SOURCE: “Dramatic ‘Pity’ and the Death of Lear,” in Renascence, Vol. XLIII, No. 4, Summer 1991, pp. 231-40.

[In this essay, Spinrad maintains that no formal dramatic theory or convention can adequately explain why the death of Lear is so profoundly moving. We weep, she suggests, because his death arouses our compassion: we feel that his suffering was undeserved.]

Despite centuries of the keenest critical analysis, there has been no real consensus on whether the death of King Lear is cathartic in the classical sense, redemptive in the medieval sense, retributive in the Renaissance sense, or futile in the modern sense. Audiences in the theater, however, reach a fairly simple consensus: they cry. Indeed, many of us may have experienced this anomaly at a performance of Lear: if not crying ourselves, then at least hearing the surreptitious sniffles of people around us—some of whom may just have spent a hard day in the classroom or at the keyboard examining the death of Lear as an academic exercise. In this essay I examine those academic exercises; and in seeming to dismantle each of them, I hope to show that they may be valid for other parts of the play, but not for what we cry over; that Shakespeare has denied us our expected forms of closure so that we may reach a kind of catharsis not covered by our standard dramatic theories.

Here I should note that when I speak of dramatic theories, I am addressing the elemental explanations that we normally use as teachers of and commentators on Lear itself: those theories, in other words, that may be heard in almost any classroom or read in any review. Indeed, if I am correct in my interpretation of what is happening in the play, analysis in terms of formal critical theory is counterproductive, since even modern theories of “indefinition” or lack of closure do not apply to a play that confirms and upsets several forms of expectation at once. As in Shakespeare's other great tragedies, there is always a “yes, but” to anything we can say about Lear, including the fact that there is always a “yes, but.”

No matter which dramatic or philosophical theory we attempt to explain the play by, we will find that we must discard part of the play in order to make the theory fit. In the classic Aristotelian formulation, for example, we expect to see a man like ourselves, a mixture of good and bad, make a tragic mistake, gradually come to anagnorisis (self-knowledge), and die or at least undergo a symbolic maiming and exile in a kind of expiation of his error. Note that I have used the term “tragic mistake” rather than “tragic flaw.” Aristotle himself puts it this way:

[P]ity is aroused by someone who undeservedly falls into misfortune, and fear is evoked by our recognizing that it is someone like ourselves who encounters this misfortune. … This would be a person who is neither perfect in virtue or justice, nor one who falls into misfortune through vice and depravity; but rather, one who succumbs through miscalculation.

(Poetics, xiii, 21-22)

In this sense, as O.B. Hardison points out, katharsis itself may be translated as “clarification” as well as “purgation” (Poetics, vi, 116). In the Renaissance, of course, this meaning was often overlooked, and the tragic hero was seen to have a flaw in the generally accepted sense (Montano, 55-56, 73).¹ Whatever the translation of hamartia, however, Aristotelian “pity” is predicated on the hero's anagnorisis; and we all too often give King Lear credit for more enlightenment than is justified by the text, in order to justify the “pity” of the audience.

Does King Lear learn anything? Maybe—but he quickly forgets it again if he does. The moments put forth by Aristotelian critics as Lear's enlightenment are usually his remarks about his subjects during the storm, his concern for Kent's and the Fool's well-being at the doorway to the hovel, and his reconciliation with Cordelia. W.F. Blissett, indeed, refers to Lear's “charitable concern for the Fool as fellow creature” as a “heavenl[y] alchemy,” suggesting a more than natural transformation pleasing to the gods (see Blissett 109 and Andresen 145-68). And Lear's words about his subjects seem to carry this transformation from the private to the public sphere as well:

Poor naked wretches …
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en
Too little care of this!

(3.4.28-33)

His words to Cordelia, too, “Pray you now, forget and forgive. I am old and foolish” (4.7.84), seem to acknowledge his fault and accept forgiveness. But these are, in truth, isolated incidents, and even in their own contexts may not be as unequivocal as we try to make them.

Certainly, Act 3, scene 4 (the scene of the “poor naked wretches”) is the only time Lear evinces any sympathy with the unfortunate. By the time he meets the blinded Gloucester in 4.6, he is more callous than when he began, making horrifying jokes about Gloucester's empty eye-sockets: “I remember thine eyes well enough. Dost thou squiny at me? No, do thy worst, blind Cupid; I'll not love” (4.6.135-37). The pity we feel in this scene is for both old men, each blind in his own way—and the pity is fostered by the horror at what Lear is saying. Although it is true that Lear uses the images of blindness as an introduction to his satire on the moral blindness of a badly governed society, the satire neither invites Gloucester to participate in it nor implicates Lear in the bad governance. Furthermore, the references to adultery, whores, and tattered clothes in the satire are perhaps too pointed toward Gloucester's background and present condition to give him comfort. In short, this scene rather undercuts than supports any idea about Lear's new compassion for his subjects; Gloucester, after all, is one of those subjects, and in fact has come to his sorry condition partly because of the division of loyalties forced by Lear's only nominal abdication. Whatever self-knowledge Lear seemed to have before, it is gone now.

As for Lear's reconciliation with Cordelia, we must remember that each time he has left one daughter, he has tried to see more good in the next; he glosses over Regan's flaws after he has cursed Goneril, and he may very well be following a pattern of increasing attempts to see good in any one of his daughters who will protect him from the others. What we may be seeing, in other words, is more wish-fulfillment than real recognition. But at any rate, his impulse toward reconciliation does not survive this scene. At his death, there is no recognition of anything—not the fact of Cordelia's death, not his own faults, not even poor Kent, who has undergone so many hardships for his old master. Twice people try to tell Lear that his faithful servant Caius is his equally faithful servant Kent; and twice Lear ignores them. He does not ask Kent's forgiveness as he asked Cordelia's; he does not thank Kent for his help; he simply does not register Kent's existence at all.

In response to critics of the pessimist school, who see in this dual and final lack of recognition the futility of a blind universe² Maynard Mack points out that self-delusion in the face of loss is one of nature's palliatives to pain:

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 on his deathbed, as we do not begrudge it to a dying man in hospital whose family has just been wiped out. Nor need we draw elaborate inferences from its illusoriness about the imbecility of our world; in a similar instance among our acquaintances, we would regard the illusion as a godsend.

(Mack, 69)

But no matter how many excuses we may make for Lear in his final grief and madness, the fact remains that there is no classic “recognition” here in any sense of the word. The Aristotelian formula simply does not hold up.

Purists may object that Renaissance authors did not follow the classic formula, that in fact Othello (say) and Macbeth do not know themselves any more than Lear does at the end. To a certain extent, this is true. But in the Renaissance formula, the death of the tragic hero takes on a retributive note, with other characters describing the faults of the hero in explanation of why he must die. And in the concluding lines, order is carefully restored to the society that has been torn asunder by the mistake or flaw of the protagonist. Does this happen in Lear? Again, not really. The surrounding characters make no mention of Lear's original errors, and although Albany claims that “All friends shall taste / The wages of their virtue, and all foes / The cup of their deserving” (5.3.303-05), the surviving good people on whom the restoration of order must devolve seem curiously unwilling to take on the responsibility. Kent declines, hinting that he soon must die in order to follow his master; and Edgar gives a short speech odd in more ways than one:

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

(5.3.324-27)

Looked at objectively, this is an equivocating speech, neither accepting nor rejecting the call to duty; following as it does on Kent's refusal, it implies a second unwilling ruler; and the fact that it is given to Edgar rather than to Albany in most editions, flies in the face of the Renaissance convention of having the highest ranking person give the final words. Furthermore, what Albany has just proposed (“Friends of my soul, you twain / Rule in this realm, and the gored state sustain” [5.3.320-21]) is exactly the kind of divided rule that caused all the trouble in the first place. The only real restoration has been that all the worst villains are dead; the hope for the future, in terms of Renaissance dramatic convention, is rather undercut than stated—although the hope is there.

Some critics who seek closure in Renaissance dramatic terms try to brush away this uncertain ending, either by ignoring the second split of the country or by giving the last speech to Albany and insisting that it says more than it really does. Others try to minimize the nature of Lear's original mistake so that reconciliation is not required here, having been accomplished earlier. Rocco Montano, for example, sees Lear as “a generous, impulsive person” whose breaking up of the kingdom would not have been perceived as all that bad, and whose misfortunes come entirely from the evil of his daughters rather than his own faults (ch. 11). What such a view does (and perhaps Montano's is more extreme than others in the group but is certainly representative) is to move the retribution and recognition back into previous scenes, so that the villains' deaths and the reconciliation of Gloucester and Edgar carry out the expected closure. Lear's death, then, becomes a sort of epilogue to the real ending.

But this will not do. If closure has been achieved before Lear's death, in dramatic terms we should not be required to cry at an epilogue. Furthermore, Lear's relative guiltlessness can be defended only if we look solely at his folkloric casting off of Cordelia. But there is more to Lear's fault than harsh treatment of a daughter. Renaissance audiences, contra Montano, would probably have been just as horrified to see Lear dividing the map of Britain and breaking his crown in half at the beginning of this play as they were during similar scenes in other plays—for example, Hotspur dividing up the kingdom in 1 Henry IV or the tug of war over the crown in Richard II. And it cannot be denied that this division of the kingdom causes many of Gloucester's problems as well as Lear's. The blinding of Gloucester, we must remember, stems from the dilemma of conflicting loyalties that he is thrown into by the divided rule of his land. So the Renaissance formula will not work either.

Shall we try, next, to fit the ending into a Christian formula?—the redemptive death that atones for everyone's sins and brings on the providential restoration of order? We have already seen that order has not been restored with the usual closure; but more to the point, what does Lear's death add to what has already happened? Long before Lear dies, the villains have destroyed themselves; and Edmund has undergone a deathbed repentance that would be more dramatically effective if his dying words had managed to save Cordelia after all. Furthermore, in order to maintain the pattern of the innocent who dies for everyone else's sins, Cordelia rather than Lear must be the victim—and sad to say, neither we nor the on-stage audience focus on Cordelia's dead body in the last scene, but rather on what effect that dead body has on Lear. Her death certainly does not redeem him; as we have seen, he breaks down into denial and despair over it rather than coming to recognition and repentance through it. So the Christian formula does not entirely work either.

But now, I have seemingly dismantled every attempt that critics have made to bring some closure to an excruciatingly painful scene. The assumption must be that I agree with those moderns who see the world of Lear as a futile and meaningless one, whose every good impulse is destined for disaster, and whose every note of hope is undercut by futility. Unfortunately, pessimistic critics must leave out just as many parts of the play as must the optimistic ones.

Despite my quibbles over the restoration of order at the end of the play, the fact remains that the villains are dead; that Edmund has repented; that at least Albany will be left to rule, with Edgar as his good counselor. And as Rolf Soellner points out, “Edgar's general capacity for feeling and his strength to translate it into sympathetic action make him the most conspicuous learner and teacher” (Soellner 298. See also Calderwood 12).³ But there is more to look at hopefully than the physical defeat of evil and the physical survival of a few good men. Something very important has been happening to people on stage throughout the play, something that is supposed to happen as well to the off-stage audience at the end of it.

Critics often note the action of the nameless servant who leaps to Gloucester's defense during the blinding scene; Kenneth Muir, indeed, sees this action as “the turning point of the play. The killing of Cornwall brings into the open the sex-rivalry of Goneril and Regan and so leads to their destruction and that of their lover” (120). But there is more import to the servant's action than the turning of the plot, and he is not the only servant who takes action. Notably, directors who want to emphasize the supposed absurdity of Lear's universe almost uniformly omit one short but significant scene: the aftermath of Gloucester's blinding, when the two remaining servants “fetch some flax and whites of eggs / To apply to his bleeding face” (3.7.106-07). Without this scene, despite the first servant's act of heroism, we bridge directly from the act of cruelty into Edgar's plunge from what he thinks the worst into still worse—the sight of his blinded father: “The worst is not / So long as we can say ‘This is the worst’” (4.1.27-28). Gloucester's despair, then, seems natural; aside from the rash act of a servant who may be an anomaly in this dark world, the world contains nothing but oppressors and victims. And if Cornwall is dying (a fact that the audience does not know yet), the man who has wounded him is dead as well, and has not kept him from gouging out Gloucester's other eye.

True, the two servants who assist the blinded Gloucester are absent from the First Folio as well as from pessimistic productions of the play. However, the scene is generally accepted by most modern editors as one of the genuine Shakespearean passages in the two Quarto editions and is accordingly included in the text of the play (albeit in square brackets) rather than in appendices of variants or corruptions. At any rate, choosing a version of a scene can be as much of an ideological decision as making a deliberate omission, addition, or transposition; and modern directors can hardly be termed slavish followers of the text, whether Folio or Quarto. The point is that in order to maintain a predominantly pessimistic atmosphere in King Lear, the scene with the two servants must be omitted.

Unless such an omission is deliberately chosen, then, there are those other two servants between the blinding and the meeting with Edgar, the servants who, if they cannot save Gloucester, will at least try to help him in his pain. Like the First Servant, they have probably gone along with miscellaneous cruelties for years—perhaps out of fear for their lives, perhaps out of fear for their jobs, or perhaps, like too many of us, out of the thoughtlessness about such things that being around them all the time leads to. And yet they act at this point, at no profit and some danger to themselves, to help a wounded man. Where such impulses exist, the world cannot be utterly lost. What those impulses are, I will address in a moment.

It is probably fruitless, and counterproductive as well, to try to impose dramatic closure on the scene of Lear's death, even if the closure we impose is a statement about absurdity. Not only do all the attempts belie the text, but they also belie the very unclosed pain that we feel in the theater. (Remember, people cry.) Nor, for that matter, should we categorically deny the play any closure at all, a denial which is an absolute itself and therefore a form of closure. We do have conventional forms of closure provided for us, but they are provided for other parts of the play. Gloucester is the Aristotelian hero who errs, undergoes suffering for his error, comes to anagnorisis, and dies reconciled (also see Perret 89-102). Edgar is the Christian hero who is taught and strengthened by suffering, and who then both saves and is saved by his father, whose redemptive death he narrates almost like a homily. Renaissance retribution overtakes Goneril, Regan, Cornwall, Oswald, and Edmund, whose very evil is shown to be self-defeating—with the added Christian hope that even the most evil (Edmund) may repent at the end. And the example of Cordelia shows that it is possible to remain good, even when provoked by evil. But the old King wanders through the play in contrast to all these proper workings-out of dramatic convention, and when he dies, we are left, dramatically speaking, with nothing. Will nothing come of nothing? Or is something left after all, something so conventional indeed that we have forgotten the convention?

To answer this question, let us go back to the blinding of Gloucester, and specifically to the two servants who lead Gloucester offstage and try to ease his pain. Significantly, these are not Gloucester's servants but Cornwall's, as we learn from the First Servant's cry to Cornwall:

Hold your hand, my lord!
I have served you ever since I was a child;
But better service have I never done you
Than now to bid you hold.

(3.7.72-75)

They are not defending their master in helping Gloucester, nor are they seeing Cornwall's character for the first time; in fact, as Cornwall's servants, they may indeed view Gloucester's actions as treasonable. It should be noted, too, that they are taking risks in helping Gloucester—the same risks that Gloucester took in helping Lear. They are, in fact, as heroic as their partner who tried to stop Cornwall, if perhaps with a different kind of heroism. What, then, prompts such moral outrage in them that they risk their lives for a virtual stranger? I should like to suggest that their initial emotion is something nobler than pity; it is compassion—the sorrow we feel even for someone who does not deserve it, simply because he is in pain. Pity may lead us to shake our heads sadly; it may cause us to moralize on the cruelty of the world or the retribution that people bring down upon themselves; but compassion makes us want to do something, whether the person for whom we are doing it deserves it or not.

And there is a suggestion later in the play that even these servants are not anomalous in this supposedly cruel universe; in 4.5, Regan's reason for wanting to find Gloucester and have him killed is not simply gratuitous malice; it is a recognition that people are indeed capable of compassion:

It was great ignorance, Gloucester's eyes being out,
To let him live. Where he arrives he moves
All hearts against us.

(4.5.9-11)

Will all these hearts that are moved have any bearing on the outcome of the last battle between the forces of good and evil in the play? Maybe; maybe not. We do not know whether any of them join Cordelia's forces, and at any rate Cordelia's forces are defeated. But what we do know is that they are having the same reaction to Gloucester's suffering that the servants of Act 3 have had; and they were moved to heroism of one kind or another.

This, then, is why we must leave Lear's death alone, as his friends do on stage, and as we do off stage in the theater. To explain it away by dramatic convention is to falsify it and to deny ourselves the new kind of catharsis that it provides. Whether we see the disappointments and futilities at the end of the play as the sign of an absurd universe that annihilates all our efforts, a call to action in despite of a cruel universe because only the virtues work to ameliorate that universe in any way (Colie, “Energies” 119, Muir, 139), a stoic hardening of ourselves to give up even the “joys of resignation” in order to find perfect resignation to pain,⁴ or a Christian reaffirmation of the survival of the good—whatever we choose to find is essentially a circular argument: the thing we were prepared to find in the first place. As Derek Peat points out, “the decision we make about [the final scene] finally determines the ‘direction of the whole movement’ of the play,” and few of those decisions actually inform our behavior in the theater. Audiences do not behave with optimism, pessimism, resignation, or even “relative detachment” (45-46). As we have had occasion to note before, audiences cry. No explanations we may bring to bear on the play change that observable fact.

And yet, we cannot blame ourselves for wanting an explanation; the sight of suffering makes us, like the on-stage audience, want to do something about someone's pain. We cannot and perhaps would not draw a sword and jump to Lear's defense, as the First Servant does for Gloucester; we cannot and perhaps would not even risk our lives to bring him medicine, as the other two servants do for Gloucester; we do not need, I hope, to have our hearts hardened against evil as those citizens do who watch the passage of the blinded Gloucester. But perhaps we need to be shaken out of our dramatic expectations at the end; to weep for a poor, bare, forked creature who has not earned our tears; to weep without explaining our tears. If we can do that, we do have closure. We have learned a new kind of heroism so old that we have perhaps forgotten it: love not just for friends, but for enemies, and for the battered stranger at the side of the road: the heroism of compassion.

Notes

1. Rocco Montano claims that Renaissance playwrights had only a limited sense of Aristotle, as filtered in a secondary descent from Euripides through Seneca, and that Elizabethan theater “developed on bases of its own … very distant from the Aristotelian system.” I think it closer to the observable truth to say that the Aristotelian system was incorporated into those other systems than to assume it was tacked on or misappropriated.

2. William R. Elton is part of this school, and cites Stoll, Orwell, Leech, G.B. Harrison, Holloway, Kott, and others as being in agreement with him….

3. James Calderwood thinks slightly less of Edgar: “Edgar will not create a new order or discover the previously unapprehended relations of things, but he will keep the world intact for one more day.” Despite his low opinion of Edgar's lack of aesthetic perception and heroism, the fact remains that when the world is falling apart, we need people to hold it together, even if only “for one more day.”

4. An idea advanced by Blissett in what I am tempted to call the euthanasia school of criticism. As Blissett describes Lear's “captivity” speech to Cordelia, “Lear has one last, hidden attachment to life: it is detachment, contentment of mind. He has not resigned the joys of resignation”—and so has to go through the horror of the death scene to accept lack of resignation as the ultimate resignation.

Works Cited

Adelman, Janet, ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of King Lear. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1978.

Andresen, Martha. “‘Ripeness Is All’: Sententiae and Commonplaces in King Lear.” Colie and Flahiff 145-68.

Blissett, W.F. “Recognition in King Lear.” Colie and Flahiff 101-116.

Calderwood, James L. “Creative Uncreation in King Lear.” Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986): 5-19.

Colie, Rosalie L., and F.T. Flahiff, ed. Some Facets of King Lear: Essays in Prismatic Criticism. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1974.

Colie, Rosalie L. “The Energies of Endurance: Biblical Echo in King Lear.” Colie and Flahiff 117-44.

Mack, Maynard. The World of King Lear. Excerpted in Adelman 56-69.

Montano, Rocco. Shakespeare's Concept of Tragedy: The Bard as Anti-Elizabethan. Chicago: Gateway Editions, 1985.

Muir, Kenneth. Shakespeare's Tragic Sequence. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1979.

Peat, Derek. “‘And That's True Too’” ‘King Lear’ and the Tension of Uncertainty.” Shakespeare Survey 33 (1980): 43-53.

Perret, Marion D. “Lear's Good Old Man.” Shakespeare Studies 17 (1985): 89-102.

Soellner, Rolf. Shakespeare's Patterns of Self-Knowledge. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1972.