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This is probably the most painful thing Shakespeare wrote

This play can have enormous physical pain -- mutilation (drawn out), naked raving lunatics, hideous humiliation

Not only physical pain but also emotional -- Shakespeare wrote to make us feel as well as think -- it is emotionally anguishing to watch Lear bargain for love and to watch him curse Goneril to sterility in front of her husband -- blinding of Gloucester is painful, but it is proceeded by Regan plucking his beard

Even in the scenes which are supposed to be warm are not: Lear coming to his senses in front of Cordelia, do not mock me

Lear to Cordelia -- "Better thou hast not been born than to not please me better." -- one of the worst things a father can say to a daughter

You can’t understand this play until you have old parents so you can understand loving them but having them be difficult

There is such a fall here -- Lear is absolutely in control at the beginning: the land is at peace, foreign Kings are wooing his youngest daughter, the dowry for the other two daughters have yet to be paid (amazing control) -- it is a story of absolute majesty which is absolutely ruined

In Hamlet one of the chief effects is variety (pirates, kings, players, and Hamlet) -- in Lear the key is repetition: banishes Cordelia and then Kent; mistreated by Goneril, then Regan; Gloucester has one then both eyes put out

(Act 4) -- Edgar says things could only get better from here -- for a moment you feel better about things -- only it doesn’t work: the next thing that happens is his old blinded father walks on the stage -- he says he didn’t think that could happen -- he says as long as you can speak you can have worse

the speech: "nothing" and "never, never, never" and "kill, kill, kill" -- how should we respond? Lear suggest howling -- what happens if you actually try to cope with it

Shakespeare knows this is hard to take so a lot of the play is about responses to coping with this

Gloucester

p. 2488 (1.2.71) - Gloucester dealing with the news that Edgar is planning against him

Gut response: rage; but it doesn’t last -- 87 -- now he is not sure "he cannot be such a monster to his father" -- the second response is not to believe, denial

Moving from feeling to mind: got to think what it means -- find an explanation -- 96 -- talks about the eclipse -- supernatural forces are responsible -- our destiny is controlled by the stars -- this is a very poor explanation -- Shakespeare dose not take astrology as an explanation -- here we are immediately encouraged to think this is a bad explanation as Edmund then goes on to say alone that Gloucester’s explanation is absurd and that when we are old and impotent we blame our problems on the star -- Gloucester is evading the truth of our nature

Glocester is evading: the fact that people are vile of their own nature -- he goes through the first part of this play not noticing that people are behaving badly -- he tries to sooth Cornwall and Lear -- it takes him a while to realize that this is not solvable

He also evades the fact that we are responsible for these -- Edmund is the product of Gloucester’s nature -- if we blame the Gods we are not taking our own responsibility

Most people in the audience see Gloucester’s evasion as just that -- the habit of mind that Gloucester reveals in jumping to the stars for an explanation is characteristic of the people in the play -- they all try to come up with some philosophical explanation

What he is being told is not true (wrong son) but one of the sons is plotting against them -- both he and Lear chose the wrong child

The emotional strength of this play comes from the realization that children can hate their parents

Lear has the same responses to Cordelia in the first scene, but this is analogous action -- the play is about two old men: everything that happens in the main plot is mirrored in the sub-plot

Gods in the Play

(4.1) Gloucester is going on about what he saw in the storm -- "as flies to wanton boys are we to the Gods; they kill us for sport" -- this may sum up the play -- this is a further evasion -- it helps Gloucester preserve his sanity for the time being -- it does contain at least a hypothetical truth -- if there are Gods in the universe of King Lear they must be willing to let these things happen, but they don’t do it: Regan and Cornwall do

Lear insists that humans are vile, Gloucester says it is the Gods

What kind of Gods in this pre-christian play? Roman Gods are mentioned.

Near the end of Act 5, Edgar makes an opposite statement about the Gods (p. 2549, 5.3.165) -- "the Gods are just" -- the ultimate just result of Gloucester’s blinding was his adultery -- the causal relationship is right, but it is an evasion -- this doesn’t make the Gods just -- an eye for a casual sin of the flesh -- what about Cordelia?

Albany has the lines calling for the Gods to defend her

We want the idea of justice -- an unjust world is very scary -- if there is justice we can say it’s not fair with some idea that that protest will be heard in some court (human or divine) and that things will be set right

There is evasion everywhere -- even Edmond evades: his response to Gloucester’s astrology response -- "I should have been that I am should the maidenliest star twinkled on" -- a psychological determinism -- he believes he has a fixed nature which he can not change -- he finds out at the end as he is moved by Gloucester’s suffering and he tries to save Cordelia and Lear --

they all come up with explanations to avoid the suffering of the world -- they do need comfort -- their intellectual mistakes are part of their defense

mankind also joins them in this

Lear is old and obviously makes mistakes -- he deserves to get what he gets

The trouble is that he has realized all of that by the end of Act 1 -- but ghastly things go on happening to him after that

18c. Poetic Justice

this play does not manifest poetic justice, so they re-wrote the play -- Nahum Tate -- in that version they win the battle and Edgar saves Cordelia from an attempted rape and marries her at the end (with not French King) -- this was closer to the original play -- this version held the stage for about 150 years -- they openly evaded it

1930s-1960s

it was very popular to see a Christian redemption in the play -- Cordelia as a Christ figure -- a purgatory which implies a paradise -- Lear is redeemed by the end

there is an element of this here -- there are some Christian comments (in Act 4) but there are none in Act 5

Later: Peter Brook’s 1964

He was influenced heavily by the theater of the absurd -- borrowed heavily on those techniques -- in was also an evasion of King Lear as it reduced the play -- made it more uniform and bleaker than it actually is

There is a hint of optimism that sneaks in to the blinding scene -- the other servants do not obey Regan’s order -- they resolve to get some medicine to help Gloucester -- Brook cut the lines and had them obey Regan -- this is our version of Cordelia marries Edgar -- we falsify things by making them bleaker -- it consoles us, for if we do believe this we live in a totally imbecilic universe and there is nothing we can do

If we don’t really believe it, we can take a sort of arty interest in the bleakness of his vision

King Lear is as terrible as life can get -- if you make it less terrible or more so then you don’t have to face it.

Organization of the Elizabethan universe -- elemental Chaos - strife - love which creates the orderly universe (God)

In this play we are not so sure about God as it is a non-Christian play -- but the same metaphysical system is prevailing with the idea that love holds the universe together and strife tears it apart

This system is directly exposed in the play - (1.4.240 p. 2496) - near the climax of his argument with Goneirl at her house -- Lear is saying his train is well behaved -- then he has a break in his thought and he thinks of Cordelia and his misbehavior towards her -- beginning of his realization that Cordelia’s fault was not as gross as he thought it was when he started, that that small error wrenched Lear’s frame of nature: he is a microcosm of the world (nature) when nature gets wrenched, gaul takes its place and you have chaos rather than the order of love

By the middle of the play we are in the wild in a raging storm with a naked lunatic - how do we get there?

It goes in two phases -- people go into wrath and then chaos/insanity

(mad is chaos of the mind)

Lear->wrath->madness

Edgar->dispossed fugitive->"mad" beggar

Britain->family strife->mutilation, murder, war

extended nature->apocalyptic storm

the pattern is moving from the order of love into the chaos of madness

more difficult than Lear as it is largely a symbolic progression

The soliloquy in which he decides to pretend to be mad (p.2506, 2.3) --he comments that he has nowhere to go and that he will dress up as the lowest and rawest personage -- naked --"horrible object" -- he will "enforce their charity" with his baseness.

The speech is in part exposition so that we know what he is going to do because the next time we will see him is when he pops out of a hovel later and drives Lear mad.

There are a whole series of thematic statements

Physical actions follow what is happening in the plays -- Lear said he would "divest" himself of authority (to lose his clothes)

1) he will strip himself -- remove his authority

2) bestiality -- he is becoming the lowest form of life -- Lear and others endure the storm as wild animals without shelter -- Gloucester describes himself as chained like a bear when being blinded -- Albany says we will all become monsters of the deep if we follow his wife -- there are 72 animal images in the play

3) madness -- Edgar will also be insane -- he will be a Bedlam beggar -- Lear had feared madness, but Edgar seems to embrace it -- the object as he defines it is to "enforce their charity" sometimes with lunatic curses and sometimes with prayers he will make unwilling human beings give to their fellows (that is his goal) -- he will look disgusting, loud voice, scars on his arms, he is obsessed with devil beating him in his speeches -- he is a horrible thing to look at -- he is repulsive: he is not the sort of person you give money to for good reasons, you give him money because you want him to go away

4) identity -- the scene ends with "Tom, that’s something, Edgar I nothing am" -- the role of Edgar has been put to nothing -- the disowning of him by his father Edgar is nothing while as Tom he can have some role and identity

The Character of Edgar

In the first scene he came across as a dummy

Here he is making a decision to assume a role -- why should he chose this role? it is a good disguise, but it seems unlikely for an Earl’s son -- he does this because Shakespeare wants him to do so -- he is the furthest from normal credibility -- he wants a third madman in the storm scenes -- he wants the more rational beggar of act 4 -- and he wants the knight in shining armor for act 5 -- he is being sketchy in psychology, but he gets this progression

He seems very sheltered at the beginning and then all of a sudden has a great experience with the raw underclasses

But he does have a purpose -- to preserve himself -- sanity and identity -- his whole position in life was largely dependent on his father -- the oldest son of an Earl had most things set out for him

What Edgar is doing is trying to respond to a very sudden attack on his identity -- suddenly uprooted from his heritage -- his sanity and identity are attacked -- very similar to what Hamlet does -- they both can conceal themselves and their real ideas, but it also allows them to release their feelings and express their inner turmoil

Or, Edgar seems to desire self-degradation -- he chooses a role which is inherently masochistic -- he has been accused of plotting to murder his father (it’s a lie), but if you follow Freud, then it is true of all sons and he is punishing himself for a crime he has wanted to commit in fantasy -- but then he saves his father’s life

The actual disguise (3.4.84, p.2519) when he comes out of the hovel, Lear asks him how he came to this condition -- whole madness, nakedness, wickedness, bestiality -- all of man at his worse -- add up all the animals and you get a man -- but there is something more particular here -- it reminds us of Oswald and Edmund: what does this mean as Edgar dose not know those things -- those are the two guys Edgar kills -- he must become those things that he eventually kills in order to grow through those thing -- not a complete idea

he discovers disposition and powerlessness in a much greater way -- he had all of Britain at his feet and now he can’t even get dinner

1) (1.4) -- 57 (p. 2492) -- Oswald tells him he is his lady’s father -- Question: who am I -- he has no identity of his own -- this is reversed as identity comes from your parents, but not so for Lear -- he has given the power to his children, so now he is under her -- he had specified that he would keep the name of a King, but now he is being told no -- he is trying to do the same thing Richard II did -- he is trying to figure out what if anything is left

2)The fool tells him he is a fool as he has given away all of his other titles -- Question: do you call me a fool? -- the fool is on Lear’s side, but very practical -- part of his madness is a compulsion to tell the truth all the time -- he is saying that if you have given away everything else you are left with what basic nature is which is folly -- he remembers this at the cliff with Gloucester that we cry that we find ourselves among fools at birth -- Kent agrees -- folly appears to be our only inherent characteristic

3) 147 -- The fool starts singing when he gave up all to his daughters and they were happy -- Question: when did you start singing so much -- the fool is telling Lear that he has infantisized himself -- he is taking a tragic hero and reducing him to a squalling child --

4) 165 -- Why do you care about your daughter’s frown now that you have nothing, and are nothing-- Question to Goneril: why do you frown -- an O without a figure -- nothing -- he is not even a fool -- [King] Lear -- everything hinged on the King part, now he has nothing

5) 205 -- You are Lear’s shadow -- a new feeling -- Lear goes into a bit of rhetorical play acting -- "does Lear walk thus?" -- Goneril describes it as comical later -- he asks who can tell him who he is, the fool answers that he is Lear’s shadow

These revelations that he is a fool, nothing, shadow, Lady’s father -- result in rage -- he got angry at Cordelia and Kent, but now his anger at Goneirl is impotent -- all he has is the power of the word -- cursing Goneril to sterility or to squalling brats is horrible -- but even at the height of his attack we see how impotent it is -- 258 -- he makes his horrible curse and then exits dramatically -- Albany is horrified, Goneril says don’t bother -- but then he comes back and complains that she dismissed half his knights -- it ruins the effect and makes him look impotent -- he then ends up crying in front of his daughter -- he threatens that he is going to get it all back and really hurt her -- he can’t, we know it, so this makes him look even more pathetic and horrible

However, even in his rage, impotence, and shame he is capable of realizing his mistakes here -- in the last scene when he and the fool are waiting for their horses to go to Regan’s, Lear is half paying attention to him (1.5.20) -- Lear realizes that he did her wrong -- it is not even a small fault in Cordelia at this point, it was his fault

But we have to go through the whole thing again with Regan, Cornwall, and Goneril -- this is part of the effect of the play (2.4) that we go through this pattern over and over again -- (2.4.260) -- they are trying to reason with him that he does not need all the knights -- they argue that he does not need these -- he says that it gives him a sense of himself to have these knights -- he turns it into a clothes issue: with Regan that you don’t need fancy clothes yet she has them, not what nature needs, but it is a good thing -- then he moves 265 onto a bigger sense of need: patience, a moral quality: the ability to endure (Kent), or Edgar’s ability to adapt to the misfortunes which befall them -- then he goes into the rage mode, but he can’t even think with what to curse them -- he doesn’t have anymore power -- but then he pulls himself together -- "you think I’ll weep" but I’ll break my heart first and go mad -- almost a deliberate decision to go mad rather than to weep and collapse in front of his daughters -- he goes into the storm (both weather and psychological)

1. Attempt to reconstitute justice

2. Act charitably to others

3. kill yourself

4. rage against the world

5. weep

6. go on

(see handout on the metaphysical question in King Lear)

Lecture 2 got to the central critical thought of the play -- the two strands of development and transformation (Edgar and Lear) into madness -- when they meet together in the storm -- the apparition of poor tomb from outside of the hovel brings Lear to real madness -- he is obsessed that all evil in the world is caused by evil daughters

More important is that in his madness Lear identifies Tom as the central embodiment of humanity -- Tom responds with the serving and loving mistress speech (p. 2519 line 94) -- Tom is "the thing itself" he is the naked animal man, Lear then wishes to join Tom in his naked state -- for the rest of the scene he calls him a "learned philosopher" -- he thinks some special source of wisdom comes from Tom, maybe he can learn from them.

The rest of the play is about the attempt to come back from that extremity -- from Beckett: "What do you do when we fall far from help?" -- the rest of King Lear is a series of answers to that question.

The whole play is concerned with justice -- Lear’s offence was the love test which offended against both love and justice -- misunderstanding of love as quantifiable

The whole play is full of trial scenes, Gloucester, Daughters -- and (p.2522 3.6) the mad trial scene: Lear raves with the fool and Tom -- the major action is the attempted trial of Regan and Goneril, represented by stools

Focusing on this scene partially because it is very difficult to appreciate when just reading -- many of the lines are mad lines -- perhaps the sound matters more than the sense of the words -- Kent as a kindly base and the mad Tom and fool -- the show is more important -- the surrealistic trial with Kent (banished) and the two fools as justices -- this scene is the first opening scene thrown to chaos

(p. 2522 13) -- picked up the hell-fire imagery -- before punishment he gets to a trial -- the Fool makes a dirty joke -- Lear insists on going on with the trial -- he calls Edgar a "robed man of justice" -- Lear’s complaints against Goneril are all reduced to the complaint that she kicked him, childish -- the Fool is playing back and forth between the mock trial and the absurdity of it all: between the pretense and the reality -- Lear puts the two of them together and takes the crookedness of the stool as a straight valuation of Regan’s heart -- 70 -- "Then let them anatomize Regan. See what breeds about her heart." -- he wants to know why people are bad -- horrible scene: mixture of madness and folly, hear the case of evil and collapse without anything having been done -- but at least the right question is asked: what is the source of evil

(sees the sheet)

Answers to why there is evil:

Gloucester: (Flies and Gods) random acts

Albany: (at Cornwall’s death) justice returns to punish our bad actions, there is a justice in the heavens

Kent: (how could the same pair of parents produce evil and good daughters) concludes it is the stars, pure fatalism -- this is the same view Gloucester took early in the play, but here we are not inclined to ridicule it -- partly because by the time we get to (4.3) we have been through so much that it is more reasonable to accept it

Cordelia: (waking up Lear from his madness, he thinks he will hate her) "no cause" to hate him -- it is just wiped out of his mind -- both she and Edgar are not mad at their fathers -- maybe there is no cause for fundamental things like love and hate -- they are first causes, they just exist

In Act 4 the daughters are rescued -- the love of the children saves both Lear and Gloucester

Despair is Gloucester’s first response, but not his only one -- he is also brought to a recognition for the need of human tragedy (p. 2528 4.1.) he gives a purse to poor Tom -- "Let the superfurous and lust dieted man who does not see because he dose feel feel your power quickly" -- the road to social justice is for the rich to feel what the poor feel -- but the irony is that Edgar is not happy to get the purse -- Edgar had begun the scene saying that nothing could get worse -- this reminds us that because one person is unhappy that someone else must be happier is not true

Edgar’s purpose is to teach his father patience -- the idea here is that there are people to help us when we fall

Gloucester thinks things are really bad at the moment and has reached his limit and resolves to suicide (4.6 p.2534) -- very simple action: Edgar as poor Tom persuades Gloucester that he is at the cliff, lets him fall, and then pretends he has been saved by the Gods -- this deception and shock treatment gets him out of his fatality -- this is absurd and weird in a lot of ways

Gloucester’s fall does not work on a realistic stage or a screen -- but this was written for an unrealistic stage where the audience’s imagination is made to work -- here Shakespeare is exploiting a part of his stage -- verbal scenery in all of his plays where a character sets up the scene -- here Edgar does the same setting the scene for the audience as the top of Dover cliffs so they really believe he is at edge of the cliff -- the audience does believe the speech and so they think he is at the top of the cliff -- so then we go ahead and Gloucester falls forward, the only odd thing we get is a line from Edgar that he is playing with Gloucester’s despair, but we don’t know how or why -- Gloucester then faints and then comes in as a different person -- the point is that we discover that there was no cliff at the same time Gloucester does; we are made to share his shock and we are put in his position to understand his shock and bewilderment -- but it carries a terrible implication that in order to go on living we must be deluded to believe a miracle has gone on to save him, a religion must be manufactured for him.

A miracle has happened: Edgar, maybe his and Cordelia’s love are miraculous

Lear: 105 -- pretending to be a king and hand down his justice -- pretending to pardon someone for adultery (ironically Gloucester is there) -- he goes on about how everyone does it and that the bastard son of Gloucester is better than his legitimate daughters -- he then "sees" a court lady who is supposed to be very chaste, but that he really goes on like a maniac -- this is his current version of love: it is just sex and it is disgusting

And as for justice (135) -- whipping of a whore, he says that the law enforcers want to commit the crime as much as the criminal -- he notes that the big con-mans arrange to have the little con-men punished -- he goes on about how wicked people are in pretending to be just

Aristotle: man is the rational animal

Swift: man is capable of rationality

Lear: man is the animal that fucks and punishes and it is rotten and disgusting

We also weep

Gloucester starts (170) audibly suffering -- he acknowledges Gloucester --a sense of breaking through this madness to the two old men and one of them reaching out and naming Gloucester

The first thing we all do is to cry when we come out of the womb and that is the defining characteristic of humans -- we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools -- most daring moment of Shakespeare’s stage metaphors by pointing out that we are just as foolish as those on the stage

The tragic flaws have been worked out, both have accomplished great learning, but Shakespeare goes on and forces the characters to go on

The wicked characters start to turn on each other, but Lear loses the battle

(5.2) the battle takes place off stage -- all we do is see Gloucester waiting for it to be over -- and when he hears that Lear has lost he gives up again -- Edgar tries once again to tell him he must endure further -- it is a restatement of Lear’s "must be patient" lines about being born

We can only hope to achieve some balance or maturity, Edgar’s "ripeness" -- that is all we can achieve to echo the great nothings

That "ripeness is all" is close to the meaning of the play -- and then Gloucester replies "that is true too" -- there are no exclusive things; everything is "true too" we must keep discovering more -- that is the action of the final scene of the play: Goneril, Regan, Edmund dead; but Cordelia and Lear die.

Cordelia’s death is not a part of a tragic plot, it is a strike out of the blue -- it is just something more that the characters have to deal with -- there are more than 6 ways of going on

Worse things keep happening in King Lear -- it is most strongly marked by Albany, Kent, and Edgar all trying to bring the play to a close 300 -- 317 -- he tries again to set things right by withdrawing from responsibility by telling Kent and Edgar to rule -- Kent has his own withdrawal -- he says he isn’t going to live much longer as his dead master is calling him -- Edgar withdraws from judgement: he says there are no more moral judgements but that we should just speak what he feels -- back to the idea that those who have not felt it must feel it quickly

Albany resigns from rule, Kent from life, Edgar from thinking about it or judging it

Lear has the last vision at the end -- Lear sees something on the lips of Cordelia -- we don’t know what it is -- from the others’ point of view, Lear is a ‘perdu’ (a lost man) at the end of the play, in military sense it is the sentry posted furthest out -- he is almost certainly lost -- he patrols our furthest reach into threatening territory -- is this what Lear is up to in the end?