[In the following excerpt, the critics examine King Lear from a historical perspective, maintaining that the play subverts the conventions of pastoral romance through its setting in an unjust, feudal society.]

In his conclusion to 'Myth in Primitive Psychology' [Bronislaw] Malinowski draws attention to the development of specifically literary forms out of the cultural praxis of myth. 'Myth contains germs of the future epic, romance, and tragedy.… Myths of love and of death, stories of the loss of immortality, of the passing of the Golden Age, and of the banishment from Paradise, myths of incest and of sorcery play with the very elements which enter into the artistic forms of tragedy, of lyric, and of romantic narrative' (pp. 143-4). Gillian Beer has noted [in The Romance, 1970] how 'romance tends to use and reuse well-known stories whose familiarity reassures', so that each new start is also a recapitulation. This ritual element in romance, binding past and present together, springs out of a central pre-occupation which it shares with the related genre of the fairy-tale and which both share with myth: a pre-occupation with areas of sociological strain, with those fault-lines of a society along which its most devastating fractures threaten always to recur. Myth, romance and fairy-tale have taken the most dangerous of experiences to their heart. In fairy-tale (and this accounts for the vigorous survival of the genre today in its current forms) those experiences are commonly centred in the family; in romance they may be more widely located—between friends or lovers, for instance, or even between fellow citizens of a shared culture. But the family remains in both the most frequent area of pre-occupation; and we must remember of course that in Elizabethan and Jacobean England the family, undergoing a period of crisis that provoked a widespread reinforcement of patriarchal authority, was the central unit and the type of all political organization. In these dangerous areas the business of romance and fairy-tale is most commonly with happy endings. They are fictions that men and women tell themselves in confirmation of their faith that the injustices of real life will not destroy their faith in Justice or jeopardize their sense of the worth of survival. Romance, that is, maps the world along the contours of our idealism; and, if its nostalgia or occasional tragedy should signal contradictions imperfectly resolved, its chief aim is nevertheless (like myth) to provide hope, to smooth over the discontinuities of the past and to ease the sociological strains of the present.

Since the publication of Maynard Mack's 'King Lear' in our Time, the romance elements in King Lear have been very widely discussed. For Shakespeare took much of his main plot from The True Chronicle Historie of King Leir, which is in fact gentle pastoral romance rather than chronicle history, and to this he brought a tragic sub-plot out of Sidney's aristocratic pastoral romance, Arcadia: there can be no doubt that he was consciously dealing with what Mack called [in 'King Lear' in our Time] 'the heady brew of romance'. Indeed, the main plot from its very start establishes associations with romance that shape our deepest hopes. We are influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by tales such as 'Cinderella', which tells of parental injustice, of 'the agonies of sibling rivalry, of wishes coming true, of the humble being elevated, of true merit being recognized even when hidden under rags, of virtue rewarded and evil punished' [Bruno Bettelheim in The Uses of Enchantment, 1978]. We are influenced by tales in which pride goes before a fall—tales of 'the Abasement of the Proud King' such as that of Nebuchadnezzar:

they shall drive thee from men, and thy dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field, and they shall make thee to eat grass as oxen, and they shall wet thee with the dew of heaven.…

Wherefore, O king, let my counsel be acceptable unto thee, and break off thy sins by righteousness, and thine iniquities by shewing mercy to the poor; if it may be a lengthening of thy tranquillity.

Kent's story too is traditional romance, worked up out of the undisguised figure of the good counsellor in the source play: for in Shakespeare we see a loyal courtier, banished for honest speaking, enter his master's service in disguise, quarrel with the servants of his master's enemies, and at the last reveal himself in the hope of a final reconciliation. The sub-plot too is typical romance: the good brother disinherited through the stratagem of a forged letter and obliged to disguise himself as a beggar until the time is ripe to return to single combat and the offer of kingship. Even the most extreme of Shakespeare's stage-events—Lear's crown of weeds, or Gloucester's leap at Dover—suggest the customary materials of comedy and romance. Indeed, the whole structure of the play itself, with the movement of its sympathetic characters away from the corrupt centres of power to the houseless nature of its middle acts, is built upon what Michael Long has called [in The Unnatural Scene: A Study in Shakespearean Tragedy, 1976] 'classic festivecomic lines'. It has now become commonplace to consider King Lear alongside As You Like It; and the comparison has particular point if it serves to remind us of the way that the play (unlike any other Shakespearean tragedy) leads us, even when we know it well, to ache after that happy ending implicit in its ancient storylines.

To speak more closely, King Lear is a study in complementary relationships of authority and service; and our response to the central focus of the Lear-Cordelia relationship is shaped precisely by two complementary traditions of romance, each of which is used by Shakespeare elsewhere and which might surely seem sufficient together to bring the play home to a final reconciliation. There is the romance of the ruler whose education is completed by exposure to feel as his subjects feel (utilized most obviously by Shakespeare in Measure for Measure, in both parts of Henry IV and in Henry V). Such romance shows how, through the ruler's incorporation of his subjects' experience, a community may be reconstituted under the protection of sympathetic authority. In the words that Daniel used to praise the sympathetic rule of James, 'the Prince himselfe now heares, sees, knows'. Then there is the complementary romance of the subject, in which a dependant's patience is rewarded after long abuse (as Hermione is rewarded in The Winter's Tale). Here too the community is re-established, this time in the security brought by undeviating service. The conjunction of these two complementary traditions in King Lear creates the expectation that the ruler and the subject together will be brought to recognize both their common humanity and their different, but reciprocal, social responsibilities; the dangers that lurk within all authority-service relationships will thus be defused and society re-established in the ideal self-image of its own dominant ideology. Especially does this seem likely when we perceive the overall structure of the play to be one of pastoral romance. For in romance the oppositional proves beneficent, and regeneration is by that which is contrary: the injustice of society is healed by the ideal equity of nature, the proud king restored by confrontation with houseless poverty, and lowly virtue brought into its full inheritance by the persecution of powerful vice. Such indeed seems the certain direction of the play, as Lear meets Cordelia in the wilds behind Dover at the end of Act IV.

But Maynard Mack's description of King Lear as 'the greatest anti-pastoral ever penned' suggests the nature of the shocks that Act V has in store for us. For this is a play in which the oppositional does not bring re-generation; instead, it breaks out in open contradiction that leads to terminal collapse. Shockingly, the tragedy negates all our expectations, even at the simplest level of the narrative; for this is the first version of the story in which Cordelia does not win a military victory over her sisters and reinstate her father on the throne. Dr Johnson was right, after all, to be horrified; for the play maps reality along the contours of a terrible dis-illusion and leaves us darkling indeed. So deliberate is Shakespeare's design to shock that Gary Taylor's guess seems very plausible: that the play in Quarto was entitled 'True Chronicle Historie', rather than 'Tragedie' as it became in the Folio, precisely to delude its first audiences into expecting the happy ending of its chief source.

Our disillusion at the narrative outcome is also a betrayal of our expectation of romance; for King Lear presents the ideal pacifications of romance in a much more chilling perspective. To borrow a fine phrase from Shelley, all those 'beautiful idealisms of moral excellence' which effect the reconciliatory rituals of romance are here seen to be ineffective when faced with the powerful social contradictions which it is commonly their business to reconcile. The play explores in particular, perhaps, the contrary truths to everything that Spenser had celebrated in book II of The Faerie Queene, where temperance had overcome the temptations of anger and lust and had sealed up the discontinuities of history in a timeless iconography of goodness. Here in King Lear temperance succumbs to anger and lust, and a rift is opened up in history. The poet, using to the full that special licence not granted to the historiographer, has brought forward by nine generations the extinction of Brutus' line; and in so doing he has brought into play that violence and destructiveness which constantly attend upon social contradiction.

King Lear has been called 'a courtly compliment' to King James; it has been considered an Awful Warning to his people and parliament in their resistance to the union of Scotland with England; it may even be considered an Awful Warning to James himself; and no doubt it will yield such meanings. But they are not spelled out for us; King Lear is remarkable precisely for its freedom from the kind of framework that we find in Gorboduc, where all things are made to spell out the credenda and agenda of political orthodoxy. We are left at the end not with dogma but with dead loss. The effect is similar to that which Fulke Greville believed was aimed at in classical tragedy: 'to exemplifie the disastrous miseries of mans life, where Order, Lawes, Doctrine, and Authority are unable to protect Innocency from the exorbitant wickednesse of power, and so out of that melancholike Vision, stir horrour, or murmur against Divine Providence'.

Yet this is not ancient tragedy but tragedy of his own national history that Shakespeare has written. He has assimilated pagan to Christian and barbaric to mediaeval in order to recreate a Tudor myth of national origin; but he has done so, once again, only to betray expectation. For King Lear subverts not only romance but also the mythical charter of its own country. It tells not of a civilization won for the present with heroic difficulty in the past, but of a civilization lost with anguish for all time—a loss which was absolute but is still present with us, informing our understanding of the disastrous miseries, the injustices and the violence which still succeeds, in our lesser world, upon the breakdown of social reciprocity.

IMAGES OF GOODNESS: CORDELIA AND KENT

The question of reciprocity, of course, is crucial. When Lear enters at the end of the play with Cordelia dead in his arms, he is desperately searching for expression that will do justice to the enormity of the sense of injustice that he feels:

Howl, howl, howl! O! You are men of stones:
Had I your tongues and eyes, I'd use them so
That heaven's vault should crack.
                                       (V. iii.256-8)

These words, in which we hear grief modulating into rage, are deeply typical of a recurrent pattern in the play. 'By none / Am I enough beloved', lamented Wordsworth's Matthew by the fountain. King Lear depicts a world in which no one can say enough, in which neither grief nor rage is satisfied; and in consequence the individual mind is driven to the uttermost extremes of fantasy to conjure up its happiness. Hence in part the play's exploration of the transformational devices of romance. But Lear's cry here, of course, would also transform the world: he would howl until the heaven's vault crack. We cannot tell what mixture of grief or rage is in his voice, whether he aims perhaps at the world's regeneration, or more simply at its destruction, in the cracking of divine remorselessness. It might be either, for pity and anger, sorrow and rage are the antithetical feelings in King Lear through which men and women try to make the justice that they cannot find. Yet it is all to no avail: the power of Lear's words can, in their expression, effect no more than a moment's brief transformation of a reality whose loveless injustice persists. The long clear light of romance that illuminates reality throughout The Faerie Queene has been diffracted; in Donne's words, 'The sun is spent, and now his flasks / Send forth light squibs, no constant rays' [from "A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day"].

It is the presence of Cordelia and Kent in the play's opening scene that calls attention to the importance of reciprocity—and also to its dependence upon a common language. For one brief moment in that scene, despite the pressure they are under, they still have access to a language in which they believe they may speak both what they feel and what they ought to say. For one brief moment, then never again, the possibilities of courtesy and honesty appear to coincide—though even here, ominously, Cordelia has already been driven to say in an aside that she would rather 'love, and be silent'. Her difficulties are obvious:

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

You have begot me, bred me, lov'd me: I
Return those duties back as are right fit,
Obey you, love you, and most honour you.
Why have my sisters husbands, if they say
They love you all?
                                    (I. i.91-9)

It is hard to say what mixture of angry defiance and riddling satire colours the love in her voice as she struggles under her father's usurpation of language and ceremony; and certainly her spirited arithmetical talk of dividing her love is not a happy solution. Kent too has to struggle:

                 Royal Lear,
Whom I have ever honour'd as my King,
Lov'd as my father, as my master follow'd,
As my great patron thought on in my
 prayers,—
                                  (11.138-41)

Then, two lines later, he is driven into unmannerly plainness. It seems, therefore, that hitherto both Cordelia and Kent have been able to accommodate an ideal conception of their relationship with Lear within the real court world, but that now it has become impossible. They can no longer speak courteously what they feel; and, in destroying that middle ground upon which the reciprocities of conversation rest, Lear is effectively already banishing them from their society.

When Cordelia tells her father that she loves him according to her bond—'no more nor less'—she is using the word that declares her faith in the ideal charter of that society. For Shakespeare has imagined the world of his play much more precisely than it is imagined in any of his sources; he has given it a feudal structure and language in which his audience could recognize the prehistory of their own Jacobean present. Cordelia's bond is the feudal equivalent of the Roman pietas, a matter of neither spontaneous feeling nor legal duty but an alloy the stronger for being compounded of both; and it is the word in which all the themes of the play briefly meet. Nature and society, affection and duty, prudence and love, religion, custom, value, law and the sense of justice: all these are composed in Cordelia's attempt to recall her father and king to her own ideal conception of the responsibilities of his authority. She is declaring that love is defined by its limits, that these limits are determined by the customary proprieties of their society, and that without such limits love becomes tyrannical and extreme. She is declaring that a woman is more than a chattel, a subject more than a slave.

But the ideal which Cordelia and Kent serve is contradicted by the real. The self-constituted ritual in which Lear engages his court in the opening scene of the play should not be seen simply as a love-test; it is an improvised perversion of the feudal ceremony of commendation, when a subject openly declared his loyalty to the king, and the king in return granted him his particular charters. Lear's irresponsible vanity thus does not only strike at the heart of his favourite daughter: it also strikes at the heart of the relationship between love and property which is, ideally, the cornerstone of the feudal system and which all its ceremonies of allegiance are designed to reinforce—and in so doing it draws out that system's latent contradictions into open conflict. No longer after Lear's act can a corrupt system of patronage and flattery idealize itself as a system of loving mutual service. Power is released from the imaginative discipline of sympathy and service, and runs at once to extremes; and, indeed, the rapidity of the political degeneration after Lear's abdication suggests how deeply rooted that tendency already was, both within the royal family and amongst the military powers of the great aristocratic houses.

Critics of King Lear, particularly since Danby, have fallen into a habit of interpreting the play in terms of a clash between feudal and bourgeois ideologies, with Shakespeare's sympathies firmly centred upon the feudal. 'As Nature goes dead, community becomes competition', wrote Danby concisely [in Shakespeare's Doctrine of Nature: A Study of King Lear, 1949]; the 'benevolent thesis' of feudalism succumbs before 'the new age of scientific inquiry and industrial development, of bureaucratic organization and social regimentation' which is somehow represented by Edmund in the play. James Kavanagh similarly writes [in "Shakespeare in Ideology," in Alternative Shakespeares, 1985] of the destruction wrought by 'an individualist ideology that lives the world as a field of calculation, self-gratification and perverse desire' upon 'the hierarchical ideology of fealty, faith and restraint, which lives the world as a field of reciprocal obligation'. It has become the orthodox reading of our time: that 'the old, patriarchal society has been stripped by the new men, the new, hard materialists' [Marvin Rosenberg in The Masks of King Lear, 1972]. Yet it is surely unlikely that two king's daughters and one illegitimate nobleman's son, all of whom are killed, should have been chosen by Shakespeare to express an emergent bourgeois ideology: rather, the true subject of King Lear, it seems to me, is not an old order succumbing to a new but an old order succumbing to its own internal contradictions. The king is unequal to the great demands made of him; the aristocracy cannot harmonize its interests; and the family, the social unit through which political power is both secured and delegated, is nowhere able to ensure its orderly survival. We may think Lear unwise to have divided his kingdom until we remember the results of Gloucester's exclusive favouring of legitimacy and primogeniture. The society fractures along its own fault-lines; and it is of no avail to blame the coarse imaginative self-will of Lear and Gloucester, since that self-will itself is a consequence of the political structure they wish to preserve.

Cordelia is disinherited and Kent banished, but Shakespeare saves them both from the prospect of immediate desolation by dramatic devices characteristic of romance: he finds a husband for the one and a disguise for the other. These are, of course, more than mere devices; they are ways of exploring those strategies by which, in fact and fantasy, men and women sustain themselves in their struggle against injustice. Cordelia makes it known to her suitors that she was disinherited 'for want of that for which I am richer' (I. i.229), and the French king finds himself strangely drawn to this 'unpriz'd precious maid' (1.258) whose virtue has made her despised and rejected of men:

Fairest Cordelia, that art most rich, being
  poor;
Most choice, forsaken; and most lov'd,
  despis'd!
                                  (I. i.249-50)

These paradoxical figures of speech, so typical of the inversions found throughout the play, suggest the idealization of which the characters will now stand in need if, deprived of their common language, they are to accommodate themselves to the increasing restrictions of the real. 'Hath not God chosen the poor of this world rich in faith, and heirs of the kingdom which he hath promised to them that love him?' (James 2:5): such idealization, of course, is a familiar consolation for suffering in fairy-tale and romance, myth and religion alike. It holds out the possibility of carrying on, even of starting afresh; and, as Cordelia leaves, her romantic marriage seems to be offering her just such an opportunity of a fresh start. 'Thou losest here, a better where to find' (I. i.260), says France. But King Lear does not follow its sources to France, and there will be no fresh start elsewhere; fortified by her idealization and the power that her marriage gives her, Cordelia will return to the struggle.

Kent will not even leave. When courtesy and plainness fail, his first impulse—like Cordelia's—is towards a transcendental idealism that inverts the world before him. 'Freedom lives hence, and banishment is here' (1.180), he says. Then, in the new perspective which displacement brings, he hits upon the romantic device of disguise that enables him too (as Cordelia's marriage enables her) to continue to serve.

If thou canst serve where thou dost stand
  condemn'd,
So may it come, thy master, whom thou
  lov'st,
Shall find thee full of labours.
                                   (I. iv.5-7)

This self-disguise enacts a widespread fantasy of neglected servants—and more particularly of unacknowledged lovers (the 'servant' such as Viola in Twelfth Night, for instance)—to win regard by anonymous attentions. The intolerable fact of real neglect and contempt becomes in imagination the ideal opportunity for patience; and Kent, serving incognito, will abase himself that what he really is may finally be gloriously recognized and the ideal relationship between authority and service re-established.

Barish and Waingrow [in "'Service' in King Lear," Shakespeare Quarterly 9, 1958], comparing Kent with the servile Oswald, describe him as "the quintessence of the good servant and the touchstone for service throughout the play'; and of course Cordelia's loyal, self-sacrificial attention to her father's business is everywhere commended. But we need to characterize this goodness, this service; we need to see it in the context of the play's romantic structures. For the compassion that Kent and Cordelia come to feel for Lear, on the dispersal of whatever anger and indignation they may have felt at first, belongs to an idealistic transformation of reality of which the most striking aspect is the idealization of the person of the king himself. Kent in the storm speaks of 'the old kind King' (III. i.28) and Cordelia at Dover of her 'dear father' (IV. iv.23)—words that bear eloquent testimony to their capacity for pity but that also have a curious insufficiency about them. For pity is not enough. Kent and Cordelia, in fact, exhibit a familiar response to threat: they turn back towards an ideal internal object, split off (in part at least) from any real object in the external world. That ideal object is, of course, the sovereign whom they had once seen in Lear and whom now, in Lear's dereliction, they cannot relinquish; and hence the strange incommensurateness of their pity to the man before us on stage, the strange disjunction between the pitiable figure they describe and the tragic figure we see.

The point is, such idealization subtly inhibits the very reciprocities it aims at—something seen most poignantly in the delicate incongruities of the so-called 'recognition scene' (IV. vii). This scene has been persistently sentimentalized by critics who share the romantic illusions of Cordelia and Kent; but the truth is, however, that the scene is not altogether one of recognition. Cordelia (like Kent) addresses Lear with tender courtesy as king, and then she kneels before him. It is hard to imagine a more moving act of forgiveness, a more generous gesture towards restitution; for she offers him her vision of his ideal sovereign self. Yet her terms of address send Lear down at once grotesquely on his knees—dazedly, it seems, half afraid of mockery, half fancying her an angel. The father kneels to the daughter, the king to the subject. The moment is profoundly moving in the depth and value of the feelings and recognitions involved; but—equally important—it is also exquisitely embarrassing in the disjunction between those feelings and recognitions. Lear will hear no talk of kingship. The plain language of his self-description, flickering between shame, wonder, self-pity and humility, coupled with the courtliness of his address to Cordelia, enacts perfectly his intuition that value lies most in the inversion of all that formerly had been. Such is his idealization. Father and daughter, even at this most moving moment of their love, are feeling different things: Cordelia (as in romance) would turn the broken man before her back into the king her father, whilst he (also as in romance) would be reborn as a new man and no king. Shakespeare tempts us with the poignant awakening of romance expectation, only to frustrate us with languages and feelings that do not quite enmesh; and so it goes on to the end. 'Shall we not see these daughters and these sisters?' (V. iii.7), urges Cordelia with tough determination to out-frown misfortune.

No, no, no, no! Come, let's away to prison;
We two alone will sing like birds i' th'cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel
 down,
And ask of thee forgiveness.…
                                 (v. iii.8-11)

The king runs into prison (under arrest as he is), imagining with his daughter to transform it into a kind of hermit's cell, where the painful mysteries of life will be revealed and loss be hallowed into sacrifice. This fantasy of power and omniscience is opposite to that in which initially he mapped out the division of his kingdom; and it is hauntingly beautiful yet it is far indeed from that full restoration for which Cordelia and Kent had longed, and his daughter can do more than look at him, weep, love and once again be silent.

Silent tears are the last that we see of Cordelia until Lear enters carrying her dead body and demanding that men should howl aloud their cry for justice; and these tears, as she watches the extraordinary behaviour of her sovereign father, seem to express at the last her own paradoxical recognition of how little her pity and her service have achieved and yet how little anything else in the world is worth. There are no words left for her; the language and iconography by which she has lived her life have disintegrated with the disintegration of the society which sustained them, and she seems finally to have become aware of the great distance between herself and her father, between her own lonely images of goodness and the outer world in which they have failed to find accommodation. The fragmentation already begun in the play's opening scene is here completed with the marginalization of those virtues in which a feudal society had seen its best self. That society has now succumbed to its own inner contradictions; and in Cordelia's lament before her frenzied father, as in Lear's lament at her death, we see emblems of how the feudal pieties of pity, love and service, idealized as they have become, can do no more than comtemplate the unjust world which they have been compelled to vacate. For certainly they are powerless to change it.

'Is this the promis'd end?' (V. iii.262), asks Kent. 'Or image of that horror?' adds Edgar with a flicker of his characteristic impulse to qualify. Questions proliferate at the end of the play, searching the seemingly inscrutable whys of injustice. 'Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, / And thou no breath at all?' (11.305-6). These are questions asked both within the play by its characters and of the play by its audience: for the play's theatrical self-consciousness, here as it concludes its business with the mythical charter of its country, involves the past inescapably in the present. It both re-calls and keeps alive the tragic awareness that, in a society where the reciprocities of authority and service have broken down, there are no answers to such questions, either in the promised ends of religion or romance. The tableau of that curiously inverted pietà, as—shockingly—the father enters with his dead daughter in his arms, undoes not only the audience's faith in its own society and its own history but also every romance and myth by which it has tried to maintain that faith, including (most disturbingly) the Christian one. The gods have not thrown incense upon sacrifice, the girl who went about her father's business will come no more to redeem nature from the general curse which twain have brought her to. Neither faith nor works of any kind can achieve that. For the consolations of metaphysics and art, like those attendant upon everyday goodness, are shown in this play to be ineffective without the primary reciprocities of social justice—and these reciprocities have long since vanished, both from the world of King Lear and from its playhouse, it seems. Their loss, moreover, is absolute; and, significantly, it is the loyal imagination of Kent that is stretched to pronounce the extraordinary epitaph upon the man who for so long, against so many odds, survived their loss: 'He but usurp'd his life' (1.316). Lear usurped his life when he began to live it for himself alone; and in so doing he entailed upon Kent, as upon Cordelia, a paradoxical idealization of the concept of service to compensate for its scant success in reality. Finally now, Kent is prepared to live out this paradox to its furthest extreme: he will obey the supposed summons of the master who could scarcely recognize him, in order to serve him in death. This final paradox emphasizes both the persistence of the human need for reciprocity and the fact of its irretrievable breakdown in the prehistory of the present—a contradiction central to the world of King Lear, and inscribed by Shakespeare into this redrafted mythical charter of his country so that his audience might know not only the past but its own time too by the idealized attenuation, the marginalization, of what yet remain its dearest images of goodness.

IMAGES OF EVIL: GONERIL, REGAN AND EDMUND

There is another way to seek reciprocity and justice, not through pity and service but through contempt and tyranny; for in this way too the master is confirmed in the ideal self-image of his own authority. This is a strategy, however, rendered unstable by its basis in denial and contradiction: it denies the subjective need for love out of which it grows, and it pursues relationship by denying the objective reality of other people. Its cause, nevertheless, is real enough—the unappeasable hunger originating in unacceptable injustice. At the root of it all in the patriarchal society of King Lear is the figure of the father. For the envies of sibling rivalry, seemingly so central to the play, resolve, as Bettelheim noted in his discussion of 'Cinderella', into a still more primary experience of injustice: 'Despite the name "sibling rivalry", this miserable passion has only incidentally to do with a child's actual brothers and sisters. The real source of it is the child's feelings about his parents.' The 'villains' of the piece—Goneril, Regan and Edmund—have been brought by paternal injustice to despise the most central relationship of their society, the filial bond; and now their every thought and deed is an act of revenge upon it.

The play opens as their revenge begins, and it traces their fierce demolition of all the pieties upon which their civilization depends, in order that they themselves might stand freely forth amidst its ruins. Yet there is a deep, potentially suicidal contradiction at the heart of this strategy: they would empty authority of all its true worth in order to assume authority themselves. Some words of Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, describing the fundamental unproductiveness of perversion, suggest themselves here: 'The pervert is trying to free himself from the paternal universe and the constraints of the law. He wants to create a new kind of reality and to dethrone God the Father.' For Goneril, Regan and Edmund are perverse. However much they might idealize their 'independent intellect', the fearlessness of their prudential self-interest or the talismanic objects of their desires, they cannot create a new, satisfactory kind of reality. Their oppositional energies, even as they destroy the middle ground upon which both the reciprocities of pietas and the negotiations of prudence depend, fall into that instability and inconsolability which Masud Khan has identified as the hallmark of perversion. Edmund's 'no less than all' (HI. iii.24) becomes the precise antithesis in the play to Cordelia's 'no more nor less'. The tragedy of the 'villains', therefore, is one of unsuccessful liberation, of oppositional energies so far marginalized by the experience of social injustice that they fall into perversion; and it is their peculiar distinction that, drawing out the contradictions of the old to its destruction, they yet create nothing new.

We sense at once what is to come from the sisters when they are left alone at the end of the opening scene: they are to be tempted with appalled fascination towards the limitlessly receding horizons of their own desires. Despite the rationalizations of self-interest which they offer, they are in fact seduced by the perverse pleasures that lie on the other side of prohibition—pleasures that lead by inner necessity to the murder of the one and the suicide of the other. The secret heart of these pleasures is envy. Melanie Klein has identified an important psychic opposition between envy and gratitude which is useful to us here: envy is passionate to spoil or to destroy the good object for its tantalizing insufficiency, whilst gratitude is affectionately appreciative of its independent existence in all its imperfections. Cordelia, we remember, could still imagine the reciprocity of gratitude; but Goneril and Regan in the perverseness of their envy become compulsively committed to desecrate the image of their father, who has made their present lives so unendurable to all of them. In this situation Cordelia had returned to the past for images of hope, but her sisters are driven to hunger for future satisfactions; and hence, of course, their incapacity for gratitude. 'Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend' (I. iv.257) cries Lear, denied the sympathy he feels his due: 'Monster Ingratitude!' (I. v.37). But Goneril and Regan know where to lay the blame—'he always lov'd our sister most' (I. i.288-9)—and now the whirligig of time brings in his revenges. The rage with which they seethe ('By day and night, he wrongs me', snaps Goneril at I. iii.4) becomes free to express itself; and the vindictive game by which they strip Lear of his retinue exemplifies, as do the bright ideas that are enacted upon the bound body of Gloucester, the obscene daring of their inventiveness. For they too must transform the world, make it conform to their own idea: all other ways of seeing must be put out.

Edmund proves to be the third person who turns the envy at the heart of the sisters' collusion into a fiercely competitive jealousy—for such is the ironically shrunken conclusion to all the limitless possibilities that had opened out before them. Like a talisman, Edmund comes to emblematize all the idealized male glamour inspired and betrayed by their father, whilst each sister represents to the other all that is most hateful in herself. Goneril's words in fear of Regan say it all:

But being widow, and my Gloucester with
 her,
May all the building in my fancy pluck
Upon my hateful life.
                                  (IV. ii.84-6)

Her sense of the hatefulness of her life is not only proleptic, however; for her life is hateful to her now, in both senses of the word—odious to her because filled with hatred, from which the sole possession of Edmund's love seems the only chance to redeem her. Yet, as Lear is cheated of Cordelia by death, so is she of Edmund; and hence her outraged cry that he is not vanquished, only 'cozen'd and beguil'd (V. iii.153). It is a perfect symmetry of felt injustice: like her father she would howl against the injustice of it all, and like her father too she has good cause. The building of her fantasy has been plucked down upon her, and—after one last idealization that shows her to be her father's daughter still ('the laws are mine, not thine'—1.157)—her confession and suicide pronounce the last judgement on her life. For she has created nothing new; her oppositional energies have been marginalized and corrupted by the injustices of the system she has opposed, wasted amongst the destructive perversities of hate and envy. Even her hostility to the 'paternal universe' proves unproductive in the end, as she turns to find in Edmund the man to whom 'a woman's services are due' (IV. ii.27).

It is Edmund, in fact, who most exhilaratingly sets out to create 'a new kind of reality and to dethrone God the Father'. He is the true opposite to Cordelia in the play, and his opening words (aside, like hers, addressed directly to the audience) challenge all the distinctions that she had tried to organize in her understanding of bond—nature and society, affection and duty, prudence and love, religion, custom, value, law and the sense of justice:

Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law
My services are bound. Wherefore should I
Stand in the plague of custom … ?
                                    (I. ii.1-3)

These are the pleasures of sacrilege: it is wholly characteristic that Edmund's adventure in morality should both begin and end in a sporting challenge, initially of the gods and finally of his elder brother. For, in a fine phrase of Conrad's, he has 'an adventurer's easy morality which takes count of personal risk in the ethical appraising of his action'. He is tempted to dare, to gamble hugely upon the nature of reality with his life as the stake. 'Now, gods, stand up for bastards!' (1.22): such a challenge, dethroning the gods, dispossessing his brother and finally destroying his father, gives him the sentiment of being and the hope of reward that he cannot find in the pieties of love or service. For, of course, as a younger brother labouring under the double burden of illegitimacy and parental disregard, he has no place in his world. He has been done a bitter injustice and his response is correspondingly vindictive: to turn against the male figures and the patriarchal customs that have marginalized him, to deify the immoral fecundity of his absent mother and to bind himself to 'the lusty stealth of nature' (1.11) whose desire has the force of law. His father had boasted that there was 'good sport at his making' (I. i.22); and it is precisely this sense of sport that Edmund revisits upon him. It is indeed, as Marilyn French has observed [in Shakespeare's Division of Experience, 1983], 'a savage imitation'; for the very nature of such children seems to be revenge.

We should perhaps best understand Edmund's ideology, opposing nature to society and thereby turning Cordelia's vision upside-down, as a perverse parody of the pastoral fantasy that shapes our romance expectations of the play—the fantasy that the injustices of civilization may be repaired by invoking the ideal equity of nature. It is perverse because grounded in envy, because (to quote Chasseguet-Smirgel again) 'this reversal of a system of values is only the first stage in an operation whose end is the destruction of all values'. But in its perverseness it serves as a grim reminder of the ineffectuality of romance to bring about the redistributions of wealth and power that matter. There is indeed an appeal open to society from nature, to the centre from the margins, to the wealthy and powerful from the poor and impotent. There is indeed justice in Edmund's demand, and truth in his perception of what he must do to get it; and it is his thoroughness that finally, by the assassination of Cordelia, prevents the play from yielding the consolations of romance. The oppositional is not to be always so easily integrated as pastoral suggests.

It is fascinating to see what Shakespeare has made of the traditional romantic pattern of the rise, fall and death-bed conversion of the villain—for Edmund, dying after defeat at the hands of his brother, determines to do good and, if possible, avert Cordelia's death. Yet nothing could be further from the easy certitudes and naive moral reparations of romance. Edmund is not converted, and he does not repent. His intention is quite precise: 'some good I mean to do / Despite of mine own nature' (V. iii.242-3). It seems that his one good act will be done to spite himself and the world he has built in the image of his own conception. 'Yet Edmund was belov'd' (1.238)—the deaths of Goneril and Regan, following hard upon Edgar's narrative of care for his dying father, complete the change begun in Edmund by his defeat and imminent death. Yet, as he contemplates the perverse reciprocities of that unholy ménage á trois, all three marrying in an instant, how shall we gauge the tones of self-lacerating irony and awakened gratitude in his voice? His admission of a lifelong hunger for love and approval is an important insight into the origins of his own nature; his sense that 'the wheel is come full circle' (V. iii.173) confesses some kind of justice in his death; but the bitterness in his voice reminds us too that he had good cause to hunger for love and for justice. It is consciously an incomplete reparation that he attempts. His death does not integrate him into a reconstituted community, as we might have expected; the injustices of history are not so simply to be set to rights.

By this bitter resistance to the compositions of pastoral and romance, Edmund has helped to draw out the contradictions within the ruling class of Lear's Britain and destroy it. The middle ground upon which love and prudence might have met has been usurped by the fathers; the children's compensatory—even heroic— idealizations of self-sacrificial goodness or self-seeking evil have been extinguished; and the loss is absolute. Furthermore, Edmund—the Bastard, the Unwanted, the Marginalized—emblematizes all the injustices of the history that we have inherited out of Lear's Britain. He does not bear them away as a scapegoat might; even in his death, he brings them into play. Similarly, the sisters—the Wicked Sisters, the Ugly Sisters—emblematize all the envious malice still at the heart of family life. Shakespeare leaves his Jacobean audience (and ourselves too, at our greater distance) to know the lesser world of the present in the shadow of this prehistory of injustice and, most important of all, to know it by the ambivalence with which we participate in its theatrical representation. For, if we see the beauty of Cordelia's goodness, we also see the glamour of Edmund and the sisters. The great hierarchy of authority and service that had ide-ally constituted the reciprocities of feudal society can no longer be invoked by the end of the play; the apparent coherence of both its social forms and its moral language has been destroyed, and nothing is left in its place. Simply, Shakespeare has turned his historical and romance materials upside-down: the heroic past out of which Tudor and Stuart moralists drew their mythical charter yields in King Lear an understanding of the present as a time and place of abiding injustice, where morality remains problematical and reciprocity incomplete.