The plot of King Lear unites the plot of the old king and his three daughters with that of the Earl of Gloucester and his two sons. The two plots occupy the same space and time: the court of the aging Lear and his family, the countryside around, and much of pagan England. Causally, the two are loosely linked. If Lear and his family had not existed, Edmund’s lechery, gallantry, and Machiavellian skill would have had less free play. Edmund is directly or indirectly responsible for the death of Lear’s three daughters, but Lear and Gloucester have little impact on one another, and their destinies are determined primarily by their own children. To use Aristotle’s test, either plot could have been omitted without radically altering the other. The play contains many brief narrations, but neither plot is significantly embedded in the other, so that the chief relationship between the two plots is (typically for Shakespeare) in the world of parallelism and contrast.
The symmetries are constructed to confront the audience with two old sinners whose wicked children play on their overwhelming credulity to gain their property and then destroy them, despite the self-sacrificing efforts of their faithful, loving children. The contrasts are almost as obvious: king vs. earl, daughters vs. sons, madness vs. blindness, etc., but this chapter will center on the magnitude of the lies used to set the plots in motion. Lear’s evil daughters proclaim their love for their father in some of the most beautiful language Shakespeare ever wrote:
Sir, I love you more than word can wield the matter
Dearer than eyesight, space, and liberty;
Beyond what can be valuèd, rich or rare;
No less than life, with grace, health, beauty, honor;
As much as child e’er loved, or father found;
Beyond all manner of so much I love you.
(1.1.36–42)
Goneril’s speech is a lie, a contradiction of her real feelings. It turns out to be important, but is elaborate only in the gorgeousness of its diction, not for any plot embedded in it. Cordelia’s contrasting speech does have the rudiments of a plot:
I love your Majesty
According to my bond; no more nor less.
….
You have begot me, bred me, loved me; I
Return those duties back as are right fit,
Obey you, love you, and most honour you.
Haply, when I shall wed,
That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry
Half my love with him, half my care and duty.
Sure I shall never marry like my sisters,
To love my father all.
(1.1.74–75, 79–87)
Cordelia does love Lear and obeys his banishment order, but her way of honoring him is unusual, and she goes far beyond her filial duties when she risks her royal life with her husband and dies trying to save her father. It may not be a striking lie; like Edgar lying to Gloucester, she hopes to shock her father back into the truth, but the untruth her lie narrates is revealing. Cordelia’s lie contains a situation, a need, and an action—marriage—which has a result that could become the basis of further steps in an embedded plot, but as a speech it is primarily an unsuccessful antidote to the speeches of her villainous sisters, who lie in the standard manner of court flatterers, almost as a matter of course. (When asked how to deal with Queen Victoria, Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli answered, “Lay it on with a trowel.”) If Lear had known himself less slenderly, he would have ignored the false statements of all three daughters, or not solicited them in the first place. In the next scene, Shakespeare wants us to compare Edmund’s lie with Goneril’s and Regan’s acquisitive speeches, but also with Cordelia’s precipitating lie. Both Edmund and Cordelia answer their fathers, “Nothing, my lord” and generate an interchange on nothing, but Edmund, the son, instigates one crisis, with Gloucester responding to his lies, while Lear instigates the other, with his daughters responding with lies. Cordelia’s lie has a rudimentary plot; Edmund stages a whole play within the Gloucester plot. Edmund invents a parricidal plot and tricks his brother into playing a plausible villain’s role. His lie gradually co-opts the whole apparatus of the state into the pursuit of his brother and eventually his father.
Psychologically, Edmund’s lie has classical Freudian implications. This drama of parricide by Edgar that Edmund has embedded in King Lear is the instrument of the parricide he himself is attempting. He wounds his own arm to make his lie more persuasive, but at a deeper level his lecherous impulsiveness parallels that of the lecherous father he is punishing for the good sport at begetting him; the wound punishes both generations, just as his lie about his pain at denouncing his father—“O heavens! that this treason were not, or not I the detector!” (3.5.12–13)—serves a practical purpose but also reflects some level of genuine horror at his greedy destruction of the father who begot him. In his pre-Soviet years, Konstantin Stanislavsky believed that an actor playing a villain should always seek out the villain’s virtues and foreground them. Edmund is a magnificent playwright and has composed a great role for himself: reluctant fidelity to Gloucester and then the same to Cornwall that is painful because it goes against his flesh and blood. He uses other lies for other purposes: simultaneous betrothal to Goneril and Regan for sensuality and the joy of deceiving husbands and concealment of his orders to kill Lear and Cordelia as a way to let the murder happen unimpeded. But these less elaborate lies are instruments for gaining ends, and only secondarily ways of expressing his own identity and those of other characters.
His brother Edgar, whom he has accused of attempting Gloucester’s murder, concocts lies that are even more elaborate. To escape pursuit, he takes it into his head:
To take the basest and most poorest shape
That ever penury, in contempt of man,
Brought near to beast. My face I’ll grime with filth,
And with presented nakedness outface
The winds and persecutions of the sky.
The country gives me proof and precedent
Of Bedlam beggars, who, with roaring voices,
Strike in their numb’d and mortified bare arms
Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary.
(2.3.4–16)
This pattern of self-mutilation in the arm seems to run in the family, but Edgar has chosen a role for himself that is the very opposite of his brother’s, one that is base and self-mortifying rather than noble and surprised by an assailant. His lie takes on a biographical identity:
A serving-man, 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.
(3.4.85–92)
Edgar’s description of his current diet—frogs, toads, tadpoles, wall-newts, rats, and mice—enriches this social and sexual self-abasement in ways that demand more explanation than the plot of his brother’s lies does.
For Edgar, this is only the first disguise. While guiding his blinded father, he changes his clothes and seems to speak better. He takes him to the imaginary cliff, describes the dizzy height, and tells the audience, “Why I do trifle thus with his despair / is done to cure it,” but then adds, “And yet I know not how conceit [imagination] may rob / the treasury of life when life itself / yields to the theft” (4.6.33–34, 42–44). In short, he risks killing his father with an enormously elaborated lie in order to cure him, but the plot of the lie he uses embeds his father’s melodramatic suicide attempt in the plot of the play. This leads to two more disguises for Edgar. He impersonates a passerby who describes the figure Gloucester left at the top of the cliff: “His eyes / Were two full moons; He had a thousand noses, / Horns whelk’d and wav’d like the enridgèd sea: / It was some fiend” (4.6.69–72). Edgar continues to select unprepossessing guises for himself—in this last case, a demon. Edgar’s new lie, less plausible than Edmund’s but still appealing to his father’s superstitious streak, continues to endanger Gloucester’s life, as Edgar himself admits later on: “Became his guide, / led him, begg’d for him, sav’d him from despair; / never, (O fault!) reveal’d myself to him / until some half hour past” (5.3.191–94). The fault he realizes too late is simply that he, not his brother Edmund, kills his father. The weapon is the most powerful instrument in Shakespeare’s armamentarium, a recognition scene:
Not sure, though hoping of this good success,
I ask’d his blessing, and from first to last
Told him my pilgrimage. But his flaw’d heart,
Alack, too weak the conflict to support!
Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief,
Burst smilingly.
(5.3.195–200)
This recognition scene is recounted in a long narrative in the final recognition scene in King Lear. It plays an active role in the causal system, motivating Edmund’s revelation of his writ on Lear’s and Cordelia’s lives, in spite of his own nature. The Earl of Gloucester is the center of the three plots—Edmund’s lie, Edgar’s lie, and Shakespeare’s fiction—in which the two false plots are embedded. In Edmund’s lies, Edgar plans Gloucester’s death, attacks Edmund, and escapes to help Lear. In Edgar’s lies, a madman obsessed with demons or a demon itself assists Gloucester’s suicide attempt, which fails because he has become as light as gossamer and floated down the cliff at Dover. In Shakespeare’s lies, the Duke of Cornwall puts Gloucester’s eyes out for helping Lear, and Gloucester’s son Edgar leads him across England and makes two efforts to kill him, the second of which succeeds. The two lies and the presented version are incompatible with respect to Gloucester, but curiously Edmund’s lie and Edgar’s depiction of himself as a demon or madman are quite compatible with the way Edgar torments and eventually kills Gloucester. Edgar’s devotion is real, but his lies are cruel, to both his father and himself. He is operating in a world of anger that comes out in his speech to his dying brother about their father, who was less than half an hour dead: “The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices/ Make instruments to scourge us. / The dark and vicious place where thee he got / Cost him his eyes.” (5.3.171–74).
Edgar bottles up his rage, but displays it in the plots of his lies, which never deal with Edmund. Edmund’s lies turn Edgar’s hidden feelings into plans and intentions. Both brothers wound their arms to confirm their lies, but also, at some level, to punish their own aggressiveness.
If the Lear plot and the Gloucester plot of the play are parallel, this light on Edgar’s motives should throw some light on Cordelia’s. But here, the play fails to crystallize. The Lear plot contains no great Machiavellian lies that entrain others in the deception and move from step to step like Edmund’s and Edgar’s. In fact, the absence of certain lies from the Lear plot deserves special attention.