[In the following essay, Schlueter discusses the conclusion of King Lear, noting that the play “both embodies and disrupts” literary conventions.]

All friends shall taste
The wages of their virtue, and all foes
The cup of their deservings. …

In Shakespeare's King Lear, the final sequence, beginning with Lear's howls and culminating in his death, may well compose the most powerful image of the play. The death of Cordelia, who earlier exchanged love and forgiveness with her father, astonishes even a reader expecting a tragic ending, for she, like Lear, has become “Great thing of us forgot!” (5.3.240).¹ Diverted and preoccupied by the unfolding events, the reader gives little thought to the Captain sent off to do “man's work” (5.3.40) or to Edmund's pending hope to do some good. When father and daughter do reappear, Cordelia hanged, the shattering spectacle urges the reader to feel that if this is the “promis'd end” (5.3.267)—of the world or of Lear and Cordelia—then there is no redeeming of sorrow and no hope of cosmic justice.

Never has the prevailing vision of Edgar, the primary spokesman of conventional consolations, seemed so shockingly inadequate to account for the action that the play presents. If as readers we grieve for the vulnerability of Lear and Cordelia, we also, as Stephen Booth suggests, grieve for “our own”² and await its explicit acknowledgment. When the acknowledgment comes, it is the more poignant that it comes from Edgar, with the final lines of the play, in a voice chastened by the weight of experience:

The weight of this sad time we must obey,
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most; we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

(5.2.328-31)

This concluding utterance seems a small concession and, surely, a perfunctory comment on the meaning of this expansive and enigmatic drama. But for Edgar, who has resisted the daunting lessons of experience throughout, relinquishing formulaic expressions of a visionary ideal to insist on the sad validations of a felt reality involves a basic change in perspective. Edgar is the one character in the play who has lived through the deepest agony of both Gloucester and Lear, serving as mad witness and spiritual guide on both the storm-beaten heath and the Dover shore. And if his heart seemed to break at what he saw, it has also had to absorb the treachery, privation, and pain he has himself known. Yet Edgar has repeatedly sought and created compensations for the “worst,” and in the immediate aftermath of his victory over Edmund, with a hundred fifty-odd lines left in the play, he confidently proclaims, “The gods are just” (5.3.173).

Other characters have made similar affirmations in circumstances that a reader, if not the character, recognizes as less than validating. Albany, hearing of the heroic action of the servant who slew the brutal Cornwall, concludes, “This shows you are above, / You justicers, that these our nether crimes / So speedily can venge!” (5.3.79-81). But while Albany is pronouncing this judgment, Cornwall's partners in crime continue to thrive and their victims to suffer—Lear is mad, Gloucester is blind, and the servant is dead. Likewise, Gloucester, in response to Edgar's fraudulent miracle on Dover Cliff, believes that the “clearest gods” (5.3.73) have preserved him, even after his encounter with Lear in the same scene petitioning the “ever-gentle gods” (5.3.218) and invoking “The bounty and the benison of heaven” (5.3.226). Now Edgar, having proved upon Edmund's person the bastard's “heinous, manifest, and many treasons” (5.3.94), seems legitimately to have vindicated the gods, and, for the time being, the reader may concede, with the dying Edmund, “Th' hast spoken right, 'tis true” (5.3.176).

Events appear to be winding down; the redemptive process appears to be in force. Edgar tells of the joy and grief that burst his father's heart and of Kent's puissant sorrow. Edmund, moved to contrition, proposes to do some good. And the report of Goneril's suicide and Regan's poisoning prompts Albany to acknowledge the appropriate “judgment of the heavens” (5.3.235). But the salutary emotions and the fitting retribution that promise to mitigate past sufferings evaporate in an instant with Albany's “Great thing of us forgot!” The fate of the king and his daughter remains to be assimilated into Albany's sense of justice, Edgar's consoling creed, and the vision of the play. The last line before Lear enters, Cordelia in his arms, contains Albany's desperate prayer: “The gods defend her!” (5.3.260). But the gods do not deliver.

Nevertheless, even as he witnesses the distraught Lear's ministrations to his dead daughter, Albany attempts to offer the summation speech conventionally accorded the reigning dignitary of a Shakespearean tragedy:

You lords and noble friends, know our intent.
What comfort to this great decay may come
Shall be applied. For us, we will resign,
During the life of this old majesty,
To him our absolute power. …
… All friends shall taste
The wages of their virtue, and all foes
The cup of their deservings.

(5.3.301-9)

In this formal declaration, Albany means to restore comfort to Lear, order to the kingdom, and justice to the world of the play. It is what he “ought to say” (5.3.329). But, as John Shaw points out in his essay on the final lines of Lear, the declaration is both premature and beside the point. Lear's death is yet to come, and Albany, “who has never been acutely perceptive,” however well-meaning, remains an imperfect judge of the “events taking place before his eyes.”³ With the exclamation “O, see, see!” (5.3.309), he interrupts his concluding couplet and directs all eyes to the final agony of Lear.

Albany's next speech is in the accents of one who has seen Lear die. He speaks only to acknowledge “general woe” and the “gor'd state” (5.3.325), relinquishing rule to Kent, who refuses it, and to Edgar, who speaks the last lines. Unlike Albany's premature declaration, Edgar's quiet reflection does not represent “what we ought to say” (5.3.329): it presents no vision of virtue rewarded, vice punished, or order restored, resting in assurances that are essentially “negative and ambiguous.”⁴ Though in itself inadequate as a comment on the disturbing substance of the play, however, Edgar's utterance may well stand as the playwright's comment on the play he has made. As Shaw puts it, in “defying the decorous pattern of the usual ending, Shakespeare is implying that any return to routine after the events of this tragedy would constitute an outrage to one's sense of moral justice as well as to one's sense of artistic rightness.”⁵ Shaw suggests that the full impact of Edgar's speech lies not only in the failure of the cosmic and political order to assert itself but also in the refusal of the conventional artistic order to do so.

If the speech is in effect a comment on the playwright's art, then the lines offer a more satisfying, albeit ironic, conclusion. After all, Edgar has spent much of his play life playing roles and creating dramatic fictions. And it is Edgar who, at the final entrance of Lear, responds to the stunned Kent's question—“Is this the promis'd end?”—with another question—“Or image of that horror?” (5.3.267). The exchange combines anticipations of the apocalypse with expectations concerning the tragic form. It reminds the reader, as the play so frequently does, that this is a dramatic fiction and that the promised end of tragedy is indeed an “image of that horror.” But if Edgar takes the initiative in recalling the tragic imperative as Lear enters, he resists it when Lear dies. The first to react to the king's passing, he misreads the event as a faint, urging his lord to “Look up,” and requires Kent to identify death: “Vex not his ghost. O, let him pass!” (5.3.317-18). Though a practicing artist, who can claim some success in redefining perception and reshaping reality, Edgar is helpless here; he must yield to ineluctable death in both life and the tragic form. His reflexive allusion to the “image of that horror” may indeed suggest that Edgar is not quite sure whether he is a participant in life or, like Gloucester at Dover Cliff, a participant in a play. Now, having failed to affect the course of either, he will at least resist decorous artistic closure in his summary speech. Proposing that we “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say” (5.3.329), he in fact says little of either. Instead, he replaces tragedy's conventional end, invoked ineffectually by Albany, with two couplets that leave no one—nihilists, existentialists, moral optimists, humanists, Christians, or Aristotelians—content.

King Lear is a play that deconstructs itself repeatedly, subverting one pattern of action and argument with the next in a teasing panorama of self-contradiction. If the reader is left with any moral certainty at the end of the drama, it is that life in both its grand and its gritty dimensions is capricious, refusing to submit to the paradigms of justice proposed by any of its characters. If there is any determinately present meaning to be found, it derives from Edgar's “Speak what we feel,” a directive that settles attention on the imperfect authority of “unaccommodated man” (3.4.105-6). But if this too is searching for definition where there is none, then Edgar's final speech becomes the ultimate comment on the play, for in refusing the promised end of tragedy, it dissolves the elements that are supposed to constitute the tragic vision. Booth is rigorous in his analysis of the irreconcilable paradoxes of the play but reassuring in his conclusion. His thesis is that the “repeated evocation of a sense of indefiniteness generates a sense of pattern and thus of the wholeness, the identity, of the play.”⁶ His comment on Albany's premature speech illustrates the point.

The glory of King Lear as an experience for its audience is in the fact that the play presents its morally capricious universe in a play that, paradoxically, is formally capricious and also uses pattern to do exactly what pattern usually does: assert the presence of an encompassing order in the work (as opposed to the world it describes). Albany's restitution speech and the inadequacy it acknowledges when Albany breaks off and says, “O, see, see!” embody the paradox precisely: both in substance and kind Albany's speech proclaims a return to order and gratifies one's assumptions that the norms of society and the norms of plays can be counted on; both Albany and his speech fail of their promised ends, and yet the mere repetition of the two kinds of failure balances and qualifies the effect of one of them, the failure of form.⁷

Booth sees the last sixteen lines of King Lear as emblematic of the experience of the whole. Those final lines, like numerous other phenomena in the play, both disrupt the reader's faith in artistic kinds and use the reader's perception of kind “to compensate artistically for the intellectual terror that the same phenomena generate by illustrating the impossibility of definition.”⁸

I begin with the promised end of King Lear because it is, in many ways, a model of dramatic closure, engaging as it does the determinations that I believe are necessary to this study. It both embodies and disrupts formal conventions, expressed in language, action, character, and genre. It establishes a contextual, or ideological, field within which the action proceeds, positing—and subverting—an order of human society with its attendant assumptions. It reclaims a previously scripted figure, present in King Leir and other historical and literary sources, affirming the established chronicle but altering it as well (in all the sources, Lear survives the end). It builds into its dramatic structure expectations that the text has of the reader and that the reader has of the text. And it displays an exceptional degree of self-consciousness as it progresses and regresses from and to the promised, yet unpromised, end. King Lear is a play that is both recursive and proleptic within itself and within the history of drama, looking backward to the Greek classics, forward to post-modern plays. Its promised end acknowledges both the point of stability at which an Oedipus ends and, prophetically, the Derridean indeterminacies that refuse to allow a postmodern work to close.

Notes

1. References to King Lear are from David Bevington, ed., The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 4th ed. (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), pp. 1172-1218. Bevington uses the Folio (1623) for his copy text of King Lear, introducing Quarto (1608) only readings in brackets.

2. Stephen Booth, “King Lear,” “Macbeth,” Indefinition, and Tragedy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 11.

3. John Shaw, “King Lear: The Final Lines,” Essays in Criticism 16, no. 3 (1966): 263-64.

4. Ibid., p. 266.

5. Ibid.

6. Booth, “King Lear,” “Macbeth,” Indefinition, and Tragedy, p. 21.

7. Ibid., pp. 27-28.

8. Ibid., p. 21.