The King Lear plot came to Shakespeare from three main sources: Holinshed’s Chronicles, Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and an earlier play, The True Chronicle History of King Leir. In all three accounts, Lear and Cordelia survive the events; the horror of the ending is Shakespeare’s own. Tolstoy detested this plot and everything else about King Lear. He is not customarily included in the canon of great humorists, but his six-thousand-word narration of King Lear is, as translators in the Slavic field sometimes say, genial.
His summary of certain passages is masterful: when Lear brings Cordelia’s body on stage, crying:
Howl, howl, howl! Oh, you are men of stones.
Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so
That heaven’s vault should crack. She’s gone for ever.
I know when one is dead and when one lives.
She’s dead as earth. Lend me a looking glass.
If that her breath will mist or stain the stone,
Why, then she lives.
(5.3.258–64)
Tolstoy’s summary is eight words longer than the original: “Lear enters with the dead Cordelia in his arms, notwithstanding the fact that he is past eighty and sick. And Lear’s horrible delirium begins again, which makes one ashamed, like an unsuccessful joke. Lear demands that everybody howl, and sometimes thinks Cordelia is dead, sometimes that she is alive. ‘Had I,’ he says, ‘your tongues and eyes, I would use them so that the heavens would crack’” (Tolstoy, PSS, 35:235).
This is not the bloodless summary students read in CliffsNotes, but one literary genius doing a demolition job on another. The central technique here is a version of the defamiliarization for which Tolstoy is famous. Morphologically, “howl” is an imperative, but Lear’s words do not demand or even implore empathy so much as they enunciate the horror of the universe. Tolstoy literalizes them, just as he adds “he says” in the middle of a deeply moving quotation, using the commas as much as the words to interrupt the reader’s response. He does the same thing with the storm scene:
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!
You sulph’rous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
singe my white head!
(3.2.1–6)
Tolstoy’s narration of this speech is as narrative as Shakespeare’s presentation is dramatic: “Lear walks across the heath [po stepi] and says words which are supposed to express his despair: he wants the winds to blow in such a way that their (‘the winds’) cheeks would burst, the rain to pour over everything and the lightning to singe his gray hair, the thunder to crush the earth and destroy all the seeds that make an ungrateful person” (Tolstoy, PSS, 35:226).
The humor again resides in large part in Tolstoy’s literalism. He reports Lear’s raging as if Lear were conveying information: the idea that one must specify exactly whose cheeks should burst projects the same naïveté as the idea of summarizing such a speech by saying, “he…” And Tolstoy has already covered himself against the kind of literary analysis I am making by saying that these are words which are supposed to express Lear’s despair. Unlike CliffsNotes, this kind of summary presupposes its reader’s acquaintance with the original. It is a text about a text, not about an unfortunate king.
Tolstoy, as it happens, denied that Shakespeare was a major playwright and considered his renown to be the kind of rampant and then inertial suggestion to which humanity has always been subject (and still is). He cites the Children’s Crusades, those of grownups too, the witch hunts, the belief in the effectiveness of torture to determine the truth, the pursuit of the elixir of life, the philosopher’s stone, and the seventeenth-century tulip mania as other examples (Tolstoy, PSS, 35:260).
Tolstoy loved to shock, and some of his distaste for King Lear reflects this need to be noticed and some reflects his distrust of lyricism and secularism, both of which were dear to Shakespeare. He explains the ongoing excitement with the play as the inertia of popular delusions:
In Roman times it was already perceived that books have destinies of their own and often very strange ones: failure, notwithstanding their high worth and vast, undeserved success, notwithstanding their insignificance. And the pronouncement was made pro capite lectoris habent sua fata libelli, that is, the fate of books depends on reader reception. Such was the correspondence of the works of Shakespeare to the world outlook of the people among whom that renown arose. The renown was supported, and is to this day, because the works of Shakespeare continue to answer the world-outlook of the people who support that renown.
(Tolstoy, PSS, 35:262)
The renown of King Lear, as we know, did not protect its plot. Through most of the eighteenth century, audiences saw only Nahum Tate’s improved version, which enabled the old king to survive and for Cordelia to marry Edgar. The Romantics finally returned Shakespeare’s original plot to the stage.
Tolstoy did not carry these doctrines of reader response to the point where the text does not matter. In fact, he compared those doctrines so devoid of aesthetic feeling as to praise Shakespeare with blind men trying to sort out diamonds from heaps of pebbles, who would conclude “that all stones are precious, especially the smoothest.” On the broadest level, Tolstoy rejected Shakespeare because his style was Elizabethan and because he was unreligious; long since, in What Is Art?, he had proclaimed that art should infect the audience with the highest religious ideas of its time. But when he singles out King Lear to attack, he does so on the basis of plot.
Let us look for a moment at another key moment in the plot of King Lear. When Lear wakes up after his madness, he sees Cordelia and says,
You do me wrong to take me out o’ the grave.
Thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound
Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears
Do scald like molten lead.
…
You are a spirit, I know. Where did you die?
…
Do not laugh at me;
For (as I am a man) I think this lady
To be my child Cordelia.
…
Be your tears wet? Yes, faith.
(4.7.44–47, 48, 67–69, 70)
This is plainly a recognition scene. Lear believes he and Cordelia are both dead, himself in torment and Cordelia in heaven. His own death would be understandable. He is old, five years older than Tolstoy when the latter wrote about the play, and he has been through rages and wanderings more harrowing than those which killed Tolstoy a few years later. But there is a glitch in the causal system: Lear has exiled Cordelia to be queen of France; he did not order her execution, and nobody has lied to him about her death. This speech belongs in another kind of play. In this other kind of play, a ruler is or feels that he is responsible for the death of a good and beautiful woman who has nevertheless survived, usually because people lied to him. This speech comes from the recognition scene of such a play. If many chronologies are right, Shakespeare had recently written one such scene, in All’s Well That Ends Well (5.3.304f). When Helena appears, the King expresses the astonishment Bertram and the others feel: “Is there no exorcist / beguiles the truer office of mine eyes? / Is’t real that I see?” (5.3.340–42). He soon wrote another about Pericles, who thinks his wife has sickened and died bearing his child and been buried at sea:
CERIMON: This is your wife.
PERICLES: Reverend appearer, no;
I threw her overboard with these very arms.
…
CERIMON: Early one morning this lady was
Thrown upon this shore. I oped the coffin,
Found these rich jewels, recovered her…
…
THAISA: O my Lord, are you not Pericles? Like him you spake,
Like him you are. Did you not name a tempest,
A birth, and death?
PERICLES: The voice of dead Thaisa!
(Pericles, Prince of Tyre, 5.3.19–21, 25–27, 35–39)
This recognition scene is generated not by a lie, but by an error about a death at sea, as in A Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night.
In Cymbeline, as we have seen, a king of Britain, one as mythical as Lear, thinks Imogen has been killed as punishment for adultery and then learns she was innocent. When he sees her alive, he says, “If this be so, the gods do mean to strike me to death with mortal joy…. The tune of Imogen!” (5.5.270–76).
And in The Winter’s Tale, King Leontes has learned that the orders he gave for Hermione’s death were unwarranted. She has survived and is placed in a niche like a statue. The king addresses it:
LEONTES: Her natural posture!
Chide me, dear stone, that I may say indeed
Thou art Hermione.
…
LEONTES: Give me that hand of yours to kiss.
PAULINA: O patience!
The statue is but newly fixed; the color’s
not dry.
…
LEONTES: Oh, she’s warm!
(5.3.29–31, 55–58, 135)
These four recognition scenes all start with the visual and are clinched by the auditory or tactile. When Lear says, “Be your tears wet,” or at the end of the play when he says, “Her voice was ever soft and low, a most excellent thing in woman,” Shakespeare is plainly pursuing a practice he would exploit in his romances and probably already had used in All’s Well That Ends Well. I know that Shakespeare is reported never to have blotted a line he wrote, but I still would suggest that these lines survive in King Lear from an early draft, in which Cordelia survives and comforts Lear in his royal old age. Shakespeare inherited this ending from The True Chronicle History of King Leir; Tate preferred it, and Tolstoy praised the earlier play as far superior to Lear.
Shakespeare, I would argue, did due diligence and tried his hand at the plot he inherited. He wrote the culmination of all his recognition scenes, but then decided that he wasn’t ready for his late romances. He had a huge task: first, he replaced the execution order with banishment, though he left the rage that could have motivated either order in a lesser king. But then he ran out of negative capability and couldn’t bear to put aside the most beautiful thing he’d ever made and use it in a lesser play. This leaves us with the only recognition scene in Shakespeare that does not correct a lie or a maritime error.
In a letter written long before his article, Tolstoy had once said King Lear ought to be a usurper. That way he would not be “a man more sinned against than sinning.” Tolstoy was willing to accept the suffering in Greek drama because it had religious meaning. William Empson once commented on Hamlet’s phrase about knowing a hawk from a handsaw, being sane. A German commentator had corrected this distinction to that between a hawk and a hansel, or male goose. Empson said that this commentator had restored an earlier version of Hamlet’s line. Hamlet, being Hamlet, had thought of knowing a hawk from a hansel and then gone one better, one weirder, closer to a modernist simile. The commentator, as Empson put it, was “unwriting Shakespeare.” Tolstoy and Tate, I suggest, were both unwriting King Lear. They had both felt the presence of an older plot. Shakespeare had too. He had read the older play and, some think, acted in it. If he could have read Tolstoy’s and Tate’s improvements, he would have said, “Been there, tried that, wrote King Lear instead.”