King Lear

“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 honour you./Why have my sisters husbands, if they say/They love you all? Haply, 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.”

Cordelia’s retort to Lear’s emotional demands is both reasonable and revealing. She works like a logician, pointing out that it doesn’t make much sense to get married if all your love goes to your father. But this argument is also emotive, suggesting a squeamish incestuous current in Lear’s claims to his daughters’ love.

“[…] Why brand they us/With base? with baseness? Bastardy base? Base?/Who, in the lusty stealth of nature, take/More composition and fierce quality/Than doth, within a dull, stale, tired bed,/Go to th’ creating a whole tribe of fops/Got ‘tween asleep and wake? 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,/And my invention thrive, Edmund the base/Shall top th’ legitimate. I grow, I prosper./Now, gods, stand up for bastards.”

Edmund’s first soliloquy is a masterpiece of broad villainy. Edmund introduces himself and his motives plainly: he wishes to be a self-made man, regardless of society’s prejudices against his illegitimacy, and he is willing to trample both his father and brother to gain power. His sense of self is straightforward yet mysterious; he blames “Nature” for his cruelty while his conscience about his own behavior is utterly untroubled. Although he later criticizes the idea that the stars determine people’s actions and fates, he is invested in the notion that he was immutably made, which excuses his villainy as inevitable.

“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 body never spring/A babe to honor her. If she must teem,/Create her child of spleen, that it may live/And be a thwart disnatured torment to her./Let it stamp wrinkles in her brow of youth,/With cadent tears fret 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.”

Lear’s infamous curse is terrifying in its grotesquerie. Here, Lear invokes Nature, begging this cruel goddess to inflict a demonic child on Goneril, one that will wrack both her body and her heart. His images are as invasive as they are ugly. His vivid imagination of Goneril’s failing body projects his own fear and loathing of age onto his daughter. Lear once more oversteps, unable to see his daughter as a separate creature from himself.

“Look, sir, I bleed.” 

When Edmund wounds himself in order to cast suspicion on Edgar, he repeatedly draws his father Gloucester’s attention to this injury—but without much avail. This moment, in which Edmund tries to get a little attention even in the midst of a doubly treacherous plot, hints at the ugly interconnections between power and love—or lack thereof—in these complicated families. Gloucester, caught up in revenge, cannot see his son’s injury; when he eventually swears to make Edmund his heir, his choice has less to do with affection for his bastard son than vengefulness against the legitimate.

“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, superservicable, finical rogue; 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 deny’st the least syllable of thy addition.” 

Kent’s rant against Oswald is exuberant and pointed. A cautious diplomat in his former life, the costumed Kent discovers a zestful love of language in the freedom of his lowly disguise. But the points he makes here are also meaningful. In attacking Oswald’s slavish acquiescence to Goneril’s instructions, he makes it clear that the selfish actions of men who stand for nothing oil the way for real cruelty.

“Whiles I may 'scape,/I will preserve myself: and am bethought/To take the basest and most poorest shape/That ever penury, in contempt of man,/Brought near to beast: my face I'll grime with filth;/Blanket my loins, elf all my hair in knots,/And with presented nakedness outface/The winds and persecutions of the sky./The country gives me proof and precedent/Of Bedlam beggars, who, with roaring voices,/Strike in their numb'd and mortified bare arms/Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary;/And with this horrible object, from low farms,/Poor pelting villages, sheep-cotes, and mills,/Sometimes with lunatic bans, sometimes with prayers,/Enforce their charity. Poor Turlygod, poor Tom,/That's something yet: Edgar I nothing am.” 

As he flees capture and death at the hands of his own father, Edgar externalizes his own inner experience. The world around him having gone mad, Edgar finds his best disguise in the costume of a mad, self-tormenting beggar. This is a pragmatic disguise—no one wants to look at a madman—but also a portentous one. As Poor Tom, Edgar—like Gloucester in his costume as Caius—will encounter truths about human life that complacent comfort only conceals. With a loss of identity comes the discovery of reality.

“Cry to it, nuncle, as the cockney did to the eels when she put 'em i' the paste alive; she knapped 'em o' the coxcombs with a stick, and cried 'Down, wantons, down!' 'Twas her brother that, in pure kindness to his horse, buttered his hay.” 

The Fool’s seemingly nonsensical interjections often play a blackly comic role, deflating the King’s agonies. Here, he compares Lear’s anguished “rising heart” to a pie full of live eels and makes a crude sexual joke along the way. The Fool, like Edgar, brings Lear back down to earth, reminding him of the animal simplicity beneath all his assumed grandeur. 

“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 stir these daughters' hearts/Against their father, fool me not so much/To bear it tamely; touch me with noble anger,/And let not women's weapons, water-drops,/Stain my man's cheeks. 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./I have full cause of weeping, but this heart/Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws,/Or ere I'll weep. O fool, I shall go mad!” 

Lear’s outburst at his elder daughters brings the dangerous complexity of the Lear family’s relationships to the breaking point. Raging and storming, Lear loses his grip on himself. He is at once terrifying and pitiful as he searches for words strong enough to communicate his fury. He is also tormented by the knowledge that he is losing touch with his sanity; even as he attempts to make a show of overwhelming power, he despairs of his own mind. This is the speech of a man divided against himself, and that internal division is externalized in his fracturing family.

“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 germens spill at once,/That makes ingrateful man.” 

Lear’s famous cry in the storm shows an external world fully inhabited by a madman’s thoughts. The storm ominously mirrors all the divisions and furies of the play’s families; Lear, losing his mind, reads it as an image of rage and a destroyer of reason. Those “thought-executing” thunderbolts, for instance, could be read either as killing thought, or moving as fast as Lear’s own uncontrollable mind. When he hopes the storm will “crack nature’s molds,” he reaches out for utter destruction of matter and order alike. Nature itself is thrown off balance, and all will pay for it.

“I'll speak a prophecy ere I go:/When priests are more in word than matter;/When brewers mar their malt with water;/When nobles are their tailors' tutors,/No heretics burned, but wenches' suitors;/When every case in law is right,/No squire in debt, nor no poor knight;/When slanders do not live in tongues,/Nor cutpurses come not to throngs;/When usurers tell their gold i' th’ field,/And bawds and whores do churches build—/Then shall the realm of Albion/Come to great confusion./Then comes the time, who lives to see't,/That going shall be used with feet./This prophecy Merlin shall make; for I live before his time.” 

The Fool’s ominous prophecy, like Lear’s address to the storm, foretells a world turned upside down. It does so in a prescient, almost postmodern style. After his fairy-tale account of an upended world, the Fool attributes this prophecy to Merlin, who hasn’t been born yet. In this curious instant, the Fool breaks both the fourth wall and the timeline of the narrative, reaching out to his audience as a contemporary who nevertheless lays claim to a home in the distant past. Lear’s world is so scrambled that even its fictional reality is fragile and uncertain.

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

Lear’s storm-tossed epiphany leads to a new experience of empathy. In his moments of lucidity between mad fits, he is suddenly able to feel the pain of the poor and to notice his Fool’s shivering. Madness, in driving Lear from his egocentric but fragile self-image as a powerful king, puts him in contact with a reality it’s all too easy and convenient for the wealthy and powerful to ignore. This speech occurs immediately before the disguised Edgar appears as “Poor Tom,” and Lear’s crazed embrace of this “philosopher” is colored by a genuine moment of revelation. 

“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 darkness 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. False of heart, light of ear, bloody of hand; hog in sloth, fox in stealth, wolf in greediness, dog in madness, lion in prey. Let not the creaking of shoes nor the rustling of silks 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. Still through the hawthorn blows the cold wind; Says suum, mun, ha, no, nonny. Dolphin my boy, my boy, sessa! let him trot by.” 

Edgar’s invented backstory for Poor Tom has a wild poetry; like Gloucester, Edgar finds liberation in his disguise, and his invention here is far more detailed than it would need to be for the mere sake of concealment. There is relish and humor as well as darkness. By concocting this fiction, Edgar, becomes an artist. Like the Fool’s nonsense songs, Edgar’s inventions and nonsense are meaningful, touching on sexual perfidy and animal lusts concealed beneath perfume and gloves.

“Poor Tom, that eats the swimming frog, the toad, the tadpole, the wall-newt and the water; that in the fury of his heart, when the foul fiend rages, eats cow-dung for sallets, swallows the old rat and the ditch dog, drinks the green mantle of the standing pool; who is whipped from tithing to tithing, and stock-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!” 

As Edgar’s mad-scene develops, his imagination populates not his back-story as a servingman and a madman. Poor Tom’s imagined abasement—eating rotting animals and cow pies, drinking foul green water—is a nightmare version of real suffering. But there’s also a bitter comedy here, as there is in the rest of this scene: it’s so grim, the reader has to laugh.

“Out, vile jelly./Where is thy luster now?” 

Cornwall’s sadistic words as he blinds Gloucester are matched in spite a few lines later when Regan leaves the maimed old man to “smell his way to Dover.” This merciless attack marks the true death of order and civilization in Lear’s England. As Gloucester notes, he is Regan and Cornwall’s host, and they break every code of hospitality and human conduct through their gruesome act. The queasily tangible image of “vile jelly” suggests the reduction of all that is human to mere foul matter in this new, chaotic world order.

“As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods;/They kill us for their sport.” 

The blinded Gloucester’s famous, pithy, and bitter summation of the human condition speaks to his despair. This is an utterly hopeless worldview, a response to a life that seems painful and indifferent to the point of cruelty. This theme of blows upon blows upon blows, seemingly without reason, will return until the end of the play.

“Come on, sir; here's the place: stand still. How fearful/And dizzy 'tis to cast one's eyes so low!/The crows and choughs that wing the midway air/Show scarce so gross as beetles. Halfway down/Hangs one that gathers samphire—dreadful trade;/Methinks he seems no bigger than his head./The fishermen that walk upon the beach/Appear like mice; and yond tall anchoring bark,/Diminished to her cock; her cock, a buoy/Almost too small for sight. The murmuring surge/That on th’ unnumb’red idle pebble chafes,/Cannot be heard so high. I'll look no more,/Lest my brain turn, and the deficient sight/Topple down headlong.” 

Like the Fool’s prophecy, Edgar’s construction of an imagined cliff of Dover gestures at the fictionality of the stage. The vivid picture Edgar draws here creates a reality; Shakespeare would evoke a “real” cliff on stage in exactly the same way as this pretended one, through language. That Edgar uses this fiction to restore some hope to his father’s heart is one of the few glimmers of redemption in the play’s grim world.

“What, art mad? A man may see how this world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears. See how yond justice rails upon yond simple thief. Hark in thine ear: change places and, handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?” 

Lear’s madness makes him into a philosopher. His scene with Gloucester is at once poignant and funny; it even inspired Samuel Beckett’s dark comedy, Waiting for Godot. Here, he also raises one of the play’s ongoing paradoxes: Physical blindness—and, by extension, impairment and suffering generally—allows for a new and more truthful kind of seeing. Through his ordeal, Lear now understands that title and position are nothing more than costumes.

“If thou wilt weep my fortunes, take my eyes./I know thee well enough; thy name is Gloucester./Thou must be patient. We came crying hither;/Thou know'st, the first time that we smell the air/We wawl and cry. I will preach to thee. Mark […] When we are born, we cry that we are come/To this great stage of fools.” 

As Lear consoles Gloucester, he connects them both back to their babyhood. Old age, sometimes read as a second infancy, brings the two suffering friends back to a new simplicity of understanding. This touching scene also connects to the play’s ideas about the malleability of reality: the world is a “stage of fools,” a play acted by idiots—which may put the reader in mind of a similar idea, less gently delivered, in Macbeth, of humans as nothing but bad actors delivering lines.

“Pray, do not mock me./I am a very foolish fond old man,/Fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less;/And, to deal plainly,/I fear I am not in my perfect mind./Methinks I should know you, and know this man:/Yet I am doubtful, for I am mainly ignorant/What place this is; and all the skill I have/Remembers not these garments; nor I know not/Where I did lodge last night. Do not laugh at me;/For, as I am a man, I think this lady/To be my child Cordelia.” 

When Lear reunites with Cordelia, he is waking from a much-needed sleep—a richly symbolic image of a return to reality. The fuddled Lear finally tells the simple, humble truth: he is a foolish old man losing his mind, but Cordelia is his true daughter. Part of coming to grips with the world, the play suggests, is gaining the self-knowledge to recognize one’s own limitations.

“What, in ill thoughts again? Men must endure/Their going hence, even as their coming hither;/Ripeness is all.” 

Edgar, exhorting Gloucester to keep going in spite of all his suffering, provides him with an injunction rather than a platitude. “Ripeness,” here, seems to be a resignation to what the world gives you. It is a form of acceptance in tune with Lear’s realizations about his own weaknesses. Gloucester will nonetheless die soon, but his heart will “burst smilingly” at the revelation that his true son has been leading him all along.

“No, no, no, no! Come, let's away to prison:/We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage:/When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down,/And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live,/And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh/At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues/Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too,/Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out;/And take upon's the mystery of things,/As if we were God's spies: and we'll wear out,/In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones,/That ebb and flow by the moon.” 

Lear’s gentle speech to Cordelia brings all of the ways he’s changed into relief. He peacefully surrenders kingship, self-interest, and self-righteousness; he knows that part of this vision involves seeking forgiveness. Thus, to live is to be one of “God’s spies”: no longer blind, but a seer.

“Thou’st spoken right; ’tis true./ The wheel is come full circle; I am here.” 

Here, Edmund undergoes a major reversal, seeing his downfall as part of the spinning of fortune’s wheel and as the inevitable consequence of his own actions. His slow death alters him in many ways: he feels sudden empathy for his father, for Lear, and for Cordelia, whom he tries to save with his last breath. His “I am here” is rather like Lear’s acknowledgement of his own foolishness. In death, the slippery, treacherous Edmund must acknowledge exactly who, where, and what he is.

“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.” 

Lear’s lament over Cordelia’s body is one of the most famous and beautiful expressions of grief in the English language. Much of his language in these final moments turns on repetitions. His unbelieving litany of “never”s brings home the true incomprehensibility of death.