SOURCE: Goldman, Michael. “The Worst of King Lear.” In Shakespeare and the Energies of Drama, pp. 94-108. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972.

[In the following essay, Goldman argues that King Lear is essentially a play about suffering.]

At the end of IV, i of King Lear, Gloucester directs Edgar to take him to Dover. His words, like so many in the play, seem to have a wide and rich application to its entire action:

There is a cliff, whose high and bending head
Looks fearfully in the confined deep.
Bring me but to the very brim of it,
And I'll repair the misery thou dost bear
With something rich about me.

(76-80)

Taken by themselves, these lines constitute a little poem on the nature of tragedy. Like Lear, in whom Nature stands on the verge of her confine, Gloucester is made to see (in spite of his blindness) deep into the fearful abyss (“How fearful / And dizzy 'tis, to cast one's eyes so low”). We do not accompany Lear beyond the edge. (We cannot, for example, tell what his last glimpse of Cordelia's lips has shown him.) Indeed we are frequently made to feel how hard it is to follow him as far as we do, but we sense that by accompanying him, with effort, in his trip to the brink, we are given “something rich about him” that is somehow related to the misery we bear.

Of course the misery we bear most immediately in the play is the pain of watching it, and the punishing aspect of the play—the indignities, tortures, and violations the actors' bodies suffer, and through them our own—cannot be overemphasized in our reading of the play or even, I believe, in production; at any rate, they are easily underemphasized.

The history of Lear in the theater has been a continuing search for new ways to make the play easier for actors and audience to take. To an extent this is a part of its design. Even those productions that mean to “bring Lear home” to the audience seem always to involve fresh bluntings and blurrings of the full effect. Peter Brook's mounting of the play, for example, was heavily indebted to Jan Kott, the author of Shakespeare Our Contemporary and a critic particularly alert—often with valuable results—to violence and “cruelty” in Shakespeare. But the production scarcely came to grips with the play's full unpleasantness. The idea was to emphasize that Shakespeare is as contemporary as Samuel Beckett, which is a little like emphasizing that Mozart is as contemporary as Satie. The suffering of King Lear was planed down to affectlessness;¹ and though this passed as a very immediate and close-to-the-bone version of the play, the reason it was so acceptable is that it was—compared to the full King Lear—so painless. Brook's interpretation had the great virtue of being manageable; it was under control as productions of Lear seldom are. It succeeded in giving us the impression of going through a great deal of horror without having to digest it. Paul Scofield was able to emerge from his performance relatively unscathed. (I say “relatively” since Scofield makes a specialty of looking scathed; he seemed no more so at the end than at the beginning.) Now, affectlessness is a revealing mood and it has its place in King Lear, especially toward the end when the more ordinary characters begin to cave in before the spectacle of Lear's suffering. Endgame, which according to Kott and Brook is the play's modern analogue, makes unrelieved affectlessness illuminating by turning it into elegant and varied, if black comedy. But this is not the method of Shakespeare's play.

It is perhaps only natural to look at King Lear and decide that since it contains so much horror its dominant mood must be beaten numbness and monotony. Certainly the response tells us something true about the play. There is more pain in it than we easily know what to do with. In an age of the knowledge of extreme pain, which is for most of us knowledge of the extreme pain of others, it is comforting to believe that affectlessness is the worst pain. It allows us to think that our sympathies are really adequate to our full experience while at the same time saving us from total disintegration in the face of the daily paper and the T.V. news. Gifted comedians like Beckett may probe our affectlessness by brilliant imitations of monotony, but the danger is that we are all too ready to believe that monotony itself is the deepest truth pain knows. Monotony may be the final condition of the suffering body and as such a blessed release, but it is not the worst suffering nor the truth of suffering. The victims of torture may be allowed the escape into affectlessness, if they can find it—but not artists or their audiences.

King Lear is designed to confront torture, not numbness. It is also deeply aware of our desire to escape. Take for example simply what we see in the scene already referred to, the physical atrocity of the tableau of Gloucester and Edgar. Gloucester is not only recently blinded, humiliated, and suicidal—his eyes are bleeding. Edgar too is a horrible sight, a fact easily overlooked in reading and largely missed in productions, where he is usually a well set-up jeune premier in a blanket. His father tells us that when he first saw him on the heath he “made me think a man a worm,” and Edgar has explained in some detail exactly how he proposes to transform himself:

I will preserve myself, and am bethought
To take the basest and most poorest shape
That ever penury, in contempt of man,
Brought near to beast. My face I'll grime with filth,
Blanket my loins, elf all my hairs in knots,
And with presented nakedness out-face
The winds and persecutions of the sky.
The country gives me proof and precedent
Of Bedlam beggars, who, with roaring voices,
Strike in their numb'd and mortified bare arms
Pins, wooden pricks, nails, springs of rosemary;
And with this horrible object, from low farms,
Poor pelting villages, sheep-cotes, and mills,
Sometimes with lunatic bans, sometimes with prayers,
Enforce their charity.(2)

(II, iii, 6-20)

There is no reason not to take him at his word. On the stage Edgar must be filthy, grotesque, very nearly naked, and bear on his body evidence of horrible mutilation. He is the kind of beggar who enforces charity—so repellent, nasty, and noisy that you pay him to go away. We have all seen beggars of this type, though they are infrequent in American cities because the mode is not profitable. Edgar is not the ingratiating panhandler, or the collapsed wino, or the pitiable orphan of the storm, and certainly not the decent young man down on his luck that actors frequently portray him to be. He is the kind that sticks his stump in your face. He does not set out to inspire feelings of benevolence, pity, or human solidarity. We give to him because we cannot stand him, because his body is a fearful reminder of the deformity that life may visit upon us at any instant.

Why, then, do we so seldom find Edgar played this way? One important reason is that it would make things very hard for the actor who has to play Lear. Edgar is usually presented as a kind of masquerade-party madman so as to contrast with Lear's genuine madness. The contrast of course is just the point, but Edgar's masquerade is a horrible and convincing affair; his life depends on it. The primary effect of the contrast is not to show up the artifice of Edgar's madness but to drive home the intensity of Lear's. Unfortunately the actor playing the King still has ahead of him the Dover scenes, the adultery speech, and the death of Cordelia; his problem is how to endure his part. Full loathsomeness for Edgar means added impossibilities for Lear. And this technical problem reflects our larger experience of the play. We say of Lear, “How can he go on? How much more is he—are we—to suffer?” Just as the characters in Hamlet keep asking questions about the meaning of action, the characters in King Lear keep inquiring about suffering: how much more there is to endure and what they are to conclude from it.

The audience quickly recognizes how cautious it must be about resolving on the “meaning of suffering” in King Lear—or at least about finding a single meaning—because it is a subject on which so many pronouncements are made in the play, only to be undercut by the continuing action. When Albany learns that Cornwall is dead he cries, “This shows you are above, / You justicers,” and one of our impulses is to agree. But it is scarcely five minutes since we have had to sit through the excruciating scene of Gloucester's blinding, and in the interim Gloucester has appeared once more, with bleeding eyes. Whatever our convictions as to justice and divinity, be they Elizabethan or existentialist, our immediate response is to add another, conflicting feeling to the one we share with Albany. And Albany's mind follows the same oscillation—a characteristic one in the play—from summing up the meaning of sorrow to feeling it anew:

                                        This shows you are above,
You justicers, that these our nether crimes
So speedily can venge! But, O poor Gloucester!

(IV, ii, 78-80)

It is no wonder that two of the most familiar quotations from King Lear cancel each other out:

As flies to wanton boys, are we to th' gods,
They kill us for their sport.

(IV, i, 38-39)

The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices,
Make instruments to plague us.

(V, iii, 170-71)

Edgar in particular has a gift for confidently formulating some principle about the uses, limits, or significance of suffering only to have it shattered by succeeding events. At the end of III, vi he has said:

When we our betters see bearing our woes,
We scarcely think our miseries our foes.
… But then the mind much sufferance doth o'erskip,
When grief hath mates, and bearing fellowship.
How light and portable my pain seems now.

(109-115)

But his next scene will show the fallacy of this comforting reflection; Edgar's grief will only be increased by the “fellowship” of his father. In IV, i he establishes another familiar principle—when things are at the worst they can only get better—which again he quickly has to abandon. (“The worst is not / So long as we can say ‘This is the worst.’”)

Gloucester shares the family weakness for half-baked moral observations. In the same scene he says to Poor Tom:

Here, take this purse, thou whom the heavens' plagues
Have humbled to all strokes. That I am wretched
Makes thee the happier.

(67-69)

Gloucester is wrong on both counts. Edgar is not inured to all strokes, and there is no closed economy of misery: Gloucester's purse does not make him happier.

This constant return to the theme of what is the worst and to the uses of suffering is of course part of the large pattern of accumulation and reduction which has often been noted in the play. In Hamlet the characteristic of the action is variety—new stimuli, changes of direction, pirates, players, ghosts, Hamlet as courtier, Hamlet as punster, Hamlet as bitter satirist, Hamlet as near-suicide, Hamlet as cunning revenger, etc. Appropriately in the language of Hamlet the tendency is toward groups of words that distinguish, vary, multiply distinctions (“dead waste and middle of the night,” “tempest, torrent and whirlwind of your passion,” “to show the very age and body of the time his form and pressure”). In King Lear on the other hand the characteristic of the action is more of the same, rejection by one daughter and then another, the putting out of one eye and then the other. We go not simply from bad to worse, but from worst to worse. Likewise, in the language of Lear, the tendency is to repetitions that accumulate intensity (“Speak. Nothing, my lord. Nothing! Nothing. Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again.” “Howl, howl, howl!” “Never, never, never, never, never!” “Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill!”). The method of the play is to expose us to more than we thought we could take, and thus to make us acutely aware of all the phenomena associated with taking it, including physical exhaustion and the coining of platitudes.

In a sense Lear is a play of competitions. Consider the number of times when characters are presented trying to outdo each other in extreme or strange activities. There is a very formal competition in filial affection at the play's beginning, as well as Lear's competition with the storm, in which he is seen “contending with the fretful elements,” striving “to out-scorn / The to-and-fro-conflicting wind and rain.” Lear competes with Edgar in nakedness as well as madness. There is a sexual competition between Regan and Goneril over Edmund. The two daughters also have a habit of competing in bloody-mindedness:

REGAN
We shall further think of it.
GONERIL
We must do something, and i' th' heat.

(I, i, 311-12)

GONERIL
What need you five and twenty, ten, or five? …
REGAN
What need one?

(II, iv, 264-66)

REGAN
Hang him instantly.
GONERIL
Pluck out his eyes.

(III, vii, 4-5)

The chivalric trial-by-combat in the last scene is another formal competition, of a more conventional type—even disconcertingly so. Suddenly we are in the presence of Spenserian, fairy-tale, happy-ending-style combat (with Edgar, having advanced through a series of improvements in dress, now “fair and warlike” in armor). And at the very end one has a sense that a terrible endurance contest is going on. Gloucester's heart bursts between extremes of joy and grief. Under the same stress Kent's heart is cracking too, but he hangs on gamely, while everyone seems to agree with Edgar that Lear has borne the most—none of these sufferers (nor, we are assured, any future competitors) will be able to match him.

The last twist of the accumulative pattern is of course the moment which Bradley³ quite correctly singles out as containing the most likely “moral” of King Lear:

ALBANY
The gods defend her! …
Enter Lear with Cordelia dead in his arms.

(V, iii, 256)

At this point Kent raises the question that perplexed Tate and the eighteenth century editors: “Is this the promis'd end?” Now, there is nothing that makes us feel more superior to this era than its “improvements” of King Lear. But Tate's version and Johnson's approval of it show that they at least felt the play's essential quality: that it is nearly or perhaps wholly unbearable. We may well ask ourselves whether our eagerness to perform the full text represents openness to its pain or rather a superior capacity to be untouched by it. Black comedy is a grim vision of life, but it is no substitute for black tragedy. Samuel Johnson apprehended the power of blackness as deeply as any man, and that is why he could not bring himself to reread the last act for years. If the play is presented with anything like its true horror, Kent's question should become our own. He is referring to the promised end of Doomsday, of course, but since we have clearly reached the final scene, the other meaning is present too. Is this the way the play is supposed to end?

It is perhaps especially shattering for Kent, because he has been promising us a different end, or at least part of an ending, for a long time. He gets a lot of dramatic play out of the fact that he intends to stay in disguise until the right moment. He makes frequent allusions to his real identity. This to the Gentleman:

                    I'll bring you to our master Lear,
And leave you to attend him. Some dear cause
Will in concealment wrap me up awhile.

(IV, iii, 52-54)

This to Cordelia when she urges him to change out of his servant's garb:

                                                  Pardon, dear madam;
Yet to be known shortens my made intent.
My boon I make it, that you know me not
Till time and I think meet.

(IV, vii, 8-11)

And he then goes on to reply gnomically to the Gentleman's rumor that he, Kent, is in Germany (90-92).

Now what is this dear cause that he has in mind? It can't be attending on Lear, since he leaves the Gentleman to do that. It can't be his political mission to Cordelia because he has completed it. As far as we can tell he spends his time after his last speech to Cordelia wandering around the battlefield … but such speculation is an exercise in the wrong kind of Bradleyism. As members of the audience we know exactly what his dear cause and made intent is—he wants to reveal himself to his master as part of the grand finale. He encounters unexpected difficulties, however, because Lear has other things on his mind:

KENT
                              O my good master!
LEAR
Prithee, away.
EDGAR
                              'Tis noble Kent, your friend.
LEAR
A plague upon you, murderers, traitors all!
I might have sav'd her.

(V, iii, 267-70)

Lear soon recognizes him, but it is not a “recognition” in the technical dramatic sense:

                                                                      Who are you?
Mine eyes are not o' th' best. I'll tell you straight.
… Are you not Kent?

(278-82)

Lear does not realize that Kent has been masquerading as Caius. Kent makes an effort to establish the connection, but fails to produce the expected theatrical surprise. Lear blankly accepts the news:

KENT
                                        The same,
Your servant Kent. Where is your servant Caius?
LEAR
He's a good fellow, I can tell you that;
He'll strike, and quickly too. He's dead and rotten.
KENT
No, my good lord; I am the very man,—
LEAR
I'll see that straight.
KENT
—That, from your first of difference and decay,
Have follow'd your sad steps—
LEAR
                                                            You are welcome hither.

(282-89)

It is as if Orestes should reveal himself to Electra and she should say, “Oh, hello Orestes.” The tragedy has outstripped Kent's scenario. He really can't accompany Lear here, no matter how he tries. The end he has promised us has to be scrapped. It is all yet another device (like Edgar's precise description of the abyss for Gloucester's benefit) for giving us a sense of having gone further than we could have expected and, consequently, as far as we can go.

The scene is designed, as the play has been, to make us feel that we are seeing the worst. Edmund's effort to save Lear and Cordelia, for example, should not be slighted in production. It provides a very important little arc of activity. At this point all the evil characters have been expelled from power. They are either dead or dying, and the dying Edmund is no longer malign. For the first time in the play, no one means any harm. Yet the suffering of the good continues to increase. We may remember that the whole sequence has been preceded by Edgar's triumphant announcement, “The gods are just.”

The question of what is worst naturally reflects the question of what is bad. All bad or unpleasant experiences reawaken our primitive disappointment at the discovery that we are not identical with nature. Cordelia's fault in the first scene is precisely this. She insists, very simply, that she is not identical with what Lear wishes her to be. Her father believes that “nature” (“where nature doth with merit challenge”) will express itself in a declaration of total love. Cordelia's refusal smashes this root conviction, one that a childish and flattered ruler might well retain—one that in some measure we all do. It is a belief that dies hard and painfully because it exempts us from suffering:

They told me I was everything.

(IV, vi, 106)

The early scenes of the play keep this idea of totality active in our minds almost as much as the idea of “nothing”:

I love you more than word can wield the matter;
Dearer than eye-sight, space, and liberty;
Beyond what can be valued, rich or rare;
No less than life, with grace, health, beauty, honour;
As much as child e'er lov'd, or father found;
A love that makes breath poor, and speech unable:
Beyond all manner of so much I love you.

(I, i, 56-62)

Sure, I shall never marry like my sisters
To love my father all.

(I, i, 105-106)

I gave you all.

(II, iv, 253)

One question the play probes is, what are we if we are not all? Lear rapidly experiences worse things than Cordelia's rejection, but it is a movement from worst to worse. The very beginning of the play has plunged him from all to nothing.

The drama advances us deeper and deeper into nothing, but we experience moments of remarkable illumination along the way, of “feeling,” to use another word the play stresses at crucial moments. At its end, the state is exhausted, it can only be “sustained” like so much misery or a wounded body. The remaining characters are exhausted too. Kent is dying. The final image must be of Albany and Edgar helping him from the stage, “sustaining” him between them. All they have left is the memory of what they have seen and felt, and by this time seeing and feeling are words charged with meaning for us.

Albany has made an effort to play the role of the conventional leader who mops up capably and efficiently at the end of a tragedy. He attempts the familiar concluding message of a Fortinbras or a Malcolm: “Let's get this nation moving again”:

                                                            you, to your rights,
With boot, and such addition as your honours
Have more than merited. All friends shall taste
The wages of their virtue, and all foes
The cup of their deservings.

(V, iii, 300-304)

But this too is a promised end that has to be scrapped. Once more the play moves from a summing up to insistence on the unbearable. Albany breaks off and cries, “O, see, see!” It is this kind of contrast that Edgar has in mind when he says:

Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
… We that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

(324-26)

Lear at the end is seeing and feeling with a peculiar intensity, asking questions we cannot answer and seeing things we cannot see. Just as with Edgar's description of the abyss, we cannot quite see all—“the deficient sight” fails. “Look on her, look, her lips, / Look there, look there!” We have gone as far as we can go; we almost see but we can't see. Nothing, as Kent has said, almost sees miracles but misery.

Cordelia has defined her relation to her father as a bond:

                                                            I love your Majesty
According to my bond; no more nor less.

(I, i, 94-95)

Her statement has a richness that dominates memory. On the one hand it is a simple plain proposition that has the ring of truth and common sense, standing out with its “no more nor less” against the all-or-nothing absolutes of the first scene. But it also resists and teases our understanding; it is a line that the rest of the play must make clear. “Bond,” whether in its legal or material sense (and both are present here), is a word of double significance; a bond brings things together, but it sets up limits too. At the moment Cordelia makes her pronouncement, bonds seem to start breaking all over the stage. Lear curses his daughter, and Kent's voice is heard calling his king mad and blind. (“See better, Lear.”) It is Cordelia's suggestion that people are held together by bonds which are necessarily not limitless that starts Lear on the course that eventually leads him to call on Nature to destroy all bonds. But Cordelia's love, if it is less than all, is more than nothing. Under the extreme pressures of reduction, Lear explores the “needs” of humanity, the bonds that the art of our necessities throws into sharp relief.

From the audience's point of view Lear is what Cordelia at one point calls him, a “perdu,” a sentry posted in an exposed position, a lost man, but one on whom we depend to hold and patrol our furthest advances into threatening territory. And this helps to explain and define what both actors and audience must undergo if they are to possess the play. By its end we should have been made to see and feel a succession of competing shocks, tortures, and degradations whose rhythm we recognize as bound up with our own abiding misery, which we make every effort to ignore or to convert into something less troublesome: our experience of the nothing that comes of not being all.

Cordelia's death has kept us from the last temptation to falsify, to believe that because goodness exists life is essentially good. Pain remains in spite of endurance, in spite of grace. But what we have seen and felt remains, too. Cordelia has loved Lear according to her bond, and we have been made to see and feel that bond, and the bond between Lear and the Fool, between Edgar and Gloucester, between Lear and the naked wretches who endure the storm, between ourselves and, through the bodies of the actors, the suffering body of humanity.

Notes

1. For accounts of Brook's production (pro and con) that reinforce this impression, see Charles Marowitz, “Lear Log,” Tulane Drama Review (Winter, 1963), pp. 103-121; and Robert Speaight, “Shakespeare in Britain,” Shakespeare Quarterly, XIV (1963), 419-21. The exact sense of affectlessness conveyed may have resulted not simply from Brook's approach but from its interaction with the peculiar strengths and weaknesses of Scofield's performance. (See Marowitz, pp. 118-19.) Interestingly, Scofield seems not to have felt particularly influenced by the analogy with Beckett, indeed to have considered it limiting. (See Carol Carlisle, Shakespeare from the Greenroom: Actors' Criticisms of Four Major Tragedies [Chapel Hill, 1969], p. 291.)

   Though I differ with Peter Brook over King Lear, I would be sorry to leave the impression that I have anything but the highest regard for him as a director of Shakespeare. He is a remarkable artist, and shows us more of Shakespeare's meaning when he is wrong about it than most of us do when we are right.

2. I follow the Quarto reading for “bare” in 1. 15; Folio omits.

3. Shakespearean Tragedy (New York, 1955), p. 260.