Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth
each group tend to appear, at least in part, as varieties of one
species; the radical differences of the two species are emphasized in
broad hard strokes; and the two are set in conflict, almost as if
Shakespeare, like Empedocles, were regarding Love and Hate as the two
ultimate forces of the universe.
The presence in _King Lear_ of so large a number of characters in whom
love or self-seeking is so extreme, has another effect. They do not
merely inspire in us emotions of unusual strength, but they also stir
the intellect to wonder and speculation. How can there be such men and
women? we ask ourselves. How comes it that humanity can take such
absolutely opposite forms? And, in particular, to what omission of
elements which should be present in human nature, or, if there is no
omission, to what distortion of these elements is it due that such
beings as some of these come to exist? This is a question which Iago
(and perhaps no previous creation of Shakespeare's) forces us to ask,
but in _King Lear_ it is provoked again and again. And more, it seems to
us that the author himself is asking this question. 'Then let them
anatomise Regan, see what breeds about her heart. Is there any cause in
nature that makes these hard hearts?'--the strain of thought which
appears here seems to be present in some degree throughout the play. We
seem to trace the tendency which, a few years later, produced Ariel and
Caliban, the tendency of imagination to analyse and abstract, to
decompose human nature into its constituent factors, and then to
construct beings in whom one or more of these factors is absent or
atrophied or only incipient. This, of course, is a tendency which
produces symbols, allegories, personifications of qualities and abstract
ideas; and we are accustomed to think it quite foreign to Shakespeare's
genius, which was in the highest degree concrete. No doubt in the main
we are right here; but it is hazardous to set limits to that genius. The
Sonnets, if nothing else, may show us how easy it was to Shakespeare's
mind to move in a world of 'Platonic' ideas;[142] and, while it would be
going too far to suggest that he was employing conscious symbolism or
allegory in _King Lear_, it does appear to disclose a mode of
imagination not so very far removed from the mode with which, we must
remember, Shakespeare was perfectly familiar in Morality plays and in
the _Fairy Queen_.
This same tendency shows itself in _King Lear_ in other forms. To it is
due the idea of monstrosity--of beings, actions, states of mind, which
appear not only abnormal but absolutely contrary to nature; an idea,
which, of course, is common enough in Shakespeare, but appears with
unusual frequency in _King Lear_, for instance in the lines:
Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend,
More hideous when thou show'st thee in a child
Than the sea-monster!
or in the exclamation,
Filial ingratitude!
Is it not as this mouth should tear this hand
For lifting food to't?
It appears in another shape in that most vivid passage where Albany, as
he looks at the face which had bewitched him, now distorted with
dreadful passions, suddenly sees it in a new light and exclaims in
horror:
Thou changed and self-cover'd thing, for shame.
Be-monster not thy feature. Were't my fitness
To let these hands obey my blood,
They are apt enough to dislocate and tear
Thy flesh and bones: howe'er thou art a fiend,
A woman's shape doth shield thee.[143]
It appears once more in that exclamation of Kent's, as he listens to
the description of Cordelia's grief:
It is the stars,
The stars above us, govern our conditions;
Else one self mate and mate could not beget
Such different issues.
(This is not the only sign that Shakespeare had been musing over
heredity, and wondering how it comes about that the composition of two
strains of blood or two parent souls can produce such astonishingly
different products.)
This mode of thought is responsible, lastly, for a very striking
characteristic of _King Lear_--one in which it has no parallel except
_Timon_--the incessant references to the lower animals[144] and man's
likeness to them. These references are scattered broadcast through the
whole play, as though Shakespeare's mind were so busy with the subject
that he could hardly write a page without some allusion to it. The dog,
the horse, the cow, the sheep, the hog, the lion, the bear, the wolf,
the fox, the monkey, the pole-cat, the civet-cat, the pelican, the owl,
the crow, the chough, the wren, the fly, the butterfly, the rat, the
mouse, the frog, the tadpole, the wall-newt, the water-newt, the worm--I
am sure I cannot have completed the list, and some of them are mentioned
again and again. Often, of course, and especially in the talk of Edgar
as the Bedlam, they have no symbolical meaning; but not seldom, even in
his talk, they are expressly referred to for their typical
qualities--'hog in sloth, fox in stealth, wolf in greediness, dog in
madness, lion in prey,' 'The fitchew nor the soiled horse goes to't With
a more riotous appetite.' Sometimes a person in the drama is compared,
openly or implicitly, with one of them. Goneril is a kite: her
ingratitude has a serpent's tooth: she has struck her father most
serpent-like upon the very heart: her visage is wolvish: she has tied
sharp-toothed unkindness like a vulture on her father's breast: for her
husband she is a gilded serpent: to Gloster her cruelty seems to have
the fangs of a boar. She and Regan are dog-hearted: they are tigers, not
daughters: each is an adder to the other: the flesh of each is covered
with the fell of a beast. Oswald is a mongrel, and the son and heir of a
mongrel: ducking to everyone in power, he is a wag-tail: white with
fear, he is a goose. Gloster, for Regan, is an ingrateful fox: Albany,
for his wife, has a cowish spirit and is milk-liver'd: when Edgar as the
Bedlam first appeared to Lear he made him think a man a worm. As we
read, the souls of all the beasts in turn seem to us to have entered the
bodies of these mortals; horrible in their venom, savagery, lust,
deceitfulness, sloth, cruelty, filthiness; miserable in their
feebleness, nakedness, defencelessness, blindness; and man, 'consider
him well,' is even what they are. Shakespeare, to whom the idea of the
transmigration of souls was familiar and had once been material for
jest,[145] seems to have been brooding on humanity in the light of it.
It is remarkable, and somewhat sad, that he seems to find none of man's
better qualities in the world of the brutes (though he might well have
found the prototype of the self-less love of Kent and Cordelia in the
dog whom he so habitually maligns);[146] but he seems to have been
asking himself whether that which he loathes in man may not be due to
some strange wrenching of this frame of things, through which the lower
animal souls have found a lodgment in human forms, and there found--to
the horror and confusion of the thinking mind--brains to forge, tongues
to speak, and hands to act, enormities which no mere brute can conceive
or execute. He shows us in _King Lear_ these terrible forces bursting
into monstrous life and flinging themselves upon those human beings who
are weak and defenceless, partly from old age, but partly because they
_are_ human and lack the dreadful undivided energy of the beast. And the
only comfort he might seem to hold out to us is the prospect that at
least this bestial race, strong only where it is vile, cannot endure:
though stars and gods are powerless, or careless, or empty dreams, yet
there must be an end of this horrible world:
It will come;
Humanity must perforce prey on itself
Like monsters of the deep.[147]
The influence of all this on imagination as we read _King Lear_ is very
great; and it combines with other influences to convey to us, not in the
form of distinct ideas but in the manner proper to poetry, the wider or
universal significance of the spectacle presented to the inward eye. But
the effect of theatrical exhibition is precisely the reverse. There the
poetic atmosphere is dissipated; the meaning of the very words which
create it passes half-realised; in obedience to the tyranny of the eye
we conceive the characters as mere particular men and women; and all
that mass of vague suggestion, if it enters the mind at all, appears in
the shape of an allegory which we immediately reject. A similar conflict
between imagination and sense will be found if we consider the dramatic
centre of the whole tragedy, the Storm-scenes. The temptation of Othello
and the scene of Duncan's murder may lose upon the stage, but they do
not lose their essence, and they gain as well as lose. The Storm-scenes
in _King Lear_ gain nothing and their very essence is destroyed. It is
comparatively a small thing that the theatrical storm, not to drown the
dialogue, must be silent whenever a human being wishes to speak, and is
wretchedly inferior to many a storm we have witnessed. Nor is it simply
that, as Lamb observed, the corporal presence of Lear, 'an old man
tottering about the stage with a walking-stick,' disturbs and depresses
that sense of the greatness of his mind which fills the imagination.
There is a further reason, which is not expressed, but still emerges, in
these words of Lamb's: 'the explosions of his passion are terrible as a
volcano: they are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that
sea, his mind, with all its vast riches.' Yes, 'they are _storms_.' For
imagination, that is to say, the explosions of Lear's passion, and the
bursts of rain and thunder, are not, what for the senses they must be,
two things, but manifestations of one thing. It is the powers of the
tormented soul that we hear and see in the 'groans of roaring wind and
rain' and the 'sheets of fire'; and they that, at intervals almost more
overwhelming, sink back into darkness and silence. Nor yet is even this
all; but, as those incessant references to wolf and tiger made us see
humanity 'reeling back into the beast' and ravening against itself, so
in the storm we seem to see Nature herself convulsed by the same
horrible passions; the 'common mother,'
Whose womb immeasurable and infinite breast
Teems and feeds all,
turning on her children, to complete the ruin they have wrought upon
themselves. Surely something not less, but much more, than these
helpless words convey, is what comes to us in these astounding scenes;
and if, translated thus into the language of prose, it becomes confused
and inconsistent, the reason is simply that it itself is poetry, and
such poetry as cannot be transferred to the space behind the
foot-lights, but has its being only in imagination. Here then is
Shakespeare at his very greatest, but not the mere dramatist
Shakespeare.[148]
And now we may say this also of the catastrophe, which we found
questionable from the strictly dramatic point of view. Its purpose is
not merely dramatic. This sudden blow out of the darkness, which seems
so far from inevitable, and which strikes down our reviving hopes for
the victims of so much cruelty, seems now only what we might have
expected in a world so wild and monstrous. It is as if Shakespeare said
to us: 'Did you think weakness and innocence have any chance here? Were
you beginning to dream that? I will show you it is not so.'
I come to a last point. As we contemplate this world, the question
presses on us, What can be the ultimate power that moves it, that
excites this gigantic war and waste, or, perhaps, that suffers them and
overrules them? And in _King Lear_ this question is not left to us to
ask, it is raised by the characters themselves. References to religious