Shakespeare: A Complete Introduction

Modern materialist criticism, as exemplified by Terry Eagleton, Malcolm Evans or Terence Hawkes, provides different radical perceptions of the play. John Drakakis notes that Eagleton’s materialist approach, for example, is one where ‘King Lear generates a rhetoric which devalues language’. It thereby ‘introduces a contradiction into the process of sign production whereby language is urged to surpass material reality at the same time as it is contained by it’ (Drakakis, J. [1996: 388–9]).

Similarly, if we look within the play for a universal value statement, we will be deluding ourselves about the nature of the work. Modern audiences or readers, for example, question the misogyny present in the work, just as they ask questions about the anti-Semitism of The Merchant of Venice or the racism in Othello.

Key idea

King Lear portrays the absurdity, vacuity and chaos upon which humanity seeks to impose order. It does so within the confines of an established dramatic structure that Shakespeare deliberately frustrates and strains to the very limit, affirming thereby his faith in the communicative function of art itself.

‘Feminist doubts about King Lear …come up in the discussion of the apparently excessive nature of the play’s misogyny. They [are] also raised in relation to the play’s ending and Lear’s appropriation of Cordelia. No one who discusses the play with women or girls today can be very confident in asserting that its values are “timeless” or “universal”; teachers find themselves apologizing for Shakespeare’s enthusiastic endorsement of what is at last being widely seen as the unfair and unjustifiable ideology of patriarchy…We can still find King Lear an excellent play in its own terms, but we must be aware that those terms are no longer our terms.’

Thompson, A. (1988: 76), King Lear, The Critics Debate. Basingstoke: Macmillan

This is a play that, however excellent in itself, needs to be handled with great care and for the twenty-first century it presents a very real challenge. Ann Thompson, earlier in her The Critics Debate volume, makes the point that there is a distinction between a critical approach to, and a critical judgement of, a play – that is, between interpretation and evaluation. So let us begin our discussion by looking at the mechanics of the play.

Structure and emblem

King Lear employs the fivefold structure of Shakespearean tragedy – problems, journeys, arrivals, complications and silence – and makes use of parallel plots and characters – the King, Gloucester and the Fool; Regan and Goneril; Edmund and Edgar. You will need to explore all of these in your consideration of the text. Many of the greatest productions of King Lear have circled around the problem implicit in its raw dialectic concerning nature, natural justice and the function of politics.

Whether in its quarto or First Folio versions, Shakespeare’s original ‘scripts’ contain a pattern or series of stark visual emblems: the King dividing his kingdom; Kent in the stocks; Edmund inflicting an injury on himself; Lear stripping himself naked on the barren heath; Gloucester’s eyes being put out; Gloucester throwing himself from the top of a non-existent cliff; the old King entering with the body of his dead daughter.

These visual signs are linked to the language the characters deploy as they bewail, manipulate, prevaricate or court each other in a world of power, violence and lust. These epic moments bring to the fore a number of contradictions at the centre of the play, and are presented in the two parallel plots: one concerning King Lear and his daughters, the other Gloucester and his sons.

The test

As the action progresses, the issues of the play seem to reflect Cordelia’s stringently sparse response to Lear’s demand that she speak of her love for him. She says she has ‘nothing’ to say. This is the first of a number of set pieces in the play which have real substance, but which at face value appear to be ‘nothing’. What is this challenge that Lear has set for Cordelia and his other daughters? Lear demands of them:

Which of you shall we say doth love us most,

That we our largest bounty may extend

Where nature doth with merit challenge.

(1.1.51–3)

However, this episode is not a competition, since as soon as Goneril has spoken the King gives her a portion of land and as soon as Regan has spoken he gives her hers. This exchange is telling, in that Lear is asking his daughters to measure something that is immeasurable. You cannot quantify love, and in this staged exchange we are to be invited to support Cordelia against her garrulous and, it turns out, deceitful sisters.

If this is a staged exchange and not a competition, then what is this test about? It may be suggested that Shakespeare sees it as an indication of the way this fictional king imposes his authority on his children: how does he perceive and construct reality here? Cordelia is going to get the best share because he believes that she will say that she loves him the most and, as his youngest daughter, it is implied, he expects her to look after him in his old age. Regan and Goneril will get their just share because they are his daughters. But behind this is a division of Lear’s power base, his land.

Spotlight

Shakespeare depicts Lear as having the power to construct his own reality, but, because he is a king, he can impose it on his subjects. Because he has authority, everyone has to conform to the order, the ceremony, the games, the tests that he creates. But Cordelia will not conform; she is a woman who resists, her resistance attracting sympathy since Lear is clearly wrong in what he is doing. Like Hamlet, she ‘knows not seems’. Her love simply ‘is’ and so does not have to be proved: to do so would be to demean it. This is what Lear is unable to understand.

In this respect, Lear is in somewhat similar to another of Shakespeare’s dramatic artefacts, Richard II, who, as we have seen (Chapter 14), at the beginning of Richard II relies on the great ceremonial order of the court that is later undermined by the politically pragmatic Bolingbroke. In Richard II the game is overtly political and the King may have an ulterior motive for hiding behind ceremony, but we also see the emotional toll it takes on the protagonist, when he comes to realize his dilemma as he gradually loses his power. This is explored further in King Lear, in which the King’s ‘family’ extends to embrace the entire community for which he has responsibility. Everything the King does, especially and including the treatment of his daughters, is necessarily political.

Telling the truth

Modern sensibilities may well approve of Cordelia’s behaviour in that she refuses to be sycophantic. She tells the truth: that she will love her husband as a husband and her father as a father. Audiences old and new will recognize this as part of a familiar collective perception of reality, and an important issue of identity for women in the early seventeenth century. But there is, however, something disturbing in Cordelia’s response. Just as in Richard II the King refuses to recognize that his questionable use of authority will lead to revolt, so in his plan for retirement Lear refuses to countenance any opposition to his patriarchal power. In fact, Lear wants to separate the position of king from the responsibilities of kingship.

Shakespeare has Lear warn Cordelia, ‘…nothing will come of nothing’ and there is a certain truth in that. But in refusing to conform to a ritual, Cordelia has placed herself outside the existing order of things. It’s not that nothing will come of nothing but that nothing can come of nothing because Cordelia refuses to be part of the material world that Lear constructs, in which everything is susceptible to measurement. Although there is biblical support for the simple use of language here, her candour is set against ‘the precious square of sense’ that allows Goneril and Regan to speak in garrulous but, as we shall soon see, duplicitous terms.

Goneril and Regan

The further irony is that Cordelia’s revolt, together with Lear’s decision to abdicate, allows Goneril and Regan to pursue the logic of Lear’s strategy to a horrifying conclusion:

GONERIL	Pray you let us hit together. If our father carry authority with such disposition as he bears, this last surrender of his will but offend us.
REGAN	We shall further think of it.
GONERIL	We must do something, and i’the heat.
	(1.1.304f.)

What they determine to create is a new domestic and political order into which the King, deprived of the symbols of his regal power, will have to fit. So it is that the play’s patterns begin to take shape. The argument about the hundred knights, for example, is a direct extension of Lear’s own flawed quasi-mathematical logic. Within a very short time, Lear’s hundred knights have been significantly reduced and Kent, in the stocks, asks why Lear has so few followers about him. The Fool replies:

All that follow their noses are led by their eyes but blind men, and there’s not a nose among twenty but can smell him that’s stinking. Let go thy hold when a great wheel runs down a hill lest it break thy neck with following it; but the great one that goes upward, let him draw thee after. When a wise man gives thee better counsel, give me mine again.

(2.4.61–8)

Thus the argument that follows between Lear and Regan and Goneril turns Lear’s argument against him, and serves to reduce him to ‘nothing’.

Parallel plots

When we turn to the parallel plots, similar issues confront us. Here, Edgar and Gloucester are tricked into believing a story that is fictitious, and that is fabricated by the deceitful and illegitimate Edmund. The result is that Edgar is forced to flee and in order to survive in a hostile environment he retreats to the inhospitable heath and takes on the persona of ‘Poor Tom’. Many productions of the play, and many criticisms of the play, seem to view Poor Tom as some kind of Elizabethan John the Baptist, sent out in a loincloth to eat insects and wild honey in the wilderness. He in fact becomes the emblem of the ‘unaccommodated man’ of whom Lear has, up to this point in the play, taken no account, and he retains this persona until he encounters his father, Gloucester, who agrees with his evaluation of human purpose that ‘Ripeness is all’ (5.2.11). It is Edgar who leads his father to recognize his past errors, and in a way not too dissimilar from that in which Cordelia’s return forces the chastened Lear to admit his.

‘[Shakespeare uses] “nothing” to suture together the Lear and Gloucester plots. Even as Cordelia’s initial response to her father is the words “Nothing, my lord”, so too, in his first exchange with his father, Edmund, when asked by Gloucester about the contents of the letter he has hastily hidden, replies, chillingly, with the very same words: “Nothing, my lord”.’

Shapiro, J. (2015: 61)

The heath

The heath is the place where the two plots come together. It is a barren waste of nothing, except for the elemental forces of nature that bear down on the characters that have resorted to its confines. As such, its function is similar to, though much darker than, the forests of the comedies, although even there the harsh consequences of elemental experience are alluded to in As You Like It. In that play, for example, Old Adam’s weariness and hunger lead him to the verge of death. But Lear’s heath is a place without trees, open to the storms and the reality of endless rain, which was described in Feste’s pessimistic closing song of Twelfth Night (5.1.381–400). Here the Fool echoes the same song as he coaxes Lear (3.2.73–6) into the shelter which they find to be Poor Tom’s hovel (3.4.37).

Key idea

A fine line can exist between comedy and tragedy. In the twentieth century G. Wilson Knight wrote of ‘King Lear and the Comedy of the Grotesque’, while Jan Kott discussed the bleakness of Shakespeare’s play in the context of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, which has been seen as a play within what is called ‘the theatre of the absurd’. Such mid-twentieth-century bleakness informed the tenor of Peter Brook’s famous production of King Lear at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1962 with Paul Scofield as Lear.

The portrayal of Poor Tom

The portrayal of Poor Tom can be a challenge to the actor playing Edgar. How does he develop the role once Edmund’s deceit has taken place and the character has fled to the heath, where he is flimsily clothed, crying out ‘Tom’s a cold’? Shakespeare gives the clue through what he is saying. Tom calls out that he is cold because exposure to the cold is the only reality that Tom knows. All other measures of reality, including his name, have been usurped by lies masquerading as truths. Edgar’s own perception of social order has disappeared: it has been stolen by his illegitimate brother, who is aware that the currency of power is land. But the heath to which those who have been displaced resort is a wasteland, barren, worthless, open to the ravages of the elements.

Edgar isn’t on the heath just to lead Gloucester. He is there as an emblematic figure, reconstructing an identity that has been taken from him. He has had to begin again and with a new name in order to rediscover himself. You may recall the plight of the usurped Richard II: ‘I have no name, no title;/No, not that name was given me at the font,/But ’tis usurp’d’ (Richard II, 4.1.255–7).

As with his earlier kings – Henry VI and Richard II – Shakespeare exposes Lear’s self-centred sanctimony as he wants to enter the hovel, kneeling in the rain to meditate on those over whose plight he has ‘ta’en/Too little care’ (3.4.32–3). He never enters Poor Tom’s shelter but rather, in encountering cold reality in the figure of the semi-naked Tom, Lear exposes himself to the elements (3.4.100f.).

Interactive narrative

It seems that Shakespeare, in a complex pattern of interactive narratives, is examining aspects of identity, experience and perception in order to pose questions about the nature of reality. The very opening of the play offers us some indication; the puns Gloucester makes about Edmund’s conception are not just for comic effect. Gloucester’s narrative of Edmund’s birth exposes an issue that informs the whole play: that at the heart of ‘order’ there lies disorder. Indeed, Gloucester may laugh and joke about Edmund’s bastardy, but Edmund shows in his Act 1 soliloquy that he can turn his illegitimacy to his political advantage, and he does so by appealing to the unmediated biological truths of ‘Nature’. (1.2.1–22). Edmund transforms Gloucester’s jokes into a new alternative reality by engineering a shift of emphasis in the very foundations of domestic society, so that his brother Edgar becomes the victim rather than the legitimate heir. He can do this because Shakespeare depicts him as realizing that society’s rules are not hard and fast, that there is a gap between the values and attitudes prescribed by law and actual human behaviour, and that this gap can be exploited.

It is not so much that Tom is ‘poor’ but that he is victimized and Shakespeare depicts him as having to suppress his bitterness in order to combat the turning of the ideological tide. On the heath he becomes the victim of the ‘cruelty’ of nature, subject to the wind, rain and tempest, with only a hovel to accommodate or protect him. But he recovers a strong enough identity for himself at the end of the narrative to be able to defeat Edmund and regain his birthright.

Questions of identity

The play asks: Who are you when you have been rejected, stripped of your power and social status or sent out on to the heath blinded or robbed of your birthright? What is the devil that Edgar describes (4.6.69–72), who he claims to see at the top of the cliff, a devil that has led Gloucester to contemplate suicide? Some might argue that it is something that Shakespeare has Edgar use to help educate Gloucester, although we should bear in mind that Edgar is employing an allegorical cloak to protect himself in what is a hostile environment. Gloucester himself is also a victim of that hostility but, after he throws himself from the imaginary cliff, he does not know whether he is alive or dead, whether he has fallen or not. The disguised Edgar claims to provide a particular experience for his disillusioned and blind father, and he does so from a position in which he is himself marginalized from society.

Moreover, the play seems to offer a perverted view of Christianity, in that the secularized Lear, realizing his own potentially tragic situation and fearing for his sanity, calls not on a god or a religious figure in his anguish but on his self-determination, tempered by his fear of insanity:

No, I’ll not weep.

I have full cause of weeping, but this heart

Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws

Or e’er I will weep. O fool, I shall go mad.

(2.2.475–8)

Belief offers no consolation for the pain and anguish that Lear suffers and which will eventually result in his death. In an incisive exchange towards the end of the first act, when the Fool had told him ‘Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise’, Lear had similarly prayed, this time to heaven:

O let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven! I would not be mad.

Keep me in temper, I would not be mad.

(1.5.41–5)

But there is no heaven to be found here, just as in Richard II there are no angels to come to the king’s service, however much he protests that they could. These are earthly kings suffering rejection and loss of identity.

In an early Jonathan Miller production, the director had an old Lear and an old Fool come face to face, mirrored in their expression of such anxiety. All of this may have had what is traditionally seen as a tragic effect but there is something mingled with it that is more challenging than the Aristotelian notion of anagnorisis, or self-recognition, will allow.

‘Unaccommodated man’

Clothes are the trappings of the society Lear is responsible for having ruled, and yet, as he comes to realize, in his encounter with Poor Tom, ‘unaccommodated man’ is something that he has failed to consider. On the heath he has to become as Poor Tom. He has to find out who he is now that language, ceremony and order have been stripped from him. He has to stand naked, exposed to the elements. Shakespeare takes King Lear beyond the realms of civilized communication to a point where he addresses Nature – the wind, rain and cold – rather than society:

Blow winds and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow!

You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout

Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!

You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,

Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts,

Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,

Strike flat the thick rotundity o’the world,

Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once

That make ingrateful man!

(3.2.1–9)

In the twenty-first century we sit and witness the tragic farce of this man reduced to nakedness and at the mercy of a violent storm. If he takes off everything, as did G. Wilson Knight as an 85-year-old actor in the 1970s, and Ian McKellen, somewhat younger, in 2007, there is a danger of distracting the audience. Through Lear’s stripping off of his clothes, audiences are being challenged to witness the breakdown of the stability of the self and the social context that sustains it. In the end, the body is primarily natural, not social, and therefore, once rejected by society, divorced from an identity within society, all that remains as a yardstick for judgement is Nature: the body outside the institutions of society, the body that will die and decompose, the naked body that on the scaffold and gibbet of Elizabethan and Jacobean England was literally ‘torn apart’. How this is achieved, without modern-day sniggering or offence, is a challenge for any director or actor, but does that matter?

Key idea

A distraught king crying out against madness and a blind man, Gloucester, later farcically throwing himself from a non-existent cliff, contribute to a sense of the ludicrous fragility of a reality that no longer inspires belief. Each event, and each character, is part of a dramatic discourse at the heart of which there appears to be nothing except illusion and disorder, and an irrationality that informs human conduct. Lear appears to conform to a familiar definition of absurdity: abdicating, forced onto an inclement heath, taking off his clothes in a storm, trying to find out who he is.

In the play Shakespeare confronts social perceptions of reality. If Lear constructs a reality that ultimately collapses, so do Regan and Goneril, so do Gloucester and Edmund, and so, in a curious way, does Cordelia. This is a domestic affair but at the same time it is not a family affair. All the characters are frustrated, more or less, in their individual attempts to resolve satisfactorily the problems that they either make for themselves or that they encounter. The result is that the play offers us a raw expression of the agony of what it can mean to be human in an inward, self-harming society driven by vicious ambition and cruelty.

The recognition scenes

Shakespeare provides three recognition scenes. The first is one between ‘the mad’ Lear and ‘the blind’ Gloucester, which concludes with these lines:

If thou wilt weep my fortunes, take my eyes.

I know thee well enough, thy name is Gloucester.

Thou must be patient. We came crying hither:

Thou knowst the first time we smell the air

We wawl and cry.

(4.6.171–6)

The second is when Lear wakes in Cordelia’s arms:

LEAR	Pray do not mock me.
	I am a very foolish, fond old man,
	Fourscore and upward, not an hour more or less;
	And to deal plainly,
	I fear I am not in my perfect mind.
	…
	Do not laugh at me,
	For, as I am a man, I think this lady
	To be my child Cordelia.
CORDELIA	And so I am, I am.
	(4.7.59–63, 68–70)

In these two he deliberately frustrates our expectation of closure, since neither of them is allowed to close the play satisfactorily. The strained frustration of the dramatic structure is thus an indication of the dark chaos of human experience that remains once the social and political context of what were formerly Lear’s identity, mind, sanity and kingdom have been taken from him. There can be no neat solutions to the dilemma for which he has himself been responsible, and we can say the same is true, in a less extreme form, of Gloucester.

A third recognition scene is to follow at the end of the fight between Edmund and the disguised Edgar, when Edmund asks who it is that has ‘slain’ him. But even this recognition, which concludes the subplot, does not arrive in time to prevent the deaths of Cordelia and Lear. The play, therefore, concludes with a curt statement that acknowledges the prevailing sadness that demands attention, while at the same time recognizing the difference between the link between ‘feeling’ and truth and the superficial demands on an imposed utterance:

The weight of this sad time we must obey,

Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.

(5.3.322–3)

It is precisely this conflict between what is felt and what ought to be done that cannot be resolved, largely because there is a gulf between signification (the capacity of language to express a stable reality) and reality itself. Gloucester, too, is dead and so are Cornwall, Regan and Goneril and all for nothing, for the impotence of office. Even the Fool, the touchstone of reality, has been hanged.

Spotlight

In King Lear, despite anagnorisis, the triple recognition scenes can provide no catharsis. Indeed, in allowing the action to lead to an inevitable and unavoidable conclusion, Shakespeare departed significantly from an anonymous earlier play, King Leir, which was one of his principal sources. Perhaps he had even acted in that earlier play with the Queen’s Men. In it, Cordelia and Lear survive and live happily together, but this is not a conclusion possible for Shakespeare’s play, in which he takes his audience to the abyss both structurally and thematically and forces us to contemplate its darkness, where possibly there remains a glimmer of light to be detected in the context of the artistry of the play that has just been performed.

If this is still regarded as a great play – which has not always been the case – I would venture to suggest that it is precisely because of the way Shakespeare pushes the action well beyond his own established rules of dramatic art. In deliberately frustrating and straining his structural template, testing it to its limit, he demonstrates his confident belief in his artistic abilities, as the greatest artists in music, literature, painting, sculpture and, today, the electronic media invariably do.