King Lear, Shakespeare’s second most reputed play, begins absurdly but soon displays the Bard at his most emotionally moving. The motivating conceit is laughable: Lear asking his three daughters—Regan, Goneril, and Cordelia—who loves him the most. The two bitchy ones (R and G) say they love him above all things, whereas the devoted Cordelia says, “I love your Majesty according to my bond.” We’re reading Shakespeare, so of course “bond” could mean three things: the loving bond I have with you (probably what she meant), the familial bond of daughter to father (less good), or the bond of duty I owe you since you sired me (how Lear took it—not good). But Cordelia, darling, why use language so ambiguous? You are speaking to the father you adore. I appreciate your honesty and all, but couldn’t you have just said, “My actions have always spoken for me and always will, my beloved progenitor”? Wouldn’t that have made it a lot easier on everybody?
Anyway, despite a lifetime of mutual love, Lear disowns her immediately and gives his kingdom to the evil not-stepsisters. Bad move. First the one tells him he can’t keep all one hundred of his manservants with him at her place, causing Lear to pout like Achilles and wish her womb forever barren (clearly the appropriate response), then the other joins league and they lock him out of doors in a terrible storm. Of course he realizes his mistake immediately but is too proud to go to Cordelia and apologize. And there you go: such is the psychology of King Lear.
Yet while the character Lear is disappointing and barely likeable or even pitiable until the end, there is still much in his play to make the ducts draw forth their droplets. It’s easy to see why many people like this Shakespearean play best of all, for what Lear loses in language compared with Hamlet, it makes up for in strumming of the soul-strings.
My favorite scene—the one that most twists my guts around—is in the parallel plot, where the good brother, Edgar, is betrayed by the bad bastard brother, Edmund, to their father, the earl of Gloucester. Then Edgar (in disguise) leads his blind father to the “cliff” of Dover, from where he “shall no leading need.” Edgar knows his father wants to commit suicide, knows the guilt his dad feels for falsely accusing him of betrayal, so he “leads” the sightless man without them going anywhere, telling him all the while how the way is getting steeper. They’re walking in a field instead of to the cliff, so when Gloucester goes to jump, to “shake patiently [the] great affliction off,” he simply falls on his knees to the ground. To imagine a son watching his parent try to kill himself and seeing how helpless he is—that is purest pathos. (And if you’re wondering, as I was, why Edgar doesn’t reveal himself here—as Hamlet didn’t to Gertrude about the murder—I think it’s because he wanted to retain his secret identity until he could revenge himself on Edmund. Perhaps he feared that Gloucester would out him—though I would have thought letting his father feel his forgiveness would have been worth it.)
That scene alone vaults King Lear toward the top of Shakespeare’s plays, but there are other exquisitely plangent moments as well. Lear’s servant Kent’s goodness and devotion throughout warms the cockles, and his speeches are top-notch. Lear’s fool, though he jibes Lear incessantly about having cast away his pearl of price, (Cordelia’s love), nonetheless stays with the deranged king into the storm and is the play’s great source of verbal wit.
The reunion of Cordelia and Lear, however, is where Shakespeare will really get you, mostly because Lear’s broken-man humility upon seeing her makes you finally care for him. Then his speech to her (see “Best Line”), as they are about to be locked in prison by the bad daughters, is as sublime an indictment of the world and glorification of the sweet escape into love and finding “the mystery of things” as you will ever read. Lear says it to his daughter, but you will want to take your loved-one’s hand and whisper, “Come, let’s away …”
On the other end of the pleasure spectrum, you can lick your Schadenfreude chops at a variety of excoriating—and odd—taunts. Kent, among a litany of invectives, manages this shockingly orthographical dig at one of the sisters’ henchmen, “I’ll… carbonado your shanks … thou whoreson zed, thou unnecessary letter!” (II, ii). What’s he going to call him next, a gerund? But Lear’s daughter Goneril has a tongue truly made of hydrochloric. Having just had Gloucester blinded, she says, “Let him smell his way to Dover” (III, vii). Ouch! Then, in reference to her mild husband, Albany, first she sells him down the river—“It is the cowish terror of his spirit / That dares not undertake”—and then disses him to his face, “You are not worth the dust which the rude wind / Blows in your face. … Milk-liver’d man, that bear’st a cheek for blows” (IV, ii). Egads. Let’s hope his other cheek is not formed for similar enterprise.
Finally, for maximum enjoyment of King Lear, pay special attention to the two-line rhymes at the end of a lot of the speeches. They are magnificent, perhaps the most beautiful in all of Shakespeare.
The Buzz: The standard interpretation says that Lear was a tragic figure who made the mistake of asking his daughters to say how much they loved him and then trusted the wrong ones. I actually think he was a little more daft than anyone (except Regan and Goneril) seems to acknowledge—look at his reactions, aren’t those the stuff of a doddering old man?—but that probably puts me in the bad person camp. Alas.
What People Don’t Know (But Should): Though Hamlet is much more famous for the paternal advice it contains (from the smarmy Polonius), I actually prefer both the message and the speaker of this marvelous jingle from Lear’s fool:
“Have more than thou showest,
Speak less than thou knowest,
Lend less than thou owest,
Ride more than thou goest,
Learn more than thou trowest,
Set less than thou throwest;
Leave thy drink and thy whore,
And keep in-a-door,
And thou shalt have more
Than two tens to a score” [I, iv]
Best Line: I love Lear’s plaintive (if histrionic) “Be my grave my peace” at the beginning (I, i) as well as this terse maxim: “To wilful men, / The injuries that they themselves procure/ Must be their schoolmasters” (II, iv). Later, when the daughters are having Gloucester’s eyes boot-heeled from his head, there’s the grim “Out vild jelly! Where is your lustre now?” (III, vii)—eeks. One of the sadder moments comes after an old man tells Gloucester, “You cannot see your way” and he responds, “I have no way, and therefore want no eyes; I stumbled when I saw”—the last bit a five-word damning of the entirety of his life. But, as mentioned above, my favorite by far is this, Lear’s final speech to a living Cordelia, the best of all:
“Come, let’s away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds i’ the 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 the moon.” [V, iii]
What’s Sexy: To support his disguise, Edgar invents a past in which he says he “served the lust of my mistress’ heart, and did the act of darkness with her … slept in the contriving of lust, and waked to do it… and in woman out-paramoured the Turk” (III, iv). “Did the act of darkness”—there’s one euphemism; here’s another: “Have you never found my brother’s way / To the forfended place?” (V, i), and a third: “Take thou my soldiers, prisoners, patrimony; / Dispose of them, of me; the walls are thine” (V, iii). He really knows how to not say it, Shakespeare.
Unfortunately, he doesn’t circumlocute some egregious misogyny, having Lear deride his ungrateful daughters with this speech:
“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.
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 fiends’.” [IV, vi]
Leaving the woman-bashing aside, we can at least endorse the line “Let copulation thrive,” right?
What to Skip: You can skip III, vi, with no loss; the disguised Edgar and banished Lear simply swap madman-speak. I know it’s not much, but the rest of the play is pretty damn incredible.