King Lear

“King Lear,”
wrote the early nineteenth-century Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in his
Defence of Poetry
, “may be judged to be the most perfect specimen of the dramatic art existing in the world.” For all the Romantics,
Lear
was Shakespeare’s most “sublime” and “universal” play. John Keats wrote a sonnet “On sitting down to read
King Lear
once again”: having burned his way through the play, he would feel somehow purified and regenerated. For Keats’ contemporary Charles Lamb, Shakespeare’s anatomy of the human condition was so profound and tempestuous that the play seemed too vast for the stage. It is the centerpiece of his essay “On the tragedies of Shakspeare, considered with reference to their fitness for stage representation”:

For Lamb, the technical necessities of the theater—the backstage machinery that creates the storm, the actor’s repertoire of gestures, looks, and vocal variations—are exterior and superficial distractions from the play’s inward and remorseless exploration of reason and madness, humankind and nature, the corruptions and abuses of power. Few theater lovers would agree with Lamb, but few would deny that the role of Lear presents perhaps the greatest of all challenges to the Shakespearean actor. There is a theater saying that by the time you’re old enough to play it, you are too old to play it.

A generation before the Romantics, Dr. Samuel Johnson confessed that even reading the play was almost too much to bear: “I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia’s death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor.” The shock for Johnson was both emotional and moral. The death of Cordelia—Shakespeare’s boldest alteration of his sources, in all of which she survives—was an extraordinary breach of the principal that Johnson called “poetical justice,” whereby “a play in which the wicked prosper, and the virtuous miscarry, may doubtless be good, because it is a just representation of the common events of human life: but since all reasonable beings naturally love justice, I cannot easily be persuaded, that the
observation of justice makes a play worse; or, that if other excellencies are equal, the audience will not always rise better pleased from the final triumph of persecuted virtue.” It had been in order to impose poetical justice on the play that during the 1680s Nahum Tate, author of the hymn “While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night,” had rewritten
King Lear
with a happy ending, in which Cordelia was married off to Edgar. Johnson had some sympathy with this alteration, which held the stage for a century and a half, whereas for Lamb it was yet one more indication that the theater was not to be trusted with Shakespeare’s sublime vision of universal despair.

Written soon after King James united the thrones of England and Scotland, and performed in his royal presence at Whitehall,
King Lear
reveals the dire consequences of dividing a united kingdom. In principle, the aged Lear’s decision to take voluntary retirement does not seem a bad thing: he is losing his grip on matters of state, his daughters and sons-in-law are “younger strengths” with more energy for government, and, most important, the division is intended to prevent a future civil war between rival claimants, which would have been a definite possibility in the absence of a son who would automatically inherit the whole kingdom. But can an anointed king abnegate his role at will? If he does, he certainly should not expect to retain the trappings of power. Goneril and Regan have a case for stripping him of his rowdy, extravagant retinue of one hundred knights.

Lear’s mistake is to link the division of the kingdom to a public show of affection. The two older sisters, well versed in the “glib and oily art” of courtly flattery, tell him what he wants to hear, but Cordelia cannot. She is one of the play’s truth tellers and simply lacks the capacity or the experience to dress her love in fine rhetoric. Lear knows that she loves him best, but we may assume that until this moment her love has always been expressed privately. As youngest and unmarried daughter, Cordelia has probably never spoken publicly before the court. Lear’s intention for the opening scene
is that it will be Cordelia’s coming out: she is supposed to give public expression to her great love and in return she will be rewarded with the richest portion of the kingdom and the most prized husband. He does not bargain on her inability to play the role in which he has cast her. Kings and earls do not necessarily have to be blind to true virtue—witness the examples of Kent and France—but Lear, too long used to having his own way and hearing only the words of flatterers, has blinded himself. Only when he has been stripped of the fine clothes and fine words of the court, has heard truth in the mouths of a fool and a (supposed) Bedlam beggar, does he find out what it really means to be human.

Where
Macbeth
and
Othello
are focused tightly upon a single plotline, the action of
Lear
greatly extends the technique of parallel plotting with which Shakespeare had experimented in
Hamlet
, where Laertes and Fortinbras serve as foils to the hero. In
Lear
, the Gloucester family plot is a sustained presence. Gloucester is another father who is blind to the true nature of his children; that blindness leads, in Shakespeare’s cruelest literalization of metaphor, to the plucking out of his eyes. Edmund corresponds to the wicked daughters; several of the play’s many letters pass between them. It is wholly appropriate that he should end up promised to them both. Like the king’s favorite daughter, Cordelia, Edgar (who is the king’s godson) is unjustly exiled from home and excluded from parental care. It is fitting to the parallel structure of the twin plots that the play ends in the Folio version with him returning to take the reins of power, just as there is a certain, though very different, logic to Nahum Tate’s infamous Restoration-period rewrite.