Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth
characteristic. It seems to be connected with his pronounced and
conscious religiousness. He interprets everything religiously, and is
speaking here from an intense conviction which overrides personal
feelings. With this religiousness, on the other side, is connected his
cheerful and confident endurance, and his practical helpfulness and
resource. He never thinks of despairing; in the worst circumstances he
is sure there is something to be done to make things better. And he is
sure of this, not only from temperament, but from faith in 'the clearest
gods.' He is the man on whom we are to rely at the end for the recovery
and welfare of the state: and we do rely on him.
I spoke of his temperament. There is in Edgar, with much else that is
fine, something of that buoyancy of spirit which charms us in Imogen.
Nothing can subdue in him the feeling that life is sweet and must be
cherished. At his worst, misconstrued, contemned, exiled, under sentence
of death, 'the lowest and most dejected thing of fortune,' he keeps his
head erect. The inextinguishable spirit of youth and delight is in him;
he _embraces_ the unsubstantial air which has blown him to the worst;
for him 'the worst returns to laughter.'[172] 'Bear free and patient
thoughts,' he says to his father. His own thoughts are more than
patient, they are 'free,' even joyous, in spite of the tender sympathies
which strive in vain to overwhelm him. This ability to feel and offer
great sympathy with distress, without losing through the sympathy any
elasticity or strength, is a noble quality, sometimes found in souls
like Edgar's, naturally buoyant and also religious. It may even be
characteristic of him that, when Lear is sinking down in death, he tries
to rouse him and bring him back to life. 'Look up, my lord!' he cries.
It is Kent who feels that
he hates him,
That would upon the rack of this tough world
Stretch him out longer.
Kent is one of the best-loved characters in Shakespeare. He is beloved
for his own sake, and also for the sake of Cordelia and of Lear. We are
grateful to him because he stands up for Cordelia, and because, when she
is out of sight, he constantly keeps her in our minds. And how well
these two love each other we see when they meet. Yet it is not Cordelia
who is dearest to Kent. His love for Lear is the passion of his life: it
_is_ his life. At the beginning he braves Lear's wrath even more for
Lear's sake than Cordelia's.[173] At the end he seems to realise
Cordelia's death only as it is reflected in Lear's agony. Nor does he
merely love his master passionately, as Cordelia loves her father. That
word 'master,' and Kent's appeal to the 'authority' he saw in the old
King's face, are significant. He belongs to Lear, body and soul, as a
dog does to his master and god. The King is not to him old, wayward,
unreasonable, piteous: he is still terrible, grand, the king of men.
Through his eyes we see the Lear of Lear's prime, whom Cordelia never
saw. Kent never forgets this Lear. In the Storm-scenes, even after the
King becomes insane, Kent never addresses him without the old terms of
respect, 'your grace,' 'my lord,' 'sir.' How characteristic it is that
in the scene of Lear's recovery Kent speaks to him but once: it is when
the King asks 'Am I in France?' and he answers 'In your own kingdom,
sir.'
In acting the part of a blunt and eccentric serving-man Kent retains
much of his natural character. The eccentricity seems to be put on, but
the plainness which gets him set in the stocks is but an exaggeration of
his plainness in the opening scene, and Shakespeare certainly meant him
for one of those characters whom we love none the less for their
defects. He is hot and rash; noble but far from skilful in his
resistance to the King; he might well have chosen wiser words to gain
his point. But, as he himself says, he has more man than wit about him.
He shows this again when he rejoins Lear as a servant, for he at once
brings the quarrel with Goneril to a head; and, later, by falling upon
Oswald, whom he so detests that he cannot keep his hands off him, he
provides Regan and Cornwall with a pretext for their inhospitality. One
has not the heart to wish him different, but he illustrates the truth
that to run one's head unselfishly against a wall is not the best way to
help one's friends.
One fact about Kent is often overlooked. He is an old man. He tells Lear
that he is eight and forty, but it is clear that he is much older; not
so old as his master, who was 'four-score and upward' and whom he 'loved
as his father,' but, one may suppose, three-score and upward. From the
first scene we get this impression, and in the scene with Oswald it is
repeatedly confirmed. His beard is grey. 'Ancient ruffian,' 'old
fellow,' 'you stubborn ancient knave, you reverent braggart'--these are
some of the expressions applied to him. 'Sir,' he says to Cornwall, 'I
am too old to learn.' If his age is not remembered, we fail to realise
the full beauty of his thoughtlessness of himself, his incessant care of
the King, his light-hearted indifference to fortune or fate.[174] We
lose also some of the naturalness and pathos of his feeling that his
task is nearly done. Even at the end of the Fourth Act we find him
saying,
My point and period will be throughly wrought
Or well or ill, as this day's battle's fought.
His heart is ready to break when he falls with his strong arms about
Edgar's neck; bellows out as he'd burst heaven (how like him!);
threw him on my father,
Told the most piteous tale of Lear and him
That ever ear received; which in recounting
His grief grew puissant, and the strings of life
Began to crack. Twice then the trumpet sounded,
And there I left him tranced;
and a little after, when he enters, we hear the sound of death in his
voice:
I am come
To bid my king and master aye goodnight.
This desire possesses him wholly. When the bodies of Goneril and Regan
are brought in he asks merely, 'Alack, why thus?' How can he care? He is
waiting for one thing alone. He cannot but yearn for recognition, cannot
but beg for it even when Lear is bending over the body of Cordelia; and
even in that scene of unmatched pathos we feel a sharp pang at his
failure to receive it. It is of himself he is speaking, perhaps, when he
murmurs, as his master dies, 'Break, heart, I prithee, break!' He puts
aside Albany's invitation to take part in the government; his task is
over:
I have a journey, sir, shortly to go:
My master calls me; I must not say no.
Kent in his devotion, his self-effacement, his cheerful stoicism, his
desire to follow his dead lord, has been well likened to Horatio. But
Horatio is not old; nor is he hot-headed; and though he is stoical he is
also religious. Kent, as compared with him and with Edgar, is not so. He
has not Edgar's ever-present faith in the 'clearest gods.' He refers to
them, in fact, less often than to fortune or the stars. He lives mainly
by the love in his own heart.[175]
* * * * *
The theatrical fool or clown (we need not distinguish them here) was a
sore trial to the cultured poet and spectator in Shakespeare's day. He
came down from the Morality plays, and was beloved of the groundlings.
His antics, his songs, his dances, his jests, too often unclean,
delighted them, and did something to make the drama, what the vulgar,
poor or rich, like it to be, a variety entertainment. Even if he
confined himself to what was set down for him, he often disturbed the
dramatic unity of the piece; and the temptation to 'gag' was too strong
for him to resist. Shakespeare makes Hamlet object to it in emphatic
terms. The more learned critics and poets went further and would have
abolished the fool altogether. His part declines as the drama advances,
diminishing markedly at the end of the sixteenth century. Jonson and
Massinger exclude him. Shakespeare used him--we know to what effect--as
he used all the other popular elements of the drama; but he abstained
from introducing him into the Roman plays,[176] and there is no fool in
the last of the pure tragedies, _Macbeth_.
But the Fool is one of Shakespeare's triumphs in _King Lear_. Imagine
the tragedy without him, and you hardly know it. To remove him would
spoil its harmony, as the harmony of a picture would be spoiled if one
of the colours were extracted. One can almost imagine that Shakespeare,
going home from an evening at the Mermaid, where he had listened to
Jonson fulminating against fools in general and perhaps criticising the
Clown in _Twelfth Night_ in particular, had said to himself: 'Come, my
friends, I will show you once for all that the mischief is in you, and
not in the fool or the audience. I will have a fool in the most tragic
of my tragedies. He shall not play a little part. He shall keep from
first to last the company in which you most object to see him, the
company of a king. Instead of amusing the king's idle hours, he shall
stand by him in the very tempest and whirlwind of passion. Before I have
done you shall confess, between laughter and tears, that he is of the
very essence of life, that you have known him all your days though you
never recognised him till now, and that you would as soon go without
Hamlet as miss him.'
The Fool in _King Lear_ has been so favourite a subject with good
critics that I will confine myself to one or two points on which a
difference of opinion is possible. To suppose that the Fool is, like
many a domestic fool at that time, a perfectly sane man pretending to be
half-witted, is surely a most prosaic blunder. There is no difficulty in
imagining that, being slightly touched in the brain, and holding the
office of fool, he performs the duties of his office intentionally as
well as involuntarily: it is evident that he does so. But unless we
suppose that he _is_ touched in the brain we lose half the effect of
his appearance in the Storm-scenes. The effect of those scenes (to state
the matter as plainly as possible) depends largely on the presence of
three characters, and on the affinities and contrasts between them; on
our perception that the differences of station in King, Fool, and
beggar-noble, are levelled by one blast of calamity; but also on our
perception of the differences between these three in one respect,--viz.
in regard to the peculiar affliction of insanity. The insanity of the
King differs widely in its nature from that of the Fool, and that of the
Fool from that of the beggar. But the insanity of the King differs from
that of the beggar not only in its nature, but also in the fact that one
is real and the other simply a pretence. Are we to suppose then that the
insanity of the third character, the Fool, is, in this respect, a mere
repetition of that of the second, the beggar,--that it too is _mere_
pretence? To suppose this is not only to impoverish miserably the
impression made by the trio as a whole, it is also to diminish the
heroic and pathetic effect of the character of the Fool. For his heroism
consists largely in this, that his efforts to outjest his master's
injuries are the efforts of a being to whom a responsible and consistent
course of action, nay even a responsible use of language, is at the best
of times difficult, and from whom it is never at the best of times
expected. It is a heroism something like that of Lear himself in his
endeavour to learn patience at the age of eighty. But arguments against
the idea that the Fool is wholly sane are either needless or futile; for
in the end they are appeals to the perception that this idea almost
destroys the poetry of the character.
This is not the case with another question, the question whether the