In this Study Guide, we’ll approach King Lear by interweaving an Act-by-Act reading, based on exercises and questions, with discussions of themes, language and characters.

The Excellence of King Lear

The Tragedy of King Lear breaks through the beliefs and stories that many of us use as shields and distractions on life’s journey. In this work of world literature, written after Hamlet and before Macbeth, Shakespeare confronts his audiences with unadorned truths about human blindness, weakness, and suffering. He exposes nature’s indifference and people’s vulnerability to malice and accident. King Lear delves with uncompromising realism into the relationship between parents and children. As a drama that fearlessly crosses so many boundaries, therefore, Shakespeare’s King Lear is not comfortable to read or watch. Yet paradoxically beauty emerges from this wreckage of hope and illusion—beauty of language and also a humane beauty.

In a letter that he wrote to relatives in 1817, the young John Keats commented on the unexpected gifts that King Lear bestows on its readers:

The excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty and Truth—examine King Lear—you will find this exemplified throughout.

So I hope that you will read this play with attention now, and be inspired to immerse yourself again in its Beauty and Truth in the years to come. Keats expanded on these qualities in a famous poem, in a way that may also be relevant to King Lear:

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
(“Ode on a Grecian Urn”)

The Tragic Double Action

[The double action of King Lear] has certain strictly dramatic advantages….To go no further, the secondary plot…provides a most effective contrast between its personages and those of the main plot.…but its chief value lies elsewhere and is not merely dramatic. It lies in the fact—in Shakespeare without a parallel—that the sub-plot simply repeats the theme of the main story….This repetition does not simply double the pain with which the tragedy is witnessed: it startles and terrifies by suggesting that the folly of Lear and the ingratitude of his daughters are no accident of merely individual aberrations, but that in that dark cold world some fateful malignant influence is abroad, turning the hearts of the father against their children and of the children against their fathers….Hence, too, as well as from other sources, comes that feeling which haunts us in King Lear, as though we were witnessing something universal—a conflict not so much of particular persons as of the powers of good and evil in the world. (A.C. Bradley. Shakespearean Tragedy. London: Macmillan, 1958: 214-215)

In this Study Guide, we’ll approach King Lear by interweaving an Act-by-Act reading, based on exercises and questions, with discussions of themes, language and characters.

STUDY EXERCISE ONE: SHAKESPEARE’S KING LEAR, ACT ONE

References in this Guide are to the Penguin edition of Shakespeare’s King Lear, edited by George Hunter and introduced by Kiernan Ryan.

Test your understanding of Act One by answering these questions:

1. Outwardly congenial and packed with masculine humour, the exchange that opens Scene 1 yet hints at a moral blindness on Gloucester’s part which later events will expose only too clearly. What does Gloucester’s moral blindness consist of?
2. Summarise the sequence of events in Scene 1 by which Lear divests himself of kingly power in favour of Goneril and Regan and their husbands, and disinherits Cordelia.
3. Briefly explicate Kent’s part in the subplot and main plot of Act 1.
4. Trace the sequence of events in Scenes 3-5 by which Lear comes to end Act 1 cast out from Goneril’s protection.
5. Briefly explicate the role of Oswald the Steward in Act 1.
6. In Act 1, Lear’s disillusionment about his daughters is well advanced before Edmund’s elaborate deception of Gloucester is complete. How does Shakespeare achieve this? What else can you observe about the parallel development of the sub- and main plots in Act 1, i.e. the “double action” of King Lear?

The Conflict between Good and Evil

Bradley is right to draw attention to good and evil as the basis of character groupings in King Lear. If Lear, Gloucester and Albany are set apart, the rest fall into two distinct groups, which are strongly, even violently, contrasted:

Cordelia—Goneril,
Kent—Regan,
Edgar—Edmund,
the Fool on one side, and Cornwall, Oswald on the other.

“Here we have unselfish and devoted love, there hard self-seeking. On both sides, further, the common quality takes an extreme form; the love is incapable of being chilled by injury, the selfishness of being softened by pity” (Bradley 215).

While unfashionable in the twenty-first century, Bradley’s analysis, based on the most fundamental of moral binaries, remains a valid approach to King Lear. This is because the unfolding tragedy relentlessly demolishes all sources of human hope except virtue. The mutual love of the listed “good” characters, ultimately including Lear, Gloucester and Albany, shines the more brightly by contrast with the selfishness of the “evil” characters. Even Edmund finally shows a capacity for redemptive action.

Moreover, the moral sensibility that drives King Lear is subtle and profound.

Neither Gloucester nor King Lear appears initially to be morally depraved—it is only later that their shallowness becomes clear. Gloucester jokes with Kent over having fathered an illegitimate son: “I have so often blushed to acknowledge him that now I am brazed to it.” (Act 1, Scene 1, lines 9-10). He is clearly proud of this “whoreson” whom he does not know, since for the last nine years Edmund has lived elsewhere.

Lear similarly does not know either his daughters or himself. Now aged over eighty, he seems to have reigned for years, effectively on the whole, since he has inspired Kent, the Fool and Cordelia with love and loyalty. However, Lear has grown complacent in his authority; egoism and vanity have deluded him into forgetting political truths and human vulnerability. His demand for extravagant avowals of love from his daughters shows that he has become blind to the seductiveness and cost of power. His retirement plan, to maintain the reverence, ceremony and privileges of kingship without the responsibility, is foolish:

Lear: Dost thou call me fool, boy?
Fool: All thy other titles thou hast given away; that thou wast born with.
(Act 1, Scene 4, lines 147-148)

When thwarted, Lear compounds his folly in Act One with hasty acts of cruelty against the people who truly love him: he banishes Kent and disinherits Cordelia. Lear’s grandiose and legalistic vows in dismissing Cordelia express childish anger and spite, as well as a gruesome imagination:

For by the sacred radiance of the sun,
The mysteries of Hecat and the night,
By all the operation of the orbs
From whom we do exist and cease to be,
Here I disclaim all my paternal care,
Propinquity and property of blood,
And as a stranger to my heart and me
Hold thee from this for ever. The barbarous Scythian,
Or he that makes his generation messes
To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom
Be as well neighboured, pitied and relieved
As thou my sometime daughter.
(Act 1, Scene 1, lines 108-119)

Harold Bloom warns nevertheless that disapproval of Lear in Act One should not go too far: “The crucial foregrounding of the play, if we are to understand it at all, is that Lear is lovable, loving and greatly loved, by anyone at all worthy of our own affection and approbation” (Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. London: Fourth Estate, 1999: 479).

Cordelia demonstrates a striking ethical purity that highlights her sisters’ and Lear’s moral relativism. She is determined to be true, both to herself and to truth as an abstract ideal: “So young, my lord, and true./ Lear: Let it be so! Thy truth then be thy dower!” (Act 1, Scene 1, line 107). The King of France’s determination to marry Cordelia without lands or dowry, and in opposition to Burgundy’s withdrawal, is a fairytale ending to this scene of a princess’s rejection by a kingly father:

France: Fairest Cordelia, that art most rich, being poor,
Most choice, forsaken, and most loved, despised,
Thee and thy virtues here I seize upon.
(Act 1, Scene 1, lines 250-253)

France and Burgundy should probably be added to Bradley’s list of morally-opposed characters.

STUDY EXERCISE TWO: A DIFFERENT APPROACH

Kiernan Ryan’s introduction to the Penguin King Lear, xliii-li, argues an alternative to Bradley’s dichotomised analysis. Ryan argues that Goneril’s and Regan’s treatment of their father is “all too explicable, though no less unforgivable” (xlv). He finds in Cordelia’s refusal to flatter Lear “an inflexible obstinacy and a presumption of moral superiority that bear the unmistakable stamp of her progenitor” (xlvi). He argues too that Edgar “finds circuitous satisfaction” while secretly enacting “filial aggression” and against his father Gloucester (xlviii-xlix).

The last three pages of Ryan’s discussion (xlix-li) are a stimulating starting point for anyone wanting to develop a feminist reading of King Lear.

KING LEAR AND POLITICS
A. The Political Theme

The depth of Shakespeare’s thinking about government, kingship and politics is obvious, especially in his history plays, such as Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, and Julius Caesar. While politics are not a primary concern in King Lear, which is a family rather than a political tragedy, the same overall message emerges: a king’s poor decisions and his yielding to flatterers—in this case members of his own family—open the door to civil chaos, warfare and death. While most of Shakespeare’s history plays end with someone in command who is ready and willing to govern the country, King Lear closes with tragic uncertainty. Kent and Edgar’s assumption of authority seems destined to be short-lived (Act 5, Scene 3, lines 319-24).

George Orwell, a major novelist and astute political thinker, crystalised the realities of power with which King Lear confronts its audiences:

“Shakespeare starts by assuming that to make yourself powerless is to invite an attack. This does not mean that everyone will turn against you (Kent and the Fool stand by Lear from first to last), but in all probability someone will. If you throw away your weapons some less scrupulous person will pick them up. If you turn the other cheek, you will get a harder blow on it than you got on the first one.” (Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays. London, 1945).

Lear’s story belongs to legend rather than history. It is set in ancient, pre-Christian Britain, “in the yeare 3105, at what time Joas reigned in Juda” (Holinshed). The narrative is preserved in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain (ca. 1137), and later in Holinshed’s Chronicle (1587), which is a major Shakespearean source. In addition, Shakespeare drew aspects of his main and sub-plots plot from works in different genres, including The Chronicle History of King Leir, a play with a happy ending performed in 1594; Edmund Spencer’s long poem, The Faerie Queene (1590); and Sir Philip Sidney’s prose romance, Arcadia (1590): see Ryan’s summary: xxvii-xxxi.

B. The Jacobean Political Context

Read James Shapiro. 1606 William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear (London: Faber & Faber, 2015) for a fascinating account of the immediate historical and biographical context of King Lear‘s writing and production.

Shakespeare wrote King Lear between March 1603 and Christmas 1606, probably towards the end of this period. The first recorded performance was before James I and the royal court at Whitehall on 26 December 1606 (Kenneth Muir, ed. King Lear. Arden Shakespeare Paperbacks. New York: Random House, 1964: xx-xxi). Probably Richard Burbage played Lear and Robert Armin the Fool.

James ascended the throne in 1603, and soon afterwards became patron of Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, which were renamed the King’s Men. The King was popular early in his reign, and benefited especially from the nationalist fervour roused by the failure of the Gunpowder Plot on 5 November, 1605. James “was trying to get Parliament to approve of the union of England and Scotland and referring in speech after speech to the misfortunes that division brought to early Britain” (Muir xxiv). “Surely… a dramatist endowed with the shrewdness and sagacity of William Shakespeare, might well develop this same theme in a play that showed the audience the miseries that such a division brought to the king, to the dynasty and so to the whole nation” (John W. Draper. “The Occasion of King Lear.” Studies in Philology 34/2 (1937): 178-85; 180).

Draper goes on to explain that King Lear warns against dividing the kingdom:

“According to Holinshed, and obviously in Shakespeare, Lear is King of all Britain. The dividing of Lear’s realm is the first action depicted on the stage, and has every appearance of theatrical significance….”

According to Shakespeare, Lear divided his kingdom into three, and then, as a result of Cordelia’s refusal to flatter, re-divided her share between her two sisters, thus leaving two parts in his final division of the realm. Since the island of Great Britain is long and narrow north and south, the lines of demarcation must have east and west, separating it, in the first division, into a southern, a middle and a northern section. Cordelia’s must have been the middle part; for it is later divided between the other two. Thus, in the final division, the two realms of Goneril and Regan must roughly have corresponded to England and Scotland.

The titles of the respective husbands bear this out…Cornwall in ancient times was more extensive than the modern shire; and Lear seems appropriately to have given to this Duke the southern half of his dominions….Albany, then, apparently received the northern half of Britain; and his title at the opening of the play suggests that he was already duke of ancient ‘Albany,’ the region north of the Firths of Clyde and Forth, including all the Scottish Highlands” (180-182).

STUDY EXERCISE THREE:  EDMUND

“The play’s great villain, the superb and uncanny Edmund, is ice-cold, indifferent to Lear as he is even to his own father Gloucester, his half brother Edgar, and his lovers Goneril and Regan” (Bloom 479).

In Acts 1 and 2, how well does Edmund fit this assessment? Discuss Edmund’s energy, his relishing of evil, his humour, and any ironies associated with him, e.g., consider Act 2, Scene 1, lines 44-49; and lines 116-117.

King Lear: Act Two

In Act 1, Goneril plots with her steward Oswald to drive Lear’s party from her house by reducing Lear’s hundred personal retainers to fifty. Charged with delivering Lear’s letters to Gloucester, Kent fights Oswald at Gloucester’s house. Cornwall and Regan retaliate by placing Kent in the stocks, even though he is the king’s messenger. Lear struggles to maintain calm and dignity, but when Goneril arrives realises that his daughters have colluded to reduce his escort from fifty, to twenty-five, to none. The main plot builds through Act 2 to the point where Lear, locked out of Gloucester’s house, faces the storm. At the end of Act 1, Lear prayed:

O let me not be mad, sweet heaven!
Keep me in temper; I would not be mad.
(Scene 5, lines 43-45)

At the end of Act 2, his words are even more moving:

You think I’ll weep.
No, I’ll not weep.
I have full cause of weeping
(storm and tempest) but this heart
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws
Or ere I’ll weep. O Fool, I shall go mad!
(Scene 4, lines 277-282)

In Act 2, the sub-plot advances in step with the main plot. Edmund convinces Gloucester that his half brother Edgar has planned Gloucester’s murder. Hounded to execution by Cornwall and Gloucester, Edgar flees and takes on the guise of a naked and dirty Bedlam beggar, Poor Tom. Meanwhile in the main plot Gloucester tries to soften the conflict between Lear and his daughters; he pleads with Regan and Cornwall that Lear should receive shelter from the wild night and bleak winds: “For many miles about/There’s scarce a bush.”

STUDY EXERCISE 4: LEAR’S FOOL

In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Feste is the wise fool who reveals the realities that underlie the delusions and the impossible aspirations of the central characters. The Fool’s part in King Lear, probably written for the same virtuoso actor, is similar. Find these examples of the Fool’s truth-telling in Acts 1 and 2:

1. That Lear was a fool for dividing his kingdom between his daughters;
2. That Kent was a fool for taking the part of someone out of favour;
3. That lords and great men are sometimes sharers in folly;
4. That a parent is foolish to hand over his power and possessions to his children before his death;
5. That Regan’s love for her father is a twin with Goneril’s love for him;
6. That Lear has become old without becoming wise;
7. That those who serve great men for gain will decamp as soon as the great man ceases to be great.

The Family Theme in King Lear

Lear’s confrontations with Goneril and Regan in Acts 1 and 2 derive much of their theatrical power from the time it takes for Lear fully to comprehend his daughters’ rejection of him. Up to the end of Act 2, when Regan and Cornwall simply turn their backs, thereby shutting Lear out to perish in the violent night, Goneril and Regan maintain a filial and caring outward demeanour; they speak “nicely,” while dis-empowering their father both literally and figuratively:

Regan: 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.
(Act 2, Scene 4, lines 141-145)

Typically for King Lear, this speech disturbs because it highlights a truth—it captures the patronising tone that sometimes invades younger people’s addresses to the elderly. Shakespeare’s speaking of this truth breaks through another illusion about parent-child relationships.

When Lear begins to understand Goneril’s rejection of him and the hypocrisy of her earlier hyperbolic profession of love, he calls down on her the curses of infertility, old age and ugliness. If she is fertile he hopes that her child will be a torment to her:

Turn all her mother’s pains and benefits
To laughter and contempt, that she may feel
How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is
To have a thankless child.
(Act 1, Scene 4, lines 283-286)

The powerful metaphor of the serpent, which Lear uses more than once, has echoed down the centuries in English-speaking countries. With it Shakespeare shatters parents’ cherished hope and belief that children will always repay love and care with reciprocal love. In Lear’s family, the odds against this settle down at two to one, while in Gloucester’s family the odds turn out to be even.

Of course, the question of how much, and what kind of love Lear and Gloucester have given their children in raising them is an important issue that affects the fathers’ fates. The early Acts provide clues about this that you might like to consider. Whatever you conclude about Lear’s and Gloucester’s sins or virtues as fathers, however, Gloucester’s blinding is mesmerising drama that lifts to a crescendo the emotional and physical agony that Shakespeare infuses into the whole of King Lear, but especially into the crucial relationships between parents and their children.

The storm in Act 2 and Act 3, the tragedy’s most memorable event and symbol, is a powerful manifestation of Lear’s inner tumult. This builds to madness after he has recognised Goneril’s and Regan’s heartlessness for what it is. You might like to consider whether Gloucester’s blinding may also be a terrible symbol, both of his failure to acknowledge his inattentive parenting and of his misjudging of Edmund and Edgar that results. The irony is that Gloucester at last gains true insight into his sons at the moment of losing his physical sight:

Gloucester: All dark and comfortless. Where’s my son Edmund?
Edmund, enkindle all the sparks of nature
To quit this horrid act.
Regan: Out, treacherous villain!
Thou call’st on him that hates thee. It was he
That made the overture of thy treasons to us;
Who is too good to pity thee.
Gloucester: O my follies! Then Edgar was abused.
Kind gods, forgive me that and prosper him.
(Act 3, Scene 7, lines 84-91)

Writing at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the distinguished critic William Hazlitt considered King Lear “the best of all Shakespear’s [sic] plays, for it was the one in which he was the most in earnest. He was here fairly caught in the web of his own imagination.” Hazlitt went on to capture for his readers the devastating effects of Lear’s discovery of his daughters’ rejection:

The passion which [Shakespear] has taken as his subject is that which strikes its root deepest into the human heart; of which the bond is hardest to be unloosed; and the cancelling and tearing to pieces of which gives the greatest revulsion to the frame. This depth of nature, this force of passion, this tug and war of the elements of our being, this firm faith in filial piety, and the giddy anarchy and whirling tumult of the thoughts at finding this prop failing it, the contrast between the fixed, immovable basis of natural affection, and the rapid, irregular starts of the imagination, suddenly wrenched from all its accustomed holds and resting places in the soul, this is what Shakespear has given, and what nobody else but he could give. (Hazlitt. The Characters in Shakespear’s Plays. London; C. H. Reynell, 1817)

STUDY EXERCISE 5: ACT THREE

1. How well does Hazlitt’s description above, of the effects of filial impiety, capture the confusion and distress of Lear’s storm speeches in Act 3, Scene 2?
2. How do the events of Act 3 contribute to the characterisation of Cornwall, Kent, Edmund, Edgar, Oswald, Albany (who is a notable absence), and Gloucester?
3. At the end of Act 3, Gloucester discovers Edmund’s filial impiety in a manner even more devastating than Lear’s disillusionment about Regan and Goneril at the beginning of the Act. Briefly trace developments in the sub-plot through Act 3. Which scene provides King Lear with a traditional Act 3 climax?
4. What might Cornwall’s fatal wounding during Gloucester’s blinding lead an audience to conclude about the belief that a divine justice oversees human affairs?

The Theme of Human Nature and the Human Condition

As well as challenging treasured parental illusions, King Lear confronts its audiences with realities of human nature and the human condition that many of us try to forget.

In his early tragedy Romeo and Juliet (1595), Shakespeare presents generational conflict from the viewpoint of young people, who, unlike their elders, are wise in perceiving the true value of love and beauty. The protagonists of later tragedies, Hamlet (1600-1601), Othello (1603-1604), and Macbeth (1606), are likewise young to mature men. Shakespeare was at most forty-two when he wrote King Lear. He was not to bid a symbolic farewell to the theatre for another five years, in Prospero’s farewell to his magic that concludes The Tempest (1611). Yet the theme of old age is central to King Lear. Shakespeare’s imagination was caught up, as Hazlitt suggests, in life’s late storms and agonies. This tragedy confronts a typical dilemma of the elderly—a desire for rest and freedom in conflict with the practical wisdom of never surrendering power advocated, for example, by the Renaissance political theorist Machiavelli. For both Gloucester and Lear, however, political pragmatism, self-knowledge and the knowledge of others, all come too late; and they come at the cost of Gloucester’s sight and Lear’s sanity.

King Lear confronts readers and audiences also with human physical weakness and vulnerability. More than any of his contemporaries, Shakespeare is the poet of nature’s beauty and grace, but in King Lear nature is malevolent to man, portentous and even diabolical:

Edgar: Away! The foul fiend follows me.
Through the sharp hawthorn blow the cold winds.
(Act 3, Scene 4, lines 43-44)

Deafening thunder, wind and rain dominate the scenes in which Shakespeare presents the mad king, the fool and the naked beggar as a cross section of humanity. When, in company with the Kent and the Fool, Lear first meets Poor Tom, he famously questions:

“….Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou owest the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Ha! Here’s three on’s are sophisticated. Thou art the thing itself! Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.”                 (Act 3, Scene 4, lines 98-104)

In the face of nature’s violence and children’s ingratitude, the only hope for humanity to be salvaged from the storm scenes of Act 3 is mutual kindness. This appears in the shelter that Gloucester provides, Kent finds, and Lear offers to his Fool and the shivering Tom, and the Fool’s and Kent’s loyalty to him. In the midst of his suffering, Lear accordingly comes to understand the primary importance of altruistic love—caritas—in a passage that is often discussed by Christian interpreters of King Lear:

Lear: (To the Fool) In boy, go first.—You houseless poverty—
Nay, get thee in. I’ll pray and then I’ll sleep.
              Exit the Fool.
Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and window’d raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en
Too little care of this!
(Act 3, Scene 4, lines 26-33)

The storm scenes therefore dramatise, not only the dilemmas of old age, but also the sufferings of the poor, too often forgotten by well fed, well clothed and well sheltered audiences, both of Shakespeare’s time and later.

STUDY EXERCISE 6: ACT THREE

Reread the Act 3 speeches of the mad King Lear, the Fool and the mad beggar, Poor Tom.

What truths do you find in these speeches? How far do you agree that these three characters, who are “not in [their] perfect mind,” convey King Lear’s central message?

Consider further whether King Lear proposes that those excluded from normal life—the outsiders—are best placed to comment on human nature and the human condition. Is it only on the outskirts of language and discourse, where ordinary sense almost collapses, that deep truths come to light?

What do you make of the Fool’s unexplained disappearance from the play after Act 3? (Perhaps the actor was needed to play Cordelia in Acts 4 and 5?)

King Lear: Act Four

In Act 4 tensions in the sub-plot and the main plot build to where the army of Edmund, Albany, Goneril and Regan is on the point of meeting Cordelia’s French forces in battle.

Act 4’s early scenes exploit the dramatic irony of Edgar’s disguise as Poor Tom: his recognition of Gloucester, and his distress over his father’s blinding. Edgar leads Gloucester to the cliffs of Dover, where he tries to purge his father’s suicidal despair. This sequence has many emotional resonances, as much for grown-up children as it has for parents.

In Act 4 the main plot develops a murderous conflict between Goneril and the widowed Regan for Edmund’s sexual favours and hand in marriage. When Edgar defends his father by killing the murderous Oswald, he finds Goneril’s letter to Edmund on Oswald’s body. Still in disguise, Edgar takes the letter to Albany, thus revealing Goneril’s plea that Edmund will murder her husband Albany and marry her. In a scene that further fuses the main and sub plots, the mad Lear converses with Gloucester, and again his ravings contain unpalatable truths, so that Edgar comments: “O matter and impertinency mixed/ Reason in madness” (Act 4, Scene 6, lines 175-176). Meanwhile Kent reports to Cordelia her sisters’ mistreatment of their father, and Kent’s part in upholding the king. The Act’s culminating scenes reunite Lear with Cordelia’s forgiveness; her tenderness and care restore Lear’s sanity.

The following comment might help to focus your reading of King Lear, Act 4:

“If we could speak of a poetic rather than dramatic centre to the tragedy, we might choose the meeting between the mad King Lear and the blind Gloucester in Act 4, Scene 6, lines 80-185. Sir Frank Kermode rightly remarks that the meeting in no way advances the plot, though it may well be the summit of Shakespeare’s art.” (Bloom 481)

A further discussion point for Act Four concerns staging. As early as 1754, Joseph Warton complained about “the utter improbability of Gloucester’s imagining, though blind, that he had leaped down Dover cliff.” You might like to consider Scene 6 with this comment in mind.

Further discussion points on staging:

• Of Act 3, Warton wrote that “the cruel and horrid extinction of Gloucester’s eyes…ought not to be exhibited on the stage.”
• Early in the nineteenth century the essayist Charles Lamb argued against any staging King Lear. After complaining of the “contemptible machinery” used for mimicking the storm, he wrote:

“The greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension, but in intellectual: the explosions of his passion are terrible as a volcano: they are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that sea his mind, with all its vast riches. This case of flesh and blood seems too insignificant to be thought on; even as he himself neglects it. (“On Shakespeare’s Tragedies.” London, 1808)

In 1999, when presumably stage resources were much better than they were in Lamb’s time, Harold Bloom endorsed Lamb’s opinion: “I emphasise reading, more than ever, because I have attended many stagings of King Lear, and invariably have regretted being there” (476).

Judge whether recent performances do justice to Shakespeare’s vision in King Lear. A sample of Ian McKellen’s masterly 2009 performance in the title role is available on YouTube. Also well worth comparing are riveting performances by Laurence Olivier (1983) and Ian Holm (1997).

King Lear: Act Five

The Nihilism of King Lear

An abyss of nothingness lurks at the centre of Shakespeare’s, as of most great tragedies. A series of syntactical negatives in King Lear comes closest to articulating this abyss:

• Lear’s and Cornelia’s dialogue of dispossession early in Act 1:

Lear: ….what can you say to draw
A third more opulent than your sisters?
Cordelia: Nothing, my lord.
Lear: Nothing?
Lear: Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again.
(Scene 1, lines 85-90)

• The Fool’s questioning of Lear later in Act 1 echoes this:

Fool: Can you make no use of nothing, nuncle?
Lear: Why no, boy. Nothing can be made out of nothing.
(Scene 4, lines 129-31)

• Lear’s final entrance with Cornelia in his arms, after the audience has been led to hope that Edmund’s intervention will save her life, consummates the tragedy. By applying repeated negatives to the insubstantiality of human existence, Lear’s own death speech eloquently articulates the nihilism theme:

Lear: And my poor fool is hanged! No, no, no life!
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more;
Never, never, never, never, never.
(Ac 5, Scene 3, lines 303-306)

These lines are powerful, not because they are rare poetry, but because they express a thought common to everyone who has lost a loved spouse, child or parent: life flourishes on every side, but not that life; that life will never return. Shakespeare captures the stunned puzzlement of grief.

In addition, the tragedy of King Lear is nihilistic, or potentially so, because it destroys the hope that divine justice overlooks human affairs, rewarding the good and punishing the evil. As we have seen, appropriate fates do overtake all the evil characters in turn—Cornwall, Oswald, Regan, Goneril and Edmund—but we hardly care, because Cordelia’s death finally forces us to recognise that blind chance, not any form of justice, prevails over human life. As Bloom remarks: “Suffering is the true mode of action in King Lear: we suffer with Lear and Gloucester, Cordelia and Edgar, and our suffering is not lessened as, one by one, the evil are cut down” (505).

Philosophy, or theology, is therefore central to an interpretation of King Lear. The characters themselves propose a range of determinants for their suffering. Kent suggests that the “stars” rule human life; Edmund says “nature” does; a troupe of imaginatively named devils afflict Poor Tom; Gloucester famously attributes humanity’s agony to a combination of divine sadism and playfulness:

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;
They kill us for their sport.
(Act 4, Scene 1, lines 36-37)

Shakespeare is true to his story’s pre-Christian setting, in having the characters refer, as here, to gods—usually Apollo, Jupiter, and other Olympians—rather than to the Christian God. Lear’s vows to the sun, moon and stars are another example (see 5.3 above). Nevertheless, the notes to the text in the Everyman edition by John F. Andrews (London: J. M. Dent, 1993) reveal that King Lear is thick with Biblical allusions, some of which would certainly have impinged on members of Shakespeare’s audiences before the twenty-first century, most of whose members consulted the Bible as the primary source of philosophy and ethics. For example, Cordelia’s statement: “O dear father,/It is thy business that I go about” (Act 4, Scene 4, lines 24-25) aligns her with Christ (Luke 2: 49).

In attempting to counter nihilism in the play, Christian apologists insist that Lear’s sufferings, his binding to “a wheel of fire,” are a purification that fits him for a higher destiny after death:

“Should we not be at least near the truth if we called this poem The Redemption of King Lear, and declared that the business of ‘the gods’ with him was neither to torment him, nor to teach him a ‘noble anger’, but to lead him to attain through apparently hopeless failure the very end and aim of life? One can believe that Shakespeare had been tempted at times to feel misanthropy and despair, but it is quite impossible that he can have been mastered by such feelings at the time when he produced this conception.” (Bradley 235)

Although Lear clearly changes morally for the better over the course of the tragedy, most twenty-first-century readers and audiences now find Bradley’s optimistic interpretation difficult to accept.

STUDY EXERCISE 7: LEAR’S DEVELOPMENT

Compare and contrast the tone and language of the following speeches:

• Act 1, Scene 1, lines 108-119: Lear’s rejection of Cordelia; see 5.3 above;
• Act 4, Scene 7, lines 59-70: Lear’s recognition of Cordelia;
• Act 5, Scene 3, lines 8-18: Lear’s plans for Cordelia and himself.

How important is rhetoric in each of these speeches? As a group, in what ways do they embody or suggest changes that have taken place in Lear in the course of the play?

My own view is that King Lear contains a large dose of nihilism, but that it does not demolish humane values. Two such values are Beauty and Truth, which, as we saw at the beginning of this discussion, John Keats found in the play. As a poet, Keats was no doubt referring to the multi-layered Beauty of Shakespeare’s language. He may have meant Truth in the sense of verisimilitude: we have seen that much of King Lear’s power derives from self-recognition–it provides us with insights into ourselves, our relationships with others, especially our families, and our progress towards old age and death.

Last week a friend of mine, an experienced clinical psychologist recently diagnosed with cancer, told me spontaneously that King Lear is her favourite Shakespeare play. When I asked why, she emailed as follows:

I know it’s far from original to say Shakespeare fascinates me because of the way he penetrates the human psyche, with all its fears and contradictions. I think Lear presents the picture of old age that so many fear; rejection, irrelevancy, loss of power and status, helplessness. The list is so long. Perhaps the overwhelming sorrow audiences feel for King Lear is also a sorrow for themselves and the passage of their own lives. All that, plus the ingratitude of children and the allure of power, are things that touch so many deep-seated emotions and sore places. For me, at least.

To this I would add that although King Lear demolishes the naïve expectation that an overarching justice punishes evil actions and rewards the good, it is equally a play that upholds the intrinsic beauty of human love and truth. These qualities are all the more remarkable for manifesting in a dark, stormy, uncertain and tragic world. Cordelia and Edgar are examples of filial love and courage. The reformed Gloucester and Lear demonstrate paternal love, and the depth of the connection that can exist between parent and child. Shakespeare also lets us admire the grace of the Fool’s and Kent’s loyalty to Lear, and of Gloucester’s charity when he risks his life to shelter Lear from the storm. A more unexpected example of casual human compassion is provided by the unnamed Servant who dies trying to prevent the blinding of Gloucester. He acts purely and simply from a recognition that such an act is evil.

We will leave the last word on Shakespeare’s King Lear once again to Harold Bloom, who begins by referring to Hazlitt:

“Hazlitt thought that it was equally impossible to give either a description of the play itself or of its effect upon the mind. Rather strikingly, for so superb a psychological critic, Hazlitt remarks: ‘All that we can say must fall far short of the subject; or even what we ourselves conceive of it.’ Hazlitt touches on the uncanniest aspect of Lear: something that we conceive of it hovers outside our expressive range.” (484)