The worst is not
So long as we can say "This is the worst." (4.1.26-27)
But Shakespeare is not done with him yet. "If ever I return to you again, I'll bring you comfort" (5.2.3-4). That is Edgar's promise to Gloucester before the battle. It is a rash promise, and poor comfort attends on it. A hiatus ensues, filled up with alarums and excursions. Then Edgar reenters and speaks again: "Away, old man.... King Lear hath lost" (5-6).
The optimism of Albany, as it is even more extravagant, is more sternly reproved.
All friends shall taste
The wages of their virtue, and all foes
The cup of their deservings. (5.3.305-06)
In that cheerful saying his philosophy is embodied. But the pentameter line, only three feet long, lacks its conclusion. Albany, rather cruelly, is made to supply the missing feet: "O, see, see!" It is the last agony of Lear to which his attention is directed.
Albany, as he presents the hopeful man who insists, a little too suavely, that God's in His Heaven, is Shakespeare's particular butt. It is he who cries, of Cordelia: "The gods defend her!" (258) The stage direction follows, enforcing the most monstrous conjunction in the play: "Enter Lear with Cordelia in his arms." The gods do not defend us. Perhaps they are unable to. "The gods reward your kindness," says Kent to Gloucester. That is the reading of the Folio, and surely it is the right reading. But the reading of the Quarto provokes speculation: "The gods deserve your kindness." It is as if the gods are weak, and require that humans collaborate with them in wielding the world. Lear, as his ar dor for the right grows upon him, shakes the superflux to the wretched. His intent is, as he says, to show the heavens more just. It is at least tenable to interpret: his intent is to justify their feckless ways as he can.
Maybe the heavens are worse than insufficient. What is said of the King, suggests not merely a lack of capacity in the ordering of things, but a malevolent purpose, as if the gods had marked us down for their sport. On this reading, Lear's reference to himself and Cordelia as "God's spies" will mean, as an early commentator suggested, "spies placed over God Almighty, to watch his motions." Maybe there is need of surveillance, if the human sacrifices on which the gods themselves throw incense are offered up for their pleasure; if the brand of fire that parts the predestined victims is handed down, and with an antique malice, from Heaven. "Can so much wrath dwell in heavenly spirits!" The Roman poet Virgil raised the question first, and it is still a problem for Shakespeare. The chill that invades us as, huddled with the others against the roaring wind and rain, we await the advent of unaccommodated man: "What art thou that dost grumble there i' th' straw?" is occasioned by the wild surmise, so much more fearful because it is involuntary, that the fiend is really walking up and down in the earth, and with the sufferance and even the connivance of Heaven. In the pitiless conclusion of King Lear, the dominion of the Prince of Darkness seems confirmed, and his presence a substantial presence as, with his terrible vans, he enshadows and overwhelms the just and the unjust alike.
If Fortune brag of two she loved and hated,
One of them we behold, (282-83)
Thou'lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never, (309-,10)
That is, I daresay, only an apparition, the disnatured child of night thoughts, and as such may be dispelled. But it needs more than to rub one's eyes, or to mutter a pious ejaculation. To such a degree is this true that even critics so tough-minded as Dr. Johnson have averted their eyes rather than acquiesce in the final horror with which the dramatist confronts them. It is too literal, too realistic for "dramatick exhibition." And yet it is remarkable that this play, in which Shakespeare's unremitting fidelity to fact is almost an occasion for scandal, manifests in its beginning a studied and a deliberate indifference to fact. If subsequent scenes are so realistic as hardly to be endured, the opening scenes have not to do with realism but with ritual and romance. Their abiding characteristic is a niggling formality. They do not wear the aspect of life so much as the aspect of art. Kent, lapsing into rude rhyme as he takes his departure, catches and communicates that aspect. His language is gnomic, admonitory, and simple--not naively but consciously simple: "artificial." He is not, for the moment, a real (an eccentric) man who displaces air like Hamlet or Parolles. He is, and by design, a flat character, highly conventionalized, who figures in an old-fashioned morality play. He would speak a prophecy before he goes.
The language of the other protagonists is of a piece with his. It does not evoke--not yet--the savage business of dragons of the prime (for all that the dragon is portentous in the threatening speeches of the King), so much as the ceremonious (the otherworldly !) business of proceedings at law and finance. Legal and fiscal metaphors reverberate. Gloucester, treating of his sons, asserts that the elder is no more dear than the younger, in his account. Lear, enacting his intention to abdicate the throne, renounces interest of territory, or possession. In lieu of Kent's insistence that he reserve his state, he stipulates his troop of knights as reservation, explicitly a legalism, in which the action of retaining a privilege is denoted. He would extend his largest bounty where nature challenges merit, or makes title to it. Regan, whose tenders of affection aim at that title, finds that Goneril has anticipated her very deed of love. The King, in whose simple-minded understanding love is a commodity, urges his youngest daughter to discover what portion her protestations can draw. But Cordelia loves only according to her bond. Failing to please, her price is fallen. Goneril pleases, in that she is taken as permitting to her father twice the retinue permitted by Regan. Her devotion may therefore be measured. She is precisely twice her sister's love.
Lear is not easily persuaded of his error, that devotion--in his psychology, a ponderable thing--is to be assessed and ought to be requited in ponderable ways. The inadmissible equation is there still, in the crass appeal to Regan when his agony is upon him: Thy half o' th' kingdom hast thou not forgot,
Wherein I thee endowed. (2.4.178-79)
He is appropriately answered, since that respects of fortune are his love: Good sir, to the purpose. (180)
This veneer of the unreal and the ritualistic, overlaying the initial action of the play, is not peculiar to the love test. The characters themselves move in an air of unreality. There is about them a felt sense of contradiction, as between what they are and what they seem to be. Lear is not a king but the show of a king. It is an insubstantial pageant over which he presides, recalling, in its unreality, the specious parade with which an earlier tragedy of Shakespeare's commences, that of Richard II, the mockery king of snows. Kent's acumen is verified when, with a lack of respect that is intended to shock and thereby to quicken perception, he sees and salutes his master, not as a monarch but as an old man.
But if Lear is an unreal image, so are the wicked daughters. Their essential vacuity, echoing to the touch, announces itself as it issues in their exaggerated protestings of love. Kent points to it obliquely in his praise of Cordelia: Nor are those empty-hearted whose low sounds
Reverb no hollowness. (1.1.155-56)
Gloucester discerns it, magnified to cosmic proportions, in the disordered state of the macrocosm, riven by machinations, by the hollowness that is hypocrisy. All that glisters is taken for gold. The pretension of the hypocrite, who professes herself weighs more than the practice of the candid and guileless retainer, who professes himself to be no less than he seems. The mere appearance is everything, and hence what is lifelike and vital is eclipsed. The characters are cut in alabaster, like monumental statues. The same metaphor describes the fool and the knave and the paragon of virtue, divesting each of human personality. Gloucester, who seems a good old man, is brazed by self-indulgence, become like hard metal. Regan, in whom nature appears tender-hefted, is hardened to insensibility, made of that self metal as her sister. Cordelia is, conversely, a little-seeming substance. But Cordelia is rendered also in nonhuman terms: her love, a precious metal, is more ponderous than her tongue.
an enemy
to all other joys
Which the most precious square of sense professes, (73-74)
Stylization of language and gesture is notable in such a play as The Tempest, and for excellent and obvious reasons. Shakespeare's resort to it in King Lear seems, however, gratuitous, and even antipathetic to the spirit of the play. Lear is not masquelike nor, certainly, romantic, in the harrowing story it tells. But observe that The Tempest begins, not formally, but realistically, with the faithful depicting of a ship driving on the rocks, a wild and literal scene in which the blasphemy and execration of real and affrighted persons bass the throbbing of the storm. And then the scene shifts abruptly. The auditor or reader, whose belief is purchased at the outset by a terrific glimpse of the real world, is brought safe to shore: is induced to enter, and willingly, the world of enchantment and romance. The fact of the transition, and the implausibility attendant on it, elude him. The tempest is still dinning in his ears.
In King Lear the dramatic problem is exactly reversed. It is to ensure that those whose disenchantment the playwright is already preparing, who are to be compelled to look on the Gorgon-features, will not evince incredulity or petrifaction. The problem is resolved by emphasizing at the outset the elements of unreality and romance. The impelling action of Lear is made to resemble a fairy tale, which is, I suppose, its ultimate source. The auditor or reader is fooled. Before he is aware, he has become a participant in the fierce and excessively painful dispute between damnation and impassioned clay.
But there is more than craft to Shakespeare's design in thus introducing his drama. He makes his characters unreal initially because he means them, at least in part, to be symbolic. The stylized quality of the beginning, as of a charade, its legalistic and ceremonious nature, the exalting in it of appearance as against reality, all work to the fulfilling of that primary intention. And though Lear is essentially representational drama, though realism very quickly takes precedence over ritual, the element of the symbolic is never dissipated altogether but figures in important ways until the end. Just as in Twelfth Night, whose burden is mistaken identity and the ho cus-pocus of identical twins, realism intrudes persistently to temper and give substance to romance-- In nature there's no blemish but the mind;
None can be called deformed but the unkind.
Virtue is beauty; but the beauteous evil
Are empty trunks, o'erflourished by the devil.
(Twelfth Night, 3.4.379-82)
--so in King Lear, an anti-romantic play in that its burden is a relentless anatomizing of evil, the symbolic declines to yield entirely to the representational. It persists, not to give substance to the teal, which is substantial enough-- Out, vile jelly!
Where is thy luster now? (3.7.84-85)
--but to order the real and make it meaningful, to avoid a confounding of it with the merely sensational. Not to grasp this ordering function is, necessarily, to run counter, to smell a fault where no fault is. Thus the embarrassment of critics so estimable as Goethe (for whom the action of the play was a tissue of the improbable and absurd), and Colendge (who saw the first scene as dispensable), and A. C. Bradley (who detected and enumerated in the whole, more and grosser inconsistencies than in any other of the great tragedies).
Misconstruction of the role and character of Cordelia typifies this failure to come to terms with the symbolic. Cordelia is, of old, a deeply disquieting figure. Why does she love, and yet remain silent? The question has engendered a little galaxy of answers. It is a question not to be asked. The first principle of good dramatic manners is to concede to the dramatist his given, so long as he is able to exploit it. Here, the given is the heroine's fatal reserve. It is the lever that starts the play on its progress. As such, it may not be queried, any more than the procedure that governs in chess or in the writing of an Italian sonnet.
But "reserve" is after all the wrong word. It suggests the wrong frame of reference. It leads to the rationalization of conduct on realistic grounds. To make the horrid point, this judgment of a contemporary critic may be cited, that Cordelia loved her father "less than she loved her own way and hated her sisters." That is a fair sample of the appeal to realism. It is at all costs to be avoided. Cordelia does not betray, what Coleridge thought to perceive, "some little faulty admixture of pride and sullenness." No stain of guilt or responsibility attaches to her. She is not imperious, like the King, not headstrong, not intractable. The appeal to heredity is a variation of the appeal to realism, and is, in this context, equally and altogether inapposite. Shakespeare's characters, unlike Eugene O'Neill's, have no antecedents. It is of no use to say that Cordelia is her father's daughter. The reason she will not speak is because she cannot speak; and she cannot because the heart of a fool is in his mouth but the mouth of the wise is in his heart.
This is to say that the muteness of Cordelia (like the fantastic credulity of Gloucester) is not so much a reflection of character as it is the embodiment of an idea. Less real than symbolic, her affinity is more to a creature of fairy tale like Cinderella than to a heroine of the realistic drama like Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire. In delineating her behavior the playwright may be, psychologically, so penetrating and exact as really to catch the manners living as they rise: that is partly an extra, added attraction, over and above what we need. More important is his intention, not to portray a believable woman, but to dramatize the proposition that plainness is more than eloquence, that beauty is to be purchased by the weight, that meager lead, which rather threatens than promises aught, buys more than silver and gold. The agitation of those who worry the details of the love test in an attempt to make it credible, which means to make it conformable to the canons of the realistic theater, is founded on their misapprehension of symbolic action.
When Cordelia is depicted as the last and least, it is not her slightness of stature that the dramatist is glancing at--or not that, decisively. He is preparing an ironic and a pregnant echo, to amplify Kent's assertion, a little later: Thy youngest daughter does not love thee least (1.1.154)
But more than that, he is invoking the promise of Scripture, unspoken in the play, and yet close to the theme, which is the heart (but not the moral!) of the play: The first shall be last and the last shall be first. When Cordelia herself exclaims, as she prepares to engage the British powers, it is not altogether the realistic business of an imminent battle to which she is adverting. (Certainly that business does not much preoccupy Shakespeare.) And therefore we are not to wonder why the King of France was, so inopportunely, called back to his kingdom, nor whether Shakespeare's allegiance or circumspection dictated the victory of the English. We want to catch in what is said an older saying, the sentence of the Evangelist, so much more than a literary reminiscence, and estimate accordingly the symbolic role the speaker plays: "Knew ye not that I must go about my father's business." It may be that Cordelia is that quintessence of womanhood celebrated reverentially (and with an appropriate silence as to particulars) by critics like A. W. Schlegel: "Of Cordelia's heavenly beauty of soul, I do not dare to speak." But it is not after all the literal woman to whom Shakespeare is holding up the mirror. Compare Beat-rice in Much Ado, or Rosalind in As You Like It.
O dear father,
It is thy business that I go about, (4.4.23-24)
It is a nice but an indispensable point to determine, just when the dramatist intends that the canons of ordinary realism are to be set aside or, better, transcended. Pretty clearly he wishes to transcend them when, in Act 2, Kent is made to sleep in the stocks, and Edgar, unmindful of him, to step forward and tell of his proposed transformation. Bradley is bemused: "One cannot help asking ... whether Edgar is mad that he should return from his hollow tree ... to his father's castle in order to soliloquize." But Shakespeare, in juxtaposing the two characters, is not concerned with motivation or, certainly, with locale. No doubt the Bedlam is understood to remain on the heath. But precisely where he is, is not a question that ought to detain us. Neither are we to ask why he fails to perceive that
someone else is up there with him on stage, in full view of the audience, and so, presumably, of himself; nor how Kent, for all his travails, can sleep undisturbed through twenty lines of blank verse. In the bringing together of the two good men, each of whom has been driven to the lowest and most dejected point of fortune, a dramatic emblem is achieved, a speaking picture, whose purport is not realistic but symbolic. What Shakespeare is after is this dark asssociation, or sequence: A good man's fortune may grow out at heels. (2.2.160)
Edgar I nothing am. (2.3.21)
In the same way the symbolic overtops the conventionally real when, in the final act, Edgar issues his challenge to Edmund. One is not to belabor the improbability of Edmund's failure to recognize his brother, though, in point of fact, the failure is itself symbolic: the villain is indeed beguiled, and not because the plot demands this but because of his own willful behavior. But what is central to the scene is the intimation one hears, in the blast of the trumpet that announces the combat, of that final trump that vindicates the right and summons the perpetrator of wrong to the Judgment. When--another illustration--Edgar, opposing Oswald, assumes the character of a rustic, the clownish dialect he speaks is, realistically, absurd: what is its occasion ? Symbolically, however, it is deeply congruous. The power of truth is attested to, however ludicrous its aspect, and the frailty which is falsehood exposed, in this meeting of the ragged fellow, whose West Country accent gives him out to be a bumpkin, but who intrinsically merits and possesses all honors, and the gilded courtier, whose extrinsic show and sophistication betoken all honors and are as paste and cover to none.