Shakespeare & Modernity

Shakespeare was an original thinker who did his thinking in the plays he wrote for the Elizabethan and Jacobean Theater (roughly between 1590-1610), the most dynamic and original theatrical culture the Western world has known since the Theater of Dionysos in Athens in the fifth century BC. The terrible beauty of some these plays is consistent with the presence of a tough, reasonable mind asking tough, reasonable questions about the kind of world that western Europe was swiftly becoming. The answers are so strikingly original, so strange and compelling in themselves, that the questions may have largely gone unnoticed.

Hamlet, as J. W. Goethe and William Empson noticed, gives the illusion of not being a play so much as a representation on the stage of the haphazard way things happen in life. Since the play is not conventionally theatrical, Hamlet himself must seem not to be acted butpresented. This absence of acting, on his part, is a sort of pun: Hamlet does not act politically any more than he does theatrically. SinceHamlet does not or cannot act, someone else must do so if there is to be a play at all. So the shallow, hypocritical Polonius becomes the comicallyunwitting dramaturge who sets up one key scene after another, including the one that gets him killed, thereby moving the play along to its final catastrophe.

We can think of Hamlet as an answer to a question: what happens to a man who insists on authenticity, in himself and others,when he is being forced to act politically i.e., as a normally power-hun-gry conspirator, in a normally corrupt and hypocritical society? In other words, is authenticity compatible with effective political action? If you know the play, you know Shakespeare’s answer: not on your life.

All’s Well That Ends Well examines the character of a young nobleman, Bertram, who cares only for his own pleasures. How is such a man to be persuaded to settle down as a useful and productive member of his community? Only with great difficulty. Character, once set, can’t be changed. In Bertram’s case it takes something like a miracle. Shakespeare, I imagine, was wondering how a future king would approach a problem that Queen Elizabeth had not solved but only contained: How to transform a warrior aristocracy into the useful citizens—squires, magistrates, civil-servants, members of Parliament,etc.—that a modern society requires.
All’s Well That Ends Well, so far as we know, was not acted during Shakespeare’s lifetime. It had a deeper and more disturbing sequel: Coriolanus. The hero of that play, the overgrown boy and soldier, Coriolanus, resembles Bertram in the prejudices that unfit him for life in a modern civil society but there the resemblance ends. Bertram has many vices and no virtues; Coriolanus, like Hamlet, is the victim of his virtues.

Coriolanus, takes us back to the early years of the Roman Republic. Under threat of imminent class warfare, Rome’s most original political institution, the Tribunate, has just been invented. The anonymous, laboring masses are to be given a voice, through their representatives, the Tribunes, in the political affairs of Rome. The aristocracy, which has been running Rome to suit itself, bitterly resents this limitation on its power. Into this explosive atmosphere steps Coriolanus, as the aristocratic candidate for Consul. A politically innocent war hero, and an authentically noble but short-tempered and very snobbish man who basically understands nothing but the art of war, Coriolanus’s wonderfully inept electoral campaign almost puts an end, then and there, to the power and the glory of Rome. This surprisingly funny story has a moral, of sorts: Keep your real thoughts and feelings out of sight if you wish to have any sort of success in the political arena. Coriolanus can’t or won’t learn this basic lesson: he insists on being honest about his true thoughts and feelings and thereby falls—twice— into traps that his political enemies have laid for him. So, once more the question is being raised: Is there no place in our politics for a man who insists, at whatever cost to himself or the state, on being (like Hamlet) true to himself? Probably not, concludes Shakespeare once more, with deep regret.

In Measure for Measure (Shakespeare’s most cryptic title) an unwise political experiment has unexpected consequences, demonstrating the truth of Kant’s aphorism “From the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” (That, it would seem, is one of the bitter lessons that modern history and modern utiopian politics has finally(?) taught us.) We can also think of the play as an oblique response to the moral perfectionism that Christianity demands, especially in Matthew 7: “Judge not that ye be not judged”.

Troilus and Cressida offers us an answer to the question: How would you have to write about Helen of Troy (“the face that launcheda thousand ships”), Agammemnon and the wrath of Achilles, thedeath of Hector, etc., if you were writing now, in 1604, under conditonsof modernity? The answer is plain: only as a study in decadence.Troilus and Cressida, devoid of coherent moral ideals, is about the irrelevance of the Homeric moral and literary tradition to present-day political morality and practice, except as an implicit indicator of how low the politics and morality of Europe had fallen. Europe,Shakespeare seems to have concluded, could no longer see itself in the Homeric mirror—nor in Chaucer’s, for that matter. Neither the cold lucidity, objectivity and “bitterness” (Simone Weil’s word) of Homer’stragic poem, nor Chaucer’s tragi-comic mix of irony and innocence, idealism and realism, were possible in 1600. Europe was becoming decadent, or modern—take your pick: complicated, sophisticated, aggressively innovative, inquisitive, individualistic, secular. This play has a modern analogue: that quintessentially modernist poem, TheWasteland, which uses literary touchstones from the past to measure the sorry state of European culture just after the first World War.

Othello is an answer to a couple of questions that may haveoccurred to Shakespeare as he was reading Chapman’s Homer (or writingTroilus and Cressida; these plays seem to have been written at about the same time). Suppose a man might still exist whose identity is defined by the ancient Homeric code of honor and courage; a naturally noble man (not that social artifact, a nobleman) in whom the Homeric world lives on, uncorrupted by rationalism or the skeptical impulses of the meddling intellect. Where might you find such a man in 1600? Not in London, Paris, Vienna, Rome, Venice. Wouldn’t he have to be a sort of noble savage? Suppose you found him, on Europe’s North African frontier, civilized him to a degree, and set him down in a modern European city? What then?

Othello and Desdemona live by and for the ancient aristocratic ideals. They are rare, exquisitely vulnerable birds. A rarity even in the ancient (classical and medieval) world that was coming to an end in 1600, they embody that world’s aristocratic ideal of magnanimous (i.e.great-souled) life. With a purity and nobility of soul that is no longer recognizable, they cannot survive under conditions of modernity. Were they, by some stroke of supernatural bad luck, to become incarnate in some modern city, we would manage to destroy them, out of misunderstanding or cynical disbelief, perhaps; or mischievously, because it would be so easy; and so much fun; or for all of these reasons and one more: to prove a point—Iago’s point—that there’s nothing special about these two; at bottom they’re no different from you and me.

Only the man we know of as Shakespeare could have imagined a man who believes in nothing but himself and torments others for the fun of it; a mean man, a spiteful man, who knows his betters better than they know themselves, having studied them from the shadows all his life; a profoundly intelligent, cynical man, a modern man: Iago. ‘Modern’ because the word‘cynic’ would not take on the meaning that I am drawing upon here—one who disbelieves in the very possibility of virtue—for about two hundred years. A few words of explanation may be necessary here. The word ‘cynic’ in Shakespeare's day—or at any time until the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries—could only have referred to an ancient post-Socratic philosopher who believed that virtue is the only good and dismissed all the other goods, so-called, that people pursue—money, power, honor, beauty—as illusions. No one knows why, or exactly when, the great reversal in the meaning of‘cynic’ occurred. The Oxford English Dictionary is not at all clear about this; its early 19th century citations under the heading of ‘cynic’ or‘cynical’ are roughly compatible with the ancient, or conventional,meaning. It is almost certain, however, that the modern meaning of the word had become well established by 1830. Stendhal, for instance, uses it confidently in its modern sense in his novel, The Red and TheBlack (1830).

When King Lear in a fit of mindless outrage sets off the little bomb that has been ticking away at the heart of his dysfunctional family, that explosion sets off another and then another until, with terrible speed, the entire moral and political order of England is in ruins. As the state returns to the state of nature, life becomes —as Hobbes will say about forty years later— “poor, nasty, brutish and short.” All of which raises a question, which may well have been Shakespeare’s question too: is civilization merely a house of cards, built on and grounded in—nothing?

‘Nature’ is being redefined in King Lear. By the end of this play, itis clear that no one, most especially Lear, has supernatural powers forthe simple reason that supernatural powers, forces and influencesdon’t exist. Macbeth brings them back.

In Macbeth, Shakespeare’s poetry shows us in unprecedented psychological and spiritual detail what happens to a man and his wife who wilfully override the moral and religious restraints that have been bredinto them by centuries of civilization. Like Edmund in King Lear, Lord and Lady Macbeth take it for granted that they are moral and social individuals, free to do as they please. If there is a deep question stirring in this play, it is about the inchoate notions of individuality that were beginning to shake Europe to pieces during Shakespeare’s lifetime. Like Troilus and Cressida, Macbeth has a modern analogue: Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. When Conrad’s Kurtz sees himself as the hollow echo-chamber he has become, he recoils in horror; contempt is the only feeling that Macbeth has left when he understands that he is merely the last of a long line of fools.

Antony and Cleopatra have qualities that poets and artists love—wit, passion, imagination—and politicians like Caesar not only lackbut despise. In the great game of power and politics, however, Caesar has the qualities that count: no scruples whatsover, and a clear understanding of his opponents’ weaknesses and his own advantages, interests and purposes. So Caesar wins the great struggle for power that, as Shakespeare saw it, settled the fate of Europe well before the birth of Jesus. Henceforth the Roman empire and therefore Europe—and therefore the modern world—would belong to Caesar and Caesar’s rational, i.e. Machiavellian, politics. Cleopatra, nevertheless, has the last word, or words, and they are by no means trivial: “’Tis paltry to be Caesar.” Indeed. And would a world strictly according to Caesar, therefore a world without poetry, be worth living in? Shakespeare invented Cleopatra—she is his invention—because he didn’t think so.

Shakespeare had a sense of history that was unique in 1600, or at anytime: he knew which way the winds of an increasingly daring and sophisticated scientific, political and economic culture were blowing; that all traditional ideas and assumptions were being thrown into doubt or blown away; that the winds of money and trade were winds of “creative destruction,” which is what the the economist Arnold Schumpeter calls them. (The phrase ‘destructive creativity’ would alsohave been apt.)

A realist, like Machiavelli, Shakespeare had no illusions about the future. It would be, he knew, a world that hardly bothered any longer to pretend that the state has morals as well as interests; a world in which one necessarily renders unto Caesar what is Caesar’s—who leaves one in no doubt about what that is—while the question of what in this life belongs to God becomes harder and harder to answer; and ideas of a transcendent Good, or of Reason, disappear entirely. He could not have foreseen, though he might have guessed, that modernity would be characterized by a cacophony of different and sometimes incompatible gods, goods and rights; free markets, free elections, a free press; secular governments and societies; utilitarian politics, Machiavellian politicians, parliamentary democracies—and ‘authenticity’, a term which no longer refers, merely, to the provenance of certain documents or works of art but to a quality that the irresistible power of the corporate state and its innumerable institutions has forced us to demand and invent: what Marianne Moore calls “aplace for the genuine.” Shakespeare anticipated the concept of authenticity in Hamlet and Coriolanus, as he anticipated the concept of (modern) cynicism and embodied it in Iago, some hundreds of years before Europe caught up with him. Finally, we must include the deep premise of King Lear, which is also the premise of all scientific inquiry: nature is all.

The world I have been referring to as ‘modern’ is the relatively safe and prosperous world that a fortunate few inhabit (temporarily perhaps) now: the modern, western or westernized world that the scientific revolution, the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment managed somehow or other to produce.

King Lear: That Way Madness Lies

Handsome, witty, powerful and rich, Lear has lived in this world for

eighty years with scarcely a thing to vex him. The one thing he

does not have is a son. He has three handsome daughters who 

who love him dearly, or so he thinks. Each is about to receive, as

dowry, roughly a third of his kingdom.

There is nothing that Lear will not do for his daughters. They have

only to ask, to receive. If happiness is defined in Hobbes’ terms as

continuing success in getting what one wants, whatever that may be,

Lear’s family ought to be almost perfectly happy. And it would be, but

for one common flaw. Lear does not love his children equally or

in quite the same way, nor do they all love him. It is not necessarily a

tragic flaw. Such inequalities are bound to happen.  

Lear has a favorite child, his youngest in this case, whom he openly

favors over the others. It’s an old story, told and retold in folk tales

the world over: a beautiful youngest daughter with a couple of proud,

mean, older sisters. The folk tales don’t explain what makes the third

daughter so special, aside from her beauty and goodness, but the reason

may readily be guessed. The first two daughters are slighted

because they are not sons, for a son is necessary if the family is to hold

on to its property and win honor in the world. These daughters become

resentful and mean. By the time the third daughter comes along, the

parents are reconciled to their fate. This child gets the love and affection

denied to the others. Cordelia, perhaps, is such a child.

Lear loves her as he does not love Regan and Goneril: unconditionally,

for herself alone as we say, with no strings attached. Or so he

thinks and so does everyone else. Her share of the kingdom, as everyone

knows, is to be larger and more opulent than her sisters’. Their

relationship with their father is both simpler and more complicated

than hers: there are hidden strings, implicit conditions. His love has

a price-tag, and so does theirs. He pretends to love his eldest

daughters by giving them money and things, and they pretend to love

him in return by giving him gratitude.

What Regan and Goneril have chiefly learned from their father is

hypocrisy. They understand their hypocritical relationship with their father very well,

but he does not. He knows that he does not feel toward his eldest

daughters what he feels for Cordelia, but he thinks it is just a difference

of degree, not of kind. Lear, in other words, does not understand

himself any better than he understands others. He is, as his daughters

have learned from the experience of a lifetime, a man who “has ever

but slenderly known himself.” And that’s not all. As the Fool’s mockery

will also show, he is entirely lacking in common sense. He is, in

short, a bit of a fool.

A fool—the real thing, that is—is someone who won’t listen to

advice and keeps making the same stupid mistakes. So it is with Lear.

You can teach him but you can’t teach him much. And one of the

things that he will never learn is that he is just a man who happens to

be a king: an extraordinarily powerful man who has been deceiving

himself in some ordinary ways.

Lear wants to retire from the business of kingship without actually

giving up real power, and he thinks he knows how to do it. He will set

up the two daughters whom he does not particularly care about in

carefully balanced dukedoms, and live out his days with the daughter

he loves in the largest and most powerful part of his kingdom. It is a

rational plan and it could have worked, at least for a while.

Unfortunately for Lear and everyone else, he can’t leave well

enough alone. The scheme has an element of arbitrariness which he

finds demeaning, perhaps, or he shrinks from making a public

acknowledgement of the fact that affairs of state are being driven by

his personal needs instead of impersonal justice. At the last minute,

catching everyone by surprise, Lear tries to give his fiat the appearance

at least of due process:

Tell me, my daughters....

Which of you shall we say doth love us most,

That we our largest bounty may extend

Where nature doth with merit challenge? I.1.53

Though the meaning of “nature” here is uncertain—natural affection

or the natural priority to be accorded to the first born, or both—

Lear’s intent seems clear. What had been settled is now up for grabs.

Merit, not his own feelings or primogeniture, is to determine which

daughter gets the largest piece, and the daughter who loves him most

is to be deemed most meritorious. It is, obviously, an absurd proposal.

Only a man who knows nothing about love would propose to measure

it in this way—or suppose that it could be measured at all; only a

man who knows nothing about justice, or himself, would presume to

judge such a case. And indeed the appearance of fairness and due

process is bogus. As we are about to learn, Lear already knows, or

thinks he knows, that Cordelia will win this contest hands-down. And

so does everyone else, including Lear’s eldest daughters. They don’t

object because they never have. The hypocrisy of Lear’s scheme is perfectly

transparent to them, but that’s nothing new.

The only people present who are unaware of Lear’s hypocrisy are

Cordelia and Lear, and this fact tells us something important about the

emotional economy he has unconsciously established over the years in

his own family, or rather with his two eldest daughters. Merit, for

them, has always been defined and rewarded in this way: they have

played their role as meritorious, i.e., loving daughters and Lear has

played his as loving father by giving them things—clothes, horses,

money, property, whatever.

That is why Lear’s test in the first scene presents no difficulties for

Regan and Goneril: this is what they have been doing all their lives.

They know their father does not love them and never has. They know

it doesn’t matter what any of them say. They have only to play their

accustomed role, say something that sounds good, and draw their 

predetermined shares of the kingdom.

The happiness of Lear’s happy family has always been a somewhat

theatrical illusion, and nothing has ever happened to destroy it, until

now. For Cordelia has had a different relationship with her father. For

reasons which are always mysterious, something went right between

them. They haven’t had to pretend to love each other. So she has

observed her sisters’ relationship with Lear from the outside, without

entirely understanding it. It is obvious to her that they have been pretending

to love Lear, but not that he has been pretending to love them,

which is why she does not know that Lear’s test is bogus. And since

he doesn’t know it either, the stage is set, as it were, for a violent confrontation:

Lear’s unlimited egoism against Cordelia's demand for absolute sincerity.

Since sincerity is impossible under the terms of Lear’s test, 

violence is inevitable.

Called upon suddenly to play a role in the same theater that her sisters

have been acting in all their lives, she rebels; called to account for

her rebellion, she exposes and destroys the illusion that Lear and his

eldest daughters have tacitly perpetuated. Since he has always been a

self-deceiver as well as an egoist, he sees Cordelia’s rebellion as

betrayal, and betrayal in a royal family is close to treason, which is

how Lear chooses to take it. Then everything falls apart. As S. L.

Goldberg finely remarks, “once Cordelia refuses to play any role at all,

the current sweeps everyone out among the immediate, but still halfsubmerged

dangers of real emotions.”

Real emotions have been rare in the royal household. At first Lear

feels exhilerated and liberated by his rage. Facts, consequences are

suddenly immaterial to him. He feels lifted out of his ordinary trivial

self. The fact that the object of his rage is the person he loves best in

all the world is, for the moment, a trifle; once off on his rampage he’s

unstoppable. And that perhaps is why the audience too is carried

away, against its better judgment. We, too, are overwhelmed by the

poetry of rage. For the moment at least, Lear seems omnipotent as he

summons all that is sacred and mysterious in nature to witness and

approve his last official act as a divinely appointed King: disinheritance

in its most radical form. This is not a legal but a sacramental act.

Not only is Cordelia not to inherit his property, she won’t even

have his genes.

Let it be so: thy truth then be thy dow’r!

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 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. I.1.116

A breath-taking claim of authority—even God can’t control heredity or

the past. And it gets better later (in I.4) when Lear calls upon nature,

that “dear goddess,” to sterilize Goneril—or, if that’s not possible and

she must teem, make her bear that ultimate infant monstrosity, a

thankless child.

Lear’s passionate outbursts against his children are clearly

over the top, as we would say, the punishments he demands 

don’t even begin to fit the crime. So extreme, indeed, are the 

punishments that Lear calls down on his daughters and so 

extraordinary the supernatural power he lays claim to, that he

throws the possibility of such power into doubt. With that doubt

comes doubt about the supernatural beings he is calling upon.

If Lear does not have the power he thinks he has, no one else does

either. One’s doubts about Lear and his gods extend to all the other

gods addressed or prayed to in this play, and there are a quite a few of

them. Just as Lear’s curses never take effect, except in ways which he

does not intend, so no prayer is ever answered. The most pointedly

unanswered prayer of all is Albany’s, “The gods defend her

[Cordelia]”(V.3.257) which is followed instantly by Lear’s entrance

with the dead Cordelia in his arms.

“King Lear is haunted,” says Stephen Greenblatt, “by a sense of rituals

and beliefs that are no longer efficacious, that have been emptied

out. The characters appeal again and again to the pagan gods, but the

gods remain silent. Nothing answers human questions but

human voices; nothing breeds about the heart but human desires;

nothing inspires awe or terror but human suffering, human depravity.

For all the invocations of the gods in King Lear, it is clear that there

are no devils.” 

The play is also haunted by doubt, a doubt more radical than anything

in Montaigne’s Essays. It is a doubt about the foundations of human

existence: the possibility that none of things we care about—

love, justice, decency, the virtues that make it possible for people 

to live together in stable communities—are grounded in anything, 

that neither god nor nature underwrites our morality or our civilizations.

“Nothing” is the key word in this play: it is dinned into our ears, a

desperate, dismal refrain. The door that this key opens leads, as you

might expect, nowhere. Nothing can be made of nothing. We know

nothing, we are nothing, we count for nothing. There’s nothing out

there, no one is listening to our prayers or curses. Though it is natural

for people to believe in gods and demons, such beliefs are never

efficacious. You can call upon your gods and spirits and people do, all

the time, but the question is, as Hotspur ironically remarks, will they

come?

Nothing is what Lear learns about himself. He knows he has made

some extraordinarily stupid mistakes, but he has no idea how he came

to make them. He dies beside his three dead daughters knowing as little

about himself and them as he ever knew: nothing. When Cordelia

says “nothing”, in response to his foolish demand that she should, in

effect, sing for her supper, he wilfully misunderstands her. In death, at

the end of the play, she is still saying nothing and he is still missing

the point.

GRATITUDE

The job of the professional fool is to make people laugh. He is supposed

to be funny. Tragic heroes are not supposed to be funny, but

Lear is. As G. Wilson Knight showed long ago, he is a hero who is

often unintentionally comic—unlike Hamlet and Cleopatra, say, who

are very witty people and usually know what they are doing when they

are being funny. Lear, who almost never knows what he is doing, is

frequently absurd, especially when he is complaining about his

ungrateful daughters. That ungainly word, “ingratitude,” will not bear

the weight of moral meaning that Lear keeps trying to give it. When

our words betray us by refusing to do what we want them to do, the

effect can be comic as well as absurd.

Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend,

More hideous when thou show’st thee in a child

Than the sea-monster! I.4.261

Ingratitude is not fiendish but common and ordinary, even natural,

and an ungrateful child is not more hideous than a sea-monster—a

grotesque idea. Gratitude is the state or condition of being grateful or

thankful for benefits and favors received. Lear wants Goneril to learn,

should she ever have a child despite his curse,

How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is

To have a thankless child! I.4.289

 The quality of love, as Portia says of mercy, is not strained or

forced. We cannot force ourselves to love others or oblige them to love

us. Love is not an obligation and cannot like a debt be paid or collected.

It is disinterested or it is nothing and it can’t be quantified or measured,

as Lear tries to do. What is it exactly? Don’t ask if you want a straight 

answer. Sonnet 116 calls it an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempest and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wand’ring bark,

Whose worth’s unknown, although his heighth be taken.

Something to chart a course by even if you don’t know what it is, a

source of value whose value can’t be measured. The more you try to

define it the vaguer it becomes; measure it and it disappears. To which one must also

add: the more you think about it, the less you understand. Love is like

wisdom: if you think you are wise, you probably aren’t. If you think

your love for another is perfect, it probably isn’t. It is easier to call love

an ever-fixed mark than to find it or hit it. The sonnet admits impediments

in the very words that rule them out. By protesting too much,

it shows us how hard it is to be clear about love. No wonder we are all

confused.

Lear’s is not the only family, by any means, to confuse love and

money, by measuring the one in terms of the other. We remove price

tags from Christmas and birthday gifts so as not to fall into that confusion—

only to fall with a louder crash, perhaps, when larger expenditures

are being considered. What is unusual about Lear’s family is

the blind stubborness with which it persists in its confusions.

Lear’s reiterated howls about the “ingratitude” of his daughters and

the comic disproportion between his rage and its object ought to show

us not only that something is wrong but that Lear knows something

is wrong. If ingratitude is a vice, it is a minor one, of slight importance

except as a sign that something else is missing. But Lear won’t go

behind this word and name the thing that’s missing because he knows

why it’s missing. He never loved anyone but himself, until Cordelia

came along. He made Regan and Goneril into the hard, cold, proud

women that they have become.

These words, “gratitude” and its opposite, “ingratitude,” are also

(like “nothing”) key words, and the door they unlock leads straight

into the private apartments of this royal family.It is in some important

respects a rather ordinary family. Lear’s confusions are widely

shared. Just as he is no different from other men in his egoism and

blindness, so his family is like many other families in the value it puts

on wealth and power, and in the way it confuses things that can be

measured, like money and gratitude, with things that can’t.

Unfortunately for Lear and everyone else in his kingdom, these are

matters that he cannot or will not take in. Even when the stark facts

of who he is and what he has done stare him in the face and he is

being prompted by a man who knows what it means to be a nobody

and a nothing in this world—the Fool—he refuses to see himself as the

self-deceiver he is and always has been. He’d rather go mad, and does.

NATURE

When Edmund acclaims Nature as his goddess, at the beginning of I.2,

he is redefining the word “nature” in order to define himself as an outlaw:

Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law

My services are bound. Wherefore should I

Stand in the plague of custom, and permit

The curiosity of nations to deprive me?

For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines

Lag of a brother? Why bastard? Wherefore base? I.2.6

The laws of nature, in the Christian philosophical tradition, are

God’s laws. Customs, morality and statutary law are grounded in

Natural Law which included the principles of ethics as well as physics.

Edmund is jettisoning the entire Natural Law tradition as so much useless

baggage; what’s left is a view of Nature as an amoral, Darwinian realm

where only strength, cunning and speed count, and only the strong, 

the cunning and the quick survive. His motives are obvious: as an illegitimate

as well as younger son he cannot inherit his father’s estate. Well, he

thinks, I’m just as good as my brother—maybe better, since my begetting

was more natural—so why should I allow myself to be fobbed off

by some foolish laws and custom? Since I am by definition an outsider,

that’s what I’ll be. I’ll take what I want. I will make my own laws

and my laws will be Nature’s laws. As an amoral being, Edmund is

merely doing, he thinks, what comes naturally. Nature is rough and

lecherous and so is he.

Edmund is not a bastard because he is a bastard but because his

father not only treats him as one but jokes about it. Edmund’s education,

therefore, closely parallels that of Regan and Goneril: they are all

three hard-hearted opportunists, not because of some bad seed, and

not because of the stars, but because that is what their experience as

children of Lear and Gloucester has taught them to be. Villains are not

born but made, which is nice to know but doesn’t take us very far.

How are they made? Why do some of us jump at the chance to

become unconscionable rogues and rascals while others resist temptation

and remain true to their beliefs? That is one of the many questions

that Lear addresses once he has rid himself of his supposedly

rational mind. “Let them anatomize Regan,” he says, presiding as

judge and jury over the kangaroo court he has convened for the trial

of his hard-hearted daughters. “See what breeds about her heart. Is

there any cause in nature that make these hard hearts?” (III.6.75)

Who does “them” refer to? Not traditional moralists like Thomas

Hooker for instance, but anatomists like Vesalius and his many students

and followers who were trying to understand the anatomical

machinery of the heart. William Harvey had recently returned, in

1603, from his studies in Padua, the leading center for anatomical

research. He was the scientist who would change medical science forever

with his discovery that the heart is a pump. London was not a

huge city, and Shakespeare, who was certainly not a nobody in 1603,

knew his way around. He would have had many opportunities to hear

about the latest findings in this field.

The scientific naturalism of Lear’s question excludes theological or

supernatural causes, though of course he doesn’t know that. Whatever

is breeding about Regan’s heart, it is not the sort of thing that an

anatomist could identify: a malignant tumor, say.

Lear’s is a naive question, to be sure, as naive in its way as Macbeth’s

demand that his doctor should “cast the water of my land, find her disease,

and purge it to a sound and pristine health.” (IV.3.50-52) Both

Lear’s question and Macbeth’s demand reflect, ironically, back on the

speaker. Macbeth is the disease that afflicts Scotland, and nothing

breeds about Regan’s heart but human desires and human resentments,

for which Lear and Lear alone is responsible.

LIFE WITH FATHER

As the passionate intensity of the first scene dissipates, we are left

alone with these sisters and daughters as they comment coldly and

lucidly on their father's mindless rampage.

Gon. You see how full of changes his age is; the observation

that we have made of it hath not been little. He always lov’d

our sister most, and with what poor judgment he hath now

cast her off appears too grossly.

Reg. ’Tis the infirmity of his age, yet he hath ever but slenderly

known himself.

Gon. The best and soundest of his time hath been but rash;

then must we look from his age to receive not alone the imperfections

of long-ingraff’d condition, but therewithal the unruly

waywardness that infirm and choleric years bring with them.

These young women know Lear through and through. The poor judgment

he has shown in the first scene is obviously nothing new but

rooted, “ingraff'd,” in his character. Knowing him, they predict that he

will be a difficult and troublesome guest in their households, and they

are right.

The problem Lear presents is simple enough, but not in a way that

he is able to appreciate: though he is no longer king, he insists on living

as if he were. But keeping a retinue of a hundred men in food,

drink, and lodging would tax the resources of any household, even a

duke’s, nor is it to be supposed that any such group of men would not

include a few drunks, lechers and hot-heads. Provocations, on both

sides, would be only too easy to find.

While it is clear that Goneril wishes to provoke a quarrel, we have

no reason to suppose that she has nothing to quarrel about. Let us

watch this one as it builds. The language Goneril uses as she addresses

her father on this occasion is deliberately provocative:

Not only, sir, this your all-licensed Fool,

But other of your insolent retinue

Do hourly carp and quarrel, breaking forth

In rank and not-to-be-endur’d riots. Sir,

I had thought by making this well known unto you

To have found a safe redress, but now grow fearful,

By what yourself too late have spoke and done,

That you protect this course, and put it on

By your allowance; which if you should, the fault

Would not ’scape censure, nor the redresses sleep,

Which, in the tender of a wholesome weal,

Might in their working do you that offense,

Which else were shame, that then necessity

Will call discreet proceeding. I.4.214

What’s most offensive to Lear is Goneril’s tone of official reproof: in

her voice he hears the hard, impersonal voice of the state, reminding him

that he is not a king any more and should act accordingly. He knows

that voice; it was his own voice, upon occasion, not so long ago. None

of the Fool’s warnings, earlier in the scene, have prepared him for this

humiliation: forced to endure an official tongue-lashing and thinly

veiled threat of real force from someone who had heretofore been happily

dependent on his whims and largesse.

It is now Lear’s turn to offend and, being Lear, he makes the most

of it by becoming not less but more theatrical, more histrionic, more

regal:

Does any here know me? This is not Lear.

Does Lear walk thus? speak thus? Where are his eyes?

Either his notion weakens, his discernings

Are lethargied—Ha! Waking? ’Tis not so.

Who is it that can tell me who I am? I.4.230

Goneril has committed the unpardonable sin of addressing him as if he

were an ordinary person, so he pretends to believe he no longer knows

who he is—as if he ever did—and he implies that it is her impertinence

that has caused this catastrophic loss of identity. Fragile identity! But

he does not say any of this directly. Ignoring her, he appeals over her

head to an imaginary but of course very real audience, and we fall for

it. Every audience of which we have any record sides with Lear in this

family squabble. It is not hard to see why: Lear is an impossible person, 

but Goneril will soon become less like a person and more like a creature 

of essentially feral appetites, i.e. more natural, in Edmund’s sense

of that word. Our knowledge of this later development is typically 

fed back into our response to this scene.

Lear is an unusually intemperate man. Whether this has always

been the case or he has merely become more rash and choleric with

age is not entirely clear. The fact that no one is prepared for rage in the

first scene suggests that he has not always been so unpredictable. Yet

even with his absurd denunciation of Cordelia ringing in our ears, we

may not be prepared for the extraordinary violence of the curse he calls

down on Goneril—this “detested kite”:

Hear, Nature, hear, dear goddess hear!

Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intend

To make this creature fruitful.

Into her womb convey sterility,

Dry up in her the organs of increase . . . I.4.279

No one likes being cursed, and Lear’s curses are especially malevolent

since he believes that he can, by his words, bend Nature to his will.

Little does he know. His words do not have the power he thinks they

have, but they do have power: the power to madden and infuriate, to

bring about the hardness of heart that he blames his oldest daughters

for. It’s only natural that, forced to listen to his verbal abuse, their hearts

should get even harder. As the play quite carefully shows us, they are a 

work in progress.

Perhaps Lear has always been a man of words, not deeds. When words

fail him and he runs out of curses, he learns how weak he really is:

No, you unnatural hags,

I will have such revenges on you both

That all the world shall—I will do such things—

What they are, yet I know not, but they shall be

The terrors of the earth! You think I’ll weep:

No, I’ll not weep:

I have full cause of weeping, but this heart

Storm and tempest.

Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws

Or ere I’ll weep. O Fool, I shall go mad. II.4.286

Weeping, he thinks, is what you do when you can’t do anything

else. Tears are a sign of weakness, and to be weak is miserable. Lear

would rather do anything than let himself be pushed around by his

daughters and he would rather go mad than admit that he might be in

the wrong. “I shall go mad,” says he to the Fool and the ambiguity of

that “shall” tells us that he is making a choice as well as a prediction.

Lear is not forced out into the storm; he leaves of his own free

will—which doesn’t mean that his daughters aren’t glad to see him go.

If it weren’t for the fact that he is going out into the storm of the century,

their indifference would be entirely understandable.

HEY, HO, THE WIND AND THE RAIN

The storm that Lear flees into may be Shakespeare’s most complicated

theatrical event. While it is a real storm it is also a Chinese box of

metaphors: for the rage that even Lear with his immense rhetorical

resources can no longer express, much less understand, for the madness

that he fears and seeks, for political and moral anarchy as he and

his kingdom disintegrate, and the state returns to the state of nature.

Yet through it all it is he, his voice, his poetry and not the storm we

hear. For Lear is the maker of this storm as he is also the maker of the

political storm which is about to tear his kingdom apart. A man who

can make storms is no ordinary man—he really is, or is like, a force of

nature. Yet at the same time he is humanized by it, brought back into

a human scale. He realizes that he can’t “out-storm” the storm and he

realizes that he is not alone in his sufferings; there are lots of people

who are worse off than he.

At first Lear welcomes the storm as if it were the answer to his

prayers, the thing he couldn’t find words for when he was impotently

threatening to bring down upon his daughters “the terrors of the

earth.” So at first the intemperance of his curses exceeds all measure:

the curse of sterility that he had earlier called down on Goneril has

been extended to all of nature. And for what? For creating people who

are capable of what he regards as the sin of sins, ingratitude.

Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ th’ world!

Crack nature’s moulds, all germains spill at once

That makes ingrateful man! III.2.9

This ought to be funny and would be if the audience weren’t almost as

confused as Lear is. The disproportion between curse and object is so

startling, perhaps, that we can’t take it in.

Maybe it even startles Lear, for this thought is quickly followed by

the common-sense reflection that he has no power over the elements

because he never did anything for them. Since wind and rain owe him

nothing, he has nothing to complain about. Nature is just doing its

thing, so let it blow, let it pour. But since Lear is perfectly certain that

he is being needlessly abused, his feelings constantly veer off into

self-pity.

Self-pity is incompatible with self-knowledge. It is also boring.

Since Lear is incapable of self-knowledge, he has to pity someone else

if he is not to bore the audience. While it is an important moment

when Lear’s “wits begin to turn” and he notices that he is not alone,

his wits never turn inward to examine himself. He notices and takes

pity on the Fool, it seems, so he won’t have to look at himself. Indeed,

he deliberately turns away from any such confrontation.

In such a night as this? O Regan, Goneril!

Your old kind father, whose frank heart gave all—

O, that way madness lies, let me shun that!

No more of that. (III.4.22)

No more of what? What is the direction and line of thought that leads

to madness? Does it not lead straight back from his self-pity to the lie

he has been living? He can’t finish his thought about his frank heart

because he knows it isn’t true. His heart was not frank and did not

give all—not, at any rate, to his eldest daughters.

Why does he think the truth, about what his frank heart did or did

not give, might drive him mad? And what does he mean by madness?

The question brings a further paradox of the play into view: when

Lear is rational he is mad. No one can tell him anything. Cross him and

he flies into a rage. No one is safe even, or especially, those he loves.

As his wits begin to “turn” and reason loses its grip, he becomes more

receptive to new ideas and experiences than he has ever been before.

He begins to acquire an oddly childish kind of sanity.

One part of himself begins to take an interest in the people around

him, as we have just seen, in his lines to the Fool: “Come on, my boy.

How dost, my boy? Art cold? I am cold myself.” He sees him as a

person like himself for the first time in the play. Now that he is wet,

cold and homeless, it occurs to him that he is not the only one, that

there are many others in the same predicament and always have been.

Another part begins to think about the fact that the world of the have-nots

is always invisible to the haves.

The meeting of Lear and Edgar, aka Poor Tom, is comic and intricately

connected with the rest of the play. It is the moment when an important

and interesting side of Lear, his thoughtful, even philosophical

side, a side that had heretofore been suppressed, begins to emerge and

flower. It is also a moment that brings out Lear’s endless talent for

self-absorption: a trait that he shares with the rest of us and one that

comedians and satirists take endless delight in. 

At first, Lear can only see Poor Tom as an analogue of himself, a 

fellow sufferer and victim: “Didst thou give all to thy daughters?” 

he asks, “And art thou come to this?” (III.4.50) Lear’s logic is 

crazy, comic, and apt. It’s as if he has discovered a law of nature: 

all fathers who give their all to their daughters end up with nothing, 

as homeless madmen; Poor Tom is almost naked, as well as homeless

and mad; therefore he must have given all to his daughters. When Kent

explains that Poor Tom has no daughters, Lear replies indignantly:

Death, traitor! nothing could have subdu’d nature

To such a lowness but his unkind daughters. III.4.71

What we know and Kent does not is that Lear is right—or at any rate

a lot closer to the truth, in his madness, than rational Kent. Edgar’s

case is indeed analogous to Lear’s. Both are victims of filial ingratitude,

and both are victims of paternal intemperance and stupidity.

His first idea is that Poor Tom must be a victim, like himself, of

unkind daughters, his second that he is doing penance for the sin of

having begotten such daughters in the first place:

Is it the fashion that discarded fathers

Should have thus little mercy on their flesh?

Judicious punishment! ’twas this flesh begot

Those pelican daughters. III.4.75

This line of thought will resurface later when Edgar will say to

Edmund, “The dark and vicious place where thee he [Gloucester] got/

Cost him his eyes.” (V.3.174) At this moment, however, Lear is driven

mainly by curiosity, not guilt: he asks Tom to tell his story. It is a

simple but significant change: his first impulse had been to impose his

own story on Tom.

Lear. What hast thou been?

Edg. A servingman! proud in heart and mind; that curl’d my

hair; wore gloves in my cap; serv’d the lust of my mistress’

heart, and did the act of darkness with her; swore as many

oaths as I spake words, and broke them in the sweet face of

heaven: one that slept in the contriving of lust, and wak’d to

do it. Wine lov’d I deeply, dice dearly, and in woman out-paramour’d

the Turk. False of heart, light of ear, bloody of hand;

hog in sloth, fox in stealth, wolf in greediness, dog in madness,

lion in prey. Let not the creaking of shoes nor the

rustling of silks betray thy poor heart to woman. Keep thy foot

out of brothels, thy hand out of plackets, thy pen from lender’s

books, and defy the foul fiend. III.4.98

Edgar has a talent for deception and camouflage. As Poor Tom, he conjures

this bogus autobiography out of nothing, out of thin air. Who is

this “servingman, proud in heart and mind,” who served the lust of his

mistress’ heart and “did the act of darkness with her”? Well, Edmund

for one, though neither Edgar nor the audience know it yet. But why

is the life of a licentious servingman the one that Edgar chooses for

Poor Tom? Because no gentleman could possibly end up as a naked,

crazy beggar who had once been a servant. No one would suspect that

he could have so declassed himself: Edgar is unrecognizable as Poor

Tom because, as Lear himself has just realized, people like that—beggars

and madmen—are invisible to the upper classes.

Edgar’s story makes for interesting contrasts and parallels with

Lear’s: his pretended madness with Lear’s real madness, his fictional

punishment over against the real punishment that is being meted out

to Lear. More important, Lear’s story, as Lear understands it, is no

truer than Edgar’s: “ingratitude” explains as much or as little as “the

foul fiend.” The foul fiend who is responsible for Edgar’s predicament

is his brother Edmund; the foul fiend who is responsible for Lear’s is

himself. The ingratitude of his daughters is only the proximate cause

of his misfortunes.

There may or may not be devils who punish sins, but it is a certainty

that there are none in this play, a point underscored later on by

Edgar’s tall tale to his father about the fiend that led him—tempted

him—to the edge of the cliff at Dover and the “clearest Gods” who

saved him. Poor old credulous Gloucester, mocked in different ways by each of

his sons, is no more deluded than Lear, who has always deluded himself.

This is a play that insists, in various ways, on being read naturalistically,

and Gloucester’s sons, each in his different way and for different

reasons, assert human responsibility. Edmund is a scoundrel

but he is right about the foppery of the world in general and his

father’s in particular. We are what we are because of what we have

made of ourselves, and others.

While Lear sees the Fool as a person for the first time, he does not

see Edgar; he is hardly able to see Poor Tom, and when he asks, “What

hast thou been?” he is not the least bit interested in his answer. What

interests him instead is his nakedness.

Thou were better in a grave than to answer with thy uncover’d

body this extremity of the skies. Is man no more than this?

Consider him well. Thou ow’st 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. Off, off, you lendings! Come, unbutton here.III.4.109

Why does Lear feel compelled to imitate Tom’s example? Why is he

suddenly ashamed to be wearing clothes? Tom, he thinks, is the real

thing, human nature in its purest state. We with our clothes on are

inauthentic by comparison, “sophisticated” in the original sense of

impure, adulterated. What’s this all about?

Lear is picking up on a line of thought that seems to have originated

in his earlier argument (in II.4) with Goneril and Regan about the

size of his little army of knights. Tom, in his nakedness, reminds Lear

of what he himself had said to his daughters about their gorgeous

clothes—which barely cover their (sexy?) nakedness—in defense of

his own irrational need for one of the symbols, at least, of sovereignty.

What do you need so many knights for? they ask:

Gon. Hear me, my Lord:

What need you five-and-twenty? ten? or five?

To follow in a house where twice so many

Have a command to tend you?

Reg. What need one? II.4.263

Lear replies that once the necessities of life have been accounted for,

none of the things we think we need can be rationally justified; the

question his daughters have aimed at the size of his train could equally

well be aimed at the fine clothes they are wearing (or not wearing).

O, 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. Thou art a lady;

If only to go warm were gorgeous,

Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear’st,

Which scarcely keeps thee warm. But, for true need—

You Heavens, give me that patience, patience I need!

II.4.271

Lear’s train of thought breaks off because he doesn’t know where it is

heading, and anyway he has a more urgent problem to think about:

how is he to endure what his daughters obviously have in mind, to cut

him down to size by reducing him to the level of a private citizen?

Since this process is unendurable to Lear, like being skinned alive,

patience is not much of a defense and the rest of this speech, as we

have noted, is almost incoherent.

To be human is to have needs that go beyond the bare necessities

of life; if all we truly need is to be warm, dry and well nourished, we

are no different from the other beasts of the forest and field, and what

we call civilization is nothing but superfluous luxury and affectation.

He doesn’t really believe this argument or notice where it is taking

him. It is merely an argument. The storm changes his mind. When he

is forced to feel what wretches feel he also begins to feel the force of

that argument, which is why he identifies Poor Tom as a philosopher.

Tom, he thinks, has turned that argument on its head: since what we

call civilization is nothing but superfluous luxury and affectation, the

only way to be human is go naked. Tom is the thing itself, 

unaccommodated man, because that’s what he, Tom, wants to be,

that’s the point he is demonstrating. He is showing us how to

recover our humanity. Or so Lear thinks.

When Lear loses his reason, he begins reasoning, i.e. trying to

think coherently about causes and effects and meanings. That’s one of

the reasons why we care about him. The question nagging at his mind,

what’s left of it, is what to make of so sadly diminished a thing as he

has now become. Tom was something and now he is nothing and yet

still, indisputably, a man. How does he do it? Maybe he knows something

Lear doesn’t? Perhaps if he follows him he’ll find out. And so

Edgar becomes, briefly, Lear’s guide into the land of the mad, the man

who knows what it’s all about. Lear calls him a philosopher, remembering

perhaps that there were once philosophers in the ancient world,

known as Cynics, who rejected the conventions, rituals and trappings

of civilization on principle in the name of a higher good: the pursuit

of wisdom and cultivation of virtue.

As it happens, Tom becomes his father’s guide and protector

instead, in a world that is neither mad nor rational but simply what it

naturally is, a world of arbitrary brute facts where actions have consequences

and what’s done can’t be undone.

Lear in his right mind is a terrible, tyrannical old man who would have

paid about as much attention to a cynic philosopher (or poet) as

Cassius does in Julius Caesar: none at all. (“Ha, Ha! How vildly doth

this cynic rhyme!” (IV.3.133) He, Lear, had been a man of the world with

no time for dreamers and visionaries. It would never have occurred to

him in his days of power and prosperity that he was neither wise nor

virtuous. As he says later, he had always been surrounded by people

who told him how wise he was and how good: “They flattered me like

a dog, and told me I had white hairs in my beard ere the black ones

were there. To say ‘ay’ and ‘no’ to every thing I said!” The wind and

the rain—and his own folly—changed all that: “When the rain came

to wet me once and the wind to make me chatter, when the thunder

would not peace at my bidding, there I found ‘em, there I smelt ‘em

out.” (IV.6.103) “Cracked open” (Linda Bamber’s apt phrase) and

out of his mind, Lear begins to show qualities that might have made

him a great man and a great king. Though he begins by closing in on

himself and blaming his troubles on others, he also begins to think

and to learn.

Once he recovers from the shock of madness and the loss of a stable

identity, he finds he rather likes his new and radically simplified

life. Unencumbered by Reason, he begins to make a new life for himself

in the world of the mad. For the first time in his life, he is free to

be his own man, his own king—a point that Lawrence Olivier, for one,

carefully brings out. When his Lear meets blind Gloucester out in the

woods or heath near Dover, Lear is happily living off the land. He

catches a rabbit in a snare, makes a meal of its heart and liver and

washes it down with water from a stream. As Edgar and Gloucester

enter (Shakespeare’s stage direction has Lear entering), he is saying,

“No, they cannot touch me for coining; I am the King himself.”

(IV.6.84) Lear is thinking about coining, i.e. making his own money,

because he knows he will need some in his new life in his new kingdom;

he can’t be entirely self-sufficient. Things are looking up. Food

is no problem, because he can catch it, and he can make his own

money. He’ll need an army too, he thinks, and so he sets about collecting

one. Now that money is no problem, he can afford to pay

recruiters (or is it press-gangs?). Having recruited some archers, he

begins testing their skill. And then he meets Gloucester.

It is not a happy recognition scene. Both of these men have been

punished out of all proportion for their sins, which is how it tends to

be in the tragic and the real world, but Lear is past the point of feeling

sorry for himself. His sufferings are remote, far off, and no longer

touch him, and so is the man he once was in that far off land of the

past: a man blinded by power and wealth and flattery. Gloucester is a

man from his past and he too is blind. The difference between literal

 and figurative blindness is of no consequence to Lear in his madness,

but then he has always been like that: a man, that is to say, who took

words for deeds, a man who confused literal and figurative meanings.

Lear knows that but it doesn’t bother him. Indeed, he thinks it’s funny,

which is why he treats Gloucester as a joke.

Ha! Goneril with a white beard? They flatter’d me like a dog,

and told me I had white hairs in my beard ere the black ones

were there. To say “ay” and “no” to everything I said! “Ay”

and “no” too was no good divinity. When the rain came to wet

me once, and the wind to make me chatter, when the thunder

would not peace at my bidding, there I found ‘em, there I smelt

‘em out. Go to, they are not men o’ their words! They told me

I was every thing. ’Tis a lie, I am not ague-proof. IV.6.105

His joke at Gloucester’s expense—his first of several—is cruel, but

then that’s how he sees himself: as the victim of a cruel joke.

Why does Gloucester remind him of Goneril and, through her, of all

that he hates in his previous life? They have two things in common,

the letter g and a lecherous disposition, but that’s enough. It doesn’t

take much to remind Lear of Goneril, who is quite a piece of work, as

we would say.

Gloucester’s arrival interrupts Lear as he is in the process of constructing

his new kingdom, and the association of Gloucester, Goneril

and lechery sets him thinking, again, about the problem of justice.

When he first tried to bring his daughters to justice (III.5 ) he was in

a retributive and self-pitying frame of mind and their trial ended

inconclusively. The judges were unable to agree about the nature of

the crime, the prisoners disappeared, the court and trial hastily

adjourned. Now, having simplified his life with the help of Tom aka

Edgar, and begun to live a life far more closely attuned than ever

before to the animal life of the countryside around him, he begins to

think of Nature in Edmund’s terms. As soon as he begins to think in

this new way, he sees how unnatural and therefore wrong our laws

and customs about lechery and adultery are. (He doesn’t know about

the treachery of Gloucester’s natural son.)

When I do stare, see how the subject quakes.

I pardon that man’s life. What was thy cause?

Adultery?

Thou shalt not die. Die for adultery? No.

The wren goes to’t, and the small gilded fly

Does lecher in my sight.

Let copulation thrive; for Gloucester’s bastard son

Was kinder to his father than my daughters

Got ’tween the lawful sheets.

To’t, luxury, pell-mell, for I lack soldiers. IV.6.117

Though Lear begins his sermon by taking a tolerant and practical view

of lechery—why get upset at a trait we share with birds, bees and flies,

especially when you need soldiers?—there is something about this

subject that darkens his mind. The more Lear thinks about our sexual

appetite, the more he identifies it as female and bestial, and the more

revolted and horrified he becomes. So virulent is his misogyny that it

disrupts the meter and turns his poetry to prose.

Behold yond simp’ring dame,

Whose face between her forks presageth snow,

That minces virtue, and does shake the head

To hear of pleasure’s name—

The fitchew nor the soiled horse goes to’t

With a more riotous appetite.

Down from the waist they are Centaurs

Though women all above.

But to the girdle do the gods inherit,

Beneath is all the fiend’s: there’s hell, there’s darkness, there’s

the sulphurous pit; burning, scalding, stench, consumption.

Fie, fie, fie! pah, pah! Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary,

to sweeten my imagination. There’s money for thee. IV.6.131

It may be that nothing can sweeten this imagination. How did it get

this way?

Lear’s forgiving view of sexuality turns unforgiving because, in

part, that is the view he inherits from Christianity: he knows the

Christian view is wrong but can’t get away from it; it draws him back

just as he is trying to formulate a more natural one. And he has a

motive for seeing his daughters as fiends: if they are fiends, they are

not humanly accountable; if they are not accountable, he isn’t either.

He can’t even be blamed for begetting them, a possibility he glances at

briefly in the line, “Judicious punishment! ’Twas this flesh begot/

Those pelican daughters.” (III.4.75) If Lear is to be believed, women

are such monsters of sexual appetite that his complicity in the begetting

of his daughters could only have been incidental. He just happened

to be in the wrong place at the right time. “Fie, fie, fie! Pah,

pah!” he says, as if to exorcise the memory of these foul embraces.

And who was the woman, his wife, the mother of his daughters? Not,

obviously, the generic monstrosity, Woman, that Lear constructs here.

She has no name and is never referred to, but there must have been

such a person: a real person, not an abstraction. Edgar had a mother

too, but she is never named or referred to either. We don’t even know

if she was alive when his half-brother, Edmund was born. And

Edmund’s mother? Well, she was fair and frolicsome, we are told. And

that is all.

There are no mothers in this play, and there is a good reason for

their absence: the mistakes that Lear and Gloucester make are so stupid

that even a little common sense would have prevented them. I

don’t say there’d have been no play had their wives been present, but

it does go more easily without them. (Just as Macbeth is simplified by

the absence of Macbeth children and babies.)

Misogyny is a man’s last refuge from responsibility, and Lear is no

exception. But while Regan and Goneril are not fiends or monsters,

they do make us feel that Lear has not entirely misjudged them. They

are extraordinarily tough, hard women to be sure, but it would be easy

to find others just like them today or at any time.

Gloucester has been overwhelmed by his injuries, while Lear has been

strangely energized by his. Gloucester knows who he is and who he’s

talking to, and though he can’t see how the world goes, he can feel it.

But that’s all. Lear doesn’t know who or where he is and couldn’t care

less; having lost his (conventional) sense of reality, he feels liberated.

For the first time in his life, thought is free, imagination untrammeled.

This freedom has a price, however: without the conventional constraints

of reason or the agendas imposed by reality, he doesn’t know

what to do with his freedom or what to think about.Gloucester's arrival

is opportune, therefore. He gives Lear something to think and make jokes about. 

Sex and adultery are the first things Lear wants to talk about (perhaps 

because Gloucester is an adulterer), then justice.

Why justice? The subject is germane to the play in several ways and

it is something that Lear needs to think about in his new (secular)

kingdom of one, but that is not why it comes up in this conversation:

as a result, say, of asking the normal, reasonable question, “how did

you lose your eyes?” It comes up because Lear and Gloucester manage,

unintentionally, to back into it. The haphazard course of this conversation

(so to speak) is part of its charm.

Having sworn off love forever (“No, do thy worst, blind Cupid! I’ll

not love”), Lear insists that Gloucester admire the penmanship of the

challenge he has been writing:

Lear. Read thou this challenge; mark but the penning of it.

Glou. Were all thy letters suns, I could not see.

Edg. [Aside] I would not take this from report: it is, and my

heart breaks at it.

Lear. Read.

Glou. What, with the case of eyes?

Lear. O, ho, are you there with me? No eyes in your head, nor

no money in your purse? Your eyes are in a heavy case, your

purse in a light, yet you see how this world goes.

Glou. I see it feelingly.

Lear. What, art mad? A man may see how this world goes

with no eyes. Look with thine ears. See how yond justice rails

upon yond simple thief. Hark in thine ear: change places, and

handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? Thou

hast seen a farmer’s dog bark at a beggar? IV.6.155

Edgar’s pained aside is understandable but irrelevant as we try to follow

Lear’s mad logic. Instead of asking Gloucester what happened to

his eyes, Lear insists, twice, that he read his challenge. And it is only

after Glouncester has insisted, twice, on his blindness that Lear gives

in and accepts the fact. (Such stubborn indifference to facts is, as we

know, characteristic of Lear.) Forced to acknowledge the obvious, he

still doesn’t ask what happened. What catches his attention is a relationship,

between blind Gloucester and the half-naked beggar who is

leading him: not of course the real relationship but a metaphorical

one. Blindness and poverty literally go hand in hand in this world, he

sees: “No eyes in your head, nor no money in your purse?” The syntax

of Lear’s question suggests an equation (eyes=money) which

strikes him as amusing, so he uses it to make a pun that is more

amusing still (picking up on Gloucester’s use of “case” for sockets):

“Your eyes are in a heavy case, your purse in a light.” Then it occurs

to him that even, or especially, those who are eyeless and penniless

can be called upon to witness, as it were, the great truth about the

world that Lear himself has only just discovered: the only thing that

counts is power. Without power, especially the power of money, one

counts for nothing. (Or as the song says, “Nobody knows you when

you’re down and out.”) Lear’s jokes drive that point into Gloucester

in the most painful way, so when Lear asks him or tells him that he

doesn’t need eyes to see how the world goes, he agrees bitterly: “I see

it feelingly.”

Lear thinks Gloucester is just being slow, that he means gropingly

or tentatively— “I'm just beginning to get the idea”—and reacts impatiently,

“What, art mad?” Did you lose your wits when you lost your eyes? And so,

lapsing out of prose, into poetry, he begins to flesh out for Gloucester his 

great truth and in so doing makes it deeper and more profound than the idea 

he began with. What Lear offers Gloucester is more than an abstract truth about

the way of the world, but a vision (powerfully reminiscent  of Langland’s visionary

poem of the 14th ceentury, Piers Plowman) of a mean, cruel, corrupt, heartless 

world driven by the lash of desire–for money, money, money. It is such a vision of

an unredeemed and unredeemable world as the world hardly understands:

Thou hast seen a farmer’s dog bark at a beggar? 

And the creature run from the cur? There thou mightst behold

the great image of authority: a dog’s obeyed in office.

Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand!

Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thy own back.

Thou hotly lusts to use her in that kind

For which thou whip’st her. The usurer hangs the cozener.

Thorough tatter’d clothes small vices do appear;

Robes and furr’d gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold,

And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks;

Arm it in rags, a pigmy’s straw does pierce it.

None does offend, none, I say none, I’ll able ‘em.

Take that of me, my friend, who have the power

To seal th’accuser’s lips. Get thee glass eyes,

And like a scurvy politician, seem

To see the things thou dost not. Now, now, now, now.

Pull off my boots; harder, harder—so. IV.6.173

And then it is gone. Lear’s vision of the world is always true, then,

now, whenever we hear or read these lines, but boots have suddenly

become more important than truth and getting them off his feet the

most important thing of all. Gloucester, his fellow inquirer after the

truth of the world, becomes nothing but a bootjack. Once more the

point, this time about justice, is made at his expense.

Character is fate in the tragic world: Lear’s and Gloucester’s fates are

written not in the stars but in their banal, unreflective selves as rather

ordinary men of the world. Neither, in his days of power, prosperity and

pride, has ever had an original idea or an unconventional emotion. That

is why neither is prepared when the trap that each has been unconsciously

preparing for himself is finally sprung: each wilfully and imperiously

refuses to understand the character and motives of his youngest

child just when it is most important that he should do so.

Lear’s sermon on justice occurs spontaneously, as a result of his

chance encounter with Gloucester. Though it is, as I have tried to show,

entirely unplanned, it clearly comes from deep within—churned up

from the depths of his soul, as Lamb says, by the tempest in his mind.

It is both original and banal, new and old—what has “oft been thought

but ne’er so well expressed.” It is what Lear himself has always known

but always repressed. Anyone who has lived in the world and is not

a complete fool knows these things.

Now that Lear knows them for real, “feelingly”—and the audience

has been forcibly reminded of what it too has always known—how

should the play end? Should it remain faithful to the ancient story

and end happily with Lear restored to power in England, Cordelia happily

married to the King of France, the two nations at peace? That is

the ending that we all desire, whether we admit it or not, and it is the

ending that Shakespeare deliberately—mockingly, perhaps?—refuses

to give us. Every comforting hope is dashed. What the play seems to

give with one hand it immediately takes back with the other.

THE FORTUNES OF WAR

Lear is found—captured after a brief chase—by Cordelia’s men and

brought in for medical treatment and the loving care he so badly

needs. Having been “cut to th’ brains,” as he says, he is partially

healed. He will never again be the man he was, however, and that we

may think is probably a good thing. The sweet, simple, direct poetry of

his reconciliation with Cordelia is especially moving because we know

what it cost. Whole layers of Lear’s personality had to be stripped

away before he could meet her or anyone else on these terms.

This brief, fragile scene of sweetness and light is followed by a scene

of barely submerged and thoroughly nasty rivalry between Regan and

Goneril, each aware of the designs of the other, while Edmund, their

object, looks on, hugely entertained. The evidence of his treachery is

written on their feral faces; they are like weasels fighting in a hole. This

is not, you would think, the way to fight a successful war, with the

leaders distracted from the business at hand by mutual jealousy and

suspicion. And in fact, it is Edmund’s lecherousness that does him in.

Had he courted Regan when her husband died instead of making love

to both the sisters and playing them off against each other, all would

have been well, for him at least. But then he would not have been the

foolish as well as unprincipled rascal that he is.

The point of the scene is not to show the potential disunity of the

English forces and raise hopes for an English defeat, but rather to

draw attention, once more, to the way people in a state of nature reveal

their true natures. The fact that it is Edmund, of all people, the amoral,

opportunistic, and self-proclaimed child of amoral Nature, who has

caught the fancy of both Goneril and Regan, shows us what they are.

He and they deserve each other. If they weren’t all such hard, cruel

people, we might find it in our hearts to pity them.

The battle for possession of King Lear and the future of England is

fought out in the distance as Gloucester listens silently in the shade of

the tree where Edgar has parked him—hoping, as Frank Kermode

observes, for “good, conclusive news and comfort and [getting] neither.

That is the way Lear works.”

It is the battle that Edmund has been itching for. If his side wins it,

he will have a pretty good chance of becoming the next king. The Duke

of Cornwall is dead; the Duke of Albany, a man of old-fashioned scruples

and principles, will be no match for him and Goneril—especially

Goneril. But Edmund’s luck has run out though he doesn’t know it yet.

His brother, having killed Goneril’s messenger and read her astonishingly

ruthless love letter, passes it on to her husband where it will

remain until the battle is over, and he is ready to use it.

The English forces win this battle for no particular reason; it could

have gone either way. Lear and Cordelia are taken. Edmund prudently

sends them off under guard with secret orders that they should be

killed as soon as possible. Cordelia has no illusions about their fate

and accepts it with stoic dignity, though she can’t resist one last ironic

gibe at her sisters: “Shall we not see these daughters and these sisters?”

These are her last words. Lear’s response is both characteristically

imaginative and unexpectedly beautiful.

No, no, no, no! Come let’s away to prison.

We two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage.

When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down

And ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live,

And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh

At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues

Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too—

Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out—

And take upon’s the mystery of things,

As if we were God’s spies; and we’ll wear out,

In a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones

That ebb and flow by th’moon. V.3.19

This, Kermode observes, is “the kind of fantastic poetry that

Shakespeare had long known the trick of.” It is not a trick though—

or not just a trick. Lear’s fantastic poetry is powerfully expressive, as

always, of the man he is, a self-deceiver who is never or rarely completely

deceived. Just as his use of the word gratitude shows that, deep

down, he does know the difference between love and gratitude, so his

poetic fantasy of a life in prison that is out of time, not of this world,

shows that he is not completely deceived about their actual fate. What

he is imagining here is a kind of immortality, a life after death.

The nemesis that has been stalking Edmund is nothing supernatural,

just his outraged brother. Edgar is no longer the patsy Edmund took

him for, but an accomplished killer and secret agent: a master of disguise

who can come and go at will, undetected, anywhere, anytime.

This talent makes him just a little spooky in a play that is otherwise

so insistent on natural causes. When Edgar appears as an unknown

knight and challenges Edmund to judicial combat, it is almost as if he

were coming as the deus ex machina of the play: an embodiment of

the moral principles that Edmund has treated with contempt. There is

no such god of course. If that is what we were hoping for, we

are soon undeceived. In the time it takes to stage this inherently theatrical

form of justice, Edmund’s orders are being carried out. Poetic

justice is what Edmund gets; he is hoist by his own petard. Meanwhile,

off stage, the remorseless logic of the tragic world is grinding away.

POETIC JUSTICE

Poetic justice is a justice that only the fictive worlds of poetry or theater

or television can supply. In these make-believe worlds the virtuous

triumph and the wicked either get what they deserve or change

their natures and their hearts. The wicked brothers, in As You Like It, 

have a change of heart and become virtuous, which is how we like it. 

The curse of madness which falls inexplicably upon Leontes in 

The Winter's Tale is lifted, also inexplicably. He gets his wife back

from the grave, and the daughter whom he had tried to destroy. 

All ends happily after all.

Alls well that ends well in the worlds of comedy and romance, and

nature occasionally imitates art in this respect: one lucks out from time

to time and gets a second chance; the wicked are not always as wicked

as they could, or might like to be; people do sometimes learn from their

mistakes or have a change of heart. And so these literary genres, comedy

and romance, don’t quite lose touch with reality, which is usually

tragic.

There are no second chances in the tragic world or the tragic theater.

Actions have unexpected consequences, and these cannot usually

be reversed. What’s been done can’t be undone. Character is fate,

and the worst of it is we create our own characters, with lots of misguided

or malicious help from our friends and others, when we are too

young to know what we are doing. By the time we acquire a modicum

of self knowledge, it is too late.

The tragic hero learns too late the meaning of his or her actions or

inactions; or maybe, like Lear or Othello, he never learns. All of

Shakespeare’s tragic heroes are slow learners. Though they learn

something from their mistakes, they learn too late, and they never

learn why they made them in the first place. And while the audience

knows more than the tragic hero, it too in the end is left clutching for

explanations. The tragedy of Lear is that whatever he learns he learns

too late: too late for wisdom since his mind is gone, too late for virtue

since his strength and power are gone, too late for love since his children

are gone. Having become what he made them, they leave him.

The most bitter pill of all, and the one that most audiences are

reluctant to swallow (and refused to swallow for almost 160 years) is,

first, that the price of learning, for Lear, is the loss of all those things—

mind, strength, power, children—that would have given point and

meaning to what he learns; and, second, that this price bears no reasonable

relationship to his sins. Lear is indeed a man more sinned against than 

sinning; his punishment doesn’t even begin to fit his crimes. That’s how 

it is in the tragic world, which is, above all, unfair.To demand poetic justice 

from a play or a novel is to demand that art should correct for the basic 

unfairness of the world.

That was the demand that was placed on King Lear for almost 160

years, from 1681 when Nahum Tate undertook the task of revising the

play in accordance with the criteria of probability and good taste that

prevailed at that time, until 1838 when Macready completed the work

of restoration that Kean had tentatively begun in the previous decade.

Other plays of Shakespeare’s have had their ups and downs in the

market-place of public taste and opinion, especially the so-called problem

plays: Troilus and Cressida, All’s Well That Ends Well, and

Measure for Measure. Dryden thought it necessary to completely

rewrite Troilus and Cressida and Antony and Cleopatra, translating

these plays into his own poetic language, in order to make them

acceptable to Restoration audiences. No other play of Shakespeare’s,

however, was actually driven from the stage by popular demand and 

more or less permanently replaced by an inferior version–inferior, 

that is to say, acccording to our romantic or post-romantic standards.

The fact that Tate’s Lear held the stage for such a long time tells us 

something important about art and the judgments, both moral and

esthetic, that we make about works of art. 

If we care about Lear, it is because of his imaginative power and

intellectual originality; it is the force of his poetry that we are responding

to, whether we know it or not. That is to say, our judgments about

King Lear are, in large part, literary, esthetic, moral.The the fact that 

Tate’s version of the play lasted for more than one hundred and fifty years, 

shows how easily literary judgments can be trumped by religious, moral or 

philosophical beliefs.

Here is a choice bit from Tate’s final scene. Albany has just told Lear all

about the wickedness of Regan and Goneril, and about Edmund, whom 

he has just left mortally wounded. He continues:

Since then my Injuries, Lear, fall in with Thine,

I have resolv’d the same Redress for both.

Kent. What says my Lord?

Cord. Speak, for me thought I heard

The charming voice of a descending God.

Alb. The Troops by Edmund rais’d, I have disbanded;

What Comfort may be brought to chear your Age,

And heal your Savage Wrongs, shall be apply’d:

For to your Majesty we do resign

Your Kingdom, save what part your Self conferr’d

On us in Marriage.

Kent.  Hear you that, my Liege?

Cord. Then they are Gods, and Vertue is their Care.

Lear. Is’t possible?

Let the Spheres stop their Course, the Sun make halt,

The Winds be hush’t, the Seas and Fountains rest;

All Nature pause, and listen to the Change.

Where is my Kent, my Cajus?

Kent. Here, my Liege.

Lear. Why I have News, that will recall thy Youth;

Ha! Dids’t thou hear’t, or did th’ inspiring Gods

Whisper to me alone? Old Lear shall be

A King again.

Kent. The Prince that like a God has Pow’r, has said it.

Lear. Cordelia then shall be a Queen, mark that:

Cordelia shall be a Queen: Winds catch the Sound,

And bear it on your rosie Wings to Heav’n.

Cordelia is a Queen.

What is the belief that trumps judgment here? How could anyone who

has read Shakespeare’s King Lear accept such drivel? Here is what a

great critic, Samuel Johnson, had to say:

Shakespeare has suffered the virtue of Cordelia to perish in a

just cause, contrary to the natural ideas of justice, to the hope

of the reader, and, what is yet more strange, to the faith of the

chronicles. Yet this conduct is justified by the Spectator

[Addison] who blames Tate for giving Cordelia success and

happiness in his alteration, and declares, that in his opinion

“the tragedy has lost half its beauty.” ....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 excellences are

equal, the audience will not always rise better pleased from the

final triumph of persecuted virtue. In the present case the public

has decided. Cordelia, from the time of Tate, has always

retired with victory and felicity. And, if my sensations could

add any thing to the general suffrage, I might relate, 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.

An honest response to the play and an honest statement of principle.

The purpose of theatrical art, says Johnson, is not to show us the truth

about human nature and the world but to show us what that truth

ought to be. Poetical justice is a justice that only poets can provide,

and it is the poet’s job to provide it. If he doesn’t, show him his error

or do what Tate has done: correct it.

Critics these days are not usually as forthright as Johnson is in laying

out their assumptions. The idea that art should not show us how

things are but how they ideally ought to be, once widely shared in the

sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is so no longer.

Socialist Realism, the twentieth-century version of that idea, is dead

and so too is its philosophical opposite, the idea that truth in a work

of art is an irrelevant consideration: art alone is what matters, for its

own sake, not for what it says or means.

It is easy to be confused about such matters. Keats’ famous clarification,

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” did nothing to clarify his poem, 

Ode on a Grecian Urn. It is one of those terse formulations, like

“might makes right,” that we can’t live with and can’t live without. For

my part, while I want to say that the poetry of King Lear is what chiefly

matters, I have to admit that I am powerfully affected by what I take

to be the truth of its tragic vision.