[Below, Berger examines the relationship Lear has with his daughters by analyzing the psychological motivations for Lear's and his daughters' actions. Berger observes that the characters in the play tend to downplay their own contributions to their problems while intensifying the role of others.]

I

This reading of some aspects of King Lear's relationship to his daughters is one of a series of reinterpretations of Shakespeare motivated by an interest in returning to a modified character-and-action approach—the approach for which A. C. Bradley is famous or nefarious. The chief differences between my version and his are as follows:

1. I have no interest in, for example, how many children Lady Macbeth had. But I do have an interest in her interest in, and fear of, children as these affect and illuminate her relationship with Macbeth. And I have an interest in the abiding nature of that relationship as it reveals or betrays itself to us in the language they speak. That relationship antedates the opening of the play. When Lady Macbeth comes onstage reading Macbeth's letter and soliloquizing, we are asked to attend to the shifting nuances of a settled relationship, and asked at the same time to wonder whether it is, in this very moment, on the verge of being permanently unsettled. We are therefore expected to assume, and so to reconstruct, a generalized past as the locus of stable or settled relationships. We are asked to deduce and to evaluate these relationships at least in enough detail to enable us to respond both to their contribution to the present conflict and to the jeopardy with which it threatens them.
2. I look for themes and forms of action which are centrally psychological and ethical, and are so in a way that enables us to use the resources of the thought and experience of our time. At the same time I think it is important to avoid succumbing to system-bound language, to systematic terminology such as that of psychoanalysis, and to try for a mix between ordinary language and the terminological suggestions offered by the language of any particular play.
3. I look for those themes and forms of action not only in individual characters but in the community or "group" of the play as a whole. By "community" or "group" I mean not only an aggregate of individuals but also the structured social and political relationships in which they find themselves as members of families, dynasties, courts, age groups, sex groups, kingdoms, etc. I think the institutions and structured relationships depicted in any play compose into a coherent and identifiable image of an institutional order specific (but not necessarily unique') to that play.
4. Putting items 2 and 3 together indicates the general orientation of this enterprise: I want to examine the way Shakespeare depicts the interaction of psyche with society in order to explore questions of the following kind: What are the social resources available to self-deception? How do characters use the roles and relationships of love, courtship, and marriage, of family, court, and kingdom, of race, religion, and gender, to validate their pursuits of power or pleasure or pain or self-interest or love?
5. Behind the particular themes and questions instanced above lurks a more abstract or pervasive question. Do the plays dramatize the thesis that individuals are not passive victims or servants of traditional arrangements, or of a divine order, but that they actively conspire with their institutions to re-create their world and society? And a correlative thesis: in so conspiring, do they jeopardize basic "natural" relationships?—relationships between parent and child, sibling and sibling, king and subject, leader and follower, woman and man, lover and lover, friend and friend?
6. My central interest, and one that integrates the previous items, is in a theme which I call "redistributing complicities," and in the way Shakespeare's language carries the burden of redistribution. The ethical donnée of any play includes a range of characters from bad through mixed to good. Generally, characters come onstage displaying their particular ethical affiliation, after which two different kinds of things can happen. The characters may shift position on the ethical spectrum; and the play may offer the audience a model of the ethical range that differs from any particular character's version of it. It is the second of these with which I am especially concerned. Between the native's and the observer's models, the basic differences will be those of contrast and placement: the character's model will have more intense lights and darks than our model; and the character will tend to locate himself/herself closer to one pole or the other. This does not mean that the audience is asked to condone duplicity, betrayal, or murder. It only means that the roots of such actions are not confined to the shallow plots of individual characters but spread down and out through the whole community or group of the play. Don John the Bastard, in Much Ado About Nothing, offers a paradigm case. His name is clearly Villain, or Trouble: his magnificent brother, the good Don Pedro, is wise enough to entrust him with a clog and muzzle and drag him along wherever he goes. "Never," says Leonato to Pedro, "never came trouble to my house in the likeness of your grace"; and that is because he comes in the likeness of Don John, who seems eager to claim even more culpability than he deserves. Such characters, like ethical vacuums, suck the guilt out of their social environment. But for the character labelled Villain to succeed, everyone has to collaborate in helping him on with his wickedness. And this is especially true of a figure like Don John, who can hardly twirl his moustache without scratching his eye; whose watchword might well be, "Thou, Bumbling, art my goddess."

At the ethical poles of King Lear are two scenarios: the mixed and good characters try to make others and themselves believe, "I am more sinned against than sinning." The bad characters try to make others and themselves believe, "I am more sinning than sinned against." My hypothesis about the play is that while any character pledges allegiance to one of these two scenarios, his language also betrays the presence of the second challenging the first. The language reveals the complementary pressures of a self-justifying function and a scapegoating function. It shows us that characters tend to avoid recognizing their own contributions to the difficulties they face, while magnifying the complicity of others. Their scenarios are frequently cast in the simplistic mode of folklore, fairy tale, or parable: for example, the Good and Bad Sibling, the Outcast and Usurping King, the Terrible Father and Helpless Child (or Helpless Father and Terrible Child). These parabolic conceptions often reinforce the character's sense of the inevitability of his/her plight, and they seem to have the effect which Freud ascribed to dreams in that their displacements and condensations enable the dreamer/character to go on sleeping, to delay re-entry into a world or knowledge or self whose reality is feared. Such themes and issues provide a background for my reading. I shall deal with some of them only incidentally and indirectly, but it will help to keep them in mind as we turn to the play's first scene and its first family.

II

The play opens with Kent and Gloucester showing mild surprise at the fact that although they always thought "the King had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall, . . . now, in the division of the kingdom, it appears not which of the Dukes he values most." Then Gloucester utters a tortuous phrase which will bear looking at: "for equalities were so weigh'd that curiosity in neither can make choice of either's moiety." Kenneth Muir, the Arden editor, brings out the uneasiness in his paraphrase: "the most careful scrutiny of either share could not induce either of the dukes to prefer his fellow's portion to their own." The weight of the phrase falls on the word curiosity, which Muir glosses as "the most minute and scrupulous attention or examination." Edmund later speaks of the inheritance laws covering primogeniture and bastardy as "the curiosity of nations." And in I. iv Lear chooses to blame the "faint neglect" of Goneril's household on "mine own jealous curiosity." Here Steevens' gloss suggests the force of the term applied by Gloucester to the two Dukes: "a punctilious jealousy, resulting from a scrupulous watchfulness of his own dignity."

Gloucester's phrase implies that each duke is scrupulously on the lookout for the chance to have his sense of his own merit injured. But it implies more than that, because it states Lear's perception of the case and his intention regarding it. Lear assumes that both dukes are anticipating an unequal distribution and waiting to start something—against each other or against him. And he will frustrate that impulse, deny them the satisfaction of injured merit. We learn, of course, that Lear is wrong, that Albany is more loyal, and that Lear's affecting Albany may have something to do with Corn wall's quick disaffection and Albany's weakness. We also learn that Gloucester appears to have been ognorant of Lear's darker purpose, to give the dukes equal thirds smaller than Cordelia's. But Gloucester's phrase prepares us to see that Lear views the political situation confronting him primarily under the aspect of a potential conflict which threatens his own future. And since he is about to give his youngest daughter more than the wives of the two dukes, there is no reason why he should not view it in this light.

When Lear addresses the dukes directly, his careful rhetoric betrays the same concern:

Know that we have divided
In three our kingdom; and 'tis our fast intent
To shake all cares and business from our age,
Conferring them on younger strengths, while we
Unburthen'd crawl toward death.

Note the articulated tension between the vigor implied by "our fast intent to shake" and the exaggerated weariness of "unburthen'd crawl toward death." The former warns his auditors not to underestimate his manhood in spite of their younger strengths while the latter prepares them to indulge in the weaknesses of age. Lear continues:

Our son of Cornwall.
And you, our no less loving son of
Albany, We have this hour a constant will to publish

Our daughters' several dowers, that future strife
May be prevented now. The Princes, France and Burgundy,
Great rivals in our youngest daughter's love,
Long in our court have made their amorous sojourn,
And here are to be answer'd.

Lear does not say, "no less beloved," but "no less loving"; not, "I love you both equally," but, "each of you loves me equally." This is a way of reminding them that they are—or should be—contending with each other in loving Lear. The epithet, "no less loving," is reserved for Albany as a qualifier which applies to Cornwall only retroactively, making the first vocative ("Our son of Cornwall") a little terse or brusque by contrast. Yet as a qualifier, it is only mildly commendatory ("not less loving" than Cornwall; but perhaps not more). Since we have been told Lear affects Albany more than Cornwall, we may feel that his difference of phrasing shows a bias in the very act of disclaiming it, and that both his language and strategy are working to set the dukes against each other even as he proclaims his intention to keep peace between them: strife now between duke and duke may indeed prevent future strife between the united dukes and Lear.

Lear's reference to France and Burgundy adds a new set of rivals. As the succeeding action shows, they are rivals not only with each other but also with him, and—so far as land is concerned—with the husbands of Goneril and Regan. There is a certain bite in the phrase "amorous sojourn" which reflects back on "no less loving." The old king divines that none of them is there for love of him, that the princes are probably not even there for love of the daughter he loves, and that they would deprive him of her for the land and power she symbolizes. But he can take pride in having kept them all waiting—the dukes for their doweries, the princes for his answer—until the moment when he can beat them at their own game, using their various desires and interests to effect his darker purpose. Part of this purpose seems to be to unburden himself of obligations by loading them on "the younger strengths" in this final burst of beneficence. He will show them once more how kind a father he is, how dear they are to him, by giving them all. I say "once more" because in subsequent scenes Lear's angry thoughts turn often to the gratitude owed a father merely as his children's genitor: to give them birth is automatically to be kind and literally to be generous in an absolute sense which establishes a permanent inequity in the relationship. His children must always be diligent in honoring their bond to their creator, must say "ay" and "no" to everything he says, and tell him he is everything (4.6.100, 106). He, on the other hand, can rest on his laurels as their only begetter, can maintain that first advantage at little cost to himself, though it may be useful to remind them occasionally of the sacrifices he has made for them. This seems to be the sense of the paternal prerogative which Lear has carried with him through life and into the play. Now, as the play opens, he, finds himself in the position of having to give them all more strenuously and conspicuously than usual. He inflicts his generosity upon them with a show of power which betrays his sense of the weakness of his position.

We can feel this in the tortuous politics of his darker purpose, and in the tactical impulse behind the words with which he calls into play a third set of rivals.

Tell me, my daughters,
(Since now we will divest us both of rule,
Interest of territory, cares of state)
Which of you shall we say doth love us most?
That we our largest bounty may extend
Where nature doth with merit challenge.

Not, "which of you doth say you love us most," but "which of you shall we say doth love us most?"—the judgment and the reward will be his to confer, and will be arbitrarily determined by what he decides to say. Furthermore, their expressions of love are compromised in advance by the nature of his request, since he is asking them to show how amorous they are, not so much for him as for his land. Again, the rivalry cuts two ways: his daughters are to compete with each other, and he is now competing with them. If they want to strip him of his power, they will have to pay for it by risking a humiliating posture—sitting up and begging, crowing for cheese. And the bargain he offers is so unequal—all that land and power for a little rhetorical fluff—that they will suffer the wound of his vigorous charity for years to come. The terms of his divestiture are therefore in the nature of a challenge thrown down to his children.

For Goneril and Regan the psychological outlook is more hopeless than for Cordelia, because Lear's challenge to them is more specious. Why are their doweries withheld until after their marriages, while Cordelia's is to be given before hers? Kittredge and the Cambridge New Shakespeare editors tell us this means the older daughters must have been recently married. This may be so, but later, when Lear says "I gave you all," Regan replies "and in good time you gave it" (2.4.252). Setting aside the Fool's favorite theme—the folly of giving away his land—the question posed by his preferential treatment is, why did he do it in this particular manner? On the face of it, his darker purpose was to give Cordelia the most opulent third of the kingdom and then, should that draw in exchange the vines of France or milk of Burgundy, move in with Cordelia so as to take advantage of his largest bounty combined with that of his new son-in-law: "I loved her most and thought to set my rest / On her kind nursery." Stanley Cavell suggests that part of Lear's strategy may have been "to put Cordelia into the position of being denied her dowry, so that he will not lose her in marriage."¹ But even if he cannot prevent her marrying, he can give her in such a way as to get her back again by competing with her husband for her attention, and conferring on her the offices of the nursery—becoming his own grandson, outwitting death, i.e., making her his mother during his second childhood. None of this, however, required the particular strategy unfolded during the first scene. Having flaunted his power by withholding their dowries, Lear with gratuitous cruelty plans to use, deceive, and humiliate Goneril and Regan in order to accentuate Cordelia's triumph and his partiality. Beneath the surface, then, his darker purpose seems to be to play on everyone's curiosity, stir up as much envy and contention as he can among the "younger strengths" with the aim of dominating and dividing them, humbling and punishing them.

Lear's behavior in this scene displays an ambivalence which is barely under control, and of which he can scarcely be unaware. Consider, for example, the words with which he reassigns Cordelia's portion to the other two sons-in-law:

Cornwall and Albany,
With my two daughters' dowers digest the third;
Let pride, which she calls plainness, marry her.
I do invest you jointly with my power,
Pre-eminence, and all the large effects
That troop with majesty. Ourself, by monthly course,
With reservation of an hundred knights
By you to be sustain'd, shall our abode
Make with you by due turn. Only we shall retain
The name and all th 'addition to a king; the sway,
Revenue, execution of the rest,
Beloved sons, be yours: which to confirm,
This coronet part between you.

His act of giving quickly turns into a new imposition when the power and large effects that troop with majesty materialize in the next sentence as his hundred knights. What he bestows in one line he takes away in another. His beloved land-hungry sons are first invited to gorge their appetites on Cordelia's portion. At the end Lear invites them to part—and thus, no doubt, to fight over—the coronet.

In this scene, then, he formally renounces power and property primarily with the intention of keeping informal control over them. As if afraid that the slow crawl toward death will inevitably leave him helpless, he tries to divide others, and lay them under obligation, against the time when he will no longer be able to deploy the political and psychological resources of kingship and fatherhood. By diversting himself of power he can hope to forestall or inhibit the more absolute divestiture he fears at the hands of others.

III

Lear's darker purpose is complicated and confused by an unruly range of feelings, but Shakespeare does not let the truth of his situation escape the old king any more than it escapes us. There is a still darker purpose under Lear's arbitrary and willful behavior, dark even to him but certainly not absent from his consciousness. As I said, he can hardly be unaware of the implications of his behavior—unaware that his giving was a form of taking; his paternal kindness a form of hostility; his renunciation an effort to retain his power; his retention of power a response to the terror of the impotency of old age. Cavell observes that Lear felt unworthy of love, and S. L. Goldberg agrees that he "needs others' respect in order to respect himself," and that "the very urgency of this need betrays the fear behind it—-which is a form not of self ignorance, but rather of self-mistrust, as if he cannot believe . . . in his mere self as worth the love and respect it needs."²

To this insight I add one qualification: the source of his fear and need must lie in patterns of feeling, behavior, and relationship that pre-date the opening scene of the play. This is implicit in Goldberg's fine appraisal of Goneril, though he does not make enough of it. When Goneril says "let me still take away the harms I fear, / Not fear still to be taken" (1.4.339-400), she may be merely rationalizing, but the confidential remarks she and Regan exchange at the end of the opening scene would support the thesis that in her case apprehension genuinely cuts both ways: apprehension as the desire to take (ap-prehend) is a function of apprehension as the fear of being taken. I agree with Goldberg that Goneril is more than "a hypocritical ingrate." She knows Lear's heart, he argues, "in the only terms in which he has given it to her," and his behavior partly justifies her fears. Her response to the world is primarily defensive: "the control visible in Goneril's speech is the kind necessary to keep the world at bay, as though she could not cope with her experience of it otherwise." She "can see personal relationships only as power-relationships" (pp. 104-106). Since he is describing Goneril's "moral outlook" and its expression in her speech patterns—in tone, imagery, and rhythm—Goldberg would seem to be dealing with relatively stable aspects of her character, which raises the question he never quite asks, "how did she get that way?", a question leading directly to Lear. For isn't her defensiveness ultimately the mirror and consequence of his? It must be an index to his habitual, not merely his recent, behavior; an index to a chronic rather than a critical problem of relationship. Goneril reveals Lear's basic approach to his children, to paternity and filiality, by her reflection of it. If he too has always treated "personal relationships . . . as power-relationships" from some basic fear, and has at the same time proclaimed his love and generosity, then he must be more the cause of her reaction to him than he is willing to admit. Where he differs from her is that the harm he fears comes as much from within himself as from others. "He has it in him so much nearer home, to scare himself with his own desert places," to paraphrase Robert Frost's description of the feeling. Even the weakest twinge of recognition, the dimmest sense of his complicity, could have brought home to him the reason for, the justness of, his suspicion that he was unloved—the sense, that is, that he had never truly loved his children, that he had always used his paternal authority to command, demand, tease, and humiliate, that the hypocrisy of Goneril and Regan only reflected his own ambivalence in wanting to be flattered while having no respect for, no trust in, the flatterers. I find him quite openly showing contempt for his daughters and behaving otherwise in a manner calculated to make his court and family despise him. I think that in hurting and punishing Cordelia he is trying to hurt and punish himself, as if he finds out too late that he is the one who should have studied deserving and who, if he is genuinely loved, is under an obligation he could never, given his paternal premises, repay. Some of these feelings, in all their confusion, press into the flamboyant statement with which he unfathers Cordelia at 1.1.116:

The barbarous Scythian
Or he that makes his generation messes
To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom
Be as well neighbor'd, pitied, and reliev'd,
As thou my sometime daughter.

Commentators point out that "generation" can mean either parents or children; both are potentially cannibalistic: in the Scythian mode of relationship each generation views the other apprehensively as a source of danger and of food. Against Lear's intention to liken Cordelia to the Scythian, the phrase likens the Scythian to Lear. It works as unintended self-caricature, and its hyperbolic quality measures the pressure of displacement. Doesn't Lear neighbor, pity, and relieve himself in doing and saying this to Cordelia? And doesn't he, equally, hate himself for it? In turning his hate outward toward Cordelia and the Scythian, he goes on doing precisely the thing that will feed self-mistrust, the suspicion of his own unworthiness.

In the first scene, Lear seems on the verge of forcing others to make him acknowledge not so much what they really think about him, but what he has always thought about them, and therefore—by a kind of recoil—about himself. The darkest purpose, the one he keeps deflecting outward, can only be called self-retribution and self-wounding; the impulse to suffer the pain he obscurely but deeply feels he deserves, to bring on himself the judgment which alone "can tell me who I am" (1.4.238). If successful, the urge to self-retribution would have made this scene an awakening toward genuine, though possibly unbearable self-knowledge. But Lear cannot let this happen, and he spends the rest of the play trying continually to regain (or remain in) the sleep of self-deception which the darkest purpose continually impels him to renounce. He cannot bring himself to be his own judge or to risk facing the punishment he feels he deserves. Suppose that in his confusion of darker purposes he sets up the scene with Cordelia partly to encourage self-wounding through mutual rejection. In the single act by which he could keep her from a husband and lose her himself, he would both prove his jealousy to himself and punish it. But when he commits his future to his other two daughters and their husbands, he shies away from the harder task of self-judgment to the easier task of self-justification. This provides what I think is a better alternative to the conventional reading, which accedes to Lear's perspective in viewing him as the foolish victim of his two cruel daughters.

Lear knows that it is safer to make Regan and Goneril his chastisers, than Cordelia. He can more easily goad them into treating him shabbily. At the same time he can evade arousing his guilty awareness of the extent to which he has already victimized them, and he can do this by making himself their victim and making them his scapegoats. We can, then, distinguish in his speech and behavior the working-out of two purposes additional to his own consciously proclaimed "darker purpose"—by which he means dark to the others but not to him. The two I have in mind are initially both dark to him, and I shall speak of them as darker and darkest: the darker purpose moves him to aggression against others; the darkest purpose moves him to aggression against himself. The darker purpose justifies itself according to the logic of the victim's formula, "more sinned against than sinning"; the darkest purpose justifies itself according to the logic of "more sinning than sinned against." Lear quickly discovers the presence within him of the darker purpose, and its usefulness; and he puts it to work. Among its uses are its effectiveness against the efforts of the darkest purpose to make itself known. It is the darker purpose, of course, which counsels madness. At the same time, to the degree that the darker purpose is effective in this policing function, it exacerbates the darkest purpose. Aggression against others, the projective distortion of guilt feelings, is the bad faith which creates, intensifies, and festers the darkest purpose. Finally, though the darker and the darkest are cross-purposes, they may lead to the same practical effect. In Acts One and Two, Lear is moved by both together to get himself locked out of doors.

We should note, especially in 1.4 and 2.4, the extent to which Lear provoked Goneril and Regan into their aggressive and mean behavior. Not that they are blameless—far from it—but that he shares in their complicity more than he seems willing to admit. From the beginning, he makes himself an unwelcome guest, flaunts his willfulness, and in all but words dares Goneril not to throw him out. When he inflicts himself prematurely on Regan, he specifies precisely the condition which he knows will make her balk: "I can stay with Regan, / I and my hundred knights" (2.4.323). They owe him all, and he is going to do his best to demonstrate that they can't and won't pay it back; by acting unreasonably he will test their gratitude and prove it inadequate. Being turned out in the storm becomes, for him, a triumph. His decision to reject their grudging hospitality ratifies their monstrous ingratitude: "No, rather I abjure all roofs, and choose / To wage against the enmity o' th' air" (2.4.210).

IV

In Lear's experiences on the heath and at Dover—in Acts Three and Four—the conflict of purposes grows keener, and its terms vary, as the darkest purpose presses against constraint and cries for justice. Both purposes increase their force by moving Lear to assimilate the storm to his torn state as a kind of metonymic amplifier. When Lear exhorts the great gods that run the thunderstorms to "find out their enemies now," we should try to imagine that he dimly conceives himself to be their true target, and that he is addressing himself:

Tremble, thou wretch,
That hast within thee the undivulged crimes,
Unwhipp'd of Justice; hide thee, thou bloody hand,
Thou perjur'd, and thou simular of virtue
That art incestuous; caitiff, to pieces shake,
That under covert and convenient seeming
Has practis'd on man's life; close pent-up guilts,
Rive your concealing continents, and cry
These dreadful summoners grace. I am a man
More sinn'd against than sinning.

(3.2.51ff.)

This may be felt as a generalized apostrophe to such wretches as his daughters and sons-in-law, yet the details reflect Lear's own condition more accurately. The image is melodramatic, hyperbolic, and simplistic, reducing the figure of evil to an outright stage villain, but this is partly because Lear is displacing its reference from himself to the world at large. With that crude form, he can avoid too close a fit. It is, so to speak, a systematically distorted communication to himself, at once thrusting in and fending off the sharp sword of justice. Only the subterranean pressure of self-retribution pushing up through layers of self-avoidance can account for the magnificence, the volcanic power, of "close pent-up guilts, / Rive your concealing continents, and cry / These dreadful summoners grace." But the power spends itself, or he rushes from it in terror toward the safety of the victim's plight: "I am a man / More sinn'd against than sinning." In his next utterance, after saying "My wits begin to turn," he urges the Fool into the hovel, thinks of straw to avert the cold, and muses, "the art of our necessities is strange, / And can make vile things precious." I read this according to the logic of the darker purpose: the necessities are those of self-avoidance; the art by which we keep our guilts pent-up can make these vile or base (lower-class) discomforts important to us as diversions from more terrible thoughts. The stormy heath is the immediate provider of these diversions, but only as an extension of the monstrous ingratitude of Lear's daughters. For it is by targeting on their cruelty to him that he can divert himself from his cruelty to them.

This process continues in the second heath scene, 3.4. Kent has been badgering Lear to take shelter in the hovel, and Lear's responses initially betray a certain confusion in his attitude toward the meaning of the storm. First he protests that it does not bother him, "is scarce felt," and in fact provides a distraction from the "greater malady" of "filial ingratitude," the tempest in his mind that "doth from my senses take all feeling else." Weathering the storm is an alternative to this, the lesser of two evils: "if thy flight lay toward the roaring sea, / Thou 'ldst meet the bear i' th' mouth."

Yet even as he pauses to define filial ingratitude at line 15, his language betrays itself: "Is it not as this mouth should tear this hand / For lifting food to 't?" The immediate impulse of meaning comes from Lear's sense of himself as the victimized feeder. But the deeper impulse shapes an image in which feeder and fed are one, and thus in which filial ingratitude is the projected or displaced version of self-inflicted suffering. As if in response to this, the darker purpose pushes the punitive impulse outward:

But I will punish home:
No, I will weep no more. In such a night
To shut me out? Pour on; I will endure.

Here the relation between inner and outer storms changes—they become functionally related complements rather than alternatives: since exposure to the storm is the result of his daughters' ingratitude, enduring the elements only intensifies his sense of their cruelty. The elements and his daughters converge; to brave the weather is to stand up to Regan and Goneril and prove to himself that they have not yet deprived him of manliness or potency. Yet this feeling is immediately challenged at line 19 by the self-image of the helpless undeserving victim:

In such a night as this? O Regan, Goneril!
Your kind old father, whose frank heart gave all,—
O! that way madness lies; let me shun that;
No more of that.

Madness will be induced by dwelling on his plight as victim and dotard rather than on his power and endurance, but in either case the tempest in the mind feeds on the physical storm. Hence Lear's confusion (and ours) takes still another turn when he refuses Kent's fourth prompting to "enter here" with

Prithee, go in thyself; seek thine own ease:
This tempest [the physical storm] will not give me leave to ponder
On things would hurt me more. But I'll go in.

The storm deepens the wound caused by filial ingratitude. What things would hurt him more? The answer is not difficult, and Lear's next speech contains it in distorted form.

Lear delays entering the hovel, sends the Fool ahead of him, begins a meditation with a personifying apostrophe ("You houseless poverty,—"), and interrupts it to urge the Fool in, while he explains, "I'll pray, and then I'll sleep." This is his prayer:

Poor naked wretches, whereso'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 more just.

On the face of it, this is an attempt to shun the madness self-pity might bring on by abjuring the victim's role, converting wretchedness to fellow feeling, and imagining a scenario in which suffering will lead to wisdom and improvement when (presumably) the king regains his power. But the lines of connection between this scenario and Lear's past and future are tenuous in the extreme. We suddenly hear that Lear has neglected the poor, which has comically little to do with what has been going on since the play's opening; and we hear him making what sounds like a suggestion for better housing and other economic reforms. Except for the echo of the theme of land distribution, these reflections are conspicuously irrelevant, and also reductive—to define his problem in terms of poverty and bad weather makes it both impertinent and easy to deal with. Pomp and Poverty are personifications in a morality play which ends happily with the triumph of poetic and political justice. Does all this mean that Lear is only—as T. S. Eliot once said about Othello—cheering himself up? Does he really imagine he can reassume the power of Pomp and redistribute goods as energetically as he had tried to "shake all cares and business from our age"?

It may seem that Lear is losing his grip on reality, but in a certain sense he is tightening it, trying to keep reality under control and out of sight. If we ask ourselves what persons or situations in the play this "prayer" calls to mind, two candidates present themselves: the effects, invoked and desired by Lear, of his banishment of Cordelia and Kent. In its evasive manner the prayer takes account of sentiments and phrases uttered in the anger of the first scene, e.g.: "Here I disclaim all my paternal care" (114); "The barbarous Scythian . . . shall . . . be as well neighbor'd, pitied, and reliev'd" (116-19); "now her price is fallen" (197); "Dower'd with our curse and stranger'd with our oath" (204); "a wretch whom Nature is asham'd / Almost t'acknowledge hers" (212-13); also the epithets Lear heard France apply to Cordelia—poor, forsaken, despis'd, cast away (250-53).

With this scene in mind, the conspicuous irrelevance of Lear's prayer comes to seem more like conspicuous evasion. The prayer is a skewed reference to the plight he wished for Cordelia—to his "little care"—and a skewed acknowledgement that he is ultimately responsible for his own houselessness as well as hers; it is also a muffled expression of hope that, by inflicting a similar physical punishment on himself, he will somehow be in the position to undo the wrong, and redistribute his land according to his original plan. "Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel" may merely command a new view, ex post facto, a new rationalization of the lockout Lear goaded his other daughters into imposing on him. But the degree of distortion or displacement in the prayer is an index of the pressure of guilt. His apostrophe, with its pluralizing, generalizing, and personifying force, and his focus on houselessness rather than homelessness, register both the effort of avoidance and the self-accusing truth from which he flinches.

Lear tries by verbal magic to grasp the power he feels deprived of, yet at the same time, as additional insurance, he keeps open the option of stepping into the role of wretched victim. "Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel" can mean two things: either (1) expose yourself to the feelings of wretches, share their feelings, or (2) expose yourself to the storm in order to feel what wretches feel, i.e., stay out of doors and get pelted, a course of action which by occasioning wretchedness would sustain his wrath against his daughters and keep him from pondering on things which would hurt him more. And this is in fact the exposure he courts. He does not "pray, and then . . . sleep" in the sense of going into the hovel to retire. But his prayer seems figuratively to be an effort to put his guilt to sleep. His displacement of guilt with respect to Cordelia seems to me to be fairly obvious. Does he also feel uneasy about Regan and Goneril? H. A. Mason thinks we cannot be sure whether Lear in this scene "had begun to see himself as in some way responsible for their treatment of him."³ Yet we should not rule out the possibility that the intensity and extraordinary richness of the rhetoric of displacement is meant to alert us to the continual regenerating of the darkest purpose—this is the boomerang or backlash effect. If in these scenes Lear is—in Mason's words—"play-acting humility," "enjoying the spectacle he imagines he is offering," "posturing" and "spouting" (p. 159), he must also be uncomfortably aware of this—aware of the pressure if not the nature of the darkest purpose of genuine self-condemnation beneath his facile, misdirected "I have ta'en / Too little care of this." "In a ghostly way," as Mason nicely puts it, "Lear's evil now begins to confess" (p. 159).

The evil, the darkest purpose, confesses in less ghostly fashion in 4.6. In his diatribes against hypocrisy, lechery, woman, authority, and justice, he re-aims once again from his own complicity to the corrupt world where an egregious good man like himself is the victim of usurers, cozeners, and flatterers. But self-reproach keeps pushing up toward the surface: "Ay, every inch a king" gives way to "a dog's obey'd in office." After having verbally whipped "yond simpering dame" for her "riotous appetite," he tells the "rascal beadle" to hold his hand: "Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thine own back." Having re-cast its aggression in the form of cynical philosophizing, the darker purpose defends against such efforts at self-judgment by distorting them to self-pity (a dog in office), or merely by its generalizing context. "None does offend, none, I say, none; I'll able 'em" (4.6.170). Like the Savior, Lear in his crown of weeds will protect the adulteress (John viii.3-11) by daring sinners to throw the first stone. "Take that of me, my friend, who have the power / To seal th' accuser's lips." But his next words come dangerously close to being a critique of his own performance in this scene—a critique of the darker purpose which has made Lear the world's accuser: "Get thee glass eyes; / And, like a scurvy politician, seem / To see the things thou dost not." Extricated from its concealing continents, the sub-text would read something like this: "I cannot cast the first stone since, looking within myself, I know myself sinful; playing the critic, the savior, only magnifies the sin. Rather than be my own accuser, I would prefer to seal my lips and blind myself by pretending to see deep flaws in human nature and society. In this way I can escape from the conscience that hunts me down." Lear then says, "Now, now, now, now; / Pull off my boots; harder, harder; so." He goes on to offer Gloucester his eyes "if thou wilt weep my fortunes," and to preach the patience that comes from knowing the world is a place for tears, a "great stage of fools." "Pull off my boots" has been glossed as the command of one who imagines he has come from hunting, and it also echoes the impulse worded in 3.4 as "off, off, you lendings"—the impulse to strip himself of what he has borrowed and owes in order to free himself from his conscience. So, in the effort to stop hunting himself down, he offers Gloucester his glass eyes, solicits his sympathy, and advocates the patience needed to tolerate the sins and follies of others.

The effort, however, does not quite succeed:

This' a good block!
It were a delicate strategem to shoe
A troop of horse with felt; I'll put 't in proof,
And when I have stol'n upon these son-in-laws,
Then, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill!

"This' a good block!": "this is a good hat" is the commentators' first choice for an adequate translation, and their second is, "this is a good mounting block," that is, for a horse. He might want to put his boots back on so he can pursue his sons-in-law instead of himself, or keep them off so he can sneak up on them. But I think a third translation also makes sense here: "this is a good execution block." He takes off his crown of weeds to offer his head to the ax. The three blocks converge: he is, confusedly, the murderous avenger, the sacrificial victim of an unjust world, and—taking off his crown—the sinner acknowledging the justice of his punishment (a good block); and perhaps he also longs wearily to have done with it—"off, off, you lendings." But Cordelia's men intervene to rescue him from that escape. He is cut to the brains, but not dead. He is the prisoner of friends who are yet his enemies because they represent the accuser within ("Your most dear daughter"). Elbowed by a sovereign shame, he flinches toward the victim's role ("the natural fool of Fortune") and asks for help. He tries to diminish the threat Cordelia poses by imagining that she is capturing him simply to get ransom money—coming not to do him any kindness but to claim what is rightly hers, what he owes her and withheld. And if that is the case, he can at least use her surgeons to cure his cut brains and restore him to a stronger state of self-delusion.

This mutual exchange will free them both of obligation. But Cordelia's spokesman thwarts this game: "You shall have any thing"—she will give him all; and after he gave her nothing. "No seconds? all myself?"—an unequal fight. Let him die rather than live on in torturing self-accusation, the captivity imposed by Cordelia. Let him confront her, fight her, make her kill him. Let her be, not the daughter he has injured but the bride who comes to unman him, corrupt him, betray him, if he lives beyond the first night. Let him finish the ax-cut by dying in a manly act, a jovial incestuous attack that will flaunt his worthlessness. Cordelia's spokesman agrees—"we obey you"—and twists him forcibly back toward life and consciousness, denying him the accusation or the death he wants. Lear runs away to escape from Cordelia but runs away to make her capture him again; fleeing yet calling the hounds ("sa, sa, sa, sa"), he demands once more to be hunted down.

V

It is to be expected that when Lear faces Cordelia the darker purpose will recoil from its pole of aggression to the pole of helplessness in order to defend against the power of the darkest purpose which her presence energizes. In 4.7 the darker purpose tries to manage Cordelia's responses in this manner. "You do me wrong to take me out o' th' grave," he begins; "thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound / Upon a wheel of fire": "I am already dead and being punished for my sins, while you are no longer suffering from the wrong I've done you." He continues to appeal to her pity for his precarious condition: "I am a very foolish fond old man"; "I fear I am not in my perfect mind." It is as if, fearing he deserves more stringent punishment, he shrinks away from it, tries to forestall it. On the verge of facing the truth and giving up all claims on his daughter, he divests himself of manhood and becomes the childish dotard so as to maintain or regain mastery of the relationship, to re-impose the bond which his action in 1.1 had canceled.

But what about Cordelia in this scene? Has she no darker purpose? Is she as pure a redemptive figure as those about her believe? Does she entirely escape the play of darker purposes circulating through the Lear community? I think not, and I approach her performance in the first scene with a purely speculative hypothesis. This is, that the thought of Lear's setting his rest on her kind nursery (a heavy phrase! a heavy rest!) must surely be oppressive to her, though she is not likely to admit it to herself; that she would like to break free of the parental bondage, get out from under, though she is not likely to admit that to herself either; that if she could find a way to do it which wouldn't jeopardize her self-respect and her sense of obligation to Lear, she would be likely to take it; and that she does find a way, and does take it.

Cordelia's first two speeches are interesting in that both are asides, and both reveal by their use of the third person that she self-consciously observes herself—possesses a strong theatrical sense of her image and role. After Goneril's speech "What shall Cordelia speak? Love, and be silent." And after Regan's:

Then poor Cordelia!
And yet not so; since I am sure my love's
More ponderous than my tongue.

The first aside may be construed as a stage direction to herself: given this overblown rhetoric of Goneril's, how shall / respond. I shall do the opposite of Goneril, hide my love, and say nothing ("nothing, my lord"). The decision is made partly on competitive grounds. But something more clearly defined emerges after Regan's speech: "Then poor Cordelia." Already she senses the value of the victim's role. "And yet not so; since I am sure my love's / More ponderous than my tongue." In some better world than this, her virtue might be rewarded, but here it will have to be its own reward, her only riches, for Cinderella is sure to go unappreciated when Father listens to her wicked sisters. Glancing critically at Regan's heavy tongue, Cordelia displays a concern for style, and especially for her own style, her own presentation of self, in this difficult moment. She competes not only with her sisters—"unhappy that I am, I cannot heave / My heart into my mouth"—but also with her father: "I love your Majesty / According to my bond; no more nor less." And in exposing the extravagance of her sisters' answers she also exposes her father to ridicule.

Some of the pressure which works on her is apparent in the following remark:

Happily, 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.

(1.1.100ff.)

Bradley observes that this statement "perverts the truth when it implies that to give love to a husband is to take it from a father."⁴ But this tells us that Cordelia has somehow accepted her father's view. Even as she distinguishes the role of daughter from that of wife, she slips into the marriage formula. She acknowledges the father's right to compete with the husband but feels it oppressive and strains away from it; she will have to wrest her love away from her father. This is her plight.

From line 223 until the royal entourage leaves the stage, Cordelia is caught in a losing struggle to sustain her dignity. "Make known," she says to Lear, "publish the fact," that it is no "vicious blot," no wickedness, "that hath depriv'd me of your grace and favor, / But even for want of that for which I am richer, / A still-soliciting eye, and such a tongue / That I am glad I have not, though not to have it / Hath lost me in your liking." Lear's renouncing his paternity only proves to her how faulty his judgment is, and how genuine her virtue. He should have recognized that she is much better than her sisters, and she wants him to publish this truth, tell everyone he has undervalued her. Much later, at 4.4.16, there is a displaced echo that reminds me of this sentiment and suggests how deeply Cordelia has been troubled by Lear's failure to make her virtue known: "All you unpublish'd virtues of the earth, / Spring with my tears." She will be able, she hopes, to cure him, and with the very virtues he refused to acknowledge.

When Burgundy rejects Cordelia, she responds with spirit, and saves face by acting as if she had a choice in the matter; "Peace be with Burgundy! / Since that respect and fortunes are his love, / I shall not be his wife." But France immediately diminishes her by dwelling on his largesse and her good fortune, indulging nice antitheses at her expense: Cordelia is "most rich, being poor, most choice, forsaken, and most loved, despised." France will lawfully seize upon "what's cast away," no doubt invoking the law of salvage. We may feel that Cordelia has brought this on herself by her commitment to the victim's role; that like Lear she wants to renounce, without really renouncing, the name and additions of daughter. But surely France's condescension must rankle. This is what Lear has brought her to. And so, when she bids her sisters farewell, we not only feel an edge of bitterness, we also hear a trace of vindictiveness:

I know you what you are;
And like a sister am most loth to call
Your faults as they are named. Love well our father:
To your professed bosoms I commit him;
But yet alas! stood I within his grace,
I would prefer him to a better place.

In asserting her moral superiority Cordelia is not entirely accurate, for she has already, and publicly, called their faults as they are named: "that glib and oily art / To speak and purpose not," "A still-soliciting eye, and such a tongue / That I am glad I have not" (224ff). Knowing what her sisters are, Cordelia nevertheless commits her father to them. It is, after all, his own fault and folly that he has deprived himself of "a better place." And then she utters the couplet which I find all the more chilling for its aphoristic bite: "Time shall unfold what plighted cunning hides; / Who covers faults, at last with shame derides." Cordelia is predicting the inevitable results to follow from her sisters' evil dispositions. But the gnomic form of the statement generalizes it, and increases its sense of predictive certainty: whoever cover his own faults, refuses to acknowledge his complicity, is finally exposed and shamed—not only to and by others, but to and by himself: when he finally acknowledges his own guilt he will deride and hate himself, be ashamed. In generalized form this is applicable to Lear. And what Cordelia's words imply is that by their bad treatment her sisters will bring him to uncover his faults and be exposed to shame. Whatever she consciously intends, her action commits Lear to his other daughters for the punishment he deserves. Cordelia will ultimately be vindicated by the effects of their punishment, without herself having any hand in it. They will do the bad things that will bring Lear to realize how he has mistreated and misprized the daughter who loved him most.

As I read her performance in this scene, then, Cordelia, for reasons of her own—not all of them available to her—accepted Lear's challenge, asserted her merit over against his nature-in-her, and by her stonewalling helped him bring on her plight. At the same time she helped Lear commit himself to her sisters' professed bosoms, after which Lear (with Kent's aid) worked with Regan and Goneril to bring out the worst in them. Yet nowhere in the play does Cordelia—or do her words—show the slightest recognition of her complicity in this skewing of relationships. When she returns in the fourth act her language remains—unlike Lear's—pure of conflicting voices, although there may be a touch of uneasiness in the way she carefully rehearses her good intentions in 4.4.23: "O dear father! It is thy business that I go about . . . No blown ambition doth our arms incite, / But love, dear love, and our ag'd father's right." This seems to me to be part of her persistent habit of publishing her unpublished virtues, and I find it disarmingly ingenuous that she has to protest she was not blown across from France by political ambition. But I also find a touch of smugness in her echoing the words of Christ (my father's business), and this is of a piece with other indications in her Dover scenes that she is here as a merciful redeemer, one who was more sinned against than sinning but has forgiven her tormenters and now returns to restore them from their crimes and woes. She joins others in viewing herself this way, and she also joins Lear in harping on the violent wrongs her two sisters did by throwing him out of doors into the terrible storm. In blaming her sisters for their treatment of him, she effectively blames Lear for bringing his misery on himself by failing to acknowledge her unpublished virtues.

With this background, Cordelia's performance in 4.7 and 5.3 takes on a more complex quality. To begin with S. L. Goldberg's good insight about the partial nature of her response:

However deeply moving and necessary is the truth of Cordelia's "no cause, no cause" . . . this is still not the whole of the truth . . . What happened in the first scene and has happened since is . . . also real. Lear has something to feel guilty about . . . Nor, for that matter, is he wholly a "poor perdu," a victim, as Cordelia supposes. His face was not just "oppos'd against the warring winds," it was urging them on. (pp. 32-33)

In the speech Goldberg alludes to, Cordelia reviles her two sisters for the violent harms they have made in his reverence, and she does so in the most Lear-like language she uses:

Had you not been their father, these white flakes
Did challenge pity of them. Was this a face
To be oppos'd against the warring winds?
To stand against the deep dread-bolted thunder?
In the most terrible and nimble stroke
Of quick, cross-lightning? to watch—poor perdu!—
With this thin helm? Mine enemy's dog,
Though he had bit me, should have stood that night
Against my fire.

(4.7.30)

This speech forgets, or at some level denies "To your professed bosoms I commit him"; it shelters under the rhetoric which characterized Lear's aggressive darker purpose on the heath. A sentinelle perdu, according to G. K. Hunter, "was an especially daring soldier who was placed . . . so close to the enemy that he was considered lost."⁵ If Regan and Goneril are the enemy, who placed him there? Lear, all by himself? I think 4.7 is so poignant partly because of Cordelia's moving concern for Lear, the love she shows him in her careful tendance of his "reverence." At the same time, I think she has triumphantly refined the victim's role to a Christ-like perfection, and she has done this by denying, by rising above, the cause: "I know you do not love me . . . You have some cause." "No cause, no cause." But she did have a share in the cause he gave her; ignoring what he did is ignoring what she did. And this may be the only way the reunion can take place—its condition; its cost. And in Act 5, her one brief speech indicates that the cause is not simply forgotten, but still there to be denied, for both of them.

VI

"The Final scene," writes Stanley Cavell, "opens with Lear and Cordelia repeating or completing their actions in the opening scene: again Lear abdicates, and again Cordelia loves and is silent."⁶ Her words are oddly formal, aphoristic, remote—and these are her last words in the play.

We are not the first
Who, with best meaning, have incurr'd the worst.
For thee, oppressed King, I am cast down;
Myself could else out-frown false Fortune's frown.
Shall we not see these daughters and these sisters?

She moves into couplets with the old consolation (more sinned against than sinning) but by now we may be able to hear the sub-text more clearly in the active shading of "incurr'd": "we aren't the first who have made the worst happen—brought it on ourselves and others—while intending the best." "Oppressed King" in the next line has the force of a tactful oxymoron—balancing his dignity against his plight—yet Cordelia's practice of addressing Lear only by his royal titles in the reunion scene seems less positive and affectionate here, a little too cool. She might have ventured something warmer, like "Dear Father." And the sentence reverbs an unintended sentiment. She means to say, "I'm sorrier for you than for myslf," but the phrase also incurs a worse meaning: "I have been cast down on your account, defeated and imprisoned because I came to relieve your oppression." And her question about seeing her sisters adds a specific sense to the previous line. She wants to outface her false sisters' frowns; she would remind the jewels of her father that she knows what they are, and that, as she predicted, time did unfold what plighted cunning hid. Her lines reveal the same competitive impulse we saw in 1.1, and we remember that she was competing then with Lear as well as her sisters. Now, as Cavell suggests, she wants to repeat or complete that episode and bid her sisters a morally triumphant farewell before going once more into a kind of exile from the world.

Lear prevents this reunion and banishes her again, this time to the cell of the smug bridegroom, giving her a share in his latest renunciation. The oppressed king becomes oppressive, and imposes his old fantasy on her (Cavell, p. 297), but in a more constraining form, now that he has finally succeeded in displacing France: "We two alone will sing like birds i' th' cage," fulfills the hope expressed in "I lov'd her most, and thought to set my rest / On her kind nursery." (1.1.123). His touching description of the life he projects for them betrays his awareness of the life she'll be deprived of: we'll 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 thus, as God's spies, "we'll wear out . . . packs and sects of great ones." He promises to repeat the propitiating gesture of 4.7—kneeling and asking forgiveness—but that will only be part of the ritual by which he forgives himself for preempting her from life. "Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia, / The Gods themselves throw incense. Have I caught thee? / He that parts us shall bring a brand from heaven, and fire us hence like foxes." Edmund had just said, "Take them away," but Lear's "He that parts us" embraces friend and foe indifferently, and by no means excludes France. The sacrifices he enjoins have been, are, and will be mostly hers. He has caught her by running away from himself and making her run after him. And he is still running away, yet still urging on the hounds of heaven.

We never learn how Cordelia feels about being caught. Edmund tells us that he ordered the captain to hang her and "lay the blame upon her own despair" (5.3.253), but this does not quite reassure us that though she didn't hang herself she was not in despair. When Lear comes onstage with Cordelia's body immediately after, all these considerations bear in on us, as they do on him. It has been said that in this final scene he is caught between his knowledge that she is dead and his inability to accept it. Yet this does not quite square with the fluctuations his words express, nor is it adequate to the complex weight of feeling and responsibility he must now be suffering under. What he does is to make sure she is dead before bringing her back to life; he controls her return, and he sends her back again to death:

She's gone for ever.
I know when one is dead, and when one lives;
She's dead as earth. Lend me a looking-glass;
If that her breath will mist or stain the stone,
Why, then she lives.

This feather stirs; she lives! if it be so,
It is a chance which does redeem all sorrows
That ever I have felt.

A plague upon you, murderers, traitors all!
I might have sav'd 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.
I killed the slave that was a-hanging thee.

"She's gone for ever" looks back toward Lear's proscription in the first scene: "Thou hast her, France; let her be thine, for we / Have no such daughter, nor shall we ever see / That face of hers again" (1.1.262). To have banished her to France was the first step in her banishment from life, and to have caught her in prison was the second step. He forgets this for a brief instant to grasp at "a chance which does redeem all sorrows," but Kent's interruption brings him back to himself, and also back, confusedly, to the first scene to listen again to Cordelia's "nothing, my Lord." Now his defenses return, he curses the sinners who might have helped him save her, puts her back to death, and revives her just long enough to reinterpret, or misinterpet, her "nothing" with a tonally bizarre statement, a statement which is at once an evasive explanation of his failure to hear her, and a courtly epitaph: "Her voice was ever soft, / Gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman"—as if to say, "the reason I misunderstood her was that she spoke softly and gently when I was asking for loud and clear protestations of love, and she could have given me that, or you traitors could have helped save her by speaking up for her. But no; the blame is mine, not hers; an excellent thing in woman." This touch of connoisseurship returns him to the role of her manly protector, which dissolves at once into self-protection: "I killed the slave that was a-hanging thee"—partly a brag, but partly also a defensive response to the accusing presence he imagines: "I did the best I could, and if it wasn't good enough, it's because I'm old"—which evokes the "I am old and foolish" of 4.7. Lear cannot shake the presence off, as the third person gives way to the second, and the past tense to the present. He can exorcise her, consign her to oblivion, only by dying. "Thou'lt come no more, / Never, never, never, never, never": is it a cry of pained recognition? or is it a judgment, a doom, a command? "Pray you, undo this button." Hearing this I think of the smug and incestuous bridegroom, but also of Lear's earlier "off, off, you lendings. Come; unbutton here" (3.4.111); another terrible effort to disencumber himself and make his conscience free, to shake all cares from his age and crawl unburdened toward death. But she will not let him. "Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips, / Look there, look there!" What if she should wake before he dies? And waking, speak? And speaking, accuse? "For thee, oppressed King, I am cast down." And so are we.

Notes

¹ "The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear," in Must We Mean What We Say? (New York: Scribner's, 1969), p. 295.

²An Essay on "King Lear" (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), p. 113.

³King Lear (II) Manipulating Our Sympathies," Cambridge Quarterly, 2 (1966-67), 160.

⁴Shakespearian Tragedy, 2nd edition (1905; rpt. New York: Macmillan, 1949), p. 321.

⁵King Lear, ed. G. K. Hunter (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 298.

⁶ "Avoidance of Love," p. 296.