[In the following essay, Blechner contends that King Lear is “a love-tragedy between father and daughter,” and provides a psychoanalytic appraisal of the play as it dramatizes the consequences of Lear's long suppressed incestuous passion for Cordelia.]

Shakespeare's King Lear is often thought to be one of his most beautiful but most problematic plays. For nearly four centuries, literary artists and critics have agonized over the work, puzzled by its seeming irrationality and its loose dramatic structure. The poetry in the play is magnificent, and it is a rare person who can see the play without feeling profoundly moved. Yet discussions of why the play is so moving often founder, and some critics of the play, without a concept of unconscious motivation, come to judge it as an arbitrary and irksome miscalculation that needs to be altered. Like the nondynamic psychiatrist who sees the psychotic symptom as something to be eradicated or covered over with invasive measures rather than understood, many reputable literary thinkers have judged King Lear a failure and have brazenly attempted to fix it.

Leo Tolstoy condemned Shakespeare's play for having superfluous characters and false effects, and he stated (1906) that he preferred The True Chronicle History of King Leir, and earlier play which is assumed to have been one of Shakespeare's sources. Geothe held a similar view. In his essay “Shakespeare und kein Ende!” (1815), Goethe discussed the practice in nineteenth-century Germany of revising Shakespeare. One director, Schroeder, eliminated the first scene of King Lear, an action that Goethe found understandable.

Thus it is true that he changed the character of the play by removing the first scene of King Lear; but he was right, for in this scene Lear appears so absurd that in the rest of the play one cannot feel that his daughters are completely unjustified. The man carries on, but one doesn't sympathize with him, and Schroeder wanted to evoke sympathy as well as disgust with the daughters, who are certainly unnatural, but not completely reprehensible. In the old work [King Leir] which Shakespeare revised, this scene brings out the most lovely effects as the play progresses.”

(p. 1007) [Translation mine.]

Thus, in the criticism of King Lear, we have a situation in which there is much condemnation of its seeming irrationality, yet the powerful, positive response of most audiences belies the intellectual argument. We have a situation that is much as in neurosis, where the conscious affective response and experience defy apparent logic; rational arguments based on conscious experience are overshadowed by the subjective reality of compelling and tenacious emotions. It behooves the psychoanalyst, in such a situation, to seek out the unconscious experience that is called forth, in this case by the play, and gives it profound psychological power.

The first psychoanalyst to write on King Lear was Sigmund Freud. In his essay, “The Theme of the Three Caskets” (1913), Freud compares the contest between the three daughters in King Lear to the general theme of a choice between three women in various works of literature, including The Merchant of Venice, Cinderella, several of Grimm's fairy tales, and various sources of Greek, Estonian, and German mythology. Freud comes to the conclusion that the three women represent the three roles that women play in man's life—the woman who bears him, the woman who is his mate, and finally “the Mother Earth who receives him once more” (p. 301). He finds that the youngest woman in each of the myths represents death. He sees choice in the myths as a “triumph of wish fulfillment,” a denial of the inevitability of death.

With his focus primarily on explaining the frequent symbol of three women, Freud does not discuss the seeming illogic, motivational ambiguities, and puzzling family dynamics that have been pointed out by various literary critics of King Lear. To focus as does Freud on Lear's choice requires a denial of the blatantly compulsive and irrational nature of Lear's actions. What looks like a volitional choice is really an action driven by intense emotions toward his daughters that are out of Lear's awareness. Freud, the pioneer explorer of the role of unconscious passion and aggression in man's life, seems in this case to be demonstrating the powerful repression of these motives himself; his focus on the symbolic meaning of the three women, however valid, evades the issues of incest and destructiveness in familial relations. We shall be in a better position to consider Freud's position after examining the play in more detail.

Much of the negative criticism of King Lear, like Goethe's, centers on the first scene of the play.¹ In it, Lear announces that he plans to divide his kingdom among his three daughters, Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia. However, he wishes first to hear them declare their love for him. Goneril is first, and she flatters her father profusely, calling him “dearer than eyesight, space, and liberty.” In return, she and her husband, Albany are awarded a large share of the kingdom. Regan is next; she matches her sister's hymn of praise, and thus gains a comparable share of the kingdom for herself and her husband, Cornwall. Finally comes the youngest daughter, Lear's favorite, Cordelia. What does she have to say? “Nothing.” Lear prompts her to respond further, and she replies that she loves her father as a daughter, “according to my bond, no more, no less.” Lear is enraged. He divides the remaining share of the kingdom between Goneril and Regan, and he disowns Cordelia. The Prince of Burgundy, who has been in the royal court for months seeking Cordelia's hand (and dowry) in marriage, is no longer interested when she is disinherited. The king of France, who has been vying with Burgundy for Cordelia's favor, still values her highly, though she is penniless, and he takes her to France as his wife. Lear storms out of court, his last words being: “Come, noble Burgundy.”

The scene raises many questions. Alfred Harbage (1958) asks, “What can be made of it? Why should that patriarch who wishes to yield up his power and possessions require of the receivers declarations of love?” He gives up, saying, “No logical reasons appear—ritual is ritual, its logic its own. Prose is yielding to poetry, ‘realism’ to reality. King Lear is not true. It is an allegory of truth” (p. 14).

To Harbage's question about the first scene of King Lear, we can add many others: If Lear's plan is to base the division of land on the outcome of what may be called the “flattery contest,” why does he make the awards of land after each daughter's declaration of love? If it is truly a contest, why does he not wait until all three daughters have spoken?

If Cordelia is Lear's favorite daughter, would he not know her well enough to expect that she would be unable to flatter him publicly? Would he not know of her unflinching truthfulness and sincerity? And if he would, why does he act surprised and enraged at her response? Why does he put her in a predictably embarrassing position in the first place?

After Cordelia is disinherited, the ever-loyal Kent, as unpremeditated a truth-teller as Cordelia, speaks out on her behalf:

Thy youngest daughter does not love thee least;
Nor are those empty-hearted whose low sounds
Reverb no hollowness.

(I.i.151-3)

Lear responds, “Kent, on thy life, no more,” and when Kent persists, Lear banishes him, too. However, it is important to notice that he does not deny Kent's words. He wishes only not to hear them, like a patient in psychoanalysis who has heard an interpretation that he knows to be true, but cannot tolerate at the moment, and who therefore decides to terminate treatment abruptly. We can expect that Kent would have understood this analogy, for he answers Lear's order of banishment with: “Kill the physician and the fee bestow / Upon the foul disease.”

All the seeming contradictions and unanswered questions suggest an unstated motivation behind the actions of Lear. In the play itself there are continual references made to the irrational power behind men's actions. In today's psychoanalytic language, we might attribute the contradictory behavior to unconscious motivation. Four centuries ago, the irrational in men's actions was more commonly attributed to the stars (a practice that has not disappeared, although kings and presidents would be less likely to acknowledge such a belief today). When Lear disinherits Cordelia, he does so with the invocation of the stars. He does not disown her by the duties of royalty or the laws of decency. He does so

          by the sacred radiance of the sun,
The mysteries of Hecate and the night,
By all the operations of the orbs
From whom we exist and cease to be.

(I.i.108-111)

It is an action governed by the stars. Today, we might say it is an expression of an unconscious wish. (See also Gloucester's speech to Edmund; I.ii.111-124.)

And what is that wish? A comparison of Shakespeare's play with the earlier King Leir may provide an answer, for it may highlight many of Shakespeare's intentions, revealed by the changes that he made. In King Leir, the plot is eminently sensible, and the motivations of the characters are much less mysterious. Leir spells out for us why he will stage the flattery contest. His wife has recently died, and he had hoped that her good advice would have gotten his daughters married, so that he might pass on the kingdom. None of his daughters is married, but Gonorill (sic) and Ragan (sic) have accepted suitors. Cordella (sic), however, has not. She says she will marry only for love, and there is no telling how long that might take. So Leir plans to hurry her along by means of the flattery contest. He expects that each daughter will say that she loves him, and when Cordella will protest that she loves him best, he will say:

Then daughter, grant me one request,
To shew thou lovest me as thy sisters doe,
Accept a husband, whom my selfe will woo.

After Leir's announcement of his plan, we get the flattery contest, and it is much more sensible than Shakespeare's version. The elder daughters each gush forth their obsequies; Cordella responds simply, without flattery; Lear is enraged; he then divides his kingdom in half, disinheriting Cordella.²

It is a simple plot. Leir—old, sly, and a bit foolish—tries to play a trick and it backfires, but his intentions are all obvious, conscious, and deliberate. The play has a happy ending, suitable for all audiences. Leir is rejoined with Cordella and her husband, the King of France. They invade England with an army, recapturing the land from the evil daughters. Leir is restored to power, and everyone, presumably, lives happily ever after.

Shakespeare ends his play quite differently. Cordelia, temporarily separated from her husband and then reunited with her father, is arrested and killed. Lear, in the final scene, enters with the dead Cordelia in his arms. He praises her beauty and the womanly qualities. Finally, as he rapturously fantasizes that his daughter still lives, Lear dies.

One of the major structural changes that Shakespeare made in the plot is the focus on Lear and Cordelia. In King Leir, the many characters are of more equal importance. All three sisters are in need of husbands,³ and they constantly bicker with each other. The King of France has a major part, both in his courting of Cordella and his military rescue of Leir in the end. In King Lear, on the other hand, the focus is on Lear and Cordelia. Only Cordelia needs a husband. The King of France is a bit part in the first scene, and then appears no more. The world in the final scene revolves around Lear and Cordelia.

It is worth noting, too, that in King Leir, Cordella is unwilling to marry the suitors who are available to her. In King Lear, however, Cordelia herself does not seem to be averse to the suitors who are courting her. They seem to be competing, but the reason for the delay is left vague; we are not led to believe that it is her own fickleness.

Now, how shall we put together all this information to help us understand Shakespeare's King Lear? Shakespeare's focus on Lear and Cordelia suggests that Lear is profoundly attached to Cordelia, with a love that goes far beyond society's bounds of paternal attachment. His actions in the first scene seem unconsciously designed to keep his favorite daughter from forsaking him and marrying either of her two suitors. Lear knows his favorite daughter well enough to predict that she will not flatter him. There is evidence in the play, which will be discussed below, that it is her very honesty that he loves most about her. And so, while consciously planning the flattery contest as the vehicle by which he will give her the largest share of the kingdom, he unconsciously wishes her to renounce all suitors and maintain her love for him alone. He may be carrying out an unconscious plan to embarrass her in public, causing her to lose her dowry, and thereby preventing her from marrying.

Lear, after all, is facing the most serious terror of the aging man—loneliness. His wife is probably dead.⁴ Two of his daughters are already gone, and the youngest is on the verge of marrying. We have, then, the pathos of an old man, horribly alone, seeking, perhaps erotically but certainly passionately, to maintain the companionship and intimacy with his one daughter who remains unattached. And the contest scene is an outbreak of that passion, wishing to make itself not only conscious but public. Cordelia herself makes the precise interpretation of what Lear is doing when she protests:

Why have my sisters husbands if they say
They love you all? Haply, when I shall wed,
That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry
Half my love with him, half my care and duty.
Sure I shall never marry like my sisters,
To love my father all.(5)

(I.i.101-106)

Thus, she points out that Lear wants to be the sole object of her love, but she cannot satisfy his wish. She will love another besides her father. Hearing this, Lear becomes enraged.

The first line of the play sets the stage for understanding Lear's motivation, for it defines the context of his conscious responsibilities and wishes, against which his actions seem so bizarre. Kent says, “I thought the King had more affected the duke of Albany than Cornwall.” Gloucester replies,

It did always seem so to us. But now, in the division of the kingdom, it appears not which of the dukes he values most, for equalities are so weighed that curiosity in neither can make choice of either's moiety.

Implicit in this dialogue is the following idea: if the King's main concern is the judicious division of his kingdom, he will attend to the merits of his sons-in-law, not his daughters. Thus Shakespeare dismisses from the very start the relevance of the daughter's love to the division of the kingdom. If the king holds a flattery contest, it makes no political sense.

Here, I ask the reader to digress with me for a moment, to consider the relationship between the technique of the psychoanalyst and the literary analyst. Many of the principles that are used to analyze the structure of a psychoanalytic session can also be used in analyzing the structure of a play, provided that the principles are based on general principles of psychological functioning. For example, it is thought that a patient's first words in a psychoanalytic session, no matter how seemingly trivial on the surface, contain within them the unconscious theme that the patient is concerned with on that day. Similarly, I have often observed that any unconscious changes that have occurred during the session will be encoded in the patient's last words. I find that if a patient says something at the very end of a psychoanalytic session that is almost the same as what he said at the beginning of the session, then the unconscious material was probably not dealt with adequately during the session.

The relationship between the first and last words, as a sign of unconscious changes or of unconscious continuity, may apply not only to psychoanalytic sessions, but to any human interaction, including those that are portrayed in the theater. Let us examine the first scene of King Lear from this standpoint. Lear's very first words in the play are: “Attend the lords of France and Burgundy, Gloucester.” On the surface, this may be a bit of courtly protocol. There are visiting noblemen in the court, and Lear wishes to be sure that they are properly attended to. But the line, like the first line of a session, reveals some critical information about Lear's unconscious psychology, for it tells us that his foremost personal concern is the pair of suitors who are seeking to “take” his last daughter away.

And the scene ends with a similar indication of Lear's preoccupation. Lear, ostensibly enraged by Cordelia's reply during the flattery contest, has disinherited her. Burgundy, uninterested in a dowerless wife, has rescinded his marriage proposal, thereby gratifying Lear's unconscious plan to keep Cordelia for himself. But France recognizes Cordelia's virtue and takes her, penniless, as his wife. Lear is furious. He virtually curses France. And then comes Lear's last line before exiting the scene. “Come, noble Burgundy.” Is Burgundy suddenly become so noble? Surely not. As Cordelia observes so eloquently about Burgundy (I.i.247-248), “respects of fortune are his love.” That is hardly noble. Only to Lear's unconscious wishes is Burgundy noble, for he has relinquished his attempt to come between the old man and his daughter. However, since Lear's unconscious wish has not been made conscious, nor has it been gratified, it continues to express itself. Thus the scene ends as it began, with Lear's concern about the suitors.

As additional evidence that Shakespeare intended to portray Lear's unconscious passion for his daughter, we may look to the changes in the characters' names that Shakespeare presumably made from the earlier King Leir. Most obvious is the change in the spelling and pronounciation of the King's name. The old version, Leir, is pronounced to rhyme with “there” (see Koekeritz, 1959), while the new version, Lear, has the connotation of its homonym “leer.” I think that we can take it for granted that Shakespeare, masterful punster that he was, would not have made this change without realizing its implications; in his other plays he often uses the word “leer” to denote an intense, lusty, or indecent glance.⁶ The implication of the name change may well be that Lear is looking upon his daughter with more than socially acceptable fatherly interest.

Similarly, we may look to the change in Cordelia's name from the old Cordella. What is Cordelia?—Cor de lia—Cor de Lear—the heart of Lear, Lear's love. If the reader balks at such word play, let him remember that Shakespeare's other puns, such as those he gives to the Fool in King Lear, are often much more loose.

Perhaps the reader is still sceptical about the thesis presented here concerning Lear's motivation in the first scene. The passion of the aged is a subject that may be objectionable to many people, and the taboo surrounding its discussion may be as strong or stronger than that surrounding the topic of infantile sexuality. However, if there is any doubt about Lear's being ruled in the first scene by his passion for Cordelia, it is dispelled by the final scenes of the play, where passion is openly expressed between father and daughter.

It is important to note, in this respect, another change that Shakespeare made from the earlier version of the play. In King Leir, Leir is united with Cordella and France, and together they form an alliance for the military recovery of Leir's kingdom. In Shakespeare, something quite different happens. Shakespeare disposes of France before the reunion of Lear and Cordelia. This is accomplished quite arbitrarily and awkwardly for Shakespeare. Kent asks, “Why the King of France is so suddenly gone back know you the reason?” and an unnamed Gentleman replies,

Something he left imperfect in the state, which since his coming forth is thought of; which imports to the kingdom so much fear and danger that his personal return was most requir'd and necessary.”

(IV.iii.3-6)

That is all we are told. But the elimination of France is critical to Shakespeare's plot, for only when Cordelia is separated from her husband is she fully available for Lear's love-making, which is the resolution of the play from the point of view of Lear's unconscious wish.

And that wish becomes unequivocal by the end of the play. The last scenes between Lear and Cordelia are thoroughly passionate, extremely different from the tepid niceties of their reunion in King Leir. In Shakespeare's play, when Lear and Cordelia are arrested by Edmund, do they consider the realities of the situation? No. Are they concerned with the political ramifications or the indignities of imprisonment? No. Instead, they revel in a fantasy of two lovers. They will make believe they are King and Queen. Lear's fantasy erupts in the beautiful speech: “Come, let's away to prison. We two alone / Will sing like birds in a cage. … He that parts us shall bring a brand from heaven” (V.iii.8-25).

Passion brings out great strength in Lear, who, we should remember, is over 80 years old. His final act of courage has been to kill the young messenger who hanged Cordelia. It is an act of brave assertion, and Lear is openly proud of it. “I killed the slave that was a-hanging thee,” he boasts (V.iii.273). And as if we, too, would not believe it, the all-knowing Gentleman pipes in, “Tis true, my lords.”

In the final scene, Shakespeare gives the stage instruction “Enter Lear with Cordelia in his arms.” This is to be done by an octogenarian who has spent the night out in a storm. But the power of a life's passion has come forth. Lear has his wish at last. Cordelia is his (although dead), and it has brought out great strength in him.

It is no exaggeration to describe Lear's final lines, when Cordelia is dead, as a Liebestod, a love-death. I do not use that term loosely; I would compare Lear's Liebestod to perhaps the most famous one, that in Wagner's opera, Tristan and Isolde. Lear and Isolde both imagine that the dead beloved shows signs of life, call out to the others present to see what they see, and die enraptured. The correspondence is not just one of general spirit and meaning; there are actual line-by-line similarities. For example, Isolde sings:

Wie den Lippen
wonnig mild
suesser Atem
sanft entweht.
Freunde! Seht!
How blissfully gentle
from his lips
sweet breath
does softly flutter—
Friends! See!

Compare this to Lear's “the feather stirs! She lives!“(V.iii.264) and “Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips, / Look there, look there!” (V.iii.309).

In summary, then, we can see in King Lear a love-tragedy between father and daughter. In the first scene the father banishes the loved daughter after having attempted in vain to prevent her from marrying. In the final scene, he achieves his wish, the taboo is broken, the love is expressed, and, as in nearly all tragedies in which a taboo has been broken, the transgressing characters die.

And what of the central part of the play? I would assert that, given our understanding of the first and last scenes, we can read the entire play as a love drama between father and daughter, in spite of the fact that Cordelia, as a character, disappears entirely, for most of the play (between the first scene of the first act and the fourth scene of the fourth act). However, I would suggest that in the central part of the play, Cordelia's presence is played out vicariously with the King by the Fool. Cordelia and the Fool are interchangeable.⁷ Almost immediately after Cordelia is banished, the Fool is called in, and it is with him that the romantic relationship between Lear and Cordelia is developed. This continues until the scene in which Cordelia and Lear are reunited. Then, the Fool disappears from the play,⁸ which makes it all the more convincing that he is a substitute figure for Cordelia. Also, the Fool is treated as Lear's offspring. Lear calls him “My boy,” and shows him the attention of a father to a young child. Finally, erasing any doubt, Lear makes the unconscious connection between the Fool and Cordelia explicit in the last scene of the play, when he says of the dead Cordelia in his arms: “And my poor fool is hanged.”

The Fool and Cordelia have much in common. They are both admirably and tragically devoted to speaking the truth, and this truth-telling takes precedence over tact. It is astonishing to hear the outrageous, insulting things that the Fool says to Lear. He calls him a fool and makes obscene jokes. Yet Lear listens to it all, even responds affectionately to the insults. When the Fool expresses the wish to learn how to lie, however, Lear threatens him: “An you lie, Sirrah, we'll have you whipped” (I.iv.177). To be dishonest to Lear would be unforgivable. Lear disowns Cordelia for truth-telling, yet once she is gone, he can show, in his interactions with the Fool, that what he condemned in her was what he loved most in her.

The Fool, something of an analyst, continued Cordelia's interpretations of Lear's need to envelop his daughter in his unconscious passion. Mincing words even less than Cordelia, the Fool sings songs and tells jokes that unreservedly identify Lear as the fool, as the man who has lost his reason to passion. The Fool is quite explicit about the sexual source of Lear's madness:

The codpiece that will house
                    Before the head has any,
The head and he shall louse:
                    So beggars marry many.

(III.ii.27-34)

The codpiece is the part of clothing that covers the genitals. Thus, the fool is saying: He who houses his genitals before his head, who puts his lust before reason, is headed for madness and penury.

Similarly, the Fool refers often to lechery (etymologically related to “leer”), as when he describes the appearance of passion in a dying body: “Now a little fire in a wild field / were like an old lecher's heart—a small spark, all the / rest on's body, cold” (III.iv.110-112).

Lear comes close to insight, especially in Act III. Here the storm breaks out at the moment that Lear's rage begins to turn to sorrow, as his unconscious conflict begins to burst forth. Lear's address to the storm, which may be seen as an outburst of his unconscious conflict, is the beginning of his understanding, albeit still projected onto the external storm, of the rage within and of his emerging sense of guilt, not yet fully accepted as his own.

                    Let the great gods
That keep this dreadful pudder o'er our heads
Find out their enemies now. Tremble, thou wretch
That has within thee undivulged crimes
Unwhipped of justice.(9) Hide thee, thou bloody hand,
Thou perjured, and thou simular of virtue
That art incestuous. Caitiff, to pieces shake,
That under covert and convenient seeming
Has practiced on man's life. Close pent-up guilts,
Rive your concealing continents and cry
These dreadful summoners grace. I am a man
More sinned against than sinning.

(III.ii.49-60)

“Thou simular of virtue that art incestuous”—Is that not an apt description of Lear in the first scene of the play?

To be sure, King Lear is not only about Lear's unconscious passion. To take that view would be to trivialize Shakespeare's character development. Lear's exorcism in the play involves many aspects of his character. The man goes through an upset of his entire personality in a much-belated excursion into self-discovery. It is a life's work crammed into a few excruciating days.

He starts the play with little self-knowledge. Regan may be right when she says of her father: “He has ever but slenderly known himself” (I.i.292-293). In the play, especially during the storm, he discovers his arrogance and pride, his lack of humility and empathy. The Fool takes aim at these characteristics, as in his ditty:

The man that makes his toe
                    What he his heart should make
Shall of a corn cry woe,
                    And turn his sleep to wake.

(III.ii.31-34)

Lear learns from the Fool, but even more so from his own suffering, about the meaning of charity and empathy, as he shows so beautifully in his “prayer”:

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them
And show the heavens more just.

(III.iv.28-36)

By the end of the play, Lear's tone has changed much. He is tender, open, and unselfish. He has learned to feel what others feel. But it is important to note, he never renounces his passion for his daughter, so that a tragic ending is inevitable.¹⁰

In light of the understanding of King Lear proposed here, certain aspects of Freud's (1913) approach to the play seem rather curious. We have no cause to quarrel with Freud's general interpretation of the theme of choosing between three women; his focus on the approach of death, represented by choosing the youngest woman (which, as noted above, he calls “a triumph of wish-fulfillment”) is not incompatible with the interpretation of the play presented here. However, in discussing the Lear story, Freud quite uncharacteristically goes out of his way to dismiss a blatant and, to my thinking, critical theme of the story—the relation of father to daughter. He writes: “We must not be led astray by the fact that Lear's choice is between three daughters; this may mean nothing more than that he has to be represented as an old man. An old man cannot very well choose between three women in any other way. Thus they become his daughters.” (Freud, 1913, p.293.) And, protesting further, Freud repeats the point: “Lear is an old man. It is for this reason, as we have already said, that the three sisters appear as his daughters.” He then continues (p. 301): “The relationship of a father to his children, which might be a fruitful source of many dramatic situations, is not turned to further account in the play.” This last point is in error. The relationship of a father to his children permeates the whole play, not only concerning Lear and his three daughters, but also the main subplot of the play, Gloucester and his two sons.

Following my analysis of King Lear, I would insist that it is important both that Lear is old and that his love is directed toward his daughter. I see in the play the outbreak of a lifelong, unconscious, incestuous passion. When that passion emerges late in life, it is by no means weakened by age. On the contrary, passion in the elderly can erupt more strongly than in the young. (This theme, in different guises, preoccupied Thomas Mann in “Death in Venice” and Tennessee Williams in “The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone.”) The King Lears of our world have lived within the constraints of society and of unconscious incest taboos, and have been unable to be passionate within those constraints. Only when they have little or nothing to lose do they finally let their passion break out. And that passion, when it does emerge, is all the more powerful for having been suppressed so long.

Notes

1. See also Nicoll (1928, p. 154-5).

2. The awarding of the lands after all the daughters have responded occurs also in other works that are considered to have been sources of Shakespeare's play, including Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Irelande and Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queen (II.10.28).

3. This is also the case in the versions by Holinshed and Spenser.

4. We know almost nothing about Lear's wife. She never appears in the play. Her existence is acknowledged only twice in the play, impersonally and obliquely, by Lear (II.iv.126) and by Kent (IV.ii.92). It is of interest that in a play dealing so much with the relations of parents and children, there are no mothers.

5. Of this, Bradley (1966) writes: “And Cordelia's speech not only tells much less than truth about her love, it actually perverts the truth when it implies that to give love to a husband is to take if from a father.” This view denies the nature of the love unconsciously demanded by Lear. It is as if Bradley were saying, “Leave off your unconscious. There is no truth there!”—which, if it were so, would mean there would be no tragedies, either. That a daughter's love for her husband does threaten the love between her and her father is a ubiquitous unconscious theme; otherwise we would not laugh at the comment, often said to the father of the bride: “Think of it this way—you're not losing a daughter; you're gaining a son-in-law.”

6. See, for example, Troilus and Cressida (V.i.90) and 2. Henry IV (V.v.7).

7. Edith Sitwell (1958) argues that in Shakespeare's time, the Fool and Cordelia were played by the same actor.

8. Bradley (1966) attributes the sudden and unexplained disappearance of the Fool to Shakespeare's haste and carelessness. I disagree. We can see in Kent's final remark to the Fool, before he disappears from the play—“Come help to bear thy master. / Thou must not stay behind” (III.iv.98-99)—an insistence that the Fool-as-Cordelia will be rejoined with the father.

9. Lear's projection of his guilt onto divine wrath here is reminiscent of Oedipus: “As for the criminal, I pray to God— / Whether it be a lurking thief, or one of a number— / I pray that man's life be consumed in evil and wretchedness” (Sophocles, trans. 1939).

10. We may propose the hypothesis that one essential difference between tragedy and other forms of theater is the fate of taboo desires in the main character. If they are resolved or renounced, then we have history or romance as in King Lear. But if the desires erupt full-force, dominate the action, and are never renounced, then a tragic ending is inevitable, as in King Lear. Surely, a more thorough survey of literature would be required to test the validity of this thesis, and that would take us too far afield here. However, as an initial exploration, one might want to compare not only the two versions of the Lear story, but also to compare King Lear with The Tempest. The Tempest is, in many ways, Shakespeare's non-tragic counterpart to King Lear, and portrays an alternative outcome to the developments of old age, and different solutions to its tasks. In both plays, an old man, wifeless and alone save for a beloved daughter who is maturing and ready for marriage, must face the consequences of age—the fading of potency and competence, the prospect of aloneness, and withdrawal from life. The storm in The Tempest, as in King Lear, symbolizes the churning up of old impulses and the agony of the impending painful crisis that must be faced. But The Tempest is a romance, not a tragedy, and the transition occurs gradually and relatively peacefully. Prospero ambivalently resigns himself to his age, yields his daughter in marriage, and ultimately bids farewell to his magical powers (which represent both his actual competence and the fantasied omnipotence of his instinctual life) with his beautiful soliloquoy in the epilogue.

References

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