Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth
or irreligious beliefs and feelings are more frequent than is usual in
Shakespeare's tragedies, as frequent perhaps as in his final plays. He
introduces characteristic differences in the language of the different
persons about fortune or the stars or the gods, and shows how the
question What rules the world? is forced upon their minds. They answer
it in their turn: Kent, for instance:
It is the stars,
The stars above us, govern our condition:
Edmund:
Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy law
My services are bound:
and again,
This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are
sick in fortune--often the surfeit of our own behaviour--we
make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon and the stars;
as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly
compulsion, ... and all that we are evil in by a divine
thrusting on:
Gloster:
As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;
They kill us for their sport;
Edgar:
Think that the clearest gods, who make them honours
Of men's impossibilities, have preserved thee.
Here we have four distinct theories of the nature of the ruling power.
And besides this, in such of the characters as have any belief in gods
who love good and hate evil, the spectacle of triumphant injustice or
cruelty provokes questionings like those of Job, or else the thought,
often repeated, of divine retribution. To Lear at one moment the storm
seems the messenger of heaven:
Let the great gods,
That keep this dreadful pother o'er our heads,
Find out their enemies now. Tremble, thou wretch,
That hast within thee undivulged crimes....
At another moment those habitual miseries of the poor, of which he has
taken too little account, seem to him to accuse the gods of injustice:
Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them
And show the heavens more just;
and Gloster has almost the same thought (IV. i. 67 ff.). Gloster again,
thinking of the cruelty of Lear's daughters, breaks out,
but I shall see
The winged vengeance overtake such children.
The servants who have witnessed the blinding of Gloster by Cornwall and
Regan, cannot believe that cruelty so atrocious will pass unpunished.
One cries,
I'll never care what wickedness I do,
If this man come to good;
and another,
if she live long,
And in the end meet the old course of death,
Women will all turn monsters.
Albany greets the news of Cornwall's death with the exclamation,
This shows you are above,
You justicers, that these our nether crimes
So speedily can venge;
and the news of the deaths of the sisters with the words,
This judgment[149] of the heavens, that makes us tremble,
Touches us not with pity.
Edgar, speaking to Edmund of their father, declares
The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us,
and Edmund himself assents. Almost throughout the latter half of the
drama we note in most of the better characters a pre-occupation with the
question of the ultimate power, and a passionate need to explain by
reference to it what otherwise would drive them to despair. And the
influence of this pre-occupation and need joins with other influences in
affecting the imagination, and in causing it to receive from _King Lear_
an impression which is at least as near of kin to the _Divine Comedy_ as
to _Othello_.
3
For Dante that which is recorded in the _Divine Comedy_ was the justice
and love of God. What did _King Lear_ record for Shakespeare? Something,
it would seem, very different. This is certainly the most terrible
picture that Shakespeare painted of the world. In no other of his
tragedies does humanity appear more pitiably infirm or more hopelessly
bad. What is Iago's malignity against an envied stranger compared with
the cruelty of the son of Gloster and the daughters of Lear? What are
the sufferings of a strong man like Othello to those of helpless age?
Much too that we have already observed--the repetition of the main theme
in that of the under-plot, the comparisons of man with the most wretched
and the most horrible of the beasts, the impression of Nature's
hostility to him, the irony of the unexpected catastrophe--these, with
much else, seem even to indicate an intention to show things at their
worst, and to return the sternest of replies to that question of the
ultimate power and those appeals for retribution. Is it an accident, for
example, that Lear's first appeal to something beyond the earth,
O heavens,
If you do love old men, if your sweet sway
Allow[150] obedience, if yourselves are old,
Make it your cause:
is immediately answered by the iron voices of his daughters, raising by
turns the conditions on which they will give him a humiliating
harbourage; or that his second appeal, heart-rending in its piteousness,
You see me here, you gods, a poor old man,
As full of grief as age; wretched in both:
is immediately answered from the heavens by the sounds of the breaking
storm?[151] Albany and Edgar may moralise on the divine justice as they
will, but how, in face of all that we see, shall we believe that they
speak Shakespeare's mind? Is not his mind rather expressed in the bitter
contrast between their faith and the events we witness, or in the
scornful rebuke of those who take upon them the mystery of things as if
they were God's spies?[152] Is it not Shakespeare's judgment on his kind
that we hear in Lear's appeal,
And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Smite flat the thick rotundity o' the world!
Crack nature's moulds, all germens spill at once,
That make ingrateful man!
and Shakespeare's judgment on the worth of existence that we hear in
Lear's agonised cry, 'No, no, no life!'?
Beyond doubt, I think, some such feelings as these possess us, and, if
we follow Shakespeare, ought to possess us, from time to time as we read
_King Lear_. And some readers will go further and maintain that this is
also the ultimate and total impression left by the tragedy. _King Lear_
has been held to be profoundly 'pessimistic' in the full meaning of that
word,--the record of a time when contempt and loathing for his kind had
overmastered the poet's soul, and in despair he pronounced man's life to
be simply hateful and hideous. And if we exclude the biographical part
of this view,[153] the rest may claim some support even from the
greatest of Shakespearean critics since the days of Coleridge, Hazlitt
and Lamb. Mr. Swinburne, after observing that _King Lear_ is 'by far the
most Aeschylean' of Shakespeare's works, proceeds thus:
'But in one main point it differs radically from the work and the spirit
of Aeschylus. Its fatalism is of a darker and harder nature. To
Prometheus the fetters of the lord and enemy of mankind were bitter;
upon Orestes the hand of heaven was laid too heavily to bear; yet in the
not utterly infinite or everlasting distance we see beyond them the
promise of the morning on which mystery and justice shall be made one;
when righteousness and omnipotence at last shall kiss each other. But on
the horizon of Shakespeare's tragic fatalism we see no such twilight of
atonement, such pledge of reconciliation as this. Requital, redemption,
amends, equity, explanation, pity and mercy, are words without a meaning
here.
As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;
They kill us for their sport.
Here is no need of the Eumenides, children of Night everlasting; for
here is very Night herself.
'The words just cited are not casual or episodical; they strike the
keynote of the whole poem, lay the keystone of the whole arch of
thought. There is no contest of conflicting forces, no judgment so much
as by casting of lots: far less is there any light of heavenly harmony
or of heavenly wisdom, of Apollo or Athene from above. We have heard
much and often from theologians of the light of revelation: and some
such thing indeed we find in Aeschylus; but the darkness of revelation
is here.'[154]
It is hard to refuse assent to these eloquent words, for they express in
the language of a poet what we feel at times in reading _King Lear_ but
cannot express. But do they represent the total and final impression
produced by the play? If they do, this impression, so far as the
substance of the drama is concerned (and nothing else is in question
here), must, it would seem, be one composed almost wholly of painful
feelings,--utter depression, or indignant rebellion, or appalled
despair. And that would surely be strange. For _King Lear_ is admittedly
one of the world's greatest poems, and yet there is surely no other of
these poems which produces on the whole this effect, and we regard it as
a very serious flaw in any considerable work of art that this should be
its ultimate effect.[155] So that Mr. Swinburne's description, if taken
as final, and any description of King Lear as 'pessimistic' in the
proper sense of that word, would imply a criticism which is not
intended, and which would make it difficult to leave the work in the
position almost universally assigned to it.
But in fact these descriptions, like most of the remarks made on _King
Lear_ in the present lecture, emphasise only certain aspects of the play
and certain elements in the total impression; and in that impression the
effect of these aspects, though far from being lost, is modified by that
of others. I do not mean that the final effect resembles that of the
_Divine Comedy_ or the _Oresteia_: how should it, when the first of
these can be called by its author a 'Comedy,' and when the second,
ending (as doubtless the _Prometheus_ trilogy also ended) with a
solution, is not in the Shakespearean sense a tragedy at all?[156] Nor
do I mean that _King Lear_ contains a revelation of righteous
omnipotence or heavenly harmony, or even a promise of the reconciliation
of mystery and justice. But then, as we saw, neither do Shakespeare's
other tragedies contain these things. Any theological interpretation of
the world on the author's part is excluded from them, and their effect
would be disordered or destroyed equally by the ideas of righteous or of
unrighteous omnipotence. Nor, in reading them, do we think of 'justice'
or 'equity' in the sense of a strict requital or such an adjustment of
merit and prosperity as our moral sense is said to demand; and there
never was vainer labour than that of critics who try to make out that
the persons in these dramas meet with 'justice' or their 'deserts.'[157]
But, on the other hand, man is not represented in these tragedies as the
mere plaything of a blind or capricious power, suffering woes which have
no relation to his character and actions; nor is the world represented
as given over to darkness. And in these respects _King Lear_, though the
most terrible of these works, does not differ in essence from the rest.
Its keynote is surely to be heard neither in the words wrung from
Gloster in his anguish, nor in Edgar's words 'the gods are just.' Its
final and total result is one in which pity and terror, carried perhaps
to the extreme limits of art, are so blended with a sense of law and
beauty that we feel at last, not depression and much less despair, but a
consciousness of greatness in pain, and of solemnity in the mystery we
cannot fathom.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 123: I leave undiscussed the position of _King Lear_ in
relation to the 'comedies' of _Measure for Measure_, _Troilus and
Cressida_ and _All's Well_.]