SOURCE: "Lear," in Harvester New Critical Introductions to Shakespeare: King Lear, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1988, pp. 69-95.

[In the following essay, Leggatt focuses on Lear's death, contending that it is "the completion of life lived to the extreme," and examines the parallels in the experiences of Lear and Gloucester.]

One of the principal ways in which critics have sought consolation for the ending of King Lear is to note that, however much Lear has suffered, he has also learnt. Walter Stein puts it succinctly: 'The world remains what it was, a merciless, heart-breaking world. Lear is broken by it, but he has learned to love and be loved'.¹ Lear in the storm, according to Robert Bechtold Heilman, 'feels compassion, acknowledges his own failures, and lessens himself in terms of divine justice; like Gloucester, he has come to a new insight'.² The idea of Lear's progress is given a religious dimension by A. C. Bradley's suggestion that 'this poem' might be renamed 'The Redemption of King Lear',³ by G. Wilson Knight's description of the play as 'purgatorial'⁴ and by Irving Ribner's reference to Lear's 'spiritual rebirth'. Other critics have resisted this view.⁵ In the storm sequence, where Heilman finds growing wisdom, Jonathan Dollimore hears 'demented mumbling interspersed with brief insight'. Passages that for some critics are prophetic wisdom are for Dollimore 'incoherent ramblings'.⁶ Combatting the view that Lear learns selfessness, Barbara Everett refers to his 'love of the "pride of life" that is involved in his first mistake, and that never leaves him up to his death. He fights passionately, at his noblest, against . . . the death of self .⁷ In her reading, Lear is not so much reformed or redeemed as intensified. This question is bound up with the question of whether Lear's experience is the full experience of the play. In the heath scenes in particular, according to L. C. Knights, the voices of the other characters are 'part of the tormented consciousness of Lear'.⁸ For S. L. Goldberg, on the other hand, 'although [Lear] is at the centre of the play, neither his consciousness nor his experience comprehends all of its meaning'.⁹ If Lear's experience is redemptive, and is the experience of the play, we can read the play as a whole through his redemption, and take a more hopeful view of it. But if Goldberg is right, we need to remain aware of the limitations of Lear's experience, and this will prevent us from seeing even his most positive insights as the play's ultimate statements.

Shakespeare has given us a point of reference to guide our reading of Lear, in the character of Gloucester. The use of a fully developed subplot is one of the features King Lear shares with Shakespeare's comedies, and one that separates it from his other tragedies. The parallels in the experience of the two old men are obvious enough: each misjudges his children, and is betrayed where he placed his trust; each is cast out, left to wander, and finally tended by the rejected child. But Gloucester always seems to operate at a different level. While Lear, in his first scene, is guilty of 'hideous rashness' (I.i. 151), Gloucester reminisces in a jocular way about an ordinary sexual lapse. Lear grandly divides a map; Gloucester is fooled by a letter. In the confrontation between Lear and his daughters, Lear storms and rages while Gloucester tries, ineffectually, to temporise: 'I would have all well betwixt you' (II.ii. 291 [II.iv]). Under pressure his resistance to evil grows, as does Albany's; but at first there is an unstable mixture of genuine, dangerous loyalty and ordinary time-serving: 'These injuries the King now bears will be revenged home. There is part of a power already footed. We must incline to the King. . . . If I die for't—as no less is threatened me—the King my old master must be relieved' (III.iii. 11-18). We can hear his resolution growing in that speech, from the cautious 'incline' to the final 'must'. When he is tied to a chair, and set upon by Cornwall and Regan, he tries to temporise at first, then throws away his caution and attacks his tormentors with exciting courage:

Because I would not see thy cruel nails
Pluck out his poor old eyes, nor thy fierce sister
In his anointed flesh stick boarish fangs.
. . .But I shall see
The wingèd vengeance overtake such children.

(III.vii. 54-6, 63-4)

His own words give Cornwall his cue; Gloucester's reward for courage is to have his eyes plucked out. Even here, his experience is at a different level from Lear's. Both men suffer physical and mental torment, but the physical is uppermost in Gloucester's case, the mental in Lear's. Gloucester's mind is always clear, and once he is blind he sees a path ahead of him. For the rest of the play he seeks for death, a thought that never once enters the mind of Lear.

Gloucester himself clarifies, and moralises, his experience. In the first moments of his blindness he learns the truth about his two sons, and declares, 'O, my follies! Then Edgar was abused. / Kind gods, forgive me that, and prosper him!' (III.vii. 89-90). He is unquestionably learning, and the equation of blindness and insight could hardly be plainer. But it works, we note, at a fairly simple narrative level: he learns that Edmond has deceived him. Later, he generalises his experience as Lear does, but in a more flat and prosaic way:

I stumbled when I saw. Full oft 'tis seen
Our means secure us, and our mere defects
Prove our commodities.

(IV.i. 19-21)

According to Northrop Frye, 'Gloucester's is a morally intelligible tragedy' in which 'Everything can be explained'. He adds, 'But the fact that Gloucester's tragedy is morally explicable goes along with the fact that Gloucester is not the main character of the play. If we apply such formulae to Lear they give us very little comfort.'¹⁰ The deaths of the two characters are strikingly different. Lear's occurs on stage and, as we will see, none of the witnesses can think of anything adequate to say about it. Gloucester's is off stage, and Edgar can describe it in a neat paradox with no stage reality to contradict or complicate it:

his flawed heart—
Alack, too weak the conflict to support—
'Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief,
Burst smilingly.

(V.iii. 188-91)

Lear's death resists analysis, resists language itself. Gloucester's death exists for us only as an analysis, a formula created by Edgar's words.

In Gloucester, then, we see a tragedy that can be moralised, analysed, explained; and we see a figure who unquestionably learns, and who moves from blindness to pained insight and finally to joy.¹¹ Does Gloucester's experience give us a simple and clarified version of Lear's to guide us through its greater complexity, or is it there essentially as a contrast? Those who want to see the main story as Lear's redemption will prefer the former reading. But the contrasts are so striking, and so thoroughly sustained, that we should probably look to them for a key to the relationship of the plots, and guide our reading of Lear accordingly. From the beginning, Gloucester is passive, worked on by Edmond as he will later be by Edgar. Lear is active, and precipitates his fall on his own initiative. While we first see Gloucester in an amiable man-toman chat with Kent, Lear is not just centrally placed on his throne but self-enclosed, self-absorbed. His 'Know that we have divided / In three our kingdom' (I.i. 37-8) is Lear's fiat; this is the voice of a man who is used to having his words create reality. The lovetest has a superficial air of ceremony but, whereas in a true ceremony the values of a community are expressed in a recurring occasion and a set form of words, this 'ceremony' expresses the needs and desires of one old man, the occasion is unique, and the speeches have to be made up on the spot. The principles of ceremony, and the communal stability they imply, are violated by the demands of Lear's will. As in the deposition scene in Richard II, we see the instruments of the state being untuned by the King himself. His surrender of power, however, is more apparent than real. Harry Berger, Jr, has argued that the terms of his bargain with his daughters are so one-sided—'all that land and power for a little rhetorical fluff'—that they will feel in his debt for the rest of his life; and Cordelia will have the extra burden of being 'his mother during his second childhood'.¹² Lear wants, as Alan Sinfield has pointed out, something it is very difficult for an absolute monarch to have: the assurance 'that he matters personally.¹³ And he intends to matter politically as well. While the hero of King Leir imagines genuine retreat—'My selfe will sojorne with my sonne of Cornwall, / And take me to my prayers and my beades' (vi. 556-7)—Lear's train of a hundred knights will mean that he is always surrounded by an image of power. Even his division of the kingdom has been seen by Ralph Berry as a clever strategy of divide and conquer.¹⁴

From the beginning there is a tension in Lear between the desire to surrender—'while we / Unburdened crawl toward death' (I.i. 41-2)—and the desire to cling to power, authority and love. Yet in clinging to these things Lear violates them. Richard II gives away his office; Lear splits his down the middle, separating 'The name and all th'addition to a king' from 'The sway, / Revenue, execution' (I.i. 136-7). He is not, we should notice, abdicating. He will be a king without acting like one, leaving his sons-in-law to act like kings without being kings. He breaks the integrity of his office, not giving away his crown, like Richard, but ordering his sons-in-law, 'This crownet part between you' (I.i. 139), leaving us to wonder how such a symbol can be divided. And of course he violates the integrity of love by making it a matter of bargaining. Kingship and love both demand some capacity for surrender: of the man to the office, of the lover to the beloved. Lear, instead, demands to be king on his terms, and to be loved on his terms. Susan Snyder has compared Lear's development to the psychology of dying, which begins with denial: he 'is by no means psychologically ready to yield up power, whatever he says. . . . When he banishes Kent for defending Cordelia, he is exercising automatically, unconsciously, the royal authority he has just supposedly handed over to others'.¹⁵ Even in his act of controlled surrender, Lear in the first scene gives the impression of massive, undisciplined power. But it will not quite do to see him as 'more a magnificent portent than a man'.¹⁶ Beneath the titanic arrogance Lear is vulnerable, anxious, needing to be assured of his future, with the contradictory wants of a child: ease and power, love that is given and love that is secured by being bought. Behind his arrogance lies the simple human fear, Old Adam's fear in As You Like It of 'unregarded age in corners thrown' (II.iii. 43). And behind that in turn lies the fear of loneliness and neglect, a fear that can be felt at any age. Lear is not just a foolish old man with everything to learn: some things he knows already, though his way of reacting to that knowledge may be grotesque: that the world is a harsh place even for the powerful, that nature plays vile tricks even on kings, and that the answer is to be found in the nurture and support one gets from other people. Lear enacts, through his contrived drama of surrendering power and finding love, a grotesque parody of the experience he will undergo more seriously in the rest of the play. Monstrously foolish though it is in its context, Lear's question, 'Which of you shall we say doth love us most' (I.i. 51), is not an idle one, and the play will take some pains to give it a proper answer.

But Lear's phrasing is interesting: 'Which of you shall we say doth love us most'. The final appeal is to his own judgement. And he seems to have made up his mind already, for he expects Cordelia to give the best speech. The arithmetical logic of the first scene is that once Goneril and Regan's portions have been given out, Cordelia's is already determined. Cordelia's refusal to play the game is the first in a series of moments in which Lear's expectations are frustrated and he has a hard time finding the right reaction. Kent and France try to make him 'See better' (Li. 158), but they fail. This remains a salient feature of Lear's character throughout: not his openness to new knowledge but his titanic resistance to it. The Leir of the older play is a gentle, mild old man: 'But he, the myrrour of mild patience, / Puts up all wrongs, and never gives reply' (viii. 755-6). When his older daughters turn against him he slips away quietly, unnoticed, in a manner very different from the stormy exits of Shakespeare's Lear. As Shakespeare seems to have created his play's theology (such as it is) by reacting against the sentimental piety of the earlier play, so he seems to have created his hero by reversing the earlier one. Lear's manner in the early scenes is tough and ironic. He appreciates the gruff, self-deprecating humour of the disguised Kent and matches it with his own: 'If thou be'st as poor for a subject as he's for a king, thou'rt poor enough' (I.iv. 21-2). The exchange between the two men displays a style of masculine plain dealing in which Lear is relaxed and self-assured. Above all, he seems to enjoy the speed of their exchange. He likes fast decisions, for he does not like to dwell on a subject. It is the slow oily politeness of Goneril that drives him frantic.

At first he simply refuses to see what is happening. The 'great abatement of kindness' his knight perceives becomes in Lear's mind 'a most faint neglect' (I.iv. 58, 66). When he cannot reinterpret, he denies. Confronted with the sight of Kent in the stocks, he refuses to believe it has happened: 'They durst not do't, / They could not, would not do't' (II.ii. 199-200 [II.iv]). In a variation on the play's own technique of visual contradiction, Lear simply refuses to believe what his eyes, and ours, see all too plainly. When he cannot deny the facts he still has trouble learning from them. The way Goneril and Regan have turned against him should have told him something about the quantifying of love that has brought him to this pass; but he will not learn. Trying to assure himself of Regan's love, he puts his clinching argument last:

Thou better know'st
The offices of nature, bond of childhood,
Effects of courtesy, dues of gratitude.
Thy half o'th' kingdom hast thou not forgot,
Wherein I thee endowed.

(II.ii. 350-4 [II.iv])

His first appeal is to the established and natural connections of the family, which Cordelia invoked in the first scene: 'I love your majesty / According to my bond' (Li. 92-3). In this view, to violate family ties is to violate a fixed arrangement that should not depend on individual wills. But Lear, in the first scene, was not willing to let his daughters' love rest on that basis: he needed a guarantee he had devised himself. And it is to that guarantee, 'Thy half o'the kingdom', that he finally appeals. We see him not advancing towards insight but retreating from it. As he clings desperately to the quantifying, bargain-striking view of love, his expression of it becomes increasingly grotesque: 'Thy fifty yet doth double five and twenty, / And thou art twice her love' (II.ii. 43-4 [II.iv]). It is as though Lear is trying to prove to himself that his system works, by stating it in its most absurd form and continuing stubbornly to believe in it.

When he tries to debate with his daughters, Lear's argument breaks down just as it is approaching its climax:

O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous.
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man's life is cheap as beast's. Thou art a lady.
If only to go warm were gorgeous,
Why, nature needs not what thou, gorgeous, wear'st,
Which scarcely keeps thee warm. But for true need—
You heavens, give me that patience, patience

I need. (II.ii. 438-45 [II.iv])

The first part of the speech moves confidently, but when Lear tries to define 'true need' he breaks off and veers away from his point. He is in fact defending the superfluity, the trappings that deck unaccommodated man, which he himself will reject when he sees Poor Tom. As he describes Regan's garments his actual contempt for this superfluity begins to show through, and he seems about to distinguish between material need and a need for something extra that is not frivolous, but runs deeper than the material. A need for what? Presumably something in relations between people: courtesy, love or respect. But his own thinking is still so bound by the material, so committed to measuring his daughters' love by how many knights they will allow him, that he cannot get this next stage of his argument organised; and so he breaks off and changes the subject, not to what he needs from Goneril and Regan but to what he needs from the heavens.

At times he hovers on the edge of absurdity:

I have another daughter
Who, I am sure, is kind and comfortable.
When she shall hear this of thee, with her nails
She'll flay thy wolvish visage.

(I.iv. 285-8)

Lear defines kindness as kindness to him; he does not notice the incongruity this leads to. Rather than building a coherent train of thought, he tries out reactions moment by moment, and again this leads to incongruity:

Thou art a boil,
A plague-sore or embossèd carbuncle
In my corrupted blood. But I'll not chide thee.

(II.ii. 396-8 [II.iv])

Yet these moments of absurdity are shot through with moments of insight, some of which are powerfully simple: 'I did her wrong' (I.v. 25). Lear's mind, like the play itself, is constantly on the move, in a dynamic pattern of advance and retreat, surrender and resistance. It is as characteristic of him to fight his feelings as to express them directly.¹⁷ Part of King Lear's overall tension is that while the play as a whole is constantly moving towards new insights, new discoveries, the central character is fighting a tremendous battle against knowledge, a battle in which, paradoxically, every loss is an advance.

A related tension is that between Lear's awareness of the world around him and his preoccupation with himself. Goneril's treatment of him leads him to an ironic questioning of his own identity, and the phrasing of his question is revealing:

Does any here know me? This is not Lear.
Does Lear walk thus, speak thus? Where are his eyes?
Either his notion weakens, his discernings
Are lethargied—ha, waking? 'Tis not so.
Who is it that can tell me who I am?
Fool Lear's shadow.

(I.iv. 208-13)

We have seen already how problematic identity is in this play, and how the Fool's reply alerts us to the problem. Lear's sense of his identity depends on how other people treat him. If Goneril is not behaving like Lear's daughter, then he must be someone other than Lear. His question is not, who am I, but who is it that can tell me who I am? Identity is socially constructed, depending not on oneself but on other people. If Lear is about to start a journey of self-discovery, as his question implies, it will of necessity involve the discovery of other people. And the process works two ways: Lear's view of the rest of the world will be bound up with his sense of himself. As we watch him over the next few scenes, we may wonder whether these two lines of investigation, of the self and of the world, are helping or hindering each other.

One of Lear's achievements is his sudden pity for the Fool in the middle of the storm:

My wits begin to turn.
(To Fool) Come on, my boy. How dost, my boy? Art cold?
I am cold myself.—Where is this straw, my fellow?
The art of our necessities is strange,
And can make vile things precious. Come, your hovel.—
Poor fool and knave, I have one part in my heart
That's sorry yet for thee.

(III.ii. 67-73)

This is the first time Lear has expressed this kind of feeling for the Fool, indeed the first time in the storm scene that he has noticed him at all. The language is touchingly simple, in stark contrast to the magnificent tirades that have preceded it. The moral he draws about learning to love vile things may refer to the Fool as well as to the hovel. But Lear has discovered pity for the Fool through noticing that he is cold himself, just as he later sympathises with houseless poverty because he himself is houseless, and with Poor Tom because, he insists, his daughters brought him to his pass. In fact, it was not 'Tom's' daughters who brought him to this pass; it was his father. Beneath Tom is Edgar, who has suffered the fate Lear wished on Cordelia. Lear is still better at seeing his sufferings than his offences. His pity for others is real, but it is also a projection of his pity for himself. By the same token, Lear's denunciation of the wickedness of man in the storm scene, though wide-ranging, is focused on one idea: 'all germens spill at once / That makes ingrateful man' (III.ii. 8-9); the centre of humanity's wickedness is what has been done to him. His view of the storm is erratic: he calls on it to aid his curses; he denounces it for joining with his daughters against him. The common factor is that he relates the storm to his own plight. And he can still declare, 'I am a man / More sinned against than sinning' (III.ii. 59-60). In what follows it is the sin of others that continues to preoccupy him.

The treatment he has suffered and the jolting image of humanity Poor Tom presents lead him to ask, as the play itself does, large questions about man and society. His scene with Gloucester is full of broken images of his royal function: we see the king reviewing his troops, receiving homage, dispensing justice. But beneath the trappings of society is the vulnerability Lear has proved in himself:

When the rain came to wet me once, and the wind to make me chatter; when the thunder would not peace at my bidding, there I found 'em, there I smelt 'em out. Go to, they are not men o' their words. They told me I was everything; 'tis a lie, I am not ague-proof.

(IV.v.100-5 [IV.vi])

In the face of this brute reality all offices are absurd: 'change places and, handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?' (IV.v. 149-50) [IV.vi]). In his attack on his daughters Lear could not quite bring himself to denounce the superficial trappings of society, for he depended on them himself. Now he sees those trappings not just as superfluous but as deceptive:

Through tattered clothes great vices do appear;
Robes and furred gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold,
And the strong lance of justice hurtles breaks;
Arm it in rags, a pygmy's straw does pierce it.

(IV.v. 160-3 [IV.vi])

Lear also recalls Edgar's interpretation of Poor Tom. The animal beneath the robes is not just vulnerable but wicked, and his wickedness is sexual. He begins with a half-recognition of Gloucester:

I pardon that man's life. What was thy cause?
Adultery? Thou shalt not die. Die for adultery!
No, the wren goes to't, and the small gilded fly
Does lecher in my sight. Let copulation thrive,
For Gloucester's bastard son
Was kinder to his father than my daughters
Got 'tween the lawful sheets. To't, luxury, pell-mell,
For I lack soldiers. Behold yon simp'ring dame,
Whose face between her forks presages snow,
That minces virtue, and does shake the head
To hear of pleasure's name.
The fitchew nor the soilèd horse goes to't
With a more riotous appetite. Down from the waist
They're centaurs, though women all above.
But to the girdle do the gods inherit;
Beneath is all the fiend's. There's hell, there's darkness, there is the sulphurous pit, burning, scalding, stench, consumption. Fie, fie, fie; pah, pah! Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, sweeten my imagination.

(IV.v. 109-27 [IV.vi])

Gloucester's offence was adultery, and Lear begins with that. While Edgar will later see this as a crime deserving the punishment of blindness, Lear excuses it with ironic tolerance: man is simply doing what the animals do. Why should one expect him to be different? Besides, the world must be peopled; for one thing, Lear's supply of knights is low: 'I lack soldiers'. But then the thought of the animal in man produces a sudden wave of disgust, in the image of the simpering dame. Initially, her offence seems to be not sexuality but the desire to conceal it. Even that degree of tolerance breaks, as sexuality itself becomes disgusting. We may have no glimpse of heaven in this play, but we do have a glimpse of hell: it lies, in Lear's imagination, between a woman's legs. Then Lear seems to decide that the fault lies not in humanity, but in his way of looking at humanity: it is his imagination, not the body, that is corrupt. Gloucester the adulterer, who began this train of thought, becomes the apothecary who must end it by curing Lear's diseased imagination. Gloucester tries, not to cure Lear, but simply to honour him: 'O, let me kiss that hand!' The fact that the gesture is physical recalls Lear's insight that beneath the trappings of society is the reality of the body, and leads to his final statement of the body's corruption: 'Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality' (IV.v. 128-9 [IV.iv]). We go from the stench of sex to the stench of death. The general impression of the speech is not of secure insight but of a restless probing, excited and urgent, attacking and recoiling, moving through a series of self-contradictions, as the mind shrinks from the unbearable, then dares itself to face it, then turns away again.

Lear's insights into the corruption of justice and the foulness of sexuality fuse into a single image:

Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand.
Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thine own back.
Thou hotly lusts to use her in that kind
For which thou whip'st her.

(IV.v. 156-9 [IV.vi])

In this, one of Lear's most dreadful images, lust and cruelty seem to operate not just beneath the system of justice but through it. Yet this leads Lear not to a universal denunciation of man, like the one heard in the storm scene, but to a universal tolerance: 'None does offend, none, I say none' (IV.v. 164 [IV.vi]). He has passed beyond his casual tolerance of sex as something the animals do, to a bitter equivalent of Cordelia's 'no cause, no cause'. This forgiveness comes not through wiping out offences but through seeing them as universal. None does offend, because all are equally guilty. From this wide general insight Lear's mind suddenly snaps back to the particular: he recognises the old man who is clumsily pulling off his boots and crying like a baby. As Gloucester has said to Edgar, 'Take my purse', Lear makes a more basic offer:

If thou wilt weep my fortunes, take my eyes.
I know thee well enough; thy name is Gloucester.
Thou must be patient. We came crying hither.
Thou know's the first time that we smell the air
We waul and cry.

(IV.v. 172-6 [IV.vi])

Universal sin has become universal suffering; we are back from the wicked animal to the naked one. The first symptom of life is a cry. And as the image of the weeping old man fuses with that of the crying baby, the whole of human life becomes a circle of pain that closes in a moment.

In much of this Lear's mind seems to have gone well beyond his own personal misfortunes. He is looking out at the world. But he offers his eyes to Gloucester on condition: 'If thou wilt keep my fortunes, take my eyes'. He is still bargaining, and his bargains still have reference to himself. We may wonder why he is so concerned with sex, since—unlike Troilus or Othello—he has not suffered betrayal in this area of his life. The answer may lie back in the storm sequence: 'Judicious punishment: 'twas this flesh begot / Those pelican daughters' (III.iv. 70-1). As a king exiled in his own land, Lear sees through the systems of power and justice that he used to administer. As a betrayed father, he sees beneath parenthood the sulphurous pit from which we all spring. Broad though it is, his vision is finally bordered by what has happened to him. Throughout his scene with Gloucester, from 'every inch a king' to 'None does offend . . . I'll able 'em' (IV.v. 107, 164 [IV.vi]), Lear insists on his own authority. And his view of universal corruption, as I have already suggested, finds no place for what we see all round him: images of loyalty and love, a son helping a father, an old blind courtier trying to honour a fallen king, an army led by his daughter coming to his rescue. Lear himself participates in this kindness, showing that there is more to parenthood than propagated curse. Comforting the crying Gloucester, he is like a parent tending a child. As the two old men cling together, all Edgar can do is stand back and comment lamely, 'O, matter and impertinency mixed—/ Reason in madness' (IV.v. 170-1 [IV.vi]), as though to emphasise that no commentary can do justice to this picture of the human bond. Yet this achievement is not fixed, any more than earlier ones have been. In a moment the old cursing, vengeful Lear is back: 'when I have stol'n upon these son-in-laws, / Then kill, kill, kill, kill, kill!' (IV.v. 182-3 [IV.vi]). We are right back to the Lear of the first two acts, who could think of nothing better to do than get even; and his vengeance is pointlessly misdirected, for one son-in-law is dead and the other is on his side.

It is at this point that Cordelia's attendants come to rescue him. Lear runs away from them. Waking in Cordelia's tent, he gets what he wanted in the first scene: 'I . . . thought to set my rest / On her kind nursery' (I.i. 123-4). Yet once again he resists, fighting off comfort as he had fought off knowledge. Cordelia addresses him with titles of respect, 'How does my royal lord? How fares your majesty?', to which he replies by trying to put as much distance between them as he can:

You do me wrong to take me out o'th' grave.
Thou art a soul in bliss, but I am bound
Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears
Do scald like molten lead.

(IV.vi. 37-41 [IV.vii])

What we see is a daughter tending a father, a basic image of human kindness that echoes Lear's comforting of Gloucester and the Fool, and Edgar's taking Gloucester by the hand. What Lear sees is the unbridgeable gulf between heaven and hell. And while he is offered new life, in images of restoration (music and fresh garments) that will be used again in Shakespeare's final romances, his first reaction is resentment at being brought out of the grave.¹⁸ Even as he gropes to understand his new experience, old ways of thought cling to him. He still imagines a scheme of retribution, the difference being that he is the offender who must be punished: 'If you have poison for me, I will drink it' (IV.vi. 65 [IV.vii]). He seeks physical guarantees of the reality of this experience, and they are images of suffering: 'I feel this pin prick'; 'Be your tears wet? Yes, faith' (IV.vi. 49, 64 [IV.vii]). He cannot accept this experience as real unless there is some pain in it.

Cordelia has a moment of shyness at Lear's waking. As he sleeps she kisses him, and speaks eloquently of her pity and her desire to restore him. but when he wakes her first impulse is to ask her attendant to speak to him, and he has to tell her, 'Madam, do you; 'tis fittest' (IV.vi. 36 [IV.vii]). We go for a moment back to the first scene, to Cordelia's reluctance to speak, her fear that her language cannot match the occasion. But this time her presence—for when she speaks, her words are few and simple and Lear never replies to them directly—is enough to guide him out of the abyss. We return to the first scene in another respect: this time Lear really does give away his kingship. He refuses to acknowledge the titles she uses, and when told he is in his own kingdom replies, 'Do not abuse me' (IV.vi. 71 [IV.vii]). And he has, at last, an answer to his question, 'Which of you shall we say doth love us most'. He gropes for an answer to his other key question: 'Who is it that can tell me who I am?' His own attempts to establish his identity are fumbling. Having seen the body as the essential reality of man, he now finds his own body unfamiliar: 'I will not swear these are my hands' (IV.vi. 48 [IV.vii]). The body is not, perhaps, our final reality after all. The fresh clothes, which in Geoffrey of Monmouth and Holinshed are given to him so that he will make a respectable appearance before Cordelia's husband, and which here are images of restoration and new life, not designed to impress in a worldly way—these clothes are simply disorientating: 'all the skill I have / Remembers not these garments' (IV.vi. 59-60 [IV.vii]). As before, clothing seems unnatural; but while previously Lear could denounce it as superfluous or deceptive, now it is simply puzzling. In his earlier tirades, he was grandly unaware of his own absurdity. Now, with nothing absurd about him, he asks shyly, 'Pray do not mock'; 'Do not laugh at me' (IV.vi. 52, 61 [IV.vii]). The old self-assertiveness is gone.

The difficulty of fixing an identity, which is part of our experience of responding to the play, is now embodied in Lear, who seems to himself, perhaps for the first time, to be truly Lear's shadow. He never does succeed in naming himself. In fact, for the rest of the play he never speaks his own name. The identity he finds for himself is both a plain but generalised recognition of present reality and a startling change from the proud, raging Lear of the earlier scenes:

I am a very foolish, fond old man.
Fourscore and upward,
Not an hour more nor less; and to deal plainly
I fear I am not in my perfect mind.

(IV.vi. 53-6 [IV.vii])

Shy and apologetic, trying to kneel before his daughter, he seems more the meek Leir of the earlier play than Shakespeare's hero. In his confrontation with Goneril he affected not to recognize her—'Your name, fair gentlewoman?' (I.iv. 214)—as part of his ironic questioning of his own identity. Now he is genuinely unsure of himself, and when he finally gropes to an act of recognition, of naming, it is not himself he names:

Do not laugh at me,
For as I am a man, I think this lady
To be my child, Cordelia.

(IV.vi. 61-3 [IV.vii])

From this point he remembers what has happened to him, and what he has done; and some of his old habits of mind, particularly his view of human relations as a matter of bargaining and exchange, begin to reassert themselves:

I know you do not love me; for your sisters
Have, as I do remember, done me wrong.
You have some cause; they have not.

(IV.vi. 66-8 [IV.vii])

'I know you do not love me' shows him in some danger of repeating his old mistake about Cordelia; but at least he is re-establishing some sense of his identity, not through counting up the number of knights he is allowed, or noting gestures of respect (he rejects those) but simply through an awareness that he has a relationship with Cordelia. In a tentative way, he learns something from her. His reply to her 'No cause, no cause' is a non sequitur, 'Am I in France?' (IV.vi. 68-9 [IV.vii]). But the idea of forgiveness has been planted in this mind, and he returns to it at the end of the scene, asking her to do what she has already done: 'You must bear with me. Pray you now, forget / And forgive. I am old and foolish' (IV.vi. 76-7 [IV.vii]).

In the way it seems to resolve questions raised in the first scene, and to give a true image of what was parodied there—Lear shedding his kingship, to be tended by his youngest daughter—Act 4 Scene 6 could be an ending. Lear's achievement of humility seems a final breakthrough. So does his critical awareness of himself, based on his recognition of Cordelia ('You have some cause') and leading to his simple plea for forgiveness. But this is not altogether a new Lear. Part of what makes the scene convincing, and therefore moving, is that Lear is still, as he has always been, a slow learner. He gropes reluctantly towards his new life, trying at first to cling to the old certainties of pain and punishment. His expressions of new insight are tentative and incomplete. This includes his insight into himself: 'old and foolish' does not quite sum up the character we have seen or the reasons he needs forgiveness. And from this point in the play his mind contracts as sharply as it had expanded. He ceases to care about kingship, justice or power. Only one thing matters: Cordelia. Not even love, as an idea, matters; simply Cordelia. He is beyond abstractions. His entire life now hinges on one person. And about her he has one thing left to learn.

In watching the reunion, we hardly notice the acute contraction of Lear's mind, for his new experience seems so complete in itself. But when he next appears we are bound to notice. Lear is quite happy to have lost the battle and to be sent to prison so long as Cordelia is with him:

Come, let's away to prison.
We two alone will sing like birds i'th' cage.
When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness; so we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news, and we'll talk with them too—
Who loses and who wins, who's in, who's out,
And take upon's the mystery of things
As if we were God's spies; and we'll wear out
In a walled prison packs and sects of great ones
That ebb and flow by th'moon.

(V.iii. 8-19)

Questions like 'Who loses and who wins, who's in, who's out' were once of vital importance to him, for he was in the thick of such action himself. Now, in line with his rejection of kingship in his previous scene, he views the whole of public life with detached amusement. Even the notion of being God's spy does not imply judgement or insight; merely the detachment of a god who finds his creatures laughable—not unlike Gloucester's gods, who kill men for their sport. Yet we know that Lear cannot live like this. Cordelia's question, 'Shall we not see these daughters and these sisters?' (V.iii. 7) shows her awareness of political reality; and that reality, in the form of Edmond and his army, is on stage with Lear even as he speaks, theatrically contradicting his words. Who loses and who wins is not an idle question, but a question of life and death: Edmond has announced his intention of having Lear and Cordelia killed if they lose the battle, and in a few moments he will give the order.

Barbara Everett has noted the childlike, unreal quality of Lear's vision,¹⁹ and W. F. Blissett observes the irony that Lear 'has not resigned the joys of resignation'.²⁰ Perhaps the most insidious danger in the speech is the way Lear turns his own relations with Cordelia into a childlike game of make-believe, kneeling and forgiving as they did at their reunion. We cannot blame Lear for wanting to hold on to that scene, but the cost of repeating it instead of letting it go is to devalue and trivialise it. As so often, Lear wants to hold back while the play moves on. As he imagined the gods aiding his curses, he now imagines them giving their blessing to his life with Cordelia. But his own imagination starts to send out warning signals:

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.

(V.iii. 20-3)

The reference to incense implies a sacrifice on an altar, Lear and Cordelia going through a kind of death. It is a sanctified death, in which they will go together to a new life. But one worry still haunts him: they could be parted. Picking up the image of the sacrifice on the altar, he insists that only fire from heaven could do it. For a moment we glimpse an image of frightened, tortured animals, taking us back to the play's middle scenes. Lear insists that he is describing an impossibility, something that cannot happen. Yet we see in a moment that it will not need fire from heaven to part them; it needs only Edmond giving an order to his captain. The ordinary world, that Lear finds so comically distant, closes in and destroys him.

And so we return to the death of Cordelia. Lear resists it, as he has always resisted new knowledge. He kills the captain who is hanging her, and throughout his last moments he alternates between stark recognition—

She's gone forever.
I know when one is dead and when one lives.
She's dead as earth.

(V.iii. 234-6)

—and refusal:

This feather stirs. She lives. If it be so,
It is a chance which does redeem all sorrows
That ever I have felt.

(V.iii. 240-2)

Whatever we may have felt about Lear's earlier resistance to knowledge, we are with him here. His struggle between acceptance and refusal of this unbearable fact is our struggle as well. Lear's knowledge has never been the full knowledge of the play: we have always been able to see more than he does. But Lear's experience, of struggling bewildered through shock after shock, has been like our experience of the play, and here we are close to being one with him. We have already seen how many readers have in their own ways refused to accept the death of Cordelia.

But we feel its inevitably, not just in the way the last scene echoes and completes the first, but in the way images from all over the play come crashing down on us in Lear's last speech:

And my poor fool is hanged! No, no, no life?
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more.
Never, never, never, never, never.
(To Kent) Pray you, undo this button. Thank you, sir.

(V.iii. 281-6)

The Fool, the animals of the middle scenes, Lear's attempts to strip, the service he gets from his attendants, all find echoes here. It is as though the whole play is bearing down on him, and on us. Yet Lear's actual death seems to have given Shakespeare trouble, for it is at this point that we have the most striking and significant change between the Quarto and the Folio. Here is the Quarto version:

Lear . . . Pray you, undo This button. Thank you, sir. O, O, O, O!

Edgar He faints. (To Lear) My lord, my lord!

Lear Break, heart, I prithee break.

Edgar Look up, my lord.

Kent Vex not his ghost. O, let him pass.

(Q.xxiv. 303-8)

Lear seems to will his heart—the 'rising heart' of his exchange with the Fool (II.ii. 292-6 [IV.iv])—to break. His death is centred on his own feeling, his own pain; he is terribly aware of that pain, and consciously uses it to bring on death. If this were the only version of the scene we had, we would accept its terrible logic as a fitting end for Lear. But the Folio goes beyond it:

Lear . . . Pray you, undo this button. Thank you, sir. Do you see this? Look on her. Look, her lips. Look there, look there. He dies.

Edgar He faints. (To Lear) My lord, my lord!

Kent (to Lear) Break, heart, I prithee break.

Edgar (to Lear) Look up, my lord.

Kent Vex not his ghost. O, let him pass.

(V.iii. 285-9)

Lear does not even know he is dying;²¹ his focus is on Cordelia. Once again our experience corresponds to his: the death that preoccupies us in the last scene is not the death of the hero: it is Cordelia's death, to which he is 'hardly more than a needful afterthought'.²² As he found his identity in her, he finds his death in hers. It is the play's last and most painful image of the human bond. Less directly than Edgar, but just as decisively, Cordelia has killed her father.

Yet this does affirm something about Cordelia, and about humanity. Certainly not in any hope of immortality; there is no suggestion of that.²³ Nor, I think, in Bradley's notion that Lear thinks he sees returning life on Cordelia's lips. If he dies of joy it is at best a merciful delusion, a cheat like Gloucester's fall. More to the point, we do not know what Lear sees on Cordelia's lips: we register instead the fact of his concentration on them. The range of his mind has narrowed all through the last scenes, from humanity to Cordelia, and now it contracts to a single intense point: Cordelia's lips. The lips that kissed him as he slept, from which he wanted eloquent words in the first scene, from which he now wants merely breath. We do not know whether he sees life or death there; it is the concentration that matters. An actor could play unbearable joy, or unbearable grief, and be true to the scene either way. Lear's commitment to Cordelia is so intense that it ends his life, demonstrating her value to him with terrible decisiveness, and countering Lear's savage view of man in the middle scenes. If man were just a bare forked animal or a wicked animal, it would not matter, as it so painfully does, that a dog, a horse or a rat should live and that Cordelia should die.²⁴ Lear has learnt not just how much Cordelia loves him but how much he loves her, and this knowledge kills him. If this is an affirmation, it is an affirmation that comes not in spite of pain, but through it.

The survivors try for other kinds of affirmation. Albany wants the Tate ending:

What comfort to this great decay may come
Shall be applied; for us, we will resign
During the life of this old majesty
To him our absolute power. . . . All friends shall taste
The wages of their virtue, and all foes
The cup of their deservings.—O see, see!

(V.iii. 273-80)

Albany's words break off as he confronts the sight of Lear with the dead Cordelia; it is as though he can make this speech only by turning away from the reality on which our own eyes are fixed, and when he turns back he breaks down. Edgar's 'Look up, my lord' (V.iii. 288) recalls his attempt to comfort Gloucester at Dover, and earns Kent's rebuke. Comfort is not just irrelevant but cruel; Lear needs to die. And the play's last speeches are shaken, feeble, deliberately inadequate, as though in the end 'language as literature, therefore language at the top of its bent, declares itself inadequate for the task it has just performed':²⁵

Albany . . . Friends of my soul, you twain
Rule in this realm, and the gored state sustain.
Kent I have a journey, sir, shortly to go:
My master calls me; I must not say no.
Edgar The weight of this sad time we must obey,
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most. We that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

(V.iii. 295-302)

There is no Fortinbras or Malcolm here to order the state and see that life goes on. The kingdom that Lear grandly sliced in three, and then in two, now lies in ruin, and no one feels like picking through the rubble. Albany wants no part of worldly power; Kent wants no part of life. Edgar seems prepared to confront only the present experience, feels that something ought to be at least said about it, but does not know what to say. He ends the play with what sounds like a lame tribute to the endurance and longevity of the old, and a fear that his own life may be shorter. (This may touch on the belief current in Shakespeare's time that the world was in its last days, one evidence for this being that modern men did not live as long as the patriarchs.) But what Edgar's halting words really convey, through their sheer inarticulateness, is an admission that Lear's experience, and to a lesser extent Gloucester's, have been larger and deeper than his own thoughts can compass. We cannot, finally, cope with this ending through discursive language any more than Edgar can. We have to face instead the thing itself, embodied in the stage picture of Lear with the dead Cordelia.

Lear is not so much a character who has been saved or educated as a character who has been through an intense experience, one that has presented him—and us—with basic images of the human condition, hurled at us with brutal speed and impact: the naked madman, the crying baby, the soul in bliss, the dead child. His death is the completion of a life lived at the extreme. That sense of extremity has been created by collisions between language and experience, as the characters confront an intractable world. If Lear seems the grandest of them, it is because he puts up the most titanic resistance to that world. But this final experience, Cordelia's death, is so intense that it kills him. For us that experience is the play's final reality, after which the efforts of language fade and die. But the image, as stubborn and intractable as Lear himself, survives to haunt us. Asserting his power over his own life, Lear began the play by asking his daughters to say how much they loved him. He ends by demonstrating his own love, and our mortal helplessness, in a manner beyond words.

Notes

¹Criticism as Dialogue (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1969), p. 113.

²This Great Stage: Image and Structure in King Lear (reprint University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1963), p. 270.

³Shakespearean Tragedy (Reprint Macmillan, London, 1957), p. 235.

⁴The Wheel of Fire, 4th edition (reprint Methuen, London, 1960), p. 179.

⁵Patterns in Shakespearean Tragedy (Methuen, London, 1960), p. 116.

⁶Radical Tragedy (Brighton, Harvester; and Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 193, 195.

⁷ 'The New King Lear', Critical Quarterly 2 (1960) 325-39 (p. 335).

⁸Some Shakespearean Themes (reprint Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1966), p. 80.

⁹An Essay on King Lear (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1974), p. 68.

¹⁰Fools of Time: Studies in Shakespearean Tragedy (University of Toronto Press, Toronto, Buffalo and London, 1967), pp. 113-14.

¹¹ On the relationship between the two plots, see Bridget Geliert Lyons, 'The Subplot as Simplification in King Lear', in Some Facets of King Lear: Essay in Prismatic Criticisim, edited by Rosalie L. Colie and F.T. Flahiff (University of Toronto Press, Toronto and Buffalo, 1974), pp. 23-38.

¹²'King Lear: The Lear Family Romance', Centennial Review 23 (1979) 348-76 (pp. 354, 355).

¹³ 'Lear and Laing', Essays in Criticism 26 (1976) 1-16 (p. 3).

¹⁴ 'Lear's System', Shakespeare Quarterly 35 (1984) 421-9 (pp. 422-6).

¹⁵'King Lear and the Psychology of Dying', Shakespeare Quarterly 3 (1982) 449-60 (p. 455).

¹⁶ Harley Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare, I (reprint Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1952), p. 285.

¹⁷ See Michael Goldman, Acting and Action in Shakespearean Tragedy (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1985), p. 77.

¹⁸ Marvin Rosenberg, in The Masks of King Lear (University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1972), reports John Gielgud's playing of this scene: he 'was bewildered, troubled, he was fretful—even at first 'a bit sulky,' as per Granville-Barker's direction' (p. 286).

¹⁹ 'The New King Lear', p. 332-3.

²⁰ 'Recognition in King Lear', in Some Facets, pp. 103-16 (p. 113).

²¹ See F.T. Flahiff, 'Edgar: Once and Future King', in Some Facets, pp. 221-37 (p.232).

²² Maynard Mack, King Lear in Our Time (University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1965), p. 84.

²³ See William R. Elton, King Lear and the Gods (Huntington Library, San Marino, 1966), pp. 54-5.

²⁴ See Paul A. Jorgensen, Lear's Self Discovery (University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles; and Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1967), p. 124.

²⁵ Sheldon P. Zitner, 'King Lear and Its Language', in Some Facets, pp. 3-22 (p. 4).