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Eyesight, space, and liberty—all key themes in the play, all elements of which Lear and his fellow sufferer Gloucester will be bereft by the play's end.
Nothing will come from nothing. Speak again.
To abjure language in such cases is not a refusal of speech, like Iago's final words, but rather an acknowledgment of the limitations of language, and the place of the ineffable or the unutterable. The modest and silent claim of a love according to her bond will distinguish Cordelia's language, and her silence, throughout the play. Like Hamlet in the court of Claudius, dismayed by the falseness of ceremony and the role-playing all around him, Cordelia refuses to play the game, refuses to involve herself in playacting and willful deception.
Silence, enacted on the stage, also resists the Machiavellian two-facedness of Edmund, that master rhetorician.
“Now thou art an O without a figure. I am better than thou art, now. I am a fool; thou art nothing” (1.4.158–159).
The play moves remorselessly from its first scene of “everything” (accommodation, luxury, comfort, and security) toward a clear-eyed
eyed and scarifying contemplation of “nothing.” And the immediate cause is Lear's own lack of self-knowledge.
Royal Lear, Whom I have ever honoured as my king, Loved as my father, as my master followed, As my great patron thought on in my prayers— 1.1.137–140
in stripping himself of these necessary roles, the powerful trappings of kingship, Lear also strips himself of dignity, fear, respect—and friends. “Out of my sight!” he rails at Kent, and Kent, again prophetically, answers, “See better, Lear” (1.1.155–156). Lear's moral blindness is as absolute in this opening scene
as Gloucester's physical blindness will be later in the play, and Lear divests himself not only of his kingdom, his daughter Cordelia, and his roles as King and father, but also of those other crucial roles as master and patron, for he divests himself of Kent.
Humanity must perforce prey on itself, Like monsters of the deep. Quarto, 16.48–49
The play is designed with a very clear symmetry: two old men, each with a loyal child he mistakenly considers disloyal (Cordelia and Edgar), and disloyal children or a child he at first thinks loyal and natural (Goneril, Regan, and Edmund).
The symmetries provided by these two plots, the Lear plot and the Gloucester plot, are not merely dynastic or structural. Lear, whose error is a mental error, the error of misjudgment in dismembering his kingdom, is punished in the play by a mental affliction, madness. Gloucester, whose sin is a physical sin, lechery, is punished in the play by a physical affliction, blindness.
Yet as with all Shakespearean evocations of allegory, whether religious, mythological, or political, the Christian undertones
and overtones in Lear work best when they are allowed to augment the dramatic action rather than displace it. The power of King Lear and its place in our cultural imaginary depend above all, at least for a modern audience, upon its depiction of a human story of love, suffering, and loss.
“Fortune, good night; / Smile once more; turn thy wheel” (2.2.157–158).
“Let go thy hold when a great wheel runs down a hill, lest it break thy neck with following; but the great one that goes upward, let him draw thee after” (2.2.238–240).
at the end of the play even the bastard Edmund, who had cynically observed, “The younger rises when the old doth fall” (3.3.22), accepts with fatality his reversal of fortune: “The wheel is come full circle. I am here” (5.3.164).
One of the functions of
Jacobean tragedy is to take this exemplary and educative form: to present us with great figures who die for sins and mistakes that could be ours, and whose tragedies take place so that ours will not, or need not. Literary tragedy is in this formal sense a scapegoat, substitute, or safety valve.
Edmund is a close relation of Iago and of Richard III in his contempt for what he regards as passive sentimentalism. Like them he is a Machiavel and a Vice figure, a character who draws strength from his own contrariness.
He revels in disorder, takes pleasure in anarchy.
O, reason not the need!
No, I'll not weep. I have full cause of weeping, Storm and tempest But this heart shall break into a hundred thousand flaws Or ere I'll weep.—O Fool, I shall go mad! 2.2.449–451
The King is in high rage, and the storm rages about him. There is no difference between Lear and his tempest, it is within him and without him; he is its cause. He is now ready, and the audience is now ready, for the third act of his tragedy,
perhaps the single most extraordinary act of any Shakespearean play.
in Shakespeare's time the plays would have been performed straight through, without a break.
“I am cold myself,” he admits, but This tempest in my mind Doth from my senses take all feeling else Save what beats there…. 3.4.12–14
In such a night To shut me out? Pour on, I will endure. In such a night as this! … 3.4.17–19
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow, You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks! You sulph'rous and thought-executing fires, Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts, Singe my white head; and thou all-shaking thunder, Strike flat the thick rotundity o'th world, Crack nature's moulds, all germens spill at once That makes ingrateful man. 3.2.1–9
Where is this straw, my fellow? The art of our necessities is strange, And can make vile things precious… 3.2.68–70
The “heath” and the storm, then, are effectively understood—and performed—as projections of Lear's mental situation upon a larger screen, at once nature and theater.
And who, or what, is Lear's Fool? Who is this most evocative of all Shakespearean clowns and motleys? Above all, perhaps, the Fool, both in his professional position as “allowed fool” in the court and in his specific role in Shakespeare's play, is an aspect of Lear himself. Repeatedly in earlier acts the Fool has artfully and poignantly demonstrated that the King is a fool, just as Feste, his comic prototype in Twelfth Night, proved the Countess to be a fool.
The Fool is a mirror, as the wasteland and the storm are mirrors, reflecting back at Lear his own concealed image. He is in this sense all too truly “Lear's shadow”: at once a reflected image; a delusive semblance or vain object of pursuit; a symbol, prefiguration, foreshadowing, or type;
The professional duty of the “licensed fool” in the period was to say things that were otherwise forbidden, to reveal painful, humbling, and comic truths—in short, to do that which a later age would call speaking truth to power. The role of the fool was to reflect and epitomize the folly of the world around him, and in essence to draw it off, or neutralize it.
Kent Where learned you this, Fool? Fool Not i'th stocks, fool. 2.2.252–253
A disputed stage tradition holds that the parts of the Fool and Cordelia were played by the same boy actor. She departs and he appears; when he leaves (“And I'll go to bed at noon” [3.6.39]), she shortly reappears by Lear's side.
The Fool is this kind of holy fool, and he exemplifies the biblical paradox that underlies so much of the play.
In the iconography of the medieval and early modern periods the Fool was often to be found in company with Death, as in Hans Holbein's “The Idiot Fool” in his Dance of Death series.
Sometimes the fool is Death in disguise, a skull wearing the traditional cap and bells that were part of the costume of the court jester; at other times he mocks Death or is heedless of him.
And yet at the same time the Fool, precisely because he is, in extremis, the representative of the body and of self-preservation, becomes the voice of common sense and practical wisdom.
“Good nuncle, in, ask thy daughters blessing. Here's a night pities neither wise men nor fools” (3.2.11–12).
the Fool is a figure of infinite value in the court world, where he reminds Lear by wit and gesture, indeed by his very existence, of Lear's own potential for folly.
And when Lear is finally convinced that he himself is a fool, the character called Fool disappears from the play, uttering his final, riddling words (found only in the Folio text): “And I'll go to bed at noon.”
The Fool will leave in the middle of the play (“at noon”). He is no longer needed. He has done his job of mirroring the folly that is in every man, and particularly in Lear. There is no more he can do. His place is taken for the rest of the play by Cordelia, who represents not contempt for mankind's limitations but hope for redemption; allegorically, if the Fool is a codpiece, Cordelia—as we have noted from her name—is the heart.
The Fool, then, is part of Lear's learning process on the heath, in the storm, and I think it is useful to look at the entirety of the third act as a tightly knit sequence that functions as a learning process at the same time that it exhibits onstage Lear's interior world of self-knowledge, what he called his “little world of man.”
No, I will be the pattern of all patience. I will say nothing. 3.2.36–37
Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en Too little care of this. Take physic, pomp, Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayst shake the superflux to them And show the heavens more just. 3.4.28–36
[T]hou art the thing itself. Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. Off, off, you lendings! Come, unbutton here. 3.4.95– 98
“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” (3.4.99–101).
