[In the following excerpt, Felperin suggests that Shakespeare's King Lear defies both simple moral and absurdist readings—the two principal modes of mid-twentieth century critical interpretation of the drama.]

The ways in which a play's central interpretive problem arises from specific changes Shakespeare has wrought on his traditional models are particularly clear and traceable in the case of King Lear. At least as early as Samuel Johnson's pained observations on the ending of the play, interpretation has concerned itself with what to make of Shakespeare's alteration of the traditional story of Lear and Cordelia away from poetic justice and toward unprecedented suffering. As everyone knows, all of Shakespeare's immediate sources—the old play King Leir, Holinshed's Chronicles, Spenser's Faerie Queene, and A Mirror for Magistrates—present Lear and Cordelia triumphant at last, with virtue rewarded and vice punished. Though some versions return Cordelia to prison, the victim of further rebellion and finally her own suicide, these events occur after Lear's vindication and peaceful death. Moreover, Shakespeare has made other changes which would seem to redouble the deliberate violence of this basic change. For one thing, he has omitted the wealth of consoling Christian and Biblical parallels that interlace the play of Leir, as well as most of the Christian atmosphere that permeates the other versions. Then too, he has included the parallel subplot of Gloucester and his sons, derived from Sidney's Arcadia, and apparently serving to universalize and underscore the cruelties of the Lear action. As if this were not enough, he adds the ordeal of madness to Lear's other afflictions. It is not difficult to see how these changes encourage the two basic possibilities of response I have termed pious and romantic, each of which informs a school of criticism on the play. A neo-romantic or modernist response oriented toward the result of Shakespeare's alterations of his Christian sources rather than the sources themselves has stressed the godless secularity of the play, the paganness of its world, and the unredeemed or “absurd” nature of its suffering. To a more allegorizing and archeological school, however, it remains possible to see through or past Shakespeare's alterations of his Christian sources in order to reconcile the play with them. “Only to earthbound intelligence,” writes one critic, “is Lear pathetically deceived in thinking Cordelia alive. Those familiar with the Morality plays will realize that Lear has found in her unselfish love the one companion who is willing to go with him through Death up to the throne of the Everlasting Judge.”¹

These are of course the extreme possibilities of response to the play. But there is a third possibility, more problematic and interesting in that it combines elements of both the modernist and pious approaches to the play in uneasy suspension. This is the view most fully articulated by A. C. Bradley, who represents the culmination of the romantic approach and sees the implications of Shakespeare's changes in their full horror, yet who also cannot resist suggesting that the play might be piously retitled “The Redemption of King Lear.” In his ambivalence Bradley anticipates what has perhaps become the dominant approach to the play, an approach that is not explicitly Christian but that displaces the older Christian meanings into the terms of a secular humanism, the Christian origin and structure of which are still clear. Lear changes, grows, gains wisdom, even a kind of redemption as the result of his suffering, madness, and death. Though Cordelia may not be the incarnate principle of Faith or Love, she is the human mediator of those virtues. Through strenuous exegesis along these lines, a critic such as Maynard Mack can argue for the modernity of the play and at the same time re-assimilate it to the vision of redemption offered in its sources, Shakespeare's departures from them serving only to humanize and deepen that vision by making it harder-earned and by that token more valuable:

If there is any “remorseless process” in King Lear, it is one that begs us to seek the meaning of our human fate not in what becomes of us, but in what we become. Death, as we saw, is miscellaneous and commonplace; it is life whose quality may be made noble and distinctive. Suffering we all recoil from; but we know it is a greater thing to suffer than to lack the feelings and virtues that make it possible to suffer. Cordelia, we may choose to say, accomplished nothing, yet we know it is better to have been Cordelia than to have been her sisters. When we come crying hither, we bring with us the badge of all our misery; but it is also the badge of the vulnerabilities that give us access to whatever grandeur we achieve.²

Quite apart from the statement itself, Mack's conclusion recalls in its rhetoric of contrast and compensation—“Death … life”; “Suffering … a greater thing”; “nothing … better”; “misery … vulnerabilities”—nothing in the play so much as Edgar's own summing-up: “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say. / The oldest hath borne most: we that are young. …” Of course it also recalls the homiletic rhetorical mode of Shakespeare's own Christian sources, not only the old Leir and A Mirror for Magistrates but the medieval dramatic and visionary tradition that Mack himself discovers behind the play. In the effort to argue the play's modernity, its special relevance for “our time,” Mack draws our attention, stylistically and substantively, to its most conventional and Christian elements.

What is it, then, in the structure of King Lear that moves such critics as Bradley and Mack to reach conclusions manifestly at odds with their own critical premises, the one employing a romantic approach in the service of Christianizing the play, and the other an archeological approach in the name of its presumed modernism? Such paradoxes of critical response can be traced directly to one of the major changes Shakespeare has worked on his sources, the introduction of the story of Gloucester as a reflection of the story of Lear. Bradley was, in fact, among the first to explore the implications of this parallelism, and most commentators since have followed him in seeing its effect as one of mutual reinforcement. The Gloucester subplot, that is, works “to enact and express a further aspect of the Lear experience.”³ It now becomes clearer how the Christianity Shakespeare has apparently taken pains to remove from King Lear finds its way back into its interpretation. For the Gloucester action embodies an essentially Christian structure, or at least a concerted attempt on the part of its principal actors to discover or recreate such a structure:

ALBANY.
If that the heavens do not their visible spirits
Send quickly down to tame these vile offences,
It will come,
Humanity must perforce prey on itself,
Like monsters of the deep.

(IV.ii.45-49)

ALBANY.
This shows you are above,
You justicers, that these our nether crimes
So speedily can venge. But, O poor Gloucester!
Lost he his other eye?

(IV.ii.78-81)

EDGAR.
It was some fiend; therefore, thou happy father,
Think that the clearest gods, who makes them honors
Of men's impossibilities, have preserved thee.

(IV.vi.72-74)

EDGAR.
The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us:
The dark and vicious place where thee he got
Cost him his eyes.

(V.iii.171-174)

Each of these expressions of belief in divine justice and providential purpose—the most explicit in the play—occurs at a major turning point in the plot, but in each instance it is the Gloucester plot that is involved. If the Gloucester plot is supposed to exist in a mirroring or parallel relation to the Lear plot, it becomes not only possible but inevitable that the Christian structure and sentiment expressed through the former will be transferred to the latter, whatever critical premise we start from.

Yet it is precisely the pervasive Christianizing of the subplot that puts into question its supposed parallelism with the main plot. It is almost as if the older Christian structure deliberately dismantled in the story of Lear is just as deliberately reconstructed in the story of Gloucester, which had been only implicitly Christian in Sidney. With its black-and-white contrasts of good and bad, lawful and illegitimate, “natural” and “unnatural” sons, its clear symmetries of cause and effect, sin and retribution, moral blindness and physical blinding, the Gloucester action is basically as simple and homiletic in structure as any of the neat little “tragedies” of A Mirror for Magistrates and the long medieval tradition of the falls of illustrious men that lies behind it. The Gloucester action, like the medieval and morality-derived models of the Lear action, is not “tragic” at all in the sense we have been exploring. It offers none of the fatal discrepancies between form and experience, role and self, sign and significance that we have seen beset Hamlet and Othello, no heroic casting about for roles and forms to define present experience, and no ironic awareness of their inadequacy even as they are played out. In this respect, the Gloucester-Edgar-Edmund subplot in Lear resembles nothing in the earlier tragedies so much as the Polonius-Laertes-Ophelia subplot in Hamlet, with which it shares the common function of re-enacting a recognizably conventional “tragedy” that throws the more intractable experience of Hamlet and Lear into stark relief. Just as the Polonius subplot turns out to be a simple revenge melodrama with the stock revenger Laertes as protagonist, as latter-day Nemesis, so the Gloucester subplot turns out to be a simple dramatic exemplum illustrating the educative abasement of the complacent sinner. Its essential Christian structure is foreshadowed as early as Kent's casual reply to Gloucester's tasteless jokes over Edmund's bastardizing: “I cannot wish the fault undone, the issue of it being so proper” (I.i.17-18). The action, that is, illustrates a fortunate fall and issues in redemptive suffering, a sadder but wiser man, and a happy death: “his flawed heart … 'Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief, / Burst smilingly” (V.iii.198-201). The Gloucester action at no point puts into question its initial assumptions concerning the origin of evil or the meaning of suffering, for in its fulfillment of a conventional Christian design those questions are answered in advance and those answers only confirmed by its outcome. Something always comes of something, evil of illegitimacy and good of legitimacy. The universe of the Gloucester action operates by strict and transparent laws of cause and effect, which are at no point challenged, though of course they can be disobeyed: “I stumbled when I saw.” The assumption here is that he now sees “feelingly” and truly. Just as his “pilgrimage” to Dover has an attainable goal, though it is not the one he intended, so experience has an ascertainable meaning, though it may not be ascertained until the end.

The Gloucester action is designed throughout to illustrate that meaning, negatively and positively, through the theatrical endeavors of Edmund and Edgar. For their histrionics, though morally contrasting, are always of a distinctly programmatic and emblematic kind. Their role-playing, that is, is only skin-deep. In Edgar's appearance as Poor Tom and later as unnamed challenger, there is nothing of the groping toward self-definition we associate with Shakespearean tragic role-playing. His roles are as easily and completely put on and off as the costume or vizor they depend on: “Edgar I nothing am” (II.ii.21). They are mere expedients contrived for the temporary purpose of preserving himself, bringing Gloucester through despair to repentance, and recovering his own legitimate rights, and once they have successfully achieved those purposes they are shed as the mere disguises they are. Edmund's role-playing is equally superficial. There is none of the mystery behind his Vice-like plot of ambition and intrigue that there is in the case of Iago, with whom he is often misleadingly equated. Edmund's “motivation” is only too clear from the patronizing treatment we see him receive at Gloucester's hands and from his own soliloquy on his status as bastard. To be a bastard is, as Edmund makes clear, to be superfluous, to have no rightful or legal place within the social structure. He therefore attempts to legitimate himself in the name of an amoral nature that exists prior to social forms, to create a rival structure proceeding from and centered on the self. All this is perfectly logical, as Richard III's “And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover … / I am determined to prove a villain” (Richard III, I.i.28-30) is logical. But in neither case is it psychological; it points to no hidden depths. Edmund has in fact more in common with such early and morality-derived Shakespearean villains as Aaron the Moor, Don John, and Richard III, who carry around with them an external sign or stigma that serves as badge and pretext for their villainy, than he does with Iago, whose alienation goes deeper and carries no badge, who is at some level a mystery to himself, and whose cultivation of a Vice-like evil can be neither fully explained nor fully demystified. For unlike that of Iago, Edmund's role can be put off as easily as it was put on: “Yet Edmund was beloved … some good I mean to do / Despite of mine own nature” (V.iii.241-246). Of course the scene of Edmund's “reformation” is no less naturalistic, no more openly homiletic in conception and derivation, than the scene of Gloucester's “suicide” and “salvation” stage-managed by Edgar. But then, these moments are not to be regarded as lapses on the part of a Shakespeare aiming at naturalistic consistency but here and there falling short of his mark. For it is within the Gloucester action that these “lapses,” which are part and parcel of its homiletic structure, moral emblematization, and allegorical motivation, are largely confined.⁴ The air of contrivance that hangs about the Gloucester action is pervasive, and it smells of morality.

Why, then, is the Gloucester action not more generally recognized to be deliberately archaic and artificial but is discussed instead as if it possessed or ought to possess a naturalistic coherence comparable to that of the Lear action? Here again the presupposition of a mutually reinforcing parallelism between the two plots is the source of potential misinterpretation. Just as the assumption of parallelism tempts us to expect from the Lear action a Christian allegorical coherence it does not have, so too it tempts us to expect from the Gloucester action a naturalistic coherence and dimensionality it does not have. Edgar's rhyming conclusion to the play, for example, in which he enjoins all present to “speak what we feel, not what we ought to say,” is often cited and discussed as if it constituted a deep and authentic response to the play's tragic experience and confirmed Edgar's wisdom and humanity. This is particularly ironic and revealing in so far as the speech may well belong to Albany—only the folio assigns it to Edgar—and it would make little difference if it were spoken by Albany. For quite apart from its choric conventionality familiar from previous summings-up by the likes of Horatio and Fortinbras, Cassio and Lodovico, the speech actually indicts its own speaker and its own idiom for having consistently done just the opposite. Edgar and Albany, who serve within the play as interpreters of Gloucester's experience, have throughout traded in a consoling and instructive morality with an unself-questioning assurance and an easy credulity that puts into question what it is they feel and whether they feel at all. Albany's assertions, for example, of divine justice—“This shows you are above / You justicers … But, O poor Gloucester! / Lost he his other eye?”—or his re-assertion at the end of its secular counterpart—“All friends shall taste / The wages of their virtue, and all foes / The cup of their deservings. O, see, see!” (V.ii.304-306)—are dramatically undermined by events that would seem blatantly to contradict them: the loss of Gloucester's other eye, the death-pangs of Lear. But when faced with the choice between revising their Christian vision in the face of adverse experience and simply reasserting that vision, such characters as Albany and Edgar invariably choose the latter course, persist in speaking what they “ought to say” at the expense of what they “feel.” Or perhaps for such determined moralists there is finally no consciousness of a gap between saying and feeling, since their action is shaped by them precisely to do away with all such discrepancies by containing, in the manner of medieval allegory, its own interpretation within it. The temptation to which many, if not most, commentators on the subplot have succumbed has been to follow their example and suppress their own sense of difference between the voice of convention and the voice of feeling—that is to say, between the subplot and the main plot.⁵

This is not finally to suggest, as up to now I may have seemed to be doing, that Shakespeare has indeed purged the Lear action of all remnants of older Christian dramatic convention. On the contrary, the main action often turns toward conventions of emblem and allegory not essentially different from those that govern the subplot, despite the fact that Shakespeare has in the end denied the poetic justice of his Christian sources. The very first scene of the division of the kingdom, for example, with its emblematic map and ritualistic speeches has struck many as archaic and antinaturalistic, a scene out of fairy-tale. In fact it recalls, in its stylized presentation of kingly pride and folly, the opening scene of one of the oldest extant moralities, The Pride of Life (1425) or, closer to home, the opening scene of Gorboduc (1562). Like his prototypes, Lear persists, against the admonitions of his wise counselors, in a course that proves disastrous, and, like them too, lives to repent of his actions. Given this initial and basic resemblance between the structure of the play and such models as these, a resemblance that has clearly survived Shakespeare's reworking of his immediate sources, it is little wonder that Bradley and others have glimpsed a vision of redemption in the play. Nor are these resemblances confined to the opening scene or the overarching structure of the Lear action. They reappear in many of its local details: in the banishment and stocking of the forthright Kent as the figure of Justice in several moralities had been banished and stocked; in Lear's homily on charity on the heath; in his mock trial of his daughters and indictments of earthly justice; in his madness itself, for which there are precedents in pictorial and morality tradition if not in the play's actual sources; in the vision of redemption Lear superimposes on Cordelia at his reunion and again even amid the shambles of the closing scene. And given this wealth of archaic reference within the Lear action, the question arises: why does all that has just been said of the gross conventionality of the Gloucester action not apply to it as well? What is it that makes the one modern, mimetic, and tragic and the other conventional and pseudo-tragic?

What distinguishes the main plot from the subplot is not the extent to which but the manner in which these older conventions are employed. In fact, the opening scene of the Lear action is much closer to the moralities in its ritual stylization than is the more domesticated and fluent opening scene of the Gloucester action. For that opening scene, staged by Lear himself, proceeds from and reflects his absolute confidence in the sacred authority of his role of king and the perfect correspondence among the natural, moral, and linguistic orders that supports it. In the security of this traditional vision of the world, Lear cannot imagine any possible disjuncture between role and self, appearance and reality, “sentence and power,” signum and res. Hence his surprise at Cordelia's unprogrammatic response of “nothing” and Kent's irreverent rejoinder to “see better.” It is against this initial morality vision of sacred unity that Lear's descent into a more modern and secular perception of ironic discontinuity is defined. The movement of the Lear action away from a morality vision thus opposes and crosses that of the Gloucester action toward a morality vision. Of course Lear does not abandon his original mode of vision immediately or willingly. He clings to his former way of seeing himself and his world, curses his daughters with a residual belief in the magical efficacy of his word, and calls down “plagues that in the pendulous air / Hang fated o'er men's faults” (III.iv.65-66). But these invocations of a morality scheme of divine justice inherent in the natural order now ring increasingly hollow even to him and almost as he utters them: “What is the cause of thunder?” (III.iv.146); “Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts” (III.vi.75-76). The change that Lear undergoes in the course of his play is not a change from one moral state to another, such as from pride to charity, but a change away from self-definition in terms of moral categories altogether and toward a new sense of existential indeterminacy, the very opposite of Gloucester's change. For whereas Gloucester is increasingly allegorized within his action, Lear is increasingly humanized within his, though not in the sense of becoming more humane—witness his cruel greeting of the blinded Gloucester and his accusations of the reassembled court as “murderers, traitors all” (V.ii.271)—but in the sense of becoming more fully and merely human.

This is not to suggest that he does not continue to fall back on moral categories of self-definition, but that he recognizes them to be somehow inadequate even as he does so. His set speech on charity toward the “poor, naked wretches,” (III.iv.28-36), for example, is right out of morality tradition and often cited as the beginning of Lear's moral re-education. But its imperative mood (“Take physic pomp”) gives way by the end of the homily to the subjunctive and optative mood (“That thou may'st shake the superflux to them / and show the heavens more just”). Man, by practicing charity, can only hope to show the heavens more just; he cannot make them so. Similarly, his mad reenactments of the forms of justice on the heath work to undermine the morality vision they represent. In that older drama, the satiric castigation of judicial corruption deals in such negative exempla as Lear offers, but only on the way to establishing a vision of true justice. Lear's recourse in his madness to this strain of morality rhetoric and imagery, however, works to strip away these social and religious legitimations to the emptiness and arbitrariness of the idea of justice itself, its fundamental disjuncture from a human nature that exists beneath or beyond moral and legal categories. Vice and guilt do not exist—“Die for adultery? No … None does offend” (IV.vi.165)—and neither does virtue and innocence: “Behold yond simp'ring dame … / The fitchew nor the soiled horse goes to 't / With a more riotous appetite” (IV.vi.108-112). Lear's view of the discrepancy between social forms and the human nature to which they are supposed to correspond is not at this point very far from Edmund's. The difference between them is not in moral outlook but in mimetic realization. Edmund holds his views lightly and complacently as a means of justifying himself and his actions; Lear comes to his reluctantly and painfully, after a lifetime of believing the opposite and against his present interests. Uniquely in the play, Lear's adoption of morality forms leads in each local instance and within his larger itinerary to a desperate fluctuation between his maddening perception of their inadequacy and a wishful retreat into the shelter they provide, however momentary.⁶

This breakdown of the morality forms by which the social order and the individual mind maintain their stability conditions not only Lear's madness in particular but Shakespearean madness in general. For the roles and forms of morality convention, as we have repeatedly seen, are employed by Shakespeare's characters as a protection against the confusion of raw experience, a screen that selectively permits only that which can be made sense of within a predetermined order to reach the perceiving mind. But it is an inflexible screen, whose very rigidity renders it breakable, exposing the self to that which it can no longer process. It is only Shakespeare's protagonists—Hamlet, Othello, Lear, and Lady Macbeth—as characters whose role-playing is precarious and whose naked humanity is therefore most vulnerable, who are capable of true madness. Their foils are immune to madness, precisely because they are too thoroughly engrossed in their protective roles for an underlying self ever to be exposed in its naked frailty. Lear in his madness thus stands in contrast to Gloucester, who naively wishes he could go mad like Lear, mistaking madness for a protection against pain when it is in fact an exposure to it:

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

(IV.vi.284-289)

Like his nakedness—to which it is the psychological correlative—Lear's madness also stands in contrast to Edgar's stagy and conventional madtalk of “sin” and “foul fiends.” Edgar's “madness,” as a role based upon a wholly traditional and external view of madness as demonic possession, is actually the antithesis of the true madness of Lear, since the latter arises from the breakdown of roles whereas the former is itself a role and therefore a protection against a maddening overperception. Like Edgar's mock-beggary, also deriving from a long tradition of moral iconography, his mock-madness is thus a shadow or parody of “the thing itself.” It has the status of a sign emptied of its significance and divorced from the realities of nakedness and madness to which it refers, the absent referent in both cases being supplied by Lear. Within the universe of Shakespearean tragedy, madness is thus the opposite pole to morality, a vision of undifferentiated anarchy as opposed to one of a wholly mapped-out order.

The temptation at this point is to grant this vision of madness and absurdity a privileged status and equate it with the meaning of the play. But this tendency is only the modernist counterpart of the archeological tendency to do the same with the earlier vision of morality, and is no more valid. Because Lear's vision of madness is an inversion of his vision of morality, it remains dependent on it, derives its terms from it, and is capable of being turned back into it. This is exactly what happens, for neither morality nor madness constitutes a resting-point for Lear or Shakespeare, and both are left behind on the way to a truer, more austere mimesis. The fact is that Lear is able to maintain neither the complacent vision he shared with his society at the beginning nor the painful counter-vision he comes to in his alienation, though he tries desperately to maintain each in turn. For when he awakens from his ordeal in the presence of Cordelia, he would seem to have renounced his restless probing for a demystified and naturalistic explanation of his world. Cordelia seems to him “a soul in bliss,” his madness the infernal or purgatorial punishment of “a wheel of fire,” and his recovery nothing less than a resurrection wrought by this “spirit” to whom he now kneels and prays for benediction. Not only has Lear renounced his maddening effort to explain the world, to find out its true causes, he has renounced the world itself. In a spirit of contemptus mundi, he resigns all interest in the vindication he had formerly tried to call down on his persecutors, leaving them to “The good years” (V.iii.24) of plague and pestilence to be devoured in due course. He welcomes his life with Cordelia in prison with a religious joy, as if it were a posthumous or monastic existence removed from the mutability of earthly life. Indeed, Lear has awakened to find himself, like several converted morality protagonists before him, clothed in the fresh garments traditionally emblematic of an inner and spiritual reaccommodation.⁷ Nowhere in the play is the return to an older morality vision so pure and complete, so strenuously and extravagantly reenacted—for we are still in the realm of histrionic recreation—as it is by Lear himself at the start of the final act. The play has all but reunited with its prototype, the wheel of interpretation come full circle.

If King Lear had ended here, we should still have had to say that Shakespeare has altered his sources significantly and, in so doing, achieved a representation of human depth and complexity quite beyond them and very much of the order of displaced Christian vision ascribed to the play by Bradley and Mack. But the final stage in the process of mimetic realization toward which the play moves consists in a still more radical putting into question of all prior visions—the vision of morality taken over from its sources and the counter-vision of madness introduced by Shakespeare alike—and that process has at this point only begun. For when Lear reenters shortly afterward with Cordelia in his arms, he no longer speaks in the recovered language of morality but in his earlier language of madness: “Howl, howl, howl, howl … / I know when one is dead and when one lives; / She's dead as earth” (V.iii.259-263). Yet by the end of this speech, he is calling for a looking-glass in the hope of life, which he then discovers in the very terms of Christian mystery: “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.267-269). Again, the play might well have ended here on this act of recuperation, however tentative, of the older vision. But it does not: “A plague upon you, murderers, traitors all! / I might have saved her. …” Or it could have ended soon afterward with Albany's assertion, however muted, of a restored justice of rewards and punishments. But it does not:

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.

(V.iii.307-311)

Lear's fluctuation between the visions of morality and madness, meaning and absurdity, accommodation and disaccommodation becomes dizzying in its intensity. But still it seems to go on: “Do you see this? Look on her. Look, her lips, / Look there, look there.” These parting lines might well be interpreted as another and final access of faith or delusion, yet they are themselves remarkably free of the mythologizations of either morality or madness, which have been only preludes to this moment and are now left behind. Lear's language and gesture now proceed not out of a convention of vision but out of a depth and fullness of feeling that is unquestionably “there” but unfathomable in its inwardness. His last lines merely point to a form that has also been “there” all along, though repeatedly misconstrued and overlooked, with no longer any attempt to define it. In the end, the play renounces its own mediations of morality and madness alike and redirects our attention to an undetermined reality that exists prior to and remains unavailable to both.

In the play that has come to be regarded as the definitive achievement of Shakespearean tragedy, Shakespeare has certainly not made things easy for us. For he leaves us in the end with not a choice of either morality and meaning or madness and absurdity, but more like an ultimatum of neither morality and meaning nor madness and absurdity, an ultimatum that becomes inescapable as a result of Lear's own strenuous and futile effort to remain within the realm of choice. Lear enacts in advance our own dilemma as interpreters, alternating between antithetical visions of experience, only to abandon both in favor of a pure and simple pointing to the thing itself. Interpreters of the play, like Albany, Kent, and Edgar within it, have been understandably reluctant to follow him into this state of aporia, of being completely at a loss, so peremptory is the human need to make sense of things, to find unity, coherence, resolution in the world of the text and the text of the world. Yet the aporia toward which not only Lear, but Shakespeare's other great tragedies, move represents the very negation of the possibility of unity, coherence, and resolution, of the accommodation that all our systems of explanation provide, be they pious or modernist, consoling or painful, older or newer. In his dizzying fluctuation between contradictory meanings, Lear reenacts the intense shifting between demystification and remystification of the self we saw in Othello's closing speech, which also ends with an act of pointing. We saw a similar movement in Hamlet's division between a last-gasp impulse to shape and tell his story—“O, I could tell you!”—and his equal and opposite impulse to repudiate self-mythologization altogether and return his play to the status of the most inexplicable dumb-show of all—“The rest is silence.” Yet this very process of casting off inherited forms and imposed meanings to point to the thing itself only invites their reimposition. Like Horatio and Fortinbras, Cassio and Lodovico, Edgar and Albany, we feel we still can and must report Hamlet's story to the world and tell Othello and Lear who they are, even though they themselves, possessed of larger, tougher, and finer minds than we, have anticipated our attempt and thrown up their hands. The characters we can denote truly—Laertes, Cassio, Gloucester—do not ask to be told who they are, for such characters are content to remain within the defining forms that tradition provides and that society, with the wisdom of self-preservation, maintains as “true.” Unlike his interpreters and his own choric commentators, however, Shakespeare never succumbs to the rhetorical pressure of the traditional forms he employs, to their built-in claim to have made sense of the world, but keeps them always in brackets and puts them ultimately into question. The Shakespearean text remains a step ahead of its critics, even at the very moment we think we have caught up with it. …

Notes

1. O. J. Campbell, “The Salvation of Lear,” ELH, XV (1948), p. 107. A useful review of Christian and existentialist, optimist and pessimist readings of the play is provided by William R. Elton in the opening chapter of his study of its renaissance theological content and context, King Lear and the Gods (San Marino, 1966).

2. King Lear in Our Time (Berkeley, 1965), p. 117.

3. L. C. Knights, “The Question of Character in Shakespeare,” in More Talking of Shakespeare, ed. John Garrett (London, 1959), p. 66. Quoted with approval by Maynard Mack, p. 71. The locus classicus of this view within Shakespearean criticism is to be found in A. C. Bradley: “The secondary plot fills out a story which would by itself have been somewhat thin. … This repetition does not simply double the pain with which the tragedy is witnessed: it startles and terrifies by suggesting that the folly of Lear and the ingratitude of his daughters are no accidents or merely individual aberrations, but in that dark cold world some fateful malignant influence is abroad, turning the hearts of the fathers against their children and of the children against their fathers, smiting the earth with a curse, so that the brother gives the brother to death and the father the son, blinding the eyes, maddening the brain, freezing the springs of pity, numbing all powers except the nerves of anguish and the dull lust of life.” Shakespearean Tragedy (New York, 1904, reprinted 1955), pp. 210-211. Like Mack and most others, Bradley transfers the superstitious or pious view of moral causality expressed by Gloucester onto the Lear action and proceeds to expound that view in the rhetoric of Christian homiletic.

4. Bradley, for example, lists a number of “improbabilities” and “inconsistencies” in the play: Edmund's ruse of writing a letter when he and Edgar live in the same house; Gloucester's journey to Dover to destroy himself when he might have done it closer to home; Edgar's unexplained decision not to reveal himself to his father; and so on. Bradley does state, however, that the improbabilities he lists are “particularly noticeable in the secondary plot.” Shakespearean Tragedy, pp. 207-208.

5. Despite the pervasiveness of the critical tendency to assimilate the two actions to one another, a nagging sense of tonal and structural difference is expressed by some critics. Bradley himself qualifies his assertion of a mutually reinforcing parallelism by stating that the subplot “provides a most effective contrast between its personages and those of the main plot, the tragic strength and stature of the latter being heightened by comparison with the slighter build of the former.” Shakespearean Tragedy, pp. 210-211. See, for example, Alvin B. Kernan, “Formalism and Realism in Elizabethan Drama: The Miracles in King Lear,” Renaissance Drama IX (1966), pp. 59-66; Sigurd Burckhardt, Shakespearean Meanings (Princeton, 1968), pp. 237-259; and Richard Levin, The Multiple Plot in English Renaissance Drama (Chicago, 1971), pp. 12-13. The “grotesque awkwardness,” “mediacy,” and “externality” which these critics respectively find in the subplot are all a function of its deliberate archaism and conventionality in contrast to the main plot.

6. In contrast to the easy volubility and willing credulity with which the characters of the subplot express and accept a moral for all occasions, Lear repeatedly displays a problematic relation to language itself almost from the beginning:

   Who is it that can tell me who I am?

   (I.iv.236)

   I can scarce speak to thee. Thou'lt not believe
   With how depraved a quality—O Regan!

   (II.iv.135-136)

   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.

   (II.iv.278-281)

   Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones:
   Had I your tongues and eyes, I'd use them so
   That heaven's vault should crack.

   (V.iii.259-261)

   These failures of speech, stammerings, outcries have no counterpart among the characters of the subplot, who are never at a loss for words. They point to the larger frustration and failure on the part of the principals—for Cordelia has foreseen the condition Lear discovers—to find an expressive form for feeling and action in the dramatic language of morality convention. By contrast, even Gloucester's “despair” is cogently expressed, and his own wavering between despair and faith is more a parody than a parallel of Lear's fluctuations. The “ill thoughts” he falls into after Edgar has indoctrinated him at Dover may correspond to Lear's own relapses into incoherence after his recuperation in the presence of Cordelia, but whereas Gloucester's wavering “'twixt joy and grief” is finally and happily resolved into joy as his heart bursts “smilingly,” Lear's desperate fluctuation between morality and madness, as we shall see, goes too deep to achieve resolution.

7. In the early morality, Wisdom, Who Is Christ (1425), for example, the regeneration of the protagonist Anima is marked by the following stage direction: “Here entrethe ANIMA, wyth the Fyve Wyttys goynge before, MYNDE on the on syde and WNDYRSTONDYNGE on the other syde and WYLL followyng, all in here fyrst clothynge. …” The Macro Plays, ed. Mark Eccles (E.E.T.S., Oxford, 1969), p. 149. On the significance of changes of costume in morality tradition, see T. W. Craik, The Tudor Interlude: Stage, Costume, and Acting (Leicester, 1967), pp. 49-92. Shakespeare calls attention to the fresh garments worn by his protagonists in similar moments of reunion and restoration in Pericles and The Tempest.