Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth
cruelties are not aimed at a blood-relation, he is not, in this sense, a
'monster,' like the remaining three.
Which of these three is the least and which the most detestable there
can surely be no question. For Edmund, not to mention other
alleviations, is at any rate not a woman. And the differences between
the sisters, which are distinctly marked and need not be exhibited once
more in full, are all in favour of 'the elder and more terrible.' That
Regan did not commit adultery, did not murder her sister or plot to
murder her husband, did not join her name with Edmund's on the order for
the deaths of Cordelia and Lear, and in other respects failed to take
quite so active a part as Goneril in atrocious wickedness, is quite true
but not in the least to her credit. It only means that she had much less
force, courage and initiative than her sister, and for that reason is
less formidable and more loathsome. Edmund judged right when, caring for
neither sister but aiming at the crown, he preferred Goneril, for he
could trust her to remove the living impediments to her desires. The
scornful and fearless exclamation, 'An interlude!' with which she greets
the exposure of her design, was quite beyond Regan. Her unhesitating
suicide was perhaps no less so. She would not have condescended to the
lie which Regan so needlessly tells to Oswald:
It was great ignorance, Gloster's eyes being out,
To let him live: where he arrives he moves
All hearts against us: Edmund, I think, is gone,
_In pity of his misery_, to dispatch
His nighted life.
Her father's curse is nothing to her. She scorns even to mention the
gods.[169] Horrible as she is, she is almost awful. But, to set against
Regan's inferiority in power, there is nothing: she is superior only in
a venomous meanness which is almost as hateful as her cruelty. She is
the most hideous human being (if she is one) that Shakespeare ever drew.
I have already noticed the resemblance between Edmund and Iago in one
point; and Edmund recalls his greater forerunner also in courage,
strength of will, address, egoism, an abnormal want of feeling, and the
possession of a sense of humour. But here the likeness ends. Indeed a
decided difference is observable even in the humour. Edmund is
apparently a good deal younger than Iago. He has a lighter and more
superficial nature, and there is a certain genuine gaiety in him which
makes one smile not unsympathetically as one listens to his first
soliloquy, with its cheery conclusion, so unlike Iago's references to
the powers of darkness,
Now, gods, stand up for bastards!
Even after we have witnessed his dreadful deeds, a touch of this
sympathy is felt again when we hear his nonchalant reflections before
the battle:
To both these sisters have I sworn my love:
Each jealous of the other, as the stung
Are of the adder. Which of them shall I take?
Both? one? or neither?
Besides, there is nothing in Edmund of Iago's motive-hunting, and very
little of any of the secret forces which impelled Iago. He is
comparatively a straightforward character, as straightforward as the
Iago of some critics. He moves wonder and horror merely because the fact
that a man so young can have a nature so bad is a dark mystery.
Edmund is an adventurer pure and simple. He acts in pursuance of a
purpose, and, if he has any affections or dislikes, ignores them. He is
determined to make his way, first to his brother's lands, then--as the
prospect widens--to the crown; and he regards men and women, with their
virtues and vices, together with the bonds of kinship, friendship, or
allegiance, merely as hindrances or helps to his end. They are for him
divested of all quality except their relation to this end; as
indifferent as mathematical quantities or mere physical agents.
A credulous father and a brother noble,
... I see the business,
he says, as if he were talking of _x_ and _y_.
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 meditates, as if he were considering a problem in mechanics. He
preserves this attitude with perfect consistency until the possibility
of attaining his end is snatched from him by death.
Like the deformity of Richard, Edmund's illegitimacy furnishes, of
course, no excuse for his villainy, but it somewhat influences our
feelings. It is no fault of his, and yet it separates him from other
men. He is the product of Nature--of a natural appetite asserting itself
against the social order; and he has no recognised place within this
order. So he devotes himself to Nature, whose law is that of the
stronger, and who does not recognise those moral obligations which exist
only by convention,--by 'custom' or 'the curiosity of nations.'[170]
Practically, his attitude is that of a professional criminal. 'You tell
me I do not belong to you,' he seems to say to society: 'very well: I
will make my way into your treasure-house if I can. And if I have to
take life in doing so, that is your affair.' How far he is serious in
this attitude, and really indignant at the brand of bastardy, how far
his indignation is a half-conscious self-excuse for his meditated
villainy, it is hard to say; but the end shows that he is not entirely
in earnest.
As he is an adventurer, with no more ill-will to anyone than good-will,
it is natural that, when he has lost the game, he should accept his
failure without showing personal animosity. But he does more. He admits
the truth of Edgar's words about the justice of the gods, and applies
them to his own case (though the fact that he himself refers to
fortune's wheel rather than to the gods may be significant). He shows
too that he is not destitute of feeling; for he is touched by the story
of his father's death, and at last 'pants for life' in the effort to do
'some good' by saving Lear and Cordelia. There is something pathetic
here which tempts one to dream that, if Edmund had been whole brother to
Edgar, and had been at home during those 'nine years' when he was 'out,'
he might have been a very different man. But perhaps his words,
Some good I mean to do,
_Despite of mine own nature_,
suggest rather that Shakespeare is emphasising the mysterious fact,
commented on by Kent in the case of the three daughters of Lear, of an
immense original difference between children of one father. Stranger
than this emergence of better feelings, and curiously pathetic, is the
pleasure of the dying man in the thought that he was loved by both the
women whose corpses are almost the last sight he is to see. Perhaps, as
we conjectured, the cause of his delay in saving Lear and Cordelia even
after he hears of the deaths of the sisters is that he is sunk in dreamy
reflections on his past. When he murmurs, 'Yet Edmund was beloved,' one
is almost in danger of forgetting that he had done much more than reject
the love of his father and half-brother. The passage is one of several
in Shakespeare's plays where it strikes us that he is recording some
fact about human nature with which he had actually met, and which had
seemed to him peculiarly strange.
What are we to say of the world which contains these five beings,
Goneril, Regan, Edmund, Cornwall, Oswald? I have tried to answer this
question in our first lecture; for in its representation of evil _King
Lear_ differs from the other tragedies only in degree and manner. It is
the tragedy in which evil is shown in the greatest abundance; and the
evil characters are peculiarly repellent from their hard savagery, and
because so little good is mingled with their evil. The effect is
therefore more startling than elsewhere; it is even appalling. But in
substance it is the same as elsewhere; and accordingly, although it may
be useful to recall here our previous discussion, I will do so only by
the briefest statement.
On the one hand we see a world which generates terrible evil in
profusion. Further, the beings in whom this evil appears at its
strongest are able, to a certain extent, to thrive. They are not
unhappy, and they have power to spread misery and destruction around
them. All this is undeniable fact.
On the other hand this evil is _merely_ destructive: it founds nothing,
and seems capable of existing only on foundations laid by its opposite.
It is also self-destructive: it sets these beings at enmity; they can
scarcely unite against a common and pressing danger; if it were averted
they would be at each other's throats in a moment; the sisters do not
even wait till it is past. Finally, these beings, all five of them, are
dead a few weeks after we see them first; three at least die young; the
outburst of their evil is fatal to them. These also are undeniable
facts; and, in face of them, it seems odd to describe _King Lear_ as 'a
play in which the wicked prosper' (Johnson).
Thus the world in which evil appears seems to be at heart unfriendly to
it. And this impression is confirmed by the fact that the convulsion of
this world is due to evil, mainly in the worst forms here considered,
partly in the milder forms which we call the errors or defects of the
better characters. Good, in the widest sense, seems thus to be the
principle of life and health in the world; evil, at least in these worst
forms, to be a poison. The world reacts against it violently, and, in
the struggle to expel it, is driven to devastate itself.
If we ask why the world should generate that which convulses and wastes
it, the tragedy gives no answer, and we are trying to go beyond tragedy
in seeking one. But the world, in this tragic picture, is convulsed by
evil, and rejects it.
4
And if here there is 'very Night herself,' she comes 'with stars in her
raiment.' Cordelia, Kent, Edgar, the Fool--these form a group not less
remarkable than that which we have just left. There is in the world of
_King Lear_ the same abundance of extreme good as of extreme evil. It
generates in profusion self-less devotion and unconquerable love. And
the strange thing is that neither Shakespeare nor we are surprised. We
approve these characters, admire them, love them; but we feel no
mystery. We do not ask in bewilderment, Is there any cause in nature
that makes these kind hearts? Such hardened optimists are we, and
Shakespeare,--and those who find the darkness of revelation in a tragedy
which reveals Cordelia. Yet surely, if we condemn the universe for
Cordelia's death, we ought also to remember that it gave her birth. The
fact that Socrates was executed does not remove the fact that he lived,
and the inference thence to be drawn about the world that produced him.
Of these four characters Edgar excites the least enthusiasm, but he is
the one whose development is the most marked. His behaviour in the early
part of the play, granted that it is not too improbable, is so foolish
as to provoke one. But he learns by experience, and becomes the most
capable person in the story, without losing any of his purity and
nobility of mind. There remain in him, however, touches which a little
chill one's feeling for him.
The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us:
The dark and vicious place where thee he got
Cost him his eyes:
--one wishes he had not said to his dying brother those words about
their dead father. 'The gods are just' would have been enough.[171] It
may be suggested that Shakespeare merely wished to introduce this moral
somehow, and did not mean the speech to be characteristic of the
speaker. But I doubt this: he might well have delivered it through
Albany, if he was determined to deliver it. This trait in Edgar _is_