Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth
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....
She stands and weeps, and goes out with him silent. And we see her alive
no more.
But (I am forced to dwell on the point, because I am sure to slur it
over is to be false to Shakespeare) this dumbness of love was not the
sole source of misunderstanding. If this had been all, even Lear could
have seen the love in Cordelia's eyes when, to his question 'What can
you say to draw a third more opulent than your sisters?' she answered
'Nothing.' But it did not shine there. She is not merely silent, nor
does she merely answer 'Nothing.' She tells him that she loves him
'according to her bond, nor more nor less'; and his answer,
How now, Cordelia! mend your speech a little,
Lest it may mar your fortunes,
so intensifies her horror at the hypocrisy of her sisters that she
replies,
Good my Lord,
You have begot me, bred me, loved me: I
Return those duties back as are right fit,
Obey you, love you, and most honour you.
Why have my sisters husbands, if they say
They love you all? Haply, when I shall wed,
That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry
Half my love with him, half my care and duty:
Sure, I shall never marry like my sisters,
To love my father all.
What words for the ear of an old father, unreasonable, despotic, but
fondly loving, indecent in his own expressions of preference, and blind
to the indecency of his appeal for protestations of fondness! Blank
astonishment, anger, wounded love, contend within him; but for the
moment he restrains himself and asks,
But goes thy heart with this?
Imagine Imogen's reply! But Cordelia answers,
Ay, good my lord.
_Lear._ So young, and so untender?
_Cor._ So young, my lord, and true.
Yes, 'heavenly true.' But truth is not the only good in the world, nor
is the obligation to tell truth the only obligation. The matter here was
to keep it inviolate, but also to preserve a father. And even if truth
_were_ the one and only obligation, to tell much less than truth is not
to tell it. And Cordelia's speech not only tells much less than truth
about her love, it actually perverts the truth when it implies that to
give love to a husband is to take it from a father. There surely never
was a more unhappy speech.
When Isabella goes to plead with Angelo for her brother's life, her
horror of her brother's sin is so intense, and her perception of the
justice of Angelo's reasons for refusing her is so clear and keen, that
she is ready to abandon her appeal before it is well begun; she would
actually do so but that the warm-hearted profligate Lucio reproaches her
for her coldness and urges her on. Cordelia's hatred of hypocrisy and of
the faintest appearance of mercenary professions reminds us of
Isabella's hatred of impurity; but Cordelia's position is infinitely
more difficult, and on the other hand there is mingled with her hatred a
touch of personal antagonism and of pride. Lear's words,
Let pride, which she calls plainness, marry her![183]
are monstrously unjust, but they contain one grain of truth; and indeed
it was scarcely possible that a nature so strong as Cordelia's, and with
so keen a sense of dignity, should feel here nothing whatever of pride
and resentment. This side of her character is emphatically shown in her
language to her sisters in the first scene--language perfectly just, but
little adapted to soften their hearts towards their father--and again in
the very last words we hear her speak. She and her father are brought
in, prisoners, to the enemy's camp; but she sees only Edmund, not those
'greater' ones on whose pleasure hangs her father's fate and her own.
For her own she is little concerned; she knows how to meet adversity:
For thee, oppressed king, am I cast down;
Myself could else out-frown false fortune's frown.
Yes, that is how she would meet fortune, frowning it down, even as
Goneril would have met it; nor, if her father had been already dead,
would there have been any great improbability in the false story that
was to be told of her death, that, like Goneril, she 'fordid herself.'
Then, after those austere words about fortune, she suddenly asks,
Shall we not see these daughters and these sisters?
Strange last words for us to hear from a being so worshipped and
beloved; but how characteristic! Their tone is unmistakable. I doubt if
she could have brought herself to plead with her sisters for her
father's life; and if she had attempted the task, she would have
performed it but ill. Nor is our feeling towards her altered one whit by
that. But what is true of Kent and the Fool[184] is, in its measure,
true of her. Any one of them would gladly have died a hundred deaths to
help King Lear; and they do help his soul; but they harm his cause. They
are all involved in tragedy.
* * * * *
Why does Cordelia die? I suppose no reader ever failed to ask that
question, and to ask it with something more than pain,--to ask it, if
only for a moment, in bewilderment or dismay, and even perhaps in tones
of protest. These feelings are probably evoked more strongly here than
at the death of any other notable character in Shakespeare; and it may
sound a wilful paradox to assert that the slightest element of
reconciliation is mingled with them or succeeds them. Yet it seems to me
indubitable that such an element is present, though difficult to make
out with certainty what it is or whence it proceeds. And I will try to
make this out, and to state it methodically.
(_a_) It is not due in any perceptible degree to the fact, which we have
just been examining, that Cordelia through her tragic imperfection
contributes something to the conflict and catastrophe; and I drew
attention to that imperfection without any view to our present problem.
The critics who emphasise it at this point in the drama are surely
untrue to Shakespeare's mind; and still more completely astray are those
who lay stress on the idea that Cordelia, in bringing a foreign army to
help her father, was guilty of treason to her country. When she dies we
regard her, practically speaking, simply as we regard Ophelia or
Desdemona, as an innocent victim swept away in the convulsion caused by
the error or guilt of others.
(_b_) Now this destruction of the good through the evil of others is one
of the tragic facts of life, and no one can object to the use of it,
within certain limits, in tragic art. And, further, those who because of
it declaim against the nature of things, declaim without thinking. It is
obviously the other side of the fact that the effects of good spread far
and wide beyond the doer of good; and we should ask ourselves whether we
really could wish (supposing it conceivable) to see this double-sided
fact abolished. Nevertheless the touch of reconciliation that we feel in
contemplating the death of Cordelia is not due, or is due only in some
slight degree, to a perception that the event is true to life,
admissible in tragedy, and a case of a law which we cannot seriously
desire to see abrogated.
(_c_) What then is this feeling, and whence does it come? I believe we
shall find that it is a feeling not confined to _King Lear_, but present
at the close of other tragedies; and that the reason why it has an
exceptional tone or force at the close of _King Lear_, lies in that very
peculiarity of the close which also--at least for the moment--excites
bewilderment, dismay, or protest. The feeling I mean is the impression
that the heroic being, though in one sense and outwardly he has failed,
is yet in another sense superior to the world in which he appears; is,
in some way which we do not seek to define, untouched by the doom that
overtakes him; and is rather set free from life than deprived of it.
Some such feeling as this--some feeling which, from this description of
it, may be recognised as their own even by those who would dissent from
the description--we surely have in various degrees at the deaths of
Hamlet and Othello and Lear, and of Antony and Cleopatra and
Coriolanus.[185] It accompanies the more prominent tragic impressions,
and, regarded alone, could hardly be called tragic. For it seems to
imply (though we are probably quite unconscious of the implication) an
idea which, if developed, would transform the tragic view of things. It
implies that the tragic world, if taken as it is presented, with all its
error, guilt, failure, woe and waste, is no final reality, but only a
part of reality taken for the whole, and, when so taken, illusive; and
that if we could see the whole, and the tragic facts in their true place
in it, we should find them, not abolished, of course, but so transmuted
that they had ceased to be strictly tragic,--find, perhaps, the
suffering and death counting for little or nothing, the greatness of the
soul for much or all, and the heroic spirit, in spite of failure, nearer
to the heart of things than the smaller, more circumspect, and perhaps
even 'better' beings who survived the catastrophe. The feeling which I
have tried to describe, as accompanying the more obvious tragic emotions
at the deaths of heroes, corresponds with some such idea as this.[186]
Now this feeling is evoked with a quite exceptional strength by the
death of Cordelia.[187] It is not due to the perception that she, like
Lear, has attained through suffering; we know that she had suffered and
attained in his days of prosperity. It is simply the feeling that what
happens to such a being does not matter; all that matters is what she
is. How this can be when, for anything the tragedy tells us, she has
ceased to exist, we do not ask; but the tragedy itself makes us feel
that somehow it is so. And the force with which this impression is
conveyed depends largely on the very fact which excites our bewilderment
and protest, that her death, following on the deaths of all the evil
characters, and brought about by an unexplained delay in Edmund's effort
to save her, comes on us, not as an inevitable conclusion to the
sequence of events, but as the sudden stroke of mere fate or chance. The
force of the impression, that is to say, depends on the very violence of
the contrast between the outward and the inward, Cordelia's death and
Cordelia's soul. The more unmotived, unmerited, senseless, monstrous,
her fate, the more do we feel that it does not concern her. The
extremity of the disproportion between prosperity and goodness first
shocks us, and then flashes on us the conviction that our whole attitude
in asking or expecting that goodness should be prosperous is wrong;
that, if only we could see things as they are, we should see that the
outward is nothing and the inward is all.
And some such thought as this (which, to bring it clearly out, I have
stated, and still state, in a form both exaggerated and much too
explicit) is really present through the whole play. Whether Shakespeare
knew it or not, it is present. I might almost say that the 'moral' of
_King Lear_ is presented in the irony of this collocation:
_Albany._ The gods defend her!
_Enter Lear with Cordelia dead in his arms._
The 'gods,' it seems, do _not_ show their approval by 'defending' their
own from adversity or death, or by giving them power and prosperity.
These, on the contrary, are worthless, or worse; it is not on them, but
on the renunciation of them, that the gods throw incense. They breed
lust, pride, hardness of heart, the insolence of office, cruelty, scorn,