King Lear Page 2
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:
EDGAR Bless thy five wits!
KENT O pity! Sir, where is the patience now That you so oft have boasted to retain?
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.
LEAR Who is it that can tell me who I am?
FOOL Lear’s shadow.
1. Robert Armin took over as company clown after Will Kempe left the Chamberlain’s Men in 1599. A playwright as well as the author of joke books, he practiced a more intellectual form of comedy than Kempe, full of witty verbal pyrotechnics: his style was given full rein in such parts as Lear’s Fool, Feste in Twelfth Night, and the sour Lavatch in All’s Well That Ends Well.
ABOUT THE TEXT
Shakespeare endures through history. He illuminates later times as well as his own. He helps us to understand the human condition. But he cannot do this without a good text of the plays. Without editions there would be no Shakespeare. That is why every twenty years or so throughout the last three centuries there has been a major new edition of his complete works. One aspect of editing is the process of keeping the texts up to date—modernizing the spelling, punctuation, and typography (
though not, of course, the actual words), providing explanatory notes in the light of changing educational practices (a generation ago, most of Shakespeare’s classical and biblical allusions could be assumed to be generally understood, but now they can’t).
But because Shakespeare did not personally oversee the publication of his plays, editors also have to make decisions about the relative authority of the early printed editions. Half of the sum of his plays only appeared posthumously, in the elaborately produced First Folio text of 1623, the original “Complete Works” prepared for the press by Shakespeare’s fellow actors, the people who knew the plays better than anyone else. The other half had appeared in print in his lifetime, in the more compact and cheaper form of “Quarto” editions, some of which reproduced good quality texts, others of which were to a greater or lesser degree garbled and error strewn. In the case of a few plays there are hundreds of differences between the Quarto and Folio editions, some of them far from trivial.
Who is left in charge at the end of King Lear? According to the conventions of Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy, the senior remaining character speaks the final speech. That is the mark of his assumption of power. Thus Fortinbras rules Denmark at the end of Hamlet, Lodovico speaks for Venice at the end of Othello, Malcolm rules Scotland at the end of Macbeth, and Octavius rules the world at the end of Antony and Cleopatra.
So who rules Britain? The answer used to be something like this. As the husband of the king’s eldest daughter, Albany is the obvious candidate, but he seems reluctant to take on the role and, with astonishing stupidity given the chaos brought about by Lear’s division of the kingdom at the beginning of the play, he proposes to divide the kingdom at the end of the play, suggesting that Kent and Edgar should share power between them. Kent, wise as ever, sees the foolishness of this and gracefully withdraws, presumably to commit suicide or will on the heart attack that he is already sensing. By implication, Edgar, who was the king’s godson and is now Duke of Gloucester, is left in charge. So it is that in the Folio text, which is the most authoritative that we have, Edgar speaks the final speech:
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.
If we were being very scrupulous, we would have added that there is some uncertainty over the matter, since in the Quarto text it is Albany who speaks the final speech, an ascription that has been followed by many editors since Alexander Pope.
Thanks to the textual scholarship of the late twentieth century, the new answer is something like this. Ah: that’s a question over which Shakespeare himself seems to have had some uncertainty. In his original version of the play Albany speaks the final speech and thus rules the realm. But then Shakespeare changed his mind. In his revised version of the play Edgar speaks the final speech and thus rules the realm. We must posit two very different stagings. In the first one, Kent’s words of refusal of his half-share in the kingdom would have been accompanied by some gesture of refusal, such as a turning away, on Edgar’s part. In the second one, Edgar’s speaking of the final speech would have been staged so as to betoken acceptance of Albany’s offer. This alteration to the ending marks the climax of Shakespeare’s subtle but thoroughgoing revision of the roles of Albany and Edgar in his two versions of King Lear. We do not know exactly when the revision took place, but it is a fair assumption that it was as a result of experience in the playhouse and with the collaboration of the company. Presumably there was dissatisfaction on the part of dramatist and/or performers with the way in which the two roles had turned out, so various adjustments were made. Shakespeare’s plays were not polished for publication; they were designed as scripts to be worked upon in the theater. To be cut, added to, and altered.
Until recently, editors were remarkably reluctant to admit this. From the eighteenth century until the 1980s, editions attempted to recover an ideal unitary text, to get as close as they could to “what Shakespeare wrote.” There was a curious resistance to the idea that Shakespeare wrote one thing, tested it in the theater, and then wrote another. It was assumed that there was a single King Lear and that the editorial task was to reconstruct it. Generations of editors adopted a “pick and mix” approach to the text, moving between Quarto and Folio readings, making choices on either aesthetic or bibliographic grounds, and creating a composite text that Shakespeare never actually wrote.
How, then, did editors deal with the following awkward fact? King Lear exists in two different texts, the Quarto and the Folio. The Quarto has nearly three hundred lines that are not in the Folio; the Folio has more than a hundred lines that are not in the Quarto; there are more than eight hundred verbal variants in the parts of the play that the two texts share. The standard editorial response to this difficulty was the claim that the Quarto was some kind of “Bad Quarto,” that is to say a text based on memorial reconstruction by actors, not on Shakespeare’s own script (his “foul papers”) or the playhouse script (the “promptbook”). It was, however, a difficult position to maintain because the Quarto text of Lear, although corrupt in many places, does not have the usual characteristics of memorial reconstruction, the kind of features so apparent in the Bad Quarto of Hamlet, such as the actor remembering “The first verse of the godly ballad / Will tell you all,” where Shakespeare wrote “the first row of the pious chanson will show you more” (Hamlet, Act 2 Scene 2). Getting the structure of a line just about right but the actual words nearly all wrong is typical of texts based on memory, but not typical of the textual anomalies in Quarto Lear.
In the 1970s the scholar Peter Blayney proved decisively by means of meticulous and highly technical bibliographic investigation that Quarto King Lear was not a bad text based on actors’ memories but an authoritative one, almost certainly deriving from Shakespeare’s own holograph (The Texts of “King Lear” and their Origins: vol. 1 Nicholas Okes and the First Quarto, published 1982). The poor quality of the text was the result of the personnel in the printing shop being unused to setting drama. Thus the fact that much of Shakespeare’s verse was set as prose was due to the printer running out of the blocks that were needed to fill in the margins where text was set as verse—Okes’ shop didn’t have the proper equipment, so the compositors resorted to prose.
Both Quarto and Folio texts are authentically Shakespearean, yet they differ substantially. Logic suggests that Quarto was his first version of the play, Folio his second. The textual variants give us a unique opportunity to see the plays as working scripts.
In the received editorial tradition, there is a very puzzling moment in Act 3 Scene 1 where Kent reports to the Gentleman on the division between Albany and Cornwall (3.1.13–23). The syntax halfway through the speech is incomprehensible and the content is contradictory: are there merely French spies in the households of great ones or has a French army actually landed in Dover? The confusion comes from editors having conflated alternative scenarios: in Quarto the French army has landed, whereas in Folio there are only spies reporting to France (thus lines 30–42 in conflated texts are Quarto only, 22–29 are Folio only: in the RSC text, compare and contrast 3.1.13–23 and Quarto Passages, 46–59).
The alteration seems to be part of a wider process of diminishing the French connection. In the Quarto we have a scene in which Shakespeare feels compelled to explain away the absence of the King of France—why isn’t he leading his own army?
KENT Why the King of France is so suddenly gone back, know you no reason?
GENTLEMAN Something he left imperfect in the state, which since his coming forth is thought of, which imports to the kingdom so much fear and danger that his personal return was most required and necessary. (Quarto Passages, 168–73)
It is, to say the least, a halting explanation, which is perhaps one reason why Shakespeare cut the whole of this scene, Act 4 Scene 3 in the received editorial tradition, from the Folio text. Theater audiences tend
to think most about the things that are mentioned: by drawing attention to the king’s absence, the dramatist in a curious way establishes his presence. Better just to keep quiet about him, which is what happens in Folio—since he’s not mentioned, the audience forgets him.
Who, then, is to lead the French army? In Quarto, the Gentleman informs Kent that the Marshall of France, Monsieur La Far, has been left in charge. By omitting the scene in question, Folio obliterates Monsieur La Far; it compensates by altering the staging of the next scene (Act 4 scene 4 in the received editorial tradition, Act 4 Scene 3 in ours). In Quarto, the scene begins “Enter Cordelia, Doctor and others,” whereas in Folio it begins “Enter with Drum and Colours Cordelia, Gentleman and Soldiers.” Where in Quarto Cordelia is a daughter seeking medical attention for her father, in Folio she is a general leading an army. She has replaced Monsieur La Far. This alteration is part of a broad shift of emphasis from family to state in the revision—Folio makes less of the familial love trial and more of the fractured internal politics of the divided kingdom. So it is that the later version adds some crucial lines in the opening scene, giving a stronger political justification for the division of the kingdom:
We have this hour a constant will to publish
Our daughters’ several dowers, that future strife
May be prevented now.… (1.1.41–43)
Furthermore, Folio cuts the so-called arraignment of Goneril, the mock trial in the hovel scene that is the quid pro quo for the show trial of love in the opening scene. This has the effect of retrospectively rendering the opening more political and less personal.
Other Folio cuts include the passage at the end of the blinding scene when loyal servants promise to apply flax and whites of egg to Gloucester’s bleeding eye sockets. When Peter Brook cut this from his famous 1962 RSC production, critics rebuked him for imposing on the play his own theater of cruelty. But now we know that Brook’s cut was made in Shakespeare’s own theater.