Shakespearean Tragedy Part 25

[Footnote 160: What immediately follows is as striking an ill.u.s.tration of quite another quality, and of the effects which make us think of Lear as pursued by a relentless fate. If he could go in and sleep after his prayer, as he intends, his mind, one feels, might be saved: so far there has been only the menace of madness. But from within the hovel Edgar--the last man who would willingly have injured Lear--cries, 'Fathom and half, fathom and half! Poor Tom!'; the Fool runs out terrified; Edgar, summoned by Kent, follows him; and, at sight of Edgar, in a moment something gives way in Lear's brain, and he exclaims:

Hast thou given all To thy two daughters? And art thou come to this?

Henceforth he is mad. And they remain out in the storm.

I have not seen it noticed that this stroke of fate is repeated--surely intentionally--in the sixth scene. Gloster has succeeded in persuading Lear to come into the 'house'; he then leaves, and Kent after much difficulty induces Lear to lie down and rest upon the cushions. Sleep begins to come to him again, and he murmurs,

'Make no noise, make no noise; draw the curtains; so, so, so.

We'll go to supper i' the morning. So, so, so.'

At that moment Gloster enters with the news that he has discovered a plot to kill the King; the rest that 'might yet have balm'd his broken senses' is again interrupted; and he is hurried away on a litter towards Dover. (His recovery, it will be remembered, is due to a long sleep artificially induced.)]

[Footnote 161: III. iv. 49. This is printed as prose in the Globe edition, but is surely verse. Lear has not yet spoken prose in this scene, and his next three speeches are in verse. The next is in prose, and, ending, in his tearing off his clothes, shows the advance of insanity.]

[Footnote 162: [Lear's death is thus, I am reminded, like _pere_ Goriot's.] This interpretation may be condemned as fantastic, but the text, it appears to me, will bear no other. This is the whole speech (in the Globe text):

And my poor fool is hang'd! No, no, no life!

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more, Never, never, never, never, never!

Pray you, undo this b.u.t.ton: thank you, sir.

Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips, Look there, look there!

The transition at 'Do you see this?' from despair to something more than hope is exactly the same as in the preceding pa.s.sage at the word 'Ha!':

A plague upon you, murderers, traitors all!

I might have saved her; now she's gone for ever!

Cordelia, Cordelia, stay a little.

Ha!

What is't thou say'st? Her voice was ever soft, Gentle, and low, an excellent thing in woman.

As to my other remarks, I will ask the reader to notice that the pa.s.sage from Lear's entrance with the body of Cordelia to the stage-direction _He dies_ (which probably comes a few lines too soon) is 54 lines in length, and that 30 of them represent the interval during which he has absolutely forgotten Cordelia. (It begins when he looks up at the Captain's words, line 275.) To make Lear during this interval turn continually in anguish to the corpse, is to act the pa.s.sage in a manner irreconcilable with the text, and insufferable in its effect. I speak from experience. I have seen the pa.s.sage acted thus, and my sympathies were so exhausted long before Lear's death that his last speech, the most pathetic speech ever written, left me disappointed and weary.]

[Footnote 163: The Quartos give the 'Never' only thrice (surely wrongly), and all the actors I have heard have preferred this easier task. I ought perhaps to add that the Quartos give the words 'Break, heart; I prithee, break!' to Lear, not Kent. They and the Folio are at odds throughout the last sixty lines of King Lear, and all good modern texts are eclectic.]

[Footnote 164: The connection of these sufferings with the sin of earlier days (not, it should be noticed, of youth) is almost thrust upon our notice by the levity of Gloster's own reference to the subject in the first scene, and by Edgar's often quoted words 'The G.o.ds are just,'

etc. The following collocation, also, may be intentional (III. iv. 116):

_Fool_. 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. [_Enter_ GLOSTER with a torch.]

Pope destroyed the collocation by transferring the stage-direction to a point some dozen lines later.]

[Footnote 165: The pa.s.sages are here printed together (III. iv. 28 ff.

and IV. i. 67 ff.):

_Lear._ Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp; Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayst shake the superflux to them, And show the heavens just.

_Glo._ Here, take this purse, thou whom the heavens' plagues Have humbled to all strokes: that I am wretched Makes thee the happier: heavens, deal so still!

Let the superfluous and l.u.s.t-dieted man, That slaves your ordinance, that will not see Because he doth not feel, feel your power quickly; So distribution should undo excess, And each man have enough.]

[Footnote 166: Schmidt's idea--based partly on the omission from the Folios at I. ii. 103 (see Furness' Variorum) of the words 'To his father that so tenderly and entirely loves him'--that Gloster loved neither of his sons, is surely an entire mistake. See, not to speak of general impressions, III. iv. 171 ff.]

[Footnote 167: Imagination demands for Lear, even more than for Oth.e.l.lo, majesty of stature and mien. Tourgenief felt this and made his 'Lear of the Steppes' a _gigantic_ peasant. If Shakespeare's texts give no express authority for ideas like these, the reason probably is that he wrote primarily for the theatre, where the princ.i.p.al actor might not be a large man.]

[Footnote 168: He is not present, of course, till France and Burgundy enter; but while he is present he says not a word beyond 'Here's France and Burgundy, my n.o.ble lord.' For some remarks on the possibility that Shakespeare imagined him as having encouraged Lear in his idea of dividing the kingdom see Note T. It must be remembered that Cornwall was Gloster's 'arch and patron.']

[Footnote 169: In this she stands alone among the more notable characters of the play. Doubtless Regan's exclamation 'O the blest G.o.ds'

means nothing, but the fact that it is given to her means something. For some further remarks on Goneril see Note T. I may add that touches of Goneril reappear in the heroine of the next tragedy, _Macbeth_; and that we are sometimes reminded of her again by the character of the Queen in _Cymbeline_, who bewitched the feeble King by her beauty, and married him for greatness while she abhorred his person (_Cymbeline_, V. v. 62 f., 31 f.); who tried to poison her step-daughter and intended to poison her husband; who died despairing because she could not execute all the evil she purposed; and who inspirited her husband to defy the Romans by words that still stir the blood (_Cymbeline_, III. i. 14 f. Cf. _King Lear_, IV. ii. 50 f.).]

[Footnote 170: I. ii. 1 f. Shakespeare seems to have in mind the idea expressed in the speech of Ulysses about the dependence of the world on degree, order, system, custom, and about the chaos which would result from the free action of appet.i.te, the 'universal wolf' (_Troilus and Cr._ I. iii. 83 f.). Cf. the contrast between 'particular will' and 'the moral laws of nature and of nations,' II. ii. 53, 185 ('nature' here of course is the opposite of the 'nature' of Edmund's speech).]

[Footnote 171: The line last quoted is continued by Edmund in the Folios thus: 'Th' hast spoken right; 'tis true,' but in the Quartos thus: 'Thou hast spoken truth,' which leaves the line imperfect. This, and the imperfect line 'Make instruments to plague us,' suggest that Shakespeare wrote at first simply,

Make instruments to plague us.

_Edm._ Th' hast spoken truth.

The Quartos show other variations which seem to point to the fact that the MS. was here difficult to make out.]

[Footnote 172: IV. i. 1-9. I am indebted here to Koppel, _Verbesserungsvorschlage zu den Erlauterungen und der Textlesung des Lear_ (1899).]

[Footnote 173: See I. i. 142 ff. Kent speaks, not of the _injustice_ of Lear's action, but of its 'folly,' its 'hideous rashness.' When the King exclaims 'Kent, on thy life, no more,' he answers:

My life I never held but as a p.a.w.n To wage against thy enemies; nor fear to lose it, _Thy safety being the motive_.

(The first Folio omits 'a,' and in the next line reads 'nere' for 'nor.'

Perhaps the first line should read 'My life I ne'er held but as p.a.w.n to wage.')]

[Footnote 174: See II. ii. 162 to end. The light-heartedness disappears, of course, as Lear's misfortunes thicken.]

[Footnote 175: This difference, however, must not be pressed too far; nor must we take Kent's retort,

Now by Apollo, king, Thou swear'st thy G.o.ds in vain,

for a sign of disbelief. He twice speaks of the G.o.ds in another manner (I. i. 185, III. vi. 5), and he was accustomed to think of Lear in his 'prayers' (I. i. 144).]

[Footnote 176: The 'clown' in _Antony and Cleopatra_ is merely an old peasant. There is a fool in _Timon of Athens_, however, and he appears in a scene (II. ii.) generally attributed to Shakespeare. His talk sometimes reminds one of Lear's fool; and Kent's remark, 'This is not altogether fool, my lord,' is repeated in _Timon_, II. ii. 122, 'Thou art not altogether a fool.']

[Footnote 177: [This is no obstacle. There could hardly be a stage tradition hostile to his youth, since he does not appear in Tate's version, which alone was acted during the century and a half before Macready's production. I had forgotten this; and my memory must also have been at fault regarding an engraving to which I referred in the first edition. Both mistakes were pointed out by Mr. Archer.]]

[Footnote 178: In parts of what follows I am indebted to remarks by Cowden Clarke, quoted by Furness on I. iv. 91.]

[Footnote 179: See also Note T.]

[Footnote 180: 'Our last and least' (according to the Folio reading).

Lear speaks again of 'this little seeming substance.' He can carry her dead body in his arms.]

[Footnote 181: Perhaps then the 'low sound' is not merely metaphorical in Kent's speech in I. i. 153 f.: