Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth
hypocrisy, contention, war, murder, self-destruction. The whole story
beats this indictment of prosperity into the brain. Lear's great
speeches in his madness proclaim it like the curses of Timon on life and
man. But here, as in _Timon_, the poor and humble are, almost without
exception, sound and sweet at heart, faithful and pitiful.[188] And here
adversity, to the blessed in spirit, is blessed. It wins fragrance from
the crushed flower. It melts in aged hearts sympathies which prosperity
had frozen. It purges the soul's sight by blinding that of the
eyes.[189] Throughout that stupendous Third Act the good are seen
growing better through suffering, and the bad worse through success. The
warm castle is a room in hell, the storm-swept heath a sanctuary. The
judgment of this world is a lie; its goods, which we covet, corrupt us;
its ills, which break our bodies, set our souls free;
Our means secure us,[190] and our mere defects
Prove our commodities.
Let us renounce the world, hate it, and lose it gladly. The only real
thing in it is the soul, with its courage, patience, devotion. And
nothing outward can touch that.
This, if we like to use the word, is Shakespeare's 'pessimism' in _King
Lear_. As we have seen, it is not by any means the whole spirit of the
tragedy, which presents the world as a place where heavenly good grows
side by side with evil, where extreme evil cannot long endure, and where
all that survives the storm is good, if not great. But still this strain
of thought, to which the world appears as the kingdom of evil and
therefore worthless, is in the tragedy, and may well be the record of
many hours of exasperated feeling and troubled brooding. Pursued further
and allowed to dominate, it would destroy the tragedy; for it is
necessary to tragedy that we should feel that suffering and death do
matter greatly, and that happiness and life are not to be renounced as
worthless. Pursued further, again, it leads to the idea that the world,
in that obvious appearance of it which tragedy cannot dissolve without
dissolving itself, is illusive. And its tendency towards this idea is
traceable in _King Lear_, in the shape of the notion that this 'great
world' is transitory, or 'will wear out to nought' like the little world
called 'man' (IV. vi. 137), or that humanity will destroy itself.[191]
In later days, in the drama that was probably Shakespeare's last
complete work, the _Tempest_, this notion of the transitoriness of
things appears, side by side with the simpler feeling that man's life is
an illusion or dream, in some of the most famous lines he ever wrote:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
These lines, detached from their context, are familiar to everyone; but,
in the _Tempest_, they are dramatic as well as poetical. The sudden
emergence of the thought expressed in them has a specific and most
significant cause; and as I have not seen it remarked I will point it
out.
Prospero, by means of his spirits, has been exhibiting to Ferdinand and
Miranda a masque in which goddesses appear, and which is so majestic and
harmonious that to the young man, standing beside such a father and such
a wife, the place seems Paradise,--as perhaps the world once seemed to
Shakespeare. Then, at the bidding of Iris, there begins a dance of
Nymphs with Reapers, sunburnt, weary of their August labour, but now in
their holiday garb. But, as this is nearing its end, Prospero 'starts
suddenly, and speaks'; and the visions vanish. And what he 'speaks' is
shown in these lines, which introduce the famous passage just quoted:
_Pros._ [_Aside_] I had forgot that foul conspiracy
Of the beast Caliban and his confederates
Against my life: the minute of their plot
Is almost come. [_To the Spirits._] Well done! avoid; no more.
_Fer._ This is strange; your father's in some passion
That works him strongly.
_Mir._ Never till this day
Saw I him touch'd with anger so distemper'd.
_Pros._ You do look, my son, in a moved sort,
As if you were dismay'd: be cheerful, sir.
Our revels....
And then, after the famous lines, follow these:
Sir, I am vex'd:
Bear with my weakness; my old brain is troubled;
Be not disturb'd with my infirmity;
If you be pleased, retire into my cell
And there repose: a turn or two I'll walk,
To still my beating mind.
We seem to see here the whole mind of Shakespeare in his last years.
That which provokes in Prospero first a 'passion' of anger, and, a
moment later, that melancholy and mystical thought that the great world
must perish utterly and that man is but a dream, is the sudden
recollection of gross and apparently incurable evil in the 'monster'
whom he had tried in vain to raise and soften, and in the monster's
human confederates. It is this, which is but the repetition of his
earlier experience of treachery and ingratitude, that troubles his old
brain, makes his mind 'beat,'[192] and forces on him the sense of
unreality and evanescence in the world and the life that are haunted by
such evil. Nor, though Prospero can spare and forgive, is there any sign
to the end that he believes the evil curable either in the monster, the
'born devil,' or in the more monstrous villains, the 'worse than
devils,' whom he so sternly dismisses. But he has learned patience, has
come to regard his anger and loathing as a weakness or infirmity, and
would not have it disturb the young and innocent. And so, in the days of
_King Lear_, it was chiefly the power of 'monstrous' and apparently
cureless evil in the 'great world' that filled Shakespeare's soul with
horror, and perhaps forced him sometimes to yield to the infirmity of
misanthropy and despair, to cry 'No, no, no life,' and to take refuge in
the thought that this fitful fever is a dream that must soon fade into a
dreamless sleep; until, to free himself from the perilous stuff that
weighed upon his heart, he summoned to his aid his 'so potent art,' and
wrought this stuff into the stormy music of his greatest poem, which
seems to cry,
You heavens, give me that patience, patience I need,
and, like the _Tempest_, seems to preach to us from end to end, 'Thou
must be patient,' 'Bear free and patient thoughts.'[193]
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 158: Of course I do not mean that he is beginning to be
insane, and still less that he _is_ insane (as some medical critics
suggest).]
[Footnote 159: I must however point out that the modern stage-directions
are most unfortunate in concealing the fact that here Cordelia sees her
father again _for the first time_. See Note W.]
[Footnote 160: What immediately follows is as striking an illustration
of quite another quality, and of the effects which make us think of Lear
as pursued by a relentless fate. If he could go in and sleep after his
prayer, as he intends, his mind, one feels, might be saved: so far there
has been only the menace of madness. But from within the hovel
Edgar--the last man who would willingly have injured Lear--cries,
'Fathom and half, fathom and half! Poor Tom!'; the Fool runs out
terrified; Edgar, summoned by Kent, follows him; and, at sight of Edgar,
in a moment something gives way in Lear's brain, and he exclaims:
Hast thou given all
To thy two daughters? And art thou come to this?
Henceforth he is mad. And they remain out in the storm.
I have not seen it noticed that this stroke of fate is repeated--surely
intentionally--in the sixth scene. Gloster has succeeded in persuading
Lear to come into the 'house'; he then leaves, and Kent after much
difficulty induces Lear to lie down and rest upon the cushions. Sleep
begins to come to him again, and he murmurs,
'Make no noise, make no noise; draw the curtains; so, so, so.
We'll go to supper i' the morning. So, so, so.'
At that moment Gloster enters with the news that he has discovered a
plot to kill the King; the rest that 'might yet have balm'd his broken
senses' is again interrupted; and he is hurried away on a litter towards
Dover. (His recovery, it will be remembered, is due to a long sleep
artificially induced.)]
[Footnote 161: III. iv. 49. This is printed as prose in the Globe
edition, but is surely verse. Lear has not yet spoken prose in this
scene, and his next three speeches are in verse. The next is in prose,
and, ending, in his tearing off his clothes, shows the advance of
insanity.]
[Footnote 162: [Lear's death is thus, I am reminded, like _pere_
Goriot's.] This interpretation may be condemned as fantastic, but the
text, it appears to me, will bear no other. This is the whole speech (in
the Globe text):
And my poor fool is hang'd! No, no, no life!
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never!
Pray you, undo this button: thank you, sir.
Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips,
Look there, look there!
The transition at 'Do you see this?' from despair to something more than
hope is exactly the same as in the preceding passage at the word 'Ha!':
A plague upon you, murderers, traitors all!
I might have saved her; now she's gone for ever!
Cordelia, Cordelia, stay a little.
Ha!
What is't thou say'st? Her voice was ever soft,
Gentle, and low, an excellent thing in woman.
As to my other remarks, I will ask the reader to notice that the passage
from Lear's entrance with the body of Cordelia to the stage-direction
_He dies_ (which probably comes a few lines too soon) is 54 lines in
length, and that 30 of them represent the interval during which he has
absolutely forgotten Cordelia. (It begins when he looks up at the
Captain's words, line 275.) To make Lear during this interval turn
continually in anguish to the corpse, is to act the passage in a manner
irreconcilable with the text, and insufferable in its effect. I speak
from experience. I have seen the passage acted thus, and my sympathies
were so exhausted long before Lear's death that his last speech, the
most pathetic speech ever written, left me disappointed and weary.]
[Footnote 163: The Quartos give the 'Never' only thrice (surely
wrongly), and all the actors I have heard have preferred this easier
task. I ought perhaps to add that the Quartos give the words 'Break,
heart; I prithee, break!' to Lear, not Kent. They and the Folio are at
odds throughout the last sixty lines of King Lear, and all good modern
texts are eclectic.]
[Footnote 164: The connection of these sufferings with the sin of
earlier days (not, it should be noticed, of youth) is almost thrust upon
our notice by the levity of Gloster's own reference to the subject in
the first scene, and by Edgar's often quoted words 'The gods are just,'
etc. The following collocation, also, may be intentional (III. iv. 116):
_Fool_. Now a little fire in a wild field were like an old
lecher's heart; a small spark, all the rest on's body cold.
Look, here comes a walking fire. [_Enter_ GLOSTER with a
torch.]
Pope destroyed the collocation by transferring the stage-direction to a
point some dozen lines later.]
[Footnote 165: The passages are here printed together (III. iv. 28 ff.