Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth
number and in grossness. And they are particularly noticeable in the
secondary plot. For example, no sort of reason is given why Edgar, who
lives in the same house with Edmund, should write a letter to him
instead of speaking; and this is a letter absolutely damning to his
character. Gloster was very foolish, but surely not so foolish as to
pass unnoticed this improbability; or, if so foolish, what need for
Edmund to forge a letter rather than a conversation, especially as
Gloster appears to be unacquainted with his son's handwriting?[134] Is
it in character that Edgar should be persuaded without the slightest
demur to avoid his father instead of confronting him and asking him the
cause of his anger? Why in the world should Gloster, when expelled from
his castle, wander painfully all the way to Dover simply in order to
destroy himself (IV. i. 80)? And is it not extraordinary that, after
Gloster's attempted suicide, Edgar should first talk to him in the
language of a gentleman, then to Oswald in his presence in broad peasant
dialect, then again to Gloster in gentle language, and yet that Gloster
should not manifest the least surprise?
Again, to take three instances of another kind; (_a_) only a fortnight
seems to have elapsed between the first scene and the breach with
Goneril; yet already there are rumours not only of war between Goneril
and Regan but of the coming of a French army; and this, Kent says, is
perhaps connected with the harshness of _both_ the sisters to their
father, although Regan has apparently had no opportunity of showing any
harshness till the day before. (_b_) In the quarrel with Goneril Lear
speaks of his having to dismiss fifty of his followers at a clap, yet
she has neither mentioned any number nor had any opportunity of
mentioning it off the stage. (_c_) Lear and Goneril, intending to hurry
to Regan, both send off messengers to her, and both tell the messengers
to bring back an answer. But it does not appear either how the
messengers _could_ return or what answer could be required, as their
superiors are following them with the greatest speed.
Once more, (_a_) why does Edgar not reveal himself to his blind father,
as he truly says he ought to have done? The answer is left to mere
conjecture. (_b_) Why does Kent so carefully preserve his incognito till
the last scene? He says he does it for an important purpose, but what
the purpose is we have to guess. (_c_) Why Burgundy rather than France
should have first choice of Cordelia's hand is a question we cannot help
asking, but there is no hint of any answer.[135] (_d_) I have referred
already to the strange obscurity regarding Edmund's delay in trying to
save his victims, and I will not extend this list of examples. No one of
such defects is surprising when considered by itself, but their number
is surely significant. Taken in conjunction with other symptoms it means
that Shakespeare, set upon the dramatic effect of the great scenes and
upon certain effects not wholly dramatic, was exceptionally careless of
probability, clearness and consistency in smaller matters, introducing
what was convenient or striking for a momentary purpose without
troubling himself about anything more than the moment. In presence of
these signs it seems doubtful whether his failure to give information
about the fate of the Fool was due to anything more than carelessness or
an impatient desire to reduce his overloaded material.[136]
Before I turn to the other side of the subject I will refer to one more
characteristic of this play which is dramatically disadvantageous. In
Shakespeare's dramas, owing to the absence of scenery from the
Elizabethan stage, the question, so vexatious to editors, of the exact
locality of a particular scene is usually unimportant and often
unanswerable; but, as a rule, we know, broadly speaking, where the
persons live and what their journeys are. The text makes this plain, for
example, almost throughout _Hamlet_, _Othello_ and _Macbeth_; and the
imagination is therefore untroubled. But in _King Lear_ the indications
are so scanty that the reader's mind is left not seldom both vague and
bewildered. Nothing enables us to imagine whereabouts in Britain Lear's
palace lies, or where the Duke of Albany lives. In referring to the
dividing-lines on the map, Lear tells us of shadowy forests and
plenteous rivers, but, unlike Hotspur and his companions, he studiously
avoids proper names. The Duke of Cornwall, we presume in the absence of
information, is likely to live in Cornwall; but we suddenly find, from
the introduction of a place-name which all readers take at first for a
surname, that he lives at Gloster (I. v. 1).[137] This seems likely to
be also the home of the Earl of Gloster, to whom Cornwall is patron. But
no: it is a night's journey from Cornwall's 'house' to Gloster's, and
Gloster's is in the middle of an uninhabited heath.[138] Here, for the
purpose of the crisis, nearly all the persons assemble, but they do so
in a manner which no casual spectator or reader could follow. Afterwards
they all drift towards Dover for the purpose of the catastrophe; but
again the localities and movements are unusually indefinite. And this
indefiniteness is found in smaller matters. One cannot help asking, for
example, and yet one feels one had better not ask, where that 'lodging'
of Edmund's can be, in which he hides Edgar from his father, and whether
Edgar is mad that he should return from his hollow tree (in a district
where 'for many miles about there's scarce a bush') to his father's
castle in order to soliloquise (II. iii.):--for the favourite
stage-direction, 'a wood' (which is more than 'a bush'), however
convenient to imagination, is scarcely compatible with the presence of
Kent asleep in the stocks.[139] Something of the confusion which
bewilders the reader's mind in _King Lear_ recurs in _Antony and
Cleopatra_, the most faultily constructed of all the tragedies; but
there it is due not so much to the absence or vagueness of the
indications as to the necessity of taking frequent and fatiguing
journeys over thousands of miles. Shakespeare could not help himself in
the Roman play: in _King Lear_ he did not choose to help himself,
perhaps deliberately chose to be vague.
From these defects, or from some of them, follows one result which must
be familiar to many readers of _King Lear_. It is far more difficult to
retrace in memory the steps of the action in this tragedy than in
_Hamlet_, _Othello_, or _Macbeth_. The outline is of course quite clear;
anyone could write an 'argument' of the play. But when an attempt is
made to fill in the detail, it issues sooner or later in confusion even
with readers whose dramatic memory is unusually strong.[140]
2
How is it, now, that this defective drama so overpowers us that we are
either unconscious of its blemishes or regard them as almost irrelevant?
As soon as we turn to this question we recognise, not merely that _King
Lear_ possesses purely dramatic qualities which far outweigh its
defects, but that its greatness consists partly in imaginative effects
of a wider kind. And, looking for the sources of these effects, we find
among them some of those very things which appeared to us dramatically
faulty or injurious. Thus, to take at once two of the simplest examples
of this, that very vagueness in the sense of locality which we have just
considered, and again that excess in the bulk of the material and the
number of figures, events and movements, while they interfere with the
clearness of vision, have at the same time a positive value for
imagination. They give the feeling of vastness, the feeling not of a
scene or particular place, but of a world; or, to speak more accurately,
of a particular place which is also a world. This world is dim to us,
partly from its immensity, and partly because it is filled with gloom;
and in the gloom shapes approach and recede, whose half-seen faces and
motions touch us with dread, horror, or the most painful
pity,--sympathies and antipathies which we seem to be feeling not only
for them but for the whole race. This world, we are told, is called
Britain; but we should no more look for it in an atlas than for the
place, called Caucasus, where Prometheus was chained by Strength and
Force and comforted by the daughters of Ocean, or the place where
Farinata stands erect in his glowing tomb, 'Come avesse lo Inferno in
gran dispitto.'
Consider next the double action. It has certain strictly dramatic
advantages, and may well have had its origin in purely dramatic
considerations. To go no further, the secondary plot fills out a story
which would by itself have been somewhat thin, and it provides a most
effective contrast between its personages and those of the main plot,
the tragic strength and stature of the latter being heightened by
comparison with the slighter build of the former. But its chief value
lies elsewhere, and is not merely dramatic. It lies in the fact--in
Shakespeare without a parallel--that the sub-plot simply repeats the
theme of the main story. Here, as there, we see an old man 'with a white
beard.' He, like Lear, is affectionate, unsuspicious, foolish, and
self-willed. He, too, wrongs deeply a child who loves him not less for
the wrong. He, too, meets with monstrous ingratitude from the child whom
he favours, and is tortured and driven to death. This repetition does
not simply double the pain with which the tragedy is witnessed: it
startles and terrifies by suggesting that the folly of Lear and the
ingratitude of his daughters are no accidents or merely individual
aberrations, but that in that dark cold world some fateful malignant
influence is abroad, turning the hearts of the fathers against their
children and of the children against their fathers, smiting the earth
with a curse, so that the brother gives the brother to death and the
father the son, blinding the eyes, maddening the brain, freezing the
springs of pity, numbing all powers except the nerves of anguish and the
dull lust of life.[141]
Hence too, as well as from other sources, comes that feeling which
haunts us in _King Lear_, as though we were witnessing something
universal,--a conflict not so much of particular persons as of the
powers of good and evil in the world. And the treatment of many of the
characters confirms this feeling. Considered simply as psychological
studies few of them, surely, are of the highest interest. Fine and
subtle touches could not be absent from a work of Shakespeare's
maturity; but, with the possible exception of Lear himself, no one of
the characters strikes us as psychologically a _wonderful_ creation,
like Hamlet or Iago or even Macbeth; one or two seem even to be somewhat
faint and thin. And, what is more significant, it is not quite natural
to us to regard them from this point of view at all. Rather we observe a
most unusual circumstance. If Lear, Gloster and Albany are set apart,
the rest fall into two distinct groups, which are strongly, even
violently, contrasted: Cordelia, Kent, Edgar, the Fool on one side,
Goneril, Regan, Edmund, Cornwall, Oswald on the other. These characters
are in various degrees individualised, most of them completely so; but
still in each group there is a quality common to all the members, or one
spirit breathing through them all. Here we have unselfish and devoted
love, there hard self-seeking. On both sides, further, the common
quality takes an extreme form; the love is incapable of being chilled by
injury, the selfishness of being softened by pity; and, it may be added,
this tendency to extremes is found again in the characters of Lear and
Gloster, and is the main source of the accusations of improbability
directed against their conduct at certain points. Hence the members of