SOURCE: Bennett, Josephine Waters. “The Storm Within: The Madness of Lear.” Shakespeare Quarterly 13, no. 2 (spring 1962): 137-55.

An understanding of Lear's madness is essential to any serious interpretation of the play and to any understanding of its structure. Yet critics have not agreed about when Lear goes mad, and almost no attention at all has been given to the dramatic function of his madness. Some put the onset of madness at the entrance of Edgar as Poor Tom of Bedlam in III. iv.¹ Others would have it at the end of that scene.² Coleridge thought that this scene ended “with the first symptoms of positive derangement”, but that Lear does not appear in “full madness” until III. vi.³ Granville-Barker agrees with Coleridge that III. vi, “the lunatic trial of Regan and Goneril”, is the high point of Lear's madness, but he describes IV.vi, Lear's encounter with Gloucester, as “another scene of madness for him, and one which lifts the play's argument to a yet rarer height.”⁴ Recently Dr. Sholom J. Kahn has gone a step further and singled out the stage direction, “Enter Lear mad”, IV.vi (Quarto text) as the earliest manifestation of full madness. He says of his article, “Briefly, we shall contend that Lear in Acts II and III is not yet fully mad, but rather on the way to that condition; and that III. vi shows him in a state which alternates between a kind of pathetic sanity and growing fits of lunacy; and that the full portrayal of the mad Lear is reserved for IV.vi, as indicated by the Quarto stage directions, the style of printing in both Quarto and Folio (chiefly prose, rather than verse), and by the nature of Lear's speeches themselves.”⁵

Determination of the beginning of Lear's madness is a necessary first step in any understanding of Shakespeare's use of it in this play, but that onset must be determined by observation of all the evidence furnished to the audience by the dramatist, and not merely by such superficial and uncertain indications as stage directions, the use of prose, or even the degree of incoherence of Lear's speeches.

I believe that Dr. Kahn is mistaken in his initial assumption. He says (p. 311), “It is obvious that the central acts of King Lear portray the progressive stages of his growing madness” (the italics are mine), and that “the relation among these three scenes (III.iv and vi, and IV.vi), with respect to Lear's madness and all that this implies for the dramatic structure and meaning of the tragedy, is climactic” (p. 313; the italics are his). It is this assumption which leads him to argue that Lear is fully mad only in IV. vi. But why must Lear's madness be progressive? Why must he be more mad in one than in another of the three short scenes in question? The assumption that he must seems to stem from an assertion of Granville-Barker's which Dr. Kahn quotes with approval, that “You cannot continue the development of a character in terms of lunacy … nor can a madman well dominate a play's action.”⁶ If this is true it follows that Lear should not be fully mad until the third of the scenes in question.

At first glance Granville-Barker's statement looks like an obvious truism, but the word “development” is ambiguous. If it refers to Lear's character as a real entity, we might agree that Lear cannot achieve truth and grow in understanding of himself while he is insane. But the dramatist had an expository problem of probing and exhibiting to his audience the cause and nature of Lear's insanity (for it is not his daughters' ingratitude, but Lear's reaction to their ingratitude which produces the insanity). The process by which Shakespeare exhibits Lear's reaction, the conflict in Lear's mind, might very well be described as “the development of a character in terms of lunacy”.

Interpretation of the play has been distorted by too much emphasis on the external conflict, on Lear's helplessness and the inhumanity of his ungrateful daughters; there has been too little attention to Lear's struggle with himself, to the storm within. In the process of intensifying, clarifying, and interpreting that struggle, Shakespeare has made use of the Gloucester plot, the Fool, and madness. Let us begin with the latter, and with the three short scenes which exhibit Lear's insanity, its cause in his own character, and its effect on him.

The first of these scenes is III. iv. Like any competent dramatist, Shakespeare makes obvious those matters which an audience must understand in order to follow the play. A mere reader, going at a much slower rate, referring back when he is in doubt, needs no such obvious guidance and even fails to see it in his attention to some less important detail. An audience, sitting at a play, must be told in advance what to expect and what to look for, since the spectator must get his information chiefly by ear, and must understand clearly and immediately or not at all. For this reason the auditor must be warned, so that he will recognize the significant event when it arrives, and the desired interpretation of each event must be adequately suggested. The audience must never be fooled, misguided, or bewildered. These things are for the characters on the stage to simulate so that the audience can enjoy its superior wisdom, but the audience's business is to understand what is going on. Gloucester must be mistaken about the character of Edgar, but the audience must know the truth. Olivia must mistake Viola for a man, but it would ruin Twelfth Night if the audience should be in any doubt at any time about her sex. In order that they may fully relish Falstaff's lies about the robbery, the audience must hear Poins and Hal plan to rob the robbers. Then they must actually see them do it; and then they must be told that Falstaff will tell incredible lies. Only then are they properly prepared to appreciate his report of how he was robbed by two, four, seven, nine, eleven, and three more—not to mention “a hundred upon poor four of us”.

With at least equal care, skill, and thoroughness, we are prepared to see Lear go mad. Shakespeare's preparation had to be particularly thorough, because this is an innovation, not to be found in any earlier version of the story, and so the audience would not expect it if they were not prepared. Kent plants the idea in the first scene (line 146) when he implies that Lear is mad for disinheriting Cordelia. We see him in a furious rage in I. iv, and at the end of I. v, he expresses the fear,

O, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven!
Keep me in temper; I would not be mad!

(ll. 40-41)

We do not see him again until II. iv, when he comes upon Kent in the stocks. Here his rising rage, his “hysterica passio” (l. 55), is countered by a real struggle for patience in his interview with Regan. But his daughters are pitiless in their contest to reduce his retinue, and as he goes out into the gathering storm Lear utters what proves to be a prophecy,

I have full cause of weeping, but this heart
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws
Or ere I'll weep. O fool, I shall go mad! Exeunt.(7)

With the opening of Act III, the suggestions of approaching insanity grow more frequent. In the first scene Kent speaks of Lear's “unnatural and bemadding sorrow” (l. 38). In the second scene, after his invocation of divine justice, when Kent urges him to take shelter in the hovel, Lear replies, “My wits begin to turn” (l. 67). He goes on, however, to speak gentle and sane words to his Fool,

Come on, my boy. How dost, my boy? Art cold?
I am cold myself. …

The statement, “My wits begin to turn”, is a cue to the audience, and it is full of irony because it is more true than the speaker realizes; but Lear is still sane, as he is a moment and one short scene later when they reach the hovel and he hesitates to enter. To Kent's urging he replies, “Wilt break my heart?” (III. iv. 4). He is using the storm and his physical misery to counter and control the storm within his mind, fighting grief and rage with physical suffering,⁸ and the prospect of shelter threatens to destroy the balance, as indeed it does. He explains to Kent,

But where the greater malady is fixed,
The lesser is scarce felt. …
This tempest will not give me leave to ponder
On things would hurt me more, …

(III. iv. 8-25)

His mind is on the brink, wavering between concern for physical suffering, and for others who share it, and self-pity, bitter hate, and longing for revenge, as he has made clear in the same two speeches:

                                                  The tempest in my mind
Doth from my senses take all feeling else
Save what beats there. Filial ingratitude,
.....                                                            But I will punish home.
No, I will weep no more. In such a night
To shut me out! Pour on; I will endure.
In such a night as this! O Regan, Goneril,
Your old kind father, whose frank heart gave all—
O, that way madness lies; let me shun that.
No more of that.

(ll. 12-22)

This is the storm within, which he is controlling precariously with the help of physical suffering inflicted by the cold. But he is on the brink of madness, as the audience has been repeatedly warned. He pauses for a moment to pity those

Poor naked wretches wheresoe'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, …

(ll. 28 f.)

He is not mad while he can pity others, and even blame himself:

                                                            O, I have ta'en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them
And show the heavens more just.

(ll. 32-36)

He is the king, thinking charitably of others, and then, suddenly, one of those “wretches”, Edgar disguised as Tom o'Bedlam, appears, and Lear, just controlling his own sanity by thinking of others, suddenly confuses the Bedlam beggar with himself, and he is over the brink.⁹

His first words to Tom, “Didst thou give all to thy daughters? And art thou come to this?”, might, by themselves, be taken as no more than bitter irony, but they are in prose and therefore suited to one whose wits are jangled, or fallen out of tune.¹⁰ More important for the audience, however, because more obvious, is Lear's obsessive reiteration, his insistence in the next three speeches on “his daughters”, “thy daughters”, and when Kent protests, “He hath no daughters, sir”, Lear retorts hotly, “Death, traitor! Nothing could have subdued nature to such a lowness but his unkind daughters.” This obsession, or idée fixe, is one of the most easily recognized exhibitions of insanity. Lear's four references to Tom's “daughters”, in four successive speeches, could hardly fail to convince listeners seeing the play for the first time, that what had been predicted repeatedly as about to happen has now happened: Lear has gone mad. The aimless babble of Tom's attempt to simulate madness contrasts effectively with Lear's fixed idea. However, just to be sure the point is not missed, the Fool is made to remark, “This cold night will turn us all to fools and madmen” (III. iv. 75).

Lear's next speech, “What hast thou been?” invites Tom's caricature of a serving man, which ends incoherently and in turn produces Lear's “Is man no more than this? …” This speech ends with the second and most striking exhibition of insanity. Modern admiration for this bit of profound [sic] philosophizing has obscured its dramatic significance. Dr. Kahn says (p. 316) that Lear's “observations about ‘the thing itself; unaccomodated man’ seem eminently sane, though they conclude with the somewhat hysterical: ‘Off, off, you lendings: come, unbutton here’.” The action indicated by this speech is Lear's attempt to tear off his clothes. The Fool remonstrates, “Prithee, nuncle, be contented: 'tis a naughty night to swim in.” Lear's attempt to strip is an action which would be recognized by almost anyone as evidence of violent insanity. Who has not heard tales of people suddenly exhibiting this sign of madness? Today we would promptly put in a call to the nearest mental hospital. While this is not the most common manifestation of mental derangement, it is the most dramatic and easily recognized. Following upon the “eminently sane” “Is man no more than this?” and as an eminently logical conclusion, it exhibits just that “matter and impertinency mixed” (IV. vi. 171) which is characteristic of much insanity and which Lear exhibits in all three of his mad scenes.¹¹

Lear has given two obvious symptoms of mental derangement, but the rule of the theater is that the audience must be told three times anything that it must know and remember in order to understand what is to follow. Shakespeare seldom violates this rule. Immediately after the Fool has restrained Lear's effort to tear off his clothes, Gloucester appears to lead Lear to a better shelter. And now he develops the delusion that Tom in his blanket is an ancient philosopher. Beginning with the lines, “First let me talk with this philosopher. What is the cause of thunder?” (l. 145), he speaks of nothing else. In six speeches he five times calls Tom his philosopher, a “learned Theban”, a “good Athenian”. Neither Kent nor Gloucester can get his attention, and Kent explains (to Gloucester and the audience), “His wits begin t'unsettle.” Gloucester echoes the thought (to make sure, among other things, that the audience does not miss it), “Thou sayest the King grows mad. … I am almost mad myself. … Grief hath crazed my wits” (ll. 156-161).

In this scene the dramatist is telling us, and showing us, as clearly and emphatically as he can, that Lear has gone mad. We see him exhibit three easily recognized signs of insanity and we are repeatedly told, by Kent, by Gloucester, and even by the Fool (l. 75), that Lear is mad. How could this point have been missed by so many modern critics? The reason is partly their close and too often dogmatic reading of what was intended to be heard and seen as a play,¹² partly a theoretical conviction that the madness of Lear should somehow be progressive and climactic, and partly lack of the familiarity with insanity which Shakespeare took for granted in his audience. Today we treat all insane people as potentially dangerous, either to themselves or to others, as “cases” to be treated, or at least put out of sight in hospitals. But in Shakespeare's time the insane were taken care of at home by their families, or became wards of someone paid to give them food and shelter, or were sent to Bedlam, a hospital which seems to have provided them with a bed, but from which they were allowed and expected to go out and beg for food. Bedlam beggars were a familiar sight in the streets of London, and, in all probability, those who put food or pennies in their begging bowls also asked them questions or drew them out to see what they would say and so get a little amusement for their money. The modern critics' notion of the talk of the insane seems to fit Edgar's pretended, rather than Lear's real, madness, since the degree of incoherence rather than delusion and irrational action is used as the measure.

In spite of the preparation for Lear's madness by his own and others' suggestions of it, and in spite of the three clear symptoms of derangement in III. iv, no critic, so far as I can find, has observed that the chief function of this scene at the hovel is to establish that Lear is mad. Even Coleridge, who does not seem to have felt that the madness must be progressive, says that “this scene ends with the first symptoms of positive derangement”, and that Lear appears “in full madness in the sixth scene”. Those who feel that the insanity must be climactic emphasize Kent's apologetic, “His wits begin t'unsettle” (iv. 153), and Gloucester's reply, “Thou say'st the king grows mad”,¹³ but at the opening of scene vi, only twenty-five lines later, Kent says, “All the power of his wits have given way to his impatience.” If we are to weigh words and tenses, we cannot ignore Kent's all and have given while emphasizing begins and grows.

Whatever readers of the play, and criticism based on reading, may contend, it seems obvious that Shakespeare intended his auditors to understand that Lear goes mad in III. iv and is mad when he appears next in scene vi. If the play is a properly constructed Elizabethan tragedy, the climax, or point of no return in the struggle which makes the plot, should come in this scene. Scenes iii, v, and vii bring the Gloucester plot to its climax of horror. Scenes ii, iv, and vi are concerned with Lear. Scene ii shows us his defiance of the storm and his self-pity:

                                                  I am a man
More sinned against than sinning

(III. ii. 58-59)

and his premonition of madness: “My wits begin to turn.” In the next scene in which he appears we see him go mad, and in the opening of scene vi Kent says that “All the power of his wits have given way to his impatience.” The problem is not, therefore, whether he is mad in III. iv, but why he is mad, and what dramatic purposes are served by the two further exhibitions of his madness.

Kent's clear and emphatic assertion that Lear is now completely mad prepares the audience for the uninhibited exhibition of Lear's inner conflict, and in successive speeches we are shown his pride, his furious desire for revenge, his attempt to use “justice” to get that revenge, and his self-pity. When the Fool proposes his conundrum, “Prithee, nuncle, tell me whether a madman be a gentleman or a yeoman?” Lear understands that the quip is aimed at him and replies proudly, “A king, a king.” The Fool supplies the correct answer, but Lear's mind is obsessed with his passionate desire for revenge:

To have a thousand with red burning spits
Come hizzing in upon 'em—

(ll. 15-16)

This furious desire to “punish home”, to torture, is as shocking as Lear's earlier cursing of Goneril. It is, in fact, as savage in wish as the blinding of Gloucester is in deed. This is the cause of Lear's madness, his bitter, futile resentment, his frustrated will which has driven him to insane hatred.

In the play-within-a-play which follows,¹⁴ the Fool and Edgar humor Lear by acting the parts he assigns to them, but they also comment, in asides, on the pity of Lear's insanity; as when Edgar says, “Bless thy five wits!” and “My tears begin to take his part so much / They mar my counterfeiting” (i.e. acting the part of judge). Lear's mind fluctuates from excitement over the imagined escape of Goneril to the abyss of self-pity in which he imagines his dogs behaving like his daughters,

                                                            The little dogs and all,
Tray, Blanch, and Sweetheart—see, they bark at me.

(ll. 61-62)

The next moment he is ready to anatomize Regan to find out, “Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?” Then, forgetting what he is about, he tells Tom, “You, sir, I entertain for one of my hundred; only I do not like the fashion of your garments. You will say they are Persian; but let them be changed.” This is an echo of his grievance (my hundred), and of his delusion that Tom is an ancient philosopher (end of sc. iv). It serves to remind the audience that he is mad. The reminder is reenforced, a few lines later by Kent's words, “trouble him not; his wits are gone.”

This scene gives us, not a further degree of insanity, but a clear exposition of the internal cause of Lear's madness. Balked pride, humiliation, impotence, and self-pity have worn him out and in the midst of this scene he falls asleep out of sheer exhaustion. We do not see him again until IV. vi. Before we turn to that scene it seems necessary to consider for a moment the function of the Fool.

Because of the nature of Lear's internal conflict, his stubborn resistance to the humbling forces unleashed against him, the devices of self-revelation so commonly used by Elizabethan dramatists—soliloquies, asides, and conversations with a confidant—are not open to Shakespeare in this play. Lear cannot debate within himself nor surrender his pride so far as to confide in anyone. The condition of his ordeal is that he cannot recognize his own weakness and dependence on others, and so he cannot admit the self-doubt and soul-searching and regret which Hamlet and Macbeth give voice to. Shakespeare was, therefore, faced with the technical problem of giving dramatic expression to one side of the internal conflict in Lear. Kent's vigorous protest is effectively silenced in the first scene. Lear himself could not express regret or self-reproach until the tempest within was over, until the struggle of his will against all the forces of life had passed its crisis and he had come to know himself.

It is the solution of this problem of how to keep before the audience Lear's guilt and folly that produced the Fool, perhaps Shakespeare's boldest stroke of genius. The tradition of the allowed Fool made him possible. Because of his unique position he could serve as a chorus representing the voice of wisdom.¹⁵ He has been described as a kind of external conscience,¹⁶ but it is not Lear's injustice but his folly that the Fool harps on. He does, however, in some respects, act not only as a reminder, but as a representative of Cordelia, appealing to Lear's affections by his doglike devotion, depending on him for protection, and so keeping Lear human in that part of the play where Cordelia cannot appear, keeping the audience reminded of her and of Lear's capacity for love.

The Fool appears in the first scene in which we see Lear after he has disowned Cordelia, and just as his conflict with his two ungrateful daughters begins, and he accompanies his master to the mad climax of his struggle (III. vi) and then is seen no more. It is strange that so stage-conscious a critic as Granville-Barker saw the Fool only as “feeble, fantastic, pathetic, a foil to Lear, a foil to the storm … a piece of court tinsel so drenched and buffeted. …”¹⁷ Even Coleridge (p. 184), though he defended the Fool as “no comic buffoon to make the groundlings laugh”, sees in him only “his wild babblings and inspired idiocy” which, he says, “articulate and gauge the horrors of the scene.” Bradley (pp. 314-315) concerns himself with the problem of the Fool's sanity, concluding that he is neither sane nor wholly insane, but that he mediates between the madness of Lear and the pretended madness of Edgar in the storm scene. He can make no more of the disappearance of the Fool than one of the “many marks of haste and carelessness in King Lear”. On both these points he seems to me to be mistaken.

The Fool's remarks are not “inspired idiocy”, but rather the indiscretions of a boy (as Lear calls him) whose mind is sane but has failed to develop into maturity. He is full of riddles, like a ten-year-old with a craze for “moron” jokes. He is child-like, unsophisticated, and uninhibited, rather than insane.¹⁸

His first appearance connects him with Cordelia. In I.iv, Lear appears for the first time after his abdication, calling for his dinner and for his Fool. After three demands, “Where's my Fool?” to get the audience's attention, an attendant explains, “Since my young Lady's going into France, sir, the fool hath much pined away.” Lear replies, “No more of that; I have noted it well.” This devotion to Cordelia makes him a silent reproach to Lear for his harshness, and his speeches constantly harp on Lear's folly in dividing his kingdom between his other two daughters. These are the truths which Lear will not face.

Sometime in Lear's encounter with Oswald, when Kent trips him, the Fool enters and offers Kent his coxcomb “for taking one's part that's out of favor”. In the same speech he quips at Lear, “this fellow hath banish'd two on's daughters, and did the third a blessing against his will.” The jest is so pointed that Lear threatens to have him whipped. Yet he keeps steadily to the point of Lear's folly through the rest of the scene, until Goneril calls him “more knave than fool”, and sends him after his master. The next scene shows him ringing changes on the same theme. His conundrums all have the point that Lear is a fool. His bitter jests counter and balance Lear's bitter thoughts. Where Lear blames his daughters, the Fool blames Lear. He is at it again in II.iv, though he has little to say after Regan appears. It is not until the storm scenes of Act III that he “labors to outjest” Lear's “heart-struck injuries” (III.i.16-17). When Lear's wits have fallen out of tune, the Fool speaks seldom and sanely. With Lear's madness in competition with Edgar's impersonation of Poor Tom o'Bedlam, the only possible course (pace Bradley) was to make the Fool the sanest of the three. It is he who comments, “This cold night will turn us all to fools and madmen.” A little later he takes a protective attitude toward Lear, restraining him with the gentle admonition, “Prithee, nuncle, be contented; 'tis a naughty night to swim in.” He is at his conundrums again at the opening of the farmhouse scene (III.vi) and takes a small part in the mock trial, but his purpose has been served, and his “I'll to bed at noon” sweeps him from the stage.¹⁹ Lear has just asked his great question, “Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?” The storm within has reached its crisis. Immediately Lear makes his first surrender—to physical exhaustion so great that he postpones his supper, and falls asleep. The Fool has served his purpose and is no longer needed. He would actually be in the way thereafter, an impertinent intrusion into the duet between Lear and Cordelia.

The next we hear of Lear is Kent's report that he has reached Dover, and

                    sometime in his better tune, remembers
What we are come about, and by no means
Will yield to see his daughter. …
A sovereign shame so elbows him; his own unkindness,
That stripped her from his benediction, turned her
To foreign casualties, gave her dear rights
To his dog-hearted daughters—these things sting
His mind so venomously that burning shame
Detains him from Cordelia.

(IV.iii.39-47)

The dramatist no longer needs the Fool's bitter voice steadily driving home the truth of Lear's injustice and folly. He has begun to admit it for himself, though only “sometime”.

Act IV, scene vi, the third and last of the “mad” scenes, opens with Gloucester's attempted suicide at Dover cliff, and his assertion that he has learned his lesson of patience. Then, in the Quarto, we have the stage direction, “Enter Lear mad.” This is the scene which Dr. Kahn thinks exhibits the climax of Lear's madness.

Lear's first speech is somewhat incoherent. He is under the delusion that he is in command of troops, for his first words are, “No, they cannot touch me for coining: I am the King himself. Nature's above art in that respect. There's your press money” (ll. 83 ff.). He imagines himself handing out coins to pay recruits. The King born (and so a manifestation of nature) is above the art of the coiner. The speech wanders on to the training of recruits to shoot, to the luring of a mouse within range with a piece of cheese, to a challenge to a duel, to an order of battle; finally he approves a soldier's shot and addresses himself to Edgar, “Give the word” (i.e. password). Edgar replies, “Sweet marjoram” and is told, “Pass.”

Lear is in a world of his own imagining, and yet he vaguely senses and reacts to the military bustle around him. The blind Gloucester recognizes his voice, but Lear sees only “Goneril with a white beard”. This is cruel, coming from the king for whom Gloucester lost his eyes, but there is worse to follow. Lear is still mad and cannot tell his friends from his enemies, yet he has learned one part of his lesson. He has been brought to recognize his physical limitations, for he goes on to say,

They flattered me like a dog, and told me I had the white hairs in my beard ere the black ones were there. … When the rain came to wet me once, and the wind to make me chatter; when the thunder would not peace at my bidding; there I found 'em, … They told me I was everything. 'Tis a lie—I am not ague-proof.

(ll. 96-104)

This is Lear's second long speech in this scene, and it marks the beginning of his recognition of his true place in the world—his human frailty; so it marks the beginning of his return to sanity. But he is not through with pride yet. Gloucester asks, “Is't not the King?” and Lear replies promptly, “Ay, every inch a king!” He knows himself, and yet, in a deeper sense, he does not “know himself”. In a vague way he has recognized Gloucester, but he speaks without pity or sympathy, not about Gloucester's loyalty and service to his king, but about his youthful fault:

Adultery?
Thou shalt not die. Die for adultery? No.
.....Let copulation thrive; for Gloucester's bastard son
Was kinder to his father than my daughters
Got 'tween lawful sheets.

(ll. 109-115)

This is cruel. Gloucester owed his blindness not only to the treachery of his bastard son, but also to his loyalty to Lear. He had been punished for his adultery, though Lear in his mad state did not know it—but even if we must assume that he did not know of Edmund's treachery, even if he did not know of Gloucester's loyalty, it was unfeeling of Lear to twit his old liegeman on his blindness—a fact which he did see. Gloucester asks, “Doest thou know me?” and Lear replies,

I remember thine eyes well enough. Doest thou squiny at me? No, do thy worst, blind Cupid; I'll not love. Read thou this challenge; mark but the penning of it. … O, ho, are you there with me? No eyes in your head, nor no money in your purse? [i.e. you are a blind beggar.] Your eyes are in a heavy case, your purse in a light one; yet you see how this world goes.

(ll. 135-146)

Beginning with the next speech he launches into a tirade against the world, its hypocrisy and injustice, ending,

                                                            Get thee glass eyes
And, like a scurvy politician, seem
To see the things thou doest not. Now, now, now, now!
Pull off my boots. Harder, harder! So.

The action suggested by this speech is that Lear pulls off his boots (the act of disrobing again). A few lines later he has evidently taken off his hat, for he says,

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

His hat is not only off, but the lines suggest that he is trying to put it on his bootless foot. The terrible reiteration of “kill” proves to be the last thunder-peal of the storm in Lear's mind. He is certainly mad from his first speech where he imagines that he is with his army, to his exit, running, followed by the attendants Cordelia has sent to find him. Yet he is not so completely insane as he was in the scene where he attempted to try Goneril and Regan before the Bedlam beggar and the Fool as two judges. In IV.vi, even in his first and most incoherent speech to imaginary soldiers he seems to be aware of the military bustle around him, although he misinterprets it. His second speech recalls the storm and shows that he has at least learned that “I am not ague-proof”. A little later, when Gloucester asks to kiss his hand, he replies, “Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality.” In lines 173-177 he speaks sanely,

If thou wilt weep my fortunes, take my eyes.
I know thee well enough; thy name is Gloucester.
Thou must be patient. …

But he is not yet ready to be patient himself. His resentment breeds distrust and he mistakes Cordelia's officers for enemies and exhibits the typical cunning of a madman in pretending to yield to them, and then suddenly running. One of these gentlemen makes the interpretive comment,

A sight most pitiful in the meanest wretch,
Past speaking of in a king!

(ll. 200-201)

By this simple act of running away (in his stocking feet?), Shakespeare invokes our deepest pity for this proud, willful, stubborn, yet helpless old man.

Critics with a taste for the sententious and the bitter have extravagantly admired the string of commonplaces on the world's injustice and on human weakness which Lear utters in this scene.²⁰ The significance of the scene lies, however, not in the truth of Lear's biting satire, his “Reason in madness”, but in his state of mind—his generalization of the injustice he has suffered (of his daughters' cruelty) to include all humanity, at the same time that he is exhibiting his own injustice and cruelty toward the pitiful blind Gloucester. The Freudian interpretation of Lear's words, which finds in Lear's comments on lechery and women's appetites indication of his own incontinence, is happily out of fashion; but there is still a tendency to see unvarnished truth in his remarks. But Shakespeare was writing for an audience which had a very different conception of the source and significance of the utterances of the insane. The ancient notion of “possession” by evil spirits, supported by Biblical authority, was still current. That conception, reflected in the treatment of Malvolio, and in the concern of Edgar's pretended madness with the “foul fiend”, should warn us that Lear's mad accusations against mankind are not Shakespeare's sane judgment of humanity. Lear's madness is a more penetrating analysis of the overthrow of reason by forces within—and they are evil forces. Lear's bitter speeches are a part of the exposition of his madness, they are not sane comments, Lear's or Shakespeare's. The sins of others are not, at this point, his concern. He must recognize and repent his own sins.

We must try to get some perspective on this scene by looking at it as a whole, and not through a reading-glass, phrase by phrase. It begins with Edgar's gentle deception of his father, the pretended fall from Dover cliff, and Edgar's denigration of himself in order to make his superstitious old father believe that it was the fiend who had led him to the edge of the precipice. Gloucester has just uttered his new resolution,

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

(ll. 75-77)

Then “Enter Lear mad”, to make his unfeeling remarks to Gloucester and to go into a tirade against mankind.²¹ It is true that Lear is mad in this scene and therefore unaccountable for what he says; but his pride and willfulness in his treatment of Kent and Cordelia have brought him to this madness, and brought Gloucester to this pass also. Shakespeare had the problem of recalling to his audience that first scene in this painful, and painfully beautiful, play. He could hardly cause Lear to reenact that blindness and hardness of heart; but he could repeat that hardness and blindness (albeit softened and excused by Lear's pitiable condition), by bringing the blind of eye and the blind of understanding into direct comparison by this encounter of the mad Lear with the blind Gloucester.

This is the nexus of the double plot—the point at which the Gloucester plot is brought into juxtaposition with Lear. The blind of eye and the blind of heart meet, and physical blindness is made to illuminate and help the audience to interpret Lear's tragic flaw.

As I remarked at the beginning of this paper, in the process of intensifying, clarifying, and interpreting Lear's struggle with himself, Shakespeare makes use of the Gloucester plot, the Fool, and madness. The use of the Gloucester plot is the most obvious of the three. The parallelism between the two plots, the contrast between the “sensual man robbed of his eyes, and the despot, the light of his mind put out”,²² is a commonplace of criticism. However, I cannot find that it has been observed that the events in the Gloucester plot regularly precede and serve as interpretive preparation for parallel events in the Lear plot in a way which is a refinement of the old dumb-show technique, as exemplified by the preliminary dumb-show in Hamlet's Murder of Gonzago. In the very first scene, Gloucester's crass boasting of his adultery and crude introduction of his bastard son prepare for Lear's equally unperceptive treatment of his youngest, gentlest, emotionally tongue-tied daughter.²³ So at each step in the action, save one, we see the crude, externalized ordeal of Gloucester before the more inward, and therefore more difficult to represent, parallel ordeal of Lear. Edmund's plot against Edgar gets under way (I. ii) before Goneril instructs Oswald to offend her father (I. iii). Edgar's life is put in danger (II. i) and he is driven out to play the madman (II. iii) in preparation for Lear's turning out and their encounter in the hovel, where Edgar's acting counterpoints and heightens the picture of Lear's madness.

On the other hand, the blinding of Gloucester follows, not precedes, the scene in which Lear goes mad, for obvious reasons. A reversal of the two scenes would be anticlimactic and unnecessary. Gloucester's ordeal is not needed to interpret Lear's ordeal in the storm. Gloucester must be blinded as preparation for the encounter in IV. vi, and this act of savagery is used adroitly to remove Cornwall and set going the rivalry of Goneril and Regan for Edmund. But the scene in the storm (III. iv) culminating in Lear's madness, while it is violent and spectacular enough to make a climax to the action of the play, evidently did not seem to the dramatist sufficiently to clarify the meaning of Lear's madness. For that, he needed a further scene in which to probe the conflict in Lear's mind and bring it to the climax of exhaustion which prepares the way for a return to sanity. But a climax of emotion ending in exhaustion does not make a suitable climax of the action. That reaches its peak of horror after Lear has asked his question and fallen asleep. The reversal comes in the same scene, when, instead of getting the needed sleep, Lear is snatched up for flight. With dramatic immediacy his passionate desire to punish his daughters turns into urgent need to escape lest they punish him.

But this is not so spectacular a scene, even with the mock-trial, as the blinding of Gloucester, where the death of Cornwall is the true climax of the action since it prepares the way for the rivalry of the sisters leading to their deaths and the defeat and death of Edmund—necessary actions if Albany and Edgar are to be left to rule a purged and chastened state. The blinding of Gloucester prepares for Edgar's tender care and instruction of his father, which precedes and illuminates Cordelia's care for and teaching of Lear. Both fathers are saved by a child's love, Gloucester first. Both learn patience, Gloucester first. Both die happy in the love of a devoted child, and Gloucester's death interprets Lear's. Gloucester's

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

(V. iii. 197-200)

And so Lear, torn between false hope and extreme grief, imagines that Cordelia breathes, and dies in that belief.

However, it is Lear's madness which centrally intensifies and clarifies the meaning of the play. We see Lear go mad in III. iv. We see the clash between his almost superhuman will and his impotence in the mock-trial scene, which begins with his burning desire for revenge and ends with the double-edged query, “Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?” Finally, in IV. vi, in the mad Lear's inhumanity to the blind and humble Gloucester—which he extends to a general satire on mankind—we see an exhibition of the lack of sympathetic understanding, of fellow-feeling, which is the basic cause of Lear's tragedy. It is his want of insight, his “blindness of heart”, which constitutes his tragic flaw.²⁴ In this scene Shakespeare has dramatized it more clearly than has any playwright since Sophocles, not only by contrasting Lear's blindness with Gloucester's, but by contrasting the patient understanding and tenderness which the disinherited and banished Edgar shows to his father with Lear's lack of sympathy with his devoted vassal and distrust of the help which his equally wronged daughter is trying to give him. We have been prepared from the first scene of Act III for her rescue of Lear, but it is in IV. vi that her love and forgiveness of extreme injury are first brought into direct contrast with Lear's unyielding pride. Edgar and Cordelia shed the clear, warm light of sanity and love on the bitter tirade of the mad Lear.

This tirade is the logical culmination of Lear's tragic flaw. Beginning with the rejection of the human condition, in “Off, off, you lendings! Come, unbutton here!” we are made to witness the probing of a mind blinded by hate and resentment which, unable to “punish home”, loses the power to distinguish reality from phantasy, friend from foe, becomes obsessed with self-pity (“O, that way madness lies”, III. iv. 21), and, in the meeting with Gloucester, exhibits alienation from all humanity, refuses help, and distrusts the whole world.

Meanwhile we have been shown signs of a return to sanity. First Kent reports that he has moments when he “in his better tune, remembers”. Then we see him actually recognize Gloucester. These are necessary preparations for the scene (IV.vii) in which he is awakened to sanity. Without them the awakening scene would be abrupt and incredible.

If we focus our attention on the external conflict, on the cruelty of his children and the pitiable fate of the helpless old man,²⁵ we fail to see how deeply the play probes into the nature of man and the experience of life: and if we do not see these things we miss the greatness of the tragedy. In the opening scene we are shown, not only that Lear does not know his children, but that he does not know himself, his responsibilities and his own best interests. Thereafter we see the tragedy of old age and ungrateful children, but this is the outside only. The core of the play is not what happens to Lear but what happens within Lear. As Regan coldly remarks at the end of the opening scene, “'Tis the infirmity of his age; yet he hath ever but slenderly known himself.” In the course of the play, Lear, like Oedipus, comes through a Laocoönian struggle to a knowledge of himself. This struggle begins with his plan to give up his duties and responsibilities but to retain his honors and dignities. This is the universal problem of age—the wish to lighten one's burden without relinquishing the honor which bearing it has won. In order to see this opening scene clearly we must view it with fresh eyes, and not through the tearful blur of sympathy with his later suffering. We must see Lear's behavior in the first scene in its full enormity, as an Elizabethan audience would have seen it. It begins with the plan to divide England. Such a plan could only be looked upon as preface and prelude to civil war, as Gorboduc; or Ferrex and Porrex had been written to show. Civil war was implicit in any division of England, and Shakespeare assumes that his audience would expect it. In the opening of Act II, Curan asks Edmund whether he has heard any rumors of civil war, and predicts that he will, in time (II.i.6-13). The threat of civil war hangs over the whole play and erupts in the last act.²⁶ No sympathy for the “poor old man” of the later scenes should blind us to the fact that in the beginning Lear commits, and has deliberately and selfishly planned, a division of the kingdom which could only lead to fratricidal strife. When Shakespeare wishes to make clear the consequences of Hotspur's rebellion, he gives us a scene in which the rebels begin to quarrel over their shares of the kingdom before they have won them. Lear begins with a display, on a grand scale, of selfish lack of concern for others in the division of his kingdom.

In a modern audience his treatment of Cordelia more readily evokes disapproval. He is not merely harsh in his punishment of her, he is positively vindictive. She is to have not the worst third, but nothing. He even tries to dissuade her suitors from taking her (ll. 189-266), and finally denies his paternity, “we have no such daughter” (ll. 262-263). Kent's determined protest shows the enormity of Lear's crime—for it is not just a mistake blundered into by an old man used to having his way.²⁷ Lear has duties as well as Cordelia, he is the source of justice for his kingdom and for his children. Kent calls his rejection of Cordelia a “foul disease” and is rewarded with banishment, and that on the shortest notice. Lear has accused Cordelia of pride (l. 129), but his own exhibition of pride reenforced by power is fearful. It produces a hardness of heart which deprives him of those who love him best, but when Goneril and Regan are equally unfeeling, Lear threatens,

I will have such revenges on you both
That all the world shall—I will do such things—
What they are, yet I know not; but they shall be
The terrors of the earth. You think I'll weep.
No, I'll not weep.
I have full cause for weeping, but this heart
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws
Or ere I'll weep. O fool, I shall go mad!

(II. iv. 274-281)

This is both prophetic and self-revelatory. Only a hard heart could shatter into “a hundred thousand flaws”. It is in the light of Lear's own unyielding pride and hardheartedness that we should read his query at the end of the mad trial scene, “Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?” It is a two-edged and most significant question.

Lear had pitted his will against the two who loved him, and less successfully against the two who did not. He will not yield, and so he will go mad. In the ecstasy of his willfulness he pits himself against the very elements of nature. Here is a man so full of self-will that he commits the grossest injustices, and yet so blind to his own fault as to invoke justice and satirize all mankind for injustice. It is the disciplining of this willful man by all the conditions of life that we witness—by the consequences of his own deeds, by age and physical weakness, and by the power of nature embodied in the storm. He is brought to seek the barest necessities of food, shelter, and rest, so that he may learn his own limitations and the true values of life—not pride and justice, but humility and love.

Overemphasis on the physical suffering, the elemental evil, obscures the interior struggle, which is of primary importance. To the Elizabethans it was a commonplace that the world is a battle ground between good and evil;²⁸ and a commonplace is not a suitable theme for the profound interpretation, or rather reinterpretation, of human experience, which makes literature great. It is the ground, the datum, on which the drama is built, not the building. The storm within Lear's mind goes beyond good and evil, beyond the narrow world of preceptoral morality, to the imponderable realities of cause and effect, of man's ignorance, his weakness, his blindness, and his blundering and suffering through life to his release from “the rack of this tough world”. The struggle between good and evil is present, but if we pay as much attention to Lear as to Goneril and Regan, we see that it is a complex, not a simple struggle, and that the more important part of it is within Lear, who begins his ordeal in power and pride and ends it in love and humbleness. In the process of this transformation the conflict is so sharp that his reason gives way for a time, and the period of his madness makes possible the dramatization of the inner struggle, the pride driven by futility and frustration to intense hate expressed in a burning desire to torture and to kill. First Kent and then his Fool point out to Lear his injustice and folly, but it is the storm, physical exhaustion, and the shame induced by Cordelia's loving solicitude, which finally teach him to know himself.

Just as Gloucester, abandoning himself to despair, falls (so he believes) from Dover cliff and is saved by a miracle created by Edgar's love, so Lear, blinded by his own self-love, falls into the abyss of madness and is saved by a miracle of love. The shame induced by recognition of his own hateful treatment of Cordelia is the balm which restores sanity on a new level of self-knowledge, humility, and gratitude (“I am a very foolish fond old man. … Pray you now, forget and forgive: I am old and foolish”, IV. vii. 60, 84).

The great flaw in Bradley's interpretation of the play is his failure to see the importance of Lear's fault (see pp. 280 ff). He does not see that the whole tragedy is as much the result of Lear's pride and willfulness as is Macbeth's of uncontrolled ambition. His excess of sympathy for Lear, the old man, blinds him to the scope of Lear's tragedy, which begins in a particular situation but widens and deepens into something much grander and more awe-inspiring, the tragedy of man.²⁹King Lear is as much a tragedy of old age as of ungrateful children—of man's failing vitality, his longing for release from work and responsibility, and his unwillingness to surrender, along with his duties, that part of himself which is his dignities. Lear stipulates,

Only we shall retain
The name, and all the addition to a king.

(I. i. 136)

It is this natural pride, and the stubborn will, developed by the responsibilities of life (heightened by making them the duties of kingship), which give Lear his significance, intensifying and universalizing his tragedy. The poet has added another dimension, in the storm scenes, in Lear's defiance of the elements and his defeat by them. Here Shakespeare has given “a local habitation and a name” to the human condition vis-a-vis nature. He has shown us Man, who pits himself against all the forces of this world (including time and weather), and who achieves wisdom only in resignation (patience) and love.

The meaning of the tragedy goes deeper than the conflict of good and evil, into the more fundamental problem of wisdom and folly, of the values of human life. Lear's story, as the story of Man's life, is much more universal than the theme of Everyman. It is the struggle of a man to retain the self, the stature and dignities he has achieved—“Ay, every inch a king”—against the grasping hands of the next generation and the very forces of nature. These things come to all (in varying degrees) who live to be old. Shakespeare has dramatized the struggle by giving Lear the power of absolute kingship, by making it a struggle between a man and his own children, reenforced and universalized by the underplot, and between man and nature, represented by age and storm. He has intensified the struggle by making the children wickedly ungrateful, and by making Lear stubborn to the point of insanity and beyond.

We cannot leave the subject of Lear's madness without considering one more scene. There has been question of whether Lear returns to insanity just before he dies. His delusion that Cordelia still lives, that he can prove it by a looking-glass, a feather, that she has spoken—these things are not evidences of insanity, but of hope and love. Lear is dazed and stunned by his loss. He cannot accept it. His mind struggles against the unbearable truth. Cordelia is the whole world to him now. He replies to Kent at random, and Albany finally says,

He knows not what he says; and vain it is
That we present us to him.

(V. iii. 293-294)

It is not that he is insane, but that he has completely forgotten self in his concentration on Cordelia. Nothing else enters his consciousness. When he is told that his two wicked daughters are dead, he replies (sadly, looking at Cordelia), “Ay, so I think”. His daughters are all Cordelia. He has forgotten hate and revenge. When he speaks of killing “the slave that was a-hanging thee”, there is a flash of the old pride, but it is only in retrospect,

I have seen the day, with my good biting falchion
I would make them skip. I am old now,
And these crosses spoil [i.e. impair] me. Who are you?
Mine eyes are not o'th'best. I'll tell you straight.

(ll. 277-280)

Here he recognizes Kent, but he has forgotten his servant Caius who served him in his madness. He is preoccupied, and inattentive, rather than insane. He pays no attention to the messenger who announces Edmund's death, nor to Albany's plan for ruling the state (a piece of business which convention required). Albany breaks off, directing attention to Lear, with his “O, see, see!”

Here Lear makes his last speech, which is sane down to the last three lines, and then reason and life slacken the string together:

And my poor fool is hanged: no, no, no life?
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never.
Pray you undo this button. Thank you sir.
Do you see this? Look on her! Look her lips,
Look there, look there—He dies.

It has been pointed out that in the first of these lines “poor fool” is a term of affection for Cordelia. It has also been suggested that Lear is here confusing the Fool and Cordelia.³⁰ Surely this is a deliberate ambiguity on the part of the poet, intended to recall the Fool and Lear's madness to the audience in a way which is psychologically perfect in its association of the Fool and Cordelia, its recall of the earlier insanity of Lear, and its suggestive preparation for a return to insanity. Shakespeare plays upon his audience as a great musician plays an organ—he knows its stops and reeds, and he knows how to develop his themes so that, at the end, when brevity is required, he can recall a whole movement by a single word.

Much curious question has been raised about the interpretation of “Pray you undo this button.” Bradley (p. 293) saw in it only “bodily oppression asking for bodily relief”. That is there, but much more, also. The line and a half which follow clearly voice a return to delusion, which has been prepared for by Lear's behavior throughout this scene, so that at the end, three lines are enough to suggest to the audience that his mind has given way again. The full significance and utter pathos of “Pray you undo this button. Thank you sir”, is largely missed if it does not recall to the auditor that earlier imperious, “Off, off, you lendings! Come, unbutton here.”³¹ The act of a madman, performed with violence in Act III, is repeated in gentleness and humble gratitude. Lear is no longer a king, for a king does not ask, he commands. He does not address his subjects as “sir”. Lear, who in his pride and frustration would reject these “lendings” in defiance of the whole world, is now a king no longer, even to himself, but simply a heart-struck old man.

His mind and body fall out of tune together, and Kent makes the interpretive comment,

Vex not his ghost. O, let him pass! He hates him
That would upon the rack of this tough world
Stretch him out longer.

The tuned string which is sanity in Elizabethan idiom, and the thread of life of classical myth, have been metamorphosed by the magic of this poet's gift for concrete image into the figure of a man stretched by an instrument of torture. There is “bodily oppression asking for bodily relief” in Lear's “Pray you undo this button”, but there is much, much more. There is a humble welcoming of death as relief from a life which, without love, has become an unsupportable burden. Lear dies because he cannot bear life any farther; and Edgar speaks a hope which is a benediction,

                                                  We that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

Notes

1. A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (London, 1949), p. 287n. says, “at sight of Edgar, in a moment something gives way in Lear's brain, … Henceforth he is mad.” Kenneth Muir, King Lear (The Arden Shakespeare, London, 1955), p. liv, says, “Yet Lear, on the appearance of Poor Tom, does go mad.” Norman Maclean, “Episode, Scene, Speech, and Word: The Madness of Lear”, in Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern, ed. R. S. Crane (University of Chicago Press, 1954), pp. 608-615, gives an elaborate analysis of Lear's reaction at his moment of encounter with Poor Tom.

2. Joseph Wharton, The Adventurer (1753) finds Lear's calling Edgar a “learned Theban” at the end of III. iv, “the first plain indication of the loss of his reason.”

3. Coleridge's Shakespearean Criticism, ed. T. M. Raysor (Harvard University Press, 1930), I, 66. Coleridge says of scene iv, “The scene ends with the first symptoms of positive derangement—here how judiciously interrupted [by the fifth scene] in order to allow an interval for Lear in full madness to appear” in scene vi.

4. H. Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare (Princeton, 1952), I, 274, 294 ff., treats IV. vi as the high point in Lear's madness. Maclean, p. 606, says, “By many signs Lear's final scene in Act III is the final scene in Lear's way to madness”; but he calls IV. vi the scene “where his madness is complete” (p. 604).

5. “Enter Lear Mad”, Shakespeare Quarterly, VIII (1957), 311-329.

6. Kahn, p. 312; Prefaces, I, 294; and see R. B. Heilman, The Great Stage (Louisiana University Press, 1933), p. 16, where he calls IV. vi, the “climactic mad scene”. See also pp. 298-299, note 28; and p. 194.

7. II. iv. 279-281. I quote the most recent carefully edited text, King Lear, ed. Alfred Harbage (Penguin Books, 1958). For a survey of comments on Lear's madness see Irving Ribner, “Lear's Madness in the Nineteenth Century”, Shakespeare Association Bulletin, XXII (1947), 117-129.

8. This is a natural and common phenomenon. People suffering from extreme grief or pain beat themselves, wring their hands, tear their hair, etc.

9. This is Maclean's conclusion, but his analysis (p. 610) is more concerned with the reaction of the audience to the events on the stage than with the explanation of Lear's psychology.

10. On the prose of madness see Milton Crane, Shakespeare's Prose (Chicago, 1951), pp. 160-161, 163 ff. Maclean, pp. 612-615, calls Lear's first question to Edgar, “The question asked in consternation and commiseration”, qualities hardly applicable to a madman.

11. These are popular, not necessarily clinical, signs of madness. Shakespeare is writing for a popular audience, and these indications are in the same class with popular stories about people who think they are Napoleon or Julius Caesar, or who suddenly kick a sympathetic visitor downstairs, “Lest you forget.” However, Shakespeare's representation of madness was highly praised by medical students of insanity in the nineteenth century; see Ribner, passim, J. S. H. Bransom, The Tragedy of King Lear (Oxford, 1934), provides a more recent study. The New Variorum Edition of King Lear, ed. H. H. Furness (Philadelphia, 1908), pp. 412-417, excerpts four of these medical opinions. Dr. Carl Stark (pp. 416-417) admires Shakespeare's preparation for madness in the physical and mental exhaustion of Lear. Dr. I. Ray, speaks of “delusions and gross improprieties of conduct” as characteristic of insanity. Most of the doctors classify Lear's as a case of senile dementia and center on the early scenes as symptomatic—an interpretation which stultifies the whole tragedy and cannot represent the author's intention.

12. The debate, opened by Charles Lamb, as to whether King Lear is an actable play, still goes on. Granville-Barker, Prefaces, I, 261 ff., defends its stage-worthiness. R. W. Zandvoort, “King Lear: the Scholars and the Critics”, surveys the trends in criticism since 1930, in Mededelingen der Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Weltenschappen, afd. Letterkunde, Nieuwe Reeks, Deel 19, No. 7 (Amsterdam, 1956), pp. 229-246.

13. Kahn, pp. 321-325.

14. Of the 38 lines omitted in the Folio, 20 are devoted to Edgar's irrelevant babble and the Fool's comments. The remaining 18 lines, spoken by Lear, come between his expression of a will to torture, “To have a thousand with red burning spits / Come hizzing in upon 'em—” (ll. 15-16), and the self-pity of “The little dogs and all”, etc. (ll. 61-63). These, with the proposal to “anatomize (i.e. dissect) Regan” to see “Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?” (ll. 74-79), are the key speeches in the scene. Lines 17-55 can be omitted without omitting any part of Lear's revelation of his hate, self-pity, and blindness to his own fault.

15. Muir, p. lxiii, suggests that he stands for “worldly common sense”.

16. W. B. C. Watkins, Shakespeare and Spenser (Princeton, 1950), p. 96-97, sees the Fool as “a dramatization of what really goes on in Lear's mind”, a symbolization.

17. Granville-Barker, p. 291. It is curious that Granville-Barker, pp. 311-312, should so vehemently deny to the Fool the prophecy which ends III. ii. Lear and the Fool are alone in the storm. Kent finds them and offers to bring them to a hovel. Lear consents and exits with Kent while the Fool turns back to make the prophecy which interposes between the exit of Lear and the entrance of Gloucester and Edmund in III. iii. In this short scene of 23 lines Gloucester confides to Edmund that he is going to disobey the Dukes and relieve Lear. He is still at home, while Lear is wandering in the storm. Obviously an interval of some kind is needed to make a pause between the two scenes, not only for the change of place, but to separate the tone of the two scenes—the pathos of Lear's sufferings and the intellectually perceived irony of Gloucester's betrayal of himself into the hands of his treacherous son. The keys in which the two scenes are written are so different that some few notes of transition are needed and the Fool's prophecy, with its conundrum quality serves admirably to lead the audience from pity and sympathy to a state of mind where they will grasp intelligently the implications of III. iii.

18. Bradley, pp. 312-315, argues that he is a boy or a frail, boyish man. For children's love of riddles, see Iona and Peter Opie, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (New York, 1960); and W. H. Canaway's letter in the Times (London) Literary Supplement Dec. 25, 1959.

19. This is his last line, although, in the Quarto, Kent apparently addresses him later, “Come, help to bear thy master. Thou must not stay behind,” a speech which suggests that the part was played by a man, not a boy (no doubt Armin).

20. Bradley does not discuss this passage. Granville-Barker, pp. 296-297, calls Lear's indictment of mankind “compassion for sin as well as suffering”, since Lear says, “none does offend, none, I say, none.” Heilman, pp. 209-210, speaks of Lear's revelation of the world's evil, and calls it (p. 198) “a very penetrating insight”, “devastating insight into the moral reality of the world.” See also pp. 95, 298-299, note 28, and 211, 220-221. G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire (Oxford, 1937), pp. 210-211, thinks that “Lear's mind in madness is penetrating below the surface shows to the heart of human reality.”

21. See Kahn, especially pp. 311-313. It does not, of course, follow, as Dr. Kahn's argument assumes, that because Lear enters mad in IV. vi, he cannot have been fully mad earlier. The stage direction is not evidence of the beginning of the derangement.

22. Granville-Barker, p. 295.

23. Cordelia's inability to “tell her love” is partly a youthful modesty and reticence in regard to emotion. See her aside in I. i, and her monosyllabic half-lines in IV. vii, especially her incoherent protest, “no cause, no cause”. She is not in general tongue-tied, but rather quick-witted and sharp in her observations, see I. i. 95-104. E. A. Block, “King Lear: A Study in Balanced and Shifting Sympathies”, Shakespeare Quarterly X (1959), 499-512, provides a useful study of Shakespeare's manipulation of the old stories and especially of the part of Cordelia, in order to create the human and credible relationships which make the action intelligible and significant.

24. See On the Art of Poetry, an amplified version of Aristotle's Poetics, by Lane Cooper (New York, 1913), pp. 40-41. In the Loeb Classical Library ed. of the Poetics, W. Hamilton Fyfe, the translator renders hamartia simply “some tragic flaw in him” and “some great flaw”, see pp. 46-47.

25. See Bradley, pp. 273-279, and passim. Muir, pp. lii-liii, in discussing the tragedy of parent-child relationship and of kingship, mentions the conflict between youth and age, but he does not analyze the struggle by which Lear learns humility and “patience”.

26. Granville-Barker, p. 273, n. 6, sees in the references to civil war in II. i. 10-11, and III. i. 19-21 (he misses Gloucester's “There is division between the Dukes” in III. iii. 7-8, and ignores the civil implications of the struggle over Edmund in IV. ii, v, etc.) as the remnant of an older plan, meaningless in the present context.

27. Bradley, pp. 315-322, presents a sympathetic discussion of Cordelia's refusal to humor Lear, but he does not see it as inability of a young girl of intelligence but emotional inexperience to “heave her heart into her mouth”. G. L. Kittredge, The Tragedy of King Lear (Boston, 1940), p. xiii, sees her refusal as simply a necessity of the story. Granville-Barker, pp. 303-305, sees pride answering pride. Others blame her as an undutiful child and thankless subject. G. Wilson Knight, p. 176, interprets Cordelia's refusal as sincerity which forbids pretense, but he comments, “It is, indeed, curious that so storm-furious a play as Lear should have so trivial a domestic basis.” Surely the failure of understanding in Lear, and of communication in Cordelia are not “trivial” at so important a juncture.

28. Bradley, pp. 262 ff., and 298-330. Heilman, passim. Recently Carolyn S. French, “Shakespeare's ‘Folly’: King Lear”, Shakespeare Quarterly, X (1959), 253-259, attempts to interpret the play in terms of natural versus spiritual wisdom.

29. R. W. Chambers, King Lear: The First W. P. Ker Memorial Lecture (Glasgow, 1940), sees the play, not as “the redemption of Lear,” not as a purgatory, or “wheel of fire” but as “a vast poem on the victory of true love.”

30. Bradley, p. 314; Watkins, p. 96.

31. Heilman, pp. 79-83, discusses Lear's three attempts to undress, in III. iv, IV. vi, and V. iii, but does not comment on the significance of the contrast.