[In the essay that follows, West explores the complex way that the negative attitudes toward sexuality expressed in the play support a sense of awe and mystery necessary to true dramatic tragedy.]

Critics of King Lear are rather generally agreed that in some sense or other it is a pessimistic play. Johnson, Swinburne, Bradley, Spencer, Chambers, Knight, and many others notice that Shakespeare is here picturing a very dark world, which Cordelia's goodness and Lear's redemption by no means lighten entirely. Grant that some of the characters are good and that some become good, still the best die and in circumstances which suggest that the gods do indeed "kill us for their sport." The suspicion that this is so, Gloucester found in his suffering, and if he abandoned it later, that is no sure sign that it was groundless. To this "tremendous and pessimistic drama", says [G. B. Harrison, Introduction to King Lear, in Shakespeare: 23 Plays and the Sonnets, 1948], "… Gloucester's words form the most fitting motto."

Those who set out to weigh the play's pessimism in detail so as to find the "logic" of the whole, usually give most attention not to the discouragement of the afflicted characters but to the decisive events of the play and especially to Cordelia's cruel death, reflected in the wreckage surrounding Lear's. G. Wilson Knight wonders [in The Wheel of Fire, 1949] whether the gods laugh at Cordelia's death, whether the "Lear universe … is one ghastly piece of fun." He concludes that it is not; and in fact, as Bradley and others who remember that the play is a tragedy have observed, the scene of Lear with Cordelia's body has a tremendous dignity and even tranquility. To the audience the quality of the scene is finally not that of an unmitigated horror nor yet of a fire of outrage at the nature of things or of a rebellious assertion of man's loneliness and sole worth. It is rather a calm and particularly poignant awe at the power of Lear's life, seen a near match for the grand finality itself of death. "The oldest have borne most; we that are young / Shall never see so much nor live so long" (V. iii. 325-326). Added up, perhaps, the events and most of the speeches of King Lear give a sum of pessimism, but those who say so almost never mean that it is a desperate pessimism, or a raging, or a defiant, like Strindberg's or Hauptmann's or Sartre's.

One of the major contributions to the impression of pessimism that the play may leave comes from a suspicion of Lear's which is parallel to the suspicion of Gloucester's that the gods are like wanton boys. Lear's is a suspicion not about killing as a joke of the gods, but about procreation as one of the devil's. "But to the girdle do the gods inherit, / Beneath is all the fiend's" (IV. vi. 119-120). To the king, maddened by the offenses of his children against him and his against Cordelia, the act of generation has come to seem an inhuman abyss of the human will.

The wren goes to't, and the small gilded
  fly
Does lecher in my sight.
Let copulation thrive; for Gloucester's bastard
  son
Was kinder to his father than my daughters
Got 'tween the lawful sheets.
To't, luxury, pell-mell! for I lack soldiers.
Behold yond simp'ring dame,
Whose face between her forks presageth
 snow,
That minces virtue, and does shake the
 head
To hear of pleasure's name.
The fitchew nor the soiled horse goes to't
With a more riotous appetite.
                              (IV. vi. 114-125)

Man begets children by an impulse that Lear now sees as resistless and polluted; that it is natural too puts a new face on nature for him. Generation is a most primitive cooperation, in which personal knowledge and affection cannot live and out of which they cannot come. We have heard Lear put a frightful curse on generation in Goneril; finally the conviction of a primordial curse on it in all times and persons ravages his mind.

If Lear's speech can be taken, as Gloucester's on the wanton gods has been, to be a "keynote" of the play, then clearly King Lear is dreadfully pessimistic on sex. If the play does indeed say that a man's origin is un-redeemed slime, that assertion goes very well with the assertion that his end is a reasonless joke. But the fact would seem to be that the play dignifies generation, after all, as it does death—dignifies them both largely with the preservation about them of their proper mystery, and sex, in addition, with an indication that a sort of miracle may attend its practice.

Plainly most of what characters in King Lear have to say about sex is unfavorable, and most of what the action seems to indicate is the same. Preliminary to Lear's shocking words on the power and horror of sex, are Edgar's account of himself as bedlam, tied largely to sexual predation, and the Fool's commentary on Lear's clash with the evil daughters, most wryly knowing on sexual evils. To Edgar copulation is the "act of darkness", and to the Fool it is that of the reckless codpiece with which the head must louse. At the beginning of the play, Gloucester is a jaunty old lecher, and at the end we hear that it was his lechery, performed in a "dark and vicious place", that cost him his eyes. Edmund early hails this vigorous lechery as a kind of ally in his elemental world of force; lust, if not the gods, stands up for bastards. Later Edmund is himself repulsively soiled with lechery, as are Goneril and Regan. Even Lear's knights are named to us, perhaps with reason, as "debosh'd and bold".

Very clearly all this is "unfavorable", and clearly the fact matters to the play. Lear seems in his madness to imply that sex is an insult to mankind and mercilessly alien—or that man is a beast. We rightly put sex at defiance, or cynically bow to it. "Let copulation thrive", since it does thrive. Yet thrive it never so well, Lear supposes that he knows it now for what it is: "There's hell, there's darkness, there's the sulphurous pit; burning, scalding, stench, consumption" (IV.vi.121-122). Sex is not the sportive arrangement Gloucester thought it. Ginger may be hot i' the mouth in more ways than one.

Yet surely the significance of the sex passages is not that they are an indictment of sex, as some of Strindberg's plays seem to amount to an indictment of woman, or Sartre's of public morality. The sex passages in King Lear do not, finally, express Shakespeare's outrage at the way man is made and reproduces himself. Shakespeare understood very well that sex is here to stay, and his plays are not rebellious against the fact. He never wasted his dramatic time on mere condemnation of anything so basic. King Lear's celebrated pessimism, what Knight calls its "fearless artistic facing of the ultimate cruelty of things", does not include a moral rejection of sex, much less a merely fastidious one. The play does, of course, face such cruel facts as that children may be unkind and that their obligation to be kind has ultimately an unknown ground, if it has any at all.

To the audience the sex horror of the play comes chiefly by way of the strongly expressed revulsion of the sympathetic characters from a self-evident foulness. With a kind of shocked Freudian insight the king detects the mating impulse as a brutal power horrifyingly strong just where it is not ordinarily evident. Behind such revulsion in the characters lies, we may assume, a kindred one, more sophisticated, in the author. Plainly Shakespeare himself considered the causes of Lear's shock and horror sufficient for their intended effect in both the king and the audience. Yet of course they do not move us as they move Lear, any more than the grieved awe we feel at Lear's death is the same as the awed grief that Edgar shows. What is mortal shock to Kent is a tragic pang to the audience. From the immediate causes of feeling in the characters the audience is detached, and its emotion is refined, furthermore, by the language and spectacle of the play. This well-known benefit from a special purchase on events and from the play's artistry is the audience's share in the sophistication of the author. What for the delirious Lear, then, is a frantic intuition of universal depravity in sex, is for the audience the recognition with pity and terror of a corruption the world may show—or of Lear's distressed way of seeing whatever it is that the world does show.

The audience's weighing of Lear's distress does not mean, of course, that the king's vehemence on sex is unconnected with facts or expresses solely his internal state. However distorted his way of seeing may be, Lear has come through an experience which the dramatic clarity of madness connects directly with sex: the hatefulness of his children belongs to the carnality that made them. "'Twas this flesh begot / Those pelican daughters" (III.iv.76-77).

Perhaps no strict computation of the grounds of Lear's sex raving is either possible or suitable, but plainly it stems in general from his daughters' ill treatment of him, real or fancied. One critic [Lilian Winstanley, Macbeth, King Lear, and Contemporary History, 1922] supposes confidently that he thinks of Goneril as the "simp'ring dame / … That minces virtue, and does shake the head / To hear of pleasure's name," yet has an appetite exceeding that of the "soiled horse". If we are bound by the straight-away facts of the plot, he can hardly have spoken from any knowledge he had of looseness in her sex life, for he could not have heard of her liaison with Edmund. The audience does know of it, of course, and understands that the horrid disparity between Goneril's loving profession and her predatory act is matched in the concealment of a riotous appetite beneath a chaste expression. Perhaps we may suppose that Lear projects from her uncovered lust for power a lust of the flesh as yet secret to him. Or perhaps to Lear's sickness Cordelia is the dame who looked modest yet yearned for fornication. She must have been the purest-appearing of his daughters, the one "Whose face between her forks presageth snow." To Lear's outrage she kept half her love for her husband and attracted the "hot-blooded France that dowerless took" her (II.iv.215).

However this may be, the sexual imagery of Lear's long speech in Act IV recalls powerfully events and speeches that have gone before it; his sex horror grounds in his sense of tainted generation. Because of unnatural daughters, the sex act appears a kind of dreadful seizure. The breeding of man, like that of the wren and the fly, is but a compulsive joining, and the chastest-seeming of women are centaurs down from the waist. If these images give justly the nature of propagation, no wonder that parent's claim on child and child's on parent do not hold good. Lear's reasoning circles: if—as his own experience testifies—these claims do not hold good, then the act of propagation upon which, most mysteriously, they rest is as bestial as it seems. The rationale of the pessimistic suspicion that tears Lear and through him affects the audience is logically naive, but resistless to the mad king and, in the sight of his suffering, impressive to us.

The audience with its sophistication understands, nevertheless, throughout that children do have a binding obligation to love and to revere their parents and parents one to love and minister to their children. This much the play takes for granted; it is a given morality in the action. To plead for Edmund and the evil sisters the vexations and humiliations their fathers troubled them with is to go outside the plain intent of the play. Lear and Gloucester, for their part, are clearly "wrong" to reject their good children and then are redeemed. Edgar and Cordelia are as blameless as dramatic characters can be and keep human seeming. The play says to the audience, then, with the most moving particularity, that the faith of child to father and of father to child does exist and ought to exist. By homely appeal to our human sympathy, the play confirms the audience in this faith and its Tightness. This given morality is almost as simple and direct as that of natural reward and punishment which Dr. Johnson wished for in King Lear, and it certainly mitigates the play's pessimism, particularly that connected with sex. If some children are kind, then generation is not all evil.

Notice, however, that the given morality does not accompany a given metaphysics or cosmogony or anthropology, much less an eschatology. King Lear does not offer us any self-assured universal scheme of things from which we may confidently take or make an over-all account of either the final process or the whole meaning of events in the play. What Bradley says of Shakespeare's tragedy in general is especially apposite to King Lear: "Shakespeare was not attempting to justify the ways of God to men, or to show the universe as a Divine Comedy. He was writing tragedy, and tragedy would not be tragedy if it were not a painful mystery. Nor can he be said even to point distinctly where a solution might lie." The given morality of King Lear suits Christianity, certainly, and no doubt it suits many other creeds, but to feel its force in the play does not require a Christian account of it nor any account that fits into a system. This is, of course, a very large question in Shakespeare criticism. I can do no more with it here than try to suggest how dramatically appropriate it is that the critic should allow the play the "painful mystery" of which Bradley speaks. This is a mystery related to that which prevails in the real world, where, however secure we are in our convictions, we must nevertheless acknowledge a vast ultimate uncertainty about whatever speculation we would use to sustain them.

One sign of such uncertainty in the play is, of course, the bafflement of the characters. Very clearly Lear and his friends are intellectually unequal to the questions they confront about generation and its duties. For Lear piety was an unexamined convention: the stars or the "gods" are our generators, and so duty is "natural", cosmic. The barbarous "unnatural" exists, but it is remote, almost mythical—the Scythian or "he that makes his generation messes / To gorge his appetite" (I.i.118-119). Lear conducts increasingly harassed calculations on childlike offices, first trivially in shares of the kingdom and numbers of knights, and then grotesquely in a phantom trial and anatomization. "Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?" (III.vi.80). He has accounted for Goneril's impiety with "degenerate bastard", and if Regan is not kind and comfortable he will divorce him from her mother's tomb as sepulchring an adultress. Yet "Gloucester's bastard son / Was kinder to his father than my daughters / Got 'tween the lawful sheets" (IV.vi.116-118). "It is the stars", says Kent, and the ineffectiveness of that answer recalls the hard logic with which Edmund disposed of foolishness about the stars. Gloucester, for his part, can account for a thankless child no better than Lear could: "I never got him" (II.i.80).

In a way, of course, these old men are equal to the question; they are serious and great of heart; whereas Edmund talking of the stars is essentially frivolous, like Cornwall commending Edmund's "childlike office" in betraying his brother or Regan tarring Edgar with his friendship to Lear's knights. Lear and Gloucester and Kent genuinely yearn toward universal order. But at their best by neither word nor deed can they do more than assert the given morality. Does their assertion and Cordelia's signify cosmic justice, some compensation in an unwritten sixth act, for their cruel deaths? Does it mean that nature finally is benign? or that God lives? For answering these questions the detachment of the audience and its superior knowledge give no decisive advantage; the bafflement of the characters proceeds not only from their intellectual inadequacies but from real deficiencies in the evidence. We know better than Lear does the evidence from Gloucester's bastard, and we know before Lear that he has "one daughter yet / Who re-deems nature from the general curse / Which twain have brought her to" (IV. vi. 209-212); such knowledge just leads us too to the hope of the given morality, not to any sure ground for it. Is this morality given by a greater authority than human yearning? The action does not positively say so. After the reconciliation of Lear to Cordelia we hear no more, it is true, of his disenchantment with generation, but his new mood is only the tenderest assertion of the given morality. It does not, as Dr. Johnson thought it should, fend off death. And it does not answer the question of the unkind child, but simply adds the question of the kind one. "One self mate and mate could not beget / Such different issues" (IV. iv. 36-37), cries Kent. But it has done so. Lear dies on an ecstatic conviction that Cordelia lives, but that does not answer for the audience why a "dog, a horse, a rat, have life" and she none. In the same way, Lear's purified love is no answer, either for him or for us, to the question of how perversions of nature can arise from the conditions of nature. In the anguish of his madness Lear comes back again and again to this profound question, and the audience, if not the king, is finally left with it. The goodness of the good children gives no explanation of the evil of the evil, and only partial reassurance.

The given morality, then, does not exhaust the sophistication of the author about generation. The play does not, like a novel of sentiment, come comfortably to rest in this morality. Along with the impression of it, the audience retains as strongly an impression of mystery, of unfathomed being. "Men must endure / Their going hence, even as their coming hither" (IV. iii. 9,10). This counsel of poise and patience is all the ultimate hope or explanation that is certain in King Lear about either birth or death.

The play's attitudes on sex, then, sustain its pessimism, but not without the tempering into grandeur that a tragedy must have, and this elevating and tranquilizing is partly the effect of preserved mystery and partly of the simple encouragement that comes from seeing one who justly thinks and has most rightly said stand out as a beacon by which, at last, the protagonist guides. Cordelia's love is "an ever-fixed mark". To what haven she guides Lear or by what right, we cannot be sure; but the dramatic relief is all the greater for the grand uncertainty. In love, the play indicates, is a kind of miracle, so that sex, along with the rest of life and death itself, is transmutable from slime to grandeur. We do not find it said that sex is itself grandeur and not slime, or that a conversion exists to more than our conviction. But the play does say that in our conviction, anyway, sex may be exalted by the miracle of love and so made confrontable, though mysterious still, secure in the doubts and even despair that properly go with great mystery.