'King Lear': cheerless, dark and deadly
A friend says he will never go to another production of King Lear again. He’s not bored or confused by the play: he just can’t bear its utter bleakness. Famously, the version we see was altered in 1681 by the playwright Nahum Tate, with a happy ending in which Cordelia and Edgar (yes, honestly) were married and lived happily ever after, a retired Lear did not die but pottered around contentedly with Kent and Albany, and all four main bad characters – Regan, Goneril, Edmund and Cornwall – were handily bumped off. This version dominated the English stage until the early decades of the 19th century.
But the real Lear of Shakespeare, which in the words of Kent in the final pages is ‘cheerless, dark and deadly’, became an appropriate story for the dark 20th century. This piece examines Shakespeare’s vision through the idea of religion – of God or the gods, the divine. Nahum Tate’s rewritten massacred version was clearly a comedy, but at the end of Shakespeare’s story there is nothing (a key word) other than unmediated darkness.
The purpose of religion in any society is supposedly to support human beings, to be both a guide and a comfort. Shakespeare was writing in a time in England of absolute Christian belief. Here he writes a supposedly ‘historical’ play about pagan times, though Christian ideas (particularly of suffering and redemption) keep breaking through. The gods are often invoked in King Lear, and on the surface this seems to be a highly religious society. But in fact there is no stage in the play when heaven seems to be active or effective. This play disabuses us of the idea that there is any benevolent power up in the skies which will protect us from ourselves. This play tells human beings: you’re on your own, and don’t expect any help from above. In the words of the critic Stephen Greenblatt:
The characters appeal again and again to the pagan gods, but the gods are utterly silent. Nothing answers to human questions but human voices.
There are characters who know this, and they are the ones who are most clear-sighted, such as Kent, Edmund and the Fool. And then there are those who have to learn it, who are blind or who fool themselves. Edmund, for instance, knows himself very well, and knows that his destiny is solely in his own hands. In his opening soliloquy, in I ii, he states: Thou, Nature, art my goddess ; to thy law / My services are bound.= In a key moment for the audience, and students of the play, he responds to his father’s foolish belief in the stars These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us with This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeits of our own behaviour, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars, as if all that we were evil on, by a divine thrusting on. In other words, he believes in innate badness; the gods have nothing to do with it. You look after yourself since no-one else will.
A very different character, the Fool, also knows this. Repeatedly he states it, in I v saying that I can tell why a snail has a house, and when asked why by Lear, answers to put his head in; not to give it away to his / daughters, and leave his horns without a case. Of course, Kent also is absolutely open-eyed about all human behaviour, and his determination to follow Lear in disguise at great risk to himself shows that he knows Lear will need such help. Help will not come from anything like natural or divine justice.
Other figures are blind to this, and have an unfounded trust in the gods. In I iv Lear calls on the divine in his arrogance as though it should serve his own will. After arguing with Goneril, he cries out : Hear, Nature, hear! dear Goddess, hear! … Into her womb convey sterility. and in II iv when he doesn’t get his own way: All the stored vengeances of Heaven fall / On her ingrateful top!
But then he starts to realise the heavens will not help him or answer his call : Heavens / If you do love old men, if your sweet sway / Allow disobedience, if you yourselves are old, / Make it your cause ; send down and take my part! Note that ‘if’ – if you do love old men (though he can’t quite believe yet that they might not). Of course, they don’t actually come down and take his part. Then there is the crucial O reason not the need speech :
You see me here, you Gods, a poor old man … II iv.
This play is gradually going to tell him and us, that the Gods don’t see anything, or if they do, they’re not particularly interested.
Goneril’s brutal statement of reality is ‘Tis his own blame ; hath put himself from rest, / and must needs taste his own folly and this is echoed by Regan – to wilful men, / The injuries that they themselves procure / Must be their schoolmasters.
By the storm scene III ii, Lear is far less confident in divine intervention: Let the great Gods, / That keep this dreadful pudder o’er our heads, / Find out their enemies now. It’s a plea. And he says Take Physic, pomp ; / Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, / That thou mayst shake the superflux to them, / And show the Heavens more just. Again, he is pleading rather than stating, demanding or expecting.
The Gentleman says that Cordelia is the one daughter who redeems nature from the general curse / Which twain have brought her to and when Lear thinks Cordelia is still alive, he says if it be so, / It is a chance which does redeem all sorrows / That ever have I felt. When she returns and sees him asleep, she asks the kind Gods, / Cure this great breach in his abused nature! By the end, Lear does not care about the world, and is happy to be in prison with her; it will be a kind of heaven for him. Of course, he is denied this. Shakespeare’s version of the Lear story is the only one in which Cordelia dies. As James Shapiro writes in an outstanding chapter called ‘From Leir to Lear’ in his outstanding book 1606: Shakespeare and the Year of Lear:
Audiences in 1606 would have expected Shakespeare’s play to end… with Lear restored to the throne and Cordelia spared. They might even have thought such a resolution was imminent in the scene in which Lear and Cordelia are at last reconciled, which takes place after close to three hours (or 2,800 lines) the typical length of one of Shakespeare’s plays. But King Lear, which has another 500 lines to go, doesn’t end there, and when it does and they are both dead, we are confronted with a desolate scene that is all the more crushing, denying us not only what we wish for, but also what we expect … the result was the darkest tragedy that Shakespeare ever wrote - and for audiences in 1606, whose expectations would have been so upended, all the more wrenching and bewildering a theatrical experience.
Shakespeare has plainly gone out of his way to subject his central character to the worst tragedy imaginable.
Furthermore, decent men such as Edgar, Gloucester and Albany are also misguided. Albany’s rock-solid faith in the gods is repeatedly disproved by the events of the play ; he refers in I iv to gods that we adore. And when he hears that Cornwall is dead, he states that This shows that you are above, / You justicers, that these our nether crimes / So speedily can venge! (but how can these justicers venge the death of Cordelia later? And was it not just the act of one outraged decent ordinary soldier?) When the officer is sent in the final scene to save Cordelia, Albany exclaims The Gods defend her! One line later Lear comes in staggering under the weight of the corpse of his darling daughter. Nice timing, Albany. The whole movement of the second half of the play seems to be Christian, as Lear learns from his errors through pain and is reconciled with Cordelia, but then, of course, Shakespeare destroys the consolation which he had led the audience to expect.
Another big fan of the gods is Gloucester. He is still calling the Gods kind just before his eyes are plucked out, III vii, and then calls to them as the first eye (‘O cruel, O you Gods!) is on its way to the dustbin. But then he does learn in the most brutal way imaginable, all dark and comfortless. Following this he speaks what might be the definitive statement on this matter in the whole play:- As flies to wanton boys, are we to th’Gods ; They kill us for their sport. Before long, talking to Poor Tom, he says Heavens, do so still! / Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man, / That slaves our ordinance, that will not see / Because he does not feel, feel your power quickly. IV i. Then on the so-called “cliff”. O you mighty Gods! / This world I do renounce, and in your sights / Shake patiently my great affliction off. There’s a notable lack of response from the gods at this point; they’re plainly on their afternoon tea break. Edgar helps him regain his faith – thou happy father, / Think that the clearest Gods, who make them honours / Of men’s impossibilities, have preserved thee. This may be a necessary deception of an old blind man – but it was not the gods who preserved Gloucester.
The last word goes to Kent. It is impossible to argue with his definitive statement that all’s cheerless, dark and deadly. This play of often appalling suffering and pain ends with the horror of Cordelia’s death. As Paul Cheetham writes,
Whereas at least some of those who suffer, notably Lear and Gloucester, have sins to expiate and lessons to learn, it is difficult to see Cordelia as anything other than an innocent victim of sheer vindictiveness.
There is no mitigation of this horror, none of the consolation of religious comfort at all.