SOURCE: McFarland, Thomas. “The Image of the Family in King Lear.” In On ‘King Lear,’ edited by Lawrence Danson, pp. 91-118. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981.

[In the following essay, McFarland considers the dramatization of family structure in King Lear.]

King Lear develops its action along a pattern supplied simultaneously by poetic fantasy and by historical reality. In the main plot, the relationship between Lear and his daughters is prefigured in the record of a distressed family situation of the late Elizabethan period. Brian Annesley, who for many years had been a gentleman pensioner to Queen Elizabeth, had three daughters. As he grew old, Annesley's mind began to give way, and two of his daughters, Christian, who was the wife of Lord Sandys of the Essex Rebellion, and Lady Grace Wildgoose, petitioned to have the old man declared insane and his estate placed in the care of Lady Wildgoose's husband. Annesley's third daughter, who was named Cordell or Cordelia, opposed the action and in October 1603 sent a letter to Cecil on behalf of her “poor aged and daily dying father.” History does not inform us of the ending of this family turbulence, other than that, when Annesley died in 1604, Lady Wildgoose unsuccessfully challenged his will. Some scholars think that when the Fool comments on the alliance of Regan and Goneril in the second act of the play, he is obliquely alluding to the Annesley affair in the line “Winter's not gone yet, if the wild geese fly that way” (2.4.45).

To this prototype for the main plot of King Lear drawn from the quotidian reality of family life in Shakespeare's milieu we may add a fictional prototype for the subplot, drawn from the furthest reaches of Elizabethan familial fantasy. For the story of Gloucester and his two sons is taken from what Sidney called “this idle worke of mine,” “this child, which I am loath to father,” this “trifle, and that triflinglie handled,” that is, The Arcadia. Here, in 1590, in the tenth chapter of the second book, we read of

an aged man, and a young, scarcely come to the age of a man, both poorely arayed, extreamely weather-beaten; the olde man blinde, the young man leading him: and yet through all those miseries, in both these seemed to appeare a kind of noblenesse, not sutable to that affliction. But the first words they heard, were these of the old man … feare not, my miserie cannot be greater than it is, & nothing doth become me but miserie; feare not the danger of my blind steps, I cannot fall worse than I am. And doo not I pray thee, do not obstinately continue to infect thee with my wretchedness.

The young man then tells the observers how this doleful scene came about:

This old man (whom I leade) was lately rightfull Prince of this countrie of Paphlagonia, by the hard-harted ungratefulnes of a sonne of his, deprived, not onely of his kingdome (whereof no forraine forces were ever able to spoyle him) but of his sight, the riches which Nature graûts to the poorest creatures. Whereby, & by other his unnaturall dealings, he hath bin driven to such griefe, as even now he would have had me to have led him to the toppe of this rocke, thêce to cast himselfe headlong to death: and so would have made me (who received my life of him) to be the worker of his destruction.

The “toppe of this rocke” in this passage becomes, in Shakespeare's imaginative expansion, the powerful evocation by which Edgar deludes his blinded father (and more than one modern critic) into thinking he stands on the cliffs of Dover:

Come on, sir; here's the place: stand still. How fearful
And dizzy 'tis to cast one's eyes so low!
.....                                                                                Half way down
Hangs one that gathers sampire, dreadful trade!
Methinks he seems no bigger than his head.
The fishermen that walk upon the beach
Appear like mice; and yond tall anchoring bark
Diminished to her cock; her cock, a buoy
Almost too small for sight. The murmuring surge
That on th' unnumb'red idle pebble chafes
Cannot be heard so high.

(4.6.11-22)

Shakespeare's conception of what Edgar immediately afterward calls “the extreme verge” is thus directly linked to Sidney's fantasy, as we can see again in the play's expansion of the blind king's lament as formulated by Sidney: “my miserie cannot be greater than it is, & nothing doth become me but miserie. … I cannot fall worse than I am.” For Edgar in effect supplies a commentary: “Who is't can say, ‘I am at the worst’? / I am worse than e'er I was. … And worse I may be yet: the worst is not / So long as we can say, ‘This is the worst’” (4.1.25-28).

King Lear, to take up Edgar's rhetoric of descent, is both a drama of “the extreme verge” and an extended trope of things getting worse. We might indeed say of its depiction of life that “This is the worst,” except that to say so would be to turn us to Edgar's wisdom and make us realize that Hamlet may descend beyond even that description. Certainly over both plays there broods Hamlet's disbelieving realization “That it should come to this.” In this statement, the sense of moving from hope to horror is accentuated by the stunning virtuosity of Shakespeare's rendering of happy past and terrible present by the pain-blurred pronouns of “it” and “this.”

Both plays augment their pain by fostering it in the matrix of family life. After this initial congruence, however, the familial similarities diminish. The family situation in Hamlet follows the model of Senecan tragedy, which in its turn had its eye upon Greek tragedy, especially the familial horrors of the house of Atreus. Seneca, who is a much more considerable dramatist than is at present fashionable to believe (Scaliger, who did not take these things lightly, ranked him with Euripides), considered human life to be hell on earth.¹ In this line of genesis, the family situation in Hamlet, to adopt a modern perspective, can be not inappropriately summed up in the vision of R. D. Laing: “A family can act as gangsters, offering each other mutual protection against each other's violence. It is a reciprocal terrorism.” Or again:

From the moment of birth, when the Stone Age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to those forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father … have been. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities, and on the whole this enterprise is successful. By the time the new human being is fifteen or so, we are left with a being like ourselves, a half-crazed creature more or less adjusted to a mad world.²

The latter part of Laing's formula for modern youth, “a half-crazed creature more or less adjusted to a mad world,” might serve as a rough description of the situation of Hamlet himself.

The model of the family in King Lear is different. The play itself might be seen as an exalted version of the “domestic tragedy” of the period—as an elevated form of such structures as A Woman Killed with Kindness or even Arden of Feversham. The situation in Hamlet, by contrast, is almost flamboyant; it has the specialness of things that happen only once, in the realm of the hypothetical, and to others than ourselves. It is significant that the play has been approached through such pairings as “Hamlet and Orestes” and “Hamlet and Oedipus.” When Freud first discerned the outline of the Oedipus complex, which he was forced to see as a flaw at the very root of human nature, he immediately illustrated it by reference to Hamlet. And the form of our contemplation of such shattering familial pain as that represented by Orestes and Oedipus is the aesthetic distancing described by Kant, whereby we take pleasure in catastrophic events such as hurricanes and erupting volcanoes provided we are simultaneously secure from their consequences. A shipwreck happens to others, not to us; and Oedipus, Orestes, and Hamlet find themselves in unthinkable situations that accentuate our own security as spectators. In this same context, we may note that of all Freud's insights into human nature, none has more fiercely engaged our protective mechanisms of resistance and denial than has his formulation of the Oedipus complex. It was not merely Malinowski who professed to find no such complex in the primitive societies he studied; almost every soi-disant rectifier of Freud begins by denying the universality of the Oedipus complex. It is as though we think it suitable for Oedipus, but not for us. We are not Prince Hamlet, nor were we meant to be.

The situation in King Lear involves a different model of experience, an image of family life that is neither flamboyant nor unique. On the contrary, it is in significant respects almost commonplace. Lear's pain and outrage are larger versions of the pain and outrage that almost all parents at some point and to some degree experience because of their offspring. Lear's agonized realization that “Age is unnecessary” is encountered again and again by aging parents and grandparents faced with loss of prestige and function, and possibly with transportation to homes for the elderly. Goneril's impatience with Lear's residing in her own domicile is an immensely larger version of a commonplace experience, that of the strains resulting when an aged parent takes up residence with a married child. “Let me not stay a jot for dinner; go, get it ready” (1.4.8-9), orders Lear imperiously, after the audience has just been informed of Goneril's instructions to “prepare for dinner” (1.3.27). This embryonic family clash, the experience of untold numbers of housewives and aging parents writ large, is the antipode of the poison coursing like quicksilver through the porches of ears that we find in Hamlet's context. “By day and night he wrongs me,” flashes Goneril, her very accents being those of the harried and hateful, but by the same token those of the commonplace and oft-repeated:

                                                                                I'll not endure it.
His knights grow riotous, and himself upbraids us
On every trifle. When he returns from hunting,
I will not speak with him. Say I am sick.
If you come slack of former services,
You shall do well; the fault of it I'll answer.

(1.3.6-11)

The same tone of quotidian exasperation permeates Goneril's spiteful references to her father's Fool:

Not only, sir, this your all-licensed Fool,
But other of your insolent retinue
Do hourly carp and quarrel, breaking forth
In rank and not-to-be-endurèd riots.

(1.4.201-204)

Unlovable though she is, Goneril here speaks in tones with which many with numerous and long-staying guests can sympathize, and we do remember that previously she has taken care to ascertain at least one of the facts: “Did my father strike my gentleman for chiding of his Fool?” “Ay, madam,” comes the answer (1.3.1-3). Moreover, in the early part of the play's action she speaks in tones that at least attempt to justify her conduct:

                                                                                I do beseech you
To understand my purposes aright.
As you are old and reverend, should be wise.
Here do you keep a hundred knights and squires,
Men so disordered, so deboshed, and bold,
That this our court, infected with their manners,
Shows like a riotous inn. Epicurism and lust
Makes it more like a tavern or a brothel
Than a graced palace.

(1.4.239-247)

Lear reacts like many a parent, and entirely like his own self-indulgent early self; we do not here have his later “O, I have ta'en / Too little care of this,” but rather instant righteousness and thunderbolts:

                                                                                Darkness and devils!
Saddle my horses; call my train together.
Degenerate bastard, I'll not trouble thee:
Yet have I left a daughter.

(1.4.253-256)

In this instance, Lear's manipulation of the dynamics of family favoritism, which repeats the fatuity with which he had offered Cordelia “a third more opulent than your sisters” (1.1.86), elicits from Goneril the shrill and wonderful rejoinder—wonderful because it endures in the common situations of human experience:

You strike my people, and your disordered rabble
Make servants of their betters.

(1.4.257-258)

It is because of the repeated projection of such exquisitely nuanced appeals to the sensus communis (Kant says that “by the name sensus communis is to be understood the idea of a public sense, i.e. a critical faculty which in its reflective act takes account [a priori] of the mode of representation of every one else, in order, as it were, to weigh its judgment with the collective reason of mankind”) that the situation between Lear and his daughters cannot rewardingly be described in terms of the rhetoric of good and evil. Thus Maynard Mack's reference, in his King Lear in Our Time, to “the unmitigated badness of Goneril and Regan” seems somewhat beside the point. Moreover, his belief that the two sisters represent “paradigms of evil” leads in my opinion to a subtle misconception of the play's meaning. In the rudimentary morality dramas that in some sense form an adumbrative basis of King Lear, such figures would indeed be paradigms of evil; in the two-dimensional fairy-tale motif of Lear's processional entrance at the beginning and his arbitrary dividing of his kingdom into three (an action of the same order as Old King Cole summoning his fiddlers three), Goneril and Regan do assume the roles of wicked elder sisters to the Cinderella-like good third sister. But these are lower layers and starting points, not the profound process of the play itself. In that process, as I have elsewhere urged, good and evil are conceptions with little purchase.³

If we persist in using the conventional rhetoric of good and evil, we should, of course, certainly have to stigmatize Goneril, Regan, and Edmund as evil. But by that same schematism we should also be forced to think of Lear and Gloucester as good. How unfitting this latter conception would be can perhaps be indicated in brief by returning to the source of the subplot. In The Arcadia the son who is helping his blind father says: “noble Gentlemen … if either of you have a father, and feele what deutifull affection is engraffed in a sonnes hart, let me intreate you to convey this afflicted Prince to some place of rest & securitie.” What Sidney next writes should prompt our reflection on its probable function in Shakespeare's work: “But before they could make him answere his father began to speake, Ah my sonne (said he) how evill an Historian are you, that leave out the chief knotte of all the discourse? my wickednes, my wickednes.”

In the movement of the play, as opposed to the source, the wickedness of the father is finally no more relevant than the evil of the child. What we are presented instead is an image of the family in dynamic interaction, an image intensified and underscored by being doubled into parallel plots. The process of things getting worse is coordinate with a process of progressive deterioration and dereliction in family relationships. After all, the source of the play found in Geoffrey of Monmouth specifically includes the allegedly evil Goneril and Regan in the original unity of love: “He was without Male Issue,” says that source for King Lear, “but had three Daughters whose names were Gonorilla, Regan, and Cordeilla, of whom he was doatingly fond, but especially of his youngest Cordeilla.” It is hardly an exaggeration, indeed, to say that the subject of the play is, not the agony of the king, but the agony of the family; and in a very real sense the protagonist of the play is not Lear alone, nor even Lear and Gloucester in tandem, but the two fathers as the center of family relationships and the service relationships that pertain to them. Any impact on any strand of this web of relationships perturbs the whole; when Gloucester suffers, a nameless serving man lays down his life in sympathetic response.

The protagonistic function is thus dispersed, and the dispersal is both welcome and in a sense necessary because of the unattractiveness of age. Although the fact that Lear is a man standing on the outer edge of existence—“O, sir, you are old,” notes Regan, “Nature in you stands on the very verge / Of his confine” (2.4.143-145)—gives him immense tragic authenticity and the play immense leverage at the tragic intersection of being and nonbeing, by the same token, his standing at the verge of nature's confine makes it difficult for us to identify with him. For an aged man is but a paltry thing, and Lear's prospects on his very verge are as bleak as those of Gloucester on his own extreme verge. The motifs of “very verge” and “extreme verge,” though emphasized by the aged fathers, actually pertain to all the characters and in truth to all human existence: in this life we all stand on the razor's edge, and death has a thousand doors. But it is Lear's definition as father that connects him with younger life and its attendant hope. His fatherhood draws him back into our common ken; his familial identity ropes him to the others as he teeters on the edge of the abyss.⁴ Indeed, even Regan's heartless remark quoted above would not have been made were he not her father.

The tension between Lear's two roles in life, one as king with its patina of symbolic paternalism, the other as father to a specific family, generates the tragic situation that arises in the play. Or more exactly, it makes up the tragic abscissa that, along with the tragic ordinate constituted by being's straining against nonbeing, delimits King Lear's tragic space.

Lear pervasively assumes at the outset that his status as king and his status as father are the same, and this initial confusion leads him into the fallacious assumption that power and love are interchangeable.⁵ It is not merely that he mistakenly believes that so much love can equal so much land, or that he carries the confusion between love and power into the further quantification of the hundred knights, appurtenances necessary to a king but irrelevant to a father. Rather, it is that he believes that the attributes he gives up as king are ones he can retain solely as father: “I do invest you jointly with my power, / Preeminence, and all the large effects / That troop with majesty,” he says to Goneril and Regan and their husbands:

                                                                                Ourself, by monthly course,
With reservation of an hundred knights,
By you to be sustained, shall our abode
Make with you by due turn. Only we shall retain
The name, and all th' addition to a king.

(1.1.130-136)

As Lawrence Stone observes, from a vantage ground atop a mass of sociohistorical data: “Shakespeare's interpretation of King Lear merely underscores the moral that a father who gives up real power, in the expectation of obtaining the love and attention of his children instead, is merely exhibiting a form of insanity. His inevitable disappointment would have come as no surprise to an Elizabethan audience.”⁶ Nor to a modern one either, we might append.

We see the same confusion of Lear's conception of himself as king and as father in his decision to divide his kingdom into three, a decision that violated the accumulated wisdom of Elizabethan statecraft. As Sir Thomas Elyot said in 1531, in The Boke Named the Gouernour:

Lyke as to a castell or fortresse suffisethe one owner or soueraygne and where any mo be of like power and authoritie seldome cometh the warke to perfection. … In semblable wyse doth a publike weale that hath mo chiefe gouernours than one.

He goes on to say that “if any desireth to haue the gouernance of one persone proued by histories let him fyrste resorte to the holy scripture; where he shall fynde that almyghty god commanded Moses … gyuynge onely to hym that authoritie without appoyntynge to hym any other assistence of equall power or dignitie.” After many examples of the ills attendant upon divided rule, he says,

But what nede we to serche so ferre from vs sens we haue sufficient examples nere vnto us? … After that the Saxons by treason had expelled out of Englande the Britons whiche were the auncient inhabitantes: this realme was deuyded in to sondry regions or kyngdomes. O what mysery was the people then in: O howe this most noble Isle of the worlde was decerpt and rent in pieces.

Elyot's political admonitions find confirmation in 1561 in Sackville's and Norton's Gorboduc, where the choric counselor warns:

To part your realm unto my lords, your sons,
I think not good for you, ne yet for them,
But worst of all for this our native land.
Within one land one single rule is best.
Divided reigns do make divided hearts,
But peace preserves the country and the prince.

(1.2.256-261)

In 1599, finally, to trace the unanimity of opinion into Shakespeare's own day, King James VI wrote to his son in the Basilikon Doron:

Make your eldest sonne ISAAC, leauing him all your Kingdomes, and prouide the rest with priuate possessiones: otherwayes by deuiding your Kingdomes, yee shall leaue the seede of diuisione and discorde among your posteritie.

Lear, in short, is behaving like a father and not like a king when he divides his kingdom. The inadequacy of his action purely as that of a father, as opposed to its patent folly as the decision of a king, is attendant, not upon the division as such, but rather upon the inequality of the division, that is, the doting promise to Cordelia to give her “a third more opulent than your sisters,” a third that directly validates Goneril's once resentful but by now matter-of-fact realization that “he always loved our sister most” (1.1.290).

An even more damaging result of Lear's confusion of kingship and fatherhood is his feeling that, like a monarch, but not like a father, he can abrogate the ties of kinship. But the family has its deep-rooted sanctities. The original sin of this dark cosmos is constituted by Lear's denial of family relation in his rejection of Cordelia:

Here I disclaim all my paternal care,
Propinquity and property of blood,
And as a stranger to my heart and me
Hold thee from this for ever.

(1.1.113-116)

Thus Lear's action, not in becoming angry with Cordelia, who has herself acted with some of the old man's willfulness, but in disclaiming paternal care, propinquity, and property of blood, is, if we like the rhetoric of good and evil, the beginning of the evil in the play's progression of events; it is an action of the same order as those of Goneril and Regan. Lear's own violation is eventually redeemed, and its purgation begins with his dawning realization that “I did her wrong” (1.5.24); whereas Goneril and Regan cannot escape their own selves and eventually begin to prey upon each other, in Albany's phrase, “like monsters of the deep.” Albany's terrifying image, which is the nadir of the play's animal references and alludes to the unspoken, dreaded boundary situation of possible descent from true human relation, is prefigured by Lear's violation at the beginning of the play. Thus France observes that Cordelia, as “the best, the dearest,” could not “commit a thing so monstrous” (1.1.217) as Lear's reaction suggests; and he refers to her “offense” as being of “unnatural degree / That monsters it” (1.1.218-220) if Lear is to be thought justified. The same misconception and foreshadowing attend also on Gloucester's early self-indulgence: “He cannot be such a monster,” he exclaims of Edgar; “Nor is not, sure,” replies Edmund smoothly (1.2.97-98). Still again, the image is refocused when Lear speaks of Goneril's ingratitude as more hideous “in a child / Than the sea-monster!” (1.4.262-263).

Thus Lear's initial confusion as to what pertains to a king and what pertains to a father sets in motion the tragic descent. That he does confuse these roles points us to a truth about the structure of the family as presented in this play. That structure, as we have suggested, is fundamentally different from the Senecan flamboyance of the family in Hamlet. The tradition there is one in which Titus Andronicus can at the very outset of his play execute Tamora's son Alarbus (“Alarbus' limbs are lopped,” report his sons matter-of-factly), despite her piteous pleas to spare him. Shortly thereafter Titus imperiously slays his own son Mutius. The play, adding the horrors of Ovid to those of Seneca, proceeds from this bloody beginning into a bizarre sequence of massacres along family lines. To reinvoke the phrase of R. D. Laing, this conception of the family exhibits on its face the contours of “reciprocal terrorism”; and it is this conception, though immensely refined, that obtains in Hamlet.

The family image in King Lear is much more like a different kind of ancient paradigm: that serene structure of mutual regard revealed in Plutarch's letter to his wife on the death of one of their children. Or to summon a modern reference to counterbalance Laing, the family image in King Lear is what in Christopher Lasch's rubric is termed “haven in a heartless world.” It is to seek a haven that Lear gives up his crown:

                                                                                Know that we have divided
In three our kingdom; and 'tis our fast intent
To shake all cares and business from our age,
Conferring them on younger strengths.

(1.1.37-40)

“I loved her most,” he says of Cordelia, “and thought to set my rest / On her kind nursery” (1.1.123-124).

That the family here is conceived of as a haven in a heartless world is not contradicted by the fact that the horrors later perpetrated within that family vie with and in certain senses even surpass those in Hamlet. For what we are talking about is, not the reality of family life, but merely the proffered image of the family. In truth, the conception of family as a haven in a heartless world can in certain respects lead to greater even though less visible destructions than can less affecting images, even as an explosion of dynamite is augmented if the explosive is covered. The offices of psychoanalysts are thronged with tormented patients who bear witness to this truth, and its dimensions are cogently revealed by the nineteenth-century diarist Amiel:

Oh, the family! If the pious, traditional superstition with which we envelop this institution would let us tell the truth about the matter, what a reckoning it would have to settle! What numberless martyrdoms it has required, dissemblingly, inexorably! How many hearts have been stifled by it, lacerated and broken. … The family may be all that is best in this world, but too often it is all that is worst. … The truth is that the family relation exists only to put us to the proof and that it gives us infinitely more suffering than happiness.

In this context we see Goneril, Regan, and Edmund all as victims of the family situation. Their inadequate action is somewhat like that of Joseph's brothers, rendered envious and malicious by their father's favoritism, or even like that of another family victim named Cain.

Despite their differences in image and provenance, the family structures in King Lear and in Hamlet both generate tragic intensifications. In one way, moreover, the two structures are identical. For both are broken families at the outset, and broken in complementary ways. In Hamlet there is no father, in King Lear no mother. We think of correlates everywhere in Shakespeare, so quickly, indeed, that we are overwhelmed by the intuition that a very substantial portion of Shakespeare's literary energy was discharged through varying apprehensions of the dynamics of family structures. Almost all these families are also broken. We think of Bertram and his mother the Countess Rousillon, will their situation, as well as that of Helena, depending on a dead father. We think of Coriolanus and his mother, Volumnia, again with a dead father. We think yet again of Brabantio and Desdemona, with a dead mother, of Polonius and Ophelia, again with a dead mother, and, perhaps most compellingly of all and most germane to the situation in King Lear, of Prospero and Miranda, still again with a dead mother.

These relationships are for Shakespeare typically charged with the most electric emotions. It is perhaps not entirely accidental that his series of passionate sonnets to a young friend involves a recognition of the emotional bond between the youth and his mother, with apparently no father to consider: “Is it for fear to wet a widow's eye,” he asks in the ninth sonnet, “That thou consum'st thyself in single life? / Ah, if thou issueless shalt hap to die, / The world will wail thee like a makeless wife; / The world will be thy widow and still weep.” But possibly the most unmistakable index of the centrality of family kinesis in Shakespeare's concern is the scene in the fourth act of King Lear where Lear is reunited with Cordelia. Such a theme of reunion, and especially of the reunion of a family—or, as here, the living heart of a family—mines the deepest and richest lode of Shakespeare's affirmation of life; and that truth is apparent in other places than King Lear. In the vast tropes of reunion and reconciliation that conclude the action of Shakespeare's last comedies, the most intense themes of joy appear, and they are invariably generated by the resurgence of a family relationship.⁷ Thus Leontes, having seemingly destroyed both his wife and his daughter, finds his daughter again in the lost Perdita and his wife again in the statue suddenly come to life. The language of joy in the familial reconstitution is almost overpowering; it is presented as a climax beyond even the reunion of friends as celebrated by the meeting of Leontes and Polixenes:

Did you see the meeting of the two kings? … Then have you lost a sight which was to be seen, cannot be spoken of. There might you have beheld one joy crown another … their joy waded in tears. … Our king, being ready to leap out of himself for joy of his found daughter … then asks Bohemia forgiveness.

(The Winter's Tale, 5.2.41-54)

As the almost orgiastic description continues, the final points of reference are familial. For the clown says:

The king's son took me by the hand and called me brother; and then the two kings called my father brother; and then the prince, (my brother) and the princess (my sister) called my father father.

(The Winter's Tale, 5.2.143-147)

This joy is confirmed and if possible even surpassed in the familial reconstitution of Pericles. First Pericles is reunited with his daughter Marina:

O Helicanus, strike me, honored sir!
Give me a gash, put me to present pain;
Lest this great sea of joys rushing upon me
O'erbear the shores of my mortality,
And drown me with their sweetness. O, come hither,
Thou that beget'st him that did thee beget;
Thou that wast born at sea, buried at Tharsus,
And found at sea again!

(5.1.194-201)

                                                                                I embrace you.
Give me my robes. I am wild in my beholding.
O heavens bless my girl!

(5.1.225-227)

The reunion with the daughter Marina is followed by reunion with the wife Thaisa:

This, this! No more. You gods, your present kindness
Makes my past miseries sports. You shall do well
That on the touching of her lips I may
Melt and no more be seen.

(5.3.39-42)

And yet not even in these outpourings of joy and wonder is the emotion as powerful as in the awesome reconciliation scene between Lear and Cordelia. Lear's awakening from madness into rationality is, on the literal plane, a moment of restoration, reconciliation, and reunion. But on the anagogical plane it is more; it is the reawakening of the dead into paradise. Lear's confused words on regaining consciousness reverberate with the sweetest topoi of Christian hope:

You do me wrong to take me out o' th' grave.
Thou art a soul in bliss.

(4.7.45-46)

When Cordelia asks, “Sir, do you know me?” Lear's answer is “You are a spirit, I know. Where did you die?” (4.7.48-49). Shakespeare's astonishing evocation of the varieties of human tears in the remainder of the passage achieves a finality that suggests the supervening state of paradise, which, in the words of the Book of Revelation hauntingly taken up by Milton, will wipe the tears forever from our eyes. Lear first speaks of tears:

                                                                                          I am bound
Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears
Do scald like molten lead.

(4.7.46-48)

The connection between scalding past and paradisal renewal is sealed by tears of watering restoration, as revealed by the virtuosity (never enough admired) of Cordelia's tear-choked replies “And so I am, I am,” and “No cause, no cause”:

LEAR.
                                                                                Do not laugh at me,
For, as I am a man, I think this lady
To be my child Cordelia.
CORDELIA.
                                                            And so I am, I am.
LEAR.
Be your tears wet? Yes, faith. I pray, weep not.
If you have poison for me, I will drink it.
I know you do not love me; for your sisters
Have, as I do remember, done me wrong.
You have some cause, they have not.
CORDELIA.
No cause, no cause.

(4.7.68-75)

Art can hardly go beyond this. Both the literal and the anagogic planes are superintended by the Doctor, who naturally would stand by a sick man recovering consciousness (even though this doctor's sudden prominence is mysterious). But as I have elsewhere pointed out, this sudden figure takes up the function of the doctor from the English folk play or mummer's play, who, as E. K. Chambers records, abruptly appears to restore the slain duelist to life.

But doctors also assist at childbirth, and that additional function leads us to still another level of meaning in this supreme scene of reconciliation. For Lear is not merely the sick and confused man regaining consciousness and rationality. He is here not restricted even to the deeper motif of devastated mortal reborn to heaven's bliss. He is also, in palpable respects, the child entering the world for the first time; and Cordelia, hovering over his bed, is, in awesome psycho-dramatic recapitulation, the eternal mother brooding over the infant's crib. Earlier in the play age was equated with infancy in the statement “Old fools are babes again” (1.3.20), and just before the reconciliation scene there is insistent reference to our entrance into the world:

                                                                                          We came crying hither:
Thou know'st, the first time that we smell the air
We wawl and cry. …
.....When we are born, we cry that we are come
To this great stage of fools.

(4.6.178-183)

These images subliminally join with the tears of the restoration scene, for Lear's tears that scald like molten lead, though unforgettably part of the agony and guilt through which he has passed, are no more scalding than the infant's tears at birth. And the very indications by which we see Lear purged of his madness and spleen are also coordinate with the sense of infant joy and calm. The doctor informs us that “the great rage … is killed in him” (4.7.78-79). A “very foolish fond old man” who reiterates that “I am old and foolish,” who asks others to “bear with me,” to “forget and forgive” (4.7.60, 83-84), is a man who in essential respects resumes the relationships of his earliest life.

I have dwelt on this one supreme scene to make clear the enormous charge of emotion with which it is invested. Its recapitulation of the earliest family situation of mother and child, which receives additional emphasis from the absence of Cordelia's mother and Lear's wife throughout the play, leads us to understand how the scene can plumb such psychic depth. At the same time, we realize that the recreation of the child's union with the parent is precisely, in Freud's description, the impelling origin and ultimate goal in the sexual development of every human being.

This aperture of understanding provided by the third or recapitulative plane of the reconciliation scene reveals to us another aspect of the play's meaning as well. For it occurs to every careful critic that there is at least a surface anomaly in the play: King Lear, which is arguably the greatest of all human documents, largely dispenses with the sexual relationships of mankind. There is no proper vehicle here for love between the sexes. It is not simply that the nominal protagonist, Lear, is eighty years old; it is also that such interest seems deliberately to be evicted. The king of France, for instance, speaks in the idealistic language of Sonnet 116, paralleling its insistence that “love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds” with “Love's not love / When it is mingled with regards that stands / Aloof from th' entire point” (1.1.238-240). But after thus displaying his own true understanding of love, the king of France withdraws to his own country, taking love with him. The possibilities for love thenceforth largely devolve on Edmund, and they become, not an index of idealistic intensification, but a grotesque badge of deterioration: “To both these sisters have I sworn my love; / Each jealous of the other, as the stung / Are of the adder” (5.1.56-58). This seething sexuality is further removed from the nobly human by Lear's searing hallucination:

I pardon that man's life. What was thy cause?
Adultery?
Thou shalt not die: die for adultery! No:
The wren goes to't, and the small gilded fly
Does lecher in my sight.
Let copulation thrive; for Gloucester's bastard son
Was kinder to his father than my daughters
Got 'tween the lawful sheets.
To't, luxury, pell-mell! for I lack soldiers.
Behold yond simp'ring dame,
Whose face between her forks presages snow,
That minces virtue, and does shake the head
To hear of pleasure's name.
The fitchew, nor the soilèd horse, goes to't
With a more riotous appetite.
Down from the waist they are Centaurs,
Though women all above:
But to the girdle do the gods inherit,
Beneath is all the fiend's.

There's hell, there's darkness, there is the sulphurous pit, burning, scalding, stench, consumption; fie, fie, fie! pah, pah! Give me an ounce of civet; good apothecary, sweeten my imagination.

(4.6.109-131)

And when Gloucester then comments, “O let me kiss that hand!” Lear's reply reverberates with sublime disgust: “Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality.”

The disgust with which the horizontal and procreative activities of man are here viewed tends to strengthen the urgency of the vertical and familial affections. The same disgust is expressed by Shakespeare in other places: in his Sonnet 129, for instance, or in the poisoned imaginations of Leontes and Othello; most of all, perhaps, in Hamlet's interview with his mother:

                                                                                          Nay, but to live
In the rank sweat of an enseamèd bed,
Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love
Over the nasty sty.

(3.4.92-95)

And when Gertrude asks, “What shall I do?” Hamlet answers that she should not

Let the bloat king tempt you again to bed,
Pinch wanton on your cheek, call you his mouse,
And let him, for a pair of reechy kisses,
Or paddling in your neck with his damned fingers,
Make you to ravel all this matter out,
That I essentially am not in madness,
But mad in craft.

(3.4.183-189)

This vividly expressed sexual disgust functions in similar ways in both Hamlet and King Lear; it tends to displace Gertrude as paramour of Claudius and reinstate and emphasize, Gertrude as wife of the father, as matron of the family, as mother of the son. The sexual disgust of King Lear, in the same way, should be seen as not merely a profound expression of something in the man Shakespeare himself, although I have no doubt that it is that as well, but also as a deliberate eviction from the play of the only force that in both common experience and psychological observation challenges the satisfactions and securities of the family. For whatever Shakespeare's idiosyncratic disgust with human sexuality (as we see, for instance, in Sonnet 94), he was also capable of depicting sexuality in the most radiant terms, as Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra attest. We are reminded, nevertheless, that in both these plays the apotheosis of sexuality occurs explicitly at the expense of family solidarity. Yet by the same token, the fact that sexual disgust appears with jolting power in King Lear tends to reassert the primary importance of the ties of the family relationship.

If in King Lear the sexual interest largely devolves on Edmund and thereby becomes an insignia of deterioration, Edmund's position as bastard both threatens the normative structure of the family and reveals him as the initial legatee of family pain. He thereby becomes the leader, as it were, the first in line, of those who descend toward the disintegrative bleakness of the world of storm and night. But in his descent he is unable to purge himself and forge a new being. Hence Edmund also, like Goneril and Regan, is less rewardingly viewed as evil than as inadequate. Indeed, he is a figure invested with deep pathos.

Here again an examination of the two sources to which I referred at the beginning of this lecture is revealing. For the Annesley prototype differs from the other sources in that it alone presents the old man as infirm of mind (his daughter Cordell writes Cecil that her father's “many years service to our late dread Sovereign Mistress” deserved better than “at his last gasp to be recorded and registered a Lunatic”); it thereby enlists our universal or public sympathy with the plight of the old man and our outrage at the callousness of Lady Wildgoose. In the source for the subplot, however, something is absent rather than present; there is no bastard, and this fact paradoxically makes the figure of Edmund seem somehow more important in Shakespeare's design.

If, as I have been tacitly assuming and sometimes hinting, Shakespeare's almost obsessive preoccupation with dramatic structures of the family takes its enormous emotional force from his own family experience—however little the details of that experience may actually abide our question—then we will find interest in J. H. Padel's recent speculations about the relationship of the sonnets to the death of Shakespeare's son.⁸ Whatever the truth may be, it is intriguing that Shakespeare had a brother named Edmund, who also became an actor, and who fathered a bastard son named Edward. This is one of a number of nagging similarities, such as that between the names Hamlet and Hamnet, or between the maiden name of Shakespeare's mother and the forest of Arden where all troubles are healed, or still again the rumor, reported by Rowe, of a gift of a thousand pounds from Southampton to Shakespeare, which Empson thinks must somehow pertain to the thousand pounds owed Falstaff by Prince Hal. These nagging similarities do not constitute evidence, but we are somehow reluctant to put them out of our minds. My visceral feeling is that the presence of Edmund and Edward, brother and bastard, in Shakespeare's familial awareness somehow pertains to his creation of Edmund and Edgar, brother and bastard, in his most familial play.

The figure of Edmund stands in starkest tension to the hegemony of the family in the play itself. If we think of the processional entry of Lear and his retainers at the beginning as having some of the formulaic depthlessness of royalty on playing cards, or perhaps even more appropriately as possessing the depthlessness of some grouped and resplendent representation of royal appearances on a late medieval tapestry, then we can think of Edmund as an unwanted thread dangling from that tapestry, a thread that, when tugged at by the play's action, comes out, not alone, but rather begins to unravel the frozen hierarchies of the tapestry itself. The pregnant encounter that opens the play establishes both the frozen hierarchies and the unwanted thread, for there we see two friends, who happen to be earls, exchanging courtesies from their hierarchical security, and one bastard, introduced with unintentional callousness and condescension. The bastard stands outside the haven represented by the family, apparently fully accepting the situation as laid down by his inattentive and carelessly joking father. But when we see the bastard alone, we understand how little those grouped hierarchies actually answer to the structure of human need.

Edmund's pathos lies in his exclusion from significant human attention. Nowhere is this more apparent than in a single line that, standing in the very midst of his plain-dealing villainy, nonetheless reverberates as a universal cry of agony. At the beginning of the second act, having involved Edgar in their father's suspicions, Edmund says, “I hear my father coming” (2.1.29). We pause at Edmund's use of the adjective “my.” Edmund next tells Edgar to “draw, seem to defend yourself”; and then, as Edgar flees, Edmund says, “Some blood drawn on me would beget opinion / Of my more fierce endeavor.” He next calls out (the words now beginning to reverberate beyond the immediate situation): “Father, father! / Stop, stop! No help?” Gloucester enters, the torches he brings with him ironically prefiguring not only the torch of the foul fiend Flibbertigibbet but also that darkness of the evolving situation in which no torch will avail him. By torchlight he sees nothing: “Now, Edmund, where's the villain?” The deprivation of a lifetime is in Edmund's answer: “Look, sir, I bleed” (2.1.42). But here, as elsewhere, Gloucester looks past his son into the miasma of self-preoccupation: “Where is the villain, Edmund?” is his only answer to the poignant cry. Small wonder, then, when he is blinded in act 4 and the Old Man says, “You cannot see your way,” Gloucester's answer seems to be the voice of justice: “I have no way and therefore want no eyes; / I stumbled when I saw” (4.1.17-19).

The pathos of Edmund's “Look, sir, I bleed” constitutes an emotional nadir for the play, and it erupts from the family situation, as does an opposite but complementary emotional zenith: Lear's eulogy of the dead Cordelia: “Her voice was ever soft, / Gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman” (5.3.274-275). The power of the specification lies in its diminuendo of observation contrasted with its crescendo of emotion; but its substance comes from the repeated observations of family interaction, the attention paid to Cordelia by her father. And this attention is starkly opposed to Gloucester's inattention to Edmund.

In largest description, indeed, the opposites that generate the play's moral movement can be viewed as the struggle between attention and inattention (“O, I have ta'en / Too little care of this!”). The truth, both of the play and of human life, is that human inattention destroys the family as haven. But the family as haven, though it undergoes vicissitudes that reveal it to be largely illusion and absolutely so in terms of the insubstantial positings of the play's beginning, complements the idea of a heartless world. The bleakness of the King Lear cosmos stands in ironic tension to the posited security of family concern:

No, I will weep no more. In such a night
To shut me out! Pour on, I will endure.
In such a night as this! O Regan, Goneril.

(3.4.17-19)

The storm that harrows Lear compounds the irony of his familial illusion:

Rumble thy bellyful. Spit, fire. Spout, rain!
Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire are my daughters.
I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness.
I never gave you kingdom, called you children,
You owe me no subscription.

(3.2.14-18)

The storm is only the bleakest intensification of the idea of an uncaring cosmos, a heartless world. The play throughout exists in what I have elsewhere called “a nightmare corner of thought.”

We may note, finally, that the mighty process by which familial haven is dissipated into heartless world results in the almost inconceivable power of the trial scene in the stormswept hovel, where the family is virtually turned inside out. The vast dialectical movement of the play's imagery and emotion is from insubstantial something toward and into nothing itself and out again to renewed and substantial something. The insubstantial something is the familial relationships and political and social hierarchies posited at the beginning; the nothing, brought alive by the repeated invocations of the word in the play's fabric of discourse and represented by repeated tropes of divestiture, from shelter to storm, from castle to hovel, from fine raiment to rags to nakedness itself, and, finally, from reason to madness, begins to reemerge as substantial something in the awesome trial scene. There the family situation is reversed. Cordelia is absent, having been replaced by the Fool. Goneril and Regan, the two other members of the family, are on trial on the mad but wonderful familial charge of having “kicked the poor king her father” (3.6.47-48). But Goneril and Regan are actually as “be-nothinged” as Cordelia, for Goneril is a joint stool, and Regan another, “whose warped looks proclaim / What store her heart is made on.”

From this point the often noted wonder ensues. The worldly situation of Lear and Cordelia, except for the momentary calm of their reconciliation, grows worse and worse, but their spiritual situation becomes better and better, until it rises to the transcendent heights of gilded butterflies, purged to the ultimate relationship of “We two alone.” All the sources concur in saying that Lear and Cordelia defeated their enemies and that Lear reigned once again over Britain. But in this play we have instead the choric cry of Edgar at the final battle: “King Lear hath lost, he and his daughter ta'en.” For worldly success would have worked against Shakespeare's final distillation of human meaning into the heavenly quintessence of family relationship. Father and daughter are more truly family than even husband and wife; and the familial nucleus of “We two alone” persists, in this greatest of Shakespeare's visions, beyond life into death itself.

Notes

1. Commentators have said little on this matter, although the cumulative testimony of the plays is almost overwhelming. But compare a philosophical analyst's recent observation with respect to Seneca's statement that it is wrong to hate life too much: “The remark gives him away; his own view is based on a hatred of life. … Fundamentally Seneca's wise man is in love with death. He is looking out for a tolerable pretext to die.” J. M. Rist, Stoic Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1969), p. 249. For Scaliger's judgment of Seneca, see J. W. Cunliffe, The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy (1893; reprint ed., Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1965), p. 7.

2. The Politics of Experience (New York: Pantheon, 1967), pp. 59, 36. The reciprocal terrorism can be physical as well as mental, and it is certainly not limited to twentieth-century realities. Thus, for a single emphatic instance, Augustin Thierry records in his Récits des temps mérovingiens that, “in the year 561, after an expedition against one of his sons, whose rebellion he punished by having him burned at the stake together with his wife and children, Lothar, perfectly at ease in mind and conscience, returned to his house at Braine.” (I have used the translation by M. F. O. Jenkins.)

3. “Reduction and Renewal in King Lear,” in Tragic Meanings in Shakespeare (New York: Random House, 1966).

4. Compare, for example, William R. Elton: “Paralleled by Edgar's quest for identity, Lear demands his own identity of daughters, his retainers, his Fool, and himself. … From one point of view, indeed, Lear may be said sequentially to dissociate into his children, Goneril and Regan (selfish willfulness) and Cordelia (courageous adamancy), as Gloucester may be seen successively to dissolve into his components, Edmund (lust) and Edgar (pathos). Here, fatherhood, as in Dostoievsky's Karamazov family, involves not only the problem of identity but also that of identity in multiplicity. Thus, through self-alienation and division, characters generate proxies for themselves, as well as analogues of each other.” “King Lear” and the Gods (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1968), p. 280.

5. Underlying the whole structure of Elizabethan attitudes about the nature of kingship was the implicit analogia of king with father (and of both with God). Thus, for instance, James VI composes his Basilikon Doron in the dual role of father counseling son and of king instructing subject (as we can see from the subtitle of the 1603 edition: His Maiesties Instrvctions to his Dearest Sonne, Henry the Prince). Furthermore, though the analogy of king and father was so taken for granted that explicit statements are infrequent, oblique alignments abound, e.g. “A good King (thinking his highest honour to consist in the due discharge of his calling) employeth all his studie and paines, to procure and mainteine (by the making and execution of good lawes) the wellfare and peace of his people, and (as their naturall father and kindly maister) thinketh his greatest contentment standeth in their prosperitie, and his greatest suretie in hauing their hearts.” Or again: “Ye see nowe (my Sonne) how (for the zeale I beare to acquent you with the plain & single verity of al things) I haue not spared to playe the baird against all the estates of my kingdome: but I protest before God, I do it with the fatherly loue that I owe to them all, onely hating their vices, whereof there is a good number of honest men freed in euery estate.” Basilikon Doron, reprint of 1599 edition, pp. 29 (sig. E3), 64 (sig. 14). But however much, under the most benign interpretation of their possibilities, the roles of king and father may be thought to coincide, in actual fact the absolute power of a king ill accords with the loving flexibility of a father. The dynamics of the contrast are existential, not historical or time-bound by Elizabethan convention. Thus a prominent modern psychiatrist prefaces a well-known study of the genesis of schizophrenia within a family by a description of the father that timelessly describes Lear's own preoccupation with his appurtenances as a king: “The father … thought of himself as a great man and expected his family to support his narcissistic need for admiration. He was unable to recognize the needs of others or even realize that they viewed the world differently than he did.” Theodore Lidz, Preface to A Mingled Yarn: Chronicle of a Troubled Family, by Beulah Parker (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1972), p. xi. In this context, it is interesting to remind ourselves that James, unlike the Lear of the play's opening, insists that a king should be humble, because a king is simply an ordinary man called to eminence by God: “Foster true Humilitie in banishing pride,” and “when ye ar there, remember the throne is Gods and not yours, that ye sit in.” Basilikon Doron, pp. 115 (sig. Q2), 109-110 (sig. P3). In brief, whatever the identity of kingship and fatherhood in static conception, the formula that describes their functioning interaction is this: the more king, the less father; the more father, the less king.

6. The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), p. 97.

7. Though Stanley Wells has pointed out that the joyous reconciliation scenes in the last comedies are prefigured by such scenes in the Greek romances that lie behind them, we may take it as an axiom of Shakespearean interpretation that what Shakespeare chooses to retain from his source materials is as truly representative of his intent as are themes created by his imagination ex nihilo.

8. “Shakespeare's Sonnets—Sonnet 146,” in Times (London) Literary Supplement, Oct. 21, 1977.