[In the following essay, Peat focuses on the ambiguities and mounting anxiety in the final scene of King Lear. Audience response to this scene repeatedly alternates between hope and despair. Peat asserts that spectators with no previous knowledge of the play would be thoroughly confused by the tumultuous events taking place on stage during this scene, and would become so emotionally involved that it would be impossible for them to serenely view the deaths of Lear and Cordelia as signs of affirmation or renewal. Peat's discussion of confusion and uncertainty in King Lear also includes an analysis of the Dover Cliff scene.]

‘By the end of King Lear, we should see that Cordelia possesses everything that is genuinely worth having.’ This might be a quotation from Shakespearean Tragedy, but it comes from a recent book by John Reibetanz.¹ The approach is new, but the conclusions are familiar: ‘through his sufferings Lear has won an enlightened soul’; ‘we protest so strongly against Cordelia's death because we are not of her world’; ‘Material goods are fetters and the body a husk to be discarded so that the fruit can be reached.’² Reibetanz acknowledges the obvious debt to Bradley, but he is no ordinary disciple. He admits his master's weaknesses, and emphasises them by considering precisely those areas Bradley ignored: the nature of the public and private theatres; Shakespeare's use and adaptation of contemporary stage tradition and the expectations of an audience moulded by regular playgoing. In the light of this, it is ironic that he reaches similar conclusions to the man who argued the play was ‘too huge for the stage’.³ Much less ironic is the fact that while I find most of Reibetanz's commentary thoroughly convincing, it leads me to an exactly opposite conclusion.

This is not so surprising; a survey of the criticism reveals it is in the nature of King Lear to stimulate contrary responses. There is a marked division between critics for whom the play makes an ‘affirmation’ and those who believe it does not.⁴ Reibetanz, who argues that the play ‘definitely points us to’⁵ Christian doctrine, obviously belongs with the former group, and I had better admit now that my own sympathies lie with the other side. This division of critical opinion is in itself, I believe, a direct result of the fact that King Lear forces every spectator to choose between the contrary possibilities it holds in unresolved opposition. Norman Rabkin's idea of the working of any Shakespearian play is an exact description of this particular one: ‘the dramatic structure sets up opposed elements as equally valid … and equally destructive, so that the choice that the play forces the reader to make becomes impossible’.⁶ Others have noticed this tension of irresolution. For J. D. Rosenberg ‘each assertion in the play confronts a counter-assertion and all interpretations contain the seed of their refutation’,⁷ and S. L. Goldberg puts it this way: ‘The outline of one thing is the boundary of its counterpart.’⁸ The penultimate scene reveals the working of the play in microcosm:

Edgar.
Here, father, take the shadow of this tree
For your good host; pray that the right may thrive.
If ever I return to you again,
I'll bring you comfort.
Gloucester.
Grace go with you, sir! [Exit Edgar.
Alarum; afterwards a retreat. Re-enter Edgar.
Edgar.
Away, old man! give me thy hand: away!
King Lear hath lost, he and his daughter ta'en.
Give me thy hand; come on.
Gloucester.
No further, sir; a man may rot even here.
Edgar.
What! in ill thoughts again? Men must endure
Their going hence, even as their coming hither:
Ripeness is all. Come on.
Gloucester.
And that's true too. [Exeunt.

(v, ii, 1-11)⁹

Edgar asks for prayer and Gloucester gives his blessing, but ‘the right’ do not thrive. Before the battle Edgar is certain of victory and makes a strong assertion, only to have the action contradict him. The audience's expectation of a happy ending, fueled by the reconciliation between the King and his daughter (and for Shakespeare's contemporaries supported by memories of Leir and Cordella's victory in the old play) is abruptly reversed. Since the faked ‘miracle’ at Dover cliff, many of Gloucester's lines have indicated patient acceptance of his lot, yet here he reverts to despair. Most important of all, in a play which questions everything and depends upon right choice, is the way the scene ends. Contrary positions are given equal validity and Gloucester's reply to Edgar's famous remark might stand as the epigraph for the play: ‘And that's true too.’

The point at which this process of juxtaposition comes to its climax is, appropriately enough, the moment when Lear dies:

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never!
Pray you, undo this button: thank you, Sir.
Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips,
Look there, look there!

(v, iii, 306-11)

There are two distinct possibilities: either Lear dies believing Cordelia lives, or his heart breaks as he realises the shattering reality of her death. The possibilities open up a variety of interpretations. A Lear who believes Cordelia is alive may be transcending earthly limitations, suffering under the final self-deception of a man who still ‘but slenderly’ knows himself, or taking refuge from reality in madness. In contrast, an awareness of Cordelia's death may be the culmination of a process of deepening knowledge of the self and the world. There is, of course, a third possibility, that Lear dies uncertain whether his daughter is alive or dead.

The text supports all these possibilities. The five times repeated ‘never’ seems conclusive enough, but since his entrance with Cordelia in his arms, the king has had other speeches which move from statement through qualification to counter-statement:

She's dead as earth. Lend me a looking-glass;
If that her breath will mist or stain the stone,
Why, then she lives …
This feather stirs; she lives!

(v, iii, 261-3, 265)

His final lines can be read as a similar move from one certainty to another, or as another example of his uncertainty.

The contradictory nature of the text is mirrored in the original editions. My quotation is the Folio version, but the Quarto omits the last two lines and contains the printer's formula for a death cry, ‘O,o,o,o.’ which suggests the king howling in anguish at his daughter's death. In the absence of evidence showing which ending Shakespeare favoured (if, indeed, both are his) all we can say is that while the Quarto supports one reading, the Folio allows others.

J. K. Walton makes his decision about the final lines after an examination of Lear's character and the development of the play. He concludes: ‘If we take it that Lear finally believes that Cordelia is alive, we alter the direction of the whole movement which has been taking place throughout the play, a movement by which he attains to an even greater consciousness.’¹⁰ Quite so, but in this play of reversals is there any reason to suppose Shakespeare did not ‘alter the direction’ himself? In the penultimate scene Gloucester reverses a parallel ‘movement’ in the subplot, and in this play subplot often mirrors main plot. In fact, as J. Stampfer points out, Gloucester's death ‘’twixt two extremes of passion’ can parallel Lear dying torn between his realisation of death and hope of life.¹¹ The play provides evidence to support conflicting interpretations of Lear's last lines and it is not putting the cart before the horse to suggest that the decision we make about those lines finally determines the ‘direction of the whole movement’ of the play.

In performance what the audience see during Lear's death speech plays a major part in determining this decision. The actor responds to the change of tone after the final sonorous ‘never’ and there is a moment's pause as the button is undone. If this button is at Cordelia's throat, it may open to reveal the lacerations of the noose. Perhaps her mouth, to which Lear draws attention, falls open and utters ‘nothing’, not as a word but as an enduring silence. The relative stage positions, with the three daughters again surrounding their father, may complete the connection with the opening scene.¹² Or the button may be at Lear's throat which makes his transition to Cordelia's body logical as the king, gasping for air, remembers his hanged daughter. Lear may remember something else. After his experience of ‘unaccommodated man’, the ‘this’ to which he draws attention may be his own flesh. If a supernumerary undoes the button, the king may appear subdued and clear-eyed, but if he addresses Kent as ‘Sir’, the audience may see a man losing his grip on reality. At this point blocking is of crucial importance. If Lear stands close to Cordelia, or kneels clasping her, his death is at the focus of the audience's attention, but the effect is quite different if he moves away to have the button undone. Then, his insistent commands turn the attention of all onstage, and of the audience, towards the body and away from himself. The shock of his death is far greater if, as he falls, heads are turned away. The final lines may not refer to Cordelia at all. In Peter Brook's production,¹³ Paul Scofield sat staring out blankly into the auditorium on his last ‘look there’. In death his eyes remained open.

In his study of the play,¹⁴ Marvin Rosenberg describes several other ways in which the death has been portrayed, but even my simplified list makes it clear that, working from the contrary possibilities of one key speech (and I've said nothing about how the lines are delivered) we can create several different plays. One of them was suggested by Bradley who believed an actor should ‘express, in Lear's last accents and gestures and look, an unbearable joy’ because he thought Cordelia alive: ‘To us, perhaps, the knowledge that he is deceived may bring a culmination of pain: but, if it brings only that, I believe we are false to Shakespeare.’¹⁵ Some years ago, Maynard Mack argued along similar lines: ‘Lear's joy in thinking that his daughter lives (if this is what his words imply) is illusory, but it is one we need not begrudge him … in a similar instance among our acquaintances, we would regard the illusion as a godsend, or even, if we were believers, as God-sent.’¹⁶ Bradley was a believer: ‘Let us renounce the world, hate it, and lose it gladly. The only real thing in it is the soul, with its courage, patience and devotion. And nothing outward can touch that.’¹⁷ This is magnificent, but it is essentially the response of a reader who has divorced the play's meaning from its immediate effect in the theatre. Despite his insistence on the dramatic context, Reibetanz does something similar when he states: ‘we should see Cordelia possesses everything that is genuinely worth having’. Perhaps we ‘should’, but I can't believe many spectators do.

Bradley, Mack and Reibetanz all share an assumption vital for their readings of the play: that the audience view Lear's final moments from a position of relative detachment and are, therefore, fully aware of the true facts of the situation. But what if the audience share the king's uncertainty? If they too look at Cordelia expecting some sign of life and find none as Lear falls, they are unlikely to view his death as a ‘godsend’ or to acknowledge that Cordelia has ‘everything’. The audience may feel they have nothing.

King Lear opens with a discussion about an impossible choice:

Kent. I thought the King had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall.

Gloucester. It did always seem so to us; but now, in the division of the kingdom, it appears not which of the Dukes he values most; for equalities are so weigh’d that curiosity in neither can make choice of either's moiety.

(I, i, 1-7)

Two possibilities are equalised and the play opens on a note of uncertainty. As the action develops, questions of ‘choice’ and ‘value’ become of paramount importance and the uncertainty intensifies, as Shakespeare leads the audience ever deeper into a world where they too must choose. Marvin Rosenberg suggests ‘The Lear world is a world of uncertainties’,¹⁸ but these uncertainties do not just exist within the play, they are generated within the audience. Shakespeare continually confounds their expectations and, at times, makes it almost impossible for them to determine what is happening onstage and why. The uncertainty that results reaches its climax in the final moments of the play. A full substantiation of these claims would require a great deal more space than this essay permits, so I will limit myself to a detailed analysis of part of act IV scene vi, Gloucester's fall from Dover cliff, and then return to the moment of Lear's death to offer an alternative to Reibetanz's ‘affirmative’ reading.¹⁹

The scene on Dover cliff caused Bradley to make an uncharacteristic point: ‘contrary to expectation, it is not, if properly acted, in the least absurd on the stage’. He added: ‘The imagination and the feelings have been worked upon with such effect … that we are unconscious of the grotesqueness of the incident for common sense.’²⁰ Modern criticism has moved the other way. After G. Wilson Knight's formative essay ‘King Lear and the Comedy of the Grotesque’,²¹ the elements Bradley denied, the grotesque and the absurd, are those that are emphasised. Jan Kott has even read the scene in terms of contemporary absurd drama.²²

How does the scene affect an audience? Do the spectators believe Gloucester is at the edge of a cliff? Alan C. Dessen gives a representative answer: ‘the fictional nature of the plummet from the cliff would be obvious to the audience’.²³ Admittedly, in performance, the fact that there is no cliff is usually made obvious, but it strikes me that the working of the scene depends on our remaining confused about the existence of cliff and sea.²⁴ Obviously, what the spectators see onstage is of primary importance. John Cranford Adams required some form of visual illusion and suggested that at the Globe Gloucester climbed a ramp—the property ‘mossbank’—and several other critics have felt the need for a symbolic indication of height.²⁵ Jan Kott is content with a flat stage: ‘Edgar … lifts his feet high pretending to walk uphill. Gloster too lifts his feet as if expecting the ground to rise, but underneath his foot there is only air.’²⁶ Neither the property nor the pantomime is necessary and without them the scene achieves a powerful ambivalence.

As it opens Gloucester poses the question about their true location:

Gloucester.
When shall I come to th’ top of that same hill?
Edgar.
You do climb up it now; look how we labour.
Gloucester.
Methinks the ground is even.
Edgar.
Horrible steep:
Hark! do you hear the sea?
Gloucester.
No, truly.
Edgar.
Why, then your other senses grow imperfect
By your eyes’ anguish.

(IV, vi, 1-6)

Of course, on the platform stage the ‘ground’ is ‘even’ and we could point to the exaggeration on ‘horrible’ as a clue that what Edgar states is untrue, but there is an obvious disagreement and, unless he is given some clear visual indication by the actor playing Edgar, a spectator unfamiliar with the play could not be sure. Then follows Edgar's long and vividly descriptive speech on the view from the cliff. On the bare Jacobean stage with its scant properties, Shakespeare often sketches the scenery for the audience in a similar way. Normally, there is a consensus of opinion: what one character sees the others see and the audience therefore know the scene is as described. Here, Shakespeare uses the convention to secure a further effect, because Edgar describes the scene for a blind man who cannot corroborate the information. The audience are thus forced to make their own decision. Even Edgar's explanatory comment, ‘Why I do trifle thus with his despair / Is done to cure it’, gives no indication that the scene he described is not real, although it does raise other riddling questions. Just what is he up to? Does he intend to prevent Gloucester from jumping, or does he hope his father will change his mind if given enough time? An unfamiliar spectator may well think Edgar means to cast off his disguise at the last moment.²⁷ The text offers just such a possibility on Gloucester's final lines before the fall: ‘If Edgar live, O, bless him! / Now, fellow, fare thee well.’ Edgar remains disguised and Gloucester falls.

For Shakespeare's contemporaries the shock must have been immense, because nothing had prepared them to expect this. In the source story in Sidney's Arcadia, the Paphlagonian king's son refuses a request to lead his father to the edge of a cliff, and this cures the king's despair for a time. Shakespeare reverses the source and this is not the only reversal here. Would the spectators recognise in Edgar and Gloucester an emblem of the Devil tempting Christ to leap down from the pinnacle of the Temple? If they did not think of this initially, they surely would later when Edgar suggests ‘It was some fiend’ that led Gloucester to the edge. In the Bible, the Devil promises that Christ will be unharmed if he jumps, but the whole point of the story is that Christ refuses the temptation. This is by no means the only reversal of a religious image in the play. The greatest of them all is the reversed Pieta after Lear enters with Cordelia in his arms (the daughter has earlier associated herself with ‘the Son’ in an echo of Luke, ii, 49: ‘O dear father, / It is thy business that I go about’). For the contemporary audience, the sight of a man damning his soul with a blessing on his lips must have had an impact it is hard for us to imagine.

At this point, then, perhaps the spectators are not struck by the ‘grotesque comedy’, but terrified by the possibility that Gloucester has actually fallen from a cliff. It is only now, after the event, that Edgar reveals it is all an illusion:

And yet I know not how conceit may rob
The treasury of life when life itself
Yields to the theft; had he been where he thought
By this had thought been past.

(IV, vi, 42-5)

As Edgar has trifled with Gloucester, so Shakespeare has trifled with his audience. What he presents is so ambiguous that, to an extent, they are placed in Gloucester's situation: they too must trust the eyes and word of another, because they can't see for themselves.

Edgar's lines resolve the uncertainty about the cliff, but how are they spoken? Does he look on impassively as his father attempts suicide (did he expect him to jump?), or even though there is no real danger is he aware that he gambles with a human life? His next lines suggest the latter, as Shakespeare makes everything uncertain once more. Perhaps a man may die if he merely believes he has fallen from a cliff: ‘Alive or dead? / Ho, you sir! friend! Hear you, sir! speak!’ (ll. 45-6). For a moment the audience share the mounting anxiety evident in the broken rhythm, but Gloucester is not dead: ‘Thus might he pass indeed; yet he revives.’

The scene is obviously a great theatrical tour de force, perfectly geared to the stage for which Shakespeare wrote: an open stage surrounded by the audience, on which illusion was created by the actors not by scenery. The proscenium stage is so much a part of the theatre of visual illusion that I suspect the scene can never attain its full power upon it. This may be why John D. Rosenberg finds it ‘a remarkable piece of virtuoso stagecraft that does not quite come off’.²⁸ I don't agree, but I think his uncertainty is a direct response to Shakespeare's creation, because this scene exhibits precisely that tension created by contrary possibilities of which I spoke earlier. It strains the resources of the theatrical illusion to breaking point and there are few moments when our ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ is challenged so directly. How can an audience believe a flat stage is a hill? How can they believe Edgar when they know he is already involved in a deception? They are reminded of this at the scene's beginning and Gloucester's suspicion might well suggest that all Edgar states is untrue:

Edgar.
… your other senses grow imperfect
By your eyes' anguish.
Gloucester.
So may it be, indeed.
Methinks thy voice is alter'd, and thou speak'st
In better phrase and matter than thou didst.
Edgar.
You're much deceiv'd; in nothing am I chang'd
But in my garments.
Gloucester.
Methinks you're better spoken.

(IV, vi, 5-10)

Then, as Gloucester seems on the point of some discovery, Edgar describes the view from the cliff. If his father hears the change in Edgar's voice, but doesn't hear the sea, then the sea doesn't exist. Or does it? The audience's attitude shares something of the duality of Gloucester's ‘And that's true too’: they half believe the cliff is real while half suspecting it is all an illusion. John Cranford Adams comes close to my perception of their double-vision: ‘listening with Gloucester's ears the audience will share his illusion … Looking with Edgar's eyes, however, they will know that no precipice exists.’ This expresses something of the tension I find in the scene, but for Adams the balance has already settled: ‘Never for a moment is the audience expected to believe that Edgar has brought Gloucester to the edge of the Cliffs.’²⁹ My point is that the scene precludes such certainty. Until after the fall, Shakespeare does not allow the audience to make up their minds.

The tour de force continues as Edgar convinces his father that everything the audience suspected was real, is real indeed. There is much more that could be said of this amazing piece of theatre, but I want especially to note the way Shakespeare leaves the audience in uncertainty for so long and then allows them to witness a character who seemed dead return to life.

The final appearance of Lear with his daughter in his arms is an enormously powerful image. It has become a theatrical tradition that the severed noose hangs from Cordelia's neck, but the tradition begs the question: do the audience believe she is dead? The direction in both Quarto and Folio, ‘Enter Lear with Cordelia in his arms’, leaves this question open, but the reader of a modern edition may find the issue prejudiced by editors who follow Rowe and insert the word ‘dead’ after ‘Cordelia’. In the theatre there are no such signposts.

The preparations for Lear's last entrance have been carefully made. Edgar's return from the battle (V, ii) is the first of a series of shock entrances that culminate in the king's final appearance. From this point, Shakespeare creates tension between an awareness of impending catastrophe and the possibility of a ‘happy’ resolution. As John Reibetanz suggests, the audience are ‘suspended between hope and despair’ because ‘Shakespeare invites a kind of double perspective: we follow the action as it progresses towards both its actual and its possible conclusions.’ This seems to me exactly right, but Reibetanz adds: ‘and we wait with some anxiety for the final stroke that will determine the shape of the whole’.³⁰ No audience in the theatre remains so detached: during this scene of mounting suspense, their emotion is intense. At the end, detachment is precisely what they are denied.

As the last scene opens, Shakespeare establishes the dual response the action will continue to evoke. Lear's ‘birds i' th' cage’ speech inspires hope, but while they respond to the beauty of the words, the audience remain aware of another listener, Edmund. His presence casts doubt on Lear's vision—he has already announced that the king ‘Shall never see’ Albany's pardon (v,i,65-8)—and he interrupts with the voice of stark reality: ‘Take them away’ (v, iii, 19). Tension mounts throughout the scene as the pendulum swings between hope and despair. Immediately after Edmund despatches the murderer, hopes revive when Albany demands the captives, only to be damned again by Edmund's politic answer:

                                         … they are ready
To-morrow, or at further space, t'appear
Where you shall hold your session. At this time
We sweat and bleed …

(v, iii, 53-6)

and the Captain has instructions to act ‘instantly’. Albany maintains the possibility that ‘right may thrive’ by arresting Edmund and offering to fight himself, if the challenger fails to appear. As he predicted, the forces of evil begin to prey on one another as Regan succumbs to Goneril's poison, but what has happened to Lear and Cordelia? The question remains unanswered as Shakespeare creates other sources of suspense and uncertainty. The challenger must ‘appear by the third sound of the trumpet’.³¹ The trumpet sounds, but no one appears. As Albany is about to step forward, a trumpet sounds within and a man in armour enters. A spectator unfamiliar with the play may guess this is Edgar, but he cannot be sure, even when he hears this master-of-many-voices speak. After Lear's unexpected defeat, the audience must wonder whether the challenger can win. In his film version, Peter Brook imaged the uncertainty by dressing the brothers in identical armour, so it was impossible to distinguish which was which. Albany's cry ‘Save him! save him!’ (l. 151) is certainly given point if he cannot determine who is down.

Edgar's victory boosts the audience's hopes, but the unrepentant Edmund tips the balance the other way:

What you have charg'd me with, that have I done,
And more, much more; the time will bring it out:
’Tis past, and so am I.

(v, iii, 162-4)

Perhaps it is already too late. The possibility of salvation recedes during Edgar's long explanatory speech, and the audience are torn ‘’twixt two extremes of passion’ as they hear Edmund's tantalising response to the news of Gloucester's death:

This speech of yours has mov'd me,
And shall perchance do good; but speak you on;
You look as you had something more to say.

(v, iii, 199-201)

Edgar seems to be about to announce the king's fate:

This would have seem'd a period
To such as love not sorrow; but another,
To amplify too much, would make much more,
And top extremity.
Whilst I was big in clamour came there in a man

(v, iii, 204-8)

but he brought no news of Lear. It was Kent who, like Gloucester, breaks under the power of emotion: ‘His grief grew puissant, and the strings of life / Began to crack’ (ll. 216-17). Edgar ‘left him tranc'd’ and the audience suspect he has joined the growing ranks of death. Suddenly a man rushes on with a bloody knife and Shakespeare engineers the moment so the audience think Cordelia is dead, but it is Goneril's death he announces, so hope remains. Then comes an even more startling entrance: Kent appears. As the climax approaches, hope and despair are held in almost simultaneous opposition and Kent's entrance is a case in point. It promotes hope because he has returned from the brink of death, and if he can others may, but his words provoke despair because he has only returned to die: ‘I am come / To bid my king and master aye good night.’ Albany remembers what the audience have never forgotten, but there is a pause while the bodies of Goneril and Regan are brought on and then continuing confusion and delay:

Edmund.
Quickly send,
Be brief in it, to th' castle; for my writ
Is on the life of Lear and on Cordelia.
Nay, send in time.
Albany.
Run, run! O, run!
Edgar.
To who, my Lord? Who has the office? send
Thy token of reprieve.
Edmund.
Well thought on: take my sword,
Give it the captain.
Edgar.
Haste thee, for thy life.

(v, iii, 244-51)

Just when it seems Lear and Cordelia will be saved, the king makes his final entrance. John Reibetanz believes: ‘Shakespeare has … prepared us for the play's final, pitiful tableau by associating Cordelia with Christ: the mortal result of “my father's business” was the best known fact of Renaissance spiritual life.’³² I would have thought the best known fact of spiritual life was the resurrection rather than the crucifixion. Christianity depends upon the fact that the dead Christ in Mary's arms will rise again. I am not suggesting that Cordelia is a Christ-figure, merely that the tension created by the reversed Pieta stems from an emblem of death that contains a promise of rebirth. The audience are reminded of this when Lear says, if Cordelia lives ‘It is a chance which does redeem all sorrows’ (l. 266). Reibetanz locates many elements from Romance literature which relate King Lear to the Last Plays, and the possibility of a return to life, which is realised in those plays, is precisely the connection. Throughout the remainder of the scene, the possibility that Cordelia lives remains open and the audience continue to alternate between hope and despair. In this world of uncertainty, this is the greatest uncertainty of all. As I suggested earlier, Lear's speeches reveal a pattern of assertions, qualifications and contradictions (a familiar pattern in this play of reversed expectations) and this creates the audience's ambivalent response. Shakespeare's contemporaries must have wondered whether Cordelia would revive for a moment as Desdemona had done. In this play there are two precedents for a return to life: Gloucester's revival from a state resembling death,³³ and Kent's recovery from his trance.

The counter-argument is that Lear's confusion is not shared by the audience, because they do not view the scene through his eyes. However, the onlooker's comments provide little guidance. Kent and Edgar voice the audience's confusion: ‘Is this the promis'd end?’ ‘Or image of that horror?’ Albany is almost speechless: ‘Fall and cease’ and after this no one except Lear comments on Cordelia. During the dialogue between Kent and Lear, references to death accumulate: Lear ‘kill'd the slave’ who was hanging his daughter; Caius is ‘dead and rotten’ (but no, he has returned from the grave as Kent); Goneril and Regan are dead and so is Edmund. At exactly the point where the spectators decide it is all over and Cordelia is dead, there is, as John Shaw suggests, a typical concluding speech. ‘The wheel has come full circle’ as Albany resigns the crown with an echo of Lear's opening words. The speech appears to move towards the concluding couplet:

All friends shall taste
The wages of their virtue, and all foes
The cup of their deservings bitter woes(34)

but the couplet is broken: ‘O! see, see!’ and Lear delivers his final shattering speech with its unbearable, unanswerable, question: ‘Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, / And thou no breath at all?’ (ll. 306-7). As I suggested in the beginning, again he moves from certainty to uncertainty, from despair to hope. For an audience who have been involved in a similar process, his death is a moment of absolute confusion. Even as they direct their attention to Cordelia, Lear falls. If for a second their hopes of life were reviving, this is the cruelest reversal in the play. Reibetanz believes they view ‘Lear's final moments’ ‘through the steady eyes of Edgar’, but the only steady eyes, as it turns out, belong to Kent. Edgar does not believe Lear is dead and his impulse is to hope for life: Kent on the contrary prays for death. The opposition is typical of the play. While the audience agree with Kent that Lear has suffered enough, they share Edgar's hopes and may even hear echoes of his words over Gloucester at Dover (the stage positions may complete the connection):

Edgar.
He faints! My Lord, my Lord!
Kent.
Break, heart; I prithee, break!
Edgar.
Look up, my Lord.
Kent.
Vex not his ghost: O! let him pass; he hates him
That would on the rack of this tough world
Stretch him out longer.

(v, iii, 311-15)

When Edgar decides ‘He is gone, indeed’ and Albany gives the order ‘Bear them from hence’, the audience are finally certain: it is finished. They are wrong. Shakespeare creates one last vivid image. Albany removes the crown from his head (this is Marvin Rosenberg's fine reading)³⁵ and says: ‘Friends of my soul, you twain / Rule in this realm, and the gor'd state sustain.’ Do Kent and Edgar stand each with a hand on the crown in a repetition of the moment in scene one (l. 139) when Albany and Cornwall did likewise? The play has demonstrated the terrible results of that first division of power and now there is a second. Or is there? Kent's final speech is usually played as his refusal of the crown (after all, he opposed the original division of power) and Edgar's speech is often a reluctant acceptance. There is a marked contrast between Kent's thoughts on death and Edgar's on youth, but the young man's words may imply he also refuses. The play ends as it began on a note of uncertainty:

Kent.
I have a journey, sir, shortly to go;
My master calls me, I must not say no.
Edgar.
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.

(v, iii, 321-6)

There is no emphasis on the restoration of order and no expressed hope in the future. On the contrary, the lines emphasise a general sense of diminution. With Lear's death something irreplaceable has gone out of the world and those who remain are smaller beings who can ‘never see so much, nor live so long’. As the death march sounds, death finally holds dominion over all.

John Reibetanz believes: ‘Edgar's desire to “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say” … shows that he has recognized the great value that resides in Cordelia's plainness, as opposed to her sisters' pleasing surfaces; and his words bring us to the same recognition.’³⁶ It would be remarkable if Edgar reached such a conclusion, since he has neither heard Cordelia speak nor occupied the stage with her until the final scene. The idea that any audience can sit back and respond with such ‘clear-eyed moral insight and judgement’³⁷ strikes me as equally remarkable. Dr Johnson offers an excellent description of what happens at a performance of King Lear and it is ironic that he is describing the effect on a reader. The play, he says, ‘fill[s] the mind with a perpetual tumult of indignation, pity, and hope … So powerful is the current of the poet's imagination that the mind which once ventures within it is hurried irresistibly along.’³⁸ The comment seems particularly applicable to the final scene, and it is this ‘tumult’ that precludes the affirmation for which some critics argue.

Bradley concluded that we realise ‘our whole attitude in asking or expecting that goodness should be prosperous is wrong; that, if only we could see things as they are, we should see that the outward is nothing and the inward is all.’³⁹ Fine sentiments, but the audience can't ‘see things as they are’, can't even determine whether or not Cordelia lives, so how can they feel she is ‘set free from life’?⁴⁰ For Bradley (and Reibetanz who follows him almost exactly) ‘what happens to such a being does not matter; all that matters is what she is’.⁴¹ This distinction is crucial to both critics’ arguments, but it is one no spectator makes. For Bradley, Cordelia is ‘a thing enskyed and sainted’ (my emphasis),⁴² but the dramatic structure Shakespeare creates ensures that the audience care intensely about what happens to her.

In an excellent essay, Nicholas Brooke accounts for the response of the affirming critics in terms of the kind of duality I've explored: ‘Action and reaction are equal and opposite … the sense of life in the presentation of death is the source of all this impulse to affirm.’⁴³ I would rather say ‘the possibility of continuing life’, because it is precisely because Shakespeare never takes up this possibility that some critics (like Tate before them) feel they must. As Brooke suggests: ‘Hope springs eternal. It had better.’⁴⁴

In the face of the uncertainty generated by the ending, it is natural to seek refuge in a dependable personal value, and it is because the play leaves the contraries unresolved that it forces us to look within ourselves and find there what we can. John Reibetanz believes ‘ King Lear directs us to a realm of meaning that exists outside the Lear world’⁴⁵ and for him this meaning is Christian, but where the play directs us depends upon where we have the desire and the capacity to go. Shakespeare has left us with no single signpost. The play provokes a choice, but it makes none. However, while we may argue that the contraries remain unresolved and the questions unanswered, we should beware of suggesting that King Lear is, in our modern sense, ‘open-ended’. Even Bradley admitted that pessimism is ‘what we feel at times in reading’⁴⁶ and in performance this feeling is a great deal more pronounced because of the tension of uncertainty.

Notes

1. John Reibetanz, The Lear World: A Study of King Lear in its Dramatic Context (Toronto, 1977), p. 121.

2. Ibid., pp. 108, 122, 121.

3. A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (1904; repr. 1969), p. 202.

4. L. C. Knights uses the word ‘affirmation’ in the essay in Some Shakespearean Themes (London, 1959), but following Bradley's idea of ‘The Redemption of King Lear’ (p. 235), many critics have argued that the ending is positive because Lear is redeemed through suffering. Several of these interpretations view King Lear as a ‘Christian’ play: Oscar James Campbell, ‘The Salvation of Lear’, English Literary History, 15 (1948); John F. Danby, Shakespeare's Doctrine of Nature (1949); Terence Hawkes, Shakespeare and the Reason (1964); R. B. Heilman, This Great Stage (Baton Rouge, 1948) and G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire (1959).

   On the other side are those who find no evidence of redemption and who stress the horrors of the final scene. Among the most notable are: W. R. Elton, King Lear and the Gods (San Marino, Calif., 1966); Barbara Everett, ‘The New King Lear’, Critical Quarterly, 2 (1960); Helen Gardner, King Lear (John Coffin Memorial Lecture, 1967); S. L. Goldberg, An Essay on King Lear (Cambridge, 1974); John Holloway, The Story of The Night (1961) and Marvin Rosenberg, The Masks of King Lear (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1972).

5. Reibetanz, The Lear World, p. 120.

6. Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (New York and London, 1967), p. 12.

7. John D. Rosenberg, ‘King Lear and his Comforters’, Essays in Criticism, 16 (1966), 144.

8. S. L. Goldberg, An Essay on King Lear (Cambridge, 1974), p. 163.

9. References are to the New Arden edition, ed. Kenneth Muir (1952; repr. 1967).

10. J. K. Walton, ‘Lear's Last Speech’, Shakespeare Survey 13 (Cambridge 1960), p. 14.

11. J. Stampfer, ‘The Catharsis of King Lear’, Shakespeare Survey 13 (Cambridge, 1960), p. 4.

12. Harley Granville-Barker noted this connection in his Preface. See Prefaces to Shakespeare (1947; repr. Princeton, 1965), pp. 17-18.

13. Stratford-upon-Avon, 1962. The treatment of this moment in Brook's film of King Lear was quite different.

14. Rosenberg, The Masks of King Lear, pp. 318-21.

15. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, p. 241.

16. Maynard Mack, King Lear in Our Time (1966), p. 116.

17. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, p. 273.

18. Rosenberg, The Masks of King Lear, p. 6.

19. In what follows I attempt to see the play from the viewpoint of a spectator who knows nothing of King Lear in order to recover something of its initial effect. I am indebted to Marvin Rosenberg's concept of the ‘naive spectator’ which he used in his work on the play, but did not describe in full until his recent study of Macbeth (The Masks of Macbeth, Berkeley, 1978). While I owe much to his insights and method, I think his approach holds some dangers—he stages the play before audiences who have never seen it before, his ‘naive spectators', and then questions them about their reactions. He probably takes into account changes in language, culture, theatrical traditions and architecture that all modify the play's effect, but even his word ‘naive’ is revealing. I assume the original spectators were far from this. I assume they recognised references to other plays and to contemporary events and that their expectations of the probable development of a play they were attending were moulded as much by their experience of similar plays, as by the play in hand. Shakespeare, like any dramatist working in a living tradition, could depend on this. He traded on their sophistication rather than their naivete.

20. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, p. 203.

21. G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire (1930).

22. Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1967).

23. Alan C. Dessen, ‘Two Falls and a Trap’, English Literary Renaissance, 5 (1975), pp. 291-307, p. 303.

24. See my ‘G. Wilson Knight and “Gloucester's Leap”’, Essays in Criticism, 23 (1973), pp. 198-200.

25. John Cranford Adams, ‘The Original Staging of King Lear’, Folger Shakespeare Library Joseph Quincey Adams Memorial Studies (1948), p. 330. Alvin B. Kernan favours a ‘low step’, ‘Formalism and Realism in Elizabethan Drama: the Miracles of King Lear’, Renaissance Drama, 9 (1966), p. 60. Waldo F. McNeir prefers a fall from ‘a booth stage’, ‘The Staging of the Dover Cliff Scene in King Lear’, Studies in English Renaissance Drama, ed. McNeir (Baton Rouge, 1962), p. 97. Harry Levin opts for ‘a single step or a low platform’, ‘The Heights and the Depths: a scene from King Lear’, More Talking of Shakespeare, ed. John Garrett (New York, 1959), p. 98. Dessen has a useful discussion of all these views and he favours a flat stage.

26. Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, pp. 112-13.

27. Rosenberg, The Masks of King Lear, p. 264.

28. Rosenberg, ‘King Lear and his Comforters’, p. 142.

29. Adams, ‘The Original Staging of King Lear’, p. 330.

30. Reibetanz, The Lear World, p. 115.

31. The Folio reading. In the Quarto, no trumpet answers within and Edgar enters ‘at the third sound’. The business recorded in Folio seems calculated to increase suspense.

32. Reibetanz, The Lear World, p. 111.

33. Notably Lear's awaking in the ‘reconciliation scene’ echoes Gloucester's words at Dover: Gloucester. ‘Away, and let me die.’ (IV, vi, 48); Lear. ‘You do me wrong to take me out o' th' grave’ (IV, vii, 45), so we might cite this as yet another precedent for a return to life.

34. John Shaw, ‘King Lear: The Final Lines’, Essays in Criticism, 16 (1966), pp. 261-7, p. 264.

35. Rosenberg, The Masks of King Lear, p. 322.

36. Reibetanz, The Lear World, p. 121.

37. Goldberg's comment on those who ignore the effects of performance and stress ‘self-knowledge attained through suffering’, p. 156.

38. Dr Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. W. K. Wimsatt (Harmondsworth, 1969), p. 125.

39. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, p. 272.

40. Ibid., p. 270.

41. Ibid., pp. 271-2.

42. Ibid., p. 264.

43. Nicholas Brooke, ‘The Ending of King Lear’, in Shakespeare 1564-1964, ed. E. A. Bloom (Providence, R. I., 1964), p. 87.

44. Ibid., p. 87.

45. Reibetanz, The Lear World, p. 120.

46. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, p. 228.