SOURCE: “The Player King,” in Sovereign Shame: A Study of King Lear, Bucknell University Press, 1984, pp. 118-46.

[In the following essay, Zak contrasts Shakespeare’s King Lear with the anonymously written The True Chronicle History of King Leir, and examines Lear’s self-destruction.]

The king's a beggar, now the play is done.

Epilogue, All's Well That Ends Well

Shame would have it hid.

Gloucester, King Lear

From a study of the contrasts between the first scenes of The True Chronicle History of King Leir and Shakespeare's spare, truncated adaptation of them in the first half of scene one in King Lear, we can better inspect several related elements in Shakespeare's design. For one thing, it appears Shakespeare took great care to keep Lear's psyche cloaked, unavailable to immediate inspection, as if our bewilderment—a sense of something hidden in Lear's motives—was a necessary first step toward understanding him. In Shakespeare's source both the abdication and the love test are far more comprehensibly motivated than in Lear. In the old play the death of Leir's beloved wife, his impotent old age, his lack of a son for heir, his own death which he imagines imminent, and, above all, his self-sacrificial concern for the safety of his nation are all discussed before his counselors as elements in his decision and combine to convince him he must reluctantly “resign these earthly cares” to his daughters and “thinke upon the welfare of my soul” (1.1.28).

Leir dreads having to shift the heavy burden of rule onto daughters he would prefer to dote upon; but because he cares so much for the future welfare of Britain, he decides he must divide the kingdom impartially among his daughters and marry each to a “neyghbouring King” so that the “State / May be protected 'gainst all forrayne hate” (1.1.55), an idea conveniently encouraged by the fact that neighboring Cornwall and Cambria have already “motion[ed] love” toward Gonorill and Ragan. The king is not suspicious of any of his daughters nor does he seem to have a favorite. He does not reveal any fear of dissension among his daughters, let alone the prospect of civil strife. The only difficulty he seems to consider is a Cordella who wishes to marry for love but who fancies none of her suitors. The love test—whatever private psychological purposes it may also serve—is consciously and clearly designed as a public, politically motivated trick, a practical “stratagem” (1.1.78) by which the king can manipulate Cordella into a patriotic marriage of his choosing with the king of Brittany as a proof of her anticipated verbal claims to outdo her sisters in love for the king. Though the trick is obviously wrong-headed, it is nonetheless a comprehensibly motivated gambit that explains the love test in a way nothing in Shakespeare's Lear explains Lear's.

In King Lear, on the other hand, with no prior discussion or even mention of the political wisdom of Lear's decision, no considered rejection of other alternatives or doubts expressed about the dangers of abdication and succession without a male heir, Lear makes but a brief public announcement of what he has already decided to do. Lear may “express” his “darker purpose” (1.1.36) straightforwardly enough; but we who must try to understand it without any sense of familial or political context or familiarity with Lear's character do not thereby find the darkness grow luminous. Not only does the only prior reference to Lear's political decision—Kent's introductory exchange with Gloucester—fail to enlighten us about the political thinking underlying the decision; but because Lear's plan, even in its details, is indicated to be general knowledge at court,¹ the reasons why Lear would therefore stage the seemingly empty, ritualistic love auction are even more puzzling. In Shakespeare, of course, there is no hint that this love test is any kind of stratagem to trick Cordelia into subordinating personal happiness to political necessity. Nor in the source, conversely, are there previously outlined maps or imperial claims to have already “divided / In three our kingdom” (1.1.37-38) to call into question the seriousness with which that love test may be taken. In fact, the pretense that there is to be a connection between the love test and the allotment of portions of the kingdom is itself a Shakespearean departure from the source. In the earlier play, the audience is aware from the outset that Leir's “zeale is fixt” (1.1.40) to be impartial and divide the kingdom into three equal portions. He does not even mention the division of the kingdom at the love test when he hopes merely to

Resolve a doubt which much molests my mind,
Which of you three to me would prove most kind;
Which loves me most, and which at my request
Will soonest yeeld unto their father's hest.

(1.3.232-35)

He is not aware that Gonorill and Ragan have meanwhile been willfully misinformed by his messenger who told them there would be a quid pro quo relationship between flattery and reward. His daughters thus find it an easy matter (since they, like Cordella, are as yet unmarried) to place Cordella's anticipated refusal in a bad light by insinuating into their praise of Leir the promise that “should you appoynt me for to marry / The meanest vassayle in the spacious world, / Without reply I would accomplish it” (1.3.248-50; cf. 1.3.269-72).

Whereas the earlier play, which concentrates our attention upon Leir's well-intentioned political concerns, creates for us the sense of Leir as a very good man and king who makes a foolish mistake, but who, once he has learned a simple lesson, can very likely recoup his losses and recover both his moral dignity and stability, Shakespeare's treatment of Lear assures far less. The absence of carefully defined and presented political motivation in Lear is only one element of our confusion about the king. Though Lear presumably loves his children, when he expresses his darker purpose he does not express any reluctance to burden them with the cares of state. In the source, by contrast, the central psychological crisis in deciding upon abdication explicitly involves the conflict between the king's desire to favor his children and indulge their protected lives of ease on the one hand and the nation's need for orderly succession and responsible rule on the other (1.3.202-211). If Leir is utterly unsuspicious of his children, Shakespeare's Lear is apparently troubled by doubts. He does not even mention foreign invasion or the need for a Britain united against its enemies without; but he does say he wishes

                                                  to publish
Our daughters' several dowers, that future strife
May be prevented now.

(1.1.43-45).

The decision to initiate the “challenge” that the love test involves would seem to undermine his purpose by encouraging his daughters to think of conflict as a proper means of settling questions of jurisdictional power (if we take what he says about “future strife” seriously). In any case, Lear seems rather boldly to allude to the fearful possibility that his own daughters or their husbands could be brought to attack one another. That same fear may also be intimated by the scrupulous equality of the portions, despite the likelihood Lear “more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall” (1.1.1-2); it may be hinted at again when Lear addresses Cornwall before Albany and the assembled court, despite the fact that Goneril is his eldest child.

When Shakespeare's Lear speaks of an “unburthen'd crawl toward death” (1.1.41), he seems momentarily to recall Leir's spiritual turn to the contemplative from the active life; but by the end of act 1 it has become clear from Shakespeare's portrait of the king as a holiday-licensed lord of misrule that his turn is more spirited than spiritual,² his retirement more a luxury and an impatience (in the modern and corrupted sense of the word “retirement,” implying alienation from our labors) than a traditional reflective submission to a solitude that aids us in engaging life more fully and meaningfully. By contrast, the only “reservation” Leir makes for himself in the source is to “take me to my prayers and beads.” The offense that results in his allowance being halved and then halved again by Gonorill is, ironically enough, nothing more than his occasional counsel to her against extravagance. Even before turning to seek Cordella's forgiveness, Leir bears up patiently under the adversities imposed by his other daughters, including an attempt on his life. On the other hand, Shakespeare's Lear—never a model of patience under siege—rushes to his complete undoing with frightening rapidity in acts 1 and 2 before daughters much more indifferently disrespectful to him than Leir's menacing and violent offspring. Unlike his predecessor, Lear cannot nobly right himself after his initial mistake in moral judgment because his folly in abdication and the banishments is not a simple error but a symptom that both manifests and conceals a more profound disease. The inexorability we come to see in Lear's deteriorating sense of self intimates a more deep-seated problem than any one or all of his accumulated acts speeding him to madness and ruin themselves communicate.

When we analyze in what specific ways Shakespeare's Lear proves himself less readily sympathetic than his model with regard to the specific acts he performs, the curious result is that even as we name and catalogue his acts of apparent bribery, his self-indulgences, his repeated impatience and petulance, and his cursing rages we do not feel satisfied that we have identified the motive for his behavior. A survey of the history of the play's criticism confirms that no attempt to “explain” Lear by any one or more of his vices has even begun to satisfy a majority of readers as an adequate delineation of the man. It would, of course, be unfortunate were that to encourage us to settle for equally unsatisfactory alternatives: ignoring the riddle Lear represents by assuming he is either mad or senile from the outset or holding that the first scene is merely a spectacular dramatic donnée setting the play in motion.³ Rather, it should invite us to explore the intuition that the essence of Lear's character lies below the surface of his whining and cursing vices. What Richard claims of himself is equally true of Lear, though it is Lear's special curse that he does not know it.

'Tis very true, my grief lies all within,
And these external [manners] of laments
Are merely shadows to the unseen grief
That swells with silence in the tortur'd soul.
There lies the substance.

(Richard II 4.1.295-99)

Though Lear's alternately vicious and abject “laments” are real enough and certainly an operative force in furthering the surface drama of the play, in the final analysis they hide more than they reveal about the man. Something more significant about him will emerge when we discern the inner urgencies that seem diametrically opposed to the outer man's behavior in the first scenes. In his willful, even wantonly senseless imperiousness at the love auction we will discover hints of the most pathetic dependency; in the arbitrary power of kingship unleashed upon Kent and Cordelia, the fear of impotence; in his subsequent and irrevocable commitment to an embattled path of action, a paralyzing fear that there may be no help for it—all of this in a man unaware of the paradoxical complexity of his acts.

In the first scene Lear places his nation and, more important (relative to the subject at hand), himself at the mercy of daughters he apparently fears. We wonder why anyone would do that, especially a king, a man with every opportunity to act arbitrarily, to exercise power, and to escape censure or humiliation. We know that as ordinary people we grow subconsciously adept at manipulating others, at subtly bribing them to do our bidding, to affirm our value; and we do so with shameful frequency. But, whenever possible, we do so without risking the humiliation of public exposure should the gambit fail or the appearance of brazenness should it succeed. Viewed in the light of our ordinary, self-protective fears, what Lear does makes no sense at all. In fact, it seems utterly foolhardy. In the glaring light of the public eye and without the serpent's subtlety he tries to purchase declarations of love, declarations that, in the very giving and receiving, reveal suspicious hints that even the parties involved may not take the transaction seriously. We may well be shocked by this display of obsessive egoism, by the prostituted nature of Lear's solicitation; but we are also shocked—though not for moral reasons—by its brazenness. We are not ordinarily either so desperate or so honest that we will risk making such solicitations openly in public and in the unflattering light of day—at least not consciously. This would be madness. But this is, as we shall see more clearly in a moment, precisely the form of madness we sense in Lear and that sets him apart even as he condemns himself by behaving as the rest of us ordinarily do. Consciously, and yet unknowingly, Lear lives out before his court and us what we, in our blindness, would like to believe is something that can only occur in our nightmares: our foolhardy exposure of self, naked in its weakness and need, before a world ready to mock us. There is, then, something openly absurd and incommensurable in what Lear does in the abdication and love test, but there is also something that in its very absurdity suggests that Lear's vices are anything but ordinary. Ordinary vice, however shameless, is seldom brazen; it is, in fact, most often quite subtle, so subtle that it knows enough to mask its deceitfulness as sincerity. But Lear's behavior here, as we shall see, is the complete opposite of such duplicity, not because it is forthright or even brave but because Lear's apparent disingenuousness both disguises and reveals a pathetic ingenuousness. His brazenness suggests no simple, self-serving egocentricity but a buried sense of vulnerability and shame for himself. Though Lear may appear to be overtly manipulative and vain in act 1, scene 1, there is nothing trivial or mean about his soul. Only excruciating misgivings about himself, not efforts to patronize or demean others, drive him to act as he does. The unacknowledged but nonetheless desperate suffering we sense in him forbids the release of laughter that his childish behavior here and throughout the first acts otherwise invites.

In the anguished need for love that Lear suffers privately in the “silence” of his “tortur'd soul” but exposes publicly in “speech” that “purpose[s] not,” he transcends the mean self-protectiveness that has the seeming wisdom of the snail and knows enough to “put's head in” his shell. The distinctiveness of Lear's journey to ruin could not be made clearer than in the juxtaposition of his last speech to his daughters in act 2 before his banishment to the heath and Cornwall's quintessentially “ordinary” reaction to it. The end of act 2 marks a minor structural climax in the play. Lear “will not trouble” these daughters again except in his imagination; the external conditions of his suffering will sink no lower. He began in a full display of regal power by banishing one daughter; now he finds himself stripped of all external tokens of civilized position and respect by daughters he feels have banished him. His last plea to them, the “reason not the need” speech (2.4.264-86), is a pathetic and yet powerfully moving outburst despite the fact that, as we shall see, its wisdom is misconceived. The sympathy the speech's rhetoric inspires has nothing to do, however, with the truth or falsehood of what Lear says. In fact, it is not even bred of what he says but of what he cannot say—his tortured silence. His inability to speak what he will do to avenge his injuries pathetically transforms a once powerful king into an impotent old man stammering his rage.⁴ But even more powerful is the silence following his declaration that he will announce his “true need,” one that presumably lies beyond superficial material needs. However, about this true need, we discover, Lear can say nothing at all. It is conceivable, of course, that he can say nothing because he suddenly realizes he does not really know what his true spiritual need is. But it could also be that he cannot speak the true need he feels because he cannot, without a cloaking mediation, declare the humiliating desperation of his need for love. In either case, his silence speaks the agony of the incapacitation he is suffering.

Against that incapacitation and his childish attempt to punish his daughters and awaken their pity for him by fleeing, we must place Cornwall's abrupt shift of subject to the wisdom of the snail: “Let us withdraw, 'twill be a storm” (2.4.287). It would obviously be a mistake to deny that Lear's entering the storm is as much a self-protective act, however unconsciously so, as Cornwall and his daughters' conscious withdrawal from the storm within Gloucester's castle; but to rest content with this likeness without discriminating the torments Lear voluntarily undergoes in his misguided but noble quest for love from the petty fears and mean self-regard of his daughters and Cornwall would be an even more serious error. Though Lear repeatedly behaves with petty spitefulness and disproportionately offended rage, we do not feel he is a mean or petty man because we are always intuitively aware that he consistently chooses to remain heroically open to undergoing an ever-widening and deepening experience of agonized crisis in his quest for love. Irving Ribner has rightly claimed that by the end of act 2 Lear could expect sympathy for nothing he has done. But, paradoxically, Harley Granville-Barker, who feels quite differently about Lear as he enters the storm, is equally correct in his more favorable assessment: “All his errors … have partaken of nobility; he has scorned policy.” The two seemingly contradictory critical verdicts actually complement one another in enriching our sense of the complexity of the man.⁵

Norman Rabkin's observation that the first scenes of King Lear establish several fundamental likenesses and thus force the spectators to “make sense of the play” by analyzing the “principles underlying … (these) analogies” is a rich, if unexplored intuition.⁶ The symbolic analogies generated by the juxtaposition of character, situation, and plot in the three playlets constituting act 1 confirm that Lear's initial behavior is not beyond comprehension or explanation,⁷ though it will become clear that the explanation both begins and ends well below the surface manifestations of Lear's whims and vices. Given Shakespeare's virtual silence about the political considerations and motivations that dominate his source and his seeming dissociation of the love test from the political arena, the most helpful clue for resolving our bewilderment about Lear may lie buried in the extent of the parallel between the two old fathers who so radically mistake their children. Gloucester's conversations with Kent and, later, with Edmund do, after all, serve to frame Lear's initial appearance on stage. Moreover, the second scene is obviously written to invite comparison between Gloucester and Lear's folly. Edmund's response to Gloucester's first speech to him is Cordelia's “nothing,” and Gloucester's immediate rage at innocent Edgar baldly mimics Lear's sudden cursing of Cordelia.

Gloucester enters in the second scene of act 1 registering his shocked alarm at the king's erratic behavior in the opening scene. If there had been any doubts in the audience's mind about whether Lear had acted mistakenly or not there, Goneril and Regan's frank remarks at its conclusion about his “poor judgment” (1.1.291) dispelled them. Consequently, as soon as Gloucester laments

Kent banish'd thus? and France in choler parted?
And the King gone to-night? Prescrib'd his pow'r,
Confin'd to exhibition? All this done
Upon the gad?

(1.2.23-26)

our first reaction is to suppose that here is a man of some good sense and moral sensitivity. Though he is openly anxious (whereas Lear had initially appeared calm before his court), the favorable first impression Gloucester makes is not unlike the one Lear made on us by virtue of his seemingly egalitarian division of the kingdom and care to avoid the appearance of favoritism in his opening speeches. But there is a false note, however, in Gloucester's surprised lament. He is fearful that the king's most faithful counselor has been exiled, that a foreign king has left Britain angered, that the king has suddenly given over power to live in dependent status; but he has nothing to say about the central moral issue—the sin against Cordelia. That it is undoubtedly but an oversight does not make it any the less revealing. All the issues Gloucester remarks upon in consternation concern the king's imprudent exposure of himself to the vulnerability to attack, as if Lear's exposing himself was what was shocking and disturbing to him. The king and Gloucester, as one of the king's chief supporters, are both now imprudently endangered and exposed. Wisdom bids fear.

However, we have no reason to believe that Gloucester is afraid for Cordelia or even chagrined about the offense against her. But then, only fathers, not children, have ever been at the center of Gloucester's reckonings, at least if we take his earlier remark to Kent about Edgar as truthful: “But I have a son, sir, by order of law, some year elder than this, who yet is no dearer in my account” (1.1.19-21). If Gloucester's claim is for the impartiality of his love for his sons, it is impartiality toward strangers, more indifference than virtue. A bit later he unaccountably fails to recognize his own son Edgar's handwriting; and as for Edmund, he “hath been out nine years, and away he shall again” (1.1.32-33). What is more, for the short while we see Gloucester with Edmund initially, the father thinks nothing of making a series of lewd jests at his son's expense.

When banishing Cordelia, Lear speaks of her as “a stranger to my heart and me / … from this for ever” (1.1.115-16). That statement not only speaks the truth about the past and future of his relationship to his daughter with profound dramatic irony, but it also identifies the essence of Gloucester's relationship to his sons. Only with a stranger could one's distrustful fears be so overwhelming that one would cry villain and ultimately try to execute without trial (as Gloucester would Edgar) instead of “suspend[ing] your indignation … till you can derive from him better testimony of his intent” (1.2.80-82) than a rumored threat upon one's life. Edmund can probe so penetratingly into the wound of Gloucester's subconscious fear that his sons do not love him because the bastard knows so intimately the distant nature of his father's relationship to his sons. When he falsely attributes to Edgar the declaration of an “idle and fond bondage in the oppression of aged tyranny, who sways, not as it hath power, but as it is suffer'd” (1.2.49-51), he is not merely inventing a falsehood. Edgar has not made the statement, but it is true in the sense that it accurately describes the only seemingly “normal” dramatic interaction between Gloucester and Edmund that we have seen. Gloucester's “idle and fond” treatment of Edmund before Kent does, in fact, sway only “as it is suffer'd.”

If that one moment can be taken as a paradigm, it is a profound indictment of Gloucester's fatherhood. When Kent asks, “Is not this your son, my lord?” Gloucester cannot simply and straightforwardly acknowledge Edmund. Instead he calls distracting attention to himself with a jest, a smug admission that he is guilty as charged.

His breeding, sir, hath been at my charge.
I have so often blush'd to acknowledge him, that now
I am braz'd to 't.

(1.1.9-11)

“The quality of nothing hath not such need to hide itself.” His speech confirms that Gloucester's sin is not an isolated, fondly remembered act of lust but a brazenly dissolute attitude of being that dogs his every step and reenacts its shame again in this pretense of shamelessness. Gloucester treats his son shamelessly here, as if Edmund were not there before him absorbing the brutality of his “fondness” for him. Knowing little else but this callous, self-absorbed insensitivity, Edmund has found it easy to harden into shamelessness himself, the shamelessness of his outrage. When Gloucester claims—even if with conscious honesty—that the habit of admitting his paternity has inured him to his shame over the sin of Edmund's conception, we are tempted to quote the Fool to him.

The man that makes his toe
                                                  What he his heart should make,
Shall of a corn cry woe,
                                                  And turn his sleep to wake.

(3.2.31-34)

It is indeed true that Gloucester has become “braz'd” to the necessity of acknowledging Edmund; but far from being the positive development beyond the need for shame he would like to think it is, the very declaration unwittingly reveals him flaunting shameful unconcern for his son.

To have chosen the alternative he has rejected—to have made his heart rather than his toe his instrument of feeling—would have meant acknowledging Edmund as son, not merely “whoreson” and “knave.”⁸ When he admits to Kent that Edmund's “breeding, sir, hath been at my charge,” he does not realize that he is transforming his shame into a pastime. His jesting may cloak his shame for himself from himself and even from Kent well enough, but it also nakedly exposes his most serious crime to us. If Gloucester could hear himself properly he would be mortified to realize that his easy bravado in acknowledging the sinful “charge” of the bastard's idle and fond conception unknowingly flees its weightier “charge”—Gloucester's responsibility as a parent to make of Edmund's “breeding” a fully human affair by laboring to harmonize his natural affection for the boy with all the arts and graces of civilization in order to deliver a well-bred and gentle man, not a maimed and outraged cripple, to his adulthood. Of that responsibility he has been criminally negligent. Gloucester's self-indulgent failure to assume the burden of fatherhood reveals that his life has been ordinary until now, an unburdened crawl toward death, in which the shame originally attached to his own sinfulness has been conveniently transferred to Edmund and, with him, pushed out of sight. Having known the occasional twinges of anxiety we soon bury, wondering when the piper will be paid for our self-absorbed living and our failures to act upon our good intentions, we can appreciate the menace lurking in Gloucester's unknowing prophecy that the “whoreson must be acknowledg'd” (1.1.24). The latent irony in this statement extends even beyond the fact that the name of bastard will necessarily give way in Gloucester's reckoning to the unmasking of a more substantive bastardy in Edmund. The most dreadful sense in which it is fair to say that Gloucester does not know what he is saying is that he should come to acknowledge (though, in fact, he never does so) that Edmund has become a bastard in the moral sense of that word largely because Gloucester has been one in that same sense all along. Like Lear with Goneril and Regan, Gloucester never fully confronts the fact that the Edmund he has helped to create is in a very real sense a projection of his shame for himself: a “disease that's in my flesh,” which, though he should, he never does “call mine” (2.4.222-23).

The similarities between the two fathers so unknowingly estranged from their children that they do not recognize them and, so, banish their better parts “upon the gad” are too extensive to be insignificant. The crucial likeness, however, the one that informs and unites these other parallels into a meaning that begins to clarify Lear's enigmatic behavior remains to be discussed. Stanley Cavell's intuition about Gloucester's initial jest has even greater relevance to Lear's more formal address to the court: “Joking is a familiar specific for brazening out shame, calling attention to the thing you do not want naturally noticed.”⁹ In Lear's first speech to the court announcing both the abdication and the love test there appear to be a series of self-conscious attempts at humor and jest, though in some instances the levity is difficult to prove with any conclusiveness because it is so much a matter of inflection and delivery rather than any inevitable contextual sense of the lines. Perhaps the most difficult and debatable instance is Lear's expression of his hope that “future strife / May be prevented now” (1.1.44-45). If this remark is delivered unleavened by cajolery or a coaxing, somewhat whimsical half-seriousness, it clearly risks direct insult to his daughters and their husbands as a bald expression of the king's distrust. Nothing forbids the possibility of such directness, of course, or even of a righteously severe royal warning; but several related considerations would seem to make a severity of tone less likely. Were Lear to be severe or even merely serious here, his tone would depart jarringly and without warning from the obviously warmhearted and openly affectionate manner immediately preceding and following these words. Lear has just finished a familiar address to Cornwall as his “son” and to Albany as “our no less loving son” (1.1.41-42); and he also seems eager to present the division of the kingdom in a benign context of paternal largesse (“our daughters' several dowers”) in which his only hesitation or mock-hesitation is, as we soon discover, to whom shall be given his “largest bounty” (1.1.52). Moreover, the remarks that follow regarding France and Burgundy's “long … amorous sojourn” (1.1.47) at his court clearly bespeak a tone of high-spirited bemusement in the king. If we take Lear's hope that “future strife / May be prevented now” with complete seriousness, it also becomes difficult to reconcile that admonitory charge against conflict with his hope to resolve the possibility of future tensions with the present strife of his daughters, even if Lear might only be speaking of “challenge” metaphorically. It would seem at least possible as an alternative that both the remark about “future strife” and the present “challenge” are complementary parts of a jest Lear makes in order to brazen out his anxieties. Perhaps Lear is aware that the possibility of future strife cannot truly be “ruled out” of existence by his last royal edict in the present, that if anyone conceives of dominion over the others that person could give birth to strife. But perhaps he may feel pacified by speaking lightly of it, as if by making a symbolic mock conflict “now” in the love challenge he can treat the very real possibility of future conflict as something ridiculously remote and unnecessary since each daughter will have already contested for her fair share.

Fortunately, the two more crucial instances of Lear's jesting—one a remark about his abdication, the other about the love test—are not nearly so questionable in tone. Each definitely, if subtly, reveals Lear as at least marginally aware and embarrassed about the absurd figure he may be cutting; and each reveals a man, like Gloucester, who tries to pretend he is not ashamed in order to put both himself and others off his track. Lear's unacknowledged shame, unlike Gloucester's shame regarding Edmund, is not related to any sense of wrong-doing, however; it is, instead, a shame at his need for love and, beyond that, a shame for himself that makes him feel undeserving of the love he feels compelled to seek. In the absence of any evidence for a true spiritual turn to the contemplative life or any indication of aged debilitation, given his later spirited pranks, Lear's remark about an “unburthen'd crawl toward death” (1.1.41) urges us, with Lear's implicit approval, to skepticism. Lear uses the phrase as a daring bluff, a jest meant to fool everyone by fooling no one. If the statement results in his hearers making light of what he says—taking his jest in jest, refusing to concur in his confession of imminent weakness and incapacity, and protesting the opposite—Lear would not, of course, be displeased. But neither would he be anything but superficially annoyed were the statement greeted merely as a self-indulgent pretense of weakness from a still vigorous and capable old man cajoling special treatment from his subjects—as long as those same subjects tolerated his bidding. What he could not abide is that the others or he suspect that he is telling the truth. His jest is a pretense made to convince others and himself that he has faced and accepted what in fact he feels is too dreadful and shaming for speech: his abject status, the wormlike crawl he is making toward death, and his need for support and expressions of love.¹⁰ Though he never can admit to himself that this is his condition, he imagines himself “the basest beggar in poorest thing superfluous” who nonetheless feels compelled by his needs to seek alms and loving tribute for his nothing. Lear jests about himself, the part of himself he is most ashamed of and most fears, so that he will not have to take its reality seriously.

A similarly unconscious masquerade informs Lear's remark about the love auction a bit later:

(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?

(1.1.49-51)

The last line is a curious circumlocution. It awkwardly, but completely, omits any reference whatever to the demand that he is imposing on his daughters, avoids any direct indication, in fact, that he is now requesting that they outdo one another in speaking the extent of their love for him. Instead, his words glide past all that to construe his role as that of the noble and impartial judge who resolves disputes equitably after they have occurred. What he avoids saying or cannot bring himself to say is some indication of the embarrassment and hidden shame Lear feels at himself. The circumlocution thus helps him ignore what he considers his shameful need for love. Moreover, if we shift the emphasis of the sense and delivery of the final line from the imperial “we” to the word “say,” we uncover what may be an even more intolerable embarrassment in Lear. Certainly Lear would not mean to imply by the words “we say” any openly cynical distrust of his daughters' honesty; but he might suddenly feel compelled to make light of the whole contest at the last minute out of sheer embarrassment at what he is doing now that he is actually doing it. By jesting at himself, lamely insinuating that the whole thing is a joke they may share together, he sanctions speech that purposes not. Only then—when they need not really believe what they say any more than will he necessarily—can Lear find the psychological wherewithal to continue the artifice. Needing their love so desperately he will bribe for it, he cannot bear to face the fact that he is at their mercy begging them; so he sanctions words that are idle and swallows without comment fulsome praise so hyperbolic it contradicts itself in the telling when Goneril declares that she loves him “more than [words] can wield the matter” (1.1.55), with a love that makes “speech unable” (1.1.60), and Regan suggests that Goneril's words only “name my very deed of love” (1.1.71).

Both Gloucester and Lear then are alike in that we first see each of them openly admitting improprieties involving the prostitution of the love relationship (Gloucester's lust for Edmund's mother; Lear's buying his daughters' declarations of love) in order like brazen beggars to enforce charity for themselves (Gloucester from Kent; Lear from his distrusted daughters). To us, their jesting reveals the truth of their shame; but because they prefer to avoid their shame rather than accept it, they merely trifle with the truth. The apparent openness with which they speak about intimate matters is but a “presented nakedness” (2.3.11), a self-deceiving cloak that hides their abiding shame at themselves from themselves.¹¹

The estrangement Lear reveals to us is complete. “He hath ever but slenderly known himself” (1.1.293-94), and, indeed, perhaps as a direct consequence, he has ever but slenderly known his children. By merely doting upon the daughter whose love has innocently fostered whatever well-being he feels, a self-absorbed Lear has for so long neglected his daughters' emotional needs and his paternal responsibility to lead them out of themselves that now Goneril and Regan's distrust of him has matured into a familial likeness of his estranged fear of them. If he, in advance of anticipated difficulties, demands from them a contractual assent to their obligation to deliver services for which he will pay in advance, then Goneril, too, can make special arrangements to “take away the harms I fear” (1.4.329). If, in effect, Lear makes fools of his daughters by asking them to compete over their portions of the kingdom when the division has already been made, he should not be so shocked and outraged to find that Goneril has been speaking with him to purpose not about her request to reduce his train when she has already dismissed “fifty of my followers at a clap” (1.4.294). And when, following Lear's threat to “resume the shape which thou dost think / I have cast off for ever” (1.4.309-10), we hear a smugly vindicated Goneril tell Albany, “What he hath utter'd I have writ my sister” (1.4.331), we also recognize her as her father's daughter, hoping that by acting in advance of anticipated difficulties “future strife / May be prevented now” (1.1.44-45). Finally, in the absence of pressing political demands arguing the need for abdication, Lear's resignation of kingship implies an alienation from his public identity as well. His speech and actions in act 1, scene 1, suggest that he has not lived his reign as a sacred bond of devoted service to his people but as a superficial burden of “cares and business” that have kept him occupied and distracted while his hidden self has stood aloof from the performance of his duties, no matter how conscientiously he may have performed them.

The most explicit intimations of Lear's buried sense of himself and his superfluous condition reveal themselves indirectly in his own words to Regan and then to Goneril and Regan in the scene just previous to his exit into the storm. In a theatrical gesture before Regan, as he kneels in mock penitence to an absent Goneril, Lear makes a very real if unspoken plea not to be humiliated by Regan in the way he feels he has been humiliated by Goneril. Although protected by the cover of his mocking pretense and the ulterior motive in this “unsightly trick,” Lear nonetheless confesses to us as to his daughter Regan his secret sense of his true condition.

“I confess that I am old; [Kneeling.]
Age is unnecessary. On my knees I beg
That you'll vouchsafe me raiment, bed, and food.”

(2.4.154-56)

The same despairing sense of his own helpless contingency is symbolically suggested again later when Lear, the beggar-king, speaking of “basest beggars” as if there could be no human creatures further from his royal station, dismisses their needs with contempt.

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.

(2.4.264-67)

Despite the a fortiori appeal Lear makes here for better treatment than basest beggars receive or deserve, his argument is not as self-evidently compelling as he would like to think it is. Lear counts on impressing his daughters with a clear sense of the distinction between his majesty and the abject lowliness of beggars, but the sense of his own words indicates he is dimly aware that there is no intrinsic or logically necessary difference between king and beggar. Lear's peremptory claim for special treatment subtly exposes his suppressed awareness of identity with the most contemptible beings. Moreover, when we realize what Lear does not—the “basest” beggars are not the ragged, maimed, and helpless creatures whose very appearance makes us ashamed of our not helping them, but those idle men who, like Lear before Goneril and Regan, though capable of giving succor instead demand it from those less capable of giving it—we also realize it is not poverty or even nature but not listening to shame itself that makes life “cheap as beast's.”

If there were any question that Shakespeare wishes us to ponder the oxymoron of king as basest beggar, it is resolved by the symbolic import of Lear's disgust with the lackey, Oswald. When Oswald irreverently remarks to Lear that he is “my lady's father” (1.4.79), Lear flies into a rage, striking him and calling him “slave” and “cur” (1.4.81). Then, later, when he realizes that Oswald's earlier arrival may have soured his welcome at Regan's and then Gloucester's, he claims that his disgust with “this detested groom” (2.4.217) is exceeded only by his hatred for Goneril. He cannot stand to look at the self-important valet:

This is a slave whose easy-borrowed pride
Dwells in the [fickle] grace of her he follows.
Out, varlet, from my sight!

(2.4.185-87)

One can understand why Oswald inspires disgust. He is as despicable as Kent's litany of abuse indicates: he is a “brazen-fac'd varlet,” a “superserviceable, finical rogue,” a “bawd in way of good service” (2.2.18-20). But such abuse is only fair to the “codpiece” half of his story. Like the rest of us, Oswald has his “grace” too. His devotion to Goneril mitigates the hatefulness of his very real vices, just as the same virtue mitigates the same vices in his self-righteous accuser, Kent.

It is true that Oswald behaves shamefully in his first meeting with Lear. Yet Shakespeare symbolically hints at the residual “grace” Oswald will later manifest when he refuses to betray Goneril's trust to Regan. In the first section of act 1, scene 4 (111-94), Shakespeare has designed a curious parody of the initial love test. It is curious especially because, against the grain of our expectations, he has cast Kent in Goneril and Regan's role as flatterer and Oswald in Cordelia's role as truthteller. Shakespeare's calling up Cordelia's likeness in Oswald's reply to Lear seems a puzzling generosity to Oswald, even if we acknowledge that his and Cordelia's motives in truthtelling differ radically. But let us return to that later. For the moment, let us examine the relevant segment of dialogue depicting a still-soliciting Lear and Kent as a flatterer.

Lear:
Dost thou know me, fellow?
Kent:
No, sir, but you have that in your countenance which I would fain call master.
Lear:
What's that?
Kent:
Authority.

(1.4.26-30)

Here, as earlier, Lear openly seeks a public recognition of his worth; and when he receives in reply a speech that flatters his sense of himself, even if it clearly seems to strain credulity, he rewards it with an indifferent and therefore nearly insulting approval not very different from the silence with which he had paid Goneril and Regan. “Follow me, thou shalt serve me. If I like thee no worse after dinner, I will not part from thee yet. Dinner, ho, dinner!” (1.4.40-42). But when Oswald replies without flattery to the same sort of question—“Who am I, sir?” (1.4.78)—a question whose tone commands reverence or at least the appearance of it, he is cursed and banished like Cordelia. By identifying the king with insulting carelessness as “my lady's father” (1.4.79) Oswald confirms for Lear what the rogue's first refusal to acknowledge Lear's call had indicated: a valet feels he can insult a king with impunity, can speak of the king as if he were nothing. In his fury Lear is no more capable of responding consciously to the reverberations Oswald's statement carry any more than he was able in his rage to bring to consciousness the hidden depths of Cordelia's “nothing.”

But having called up the image of Cordelia in Oswald's reply to Lear, Shakespeare surprises us yet again. Once Oswald has unknowingly delivered his oracle, the symbolic parallel to Cordelia breaks down. Shakespeare is not, however, finished with correspondences. After Oswald has been cursed and attacked for truth telling, he does not react in the way Cordelia had but, surprisingly enough, in exactly the way Lear reacts to his daughters whenever they slight his dignity—with self-righteous but impotent protest: “I'll not be strucken, my lord” (1.4.85). Oswald's pleas of protest, like Lear's before Goneril and Regan, only serve to produce more severe humiliations and then flight. It is little wonder, therefore, that Lear cannot bear the sight of Oswald: to look at Oswald would force him to see himself in the “slave whose easy-borrowed pride lives in the fickle grace of her he follows.” As Lear moves from daughter to daughter, his shame wears its easily borrowed pride only so long as the daughters he depends upon are willing in their fickle turns to grant it.

Were Lear truly to recognize his identity with Oswald as the basest sort of beggar, the ultimate effect would mean, as one might suspect, a fall into the depths of despair; but that very process could also lead to healing. To suggest how, we must reconsider Shakespeare's seemingly arbitrary, if glancing, reminiscence of Cordelia in Oswald's part in the parody of the love test. When Oswald calls Lear “my lady's father,” Lear takes his remark merely as an unforgiveable insult. It is certainly true that Oswald's speech is meant to insult Lear and that the valet does not love the king. But if Lear could “stand for” Oswald lovingly enough to come to understand him more fully, he would realize that Oswald is, nonetheless, genuinely devoted to Goneril. The basest beggar is capable of love. Consequently, his calling Lear “my lady's father” could never be merely an insult. In a symbolic sense at least, it is a gesture of praise or tribute: the old king is not a vile nobody, but the father of Oswald's beloved queen. The only virtuous transcendence of shame begins with its acceptance. It is a curious paradox that as long as we attempt to flee shame in order to maintain the pretense of our own purity and virtue we can never overcome our self-absorption. But if, in despair, we admit our shame we may also begin to transcend it because we will have given up the lonely exile of the fugitive's flight from his crime and, consequently, will be permitted to enter a community in which reciprocity and love are possible.

If we try to write a synopsis of the first two acts of King Lear in order to integrate the scattered observations we have been making about various scenes in this chapter and the last, we could say that acts 1 and 2 are a series of mirroring encounters between Lear and other characters punctuated only by scenes in the subplot involving Gloucester with Edmund and Edgar in soliloquy.¹² Even these scenes from the subplot do not, however, finally divert us from our ever-deepening and more certain sense of Lear in hiding. They, too, like the mirroring encounters, ultimately serve by means of symbolic correspondences to intimate depths beyond the surface of Lear's acts. The juxtaposition of Gloucester and Lear jesting to brazen out their shame and enforce charity prefaces Lear's oracular encounters with Cordelia and Oswald. Then the Fool lovingly confronts Lear with a sweet and bitter image of himself before Lear flees that door to freedom only to rage, like a caged bird, at his own image in the person of Goneril while Albany's repeated offers of mediation go unheard. Edgar's “disguise” soliloquy also emblematically defines the nature of Lear's self-disguise in exile. And, finally, when Lear unknowingly beholds the mirroring humiliation of Kent stocked, we see in small what awaits him before his daughters in the final scene of act 2.

Such a synopsis suggests the bifurcated effect of the play to this point. The difference between the overtly dramatic and the more obscure symbolic effects of the encounters and juxtapositions in these two acts is so marked that it seems as if we are speaking of two different plays simultaneously. Were it not for the more important and serious drama we sense silently developing below the surface, the literal drama would legitimately prove Lear a character unable to sustain sympathy and concern. For in it Lear plays an arrogant, self-important, willfully impatient and resentful part in a ludicrous series of follies and comeuppances until, by the end of act 2, what Cornwall says of Kent's humiliation can appropriately describe Lear as well: “His own disorders / Deserv'd much less advancement” (2.4.199-200).¹³ Lear strikes us as more than the sum of his disorders, however, because we sense that he is also the protagonist in the tragic dumb show we have just summarized.¹⁴ The “external [manners] of laments” nearly alienating us from Lear never fully mask from us the strangling shame that “swells with silence in [his] tortur'd soul.” Not the security and distance that laughter provides, but only compassion and dread can comprehend the drama of silence enacted on the symbolic plane of Lear's otherwise ludicrous encounters with others (even those we have yet to discuss: one involving Edgar in act 3, the other, Gloucester in act 4). Our compassion for Lear as a figure of tragic stature grows despite the foolish willfulness with which he may behave at any particular moment. At one point, for example, because he is outraged that half his train has been dismissed, Lear threatens to reascend the throne. The threat may seem more foolish than terrible, but in the final analysis that does not undermine a certain tragic grandeur in the man. We know there is little likelihood that Lear will attempt to make good on his threat to “take't again perforce” (1.5.40) from Goneril, but not because Lear is afraid of the attempt or because he does not, realistically speaking, have the power to do so. Lear shows no fear in facing the storm or attacking Cordelia's hangman. Moreover, if he really desired to, Lear could very likely rally enough support in his kingdom to mount a realistic challenge, especially given the way Goneril has repaid his apparent generosity. We sense, rather, that actual violence upon his daughters is unlikely because we know that no matter how imperiously and manipulatively Lear may act, his is not a rage for domination but a rage for acceptance. And because we are at least intuitively aware that beneath Lear's brittle facade of dignity confirmed or denied lies a nearly unthinkable and certainly unspeakable void, we must take these pleas for acceptance with a seriousness they do not seem to warrant, since in repeatedly making them he can tolerate no slight to his superficial but desperately maintained sense of self-esteem.

If recognizing these hidden needs and avoidances arouses pity in us, the way Lear responds to the frustration of his need for acceptance awakens fear at his titanic agony. Like Oedipus, that other great stranger to himself and his people, once Lear's tenuously maintained self-respect has been jeopardized, he, too, commits himself with extraordinary determination to a quest to discover the reality and meaning of his condition, no matter how degrading and convulsive that condition may be for him or what suffering it may demand. Though every action Lear performs reveals him foolishly demanding that his daughters and then the heavens honor and express love for him on his terms, his folly does not efface the terrible strength with which he greets the repeated refusals of daughters and gods to satisfy him. With an ever-broadening and deepening comprehension of his insecure position in the world, he chooses to keep before himself, without mitigation or trivial distraction, what he understands to be the misery he suffers—the deprivation of love. He shuns nothing that threatens to deepen this sense and experience of his or man's condition. He would, in fact, rather “abjure all roofs” than stop attempting to make sense of his experience or passively accept and live on someone else's trivialized terms.

Perhaps the clearest indication of the unrelenting nature of this quest can be seen if we contrast Lear's attitude toward and experience of suffering with Gloucester's after his blinding.¹⁵ In most ways, Gloucester acts as Lear's double, even to the extent that, like the king, he radically mistakes the source and meaning of his misery, though suffering greatly. But when we compare their fates, Gloucester shows himself the king's foil—playing a suicidal Jocasta to Lear's Oedipus. If we consider the reversals that repeatedly humiliate the blind earl's desires, first to redeem his “abused” life by asserting a commanding dignity in death and then, when his suicide attempt misfires, his hope for his own murder or madness as a delivery from the insulting consciousness of his own fallibilities and degradation, we come to realize that Edgar is not the only member of his family who “must play fool to sorrow / Ang'ring itself and others” (4.1.38-39).¹⁶

Amplifying too much in the consistently contradictory and therefore essentially ironic sequence of “philosophical” remarks he suddenly begins making to a disguised Edgar now leading him, blind Gloucester also “tops [the] extremity” of the sorrow he has already suffered. Based on the things Gloucester says and does after his mutilation by Cornwall, it would certainly be difficult to defend a claim for any significant growth in his understanding of himself and his condition. Indeed, in his last major speech in which he expresses his envy of the distracted king and, thus, a curious self-pity (given the grotesque condition of the king he and we have just witnessed), Gloucester seems anything but wise.

The King is mad; how stiff is my vild sense
That I stand up, and have ingenious feeling
Of my huge sorrows! Better I were distract,
So should my thoughts be sever'd from my griefs,
And woes by wrong imaginations lose
The knowledge of themselves.

(4.6.279-84)

Gloucester's unconscious method here—deflecting attention from the king's greater grief to evoke sympathy for his own lesser one—is not significantly different from that in his previous encounter with a distracted Lear before his blinding. There, we recall, a Gloucester similarly absorbed in his own grief had begged Caius for sympathy while the king raved:

Thou sayest the King grows mad, I'll tell thee, friend,
I am almost mad myself. I had a son,
Now outlaw'd from my blood; he sought my life,
But lately, very late. I lov'd him, friend,
No father his son dearer; true to tell thee,
The grief hath craz'd my wits.

(3.4.165-70)

Clearly we should not minimize the heroism in Gloucester's decision to risk himself to aid the king in act 3, nor his very real and unselfish expression of sympathy for the king in their encounter in act 4, especially since by then Gloucester has found torture his only reward for his troubled efforts to help Lear. Nor should we underestimate or patronize the mental torments urging Gloucester to make the kind of remarks quoted. But these considerations do not finally prevent Gloucester's calling attention to himself before Caius and Lear in act 3 from striking us in context as somewhat melodramatic and less than generous. Nor does his earlier generosity diminish the foolish and self-pitying delusion of this speech in act 4. Gloucester is surely no worse off now than the raving king is. In fact, the dramatic irony in his words reveals he is more like the distracted king than a man too sane for his own good. Even after his blinding, Gloucester's “thoughts” remain “severed from [his] griefs,” his woes proving a distraction in which they “lose / The knowledge of themselves” by “wrong imaginations.” As in Lear's case, his “grief lies all within”; and his philosophical curses and prayers to the gods—“these external [manners] of laments”—are merely “shadows to the unseen grief” in himself he still has not fathomed. Even blind, he is so ashamed of his shameful acts that he flees from an acknowledgment of their shamefulness. Because he cannot, like Cordelia, “become” his sorrow, he only compounds it. In the face of his humiliation—the shame at having mistaken his sons and the vulnerability his mutilation keeps before him constantly—Gloucester imagines he can yet see his dignified way clear to victory. To shield himself from his own misery, he holds to a fanciful and delusive hope (as against true and generous hope), speciously imagining he can triumph over the vulnerability he suffers and the catastrophic mistake he has so clearly made. These are the “wrong imaginations” that forbid knowledge of himself and his true grief. Whether wrongly fancying he possesses the unhindered imperial power to execute himself with a dignity and impunity his life has not provided him (and thus tyrannize over heaven's tyrannical will), or wrongly calling for murder or madness to hasten his abdication from the community of man and the hidden reality of his shame, Gloucester persists in trying to “enforce [the] charity” of oblivion for himself rather than accepting charity for himself and giving it to others.

This last contrast between giving and enforcing charity is the burden of the irony in Gloucester's foolish lament about his remaining sane. Regretting the sensitive capacity of “ingenious feeling” clearly undermines any positive metaphorical sense in which we may have been tempted to take Gloucester's earlier remarks about how the “lust-dieted man … will not see / Because he does not feel” (4.1.67-69) and how he himself now “see[s] … feelingly” the way the world goes (4.6.149). For here, presumably at the end of his spiritual journey, Gloucester openly condemns any value in feeling. Distraught by his agony and filled with self-contempt, the blind earl's “other senses” do indeed “grow imperfect / By [his] eyes' anguish” (4.6.5-6). No more precious to him now that he is blind, he condemns them as “vild,” ironically concurring in this assessment with Cornwall's horrifying contempt for his eyes as “vild jelly” (3.7.83). The most profound irony in Gloucester's words, however, is the truth that he unknowingly speaks: “The King is mad. How stiff is my vild sense, / That I stand up and have ingenious feeling / Of my huge sorrow!” (4.6.279-81) Gloucester “stiff(ly),” that is, stubbornly sins against generous love for the king in his own self-regarding grief. Love is not love that “stands up” for itself to stand aloof from the entire point. He could yield and bow to active care for Lear and himself, not envy the king his madness in contempt for his own suffering, just as he could have sought reparation and atonement rather than suicide after the blinding.

In Gloucester unacknowledged shame itself speaks for the instant remedy of death, not to secure atonement with the community but as a secure abdication from it. Initially it might appear that his remarks to the old man guiding him, his gift of his purse to Poor Tom, and his speech about distribution undoing excess imply a significant new generosity of spirit in the earl; but that first impression will not bear scrutiny. Gloucester may feel that banishing the old man from his sight is a generous gesture made for the servant's own good (“Thy comforts can do me no good at all; / Thee they may hurt” [4.1.16-17]; “Do as I bid thee, or rather do thy pleasure; / Above the rest, be gone” [4.1.47-48], but the tone of his dismissal, imperious and subtly insulting, hints just the opposite—that the banishment is really for Gloucester's wrongly imagined benefit, not his servant's. In the first place, despairing insistences condemn his servant to impotence by forbidding him the moral dignity of his choice in the matter. Banishing his servant to stand apart allows Gloucester, even in despair, to nurse the pretense of his own power. Alone but for a madman, he can subtly anesthetize his painful shame before others—his sense that he is utterly at their mercy, weak, vulnerable, and, despite his protestations to the contrary (4.1.77-78), desperately in need of someone to lead him who can discern his state better than he himself does.

When Gloucester blindly claims, “I have no way, and therefore want no eyes; / I stumbled when I saw”, (4.1.18-19), we realize that even his despair is a defense against his experience of fallibility and weakness. He does “want eyes” because, as Shakespeare's symbolic staging of his suicide attempt confirms, “our mere defects” are no “commodity” in that sense. Blindness will not protect us from blindness.¹⁷ Edgar's ruse proves Gloucester can “stumble” when he is blind as well. As for his speech about “distribution”—

Here, take this purse, thou whom the heav'ns' plagues
Have humbled to all strokes. That I am wretched
Makes thee the happier; heavens, deal so still!
Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man,
That slaves your ordinance, that will not see
Because he does not feel, feel your pow'r quickly;
So distribution should undo excess,
And each man have enough.

(4.1.64-71)

—the obvious irony bred of the fact that Edgar is the man whom Gloucester's first two declarations wrongly describe should awaken suspicion about the remainder. What Gloucester does not realize in beseeching the gods to punish on is that he is only calling further punishment on himself and those close to him. The difference between the “lust-dieted” man and the loving one is the difference between willful self-gratification and real generosity. His attempted suicide is no generosity to himself or to others but a willful “excess,” a superfluous misery conceived to gratify his self-contempt. When Gloucester is dead, or even when all the “lust-dieted” men suffer as he has suffered, each man will not have enough. That kind of distribution is not pastoral's sharing of the good and goods in common joy; it is torture that tops the extremity of woe.

The way in which Gloucester greets his failed suicide attempt—

Is wretchedness depriv'd that benefit,
To end itself by death? 'Twas yet some comfort,
When misery could beguile the tyrant's rage,
And frustrate his proud will.

(4.6.61-64)

—gives the lie to his pretense of patience and renunciation in the suicide prayer made moments earlier.

                                                  O you mighty gods!
This world I do renounce, and in your sights
Shake patiently my great affliction off.
If I could bear it longer, and not fall
To quarrel with your great opposeless wills,
My snuff and loathed part of nature should
Burn itself out.

(4.6.34-40)

It is no accident that the latter quotation should so remind us of Lear's abdication speech, his decision to “shake all cares … from our age,” renounce the world, and crawl toward death. Each, pretending dignity, holds himself in contempt. Except for his genuine belief that his is but the “snuff and loathed part of nature,” all other claims Gloucester makes here are merely a bewildered pretense.¹⁸ Contrary to his claim, and though suffering mercilessly, there is no question of whether or not he can “bear it longer,” but only whether his stiff, unwavering refusal to live since his blinding can imply anything but that he has not been able to bear it at all. Even later, in a seemingly more resigned mood, Gloucester reveals he has never fully internalized his suffering and, in loving pity, learned to tolerate it.

                                                  Henceforth I'll bear
Affliction till it do cry out itself
“Enough, enough,” and die.

(4.6.75-77)

This is not patience, but an unyieldingly painful confrontation with his own misery in which he will wrestle his way to victory even as he dies, just as previously in his suicide attempt he continued to “quarrel” with gods he did not truly believe “opposeless” at all since he felt that he could “beguile the tyrant's rage / And frustrate his proud will.”

The true penitent's renunciation would involve sacrificing something he has wrongly loved; Gloucester only wishes to crush his “snuff and loathed” life to spite his blind eyes. The failure of the attempt does not give him a discerning pause. It is true that he comes to realize he was living in illusion when, first blinded and immediately thereafter, he found life “all dark and comfortless” (3.7.85). Now, he recognizes “'twas yet some comfort, / When misery could beguile the tyrant's rage, / And frustrate his proud will.” (4.6.62-64) Not being the worst stands in some rank of praise to be longed for. The unknowing irony in his words, however, shows that Gloucester is taking paltry comfort from the presumption he will have none. Gloucester intends to speak of the “tyrant's rage” and “proud will” of the gods, but his is the more demonstrably tyrannical and unyielding will at work in the play. His miseries once held “some comfort”; but even after the failure of his suicide has again “frustrated” his “proud will,” the resulting misery seduces him into the lonely and vain comfort of this new form of despair. His failure has at least temporarily beguiled his tyrannical rage, but it has not “fooled” him enough to put him at his or pastoral's ease in bearing's fellowship. Without generosity toward himself or another, and thinking himself the “worst and most dejected thing of fortune,” he cannot yet, like Cordelia and the Fool, take ease's comfort, “Stand still in esperance,” and, like them, “return to laughter.”

Lear may ultimately suffer no more wisely than Gloucester does, but he does so much more grandly and terribly as we shall see. If, in the final analysis, Lear's growing miseries, like Gloucester's, are endured in an unconsciously defensive and self-defeating attempt to avoid even greater misery, Lear's avoidance is a far more subtle matter than Gloucester's suicidal flight to oblivion. If Lear flees himself he does so bravely attempting to confront himself. If he persists in abdicating from the community of man, he does so even as he involves himself experientially and conceptually in man's suffering in more profound terms than he had previous to the division of the kingdom. As we watch Lear's miseries deepen and broaden, physically, emotionally, and intellectually, right up to the end, what builds in us is a terrible pity for him as a man who in seeking what he assumes to be the highest good does only evil, who in relentlessly seeking the truth always falls short of it. Watching Lear undo himself and die in agony over Cordelia makes us aware that even the greatest suffering need not purify or make us wise. Because the avoidances he lives are so subtly tempting to us all, the Tantalus vision his fate embodies gives us an inkling of the frightful meaning of Kent's riddle: “Nothing almost sees miracles but misery.”

Notes

1. Cf. Van Laan, “Acting as Action in King Lear,” in Some Facets of “King Lear,” p. 59.

2. As Soji Iwasaki, “Time and Truth in King Lear,” in English Criticism in Japan, p. 67, states: “To have the nominal authority of a king and a hundred knights for hunting and banqueting, however, is in fact to be a holiday king, or a Lord of Misrule.”

3. Both William Frost, “Shakespeare's Rituals and the Opening of King Lear,” reprinted from The Hudson Review in Shakespeare: The Tragedies, pp. 190-200 and Elliott, “The Initial Contrast in King Lear,” pp. 235-50, argue that the first scene is a spectacular dramatic introduction about which we need not raise questions regarding the central characters' motives.

   The problem with the ingenious analysis of the first scene made by John R. Dove and Peter Gamble, “Our Darker Purpose: The Division Scene in Lear,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 70 (1969): 306-18, is that if, as they maintain, Lear's coronet for Cordelia is to be a surprise bequest in exchange for her marrying neither of her suitors, then they cannot logically argue that her replies to Lear are clipped because she realizes that to express her love would be to sacrifice herself to Lear. If his plan is a surprise, she cannot know that.

4. Cf. Goldberg, Essay on “King Lear,” p. 112: “His speech about ‘need’ significantly breaks off when it brings him face to face with the utter impotence of his will to make the external world yield satisfaction.”

5. Ribner, Patterns in Shakespearean Tragedy, p. 118, and Granville-Barker Prefaces to Shakespeare. Vol II. (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1946), p. 30. See also Sigurd Burckhardt, Shakespearean Meanings (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 247.

6. Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (N.Y.: Free Press, 1967), pp. 32-33; Cf. Champion, Shakespeare's Tragic Perspective, pp. 156-57.

7. Cf. Van Laan, “Acting as Action in King Lear,” p. 64.

8. Cf. “Avoidance of Love,” p. 276. Cavell's entire discussion of the Gloucester-Edmund relationship is a profound one.

9. Ibid., p. 277.

10. It is difficult to agree with Cavell (ibid., pp. 288-90) that what Lear really wants is “false love” or that he has a “terror of being loved.” If those are his desires and fears, he does not require a love test to gain the former and avoid the latter.

11. If Shakespeare were seriously interested in suggesting that unacknowledged incestuous desires were the cause of Lear's behavior in act 1, scene 1, he would not have found it necessary to develop a subplot. The extensive number of parallels we have just seen between Gloucester and Lear would appear to argue that Shakespeare's vision of things is embodied in the behavior of both old men. For claims that an incest theme exists, see Arpad Pauncz, “Psychopathology of Shakespeare's King Lear,” AI 9(1952): 57-58; John Donnelly, “Incest, Ingratitude, and Insanity: Aspects of the Psychopathology of King Lear,” Psychoanalytic Review 40(1953): 149-53; F. L. Lucas, Literature and Psychology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1957), pp. 62-71; Mark Kanzer, “Imagery in King Lear,” AI 22(1965): 3-13; Jorgensen, Lear's Self-Discovery, pp. 128-29; S. C. V. Stetner and Oscar B. Goodman, “Lear's Darker Purpose,” L&P 18 (1968): 82-90; William Chaplin, “Form and Psychology in King Lear,” L&P 19(1969): 31-45; Simon O. Lesser, “Act One, Scene One, of Lear,” CE 32 (1970-71): 155-71; Leslie Fiedler, The Stranger in Shakespeare (N.Y.: Stein & Day, 1972), pp. 209-15; Cavell, “Avoidance of Love,” p. 296. Both Stephen Reid, “In Defense of Goneril and Regan,” AI 27 (1970): 238 and Alan Dundes, “To Love My Father All: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Folktale Source of King Lear,” SFQ, 40 (1976): 361, even argue that Cordelia is the one with the hidden incestuous desires!

12. Speaking of the tragedies in general, Mack, “Jacobean Shakespeare,” p. 43, insightfully identifies the structural practice in King Lear: “During the hero's journey, or at any rate during his over-all progress in the second phase, he will normally pass through a variety of mirroring situations … (though it will be by us and not him that the likeness in the mirror is seen).” Cf. Reibetanz, “Theatrical Emblems in King Lear,” p. 39 and Fly, “Beyond Extremity,” p. 109.

13. Margaret Webster, Shakespearean Tragedy (London: J. M. Dent, 1957), pp. 216-17; Jones, Scenic Form in Shakespeare, p. 181; McFarland, Tragic Meanings in Shakespeare, p. 128—all seem to agree with Schucking, “Character and Action: King Lear,” p. 61, when he claims that until act 3 Lear shows a lack of judgment and immoderation like that in act 1, scene 1. “Nevertheless, the poet evidently does not wish him to forfeit thereby the sympathy of the spectator, though it is put to a very severe test.” Cf. Edward A. Block, “King Lear: A Study in Balanced and Shifting Sympathies,” SQ 10 (1959): 499-512.

14. Cf. Stockholder, “Multiple Genres of King Lear,” 46-47.

15. Both Jorgensen, Lear's Self-Discovery, pp. 92-93, and Norman Council, When Honour's at the Stake: Ideas of Honour in Shakespeare's Plays (N.Y.: Barnes and Noble, 1973), p. 153, argue that Gloucester functions as a foil to Lear because of his defeatism.

16. Bridget G. Lyons, “The Subplot as Simplification in King Lear,” in Some Facets of “King Lear”, p. 31, uses act 2, scene 4, 146-50 as an effective emblematic motto for Gloucester's suicide; but I cannot agree with either her or John Danby, “King Lear and Christian Patience,” in Poets on Fortune's Hill (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1966), p. 126, that Gloucester finally gains patience and fulfillment.

17. Cf. Rosenberg, Masks of “King Lear”, p. 242.

18. Cf. Enright, Shakespeare and the Students, p. 54.