Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth
But there is another aspect of Lear's story, the influence of which
modifies, in a way quite different and more peculiar to this tragedy,
the impressions called pessimistic and even this impression of law.
There is nothing more noble and beautiful in literature than
Shakespeare's exposition of the effect of suffering in reviving the
greatness and eliciting the sweetness of Lear's nature. The occasional
recurrence, during his madness, of autocratic impatience or of desire
for revenge serves only to heighten this effect, and the moments when
his insanity becomes merely infinitely piteous do not weaken it. The old
King who in pleading with his daughters feels so intensely his own
humiliation and their horrible ingratitude, and who yet, at fourscore
and upward, constrains himself to practise a self-control and patience
so many years disused; who out of old affection for his Fool, and in
repentance for his injustice to the Fool's beloved mistress, tolerates
incessant and cutting reminders of his own folly and wrong; in whom the
rage of the storm awakes a power and a poetic grandeur surpassing even
that of Othello's anguish; who comes in his affliction to think of
others first, and to seek, in tender solicitude for his poor boy, the
shelter he scorns for his own bare head; who learns to feel and to pray
for the miserable and houseless poor, to discern the falseness of
flattery and the brutality of authority, and to pierce below the
differences of rank and raiment to the common humanity beneath; whose
sight is so purged by scalding tears that it sees at last how power and
place and all things in the world are vanity except love; who tastes in
his last hours the extremes both of love's rapture and of its agony, but
could never, if he lived on or lived again, care a jot for aught
beside--there is no figure, surely, in the world of poetry at once so
grand, so pathetic, and so beautiful as his. Well, but Lear owes the
whole of this to those sufferings which made us doubt whether life were
not simply evil, and men like the flies which wanton boys torture for
their sport. Should we not be at least as near the truth if we called
this poem _The Redemption of King Lear_, and declared that the business
of 'the gods' with him was neither to torment him, nor to teach him a
'noble anger,' but to lead him to attain through apparently hopeless
failure the very end and aim of life? One can believe that Shakespeare
had been tempted at times to feel misanthropy and despair, but it is
quite impossible that he can have been mastered by such feelings at the
time when he produced this conception.
To dwell on the stages of this process of purification (the word is
Professor Dowden's) is impossible here; and there are scenes, such as
that of the meeting of Lear and Cordelia, which it seems almost a
profanity to touch.[159] But I will refer to two scenes which may remind
us more in detail of some of the points just mentioned. The third and
fourth scenes of Act III. present one of those contrasts which speak as
eloquently even as Shakespeare's words, and which were made possible in
his theatre by the absence of scenery and the consequent absence of
intervals between the scenes. First, in a scene of twenty-three lines,
mostly in prose, Gloster is shown, telling his son Edmund how Goneril
and Regan have forbidden him on pain of death to succour the houseless
King; how a secret letter has reached him, announcing the arrival of a
French force; and how, whatever the consequences may be, he is
determined to relieve his old master. Edmund, left alone, soliloquises
in words which seem to freeze one's blood:
This courtesy, forbid thee, shall the duke
Instantly know; and of that letter too:
This seems a fair deserving, and must draw me
That which my father loses; no less than all:
The younger rises when the old doth fall.
He goes out; and the next moment, as the fourth scene opens, we find
ourselves in the icy storm with Lear, Kent and the Fool, and yet in the
inmost shrine of love. I am not speaking of the devotion of the others
to Lear, but of Lear himself. He had consented, merely for the Fool's
sake, to seek shelter in the hovel:
Come, your hovel.
Poor fool and knave, I have one part in my heart
That's sorry yet for thee.
But on the way he has broken down and has been weeping (III. iv. 17),
and now he resists Kent's efforts to persuade him to enter. He does not
feel the storm:
when the mind's free
The body's delicate: the tempest in my mind
Doth from my senses take all feeling else
Save what beats there:
and the thoughts that will drive him mad are burning in his brain:
Filial ingratitude!
Is it not as this mouth should tear this hand
For lifting food to't? But I will punish home.
No, I will weep no more. In such a night
To shut me out! Pour on; I will endure.
In such a night as this! O Regan, Goneril!
Your old kind father, whose frank heart gave all,--
O, that way madness lies; let me shun that;
No more of that.
And then suddenly, as he controls himself, the blessed spirit of
kindness breathes on him 'like a meadow gale of spring,' and he turns
gently to Kent:
Prithee, go in thyself; seek thine own ease:
This tempest will not give me leave to ponder
On things would hurt me more. But I'll go in.
In, boy; go first. You houseless poverty--
Nay, get thee in. I'll pray, and then I'll sleep.
But his prayer is not for himself.
Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are,
it begins, and I need not quote more. This is one of those passages
which make one worship Shakespeare.[160]
Much has been written on the representation of insanity in _King Lear_,
and I will confine myself to one or two points which may have escaped
notice. The most obvious symptom of Lear's insanity, especially in its
first stages, is of course the domination of a fixed idea. Whatever
presents itself to his senses, is seized on by this idea and compelled
to express it; as for example in those words, already quoted, which
first show that his mind has actually given way:
Hast thou given all
To thy two daughters? And art thou come to this?[161]
But it is remarkable that what we have here is only, in an exaggerated
and perverted form, the very same action of imagination that, just
before the breakdown of reason, produced those sublime appeals:
O heavens,
If you do love old men, if your sweet sway
Allow obedience, if yourselves are old,
Make it your cause;
and:
Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! spout, rain!
Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are my daughters:
I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness;
I never gave you kingdom, call'd you children,
You owe me no subscription: then let fall
Your horrible pleasure; here I stand, your slave,
A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man:
But yet I call you servile ministers,
That have with two pernicious daughters join'd
Your high engender'd battles 'gainst a head
So old and white as this. O! O! 'tis foul!
Shakespeare, long before this, in the _Midsummer Night's Dream_, had
noticed the resemblance between the lunatic, the lover, and the poet;
and the partial truth that genius is allied to insanity was quite
familiar to him. But he presents here the supplementary half-truth that
insanity is allied to genius.
He does not, however, put into the mouth of the insane Lear any such
sublime passages as those just quoted. Lear's insanity, which destroys
the coherence, also reduces the poetry of his imagination. What it
stimulates is that power of moral perception and reflection which had
already been quickened by his sufferings. This, however partial and
however disconnectedly used, first appears, quite soon after the
insanity has declared itself, in the idea that the naked beggar
represents truth and reality, in contrast with those conventions,
flatteries, and corruptions of the great world, by which Lear has so
long been deceived and will never be deceived again:
Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou owest the
worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no
perfume. Ha! here's three on's are sophisticated: thou art the
thing itself.
Lear regards the beggar therefore with reverence and delight, as a
person who is in the secret of things, and he longs to question him
about their causes. It is this same strain of thought which much later
(IV. vi.), gaining far greater force, though the insanity has otherwise
advanced, issues in those famous Timon-like speeches which make us
realise the original strength of the old King's mind. And when this
strain, on his recovery, unites with the streams of repentance and love,
it produces that serene renunciation of the world, with its power and
glory and resentments and revenges, which is expressed in the speech (V.
iii.):
No, no, no, no! 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 hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too,
Who loses, and who wins; who's in, who's out;
And take upon's the mystery of things,
As if we were God's spies: and we'll wear out,
In a wall'd prison, packs and sets of great ones,
That ebb and flow by the moon.
This is that renunciation which is at the same time a sacrifice offered
to the gods, and on which the gods themselves throw incense; and, it may
be, it would never have been offered but for the knowledge that came to
Lear in his madness.
I spoke of Lear's 'recovery,' but the word is too strong. The Lear of
the Fifth Act is not indeed insane, but his mind is greatly enfeebled.
The speech just quoted is followed by a sudden flash of the old
passionate nature, reminding us most pathetically of Lear's efforts,
just before his madness, to restrain his tears:
Wipe thine eyes:
The good-years shall devour them, flesh and fell,
Ere they shall make us weep: we'll see 'em starve first.
And this weakness is still more pathetically shown in the blindness of
the old King to his position now that he and Cordelia are made
prisoners. It is evident that Cordelia knows well what mercy her father
is likely to receive from her sisters; that is the reason of her
weeping. But he does not understand her tears; it never crosses his mind
that they have anything more than imprisonment to fear. And what is that
to them? They have made that sacrifice, and all is well:
Have I caught thee?
He that parts us shall bring a brand from heaven,
And fire us hence like foxes.
This blindness is most affecting to us, who know in what manner they
will be parted; but it is also comforting. And we find the same mingling
of effects in the overwhelming conclusion of the story. If to the
reader, as to the bystanders, that scene brings one unbroken pain, it is
not so with Lear himself. His shattered mind passes from the first
transports of hope and despair, as he bends over Cordelia's body and
holds the feather to her lips, into an absolute forgetfulness of the
cause of these transports. This continues so long as he can converse
with Kent; becomes an almost complete vacancy; and is disturbed only to
yield, as his eyes suddenly fall again on his child's corpse, to an