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Written soon after King James united the thrones of England and Scotland, and performed in his royal presence at Whitehall, King Lear reveals the dire consequences of dividing a united kingdom. In principle, the aged Lear's decision to take voluntary retirement does not seem a bad thing: he is losing his grip on matters of state, his daughters and sons-in-law are 'younger strengths' with more energy for government, and, most importantly, the division is intended to prevent a future civil war between rival claimants, which would have been a definite possibility in the absence of a son who would automatically inherit the whole kingdom. But can an anointed king abnegate his role at will? If he does, he certainly should not expect to retain the trappings of power. Goneril and Regan have a case for stripping him of his rowdy, extravagant retinue of one hundred knights.
Lear's mistake is to link the division of the kingdom to a public show of affection. The two older sisters, well versed in the 'glib and oily art' of courtly flattery, tell him what he wants to hear, but Cordelia cannot. She is one of the play's truth-tellers and simply lacks the capacity or the experience to dress her love in fine rhetoric. Lear knows that she loves him best, but we may assume that until this moment her love has always been expressed privately. As the youngest and unmarried daughter, Cordelia has probably never spoken publicly before the court. Lear's intention for the opening scene is that it will be Cordelia's coming-out: she is supposed to give public expression to her great love and in return she will be rewarded with the richest portion of the kingdom and the most-prized husband. He does not bargain on her inability to play the role in which he has cast her. Kings and earls do not necessarily have to be blind to true virtue – witness the examples of Kent and France – but Lear, too long used to having his own way and hearing only the words of flatterers, has blinded himself. Only when he has been stripped of the fine clothes and fine words of the court, and has heard truth in the mouths of a fool and a (supposed) Bedlam beggar, does he find out what it really means to be human.
Where Macbeth and Othello are focused tightly upon a single plot line, the action of Lear greatly extends the technique of parallel plotting with which Shakespeare had experimented in Hamlet , where Laertes and Fortinbras serve as foils to the hero. In Lear , the Gloucester family plot is a sustained presence. Gloucester is another father who is blind to the true nature of his children; that blindness leads, in Shakespeare's cruellest literalization of metaphor, to the plucking out of his eyes. Edmund corresponds to the wicked daughters; several of the play's many letters pass between them. It is wholly appropriate that he should end up promised to them both. Like the king's favourite daughter Cordelia, Edgar (who is the king's godson) is unjustly exiled from home and excluded from parental care. It is fitting to the parallel structure of the twin plots that the play ends in the Folio version with him returning to take the reins of power, just as there is a certain, though very different, logic to Nahum Tate's infamous Restoration-period rewrite with a happy ending, in which Edgar is married off to Cordelia.
Shakespeare never takes one side of a question. In the very opening lines of the play we discover that it is Edmund who has previously been unjustly exiled from home and excluded from parental care. Kent, the play's best judge of character, initially describes Edmund as 'proper': he has the bearing of a gentleman, but his illegitimacy has deprived him of the benefits of society. Edmund's first soliloquy makes a good case for the unfairness of a social order which practises primogeniture and stigmatizes bastardy; his discovery near the moment of death that 'Edmund was beloved' is curiously touching. He is not, then, an uncomplicated stage 'machiavel', an embodiment of pure, unmotivated evil.
Astrology and astronomy were synonymous in the Elizabethan age: the signs of the times were read in the signs of the skies. King Lear is a play about bad times. The state drifts rudderless, child turns against parent, the clouds of war gather, the king and all around him totter on the brink of the abyss. So it is that Gloucester blames it all on the stars: 'These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us.' Edmund, however, disputes this: 'an admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition on the charge of a star!' He argues that things often regarded as the product of the 'natural order' are actually shaped by 'custom' – for him, primogeniture and legitimacy would come into this category. The position articulated here is close to that of the sixteenth-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne in the closing section of his Apology of Raymond Sebond : any custom abhorred or outlawed by one nation is sure to be praised or practised by another. But if you have nothing save custom, no divinely sanctioned hierarchy, then where does your value-system come from? Montaigne's answer is blind faith in God, whereas Edmund, like an apologist before his time for the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, commits himself to 'nature' as a principle of survival and self-seeking.
Gloucester's philosophical orientation, meanwhile, turns towards the Stoic idea of finding the right timing for death. After his mock suicide he says, 'henceforth I'll bear / Affliction till it do cry out itself / ''Enough, enough'' and die.' But he cannot sustain this position: when Lear and Cordelia lose the battle, he is found in 'ill thoughts again', wanting to rot. Edgar responds with more Stoic advice: 'Men must endure / Their going hence, even as their coming hither: / Ripeness is all.' But this idea of ripe timing doesn't work out: by mistiming the revelation of his own identity to Gloucester, Edgar precipitates his father's death.
The play's pattern, then, is of Stoic comfort not working. At the beginning of the fourth act Edgar reflects on his own condition and cheers himself up with thoughts about the worst, but then his father comes on blinded and he is instantly confounded – things are worse than before. If the case of Edgar reveals the deficiency of Stoic comfort, that of Albany demonstrates the inadequacy of belief in divine justice. His credo is that the good shall taste 'the wages of their virtue' and the bad drink from the poisoned 'cup of their deservings'. This scheme works for the bad, but not for the good. In the closing scene, Albany tries to orchestrate events, to make order out of chaos, but each of his resolutions is followed by new disaster: he greets the restored Edgar, then immediately hears the news of Gloucester's death, then the news of the two queens' deaths; then Kent comes on, dying; then in response to the news that Cordelia is to be hanged, Albany says 'The gods defend her!', only for Lear to enter with her in his arms already hanged. The gods have not defended her. Then Albany tries to give power back to Lear – and he promptly dies. Then he tries to persuade Kent and Edgar to divide the kingdom, and Kent promptly goes off to die.
The final lines of the play – given to different speakers in the Quarto and Folio versions of the text – suggest that the lesson has been learnt that Stoic comfort will not do, that it is better to 'speak what we feel' than 'what we ought to say'. The Folio's ascription of this speech to Edgar makes more dramatic sense than the Quarto's to Albany, since Edgar's stripping down in Act 3 is an exposure to feeling, occurring in conjunction with Lear's feeling with and for the poor, which makes him the character better prepared to voice this sentiment.
The Stoic philosopher tries to be ruled by reason rather than passion. But for the great sixteenth-century humanist Desiderius Erasmus in his Praise of Folly , there is inhumanity in the notion that to be wise you must suppress the emotions. The most important thing is to 'feel' – as Gloucester has to learn, to see the world not rationally but 'feelingly'. Erasmus' Folly points out that friendship is among the highest human values, and it depends on emotion. The people who show friendship to Lear (Fool; Kent disguised as Caius; Edgar disguised as Poor Tom and then as Peasant) and to Gloucester (Servants, Old Man) are not the wise or the rich.
We are ruled by our passions and our bodies; we go through life performing a series of different roles of which we are by no means in control. 'All this life of mortal men, what is it else but a certain kind of stage play?' asks Erasmus' Folly. Lear echoes the sentiment: 'When we are born, we cry that we are come / To this great stage of fools.' In the great theatre of the world, with the gods as audience, we are the fools on stage. Under the aspect of Folly, we see that a king is no different from any other man. The trappings of monarchy are but a costume: this is both Folly's and Lear's discovery.
The play ends on a note of apocalypse, millennial doom. A trumpet sounds three times to announce the final showdown. Then when Lear enters with his beloved daughter dead in his arms, loyal Kent asks 'Is this the promised end?' He is thinking of Doomsday, but the line is also a sly allusion on Shakespeare's part: in all previous versions of the Lear story, several of which would have been familiar to members of his audience, Cordelia survives and Lear is restored to the throne. The death of Cordelia is all the more painful because it is not the end 'promised' by previous literary and theatrical tradition.
King Lear is a play full of questions. The big ones go unanswered. The biggest of all is Lear's 'Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?' In this world, there is no rhyme or reason, no pattern of divine justice. Here again, Shakespeare departs strikingly from his source, the old anonymous play of King Leir , in which Christian providence prevails. Shakespeare reimagines his material in a bleak pagan world. In this, he not only looks back to the past, but also anticipates a future that is ours – a time when the old religious hierarchies and moral certainties have been stripped away.
But in a strange way an answer is to be found in Edgar's reply to Kent's line about the promised end. A question is answered with a question: 'Or image of that horror?' It's not really the end of the world; it's an image of the end. Hamlet said that the player holds up a mirror to nature, but in King Lear we are reminded again and again that what you see in a mirror is an image, not the thing itself. Gloucester doesn't really jump off the cliff: it's all an elaborate game, designed by Edgar to teach his father a lesson. In uncertain times, we need images, games and experiments as ways of trying to make sense of our world. We need plays. That is why, four centuries on, we keep going back to Shakespeare and his dazzling mirror-world in which everyone is a player.
Looked at in one way, the world of King Lear , with its images of doom, its mad king, its scheming ugly sisters, its fool and its (pretend) mad Bedlam beggar, could not be further from ordinary life. But looked at another way, it is an image of ordinary things, but seen in extremity. It is a play that has more time for a language of ordinary things – garden water-pots, wrens and toasted cheese – than for the glib and oily art of courtly speech.
So is the whole play, like the 'Dover cliff' scene, an elaborate game designed by Shakespeare to teach us a lesson? Only if we think of it as a lesson in feeling, not high-minded judgement. To be truly responsive to the play we must, as the final speech has it, 'Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.' To be human is to see feelingly , not to fall back on easy moralizing, the 'ought to say' that characterizes people like Albany. And seeing feelingly has to do with our sympathetic response to the images that confront us, both on the stage and in the great theatre of the world. Lear becomes human when he stops caring about one kind of image (the glorious trappings of monarchy) and instead confronts another: the image of raw human being, of a fool and a Bedlam beggar, of poor naked wretches. Come the last trump, the play tells us, we will be judged by our fellow-feeling for the dispossessed, not our status in society. In this, as in so much else, Shakespeare speaks not only for his own age, but for ours.
PLOT: Lear, King of Britain, decides to abdicate and divide his kingdom between his three daughters. When his beloved youngest, Cordelia, refuses to make a public declaration of love for her father she is disinherited and married to the King of France without a dowry. The Earl of Kent is banished by Lear for daring to defend her. The two elder daughters, Goneril and Regan, and their husbands inherit the kingdom. Gloucester, deceived by his bastard son Edmund, disinherits his legitimate son, Edgar, who is forced to go on the run to save his life. Lear, now stripped of his power, quarrels with Goneril and Regan about the conditions of his lodging in their households. In a rage he goes out into the stormy night, accompanied by his Fool and by Kent, now disguised as a servant. They encounter Edgar, disguised as a mad beggar called 'Poor Tom'. Gloucester is betrayed by Edmund and captured by Regan and Cornwall, who put out his eyes. King Lear is taken secretly to Dover, where Cordelia has landed with a French army. The blind Gloucester meets but does not recognize Edgar, who leads him to Dover. Lear and Cordelia are reconciled, but in the ensuing battle are captured by the sisters' forces. Goneril and Regan are both in love with Edmund, who encourages them both. Discovering this, Goneril's husband Albany forces Edmund to defend himself against the charge of treachery. A knight appears to challenge Edmund and, after fatally wounding him, reveals himself to be Edgar. News comes that Goneril has poisoned Regan and then committed suicide. Before dying, Edmund reveals that he has ordered the deaths of Lear and Cordelia.
MAJOR PARTS: ( with percentage of lines/number of speeches/scenes on stage ) Lear (22％/188/10), Edgar (11％/98/10), Earl of Kent (11％/127/12), Earl of Gloucester (10％/118/12), Edmund (9％/79/9), Fool (7％/58/6), Goneril (6％/53/8), Regan (5％/73/8), Duke of Albany (5％/58/5), Cordelia (3％/31/4), Duke of Cornwall (3％/63/5), Oswald (2％/38/7).
LINGUISTIC MEDIUM: 75％ verse, 25％ prose.
DATE: 1605–06. Performed at court December 1606; draws on old Leir play (published 1605); seems to refer to eclipses of September and October 1605; borrows from books by Samuel Harsnett and John Florio that were published in 1603.
SOURCES: Based on The True Chronicle Historie of King Leir and his Three Daughters , an old play of unknown authorship that was in the London theatrical repertoire in the early 1590s, but makes many changes, including alteration of providential Christian to pagan language and the introduction of a tragic ending. The Lear story also appeared in other sources familiar to Shakespeare: The Mirrour for Magistrates (edition of 1574), Holinshed's Chronicles (1587), and book 2 canto 10 of Edmund Spenser's epic poem The Faerie Queene (1590). In all versions of the story before Shakespeare's, there is a 'romance' ending whereby the old king is restored to his daughter Cordelia and to the throne. The Gloucester sub-plot is derived from the story of thePaphlagonian king in book 2 chapter 10 of The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia by Sir Philip Sidney (1590): a blind old man is led to the top of a cliff from where he contemplates suicide because he has been deceived by his bastard son; the good son returns and encounters the bad one in a chivalric duel. The story was intended to exemplify both 'true natural goodness' and 'wretched ungratefulness'; a few chapters later (2.15), Sidney tells of a different credulous king who is tricked into mistrusting his virtuous son. The characters of 'Poor Tom' and the Fool are entirely Shakespearean creations, though some of the language of demonic possession feigned by Edgar is borrowed from Samuel Harsnett's Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (1603), a work of propaganda about Catholic plots and faked exorcisms which Shakespeare probably read because of the Stratford origins of one of the exorcizing priests, Robert Debdale. The language of the play and some of its philosophical ideas reveal that Shakespeare had also been reading The Essayes of Montaigne in John Florio's English translation (1603).
TEXT: Published in Quarto in 1608 under the title M. William Shak-speare: HIS True Chronicle Historie of the life and death of King LEAR and his three Daughters. With the vnfortunate life of Edgar, sonne and heire to the Earle of Gloster, and his sullen and assumed humor of TOM of Bedlam: As it was played before the Kings Maiestie at Whitehall vpon S. Stephans night in Christmas Hollidayes. By his Maiesties seruants playing vsually at the Gloabe on the Bancke-side . This text was very poorly printed, partly because its printer (Nicholas Okes) was unaccustomed to setting plays and also because it seems to derive from Shakespeare's own working manuscript, which would have been difficult to read. Quarto includes about 300 lines that are not in the 1623 Folio text, which was entitled 'The Tragedy of King Lear' and has clear signs of derivation from the theatrical playbook (though, to complicate matters, the Folio printing was also influenced by a reprint of the Quarto that appeared in 1619 as one of the ten plays published by Thomas Pavier in an attempt to produce a collected Shakespeare). The Folio in turn has about 100 lines that are not in the Quarto, and nearly 1000 lines have variations of word or phrase. The two early texts thus represent two different stages in the life of the play, with extensive revision having been carried out, either systematically or incrementally. Revisions include diminution of the prominence given to the invading French army (perhaps for political reasons), clarification of Lear's motives for dividing his kingdom, and weakening of the role of Albany (including reassignment from him to Edgar of the play's closing speech, and thus by implication – since it was a convention of Shakespearean tragedy that the new man in power always has the last word – of the right to rule Britain). Among the more striking cuts are the mock trial of Goneril in the hovel and the moment of compassion when loyal servants apply a palliative to Gloucester's bleeding eyes. For centuries, editors have conflated the Quarto and Folio texts, creating a play that Shakespeare never wrote. We endorse the body of scholarship since the 1980s and the new editorial tradition in which Folio and Quarto are regarded as discrete entities. We have edited the more theatrical Folio text, but have corrected its errors (which are plentiful, since much of it was set in type by 'Compositor E', the apprentice who was by far the worst printer in Isaac Jaggard's shop). The influence of Quarto copy on the Folio is of great assistance in making these corrections. Textual notes are perforce more numerous than for any other work by Shakespeare; several hundred Quarto variants are listed. All the most significant Quarto-only passages are printed at the end of the play.