SOURCE: Kirsch, Arthur. “The Emotional Landscape of King Lear.” Shakespeare Quarterly 39, no. 2 (summer 1988): 154-70.

[In the following essay, Kirsch focuses on religious, specifically Christian, elements in the characters of King Lear. Kirsch concentrates on the figures of Lear and Cordelia, and examines their relation to motifs of love, suffering, and death.]

The tragedy of King Lear raises large religious, as well as political and social, questions, and there is a disposition in recent scholarship to treat the play as if it were an argument that gives unorthodox, if not revolutionary, answers to them. Prominent critics have contended that Lear is locked in combat with Elizabethan conceptions of Providence and order,¹ and one influential Marxist critic has maintained that the play constitutes both a specific criticism of Elizabethan ideology and a denial of what he calls “essentialist humanism,” the belief that, with respect to tragedy, assumes “a human essence which by its own nature as well as its relation to the universal order of things, must inevitably suffer.”²

The current popularity of such views makes it urgent, I think, to reassert the less fashionable position that though Shakespeare is “the soul of [his] age,” as Ben Jonson wrote, he is also “not of an age, but for all time,” and that, as Dr. Johnson argued, his plays have “pleased many, and pleased long,” because they are “just representations of general nature,” “faithful mirror[s] of manners and of life.” Shakespeare's tragedies are, above all else, plays of passions and suffering that we eventually recognize as our own, whatever their social, political, or religious contingencies may have been in the Renaissance. However we may interpret the particular ideological questions King Lear seems to pose, it is the universal human anguish that gives rise to them upon which Shakespeare primarily focuses and to which audiences have responded for nearly four hundred years.

The experience of feeling—physical as well as emotional feeling—is at the core of King Lear, as the enlargement of our own capacity to feel is at the core of any persuasive explanation of why we can take pleasure in such a tragedy. The word “heart” resonates in the play, describing the extremes of the play's characterizations, from the “honest-hearted” Kent (I.iv.19) to the “marble-hearted” ingratitude and “hard-hearts” of Goneril and Regan (I.iv.237; III.vi.36).³ “Heart” is the metonym for Lear himself in the storm—“poor old heart, he holp the heavens to rain” (III.vii.60)—and it is the primary register of Lear's experience. He rejects Cordelia because she cannot heave her “heart” into her “mouth” (I.i.92), and he pronounces her banishment as the divorce of her heart from his own: “So be my grave my peace as here I give / Her father's heart from her” (I.i.125-26), an uncanny line that predicates his eventual reunion with her in death. The heart is physically palpable to Lear. He says he is “struck … upon the very heart” by Goneril's “tongue” (II.ii.333-34), and the same tactile sense of the heart emerges in the synapse between physical and emotional pain that prompts the first movement of fellow-feeling in him:

                    My wits begin to turn.
(To Fool) Come on, my boy. How dost, my boy? Art cold?
I am cold myself. …
Poor fool and knave, I have one part in my heart
That's sorry yet for thee.

(III.ii.67-69, 72-73)

As Lear moves toward madness, he recognizes that his rage against Cordelia drew from his “heart all love” and “wrenched” his “frame of nature / From the fixed place” (I.iv.247-48); he then repeatedly identifies his incipient madness with his heart: “O, how this mother swells up toward my heart! / Histerica passio down, thou climbing sorrow” (II.ii.231-32); “O me, my heart! My rising heart! But down” (II.ii.292); “But this heart shall break into a hundred thousand flaws / Or ere I'll weep” (II.ii.458-59).

The breaking of the heart “into a hundred thousand flaws” defines the point towards which most references to the heart in King Lear eventually move, and suggests the extremity of pain and suffering that is the play's peculiar concern. In his most famous soliloquy Hamlet speaks of the “heartache” of human existence. In King Lear we hear of and then see hearts “cracked” (II.i.89) and “split” (V.iii.168). Edgar tells us that his father, Gloucester, died when his “flawed heart … / 'Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief, / Burst smilingly” (V.iii.188, 190-91), and at the moment of Lear's death, Kent says, “Break, heart, I prithee break” (V.iii.288), a line that corroborates the truth of what we have just witnessed, whether it refers to Lear's heart or to Kent's own.

The dramatization of the metaphor of a breaking heart and its association with the extremity of dying are central to King Lear, for though, again like Hamlet, King Lear is essentially concerned with the anguish of living in the face of death, it does not look beyond the grave. It focuses instead, and relentlessly, upon the shattering of the heart and upon actual human deterioration—the physical “eyes' anguish” (IV.v.6) of Gloucester's maiming, the emotional “eye of anguish” (IV.iii.15) of Lear's madness. Nor does the Fifth Act of the play bring relief, as it does in Hamlet. There is no recovery from sorrow and grief at the end of Lear, and there is no suggestion of the “special providence” that Hamlet, in his luminous reference to Matthew, sees in the fall of a sparrow. The agonized question that Lear asks over Cordelia's lifeless body, “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” (V.iii.282-83) is not answered in the play, certainly not by his own few succeeding words; and among those words the ones that are most unequivocal and that we most remember are: “Thou'lt come no more. / Never, never, never, never, never!” (V.iii.283-84). These lines express the immediate, “essential,” feeling of all of us in the presence of the death and dying of those we love, but they have an acute and governing power in King Lear.⁴ They occur at the very end, they occur after protracted suffering, they violate the hopes that appear to be raised by the reunion of Lear and Cordelia, and they occur over the dead body of a character who has seemed to symbolize the heart's undying resources of love in the play. There is no scene in Shakespeare that represents the wrench of death more absolutely or more painfully; and the scene is not merely the conclusion of the action of the play, it is its recapitulation, the moment in which the whole of it is crystallized.

In this regard, as in others, King Lear is very reminiscent of Ecclesiastes. The depiction of suffering in King Lear has often been compared to the Book of Job,⁵ which, of course, focuses upon the suffering of an individual; and the protraction of Job's suffering as well as his protests against it do indeed suggest the magnitude of Lear's heroic characterization. But there is no Satan at the beginning of King Lear, nor a whirlwind from which God speaks at the end to make the play's extraordinary sense of heartfelt pain even intellectually explicable. In its overall conception as well as in much of its ironic texture, King Lear is closer to Ecclesiastes, the book of the Old Testament that is most nearly pagan in its outlook and that treats human life almost exclusively in terms of the immanence of its ending.

The Preacher in Ecclesiastes speaks over and over again of the heart, occasionally of the “heart of the wise” or “of fooles” (7:6),⁶ but most often of his own: “And I haue giuen mine heart to search & finde out wisdome” (1:13); “I thought in mine heart” (1:16); “And I gaue mine heart” (1:17); “I said in mine heart” (2:1); “I soght in mine heart” (2:3). The Preacher's experience of the heart suggests many of the major motifs as well as the specific language of King Lear. His announced theme is “vanity,” a word whose principal connotation (and whose translation in the New English Bible) is “emptiness,” and he speaks of man's identity in this life as “a shadow” (7:2) and his achievements as “nothing” (5:14; 7:16). He likens men to beasts:

For the condition of the children of men, and the condition of beastes are even as one condition vnto them. As the one dyeth, so dyeth the other: for they haue all one breath, and there is no excellencie of man aboue the beast: for all is vanitie.

(3:19)

He describes man's nakedness: “As he came forthe of his mothers belly, he shal returne naked to go as he came, & shal beare away nothing of his labour, which he hathe caused to passe by his hand” (5:14). He talks repeatedly of the paradoxes of wisdom and folly and madness:

And I gaue mine heart to knowe wisdome & knowledge, madnes & foolishnes: I knewe also that this is a vexacion of the spirit.

For in the multitude of wisdome is muche grief: & he that encreaseth knowledge, encreaseth sorowe.

(1:17-18)

He relates such paradoxes to kingship: “Better is a poore and wise childe, then an olde and foolish King, which wil no more be admonished” (4:13), and he relates them as well to eyesight: “For the wise mans eyes are in his head, but the foole walketh in darkenes: yet I knowe also that the same condition falleth to them all” (2:14). He also associates “The sight of the eye” with “lustes” (6:9), and he speaks of how men are killed like fishes in a net and birds in a snare (9:12). And he is preoccupied with the paradoxes of justice and injustice:

I have sene all things in the daies of my vanitie: there is a iuste man that perisheth in his iustice, and there is a wicked man that continueth long in his malice.

(7:17)

There is a vanitie, which is done vpon the earth, that there be righteous men to whome it cometh according to the worke of the wicked: and there be wicked men to whome it cometh according to the worke of the iuste: I thoght also that this is vanitie.

(8:14)

The premise as well as the conclusion of all these experiences is that

All things come alike to all: and the same condition is to the iuste and to the wicked, to the good and to the pure, & to the polluted, & to him that sacrificeth, & to him that sacrificeth not: as is the good, so is the sinner, he that sweareth, as he that feareth an othe.

(9:2)

The “olde and foolish King” is perhaps the most inescapable of the resemblances between these verses and King Lear, but many others are equally suggestive: the painful paradoxes of folly and wisdom that are the subject of the Fool's speeches and songs; the realization of the metaphors of sight in Gloucester's building; the nakedness of birth and death and of man's whole condition that is lamented by Lear and acted out by both Lear and Edgar; the random wantonness of death of which Gloucester complains; the comparisons of men and beasts that suffuse the language of the play and that are especially prominent in Lear's speeches, including his last; the vision of the confluence of the just and the wicked that consumes Lear on the heath and that leads him to conclude, not unlike the Preacher, that “None does offend, none, I say none” (IV.v.164).

Ecclesiastes, of course, is not the only source from which Shakespeare could have inherited such preoccupations. Most of them are prominent in Montaigne's “Apologie of Raymond Sebond,” a work that clearly lies behind the play,⁷ and they are present as well in other parts of the Bible itself, especially its depictions of the end of the world.⁸ The vision of the Apocalypse in Mark 13, for example, virtually describes the central action of King Lear:

For nacion shal rise against nacion, and kingdome against kingdome, and there shalbe earthquakes … the brother shal deliuer the brother to death, and the father the sonne, and the children shal rise against their parents, and shal cause them to dye.

(13:8, 12)

But if the Apocalypse suggests that general social and political outline of Lear, the large number of evocations of Ecclesiastes (and many more could be cited) give that outline its emotional definition. The Preacher's lament that “he that encreaseth knowledge, encreaseth sorowe” is a line that the Fool could sing: it evokes the cadence as well as the substance of his characterization and its relationship with Lear's. The Preacher's repeated references to the anguish of his own heart suggest the pain of protest as well as of resignation, a combination of feelings that King Lear eventually also elicits—in us, if not also, at the last, in Lear himself. And perhaps most important, if most obvious, vanitas, the theme that echoes endlessly in Ecclesiastes and that King Lear catches up in its preoccupation with the word “nothing,” leads not just to the idea of emptiness, but to its paradoxically full feeling, the feeling to which Edgar refers at the end when he says that we should “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say” (V.iii.300). This feeling has a far greater amplitude and richness in the play than in Ecclesiastes, but its roots are the same.

Subsuming all of these motifs is the focus upon death as the universal event in human existence that not only ends life but calls its whole meaning into question. The Preacher in Ecclesiastes at one point asks, “Who is as the wise man? and who knoweth the interpretacion of a thing?” (8:1), and the burden of the question is that given the transience and mutability of human life, who can know? As in King Lear, which also poses this question insistently, there is no satisfying answer, and certainly no consoling one. But again like Lear, Ecclesiastes does offer a characteristic perception of human existence in the face of death, if not an interpretation of it. For the Preacher's anguished sense of the dissolution of all things in time almost necessarily impels him to think of those things in terms of polarities—the polarities of beginnings and endings especially, but also of their cognates in creativeness and destructiveness—and to think of life itself as a composition of extremes that have individual moral definition, but that are not necessarily morally intelligible as a whole. He suggests this understanding in the passage already quoted in which he says that “All things come alike to all,” to the just and the wicked, the good and the pure, and that “as is the good, so is the sinner,” and he does so strikingly in the passage for which Ecclesiastes is now best known and which is regularly cited in liturgies for the dead, the passage that speaks of a time to be born and a time to die, a time to slay and a time to heal, to weep and to laugh, to seek and to lose, to keep and to cast away, to be silent and to speak, to love and to hate (3:1-8).

This polarized landscape suggests the most profound of the affinities between Ecclesiastes and King Lear, for the kingdom of Lear too is defined by the antinomy of “coming hither” and “going hence” (V.ii.10) and by corresponding oppositions of human states of feeling and being. The association of such oppositions with the experience of death is adumbrated earlier in Shakespeare's career in Richard II, a play that is also concerned with an abdication that is a prefiguration of death:

What must the King do now? Must he submit?
The King shall do it. Must he be deposed?
The King shall be contented. Must he lose
The name of King? A God's name, let it go.
I'll give my jewels for a set of beads,
My gorgeous palace for a hermitage,
My gay apparel for an almsman's gown,
My figured goblets for a dish of wood,
My sceptre for a palmer's walking staff,
My subjects for a pair of carvèd saints,
And my large kingdom for a little grave,
A little, little grave, an obscure grave. …

(Richard II, III.iii.142-53)⁹

Richard's itemization of these oppositions is melodramatic, but the contrasts nonetheless do characterize his sensibility, because once his mind is focused on death there is no middle ground in which he can live. In King Lear these meditative antitheses are not only acted out by Lear himself but also inform every part of the play's action. For like Ecclesiastes, King Lear is composed of oppositions, oppositions between weeping and laughing, seeking and losing, being silent and speaking, loving and hating. The characters embody such contrasts: Cordelia is schematically opposed to Goneril and Regan, Edgar to Edmund, Kent to Oswald, Albany to Cornwall.

Some of these oppositions are combined in single characterizations, especially those of the Fool and Cordelia, but also those of Gloucester and Lear. The Fool's embodiment of the paradoxes of wisdom and folly that run through Ecclesiastes is of course obvious. He incarnates these paradoxes in his traditional role, in his dress, and in his speech; and he does so with the bias toward the broken heart that is characteristic both of Ecclesiastes and of the play. Enid Welsford remarks that “the Fool sees that when the match between the good and the evil is played by the intellect alone it must end in stalemate, but when the heart joins in the game then the decision is immediate and final. ‘I will tarry, the Fool will stay—And let the wise man fly.’” She adds that this “is the unambiguous wisdom of the madman who sees the truth,” and that it “is decisive” because it reflects the way that normal human beings see the world feelingly.¹⁰ I think that though this is perhaps true, the Fool's “whirling ambiguities” carry a burden that is further reminiscent of Ecclesiastes and less comforting. The Fool tells Lear that when Lear made his daughters his mothers,

Then they for sudden joy did weep,
                    And I for sorrow sung,
That such a king should play bo-peep
                    And go the fools among.

(I.iv.156-59)

Besides providing the keynote of his own characterization, this particular condensation of emotions is also eventually associated with the moment of death itself in the play. The paradoxical fusion of the extremities of joy and sorrow was often noted in Renaissance commentaries on the passions,¹¹ but its identification with death is peculiar to Lear. The correspondence between the two is suggested in the old ballad that the Fool seems to be adapting:

Some men for sodayne ioye do wepe,
          And some in sorrow syng:
When that they lie in daunger depe,
          To put away mournyng.(12)

It is that shadow of mourning in the Fool, the association of the Fool with Death that is always incipient in his traditional role as the teller of the truths of human vanity and mortality, that makes particularly appropriate Lear's conflation of him with Cordelia at the end of the play, when he says, “And my poor fool is hanged” (V.iii.281).

The combination of opposites is especially profound in Cordelia's characterization, but the play's most manifest combinations of the extremes that are traced in Ecclesiastes occur in the actions as well as characterizations of Lear and Gloucester, the two aged and dying protagonists who participate in the being of all of their children, the loving and the hateful, the legitimate and the illegitimate. Indeed a large part of the action of the play consists of Lear's and Gloucester's oscillation between extremes that are never ameliorated, that tear at them, and that ultimately break their hearts.

Gloucester's initial arrogance in his talk of Edmund's bastardy yields very quickly to the demoralizing thought that his legitimate son seeks his death; and the “good sport” (I.i.22) of the scene of Edmund's conception is eventually contrasted with the malignant horror of the scene in which Gloucester is blinded. Edgar, who makes the latter contrast explicit, also tries to treat it homiletically: “The dark and vicious place where thee he got / Cost him his eyes” (V.iii.163-64); but the symmetry of Edgar's formulation does not dispel our own sense of the gross disparity between the two scenes. And the same is true of Gloucester's states of mind on the heath, after his blinding. Edgar's sententious efforts to preserve his father from despair finally only intensify our sense of the alternations between despair and patience that punctuate Gloucester's feelings, alternations that continue to the point of his death, and that actually constitute it. Near the end Gloucester, in his anguish, says to Edgar that “A man may rot even here” (V.ii.8). Edgar's famous response, “Men must endure / Their going hence even as their coming hither. / Ripeness is all” (V.ii.9-11), might well be a verse in Ecclesiastes. (The exhausted tone of Ecclesiastes is generally apposite to the Gloucester plot.) “Ripeness” is a metaphor not for the fullness of life, but for the need to be resigned to the arbitrariness of its ending. As the context itself suggests, Edgar is evoking a traditional image of ripe fruit dropping from a tree and then rotting.¹³ “Ripeness is all” is Gloucester's epitaph.

Similar stark contrasts of feeling, on a far more massive scale, inform Lear's movement toward death, and in his case there is not even the patina of moral commentary. The Fool's comments, which are the analogues of Edgar's, are almost always morally equivocal, and they are entirely absorbed with the paradoxical oppositions that compose Lear's condition. In the second childhood of age, Lear is at the same time “every inch a king” (IV.v.107); and though he sometimes enacts these roles simultaneously, he cannot mediate between them: they remain in opposition until the play's end. His sense of humility grows, but it alternates with his wrath, never replaces it. He rages in his last appearance in the play, as he did in his first. His increasing apprehension, early in the play, of the wrong he did Cordelia is balanced by his excoriations of his other daughters and by the fury of his madness, just as later in the play the joy of his recovery of Cordelia is balanced by the desolation of his loss of her. In a wonderful speech, he imagines kneeling and humbling himself as a child before Cordelia:

                                        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. …

(V.iii.8-13)

But the childlike humility of this speech is a function of its childlike presumption, for Lear also tells Cordelia that they will “take upon” themselves “the mystery of things / As if we were God's spies” (V.i.16-17).¹⁴ And the yoking of such disparities continues until his death, and in the very moment of it. His very last words express the hope—or delusion—that Cordelia is alive. They join with, they do not transform, the knowledge that she will never return.

It is tempting to see in Lear's movement towards death an image of the homiletic journeys of the protagonists of the earlier morality plays, particularly because those plays seem similarly composed of radically contrasting states of feeling and being—virtue and vice, despair and hope, good and evil, angels and devils. But the resemblances only highlight the profound difference. In the moralities, the summons of death is not ultimately an end but a beginning that retrospectively gives meaning to the large contrasts of human existence. In King Lear, as in Ecclesiastes, the summons is to an absolute ending whose retrospect of existence is not morally comprehensible. Edgar tries to make it so for his father's death, and there is perhaps a moral, if barbaric, decorum in Gloucester's destruction by his bastard son. But the Gloucester plot is not the primary plot of King Lear. That plot is Lear's, and even Edgar cannot moralize Lear's story. He says of the spectacle of Lear's meeting with Gloucester on the heath, “I would not take this from report; it is, / And my heart breaks at it” (IV.v.137-38). The verb is in Edgar's comment suggests that Lear's suffering presents us with the world of unmediated existential extremes we find in Ecclesiastes, where “as is the good, so is the sinner.” The growth in Lear's understanding itself suggests this world. Lear does change on the heath. His own suffering allows him to feel, almost literally to touch, the pain of poor Tom and of the Fool and of poor naked wretches everywhere. This compassion is important and deeply moving. The sympathetic experience of pain establishes a human community in a play that otherwise seems to represent its apocalyptic dissolution, and it informs our sense of Lear's heroic stature. But his compassion should also not be misconstrued in a Romantic fashion, for the knowledge of human frailty that his suffering brings him increases his sorrow to the point of madness. Critics sometimes talk of the “privilege” of Lear's madness, but if we examine our own experience of mentally infirm human beings, we will, like Edgar, know better. It is a horror, and an anticipation of “the promised end … Or image of that horror” (V.iii.238-39) that we witness in Cordelia's death.¹⁵

Cordelia's death is, typically, preceded by her reunion with Lear after he awakens from his madness, a scene that has often been treated as if it were the climax of the action and that has frequently been compared with the reunion of Pericles and Marina. The two scenes have many elements in common: both show old and exhausted fathers, discomposed by suffering, reunited with daughters from whom they have long been separated and who seem to bring them back to life. In both, the recognitions are luminous; and both have verse of extraordinary lyric intensity. But the two scenes are also profoundly different in their immediate and eventual effects as well as in their generic contexts. Pericles's recovery of Marina is at once a recovery of his identity and an acknowledgement of its definition in the stream of time. For though, “wild in [his] beholding” (V.i.221),¹⁶ he draws Marina to himself and embraces her, he also immediately dreams of his eventual reunion with his wife and anticipates giving Marina away in marriage. In addition, he hears the music of the spheres, a music that helps give Marina's nurture of him the cosmic sense of the intelligibility, if not miracle, of rebirth: “O, come hither,” he tells her, “Thou that beget'st him that did thee beget” (V.i.194-95). The scene invokes the combination of joy and pain that is habitual in King Lear, but with a diametrically different accent. As Pericles recognizes Marina, he says:

O Helicanus, strike me, honour'd sir!
Give me a gash, put me to present pain,
Lest this great sea of joys rushing upon me
O'erbear the shores of my mortality,
And drown me with their sweetness.

(V.i.190-94)

Pericles's mixture of joy and pain is a guarantee of renewed life rather than an expression of its ending; and he later discriminates the pattern of the fortunate fall in all his suffering, suffering that is the prelude to joy and that heightens it: “You gods, your present kindness / Makes my past miseries sports” (V.iii.40-41).

The pattern, as well as the texture, of Lear's experience is the reverse. Lear tells Kent at the outset of the play that he had “thought to set [his] rest / On [Cordelia's] kind nursery” (I.i.123-24), and it is the peculiar nursing, rather than rebirth, of Lear that we witness in the scene in which he is reunited with Cordelia. For Cordelia ministers not only to an aged father but also to a man transformed by age into a child again. The metaphor of age as second childhood pervades the sources of King Lear, and as G. Wilson Knight suggested long ago,¹⁷ Shakespeare himself tends to give it a harsh, if not grotesque, inflection in the play. The Fool speaks of the king putting down his breeches and making his daughters his mothers (I.iv.153-55), a metaphor that is painfully acted out as Lear kneels to Cordelia and says,

                                                            Pray do not mock.
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.52-56)

That Lear should have to kneel and confess the infirmity of age to his evil daughters is “terrible,” but that he should do so to Cordelia as well “has also something of the terrible in it. …”¹⁸ The Fool repeatedly rebukes Lear for giving away his power and turning his family relationships upside down, and Lear's behavior in the opening scene would seem to justify those rebukes. But there is a sad irony in the Fool's speeches, for as Montaigne suggested,¹⁹ and as the play itself eventually shows, human beings of “fourscore and upward” usually cannot do otherwise. There is often no choice for us but to become the parents of our parents in their old age and to treat them as children, and it is painful because whether our motives verge toward Cordelia's or toward Goneril and Regan's (and they may do both) the nursing of parents is not nurture for future life but the preparation for death. It is directly so for Lear. The music he hears in his reunion with Cordelia suggests no larger life into which he can be incorporated, and his recovery of her is the immediate prelude to his excruciating loss of her as well as to his own death. In the manner of the whole play, it is a joy that heightens sorrow, that makes it heartbreaking.

As is well known, Dr. Johnson found Cordelia's death both bewildering and unendurable, and like many later critics, he wished to deny it. He protested that “Shakespeare has suffered the virtue of Cordelia to perish in a just cause, contrary to the natural ideas of justice, to the hope of the reader, and, what is yet more strange, to the faith of chronicles.” He added, “I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia's death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor.”²⁰ As Johnson's commentary suggests, there is an inner logic to adaptations of King Lear, like Nahum Tate's, that left Cordelia and Lear alive and united at the end of the play. All of Shakespeare's own sources—the old play of King Leir, Holinshed, Spenser, and others—end (in the short term, at least) by giving life and victory to Cordelia and Lear.²¹ Only Shakespeare does not, and his insistence on Cordelia's death and Lear's final agony, as Northrop Frye remarks, is “too much a part of the play even to be explained as inexplicable.”²² Lear's and Cordelia's union in death is at the heart of Shakespeare's rendition of the Lear story. It is prepared for by every scene in which they appear together, including their earlier reunion, and is the event that not only concludes the tragedy, but wholly informs it. We cannot deny it, however much we wish to and however much the play itself makes us wish to.

A modern understanding of the psychology of dying can help illuminate this phenomenon.²³ Freud's discussion of King Lear is especially pertinent. He argues that the choice among the three daughters with which King Lear begins is the choice of death. Cordelia, in her muteness, he says, is the representation of death and, as in the depiction of such choices in the myths and fairy tales that King Lear resembles, her portrayal as the most beautiful and desirable of the three women expresses the inherent, often unconscious, human wish to deny death. “Lear is not only an old man: he is a dying man,” and this reality subsumes both “the extraordinary premise of the division of the inheritance” in the opening scene and the overpowering effect of the final scene:

Lear carries Cordelia's dead body on to the stage. Cordelia is Death. If we reverse the situation it becomes intelligible and familiar to us. She is the Death-goddess who, like the Valkyrie in German mythology, carries away the dead hero from the battlefield. Eternal wisdom, clothed in primaeval myth, bids the old man renounce love, choose death and make friends with the necessity of dying.²⁴

Freud's identification of Cordelia with Lear's death suggests the kind of allegorization that often exasperates literary critics, but in this instance, at least, it seems just. Shakespeare's characterization of Cordelia is very luminous, but it is also very sharply focused. She is from first to last a function of Lear's character, a part of him to which we know he must return. She is clearly the person who counts most to him, and in the extremely crowded action of the play it is his relation to her that we most attend to and that most organizes our responses. Their relationship is the emotional as well as structural spine of the play. Cordelia is the absolute focus of Lear's attention, and ours, in the opening scene; it is Lear's rejection of her that initiates the tragic action; and during that ensuing, often diffuse, action neither he nor we can ever forget her. The Fool, who is Cordelia's surrogate, does not allow us to, both because he keeps her constantly in Lear's mind and because the combination of love and sorrow that he brings to Lear prepares us for a similar combination in Cordelia's final role. The collocation of her reunion with Lear and his loss of her is of a piece with all the words of the Fool that weep for joy and sing for sorrow, and it constitutes the same paradox of heartbreak and death.

Lear himself momentarily associates Cordelia and death in the opening scene of the play, when he says, “So be my grave my peace as here I give / Her father's heart from her,” and the association is apparent in the scene's literal action as well. Freud contends that Cordelia's silence directly connotes death, as muteness often does in dreams.²⁵ But Cordelia also speaks in the scene, and what she says indicates clearly enough that Lear's rejection of her is precisely his denial of the impending death that he ostensibly acknowledges in the very act of dividing his kingdom and in his explicit announcement that he wishes “To shake all cares and business from our age,” and “Unburdened crawl toward death” (I.i.39, 41). Cordelia tells her father that she loves him “According to [her] bond, no more nor less.” She goes on to say, in a speech that is akin to Desdemona's defiance of Brabantio:

                                                            Good my lord,
You have begot me, bred me, loved me.
I return those duties back as are right fit—
Obey you, love you, and most honour you.
Why have my sisters husbands if they say
They love you all? Haply when I shall wed
That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry
Half my love with him, half my care and duty.
Sure, I shall never marry like my sisters.

(I.i.93, 95-103)

Cordelia exhibits not a little of Lear's own stubbornness in this speech, but though that trait may explain the manner of her speech, it does not account for what, as Kent remarks, she “justly think'st, and hast most rightly said” (I.i.182). What she declares quite clearly in these lines is not only that she must have the freedom to love a husband, but also that it is in the nature of things for parents to be succeeded by children and for her to have a future that Lear cannot absorb or control. Her peculiar gravity in this scene, the austerity of her insistence on the word bond as well as her reiteration of the word nothing, reflects more than her temperament. It also suggests, even this early in the play, the particular sense of the nature of things that is evoked in Ecclesiastes—the sense of human vanity that comes with the awareness of the ultimate bond with death. At any rate, it is to the natural realities given expression in Cordelia's speech that Lear responds. His rage against her, like his cosmological rage throughout the play, is his refusal to “go gentle into that good night,” his unavailing, as well as heroic, attempt to deny death and hold on to life.

Shakespeare's portrayal of this rage and denial is intelligible in Renaissance as well as modern terms. Montaigne's discussion of death and dying in “Of Judging of Others Death,” for example, is remarkably apposite to Lear. In an argument that has analogies with Freud's, Montaigne remarks that a dying man “will hardly beleeve he is come to [the] point” of death and that “no wher doth hopes deceit ammuse us more. …” “The reason,” he says,

is, that we make too much account of our selves. It seemeth, that the generality of things doth in some sort suffer for our annullation, and takes compassion of our state. Forsomuch as our sight being altered, represents unto it selfe things alike; and we imagine, that things faile it, as it doth to them: As they who travell by Sea, to whom mountaines, fields, townes, heaven and earth, seeme to goe the same motion, and keepe the same course, they doe. … We deeme our death to be some great matter, and which passeth not so easily, nor without a solemne consultation of the Starres; Tot circa unum caput tumultuantes Deos. So many Gods keeping a stirre about one mans life. … No one of us thinkes it sufficient, to be but one.²⁶

Shakespeare's depiction of Lear is clearly informed by such ideas. His portrait is more sympathetic than Montaigne's, but similarly ironic. Rage and cosmological pretension characterize Lear throughout the play. These feelings reach their apogee during the time when his denial of what Cordelia stands for is literalized by her absence from the play. Her return in Act IV heralds his significant recognition that he is “but one”—“They told me I was everything; 'tis a lie, I am not ague-proof” (IV.v.104-5)—and permits him to recover from his madness when he is physically reunited with her. But his inescapable attachment to her, his bond with her, always remains a prefiguration of his death. It is often difficult in our experience of King Lear to understand that Lear's denial of death is represented as much in his love for Cordelia as in his rage against her. It is even more difficult, but crucial, to understand that Cordelia's own love is itself a function of this denial, that the expression of her love at the end of the play is as much a signification of Lear's death as is the muteness of that love at the start. Granville-Barker hints at such a meaning as well as at Cordelia's general symbolic properties in his comments on her characterization. He observes that she does not change in the play, and that her cry of “No cause, no cause” to Lear at their reunion is essentially of a piece with her earlier declaration of “Nothing, my lord.” He remarks that though “it is no effort to her to love her father better than herself, … this supremest virtue, as we count it, is no gain to him,” and he asks, “Is there, then, an impotence in such goodness, lovely as we find it? And is this why Shakespeare lets her slip out of the play … to her death, as if, for all her beauty of spirit, she were not of so much account?”²⁷ The questions Granville-Barker asks and the paradox he discriminates are central to Cordelia's characterization and are at the center of most of the play's other paradoxes as well. They are best explained, I think, in terms (which Granville-Barker himself does not use) of the phenomenon of the denial of death, what Montaigne calls “hopes deceit.”²⁸

In all the myths of the choice among three sisters that Freud finds analogous to Lear, the woman representing the power of death is transformed into a woman representing the power of love. Contradictions and contraries of this kind are characteristic of the process of condensation in dreams, but Freud relates such contradictions in King Lear primarily to the human disposition to make use of the imagination “to satisfy wishes that reality does not satisfy” and to deny what cannot be tolerated. The profound human wish to deny “the immutable law of death” is represented both in the identification of the most beautiful sister with death and in the presence of choice itself:

Choice stands in the place of necessity, of destiny. In this way man overcomes death, which he has recognized intellectually. No greater triumph of wish-fulfilment is conceivable. A choice is made where in reality there is obedience to a compulsion, and what is chosen is not a figure of terror, but the fairest and most desirable of women.²⁹

In the old chronicle play of King Leir, the king has an explicit political motive that is associated with his testing of his daughters' love as well as with the division of the kingdom, and the two wicked daughters are forewarned of it while the good one is not. All three daughters, moreover, are unmarried, and the issue of their marriages is related to the love test and to politics. Shakespeare almost entirely shears away such surface motives and rationalizations for Lear's action in order to make its underlying motive of denial more stark and more compelling.³⁰ The whole of the scene echoes with negations and contradictions. Its sense of high order and ceremony is prefaced by Gloucester's casual talk of ungoverned instinct. The ceremony itself is a decoronation, deeply reminiscent of Richard II's undecking of “the pompous body of a king” as well as of Richard's ambivalence: “Ay, no; no, ay; for I must nothing be” (Richard II, IV.i.240, 191). The pun is not only on “Ay” for “I,” but also “no” for “know.” Richard knows no “I” and sees that he is to be no “I.”³¹ He thus seems to indicate and accept, more clearly than Lear ever does, that the loss of his crown also constitutes the loss of his life, that “nothing” is death. This meaning of the word becomes unmistakably plain in his final speech in prison when he says,

Thus play I in one person many people,
.....                                                            But whate'er I be,
Nor I, nor any man that but man is,
With nothing shall be pleased till he be eased
With being nothing.

(V.v.31, 38-41)

Lear himself does not acknowledge the ambivalence that Richard exhibits in resigning the throne, but he unquestionably acts it out. He invests Cornwall and Albany with his “power, / Pre-eminence, and all the large effects / That troop with majesty,” but he wishes at the same time to “retain / The name and all th'addition to a king” (I.i.130-32, 135-36). Richard II also cleaves, unavailingly, to the “king's name,” and in his case the implications of that wish are explicitly related to the Renaissance concept of the mystical union between the king's two bodies, between the body natural that is subject to time and death, and the body politic that is divine and immortal.³² Richard's repeated invocations of his name (“Arm, arm, my name!” [III.ii.82]) signify the imminent severing of this union and his growing consciousness of death. Even though the universe of King Lear is not Christian, Lear's wish to “retain / The name and all th'addition to a king” would probably have been understood in the same context of ideas and have suggested the same implicit focus upon mortality. But in any case, his wish, even on its face, contradicts his ostensible desire to resign the “sway,” “revenue,” and “execution” of the king's power (I.i.136-37), and that contradiction governs his manner, his speech, and his actions throughout the opening scene.

The contradictions that govern Cordelia in the scene are less obvious, but more profound and more moving. What is compelling about her from the outset is that she continuously represents both sides of the process of denial: the heart's sorrow as well as its joy. She represents the vanity of denial but also its animating power, the love of life as well as the inescapability of death, the mother that nurtures us, as Freud suggests, as well as the Mother Earth that finally receives us.³³ She tells Lear the truth of his dying in the opening scene: “Nothing, my lord.” She stands in mute rebuke to the folly of his attempt to deny it. And she eventually becomes that truth when she lies lifeless in his arms. But at the same time the very telling of that truth is replete with love—“What shall Cordelia speak? Love and be silent” (I.i.62)—which is what makes Lear's rejection of her seem unnatural on the literal as well as the symbolic level. As the play progresses she comes more and more to represent everything that binds Lear most nobly to life and that makes his protest against death at once heart-breaking and heroic. Freud speaks of the resistance to death as essentially a reflex of the ego's wish to be immortal. But he undervalues human love, for another reason that we do not wish to die and see those close to us die, even the very old, is that we are capable of cherishing and loving others. Cordelia is an incarnation of this capacity.

Shakespeare endows Cordelia's representation of such love in King Lear with religious, and specifically Christian, overtones, and perhaps the greatest pain of her death, and of her tragic embodiment of the futility of the denial of death, is that the promise of these overtones also proves empty. Cordelia's counterpart in the chronicle play of King Leir is, like the whole of that play, explicitly homiletic and Christian. When she is rejected by her father, she turns to “him which doth protect the iust, / In him will poore Cordella put her trust,” and later, as she acknowledges her sisters' “blame,” she prays for God's forgiveness both of them and of her father:

Yet God forgiue both him, and you and me,
Euen as I doe in perfit charity.
I will to Church, and pray vnto my Sauiour,
That ere I dye, I may obtayne his fauour.

(ll. 331-32, 1090-93)³⁴

Cordella's trust in God is fully vindicated at the end of the play when she and Leir are triumphantly reunited and he is restored to love and dignity.

Shakespeare intensifies, at the same time that he transmutes, the old play's association of Cordella with Christianity. There are unmistakable New Testament echoes in King Lear, and most of them cluster around Cordelia. They start in the opening scene, when France uses the language of miracle and faith to question Lear's judgment of Cordelia (I.i.220-22) and when he takes her as his wife:

Fairest Cordelia, that art most rich, being poor;
Most choice, forsaken; and most loved, despised:
Thee and thy virtues here I seize upon.

(I.i.250-52)

The allusion to 2 Corinthians 6:10 is clear—“as poore, and yet [making] manie riche: as hauing nothing, and yet possessing all things”—and it resonates with the deepest preoccupations of the whole scene. The allusions and associations intensify at the end of the play. When Cordelia returns from France she says, “O dear father, / It is thy business that I go about” (IV.iii.23-24; cf. Luke 2:49); and shortly afterwards, the Gentleman who is sent to rescue Lear says,

                                                  Thou hast a daughter,
Who redeems nature from the general curse
Which twain have brought her to.

(IV.v.201-3)

At the very end Cordelia's death is associated with the Last Judgment (V.iii.238-39), and Lear himself wishes for her revival in language that seems to echo the most profound of Christian beliefs:

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.240-42)

But Cordelia does not live, and Lear, whether he dies thinking she does or not, is not redeemed by her. For in the pagan world of King Lear the New Testament's conception of death, and life, is the denial; the reality is that of Ecclesiastes, the pilgrimage of the heart in the Old Testament that insists above all else that death cannot be denied. Shakespeare, in all the plots of King Lear, at once summons up and denies the most profound energies of the comic and romantic impulses of the chronicle play of Leir, as well as of his other sources.³⁵ We expect and wish, for example, for Gloucester to recognize his good son Edgar, but he does so only at the very moment of his death and off-stage, and we wish, as Kent does, that Lear will recognize him as his faithful servant Caius, and he never does. The most painful of these denials of our romantic expectations, however, is the treatment of Cordelia. By associating her role with the Christian hope of redemption (an association that is strengthened by the play's simultaneous evocation and frustration of the generic expectations of the morality play as well as of romance³⁶), Shakespeare deliberately violates, as Dr. Johnson perceived, not only “the faith of the chronicles” but also the profoundest “hope of the reader.” We ourselves are thus compelled not just to view the process of denial, but to undergo it and endure it. There is no deeper generic transformation of a source in the canon, and it is the wellspring of the sense of grotesqueness as well as of desolation that is so peculiar to this tragedy.³⁷

Such an understanding of the Christian evocations in the pagan world of King Lear can help clarify the religious issues that continue to vex criticism of the play, but it should not be interpreted to suggest that King Lear is thus either an argument against Providence or a homily on the inadequacy of pagan virtue.³⁸ Nor does it suggest that the play's conception of death is unique among Shakespeare's tragedies. The tragic sense that death informs as well as ends human life, and that after it, in Hamlet's last words, “The rest is silence” (V.ii.310), is as germane to Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth, which have manifest Christian settings, as it is to King Lear. Christian belief does give a providential perspective to death in those plays, most strongly in Hamlet, where the intimations of another world of being become a part of the hero's consciousness; but such a perspective, even in the case of Hamlet, cannot absorb or fully explain the hero's actual suffering. Nor can it finally mitigate the effect of that suffering on us. We can spend much time gauging the level of irony in the endings of the tragedies, but when we see or read these great plays we do not construe the endings, we feel them, and what we feel is a paramount sense of suffering and loss. The distinction of King Lear is that the death of Cordelia compounds that feeling and focuses it. All of us are pagan in our immediate response to dying and death. The final scene of King Lear is a representation—among the most moving in all drama—of the universality of this experience and of its immeasurable pain.

Notes

1. See, e.g., William Elton, King Lear and the Gods (San Marino: Huntington Library Press, 1968), and Stephen Greenblatt, “Shakespeare and the Exorcists,” After Strange Texts, eds. Gregory F. Jay and David L. Miller (Birmingham: Univ. of Alabama Press, 1985), pp. 101-23.

2. Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 157. His discussion of Lear is on pages 189-203. See also Walter Cohen, Drama of a Nation (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985).

3. All references to King Lear are to the Folio text in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, eds. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).

4. Significantly, Dollimore's attack on the humanist assumption that in tragedy men must suffer never really comes to terms with the suffering that is produced by death, the one event in human life, besides birth, that is ineluctable and universal.

5. See especially John Holloway, The Story of the Night (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1961), pp. 85-91. For a suggestive survey of biblical echoes in the play, which includes but does not give particular emphasis to Ecclesiastes, see Rosalie L. Colie, “The Energies of Endurance: Biblical Echo in King Lear,” in Some Facets of King Lear, eds. Rosalie Colie and F. T. Flahiff (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1974), pp. 117-44.

6. All quotations from the Bible are from The Geneva Bible, A facsimile of the 1560 edition (Madison, Milwaukee, and London: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1969).

7. See Thomas McFarland, Tragic Meanings in Shakespeare (New York: Random House, 1966), pp. 149-71.

8. See Holloway, pp. 75-80; and Joseph Wittreich, “Image of that Horror”: History, Prophecy, and Apocalypse in King Lear (San Marino: Huntington Library Press, 1984).

9. Allan Bloom comments on this speech in his fine essay on Richard II in Shakespeare as Political Thinker, eds. John Alvis and Thomas G. West (Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, 1981), pp. 55-56.

10. The Fool: His Social and Literary History (London: Faber and Faber, 1935) p. 267.

11. For thorough discussions of these commentaries, see Elton, King Lear and the Gods, pp. 270-72.

12. Cited in the Arden King Lear, ed. Kenneth Muir (London: Methuen and Co. Ltd., 1952), p. 45. For a discussion of the ballad, see Hyder Rollins, “‘King Lear’ and the Ballad of ‘John Careless,’” Modern Language Review, 15 (1920), 87-89.

13. See J. V. Cunningham, Tradition and Poetic Structure (Denver: Alan Swallow, 1960), pp. 135-40.

14. See Elton, pp. 249-53.

15. For the argument that Lear's suffering and madness are purgatorial, see Paul A. Jorgenson, Lear's Self-Discovery (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1967).

16. All references to Pericles are to the New Arden edition, ed. F. D. Hoeniger (London: Methuen and Co. Ltd., 1963).

17. “King Lear and the Comedy of the Grotesque,” The Wheel of Fire (London: Methuen and Co. Ltd., 1949), pp. 160-76.

18. Barbara Everett, “The New King Lear,” Critical Quarterly, 2 (1960), 325-39, esp. pp. 334-35.

19. See especially “Of the Affection of Fathers to Their Children,” Montaigne's Essays, trans. John Florio, 2 vols. (London: The Nonesuch Press, 1931), Vol. I, 437-59. Montaigne's assumption is that fathers not only often have to give up power to their children, but should do so.

20. The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson: Johnson on Shakespeare, 15 vols., Vol. VIII, ed. Arthur Sherbo (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1968), 704.

21. In the longer term, in the chronicles, Cordelia commits suicide after Lear's own death. Shakespeare's stress, of course, is on Lear's experience of Cordelia's death.

22. Fools of Time: Studies in Shakespearean Tragedy (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1967), p. 115.

23. The ground-breaking study on this subject is Susan Snyder's “King Lear and the Psychology of Dying,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 33 (1982), 449-60. My own analysis places more emphasis upon Freud's insight into the play, but I remain much indebted to her article.

24. “The Theme of the Three Caskets,” Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74), Vol. 12, 301.

25. Works, Vol. 12, 295.

26. Montaigne's Essays, Vol. I, 694-95.

27. Prefaces to Shakespeare, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1952), Vol. 1, 305.

28. I think this is the phenomenon Stanley Cavell is really touching upon in “The Avoidance of Love,” Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 272-300, for in King Lear the avoidance of love (as well as the embrace of it) is fundamentally the avoidance of death.

29. Works, Vol. 12, 299.

30. For an interesting, if highly inferential, insistence on the political motives of the opening scene of Lear, see Harry V. Jaffa, “The Limits of Politics,” in Shakespeare's Politics, eds. Allan Bloom and Harry Jaffa (New York: Basic Books, 1964), pp. 113-38.

31. See Molly Mahood, Shakespeare's Wordplay (London: Methuen and Co. Ltd., 1957), p. 87.

32. See Ernst Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957), pp. 24-91.

33. Works, Vol. 12, 301.

34. The History of King Leir 1605, gen. ed. W. W. Greg (Oxford: The Malone Society Reprints, 1907).

35. For a discussion of the generic expectations of romance in King Lear, see Leo Salingar, “Romance in King Lear,” English, 27 (1978), 5-22.

36. See Edgar Schell, Strangers and Pilgrims: from The Castle of Perseverance to King Lear (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983).

37. See G. Wilson Knight, “King Lear and the Grotesque”; and Susan Snyder, The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare's Tragedies (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 137-79.

38. Cf. Thomas P. Roche, Jr., “‘Nothing Almost Sees Miracles’: Tragic Knowledge in King Lear,” in On King Lear, ed. Lawrence Danson (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1981), pp. 136-62.

Portions of this argument appeared in abbreviated form in William Shakespeare: His World, His Work, His Influence, 3 vols., ed. John Andrews (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1985), Vol. II, 524-31.