Shakespearean Tragedy Part 20

[Footnote 128: It is to Lear's altered plan that Kent applies these words.]

[Footnote 129: There is talk of a war between Goneril and Regan within a fortnight of the division of the kingdom (II. i. 11 f.).]

[Footnote 130: I mean that no sufficiently clear reason is supplied for Edmund's delay in attempting to save Cordelia and Lear. The matter stands thus. Edmund, after the defeat of the opposing army, sends Lear and Cordelia to prison. Then, in accordance with a plan agreed on between himself and Goneril, he despatches a captain with secret orders to put them both to death _instantly_ (V. iii. 26-37, 244, 252). He then has to fight with the disguised Edgar. He is mortally wounded, and, as he lies dying, he says to Edgar (at line 162, _more than a hundred lines_ after he gave that commission to the captain):

What you have charged me with, that have I done; And more, much more; the time will bring it out; 'Tis past, and so am I.

In 'more, much more' he seems to be thinking of the order for the deaths of Lear and Cordelia (what else remained undisclosed?); yet he says nothing about it. A few lines later he recognises the justice of his fate, yet still says nothing. Then he hears the story of his father's death, says it has moved him and 'shall perchance do good' (What good except saving his victims?); yet he still says nothing. Even when he hears that Goneril is dead and Regan poisoned, he _still_ says nothing.

It is only when directly questioned about Lear and Cordelia that he tries to save the victims who were to be killed 'instantly' (242). How can we explain his delay? Perhaps, thinking the deaths of Lear and Cordelia would be of use to Goneril and Regan, he will not speak till he is sure that both the sisters are dead. Or perhaps, though he can recognise the justice of his fate and can be touched by the account of his father's death, he is still too self-absorbed to rise to the active effort to 'do some good, despite of his own nature.' But, while either of these conjectures is possible, it is surely far from satisfactory that we should be left to mere conjecture as to the cause of the delay which permits the catastrophe to take place. The _real_ cause lies outside the dramatic _nexus_. It is Shakespeare's wish to deliver a sudden and crushing blow to the hopes which he has excited.]

[Footnote 131: Everything in these paragraphs must, of course, be taken in connection with later remarks.]

[Footnote 132: I say 'the reader's,' because on the stage, whenever I have seen _King Lear_, the 'cuts' necessitated by modern scenery would have made this part of the play absolutely unintelligible to me if I had not been familiar with it. It is significant that Lamb in his _Tale of King Lear_ almost omits the sub-plot.]

[Footnote 133: Even if Cordelia had won the battle, Shakespeare would probably have hesitated to concentrate interest on it, for her victory would have been a British defeat. On Spedding's view, that he did mean to make the battle more interesting, and that his purpose has been defeated by our wrong division of Acts IV. and V., see Note X.]

[Footnote 134: It is vain to suggest that Edmund has only just come home, and that the letter is supposed to have been sent to him when he was 'out' See I. ii. 38-40, 65 f.]

[Footnote 135: The idea in scene i., perhaps, is that Cordelia's marriage, like the division of the kingdom, has really been pre-arranged, and that the ceremony of choosing between France and Burgundy (I. i. 46 f.) is a mere fiction. Burgundy is to be her husband, and that is why, when Lear has cast her off, he offers her to Burgundy first (l. 192 ff.). It might seem from 211 ff. that Lear's reason for doing so is that he prefers France, or thinks him the greater man, and therefore will not offer him first what is worthless: but the language of France (240 ff.) seems to show that he recognises a prior right in Burgundy.]

[Footnote 136: See Note T. and p. 315.]

[Footnote 137: See Note U.]

[Footnote 138: The word 'heath' in the stage-directions of the storm-scenes is, I may remark, Rowe's, not Shakespeare's, who never used the word till he wrote _Macbeth_.]

[Footnote 139: It is pointed out in Note V. that what modern editors call Scenes ii., iii., iv. of Act II. are really one scene, for Kent is on the stage through them all.]

[Footnote 140: [On the locality of Act I., Sc. ii., see _Modern Language Review_ for Oct., 1908, and Jan., 1909.]]

[Footnote 141: This effect of the double action seems to have been pointed out first by Schlegel.]

[Footnote 142: How prevalent these are is not recognised by readers familiar only with English poetry. See Simpson's _Introduction to the Philosophy of Shakespeare's Sonnets_ (1868) and Mr. Wyndham's edition of Shakespeare's Poems. Perhaps both writers overstate, and Simpson's interpretations are often forced or arbitrary, but his book is valuable and ought not to remain out of print.]

[Footnote 143: The monstrosity here is a being with a woman's body and a fiend's soul. For the interpretation of the lines see Note Y.]

[Footnote 144: Since this paragraph was written I have found that the abundance of these references has been pointed out and commented on by J. Kirkman, _New Shaks. Soc. Trans._, 1877.]

[Footnote 145: _E.g._ in _As You Like It_, III. ii. 187, 'I was never so berhymed since Pythagoras' time, that I was an Irish rat, which I can hardly remember'; _Twelfth Night_, IV. ii. 55, '_Clown._ What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild fowl? _Mal._ That the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird. _Clown._ What thinkest thou of his opinion? _Mal._ I think n.o.bly of the soul, and no way approve his opinion,' etc. But earlier comes a pa.s.sage which reminds us of _King Lear_, _Merchant of Venice_, IV. i. 128:

O be thou d.a.m.n'd, inexecrable dog!

And for thy life let justice be accused.

Thou almost makest me waver in my faith To hold opinion with Pythagoras, That souls of animals infuse themselves Into the trunks of men: thy currish spirit Govern'd a wolf, who, hang'd for human slaughter, Even from the gallows did his fell soul fleet, And, whilst thou lay'st in thy unhallow'd dam, Infused itself in thee; for thy desires Are wolvish, b.l.o.o.d.y, starved and ravenous.]

[Footnote 146: I fear it is not possible, however, to refute, on the whole, one charge,--that the dog is a sn.o.b, in the sense that he respects power and prosperity, and objects to the poor and despised. It is curious that Shakespeare refers to this trait three times in _King Lear_, as if he were feeling a peculiar disgust at it. See III. vi. 65, 'The little dogs and all,' etc.: IV. vi. 159, 'Thou hast seen a farmer's dog bark at a beggar ... and the creature run from the cur? There thou mightst behold the great image of authority': V. iii. 186, 'taught me to shift Into a madman's rags; to a.s.sume a semblance That very dogs disdain'd.' Cf. _Oxford Lectures_, p. 341.]

[Footnote 147: With this compare the following lines in the great speech on 'degree' in _Troilus and Cressida_, I. iii.:

Take but degree away, untune that string, And, hark, what discord follows! Each thing meets In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters Should lift their bosoms higher than the sh.o.r.es And make a sop of all this solid globe: Strength should be lord of imbecility, And the rude son should strike his father dead: Force should be right; or, rather, right and wrong, Between whose endless jar justice resides, Should lose their names, and so should justice too.

Then everything includes itself in power, Power into will, will into appet.i.te; And appet.i.te, an universal wolf, So doubly seconded with will and power, Must make perforce an universal prey, And last eat up himself.]

[Footnote 148: Nor is it believable that Shakespeare, whose means of imitating a storm were so greatly inferior even to ours, had the stage-performance only or chiefly in view in composing these scenes. He may not have thought of readers (or he may), but he must in any case have written to satisfy his own imagination. I have taken no notice of the part played in these scenes by anyone except Lear. The matter is too huge, and too strictly poetic, for a.n.a.lysis. I may observe that in our present theatres, owing to the use of elaborate scenery, the three Storm-scenes are usually combined, with disastrous effect. Shakespeare, as we saw (p. 49), interposed between them short scenes of much lower tone.]

[Footnote 149: 'justice,' Qq.]

[Footnote 150: =approve.]

[Footnote 151: The direction 'Storm and tempest' at the end of this speech is not modern, it is in the Folio.]

[Footnote 152: The G.o.ds are mentioned many times in _King Lear_, but 'G.o.d' only here (V. ii. 16).]

[Footnote 153: The whole question how far Shakespeare's works represent his personal feelings and att.i.tude, and the changes in them, would carry us so far beyond the bounds of the four tragedies, is so needless for the understanding of them, and is so little capable of decision, that I have excluded it from these lectures; and I will add here a note on it only as it concerns the 'tragic period.'

There are here two distinct sets of facts, equally important, (1) On the one side there is the fact that, so far as we can make out, after _Twelfth Night_ Shakespeare wrote, for seven or eight years, no play which, like many of his earlier works, can be called happy, much less merry or sunny. He wrote tragedies; and if the chronological order _Hamlet_, _Oth.e.l.lo_, _King Lear_, _Timon_, _Macbeth_, is correct, these tragedies show for some time a deepening darkness, and _King Lear_ and _Timon_ lie at the nadir. He wrote also in these years (probably in the earlier of them) certain 'comedies,' _Measure for Measure_ and _Troilus and Cressida_, and perhaps _All's Well_. But about these comedies there is a peculiar air of coldness; there is humour, of course, but little mirth; in _Measure for Measure_ perhaps, certainly in _Troilus and Cressida_, a spirit of bitterness and contempt seems to pervade an intellectual atmosphere of an intense but hard clearness. With _Macbeth_ perhaps, and more decidedly in the two Roman tragedies which followed, the gloom seems to lift; and the final romances show a mellow serenity which sometimes warms into radiant sympathy, and even into a mirth almost as light-hearted as that of younger days. When we consider these facts, not as barely stated thus but as they affect us in reading the plays, it is, to my mind, very hard to believe that their origin was simply and solely a change in dramatic methods or choice of subjects, or even merely such inward changes as may be expected to accompany the arrival and progress of middle age.

(2) On the other side, and over against these facts, we have to set the mult.i.tudinousness of Shakespeare's genius, and his almost unlimited power of conceiving and expressing human experience of all kinds. And we have to set more. Apparently during this period of years he never ceased to write busily, or to exhibit in his writings the greatest mental activity. He wrote also either nothing or very little (_Troilus and Cressida_ and his part of _Timon_ are the possible exceptions) in which there is any appearance of personal feeling overcoming or seriously endangering the self-control or 'objectivity' of the artist. And finally it is not possible to make out any continuously deepening _personal_ note: for although _Oth.e.l.lo_ is darker than _Hamlet_ it surely strikes one as about as impersonal as a play can be; and, on grounds of style and versification, it appears (to me, at least) impossible to bring _Troilus and Cressida_ chronologically close to _King Lear_ and _Timon_; even if parts of it are later than others, the late parts must be decidedly earlier than those plays.

The conclusion we may very tentatively draw from these sets of facts would seem to be as follows. Shakespeare during these years was probably not a happy man, and it is quite likely that he felt at times even an intense melancholy, bitterness, contempt, anger, possibly even loathing and despair. It is quite likely too that he used these experiences of his in writing such plays as _Hamlet_, _Troilus and Cressida_, _King Lear_, _Timon_. But it is evident that he cannot have been for any considerable time, if, ever, overwhelmed by such feelings, and there is no appearance of their having issued in any settled 'pessimistic'

conviction which coloured his whole imagination and expressed itself in his works. The choice of the subject of ingrat.i.tude, for instance, in _King Lear_ and _Timon_, and the method of handling it, may have been due in part to personal feeling; but it does not follow that this feeling was particularly acute at this particular time, and, even if it was, it certainly was not so absorbing as to hinder Shakespeare from representing in the most sympathetic manner aspects of life the very reverse of pessimistic. Whether the total impression of _King Lear_ can be called pessimistic is a further question, which is considered in the text.]

[Footnote 154: _A Study of Shakespeare_, pp. 171, 172.]

[Footnote 155: A flaw, I mean, in a work of art considered not as a moral or theological doc.u.ment but as a work of art,--an aesthetic flaw.

I add the word 'considerable' because we do not regard the effect in question as a flaw in a work like a lyric or a short piece of music, which may naturally be taken as expressions merely of a mood or a subordinate aspect of things.]

[Footnote 156: Caution is very necessary in making comparisons between Shakespeare and the Greek dramatists. A tragedy like the _Antigone_ stands, in spite of differences, on the same ground as a Shakespearean tragedy; it is a self-contained whole with a catastrophe. A drama like the _Philoctetes_ is a self-contained whole, but, ending with a solution, it corresponds not with a Shakespearean tragedy but with a play like _Cymbeline_. A drama like the _Agamemnon_ or the _Prometheus Vinctus_ answers to no Shakespearean form of play. It is not a self-contained whole, but a part of a trilogy. If the trilogy is considered as a unit, it answers not to _Hamlet_ but to _Cymbeline_. If the part is considered as a whole, it answers to _Hamlet_, but may then be open to serious criticism. Shakespeare never made a tragedy end with the complete triumph of the worse side: the _Agamemnon_ and _Prometheus_, if wrongly taken as wholes, would do this, and would so far, I must think, be bad tragedies. [It can scarcely be necessary to remind the reader that, in point of 'self-containedness,' there is a difference of degree between the pure tragedies of Shakespeare and some of the historical.]]

[Footnote 157: I leave it to better authorities to say how far these remarks apply also to Greek Tragedy, however much the language of 'justice' may be used there.]

LECTURE VIII

KING LEAR

We have now to look at the characters in _King Lear_; and I propose to consider them to some extent from the point of view indicated at the close of the last lecture, partly because we have so far been regarding the tragedy mainly from an opposite point of view, and partly because these characters are so numerous that it would not be possible within our limits to examine them fully.

1

The position of the hero in this tragedy is in one important respect peculiar. The reader of _Hamlet_, _Oth.e.l.lo_, or _Macbeth_, is in no danger of forgetting, when the catastrophe is reached, the part played by the hero in bringing it on. His fatal weakness, error, wrong-doing, continues almost to the end. It is otherwise with _King Lear_. When the conclusion arrives, the old King has for a long while been pa.s.sive. We have long regarded him not only as 'a man more sinned against than sinning,' but almost wholly as a sufferer, hardly at all as an agent.

His sufferings too have been so cruel, and our indignation against those who inflicted them has been so intense, that recollection of the wrong he did to Cordelia, to Kent, and to his realm, has been well-nigh effaced. Lastly, for nearly four Acts he has inspired in us, together with this pity, much admiration and affection. The force of his pa.s.sion has made us feel that his nature was great; and his frankness and generosity, his heroic efforts to be patient, the depth of his shame and repentance, and the ecstasy of his re-union with Cordelia, have melted our very hearts. Naturally, therefore, at the close we are in some danger of forgetting that the storm which has overwhelmed him was liberated by his own deed.

Yet it is essential that Lear's contribution to the action of the drama should be remembered; not at all in order that we may feel that he 'deserved' what he suffered, but because otherwise his fate would appear to us at best pathetic, at worst shocking, but certainly not tragic. And when we were reading the earlier scenes of the play we recognised this contribution clearly enough. At the very beginning, it is true, we are inclined to feel merely pity and misgivings. The first lines tell us that Lear's mind is beginning to fail with age.[158] Formerly he had perceived how different were the characters of Albany and Cornwall, but now he seems either to have lost this perception or to be unwisely ignoring it. The rashness of his division of the kingdom troubles us, and we cannot but see with concern that its motive is mainly selfish.

The absurdity of the pretence of making the division depend on protestations of love from his daughters, his complete blindness to the hypocrisy which is patent to us at a glance, his piteous delight in these protestations, the openness of his expressions of preference for his youngest daughter--all make us smile, but all pain us. But pity begins to give way to another feeling when we witness the precipitance, the despotism, the uncontrolled anger of his injustice to Cordelia and Kent, and the 'hideous rashness' of his persistence in dividing the kingdom after the rejection of his one dutiful child. We feel now the presence of force, as well as weakness, but we feel also the presence of the tragic [Greek: hubris]. Lear, we see, is generous and unsuspicious, of an open and free nature, like Hamlet and Oth.e.l.lo and indeed most of Shakespeare's heroes, who in this, according to Ben Jonson, resemble the poet who made them. Lear, we see, is also choleric by temperament--the first of Shakespeare's heroes who is so. And a long life of absolute power, in which he has been flattered to the top of his bent, has produced in him that blindness to human limitations, and that presumptuous self-will, which in Greek tragedy we have so often seen stumbling against the altar of Nemesis. Our consciousness that the decay of old age contributes to this condition deepens our pity and our sense of human infirmity, but certainly does not lead us to regard the old King as irresponsible, and so to sever the tragic _nexus_ which binds together his error and his calamities.

The magnitude of this first error is generally fully recognised by the reader owing to his sympathy with Cordelia, though, as we have seen, he often loses the memory of it as the play advances. But this is not so, I think, with the repet.i.tion of this error, in the quarrel with Goneril.