Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth
imagination the story is not at all incredible. It is merely strange,
like so many of the stories on which our romantic dramas are based.
Shakespeare, besides, has done a good deal to soften the improbability
of the legend, and he has done much more than the casual reader
perceives. The very first words of the drama, as Coleridge pointed out,
tell us that the division of the kingdom is already settled in all its
details, so that only the public announcement of it remains.[126] Later
we find that the lines of division have already been drawn on the map of
Britain (l. 38), and again that Cordelia's share, which is her dowry, is
perfectly well known to Burgundy, if not to France (ll. 197, 245). That
then which is censured as absurd, the dependence of the division on the
speeches of the daughters, was in Lear's intention a mere form, devised
as a childish scheme to gratify his love of absolute power and his
hunger for assurances of devotion. And this scheme is perfectly in
character. We may even say that the main cause of its failure was not
that Goneril and Regan were exceptionally hypocritical, but that
Cordelia was exceptionally sincere and unbending. And it is essential to
observe that its failure, and the consequent necessity of publicly
reversing his whole well-known intention, is one source of Lear's
extreme anger. He loved Cordelia most and knew that she loved him best,
and the supreme moment to which he looked forward was that in which she
should outdo her sisters in expressions of affection, and should be
rewarded by that 'third' of the kingdom which was the most 'opulent.'
And then--so it naturally seemed to him--she put him to open shame.
There is a further point, which seems to have escaped the attention of
Coleridge and others. Part of the absurdity of Lear's plan is taken to
be his idea of living with his three daughters in turn. But he never
meant to do this. He meant to live with Cordelia, and with her
alone.[127] The scheme of his alternate monthly stay with Goneril and
Regan is forced on him at the moment by what he thinks the undutifulness
of his favourite child. In fact his whole original plan, though foolish
and rash, was not a 'hideous rashness'[128] or incredible folly. If
carried out it would have had no such consequences as followed its
alteration. It would probably have led quickly to war,[129] but not to
the agony which culminated in the storm upon the heath. The first scene,
therefore, is not absurd, though it must be pronounced dramatically
faulty in so far as it discloses the true position of affairs only to an
attention more alert than can be expected in a theatrical audience or
has been found in many critics of the play.
Let us turn next to two passages of another kind, the two which are
mainly responsible for the accusation of excessive painfulness, and so
for the distaste of many readers and the long theatrical eclipse of
_King Lear_. The first of these is much the less important; it is the
scene of the blinding of Gloster. The blinding of Gloster on the stage
has been condemned almost universally; and surely with justice, because
the mere physical horror of such a spectacle would in the theatre be a
sensation so violent as to overpower the purely tragic emotions, and
therefore the spectacle would seem revolting or shocking. But it is
otherwise in reading. For mere imagination the physical horror, though
not lost, is so far deadened that it can do its duty as a stimulus to
pity, and to that appalled dismay at the extremity of human cruelty
which it is of the essence of the tragedy to excite. Thus the blinding
of Gloster belongs rightly to _King Lear_ in its proper world of
imagination; it is a blot upon _King Lear_ as a stage-play.
But what are we to say of the second and far more important passage, the
conclusion of the tragedy, the 'unhappy ending,' as it is called, though
the word 'unhappy' sounds almost ironical in its weakness? Is this too a
blot upon _King Lear_ as a stage-play? The question is not so easily
answered as might appear. Doubtless we are right when we turn with
disgust from Tate's sentimental alterations, from his marriage of Edgar
and Cordelia, and from that cheap moral which every one of Shakespeare's
tragedies contradicts, 'that Truth and Virtue shall at last succeed.'
But are we so sure that we are right when we unreservedly condemn the
feeling which prompted these alterations, or at all events the feeling
which beyond question comes naturally to many readers of _King Lear_ who
would like Tate as little as we? What they wish, though they have not
always the courage to confess it even to themselves, is that the deaths
of Edmund, Goneril, Regan and Gloster should be followed by the escape
of Lear and Cordelia from death, and that we should be allowed to
imagine the poor old King passing quietly in the home of his beloved
child to the end which cannot be far off. Now, I do not dream of saying
that we ought to wish this, so long as we regard _King Lear_ simply as a
work of poetic imagination. But if _King Lear_ is to be considered
strictly as a drama, or simply as we consider _Othello_, it is not so
clear that the wish is unjustified. In fact I will take my courage in
both hands and say boldly that I share it, and also that I believe
Shakespeare would have ended his play thus had he taken the subject in
hand a few years later, in the days of _Cymbeline_ and the _Winter's
Tale_. If I read _King Lear_ simply as a drama, I find that my feelings
call for this 'happy ending.' I do not mean the human, the
philanthropic, feelings, but the dramatic sense. The former wish Hamlet
and Othello to escape their doom; the latter does not; but it does wish
Lear and Cordelia to be saved. Surely, it says, the tragic emotions have
been sufficiently stirred already. Surely the tragic outcome of Lear's
error and his daughters' ingratitude has been made clear enough and
moving enough. And, still more surely, such a tragic catastrophe as this
should seem _inevitable_. But this catastrophe, unlike those of all the
other mature tragedies, does not seem at all inevitable. It is not even
satisfactorily motived.[130] In fact it seems expressly designed to fall
suddenly like a bolt from a sky cleared by the vanished storm. And
although from a wider point of view one may fully recognise the value of
this effect, and may even reject with horror the wish for a 'happy
ending,' this wider point of view, I must maintain, is not strictly
dramatic or tragic.
Of course this is a heresy and all the best authority is against it. But
then the best authority, it seems to me, is either influenced
unconsciously by disgust at Tate's sentimentalism or unconsciously takes
that wider point of view. When Lamb--there is no higher
authority--writes, 'A happy ending!--as if the living martyrdom that
Lear had gone through, the flaying of his feelings alive, did not make a
fair dismissal from the stage of life the only decorous thing for him,'
I answer, first, that it is precisely this _fair_ dismissal which we
desire for him instead of renewed anguish; and, secondly, that what we
desire for him during the brief remainder of his days is not 'the
childish pleasure of getting his gilt robes and sceptre again,' not what
Tate gives him, but what Shakespeare himself might have given him--peace
and happiness by Cordelia's fireside. And if I am told that he has
suffered too much for this, how can I possibly believe it with these
words ringing in my ears:
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 again when Schlegel declares that, if Lear were saved, 'the whole'
would 'lose its significance,' because it would no longer show us that
the belief in Providence 'requires a wider range than the dark
pilgrimage on earth to be established in its whole extent,' I answer
that, if the drama does show us that, it takes us beyond the strictly
tragic point of view.[131]
A dramatic mistake in regard to the catastrophe, however, even supposing
it to exist, would not seriously affect the whole play. The principal
structural weakness of _King Lear_ lies elsewhere. It is felt to some
extent in the earlier Acts, but still more (as from our study of
Shakespeare's technique we have learnt to expect) in the Fourth and the
first part of the Fifth. And it arises chiefly from the double action,
which is a peculiarity of _King Lear_ among the tragedies. By the side
of Lear, his daughters, Kent, and the Fool, who are the principal
figures in the main plot, stand Gloster and his two sons, the chief
persons of the secondary plot. Now by means of this double action
Shakespeare secured certain results highly advantageous even from the
strictly dramatic point of view, and easy to perceive. But the
disadvantages were dramatically greater. The number of essential
characters is so large, their actions and movements are so complicated,
and events towards the close crowd on one another so thickly, that the
reader's attention,[132] rapidly transferred from one centre of interest
to another, is overstrained. He becomes, if not intellectually confused,
at least emotionally fatigued. The battle, on which everything turns,
scarcely affects him. The deaths of Edmund, Goneril, Regan and Gloster
seem 'but trifles here'; and anything short of the incomparable pathos
of the close would leave him cold. There is something almost ludicrous
in the insignificance of this battle, when it is compared with the
corresponding battles in _Julius Caesar_ and _Macbeth_; and though there
may have been further reasons for its insignificance, the main one is
simply that there was no room to give it its due effect among such a
host of competing interests.[133]
A comparison of the last two Acts of _Othello_ with the last two Acts of
_King Lear_ would show how unfavourable to dramatic clearness is a
multiplicity of figures. But that this multiplicity is not in itself a
fatal obstacle is evident from the last two Acts of _Hamlet_, and
especially from the final scene. This is in all respects one of
Shakespeare's triumphs, yet the stage is crowded with characters. Only
they are not _leading_ characters. The plot is single; Hamlet and the
King are the 'mighty opposites'; and Ophelia, the only other person in
whom we are obliged to take a vivid interest, has already disappeared.
It is therefore natural and right that the deaths of Laertes and the
Queen should affect us comparatively little. But in _King Lear_, because
the plot is double, we have present in the last scene no less than five
persons who are technically of the first importance--Lear, his three
daughters and Edmund; not to speak of Kent and Edgar, of whom the latter
at any rate is technically quite as important as Laertes. And again,
owing to the pressure of persons and events, and owing to the
concentration of our anxiety on Lear and Cordelia, the combat of Edgar
and Edmund, which occupies so considerable a space, fails to excite a
tithe of the interest of the fencing-match in _Hamlet_. The truth is
that all through these Acts Shakespeare has too vast a material to use
with complete dramatic effectiveness, however essential this very
vastness was for effects of another kind.
Added to these defects there are others, which suggest that in _King
Lear_ Shakespeare was less concerned than usual with dramatic fitness:
improbabilities, inconsistencies, sayings and doings which suggest
questions only to be answered by conjecture. The improbabilities in
_King Lear_ surely far surpass those of the other great tragedies in