Melius enim iudicavit de malis benefacere, quam mala nulla esse permittere.” Translated: “For God determined it better to bring good from evil than not to allow any evil to exist at all.”
[31] Blake, William. ”London” from Songs of Innocence & of Experience. (Gutenberg e-text.) Accessed 7/29/2024.
[32] King Lear 783, 1.5.20.
[33] Lear says, “Then let them anatomize Regan, see what breeds about / her heart. Is there any cause in nature makes these / hard hearts?” (809, 3.6.70-72) Also quoted in a previous endnote.
[34] Shakespeare, William. The Comical History of The Merchant of Venice. In The Norton Shakespeare: Comedies, 3rd ed. 467-521. See 508, 4.1.182.
[35] Anonymous (or Thomas Kyd), 1605. The True Chronicle Historie of King Leir. (Folger.) Accessed 7/29/2024.
[36] Tate, Nahum. King Lear. (internetshakespeare.uvic.ca.) Accessed 7/29/2024.
[37] Here is Dr. Johnson’s pronouncement in Rambler #4: “In narratives where historical veracity has no place, I cannot discover why there should not be exhibited the most perfect idea of virtue; of virtue not angelical, nor above probability … but the highest and purest that humanity can reach…. Vice, for vice is necessary to be shewn, should always disgust; nor should the graces of gaiety, or the dignity of courage, be so united with it, as to reconcile it to the mind….” (excerpted from johnsonessays.com. Matt Kirkland.) Accessed 7/29/2024.
[38] King Lear 809, 3.6.42.
[39] Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land. (American Poetry Foundation.) Accessed 7/29/2024. See also Jessie L. Weston’s 1920 study From Ritual to Romance. Eliot used it while writing his poem. (Gutenberg e-text.) Accessed 7/29/2024.
[40] King Lear 825, 4.6.185. See also Shakespeare, William. The Most Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. Second Quarto. In The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies, 3rd ed. 209-77. At 245, 3.1.134, when he realizes he’ll be executed or banished for killing Tybalt, Romeo exclaims, “Oh, I am fortune’s fool.”
Last Updated on April 11, 2025 by ajd_shxpr