SOURCE: “The Passing of King Lear,” in Shakespeare Survey, Vol. 41, 1989, pp. 145-57.

[In the following essay, Kirby analyzes the moment of Lear's death in terms of medieval Christian thought and Shakespeare's stagecraft, contending that even though providence does not preserve Lear and Cordelia in the temporal sense, the king dies suffused with joy and in a state of grace. Kirby also discusses the deaths of the villainous characters in the play, as well as those of Gloucester, Kent, and Cordelia.]

Generations of scholars have grappled with the problems posed by the ending of Shakespeare's King Lear: not one of the solutions proposed to date has commanded general and lasting assent. As Bridget Lyons put it:

Lear's words just before his death have always eluded the attempts of critics to label what he sees, does or feels at the moment that he utters them.¹

Such critical attempts have been varied in the extreme: for G. R. Hibbard, they range from the ‘sentimental wishful thinking’ of writers such as Paul N. Siegel to the ‘reductive nihilistic rant’ of Jan Kott.² Reactions to these attempts have been equally varied: what to one scholar is sublime is ridiculous to another. As a result, one senses the tendency, at the present time, to feel that this is perhaps one of the Shakespearian mysteries we are not intended to solve: that we should be content to say of Lear, as the churlish priest said of Ophelia, that his end was doubtful. It is therefore clear that any further attempt to provide a solution to the enigma must, if it is to have the slightest hope of carrying conviction, be based on foundations laid with the very greatest care. I shall thus begin by inviting assent to a certain number of premises essential to my later arguments.

The first of these can be most briefly expressed in the words of Terence Spencer at a medieval symposium a decade ago: ‘Shakespeare was a medieval.’ Contrary to the views of certain critics who in the recent past have tried to minimize, or ignore, such features in Shakespeare's work, it must be strongly affirmed that in his plays he used beliefs, ideas, attitudes, themes which are more familiar to the medieval than the modern mind; and it therefore follows that if in a given context we adduce an interpretation based on a medieval rather than modern viewpoint, such an interpretation must be considered on its merits, and not dismissed on the spurious grounds that in Shakespeare was the light of the Renaissance, and no medieval darkness at all.

This last phrase foreshadows my second premise. Whether Shakespeare was a ‘born-again Christian’, as one or two critics have tried to demonstrate with very limited success, or merely assented to the so-called ‘Established’ views of his time, he nevertheless wrote within what now tends to be called the Judeo-Christian tradition. On many occasions in his plays he used beliefs, ideas, attitudes that are rooted in the religious views of his time; and it therefore follows that if in a given context we adduce a Christian rather than pagan or secular, an eternal rather than temporal, interpretation, such an interpretation must, again, be judged on its merits.³

My third premise is, in essence, a combination of the first two. On many occasions in his plays, Shakespeare used beliefs, attitudes, ideas, themes which are familiar in medieval Christian thought. To take an exceedingly obvious example: Horatio's farewell to Hamlet takes the form of a prayer that his eternal destiny may be the bliss of Heaven:

                                                                                          Good night, sweet prince,
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

(5.2.312-13)

It is to Hell that Hamlet is determined to send Claudius and for this reason renounces his best opportunity to execute vengeance on him:

A villain kills my father, and for that
I, his sole son, do this same villain send
To heaven …
No …
Up, sword, and know thou a more horrid hint
.....And that his soul may be as damned and black
As hell whereto it goes.

(3.3.76-8, 87-8, 94-5)

But it is equally clear that the immediate destiny of King Hamlet was neither Heaven nor Hell but a prison-house where he is, as he says:

                                                                                          confined to fast in fires
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away.

(1.5.11-13)

The penultimate word of this excerpt makes it abundantly clear that it is from the purgatory of pre-Reformation Christian belief that King Hamlet comes to walk the battlements of Elsinore. Examples could easily be multiplied of the use of medieval Christian ideas in Shakespeare's plays: and it is thus clear that if we should adduce such ideas in relation to the interpretation of specific passages, such a critical approach must, again, be judged on its merits. To dot the ‘i’s and cross the ‘t’s: it is not necessary that the critic be a Christian himself for him to admit a Christian interpretation of a given passage; it is not necessary for us to prove that Shakespeare was a convinced Christian before we can claim that he gave a Christian slant to a given passage; all that is necessary is to show that certain ideas were current in his day, and preferably that he or his contemporaries used them in other contexts. This may sound obvious; but it has not always seemed so to those who have written on the ending of King Lear.

Premise number four: words, words, words. The last of the above quotations illustrates a commonplace of criticism, that Shakespeare was a master-craftsman with words, and that on occasion he used a single word to demonstrate clearly his visualization of a particular situation. An understanding of the precise value of each individual word of Shakespeare's text is as essential as ever it was to sound criticism; and this must take into account differences in the semantic value of words in Shakespeare's time and our own. I have not observed, for instance, that any critic has commented on the meaning of one significant word in the final statement of the play, which begins: ‘The weight of this sad time we must obey’ (5.3.299).⁴ It is true that one recent editor has come up with the remarkable suggestion that the choice of the word ‘weight’ may imply that the speaker already has the dead body of Lear in his arms! But in my view it is more significant that the word ‘sad’ does not necessarily mean, in this context, what one might naturally assume. The use of the word in its present-day sense by Kent at 5.3.265 (‘your sad steps’) may blind us to the fact that Shakespeare frequently used it in the older sense ‘serious’, ‘solemn’; and the use of ‘weight’ accords at least as well with this meaning of the word. That this is a solemn moment in the play is beyond doubt; how far it is also ‘sad’ is open to question.

From words to actions. If Shakespeare was a master-craftsman with words, he was also very much a man of the theatre, adapting his text to the exigencies of the place of performance, and frequently indicating how the words of his text were to be backed up by action on the part of the players. Hamlet's dislike of fools who spoke or did more than was set down for them, and of leading actors who might be tempted to ‘out-Herod Herod’ is well known (3.2.1-35): to quote another of his comments which seems to reflect his creator's opinion, the players should ‘suit the action to the word, the word to the action’. We are therefore obliged to consider, in any context, how the individual scene can be realized on stage, and if possible how Shakespeare himself envisioned it. For while the literary critic may on occasion modestly admit defeat in his attempt to determine what Shakespeare intended, directors of his plays cannot permit themselves the same licence: they must of necessity take a view, which may or may not be consonant with that of Shakespeare. The final line and a half of Lear's last speech has in the wisdom of different critics been interpreted in terms of extreme despair and extreme joy; the director has to make a choice. My final premise, then, is that in any examination of the ending of King Lear the possible range of actions, and any help Shakespeare may give us in his text, must be given full consideration.

From premises to motifs. Over the years, much critical thought has been devoted to a number of issues raised by King Lear. One such issue relates to the structure of the play. It has long since been noted that the basic framework of the play has this in common with such works as Macbeth and Richard III, that in its treatment of British history we move from a situation of stability through a period of instability and back to stability again; on the other hand, the device whereby the sub-plot reflects the main plot in many respects is highly distinctive, emphasizing as it does the personal aspects of the double tragedy. More recently it has been pointed out that in King Lear Shakespeare frequently frustrates the expectations of his audience: and in fact this functions now for evil, now for good—such instances as Edgar's congratulating himself that things cannot get any worse just before he meets his blinded father, and the complete change in the character of Albany, come readily to mind. Such reversals come thick and fast as the play draws to its close: the unexpectedness of the defeat of Lear and his daughter; the reversal of Edmund's fortunes; the so-called ‘false ending’; and, supremely, Lear's final entrance. But on one point the critics have been far from unanimous: for one critic, every up-turn in the second part of the play is followed by a down-turn; for another, the opposite is true.⁵ Bradley, commenting on the final scene, takes the former view: ‘It is’, he says, ‘as if Shakespeare said to us: “Did you think weakness and innocence have any chance here? Were you beginning to dream that? I will show you it is not so.”’⁶ Many have followed Bradley. But is Lear's final entrance, with Cordelia in his arms, indeed the final reversal?

The second motif I shall touch on is the problem of the justice of the gods as portrayed in King Lear. There is apparently a contradiction in the play. On the one hand, we have Albany's:

                                                                                          This shows you are above,
You justicers, that these our nether crimes
So speedily can venge,

(4.2.46-8)

in relation to Cornwall's death, and the darker comment of Edgar at the end of the play:

The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us.
The dark and vicious place where thee he got
Cost him his eyes.

(5.3.161-4)

By contrast, there is Gloucester's ‘O cruel! O you gods’ (3.7.68), and Albany's ‘The gods defend her!—Bear him hence a while’ (5.3.231), followed at once by that most memorable of all stage directions: ‘Enter Lear with Cordelia in his armes.’ Critical reaction to the problem has varied greatly; but in the last decade or so scholars have been far more inclined to underline the occasions in the play when the justice of the gods is less than apparent.

This problem is closely bound up with another, that of crime and punishment in the play. At first glance it may seem that the evil characters get off lightly—that the quick and relatively easy deaths they die compare most favourably with the hell, or rather purgatory, on earth that Lear, Gloucester, and to a smaller extent Kent go through. But in his essay in Shakespeare 1564-1964⁷ Kenneth Myrick emphasized the difference between twentieth- and seventeenth-century thinking on this issue. Most of our contemporaries, whatever their religious outlook, tend to regard a quick death as being much more desirable than a long-drawn-out one—witness that well-known medievalist C. S. Lewis, who in his Screwtape Letters (London, 1942) compared favourably the death of his protagonist in an air raid with that of an elderly rich man struck down by an incurable disease and condemned to the gradual realization of his mortality. More typical of earlier thinking on the subject are the words of the Litany: ‘from battle and murder, and from sudden death. Good Lord, deliver us’.⁸ The sudden death which seems so relatively agreeable to many moderns was in most cases the greatest of tragedies for those who believed that their eternal destiny was conditioned by their actions during life and their spiritual state at the moment of death. Thus, the Ghost in Hamlet makes it plain that in killing him Claudius had not merely committed fratricide but had condemned him to an appalling purgatorial experience of indeterminate duration (1.5.9-22): to quote his own words, he was:

Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,
Unhouseled, dis-appointed, unaneled,
No reck'ning made, but sent to my account
With all my imperfections on my head.

(1.5.76-9)

And since the lightest pain of purgatory was thought to be greater than the worst punishment human cruelty could devise, the second aspect of Claudius' action was demonstrably worse than the first.

Now, if we apply this thinking to King Lear, we see at once that the above passage applies with peculiar force to Cornwall, Oswald, Goneril, Regan, and in some measure Edmund. As Myrick (p. 67) pointed out, ‘One by one, the five villainous characters in Lear are destroyed in the exact circumstances in which the Elizabethan had been trained to see and dread the judgment of an angry God’—that is, when they are about to commit, or have recently committed, a fault; when everything seems to be going well for them; with great suddenness. Cornwall has just blinded Gloucester; Oswald is preparing to kill Gloucester; Regan seeks the death of her father, and has ordered the killing of Gloucester; Goneril has poisoned her sister; Edmund has ordered the execution of Lear and Cordelia.

Myrick's point seems to me incontrovertible: but I should like to add a further justification of it which has wider implications.

My fourth premise was the importance of individual words; and it seems to me very noteworthy that Cornwall and Oswald, and Goneril and Regan, are linked in their deaths by words of special significance. Cornwall's final speech ends with the words:

                                                                                          Regan, I bleed apace.
Untimely comes this hurt. Give me your arm,

(3.7.95-6)

while Oswald's last words are ‘O untimely death! Death!’ (4.5.249). Now, the use of ‘untimely’ in both cases can certainly be seen in terms of temporal misfortune: as Myrick (p. 66) says, everything is going well for Cornwall, who seems to have nothing to lose by his cruelty, and for Oswald, who has much to gain from his intended action. But if we go beyond temporal to eternal considerations, it is clear that their deaths are untimely in the extreme. Shakespeare, in fact, has used a single word to imply, almost in passing, that the crimes they have committed, or are about to commit, carry an eternal as well as temporal punishment—they are, indeed, cut off amid the blossoms of their sin.

As to Goneril and Regan: the circumstance of their deaths is reported three times in the final scene, and one of these reports is apparently inaccurate. We are first told, by a Gentleman with a bloody knife, that Goneril has poisoned her sister and committed suicide. This account is echoed in Edmund's words:

The one the other poisoned for my sake,
And after slew herself.

(5.3.216-17)

But a mere fifty lines later Kent, speaking to the heedless Lear, says:

Your eldest daughters have fordone themselves,
And desperately are dead.

(5.3.267-8)

Largely, this has gone unremarked: such comments as have been made mostly assume a slip on Shakespeare's part in the heart of composition. However, it seems to me far more important that Shakespeare has deliberately linked these two in this final statement concerning their end, and that what he is saying is that Goneril and Regan have brought about their own destruction, and have died in despair.⁹ The word ‘desperately’ has, then, a comparable function to ‘untimely’ in the previous example; Goneril and Regan die in a state of despair,¹⁰ and what that means is well illustrated in Shakespeare's own lifetime by Spenser's Faerie Queene, where in Book One the Red Cross Knight's most dangerous enemy is not the dragon but Despair personified (see Canto ix). Again, therefore, Shakespeare has in a single word rounded off his statement concerning the temporal and eternal destiny of two of his characters.

This practice of Shakespeare's is not, however, limited to the evil characters. Goneril and Regan die in despair; Gloucester seeks death because he is in a state of despair—as Edgar says:

Why I do trifle thus with his despair
Is done to cure it.

(4.5.33-4)

After his apparently miraculous deliverance from death, Gloucester is content to bear his affliction, though he welcomes Oswald's attempt to end it for him (4.5.229-30). The circumstances of his death are related by Edgar in the final scene, where we learn that it is in fact Edgar himself who is the immediate cause of his father's passing. Edgar relates how he:

                                                                                                    became his guide,
Led him, begged for him, saved him from despair

(5.3.182-3)

and then told him the whole story of his share in his father's purgatorial experience, but (he continues)

                                                                                          his flawed heart—
Alack, too weak the conflict to support—
'Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief,
Burst.

(5.3.188-91)

That is, in contemporary terminology, the conflict of the overwhelming emotions of sorrow for his son's sufferings, and joy at their reunion, brings on a heart attack that kills him. However, if this is our last word, it is not Shakespeare's, for Edgar's speech in fact ends:

                                                                                          but his flawed heart …
'Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief,
Burst smilingly.

(5.3.188, 190-1)

Another single word; a comparable function. Gloucester dies in joy, knowing his beloved son Edgar to be alive.

So far, we have seen that the final words spoken by, or about, five of the principal characters are of particular importance in the assessment of Shakespeare's final statements about them; it will thus be appropriate, in due course, to take note of the import of other ‘last words’. But we can also maintain that in the case of these five characters ‘The gods are just’ (5.3.161) in respect of their passing: of the evil characters, two die an untimely death both temporally and eternally, two die in the despair which also adumbrates damnation; conversely, Gloucester passes through the temporal purgatorial experience called for by his ‘sins’ to end his life at a moment when hope has not only banished despair, but has itself been emptied in delight.

What of the others? The case of Edmund, which is but a trifle here, is plain on the temporal level; he is justly killed for his own treachery, as he himself implicitly acknowledges.¹¹ On the post-temporal level his case is not as clear as those of the other evil characters. His death is doubtful: but I am inclined to think that because he is unable to complete the penitential sequence of contrition, confession, and satisfaction—Cordelia dies because he delays—it is dubious whether his ‘deathbed confession’ is sufficient to enable him to escape the eternal consequences of his actions.

Thus we are left with Kent, Cordelia, and Lear himself. Kent, because it is clear that in the final scene of the play he is living the last hours of his life.¹² Questions of crime and punishment are irrelevant to him; but he has shared in the sufferings of his master, and in the final scene his quasi-purgatorial experience reaches its climax when Lear, in his agony over Cordelia, lumps him with the ‘murderers, traitors all’ (5.3.244) who have brought about her death. His unremitting faithfulness to his master is, however, rewarded on the temporal level in Lear's belated recognition of him, in the eulogy of Edgar (‘'Tis noble Kent, your friend’, 5.3.243), underscoring as it does his earlier reception by Cordelia:

O thou good Kent, how shall I live and work
To match thy goodness?

(4.6.1-2)

and, supremely, in Albany's offer that he and Edgar should rule jointly in the realm. However, Kent's own last words make it clear that his ultimate reward is not an earthly one: it is, rather, reunion with his beloved master beyond the grave:

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

(5.3.297-8)

His sufferings and his reward thus compare with, and contrast with, those of Edgar. For one, there is an earthly kingdom; for the other, the kingdom that awaits those who have been faithful unto death.

And Cordelia? Critics from Samuel Johnson onwards have, understandably, preferred to say little about the tragedy of her passing; and it is well known that a bastardized form of the play, with a ‘happy ending’, held the stage for a century and a half. Judged by purely temporal criteria, her death is an abomination: it compares in its violence and suddenness with that which overtakes Cornwall, Oswald, Goneril, and Regan; the ‘consolation’ aspects of the deaths of Gloucester and Kent, as set out above, are absent, or at least not conspicuously present; and there are no ‘last words’ to guide us. True, Shakespeare's main concern in the final moments of the play is with the effect Cordelia's death has on Lear; but to suggest that this is sufficient justification for the death Shakespeare gives her is unthinkable. There must, I believe, be another answer to the problem. But since I do not think that Cordelia's death can be understood apart from Lear's passing, I shall not anticipate my conclusions here, but move on to the fourth and last of my themes, which has already been adumbrated in this preceding section: the portrayal of good and evil in King Lear.

The main point I wish to make here is that among Shakespeare's plays King Lear is unusual in the extreme in its treatment of the good. In his earlier plays, Shakespeare tends towards a merely temporal view of good and evil. Thus, in the history plays the virtue of the English is often contrasted with the villainy of their opponents (Shakespeare's treatment of Joan of Arc is especially notorious); the virtues of the first of the Tudors are in total contrast to the vices of his predecessor. The love of Romeo and Juliet is contrasted with the hate of their respective families; in the substantially later Measure for Measure, the lust of Angelo is unable to overcome the virtue of Isabella. And so on. Furthermore, from his earliest years Shakespeare created convincing embodiments of evil: Aaron, Richard III, and Iago are just three of the names that come readily to mind. However, when we look for their counterparts, we find that extreme evil is not in general balanced by extreme good; rather, the good are relatively neutral and even on occasion colourless. Shakespeare does his best for the future Henry VII, but fails to make him convincing; Cassio is an honest man, and Desdemona an honest wife, but little more; we sympathize, and later rejoice, with Macduff; we sorrow with Ophelia, and admire Horatio. But the good qualities of these characters are all relatively subdued.

What happens in King Lear? Edmund has been described as a more likeable Iago; Goneril and Regan call both Tamora and Lady Macbeth to mind; the evil in Cornwall parallels that in Aaron and Richard III. But to whom can Cordelia be likened, outside this play? I submit that one of the things Shakespeare set out to do in King Lear was to establish an absolute contrast between the quintessence of good and the extremes of evil, and that he achieves as nowhere else the positive portrayal of good. He does so partly through the force of contrast: the simple goodness of Cornwall's surviving servants as portrayed in the quarto version, and of the old man in Act 4 Scene 1, who is prepared to perform a last service for his master at the risk of death, shine out the more clearly against the appalling act of cruelty we have just witnessed. But he also builds up, in different ways, the characters we recognize as good so that at the end of the play they are infinitely more than such figures as Henry Richmond, Malcolm, or even Horatio. Words and actions alike have their part to play in this process. Albany moves from a theoretically commendable ‘great love’ of his unworthy spouse to a clear recognition of the essential evil in her nature, and thence to an acceptance and fulfilment of his chief responsibility, the restoration of good order in the state. Kent's honesty in the first scene of the play, and his faithfulness subsequently, are the essence of his goodness, which is underlined no less than three times by Cordelia at the moment of their reunion; and his own simple and moving words, ‘Kind and dear princess’ (4.6.26), are certainly the most effective witness to the total contrast between Cordelia and her sisters.

But this is not all. While much of the goodness depicted functions on a temporal level, it is impossible to ignore the other dimension. The faults committed in this play—Gloucester's adultery, Lear's pride, Cornwall's wrath, the murderous intentions of Goneril and Regan which are the ultimate consequence of their lack of duty to their father—operate simultaneously on the temporal and spiritual levels, the latter calling to mind the Ten Commandments and the Seven Deadly Sins. The virtues shown by the ‘good’ characters have a similar ambivalence, and this is particularly well demonstrated in the case of Edgar. In the Dover cliff scene, Shakespeare considered it necessary to underline one aspect of the events—as Gloucester prepares for death, Edgar says:

Why I do trifle thus with his despair
Is done to cure it.

(4.5.32-3)

Critics who concern themselves only with the temporal aspects of this play have been offended by the sequence of Edgar's actions. What we need to realize, however, is that Edgar does far more than save his father from death at this point: when he recalls the circumstances of Gloucester's passing: ‘Led him, begged for him, saved him from despair’ (5.3.183), we are certainly meant to regard the last four words as the climax of the statement; in Act 4, Edgar saves his father both from physical and from spiritual death. Gloucester passes from despair to hope, a hope which is ultimately realized. And hope is also the keynote of Edgar's response to his own sufferings. This is explicit both in his words and his actions:

The low'st and most dejected thing of fortune,
Stands still in esperance, lives not in fear,

(4.1.3-4)

reflects his approach to his situation in the latter part of the play; it is hope that drives him on in his challenge to Edmund, whom he takes on, not sure, though hoping, of the good success he achieves. And, as Gloucester's resignation turns towards a barely expressed hope that he may once again see his son:

                                                                                          O dear son Edgar,
The food of thy abusèd father's wrath—
Might I but live to see thee in my touch
I'd say I had eyes again

(4.1.21-4)

—a hope that is ultimately rewarded, so Edgar's hope is fulfilled, for:

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

(5.3.278-80)

If, then, the goodness of Kent takes the form of faithfulness above all, and that of Edgar is essentially motivated by hope, what of Cordelia? Shakespeare's own words suffice:

                                                                                          O dear father,
It is thy business that I go about …
No blown ambition doth our arms incite,
But love, dear love, and our aged father's right.

(4.3.23-4, 27-8)

Faithfulness, hope, love, these three. And yet: Edgar is restored to his rights, with boot and such addition as his honour has more than merited; Kent approaches the end of his life in the knowledge that evil is destroyed and in the anticipation that death means reunion with his master; Cordelia is hanged.

There is, then, an apparent discrepancy common to the themes we have considered. Evil, on the verge of triumph at the beginning of the final scene of the play, is destroyed before its end, together with its perpetrators; good is largely triumphant, with stability restored to Britain and the virtuous in part restored to their rights. So far, the justice of the gods is vindicated. But they do not save Cordelia, or Lear. Gloucester dies of joy, knowing Edgar to be alive, but it seems that the death of Cordelia leads inevitably to the death of Lear. One thing is clear: if there is any solution to this paradox, it can only be found in the last moments of the play, and in the passing of King Lear.

Criticism ancient and modern alike has concentrated on Lear's final speech in its attempts to determine exactly what happens at the end of the play; and most of the conclusions reached, particularly in the last twenty-five years or so, are in accordance with one of two views. The first sees both Lear and Cordelia as involved in the destruction which envelops good and evil alike. The despair into which Lear falls is maintained right up to the moment of death: and his last words as recorded in the folio text are to be interpreted as his final certainty that there is indeed ‘no life’ in Cordelia. Lear dies of despair, knowing Cordelia to be dead.

If what I have said so far be accepted, it is not difficult to refute such an interpretation. What we are being asked to accept is that Lear's sufferings, unlike those of Gloucester, are for nothing; that unlike Gloucester, unlike Kent, but like Goneril and Regan, Cornwall and Oswald, he dies not in a state of grace but in the opposite, and that the purgatorial experience, which in Gloucester has led to hope ultimately justified, leads Lear only to destruction.

The second viewpoint, far more common, and indeed adopted by most editors and critics alike, is best known from Bradley's analysis of the ending:

though he is killed by an agony of pain, the agony in which he actually dies is one not of pain but of ecstasy … He is sure, at last, that she lives.

(p. 291)

Kenneth Muir expresses the point even more succinctly: his note on the passage, following Bradley, reads: ‘Lear dies of joy, believing Cordelia to be alive’.¹³

In my opinion, the one service that has been done to Lear criticism by those who hold the first of these views has been to highlight the limitations of the second. As they rightly say, what we are being asked to accept is that, while Gloucester dies knowing the truth, Lear dies deceived by appearances. The parallel between the main plot and the sub-plot, including the temporal purgatorial experiences of Lear and Gloucester, which has been maintained throughout the play so far is then, if we are to believe Bradley and those who have followed him, broken in the terminal experience of their respective lives, and to no apparent purpose. It seems clear that neither of these views should be adopted if there is a defensible alternative. For me, Bradley was closer to the truth in his immediately following comment:

To us, perhaps, the knowledge that he [Lear] is deceived may bring a culmination of pain: but, if it brings only that, I believe we are false to Shakespeare, and it seems almost beyond question that any actor is false to the text who does not attempt to express, in Lear's last accents and gestures and look, an unbearable joy.

(p. 291)

The final moments of Lear's life are dealt with in fifty-five lines; sixteen more separate his death from the end of the play. Lear's first speech includes two apparently final statements about Cordelia: ‘She's gone for ever’; ‘She's dead as earth’ (5.3.234, 236). But in the exchanges that follow, Lear is clearly trying to convince himself that somehow, miraculously:

This feather stirs. She lives. If it be so,
It is a chance which does redeem all sorrows
That ever I have felt.

(5.3.240-2)

This alternation between hope and despair, signalled by the stage direction ‘Enter Lear with Cordelia in his armes’ (tln 3216; 5.3.232.2),¹⁴ is the motive force of this penultimate section of the play. For Lear, nothing else matters: not noble Kent, his friend; not the death of his elder daughters; not the restoration of his royal authority. His attention is hardly diverted from the one stark fact which no looking-glass, no feather, can controvert, and which he, and we, come finally to recognize: Cordelia is dead.

And my poor fool is hanged. No, no, no life?
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.

(5.3.281-4)

The certainty of her death; the final, violent, reaction against the apparent injustice of the gods; the valley of the shadow of despair: Lear's penultimate moments are comparable with the last moments of Goneril and Regan. The next line makes it clear that he is gasping for breath; and it is pleasant to suppose, though Shakespeare does not make it plain, that the last simple earthly service, the loosening of the button at his neck, is performed by Kent. The final words Shakespeare gives him are crucial. In the quarto text, the words ‘Thank you, sir’ are followed simply by a fourfold ‘O’, generally interpreted as no more than the last gasp of a dying man (q: 24.304). In the folio, by contrast, are fourteen enigmatic words:

Do you see this? Look on her. Look, her lips.
Look there, look there.

(5.3.286-7)

The relationship between the quarto and folio texts of the play has been the subject of much discussion in recent years. In the present context, P. W. K. Stone, who considers the folio a revision by a hand other than Shakespeare's, comments:

It is difficult to see these lines as anything more than an attempt on the reviser's part to provide Lear's speech with a more dramatic ending … The reviser … unable to supply anything original, reverts weakly to an idea that has already been exploited to moving effect (V.iii.265-7 and 271-2), viz. that Lear fancies Cordelia may still be alive.¹⁵

His general position has, however, been rejected by several critics, including Steven Urkowitz and Gary Taylor,¹⁶ who regard Shakespeare himself as having been responsible for the folio text; and Thomas Clayton largely rejects Stone's strictures on the folio ending, commenting thus on Lear's last speech as it appears there:

The relations between the passage, its antecedents in the immediate context, and the whole play help to give it a range and power as well as subtlety mostly lacking in the ending of the earlier version: the passage is imaginative and dramatic in itself, and full of significance and histrionic potentialities.¹⁷

To this it may be added that the quarto text of Lear's last speech is almost certainly imperfect: even as printed in the Oxford Shakespeare (24.300-4) there is one hypermetric line, and in certain others the blank verse halts badly. By contrast, there is nothing self-evidently wrong with the folio text. In consequence, I would judge it unsafe to base any argument on the quarto reading, and concur, with Clayton, in the almost unanimous critical standpoint, that the folio text reflects Shakespeare's own decision regarding the words which accompany the passing of King Lear. But what do we see? Why should we look at her lips? Look where? Look where?

If Lear's last speech has been the subject of innumerable comments, the final sixteen lines of the play have received little attention. Yet to me they seem vital to our understanding of what happens at the last moment of Lear's life.

These lines fall into two structural units. The first is an exchange between Edgar and Kent; the second is the final statement by Albany, his offer to Edgar and Kent to assume responsibility for the ‘gored state’, and their respective responses.¹⁸ In the former unit, the audience's attention, which in Lear's final speech had been concentrated on Lear and Cordelia to the exclusion of all else, becomes divided between Edgar, who has rushed forward to attend to Lear, and Kent, who this time stands aloof. This division, it seems to me, is not arbitrary: Shakespeare establishes a specific contrast between Edgar and Kent which functions on two levels. First, with regard to the temporal fact of Lear's passing. Kent, whose faithfulness to his master during his lifetime knew no bounds, stands aside; Edgar, whose comparable service to his father saved Gloucester from death at the wrong time, acts now when the time for action is past—much like the enthusiastic young doctor or nurse who drags a terminally ill patient back from death only to condemn him to months or years of further suffering. The misguided enthusiasm of youth; the mature wisdom of age. Good in combination, of course, as Albany recognizes when he offers them joint sovereignty in the kingdom. The second level of contrast relates to the implications of Lear's death for each of them: Edgar tries to detain Lear in this world, but Kent is no longer concerned primarily with time, but with eternity. His first words show this. ‘Break, heart, I prithee break’ (5.3.288) is not an expression of heartbreak, of despair: it is essentially a prayer—a prayer that his life may end at the moment which is for him supremely right.¹⁹ He had come to bid his king and master aye good night: now, only death can reunite them. And the sense in which we are to understand this is clearly set forth in Kent's next words:

Vex not his ghost. O, let him pass. He hates him
That would upon the rack of this tough world
Stretch him out longer.

(5.3.289-91)

That is, Edgar should not attempt to detain Lear in this world, but allow his spirit to pass from this world to the next, through nature to eternity. And Kent's final words, as important as some we have already examined, underscore the imminence of their reunion:

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

(5.3.297-8)

To dot the ‘i’s and cross the ‘t’s once more: Kent is dying, but his death will lead to reunion with his master, not in the grave, but in life after life.

Shakespeare, then, points us in two directions at once, in the last sixteen lines of King Lear. We look at Edgar, and see the restoration of temporal order: his youthful enthusiasm, though sometimes misguided, will blend well with Albany's hard-won wisdom. We look at Kent, and see one who stands between time and eternity, and who already begins to see the second.

It is time to recall the premises with which I began. From ancient times, certain experiences have been associated with those who are ‘fey’; others have been reported by those who have witnessed the moment of death. To take a few instances from medieval and earlier literature: King Saul receives no comfort from the spirit of Samuel, called back from eternity on the eve of Saul's death; Olaf Haraldsson, King of Norway, has a vision of the world spread out before him on the eve of his final battle; a rather different but also highly symbolic vision is included in the treatment of the last days of Arthur in Lazamon's Brut. That the mantle of Elijah falls on Elisha is conditional upon Elisha's witnessing the passing of Elijah; and one of the commonest topoi in saints' lives and other medieval works is the account of those present at the passing of saints and good men, accompanied by flights of angels to sing them to their rest.²⁰

Experiences of a comparable kind are by no means absent from Shakespeare's plays. Visions of the dead are common: Brutus is visited by Caesar, and will see him again at Philippi; Banquo appears to Macbeth; and in the night before Bosworth Field a sequence of Richard's victims call down despair and death on him and bring comfort to Richmond. Horatio sees nothing at the moment of Hamlet's death, but his prayer is based solidly on medieval tradition. Kent envisions his reunion with his master.

What then of Lear? I have tried to show that it is both unthinkable and illogical that he dies in despair: he passes, indeed, through despair, as Gloucester does, but the last fourteen words he utters constitute, in my view, the final reversal in Shakespeare's statement about him. But I have also implied that for Lear to die in joy, believing Cordelia to be alive, is almost as unthinkable and certainly just as illogical. However, there is a third possibility, mentioned or hinted at in the past, which in the last quarter-century has tended to be dismissed by some critics as ‘sentimental wishful thinking’ and treated by others with the contempt they consider it deserves. Yet it seems eminently logical to affirm that when we have eliminated what appears impossible, that which remains, however unpalatable it may be to such critics, is likely to be the truth.

In his final moments, Lear's attention is clearly diverted from both his despair at Cordelia's death and his own gasps for breath and towards the body of Cordelia. One or two commentators have suggested or implied that he is still fiddling about with a looking-glass or feather, but the time for that is past. Whatever he sees, it is so overwhelming that he is provoked into the final burst of energy that kills him. It brings him once more towards Cordelia and fixes his, and our, attention on her lips. So much is clear; the rest is not. What is it that he sees, does, and feels at the moment of his passing?

If we reject, as I believe we must, a merely temporal significance in this event, we are faced with the recognition that Shakespeare here adumbrates two of the commonest moment-of-death experiences, attested both in literature and in the reports of those who have been present at the death of a loved one. The first I have already mentioned: in earlier literature, notably the saints' lives, the soul leaves the body at or soon after physical death—and of course through the mouth, as depicted in both medieval and renaissance art²¹—and is received by either angelic or demonic powers. As Shakespeare might have written, and with greater justice, ‘Goodnight, sweet princess, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.’ The second experience: at the moment of death, or somewhat earlier, the dying person sees one or more of those he has known and loved during his life. As I have shown, this type of experience is partly reflected elsewhere in Shakespeare's plays, though it is more often hate than love which provokes such happenings; and it is obviously this experience which Kent either has, or envisions, at the moment he utters his last words.

I thus conclude that there is one portrayal of Lear's passing which fits the evidence. As Bradley said, though for the wrong reason, Lear's last words express an unbearable joy. His antepenultimate movement draws him to Cordelia's body: he bends towards her once more, but this time not because he thinks he sees at her lips signs of life—Stone was right in regarding such an ending as bathetic.²² His penultimate movement draws him into an upright position, from which he collapses in what Edgar perceives as a faint; his words ‘Look there, look there’ are not, in consequence, directed to Cordelia's body but to her spirit which, as the spirit of Caesar did for Brutus, stays for her father. ‘My daughter calls me: I will not say no.’ Lear and Cordelia pass, together, from life into life.²³

In the past, many critics have rejected the suggestion that there may be more than a temporal element in King Lear. George Sampson, indeed, opens the single paragraph he devotes to the play with the statement:

The power of King Lear … is so stupendous that we are astonished to remember that it makes no use of the supernatural.²⁴

This is, indeed, to look at the play with one eye closed! What we should rather do is to look at that final scene and perceive, on the one hand, the temporal tragedy symbolized by the corpses of Lear and Cordelia—removed, be it noted, before the play ends—and on the other the solitary figure of Kent, standing between time and eternity. And if we look at both, as Shakespeare most certainly intended us to do, we may, without being condemned for sentimental wishful thinking, express the passing of King Lear in terms in which logic, justice, and sentiment concur. Lear dies of joy, not because he believes Cordelia to be alive, but because he knows that their last parting has come and has gone, and that he will never need to say goodbye to his beloved daughter again.

Notes

1. ‘The Subplot as Simplification in King Lear’, in Some Facets of ‘King Lear’: Essays in Prismatic Criticism, eds. R. L. Colie and F. T. Flahiff (Toronto and Buffalo, 1974), p. 23.

2. See, respectively, ‘King Lear: A Retrospect, 1939-79’, in Shakespeare Survey 33 (1980), 1-12; Shakespearean Tragedy and the Elizabethan Compromise (New York, 1957); and Shakespeare our Contemporary (New York 1964). Among the many articles relating to the ending of the play which are not specifically cited in the present paper are Nicholas Brooke's ‘The Ending of King Lear’, in Shakespeare 1564-1964, ed. E. A. Bloom (Providence, 1964), pp. 71-87; O. J. Campbell's ‘The Salvation of Lear’, Journal of English Literary History, 15 (1948), 93-109; H. L. Hennedy's ‘King Lear: Recognizing the Ending’, Studies in Philology, 71 (1974), 371-84; and J. Stampfer's ‘The Catharsis of King Lear’ and J. K. Walton's ‘Lear's Last Speech’, both in Shakespeare Survey 13 (1960), 1-10 and 11-19 respectively. Surveys of critical approaches to the problems are also found in L. S. Champion, ‘King Lear’: An Annotated Bibliography, 2 vols. (New York and London, 1980); J. T. Spikes, ‘Bradleyism at Mid-Century: The Death of King Lear’, Southern Quarterly, 5 (1966), 223-36; and E. W. Talbert, ‘King Lear’, in Critical Approaches to Six Major English Works, eds. R. M. Lumiansky and Herschel Baker (Philadelphia, 1968), pp. 167-208.

3. This premise is not invalidated by Shakespeare's decision to use the Classical pantheon in King Lear rather than the Judeo-Christian setting of the Chronicle play of King Leir (see for example W. R. Elton, ‘King Lear’ and the Gods (San Marino, 1966), chapter 4), for it has long since been demonstrated that biblical reference and allusion are by no means absent from his play. And as Elton accepts (his chapter 5), certain of his characters approximate in their behaviour to certain of the Christian virtues. On this, see also R. B. Heilman, This Great Stage: Image and Structure in ‘King Lear’ (Baton Rouge, 1948), particularly chapter 10.

4. Unless otherwise stated, quotations from Lear are from The Tragedy of King Lear: The Folio Text.

5. See, for instance, Carol Marks, ‘“Speak what we feel”: The End of King Lear’, English Language Notes, 5 (1968), 163-71, and J. H. Summers, Dreams of Love and Power (Oxford, 1984), p. 99.

6. A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 2nd edn. (London, 1905), p. 271 (henceforward Bradley).

7. ‘Christian Pessimism in King Lear’, Shakespeare 1564-1964, pp. 56-70 (henceforward Myrick).

8. The Book of Common Prayer 1559: The Elizabethan Prayer Book, ed. John E. Booty (Charlottesville, Va., 1976), p. 69.

9. The first quarto reads ‘foredoome’, emended in the second quarto to ‘fore-doom'd’. If the emendation is correct, it suggests that Shakespeare originally meant Kent to say that Goneril and Regan have condemned themselves in advance and have died in despair. This reading, of course, avoids the apparent contradiction.

10. Compare and contrast G. K. Hunter's note to 5.3.290 in his New Penguin edition of King Lear (Harmondsworth, 1972), p. 310.

11. Instant confession on such occasions is not limited to Edmund and Laertes; for another example, Horner the Armourer, see The First Part of the Contention (2 Henry VI), 2.3.98.

12. In the quarto version Edgar describes Kent as having suffered a heart attack (24.212-15); in both versions Kent comes to bid his king and master aye good night (Q: 24.230-1; f: 5.3.209-10).

13. Kenneth Muir, ed., King Lear, new Arden Shakespeare (London, 1972), p. 205, note to line 309.

14. The addition ‘dead’ to this stage direction, adopted by many editors, is unfortunate: as G. W. Williams reminds us, we need to recover the uncertainty experienced by the original audience (‘Petitionary Prayer in King Lear’, in The South Atlantic Quarterly, 85 (1986), 360-73, p. 361). See also C. F. Williamson, ‘The Hanging of Cordelia’, Review of English Studies, ns 34 (1983), 414-18.

15. The Textual History of King Lear (London, 1980), p. 247.

16. Shakespeare's Revision of ‘King Lear’ (Princeton, 1980); and ‘King Lear: The Date and Authorship of the Folio Version’, in The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare's Two Versions of’King Lear’, eds Gary Taylor and Michael Warren (Oxford, 1983), pp. 351-468.

17. ‘“Is this the promis'd end?” Revision in the Role of the King’, in The Division of the Kingdoms, 121-41, p. 135.

18. I accept, without being entirely convinced about it, the Folio attribution of the last speech of the play to Edgar.

19. These words, given in the quarto text to Lear, are often taken as referring to Lear's heart rather than Kent's own. On balance, however, I accept Bradley's view (p. 309).

20. See, respectively: 1 Samuel 28; Saint Olaf's saga, chapter 213 (Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, trans. Samuel Laing, Everyman's Library, vol. 722 (1914; London, 1964) and see chapter 226; Lazamon, Brut, eds. G. L. Brook and R. F. Leslie, Early English Text Society, no. 277, vol. 2 (London, 1978), pp. 734-7; 2 Kings 2. Of the many early examples of the last-mentioned topos which might be cited, there are Bede's accounts of the deaths of Eorcengota, Fursa, and the Abbess Hild (Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, eds. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969), pp. 238, 270, and 412); while from the end of the medieval period we have Malory's account of the death of Lancelot—after he has been ‘howselyd and enelyd’, a vision is granted to the bishop in which he saw ‘syr Launcelot … with mo angellis than ever I sawe men in one day. And I sawe the angellys heve up syr Launcelot unto heven, and the yates of heven opened ayenst hym’ (Malory: Works, ed. Eugène Vinaver, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 1977), p. 724).

21. This paper was originally prepared for the conference entitled ‘Zeit, Tod und Ewigkeit in der Renaissance Literatur’, held in Mattsee, Austria, in May 1986. By a happy coincidence, Dr James Hogg's paper ‘A Morbid Preoccupation with Mortality’ was accompanied by a selection of illustrations from the Carthusian MS British Library Additional 37049, one of which, from fol. 29r, depicts precisely this kind of happening. Such examples are of course legion. It is also noteworthy that W. R. Elton admits the possibility of this interpretation (’King Lear’ and the Gods, p. 258, note 210), in relation to Cordelia.

22. It is on this issue, principally, that I part company with C. F. Williamson, whose article (cited at note 14 above) convincingly demonstrates that Lear had every reason to entertain the belief that Cordelia might have survived the ‘hanging’. Lear's actions and reactions in this scene are, consequently, not deluded but eminently sane.

23. This is, of course, the answer to the problem set forth earlier. Kent's ultimate reward is not, as we have seen, on the temporal plane; neither is Cordelia's. But there is an important parallel to be noted with Edgar as well. Edgar's loving care of his father brought Gloucester back from despair and both temporal and eternal death; Cordelia brought her father back to sanity and an understanding of the depths of her love for him. It remains only to be emphasized that there is one class of human beings for whom the moment of death is immaterial—those who have lived in such a way that they have no cause to fear it. Marlowe's Faustus dies in terror because he has sold his soul to the devil; Shakespeare's King Hamlet suffers the pains of purgatory to eradicate the foul crimes done in his days of nature; Cordelia's is the love that conquers all things.

24. The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature (Cambridge, 1941), p. 266.