[In the following essay, originally published in 1983, Booth illustrates how the audience's original evaluations of the characters in King Lear are thrown into question by later events, a process that mirrors Lear's misjudgment of his daughters.]

To make a work of art—to give local habitation and nameability to an airy nothing or a portion of physical substance—is to make an identity. I have argued that King Lear both is and is not an identity—that our sense that it inhabits only its own mental space is countered by a sense that it and those of its elements that I have discussed are unstable, turn into or fuse into other things. The identities of the characters and our evaluations of them belong in the catalogue of elements that duplicate the simultaneously fixed and unfixed quality of the whole of King Lear. By way of transition from discussing an audience's experience of words in Lear and in support of the thesis that all the phenomena I talk about are of one general kind (that to relate an audience's conclusions about characters and events to the foregoing discussions of ends, limits, and terms is to do more than play on words), I will begin by talking about the likeness and difference of Goneril and Regan, a likeness and difference played out both in the large action of the play and in the following short exchange on the subject:

FOOL:
Shalt see thy other daughter will use thee kindly; for though she's as like this as a crab's like an apple, yet I can tell what I can tell.
LEAR:
What canst tell, boy?
FOOL:
She will taste as like this as a crab does to a crab. Thou canst tell why one's nose stands i' th' middle on's face?
LEAR:
No.
FOOL:
Why, to keep one's eyes of either side 's nose, that what a man cannot smell out he may spy into.
LEAR:
I did her wrong.
FOOL:
Canst tell how an oyster makes his shell?
LEAR:
No.
FOOL:
Nor I neither; but I can tell why a snail has a house.
LEAR:
Why?
FOOL:
Why, to put 's head in; not to give it away to his daughters, and leave his horns without a case.
LEAR:
I will forget my nature. So kind a father!

(1.5.12-28)

When the Fool says “Shalt see thy other daughter will use thee kindly,” the tone and context of the line make “tenderly” the primary meaning of kindly. Our knowledge of Regan's likeness to Goneril and of the Fool's opinion of both sisters makes that sense most inappropriate. As the speech continues, it moves toward explaining that to say Regan will act “kindly” is to say that she will act according to her own nature. But the speech does not move there directly: “for though” suggests that the sentence is about to confront our objections to the idea that Regan will behave tenderly, benevolently, or humanely; “for though she's as like this as a crab” confirms that suggestion, and “crab” probably suggests that both sisters are crabbed, are like pinching crustaceans; “for though she's as like this as a crab's like an apple” thus strikes us as a statement that the sisters are unlike (crustaceans are unlike apples), that the sisters are alike (crab apples are apples), and again that the sisters are unlike (crab apples are so called because they are sour and one thinks of apples as sweet). When the Fool completes his “although … but” construction with “she will taste as like this as a crab does to a crab,” we understand the whole sentence as an assertion of likeness, both because we know that Goneril and Regan are alike, and because the proposition x is like x is incontrovertible. On the other hand, both the construction (“thy other daughter will use thee kindly … though … yet …”) and the previously established versatility of the word crab make the completed statement seem to confirm the original assertion that Regan will be benevolent—an assertion we cannot believe the Fool would make. Our miniature mental decathlon is thereupon prolonged by a last incidental mental hurdle: the Fool gives up the topic of crab apples only to take up oysters and snails.

Something less complex but similar happens over our three-hour experience of the play. Shakespeare goes to some trouble to establish Goneril and Regan as a single evil force: Regan's first words are “I am made of that self mettle as my sister, / And prize me at her worth” (1.1.69-70); the first scene ends with a dialogue in which they agree to act together and which is constructed less as a conversation than as a monologue for two speakers. As the play progresses, they earn the joint title “unnatural hags,” but we come to recognize Goneril's superior intelligence and managerial skill and to see that Regan trails behind her, compensating for dullness with exaggerated brutality. By act 5, when their mutual antagonism has become the most virulent in the play, Goneril and Regan are surely no longer a single unit; but in their squabble over Edmund they again seem interchangeable to us (one has to think a moment to remember which sister is murdered and which is the suicide).

A pair of characters who are nearly indistinguishable and also at odds is no more unusual than a pun on crab is; consider Tweedledum, Tweedledee, Fafner and Fasolt. My point in bringing up the two equation problems is that they support the assertion that almost any pair of elements one looks at in this play will reveal the essential characteristic of art: like two rhymed words, two verse lines, two metric feet, or two syllables, they will be alike in at least one respect and different in at least one other. That characteristic exercises the mind; when a seemingly infinite number of its manifestations are superimposed on one another as they are in Lear, the mind senses that it has reached or perhaps passed the limits of its endurance. Moreover, likeness unifies like elements, isolates them from others, gives them an identity; difference divides. Like “crab” and “crab,” Goneril and Regan are a unit and are also detached elements free to relate with or oppose any others. All of which is to say that, as King Lear is a giant amplification of the principle of simultaneous likeness and difference, unity and division, its primary quality—the sense it gives both of defined identity and of limitless amorphousness—is only a variation on, and extension of, that principle.

As is always the case with Shakespeare, his techniques in Lear are unique only in their degree and density of manifestation. The practice of “rhyming” a pair of sharply contrasted characters by having them share some identifying characteristic is not unusual in literature and is common in Shakespeare; the juggernaut loquacity of Hotspur and Falstaff and Edmund's and Lear's prayers to nature are examples. The names Edmund and Edgar are disquieting variants on the same technique (I doubt that I am alone in the habit for forgetting which name goes with which brother and in feeling foolish even to have approached a confusion between such opposites). In a quite different way, Edgar's disguises make us uneasy about an identity of which we are certain; we are party to the disguises from the beginning, but as they proliferate and Edgar shifts from persona to persona we are simultaneously Edgar's confidants and as disoriented as Gloucester is when he observes (as audiences usually do not) that by 4.6 Edgar has ceased to talk like a Bedlam beggar: “Methinks thy voice is altered, and thou speak'st / In better phrase and matter than thou didst” (7-8).

A similar sense that we lack a hold on categories and that categories lack the power to hold reality results from the unexpectedly literal truth of “Edgar I nothing am” (2.3.21). Even though Edgar's asides to the audience remind us that this mad beggar is only Edgar in disguise, Poor Tom—perhaps the most thoroughly documented briefly assumed identity in literature—seems more Edgar's fellow character than his persona, and we usually think of him as such (witness the critics who talk about what Poor Tom does or says, but would never speak so of Caius, Cesario, Sir Topas the curate, Friar Lodowick, Old Stanley, or Mr. Premium).

As the identities of the characters in King Lear are both firm and perfectly fluid, so are the bases on which we evaluate them. The play asks us to value faithful service, but we are likely to be discomfited when—in 4.5 and at his death in 4.6—the contemptible Oswald turns out to be as selflessly faithful to Goneril as the Fool and Kent are to Lear, and when the peasant who lunges out of the background to act our will by trying to save Gloucester's eyes prefaces his fatal attack on Cornwall by announcing that he has served Cornwall ever since he was a child (3.7.73).

Values that an audience carries with it everywhere but that are not central to Lear are also baffled. Stop for a minute and ask yourself in simpleminded terms whether the battle in act 5 is won by the good side or the bad side. This is a battle between the French and the English. The French, whose “secret feet” have been ominously abroad in the land since 3.1, lose to our side, the English. This is a battle between the armies of Goneril and Regan, on the one hand, and Lear and Cordelia, on the other; our side loses. The whole problem is further complicated by Albany—of whom it is said that “what most he should dislike seems pleasant to him; / What like, offensive” (4.2.10-11), and who of all the characters in Lear is most like its audience, and who wrestles with and mires himself in the muddle of political and moral values (5.1.21-27): Albany simultaneously fights against and on behalf of Lear and Cordelia.

In the first few minutes of King Lear a Renaissance audience received signals from which it would have identified the kind of play to follow, predicted its course and the value system it would observe (indeed, Edgar and some critics hope that the play that does follow really is of the kind signaled). First, the audience meets a spiritually brutal old man who jokes boastfully about his past whoring. The Gloucester plot is poised to go the exemplary way of its source, Sidney's Arcadia (five hundred pages of lustful strawmen who are crippled by infatuation and brought to grief because they are governed by passion and forget the obligations and aspirations toward which reason beckons them in vain). Any member of a Renaissance audience would have been ready to see Gloucester's subsequent career as a demonstration that “the dark and vicious place” where Gloucester begot his bastard “cost him his eyes,” but Shakespeare gave his audience no chance to do so. Our sense of Gloucester's condition changes repeatedly: first we see him as a casually cruel old rake, then in 1.2 as a doddering fool, and finally as a pure victim. When Edgar accounts for Gloucester's fate by moralizing the dark and vicious begetting of Edmund, the comment is as insufficient and trivial a summary of what we have seen as it is inappropriate and flat in the dramatic situation in 5.3 at the moment Edgar speaks it.

Shakespeare so far expands the range in which the characters and their actions ask to be considered that no system for comprehending them can hold them. But he does not let us altogether abandon any of the frames of reference that the play overlays. In Edgar's desperate efforts to classify and file human experiences, Shakespeare tantalizes us with the comfort to be had from ideologically Procrustean beds to which he refuses to tailor his matter.

The strongest signal Shakespeare gave his audience of coming events and the evaluations appropriate to them is Lear's plan to give up rule and divide his kingdom: this play will be another Gorboduc. Lear's action will be the clear cause of clear results in which we will recognize another illustrated exposition of the domino theory of Elizabethan politics. The theory, now best known from Ulysses' lecture on degree (Troilus and Cressida, 1.3.125-34), got its most exhaustive theatrical exposition from Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, whose urgently homiletic Gorboduc appeared almost half a century before Shakespeare wrote King Lear.

The undeniable likeness between Lear and Gorboduc—in both of which the action is precipitated by a legendary English king who divides his kingdom and parcels it out to his children—has been scrupulously demonstrated by Barbara Heliodora Carneiro de Mendonca (“The Influence of Gorboduc on King Lear,” Shakespeare Survey 13 [1960]: 41-48); she argues that Shakespeare had Gorboduc in mind when he wrote King Lear. Whether that is true or not, the beginning of King Lear would surely have reminded its audience of the kind of exemplum Gorboduc is. An audience's experience of an exemplum is relaxing. Each act of Gorboduc begins with a dumb show, an allegorical abstract of the ideas to be embodied in the ensuing action, and closes with a flatfooted and redundant choral interpretation of both the dumb show and the events of the story. The redundancy exists because every action clearly relates to the one frame of philosophical reference it was chosen to serve and because the authors provide characters to moralize the action as it unfolds. All three of the following sample quotations (from vol. 1 of Drama of the English Renaissance, ed. Russell A. Fraser and Norman Rabkin [New York, 1976]) appear within one short stretch of Gorboduc:

And oft it hath been seen where nature's course
Hath been perverted in disordered wise,
When fathers cease to know that they should rule,
The children cease to know they should obey.
And often overkindly tenderness
Is mother of unkindly stubbornness.

(1.2.205-10)

Only I mean to show, by certain rules
Which kind hath graft within the mind of man,
That nature hath her order and her course,
Which being broken, both corrupt the state
Of minds and things, even in the best of all.

(218-22)

Within one land one single rule is best.
Divided reigns do make divided hearts.

(259-60)

For an audience brought up to expect reference to chaos when degree is shaken (conditioned, much as American movie audiences once were to obligatory discussion of universal suffrage whenever any fiction came within hailing distance of political philosophy), Lear's abdication and the partition of his kingdom would have called for commentaries similar to these from Gorboduc; but Shakespeare does not provide them—at least he does not provide them in a way calculated to give an audience the comfortable irresponsibility of a secure point of view.

The philosophical platitudes a Renaissance audience learned in school and was ready to apply to King Lear are voiced—but only as the maunderings of a superstitious dodderer:

These late eclipses in the sun and moon portent no good to us. Though the wisdom of nature can reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself scourged by the sequent effects. Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide. In cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palace, treason; and the bond cracked 'twixt son and father. This villain of mine comes under the prediction, there's son against father; the King falls from bias of nature, there's father against child. We have seen the best of our time. Machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves.

(1.2.101-12)

Here are all the raw materials of the predictable catalogue of predictable aberrations set off by a violation of the natural hierarchy, but an audience in any period is readier to scorn an old wives' tale of astrological influence than it is to scorn the attribution of a similar chain of aberrations to a precipitating human action with which some of the ensuing events are in a demonstrable cause-and-effect relationship. Here Gloucester recognizes and articulates the repeating patterns that we ourselves have observed (Lear and his daughters, Gloucester and his sons; Lear and Kent; Lear and Cordelia, Gloucester and Edgar) and will perceive later (the storm will be to the order of physical nature as Lear was when he disarranged the order of society); but Gloucester's organization of our thoughts disorders them—makes us more, rather than less, uneasy mentally—because the kind of comment we expect to hear and the kind of thinking we ourselves are doing are so distorted by the focus and context Gloucester gives them that they function only as evidence of Gloucester's gullibility. Moreover, even that is not quite straightforward, because Gloucester joins us in recognizing Lear's blindness about Cordelia but is himself blind to Edmund's wickedness and Edgar's virtue. The only mental satisfaction we have in the scene comes from joining the villainous Edmund in the superiority given him by his perspicacity about the mental weakness of his victim—whose fuddled state and patterns of thought are parodies of our own.

An audience's experience with more purely local ideological stances—those evoked in the course of this particular play—is no easier. For example, consider the complexities of thinking about (1) Lear's retinue of knights; (2) Goneril's assessment of it as “riotous,” “insolent,” and a “disordered rabble” (2.3.6, 1.4.192, 246); and (3) the disguised Kent as one of its members. We know that Kent is noble-spirited; in fact, at the point in King Lear when he reappears in disguise to serve where he stands condemned (1.4.1-7), Kent is the one major character whom an audience can effortlessly accept as altogether admirable. We also “know” that Lear's hundred knights are unjustly maligned by Goneril; we know so because Goneril is wicked by generic definition, because she admits to Oswald that she seeks to stimulate culpable behavior in Lear's followers (1.3.22-25), because the reasons she gives Albany for dismissing the hundred knights have nothing to do with the knights' personal behavior (1.4.313-18), and—most importantly—because the one representative knight we meet while Lear is Goneril's guest fully justifies Lear's angry rejoinder to Goneril's accusations: “Detested kite, thou liest. / My train are men of choice and rarest parts” (1.4.253-54). The knight is not only notably civil and decorous himself but particularly sensitive to incivility and indecorum in others:

KNIGHT:
My lord, I know not what the matter is; but to my judgment your Highness is not entertained with that ceremonious affection as you were wont. There's a great abatement of kindness appears as well in the general dependants as in the Duke himself also and your daughter.
LEAR:
Ha? Say'st thou so?
KNIGHT:
I beseech you pardon me, my lord, if I be mistaken; for my duty cannot be silent when I think your Highness wronged.

(1.4.55-63)

The second of the knight's speeches quoted above is, in fact, a gracious and particularly mannerly restatement of the principle Kent put forward to justify the honorable insolence for which he was banished (1.1.145-49, 155-57). Kent himself, however, is—in his disguise as Lear's recruited retainer, Caius—the only one of Lear's retinue who displays the wonted behavior Goneril attributed to the others before Kent joined them. We applaud Kent when he trips Oswald, but the action we see is an example of just the kind of bluff, cheerful brutality that one would expect from the entourage Goneril describes—the entourage we know is otherwise than her malice would have it be. Later—before Gloucester's house—the admirable, honorable Kent picks a fight with the despicable Oswald. Oswald speaks politely; Kent responds with a gratuitous lie (he is not of Gloucester's house), and then with clumsy, contrived, and increasingly shrill abuse:

OSW.:
Good dawning to thee, friend. Art of this house?
KENT:
Ay.
OSW.:
Where may we set our horses?
KENT:
I' th' mire.
OSW.:
Prithee, if thou lov'st me, tell me.
KENT:
I love thee not.
OSW.:
Why then, I care not for thee.
KENT:
If I had thee in Lipsbury Pinfold, I would make thee care for me.
OSW.:
Why dost thou use me thus? I know thee not.
KENT:
Fellow, I know thee.
OSW.:
What dost thou know me for?
KENT:
A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking, whoreson, glassgazing, superserviceable, finical rogue.

(2.2.1-17)

We, of course, know Oswald too: no henchman of Goneril's gets any sympathy from us. Moments later, moreover, Oswald earns the contempt that any fictional character evokes from any audience that sees him refuse to “fight like a man.” However—and even though Kent later explains why he was then freshly irritated with Oswald (2.4.26-44)—Oswald's local innocence of any crime to justify an attack on him makes our delight in his humiliation less easy to revel in than we would like.

Similarly contradictory responses make it similarly difficult for an audience to maintain its altogether just prejudices during the rest of the scene. We fully accept the justice of Kent's opinions, but what we hear is crude, childish, wilfully perverse insolence to Regan, to Cornwall (who—so far—is guilty only of being Regan's husband and who, like Albany in 1.4, is principally concerned to find out what all the fuss is about), and to the grandly villainous but here unexceptionable Edmund (who speaks only one line in the scene—“How now? What's the matter? Part!” [2.2.40], and is thereupon grandiloquently challenged by Kent, who shares none of our privileged knowledge of Edmund's villainy—“With you, goodman boy, if you please! Come, I'll flesh ye; come on, young master” [2.2.41-42]).

The incidental mental discomfort we feel when we see the virtuous Kent in the wrong in minor matters, see the malicious, lying Oswald wronged, and see isolated evidence that could seem to confirm what we took to be—and still must take to be—a slander on Lear's hundred knights gets its particular power from the very fact that it is incidental. The discomfort I have described disturbs our mental equilibrium but—because it is generated in relation to relatively minor particulars (and as an understandable by-product of the process whereby we become familiar with the purposefully un-Kent-like persona in which Kent disguises himself)—never threatens really to throw our thinking off balance and become a “problem” for interpreters of the play.

As commentators have often observed, perception of moral scale is an essential element in an audience's experience of King Lear. The conflict between the most vital responses the play evokes—the conflict between our response to the smug, petty autocrat Lear is in scene 1 and our responses to him thereafter—has a real but relatively inefficient likeness to the incidental conflicts the play evokes during Kent's first few scenes as Caius the bullyboy. We yearn to see Lear get his comeuppance, but his just deserts are followed by additional punishments out of all proportion to his crime. We cannot comfortably tell ourselves that “he brought it on himself”—even though he did. The need to reason the discrepancy between our feelings about Lear during scene 1 and those evoked by the subsequent action arises, I think, only when we look back at the play during a discussion of it.

As we read King Lear and as it passes before us in the theatre, the circumstances of our thinking shift gradually in response to the sequence of events. Lear leaves the stage at line 266 of scene 1. When he reappears at the beginning of scene 4, he is still confidently absolute (“Let me not stay a jot for dinner”), but, though nothing has happened to change Lear's view of his situation, a lot has happened to change ours: we have heard Cordelia's dire (and generically bolstered) predictions (1.1.268-75, 280-81); we have heard the wicked sisters conspire in the last lines of 1.1; and scenes 2 and 3 have focused on children scheming to undo their parents. By the time we see Lear's first frustrated confrontation with Oswald, we are ready to see Lear's situation from Lear's point of view.

The change in our estimate of Lear does not threaten us with mental crisis and therefore differs greatly from our experiences with the disguised Kent. Our effortless decision to ally ourselves with Lear is, however, enhanced by nervous energy generated by incidental and ultimately weak challenges to our justifiably firm general estimates of Goneril, Regan, and—especially—Cordelia. Those estimates are jostled by perceptions that could lead to contrary estimates but are evoked in a moral scale lesser than the one in which we have earlier assessed the sisters' motives and actions. We are pressed toward, but not to, the point of rethinking and justifying our evaluations.

We are similarly pressed by our experience of the disguised Kent and by comparably disquieting experiences that arise from the fact that the wicked Edmund (for whom we felt sympathy in the first moments of the play during a conversation that ignored his rights and needs and, in a different dimension, ignored ours as well) takes us into his confidence and is superficially but intensely attractive when he does so; and from the fact that the virtuous, philosophical, and equally confidential Edgar is so often so foolish in his easy, inadequate moralizing, and from the fact that he so inadequately explains his tactics in denying his father the comfort of knowing that one of his sons cares for him. But our best-grounded judgments on Kent, Edmund, and Edgar easily overwhelm the incidental static that complicates our perception of them.

The same is true of the interaction between our first and definitive moral verdicts on the three sisters and minor irritants to our mental comfort while we listen to them in scene 1. The irritants are too small to put our judgments of Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia in doubt but are sufficient to make us peripherally uneasy about our capacity to get and keep a fixed grip on things.

Consider the incidental awkwardness of listening to the conversation that concludes scene 1. Through most of the scene we have been ready for some summary comment more diagnostically precise than Kent's hyperbolic “Lear is mad.” When the observations we ourselves have made of “the unruly waywardness that infirm and choleric years bring with them” (1.1.297-98) are finally given voice, our spokeswomen are the two characters from whom we most wish to be disassociated: Goneril and Regan.

Earlier Cordelia has been our agent in labeling the two fairy-tale wicked sisters for what they are. Western culture is genetically incapable of producing an audience not conditioned to identify itself with the youngest of three sisters and to recognize transparent vessels of wickedness in elder sisters pleasing to their parent. In any case, Cordelia's first line, an aside, must inevitably fix her in the bosom of her confidants, the audience: “What shall Cordelia speak? Love, and be silent” (1.1.62). I am certain that no audience has ever genuinely changed its mind about Cordelia or felt really tempted to do so. That would be considerably simpler than what I believe does happen. When Cordelia's turn comes to bid in Lear's auction, she voices our contempt for the oily speeches of Goneril and Regan and for the premises behind the whole charade. We are relieved to hear the bubbles pricked, but Cordelia's premises do not present a clear antithesis to the faults in Lear's. Her ideas are only a variation on Lear's; she too thinks of affection as a quantitative, portionable medium of exchange for goods and services (1.1.95-104). Moreover, she sounds priggish. When she parries Lear's “So young, and so untender? with “So young, my lord, and true,” we share her triumph and her righteousness. We exult with her, but we may well be put off by the cold competence of our Cinderella. We agree with Kent when he says that she thinks justly and has “most rightly said” (1.1.183), but we are probably much more comfortable with his passionate speeches on her behalf than we were with her own crisp ones. Cordelia does not sound like a victim.

She is silent during Kent's criticisms of Lear; she does not speak again until the suitors are informed of her fall from grace. Shakespeare might then have had her say, I yet beseech your Majesty that you make known it is no vicious blot, murder or foulness, no unchaste action or dishonored step, that hath deprived me of your grace and favor. Instead, he laces the speech with gibes at the elder sisters and smug expressions of self-righteousness. Cordelia is justified in all that she says, but not lovable:

                                                                      I yet beseech your Majesty,
If for I want that glib and oily art
To speak and purpose not since what I well intend
I'll do't before I speak, that you make known
It is no vicious blot, murder or foulness,
No unchaste action or dishonored step,
That hath deprived me of your grace and favor;
But even for want of that for which I am richer—
A still-soliciting eye, and such a tongue
That I am glad I have not, though not to have it
Hath lost me in your liking.

(1.1.223-33; italics mine)

Our discomfort reaches a high point just before Cordelia begins her two-hour absence from the stage. France tells Cordelia to bid her sisters farewell, whereupon Shakespeare gives her two speeches (1.1.268-75, 280-82), that make Lear's peril vivid for us (“The jewels of our father, with washed eyes / Cordelia leaves you”) and make Cordelia sound cold, priggish in the extreme, and a bit cheap in the crudeness of her ironies. We find ourselves in perfect agreement with Cordelia's every action and word—and probably also sensible of sharing Regan's irritation when she says, “Prescribe not us our duty” (1.1.276).

As commonly in Shakespeare's plays, the characters in Lear apply theatrical metaphors to the events of the fiction in which they are actors in both that word's pertinent senses (see, for example, 1.2.130-31: “and pat he comes, like the catastrophe of the old comedy. My cue is villainous melancholy”; and 5.2.89, Goneril's scornful “An interlude!”). In King Lear the metaphors are especially appropriate because the play as play—as an event in the lives of its audience—is analogous to the events it describes. Many commentators have observed that Lear presents the love auction in scene 1 as a theatrical pageant, a ceremonial enactment of events already concluded: in the first speeches of the play, Gloucester and Kent already know the details of the division, and, when Lear invites Cordelia to speak, he has already assigned all of the kingdom but the opulent third reserved for her. But, like Shakespeare's play, Lear's pageant does not unfold as expected.

Moreover, Shakespeare's audience is like Lear. Even before Shakespeare displays the embryo of a Gorboduc-Cinderella hybrid, we have already begun to act like Lear. The first words of the play focus our attention on Albany and Cornwall; as the play progresses, a series of beckoning hints of a coming clash between the two dukes (2.1.10-11, 25-27; 3.1.19-29) misleads us down a path to nowhere and does nothing to prepare us for the conflict between the two duchesses. More obviously symptomatic of our Lear-likeness are the character assessments we make during the conversation about Edmund's bastardizing (1.1.7-32). A moment later an audience will instantly assess Lear and join him in evaluating his three children on the basis of a few words; the audience will evaluate the children correctly; Lear will evaluate them incorrectly. The audience will evaluate the father correctly but inadequately. And the audience will be contemptuous of Lear's faith in conclusions reached on such meager, arbitrarily limited evidence. What we see Lear do during the test is what all audiences do always; what is more, before this audience first meets Lear, it has already made character assessments as faulty as Lear's. The division scene echoes the details of the opening conversation in which a casually autocratic parent (“He hath been out nine years, and away he shall again”—1.1.31-32) evaluates his children (“I have a son, sir, by order of law, some year elder than this who yet is no dearer in my account”—18-19). Gloucester's early speeches invite their audience to register him as a brutal oaf (an accurate but insufficient estimate) and Edmund as the humbly patient victim of his father's insensitivity (as erroneous an estimate as Lear's of Goneril and Regan).

Even our evaluations of the play are unfixed. Whenever we find fault with something Shakespeare does in King Lear, the alternative turns out to be in some way less acceptable. The plotting of King Lear invites adverse criticisms, but what Lear says to Kent on the heath might well be said to anyone who accepts even the more obvious of the invitations:

                                                                                          Thou'dst shun a bear;
But if thy flight lay toward the roaring sea,
Thou'dst meet the bear i' th' mouth.

(3.4.9-11)

Take, for example, the usually disturbing behavior of Edgar, who seems to be torturing his father by not revealing his identity: when Edgar at last does reveal his identity, the news kills Gloucester instantly. The crowning example, of course, is the end of the play—where we wish events otherwise than they are and where remedy would give more discomfort than the disease.

King Lear turns out to be faithless to the chronicle accounts of Lear, but its perfidy is sudden; the movement of the plot is toward a happy ending. I expect that every audience has felt the impulses that drove Nahum Tate to give Lear its promised end and led Samuel Johnson to applaud the deed. But Tate, who called Shakespeare's play “a Heap of Jewels, unstrung, and unpolished,” made wholesale changes; after he had strung and polished the treasure he had seized, he had a new heap of jewels altogether. I doubt that many audiences could feel comfortable with a production that made sensible revision of the ending but left the play otherwise as Shakespeare wrote it. Rather than “rise better pleased from the final triumph of persecuted virtue,” such an audience would probably value finality over triumph, and echo Kent:

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

(5.3.314-16)

To allow Lear and Cordelia to retire with victory and felicity would be to allow more to occur, would be to allow the range of our consideration and of our standards of evaluation to dilate infinitely. It would be a strong man whose natural ideas of justice and hopes for a happy resolution could outweigh his more basic need—his simple need of an ending—if, instead of Tate, he had seen Shakespeare.