Shakespeare After All

by Marjorie Garber

Gloucester says, “Our flesh and blood, my lord, is grown so vile / That it doth hate what gets it” (3.4.129–130).

“He childed as I fathered,” he remarks, aside, to the audience (Quarto, 13.99). This is one of those moments in King Lear that open up toward the sublime, as the speakers' generalizations on human nature begin to approach the condition of aphorism. It is for perceptions like these, and not for its

commentary on seventeenth-century monarchy or the plight of early modern mendicants, that the play is regarded as one of Shakespeare's most magnificent achievements.

Lear's madness now becomes itself an emblem, a touchstone, for the madness that afflicts so many others in the play. And this madness is a condition we have seen before in Shakespeare. Hamlet feigned madness (or was it feigned?). And what of Othello? And Ophelia? And (shortly) Lady Macbeth? What is this disease of madness, and what is its function in drama? Most evidently, and perhaps most importantly, madness permits the maddened victim to speak the truth, like a licensed fool,

A madman or madwoman is a sublime version of a fool—in the confines of theater. He or she can echo the prevailing madness of the world, speaking through the onstage audience to an audience in the theater, asserting, proclaiming, or establishing contestatory and unwelcome “truths” about the human condition:

As Edgar, ever the audience's eyes and ears onstage, remarks, [aside] O, matter and impertinency mixed— Reason in madness! 4.5.164–165

Because I would not see thy cruel nails Pluck out his poor old eyes…. 3.7.54–55

This nameless servant provides not only a model of hospitality and decency but also an example of a good rebellion against nature and social order, a moral and healthy rebellion against a father figure, very like Cordelia's rebellion against her father, Lear. “I have served you ever since I was a child,” the servant says to Cornwall. “But better service have I never done you / Than now to bid you hold” (3.7.71–73). Cordelia and Kent made much the same appeal in the love test of the opening scene. Here a servant not only holds to it, but dies for it.

That never occurred to me before.

To be worst, The low'st and most dejected thing of fortune, Stands still in esperance, lives not in fear. The lamentable change is from the best; The worst returns to laughter…. 4.1.2–6

As always in Shakespeare, where language is the index of full humanity, speech and communication are bounded by the unutterable and inexpressible.

I would not take this from report; it is, And my heart breaks at it. 4.5.134-135

Shakespeare achieves this further growth, and is able to make his play move even beyond the unspeakable moments of tragedy, by a deliberate recourse to two other dramatic modes he has at his command: comedy and romance.

This essential tragicomic moment, a jump from nowhere to nowhere, from flat ground to flat ground, is rendered—instead of being slapstick—very close to sublime.

The scene at Dover “cliff,” then, is an essentially comic device turned to the service of tragedy, a mistake that is not a mistake, a fall that is not inglorious and ludicrous but

glorious and lifesaving. (“Give me your hand. You are now within a foot / Of th’extreme verge.”)

Gloucester O, let me kiss that hand! Lear Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality. 4.5.125–126

the “natural fool of fortune,”

the path of romance, fantasy, poetry, and dream will be the path of the future for Shakespearean dramaturgy, and will manifest itself in the brilliant achievement of several of his last plays, from Pericles (which resembles Lear in many ways) to The Tempest.

The most striking single image in this passage is the description of Cordelia's passionately mixed feelings: her smiles and tears were like “[s]unshine and rain at once.”

Her affirmation itself comes as a negative. Something can come of nothing. Love is not a matter of pretty speeches, nor of “cause,” that legal word to which Othello clings, so desperately and futilely, at the end of his tragedy (“It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul” [5.2.1]). Love is a bond that transcends both rhetoric and the law, but it requires expression and communication, voiced or unvoiced.

Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia, The gods themselves throw incense. 5.3.20

Retreat from the public arena, from governance and power, for this King is tantamount to a symbolic death, and as we have already seen in our discussion of the Fool, in many ways King Lear is a play about the acceptance of death.

The play has all along been a process of interlocking plots, cross-relationships: the Lear plot and the Gloucester plot, the mad King and the blind Duke, two old men and their faithless and faithful children.

The competing texts might be called “The Play of Edmund” and “The Play of Edgar,” or “The Play of Time” and “The Play of Timelessness.” For the plays of Edmund and Edgar are already plotted, already in rehearsal. They are plays that embrace opposite philosophies.

As Kent says, “All's cheerless, dark, and deadly.”

Lear has lost Cordelia, and Cordelia is all he has of the human bond that makes life possible. Now he in his turn acknowledges the loss of language, the loss of breath, and pleads for his own final stripping toward the grave:

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. [To Kent] Pray you, undo this button. Thank yo...

Lear himself is greater at the close of the play than at the beginning. His growth from error to acknowledgment of his poor, stripped nature, to repentance and a humble kneeling before Cordelia, is an upward progression as well

as a downward one. He is greater on his knees than on his throne. Cordelia, too, grows and changes from act 1 to act

Macbeth

30

HE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH is the great Shakespearean play of stage superstition and uncanniness. It has always been considered by actors to be an unlucky play. Many will refuse to wear costumes that have appeared in productions of it; most, once they are acclimated to the mores of the theater world, will not mention the play's title, or the names of any of its characters, onstage or in the wings or dressing rooms. They call it, instead, “The Scottish Play.”

The play is about transgression and witches, unleashed powers that have, as theatrical events unfold, already crossed the threshold into the supposedly safe space of the stage.

Somewhere behind the dominant figure of King James, whose image is everywhere in Macbeth, lie the shadows of these strong female figures, “mothers” and queens, with their inescapable aura and their evident power over his life, his fate, and his future.

Are the “witches” inside or outside Macbeth? Are they part of his consciousness, prompting him to ambition or murder—or are they some external supernatural force? The nature of theater does not require an either/or answer to this question; the success of

Shakespeare's play is in producing both of these effects, alternately and concurrently. The witches are both inside and outside the mind of the protagonist. They tell him what he has already been thinking,

If the witches are causative, it is not because they tell Macbeth what to do—or, in fact, because they tell him anything—but because, like Iago, they allow him to interpret things as he wants to see them.

Plainly these witches are not causes; Banquo, who has heard that his sons will be kings, does not immediately go off to commit murder to fulfill the prophecy, but Macbeth does. In fact, like all omens and portents in Shakespeare, the witches exist to be interpreted. They are the essence of ambiguity, ambiguous not only in their speech but in their gender: “You should be women, / And yet your beards forbid me to interpret / That you are so”

Macbeth, we will see, is an equivocator in all things: a man who is split in two directions, who commits murder to become King, and suffers every moment once he is King.

“What bloody man is that?” These are Duncan's first words, the King's first words. A man covered in blood, who seems to foreshadow all the bloody language to come in this play.

Duncan is a crucial figure for this play: all the drama swirls around him. And Shakespeare's Duncan differs importantly from his source in the historical chronicles.

There is a way in which, as I have noted, the unwitting and ultimately dangerous innocence of Duncan resembles the innocence of Desdemona in Othello. Both characters are naïve, optimistic, and trusting, and both are murdered.

The plot of clothing imagery in Macbeth speaks to a number of cultural anxieties, current and historical, about both the legibility of social rank and the legitimacy of rule. It is not merely decorative; if it influences the “poetry” of the

play, it does so at the level of action, motivation, psychology, and design.

The witches never directly suggest a course of action, nor do they tell Macbeth to murder Duncan. It is his own “horrible imaginings” and his wife's prompting that move him in the direction of action.

Macbeth will move from sensitivity to insensitivity From his first interior agony and moral doubt he will move downward toward a condition in which he feels and senses nothing at all, where he has supped full with horrors, has forgotten the taste of fears, cannot be moved by the death of his wife, and fittingly becomes at the last no longer a man but a rare monster painted upon a pole: a caricature of a tyrant.

This is the downward slope, the tragic pattern of Macbeths fall, and it parallels the exaggerated unfolding of the clothing imagery, from fit to unfit. But it begins in equivocation, in moral ambiguity and interior battle.

change comes over his diction the minute the murder is accomplished: it becomes fragmented, disoriented, and disordered, the words dropping singly, like stones down a well, and echoing as they fall:

At this point in the play she, unlike her husband, is untouched by horror. Her crisis will come later, and be even more terrible. But at this point, anticipating her own sleepwalking (and hand-washing) scene, she says, dismissively, “A little water clears us of this deed.”

Like Richard II, Macbeth has a chiastic, or X-shaped, structure,

charting at once the upward and downward trajectories of its two protagonists. As Macbeth moves downward toward inhumanity and loss of affect, Lady Macbeth moves upward, toward feeling and horror.