[In the following essay, Rosen examines the unconventional dramatic form of King Lear, particularly the appearance of the climax early in the play instead of at the end, where it traditionally occurs.]

That catastrophe informs the substance and texture of King Lear is clear. First performed in 1605-1606, a few years after James I assumed the throne, the play begins with a kingdom ruled by a majestic figure, presiding over a court of respectful and obedient subjects. However, the respect and obedience that grace Lear's court quickly dissipates; soon there is bitter internecine rivalry and eventually civil and international war. Meanwhile, the characters most worthy of our sympathy are subjected to brutality, afflicted with madness, and separated from those to whom they are closest. Even when reconciliation is in the offing, Shakespeare, deviating from his sources, makes sure that death has the upper hand. Furthermore, as if one story of affliction were not enough, Shakespeare adds a subplot (the story of the Duke of Gloucester and his sons) in which the cruelty is, if anything, more raw and intense. By doubling the tragedy, some commentators suggest, Shakespeare wants to teach that the anguish that Lear's family suffers is not unique but, horribly, repeatable—and thus the way of the world.

The unrelieved suffering the characters endure, however, is only part of the story. The other part has to do with the form in which Shakespeare represents Lear's tragedy. For one thing, the play goes on much longer than needed to convey the tragedy that has overtaken Lear and his court. A related issue concerns locating the climax—or, in the language of premodern criticism, the catastrophe—of the play. If one looks to the latter part of play, it initially appears as if the climax has already come and gone. On closer inspection, it appears that the play at least tries to locate the climax in the conventional venue, somewhere around act 5. But even there the climax doesn't work as it should. Rather than seeing these difficulties in locating the climax as symptoms of Shakespeare's ineptitude or indifference, I prefer to see them as clues that signal how the play can be read or viewed. Significantly, the play itself seems to recommend such an approach: by using theatrical terms at key moments in the dialogue, King Lear also evinces a kind of self-consciousness about form, as if the play worries over (or takes pleasure in?) its own deviousness, and, by use of such terms, invites attention to its heterodox exercise in tragic form.

So while the events that unfold in the play are clearly catastrophic in the first sense of the term, it is the second sense, having to do with form, that most interests me here. I assume, then, as have a number of critics before me, that the special nature of Lear's tragedy is connected to Shakespeare's canny manipulation of form. I go further than most, however, in suggesting a longer and more extensive context for tracing King Lear's experiment with tragic form. Crucial to this legacy is the notion of dramatic catastrophe. To appreciate Shakespeare's strategy it is necessary to begin by reviewing the way that catastrophe operates in ancient drama and, particularly, in medieval and early modern dramatic theory. Such a review is clearly apposite for addressing the issues of catastrophe in King Lear. …

DONATUS, DRAMA, AND RENAISSANCE CATASTROPHE

In the context of the reemergence of classical drama in the Renaissance, dramatists and scholars attempted to retrieve not only the neglected plays of the classical period, but also the dramatic principles by which the plays had been constructed. The fourth-century writings of Donatus, which included the essays De Fabula and De Comedia, as well as a substantial commentary on the plays of Terence, played a crucial role in this effort at reconstruction.¹ Indeed, the principles most influential for the Renaissance derived not from Aristotle but from Donatus.² Initially, in fact, the contribution of Aristotle's Poetics to this excavation of classical dramatic structure was negligible.³ The first major translations of the Poetics were not published until 1538 and 1540, and its influence began to be seriously felt only in the latter half of the sixteenth century. By then Donatus and, through him, Roman playwright Terence had already provided a framework for thinking about the fundamental elements of dramatic structure—including the nature and function of dramatic catastrophe. In order to understand the legacy of dramatic catastrophe, it is therefore necessary to briefly review the notion as developed by Donatus, and then to sketch the course of its assimilation in the Renaissance.

Donatus takes up the notion of the catastrophe in considering the division of drama into its appropriate theatrical and structural parts. There is a fundamental division of the drama into four parts: the prologue, protasis, epitasis, and catastrophe:

The prologue is a kind of preface to the drama. In this part and this part only it is permissible to say something extrinsic to the argument, addressed to the audience and for the benefit of the poet or the drama or an actor. The protasis is the first act and the beginning of the drama. The epitasis is the development and enlargement of the conflict and, as it were, the knot of all the error. The catastrophe is the resolution of the course of events so that there is a happy ending which is made evident to all by the recognition of past events.⁴

This concise explication of dramatic structure shows that the catastrophe complements the preceding sections of the drama. Where the protasis and epitasis supply the story and complicate its intrigue, the catastrophe resolves the conflict that it inherits. There is, as well, a dispensation of knowledge that occurs in the resolution of the conflict, and what is revealed is thereafter known to all. The catastrophe therefore not only brings to light what was hidden, but ensures that the revelation extends to everyone.⁵

Along with the terse itemization of the components of catastrophe, Donatus, as already mentioned, sheds light on the elements of drama through his commentary on the plays of Terence.⁶ The commentary displays how the abstract dramatic structure meshed with the stuff of the plays. For our inquiry into dramatic catastrophe, The Andrian, Terence's clever domestic comedy, offers a particularly apt example.⁷

In this play, Pamphilus, son of an Athenian gentleman, seduces the low-born Glycerium, who soon becomes pregnant. Pamphilus promises to marry her but learns that his father has already arranged an upscale marriage to Chremes' daughter. While playing along with his father's plan, Pamphilus schemes to have his own way, only to have his hopes dealt a blow when Chremes calls off the marriage, which threatens to dishonor all. By the fifth act of the play, the intrigue between son and father has become so clouded that an unhappy conclusion seems inevitable. It is Crito's arrival on the scene and the precious information he provides—that Glycerium is actually Chremes' long-lost daughter—that brings a solution to a situation seemingly unresolvable.

Listed in the text as “Crito, hospes,” the character who is brought in from the wings has the authority, limited though it may be, to move the play to its conclusion. “Here speaks a character,” comments Donatus at the point of Crito's arrival, “specially devised for the purpose of the catastrophe, for this Crito makes no contribution to the plot except to resolve the misunderstanding.”⁸ Donatus' pointed phrasing—“no contribution except”—may explain why the character who served this purpose himself became known as “the catastrophe,” an appellation linking this character inexorably to the final movement of the play.

The function of the catastrophe is thus simple, univocal, and yet, at the same time, pivotal. Paul Moorhead's explication of the Donatus commentary delineates further the special features of the catastrophe:

This character is inorganic and his sole function is to loose the error of the play. The Commentator states that at Andria 533 the action has been brought to such a crisis that it does not seem possible that the poet can bring about the resolution dramatically (consilic) but must employ chance (eventu) in the person of Crito.⁹

Having no role in the drama up till this point, Crito is said to be “inorganic,” for he emerges from outside rather than from within the plot. The momentum for the reversal he renders seems to derive from his outsider status. Furthermore, coming from outside the plot, the catastrophe of The Andrian embodies the element of chance. His arrival on the scene, perfectly timed to eliminate the misunderstanding that impedes the resolution, is arbitrary rather than necessary, contingent rather probable. As Davos, the slave and arch-complicator of the plot, comments upon Crito's arrival: “In all my life I never saw anything fit so perfectly, man, arrival, and moment.”¹⁰ Davos' ironic comment on the improbable nature of Crito's arrival will again be heard, albeit in a different voice, when Edmund muses on the fortuitous entry of the catastrophe in King Lear.¹¹

In De Fabula, Donatus observes how Terence was special among dramatists in his use of characters from outside the plot:

Like the Greeks, all the Latin writers but Terence have theoi apo mechanes—that is, “gods from a machine”—to narrate stories. Besides, the other comic writers do not readily admit protatika prosopa—that is, characters drawn from outside the plot—while Terence often uses them since the plot becomes clearer through introducing them.¹²

The dramatic practice of Terence, we are told, is special on two accounts. First, because he does not bring in “gods” from outside the plot to narrate. He does, however, bring human characters outside—a device known as persona ex machina. While Donatus does not speculate on what Terence loses by omitting the god's narration, he does indicate that the introduction of characters from outside the plot is actually an asset to it. At least to Donatus' mind, then, the introduction of such a character is an admirable practice.

Terence's regular use of the device of the persona ex machina, of drawing in a character from outside the plot, does not, according to Donatus, compromise the organic form of his drama. Terence is able to maintain clarity of dramatic exposition because he “never brings in abstruse material or things that have to be glossed by antiquaries.”¹³ That he is lucid and accessible can be explained by his competence in dealing with dramatic structure: he is “careful about plot and style … he joined the beginning, middle, and end so carefully that nothing seems extraneous and everything appears to be composed from the same material and to have a single body.”¹⁴ The comedies of Terence are thus for Donatus the model of a tight dramatic structure. More important for our purposes is that Terence's construction of the catastrophe using an external agent became a norm for Renaissance drama.

The introduction and consolidation of Donatus' dramatic terminology in the Renaissance occurred through a variety of channels, including commentaries on the six Terentian comedies by such prominent Renaissance figures as Melancthon and Erasmus.¹⁵ A significant number of lesser but able scholars also contributed commentaries which attempted to wrest from the plays aesthetic and moral norms applicable to emerging Renaissance ideals.¹⁶ The plays of Terence also received considerable attention in the handbooks of grammar and rhetoric, and thus became exemplary for generations of students.¹⁷

The extent of Donatus' influence on the Renaissance conception of catastrophe appears great. In commenting on the expression Catastrophe fabulae in his De Adagia, Erasmus, for example, identifies Donatus as his source:

We call the outcome of anything, in proverbial language, the catastrophe or denouement. … Every plot, as Donatus shows, is divided into three parts, protasis, epitasis, and catastrophe. The protasis is the first excitement, swelling as it goes on. The epitasis is a flurry of complications. The catastrophe is a sudden transformation of the whole thing.¹⁸

The impact of the Donathusian view can also be discerned in the definitions of catastrophe set forth in English dictionaries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.¹⁹ In the mid-sixteenth century, T. Cooper's influential dictionary terms catastrophe a “subversion. Also the latter end of a comedie, and, proverbially, the ende of any thing.”²⁰ Later in the next century, Elisha Coles, in An English Dictionary (1672), laconically reiterates a common view: “catastrophe, the conclusion (of a play).” As with Erasmus' explication of Catastrophe Fabulae (section 1311), the definitions of catastrophe emphasize the association with dramatic endings and with transformation.

Kenneth Muir, drawing on George Coffin Taylor's Shakespeare's Debt to Montaigne, lists catastrophe as one of the words Shakespeare has likely appropriated from the John Florio translation.²¹ Though the evidence for a direct link from Montaigne to King Lear seems inconclusive, it is interesting to note the definition given catastrophe in Florio's Italian-English dictionary, first published in 1598: “catastrophe, the conclusion or shutting up of a comedie or any thing else.”²²

Renaissance associations continue to inform the writing of the neo-classicists. Having outlined the four-part division of dramatic structure, John Dryden offers a lucid recapitulation of the use and meaning of dramatic catastrophe:

Lastly the catastrophe, which the Grecians called lysis, the French le denouement, and we the discovery or unraveling of the plot: there you can see all things settling again upon their first foundations; and, the obstacles which hindered the design or action of the play once removed, it ends with that resemblance of truth and nature, that the audience are satisfied with the conduct of it.²³

While Dryden's seventeenth-century gloss on dramatic catastrophe adds a certain metaphysical and rhetorical dimension, the elements of ending and resolution remain prominent. Indeed, Marvin Herrick emphasizes the consonance that existed between Dryden's view of dramatic catastrophe and that of his predecessors: “Eugenius, in Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesy, described the ending of a play in terms that would have satisfied almost any Renaissance student of the drama from Melancthon on.”²⁴

In considering the role of the catastrophe in King Lear, it is important to recall that the Renaissance student of drama was generally able to apply the terms of dramatic structure to tragedy as well as comedy. The virtues inherent in the four-part division of drama, though derived from reflection on the comedies of Terence, transcended the generic particularities of comedy and tragedy. Thus the Italian playwright Giraldi, interested in writing a tragedy, chose as his model Terence rather than the Greeks, “assuming,” writes T. W. Baldwin, “that the Terentian theory of dramatic structure applies as well to tragedy as it does to comedy.”²⁵ Baldwin proclaims the interchangeability of tragedy and comedy with respect to dramatic structure in another context as well: “Aristotle's theory, of course, applied to tragedy; but the Renaissance assumed that fundamentally there was no difference between the dramatic structure of comedy and tragedy.”²⁶ The specific formal dimensions of dramatic catastrophe appeared to apply to tragedy and comedy alike.

In sum, Renaissance conceptions of the function of catastrophe assert the intimate association between drama and the notion of catastrophe. In the context of this association, commentators stressed the connection between catastrophe and endings or conclusions; and also between catastrophe and, in Erasmus' phrase, “sudden transformation.” As we turn to the role of catastrophe in King Lear, we can reasonably assume that these associations were those of Shakespeare as well.²⁷

“WARPS AND UNDERMINES”: ANTIFORMALIST LEAR

The appreciation of the importance of the catastrophe centered around a concern with dramatic form. In addition, considerations of dramatic catastrophe went hand in hand with considerations of character motivation. Though only occasionally speaking about these concerns in direct connection with catastrophe, King Lear's critics from the seventeenth century on have emphasized the play's problems around form and motivation. Their objections have centered on several aspects of the play: the torture manifested in the blinding of Gloucester; the grotesque decorum of the fool; the clumsy spectacle of the storm scenes; but particularly controversial is the tragic ending, in which the innocent Cordelia and the repentant Lear suffer senseless death. The provocative nature of these aspects have actually led to alternative versions of the play, the most renowned adaptation being that of Nahum Tate.

Tate's adaptation, The History of King Lear (1680),²⁸ attempted to make the play comply with his generation's more delicate aesthetic standards. He thus expurgated offensive scenes, reworked the poetry, and, importantly, emended the ending, permitting Lear and Cordelia to live and enjoy the fruits of their reconciliation. The emendations proved immensely popular for critics and audience alike, and Tate's Lear became the preferred version for over a hundred years.

It is the latter change rendered upon Shakespeare's Lear which is important to note in the context of a discussion of dramatic catastrophe. Tate refers to the problem of form in the preface to his version of Lear: “I found the Whole … a Heap of Jewels, unstrung, and unpolish'd; yet so dazling in their Disorder, that I soon perceiv'd I had seiz'd a Treasure.”²⁹ Because the problem with the disorder of the play is so profound, Tate feels justified in adding an entirely new dimension: “'Twas my good Fortune to light on one Expediant to rectifie what was wanting in the Regularity and Probability of the Tale, which was to run through the Whole, as Love betwixt Edgar and Cordelia; that never chang'd Word with each other in the original.”³⁰ This “rectification” of the original provides links between scenes that previously were only haphazardly connected. The love affair between Edgar and Cordelia “renders Cordelia's Indifference, and her Father's Passion in the first scene, probable.”³¹ Tate recast or reworked scenes to supply the motivation that was originally absent or obscure. For Tate, the problem of motivation thus implies a problem of form, and vice-versa.

While Tate's adaptation of King Lear indicated that Shakespeare had not satisfied the demands of the theater, the romantic critics of King Lear felt that theater could not satisfy the demands of Shakespeare. First published in 1811, Charles Lamb's well-known discussion of King Lear argues the incapacity of theater to do justice to the profundity of the play and to the character of Lear himself:

So to see Lear acted—to see an old man tottering about the stage with walking-stick, turned out of doors by his daughters in a rainy night, has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting. We want to take him into shelter and relieve him. That is all the feeling which the acting of Lear ever produced in me. But the Lear of Shakespeare cannot be acted. The contemptible machinery by which they mimic the storm which he goes out in, is not more inadequate to represent the horror of the real elements, than any actor can be to represent Lear.³²

The attempt to dramatize King Lear could only compromise the essential nature of the play. The dramatic idiom, in other words, rather than serving as the natural medium by which the play could be appreciated, was viewed as something extraneous to the play's successful realization.

King Lear's status as a drama was thus considered problematic in at least two ways. The inadequate account of motivation violated the eighteenth century's idea of dramatic clarity. And, in the view of the early romantics, the profound mystery embodied by the play resisted dramatic expression. Both of these concerns were expressed by A. C. Bradley in his influential lectures on King Lear, originally published in 1904. According to Bradley's famous formulation, “King Lear seems to me Shakespeare's greatest achievement, but it seems to me not his best play.”³³

While Lamb had expressed reservations regarding Shakespeare's tragedies in general, Bradley is convinced that the special nature of King Lear is at odds with dramatic performance. The conflict between play and dramatic performance, writes Bradley,

is not so with the other great tragedies. No doubt, as Lamb declared, theatrical representation gives only a part of what we imagine when we read them; but there is no conflict between the representation and the imagination, because these tragedies are, in essentials, perfectly dramatic. But King Lear, as a whole, is imperfectly dramatic, and there is something in its very essence which is at war with the senses, and demands a purely imaginative realization.³⁴

The essential nature of the play can only be grasped, according to Bradley, in the realm of the imagination.

The dramatic stature of the play is also weakened by inadequate motivation. Bradley argues this point with particular reference to the death of Cordelia at the end of the play. He refers to Cordelia's death as the “unexpected catastrophe,” and sets forth what makes its motivation problematic: “The real cause [of Cordelia's death] lies outside the dramatic nexus. It is Shakespeare's wish to deliver a sudden and crushing blow to the hopes which he has excited.”³⁵ Bradley faults the death as the catastrophe because it does not proceed from what has come before and from what an audience is led to expect. Bradley's way of characterizing the problem of the catastrophe will be taken up later on.

Modern criticism has again viewed Lear's dramatic irregularities as significant to an understanding of the play. But rather than considering the unconventional structure an obstacle that must be surmounted, it sees the play's disorder as purposeful, and as integral to its meaning. This perspective, referred to by some critics as “antiformalist,” asserts that the calculated disorder of the play's structure involves the audience in a dramatic experience that is essential to understanding King Lear. The play, writes James Hirsh, “does have an artistically purposeful structure, or rather an antistructure that depends in part on the audience's familiarity with conventional dramatic structure.”³⁶ To be understood, the dramatic peculiarities of King Lear must be viewed against the formal coherence that was characteristic of conventional drama. The structure of Lear presents these conventions, but also, in James Calderwood's phrase, “warps and undermines them.”³⁷

In this vein, Stephen Booth has observed that the play sets up endings or boundaries only to repeatedly transgress them.³⁸ For example, the effort to shelter Lear on the heath, a project initiated in act 3, scene 2, is seemingly accomplished in scene 4 of the act. Yet despite all efforts, Lear gains shelter only in scene 6. This signals an ending close at hand: Lear will get out of the storm. But at the same time that the scene moves toward a conclusion, it also seems to protract Lear's quest and postpone the conclusion repeatedly. Booth contends that this pattern is found in numerous scenes and indicates the essential concern of the play as a whole. By repeatedly transgressing boundaries, the play demonstrates that the dramatic structure adapted to contain the action is inadequate to the material at hand.

In the antiformalistic perspective, then, the expectations of the audience play a key role. Indeed, the expectation of the audience is virtually made the subject of the play. As the dramatic structure is incapable of containing the action, so is the audience made aware that its own attempts to structure the experience of tragedy are inadequate as well.

Booth's observations on the subversive structure of Lear can thus be viewed as the most recent in a long series of reflections on the role of dramatic structure in the play. This review of the attitudes taken toward the unconventional dramatic structure of King Lear provides a context in which to consider the conspicuous reference to catastrophe early in the play.

“AND PAT HE COMES”: LOCATING LEAR'S CATASTROPHE

In conventional tragic structure based on classical drama, the catastrophe would come at the end of the play. Having been vouchsafed the crucial information hitherto unknown, the protagonist would undergo intense, climactic suffering and then, in a relatively brief compass of time, the play would conclude. King Lear is different. In Lear the reference to catastrophe comes in the opening stages of the play. The catastrophe that has such profound associations with the conclusion of the drama has been relocated, or, more forcefully put, dislocated.

In act 1, scene 2, Edmund, Gloucester's bastard son, has just inaugurated his plan to defame his noble brother, Edgar, an act of cunning by which Edmund hopes to obtain the inheritance and title denied him because of his birth. On the heels of Edmund's subversive soliloquy, Edgar enters the play and is immediately cast into a theatrical role: “And pat he comes,” says Edmund, “like the catastrophe in the old comedy” (1.2.141).³⁹

Shakespeare invokes the figure of “the catastrophe” here to activate a number of levels.⁴⁰ Clearly, the term intervenes in the power struggle between the two brothers: by choosing to dub Edgar “the catastrophe” (the character, we recall, whose entry into the play testifies to authorial control), Edmund signals his own mastery of Edgar's fate. But the use of catastrophe here also comments self-reflexively on the form of the play. For the reference comes not at the end of the play but rather early on; not as a career concludes or a fate is sealed, but rather just as the plot is beginning to be advanced and complicated.

To be sure, this change in the position of the catastrophe accords with the view of Elizabethan drama set forth by Bernard Beckerman. Particularly in Shakespeare's plays, Beckerman argues, the climax occurs earlier in the play and endures for a greater period of time than in classical or neo-classical dramatic structure. Rather than a brief, concentrated climax, Shakespeare develops a “climactic plateau,” “a ‘coordination of intense moments’ sustained for a surprisingly extended period.”⁴¹

Yet King Lear presents the most radical example of Elizabethan revision of classical practice. For the first-act allusion to catastrophe signals that it enters this play virtually at the beginning and is present thereafter. The suffering usually confined to a single scene, and usually deferred till the end of the play, is then scattered throughout its remaining scenes.

Tellingly, in this scene the overturning of dramatic conventions goes hand in hand with the overturning of social conventions. Through the plot against brother and father, Edmund not only aspires to obtain wealth and title, but also—as demonstrated in his interrogation of the value of birth and stature that opens the scene—hopes to reverse the conventional criteria that determine virtue and privilege. It is then the simultaneous subversion of social hierarchy and of dramatic structure that determines the special character of reversal in the scene.

Shakespeare also reworks other elements associated with catastrophe. Edgar's entry, for example, reverses the formula of the conventional recognition. While the catastrophe traditionally serves as the bearer of information calculated to effect, in Eramus's formulation, the “transformation of the whole,” Edgar as the catastrophe is strikingly ignorant of what awaits him. To contrast here the exposition of Donatus, Edgar's entry achieves not the dissemination of knowledge, but rather the enhancement of deception.

Edmund's nomination of Edgar as the catastrophe registers Edmund's appreciation for the timing of his entry. As when Davos in Terence's The Adrian marveled at the ability of Crito to enter the play exactly when he was needed, so Edmund views Edgar's arrival as perfectly timed to fit in with his malevolent designs. Yet it is important, according to the conventions of the catastrophe, that he appears to arrive by chance. We recall that Donatus defined the arrival of Crito as occurring by “chance” rather than “dramatically.”

Commentators on the allusion to catastrophe in King Lear also note chance as an essential feature of this reference to catastrophe. The Cambridge edition of King Lear, for example, glosses the reference to catastrophe as “an allusion to the clumsy structure of the early comedies, in which the conclusion seemed to come by chance at the very moment it was wanted.”⁴² Catastrophes betray “clumsy structure” because they show the dramatist's hand in bringing about a desired conclusion. The clumsiness is also evident because the catastrophe's entry “seemed to come by chance”—seems, not does. The clumsy entry of the catastrophe, in other words, exposes the purposefulness of the dramatist's devices in creating the illusion of the drama. The catastrophe's function, metadramatically speaking, is to witness the constructed nature of the drama. By relocating in act 1 the emphasis on catastrophe, Shakespeare reinforces this function.⁴³

“KNOW MY NAME IS LOST”: RECUPERATING CATASTROPHE

In act 1, the early reference to “catastrophe” signals a metatheatrical commentary important to the antiformalist structure of the play. In act 5, another metatheatrical reference serves as a clue to interpreting the dramatic structure. Lear's eldest daughter Goneril, impressed by the formality of the accusations of treason, refers to the exchange between the Duke of Albany and Edmund as “An Interlude!” (5.3.90). Though directed to Albany and Edmund, the description applies to the accusation, the challenge, and the duel as well. Goneril's use of the theatrical term suggests that the action of the duel will achieve the artifice and stylization usually associated with conventional drama, and the scene that unfolds does indeed return to highly stylized legal and dramatic conventions. It is here, moreover, that the play attempts to restore the conventional fifthact catastrophe. And, in this attempt at regaining its dramatic balance, the play draws upon the idiom of the earlier catastrophe.

A summary of the scene suggests the resemblance. As in the earlier catastrophe, it is again Edmund and Edgar who play the key roles. Leaving his father, but maintaining his disguise, Edgar deposits a letter with Albany, arranging for a challenge to Edmund's newly acquired kingship. At the appointed time, Albany accuses Edmund of treason, Edmund counters, and a duel is proposed. Albany orders the Herald to carry out the public announcement of the duel, inviting contenders to respond to the summons of the trumpet. In response to the third trumpet, an unknown knight signals, appears, and claims his right to challenge the traitor Edmund. The unknown knight is of course Edgar, still disguised.

Upon his entry, Edgar has the credentials of the dramatic catastrophe. He appears from off stage, and is situated outside of the characters and events that have constituted the action. His appearance is sudden, and is made to seem even more so by coinciding with the third and final trumpet blast. That the play is now in the fifth act indicates that the time is appropriate for the catastrophe to enter and bring the play to its conclusion.

In light of the premature presentation of the catastrophe in act 1, the return of Edgar as the unknown knight seems an attempt to relocate the catastrophe in its proper place. The unusual stylization of the duel scene enforces the sense of a return to set conventions. Edmund and Edgar, for example, conduct their joust according to the conventions of knighthood and its attendant “trial-by-arms.” Prompted by the abnormal appearance of chivalry in the play, critics draw attention to its peculiar contribution. “The duel,” writes Fitzroy Pyle, “governed by the rule of knighthood” is “little in keeping with the manners and atmosphere of the [rest of the] play.”⁴⁴ Bridget Gellert Lyons sees the formality of the duel as deviating especially from the complex realism of the main plot: “Like the curious scene on the Dover cliff, the combat—chivalric and medieval—is out of keeping with the main story of King Lear. In this scene the idea of justice is rendered in the archaic mode of romances.”⁴⁵

The antiquated nature of the duel would be readily apparent, writes Rosalie Colie, to the playgoers of the seventeenth century: “he [Edmund] is to prove himself by an old-fashioned and quintessentially aristocratic method, the formal trial-at-arms outmoded in the late sixteenth century as customary proof.”⁴⁶ The archaic quality of the trial-at-arms seems to neutralize the realistic dimensions of the play and heighten those of the morality play: the episode “sets the struggle between factions into a simple morality-context, where virtue must be victorious.”⁴⁷

It is compelling that, as the play renders justice through the archaic ceremonies of chivalry, so the play also struggles to regain its dramatic balance by instituting a fifth-act catastrophe. Furthermore, the details of the duel pointedly hark back to Edgar's earlier entry into the play, and signal a series of reversals. The first-act catastrophe, for instance, occurred on the heels of Edmund passing his forged letter off on his father, which inaugurated Edgar's exile from home and name. In act 5, it is Edgar who provides the letter, which arranges for his return to power and reputation. Whereas Edgar's first-act entry was timed to coincide with Edmund's utterance of his name, Edgar's entry in act 5 emphasizes that his name has been lost:

HERALD:
                                                                                                                        What are you?
Your name? Your quality? And why you answer
This present summons?
EDGAR:
Know, my name is lost …

(5.3.119)

Even the musical phrase—“Fa, sol, la, mi”—which Edmund intones in the first instance has its correlate in the second when Edgar announces his challenge with the sound of trumpet. The phrase, notes the Arden commentary, indicates that “Edmund sings to himself so as to pretend that he is unaware of Edgar's approach.”⁴⁸ When, in act 5, Edgar enters disguised as a knight, Edmund is truly unaware of his brother's identity.

The pattern of reversals appears to offer a corrective to the sinister character of the catastrophe of act 1. The quality of a corrective has been noted as a feature of the duel scene itself. Lyons observes that Lear's hallucinatory speeches in act 4 are composed partly of fragmented images of a “trial-by-arms”:

There's your press-money. That fellow handles his bow
like a crow-keeper: draw me a clothier's yard. Look,
look! a mouse. Peace, peace! this piece of toasted
cheese will do't. There's my gauntlet; I'll
prove it on a giant. Bring up the brown bills.
O! well flown bird; i' th' clout, i' th'
clout: hewgh! Give the word.

(4.6.86-93)

In his fevered associations, Lear perceives a mouse as a fitting opponent for battle. Edmund and Edgar, invested with the privileges of knighthood, follow the customs and formality which organize the violence of revenge into a coherent ritual form. In contrast to Lear's delusions of honorific battle, the trial-by-arms is thus therapeutic for the play as a whole. So Lyons writes: “The chivalric duel in the last act, then, reminds us of the possibility of a more orderly world by ritualizing what is distorted in Lear's imagination and experiences.”⁴⁹

This ritualization would seem, as Lyons suggests, to return good and evil to their proper places, for Edgar vanquishes Edmund and thereby reclaims his lost name. But the order that the stylized duel represents is under pressure from forces of disintegration within and without. The pressure within arises from Edmund's agreement to battle an unknown antagonist:

In wisdom I should ask thy name;
But since thy outside looks so fair and war-like,
and that thy tongue some say of breeding breathes,
What safe and nicely I might well delay
By rule of knighthood, I disdain and spurn …

(5.3.142-145)

Engaged in a trial-by-arms that is governed by the rules of knighthood, Edmund can honorably refuse to accept the challenge of this unknown knight. Colie argues that the temptation to engage in a contest in which participation is defined by aristocratic privilege is too attractive for Edmund to pass up. The duel, in Colie's words, offers Edmund “a chance to act with the full dignity of the high-born, to take up the class-legacy his father did not leave him.”⁵⁰ Yet Colie's argument seems to miss what is crucial. For Edmund has the same opportunity to affirm “the full dignity of the high-born” by refusing the challenge as by accepting it. Furthermore, not indulging a challenge from one of a lower rank would reinforce his own superior rank. His allegedly high-born status would just as well be proclaimed by his firm adherence to the aristocratic code of the trial-by-arms.

As it stands, Edmund accepts the challenge by using criteria that are anything but aristocratic. The criterion that he draws on to justify his entry into battle—“But since thy outside looks so fair and war-like”—recalls, in fact, his own anti-aristocratic manifesto from act 1:

                    Wherefore should I
Stand in the plague of custom, and permit
The curiosity of nations to deprive me,
For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines
Lag of a brother? Why bastard? Wherefore base?
When my dimensions are as well compact,
My mind as generous, and my shape as true,
As honest madam's issue?

(1.2.2-9; emphasis added)

Written out of his father's legacy because of his time of birth and his bastardy, Edmund remonstrates that his physical attributes should serve as signs of his merit and nobility. It is this progressive critique of the aristocratic code that forms the ideological ground for Edmund's assault on his brother and father. Thus, in agreeing to accept the unknown knight's challenge because of the “fairness” of his physical attributes, Edmund is continuing to operate according to the progressive, “new man” terms he originally set forth in act 1.

The trial-by-arms, then, which could “remind us of the possibility of a more orderly world” by retrieving the emblem of an archaic, aristocratic code, is only made possible through Edmund's use of anti-aristocratic criteria. The order, in other words, which the trial-by-arms signifies can be obtained only through the violation of the code representing that order.⁵¹

The return to order which the combat is said to signify is also problematized through the placement of the duel in the play. As Lyons notes, the placement “following the defeat of Lear and Cordelia's forces and preceding the even more appalling catastrophe of Cordelia's hanging and Lear's death, points also to the limitations of the order it suggests.”⁵² Whatever vestige of archaic order the duel represents, it is temporary and tentative. It is, moreover, placed before the most profound disaster the play has to offer.

The duel, then, is better characterized as a dramatic pause than as a dramatic catastrophe. The reference to the duel and its attendant rites as “An Interlude” is thus particularly apposite. Commenting on the meaning and implications of the reference to “interlude” at this point in the play, William Matchett emphasizes the full dramatic import of the term: “Editors are apt to gloss ‘interlude’ merely as ‘a play’ (e.g., Muir in the Arden, Fraser in the Signet), but it surely has the more specific meaning of ‘a comedy’, and probably still carries the connotation of an entertainment between acts of a serious drama. Goneril mocks Albany's mockery as interrupting to Edmund's fate; the whole action is interrupting attention to Lear's and Cordelia's.”⁵³ More aggressive than a simple pause, the “interlude” deflects attention from what is most important and channels it toward entertainment. This can be seen as a metaphor for what occurs to Edgar. Hoping to effect a reversal in the fortunes of the kingdom, Edgar enters as the catastrophe. But his entry, and the duel that ensues, serve as elements of the interlude, bracketed from the main action. As if depicting a mortal contest between two contrary elements of dramatic form, the play refuses to accommodate the conventional catastrophe. Again, the unconventional drama, this time in the form of the interlude, undermines Edgar's attempt to usher in an appropriate ending. The catastrophe is again subverted.

King Lear cannot, in sum, account for the disaster that it so forcefully presents. All attempts, however worthy, by character, critic, or play itself to explain the disaster that triumphs are fated to come up short. To view this inadequacy as fundamental to King Lear is a line of thinking about the play which has a current vogue, likely abetted by the absurdist performances and interpretations of recent years. Its frequency of proclamation, however, makes the basic claim no less true. Characters throughout the play strain to find causal connections between events, and cannot. The clumsiness evinced by Tate's adaptation, meant to provide a motivation where previously there was none, suggests, paradoxically, how important it is that motivation remain opaque.

This opacity was what, in another way, so frustrated Bradley about Cordelia's death. For it could not, to his mind, be accounted for by what had come before in the play. Since it occurred without proper dramatic preparation, Bradley could only refer to the death as the “unexpected catastrophe.” The phrase, however, is probably more telling than Bradley ever thought it would be. For it is the notion of catastrophe that presents this problematic in all its rich complexity. It is, as we have seen, the nature of dramatic catastrophe as formulated by Terence and his commentators to come from outside the plot. The impetus the catastrophe gives to the conclusion of the drama depends on its deployment of external agency. To phrase it another way: the catastrophe cannot resolve the drama by utilizing the logic of the events within the play itself. Superfluous to the plot, coerced by the hand of the dramatist alone, the catastrophe stands for the unmotivated, and thus the arbitrary, the contingent, the unexpected. Only through these ingredients, paradoxically, can the drama be completed.

In reviewing these features of catastrophe, we can better understand the desire of King Lear to make conspicuous the issue of catastrophe. For King Lear is intensely concerned with the difficulty of accounting for motivation, of determining present events in light of past, and especially of making sense of disaster. Catastrophe, as we have seen, is a notion that in its very substance dramatizes these issues.

Notes

1. The essays circulated throughout the Renaissance under the name of Donatus. Modern scholarship, however, has determined that Donatus was the author of De Comedia and his contemporary Evanthius was the author of De Fabula. The standard edition is De Comoedia et Tragoedia, in Commentum Terenti, ed. Paul Wessner, vol. I (Leipzig: Teubner, 1902-05). Following scholarly convention, I will attribute the essays to Donatus when referring to either one.

2. Robert Miola has recently chronicled the pervasive influence of Terence on Shakespearean comedy and tragedy. See Shakespeare and Classical Comedy: The Influence of Plautus and Terence (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994); see also Bruce Smith, Ancient Scripts and Modern Experience on the English Stage, 1500-1700 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988). A generation before, T. W. Baldwin also argued the formidable influence of Donatus in William Shakespere's Five-Act Structure: Shakespere's Early Plays in the Background of Renaissance Theories of Five-Act Structure from 1470 (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1963). A concise summary by O. B. Hardison, Jr., can be found in his general introduction to medieval literary criticism and specific introduction to “Evanthius and Donathus” in Classical and Medieval Literary Criticism: Translations and Interpretations, ed. A. Preminger, O. B. Hardison, Jr., and Kevin Kerrane (New York: Ungar, 1974) 263-301. There appears to be a virtual scholarly consensus regarding the profound influence of Donatus in the Renaissance.

3. See Baldwin, William Shakespere's Five-Act Structure. The introduction to H. W. Lawton, Handbook of French Renaissance Dramatic Theory (Westport, CT.: Greenwood, 1974), contains an excellent summary of the state of dramatic theory in the Renaissance. Some critics, including Baldwin, argue that the categories employed by Donatus derive from Aristotle, not unlikely by way of a work that did not survive. A reconstruction of this missing work and the transmission of its legacy is pursued in depth in A. P. McMahon, “Seven Questions on Aristotelian Definitions of Tragedy and Comedy,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology XI (1929): 97-198.

4. Preminger 305. Donatus' De Comedia gives a somewhat different inflection to the four divisions:

   Prologue is the first speech, so called from Greek protos logos [“first word” or “first speech”] preceding the complication of the plot proper … Protasis is the first action of the drama, where part of the story is explained, part held back to arouse suspense among the audience. Epitasis is the complication of the story, by excellence of which its elements are intertwined. Catastrophe is the unraveling of the story, through which the outcome is demonstrated

   (307-308).

5. Clearly, the catastrophe as tersely described in this anatomy shares features with the notions of peripety (reversal) and anagnorises (recognition). See Baldwin's comparison of Donatus and Aristotle in William Shakespere's Five-Act Structure.

6. Paul Wessner, ed., Commentum Terenti.

7. An analysis of the Andrian is also useful because its plot is considered by many critics to be the exemplar of Terentian dramatic form. Moreover, of the five Terentian plays glossed by Donatus, his commentary on this particular play is the most extensive. See Marvin Herrick, Comic Theory in the Sixteenth Century (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1950) 107. It is also clear from a review of the Short Title Catalogue that this was the Terence play most frequently translated into English in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

8. Lawton 18-19.

9. Paul Grady Moorhead, “The Comments on the Content and Form of the Comic Plot in the Commentum Terenti Ascribed to Donatus” (Ph.D. diss., U of Chicago, 1923).

10. The translation is Baldwin's.

11. Miola sensitively shows the circulation of voices from New Comedy to King Lear. See especially Chapter 6, 187-201, focusing on Lear.

12. Preminger 304.

13. Preminger 304.

14. Preminger 304.

15. Herrick gives a succinct overview of the major Renaissance commentators on Terence 2 ff.

16. To name a few: Joannes Calphurius (d. 1503); Petras Marsus (1442?-1512); Ambrosius Beradt (d. 1542); lodocus Willichus (1501-52). In the latter part of the century J. C. Scaliger was a dominant figure. Again, see Herrick, Baldwin, Miola, and Smith.

17. Both Miola and Smith summarize the importance of Terence (and other Roman dramatists) for Renaissance education. See also Joel B. Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama (Berkeley: U of California P, 1978), particularly the chapter, “Terence and the Mimesis of Wit”; and David McPherson, “Roman Comedy in Renaissance Education: The Moral Question,” Sixteenth Century Journal 12 (1981): 19-30; on drama generally in Renaissance education, see Baldwin, William Shakespeare's Five-Act Structure; T. H. V. Motter, The School Drama in England (Port Washington, NY: Kennikut Press, 1968); M. L. Clarke, Classical Education in Britain, 1500-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1959) 9ff.; Lawrence Tanner, Westminster School: A History (London, 1934) 55-59.

18. Collected Works of Erasmus: Adages Ii1 to Iv100, trans. Margaret Mann Phillips, annotations by R. A. B. Mynors (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1987) 177.

19. Thomas Elyot, in 1538, states simply that catastrophe is a “subversion, or volume.”

20. The sequence of the two primary aspects of catastrophe is reversed in Randle Cotgrave's A Dictionary of the French and English Tongues (1611): “A catastrophe, conclusion, last act, or part of a play; the shutting up of a matter; also th' utter ruine, subversion, destruction, fatall, or finall, end of.”

21. Kenneth Muir, ed., King Lear, Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1972) 250.

22. John Florio, Queen Anna's New World of Words (1611) (Menston, England: Scolar Press, Ltd., 1968). The Scolar Press reprint is from the second edition of Florio's 1598 compilation. As in most dictionaries of the period, the dramatic connotation of catastrophe is here fundamental, and serves as the basis of comparison for other uses. The primary association of catastrophe with the ending of a drama also informs Samuel Johnson's mid-eighteenth century definition: “The change or revolution, which produces the conclusion or final event of a dramatick piece” (A Dictionary of the English Language, 1755 [New York: Arno Press, 1979]). While adding to Florio's definition, Johnson also sees that the essential component of catastrophe has to do with dramatic endings. The example that Johnson cites to illustrate this definition is, in fact, “And pat he comes …”—a reference to catastrophe in King Lear that I will soon consider. There is, to be sure, some irony in Johnson's citation of the passage from Lear. While his definition emphasizes the association of catastrophe with the events at the end of a drama, the quotation from Lear refers to Edgar's initial entry into the play. The reference to catastrophe in Lear thus initiates the action rather than concludes it.

23. John Dryden, An Essay of Dramatic Poesy, Neo-Classical Dramatic Criticism, 1560-1770, ed. Thora Burnley Jones and Bernard de Bear Nicol (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1976) 17.

24. Herrick 123.

25. Baldwin 260.

26. Baldwin 252.

27. The degree to which one can assume Shakespeare's inheritance and application of Renaissance dramatic principles and techniques is open to debate. The terms of this debate can be witnessed in the controversy over the basic unit of Shakespeare's drama. Baldwin argues, for example, that the five-act division served as a primary structuring element for Renaissance drama. He argues his point through indirection and a theory of cultural osmosis. James Hirsh, who believes the scene to be the basic unit, counters that just because an element of form is a common cultural inheritance does not mean that an innovative playwright such as Shakespeare would be sure to employ it. The Structure of Shakespearean Scenes (New Haven: Yale UP, 1981). My cautious mode of expression at the end of this section attempts to show respect for the difficulty of answering definitively such questions as these.

28. Nahum Tate, The History of King Lear, Shakespeare's Adaptations, intro. and notes by Montague Summers (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1967) 175-254.

29. Tate 177. Tate's remarks take the form of a letter “to my Esteem'd Friend Thomas Boteler, Esq.” Moving in a direction different than my own, Nancy Klein Macguire has interpreted Tate's adaptation of Lear in light of Restoration politics. See “Nahum Tate's King Lear: ‘the king's blest restoration,’” in The Appropriation of Shakespeare: Post-Renaissance Reconstructions of the Works and the Myth, ed. Jean Marsden (New York: Harvester, 1991) 29-42.

30. Tate 177.

31. Tate 177.

32. “On the Tragedies of Shakspeare, Considered with Reference to their Fitness for Stage Representation,” in Critical Essays by Charles Lamb, ed. W. MacDonald (London, 1903).

33. A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Macmillan, 1963) 199.

34. Bradley 202.

35. Bradley 204.

36. “An Approach through Dramatic Structure,” in Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare's King Lear, ed. Robert H. Ray (New York: MLA, 1986) 89.

37. James Calderwood, “Creative Uncreation in King Lear,” Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986): 12.

38. Stephen Booth, King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition, and Tragedy (New Haven: Yale UP, 1983).

39. Muir, ed., King Lear, Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1972). Unless otherwise indicated, all subsequent citations from the play refer to this edition. In recent years, the text of King Lear has been a crux of debate, the new Norton Shakespeare, for instance, publishing both the folio and the quarto editions, plus a third, conflated text. For a discussion of the controversy see Gary Taylor and Michael Warren, eds., The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare's Two Versions of King Lear (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1983). While sympathetic to Taylor and Warren's theory, I have not found that textual questions are crucial to my particular angle of interpretation. For a similar response, see Richard Halpern's brief remarks in The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Geneology of Capital (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991).

40. Like other Elizabethan playwrights, Shakespeare makes explicit reference to “catastrophe” in several plays: Love's Labour's Lost, All's Well That Ends Well, Henry 4, Part II, and King Lear.

41. Bernard Beckerman, Shakespeare at the Globe, 1599-1609 (New York: Macmillan, 1962) 42.

42. George Ian Duthie and John Dover Wilson, eds., King Lear (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1968) 158.

43. Miola also reads this allusion in light of Davos' antics in The Andrian, focusing not on dramatic structure but on Shakespeare's reworking comic devices for tragic effects. Interestingly, this focus leads him to emphasize the role of chance, again with a eye toward Shakespeare's inflecting New Comedy chance to tragic ends.

44. Fitzroy Pyle, “Twelfth Night, King Lear, and Arcadia,” Modern Language Review (October, 1948): 449-455.

45. Bridget Gellert Lyons, “The Subplot as Simplification in King Lear,” in Some Facets of King Lear: Essays in Prismatic Criticism, eds. Rosalie L. Colie and F. T. Flahiff (Toronto: U of Toronto, 1974) 32-33.

46. Rosalie L. Colie, “Reason and Need: King Lear and the ‘Crisis’ of the Aristocracy,” in Colie and Flahiff 208.

47. Colie, “Reason and Need” 208.

48. Muir 32.

49. Lyons 35.

50. Colie, “Reason and Need” 208.

51. Gillian Murray Kendall, interpreting the combat between the brothers in the context of ritual, argues similarly that the emphasis on order is, ultimately, meant to be read ironically; since both brothers are able to manipulate the conventions of the combat for their own purposes, the order purportedly inscribed by ritual is shown to be “arbitrary” and “hollow.” Kendall does not however link her reading to conventions of dramatic structure. “Ritual and Identity: The Edgar-Edmund Combat in King Lear,” in True Rites and Maimed Rites: Ritual and Anti-Ritual in Shakespeare and His Age, ed. Linda Woodbridge and Edward Berry (Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1992). The notion that chivalric combat was (or was perceived to be) archaic in early modern England—as Colie, Kendall and I assume—has been challenged by Richard McCoy. See The Rites of Knighthood: The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry (Berkeley: U of California P, 1989), especially chapter 1, in which he reviews the literature on chivalry and ritual combat.

52. Lyons 35.

53. William Matchett, “Some Dramatic Techniques in King Lear,” in Shakespeare: The Theatrical Dimension, eds. Phillip C. McGuire and David Samuelson (New York: AMS, 1979) 207.