[In the following essay, Lindheim examines the pastoral elements in King Lear and maintains that in the play Lear comes to understand such pastoral concerns as how individuals should interact with nature and society and the importance of demonstrating pity and compassion for others.]

That King Lear has some connection with pastoral literature is not altogether a new idea. Critics of As You Like It have long noted various parallels between that play and King Lear,¹ and recently Maynard Mack has suggested Lear's relation to pastoral romance. In Professor Mack's assessment, King Lear alludes to the patterns of pastoral romance only to turn them upside down: ‘It moves from extrusion not to pastoral, but to what I take to be the greatest anti-pastoral ever penned.’² What I wish to suggest instead is that King Lear makes no apologies for taking its pastoral ‘straight,’ and that pastoral is relevant to its germinating impulses. King Lear derives its resemblance to As You Like It and to pastoral romance from something which is basic to its conception. We have only to reflect upon what the past thirty-five years or so have taught us about the nature of pastoral—its vision and the questions it implies—to see why Shakespeare could have considered the combination of pastoral and tragedy a viable paradox.

The combination is viable because pastoral too deals with fundamental questions about man. By asking what is natural for man, pastoral consciously and normatively explores man's relation with civilization, with nature, and even with the cosmos. For the Renaissance writer pastoral was clearly associated with the major poetic themes. Spenser, for example, turns to pastoral to examine time, death, and the natural order in the Shepheardes Calender, or to explore the roots of civilization and social cohesion in Book VI of The Faerie Queene.³ Milton, too, conceives pastoral in this way, not only in the Eden of Paradise Lost but earlier in Lycidas, where tragic questionings implicit in pastoral elegy are insisted upon.⁴ If for the moment we accept Frank Kermode's thesis that all serious pastoral is concerned with the contrast between art and nature,⁵ this too has relevance to King Lear, for it lies at the core of Lear's discoveries about unaccommodated man: ‘there on's are sophisticated; thou art the thing itself’ (3.4.108-9). One of the thematic chains to which these words belong, the concern with gorgeous clothing and ‘superfluity,’ is in fact a traditional topos of the kind of pastoral Hallett Smith describes as extolling the values of the good life:

Oh happy who thus liveth,
          not caring much for gold:
With cloathing which sufficeth,
          to keep him from the cold.(6)

The muted generalities of these lyrics are wildly magnified and intensified in the storm scenes of King Lear, but certain themes in both can be identified: the concern for man stripped of all the accountrements of society, the evils of that society itself when seen from the perspective of a man somehow purified, and finally the needs basic to all men that permit one to define what is minimally necessary for a genuinely human existence.

In Lear's anguished comments on the society he once ruled we meet a tragic satire that thus has its roots in pastoral as well. The connection between social or political commentary and pastoral, available at least since Virgil's First Eclogue, was one that Shakespeare apparently found useful. In As You Like It, for example, virtually an examination of pastoral conventions, Shakespeare introduces two satiric figures, Jaques and Touchstone, and a formal discussion of a satiric problem: the distance necessary for effective moral judgment. Among the questions opened in this interchange between Jaques and the Duke (2.7.44-86) is whether Jaques' libertine past disqualifies him from practising satire. In King Lear, all such considerations of personal infection (which remain relevant to tragic satire in Hamlet) disappear in the wake of the play's demand for feeling and experience. Lear's awareness of his responsibility for injustice in his kingdom (‘O! I have ta'en / Too little care of this’ [3.4.32-3]) is felt to lend even greater authority to his criticism of society. Jaques envies the Fool his motley, which he sees as a badge of his difference from ordinary people and his licence ‘To blow on whom I please’ (49); Lear's speeches are wrung from his newly awakened sense of identity with ordinary mankind (‘Off, off, you lendings!’). King Lear may not rest in the equation of humanity with ‘unaccommodated man,’ but the identification seems logically necessary to substantiate Lear's discoveries. Though we may say that Lear is approaching a pastoral position by recognizing himself as an ‘everyman’ who is uninvolved in society's scramble for wealth and position,⁷ nevertheless, his ‘unaccommodated man’ remains qualitatively different from the traditional shepherd who earns his authority as commentator by his purity and harmony with nature. It is an index of the kind of pastoral Shakespeare is working towards that this stripped figure should be defined not in terms of his moral purity, but as a forked animal who suffers and has suffered.

In As You Like It these perceptions (in so far as they are recognized) are held in disjunction; that is, they are strung along sequentially to make up the action. Jaques is a ridiculous figure, not, to be sure, because he is disqualified from making moral judgments by his libertine past, but because throughout the play he refuses to be fully human. And insufficient humanity, manifested doubly in his opposition to love and his inability to undergo the ‘education and rebirth’ offered by the pastoral experience,⁸ is in this play a cardinal failing. The point is made beautifully in the very scene in which Jaques and the Duke discuss effective moral judgment (2.7) because Shakespeare will not underwrite Jaques' cynicism or pat formulations. Nor, indeed, will he underwrite the audience's expectations of pastoral. We begin with what seems another aspect of the contrast between court (city) and country; Jaques' desire to ‘Cleanse the foul body of th' infected world’ suggests the immense vulnerability of civilization and especially of the city, since he takes aim at ‘the city woman’ and him ‘of basest function’ who (illegally, immorally) wears gorgeous clothes. Yet this speech gives way to Orlando's entrance, and the terms of discourse suddenly alter, so that ‘civility’ and being ‘inland bred’ become signs of moral probity and the guarantors of humane behaviour:

If ever you have looked on better days,
If ever been where bells have knolled to church,
If ever sat at any good man's feast,
If ever from your eyelids wiped a tear
And know what 'tis to pity and be pitied,
Let gentleness my strong enforcement be.

(113-18)⁹

We may protest that this is merely Orlando's misunderstanding of pastoral life—the first seven lines of the speech (106-12) assume ‘savagery’ from those who live in a ‘desert inaccessible’ and who ‘Lose and neglect the creeping hours of time’—but the Duke repeats these very words when he responds to Orlando's needs. The scene in fact unfolds within an extraordinarily civilized context, reflecting, it seems to me, the filtered influence of Æneas' entrance into the temple of Dido's Carthage (Æneid I. 446ff). The significant echo occurs between the most important lines: Dido's ‘non ignara mali miseris succurrere disco’ (630) and Æneas' famous ‘lacrimae rerum’ speech form the basis of Orlando's ‘If ever from your eyelids wiped a tear / And know what 'tis to pity and be pitied’ (cf. also the Duke's ‘Thou seest we are not all alone unhappy’ [136]). Virgil's emphasis on the founding of Carthage, on the city as symbol of the desired end both of personal trial and communal suffering, is also part of the ambience of this exchange in As You Like It.¹⁰ The Virgilian echoes contribute to the decidedly urban, ‘nurtured’ cast of this statement of values—which forms what is in effect the doctrinal heart of the pastoral examination in As You Like It. Thus, even in a play that we may consider an example of pastoral, Shakespeare's handling of the relevant themes is extremely complex, oriented towards action rather than contemplation, so that impulses like pity, which are normally pastoral expressions of purified human nature, find their root justification as well in more complex civilization. Shakespeare presents a similar ambivalence toward traditional pastoral motifs in Cymbeline 3.3 (which also begins with a clear reference to the Æneid, to Evander's ‘aude, hospes’ speech of VIII.364f), where the two rusticated princes do not refute old Morgan's statements about the corruption inherent in court and city life, but insist that it is necessary for a fully human—meaning heroic—existence: the princes complain, ‘We have seen nothing / We are beastly …’ (39-40).

It is perhaps in what I have suggested is its ‘doctrinal heart’ that As You Like It shows its most important resemblance to King Lear—in the insistence that the human condition requires one ‘to pity and be pitied,’ to respond sympathetically to another person's suffering or to an outrage against one's sense of human value. The first of these alternatives is more prevalent in As You Like It, where repeated offers of sympathy or help to someone who is in need form a central pattern of action in the play. The motif is usually expressed in terms of some bond or tie which impels it: Adam's decision to help Orlando because of loyalty to his old master, Celia's flight from the court with Rosalind because of their friendship, Orlando's determination to find food for the dying Adam (because of gratitude, honour, the reciprocal nature of the bond of service?), Orlando's rescuing of Oliver from the lion because they are brothers, Phebe's pity for Sylvius once she too knows the pains of love, etc. All these acts are generalized and epitomized in the central gesture with which the Duke responds when he is conjured to pity another, not because of particular attachment, but on the grounds of his civilized humanity.

One can, I think, scarcely overemphasize the importance of this same motif or gesture to King Lear, since it is the focus for Shakespeare's explorations concerning man and the minimally ‘ideal’ society. Shakespeare's strategy in the play seems two-fold: the first thrust is towards drastic reduction, towards the thematic word ‘nothing’; the second is towards establishing the minimal essential ‘something’ that allows one to define man normatively, namely, feelings of pity and love. King Lear envisions possibilities of justice, equality, opulence which we may justifiably consider part of a maximally ideal society; yet the play, like pastoral, is really concerned with the basic and minimal. But paradoxically, what in political or social terms is only minimally ideal turns out to be, in personal terms, a kind of perfection: the love that obtains between father and child is sufficient to transform prison into something that the gods themselves throw incense on. However much the play makes of the theme of social justice, the ‘minimally ideal society,’ then, is not a political construct of any sort: its essence is the love between father and child, Cordelia reconciled to King Lear, Edgar reunited with Gloucester. In its fullest form the essential element is this special kind of purified love, but for purposes of ‘definition,’ the element that distinguishes man seems to be his capacity for pity. ‘… It is especially humane (and humanity is the virtue most peculiar to man) to relieve the misery of others …’: the authority is Sir Thomas More in his Utopia.¹¹

The drive to reduce man to ‘nothing,’ to a state just below what we would accept as human, materializes in the figure of poor Tom, who is an objective embodiment of Lear's anguished imagination: ‘Allow not nature more than nature needs, / Man's life is cheap as beast's’ (2.4.268-9); ‘Is man no more than this? … unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art’ (3.4.105, 109-11); ‘I' th' last night's storm I such a fellow saw, / Which made me think a man a worm’ (4.1.32-3). But Shakespeare wants to do more than merely isolate this supremely negative figure; Edgar's decision ‘To take the basest and most poorest shape / That ever penury, in contempt of man, / Brought near to beast’ is taken apparently in part so that he may go through villages and ‘Enforce their charity. Poor Turlygod! poor Tom! / That's something yet: Edgar I nothing am’ (2.3.7-9, 20-1). The ‘something’ that poor Tom is, on the one hand, is a role (in contrast to which, Lear has lost his roles of king and father and Edgar is no longer a son), but on the other hand, more important for this discussion, it is an object of pity, a means by which other people are enabled to discover or manifest their humanity. Human reduction, the first motif, thus leads naturally to the second motif of pity. Lear's radical discovery about unaccommodated man follows such a moment of awareness of another person's suffering: ‘Thou wert better in a grave than to answer with thy uncover'd body this extremity of the skies’ (3.4.103-5). We recognize this as a statement about himself as well as about poor Tom; he too has been ‘reduced’ to a mere man. These perceptions of others are wrung from his own suffering: ‘How dost, my boy? Art cold? / I am cold myself … Poor Fool and knave, I have one part in my heart / That's sorry yet for thee’ (3.2.68-9, 72-3). The mad speeches play variations on our sense of this identification: ‘What! has his daughters brought him to this pass? … nothing could have subdu'd nature / To such a lowness but his unkind daughters’ (3.4.63, 70-1). Lear's inability to distinguish himself from other people is the mad counterpart of his new openness to feelings of pity and concern for others, and it culminates in his recognition of himself in the figure of ‘man’ he has just discerned: ‘Off, off, you lendings! Come; unbutton here’ (111-12).

The idea of compassion is so strong in King Lear that it seems to determine certain technical aspects of the play, one rhetorical in the large sense of the term, the other in the narrower stylistic sense. That the play ‘notoriously overwhelms and exhausts us’¹² is Shakespeare's conscious intention, the result of an unprecedented insistence that the audience actively participate in the emotional experience of his characters. He does this by having the characters on stage constantly express their own emotional reactions, which calls attention to what the audience feels and certifies its response as proper before it can be stifled as ‘unmanly.’ On some such grounds we may account for Edgar's frequent remarks to the effect that ‘My tears begin to take his part so much, / They mar my counterfeiting’ (3.6.60-1) and ‘I would not take this from report; it is, / And my heart breaks at it’ (4.6.142-3), or Albany's ‘If there be more, more woeful, hold it in; / For I am almost ready to dissolve, / Hearing of this’ (5.3.202-5).¹³ It might be possible to attribute this emphasis on emotional participation both to the general rhetorical or affective bias of Renaissance poetic theory which had as its chief aim the moulding of audience response, and to the specific description that the Donatan tradition gave to tragedy: ‘the primary effect of tragedy is sorrow or woe, of which pity is a species.’¹⁴ Yet no other Shakespearean tragedy is so insistent in its allegiance to the theory—because in no other play is the concern with pity so central thematically.

The basis of the rhetorical scheme characterizing the expression of these themes is an implicit comparison of an extreme and an extremely negative character. Shakespeare restricts his usage of this rhetorical pattern to the Lear story, probably because the physical outrage of the Gloucester subplot makes any heightening of our responses there unnecessary. We hear it first in the very opening scene of the play, in Lear's assertion that

                                                  The barbarous Scythian,
Or he that makes his generation messes
To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom
Be as well neighbour'd, pitied, and relieved,
As thou my sometime daughter

(116-20),

where the comparison is still confined to human beings, though the Scythian is felt to be only marginally human, a figure who is morally ‘nothing’ to weigh along with the materially deprived figures who will later haunt the play. We hear it last just before the reconciliation scene, where it works in its more characteristic form, with animals:

CORD.
                                                                                          Mine enemy's dog,
Though he had bit me, should have stood that night
Against my fire.

(4.7.36-8)¹⁵

In Albany's confrontation with Goneril the comparison becomes linked to the idea of filial bonds and the borderline dividing man, beast, and ‘monsters of the deep’:

Tigers, not daughters, what have you perform'd?
A father, and a gracious aged man,
Whose reverence even the head-lugg'd bear would lick,
Most barbarous, most degenerate! have you madded.

(4.2.40-3)

A ‘head-lugg'd bear,’ tortured to wildness, would show more pity—and piety—than Goneril and Regan have shown. The purpose of the rhetorical scheme is to help us realize the extent of the moral depravity, of the falling away from humanity, that is at the core of these actions. And in this play, ‘to show the extent’ of anything means to drive to the uttermost limits and then perhaps beyond, not just intellectually but emotionally. Gloucester's great speech condemning the sisters' behaviour most fully explores the hyperbolic tendency implicit in the scheme. He has disobeyed their order not to help Lear

Because I would not see thy cruel nails
Pluck out his poor old eyes; nor thy fierce sister
In his anointed flesh rash boarish fangs.
The sea, with such a storm as his bare head
In hell-black night endur'd, would have buoy'd up,
And quench'd the stelled fires;
Yet, poor old heart, he holp the heavens to rain.
If wolves had at thy gate howl'd that dearn time,
Thou should'st have said ‘Good porter, turn the key.’

(3.7.55-63)

Humanity has exceeded its upper and lower limits in the line containing ‘anointed flesh’ and ‘boarish fangs,’ just as the description of the sea suggests that the sufferings of this finite old man have exceeded what illimitable Nature could have endured without breaking her own laws. The wolves offer us a tonic return to the kind of rhetorical scheme we have been tracing; the extremity of the outrage it implies becomes underlined by association with the hyperbolic description of the sea. Most uses of the scheme point to the cruelty of the offence; here in Gloucester's speech Shakespeare gives equal emphasis to the magnitude of the suffering.

The affective mechanism of the rhetorical scheme itself contributes to the emotional exhaustion one experiences with this play. It is on the one hand powerfully expressive, yet it also points to a failure of expression because the tendency towards hyperbole implies that the speaker is without an adequate vehicle to convey the indignation he feels. In its full form it gives voice to the audience's sense of the enormity of the behaviour, the emotional and moral incomprehensibility of such personal yet cosmic evil. The expressiveness offers us some satisfaction at having recognized and condemned the outrage; the inexpressiveness keeps us tense and frustrated because ultimately it eludes our power as well as our intellectual grasp. It is exhausting too because it is pitched to such a key in order to evoke our astonishment as much as our pity or indignation; that is, Shakespeare is working with both halves of the Donatan formula and is trying simultaneously for woe and wonder, as the Renaissance thought tragedy should.

Shakespeare's desire to elicit the audience's emotional involvement and to keep passion at its apex is promoted by the way that the pure evil of the two sisters is manifested. Lear himself talks frequently of their stony hearts—one never forgets the question he hurls at the gods in the mock-trial scene, ‘Is there any cause in nature that make these hard hearts?’ (3.6.78-9)—and we are to follow this lead, I think, to understand their place in the economy of the whole. William Hazlitt's assessment is just: ‘that which aggravates the sense of sympathy in the reader, and of uncontrollable anguish in the swoln heart of Lear, is the petrifying indifference, the cold, calculating, obdurate selfishness of his daughters.’¹⁶ What shocks us most about them is their total lack of human feelings, especially pity. Lear is too complexly conceived to be defined by the single quality of his passion, but Goneril and Regan, and, later, Cordelia, are in fact largely determined by the quality of their feeling. (So that Lear's original question, ‘Which of you shall we say doth love us most?’ remains ironically central to the play, though the chamber in which it echoes changes from fairy tale to apocalypse.) The elaborate description of Cordelia in 4.3 reveals primarily a creature capable of feeling. She represents, if I may simplify, a middle term between the emotional outbursts of Lear and the absolute dearth of feeling in her sisters:

KENT
Did your letters pierce the queen to any demonstration of grief?
GENT.
Ay, sir; she took them, read them in my presence;
And now and then an ample tear trill'd down
Her delicate cheek; it seem'd she was a queen
Over her passion; who, most rebel-like,
Sought to be king o'er her.

(4.3.10-16)

Shakespeare's imagination dwells most lavishly on the paradoxical play of feeling and restraint, making the balance also a transcendence:

GENT.
                                                                                patience and sorrow strove
Who should express her goodliest. You have seen
Sunshine and rain at once; her smiles and tears
Were like, a better way; those happy smilets
That play'd on her ripe lip seem'd not to know
What guests were in her eyes; which parted thence,
As pearls from diamonds dropp'd.

(17-23)

This is surely a great deal of attention to give to a few tears in a play that encompasses so much and such violent action. Thematically, however, this is a moment of revelation, an outpouring of pity and love, but tempered by the quality of strength implied in ‘queen’ and ‘patience.’ It would seem to be an answer to the problem of absolutes set up in the play's opening scene, where Cordelia's unbending allegiance to Truth is almost inhumanly ‘stoic.’ The solution is not a compromise with Truth, but an infusion of human feeling—of pity for another's suffering as well as of love. An analogous change takes place in the theme of ‘service’ or loyalty. In 1.1 Kent's Platonic notion of service manifests itself as absolute fidelity to Truth (as does Cordelia's understanding of her filial bond), but in the course of the play the manifestations are all gestures of compassion, emphasizing human response rather than abstract principle: Cornwall's servant outraged by his master's attack on Gloucester, Gloucester himself seeking to aid the king, Kent's ministrations in the storm, Gloucester's servants who help him after he has been blinded, etc. Edgar's case binds the three motifs together because he becomes his father's servant and ‘saves’ him, not through truthfulness, but through the stratagem of pretending that Gloucester has survived a leap from the Dover cliffs. The ‘good’ characters of the play are defined by their capacity for this kind of human feeling; it is ultimately what makes Lear ‘More sinn'd against than sinning.’

The followers of the wicked sisters, in turn, interpret ‘pity’ according to their own values. Regan tells the just-blinded Gloucester that Edmund is ‘too good to pity’ him; in a later speech to Oswald she reveals her Machiavellian understanding of feeling as only a factor—real or feigned—in political manipulation:

It was great ignorance, Gloucester's eyes being out,
To let him live; where he arrives he moves
All hearts against us. Edmund, I think, is gone,
In pity of his misery, to dispatch
His nighted life; moreover, to descry
The strength o' th' enemy.

(4.5.9-14)

With Edmund we have the most telling statement of the evil camp's relation to pity. In asking his captain to murder the imprisoned king and Cordelia, he defines the new regime:

                                                            know thou this, that men
Are as the time is; to be tender-minded
Does not become a sword …

(5.3.31-3)

The officer's willing assent ironically hearkens back to the pastoral definition of basic man that the play has been concerned with:

I cannot draw a cart nor eat dried oats;
If it be man's work I'll do't.

(39-40)

The two groups of people surrounding the king move in precisely opposing directions. Those in the evil camp move from a hypocritical profession of feeling (the sisters' declarations of love, Edmund's feigned compassion for Edgar and loyalty to his father) to a revelation of their coldness and Machiavellian opportunism; the good people are more complexly arranged, but they generally follow the pattern set by the king in moving from a relatively inflexible understanding of their roles to a new understanding based on or manifested by compassion (Cordelia and Kent as outlined above; Gloucester and Albany away from a kind of ‘formalism’ by which their allegiance for a while is given to wife or to constituted legal power; for Edgar the pattern seems to be increasing intensity of feeling rather than a qualitative change in direction). One of Shakespeare's methods in effecting these transitions is to fuse the metaphoric idea of knowledge frequently implied in sight imagery with the idea of suffering that potentially underlies ‘feeling.’ The best known of the fusions is probably Gloucester's ‘I see it feelingly’ (4.6.150), which echoes his earlier prayer,

Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man,
That slaves your ordinance, that will not see
Because he does not feel, feel your power quickly.

(4.1.67-9)

These are expressions of the theme that explicitly connect sight (knowledge) and feeling (pity, suffering, touch); several other speeches work overtly with only one of the parts, but link it firmly to the other motifs of the play. The closely related prayer uttered by Lear during the storm, for example, works with ‘feeling’ and has its own reverberations in what we have seen to be pastoral motifs concerned with social justice and unaccommodated man:

Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the Heavens more just.

(3.4.34-6)

Even as Edgar's disguise as poor Tom answered the needs of the Lear plot by offering the reductive image of ‘Man's life [as] cheap as beast's,’ his statement of identity to Gloucester asserts the differentiating element which the play has been seeking:

GLOU.
Now, good sir, what are you?
EDG.
A most poor man, made tame by Fortune's blows;
Who, by the art of known and feeling sorrows,
Am pregnant to good pity.

(4.6.221-5)¹⁷

The fusion in this passage has suppressed the element of sight altogether and joined suffering directly with knowledge. That the tendency of the play in all its aspects is to insist upon the primacy of feeling has long been hidden by traditional interpretations of its dominant sight imagery which equate sight with insight. The reassessment offered in Paul J. Alpers' ‘King Lear and the Theory of the “Sight Pattern”’ seems to me a much more accurate and sensitive reading of Shakespeare's use of sight and eyes in the play. Professor Alpers' argument is that references to the eyes in King Lear ‘constantly draw our attention not to the perception of moral obligations, but to the actual human relationships that give rise to moral obligations’; eyes ‘are characteristically represented as the organs through which feeling toward other people is expressed.’¹⁸ He aptly quotes the final lines of Gloucester's ‘I stumbled when I saw’ speech—‘Might I but live to see thee in my touch, / I'd say I had eyes again’ (4.1.23-4)—to affirm that ‘what is important for Gloucester is not insight but a relationship for which the only possible metaphor is physical contact.’¹⁹ Feeling in the play means not only emotion or suffering, but the actual sense of touch, just as seeing is often made more ‘sensory’ by being linked with the sense of smell (for example, Regan's ‘Go thrust him out at gates, and let him smell / His way to Dover’ [3.7.92-3]).²⁰ The double drive towards reduction and then differentiation discussed earlier is therefore contained within the double use of these words, for in addition to making use of overtones that suggest higher forms of apprehension (insight, compassion), Shakespeare employs the two key words ‘see’ and ‘feel’ to insist upon man as animal or creature, never letting his audience escape from the physical reality that underlies what is experienced in the play.

The slight possibility of relief offered by Gloucester's lines quoted above—that is, that embracing his son again would heal the anguish of his blindness—is echoed by Lear:

This feather stirs; she lives! if it be so,
It is a chance which does redeem all sorrows
That ever I have felt.

(5.3.265-7)

As positive statements, both imply that the experiences that ultimately define one's life are those of pure love (agape not eros) rather than those of pain. Yet this is not, I think, our impression of the play. This hope of redemption is evoked only to be denied, not as ‘truth’ but as reality. ‘Life’ as defined by King Lear will not permit it. The dramatic embodiment of the possibility of redemption occurs in the reconciliation between Lear and Cordelia in act 4, but Shakespeare defied the ‘Leir’ tradition to have his play move on to the apocalyptic horror of act 5, beyond any experience of romance (for of course these moments of reconciliation are the stuff of romance, and of Shakespeare's later romances in particular) to a conclusion that in its painfulness is almost beyond the experience of tragedy itself. In fact, in terms of the audience's response, even the reconciliation scene between Lear and Cordelia can hardly be said to offer an oasis of relief. Its pathos is bearable only by contrast with the pain of having watched Gloucester's eyes being put out.

Our final impression of the play, as members of an audience even more than as readers, is dominated by a sense of physical pain, of life itself defined as torture: ‘he hates him / That would upon the rack of this tough world / Stretch him out longer’ (5.3.313-5). And again, we are expected to feel and give vent to our feelings. Lear's entrance with Cordelia in his arms is directed as much to us as to the people on stage:

Howl, howl, howl! O! you are men of stones:
Had I your tongues and eyes, I'd use them so
That heaven's vault should crack.

(5.3.257-9)

(It is the old antithesis between persons with stone hearts and those capable of feeling, who have a sympathetic connection with nature and the cosmos.)²¹ Kent's words at Lear's death are yet another cue for passion: ‘Break, heart; I prithee, break!’ Dr Johnson's famous comment upon the ending of King Lear is an emphatic statement of what we all feel in some measure—or the play has not done its job properly.

What we have been tracing here is, I think, the transformation of an essentially pastoral perception; but King Lear is not itself primarily a pastoral. The play uses pastoral structure to get at pastoral ideas—to arrive at basic man and a purified order of human values that encompasses public justice and private compassion—but once having arrived at the theme of human feeling, Shakespeare goes on to treat his material according to the tragic mode. The Aristotelian formula of pity and terror (underlying the Donatan woe and wonder) reinforced the propriety of the theme for tragedy, and the combined affective and didactic bias of Renaissance poetic theory channelled it into an attempt to stir up an analogous emotion on the part of the audience.

The pastoral-romance structure, like the reconciliation scene that is also from romance, is finally ironic, in the sense that both contribute to the meaningful pattern of life without ultimately having the power to define it. King Lear is tragedy, and neither pastoral nor romance, for all the use it makes of those modes. The last glimpse back to pastoral in the play (and it is fittingly to pastoral elegy) is a measure of the difference. One of the standard conventions of pastoral elegy is the comparison between the protagonist's death and the rebirth cycle of vegetative nature, a comparison which points to man's alienation from a nature that he is otherwise harmoniously part of and which formulates the anguish and tension that the final consolation of the elegy then overcomes. Another form this questioning frequently takes is ‘Why this person and not someone less worthy?’ There is an analogous moment in King Lear when Lear emerges with the body of Cordelia in his arms. The reduction motifs that culminated in the pitiable figure of unaccommodated man with whom Lear identified himself make the question of worthiness impossible for Lear to ask.²² And there is no lush nature in our experience of the play to give the vegetative comparison resonance.²³ Instead, Lear's despairing cry is formed in terms of animals such as those which all along have been vehicles in the negative comparison that sought to define justice or humanity:

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,
And thou no breath at all?

(5.3.306-7)

The riddle, the incomprehensibility, the anguish are what we are left with. For King Lear there can be no final consolation.

Notes

1. See, for example, Helen Gardner, ‘As You Like It,’ in More Talking of Shakespeare ed. John Garrett (New York 1959) reprinted in As You Like It ed. Albert Gilman (New York 1963).

2. ‘King Lear’ in Our Time (Berkeley 1965) 65.

3. See Isabel G. MacCaffrey, ‘Allegory and Pastoral in the Shepheardes Calender,’ English Literary History 36 (1969), and Donald Cheney Spenser's Image of Nature: Wild Man and Shepherd in ‘The Faerie Queene’ (New Haven 1966) chap 5, for Courtesy's connection with Justice.

4. See the fine reading of Lycidas by Rosemond Tuve in Images and Themes in Five Poems by Milton (Cambridge, Mass. 1957).

5. The Tempest ed. Frank Kermode (London 1966) xxiv.

6. Elizabethan Poetry: A Study in Conventions, Meaning and Expression (Cambridge, Mass. 1964) 30. The stanza is from William Byrd's ‘The Heardmans happie life’ Englands Helicon ed. Hugh MacDonald (London 1949) 144.

7. See William Empson Some Versions of Pastoral (Norfolk, Conn. 1960).

8. Walter R. Davis describes the pastoral romance pattern as one of ‘disintegration, education and rebirth’ in W. R. Davis and R. A. Lanham Sidney's ‘Arcadia’ (New Haven 1965) 38.

9. As You Like It ed. Albert Gilman (New York 1963).

10. Note the further reference to Æneas in this scene when Orlando returns carrying old Adam on his back just as Æneas carried his father, Anchises. The words pity and piety were not fully distinguished in English until about 1600, and the confusion is part of the richness of ‘Those pelican daughters’ (3.4.75); cf. the phrase ‘the Pelican in her piety.’

11. Ed Edward J. Surtz, sj, (New Haven 1964) 93.

12. Paul J. Alpers, ‘King Lear and the Theory of the “Sight Pattern,”’ In Defense of Reading: A Reader's Approach to Literary Criticism ed. Reuben A Brower and Richard Poirier (New York 1963) 145.

13. Similar to these in attempting to evoke and channel our pity are Lear's repeated remarks concerning his own tears, endurance and old age: 2.4.192-5, 274-5; 3.2.20, for example.

14. Both points are made in J. V. Cunningham Woe or Wonder: The Emotional Effect of Shakespearean Tragedy (Denver 1951) 99.

15. Actually, about half the number refer to human beings, half to animals, but the latter tend to be more striking. Other examples occur at 2.2.136-7, 3.1.12-15 (where oddly the animals seem right out of pastoral romance), 4.7.30-1, perhaps 4.6.205-6.

16. Characters of Shakespeare's Plays (1817) reprinted in King Lear: Text, Sources and Criticism ed. G. B. Harrison and R. F. McDonnell (New York 1962) 88. Just after this Hazlitt suggests that Shakespeare uses the Fool as comic relief for the audience's tension; the emotional effect of the scenes with the Fool seem to me quite the opposite. For the remarks of Goneril and Regan that are especially cruel in the way indicated, see 2.4.203, 219, 304ff.

17. Cf. Dido's ‘non ignara mali miseris succurrere disco.’

18. P. 135. Note that in the final lines of the play, ‘see’ has been rechannelled towards feeling rather than knowledge: ‘The oldest hath borne most: we that are young / Shall never see so much, nor live so long’ (5.3.325-6). ‘See’ has little to do with moral perception here, but is another form of endurance or experience, parallel in meaning with ‘borne’ and ‘live.’

19. Ibid 144.

20. Alpers discusses this and the two related speeches of the Fool (1.5.19-23 and 2.4.68-71) on pp. 136 and 142. See also his fine treatment of another scene that has an overwhelming emotional impact, 4.6 on pp. 146-7.

21. The bond between Nature and Lear shown in the storm scene and between Nature and Cordelia suggested in her invocation to the ‘unpublish'd virtues of the earth’ to cure her father (4.4.15-18) are of course related to pastoral convention.

22. A comment made about the mad Lear in the negative rhetoric discussed above also links the implications of the rhetorical pattern with the reduction motifs: ‘A sight most pitiful in the meanest wretch, / Past speaking of in a King!’ (4.6.205-6). Here pity is generated first for the marginal figure, then applied to the king, reversing the pattern of the play, where we first understand the suffering of the king himself and then apply it to man in general. The movement of the play forces greater and greater generalization, but the identification at the heart of it is truly reversible, so that there is no possibility of Lear's asking finally why should this happen to his daughter and not some more ordinary person. The issue is not one of worth, but of mere human life.

23. Note that the ‘shadowy forests … with champains rich'd, / With plenteous rivers and wide-skirted meads’ described in the opening scene (1.1.64-5) become in our experience a place where ‘for many miles about / There's scarce a bush’ (2.4.303-4).