It is a striking fact that, although Shakespeare’s main source for Lear was a tragicomedy, he himself added or expanded most of the comic elements I have been discussing: double plot, green world, upended hierarchies, commentary by the Fool, disguise. All together they carry strong suggestions of a final comic ordering—or they would if the outcome of Shakespeare’s play were not so well known. As familiarity with Hamlet diminishes the uncertainty we ought to be sharing with the hero in the early acts of the play, so familiarity with Lear mutes the full effect of these implications of comic pattern. If we did not know what was coming, we would surely recognize and respond to the play’s evident thrust beyond madness and misery to growth, reintegration, and new harmony.¹ We might recognize too that this comic movement, carried on as it is in terms of serious moral issues instead of the more purely social concerns of romantic comedy, points to an analogue with the Christian divine comedy of redemption. It is analogue only, because for reasons that I shall explore later Shakespeare placed the action of Lear in an emphatically non-Christian milieu. But in the sequence of pride, fall, recognition of guilt, forgiveness, and reconciliation, Christian audiences might well see something akin to their faith’s basic pattern of evitability: sin and its consequences dissolving in new opportunity, the birth of the new man.

Sure enough, the last scene of Act IV brings a moving reconciliation between Lear and Cordelia. The Prodigal Son undercurrent joins with more overt allusions to Cordelia as savior—holy water, going about her father’s business, redeeming nature from the general curse.² Lear’s perception moves from death and hell to new life. And mercy supersedes justice:

The scene is so charged and so satisfying that the unknowing audience could easily forget that Edmund, Goneril, and Regan are still at large, and feel that here was the end of the story. It is only after Lear and Cordelia exit that Shakespeare looks beyond the reunion to remind us of the coming battle:

With this swing from security to fear begins the peculiar rhythm that dominates the last act of Lear and makes it different from the final acts of all Shakespeare’s other tragedies. It is a very crowded act. As one event or announcement succeeds another, we are cast up and down by turns, hope alternating with fear. The battle is done almost before we know it has started; Edgar lets us down suddenly with the news that Lear and Cordelia have been defeated and taken prisoner. But hopes rise again immediately afterwards when Lear appears, not in despair but serenely happy. His lyrical “let’s away to prison” speech reduces to insignificance the battle and its outcome (“who’s in, who’s out”) and thus refines our expectations, redirects them toward a more appropriate resolution. Surely it is right for the painfully educated new Lear to turn his back on the vanities of power, rather than to regain his throne by martial victory. Lear imagines his earthly paradise so beautifully that we forget it will be inside a prison. . . .

Does this strain of grotesquerie [reversals, startling events, the Fool’s language, Gloucester’s leap] prepare us for the final absurdity of Cordelia’s death? Not directly, certainly. The essence of grotesque, after all, is that it intrudes unexpectedly. And, as we have seen, the rhythm of Act V keeps renewing hope until Lear enters carrying the dead Cordelia. On the other hand, the earlier shocks and dislocations have a similar spirit. They will probably connect with each other somehow, so that later ones reverberate beyond their particular moments. Subjective responses must vary from one spectator to the next (or, in the same spectator, from one occasion to the next), yet surely there is a common element of unease, unease not at the center of consciousness, but around the edges, waiting to close in at the shattering non sequitur of Cordelia’s death.

If I am right, then Shakespeare has, in a way, prepared us for the end even while necessarily leaving us unprepared and open to shock. The question remains, to what purpose? Are we supposed to feel that the last shocking joke is the point, that the intimations of positive moral evolution in the divine comedy pattern were there only to show up the folly of perceiving order in an orderless universe? Or should we see Cordelia’s death and Lear’s last agony as underlining the pain of the human condition but leaving the redemptive pattern more or less intact? Probably critical opinion still leans more toward the second alternative, although Barbara Everett, Nicholas Brooke, William Elton, and John D. Rosenberg, among others, have argued for more pessimistic readings.³ At one extreme, R. W. Chambers celebrates Lear as Shakespeare’s Purgatorio; at the other, Jan Kott proclaims it Shakespeare’s Endgame.⁴ The play’s stage history shows something of the same split. While eighteenth- and nineteenth-century productions generally cut or prettified the grotesque elements, some twentieth-century ones have opted emphatically for absurdity—notably that of Peter Brook in 1962.

The pessimists have sequence on their side, certainly. In terms of events, blind chance, or malevolent fate, has pretty much the last word. After the play action has come to its grim close, one can look back over the whole to see what happens to purpose and plan on several levels. On the surface, several characters initiate plots of some sort, to get power or love, to save or destroy. None of them, good or bad, ultimately succeeds. On a deeper level are the obscurely motivated wanderings of Lear and Gloucester. These acquire a purpose not intended by the wanderers and only partly engineered by Edgar, a positive pattern seemingly ascribable to an orderly, though awesome, providence that guides faulty men through suffering to wisdom. Taken together, these levels suggest a universe like that of Hamlet, in which human schemes go awry while some power beyond the human directs events toward a larger order. In Lear, however, there is still another level, one only suggested in Hamlet, to which belong those grotesque incongruities that mock all human dignity and meaning. The grotesquerie might have been contained, if not resolved, in a framing order, as the graveyard scene is in Hamlet. But Act IV, with Lear and Gloucester secure in their redemption, is not the end of the story. When Cordelia and Lear die as they do, the play seems finally to say, “This universe, after all, has no concern for men’s moral growth, in fact has no mind; those momentary janglings that you shuddered at before shrugging them off as peripheral—they are the point.” Pelican yields to pillicock.

The play does say this, but it says more. Even Brook, who more or less realized the Endgame-Lear on stage, found he had to cut or undermine certain parts of the text that worked against the Beckettian bleakness. The practical compassion shown by Cornwall’s servants to the blinded Gloucester was omitted, as was Edmund’s repentant “some good I mean to do,/ Despite of mine own nature” (V. iii. 243-44); and Edgar’s (or Albany’s) couplets that conclude the play were spoken against a rumble of thunder presaging another storm. Brook’s decisions help to define the affirmative elements in Lear. The servants can do little enough for Gloucester, yet their disinterested impulse to help offers more hope for the human spirit than Brook’s vision would allow. Since we know nothing beforehand of these nameless men and see nothing of them afterward, their act may perhaps imply something about humanity in general. In any case, its significance is in its quality rather than its efficacy. Those who find values affirmed amid the despair of Lear tend to locate them in the characters as opposed to the course of events, in the constant loyal goodness of some and the spiritual growth of others. Without ignoring the Gonerils and Oswalds who exist alongside the Cordelias and Kents, without denying that the good go down as well as the corrupt, this view finds meaning “not in what becomes of us, but in what we become.”⁵

Brook’s impulse to sabotage the final speech points us to another aspect of affirmation in Lear:

While the words are muted and sad enough, their message is not despair. If the first line is meant as a response to Kent’s speech just before, in which he rejects a share in rule and in life itself, then “we must obey” counters “my master calls me; I must not say no.” That is, we must accede to life, not death. At any rate, the word obey suggests order, as does the balanced form of the last three lines. And the order sought is significantly different from the hypocritical forms with which the evil began in Act I. “What we ought to say,” with its reminder of the love test, yields to “what we feel” (my italics). This speech is probably Edgar’s; Albany has already showed the same spirit in his attempts to provide for the future of the state. First he aspires to a moral settling of accounts: the king will be restored, friends will be rewarded, enemies will be punished (298-304). He breaks off to witness yet another horror, Lear’s last agony. Although events once again have mocked human orderings, Albany, instead of subsiding into despair, tries again to pick up the pieces: “Friends of my soul, you twain/ Rule in this realm and the gor’d state sustain” (319-20). Starting as a passive neutral, Albany has, during the course of the action, defined himself by choosing human fellowship as the only alternative to men’s preying upon one another like monsters of the deep. Now left, by Lear’s defeat and Cornwall’s death, sole ruler of Britain, he gives up the throne—first to the rightful king, and then after Lear has died to Kent and Edgar, presumably out of a sense of his own unworthiness. Again this last scene recalls the first, again with a significant difference: Albany’s unselfish offer of power is the opposite of Lear’s self-serving abdication. Although in order that this structural point be made Albany must decline active participation in rule, his words here—“friends of my soul . . . the gor’d state sustain”—express continued concern for the private and public bonds that tie men together. Enid Welsford has observed that in the early part of Lear the bad characters are firmly allied while the good are divided among themselves; toward the end the reverse is true.⁶ Albany’s words to Edgar and Kent throughout the scene have underlined that community of the good, even surrounded by terrifying disorder. As for the bad characters, Goneril has preyed on Regan and on herself, and Edmund has departed further from the solidarity of evil at the last, to make common cause with the good. Edmund’s impulse to save Cordelia and Lear is ineffective, as future events may frustrate Albany’s hopes for the gored state, but the impulse itself marks Edmund’s reentry (or entry) into the human community.

The final movement of Lear, then, is not all pillicock. Some elements counter the pervasive absurdity. Yet this negative, rather grudging formulation will not do for the many readers and spectators who find the play exalting. Are Bradley and all the others who see transcendent victory at the end simply refusing to face the bleak facts? Certainly the facile optimism of some finds sweetness in the uses of adversity with too little attention to the actual experience of the two old men—grinding agony, exhaustion, death. Others import back into the story the Christian otherworldly comfort that Shakespeare so rigorously excluded from it, so that they can imagine Lear and Cordelia united again beyond the grave. There is exaltation in Lear, I believe, but it is tragic exaltation. Far from depending on the next world, its premise is that this world—imperfect, limiting, indifferently cruel, perhaps senseless—is all there is. Lear’s universe is preeminently the scene of tragic heroism as I described it in the Introduction, and Lear himself is the unaccommodated but also unaccommodating hero. “Pour on; I will endure” (III. iv. 18). He does more than that. Mocked and trivialized by his Fool and by his own silliness, battered by storms within and without, Lear keeps on asking. His pursuit of justice does not stop with the half-truth that he is more sinned against than sinning, or with the abortive trial of Goneril and Regan, or even with his anarchic intuition that all are guilty and hence none can justly punish: “Handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?” This question, with all the reservations it implies about human justice, is allowed to stand; and no divine justice comes to answer the later, more terrible question, “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,/ And thou no breath at all?”⁷ Yet in a world where “none does offend,” Lear has nevertheless insisted on his moral responsibility, offering himself to Cordelia for punishment because he has wronged her: “You have some cause.” Not finding morality outside, he has created it inside. Like other tragic heroes, Lear in adversity realizes more and more of his self. The final words of the play pay tribute to that fullness of enduring and learning: “the oldest,” Lear, has suffered and lived more fully than any who come after him will. Like Hamlet in particular—not the Hamlet who saw heaven ordinant and divinity shaping our ends but the Hamlet of the graveyard scene—Lear seems in his energetic, questing response to absurdity to be creating a self, defining it against nothingness.

Creation is a divine act. It may perhaps seem strange to talk of human beings performing divine acts in a play whose characters appeal so often to the gods. Religion is omnipresent in Lear. Its content, however, is problematic. Scholars have tried to piece together a consistent theology from the many religious invocations and explanations, but with little success. The comments contradict each other; and the action confirms Gloucester’s “as flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods” at least as much as it confirms Edgar’s “the gods are just.” In fact, if we mean by “gods” anything more than “the way things turn out,” they do not seem to exist in the play at all. Omnipresent yet nonexistent, the gods invoked in Lear carry a dual meaning, indicating simultaneously that men need a divinity greater than their own selves and that those selves are after all the only source of that divinity. Any divine comedy they achieve is self-generated, without support from a larger order.

Notice, for example, that prayers to these gods are almost never answered. Lear exhibits from time to time the patience he has prayed for, Cordelia’s appeal that her father be restored to his senses meets with some short-range success, and Edgar does eventually prosper as the remorseful Gloucester twice prays he will.⁸ One could say, more doubtfully, that Edmund’s goddess Nature stands up for bastards, at least for a while. In general, though, prayers go unanswered so regularly that asking for a divinely initiated action just about guarantees it will not happen. The gods do not strike Goneril blind and lame, do not keep Lear from madness or even from humiliating tears, do not find out and punish their enemies in the storm, do not crack Nature’s molds and destroy the world, do not reward Gloucester’s kindness to Lear or keep him from further despair after his attempted suicide, do not cause the right side to win the battle, and most of all do not save Cordelia from death.⁹ Either the heavens are empty or their divinities are perverse, alien to any moral system we can understand. At times the result is so ironically at odds with the prayer that one suspects a malicious intelligence behind it. The reward for Gloucester’s kindness is his savage blinding by Cornwall; the stormy blasts and eye-piercing flames that Lear calls down on Goneril fall in fact on himself and Gloucester.

On the other hand, it gradually becomes apparent that images of the gods in Lear have a close subjective relation to the characters who offer them. Kind and protective themselves, Kent and Cordelia see the gods as kind and protective. Edgar and Albany, who value justice, see them as just. For Lear in his anger at his elder daughters, they are wrathful and punishing, but after he is reborn into humility, they smile on self-sacrifice. For Gloucester after he has sheltered Lear from the storm, the gods are kind; when he despairs they are wantonly cruel; after he is brought from despair to acceptance they are “ever-gentle.”¹⁰

Edmund’s goddess Nature is clearly a projection of his own lawless, amoral energy. His address to her in the second scene of Act I serves dramatically to introduce him to the audience, but after this speech, which in any case is more self-definition than plea, Edmund forgets he has a tutelary deity. He refers to things divine only twice, to bolster his pose of righteousness when he is doing down first his brother and then his father:

Aside from these pious frauds practiced on Gloucester and (rather unnecessarily, one would think) on Cornwall, Edmund is as silent on religious matters as the other bad characters are. Regan has one conventional exclamation (II. iv. 166), while Goneril and Oswald say nothing of the gods. It would appear that besides differentiating images of the divine according to temperament and moral condition of the imager, the play distinguishes more generally between the good characters who invoke their gods in earnest and the bad ones who call on them hypocritically or not at all. This might indicate that the gods are real after all, but I think there is a better explanation.

The strongest evidence that men make divinities rather than the other way round is that again and again conclusions about what the gods are like and what they should do follow and grow out of human initiatives. A good example is Lear’s meditation on poverty during the storm. He says, “I’ll pray,” but then he talks not to gods but to men, the poor naked wretches and those in power who should be taking thought for them:

The gods come in only at the end, and they come as result rather than cause. When human rulers like Lear learn to distribute wealth justly, then the heavens will be revealed as just.

Words and action follow this pattern at several significant points. When Albany hears that Cornwall has been killed for blinding Gloucester, he says,

Does it show any such thing? A man has punished Cornwall, not the “visible spirits” sent down from heaven that Albany conceives as the proper agents of retribution (IV. ii. 46-47). What “proves” the existence of heaven is a purely human action. The scene of Cornwall’s punishment itself ends in a similar way:

First comes the desire to help; then it is projected onto the gods.

In the Dover cliff scene, we actually watch Edgar invent new gods for his father. Picking him up after his “leap,” Edgar proclaims Gloucester’s life a miracle and instructs him about the makers of that miracle: “Think that the clearest gods, who make them honours/ Of men’s impossibilities, have preserved thee” (IV. vi. 73-74). Both the impossibility and the miraculous preservation are, of course, Edgar’s own work. He is converting his father away from the casual murderer-gods Gloucester has earlier called up from his despair. Interestingly, Gloucester himself has shown an impulse toward a more positive belief soon after the “flies to wanton boys” pronouncement, in a speech that more or less parallels Lear’s meditation on social justice. Like Lear, he is stirred by his own misery to feel for others:

What has happened to him seemed senseless only a moment ago, yet now he perceives a purpose in it: heaven strikes at the comfortably hard-hearted ones to make them, in Edgar’s later phrase, “pregnant to good pity.” Why does Gloucester see this just now and not before? Because he has felt the good pity and initiated, by himself, the distribution that undoes excess—“take this purse.” He finds meaning in heaven’s act only through his own act.

Religion in King Lear, then, does not contradict heroic self-creation but reinforces it. Men make gods in their own images. Shakespeare is not Marlowe, however, and the play does not celebrate the all-sufficient ego. Edgar’s insistence that his father attribute his rescue from death to the “clearest gods” reminds us that, even though the gods have no objective reality, it is a sign of moral health to invoke them. The implication is that men must create gods out of themselves but not make self their god. They need to refer their lives to larger ideals of order and community, even if the order receives no support from an indifferent universe, and community cannot save them from undeserved suffering.

In a sense, King Lear is a play about religion in the making. Shakespeare created for it a thoroughly pagan milieu quite unlike that of his source play, which is steeped in Christian allusion and assumption. The play world of Lear is emphatically, if not totally, primitive. Elton thinks that Shakespeare de-Christianized the story in order to make his own play demonstrate the breakdown of belief in providence. He sees the “poor naked wretches” speech as an indictment of cosmic injustice, with Lear’s recognition of his own injustice as an incidental irony.¹¹ I would argue rather that this recognition is central: it is Lear’s acknowledgment that if justice is to exist, he as man and ruler must make it happen. Cosmic injustice is still there, but all is not therefore cheerless, dark, and deadly. Shakespeare’s decision to examine man’s ethical and metaphysical position in the universe without the donnés of Christian revelation is in line with the general tendency of his maturing art. Charlton points out, for example, that in Richard III it is assumed that the wages of sin is death, while Macbeth, in the next decade, reveals the internal necessity of that principle, by demonstrating its roots in “the bare rudiments of human nature.”¹² One sees the same impulse to discard orthodox frameworks and start with human beings alone in the development of Shakespeare’s political drama. The divine scheme of sin and retribution that is prominent in the Henry VI-Richard III tetralogy is much less noticeable in the Richard II-Henry V group, where problems of government are explored mainly in human terms. Shakespeare went farther in the same direction when he abandoned English history, with its patriotic imperatives, for the emotional neutrality of Rome. In Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and especially Coriolanus, he used that freedom to address fundamental questions about the individual’s relation to the state without any prior assumption in favor of the state. He could hardly ask whether English prosperity and continuity were worth all they demanded (though perhaps he comes close to asking it through Hal’s rejection of Falstaff). He could and did question the value of Rome. Hamlet, after some flirtation with absurdity, finally asserts an external guiding providence; five years later, in Lear, Shakespeare removes providential sureties and leaves his characters alone to destroy themselves or to create a positive ethic out of their own need. The play’s values of love, forgiveness, and fellow-feeling gained through suffering are indeed those preached by Christianity. The point is that, rather than being handed down from on high, they take root in and grow up from the ground of human desperation. Furthermore, in an apparently random universe with no afterlife in which ultimate justice is meted out, following that ethic must be its own reward. Victories won through it are personal, limited, and nonenduring.

I suggest as the shaping emotion of tragedy a tension between recognition of death’s rightness and protest against its wrongness. This is to say that tragedy’s ground is the disputed border—or no-man’s-land—between a just and orderly pattern for life on the one hand and an amoral patternlessness on the other. Shakespeare in King Lear is not rewriting the Purgatorio or anticipating Endgame; he is setting one vision against the other, and in their uneasy coexistence lies the play’s peculiar tragic force. Dante and Beckett at their respective poles offer not tragedy but two kinds of comedy. What is important to realize here is that each kind in its way diminishes man somewhat. He is either a figure in a preestablished scheme, following the way laid out for him by a higher intelligence, or he is an aimless atom in a universe of aimless atoms. Where the two comic visions are held in balance, with neither dominating, individual choice and perseverance have special significance. The universe of tragedy, and preeminently of Lear, intimates pattern but fails to complete it; some pieces of the jigsaw are forever missing, and some of those on hand will never fit. Man is heroic in these circumstances when, like Lear, he has the capacity to create a larger self even out of the destructive element—to make his own meaning.

Source

From SNYDER, SUSAN; THE COMIC MATRIX OF SHAKESPEARE’S TRAGEDIES. © 1979 Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.

Works Cited