King Lear (2 page)

Shakespeare never takes one side of a question. In the very opening lines of the play we discover that it is Edmund who has previously been unjustly exiled from home and excluded from parental care. Kent, the play’s best judge of character, initially describes Edmund as “proper”: he has the bearing of a gentleman, but his illegitimacy has deprived him of the benefits of society. His first soliloquy makes a good case for the unfairness of a social order that practices primogeniture
and stigmatizes bastardy; his discovery near the moment of death that “Edmund was beloved” is curiously touching. He is not, then, an uncomplicated stage “Machiavel,” an embodiment of pure, unmotivated evil.

Astrology and astronomy were synonymous in the Elizabethan age: the signs of the times were read in the signs of the skies.
King Lear
is a play about bad times. The state drifts rudderless, child turns against parent, the clouds of war gather, the king and all around him totter on the brink of the abyss. So it is that Gloucester blames it all on the stars: “These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us.” Edmund, however, disputes this: “an admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition on the charge of a star!” He argues that things often regarded as the product of the “natural order” are actually shaped by “custom”—for him, primogeniture and legitimacy would come into this category. The position articulated here is close to that of the sixteenth-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne in the closing section of his
Apology of Raymond Sebond:
any custom abhorred or outlawed by one nation is sure to be praised or practiced by another. But if you have nothing save custom, no divinely sanctioned hierarchy, then where does your value system come from? Montaigne’s answer is blind faith in God, whereas Edmund, like an apologist before the letter for the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, commits himself to “nature” as a principle of survival and self-seeking.

Gloucester’s philosophical orientation, meanwhile, turns toward the classical Stoic idea of finding the right timing for death. After his mock suicide, he says “henceforth I’ll bear / Affliction till it do cry out itself / ‘Enough, enough’ and die.” But he cannot sustain this position: when Lear and Cordelia lose the battle, he is found in “ill thoughts again,” wanting to rot. Edgar responds with more Stoic advice: “Men must endure / Their going hence, even as their coming hither: / Ripeness is all.” But this idea of ripe timing doesn’t work out: by mistiming the revelation of his own identity to Gloucester, Edgar precipitates his father’s death.

The play’s pattern, then, is of Stoic comfort not working. At the beginning of the fourth act Edgar reflects on his own condition and cheers himself up with thoughts about the worst, but then his father
comes on blinded and he is instantly confounded—things are worse than before. If the case of Edgar reveals the deficiency of Stoic comfort, that of Albany demonstrates the inadequacy of belief in divine justice. His credo is that the good shall taste “The wages of their virtue” and the bad drink from the poisoned “cup of their deservings.” This scheme works for the bad, but not for the good. In the closing scene, Albany tries to orchestrate events, to make order out of chaos, but each of his resolutions is followed by new disaster: he greets the restored Edgar, then immediately hears the news of Gloucester’s death, then the news of the two queens’ deaths; then Kent comes on, dying; then in response to the news that Cordelia is to be hanged, Albany says “The gods defend her!,” only for Lear to enter with her in his arms already hanged. The gods have not defended her. Then Albany tries to give power back to Lear—and he promptly dies. Then he tries to persuade Kent and Edgar to divide the kingdom, and Kent promptly goes off to die.

The final lines of the play—given to different speakers in the Quarto and Folio versions of the text—suggest that the lesson has been learned that Stoic comfort will not do, that it is better to speak what we feel than what we ought to say. The Folio’s ascription of this speech to Edgar makes more dramatic sense than the Quarto’s to Albany, since Edgar’s stripping down in Act 3 is an exposure to feeling, occurring in conjunction with Lear’s feeling with and for the poor, which makes him the character better prepared to voice this sentiment.

The Stoic philosopher tries to be ruled by reason rather than passion. But for the great sixteenth-century humanist Desiderius Erasmus in his
Praise of Folly
, there is inhumanity in the notion that to be wise you must suppress the emotions. The most important thing is to “feel”—as Gloucester has to learn, to see the world not rationally but “feelingly.” Erasmus’ personification of Folly points out that friendship is among the highest human values, and it depends on emotion. The people who show friendship to Lear (Fool, Kent disguised as
Caius, Edgar disguised as Poor Tom and then as Peasant) and to Gloucester (Servants, Old Man) are not the wise or the rich.

We are ruled by our passions and our bodies; we go through life performing a series of different roles of which we are by no means in control. “All this life of mortal men, what is it else but a certain kind of stage play?” asks Erasmus’ Folly. Lear echoes the sentiment: “When we are born, we cry that we are come / To this great stage of fools.” In the great theater of the world, with the gods as audience, we are the fools on stage. Under the aspect of Folly, we see that a king is no different from any other man. The trappings of monarchy are but a costume: this is both Folly’s and Lear’s discovery.

Erasmus’ Folly tells us that there are two kinds of madness—one is the thirst for gold, lust, and power. That is the madness of Regan, Cornwall, Edmund, and the rest. Their madness is what Lear rejects. The second madness is the desirable one, the state of folly in which “a certain pleasant raving, or error of the mind, delivereth the heart of that man whom it possesseth from all wonted carefulness, and rendreth it divers ways much recreated with new delectation” (
Praise of Folly
, in the sixteenth-century English translation of Sir Thomas Chaloner). This “error of the mind” is a special gift of the goddess Folly. Thus Lear is happy when his mind is free, when he is running around in his madness like a child on a country holiday: “Look, look, a mouse! Peace, peace, this piece of toasted cheese will do’t.” Lines such as that bring a smile to our faces, not least because the mouse isn’t really there. Lear repeats his “look, look” at the end of his life. Cordelia is dead, but he deceives himself into the belief that she lives—that the feather moves, that her breath mists the looking-glass. His final words are spoken in the delusion that her lips are moving: “Look on her, look, her lips, / Look there, look there!” Her lips are not moving, just as there is no mouse, but it is better for Lear that he should not know this. Philosophers say that it is miserable to be deceived; Folly replies that it is most miserable “not to be deceived,” for nothing could be further from the truth than the notion that man’s happiness resides in things as they actually are. Lear’s Fool says that he would fain “learn to lie.” Lying is destructive in the mouths of Goneril, Regan, and Edmund at the beginning of
the play, but Cordelia—who has a special bond with the Fool—has to learn to lie. At the beginning, she can only tell the truth (hence her banishment), but later she lies beautifully and generously when Lear says that she has cause to do him wrong, and she replies, “No cause, no cause.”

The closing section of Erasmus’
Praise of Folly
undertakes a serious praise of Christian “madness.” Christ says that the mystery of salvation is hidden from the wise and given to the simple. He delighted in simple people, fishermen and women. He chose to ride an ass when he could have mounted a lion. The language of his parables is steeped in simple, natural things—lilies, mustard seed, sparrows, a language analogous to that of Lear in his madness. The fundamental folly of Christianity is its demand that you throw away your possessions. Lear pretends to do this in Act 1, but actually he wants to keep “The name and all th’addition to a king.” Only when he loses his knights, his clothes, and his sanity does he find happiness.

But he also becomes kind. Little things show us this: in Act 1, he’s still always giving orders. Even in the storm he continues to make demands: “Come, unbutton here.” But in the end he learns to say “please” and “thank you”: “Pray you undo this button: thank you, sir.” He has begun to learn true manners not at court, but through the love he shows for Poor Tom, the image of unaccommodated man, the image of himself: “Did’st thou give all to thy daughters? And art thou come to this?” True wisdom comes not in Gloucester’s and Edgar’s words of Stoic comfort or Albany’s hapless faith in divine providence, but in moments of folly and love, as in this exchange:

Patience is the boast of the Stoic. It’s a retainer like the hundred knights. To achieve true wisdom, you must let it go. You must let even the wits, the sanity, go. What you must keep are the
pity
and the
blessing
. Pity and blessing are at the very heart of
King Lear
. Pity
means the performance of certain deeds, such as showing kindness to strangers. Blessing is a performative speech act, an utterance that effects an action by the very act of being spoken. Typically blessing is accompanied by a small but forceful
gesture
, a kind of action that is of vital importance on the bare boards of the Shakespearean theater.

The play ends on a note of apocalypse, millennial doom. A trumpet sounds three times to announce the final showdown. Then when Lear enters with his beloved daughter dead in his arms, loyal Kent asks, “Is this the promised end?” He is thinking of Doomsday, but the line is also a sly allusion on Shakespeare’s part: in all previous versions of the Lear story, several of which would have been familiar to members of his audience, Cordelia survives and Lear is restored to the throne. The death of Cordelia is all the more painful because it is not the end “promised” by previous literary and theatrical tradition.

King Lear
is a play full of questions. The big ones go unanswered. The biggest of all is Lear’s “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” In this world, there is no rhyme or reason, no pattern of divine justice. Here again, Shakespeare departs strikingly from his source, the old anonymous play of
King Leir
, in which Christian providence prevails. Shakespeare reimagines his material in a bleak pagan world. In this, he not only looks back to the past, but also anticipates a future that is ours—a time when the old religious hierarchies and moral certainties have been stripped away.

But in a strange way an answer
is
to be found in Edgar’s reply to Kent’s line about the promised end. A question is answered with a question: “Or image of that horror?” It’s not
really
the end of the world; it’s an
image
of the end. Hamlet said that the player holds up a mirror to nature, but in
King Lear
we are again and again reminded that what you see in a mirror is an image, not the thing itself. Gloucester doesn’t really jump off the cliff: it’s all an elaborate game, designed by Edgar to teach him a lesson. In uncertain times, we need images, games, and experiments as ways of trying to make sense of our world. We need plays. That is why, four centuries on, we keep going back to Shakespeare and his dazzling mirror world in which everyone is a player.

Looked at in one way, the world of
King Lear
, with its images of doom, its mad king, scheming ugly sisters, its fool and its (pretend)
mad Bedlam beggar, could not be further from
ordinary life
. But looked at another way, it is an image of ordinary things, but seen in
extremity
. It is a play that has more time for a language of ordinary things—garden waterpots, wrens, and toasted cheese—than for the “glib and oily art” of courtly speech.

So is the whole play, like the “Dover cliff” scene, an elaborate game designed by Shakespeare to teach us a lesson? Only if we think of it as a lesson in feeling, not in high-minded judgment. To be truly responsive to the play we must, as the final speech has it, “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.” To be human is to
see feelingly
, not to fall back on easy moralizing, the “ought to say” that characterizes people like Albany. And seeing feelingly is to do with our sympathetic response to the images that confront us, both on the stage and in the great theater of the world. Lear becomes human when he stops caring about one kind of
image
(the glorious trappings of monarchy) and instead confronts another: the image of raw human being, of a fool and a Bedlam beggar, of poor naked wretches. Come the last trump, the play tells us, we will be judged by our fellow feeling for the dispossessed, not our status in society. In this, as in so much else, Shakespeare speaks not only for his own age, but for ours.