SOURCE: Tippins, Darryl. “‘Can you make no use of nothing?’: Nihilism and Meaning in King Lear and The Madness of King George.” In Performance for a Lifetime, edited by Barbara C. Ewell and Mary A. McCay, pp. 159-80. New Orleans: Loyola University New Orleans, 1997.

[In the following essay, Tippins offers a reading of King Lear that attempts to mediate between absurdist or pessimistic interpretations of the play and religious or redemptive ones.]

At the heart of any dialogue is the conviction that what is exchanged has meaning.

—Michael Holquist

And yet this nothing / is the seed of all—heaven's clear / eye, where all the world's wonders appear.

—Wendell Berry

Fierce debates rage over the ultimate meaning and purpose of Shakespeare's greatest tragedy, King Lear. On the one hand, the so-called “Idealists” (that is, the humanists and Christian readers) value the play as a story of redemptive suffering. A. C. Bradley spoke for this group when he maintained that Lear died, not in despair, but in ecstasy, believing that Cordelia was alive (252-53). Joseph Summers argued a different kind of hopeful ending: though Lear dies knowing that Cordelia was indeed dead, he dies knowing that what she taught him about love is “truly more alive than anything else in his world” (Summers 92). Many others agree that the play is ultimately meaningful and supportive of great Christian, or at least traditional, ethical themes—love, mercy, forgiveness, renunciation, and so forth. Stanley Wells summarizes:

Uncompromisingly the play acknowledges the power of evil, the inevitability of death, the fragility of the human body, while also asserting the spiritual values that can give meaning to life.

On the other hand stand the skeptical Shakespeareans who are now ascendant. William R. Elton argues forcefully that this tragedy is certainly not an optimistic Christian drama, but a pagan story of “all-dissolving chaos” (338). Nicholas Brooke concurs: Lear's “final retreat to madness” makes it “impossible to retain any concept of an ordered universe” (“The Ending” 85). In fact, he argues, the last act “shatters the foundations of faith itself” (qtd. in Wells 248). Recent materialist critics like Jonathan Dollimore argue forcefully that the play undermines all notions of transcendent value, including the very construct called “humanity”; those who find a meaningful end in Lear are guilty of “essentialist mystification” (202). “All moral structures,” claims Nicholas Brooke, “whether of natural order or Christian redemption, are invalidated by the naked fact of experience” (Shakespeare 59-60). Harold Bloom concurs: “Shakespeare's darkest tragedies, Lear and Macbeth, do not yield to Christianization” (51). A. L. French finds the Bradleyan salvationist interpretation “distasteful in itself as well as absurdly inappropriate to the spirit of Shakespeare's play” (144). Absurdist, nihilist, and materialist readings constitute the Lear orthodoxy of the late twentieth century, it seems.

One wonders: is it possible to negotiate between these agonistic positions? The answer is, yes, one can. Each camp seems to have gotten in touch with one powerful dimension of the play, championing it to the exclusion of other dimensions. The nihilists gravitate towards Kent's profoundly negative point of view, “All is cheerless, dark, and deadly,” while the idealists defer to Edgar's “The gods are just,” and while the so-called Redemptivists soften or disallow the play's dark tones. Pechter maintains: “What Tate and the Redemptivists … attempt to do is to protect us from the play, render us invulnerable—whether through plot changes or through the imposition of systems of meaning—to the extraordinary power of King Lear to make us suffer” (182).

Pechter criticizes those who, like Bradley, argue that the play contains something affirmative about life. These Redemptivists often make Edgar the authorial mouthpiece; and, like Edgar, they attempt “to control experience by reorganizing it into ‘patterns’ of significance” (182). Both readings slip into precisely the kind of absolutism that the play itself resists, but a more sophisticated alternative would be one neither naively optimistic nor absolutely pessimistic, and would instead welcome the play's abundance of positive and negative elements.

For what if Lear is neither naively optimistic nor lacking a system of meaning? What if this play has a “pattern” of significance, but this significance proves to be darkly meaningful? What if the work operates in a mysterious, paradoxical realm where conflicting realities co-exist? I maintain that the play is dialectical, with ever-shifting points of view. Jay L. Halio marks out this more inclusive position:

King Lear thus offers powerful, imaginative rendering of conflicting and sometimes complementary attitudes and beliefs. If none dominates the action, our final impression of the play must remain what A. C. Bradley called a “mystery we cannot fathom.”

(15)

In contrast some Redemptivists and some nihilists generally suppress those elements in the play that do not fit their monological thesis of salvation or chaos. A. C. Bradley long ago acknowledged this slipping into reductionism when he accused Swinburne of emphasizing “only certain aspects of the play and certain elements in the total impression” (278). Norman Rabkin has eloquently warned against the same problem in approaching The Merchant of Venice. Surely Bradley is right in arguing that the total impression is bigger than either the elements of darkness or of light. We must reach for a reading that, paradoxically, can allow for salvation and for chaos.

One way to preserve the paradoxical mystery of King Lear while making some sense of the debate about the play's alleged paganism, or nihilism, or absurdity on the one hand—or its Christian-humanist-idealist vision on the other—is to acknowledge a major mythic pattern that lies within the play, a trope that is at once pagan, Hebraic, Christian, and even, in a particular sense, “nihilistic.” I refer to “kenosis,” a concept which allows one to see how the play can at once be religious, yet also pessimistic, and even nihilistic. A “kenotic” reading of the play uniquely avoids the implicit optimism of orthodox idealist readings while refusing an absurdist interpretation as well. In other words, kenosis makes possible a complex, dialectical view of the play which resists reduction. If a kenotic vision lies back of this grand work, then the contending critics are partly right, partly wrong.

Despite significant differences among the ancient Hebrews and Greeks (and later the Hellenized Christians who composed the Greek New Testament), they shared a vision of human experience as profoundly kenotic. Kenosis is based on the Greek verb kevow, which means “to make empty; to deprive of content or possession; to be desolate; to nullify, destroy; to come to nothing” (Kittel and Friedrich 3: 661).

Of course, the breaking or the “emptying” of an earthly king or a godlike hero has long been a familiar literary pattern. Classical male heroes and protagonists (like Oedipus, Kreon, and Jesus Christ) undergo a trial in which they lose their royal status, are emptied and humiliated, reduced to “nothing,” and as a result gain something (wisdom, honor, glory, understanding, and so forth). After being broken, maddened, blinded, stripped, thwarted, and emptied, the hero often finds his true voice, his vision, his vocation, his redemption, even though it may require his death.

The kenosis myth is very rich, complicated, and ancient. One authority on the subject, Ralph P. Martin, traces the idea of the kenotic descent of the divine hero to ancient Hellenistic legends (76-80). It appears in several Athenian dramas like Antigone, Ajax, and the Suppliant Maidens; yet the kenotic trope, while centuries old, has in recent years been largely forgotten in literary circles. It is crucial to much literature steeped in the Christian tradition, and as we shall see with Alan Bennett's recent play and screenplay The Madness of King George, the theme enjoys continuing significance in contemporary drama.

In this essay I wish to show how a recent kenotic drama can assist us in reading King Lear with fresh eyes. By comparing Shakespeare's and Bennett's uses of kenotic ideas, not only do we discern the continuing vitality of kenosis as a literary theme, but we also discover how the kenotic trope gives these works special shape and value. The Bennett play serves as a kind of commentary on Shakespeare's work, exposing latent kenotic motifs in the Renaissance play that have been masked by time and forgetting.

Additionally, through Bennett's remarkable appropriation of Shakespeare's plot, we discover a potent reply to critics who insist on Lear's absurdism or nihilism. Bennett's fictional players function as an audience for King Lear. King George, in particular, “listens in” on the Shakespearean plot and then appropriates it in illuminating ways—just as Hamlet hears and appropriates the First Player's tragic speech in interesting and significant ways (Hamlet II.ii). Ultimately, The Madness of King George is a creative (re)interpretation of King Lear. Through the intertextual “dialogue” of these two plays we are not only presented a picture of the dynamics of theatrical experience, but we are provided telling cues for reading King Lear for ourselves. A play, we recall, not only contains dialogue; it is a dialogue—with a living audience—and all dialogue presupposes meaning. “At the heart of any dialogue is the conviction that what is exchanged has meaning” (Holquist 38). Alan Bennett, through his mad protagonist, teaches us once again how to dialogue with Shakespeare's great tragedy in a meaningful way.

When the ancient world was Christianized, kenosis entered with full force into Western thought and literature; indeed, Jesus Christ came to be seen as the supreme kenotic hero. St. Paul in his Philippian epistle described Jesus Christ as having experienced the truest form of kenosis (Philippians 2:5-11). Kenotic descent was a theme that apparently enamored St. Augustine; it appears as a recurring metaphor in the Confessions. Stories of saints and heroes who are stripped and humiliated, in imitation of Christ, became standard in the Middle Ages. As a number of authorities have shown, interest in kenotic themes flourished in the Reformation, generating extensive discussion of the theme. Kenotic literature abounds in the Renaissance, most notably in John Milton's drama Samson Agonistes, but also in the work of George Herbert and John Donne. The endurance of the kenotic trope in Western literature is truly remarkable, stretching from the ancient Greeks to Harold Bloom.

Either intuitively or through his exposure to Scripture, liturgy, and sacred art, Shakespeare knew the paradigm well. Kenotic language circulates through his plays, allowing the exploration of a number of motifs central to the hero's tragic descent. As the Shakespearean hero encounters his dark experience, he is forced into a radical mortification, self-forgetfulness, and—above all—self-annihilation or “nothingness” (which James L. Calderwood calls “creative uncreation”). For example, Richard II, shortly before his execution, describes himself as one who must undergo the curriculum of suffering and become “nothing”—a central kenotic motif:

But what e'er I be,
Nor I, nor any man but man is,
With nothing shall be pleas'd, till he be eas'd
With being nothing.

(Richard II 5. 5. 38-41)

“Kenotic impulses” such as the one that appears in Richard can be found in most of Shakespeare's tragic heroes, as Fortin argues (80-94). However, an examination of King Lear reveals that it is the most kenotic Shakespearean play of all.

Metaphor is often an efficient and effective mode of entry into a text, argues Madelon Golhke Sprengnether: “It is metaphor that allows us to subread, to read on the margins of discourse, to analyze what is latent or implicit in the structures of consciousness or of a text” (46). Hence, the kenotic trope helps us to “subread,” to read on the margins and discover latent and implicit structures in Shakespeare's text. Kenosis is not a single figure of speech; it actually entails a series of related figures, including concepts of emptying (indeed, pouring out to the point that one is hollow or “nothing”); impoverishment; divestiture; occultation (or concealment, hiddenness); depotentiation (loss of power); torture; descent; and journeys into exile. Of course, many of these figures are prominent in King Lear.

Motifs of emptiness and nothingness abound in the play. Defining “the quality of nothing” is the play's unspoken query (Gloucester, 1. 2. 33). “The word [nothing] reverberates throughout the first half of the play,” observes Halio (114). “Nothing almost sees miracles” (2. 2. 148). The Fool notes and names Lear's kenotic fall: “now thou art an O without a figure. I am better than thou art now; I am a fool, thou art nothing” (1.4. 152). Like an ancient Greek figure, like Christian protagonists before him, Lear is moving towards the very death of the self. “O ruin'd piece of nature! This great world / Shall so wear out to naught” (4. 5. 135).

Postmodernists may detect in such passages a Nietzschean nihilism, but emptiness is not necessarily negative, as the contemplative tradition associated with the via negativa shows. “Nothingness” may become space for the spirit; it may mark the nadir of self, signaling the possibility of new growth. Hence, Kierkegaard writes: “God creates everything out of nothing—and everything which God is to use he first reduces to nothing” (45). Calderwood observes perceptively: “Something frequently comes of nothing in King Lear” (6).

Early in the play, the imperceptive and childish monarch speaks an apparently logical maxim: “Nothing will come of nothing” (1. 1. 85). But of course Lear is wrong on this point, as he is wrong about almost everything. It is the Fool who corrects him through his brilliant question—indeed the most haunting of the play: “Can you make no use of nothing, nuncle?” (1. 4. 115, my emphasis). Derek Peat argues that the play “forces every spectator to choose between the contrary possibilities it holds in unresolved suspension” (qtd. in Wells 248). I would amend Peat's insight to say that the play invites every spectator to consider the mysterious connections between contrarieties—specifically, to find the paradoxical relation of “nothing” to “something.” If Maynard Mack is correct in saying that the Fool is offering “dramatic short-hand … for goings-on in the King's brain” (Mack 245-46), then Lear's dialogue with the Fool reflects the monarch's psychic wrestling over his own baffling kenotic experience. “What does it mean to be emptied, to become nothing, in this horrific fashion?” Lear is more or less asking himself. Lear's encounter with darkness teaches him (and spectators as well) to make use of “nothing.” He is learning the same lesson that Yeats's Crazy Jane attempts to teach the Bishop:

But love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.

After he is reduced to the status of a “poor, bare fork'd animal” (and after the Fool disappears), Lear is paradoxically invested with new faculties and powers. After his kenotic humiliations, he thinks more of others, and he consistently demonstrates compassion towards Gloucester, Kent, Tom o'Bedlam, and Cordelia. The holocaust of bodies in the final scene in no way undercuts the fact of Lear's changed behavior or heightened insights.

Throughout the play, O's, circles, and spheres abound (bleeding rings, the wheel of fire, bonds, the globe's “thick rotundity,” Wheel of Fortune, precious stones [i.e. eyeballs], crowns, and so forth). These figures are freighted with double meanings; they may be empty or full. In Medieval and Early Modern terms the circle is perfectly ambiguous, signifying either lack or fullness—absence or presence. As the Fool makes plain, the egg (one of the play's most “fertile” O's) and the crown are polysemous: either one may be full or empty (1.4.120 ff.). The Fool tells us that the monarch's “crown” (meaning, variously, Lear's bald head, the royal coronet, and, by extension, the kingdom or the crown's domain) is not worth the two halves of an eggshell: “Nuncle, give me an egg, and I'll give thee two crowns” (1. 4. 120). The Fool suggests that the crown (i.e., head, coronet, imperial domain) is worthless because the king himself has profligately emptied his head, his office, and his lands. That is to say, Lear is not merely the victim of kenotic emptying; he is the very agent of it. The Fool is emphatic: “thou clovest thy crown i'th'middle and gav'st way both parts” (1. 4. 123-24).

Circles and O's suggest the hollow, the empty, the void; but also the seed of transcendent hope. According to John Donne, man's life, properly considered, is a circle, “an endlesse, and perfect Circle … for immortality, and eternity are a Circle too” (2: 199-200); and the circle is a symbol of perfection, “one of the most convenient Hieroglyphicks of God.” In such an economy, O's and “emptiness” may well be signs of ultimate meaning and purpose. Thus, the very passages that skeptical critics use to “prove” the play's nihilism equally suggest the play's transcendent kenoticism. “Can you make no use of nothing?,” then, is sharply double-edged. Lear first answers the question “no,” but by Act 4 Scene 6 in the arms of his beloved Cordelia, he discovers a “yes.” And if this “yes” becomes “no” once again, with the gratuitous slaughter of Cordelia (“Never, never, never, never, never” [5. 3. 282]), why should this seemingly final “no” have the last word? The oscillating movements of the play invite the spectator to consider the possibility of “no,” and “yes.” In “The Slip” Wendell Berry suggests how kenosis preserves the mysterious, life-affirming paradox of the yes and no: “And yet this nothing is the seed of all.” Something accrues to the audience through the process of watching the tragic, kenotic ordeal. The play, in one sense, does not end on the stage. It lives on and is completed in us.

“Nothing will come of nothing” (“Ex nihilo nihil fit”) Lear tells Cordelia early in the play (1. 1. 85). But this is the claim of a sadly blind and deaf old man. Had Lear been more alert, he might have heard the heartfelt fullness in Cordelia's apparent verbal emptiness. He might have discerned the creative love in the apparent absence of love. Paradox reigns supreme here, for Cordelia is full while her sisters are merely fulsome. In fact, as the play's next four acts reveal, a world of action is born of Cordelia's pregnant silence, just as Lear's own spiritual hollowness is the “mother” of disaster (2. 4. 52). Note even here the implied hollowness: According to Harsnett the disorder called “mother” or “hysterica passio” is caused by “the wind in the bottome of the belly.”

Impoverishment, loss of wealth, and the symbolic loss of spiritual and psychic qualities is another prominent kenotic figure, and it is most often associated with Cordelia. Just as Cordelia loses all but gains the French monarch, so Lear must lose his jewel in order to grow and learn. Fittingly, biblical kenotic language circulates through Cordelia's speeches and in speeches about her. France paraphrases St. Paul's language of kenosis from 2 Corinthians 6:10 and 8:9 in a speech which John Reibetanz calls “rhymed paradoxy” (qtd. in Halio 109):

Fairest Cordelia, that art most rich being poor,
Most forsaken, and most loved despised,
Thee and thy virtues here I seize upon.
Be it lawful I take up what's cast away.
Bid them farewell, Cordelia, though unkind;
Thou losest here a better where to find.

(1. 1. 245-48, 255-56)

Kenosis is also illustrated figuratively through the putting on and the taking off of garments—investiture and divestiture. In Lear as in so much of Shakespeare, the changing (or loss) of one's apparel oft proclaims the man. “Through tattered clothes great vices do appear: Robes and furr'd gowns hide all” (4. 6. 156-57) says Lear. They hide not only the corruption and hollowness of the self, but also humanity's tragic vulnerability. Nakedness marks the beginning of a new identity.

Kenosis is also suggested by depotentiation, the loss of power. Sometimes the depletion of power is suggested by the loss of sexual potency; at other times spiritual depotentiation is dramatized by the loss of authority or physical strength. Lear's loss of power is systematic, inexorable, and extreme—he loses his kingdom, his family, his retainers, his property, his Fool, his wits, his very self. He becomes a “poor, bare, fork'd animal.” Loss of control over one's own body through imprisonment and torture (such as crucifixion) is the ultimate manifestation of depotentiation—what Simone Weil calls malheur. Edgar, upon seeing Lear on the heath, remarks tellingly, “O thou side-piercing sight!” (4. 5. 84). Lear's torture is the equivalent of crucifixion:

He hates him
That would upon the rack of this tough world
Stretch him out longer.

(5. 3. 288-90)

A final prominent kenotic metaphor has been called the “dramatic parabola” (Brunner 561-63). According to this trope, the hero descends, or journeys into exile. In Pauline theology, the Son of God leaves the precincts of heaven to descend to earth. He undergoes stages of descent—first to the level of humanity, then to the level of a slave, and finally to the level of a criminal shamefully executed (Philippians 2:5-11). Since the 5th century of the Common Era, the kenotic journey has often been viewed as an exile from home with a final return. St. Augustine melded the journey of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15) with the Neoplatonic myth of the soul's exile from the realm of the Ideal in telling his own story of fall and redemption (Chadwick xxiv). The Medieval idea of the Wheel of Fortune (another circle, of course) also allowed poets to suggest the same theme, which implicitly offers hope, for if one is going down, one can always wait stoically for the upward turn. Edgar is the voice of this ancient version of kenotic promise:

To be worst,
The low'st and most dejected thing of fortune,
Still stands in esperance, lives not in fear.

(4. 1. 2-4).

Edgar also implies an affirmative answer to the Fool's query. One can make use of “nothing” by facing the blasts of airy nothing (storms of life) and finding cause for laughter:

The worst returns to laughter. Welcome, then,
Thou unsubstantial air that I embrace:
The wretch that thou hast blown unto the worst
Owes nothing to thy blasts.

(4. 1.6-9)

If one accepts kenotic structure in Lear, “insubstantial air” and “nothing” can be read at once negatively and positively.

While the kenotic trope typically implies both descent and ascent, the Lear plot appears to move only downward. Dreams of ascent and return are never fulfilled, though the play's principal characters often imagine happy endings. A special problem of this play is that one can never say when one has actually hit bottom. The abyss of terror is deeper than Lear ever imagined. Part of the particular horror of Lear is the constant arousal of expectations that, at last, Lear has reached bottom or the outer boundaries of spiritual banishment, when he has not. Shakespeare, we know, revised the preexisting Lear plot precisely in order to defeat Lear's—and the audience's—expectations of an early, if not a pleasing, resolution.

Lear's reunion with Cordelia is the finest case in point. It is singularly important, as Susan Snyder and others have pointed out, that this delicate scene of reunion recalls the classic story of the Prodigal Son's reunion with his father (Snyder 361-69; Tippens, “Prodigal Son” 57-77). Shakespeare casts Lear as a kind of returning prodigal, the “child-changed” father/son who has lived among “rogues forlorn.” Cordelia, as gracious, forgiving parent, asks her prodigal father:

And wast thou fain, poor father,
To hovel thee with swine and rogues forlorn
In short and musty straw?

(4. 6. 35-37)

Of course, in kenotic plots, the hero is supposed to enjoy a homecoming, a vindication, even a glorification. In the Philippian hymn text, after humiliation, crucifixion, and death, the writer can say, “Therefore, hath God highly exalted him. …” No doubt any audience attuned to the kenotic pattern hopes for just such a restoration. Indeed, Lear himself expects it:

Thou shalt find
That I'll resume the shape which thou dost think
I have cast off forever.

(1. 4. 263-65).

Lear supposes that such a life as his will yield a glorious return, for upon such sacrifices “[t]he gods themselves throw incense” (5. 3. 21). The pattern is clear, the expectation logical—but utterly mistaken. The wheel has not yet turned full circle. Edgar's question haunts this scene of surreptitious bliss, “Who is ‘t can say, ‘I am the worst?’” (4. 1. 25). Lear's kenotic story prepares us for the upward movement that never arrives—or at least that does not arrive with any clarity. Yet this does not mean that such a movement is not possible; it just means “not yet.” In this respect, the play is anything but optimistic Christian drama. The exile is longer, the fall more profound, the stripping more thorough than anyone imagined. And that is what makes the story tragic.

So, how shall we judge King Lear? Is it Christian, humanist, existentialist, or absurdist? Perhaps we need to trouble the categories a bit. Louis A. Ruprecht, Jr., in his work Tragic Posture and Tragic Vision, argues that ancient Christians and Hellenistic dramatists shared a surprisingly similar view of the world. For example, as interpreters of the Gospel of Mark have recently shown, St. Mark's story is far darker than many have supposed (see, for example, Stephen Moore's, Literary Criticism and the Gospels and Mark and Luke in Poststructuralist Perspectives). Belief in resurrection does not automatically cancel the tragic sense, nor does the absence of death in the final act necessarily signify the comic. Indeed, many Greek tragedies do not end in a series of deaths, yet they are universally seen as tragic, argues Ruprecht. “Teleology,” the concern for endings, has been over-emphasized. If one considers the tone of the Gospel of Mark, for example, (which ends, not incidentally, with the stark sentence, “for they were afraid”) and the Oedipus cycle, we see that both types of literature (gospel and tragedy) share a common view:

“Tragedy shows us pain and brings us pleasure in the process.” Which is to say that suffering teaches, and that really is the tragic in tragedy. You never gain something but that you lose something.

(Ruprecht 97)

Many have tried to determine the meaningfulness of King Lear according to the final mental or spiritual disposition of the protagonist. Does Lear die in hope, in despair, or in delirium? The truth is, the final scene is susceptible to radically different interpretations. Actor, director, and spectator have considerable freedom to construe Lear's end.

But of course we do not have to know what was in the dying Lear's mind to come to grips with the play's meaning. Peter Brooks warns against making too much of any narrative's conclusion. The ending “does not abolish the movement, the slidings, the errors and partial recognitions of the middle. … The end] is not the exclusive truth of the text, which must include the processes along the way …” (711, 713). The final scene of recognition “cannot abolish textuality, does not annul the middle which, in its oscillation between blindness and recognition, between origin and endings, is the truth of the narrative text” (719). Ruprecht states boldly: “Tragedy has no interest in the end” (97). Brooks and Ruprecht make us wary of founding the “final” meaning of King Lear on a single reading of the conclusion, whatever that reading may be. Indeed, the play's final moment, overwhelming as it is, cannot entirely cancel previous scenes of charity, reconciliation, and even hope. The best interpretation of Lear maintains the “counterpoint of ever-shifting response” (Rabkin 30).

Quite apart from the death scene, what we can know is the quality of Lear's suffering. We can see the oscillations between blindness and insight. We can see how the kenotic ordeal alters him. We can watch Lear significantly alter his treatment of Cordelia and friends. We can see that you never gain something but that you lose something. We can see that destruction is necessary for recreation, that “nothing can be sole or whole / That has not been rent” (Yeats). “Life peers through the hollow eyes of death. The dry bones are made fruitful. … rebirth is founded on destruction. Mors vitae initium. The beginning of life is death” (Fraser 131). What is this truth? Is this orthodox faith? Yes, perhaps, but this is no naively optimistic faith. The fact of suffering overwhelms any cheer we might muster. Is it nihilism? Yes, perhaps, but this is not an “empty” nihilism, but a pregnant darkness such as one finds in The Cloud of Unknowing or John of the Cross, who declares that something can come from nothing.

Of course, such a darkly positive reading of the play is not inevitable. The something that comes from nothing is never writ large. It is a seed growing secretly. In Gospel language: “Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24). It is voiced in the enigmatic sayings of fools, madmen, and prophets. Reality is too thick to be plain; as mad King George explains, there is a mist over the eyes. Hence, a materialist or nihilist reading is always conceivable, for the reading, finally, derives from the fullness or the emptiness of the spectator who bears significant responsibility for completing the play's meaning, much as Shakespeare asserted in earlier plays like Henry V and Midsummer Night's Dream: “Work, work your thoughts, and therein see. …” says the Chorus in Henry V. Without imagination, which in Shakespeare is very close to faith, the spectator misses the possibilities. Despairing readers may hold to their interpretations, but they should acknowledge that their dark readings derive from their milieu as much as from the text. And they might refrain from scorning readings which manage to find a constellation of meaning through connecting the few points of light in Lear's dark firmament. Skeptical interpreters may still counter that “meaningful” readings belong to a defunct Christian past. In a postmodern setting how is a coherent reading possible? Alan Bennett's masterful screenplay suggests one answer.

The Madness of King George illustrates how a later work can cast a backward light on a literary predecessor, casting both in fresh perspectives. King George not only echoes and parallels King Lear in important ways; Bennett's drama also teaches us to see rich possibilities in the precursor text. Both plays center on parent-child conflicts in British monarchical households. Both center on a protagonist who undergoes a trial of fire that changes the protagonist forever. Like Lear, George is an English monarch who “hath ever but slenderly known himself”; and though his children are no matches for Gonerill, Regan, or Edmond, the Prince of Wales actively plots to seize the crown. Like Lear, George is dethroned, humiliated, and exiled.

Yet the connections between King Lear and King George extend far beyond details of plot. The deepest affinities appear when one observes the kenotic tropes of blindness, madness, and stripping. That Alan Bennett casts George as Lear redivivus becomes apparent after George is declared mad and is removed from power. Like Lear, in his madness George speaks a kind of inspired wisdom. He tells his frightened daughter: “Papa's not mad, my darling. No, no. He has just lost himself, that's all” (37). After being deposed, he sounds strikingly like Lear in his imperious declarations. Tortured with savage medical treatments, he shouts: “No! I am the Lord's anointed!” (42).

Like Gloucester and Lear, George's vision (both literal and spiritual) fails him. In a rich elegiac moment echoing Gloucester's “I stumbled when I saw,” George says mournfully:

I am not mad. I can't see. There is a mist. Oh, the Queen, missed, oh, oh, missed her, gone gone gone gone. …

(43)

In George's confusion of homophones (“mist—missed”) we are reminded of Lear's deep grief over losing Cordelia and Gloucester's sorrow at mistreating Edgar; and in George's elegiac repetitions of “gone, gone, gone, gone” and “no, no, no, no” (19), we hear echoes of Lear's “kill, kill, kill, kill, kill!” (4. 5. 179), “Howl, howl, howl, howl!” (5. 1. 231), and “Never, never, never, never, never” (5. 2. 282). As the medical tortures proceed apace at Kew, George becomes increasingly an image of Shakespeare's kenotic protagonist. The stage directions make the parallel explicit: “The King, cloaked and bearded now, looks like Lear” (57). Lear haunts the screenplay, serving as echo and commentary, an echoing and commentary that work in two directions.

King George's kenotic emptying is almost as extreme as Lear's. George is described as a “wretched moaning figure” who suffers intolerably at the hands of what he calls his “doctormentors” (44). As in Lear, the kenotic humiliations are revealed through a series of tropes, including the divestiture and investiture of clothing. In a scene recalling Lear on the heath, George runs half naked from the castle; and later he is quite literally stripped by his caretakers. When his sanity appears to return, he is given appropriate garments once again. He also makes the journey of the dramatic parabola—away from Westminster and Windsor—towards austere, cold, and remote locations. He rages through a heath-like expanse, and he descends to a kind of death, an image which is further developed when the Queen warns that her husband's deposition is his “death warrant” (65).

The kenotic trope of pouring out, emptying, and evacuation is suggested symbolically in numerous ways. George attempts to evacuate his tormented mind: “I have to empty my head of words,” he says (38); and the evacuation of George's body (fourteen bowel movements [20]) is a painfully gruesome physical kenosis. One of the most unbearable moments occurs when the King can literally no longer contain himself and is reduced to utter humiliation as his servants look on helplessly. The King wastes away so completely in fact that, in his own thinking, he has become nothing: “Nobody sees me. I am not here” (55). However, as in Lear, nothingness is not the end of the matter, but the beginning, the sign of potential renewal, the reconstruction of the self.

Just as emptiness can be a sign of fullness, so madness proves its opposite. The categories of madness and sanity are slippery and ad hoc in George's universe as in Lear's. In both plays there is a subversive interrogation of assumptions. Power and authority are not contradictory to madness, but rather forms of it. Hence, Dr. Willis's remark: “Do you know, Mr. Greville, the state of monarchy and the state of lunacy share a frontier” (48). In the Regency Crisis of the 1780s, Bennett finds a narrative that portrays the postmodern crisis of identity. Is George mad? How can one tell? In a move reminiscent of Foucault, Bennett suggests that madness, like the self, is a construct. The only relevant questions about George are: Can he perform? Can he seem? Can he act like a monarch? “Monarchy is a performance,” Bennett explains in his introduction to the play, “and part of the King's illness consists in his growing inability to sustain that performance” (Bennett xxix).

At the critical moment when George apparently begins to regain his senses, Chancellor Thurlow discovers the King reading and performing the reunion of Cordelia and Lear from Act 4, Scene 6. George insists that Thurlow join him in the performance; and Thurlow, at George's insistence, takes Cordelia's part. Greville plays the doctor, and the King, of course, plays Lear:

THURLOW: (As Cordelia)
“O you kind gods
Cure this great breach in his abused nature.
Th'untuned and jarring senses, O wind up,
Of this child-changed father.”
KING:
That's very good. “Child-changed father” is very good.

The scene continues with the King's elaborate pantomime of Lear waking:

KING: (As Lear)
“You do me wrong to take me out o' th' grave.
Thou are a soul in bliss, but I am bound
Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears
Do scald like molten lead.”
Oh, it's so true!
“Pray you do not mock me.
I am a very foolish, fond old man.
And, to deal plainly,
I fear I am not in my perfect mind.”

(69-71)

In his outburst “Oh, it's so true!” George's recognition is evident. Immediately, the others notice George's new (or renewed) rationality. Thurlow remarks, “Your Majesty seems more yourself,” to which the King replies:

Do I? Yes, I do. I have always been myself even when I was ill. Only now I seem myself. That's the important thing. I have remembered how to seem. What, what?

(71)

In the “What, what?” tag Thurlow, Greville, and the audience find the signal that the King's madness has lifted. He is himself, whatever that “self” may be, yet he is more than his former self. In numerous ways, George has changed. He is less dictatorial, less self-centered, and more understanding of his role and the role of the royal family. Like Lear and Gloucester before him, he comes to see things “feelingly,” remarking “Love, that is the keynote” (75).

Bennett's play appears to end more optimistically than King Lear; yet even here Bennett's play shares an important common element with Shakespeare's tragedy. Like Lear, King George ends in ambiguity. If Bennett's play teaches us anything, it is that one must be wary of appearances. A close scrutiny of the final scene reveals that George's recovery of the throne and health is ambiguous. Like the rest of George's royal life, the glorious reception before St. Paul's is brilliant theatrics, “seeming.” Even as George smiles and waves to the people, we cannot even be sure that he is cured of his malady. A stage direction indicates that George's mental health is at best precarious: “The King makes the faintest shudder; fear shows in his eyes. He cannot tell if he is still ill or not” (80). “Presume not I am the thing I was,” he tells Dr. Willis (80); but of course we are not at all clear what thing George was, or now is. The reality of George is either unimportant or unavailable to us as spectators, just as it is unavailable to George himself. The construct of the self, the seeming, the performance of the King is the only “reality” we have.

Consequently, the play's conclusion is disturbingly unclear and charged with irony. On the steps of St. Paul's Cathedral, the royal family present themselves as exemplars of and to the kingdom. As Handel's music swells, the family puts on the play that everyone expects. And George exhorts his family in terms etched in irony:

We must try to be more a family. There are model farms now, model villages, even model factories. Well, we must be a model family for the nation to look to.

(81)

“Who could think they are not happy?” the stage directions darkly inquire. To underscore the irony of the final scene, this caption concludes the play:

The colour of the King's urine suggests he was suffering from porphyria, a physical illness that affects the nervous system. The disease is periodic, unpredictable—and hereditary.

(81)

The film suggests that madness and confusion are expected features of the British royal family—and, by extension, madness and confusion are genetic traits of the human family. In fact The Madness of King George questions our ability to rise above our “unpredictable” and “hereditary” condition.

In stressing the many parallels between Bennett's play and Shakespeare's, I have obviously ignored important differences. Each artistic work is a unique creation, arises uniquely from its own milieu; yet I do wish to argue that, in current debates about King Lear's meaning, Bennett's play can be pressed into useful service. In two respects, at least, King George helps us become better readers of King Lear. First, Bennett's play recalls us to the classic trope of kenosis. In this contemporary play of a child-changed father we are called back to the story of a hero who undergoes a radical descent that ultimately proves meaningful. According to Sprengnether's terms, the kenotic metaphor helps us “to read on the margins” and uncover “latent or implicit” motives in Shakespeare's tragedy (46).

In a second way King George assists our reading of Lear by illustrating why Shakespeare's tragedy cannot, finally, be read as an absurdist or nihilistic text. As we watch old George respond to the drama of Lear, we see how theatrical experience belies current nihilistic interpretations. In fact, George responds empathically to Lear in much the way actors and spectators have for over three centuries. Both plays reveal that empathy with another's suffering is “natural” and “normative,” and certainly better than selfish indifference or cruelty. Indeed, Kent is the embodiment of this value. He feels with and for the good characters—Lear and Cordelia, above all. If Kent goes off to die or commit suicide, as some maintain (“I have a journey, sir, shortly to go: / My master calls me, I must not say no,” 5. 3. 295-96), it is not because he is indifferent to humanistic values like love, compassion, and loyalty. Rather, he departs precisely because these are inalienable qualities of his character. In the same way, we follow Lear with interest precisely because he transcends himself, abandoning his narcissism and learning to value others. Lear's discovery of others' needs is “meaningful.” The fact that the objects of his love, the Fool and Cordelia, are torn from him does not diminish our certainty that it is better to love than not to love.

In other ways both plays imply that compassion for suffering is superior to cruelty. In fact, as we see cruelty enacted, we do not move to a position where human actions do not matter (an absurdist position); indeed, these texts ask us to re-double our conviction that benevolence and cruelty are quite different realities. Pity presupposes that humans matter. Suffering in King Lear may appear wanton or inexplicable, but no spectator views it as irrelevant. If readers arrived at a position in which cruelty or evil were just names for things they found personally distasteful, then the play could certainly be called absurdist. But who can read the play in this way?

Lear questions, “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life / And thou no breath at all?” (5.3. 307-8). Such a question only makes sense in a meaningful universe. In a truly absurdist world, where all values have been rendered subjective or beyond definition, such questions fade into nonsense; but Lear dies believing that a human life ought to count more than a rat's life. He is still in the grip of a fundamental polarity (human/not human). Valuing the human, he knows that it is wrong for the good Cordelia to die; so does King George, and so do the viewers. That is why Thurlow pronounces King Lear “so damned tragic” (73). That is why King Lear ends with so much “meaning.” As long as we care, we defy absurdity.

Thus, Alan Bennett's strange serio-comic play The Madness of King George is a commentary which explains why Shakespeare's tragedy cannot, finally, be read as an absurdist or nihilistic text. As we watch old George respond to the play, we see that he stands for all audiences who find meaning in Shakespeare's tragedy. In that uncanny intertextual moment when George reenacts Lear's encounter with Cordelia, the audience observes one suffering kenotic victim peering into the life of another; and so George III finds himself in Lear and is mysteriously changed in the process. In this creative, hermeneutic moment, Bennett has provided a path—and an answer—for critic and play-goer alike. What Lear does for George III, Lear has done for audiences for centuries. Shakespeare's tragedy shows us the continuing power of the kenotic trope, and it shows us how, in the mad protagonist's hollowing out, we are mysteriously made full.

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