KING LEAR -- BACKGROUND AND ANALYSIS

The following material is based upon an audio lecture available at the web page for English 154. Although the following text material is not identical to the audio lecture, it is essentially the same information. You should have read the play prior to reading this material. The text referred to is the Signet paperback edition of the play, a book you should have open as you read this material.

Based upon internal references and external events, scholars assume King Lear was written in 1604 – 1605. Most believe it was written right around the time Shakespeare was working on Othello, since there are parallels between the way Iago tries to fool Othello and the way Edmund proposes to trick his father, Gloucester. There are also some parallels in language between Shakespeare's problematic comedy Measure for Measure, written around the same time, and certain passages in King Lear.

The play was written soon after James had been crowned king of England, as well as Scotland, in 1603. The theme of unity of the kingdom, a central point of the play, was a hot topic of political conversation in these years. Shakespeare's tragedies often reflect issues that were in the public arena at the time he wrote specific plays.

King Lear was a supposedly one of the first monarchs in prehistoric Britain. He had come down to Shakespeare's time as a figure of myth and folklore. The opening situation in the play, an aged ruler who must choose among his three daughters, is right out of Grimm's fairy tales; we know it will be the youngest who loves her father the most, just as in many fairy tales. The immediate source for the play, however, is an earlier play titled King Leir, which has the same basic situation as Shakespeare's play but is very different in story line and characters. It is as if this earlier play served simply as an inspiration for Shakespeare to write a totally different play, which has become the most powerful of all Shakespeare's works. As he did so often in his history plays, Shakespeare used Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, a massive collection of historical fact, fantasy and folklore. He also used a poem by a contemporary poet named Stratchy, which has a number of parallels, and a more famous work of fiction, Arcadia, by the famous courtly writer Sir Philip Sidney. In addition he used bits and pieces of other works which he blended to make a unique version of the story. One of my favorite such sources was an attack on the Jesuit order of the Catholic Church by Harsnett, written in 1602, which lists various demons the Jesuits allegedly used as allies. Many of the demons' names are to be found in the mad ravings of Tom of Bedlam in the play. There are passages from most of these sources in the appendix of your Signet edition. Take a look at how Shakespeare shaped his source material to make his own powerful creation.

King Lear was a popular work during Shakespeare's lifetime, evidenced by the fact that there were two editions of the play, published in quarto form before the inclusion of the play in the First Folio in 1623. These different editions do not posed significant textual problems for the general reader.

During the intervening centuries the scene where the crazed King Lear goes out into the storm (Act III, scene 2) has become the best-known part of the play. In the late 1600's the play fell into disfavor because the powerful emotions, and the final scene of Lear's suffering was thought to be too much for theater audiences. Eventually the play was rewritten so that Lear survived his ordeal and returned to the throne. Cordelia also survived and married Edgar. This bastardization of Shakespeare's original play reigned supreme during the 18^th Century. In the 19^th Century the famous novelist Charles Dickens wrote a parody of this kind of emotional emasculation of Shakespeare when he described an adapted version of Romeo and Juliet in the novel Nicholas Nickelby. Not only do Shakespeare's famous couple survive their misunderstanding in the tomb, but so does Romeo's friend, Mercutio, who ends up marrying Romeo's cousin Benvolio, who is in actuality Benvolia, a girl who has been masquerading as a man for years.

Gradually theater people rediscovered Shakespeare's original King Lear and began to stage it again, despite the admonition of Samuel Johnson, a famous 18^th Century Shakespearean scholar, who declared that the final scene of the play was too emotionally draining for the general public to witness performed. Nevertheless, the play has been restored to its preeminent position. Many people believe it to be the best of Shakespeare's tragedies. I go even further and hold it to be the finest work of literature ever produced by humankind. It has attracted many of the finest actors in the world, often as the challenge of their careers. The great film actor Charles Laughton was performing in a stage version of the play when he died. When Sir Laurence Olivier was in declining health, he chose Lear as the final Shakespearean play he would perform on the screen. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival chose Lear to mark its momentous 50^th season. In addition to famous stage productions, the play was also the subject of an excellent film, titled The Dresser, about performing the play during the Blitz in Britain during World War II. In that film we see the relationship between a backstage functionary, a man who helps dress cast members, and the egotistical actor who has performed the part of Lear for years. The actor, simply referred to as "Sir," has been married many times, always to the young actress who plays the part of Cordelia. As the wives put on weight and Sir becomes older, he trades in his old wife for a younger, lighter one that he can carry onstage during the final scene. The film is very insightful about life, love and King Lear and is available for rental.

There are a number of film versions of the play, although they may be difficult to find in your local rental outlet. The major version available is by Lawrence Olivier, done on television, in 1982. It has a number of fine British actors and is pretty faithful to the text. A more recent television production was done with Ian Holm as Lear and was done with minimal sets. Another British version from 1969 is directed by Peter Brook of the Royal Shakespeare Company and stars Paul Scofield as Lear in an excessively dark and gloomy production. Two unusual foreign films provide us with insights about the cultures from which they came. A Russian film from the 1960's features a script by the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Boris Pasternack. It turns Lear's family tragedy into a national disaster with widespread suffering and destruction, similar to what happened to the Soviet Union in the 20^th Century. The great Japanese director Kurosawa redid Lear as a samurai drama, called Ran, with the king's daughters replaced by ambitious sons who oppose their father in magnificent battle scenes. King Lear may be one film you'll need to buy on the Internet rather than trying to find in a store.

Themes in King Lear

One of the things which make King Lear such an impressive work is that it touches on so many themes that illuminate the human condition. Here are eight themes which are explored in the play:

1.) Conflict between fathers and daughters: As children mature their relationship with their parents, especially their fathers, changes from one of loving dependency to often stormy confrontation. We can see why children may need to assert their independence, but this conflict can be tough for fathers who see themselves going from the center of the child's universe to an unwelcome reminder of the past. Lear's struggle for respect from his daughters is heightened because the two older girls are so consciously bad, while the youngest daughter, Cordelia, dares to challenge her father's wrong-headed decisions with love he cannot recognize.

2.) Conflict between fathers and sons: The same conflict that Lear faces tears apart Gloucester and his two sons. In this case the struggle is over power and is intensified because the father fears that one son is trying to get rid of him. Both Lear and Gloucester are easily manipulated because they do not know their children's hearts.

3.) The problems of giving up power: We see frequent examples of older men who have problems relinquishing power. They retire from running a business, but they continue to try and exercise control even after they have left. King Lear is a perfect example of a man who can't let go. He has been a monarch for so long he thinks his first name is "King." The play shows us how the old man suffers because he must forge a new identity through intense suffering at an age when change is most difficult for him.

4.) The difference between true loyalty and blind obedience: We meet two characters in the play who illustrate the fact that there is an enormous difference between simply obeying orders and being loyal to what one's leader stands for. Goneril's servant Oswald obeys every evil order his mistress gives him and is truly despicable. The Earl of Kent disguises himself to return and serve King Lear even though he has been banished by the ruler. Kent is loyal to the higher good that Lear has forgotten.

5.) The difference between true love and lust: Edmund the Bastard rises quickly in his climb to power over the bodies of his brother and father. Edmund almost becomes the sole ruler of England by using physical lust to win Lear's two older daughters to his cause. Ultimately that physical passion will lead to their and his destruction. Cordelia's selfless love for her father, when he least deserves it, shines by way of contrast.

6.) The difference between sanity and insanity: For much of the play we watch as King Lear loses his sanity because the injustice of his treatment and the resulting emotional stress prove too much for him. In his madness, however, we see the beginnings of a new, wiser identity. His madness is complimented by two other characters who pretend they are insane, or at least mentally impaired. The Fool plays a role where he is supposed be to a half-wit, and consequently despite the wisdom of his observations, Lear never takes him seriously. Edgar, the object of an intense manhunt, can only escape death by playing the part of a lunatic who is possessed by demons and hallucinates. Shakespeare plays with the idea of real insanity and mock madness throughout the play.

7.) The function of charity in restoring spiritual health: Several characters suffer from the most profound despair, a spiritual condition. Some of these characters are helped to recover their spirits because of simple acts of charity. Helping others becomes a form of therapy that helps bring them back from the desolation of their souls. This is one of several aspects of the play that have a profound religious resonance.

8.) The power of redemption in achieving inner peace: Both Lear and Gloucester suffer terribly, and yet both of them achieve a profound inner peace just before they die. They are able to do this because they are freed from their previous sins by the intervention of one of their children who, although wronged, redeems them. This redemption comes at a time when the suffering father least expects it. This idea of redemption, almost as if it were the miraculous intervention of a higher power, is another theme with religious resonance in the play.

Features of the Composition of King Lear

There are aspects of the way King Lear was written that make it especially effective as a drama and very provocative in its ideas. Here are five ways in which the play is unusual in its composition:

1.) Parallel Storyline: To the basic story of King Lear, Shakespeare added the account of Gloucester and his struggle with his two sons. In both stories the fathers mistake the loyalty and intention of their children. Shakespeare is able to cut back and forth between the two stories throughout the play, doubling the conflict and allowing the audience to perceive similarities between the two families.

2.) Economy of Narrative Development: At the point in his career when Shakespeare wrote this play, he was very skilled in revealing a plot. Once the qualities of a character and the situation are established, Shakespeare is able to develop a story very quickly, presenting only the highlights and allowing the audience to fill in the intermediate stages in their imaginations. For example, Edmund’s seduction of Lear’s two daughters to advance his own ambitions is presented in minimal manner, allowing more time for showing Lear’s ordeal.

3.) Extremes in Good and Evil: More than in any other play, King Lear has characters of overwhelming evil, Goneril, Regan and Edmund, and characters of transcendent good, Cordelia, Kent and Edgar. The struggle between these two extremes dominates the play, and those people caught between the extremes, such as Albany or Gloucester, are shown to be ineffectual, despite their best intentions, in stopping the evil taking place.

4.) Consciously Pagan Context for the Action: The events of King Lear’s life took place before the birth of Christ. Ordinarily Shakespeare paid little attention to historical authenticity, but in this play he emphasizes the idea that these characters exist in a pre-Christian time. Both Lear and Gloucester evoke the idea of pagan gods controlling the events of this world. One of the effects of this setting in time is that the suffering of the characters is seen in its own terms. There is no heavenly bliss awaiting the victims of the cruelty in this play. For Shakespeare’s largely traditional Christian audience, the lack of divine justice must have made the suffering all the more powerful.

5.) Dramatic Force of Reconciliation: Because both Lear and Gloucester bring terrible suffering upon themselves by their own blindness, they both sink into spiritual despair. When the children whom they have wronged return to redeem them, the resulting reconciliations are dramatic highpoints of the play, heightening the emotional response of the audience.

Act I, Scene 1

In the opening scene an elderly King Lear decides to give up his throne, dividing his kingdom among his three daughters. His two older daughters, Goneril and Regan and their husbands, welcome this decision. Lear’s youngest daughter, Cordelia, and Lear’s chief advisor, Kent, oppose the decision and try and get the king to reconsider. He refuses to change his mind, and almost all of the conflict that will shape the play begins. Five of the major characters in the play – Lear, Goneril, Regan, Cordelia and Kent – are clearly established in this scene.

Most of the scene takes play in the public arena with momentous decisions and pronouncements. Almost all the language of these vital events is in blank verse, as befits such important occurrences. And yet the scene begins with a small, private moment between two of Lear’s closest advisors, Kent and Gloucester, and Gloucester’s son, all speaking in prose. What are the purposes of this passage? What do we discern about the dynamics of the relationships among these three men? Why is it in prose? [Act I, scene 1, lines 1 – 34]

The first important purpose of this passage is to show that the decision to divide the kingdom has already been made. Lear has divided his kingdom equally among his children. At line 3 Gloucester tells us,

[I]n the division of the kingdom, it appears not which of

the dukes [Lear’s two sons-in-law] he values most, for equalities are so

weighed that curiosity in neither can make choice of

either’s moiety [share].

In other words, regardless of the king’s previously perceived partiality for Albany over Cornwall, the division of the kingdom has been so scrupulously equal that neither of the sons-in-law can quibble that the other’s share is any better. Why is this information important? Because it emphasizes that much of what follows is political theater rather than a substantive policy decision. The important stuff has already been decided when Lear asks his daughters to compete for their portions of the kingdom. They are putting on a show in public to please their father. It is also significant that neither Kent nor Gloucester raises any objections to the decision to divide the kingdom, although both will subsequently criticize Lear’s action. Look for what will change their minds about the division.

The second important purpose of this passage is to establish Gloucester relationship with his illegitimate son, Edmund. We get the first inkling that Edmund may be an embarrassment for his father in the fact that Gloucester has not introduced him to Kent. At line 8 Kent has to ask, “Is not this your son, my lord?” In the world of formal etiquette practiced by gentlemen in the Renaissance, not introducing someone in such circumstances is a serious breach or a deliberate snub. Furthermore, among the small group of the close advisors to the king, Kent would normally have known all of Gloucester’s children, unless their father had deliberately hidden one from public view, as he apparently has done in this case. In acknowledging that Edmund is his flesh and blood at line 9, Gloucester reveals why he may have been reluctant to mention his existence before: “His breeding, sir, hath been at my/ charge. I have so often blushed to acknowledge/ him that now I am brazed [hardened] to’t.” In the first sentence here Gloucester is saying that Edmund’s “breeding,” his upbringing and education, has been done at his “charge,” or expense. However, he is also saying that he has been accused, or “charged,” with having fathered, or “bred,” the boy. Clearly the accusation has caused him much embarrassment in the past, but Gloucester is now used to admitting his guilt. Ask yourself, if you were Edmund, how would this admission make you feel?

When Kent doesn’t understand exactly what Gloucester is saying, he says at line 12, “I cannot conceive you, sir.” This gives Gloucester a chance to make a tasteless pun on “conceive,” or “become pregnant.”

Sir, this young fellow’s mother could,

whereupon she grew round-wombed, and had

indeed, sir, a son for her cradle ere she had a

husband for her bed. Do you smell a fault?

Gloucester treats the fact that he got a woman pregnant and is responsible for an illegitimate son as a joke. Notice that in the passage above he does not mention his own actions; it’s all the fault of the woman. Once again ask yourself, how would Edmund feel about this description of his conception?

Kent is a true gentleman, and at line 17 he quickly denies that there is any “fault” attached to either Edmund’s mother, Gloucester or Edmund himself: “I cannot wish the fault undone, the issue of it/ being so proper.” In other words, Edmund is such a good-looking kid that it makes up for any irregularity in his birth. That is how a gentleman should behave, putting at ease all with whom he dealt, regardless of their social status. And as an illegitimate child, even though his father is a powerful nobleman, Edmund is at a distinct disadvantage in this situation.

Gloucester may be embarrassed by Edmund, but he continues to treat his conception as a joke. At line 19 he explains in more detail:

But I have a son, sir, by order of law,

some year elder than this, who yet is no dearer

in my account; though this knave came some-

thing saucily to the world before he was sent for,

yet was his mother fair, there was good sport at his

making, and the whoreson must be acknowledged.

Do you know this noble gentleman, Edmund?

Gloucester now reveals he has another son, a legitimate son (“by order of law”), who is a year older than Edmund. Gloucester assures us that he loves his sons equally, but as he goes on to describe Edmund’s conception, he calls his son “knave,” a term which one used with inferiors, regardless of how much affection you felt for them. More telling, he also calls Edmund a “whoreson” who must be “acknowledged,” literally the “son of a whore” whose existence is painful to his father. However, Gloucester assures Kent, all the trouble was worth it because Edmund’s mother was attractive and the act of creating a child was “good sport.” Gloucester is a snickering old lecher, laughing about his past conquests and the proof of his virility. If you were Edmund, how would you feel about the way your father describes you and your mother, especially to a stranger?

At line 33 we learn how Gloucester has dealt with this embarrassment and why Kent has never met Edmund before. Gloucester had sent his son into some kind of exile, away from the court and his father’s life, for nine years. Psychologists would quickly add that these are a child’s formative years. We can imagine how excited Edmund must feel, to be allowed to return to his father and brother. Now Gloucester drops another bombshell: he intends to send his son away again. Modern productions often show Edmund hearing of his father’s plans for the first time here and being appalled. Although Shakespeare never draws a direct connection between Gloucester’s abusive treatment and Edmund’s subsequent evil, we can understand why Edmund might be disposed to ignore his obligations to dear old dad later in the play. For the time being Edmund is apparently obedient and eager to please, as we see in his exchange with Kent between lines 27 and 32 where the young man says, “I shall study deserving.” (There is a rather ominous note to this sentence which, on the surface, just means Edmund will try to make himself worthy of others’ approval; however, given the enormous evil he commits throughout the play, his “deserving” becomes rather ironic.)

With the entrance of King Lear and the rest of the court, the scene now becomes very public, and the language changes accordingly to verse to mark that these are serious events unfolding. King Lear will explain that he is stepping down as monarch and dividing his kingdom among his three daughters. In his statements and actions throughout this next sequence, does King Lear strike you as someone who is tired and eager to give up power? [Act I, sc. 1, lines 35 – 189]

This entire scene is played out on a public stage; that is, King Lear is speaking to the entire court and through it to the country. It is the equivalent of a presidential news conference. We know this because the trumpets announce the king’s official entrance, and he is surrounded by his daughters, their husbands and his attendants. We also know these are public pronouncements because Lear uses the royal “we,” as at line 38 and elsewhere throughout the passage. When a king referred to himself as “we,” he was speaking both as an individual and as the embodiment of the nation.

At line 40 King Lear states his purposes in stepping down as the ruler and dividing his kingdom:”To shake all cares and business from our age, / Conferring them on younger strengths, while we/ Unburthened [unburdened] crawl toward death.” This makes it sound as if Lear were decrepit with age and ready to die. But Lear’s actions and words throughout this scene contradict the image of a tired, old man. He exudes authority, and much of what he speaks is in the form of commands: “Attend the lords of France and Burgundy, Gloucester” [line 35]; “Give me the map there” [line 37]; “To thine and Albany’s issue/ Be this perpetual” [line 68]. King Lear says he is ready to give up power, but he is incapable of doing so. In fact, his inability to relinquish his authority is one of the causes of the tragedy. If he were to shuffle off meekly to the old folks home, there would not be any conflict in the play.

Underlying Lear’s decision to step down and divide his kingdom into three parts are two assumptions. In the opening lines Kent had referred to a possible rivalry between Lear’s sons-in-law, Albany and Cornwall. And now at line 46 Lear says that “future strife/ May be prevented now.” Clearly breaking a united kingdom into three, to include a portion for Cordelia and her future husband, is meant to avoid conflict. It will have the opposite effect. The second assumption on Lear’s part is that he is such a mighty monarch, no one person could replace him; it will take three people.

Lear’s sense of his own power is also behind his command that his daughters tell him, in public, how much they love him. He enjoys making them perform tricks which flatter his ego before he rewards them. His actions also suggest a parent who needs to be reassured of his children’s affection toward him, almost as if his giving up power might endanger the bond of love between them. At line 53 Lear asks, “Which of you shall we say doth love us most/ That we our largest bounty may extend/ Where nature doth with merit challenge.” However, we know that he has already divided the kingdom, so what he asks of his three daughters is not a competition, but to enact a piece of political theater. Whatever motivates Lear, we are about to discover how poorly he understands himself and his own children.

Lear’s two eldest daughters play the game and tell him what he wants to hear. Goneril loves him “Dearer than eyesight, space and liberty;/ Beyond what can be valued, rich or rare” [58-59]. The middle daughter, Regan, outdoes her sister and says, at line 74,

I profess

Myself an enemy to all other joys

Which the most precious square of sense professes,

And find I am alone felicitate [happy]

In your dear Highness’ love.

These girls love their Daddy! They are flattering him, of course. One of Lear’s major character flaws is that he mistakes their flattery for sincere expressions of affection. He will pay a terrible price for this fault.

I spoke earlier of Lear’s sense of power. We certainly can see that in the way he bestows the portions of his kingdom. At line 65, pointing to the map, he gives Goneril her third:

Of all these bounds, even from this line to this,

With shadowy forests, and with champains [plains] riched,

With plenteous rivers, and wide-skirted meads [meadows],

We make thee lady. To thine and Albany’s issues [descendents]

Be this perpetual [for all time].

King Lear sounds like a powerful god dispensing pieces of his own creation. It’s this quality which gives us a sense of how accustomed he is to wielding power.

Lear clearly loves his youngest daughter, Cordelia, the best of his children. At line 125 he tells us, “I loved her most, and thought to set my rest/ On her kind nursery [care-giving].” I am hardly an expert on parenting skills (although my two children survived my missteps), but I do know that it is not a good idea to let your kids perceive that you favor one over another. At line 85 Lear makes the connection between Cordelia’s dowry, what she will receive as a settlement for marriage, and her prospects for a good marriage with either the Duke of Burgundy or the King of France. He offers her an opportunity “to draw/ A third more opulent than your sisters.” Since we’ve already been told that the divisions of the kingdom were precisely even, Lear may just mean that he will give Cordelia the choicest land. Or it may just be a verbal gesture. In any event there is a lot riding on Cordelia’s answer to Lear’s request.

Of all the characters in this scene, Lear’s youngest daughter, Cordelia, is the only one who speaks directly to the audience in two asides, mini-soliloquies, at lines 64 and 78. These private moments help us identify with her character. The revelations show us the struggle which Cordelia faces in whether or not to “play along” with her father’s political charade of publicly declaring her love. At line 64 she shares with us her strategy of non-participation, “Love, and be silent.” At line 79 she once again assures us that she does love her father: “I’m sure my love’s/ More ponderous [weighty, substantial] than my tongue.” So we know before the confrontation with her father what Cordelia’s real feelings are for Lear.

What is Cordelia’s objection to “playing along” with Lear? It may be a natural reluctance to displaying her emotions in public or flattering her father. It could be Cordelia foresees the problems which will occur if her father tries to give up his power. It might be that she knows it is a mistake for him to trust her older sisters with power and especially with helping care for him. After all, Cordelia may have a better sense of her sisters’ real feelings toward their father than Lear does. Finally, Cordelia, like Kent and Gloucester, may have sensed that it would be a mistake to divide the kingdom.

Cordelia’s response at line 89 is stark in its simplicity: “Nothing, my lord.” At first, Lear doesn’t understand, “Nothing?” and she reiterates her answer, prompting her father to warn her at line 92, “Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again.” Think about the exercise of power in this exchange: “I don’t like what you said so change your words.” Ironically, Lear is terribly wrong when he says, “Nothing will come from nothing.” He means Cordelia won’t receive anything with that answer. However, all the ensuing suffering and tragic wisdom flow from this word “nothing.” “Nothing” and plays on this idea “Nothing will come from nothing” are repeated throughout the play, forming a motif. The frequent repetitions will remind us of this dramatic beginning and will allow us to measure how much has come from this initial “nothing.”

King Lear mistakenly measures love and believes he can equate a person’s love with the words she speaks. Cordelia at line 93 tries to explain her answer: “Unhappy that I am [unfortunately], I cannot heave/ My heart into my mouth. I love your majesty/ According to my bond [obligation of child to parent], no more nor less.” This explanation does not satisfy Lear, but he tries to give his beloved daughter a second chance at line 96: “How, how, Cordelia? Mend your speech a little,/ Lest you mar your fortune.” Be careful what you say so you don’t ruin your chance at getting some of the kingdom.

At line 97 Cordelia offers at least one explanation for her answer – a direct challenge to her sisters’ veracity:

Good, my lord

You have begot me, bred me, loved me. I

Return those duties back as are right fit,

Obey you, love you, and most honor you.

Why have my sisters husbands if they say

They love you all? Haply [perhaps], when I shall wed,

That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry

Half my love with him, half my care and duty.

Sure I shall never marry like my sisters,

To love my father all.

We see here that Cordelia does acknowledge her love for her father and the rational basis for that love as a reciprocity for what he has provided her. However, she questions her sisters’ extravagant declarations of love, “more than eyesight.” How could they have husbands since they claim to love their father so totally? Cordelia reserves the right to share her love between her father and any future husband. You can see that her questioning here is designed to challenge her sisters’ truthfulness. Lear’s response is not to re-examine what Goneril and Regan told him but to see Cordelia’s answer as a denial of him. “But goes thy heart with this?” That is, do you really mean this? When Cordelia confirms it, he asks at line 108, “So young, and so untender?[so cruel]” to which she says, “So young, my lord, and true.” Cordelia sees herself as being the only person at the court willing to tell her father the truth. It is not the only time in the play that we see the courage of Lear’s youngest daughter.

Lear told us earlier that he loved Cordelia best of all his girls, but he now irrevocably severs his relationship with her. He has known her all her life, and yet now, after only 18 lines, he shuts the door on her. At line 110 he tells her, the court and us

Let it be so [your being true], thy truth then be thy dower [inheritance]!

For, by the sacred radiance of the sun,

The mysteries of Hecate [goddess of the underworld] and the night,

By all the operation of the orbs [stars and planets]

From whom we do exist and cease to be,

Here I disclaim all my paternal care,

Propinquity and property of blood [family relationship],

And as a stranger from my heart and me

Hold thee from this for ever.

There is about Lear’s behavior a kind of emotional immaturity. Those of us who are used to dealing with the frustrations of ordinary life know that you can’t simply end the basic relationship between father and child over few words. Only a child would sulk and announce, “I’ll never talk to you again.” The rest of us have learned the hard way that you have to compromise in this world. But Lear has had absolute power all his life, and in some ways he has never had to grow up emotionally. And like anyone with absolute power, King Lear makes the break absolute, “for ever.” The other thing to notice here is that Lear calls upon the higher powers which he believes control his world: the forces controlling the sun, the moon and the stars. Why is this important? Because it reminds us that the context of this play is pagan, before the Christian era. And why is that important? Because Shakespeare’s audience believed in a traditional Christianity where suffering of pagans would not result in salvation after death. The terrible things which happen in this play do not have any relief in a benevolent Christian afterlife, which makes the suffering even more poignant. There will be many reminders of this pagan context throughout the play.

To show how absolute his determination is to cut Cordelia out of his life, Lear adds a rather odd comparison at line 118:

The barbarous Scythian [a tribe considered savages],

Or he that makes his generation messes

To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom

Be as well neighbored, pitied, and relieved,

As thou my sometime [former] daughter.

The Scythians were a people in what is now Russia who had a reputation of being uncivilized. The second comparison is just strange – the savages who supposedly devour their own “generation,” referring to either children or parents. Cannibalizing your close relatives is just wrong, and it gives us an idea of how angry Lear is, if he would rather welcome such a person than his own daughter.

At line 122 the Earl of Kent interjects to try and change Lear’s mind. The king warns him: “Come not between the Dragon [one of the symbols of a powerful English king] and his wrath./ I loved her most, and thought to set my rest [retirement years]/ On her kind nursery.” So Lear confirms that he favored Cordelia over her sisters and shows how hurt he is by what he sees as her rejection. After ordering her out of his sight, he asserts that royal power we saw earlier, at line 128 ordering that the King of France be called forth. He orders his sons-in-law, Albany and Cornwall, to divide up Cordelia’s portion of the kingdom. He says now of Cordelia’s position. “Let pride, which she calls plainness [honesty], marry her.” So for him his daughter did what she did because she was too proud to declare her love for her father. Furthermore, we see how Lear uses the possibility of marriage as a reward or punishment.

Lear now sets forth the conditions of his stepping down: he will give up all the power of the throne, in exchange for his daughter and her husbands housing him and 100 of his closest friends every other month. He will keep his title and honors, but he will give up to his wives’ husbands “The sway [rule],/ Revenue [ability to tax], execution of the rest [ability to pass and enforce laws],/ Beloved sons, be yours.” To symbolize this new arrangement he orders Albany and Cornwall to divide a crown between them. Now the people in Shakespeare’s audience had been raised to regard national unity as a paramount value. They would react to this idea of breaking the crown as a slap in the face. It would be as if a character in a contemporary drama cut up an American flag to show the division of the country. We fought the Civil War over this issue, and we would realize in an instant that national division is wrong.

Counting his brief interruption at line 122, Kent will try seven times to stop Lear’s actions. At line 142 he tries to be polite and respectful as he reaffirms his love and honor for Lear as “my king….my father….my master….my great patron.” But before he can state his objection, Lear warns him at line 145, “The bow is bent and drawn; make from the shaft,” as if Lear were an English long bow about to be unloosed with fatal consequences. Kent invites Lear shoot away, even if the arrow pierces his heart.

At line 147 Kent tries the direct approach:

Be Kent unmannerly

When Lear is mad. What wouldst thou do, old man?

Think’st thou that duty shall have dread to speak

When power to flattery bows? To plainness honor’s bound

When majesty falls to folly. Reserve thy state [authority],

And in thy best consideration check

This hideous rashness. Answer my life my judgment,

Thy youngest daughter does not love thee least,

Nor are those empty-hearted whose low sounds

Reverb no hollowness.

Kent really does risk his life here by trying break through Lear’s stubborn insistence on his course of action. Kent addresses the king in the plainest terms possible, to the point of being insulting or, as he says at line 147 “unmannerly” in the face of Lear’s madness. At line 148 he calls the king “old man,” a forceful reminder of why Lear needs to re-examine his actions. He excuses his opposition as “duty” [149] in the face of “power” bowing to “flattery” [150]. So Kent implies that Lear as an old man has been deceived by the flattering lies of his older daughters. He explains his tough language, his “plainness” [150], as the result of his “honor” [150] responding when Lear’s “majesty falls to folly” [151]. Kent now urges Lear not to give up power: “Reserve thy state” [151] and to revoke his unthinking rejection of Cordelia, “This hideous rashness” [152]. At line 152 he stakes his life on his judgment that Cordelia is true and that her mild answer to Lear’s request, her “low sounds” [155], do not mean her love is “hollow” [156] or insincere.

Rather than realizing the wisdom of Kent’s observations, Lear warns him at line 156 he has gone too far: “Kent, on thy life, no more!” Kent responds, “My life I never held but as a pawn/ To wage against thine enemies, nor fear to lose it,/ Thy safety being motive” [the reason for my action]. Again we see how Kent is willing to risk his life in service to his master, even if it means he must oppose the mistake that master is now making. This is true loyalty. Lear tries to remove this irritation of Kent’s truthfulness by ordering him “Out of my sight” at line 159. This denial has probably worked for Lear throughout his life, but Kent will not be denied and urges the king “See better, Lear, and let me still [always] remain/ The true blank [bull’s eye of a target] of thine eye.”

At line 162 Lear begins a curse evoking the Roman god Apollo, the god of truth and wisdom. Now it is Kent’s turn to interrupt Lear, the sixth time he has tried to get Lear to change his mind. At line 163 he tells the king, “Thou swear’st thy gods in vain,” because Lear’s angry curse will not deter Kent and because Apollo is hardly the god Lear should be evoking in this instance when his own actions are neither truthful nor wise. Unable to order Kent into silence, Lear flies into an irrational rage and preparing to pull his sword on his oldest advisor and probably his best friend, the old man shouts, “O vassal! Miscreant!” [164]. These two insults are based upon denying Kent’s true social status as an earl. In effect Lear tries to silence his critic calling him a low class servant. It would be entirely inappropriate for the crown head of a country to kill a member of his court in anger. It would bring dishonor on the throne, and Lear’s sons-in-law move to restrain him. At line 165 Kent raises his seventh and final objection:

Kill thy physician, and the fee bestow

Upon the foul disease. Revoke thy gift [of Cordelia’s portion of the kingdom],

Or, whilst I can vent clamor from my throat,

I’ll tell thee thou dost evil.

By threatening to kill him, Kent says, Lear is trying to stop the only person who is attempting to heal him of his disease. The loyal advisor promises to continue to tell Lear he is committing an evil act as long as he is alive.

When his daughter disappointed him, King Lear gave her 18 lines to change her mind. With Kent, whom he has probably known a lot longer than his daughter, he gives 45 lines to change his message. Now, at line 167 he lowers the boom on Kent:

Hear me, recreant!

On thy allegiance, hear me!

That thou hast sought to make us break our vows,

Which we durst never yet, and with strained [excessive] pride

To come betwixt our sentence [decree] and our power [authority],

Which nor our nature nor our place [position] can bear,

Our potency made good, take thy reward.

Lear now gives Kent five days to make provision and then banishes him from the kingdom upon pain of death. To illustrate how serious he is in this judgment, at line 180, he swears by “Jupiter,” the king of the Roman gods, and adds, “This shall not be revoked.”

To understand the power of Lear’s command here, you must know that everyone in the kingdom had to pledge loyalty to the king. However, members of the inner circle, the court and most powerful nobles, took an additional, personal oath to the king as their “liege lord,” an oath called “allegiance..” (You can see the root of the word here.) To violate that oath meant that you were a double traitor for breaking your loyalty oath and your allegiance. So when Lear orders Kent to shut up, he does so by evoking a very powerful control. He accuses Kent of two crimes very serious to Lear: 1.) trying to make the king change a vow or decree, something he claims he has never done in his life. That’s fascinating – a man who has lived for 80+ years and has never once changed his mind! 2.) attempting to interfere with Lear’s exercise of power, which the king says neither his position as monarch nor his nature as a leader can tolerate. Furthermore, Kent’s actions are based upon his own “strained pride,” the same sin that Lear said was responsible for his daughter’s behavior. Kent accepts the order of banishment without further argument, telling Lear at line 182, “Sith [Since] thus thou wilt appear,/ Freedom lives hence, and banishment is here.” So Lear’s stubborn adherence to his course of action has reversed the normal values of society. Kent wishes Cordelia well, telling her at line 185, “That justly think’st, and hath most rightly said.” He rather sarcastically hopes for Goneril and Regan “That good effects may spring from words of love.” In other words, the older sisters have said all the “right” things, but it remains to be seen if their actions will mirror their words. Finally, in the last series of rhymed couplets with which Kent bids the court farewell, he declares at line 188, “Thus Kent, O Princes, bids you all adieu./ He’ll shape his old course in a country new.” Kent promises not to change his behavior but to continue to speak in a plain, direct manner and act in a moral fashion, just in a new location. We’ll see how he goes about achieving this change.

In the final sequence in this initial scene, notice how Lear publicly humiliates his daughter Cordelia, using her marriage prospects to punish her. He will consciously evoke the idea of “nothing” in the course of his cruelty. How do you account for the actions of the King of France in this scene? Finally, notice how at the end the older sisters reveal their true feelings for dear old Dad. [Act I, scene 1, lines 190 – 311]

Marriages, especially among members of royal families, could involve lengthy negotiations over what each party would bring to the union. Cordelia’s two suitors, the Duke of Burgundy and the King of France, have undoubtedly been in discussions about what her dowry or marriage settlement would be. So when King Lear asks Burgundy at line 193, “What in the least/ Will you require in present [immediate] dower,” the duke, who has missed all the previous action, thinks he is still in contract negotiations. He answers that he’ll take what Lear previously offered, a third of the kingdom, and that he’s sure the king will offer no less. This gives the angry father a chance to declare at line 198:

When she was dear [precious] to us, we did hold her so;

But now her price is fallen. Sir, there she stands.

If aught within that little seeming substance,

Or all of it, with our displeasure pieced [added],

And nothing more, may fitly like [please] your Grace.

She’s there, and she is yours.

Lear gets his revenge upon his disobedient daughter. He says, in effect, “She has no use to me. If you want her, take her,” as if she were a discarded piece of furniture. He even gets to throw “nothing” back in her face. For a royal princess this was the height of public humiliation. Small wonder that Burgundy passes on the offer!

Lear tells the King of France at line 210 that he will not insult him by making the same offer, but France wants to know what Cordelia, who was Lear’s favorite, could have done to lose her father’s approval. “Sure her offense/ Must be of such unnatural degree/ That monsters it [220],” i.e., a monstrous crime against nature. He is not prepared to believe Cordelia capable of such a sin. At line 228 Cordelia pleads with her father

That you make known

It is no vicious blot, murder, or foulness,

No unchaste action or dishonored step,

That hath deprived me of your grace and favor;

But even for want [lack[ of that for which I am richer,

A still-soliciting [always begging] eye, and such a tongue

That I am glad I have not, though not to have it

Hath lost me in your liking.

There is no back-down in Cordelia. She is defiant that she was truthful and was a better person for it. But we still detect a note of sorrow in the last two lines here. Lear’s response at line 235 is that of the angry parent confronted with a rebellious teenager throughout history: “Better thou/ Hadst not been born than not t’ have pleased me better.” Most parents may feel this way at times, but they smart if they don’t say it. It’s too extreme!

France dismisses Cordelia’s supposedly monstrous sin, and he gallantly offers Burgundy a second chance to claim her. But Burgundy is still back in the contract negotiations mode and at line 244 asks Lear to give his previous best offer and he’ll take Cordelia off his hands. At line 247 Lear gets a second chance to taunt his daughter: “Nothing. I have sworn. I am firm.” Cordelia adds that she wouldn’t want to marry Burgundy anyway. Now the King of France makes his move at line 252: “Fairest Cordelia, that art most rich being poor,/ Most choice forsaken, and most loved despised,/ Thee and thy virtues here I seize upon.” In this declaration of love we see those oxymorons, the self-contradictory phrases that Romeo was so fond of. It is precisely because Cordelia has lost everything that France finds her lovable. At line 267 Lear angrily tells France to take her “Without our grace, our love, our benison [blessing].” He vows he will never see Cordelia again.

Cordelia bids her evil sisters farewell, telling them she knows what they really are like: “[I] am most loath to call/ Your faults as they are named [271].” Nevertheless, she hopes they will love and care for their father. Regan and Goneril respond by telling her she’s lucky France took her without a dowry and not to lecture them. Cordelia gets the last word in the exchange at line 282: “Time shall unfold what plighted [covered] cunning hides, /Who covers faults, at last shame them derides.” Those who hide their evils will have them finally exposed and suffer shame. A foreshadowing of what is to come!

Now in the last 25 lines of the scene Shakespeare changes direction. Alone, Goneril and Regan drop the pretense and tell us exactly what they think of their father, and it isn’t pretty. The language changes. Throughout the scene from the appearance of Lear back at line 35 the language of the court has been in verse. In the sequence where France takes Cordelia and she says farewell to her sisters the verse has included occasional rhymed couplets. Now that they can reveal their true nature, the evil sisters speak in prose, as if to emphasize that their previous utterances were phony. The girls see their father and his actions with a clarity no one else has shown to this point. At line 290 Goneril says of him

You see how full of changes his age is. The

observation we have made of it hath not been little.

He always loved our sister most, and with what

poor judgment he hath cast her off appears

too grossly.

The implication here is that the girls have discussed their father’s shortcomings a lot: “the observation we have made of it hath not been little.” So while they were telling Lear how much they loved him, they really thought he was a foolish old man. Given the fact that they both got more of the kingdom than they had expected, they might show a little gratitude here, but they’re too nasty. Goneril adds her insight at line 295: “’Tis the infirmity of his age; yet he hath ever but slenderly known himself.” This is very revealing! Lear has always acted foolishly because he has not really understood himself. No other character in the play provides this kind of analysis, and Shakespeare gives this information to the character who can hurt Lear the most with it. Goneril agrees at line 297: “The best and soundest of his time [his life] hath been/ but rash.” Regan cites the banishment of Kent as an example of this unthinking behavior. Remember that Kent had been banished for daring to suggest that Cordelia keep her third of the kingdom, but Regan ignores that in her haste to fault her father. At line 307 Goneril warns, “if our father carry authority with such disposition/ as he bears [possesses now], this last surrender of his will/ but offend us.” She’s saying that Lear’s behavior in giving up the crown and turning power over to them is an example of his mental faults and promises that they will have trouble with him. Once again, it would be nice if these daughters would express some appreciation for what they have gotten as a result of their father’s failings. The exchange ends with Regan saying that they need to think about a course of action, while the older, take-charge girl, Goneril, disagrees and declares at line 311, “We must do something, and i’ th’ heat [right now].” She will proceed to act quickly.

Act I, Scene 2

We now move to the parallel plotline involving the family of Gloucester and his two sons. Just as Lear has children who plot against him, the earl of Gloucester has a conniving child. And just as Lear mistakenly banishes the people who truly love him, so Gloucester will condemn the wrong person. In this scene we are shown the evil design right at the beginning. What rationale does Edmund offer for his actions? How compelling is this justification? What is it that Edmund proposes to do at this point?

[Act I, 2, lines 1 – 22]

We met Edmund back at the beginning of the first scene where we saw his father referring to him in an insulting manner: ‘knave,” “whoreson,” etc. Illegitimate children were often called “natural,” so it is appropriate that Edmund begins by pledging his services to the goddess Nature. King Lear will also evoke “Nature” later in the play, but these are two very different conceptions of a higher power. Under Lear’s “Nature,” a kind of benevolent power which operates the world, children do what their parents want. Edmund’s “Nature” is a rough force which seeks to overturn civilization and order. Edmund goes on to explain how his “Nature” helps him deny any man-made status which society would seek to impose on him because of his birth. At line 2 he asks a rhetorical question:

Wherefore [why] should I

Stand in the plague of custom [allow social taboos], and permit

The curiosity of nations [the condemnation of fastidious people] to deprive me,

For that [because] I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines

Lag of a brother?

In other words, why should I be treated with less respect just because some people might object to the condition of my birth or the fact that I am not my father’s oldest son? Remember that inheritance went to the oldest son at this time, so Edmund as the younger, illegitimate son can expect little or nothing from his father. The thing that really rankles Edmund is his status as a bastard, which he equates with the social term “base” or lower class. Notice how many times in these 22 lines Edmund uses those two terms or variations of the words.

Edmund will ask two more extended rhetorical questions (questions that really require no answer but are only asked to illustrate the speaker’s point). First at line 6

Why bastard? Wherefore base?

When my dimensions are as well compact,

My mind as generous, and my shape as true,

As honest madam’s issue?

Why should I be branded as inferior when I am physically and psychological equal to any child born to an honest, married woman? We might have to grant Edmund a point here. There is no inherent reason why he should be treated as less worthy because of the circumstances of his birth, over which he had no control. He asks the second rhetorical question, and in the process demonstrates at line 9 how obsessed he is with those two terms which he connects in his mind:

Why brand they us

With base? With baseness? Bastardy? Base? Base?

Who, in the lusty stealth of nature, take

More composition [fuller mixture] and fierce quality [energy]

Than doth, within a dull, stale, tired bed,

Go to th’ creating a whole tribe of fops [foolish dandies]

Got [begot] ‘tween asleep and wake?

In the previous speech Edmund argued that bastards had a right to be treated equally. Now he argues in a wonderfully imaginative passage that, given the circumstances of their conceptions, illegitimate children are actually superior to the legitimate offspring of married couples. He evokes the heightened passion of the illicit affair which leads to the creation of a bastard, the enhanced “composition” and “fierce quality.” He contrasts that with the process of conceiving children within a marriage, which he reduces to the image of “a dull, stale, tired bed” shared by a couple who now have conventional sex without even being fully awake – “Got ‘tween asleep and wake” – and as a consequence produce lots of children – “a whole tribe” -- of no particular distinction – “fops.”

Up to this point you could say that Edmund is making a pretty good case for himself. We have seen his father emotionally and socially abuse him; we have seen him rejected and about to be sent away again. He has argued persuasively that he should at least be treated equally, if not regarded as superior to other sons. Now, however, the bastard son of Gloucester makes a big leap at line 15:

Well then,

Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land.

Our father’s love is to the bastard Edmund

As to th’ legitimate. Fine word, “legitimate.”

Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed [work],

And my invention [plan] thrive, Edmund the base

Shall top th’ legitimate. I grow, I prosper;

Now, gods, stand up for bastards.

If he has been treated unfairly, Edmund figures he is justified in doing what he has to in order to win. Most of Shakespeare’s villains have similar excuses for their evil: somebody mistreated them, and so they are justified in doing what they want. Just as he was fixated on the words “base” and “bastard” before, now Edmund locks on the word “legitimate.” How many times does he use that word? He is delighted at the prospect of defeating his brother in a contest poor Edgar doesn’t even know is happening. Notice that Shakespeare is careful to have Edmund assure us that his father loves both his sons equally. When the villain tells us there is no favoritism, we tend to accept that as an accurate assessment. Nevertheless, Edmund ends his speech with the battle cry of the Bastards Liberation Movement: “Now, gods, stand up for bastards!”

In this next sequence how does the language change from the first 22 lines of the scene? Why? Watch how Gloucester is successfully deceived because

1. no one suspects Edmund of duplicity;

2. Edmund uses psychological manipulation on Gloucester and later Edgar;

3. Gloucester seems predisposed for some reason to fear betrayal by Edgar.

[Act I, 2, lines 23 – 127]

Edmund makes his opening declaration in verse to let us know this is a serious statement. After Gloucester’s opening lines the rest of the scene, the deception, is in prose to set it apart and remind us Edmund is not being truthful.

Gloucester enters at line 23 cataloguing all the faults of Lear’s behavior in the opening scene:

Kent banished thus? and France in choler parted?

And the King gone tonight? prescribed his pow’r?

Confined to exhibition? All this done

Upon the gad? [on the spur of the moment]

We have six rhetorical questions here designed to show us that Gloucester doubts the wisdom of King Lear’s earlier decisions. He thinks it was a mistake to banish Kent. Relations with the King of France are now strained. Lear has walked away from his responsibility as the monarch – “prescribed his power” – without adequate transition or preparation – “tonight.” He has made himself the figurehead rather than the actual ruler. And he has done all of this without careful thought or consultation. Gloucester can see what Lear did wrong, although you notice that he was careful not to tell Lear. He can see other people’s faults, but he will proceed to make many of the same mistakes himself. It begins when he notices Edmund quickly trying to hide a letter as he comes in at line 26.

Now Edmund’s manipulation of his father will consist of creating an illusion of something going on which he will try and hide unsuccessfully from his father. The more Edmund denies this illusion, the more Gloucester believes it must be true. The manipulation takes place in 10 steps. In the first three steps (27 – 32) Edmund denies that he has a letter and then tries to deny that it contains anything. Notice the reappearance of the “nothing” motif at line 32:

Gloucester: What paper were you reading?

Edmund: Nothing, my lord.

Gloucester: No? What needed then that terrible dispatch [hasty hiding]

of it into your pocket? The quality of nothing

hath not such need to hide itself. Let’s see!

Come, if it be nothing, I shall not need spectacles [to read it].

Gloucester here even does a paraphrase of Lear’s famous line “Nothing shall come of nothing.” Edmund accomplishes his first manipulation in getting his father to “force” him to give up the letter.

Steps 4. 5. and 6 consist of Edmund preconditioning his father to see something terrible in the letter. At line 39 he declares, “I find it [the letter] is not fit/ for your o’erlooking.”

Yes, that should deter Gloucester from reading the letter. At line 42 he pretends that he is conflicted about whether to give up the letter, blaming his dilemma on the contents. Then at line 46, as he reluctantly gives up the letter, he rather plaintively says, “I hope, for my brother’s justification, he wrote this but as an essay [test] or taste of my virtue.” With supporters like Edmund, Edgar is one lucky guy!

The letter at line 48 is a masterpiece of manipulating Gloucester’s insecurities:

This policy and reverence of

age makes the world bitter to the best of our

times; keeps our fortunes from us till our oldness

cannot relish [enjoy] them. I begin to find an idle and

fond [foolish] bondage in the oppression of aged tyranny,

who sways [rules] , not as it hath power, but as it is suffered [tolerated].

Come to me, that of this I may speak more.

If our father would sleep till I waked him, you

should enjoy half his revenue [wealth] for ever, and live

the beloved of your brother, EDGAR

The letter says that young men ruin their youth because they must defer to their aged parents. They are denied access to the money they will inherit when they could enjoy it most. Furthermore, parents exercise too much control over their children, simply because the children allow themselves to be ruled. The letter ends with that sinister note, “If our father should sleep till I waked him…” and promises a share of the inheritance that Edmund would not normally expect to see. It works on Gloucester who immediately sees a conspiracy out to get him. He wonders if Edgar could be capable of such feelings and asks Edmund for more details, such as how it was delivered. Something in the letter stirs a fear in Gloucester that it might truly reflect his son’s feelings.

In the next three steps of the manipulation Edmund will feed his father’s paranoia. First, at line 64 he tells his father the letter was thrown in the window, mysteriously, as if part of a conspiracy. Then at 66 Gloucester asks if the “character,” or handwriting, is Edgar’s. Edmund’s “defense” of his brother at line 68 is designed to make him appear more guilty: “If the matter were good, my lord, I durst/ swear it were his; but in respect of that, I would/fain think it were not.” Surely Edgar couldn’t have written this! When Gloucester declares that it is Edgar’s handwriting, Edmund “defends” his brother one more time at line 72: “It is his hand, my lord; but I hope his heart is/not in the contents.”

The final step in this process of manipulation comes when Gloucester asks if Edgar had ever mentioned any of this hostility before. Edmund stoutly defends his brother at line 76:

Never, my lord. But I have heard him

oft maintain it to be fit that, sons at perfect [mature] age,

and fathers declined, the fathers should be as a ward

to the son, and the son manage his revenue.

Now this invented story of Edgar’s thoughts on managing an aged parent’s money is intangible hearsay and only indirectly related to the ideas in the letter. Nevertheless, Gloucester seizes upon it as “proof” of Edgar’s guilt. Once again it is apparent that Gloucester is predisposed to fear the worst in his son. Furthermore, his suspicions indicate a lack of communication between Gloucester and Edgar. It is no surprise then that Edmund, at lines 85 – 95, offers to determine for his father the extent of Edgar’s complicity. He will tell who is speaking the truth. To do this he proposes to arrange for his father to eavesdrop on the two of them so he can hear with his own ears if Edgar is guilty. Gloucester now turns over to Edmund the entire means of control . At line 105 he directs, “seek him out; wind me into him [gain his confidence for me], I pray you; frame the/ business after your own wisdom. I would unstate [bankrupt]/ myself to be in a due resolution.” So Gloucester here urges one son to use trickery and deceit on the other to uncover the truth.

Throughout human history when people have suffered setbacks, they look for possible reasons outside themselves, some higher power which has led to their personal disaster. At line 112 Gloucester does this:

These late eclipses in the sun and moon

portend no good to us. Though the wisdom of

Nature can reason it thus and thus, yet Nature

finds itself scourged by the sequent effects [punished by consequences]. Love

cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide. In

cities, mutinies, in countries, discord; in palaces,

treasons; and the bond cracked ‘twixt son and

father. This villain of mine comes under the

prediction, there’s son against father; the King falls

from bias of nature, there’s father against child.

We have seen the best of our time. Machinations,

hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders

follow us disquietly to our graves. Find out this

villain, Edmund; it shall lose thee nothing. Do it

carefully. And the noble and true-hearted Kent

banished; his offense, honesty. ‘Tis strange.

There is something poignant in Gloucester’s efforts to find some supernatural reason why his son has betrayed him. It must be some planetary force which leads to general collapse. It’s not just his family. All of society is in trouble. Notice that his son has done him wrong, but King Lear has done his child wrong. He realizes Kent has been accused falsely but not Edgar. I believe all people, regardless of when they have lived, have echoed Gloucester’s belief that they have seen the best of their times; it’s all downhill from this point on.

Gloucester’s efforts to find some reason in the stars is a particularly medieval belief, even though millions still consult their astrological charts everyday. In the next sequence after Gloucester has left, Edmund gives us a very modern explanation for what just happened. What does he say explains human behavior? How is he able to manipulate his brother? [Act I, 2, lines 128 – 198]

Beginning at line 128 Edmund mocks his father’s beliefs:

This is the excellent foppery of the world,

that when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeits

of our own behavior, we make guilty of our disasters

the sun, the moon, and stars; as if we were

villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion;

knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical

predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by

an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and

all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on.

An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to

lay his goatish disposition on the charge of a

star. My father compounded with my mother

under the Dragon’s Tail [a constellation], and my nativity was

under Ursa Major [the Great Bear constellation], so that it follows I am rough

and lecherous. Fut! I should have been that I

am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled

on my bastardizing.

Edmund does not believe in astrology. He thinks we are what we choose to make ourselves. For him “planetary influence” is a lot less important than free will, the decisions that human beings make about their own lives. In this Edmund is articulating a much more modern philosophy than his father, a philosophy associated with Machiavelli, an early 16^th Century writer who was very important in our cultural heritage. Machiavelli was the first modern political scientist. In order to gain a government job with one of the powerful Da Medicis, political leaders in Renaissance Italy, Machiavelli wrote a book called The Prince. In it he explained that the ordinary people could believe that forces like God, Fate or the stars controlled their lives, but rulers had to know better. The prince had to operate on the assumption that he made his own luck and controlled his own destiny; in other words, he had to believe in his own free will. Although Machiavelli did not get his job, The Prince became one of the most widely read books of the age. In Shakespeare’s time the idea of free will was associated with villains who were emboldened to take advantage of the rest of the people through deceit. In Shakespeare’s plays these “free will” villains are sometimes called “machiavellis” in tribute to the master. In his speech here Edmund asserts that the disasters which befall people like his father are often the result of their own excesses. Stars and planets have nothing to do with it. Of course, Shakespeare makes sure that Edmund mockingly includes his own astrological charts, so that the true believers in the audience could point out that Edmund’s behavior is entirely consistent with his time of birth.

At line 144 Edmund anticipates what he will say to Edgar, and Edgar appears at that moment, as if on cue in a play. That is the cue for him to assume another role, that of a concerned brother worried by recent astrological signs – “O, these eclipses portend these divisions” [line 147] – just as if Edmund were now playing his father. Furthermore he tells us he has to play this role with “villainous melancholy” – profound sorrow – as if he were a wandering lunatic – “Tom o’ Bedlam” -- who suffered from depression. The reference here to Tom o’ Bedlam anticipates one of the most unusual features of the play. More about that later. At lines 155 – 161 Edmund even paraphrases his father’s statement a few lines earlier about the “unnaturalness between child and parent”

[line 156].

Edgar does not seemed swayed by the astrological references, asking his brother at line 162, “How long have you been a sectary astronomical” as if it were something funny. But when Edmund at line 164 asks when Edgar last saw Gloucester and at 168 asks, “Parted you in good terms? Found you no displeasure in him by word nor countenance?” he seems to hit a responsive chord in his brother. It suggests that Gloucester has been moody in the past and that the brothers are never sure what their father’s state of mind will be. Edgar is overly credulous in this scene, but Shakespeare hints that there may be some believability in Edgar’s uncertainty. When Edmund reveals there is some tension between Gloucester and Edgar, the older son immediately guesses at line 177, “Some villain hath done me wrong.” Edmund piously agrees, “That’s my fear, brother.” Having planted the seed of doubt, Edmund now takes it to a new level, warning his brother to lock himself in Edmund’s room and at line 183, “If you do stir abroad, go armed.” This really gets Edgar’s attention, so that Edmund is able to add at line 187, “I have told you what I have seen and/ heard; but faintly, nothing like the image and horror/ of it.” We don’t know much about Edgar before this first meeting, but we see in this scene that he too can be manipulated, not in exactly the same way as his father, but nevertheless just as effectively.

When Edgar hurries off to hide in Edmund’s room, the bastard returns to verse at line 192 to provide a summary of what he has accomplished in this scene:

A credulous father, and a brother noble,

Whose nature is so far from doing harms

That he suspects none; on whose foolish honesty

My practices ride easy. I see the business.

Let me, if not by birth, have lands by wit.

All with me’s meet [proper], that I can fashion fit.

The change of language to verse once again emphasizes that he is being truthful, in contrast to what went before. The quality that comes through in this passage is how much Edmund enjoys taking advantage of his family. He likes being a villain and feeling superior to his victims. The passage ends with a rhymed couplet, which is the device Shakespeare .often used to signal to his audience that when this character leaves the stage it is the end of the scene. The next character will be in a different place and/or time.

Act I, Scene 3

In the opening lines of this scene we see Goneril make good on her threat to do something about controlling her father’s exercise of power. Notice how she seeks for a rationale for curbing him. [I, 3]

At line 1 Goneril asks her sycophantic servant, Oswald, if Lear hit one of her gentleman who apparently took exception to Lear’s jester. At line 7 she charges that Lear’s companions, the 100 knights about whom we will hear a lot, are “riotous” and that Lear himself complains all the time. Goneril’s response to this domestic tension is to refuse to speak to her father and to encourage her servants to “come slack of former services” [10], that is to deliberately insult the king.. She repeats her directions to Oswald at line 13. Dr. Phil would undoubtedly say this family needs to confront their problems, if they really are problems, and not play games. She explains her strategy and the reasons for it at line 17:

Idle old man,

That still would manage those authorities

That he hath given away. Now by my life,

Old fools are babes again, and must be used

With checks as [well as] flatteries, when they are seen abused.

There is a level of hatred here that Lear still thinks of himself as a king, even when he has given up the rule. Rather than being understanding of her father’s difficult transition, she dismisses him as an “old fool” who acts like a baby and has to be controlled by use of “flatteries” as well as “checks” or discipline. Goneril admits, in effect, to flattering her father when asked to do so in the first scene. She leaves to write her sister to let her know what the plan of action is.

We are introduced to Oswald in this scene who will emerge as a loyal servant who does whatever his employer tells him to, regardless of the morality of the action or the consequences. Oswald will serve as a contrast to another loyal servant, Kent, who is true to the better spirit of his master, what his master should be doing if only he were thinking straight.

Act I, Scene 4

In this scene Kent returns in disguise to serve Lear in a new capacity. King Lear is deliberately insulted and has to learn how that feels. We are introduced to the extraordinary character, the Fool, a professional jester who attempts to use humor to help make Lear see more clearly. Finally we witness the first violent confrontation as Lear discovers what Goneril really thinks of him. In the opening sequence we meet Kent again. How has Kent physically and verbally disguised himself? Why doesn’t Lear recognize when he is being insulted? [I, 4, lines 1 – 94]

In the opening lines Kent appears in disguise and lets us know his plan:

If but as well I other accents borrow

That can my speech defuse [disguise], my good intent

May carry through itself to that full issue [outcome]

For which I razed my likeness [changed my appearance].

On Shakespeare’s stage there was a convention, an unspoken agreement between players and audience, that if an actor simply changed clothes or took off a phony beard, his appearance would have changed sufficiently so that no one could recognize him. We saw this convention used in Twelfth Night to enable Viola to carry off her masquerade as a man. Kent tells us he has “razed” his appearance, which probably means he shaved his beard. Even more important to his disguise, however, is his change in language. From now on Kent will speak largely in prose and adopt the accent and vocabulary of a lower-class peasant. Language has been throughout the history of England the most important social identifier, as we see in a play like My Fair Lady, where the Cockney flower girl becomes the princess simply through voice lessons. Now Kent introduces himself to Lear with this colorful description of his new persona at line 14:

I do profess to be no less than I seem, to

serve him truly that will put me in trust, to love

him that is honest, to converse with him that is wise

and says little, to fear judgment [divine retribution], to fight when I

cannot choose, and to eat no fish.

The “new” Kent is plain-spoken, direct and wise from his experience. In other words, he’s a lot like the “old” in different clothes and accent. The reference to “eat no fish” is interesting, as your notes make clear. This is one of the few references in Shakespeare’s plays which may refer to the rampant anti-Catholicism of that age. Ironically he says he is “as poor as the king,” at line 20, as if he did not realize he was talking to the king. It also suggests that people look upon Lear, now that he has given up his throne, as impoverished. Lear finds the fact that Kent apparently doesn’t know who he is to be amusing and asks what he wants at line 24:

Lear: What wouldst thou?

Kent: Service.

Lear: Who wouldst thou serve?

Kent: You

Lear: Dost thou know me, fellow?

Kent: No, sir, but you have that in your countenance [bearing]

which I would fain call master.

Lear: What’s that?

Kent: Authority.

Kent here identifies that quality which Lear demonstrated throughout the first scene, even when he was making a fool of himself. In fact, if Lear did not have such a commanding sense about himself, we would likely have no tragedy. The kind of humiliation his daughters are about to put him through is made much worse because he is so obviously unable to compromise and change his sense of authority. We may not like Lear as a human being, but his suffering is powerfully felt.

Kent is asked to give his resume for the job as Lear’s attendant, and he is again direct at line 33:

I can keep honest counsel [honorable secrets], ride, run, mar a

curious [elaborate] tale in telling it, and deliver a plain message

bluntly. That which ordinary men are fit for, I

am qualified in, and the best of me is diligence.

Notice here again Kent’s insistence on his verbal limitations. “A curious tale” refers to the fancy speech and elaborate stories associated with courtiers. He is comfortable delivering “plain messages bluntly.” In a way Kent’s disguise works because he keeps telling the other characters what it is. Although Lear will spend the rest of the play referring to Kent as “fellow” or “sirrah,” he apparently adopts the name “Caius.” When asked his age he answers with customary candor: “Not so young, sir, to love a woman for singing,/ nor so old to dote on her for anything. I have/ years on my back forty-eight.” When the average life expectancy was thirty-six, forty-eight was getting up there. One of the things that attract Lear to Kent is this sense of shared maturity.

Throughout this sequence of the play, from line 40 to 97 when he finally appears, King Lear calls frequently for his Fool. How many times does he do so? Furthermore, he seems agitated by the Fool’s absence? Why isn’t he around? (Hint: look at line 75.)

At line 45 Oswald enters and Lear asks where his daughter is, but Oswald does not answer, in effect putting him on hold with “So please you –“at line 46. At line 55 when Lear sends one of his knights to bring Oswald back to explain his behavior, the slimy servant insults the king again by refusing to return. At line 86 when Oswald does re-enter. Lear describes his insolent facial expression: “Do you bandy looks with me, you rascal?” The most calculated insult is at line 81 when Lear asks Oswald who he, the king, is, and Goneril’s sycophant answers, “My lady’s father.” It is tough on a man who has been used to being the center of attention all his life, but it is doubly difficult to tell him that now his identity is defined only by his relationship to his daughter.

What is amazing about the insults to Lear is that the king at first does not recognize them. He has lived in such a social cocoon all his life that he doesn’t know when people are disrespecting him. At line 57 one of his knights has to explain to him what is happening.

My lord, I know not what the matter is;

but to my judgment your Highness is not

entertained with that ceremonious affection as you

were wont. There’s a great abatement of kindness

appears as well in the general dependents [household servants] as in the

Duke himself also and your daughter.

The fact that one of Lear’s underlings has to explain this to him is evidence of how sheltered he has been. Lear acknowledges at line 68 that he had noticed something was amiss: “I have perceived a most faint neglect/ of late, which I have rather blamed as mine own/ jealous curiosity [concern for honor] than as a very pretense [actual intention] and/ purpose of unkindness.” In other words, Lear thought the problem lay within his own perception rather than in anything people were doing to him. What Lear is doing here is making excuses for someone else’s behavior, probably the first time he has ever had to do that. When he really was king, he didn’t have to worry about making allowances.

When Oswald insults Lear for the fourth time with his wiseass answer, “My lady’s father,” Lear loses his temper, much as we saw him do with Kent in the first scene. At line 82 he shouts, “’My lady’s father/’ My lord’s knave, you/whoreson dog, you slave, you cur!” and he begins to beat Oswald. This is exactly the confrontation Goneril has hoped to provoke. However, for Lear to raise his hand against such a lowlife scum is a violation of his honor and royal personage. So at line 88 Kent quickly jumps in and takes over the physical punishment of Oswald, tripping him as he calls him a ‘base football player.” I love that insult, and it shows the antiquity of the game in one form or another. (They probably only played man-to-man pass defense in Shakespeare’s time.) Kent proceeds to thoroughly trounce Oswald, as he says at line 91 to teach the servant “differences,” that is to remind him of his place. Lear applauds Kent’s initiative and offers him money as an “earnest” or payment for his services. At that point the Fool finally reappears.

We know Lear has been anxious about the return of the Fool, and we have some idea of why he has been away. The Fool performs comic routines non-stop. What does all his humor have in common? In this sequence Goneril’s plan behind the confrontation is revealed. What does she intend to do about Lear? Does she provide justification for her actions? [Act I, 4, lines 95 – 355]

Some of you may have seen the character of a professional jester or fool in Twelfth Night. As you recall Feste, the fool, was a comedian hired to entertain the countess Olivia with jokes and humorous observations. According to the centuries-old tradition the jester was someone who was mentally challenged, hence the title “fool.” But in Twelfth Night Feste was the wisest and most perceptive of the characters. So too in this play the character is called simply “Fool,” as if he has no name, just a derogatory job title. Nevertheless he is one of the smartest characters and one of the most courageous because he reminds Lear of the mistakes in judgment he has made, something that Gloucester was unwilling to do. The fool/jester had always been on the edges of court society, considered one of the base servants. In fact he had originally been given just rags to wear and had to construct a suit of clothes that came to be called “motley,” because of its ratty appearance. The fool/jester had made this costume a badge of his office and wore motley with pride. It signified that he might be a halfwit, but he was paid for it. Other things associated with being a fool/jester included wearing bells (supposedly made you funnier), a coxcomb, a special cap made up of weird spires, often tipped with bells, again a symbol of his job. He might use a hand puppet called a zany that he would use in his comic routines. The fool/jester often specialized in cutting edge humor that could be insulting to the powerful lord who employed him. However, he could hide behind his supposed mental problems or use the hand puppet to say the really outrageous things and escape censure most of the time. There were by tradition two general categories of fool/jesters: the “sweet” fools who specialized in gentle humor which was funny without being insulting; the “bitter” fool whose satiric humor could be insulting and upsetting to an audience. It would be similar to the difference between Bill Cosby and Chris Rock as comedians.

In the sequence from line 95 to 243 the Fool has 24 jokes. Some are one-line zingers, some involve songs or more elaborate set-ups. But they all have the same point: to show Lear’s mistakes. The jokes fall into four subcategories:

1.) It was stupid to give up power and wealth.

2.) It was really counterproductive to have banished Cordelia.

3.) It was dumb to put yourself at the mercy of your evil daughters.

4.) It was all caused by the fact that you act without thinking.

The Fool walks in as Lear is giving Kent money, and the jester “hires him too,” by giving him his coxcomb, implying that Kent will also be a fool. At line 101 he explains that by working for Lear, Kent is “taking one’s part that’s out of favor./ Nay, an [if] thou canst not smile as the wind sits,/ thou’lt catch cold shortly.” It’s a mistake to be seen with Lear, who is no longer in power; to survive you have to bend with the wind, that is kiss up to whoever the new power broker is. The Fool explains why Lear is out of power at line 104: “Why, this fellow has banished two on’s [of his] daughters,/ and done the third a blessing against his will.” This is a clever reversal of what we thought happened: Lear “banished” his two daughters, i.e. they won’t be seeing him much longer, once he gave them power, and he did Cordelia a “blessing” by sending her away. At line 107 the Fool makes an unusual request of Lear: “How now, Nuncle [‘uncle,” a term of endearment]? I would I had two coxcombs and two daughters.” He explains at line 110: “If I gave them all my living, I’d keep my coxcombs/ myself. There’s mine, beg another of thy daughters.” So he reminds Lear that the king has surrendered his means of supporting himself, and he suggests that Lear is like a fool by offering him the badge of his job. (It’s not the only time the Fool will remind Lear that it is the king who is mentally challenged.) The term “Nuncle” is one that the Fool will use throughout the play. I had a friend who played the Fool in a production at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival years ago. In creating a sense of his character Jim envisioned that the Fool was actually a deformed illegitimate child of Lear’s, whom Lear kept around the palace but whose relationship he kept hidden by saying he was the fool’s “uncle.”

Lear tolerates the Fool up to a point, but when he thinks his employee has gone too far he threatens him as at line 113: “Take heed, sirrah [base fellow] – the whip.” The Fool’s “jokes” are in actuality a form of therapy as the jester tries to use humor to make the king realize the mistakes he has made and what he must do to make up for his faults. The tragedy is that Lear never really “hears” the Fool’s message. Because the Fool is supposedly a fool, his wisdom mere nonsense, Lear never heeds his warnings. The Fool comments on Lear’s threats with another joke at line 114: “Truth’s a dog must to kennel; he must be/ whipped out, when Lady the Brach [Bitch] may stand by/ th’ fire and stink.” This is a wonderful little morality tale. There are two dogs, one a mangy mutt named “Truth” and the other a fancy poodle named “Lady.” One of the dogs pees in the fireplace, and the owner automatically assumes Truth is the culprit and whips him out of the house to the kennel, while it was Lady who was guilty. People don’t want to believe the truth. Lear calls the Fool a “pestilent gall,” an “irritation” to him. Nevertheless he laughs at the Fool’s jokes and plays along, as at line 120 when the Fool teaches his employer a speech. The nonsense rhymed verse (“How many words can I find to rhyme with ‘showest?’”) is designed to remind Lear about human excess and how we can avoid disaster by practicing self-restraint, something Lear didn’t do earlier. Kent comments that the doggerel poem doesn’t seem to mean anything, is “nothing” [131], to which the Fool quips, “Then ‘tis like the breath of an unfee’d lawyer/ -- you gave me nothing for’t.”

We are back with the motif of “nothing,” and the Fool quickly uses it to tweak Lear. He asks at line 133, “Can you make no use/ of nothing, Nuncle?” to which Lear answers, “Why, no, boy. Nothing can be made out of nothing.” We have an echo here of Lear’s line to Cordelia back in the first scene: “Nothing will come of nothing.” The Fool turns to Kent and quips, “Pirthee, tell him , so much the/ rent of his land comes to; he will not believe a Fool.” Lear is seeing first hand how he has created “nothing” by his actions. Lear’s comment at line 140 is “A bitter Fool.” Remember the two categories of fools? The Fool quickly picks up the challenge and asks at line 141 if Lear knows the difference between a sweet and bitter fool. He suggests a little demonstration of the difference and asks that Lear stand in for the person who advised him to give away his lands. The Fool concludes in a little nonsense verse at lines 144 – 151,

The sweet and bitter fool

Will presently appear,

The one in motely here [the Fool],

The other [bitter fool] found out there [pointing to Lear].

This comic moment is too obvious for even Lear to ignore and he asks, “Dost thou call me fool, boy?” to which the Fool responds, “All thy other titles thou has given away; that/ thou wast born with.” It’s an echo of Regan saying back at the end of the first scene, “He hath ever but slenderly known himself.” Kent, at line 155, reinforces the Fool’s message: “This is not altogether fool, my lord.” He too is working toward Lear’s redemption.

The Fool follows up at line 156 on Kent’s remark about his message not being entirely foolish:

No, faith, lords and great men will not let me [be a fool by myself].

If I had a monopoly out, they would have part

on’t. And ladies too, they will not let me have all

the fool to myself; they’ll be snatching.

The Fool here mockingly complains about unfair competition. The reference to “monopoly” reminds us that English monarchs, especially James I, controlled the economy and rewarded their favorites by allowing them exclusive control over a particular market. The Fool says the supposed superior people horn in on his business by saying or doing foolish things. The additional remark about the ladies is actually a bawdy statement saying that they won’t leave him alone but are always “snatching “ at his “fool” or sexual organ. This is one of the few jokes the Fool makes that is not directed at Lear, but it is an indirect indictment of all the upper classes.

At line 160 the Fool starts a new comic riff by offering Lear two crowns in exchange for an egg. When Lear asks what two crowns they will be, the Fool explains,

Why, after I have cut the egg i’ th’ middle,

and eat up the meat, the two crowns of the egg.

When thou clovest thy crown i’ th’ middle and

gav’st away both parts, thou bor’st thine ass on

thy back o’er the dirt. Thou hadst little wit in thy

bald crown [head] when thou gav’st thy golden one away.

If I speak like myself in this, let him be whipped

that first finds it so.

The Fool’s humor here is directed at the symbolic division of the crown back in the first scene. First the Fool mocks that division as an empty gesture which would result in useless eggshells. Then he refers directly to Lear’s act and compares it to an equally foolish act – carrying a donkey on his back – as a disruption of the natural order. Finally the Fool falls back into a traditional defense against slanders that professional jesters often used: if I say something offensive, the fault lies with the person who perceives it, not with me because I’m so dim-witted I don’t know what I’m saying. He ends at line 170 singing still one more nonsense song.

At line 174 Lear asks the Fool when he started singing so much. The Fool’s answer introduces another attack on Lear’s self-inflicted relationship woes, but this time from a different perspective:

I have used it [singing], Nuncle, e’er since thou mad’st

thy daughters thy mothers; for when thou gav’st

them the rod, and put’st down thine own breeches,

[singing] Then they for sudden joy did weep

And I for sorrow sung,

That such a king should play bo-peep [like a blindfolded child]

And go the fools among.

Prithee, Nuncle, keep a schoolmaster that can teach

thy Fool to lie. I would fain learn to lie.

Here we get another disruption of natural order. Giving his two daughters power and control was like making them Lear’s mother. He should not be surprised when they use the “rod” of punishment on him. The image of Lear lowering his pants to be whipped leads the Fool to another comic quatrain, but one has the sense that the Fool feels bad about the extent to which Lear has disgraced himself. In any event the Fool asks for help in learning how to lie. It is as if it has become too painful for him to keep reminding Lear of his failings. All Lear hears is that the Fool wants to avoid telling the truth, and he uses his same blunt warning of punishment he did before: “And [if] you lie, sirrah, we’ll have you whipped.”

The Fool points out the dilemma into which Lear has placed him at line 186:

I marvel what kin thou and thy daughters are.

They’ll have me whipped for speaking true; thou’lt

have me whipped for lying; and sometimes I am

whipped for holding my peace. I had rather be any

kind o’ thing than a Fool, and yet I would not be

thee, Nuncle; thou hast pared [trimmed] thy wits o’ both sides

and left nothing i’ th’ middle. Here comes one o’

the parings.

The conflict between Lear and his daughters have left the Fool no room to maneuver; he will offend one side or the other. And sometimes he is whipped for “holding his peace,” i.e. not saying anything but also possibly “holding his piece,” i.e. masturbating. The Fool says with great feeling that he would rather be any other kind of a person than a fool, but he would not want to be Lear. He returns to the image of Lear dividing his crown, but now he says Lear has cut away both sides of is brain and left nothing in the middle. We are back to the “nothing” motif. As Goneril enters Fool calls her “one of the parings.”

When Lear asks Goneril why she is frowning so much in recent days, the Fool at line 197 points out the significance of the question:

Thou wast a pretty fellow when thou hadst no

need to care for her frowning. Now thou art an O

without a figure [a digit giving value to a zero]. I am better than thou art now:

I am a Fool, thou art nothing.

Lear didn’t need to worry about other people’s feelings for all the years he was king; they had to adjust to his emotional state, not the other way around. Now he has to worry about what his daughter is feeling because she has the power. The Fool’s comparison of Lear to a zero without any other digit to give it value is very imaginative. Again he winds up reminding Lear of his new place in society at the same time he recalls for us the confrontation with Cordelia with references to “nothing.”

Goneril now has a long speech, from line 206 to 219. In it she makes a perfectly reasonable case for curtailing Lear’s retinue, whose behavior she calls into question. She begins the “all-licensed Fool,” that is the fool is allowed to do or say anything without restraint. Next she includes the 100 knights which she calls an “insolent retinue” who start fights. She says she has told Lear about these problems, but she now realizes that her father protects and allows these misbehaviors. At line 215 she warns him indirectly that his actions “Would not ‘scape censure, nor the redresses [countermeasures] sleep” [fail to be taken]. Such corrections might do Lear “some offense” but they would be absolutely necessary to remedy the situation. What is important in this speech is that Goneril tries to make a solid case for taking charge of her father. But even more important is the unmistakable threat that lies behind the “reasonable” language.

At line 220 the Fool now interprets the message behind Goneril’s “reasonable” words:

For you know, Nuncle,

The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long,

That it had it head bit off by it young.

So out went the candle, and we were left darkling [in the dark].

The Fool cuts through Goneril’s courtly speech and reduces its indirect meaning to a blunt, cautionary message. The folklore of Shakespeare’s day held that the cuckoo bird would lay its eggs in other birds’ nests. Then the unsuspecting foster parents would hatch the egg. The young cuckoo was much larger and more aggressive than the young of the sparrows that lived in the hedges, and it would quickly crowd its foster siblings out of the nest and demand all the food the parents would bring. The final indignity was that the large, hungry cuckoo chick would bite off the heads of its adoptive parents. This habit of the cuckoo foisting its off-springs onto strangers is one of the reasons that cuckoldry (sexual betrayal of a man by his wife) was associated with the cuckoo. The unsuspecting cuckold would raise another’s child. The Fool envisions this final assault from the cuckoo as if he and Lear were the parents suddenly swallowed by a hungry chick and left in the dark.

Lear doesn’t hear all the indirect language and hidden threats of Goneril’s speech. All he hears is that someone is opposing him. That is enough to call into question Lear’s identity and all his relationships. If his daughter dares to tell him she doesn’t approve of his actions, he does not know who she is at line 224, “Are you our daughter?” This is a graphic example of how much Lear’s identity is tied to people treating him in a certain way. (Notice that he asks the question using the royal “we,” as if it were a public inquiry.) Goneril asks him to remember who he is in a mild speech from line 225 – 229. The Fool once again offers a homely translation of her courtly language at line 230: “May not an ass know when the cart draws/ the horse?” As with the earlier reference to Lear bearing his ass on his back over the dirt, so here we see the disruption of the normal order. Goneril may sound reasonable, but she is seeking a radical change in her relationship with her father. At line 232 Lear again questions his own identity because his daughter seeks to oppose his will:

Does any here know me? This is not Lear.

Does Lear walk thus? Speak thus? Where are his eyes?

Either his notion [thought] weakens, or his discernings [understanding]

Are lethargied [weakened] -- Ha! Waking? ‘Tis not so.

Who is it that can tell me who I am?

Lear’s outburst here is done with heavy sarcasm. The six rhetorical questions are not asked to be answered. He is indirectly emphasizing his daughter’s outrageous behavior by showing how it has called into question his own identity. He even plays out the idea that he may be asleep by testing to see if he is awake. The passage again shows how Lear’s identity is linked to how others see him. Despite the rhetorical nature of the questions, the Fool offers an answer at line 237 to the question “Who am I”: “Lear’s shadow.” This is a very perceptive answer because Lear really has become a shadow of his former self through his own efforts. Lear acknowledges the truth of the statement, but not because of his own failings. At line 238 he says, “I would fain learn that; for, by the marks of sovereignty [symbols of my status as king and father],/ knowledge, and reason, I should be false/ persuaded I had daughters.” Lear misses entirely the suggestion that he has brought this situation on himself; he only sees that his daughters are ignoring who he is and what they owe him. The Fool adds another remark that offers a disruption of normal order at line 241: “[Daughters] Which they will make an obedient father.” In a very real sense this is the goal of Goneril’s efforts to disrupt her father’s way of life. Lear is still thinking of his own “zinger” that he thought he had daughters, and he asks Goneril at line 242, “Your name, fair gentlewoman?” This is clearly another piece of heavy-handed sarcasm. He doesn’t really ask the question to be answered but to indirectly make the point that his daughter has displeased him. One of the reasons Lear’s use of sarcasm is so obvious is because he is not very good at it. He hasn’t had to use sarcasm much in the past. Sarcasm is an indirect form of communications, used by people who cannot openly state their message. People who have real power do not need to hide their meaning or imply their feelings. Sarcasm is the weapon of the weak, and :Lear hasn’t needed to worry about being direct up to this point. Now he cannot exert power the way he used to. It’s a lot like Lear’s having to be told when he was insulted.

Goneril once again responds to her father’s provocation by giving an answer which sounds reasonable. The language she uses in her response from line 243 to 258 is, in comparison to Lear and the Fool’s insulting comments, courtly and moderate. It is courtly because it is in verse, compared to the prose Lear and the Fool have been using. It is courtly because the sentences are longer. For example the sentence that begins at line 247 contains 29 words; in Lear’s passage at line 230 the longest sentence is nine words. The syntax or grammatical structure of the sentence is much more convoluted. For example the sentence that begins at line 253: “Be then desired/ By her, that else will take the thing she begs,/ A little to disquantity your train.” Goneril is asking Lear to get rid of some of his 100 knights, but does so in language which obscures the fact that she is doing the asking. Furthermore, the key verb “disquantity” doesn’t appear until almost the end of the sentence. By way of contrast look at the simple sentence in the Fool’s speech at line 200: “I am a Fool; thou art nothing.” Working with the convoluted syntax to obscure the meaning somewhat is the formal vocabulary. Look at the description of the 100 knights at line 248: “Men so disordered, so deboshed and bold.” The words roll off the tongue and have an alliterative charm (the repeated “d” sounds) but they really don’t tell us why Goneril condemns the knights. Compare that to the very clear choice of words in the Fool’s little homey explanation at line 221: “The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long/ That it had it head bit off by it young.” These qualities of Goneril’s courtly speech all tend to soften the message and heighten the contrast with Lear and the Fool by making the message more indirect. But Goneril is quite clear about her intention. She wants to destroy her father, and she knows him well enough to know that he bases his identity on how others treat him. That’s why the 100 knights are so important to him. They really don’t serve any useful function except to remind him that he was once a very important man. Therefore, if she can strip his knights from him, she can destroy his sense of self. That’s the subtle threat behind Goneril’s “reasonable” words.

King Lear reacts to this threat to his identity as we might expect. At line 258 he explodes:

Darkness and devils!

Saddle my horses; call my train [knights] together.

Degenerate bastard, I’ll not trouble thee:

Yet have I left a daughter.

An observer might fault Lear for escalating verbal violence. Certainly calling your own daughter “degenerate bastard” is a bit strong. And rather than talking out their differences, which Dr. Phil might advise, Lear is out the door, convinced that his sole remaining daughter, Regan, will be as outraged as he is. As is customary in family fights like this, the clueless husband enters in the middle of the argument with no idea what is happening. Albany enters at line 264 and Lear demands, “O. sir, are you come?/ Is it your will? Speak, sir.” Are you a party to your wife’s deliberate insult of her king and father? Without giving him a chance to answer, Lear turns his wrath back on his daughter at line 266: “Ingratitude! Thou marble-hearted fiend,/ More hideous when thou show’st thee in a child/ Than the sea-monster.” For Lear the ultimate sin is a child who is not grateful and appropriately obedient after having been given half the kingdom. All poor Albany can do is urge Lear to be patient, but it’s too late. The old man defends his 100 knights from Goneril’s charges. From line 270 to 273 he uses the same courtly language his daughter had previously to assert that the knights are honorable, respectful and well-behaved. Some productions try to show the knights in one extreme or another. One version had the knights all about Lear’s age, so they just sat around and slept a lot. In another production they rode their horses into the dining hall and engaged in food fights. The fact is that how the knights behave is immaterial. Goneril is determined to get rid of them, regardless of the truth of the situation. At line 269 Lear calls his daughter a particularly choice name – “Detested kite!” A kite is a bird which eats carrion, especially dead bodies left hanging up as a public warning. They were like the turkey vultures of Shakespeare’s age, and so his calling Goneril that kind of bird is appropriate; she is feasting on her own father. At line 273 King Lear expresses regret for the first time for what he did to Cordelia; certainly her “sin” seems far less serious when compared to Goneril’s open hostility:

O most small fault,

How ugly didst thou in Cordelia show!’

Which, like an engine [war machine, e.g. a catapult] wrenched my frame of nature

From the fixed place [center of my affections]; drew from my heart all love,

And added to the gall [bitterness]. O Lear, Lear, Lear!

Beat at the gate that let thy folly in [striking his head]

And thy dear judgment out.

Lear’s approach to admitting his past mistakes is interesting. He doesn’t address Cordelia directly but instead talks about her “small fault,” which he now begins to see in a different context. And now Lear gives the first indication of what lies before him: madness. Earlier in this scene Lear complained that when people treat him in some way which he does not like his identity is threatened. Now we see that if this “abuse” continues, the danger is to his sanity – graphically shown by beating his head.

At line 280 Albany says he has no idea what has upset Lear, an excuse the old man dismisses as he goes into his first great curse. As his daughters deliberately provoke him, Lear, who used to wield absolute power, is reduced to verbal curses. They are among the very best in all of the plays because Lear still has that inner power. Here is Lear’s curse of his daughter. Ask yourself if normal relations are ever again possible between these two people after these words have been spoken:

Hear, Nature, hear; dear Goddess, hear:

Suspend thy purpose if thou didst intend

To make this creature fruitful.

Into her womb convey sterility,

Dry up in her the organs of increase,

And from her derogate [degenerate] body never spring

A babe to honor her. If she must teem [give birth like an animal],

Create her child of spleen [ill nature], that it may live

And be a thwart disnatured [unnatural] torment to her.

Let it stamp wrinkles in her brow of youth,

With cadent [plenteous] tears fret [wear] channels in her cheeks,

Turn all her mother’s pains and benefits

To laughter and contempt, that she may feel

How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is

To have a thankless child.

The speech is a direct echo of Edmund speech calling upon his version of Nature back in the opening lines of Act I, scene 2. Of course, Lear’s Nature is very different from Edmund’s kind of amoral force that looks out for bastards. Lear’s Nature clearly punishes wayward children. More importantly this curse really crosses the line of what can be tolerated. For one thing Lear deliberately uses words like “teem” to make Goneril sound like a sow delivering a litter of piglets. For another the language is really violent and abusive. In one production of King Lear Goneril absorbs this curse as if she was being punched in the stomach. She wrapped her arms around her middle as if she were trying to protect her womb from his hateful words until she ended up lying on the floor in a fetal position. You knew from the expression on her face that she could never forgive her father, would never stop until she had exacted a full revenge. In Shakespeare’s day a powerful curse from your father was a very serious affair, especially if he prayed that you would be made sterile. I like to point out that Lear’s description of the “thwart disnatured” child of spleen is a perfect explanation of a teenager. Seriously, Lear’s anger here leads him beyond the pale; he can never hope to have a normal relationship with his daughter again because of her sin of ingratitude. (“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is/ To have a thankless child” was my mother’s favorite curse when I was a teenager.)

Lear storms out and at line 297 Albany asks what set this explosion off. His wife tells him, in effect, to butt out: “Never afflict yourself to know the cause.” Goneril consistently treats her husband with disdain throughout the play; it’s not a healthy marriage. Lear comes back in after only four lines, even more angry than before. Here is what has set him off. In her previous speeches in this scene Goneril had presented herself as a rational adult trying to resolve a problem mutually with her father. She had asked him to “disquantity his train a little” without specifying how many knights she wanted him to get rid of. But when he goes offstage he learns that, behind the reasonable speech, Goneril has already acted and order 50 of the knights out of the castle within a fortnight (two weeks). Her mild words mask the iron fist of someone who is determined to exercise power. Hence Lear’s explosion at line 301: “What, fifty of my followers at a clap [all at once]?/ Within a fortnight?” By her action Goneril reveals her true self to her father and sets the stage for the rest of Lear’s emotional destruction. Albany still hasn’t a clue, but Lear focuses only on his daughter and levels his second great curse at line 302:

Life and death, I am ashamed

That thou hast power to shake my manhood thus!

That these hot tears, which break from me perforce [without control],

Should make thee worth them. Blasts and fogs upon thee!

Th’ untented woundings [injuries too deep to be cleaned] of a father’s curse

Pierce every sense about thee! Old fond [foolish] eyes,

Beweep this cause again, I’ll pluck ye out

And cast you, with the waters that you loose,

To temper clay.

Lear’s first concern here is that Goneril has so enraged him, he is crying. For a man like Lear tears are a sign of weakness, a loss of manhood. He is even angrier that it is Goneril who has made him weep and therefore must feel some triumph over him. He calls down “blasts”, or winds, and “fogs” upon her. These were thought the primary ways in which infection spread to humans. He again invokes the power of a father’s curse upon a daughter, a curse so deep that it cannot be treated. Finally, he blames his eyes for crying and threatens, if they do not stop producing tears, to put out his own eyeballs and use them and his tears to mix with clay and make it more malleable. Lear has set up an impossible dilemma for himself: he does not want to weep and he does not want to go mad, and yet the emotional pressure he feels becomes intolerable. Lear leaves with two threats to Goneril. First, when Regan hears how her sister has treated him, “with her nails/ She’ll flay thy wolvish visage [face like a wolf, considered a cruel animal].”

Second, Lear threatens to “resume the shape [what he was before he gave up power]which thou dost think/ I have cast off for ever”[line 316]. He can only conceive of opposing his daughter by returning to his old dictatorial ways. Lear storms out again.

When Albany once again tries to talk about what just happened, Goneril shuts him up again at line 320 :”Pray you, content. What, Oswald, ho!” What she does here is to tell him to forget about his concerns and turns away to talk with Oswald, her servant. This behavior is terribly insulting to a powerful noble like Albany. After she chases off the Fool, who runs after Lear singing a little nonsense song that insults Goneril, she manufactures a justification for her actions after the fact. From line 329 to 334, Goneril now decides that it would be dangerous to public safety to allow Lear to have his knights. He cannot control the excesses of their behavior, she sarcastically declares. She sends Oswald off to alert Regan about what has happened, urging him to add more reasons for her actions. She now explains to Albany why she pays no attention to his concerns at line 347:

No, no, my lord,

This milky gentleness and course of yours {your habit of reacting mildly],

Though I condemn not, yet under pardon [excuse me for saying],

You are much more attasked [blamed] for want of wisdom

Than praised for harmful mildness.

In other words, people know you’re a wuss and they make allowances for it. The scene ends with Albany backing down, saying, “Well, well, th’ event.” Let’s see how things turn out.

Act I, scene 5

This short scene takes place outside Goneril’s castle as Lear waits for his horses to be brought so he can make his dramatic exit. Except for a couple of short passages of instruction to Kent, the entire scene consists of jokes between the Fool and Lear. Yet, it is one of the most poignant scenes in the play. How has Lear’s state of mind changed from the previous scene? How has the Fool’s humor changed from the previous scene?

[Act I, scene 5]

The Fool’s humor takes the form of eight jokes here. These are shorter, less elaborate than the jokes in the preceding scene, and come in a rapid-fire fashion. The subject matter for most of them continues to be Lear’s folly, but there are a couple that seem to have the sole function of distracting Lear from his growing despair.

The first three jokes taunt Lear for his past mistakes and future misjudgments. At line 8 the Fool asks an unusual question: “If a man’s brains were in’s heels, were’t not in/ danger of kibes?” “Kibes” are chilblains, a common foot ailment in those days. The Fool’s punch line at 11 is “Thy wit shall not go slipshod”: you will never have to wear slippers on your brains because you have none. Lear gives a forced laugh. At line 14 the Fool now warns Lear not to get his expectations up about Regan’s treatment: “Shall see thy other daughter [Regan] will use thee/ kindly, for though she’s as like this [Goneril] as a crab’s/ like an apple, yet I can tell what I can tell.” Regan may treat you as you want, i.e. “kindly,” or she may treat you after her kind or as her nature dictates, which is not so nice. The punch line at 18 makes this play on words clear: “She [Regan] will taste as like this [Goneril] as a crab to a crab.” Back when I was a boy there were plenty of crabapple trees in neighbors’ yards, and everyone knew what that kind of crab tasted like – incredibly sour. Regan will make Lear wish he had not tasted her kindness. The third joke asks Lear if he knows why a man’s nose stands in the middle of his face: the answer at line 22, “Why, to keep one’s eyes on either side’s nose,/ that what a man cannot smell out, he may spy into.” In other words be more careful about accepting people at their word.

At line 24 Lear’s response at first seems nonsensical: “I did her wrong.” Is he having second thoughts about his fight with Goneril? No, he is now terribly sorry for the way he treated Cordelia and acknowledges that he was at fault. It’s sad that it has taken so much turmoil to show Lear the error of his actions. The Fool quickly interjects a new question, almost as if to take Lear’s mind off the regret he is feeling. “Canst tell how an oyster makes his shell [line 26]?” When Lear confesses he doesn’t know, the Fool quips “Nor I neither; but I can tell why a snail has a home.” His answer at line 31, “Why, to put ‘s head in; not to give it away to/ his daughters, and leave his horns without a case.” “Horns” here refer to the snail’s horns but also the mythical horns of a cuckold, a man who has been sexually betrayed by his wife. Such a man was a laughing stock in the society of Shakespeare’s day; so the Fool is casting aspersions upon Lear’s abilities. At line 33 Lear once more reveals that he is very distracted. He’s not listening to the Fool but thinking about what his oldest daughter has done to him: “I will forget my nature [fatherly feelings]. So kind a father!” The Fool again offers a quick joke to take Lear’s mind off his dilemma: “The reason why/ the seven stars [the Pleiades] are no moe [more] than seven is a pretty reason.” And for once Lear seems to have heard the Fool’s question, because he answers, “Because they are not eight.”

The Fool congratulates Lear on his answer and tells him he would make a good Fool. But Lear at line 40 is back in his dark mood: “To take ‘t again perforce [by force]. Monster ingratitude!” Lear envisions exacting some terrible revenge upon his daughter, beginning with taking back his power. The Fool tries to bring Lear back to the present moment by telling him at line 41, “If thou wert my Fool, Nuncle, I’d have thee/ beaten for being old before thy time.” This seems to catch Lear’s attention, and he asks why. The Fool explains, “Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise.” This is a very powerful indictment of Lear and at the same time a poignant reminder of his advanced age. Lear at line 46 has another premonition of his coming madness: “O, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven!/ Keep me in temper [sanity]; I would not be mad!”

The scene ends with the Fool addressing the audience with a warning at line 51: “She that’s a maid now, and laughs at my departure,/ Shall not be a maid long, unless things be cut shorter.” This rhymed couplet alerts the audience that the scene will now shift to another location. More importantly the Fool is warning those audience members who are only focused on the jokes and dismiss Lear’s suffering that they are missing the point. If such short-sighted persons were virgins, they would not maintain their chastity for very long, unless men’s “things” were too short to do the job. It’s a bawdy comment in questionable taste, but it does emphasize the fact that King Lear is embarking on a terrible journey.

Act II, Scene 1

In the preceding scene Lear was setting out to go to Regan and Cornwall’s castle.

The entire second act takes place at Gloucester’s castle. In this scene Edmund executes his plan to strip Edgar of his inheritance, if not his life. Edmund is at his most creative in this scene, simultaneously manipulating both his brother and his father. No sooner has he gotten what he wanted from his father than Edmund moves up the ladder of success, attaching himself to Regan and Cornwall as powerful people who can help him get ahead. [Act II, scene 1]

Edmund meets a messenger, Curan, who brings word that Regan and Cornwall will soon arrive. At line 11 he asks Edmund if he has heard of impending warfare between Albany and Cornwall. This is one of several reminders that the kingdom is not a peaceful place and that Lear’s efforts to prevent civil war by dividing the country did not work. Edmund immediately incorporates this news into his plot. At line 22 he calls Edgar out of hiding and in an apparent panic tells him,

My father watches. O, sir, fly this place.

Intelligence is given where you are hid [you’ve been discovered].

You have now the good advantage of the night.

Have you not spoken ‘gainst the Duke of Cornwall?

He’s coming hither, now i’ th’ night, i’ th’ haste [in a hurry],

And Regan with him. Have you nothing said

Upon his party ‘gainst the Duke of Albany [opposing his conflict with Albany]?

Advise yourself.

Edmund here uses two things he knows are true – Cornwall’s arrival and the growing hostility with Albany – to manufacture an additional threat to Edgar’s safety. It doesn’t make any difference if Edgar is innocent of this new charge; he may be seen as a potential enemy of Cornwall whose arrival now forces him to act quickly. At line 30 Edmund begins a desperate charade by announcing Gloucester’s approach:

I hear my father coming. Pardon me:

In cunning [pretense] I must draw my sword upon you.

Draw, seem to defend yourself; now quit you well [appear to fight me].

Yield! Come before my father! Light ho! Here!

Fly, brother. Torches, torches! – So farewell.

Edmund here operates on three different levels at once. He apologizes for drawing his sword against his brother, which gives an additional urgency to the action. It convinces Edgar that Edmund is willing to protect him. At line 33 he cries out “Yield” and calls for torches (Remember this is happening at night!) all for the benefit of his father to convince him that he is trying to stop Edgar. And, of course, he has already told us how he is fooling both his father and brother. The rapidity with which everything happens disorients Edgar and makes him act without thinking. At line 35 Edmund cuts his arms to draw blood and “beget opinion,” create a favorable opinion.

When Gloucester arrives with the torches at line 39, he asks where Edgar is. Edmund quickly reinforces that “opinion” he wanted to create: “Here stood he in the dark, his sharp sword out,/ Mumbling of wicked charms, conjuring the moon/ To stand auspicious mistress.” The image he creates of the “evil” Edgar is like something out of Macbeth: mumbling wicked charms and calling on the spirit of the night. Of course, the idea of “conjuring” a higher power to “stand auspicious mistress” sounds suspiciously like what Edmund himself did back in the opening lines of Act I, scene 2, when he prayed to Nature. This is what Gloucester wants to hear, that his son is unnatural and possessed by demonic powers. Gloucester asks a second time at line 42 where Edgar has gone and has to repeat the question again at line 43 before Edmund finally answers him, giving Edgar a chance to escape. (It’s important that Edgar get away at this juncture so that Edmund can further poison Gloucester’s mind.)

Edmund continues his creative fiction at line 46, telling his father what Edgar tried to persuade him to do:

Persuade me to the murder of your lordship;

But that I told him the revenging gods

‘Gainst parricides did all the thunder bend;

Spoke with how manifold and strong a bond

The child was bound to th’ father.

This is just what Gloucester wants to hear from a dutiful son. Edmund reminds his father of his courageous action in stopping his wicked brother’s sword at a physical cost. Gloucester has heard enough and orders that Edgar be found and “dispatched” – killed outright. He offers a reward to the person who does the deed. Edmund now covers his tracks in an ingenious way, just in case Edgar gets a chance to deny his crime. At line 66 he tells his father:

When I dissuaded him from his intent,

And found him pight [committed] to do it, with curst speech

I threatened to discover [reveal] him. He replied,

“Thou unpossessing [impoverished] bastard, dost thou think,

If I would stand against thee, would the reposal [placing]

Of any trust, virtue, or worth in thee

Make thy words faithed [believed]? No. What I should deny –

As this I would, ay, though thou didst produce

My very character [handwriting] – I’d turn it all

To thy suggestion, plot, and damned practice.

So if Edgar were ever to get to speak to his father and deny the charges against him, Edmund has effectively poisoned the well by saying he would say these things. Edmund even plays up the discrimination against him because he is a bastard. Gloucester falls for the performance completely. At line 80 he angrily denies that Edgar is his son. At line 85 he gives Edmund the news he has wanted to hear: “and of my land,/ Loyal and natural boy, I’ll work the means/ To make thee capable [of inheriting]. Edmund’s rise to the top has been swift indeed.

Cornwall and Regan and their attendants arrive. A word of explanation about what has brought them to Gloucester’s. When Kent and Oswald both delivered messages to Regan at her home, and she was alerted to the imminent arrival of her father, she and Cornwall decided to leave their home immediately and go off to visit Gloucester. They will tell the King’s old advisor that they need to consult with him at line 124 following, but it becomes clear that they have only come so as to avoid having to accommodate Lear in their home. They are shocked by the news that Gloucester’s son has apparently tried to murder him, but the couple has a political agenda, which Regan reveals at line 93: “What, did my father’s godson seek your life?/ He whom my father named your Edgar?” It seems a strange way to identify the suspect, by his relationship with Regan’s father. The purpose of these rhetorical questions becomes clearer at line 96: “Was he not companion with the riotous knights/ That tended upon my father?” In keeping with Goneril’s plan that all evil comes from their father and his attendants, Regan suggests by her questions that if Edgar has been corrupted it must have been because he hung out with those knights, or even that he was named by and associated with Lear himself. It is a real stretch to argue that Edgar is a murderer because he was Lear’s godson, but the girls don’t need to make a cogent argument; they just have to create a suspicion.

Poor Gloucester doesn’t understand Regan’s questions, but Edmund sees immediately what Regan is after. At line 99 he tells her what she wants to hear: “Yes, madam, he was of that consort [hung out with the knights]” so she can proclaim, “No marvel then, though he were ill affected [disposed to evil]./ ‘Tis they that put him on the old man’s death.” Further, Regan explains, her sister has warned her of the danger posed by the knights, so that she has chosen not to be home when they come to visit.

Edmund’s actions here are breathtaking in their swiftness. You can see him saying to himself. “Well, I’ve gotten everything I wanted from the old man 14 lines back. Time to move on and find a new corporate sponsor, someone who can help me get ahead.” Cornwall sees Edmund as a potentially useful guy to have around, someone who knows the score. He praises Edmund’s actions in exposing the plot, calls it at line 108, “A childlike office [something done by a good son],” and Gloucester shows his wounds. Cornwall adds his command that Edgar be killed on sight and at line 115 he extends to Gloucester’s illegitimate son a great honor:

Cornwall: For you, Edmund,

Whose virtue and obedience doth this instant

So much commend itself, you shall be ours.

Natures of such deep trust we shall much need.

You we first seize on.

Edmund: I shall serve you, sir.

Truly, however else.

This is ironic at several different levels. First, great lords and kings would often favor the sons of people who served them by bringing the young men to court and establishing them as wards. It was considered a mark of great favor, and Gloucester quickly thanks Cornwall for the honor. It is ironic that Edmund is being honored as a “good” son for having tricked his father and brother. It is doubly ironic that he is being so honored by Cornwall and Regan, the poster kids of elder abuse. It is triply ironic that Cornwall singles out the man who will take his place in his marriage bed after he dies. So Edmund’s line above about serving Cornwall “Truly, however else,” has a real strange ring to it in light of what is about to happen. Virtue by villains is rewarded by villains.

Act II, scene 2

Kent and Oswald, following Regan and Cornwall from their castle, arrive at Gloucester’s at the same time. Which of these messengers, one from the king and one from Goneril, has priority under normal circumstances? What provokes the confrontation between the two messengers? Why does Kent end up in the stocks, and what’s wrong with that? [Act II, scene 2]

This scene opens with Kent meeting Oswald in front of Gloucester’s castle and starting a fight with him. Kent offers little explanation for his hostility toward Goneril’s servant, although he does remind him at line 29 that he had beaten him after he had repeatedly insulted Lear. The full explanation for Kent’s behavior does not come to light until Act II, scene 4, line 26 where he explains to Lear that Oswald had arrived at Regan’s just after he had delivered the king’s message. Regan and Cornwall quickly packed up and fled their home, making it clear that they were displeased with Kent and his message. The king’s royal messenger deducted that it was the message from Goneril which Oswald brought that created the change in Regan and Cornwall’s attitude. By the way, a royal messenger was considered to be a direct emissary from the monarch and was to be treated with deference and honor, as if the king himself were there. Clearly Kent has not been afforded this treatment. No wonder he is angry when Oswald innocently asks where he can put his horses. When Oswald protests that he has no idea who Kent is or why he should be so hostile, Kent says at line 12 that he knows Oswald and proceeds to deliver one of the most scathing attacks in all of Shakespeare, not so much against Oswald as an individual but as a social type: When Oswald asks what Kent knows him for, he answers:

A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats,

a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited,

hundred-pound, filthy worsted-stocking knave, a

lily-livered, action-taking, whoreson, glass-gazing

superserviceable, finical rogue; a one-trunk-

inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in

way of good service, and art nothing but the

composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pander, and

the son and heir of a mongrel bitch; one whom I

will beat into clamorous whining if thou deniest the

least syllable of thy addition.

Don’t hold back, Kent! Tell us what you really think. Behind the colorful “dissing” of the speech, what Kent objects to is primarily Oswald pretending to be a gentleman. The real gentleman, a noble and former advisor to the king, disguised as a peasant, gives the run-down on a social type, the poser, the phony gentleman, who often appears in Shakespeare’s plays. Oswald is a “knave” and “rascal,” both of which denote lower-class behavior if not birth. He survives by eating the leftovers on the dishes he takes from the table, “broken meats.” He is at once “base,” lower-class with nothing admirable, while being “proud.” He has three suits to his name, the normal allotment of clothes given to a servant, and he has 100 pounds to his name, a bank balance that real gentlemen would sneer at; later he will insult Oswald’s inheritance as a gentleman as nothing more than a “one trunk.” Furthermore, as a servant he is given stockings to wear made of “worsted,” a really cheap, rough fabric in those days. Instead of exhibiting the valor of a true gentleman who protected his honor, Oswald is a coward, “lily-livered.” The liver was thought to be the organ of courage, and according to folklore a fearful person had no blood in his liver. Oswald is the kind of person who, if someone insults his honor, will bring a law-suit (“action-taking”) rather than fight a duel. Shakespeare knew the type well, having been charged in court with threatening someone in London.. No wonder Kent calls the type “whoreson,” the same thing Gloucester called Edmund. Oswald spends his time looking at himself in the mirror or “glass.” He is “superserviceable,” a wonderful word that means he will do whatever it takes to please his employer; in a couple of lines Kent amplifies on this idea saying Oswald would be like a bawd or pimp “in the way of good service.” Kent ends with a crescendo of insults and threats, including “the son and heir of a mongrel bitch,” my personal favorite.

If Oswald were the gentleman he pretends to be, his honor would be offended by this litany of abuse and he would demand satisfaction with his sword. In earlier days a gentleman was distinguished by his ability to carry and use a sword, licensed by his coat-of-arms. But when Kent reminds Oswald that he beat him before Lear and directly challenges him to draw his sword, the phony gentleman refuses, even when his manhood is attacked by being called a “cullionly barbermonger,” someone who spends his time in barbershops. Kent continues to demand that Oswald draw his sword, and when he refuses and cries for help, Kent beats him at line 43. Edmund responds first to Oswald’s cries and tries to separate the combatants. Kent calls him “goodman boy,” a term of contempt one would use with a peasant, and threatens him with his sword as well. Cornwall enters, orders the fighting to stop and asks Oswald what the matter is. When Oswald pleads that he is out of breath, Kent gets another zinger in at line 54: “No marvel, you have so bestirred your valor./ You cowardly rascal, nature disclaims in thee {renounces any part of you]. A/ tailor made thee.” You are not a real man but the creation of a clothes maker. When Cornwall asks about this last rather strange assertion, Kent explains at line 59 that it must have been a tailor: “A stonemason or a painter could/ not have made him so ill [badly], though they had been / but two years o’ th’ trade.”

Cornwall again asks Oswald what caused the quarrel, and at line 63 the fake gentleman begins by referring to Kent as “This ancient ruffian, sir, whose life I have/ spared at suit of [because of] his gray beard –“ Kent now delivers three great insults at line 65:

Thou whoreson zed [the least-used letter of the alphabet], thou unnecessary letter!

My lord, if you will give me leave, I will tread this

unbolted [unadulterated] villain into mortar and daub the walls of

a jakes [outhouse] with him. Spare my gray beard, you wagtail!

The reference to Oswald as the letter Z of society is pretty literary. Offering to use him to paint a jakes is wonderfully foul. And to call him a “wagtail” is very ingenious. A wagtail was a bird that bobbed up and down, suggesting a fawning, obsequious servant like Oswald. When Cornwall asks if Kent has no reverence, no sense of appropriate language and behavior before his social betters, he replies at line 72 that “anger hath a privilege.” He explains his anger, and now his language changes. Kent has spoken in prose throughout this scene, as befits the scurrilous nature of his insults; he switches to verse as he lays out the serious charges against Oswald as a social type:

That such a slave as this should wear a sword,

Who wears no honesty. Such smiling rogues as these,

Like rats, oft bite the holy cords [sacred bonds of marriage or childhood] atwain

Which are too intrince [intricate] t’ unloose; smooth every passion

That in the natures of their lords rebel,

Being oil to fire, snow to the colder moods;

Renege, affirm, and turn their halcyon beaks [the kingfisher’s beak]

With every gale and vary [change] of their masters,

Knowing naught, like dogs, but following.

Oswald is the kind of servant who brings out the worst in his master. Rather than helping the person he serves maintain a moral balance, the Oswald type encourages the excesses which ultimately will destroy both of them. Unfortunately for Kent he is sharing this insight with three of the most morally flawed people ever to rampage through the world, Edmund, Regan and Cornwall. Their reaction to Kent’s outburst is probably dismissal or incomprehension. Why wouldn’t you want a servant who did exactly what you told him to do and who mirrored your every mood? A dog makes a perfect servant.

Cornwall has assumed command of this situation and he demands that Kent explain why he has quarreled with Oswald. Realizing that he cannot hope to explain moral complexities to the ham-handed duke, Kent simply says, at line 92, “His countenance likes me not.” That is, I don’t like his looks. Cornwall won’t be put off and tries to catch Kent in a verbal trap: if you don’t like Oswald’s looks, “No more perchance does mine, nor his, nor hers {line 93],” to which Kent retorts at line 94,

Sir, ‘tis my occupation to be plain:

I have seen better faces in my time

Than stands on any shoulder that I see

Before me at this instant.

Well, Kent prided himself when he was Lear’s chief advisor with being direct and honest. And now that he has adopted a disguise as a royal messenger, he remains blunt. But he has insulted the wrong people, people who are not used to honesty and do not make allowances for it. Cornwall, trying to match wits with an apparent commoner, explains what he thinks is Kent’s game at line 97:

This is some fellow

Who, having been praised for bluntness, doth affect

A saucy roughness, and constrains the garb

Quite from his nature [using his honesty to hide his deceit]. He cannot flatter, he;

An honest mind and plain, he must speak truth

And [if] they will take it, so; if not, he’s plain.

These kind of knaves I know, which in this plainness

Harbor more craft [deceit] and more corrupter ends

Than twenty silly-ducking observants [obsequious servants]

That stretch their duties nicely [are overly eager in their service].

Cornwall fancies himself a cynical observer of human behavior, and he claims that Kent’s honesty and objection to Oswald’s values really masks a clever and deceptive manipulator. Kent’s plainness is just an act, and he calls him on it.

Kent’s response at line 107 at first seems very strange:

Sir, in good faith, in sincere verity,

Under th’ allowance [approval] of your great aspect [position],

Whose influence [like a planet], like the wreath of radiant fire

On flick’ring Phoebus’ front [face of the sun] –

Behind this apparent gobbledy guck, Kent is mocking the elaborate flattery of courtiers’ language. In effect he is saying, “If you don’t like me as a plain-spoken peasant, I’ll give you the kind of bullshit you’re obviously used to.” Cornwall is too slow to catch the sarcastic thrust and, confused, asks, what Kent means, so that the king’s messenger has to explain at line 111, shifting back to his plain prose after the fancy verse of the courtier,

To go out of my dialect [manner of speech], which you discommend

so much. I know, sir, I am no flatterer. He that [the person you described back at

line 103] beguiled you in a plain accent was a plain knave,

which, for my part, I will not be, though I should

win your displeasure [instead of the title “Your Grace”] to entreat me to ‘t.

Kent explains his reversion to the language of the court, even as he insults Cornwall, at least indirectly, as the kind of person who prefers flattery to honesty, as if he knew the difference.

Cornwall doesn’t want to play word games with Kent anymore, and now he turns for an explanation for the argument to Oswald who explains from line 117 – 126 that Lear had recently struck Oswald, unfairly, and that Kent tripped him from behind and took advantage of him to win the king’s approval, even though Oswald did not offer any resistance. Now, upon arriving at Gloucester’s gate at the same time, Kent is trying to win points again by attacking him. Apparently Cornwall shows approval for Oswald’s explanation because Kent now insults the duke again at line 126: “None of these rogues and cowards/ But Ajax is their fool.” Oswald is a rogue and a coward, and his “champion” (the fool who believes him) is Ajax, the bragging halfwit of the Greeks’ army in the Trojan War. Shakespeare had created a memorable characterization of Ajax in his recently written play Troilus and Cressida. The thing that Shakespeare and his audience loved about Ajax as a comic figure was that his name represented wonderful pun: “a jakes” was an outhouse or privy. Cornwall finally gets the insult.

His reaction is swift and unexpected. He orders that the stocks be brought in to punish Kent, “you stubborn [insulting] ancient knave, you reverent [elderly] braggart./ We’ll teach you.” (The insults about his age are probably more hurtful than the attacks on his behavior.) The stocks were a particularly unpleasant form of punishment for a man like Kent. You sat on a raised platform out in public with your feet locked in a heavy wooden device. Sitting in the stocks was no doubt uncomfortable, a lot like riding in coach on certain airlines, but its real purpose was public humiliation. Stocks were used for petty crimes like drunkenness or petty theft; they certainly weren’t used for older men, especially when they were royal messengers representing the king. It is a lot like that great episode of “The West Wing” when the president’s nominee for the Supreme Court is arrested and thrown in a drunk tank in a small town. Kent, suddenly very serious, objects at line 129:

Sir, I am too old to learn.

Call not your stocks for me, I serve the King,

On whose employment I was sent to you.

You shall do small respect , show too bold malice

Against the grace and person [the king’s position and his character] of my master,

Stocking his messenger.

Cornwall’s action is a deliberate insult to Lear, who will soon arrive, and Kent points this out.. Gloucester does as well at lines 142 – 150, emphasizing the socially inappropriate nature of the punishment. If Kent is out of line, it is up to Lear to discipline him.

Cornwall is not the kind of ruler who is used to changing his mind. He thought of the stocks, and by God, he will have them! At line 136 we have an exchange that is quite revealing about the relationship of Cornwall and Regan. Incensed by Kent’s attitude, Cornwall orders that he be placed in the stocks until noon. (We know this exchange is taking place in the morning from the first line of the scene.) Lovely Regan, “the Tiger Bitch,” as I like to call her, gets real enjoyment out of inflicting pain and humiliation on people who can’t fight back, so she chimes in “Till noon? Till night, my lord, and all night too.” She enjoys sadism; her husband enjoys giving her what she wants. It’s a match made in heaven. When Kent objects at line 138, “Why madam, if I were your father’s dog,/ You should not use me so.” Her reply: “ Sir, being his knave, I will.”

After they have made the decision, Regan and Cornwall look for a justification. At line 150 Regan defends their action as a way of satisfying Goneril whose messenger, Oswald, had been abused.

Gloucester is left alone with Kent and offers the following explanation at line 155: “I am sorry for thee, friend. ‘Tis the Duke’s pleasure,/ Whose disposition all the world well knows/ Will not be rubbed nor stopped. I’ll entreat for thee.” Gloucester has spent his life getting along with egomaniacs like Lear and Cornwall, and making excuses for their excesses comes easily for him. Kent tells him not to bother and says he can use the rest. Alone at line 163 Kent takes a very philosophical tack. He realizes that Lear will see in this gesture his own downturn of Fortune. Kent, in his wretched condition, takes the occasion to read a letter from Cordelia. As he says at line 168, “Nothing almost sees

Miracles/ But misery.” Only those who are in the worse condition can see the means of their salvation. Cordelia has learned of his disguise and will undoubtedly act to help her father. Even as we approach the absolute worse of Lear’s suffering Shakespeare wants us to know that help is on the way. That way the audience can maintain some sense of balance in what is about to happen. As Kent says in the final two lines, “Fortune, good night;/ Smile once more, turn thy wheel.” One of the oldest images in Western culture is of the goddess Fortune with her wheel which constantly turns, throwing those who were on top down and elevating those, like Kent in his stocks, who were at the bottom.

Act II, Scene 3

Edgar is a hunted man. He decides to disguise himself as a wandering lunatic, calling himself “Tom of Bedlam.” Why do you think Edgar chooses this as a disguise? How does Edgar evoke the “nothing” motif? [Act III, scene 3]

Edgar heard people shouting that he was a dangerous criminal and managed to hide in a hollow tree. He now makes a fateful decision about how he will escape the dragnet. For several hundred years before Shakespeare’s time and for some time after that, the economy of the English countryside underwent a profound change. England had historically been a country of small farmers: people who owned and worked a small plot of land in subsistence farming, and many others, like Shakespeare’s father, John, who worked someone else’s land as a tenant. In the later Middle Ages landowners in England discovered that they could make much more money raising sheep and selling wool. All they needed was land for pasture. And so land formerly used for farming was transformed for grazing sheep, and people who had farmed the land were evicted and became a class of permanent homeless wanderers. This dispossessed class of rural poor persisted generation after generation and became known as the sturdy beggars. Government officials worried about what to do with them and how to control them. Their concern resulted in a series of regulations called the Poor Laws. The main purpose of these laws was to keep the beggars from wandering and to make the community which had spawned them take responsibility for them. Local parishes, often called “tithings,” were supposed to provide shelter and food for the poor, but the homeless people had to stay where they were supposed to. If they were found outside their home parish, they could be charged with being a “vagrant” and whipped until they left.

One special subcategory of “sturdy beggar” was the insane person. There were few facilities for the care and treatment of madness during the Middle Ages, and when England during its Protestant Reformation around 1540 closed the religious houses, the monasteries and nunneries which had helped the insane, there was only one major treatment center left, the Hospital of Bethlehem in London. We can guess what it was like in this place when we realize that the word “bedlam” was created by shortening the name. A place of lunatic confusion! Patients treated here were often released to free up space for others. Such released madmen were given special licenses to allow them to beg for money to keep themselves alive. The prospect of running into a released schizophrenic was scary. What made it more frightening was what people believed the two causes of madness to be: people went insane because of an excess of emotional stress, as we see happening with King Lear; or they went crazy because they were possessed by demons. To make matters worse, madness by possession was thought to be contagious, so if you were around such insanity for too long, you could become insane yourself. “Bedlam beggars” were a frightening sight, and people who met them often paid handsomely to get them to go away. This form of extortion by fear was so effective there were many cases of regular beggars pretending to be released lunatics to make more money.

At line 9 Edgar describes how to look like a Bedlam beggar:

my face I’ll grime with filth,

Blanket my loins, elf [tangle] all my hairs in knots,

And with presented nakedness outface [endure]

The winds and persecutions of the sky.

At line 14 he explains how such people behave to heighten the effect of their appearance: “who, with roaring voices,/ Strike [stick] in their numbed and mortified bare arms/ Pins, wooden pricks [sharp sticks], nails, springs of rosemary.” At line 17 he describes how they operate on a terrified populace, mostly in the countryside:

And with this horrible object [their overall appearance], from low [small] farms,

Poor pelting [impoverished] villages, sheepcotes, and mills,

Sometimes with lunatic bans [curses], sometimes with prayers,

Enforce their charity [extort money in the form of donations].

People in Shakespeare’s time went to great lengths to avoid such creatures. No wonder Edgar chooses this disguise to escape detection! Throughout his charade Edgar will refer to himself in the third person as “Poor Tom” or by the names of demons who supposedly possess his spirit, as “Turleygod” at line 20. As Edgar says, evoking the motif of “nothing” once again at line 21, “That’s something yet: Edgar I nothing am,” or “ I have a chance at survival as a Bedlam beggar and I must now forget that I was ever Edgar.”

Act II, Scene 4

In this scene King Lear arrives at Gloucester’s castle and discovers Kent in the stocks. This deliberate insult to his authority sends him into a towering rage. He confronts Cornwall and Regan, and soon after Goneril arrives. Lear’s daughters systematically strip him of his sense of authority and therefore his identity. Lear has not learned how to compromise in this hostile new world, and filled with frustration and growing insanity, he finally rushes out into a terrible storm. His children lock the door on him. They will never see their father again.

In the opening sequence, lines 1 – 125, Lear discovers Kent in the stocks. The question of who is responsible for this outrage becomes an obsession for the old man. He alternates between demanding an explanation and making excuses for the actions of Regan and Cornwall. What has happened to Lear’s one hundred knights? Why do Kent and the Fool remain with the king? What signs point to Lear’s coming madness?

[Act II, scene 2, lines 1 – 125]

Even before he sees his messenger in the stocks, Lear realizes he has been insulted. At line 1 – 2 he finds it strange that Regan and Cornwall suddenly left their home, just before he arrived, and did not send Kent back with a message. At line 4 Kent greets Lear, and the king sees the insult immediately at line 6: “Mak’st thou this shame thy pastime?” Are you doing this deliberately to shame yourself? At line 11 he asks, “What’s he that hath so much thy place mistook/ To set thee here?” The Fool mocks the messenger’s situation in sexual terms at line 7:

Ha, ha, he wears cruel garters [unforgiving stockings]. Horses are tied

by the heads, dogs and bears by th’ neck, monkeys

by th’ loins, and men by th’ legs. When a man’s overlusty

at legs [a sexually promiscuous vagabond], then he wears wooden netherstocks.

Lear refuses to accept the fact that anyone could have deliberately done this to a royal messenger, but Kent insists that the act was done consciously and by Lear’s own daughter. At line 20 when the king refuses to believe it and swears by “Jupiter,” king of the gods, Kent counters with “By Juno [queen of the gods], I swear ay.” The act itself is something so outrageous, Lear has trouble conceiving it. Once again we are struck by how the old man has been protected from the vicissitudes of ordinary life where people get insulted everyday. At line 22 he explains the significance of the act:

They durst not do’t;

They could not, would not do’t. ‘Tis worse than murder

To do upon respect [the respect due a king] such violent outrage.

Resolve [tell] me with all modest [appropriate] haste which way

Thou mightst deserve or they impose this usage

Coming from us. [being a royal messenger]

At lines 26 – 44 Kent describes in full what happened. He delivered his message to Regan and Cornwall at their home, but before they had read what Lear had sent, they were interrupted by the arrival of Oswald from Goneril. Her message was given priority, and upon reading it, Regan and Cornwall immediately decided to leave. They ordered Kent to follow them for an answer, but they made their disapproval of Lear’s message clear by giving Kent dirty looks. Arriving at Gloucester’s, Kent once again encountered Oswald and, realizing the poisonous nature of his message, Kent challenged him to a fight. It is this which has incensed Cornwall and Regan to punish him.

The Fool sees the consequences of what has happened, and he tries to warn Lear at line 45: “Winter’s not gone yet, if wild geese fly that way.” In other words, “You are in for more cold and stormy weather if silly people like Oswald or even your daughter and son-in-law act like this.” He then sings a comic song which amplifies on what Lear can expect:

Fathers that wear rags [who are poor]

Do make their children blind [indifferent],

But fathers that bear bags [moneybags]

Shall see their children kind.

Fortune, that arrant whore.

Ne’er turns the key [lets in] to th’ poor.

But for all this, thou shalt have as many dolors [sorrows, with pun on money] for

thy daughters as thou canst tell [count or relate] in a year.

Your children have told you what you wanted to hear so they could get their hands on your wealth. Now they will cause you great pain.

At line 55 Lear has an unusual reaction to this obvious truth about his family relationships: “O, how this mother swells up toward my heart!/ Hysterica passio, down, thou climbing sorrow,/ Thy element’s below.” People at this time believed that extreme emotional upset in men was a pathological condition, and they associated it with women, calling it “the mother.” The technical term Lear uses here, “hysterica passio,” reminds us that emotions had been connected since the ancient Greeks with female sexuality. “Hysteria” and “hysterectomy” have the same root word. The major symptom of “the mother” was a choking sensation, which Lear believes will come from his overcharged heart and seize him. This is one more sign that Lear is headed for some kind of crisis.

Lear leaves to speak with Gloucester, and the first thing Kent asks the Fool at line 61 is why Lear has so few of his hundred knights with him. The Fool answers tauntingly, “And [if] thou hadst been set i’ h’ stocks for that/ question, thou’dst well deserve it.” Kent has dared to ask the question that is glaringly apparent: most of the knights have disappeared, and the coming fight over whether the king can keep his companions is largely academic. The knights themselves have chosen to leave Lear’s company. When Kent asks why at line 66, the Fool does a homey but brilliant analysis of power:

We’ll set thee to school to an ant [as your teacher], to teach thee

there’s no laboring i’ the’ winter [save up during the summer]. All that follow

their noses are led by their eyes but blind men,

and there’s not a nose among twenty but can smell

him that’s stinking [Lear’s fortunes are rotting]. Let go thy hand 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. When a wise man gives

thee better counsel [advice], give me mine again. I would

have none but knaves follow it since a Fool gives it.

‘

Lear is in decline, and the ambitious men who served him are abandoning him. Be careful to pick only those who are heading for success to follow so they can help your career. But as soon as he gives this advice the Fool announces that only “knaves,” those who lack moral scruples or loyalty, should follow it. The Fool reinforces this message with a song from line 77 – 84. The “smart” people will serve their masters only for form, what they can get out of a relationship. The “fools” are loyal to the bitter end, and the Fool vows to stay with Lear. He may be only a fool, but at least he is not a “knave.” Kent is in a similar situation; he has already demonstrated to us that he will stick with Lear regardless of the circumstances. At line 85 he asks, “Where learned you this, Fool?’ to which the Fool answers, “Not i’ th’ stocks, fool.” This is one of the better put-downs in the play.

Lear re-enters with Gloucester, frustrated by the refusal of Regan and Cornwall to leave their room to talk with him at line 87: “Deny to speak with me? They are sick, they are weary,/ They have traveled all the night? Mere fetches [excuses],” and he sends Gloucester back to get a better answer. Gloucester counters by making excuses for his new master, the Duke of Cornwall, at line 90:

My dear lord,

You know the fiery quality of the Duke,

How unremovable [unchangeable] and fixed he is

In his own course.

As we listen to Gloucester trying to justify Cornwall’s boorish behavior, we realize that Gloucester spent years doing the same kind of thing for Lear. He knows there is a new political order, but the old king does not. He explodes in anger at line 93: “Vengeance, plague, death, confusion!/ Fiery? What quality? Why, Gloucester, Gloucester,/ I’d speak with the Duke of Cornwall and his wife.” Notice how he repeats the word “fiery” which obviously bothered him when Gloucester used it. Wringing his hands, Gloucester tells Lear at line 96, “Well, my good lord, I have informed them so.” That’s all that Gloucester can do; it’s not like the old days when Lear’s command was absolute. Lear understands the change in that word “informed.” In the old days no one simply “informed” anyone of the king’s orders. Lear breaks into rage about the word at line 97: “Informed them? Dost thou understand me right?” What part of “command” do you not understand? At line 99 he expands on his anger:

The King would speak with Cornwall. The dear father

Would with his daughter speak, commands – tends service [I’m waiting].

Are they informed of this? My breath and blood!

Fiery? The fiery duke, tell the hot duke that –

And at that point, in the middle of a sentence, Lear suddenly understands what has changed. He is no longer in charge. He begins finding excuses for the way he has been treated at line 103:

No, but not yet. May be he is not well.

Infirmity doth still neglect all office

Whereto our health is bound. We are not ourselves

When nature, being oppressed, commands the mind

To suffer with the body. I’ll forbear.

This is probably the first time in his life the Lear has had to “forbear” or be patient. He accepts the convenient excuse which Gloucester has offered for the Cornwalls’ boorish behavior, as we all do when someone tells us they can’t do something we want because they are sick. But then at line 110 he looks at Kent in the stocks and that sets off his rage again. You can pretend someone is unintentionally rude, but you can’t ignore the deliberate insult of this gesture.

Death on my state [royal power]! Wherefore

Should he sit here? This act persuades me

That this remotion [remaining aloof] of the Duke and her

Is practice [trickery] only. Give me my servant forth [release him].

Go tell the Duke and’s wife I’d speak with them!

Now, presently! Bid them come forth and hear me,

Or at their chamber door I’ll beat the drum

Till it cry sleep to death [until sleep is destroyed].

The old Lear reasserts himself, and we are headed for a family confrontation. All Gloucester can do at line 118 is to whine ineffectually, “I would have all well betwixt you.” Throughout this play the good, decent people, when confronted by the raging anger, madness or evil of the principal characters, are unable to do anything to stop what is happening. We’ll see the same paralysis of good with Albany and Edgar.

At line 119 while he waits for Gloucester’s return Lear feels his emotions rising again, the reappearance of “the mother” of line 55: “O me, my heart, my rising heart! But down!” The Fool no longer needs to use his humor to remind Lear that he made a mistake. Now at line 120 he employs bad jokes to try and distract Lear from his impending emotional explosion. If you feel your heart rising,

Cry to it, Nuncle, as the cockney [ignorant resident of London] did to

the eels when she put ‘em i’ th’ paste alive. She

knapped [rapped] ‘em o’ th’ coxcombs with a stick and

cried, “Down, wantons, down!” ‘Twas her brother

that, in pure kindness to his horse, buttered his hay.

Throughout history certain groups have been made the butt of “dumb” jokes. Apparently in the early 1600’s the working class people who lived in East London were the popular target. You could substitute “blonde” and retell this joke about someone who didn’t know you had to kill the eels before you put them in a boiling sauce. When the creatures writhed and lifted up, the dumb girl thought they were male erections and hit them with a stick. And buttering hay doesn’t really do any favors for the horse. The humor may be raw, and it is a real stretch to go from Lear’s rising heart to eels like erections, but the Fool’s intention here is to try and help relieve the king’s emotional pressure.

In the last part of this scene Regan and Goneril combine to destroy Lear’s sanity. What is the major tactic for doing so? How does Lear facilitate his own destruction? What external event does Shakespeare use as a metaphor for Lear emotional breakdown?

[Act II, scene 4, lines 126 – 308]

Gloucester brings the Cornwalls to finally speak with Lear. After dodging her father earlier, Regan says at line 127 that she is glad to see him. Lear responds sarcastically that he is glad to hear that, since if she wasn’t, then he would suspect that her mother had been an adulteress and she wasn’t really his child. Without any further ado Kent is freed from the stocks, and at line 132 Lear launches directly into his self-pitying complaint about how badly Goneril has treated him:

Beloved Regan,

Thy sister’s naught [naughty, evil]. O Regan, she hath tied

Sharp-toothed unkindness, like a vulture, here. [Points to his heart]

I can scarce speak to thee. Thou’lt not believe

With how depraved a quality – O Regan!.

Lear is so intent on getting affirmation of how badly he has been treated, that he ignores the reality of his situation. The Fool had warned him back in I, 5, line 14 that Regan would be no better than Goneril; he has seen the evidence of the contempt in which he is held by the stocking of his servant; he has realized that the Cornwalls’ earlier refusal to see him was a deliberate rebuff. And yet now he expects Regan to comfort him and agree that he is “more sinned against than sinning.” The fancy term for Lear’s failure to see is called cognitive dissonance. It simply means that even when we know better, we keep making the same mistakes.

If Lear expected sympathy from his second daughter, he is quickly disabused of his fantasy. At line 137 Regan says, “I pray you, sir, take patience. I have hope/ You less know how to value her desert/ Than she to scant her duty,” which is just a fancy way of saying, “If you have a problem with my sister, it’s undoubtedly your fault, not hers.” She goes on to explain at line 141:

If, sir, perchance

She have restrained the riots of your followers,

‘Tis on such ground, and to such wholesome end,

As clears her from all blame.

What’s most remarkable about this reasonable-sounding explanation is that Lear had not mentioned anything about Goneril kicking out 50 of his knights; the two sisters have obviously been in contact. Lear misses the significance of this piece of information. Regan offers an explanation and solution at line 145:

O, sir, you are old.

Nature in you stands on the very verge

Of his confine [the end of your life]. You should be ruled, and led

By some discretion that discerns your state

Better than you yourself [you need elder care]. Therefore, I pray you

That to our sister you do make return,

Say you have wronged her.

“You are old. You need someone to run your life. Go back and stay with Goneril.” Naturally Lear rejects this simple solution. In the old days he would have ordered his daughter punished for even thinking such a thing. Now, stripped of power, Lear is reduced at line 152 to the verbal resistance most of us use when we aren’t happy, sarcasm:

Ask her forgiveness?

Do you but mark how this becomes the house [makes the royal family look].

“Dear daughter, I confess that I am old.

[Kneeling]

Age is unnecessary. On my knees I beg

That you’ll vouchsafe me raiment, bed, and food.”

Sarcasm, a form of irony where we say something but deliberately mean its opposite, is often used when people feel they have no direct power. Because they cannot stop what is happening, they voice their opposition indirectly. Lear doesn’t really want to go back and apologize for being old and beg for sustenance. He reinforces his sarcasm by kneeling. On Shakespeare’s stage to kneel implies that the kneeler is in an inferior social position to the person before whom he kneels, as one would be if he had to beg. Lear does this for dramatic effect, to highlight how incongruous it is for the king to have to lower himself to anyone. Despite the impact of an eighty-year-old king on his knees, Regan dismisses the gesture at line 156 as an “unsightly trick.”

Lear now falls into rage again and utters another one of his monumental curses at line 157 as he swears never to return to Goneril:

Never, Regan.

She hath abated me of half my train [knights],

Looked black upon me, struck me with he tongue,

Most serpentlike, upon the very heart.

All the stored vengeances of heaven fall

On her ungrateful top [hear]! Strike her young bones

You taking [infectious] airs, with lameness…..

You nimble lightnings, dart your blinding flames

Into her scornful eyes! Infect her beauty,

You fen-sucked [drawn from swamps] fogs, drawn by the pow’rful sun,

To fall and blister [afflict with welts] her pride.

In the first four lines he likens Goneril to a snake for depriving him of half his knights. The curse is quite specific as Lear calls down heavenly retribution upon his daughter’s head, her bones, her eyes and her beauty, which he equates with her pride. Notice how this heavenly vengeance takes the form of such natural phenomena as fog, lightening and “airs” or breezes. Regan had not witnessed the earlier curses of Goneril, such as “detested kite” or “dry up in her the organs of increase,” and she is struck by the vehemence of her father’s hatred. She also realizes at line 168 he will soon be saying the same thing to her: “O the blest gods!/ So will you wish on me when the rash mood is on.” In a long speech from line 169 to 180 Lear denies that he will ever curse Regan because she is tender-hearted and not harsh. She will never begrudge her father his pleasures or speak rudely to him or take away his knights. At line 179 he concludes, “Thy half o’ th’ kingdom hast thou not forgot,/ Wherein I thee endowed.” Regan’s cold-hearted response is not, “Thanks, dad” or “I’ll do what you want,” but rather, “Good sir, to th’ purpose,” as if to say, “What’s your point?”

Faced with uncertainty about Regan’s real feelings, Lear fastens onto the one tangible thing he has before him, the fact that his royal servant was stocked. At line 181 he demands to know who was responsible. With the arrival of Goneril (notice the sound of trumpets announcing that fact at this point) things are about to get even more confusing for the old king. So he holds on to this one question and asks for an answer over and over. How many times does he ask all together?

Goneril is preceded by her servant Oswald, whom Lear recognizes at line 184, saying, “This is a slave, whose easy borrowed pride [quality which he does not have himself and so takes from others]/ Dwells in the fickle grace [favor easily changed] of her he follows [i.e. Goneril].” Lear orders him out of the room, but Oswald ignores him, and so at line 187 the old king asks again who put his servant in the stocks, adding, “Regan, I have good hope/ Thou didst not know on’t.” It is, of course, a forlorn hope. Goneril herself enters at 188, Lear rages,

O heavens!

If you do love old men, if your sweet sway

Allow [approve of] obedience, if you yourselves are old,

Make it [this] your cause. Come down and take my part.

Lear calls upon the gods to side with him. He is, therefore, appalled when Regan takes Goneril by the hand, showing her acceptance of her older sister’s behavior. Goneril, however, dismisses Lear’s objections at line 184: “How have I offended?/ All’s not offense that indiscretion [foolishness] finds/ And dotage [old age] terms so.” Lear prays for patience in the face of this provocation and asks, for the third time, who put Kent in the stocks. Cornwall finally confesses he did, but makes no excuse for it, blaming Kent’s “disorders” at line 198. When Lear begins to offer an objection, Regan cuts him off with one of the most devastating insults of the play at line 200: “I pray you, father, being weak, seem so,” that is, recognize that you no longer have any power and act accordingly. Given what he has been and how he still thinks of himself, this must crush Lear’s spirits. Certainly what follows must crush them even further. Regan tells Lear that because she away from home she does not have what is needed to care for him. He must return with Goneril. This from the daughter he was counting on!

Lear’s dramatic response at lines 206 – 216 to the idea of returning to Goneril is a combination of angry exaggeration and sarcasm.

Return with her, and fifty men dismissed?

No, rather I abjure all roofs, and choose

To wage [fight] against the enmity o’ th’ air,

To be a comrade with the wolf and owl,

Necessity’s sharp pinch.. Return with her?

Why, the hot-blooded [impetuous] France, that dowerless took

Our youngest born, I could as well be brought

To knee [kneel before] his throne, and squirelike [like a servant] pension beg

To keep base life afoot. Return with her?

Persuade me rather to be slave and sumpter [mule]

To this detested groom.

This speech breaks into three angry refusals, each introduced as Lear incredulously asks “Return with her.” He first says in a dramatic gesture that he would rather refuse to live indoors again, regardless of the weather and the harshness of nature. Ironically, Lear is a few hundred lines away from doing just that. Always be careful when you make a dramatic statement as a gesture; it may turn true, at least in a Shakespearean play! The second part is at once personal and political. Rather than returning with Goneril this proud King of England would rather humble himself before the King of France and beg for a pittance to keep himself alive. It’s interesting to see that Lear still thinks about Cordelia and what straits he thrust her into. In the third part Lear seeks to make an even more dramatic gesture, and he points to the lowest, slimiest person present, the loathsome Oswald, and sarcastically says he would rather become a personal servant to him. As he points to the “detested groom,” Goneril, at line 216, says, “At your choice, sir,” or “if that’s really what you want.” Lear expects his daughters to be shocked and appalled by how low they are forcing him to stoop. He believes that they will come to their senses when they see how they are disgracing him. Instead, they refuse to play the game and accept the guilt.

King Lear for the first time begins to look beyond his own rage and sense of betrayal. If his daughters are not as he would have them, whose fault is it? In a remarkable speech at lines 218 –230, he begins to accept responsibility, although in a rather odd way:

I prithee, daughter, do not make me mad.

I will not trouble thee, my child: farewell.

We’ll no longer meet, no more see one another.

But yet thou art my flesh, my blood, my daughter,

Or rather a disease that’s in my flesh,

Which I must needs call mine. Thou art a boil,

A plague sore, or embossed carbuncle [swollen boil]

In my corrupted blood.

The key concept here is that Lear, even as he calls Goneril the most disgusting things, acknowledges that she belongs to him, and if she is bad, the fault lies in him, in his “corrupted blood.” We’ll see as the play unfolds how Lear comes to explain the source of this corruption. He goes on to say he will forbear from chiding her or saying insulting things (He’s pretty much done his best in this regard up to this point!) and instead leaves her to the gods to punish her. And he repeats his decision to go and stay with Regan with his 100 knights, this despite Regan’s declaration back at line 202 that she could not accept him. “Cognitive dissonance” strikes again!

Regan quickly destroys the old man’s illusions, telling him again that since she cannot care for him right now, he must return to Goneril. She adds, at line 236, that upon further consideration she will not accept 50 knights when she is able to welcome him. The girls’ rationale sounds perfectly reasonable. Regan says that such a large group is a danger to domestic peace and an unnecessary expense. She questions how so many different people within one household can live peaceably. Goneril adds that Lear can be adequately served by their servants; he doesn’t need his own people. Regan agrees and says that if the servants fail to serve her father properly, then she or Goneril can control them. She concludes that she will not allow Lear to have more than 25 companions. With a voice full of sorrow and injury at line 249 Lear simply says, as they whittle away his identity, “I gave you all,” to which Regan responds crushingly, “And in good time you gave it.” What she’s saying is “Thank god you gave us the kingdom. It was about time.”

You would think that Lear had learned his lesson by now, but he hasn’t. He proceeds to make one of the dumbest decisions of the play at line 255. If Regan will only allow him 25 knights, then he recalculates the mathematics of love:

Those wicked creatures yet do look well-favored,

When others are more wicked; not being the worst

Stands in some rank of praise. I’ll go with thee. [to Goneril]

Thy fifty yet doth double five-and-twenty,

And thou art twice her love.

Lear had tried to measure love by words back in the first scene, and he’s still trying to measure love here. It is as if he had forgotten all about calling his eldest daughter “an embossed carbuncle” or “detested kite.” Somehow, they are going to go back to what had existed before, as if all that hatred had vanished. There’s something almost pathetic about Lear’s naiveté. The hundred knights are not about Lear’s need for servants. They are all about his sense of identity; he is who he is because he has one hundred knights at his beck and call. The girls understand this need completely, and they know that stripping him of his attendants will remove the last vestiges of power. Besides, it’s fun to whipsaw him with numbers as they do now. Goneril tells her father at line 260, “What need you five-and-twenty? Ten? Or five?/ To follow in a house where twice so many/ Have command to tend you?” To which Regan adds, “What need one?”

Lear answers this rhetorical question in one of the most famous speeches in the play. In it Lear articulates some hard-won wisdom, gives vent to a sense of injury and finally reveals his breaking point and descent into madness. At line 263 he responds to the question of need:

O reason [calculate] not the need! Our basest beggars

Are in the poorest things superfluous [may have too much of something petty].

Allow not nature more than nature needs [what’s necessary for life],

Man’s life is cheap as beast’s. Thou art a lady;

If only to go warm were gorgeous,

Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear’st,

Which scarcely keeps thee warm.

“You cannot measure need. Even the poorest person has too much of something. If we restrict people to just the bare minimum to meet their needs then they are no better than animals. For example, you are a fine lady who wears gorgeous clothes. If we define your need as mere warmth, you would not need your fine garments which, in truth, barely keep you warm anyway.” Lear here effectively turns the argument back on his daughters, who are undoubtedly quite vain about their latest from Nordstrom’s.

But, for true need --

You heavens, give me that patience, patience I need.

You see me here, you gods, a poor old man,

As full of grief as age, wretched in both.

If it be you that stirs these daughters’ hearts

Against their father, fool me not so much [don’t make me a fool]

To bear it tamely; touch me with noble anger,

And let not women’s weapons, water drops,

Stain my man’s cheeks.

Lear begins to expand his point about need being more than just some minimum for survival, but before he can articulate his idea he gives way to self-pity. He asks for patience to suffer what is happening to him, but then he decides that he cannot accept his daughters’ outrage without protest. Instead of weeping, as he probably has started to do, he wants “noble anger” as would befit a king. In this passage we see Lear go from patiently accepting, to weeping like a woman, to angrily resisting like a man. Even his sense of his own gender identity is affected by this crisis.

No, you unnatural hags!

I will have such revenges on you both

That all the world shall – I will do such things –

What they are, yet I know not; but they shall be

The terrors of the earth. You think I’ll weep.

No, I’ll not weep –

Storm and tempest

I have full cause of weeping, but this heart

Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws [pieces]

Or ere [before] I’ll weep. O Fool, I shall go mad!

In their anger both Lear and Gloucester characterize their children as “unnatural” as Lear does here. He falls into his familiar pattern of cursing and threatening dire punishment. But here, at line 279, the full realization of his situation comes crashing down on the old king in mid-sentence. He cannot think of what he will inflict upon daughters and is reduced to pathetically promising that whatever the punishments are, “they shall be the terrors of the earth.” I believe that in the moment Lear’s spirit finally breaks. He feels himself start to weep and again has that fear this will destroy his manhood. So, since he cannot bring down “noble anger” and he cannot allow himself to weep, he concludes that his heart will break. Shakespeare signals this internal crisis by having the sound of a gathering storm offstage. We can see the storm as a metaphor, a symbol, for what Lear is suffering. Shakespeare’s audience would have seen a closer connection between the two events. They believed that there were subtle but strong links between the little world of man, the microcosm, and the large world of nature, the macrocosm. If things were falling apart for King Lear, that could trigger a sympathetic reaction in the weather. Now, for the first time since line 86 the Fool is referred to. Throughout the crisis with the girls the Fool has been silent. No smart remarks distract from the powerful emotions Lear has experienced. As Lear feels his sanity give way, he cries out to the Fool, as if he realizes now what his closest friend was trying to tell him before. It is too late for wisdom. Lear rushes out into the storm with the Fool, Kent and Gloucester.

Cornwall and the girls feel very self-righteous. At line 289 Goneril smugly declares, “’Tis his own blame; [he] hath put himself from rest [shelter or peace of mind] --/ And must needs taste his folly.” In other words, the old man is only getting what he deserves. Both girls affirm that they will not allow Lear back in with even a single follower. When he returns from seeing Lear leave, Gloucester describes Lear’s rage and the fact there is no other shelter around for miles. Nevertheless, the girls declare that Lear “leads himself,” that is he cannot be deterred. As Regan says at line 301, “to willful men/ The injuries that they themselves procure/ Must be their schoolmasters,” and they forbid Gloucester from offering any help to his old master. They tell him twice, “Shut up your doors.” Whatever happens to Lear in the storm, he has brought it on himself.

Act III, Scene 1

In this scene Kent meets a gentleman, perhaps one of Lear’s hundred knights, and receives a report on Lear’s situation. Kent sends the gentleman to Dover to tell Cordelia what has happened to her father. In light of the emotional power of the preceding scene, what dramatic purposes does this scene serve? What four pieces of important information does the scene provide? [Act III, scene 1]

Having set up Lear’s descent into madness and his flight out into the storm, Shakespeare is in no hurry to show us the payoff. A scene like this builds suspense for what follows. For some reason Kent has been separated from Lear, so he has to get a description of the severity of the storm and Lear’s madness from the gentleman, preparing us for the next scene. Since the special effects available on Shakespeare’s stage were limited, the language here emphasizes how terrible the storm is. Next, we are told that only the Fool is with Lear and that his purpose is to “outjest/ His heart-struck injuries” [line 16]. This is the first time anyone has articulated what the Fool is doing with his humor. Third, Kent tells us again that there is growing animosity between Cornwall and Albany. As a general rule if Shakespeare had some important information that took place off-stage, as this does, he tried to convey that to his audience in about four different places and with different characters. Finally, Kent reminds us that Cordelia knows that Lear is in trouble and now reveals that she has landed in Dover with an army. This information is important because Shakespeare wants us to know, even as we watch Lear’s suffering, that help is on the way.

Throughout this scene Kent is still disguised as a peasant, but he speaks in the formal language of the court, with specialized vocabulary and complex syntax. Despite his appearance, he urges the gentleman to trust him and to deliver the news of Lear’s treatment to Cordelia. Being very coy about his disguise, Kent gives the gentleman a ring by which Cordelia will recognize Kent and will tell the messenger his real identity. We can assume that Shakespeare’s audience enjoyed the idea of characters play-acting a part as Kent does throughout the play.

Act III, Scene 2

This scene of Lear raging in a storm out on a desolate heath is one of the most famous in all of the plays. It is the dramatic heart of the play as we see Lear’s madness mirrored by the violence of nature. As you read this scene notice the three different ways in which King Lear views the storm. How many different elements does the storm have? How does Lear change in a significant way near the end of the scene? How have the Fool’s humor and his message changed from previous scene? [Act III, scene 2]

As Shakespeare wrote this scene in blank verse he did something very unusual with the language. Many of the images Lear uses are condensed and exaggerated, almost in a kind of poetic shorthand. For example, in the first nine lines of the scene the four elements of the storm (wind, rain, lightning and thunder) are shown as instruments of universal destruction, which Lear calls upon as punishment for ingratitude.

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 molds, all germains spill at once,

That make ingrateful man.

Lear starts with the wind, which he personifies as if it were a person who could blow so hard in rage his cheeks would crack, much as the jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie could do. In the second line he evokes not just rain, but rain so heavy and prolonged it becomes a “cataract” or a “hurricane,” the frightening tropical storm English explorers had encountered. This exaggerated downpour is urged to flood the countryside, and Lear envisions the water covering the highest point in any village, the steeple on the church, atop which sat the weather vane in the shape of a cock. In line four Lear calls down the lightning. People in Shakespeare’s time did not fully understand the nature of an electrical storm. (It was about 150 years before Ben Franklin’s experiment with the kite.) They thought that lightning was caused by the ignition of sulphur in the atmosphere; it happened as quickly as one could think and was the precursor of the thunder, much like a single scout (“vaunt-courier”) on horseback rode out before a mighty army. Lear orders the lightning to strike him. In those days people believed it was the thunder, the sound, which caused the real damage, could split an oak tree. Lear calls upon the ultimate destructive power of the storm to flatten the entire globe, expressed here as “thick rotundity.” Specifically the thunder is to destroy the “molds” and “germains,” the forms and seeds of life itself. The “thick rotundity” could also suggest the shape of a pregnant woman, because all this cosmic destruction is being called down upon the world to stop the birth of ungrateful mankind. Because his daughters have behaved badly all humanity must suffer the consequences. Not only are the images of the four elements of the storm exaggerated, Lear’s emotional reaction, while understandable, is over the top.

Events have spiraled out of control, and the Fool’s message at line 10 now reflects the change and his panic about what is happening:

O Nuncle, court holy-water [flattery] in a dry house is

better than this rain water out o’ door. Good

Nuncle, in; ask thy daughters blessing. Here’s a

night pities neither wise man nor fools.

Earlier in the play the Fool had been relentless in pointing out Lear’s mistakes and his susceptibility to flattery. Now he urges Lear to go back in and play the game, give the girls what they want. Anything would be better than suffering in the storm. The Fool has clearly reached his breaking point just as Lear is getting started with his trial by suffering. The Fool will be less and less important in Lear’s education from this point on.

In his second long speech (lines 14 – 24) Lear shifts his vision of the storm. Now the violence of the elements reminds him of his daughters’ treatment:

Rumble thy bellyful. Spit, fire! Spout, rain!

Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire are my daughters.

I tax [accuse] not you, you elements, with unkindness.

I never gave you kingdom, called you children,

You owe me no subscription [allegiance]. Then let fall

Your horrible pleasure [will]. Here I stand your slave,

A poor, inform, weak, and despised old man.

But yet I call you servile ministers [agents],

That will with two pernicious daughters join

Your high-engendered battles [heavenly armies] ‘gainst a head

So old and white as this. O, ho! ‘tis foul.

In his current state of mind everything, even the storm, is all about Lear and the injustice he has suffered. Therefore, it is not surprising that he again personifies the elements of the storm but now accuses them of being in league with his daughters. And once again, he gives way to self-pity here in the last four lines of the speech.

The Fool is still preoccupied by the need for the two of them to seek shelter. At line 25 he brings up the idea of getting a house for Lear’s head, “a good headpiece” suggesting both the protection of a helmet and the idea of brains. He then sings a little song at line 27 which repeats the idea of taking care of first things first, but now with a little edge directed at Lear’s past follies:

The codpiece that will house

Before the head has any,

The head and he [it] shall louse:

So beggars marry many.

The codpiece was a padded decorative attachment worn on the front of a man’s pants, suggesting, as it does here, a man’s penis. When you are foolish enough to worry about sex before you have a house for your head, you will end up a homeless beggar sharing the lice of many different women, all as wretched as you. Lear’s sexual appetites have left him with daughters who have broken his heart and now left him out in the cold.

The man that makes his toe

What he his heart should make

Shall of a corn cry woe,

And turn his sleep to wake.

The man who elevates the basest part of his body (his toe or his codpiece) over his heart, what he knows is true, will create such pain for himself that he will be unable to sleep. Lear so sinned when he banished Cordelia (his heart) and gave all to his evil daughters (his toes, with the suggestion that the mean girls are punishment for his earlier sexual sins). The Fool finishes his little nonsense lesson at line 35: “For there was never yet a fair woman but she made/ mouths in a glass,” that is, “Beautiful women are often vain and preen into a mirror.” This little truism may suggest that both the girls have used their wiles, honed by their own vanity, to fool their father.

Lear, as usual, is not listening to the Fool. At line 37 he declares, to himself and us, “No, I will be the pattern of patience./ I will say nothing.” Perhaps he realizes how far out of control he has veered, how he has allowed his emotions to carry him further into madness. He tries to steel his resolve not to go down that road. In so doing, of course, he evokes the “nothing” motif once again. Even if Lear does not recognize the echo of his daughter’s stand in the first scene, we do. When Kent enters calling for his master, the Fool responds at line 40, “Marry, here’s grace and a codpiece; that’s a wise man and a fool.” That would seem to indicate Lear ( as a king referred to as “Your Grace”) and the Fool (who often wore an exaggerated codpiece for comic effect). However, the Fool has called Lear a fool throughout the play, and he just drew the parallel between the old man and an unthinking penis. So which is which? The Fool leaves it up to Kent and the audience to decide. In his speech (lines 42 – 48) Kent reinforces the idea of the extreme violence of the storm, just in case the special effects have failed to impress us. He ends at line 47 assuring us, “Man’s nature cannot carry [endure]/ Th’ affliction nor the fear.”

Lear now shifts into his third vision of the storm at line 49 to 59. The elements of the storm become agents for some kind of divine retribution, exposing hidden sins and punishing the offenders.

Let the great gods

That keep this dreadful pudder [turmoil] o’er our heads

Find out their enemies now. Tremble, thou wretch,

That hast within thee undivulged crimes

Unwhipped of justice. Hide thee, thou bloody hand,

Thou perjured, and thou simular [counterfeit] of virtue

That art incestuous. Caitiff [wretch], to pieces shake,

That under covert and convenient seeming [pretense]

Has practiced on [plotted against] man’s life. Close [hidden] pent-up guilts,

Rive [expose] your concealing continents [coverings], and cry

These dreadful summoners grace. I am a man

More sinned against than sinning.

In his preceding speeches in this scene, Lear had personified the elements of the storm. He now imagines guilty sinners who are exposed by the ferocity of the storm to the gods’ punishment. Those who have not been whipped for their crimes, a common form of punishment, need to beware. Criminals who have lied and hidden their plots against other people’s lives or have committed incest will be exposed. Hypocrites will pay for their pretense of virtue. The avenging gods are pictured as “summoners,” officials in the medieval church who apprehended and brought to justice those guilty of immorality. The image here combines the idea of an efficient legal system coupled with the power of religion. Having catalogued the ways in which men have broken the rules, Lear, at the end of his speech, excludes himself from their ranks. He sees himself as the victim, not the criminal. This perception will change as the play progresses.

Kent urges Lear to accompany him to a nearby hovel which will provide temporary shelter from the storm while he returns to Gloucester’s castle and tries to force those inside to allow the king to enter. At this point, line 67, an extraordinary change occurs in the angry, crazed king. He begins to notice someone other than himself:

My wits begin to turn.

Come on, my boy. How dost, my boy? Art cold?

I am cold myself. Where is this straw, my fellow?

The art of our necessities is strange,

That can make vile things precious. Come, your hovel.

Poor Fool and knave, I have one part in my heart

That’s sorry yet for thee.

Even as he reminds us that he is losing his mind, Lear notices the Fool, perhaps for the first time in the play. Throughout the drama up to this point King Lear has been focused just on himself and his mental anguish. Now he realizes he is not alone in his suffering, and he even feels the cold for the first time. Lear’s expression of concern for the Fool and Kent (“knave”) suggests the basis for his possible recovery in the future.

The Fool now sings at line 74 a verse from a song which originally appeared in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night where it was sung by another professional jester, Feste:

He that has and a little tiny wit,

With heigh-ho, the wind and the rain,

Must make content with his fortunes fit

Though the rain it raineth every day.

Perhaps the Fool sings this song because it suits the weather. Maybe it occurs to him because Lear has talked about losing his wits, going mad, and therefore has “little wit.” The moral expressed here is that one must be happy with whatever his fortunes allow him. Certainly that fits Lear who is going off to try and get comfort in a hovel. The king agrees at line 78: “True, my good boy. Come, bring us to this hovel.” This is one of the only times in the play the Lear seems to hear and to affirm what the Fool is telling him. He seems to have turned a corner in his recovery.

The scene ends with the Fool addressing the audience directly, giving what he calls “a prophecy,” a foretelling of the future. The audience lives in the future which the Fool predicts, so we are able to judge whether he is right. The message is a mixture of social satire and utopian dreams which are intended ironically. The first four lines present ordinary social abuses as if they were signs of a dire calamity: priests ignore the spirit as they emphasize the form of worship; brewers water down their ale; noblemen are slaves of fashion; and the only religious heretics who are burned are the poor victims of venereal disease (“wenches’ suitors”) who experience a burning sensation as a symptom. These “prophecies” would have gotten a big laugh since they were commonplace at the time the play was performed. (Fortunately our society is much more morally advanced.) Then the Fool, from line 85 on, changes his focus and lists six events which will signal a collapse of English society: when courts dispense equal justice; when the social elite are not always impoverished; when people don’t talk badly about their neighbors; when pickpockets don’t work in crowds; when misers count their money in public; and when pimps and whores use their profits to build churches. Here the humor arises because the audience realizes these things are not likely to happen, so “Albion” (an ancient name for Britain) is not in danger of “great confusion.” Should that apocalypse occur, says the Fool, the greatest change would be that people would use their feet for walking. He concludes by telling us that this prophecy will actually be made by Merlin, the great wizard of King Arthur’s court. Arthur was reputedly a leader in Britain before the invasion of the Anglo-Saxons around 700 A.D. while the Fool is in a drama set hundreds of years earlier. We have a character apparently placing events in a timeline for the audience that has already experienced these events. This is one of the only times in all Shakespeare’s plays where a character in a historical drama demonstrates any awareness of differences in time outside the play.

Act III, Scene 3

After being a spectator as Lear ruined his life and then trying ineffectually to bring peace between Lear and the Cornwalls, Gloucester finally takes sides. Unfortunately it is too late to be effective and will cost him dearly. In this scene what are the crimes Gloucester accuses Cornwall, Regan and Goneril of? Why does Edmund decide to betray his father? [Act III, scene 3]

At the beginning of the scene Gloucester calls the treatment of Lear “unnatural” [line 2]. It’s a word that is used frequently throughout the play when people are upset, but in the case of Lear’s being locked out in the storm it seems particularly appropriate. Edmund at line 7 agrees it is “Most savage and unnatural,” but that doesn’t stop him from ratting out his father. At line 3 Gloucester cites another violation, the way the Cornwalls have taken over his house and ordered him around. The people at this time took the code of being a good host and good guest very seriously. At line 6 we get another example of the “nothing” motif, and then Gloucester reveals one more time that there is a growing division between Cornwall and Albany. In addition, he tells Edmund what we already know, that forces seeking to redress the crimes against Lear have landed in England. Gloucester tells his son that they must side with the king’s cause and that he has hidden a letter telling of the coming invasion, even though he has been threatened with death if he seeks to help Lear. At the end of the scene Edmund tells us that he will go directly and tell Cornwall what his father is doing. As he says of this betrayal at line 24, “This seems a fair deserving [worthy of a reward], and must draw me/ That which my father loses – no less than all./ The younger rises when the old doth fall.” After having stolen his brother’s inheritance, Edmund has gotten everything he can from his father. It’s time to move on up the corporate ladder; after all he is a young man in a hurry, and his father is old. Ironically, it’s the same argument Edmund incorporated into the phony letter in I, 2.

This is the first of three scenes about Gloucester’s agony which alternate with those of Lear’s suffering. Shakespeare wants us to view the way the two fathers undergo the consequences of their earlier mistakes in a parallel fashion. Dramatically, it moderates the intensity of the action by shifting our attention between the two old men.

Shakespeare knew that the emotions of the audience could only be stretched so far.

Act III, Scene 4

In this dramatic scene Lear gains wisdom even as he encounters Edgar, disguised as the wandering lunatic Tom o’ Bedlam. The power of Edgar’s performance as a madman threatens Lear’s sanity. Gloucester arrives with an offer of help in a situation where most of the characters are trapped playing a role as someone they really aren’t. Identify those playing roles.

In the first 36 lines Lear, Kent and the Fool arrive at the hovel, but before he will enter Lear shares some important insights into the nature of perception and the way he has lived his life. Why do these insights offer hope that a new, wiser King Lear is emerging? [Act III, scene 4, lines 1 – 36]

The three have arrived at the hovel. Kent describes the storm and need for shelter at line 2: “The tyranny of the open night’s too rough/ For nature to endure.” This assertion give Lear the topic for his first important insight at lines 6 – 12:

Thou think’st ‘tis much that this contentious storm

Invades us to the skin: so ‘tis to thee;

But where the greater malady is fixed [rooted in the mind],

The lesser is scarce felt. Thou’dst shun a bear;

But if thy flight lay toward the roaring sea,

Thou’dst meet the bear i’ th’ mouth. When the mind’s free [from care],

The body’s delicate.

Lear’s point here is one we have all experienced: our state of mind affects how we perceive reality. The unusual analogy of fearing the bear until confronted by the roaring sea is especially powerful. This is the first time in the play where Lear shares his life lessons with others, to help make sense of his reality. And he does so without once mentioning his daughters or how they have injured him.

The moment does not last. At line 12 he applies the insight to himself and returns to his theme of victimization. Notice in this next sequence how his mood violently swings between rage and self-pity and his growing awareness of his own madness:

The tempest in my mind

Doth from my senses take all feeling else,

Save what beats there. Filial ingratitude,

Is it not as [as if] this mouth should tear this hand

For lifting food to’t? But I will punish home.

No, I will weep no more. In such a night

To shut me out! Pour on, I will endure.

In such a night as this! O Regan, Goneril,

Your old kind father, whose frank heart gave all –

O, that way madness lies; let me shun that.

No more of that.

Seeing the rapid variations of emotions in these 11 lines, you can begin to appreciate the challenge for an actor in this role. Lear here is struggling to find some way to deal with his rage and sense of loss, some way which will enable him to move beyond.

This is a strange moment for royal protocol, but neither Kent nor the Fool can get in out of the rain until the king enters the hovel. At line 23 Lear urges his companions to go in first, saying, “This tempest will not give me leave to ponder/ On things would hurt me more.” Then he realizes that they are waiting on him and declares that he will enter. He glances at the Fool, who has been with him through all his trials and says, “In, boy; go first. You houseless poverty --/ Nay, get thee in. I’ll pray, and then I’ll sleep.” His offer here is a small act of kindness, as he suddenly sees in the Fool (“houseless poverty”) the embodiment of all those who are impoverished and lack shelter. This small moment leads Lear to the realization that he shares his condition with mankind at line 28:

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 [full of holes] 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 [that which is superfluous] to them,

And show the heavens more just.

Probably for the first time in his life Lear knows intimately what it means to be without shelter in a “pitiless storm.” He is thinking about someone other than himself and he wonders how people who are homeless, underfed and ill-clad will survive “seasons such as these.” Notice the imaginative way he describes the ragged clothes of these “wretches”; “looped and windowed raggedness” evokes the image of people trying to stay warm with garments full of holes. Remarkably Lear realizes that he did not pay enough attention to the plight of those who suffer as he does himself now that he is no longer king. Ronald Reagan rode to the presidency excoriating “welfare cheats” and “phony poverty programs,” but he was astonished his first winter in Washington when he saw the homeless people trying to stay warm on the heating grates outside the public buildings. It’s one thing to deplore poverty in the abstract but quite another when you see it up close. Lear’s solution is for all in a position of authority (“pomp”) to undergo what he is enduring so that they can understand their obligation to help. Lear doesn’t say that they should become do-gooders, just to make themselves feel better. No, the concept of the absolute monarchy rested on the premise that it was the ruler’s job to justify the relationship of the divinity to the people of the state. For President Reagan it was his decision to make the government stocks of surplus cheese (“the superflux”) available to the poor. This is a remarkable insight for Lear, a man who has not been paying attention for 80 years, and if the play were to end here, we would say that the new Lear who is emerging promises to be a much better father and ruler than he was before. But, alas, things seldom end when we’re at our best, and Lear’s suffering must go on.

In the next 80 lines we are introduced to Edgar’s creation of Tom o’ Bedlam. Edgar can trust no one, and he must make his disguise absolutely convincing if he is to survive. The key to understanding his performance is to remember that Shakespeare’s audience believed that madness, especially that caused by demonic possession, was contagious. The better Edgar plays the lunatic, the better his chances of escape. Like any good actor, Edgar has created a fully realized character with a believable past. What are the pertinent points in his performance? How do you explain King Lear’s reaction to Edgar? [Act III, scene 4, lines 37 – 116]

Edgar’s performance is a spooky combination of humor, grotesqueness, religious cant and powerful hallucinations. His first pronouncement at line 37 as the Fool enters the hovel is to cry out as if the whole world were underwater and he were on a ship, measuring the depth: “Fathom and half, fathom and half! Poor Tom!” Back in Act III, scene 2 Lear had called upon the storm to drown the world; here Edgar gives us a comic confirmation that it is happening. And just as Lear often gives way to self-pity, Edgar’s stock line is “Poor Tom” or “Tom’s a-cold,” as if his existence is defined by his poverty or his suffering. Tom is indeed “poor” and “cold” at several different levels of meaning: physical, psychological and spiritual.

Edgar enters at line 45 probably dressed like the “wretches” Lear had envisioned a few lines before. Tom’s first words are a warning: “Away! The foul fiend follows me. Through the/ sharp hawthorn blows the cold wind. Humh! Go to/ thy cold bed, and warm thee.” Your notes tell you how Tom uses a line from a ballad here, but what is most immediate is the sense that it is dangerous to be around him. Demons surround him; their presence is signaled by the sound of the wind through the trees, which Tom imitates with “Humh.” The message here is clear: Stay away! At line 48 Lear can think of only one reason why a man could be this wretched: “Didst thou give all to thy daughters? And art thou come to this?” Despite the earlier prayer, Lear is back seeing the world through the prism of his own suffering. Tom picks up on the idea of “giving” and at line 50 he provides us with a detailed background of his character:

Who gives anything to Poor Tom? Whom the

foul fiend hath led through fire and through flame,

through ford and whirlpool, o’er bog and quagmire;

that hath laid knives under his pillow and

halters in his pew [ledge outside a window], set ratsbane by his porridge,

made him proud of heart, to ride on a bay trotting

horse over four-inched bridges, to course [attack] his

own shadow for a traitor. Bless thy five wits,

Tom’s a-cold. O, do, de, do, de, do, de. Bless thee

from whirlwinds, star-blasting, and taking. Do

Poor Tom some charity, whom the foul fiend vexes.

There could I have him now – and there – and there

again – and there.

Storm still

One of the symptoms of madness that Tom is aware of is his propensity to suicide, which he blames on the “foul fiend,” that is, Satan. Suicide was considered perhaps the worst of sins by Shakespeare’s audience. Tom feels he has been tempted to kill himself by burning (“fire and flame”), by drowning (“ford and whirlpool”) or by suffocation in quicksand (“bog and quagmire”). More active forms of suicide are knives, halters or nooses outside the window, ratsbane or poison next to his breakfast cereal. Tom has been tempted to kill himself in a fit of pride by riding a horse at a trot over a narrow bridge. He even sees his own shadow as a potential enemy. Such an admission of possible suicide would have been seen as an act of madness, even if Tom is sure it is the devil who is leading him to take his own life. Bedlam beggars would offer generic blessings as a way of getting alms, so Tom blesses his listeners’ wits against the same illness that afflicts him, whether “star-blasting” or “taking.” (check your notes). He is so cold his teeth chatter: “do, de, do, de, etc.” As he asks for “some charity,” he pretends he sees the hallucination of the fiend who threatens him. The act of seeing some demon makes his madness that much more sinister.

Lear, however, sees only another wronged father at line 63: “What, has his daughters brought him to this pass [condition]?/ Could thou save nothing? Wouldst thou give ‘em all?” The Fool, trying to find humor in a frightening situation, quips, “Nay, he reserved a blanket [to wrap up in], else we had been all shamed.” Once Edgar is on the scene the Fool’s comedy will be less and less relevant. At line 66 Lear reverts to his earlier pattern of issuing monumental curses, now on behalf of another supposed victim of elder abuse, Tom. When Kent tries to explain that the lunatic has no daughters, Lear explodes at line 70:

Death, traitor, nothing could have reduced nature

To such a lowness but his unkind daughters.

Is it the fashion that discarded fathers

Should have thus little mercy on [shown to] their flesh?

Judicious punishment – ‘twas this flesh begot

Those pelican daughters.

After that brief glimpse of a wiser, more patient man just a few lines before in his prayer, Lear is quickly reverting to symptoms of his madness. Tom can only be in this extreme state of suffering because he has daughters; to suggest any other explanation is an act of treason. And Lear returns to a theme he had introduced before in Act II, scene 4, line 220, that the cause of his daughters’ bad behavior lies in his own sins. Shakespeare’s age believed that the pelican fed its young with its own blood, often at the risk of its own life, so Lear’s daughters and Tom’s feast on their parents. Edgar probably doesn’t understand Lear’s reference to “pelican daughters,” but he responds with some nonsense suggested by “pelican” at line 76: “Pillicock sat on Pillicock Hill.” Although Tom makes it sound as if it is a place name, in some sources “pillicock” is a term of endearment used to refer to a penis. (Feel free to use it.) The Fool’s comment at line 77, “This cold night will turn us all to fools and madmen,” conveys a sense of despair. Just being around Tom threatens everyone’s sanity; the lunatic is also taking over some of the functions the Fool had provided earlier, such as telling a bawdy joke to relieve the tension of a situation. Tom responds at line 80 with a kind of Reader’s Digest version of the Ten Commandments, the kind of thing that Bedlam beggars might recite to encourage people’s charity. It ends with his stock line “Tom’s a-cold.”

King Lear asks Tom what he had been, and his answer at line 85 adds more details to the character’s past:

A servingman, proud in heart and mind; that

curled my hair, wore gloves in my cap; served the

lust of my mistress’ heart; and did the act of dark-

ness with her; swore as many oaths as I spake

words, and broke them in the sweet face of

heaven. One that slept in the contriving of lust

and waked to do it. Wine loved I deeply, dice

dearly, and in woman out-paramoured the Turk.

If we take Tom at his word, he is a member of the lower class who rises above his station and is guilty of all the major seven deadly sins. He calls himself a “servingman,” perhaps someone like Oswald, who is guilty of pride despite his humble origins. He adopts the habits of a courtly lover, curling his hair and wearing the favors of a gentlewoman, often a glove, in his hat as a public display of his exalted rank. He satisfies the sexual desires of his employer, probably the same gentlewoman whose glove he wears. He is sexually promiscuous and has many more lovers, rivaling (“out-paramouring”) the infamous Turkish pashas and their huge harems. He makes many promises and breaks them without thought. He drinks too much, loving wine “deeply” as one swallowing a lot; he gambles too much, loving the dice “dearly,” or expensively, as someone would who ran up big debts. The suggestion here is that it is his life of sin and deceit, pretending to be someone he is not, which has led to his madness. Tom continues at line 93 – 95 cataloging his depraved qualities, identifying some with the appropriate animal, like dog, fox, wolf or lion. The “dog” is identified with madness, as a rabid dog might be, one of the most frightening prospects in that time. At line 95 he identifies the primary source of the temptations to sin:

Let not the creaking of

shoes, nor the rustling of silk betray thy poor

heart to woman. Keep thy foot out of brothels,

thy hand out of plackets, thy pen from lenders’

books, and defy the foul fiend.

It’s mostly the fault of women! Fashionable ladies in those days would wear shoes which deliberately creaked, which like the rustling of silk dresses, was thought to increase sexual allure. Poor men were thus tempted to lose their hearts or to visit brothels or to stick their hands into “plackets,” the openings in women’s petticoats. The only other source of temptation is the person who lends money. Stay away from women and credit cards and you too can “defy the foul fiend,” or Satan. Now Lear had already started to identify the cause of his troubles as a “sickness in my blood,” the existence of some past sin of which he’s guilty which has led him to his current situation. Tom’s creative invention of the oversexed servingman serves to reinforce Lear’s assumption in his madness that the root of his problem is the sex act. Tom finishes his long speech at line 99 by hallucinating again that he sees the fiend who is attacking him, now identified as “Dolphin,” like the French crown prince, trotting by on a horse. We are invited to share in his nightmare vision by hearing the fiend in the sound of the wind: “Still through the hawthorn blows the/ cold wind; says suum, mun, hey no nonny.” In this line “suum, mun” are imitations of the wind; “hey no nonny” was a phrase often found in the refrains of songs as the comic euphemism for a sexual organ or act.

King Lear is profoundly moved by what Tom has said and by his presence. Whereas the Fool had never been able to reach his master by what he said, Lear looks upon Tom as a “philosopher” or “learned Theban,” or scholar from ancient Greece. At line 103 he explains what Tom represents to him:

Thou wert better in a grave than to answer [endure]

with thy uncovered body this extremity of the

skies. Is man no more than this? Consider him

well. Thou ow’st the worm no silk, the beast no

hide, the sheep no wool, the cat [civet] no perfume, Ha!

here’s three on’s [of us] are sophisticated [artificial]. Thou art the

thing itself; unaccommodated [uncivilized] man is no more

but such a poor, bare, forked [two-legged] animal as thou art.

Off, off, you lendings [borrowed clothes]! Come, unbutton here.

[Tearing off his clothes]

The old King Lear would say that Tom was better off dead than suffering as he does. But the newly emerging Lear asks the fundamental question, “Is man no more than this,” the same question posed by the existential philosophers of the 20^th Century. Tom is man stripped to the bare essentials. (People in Shakespeare’s day used the secretions of the civet cat as the base for perfume.) Certainly someone like Tom would have no concern over whether there were 100 or 50 knights to wait on him. In a sudden realization Lear sees that he has been worrying about the wrong things. With zeal of a new convert, he tries to emulate Tom by tearing off his own clothes, although as an 80 year-old man who has always had someone dress him, he does need help with the buttons. Interestingly Lear’s final words in the play will contain an echo of the last line of this speech.

Lear in his wisdom born of madness has moved beyond the Fool, who now at line 112 tries to retrain Lear from undressing:

Prithee, Nuncle, be contented; ‘tis a naughty [wicked]

night to swim in. 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. Look, here comes a

walking fire.

The Fool tries to turn this frightening situation into a joke, exaggerating the downpour much as Tom had back at line 37. Lear may find great philosophical significance in meeting a lunatic in a storm, but all the Fool wants is shelter and warmth. Ever since Lear stormed out of Gloucester’s castle, the Fool has been increasingly irrelevant; Lear no longer needs his insights into his folly, and Tom now commands Lear’s total attention. As the Fool wishes for a little fire, which he cleverly compares to a lecher’s heart, as if on cue a fire suddenly appears in the darkness.

Gloucester enters, looking for Lear, and in the final 70 lines of the scene five of the “good” people in the play interact to try and help Lear cope with his condition. What is ironic about this sequence? [Act III, scene 4, lines 117 – 187]

What is ironic about this portion of the play is that the five people present on stage all want the same thing. They all feel strongly that Lear has been wronged and must be helped to safety. If they were to share their thoughts freely they would soon discover that they have been the victims of deceit or misunderstanding. However, they are unable to step outside the roles they are playing: Tom and Kent can’t drop their disguises; the Fool is trapped playing a comic irrelevancy; Lear and Gloucester cannot see beyond their own suffering. So each plays out his part in this interaction which is the only time all five are together without the interference of Lear’s daughters or Gloucester’s bastard son.

Gloucester enters carrying a torch, an important prop for Shakespeare’s stage. Because the plays were usually performed outdoors at the Globe in the afternoon, the stage convention was established that if a character carried a torch, it meant the action was taking place at night. The audience members could see clearly that Gloucester was approaching, but they knew the characters could not recognize each at first in the imaginary darkness. As Gloucester approaches Tom imagines at line 117 that the “walking fire” is one of his omnipresent demons.

This is the foul fiend Flibbertigibbet. He begins

at curfew [9:00 p.m.], and walks till the first cock [midnight]. He

gives the web and the pin [cataracts], squints the eye, and

makes the harelip; mildews the white [ripening] wheat, and

hurts the poor creature of earth.

My grandmother used the name “Flibbertigibbet” as a comic term for any kid who couldn’t sit still. I’m sure she would have been surprised to learn that the word comes from a book written by Samuel Harsnett right around the same time as the play. Harsnett’s book detailed all the different demons allegedly used by the Jesuits to further their wicked plots. Flibbertigibbet, like any self-respecting satanic power, has a specific time period when he operates, in this case from 9:00 p.m. to midnight. He is responsible for spreading cataracts, causing certain birth defects, ruining wheat just before it can be harvested and generally inflicting trouble for humans and beasts. In this description we can see why the idea of demons and witches has been so important for people around the world as an explanation for seemingly mysterious diseases and disasters which plague them. What is ironic about this passage in the play is that Edgar explains the “walking fire” approaching them as a demon when it is actually his father whose unwarranted suspicions have forced him to play the part of Tom. The vividness of Tom’s description heightens the spooky quality of this encounter. In an effort to ward off the approaching evil, Tom sings a little song at 122 – 126, a magic charm, evoking an Anglo-Saxon saint who cast out demons and witches; “And aroint thee witch” he declares.

The men do not recognize each other at first, and Gloucester calls out asking who they are and their names. Tom eagerly answers at line 131:

Poor Tom, that eats the swimming frog,

the toad, the todpole [tadpole], the wall-newt [lizard] and the water [newt];

that in the fury of his heart, when the foul fiend

rages, eats cow-dung for sallets [salads], swallows the old

rat and the ditch-dog [dead dog in a ditch]; drinks the green mantle [pond scum]

of the standing [stagnant] pool; who is whipped from tithing [village]

to tithing, and stocked, punished, and imprisoned;

who hath had three suits to his back, six shirts to

his body,

Horse to ride, and weapon to wear,

But mice and rats, and such small deer,

Have been Tom’s food for seven long year.

Beware my follower! Peace, Smulkin, peace,

thou fiend!

This tells us more, perhaps, than we wanted to know about Tom’s condition. Living on the verge of starvation, he survives on what he can catch in the countryside. Sometimes his madness and hunger cause him to eat and drink things which are, well, inappropriate. Back in Act II, scene 3, I described how officials sought to control the “problem” of the rural poor, the “sturdy beggars,” through the series of Poor Laws which provided for forcing unwanted vagrants back to their home parish by whipping them or using some other form of punishment to encourage them to move along. Tom describes how he has been so punished, even though at one time, as a favored serving man, he had been given three suits and six shirts by his employer. As a gentleman wannabe, he had even had a horse and could carry a sword, traditional marks of the upper classes. But now his poverty and his madness have reduced him to eating rodents and worse. As he evokes his transformation in the verse of a song, a kind of parody of a popular ballad at that time which your notes tell you about, he is suddenly thrust back into his hallucinations and imagines his demonic companion, perhaps in the form of a black or grey cat called “Smulkin,” who is ready to strike. It’s another scary reference from the Harsnett book.

Gloucester recognizes Lear and is appalled that the king is attended only by his Fool, an apparent peasant (Kent) and a nearly naked lunatic. What has happened to the hundred knights? At line 145 he asks, “What, hath your Grace no better company?” Tom takes umbrage at this insult to his demons and insists at line 145: “The Prince of Darkness is a gentleman./ Modo he’s called, and Mahu.” His demon is a gentleman, so Lear does have some genteel company, and Shakespeare gets to use two more names from Harsnett’s book. Gloucester chooses to ignore Tom’s pronouncement and expresses sympathy for Lear’s plight at line 147: “Our flesh and blood, my Lord, is grown so vile,/ That it doth hate what gets [begets] it.” He clearly has Goneril and Regan in mind, but he says this in front of his own son who knows all too well about “flesh and blood” hating its own child. No wonder Edgar says, rather poignantly, “Poor Tom’s a-cold.”

Gloucester proposes to take Lear to a better shelter, despite his daughters’ “hard commands” not to offer any aid. Lear, however, only wants to talk with Tom, his “philosopher” or “learned Theban” as he calls him. At line 161 he asks Tom what his “study” is, the area of learning he specializes in. Tom replies, “How to prevent [stop] the fiend, and to kill vermin,” like fleas or lice. While Lear and Tom chat privately, Kent, disguised as Caius, urges Gloucester not to bother the king any more because “His wits begin t’ unsettle” [line 165]. Gloucester replies:

Canst thou blame him?

His daughters seek his death. Ah, that good Kent,

He said it would be thus, poor banished man!

Thou say’st the King grows mad – I’ll tell thee, friend,

I am almost mad myself. I had a son,

Now outlawed from my blood; he sought my life

But lately, very late [recently]. I loved him, friend,

No father his son dearer. True to tell thee,

The grief hath crazed my wits.

For some reason Kent does not reveal his identity to Gloucester. And it is likely that Edgar does not overhear his father explain the reason for their sudden estrangement. We are struck by how the course of this tragedy might have changed if everyone would just drop their disguises at this point. But they don’t, and events are about to thrust them into even greater suffering. Gloucester finally convinces Lear to go to better shelter by agreeing to allow Tom to come along. As the scene ends Tom quotes a little nonsense rhyme, probably a verse from a ballad now lost, about the heroic figure of Rowland, a knight in a number of medieval romances. In the verse Rowland is still a squire, a knight in training, but Tom gives him the famous words from the giant in the folk story of Jack and the Beanstalk. What’s most important about this little apparent irrelevancy is that it comes from Tom. Up to this point it has been the Fool whose nonsense rhymes end some scenes. His function in the play, however, has been taken over by Tom.

Act III, Scene 5

Meanwhile, back at the castle, Edmund is ratting out his father. What concern does Edmund express about betraying his father? Why? [Act III, scene 5]

Edmund gives a “performance” in this short scene, in some ways just as creative as his brother’s as Tom. The Bastard worries how his betrayal of his father, which he characterizes at line 4 as “nature [love of father] gives way to loyalty [to Cornwall]” will make him appear to others. Cornwall takes Gloucester’s actions as evidence that his inner evil had prompted Edgar to try to kill him with good reason. Edmund, even as he gives Cornwall the letter his father had received about Cordelia’s return, laments that he must be the one to detect and act as a traitor to his father. Cornwall, for all his moral outrage, offers Edmund some pragmatic advice. Whether or not the charges against Gloucester are true, Edmund’s actions have gained him his father’s title. Edmund puts aside his hypocrisy over revealing his father’s sympathies at line 21 when the bastard hopes that his father is found comforting Lear since that will make his accusations seem more believable. He once again swears allegiance to Cornwall: “I will persever in my course of loyalty, though the conflict be sore between that and my blood [the love he is supposed to feel for his own flesh and blood].” Cornwall, at line 25, promises, “I will lay trust upon thee, and thou shall find a dearer father in my love.” Given Cornwall’s cruelty, this is hardly a comforting thought, but Edmund is moving on up the corporate ladder.

Act III, Scene 6