[In the following essay, originally delivered as a lecture in 1971, Levenson contends that silence in King Lear is integral to the play's structure, characterization, and thematic development.]

Only he who has attained to his own identity, can be silent, only when thinking has reached reality, will it come to a stop.¹

At the end of Stravinsky's Les Noces, an extraordinary series of pauses punctuates the music. Creating and disappointing expectation almost simultaneously, the pauses compel the listener's attention, his energies, with at least as much force as the sounds. When the last vibration from the percussion blends completely with the stillness in which it began, we experience all the resonance of silence.

Silence in drama can create, disappoint, compel, and absorb as vigorously as the most eloquent musical pause. And this profound similarity exists because the dramatist and the composer share the power to create silence. The poet and the novelist must invoke or describe stillness; the painter and the sculptor can express it through space or light. But, for the makers of drama and music, silence itself furnishes means to express, invoke, even define other kinds of reality.

Despite this resemblance, our response to silence in the two modes differs as significantly as our general reactions to music and drama. We allow music to engage all of our faculties. We accept what is mysterious, otherworldly, non-rational, confusing, without questioning or analysis. In effect, we do not feel uncomfortable with those elements in music which are beyond rationalization. With drama, on the other hand, we immediately try to explain everything. An image from Pirandello's Umorismo describes the phenomenon: ‘By means of logic the brain pumps feelings from the heart and extracts ideas. The feeling passes through the filter and leaves whatever it contains that is hot and cloudy; then it is refrigerated, purified, and i-de-a-lized.’² As Professor Harbage said recently of Shakespearian scholarship in particular, ‘Sometimes we seem to be witnessing a game of critical scrabble, with the contestants each taking a handful of pieces from the plays and arranging them according to taste, with the one who achieves the most novel arrangement declared the winner of the game.’³ In the terms of a contemporary philosopher, we are men of faith about music, men of reason about drama; Hebraists in one area, uninspired Hellenists in the other.⁴

Perhaps the drama of today, baffled by feeling and insistently cerebral, forces us to play intellectual games. But the older drama suffers through this rarefied response in production, in the classroom, in scholarship. And Shakespearian drama, which attracts large numbers of followers because of its rich blend of sentient thought, paradoxically suffers the greatest degree of dilution. As one result, we can no longer respond to the silences in Shakespeare's plays. We ignore or catalogue them, censure them as artistic blunders or commend them as artistic coups. But we do not listen to them.

In King Lear more than any other Shakespearian drama, silence gives form to the action, substance to the characters and themes. Appropriately, it plays a forceful rôle in the concentrated opening scene, where it combines with ritual to set the love-test parable in high relief from the rest of the play. Like music, drama begins in silence: ‘Sound is an event: by its coming it breaks an original silence, and it ends in final silence.’⁵ What Gisèle Brelet says about the originating stillness of music applies to plays as well: ‘That silence into which music is born is not pure nothingness: in it dwell an attentiveness and an expectation.’⁶ Unlike Shakespeare's other tragedies, King Lear prolongs the initial silence, the expectation, in the quiet conversation with which it opens. Anticipation grows until it is great enough to receive the protagonist. Then the sennet sounds. At the end of the scene, the jarring medley of court sounds fades into the subdued exchange between Goneril and Regan. This still moment prepares us for the ‘final silence’ of the scene, which in turn precedes the holocaust that begins with scene ii.

As the opening scene begins and ends in pronounced silence, so it develops or realizes itself. At its heart is Cordelia's stillness, which punctuates keenly the easy flow of words prescribed by ceremony. In music, the silence of punctuation has been called, ‘the fullest and most important moment of musical becoming: the very moment when it is made real.’⁷ Cordelia's speechlessness is such a moment in drama.

Shakespeare created Cordelia's silence, for which no precedent exists in the fifty-odd versions of the Lear story.⁸ Even in the folk-tale originals of the love-test, Cordelia's prototypes experience no difficulty expressing themselves, and answer their fathers with either a riddle or, less frequently, a straightforward declaration of filial devotion. Most often the youngest daughter responds simply that she loves her father like salt, and because he does not realize the value of salt, he angrily casts her out. After various adventures, the erring parent, forced to do without salt, learns its merit and that of his daughter. In the terms of folklore, the earliest Cordelias were Ingenious Heroines with didactic rôles who made clear the distinction between the real and apparent values of salt, and therefore between real and apparent values.⁹

When Geoffrey of Monmouth first linked the love-test story with the legend of King Lear and his daughters, he made the Ingenious Heroine more subtle and articulate than her predecessors, though no less didactic. This Cordelia gives her answer eagerly, ‘desirous to make trial of … [her father's] affection’:

My father … is there any daughter that can love her father more than duty requires? In my opinion, whoever pretends to it, must disguise her real sentiments under the veil of flattery. I have always loved you as a father, nor do I yet depart from my purposed duty; and if you insist to have something more extorted from me, hear now the greatness of my affection, which I always bear you, and take this for a short answer to all your questions; look how much you have, so much is your value, and so much do I love you.¹⁰

In the versions generally considered Shakespeare's immediate sources, Cordelia responds with varying degrees of wordiness, according to different motives. But she always answers at once. The ghost of Cordile in Higgins' Mirror for Magistrates speaks succinctly to expose her sisters' flattery: ‘I will (said I) at once my love declare and tell …’¹¹ Holinshed's Cordeilla is downright verbose:

Knowing the great love and fatherlie zeale that you have alwaies borne towards me (for the which I maie not answere you otherwise than I thinke, and as my conscience leadeth me) I protest unto you, that I have loved you ever, and will continuallie (while I live) love you as my naturall father. And if you would more understand of the love that I beare you, assertaine your selfe, that so much as you have, so much you are worth, and so much I love you, and no more.¹²

The Cordeill of The Fairie Queene with dignified simplicity ‘said she lov'd him as behoov'd …’¹³ Finally, Cordella in the anonymous Leir play determines to edify her father by making plain her sisters' flattery and stressing the integrity of good deeds. Like Shakespeare's Cordelia, she speaks twice in asides, but they indicate the revulsion hypocrisy makes her feel. (If Coleridge had known this version of the story, he might have hesitated to burden Shakespeare's Cordelia with a reaction of disgust.) When Leir misunderstands her words, she tries to help him interpret the riddle, disparages her sisters, and in the end, irritates him so greatly that he cuts her off mid-sentence:

CORDELLA
Deare father -
LEIR
Peace, bastard Impe, no issue of King Leir,
I will not heare thee speake one tittle more.(14)

Shakespeare's Cordelia differs strikingly from most of her precursors. Whereas many Ingenious Heroines intentionally play didactic rôles during the love-test, she can barely answer Lear's question, and Kent, the Fool, and Edgar assume the responsibilities of teaching in the play. The prototypes generally prepare us for their responses; their purposes in speaking are clear. But Cordelia reveals only her confusion and initially can say nothing.

What does her ‘Nothing’ express? If we find in it ‘some little faulty admixture of pride and sullenness,’ or worse, a great and crucial fault,¹⁵ like Lear we deceive ourselves by distorting what we hear. A remark by the composer John Cage about silence suggests what we might find in Cordelia's: ‘Keeping one's mind / on the emptiness, / on the space / one can see anything can be in it, is, as / a matter of fact, in it.’¹⁶ Her stillness resonates like the silences of the Bible, fairy-tale and folk ritual, analogous moments that need reflecting upon.

At once a narrative technique and complex symbol, silence in the Bible points the inexpressible. S. Goitein's Studies in Scripture, an excellent literary analysis of the Bible, explains one function of silence in discussing the ‘Binding of Isaac’:

At the time of the binding itself no words were said—neither by father nor son; for it is a very important principle in biblical narrative that when the cry of crisis reaches the point no longer controlled by human speech … the writer passes over it in silence. In contrast to this, the action is pictured in great detail, so that we may feel a shiver at Isaac's destiny …¹⁷

Like most profound insights, this one states the obvious, that which stands in our paths—unnoticed. Here is the familiar passage Goitein cites:

When they arrived at the place God had pointed out to him, Abraham built an altar there, and arranged the wood. Then he bound his son Isaac and put him on the altar on top of the wood. Abraham stretched out his hand and seized the knife to kill his son.

(Gen 22:9-10)¹⁸

Deep silence characterizes not only the binding, but also the dialogue with God (where we do not hear Abraham's answer) and the journey. As Erich Auerbach interprets the story in Mimesis: ‘the journey is like a silent progress through the indeterminate and the contingent, a holding of the breath, a process which has no present …’¹⁹ ‘Everything remains unexpressed.’²⁰

Still moments like these again and again heighten our experience of the Old Testament. The dismissal from Eden happens swiftly in dramatic images: ‘He banished the man, and in front of the garden of Eden he posted the cherubs, and the flame of a flashing sword, to guard the way to the tree of life’ (Gen 3:24).²¹ During Noah's ordeal, described by many concrete details, no one speaks a word. Although Joseph's brothers discuss their treachery both before and after they throw him into the well, narrative understatement accomplishes the event itself: ‘So, when Joseph reached his brothers, they pulled off his coat, the coat with long sleeves that he was wearing, and catching hold of him they threw him into the well, an empty well with no water in it. They then sat down to eat’ (Gen 37:23-5). Physical images of destruction and force express the great anger of Moses, as a whale's belly indicates the absurdity and extent of Jonah's plight. The week-long silent reception of Job's calamity speaks for itself.

In the New Testament as well, profound events realize themselves through silence. Clearly, the most intense stillnesses mark the drama that culminates in the Passion. The Marys, Martha, and Salome, who quietly serve Christ and witness his suffering, incarnate ‘the moment in and out of time.’ But it is Christ himself whose silence resounds most forcefully in each of the gospels. According to Matthew, Mark, and John, Pilate marvels at it: ‘Have you no reply at all? See how many accusations they are bringing against you!’ Luke describes the episode with Herod as a clamour of words—lengthy interrogation, accusations, mockery—with Christ still and separate at the centre.

The impact of Christ's silence greatly impressed the writers of medieval passion plays, who prolonged the biblical moment—sometimes interminably. The scene of the silent response often occurs more than once in these dramas, accompanied generally by the noisy confusion of the frustrated judge(s). Christ answers neither Caiaphas nor Pilate nor Herod, despite coaxing, buffeting, and cursing which grows more and more scatological as the speaker's rage increases. In the Chester version, Caiaphas at first stands dumbfounded by the silence, and Herod threatens to expire for woe if Jesus does not speak, for he has decided that the accused is either ‘dumbe and deafe as a doted doe, / or frentick,’²² The Wakefield Master focusses on Caiaphas' reactions, a study in the perplexity of a stupid man. The priest condescends at first to persuade Christ with a Latin aphorism. This ploy failing, he resorts to one clean and one dirty curse; a rationalization that the accused is frightened; a petulant charge about loquaciousness in the past; a wheedling request to say something, ‘Be it hole worde or brokyn’; a decision that Christ must be deaf or witless; and finally, a tantrum: ‘So, I cry and I showte!’²³ The Ludas Coventriae interrogators turn to beatings when words produce no effect,²⁴ whereas those in the York Passion Play simply keep on talking. The York version, in fact, could rival any modern absurdist play as a rendering of verbal non-communication. The ultimate reductio ad absurdum, a scene that Bottom would have loved to act, shows Herod trying to reach Christ by shouting in strange tongues:

… uta! oy! oy! …
Say may thou not here me? oy! man, arte thou woode?(25)

One recognizes in these dramatic presentations of Christ's silence a revealing analogue for Cordelia's. In both, pauses in the midst of ceremony, hypocrisy, and wordiness force a confrontation with truths too large for the compass of language. Only the person who refrains from speaking recognizes, as Dante did, ‘How scant is language, all too weak to frame my thoughts.’ In each of the two situations, tragedy results from the failure of others to grasp this basic fact of life which the Bible continuously teaches implicitly through its narrative style and, of course, explicitly in its content.²⁶

When Freud discussed Cordelia's rôle in his essay ‘The Theme of the Three Caskets,’ he pointed out that in fairy-tale and folklore too silence expresses ‘thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls.’ For him her quietness signifies death, and Lear's response to it conveys his unreadiness to accept his end.²⁷ But fairy-tale and folklore do not disclose thus categorically the meanings of stillness. Most frequently they imply that silence is an almost superhuman feat which can accomplish great deeds, break evil spells, and establish its custodian as a person of spiritual strength. The Grimm brothers relate two stories, cited by Freud, in which a maiden releases her brothers from a wicked enchantment which has turned them to swans or ravens by refraining to speak for several years:²⁸

… there is but one [way to release them] in the whole world, and that is so hard that you will not save them by it, for you must be dumb for seven years, and may not speak or laugh, and if you speak one single word, and only an hour of the seven years is wanting, all is in vain, and your brothers will be killed by the one word.²⁹

In a Transylvanian gypsy story which has many analogues, the hero saves a beautiful maid from an evil spirit by undergoing three hours of various torments without making a sound.³⁰ Through the sacrifice of her lovely voice, Hans Christian Andersen's Little Mermaid becomes a spirit of the air with a voice like ethereal music.³¹ The dumbness of young Prince Ivan in an old Russian tale emblematizes his virtues. His parents, who misinterpret its significance, suffer a curse for their obtuseness.³² Sweet Martha, in a variant of the Cinderella story, saves her own life and receives rich gifts by maintaining silence as she wards off death by frost.³³

The special strength required to keep still on crucial occasions graces few fairy-tale protagonists. For every hero who achieves silence, another fails. The would-be deliverer of the legendary White Lady in the White Tower at Prague shouts in pain, prompted by three bayonet stabs in his breast.³⁴ In a Hessian story with a number of parallels, a forester finds it impossible to maintain the silence which could have saved a maiden bewitched into a swan.³⁵ An Irish variant of the Grimm swan tale describes the tragic fate of a sister who cannot remain quiet for crying;³⁶ and the wicked sisters of sweet Martha perish because they are ‘rough of the tongue.’³⁷ Moreover, in many tales where an evil spell or threat forces the hero to suffer anguish and humiliation in silence, animals take over his speaking function or a revealing accident occurs which relieves and sometimes liberates the victim.³⁸ Ordinary mortals cannot bear too much silence.

Fairy-tale suggests a connection between silence and the superhuman; folklore, with its emphasis on ritual silence, openly acknowledges the link. Perfect stillness, for example, confers special powers to see the realm of Faery.³⁹ Since noise disturbs the powerful, protective spirits of the universe, any task that calls for supernatural assistance—from the sowing of flax to the performance of magic rites—must take place in wordless reverence. On the other hand, vehement uproar effectively dispossesses evil spirits.⁴⁰

Like the Bible, then, fairy-tale and folklore reveal ‘that language does have its frontiers … which give proof of a transcendent presence in the fabric of the world.’⁴¹ Additional evidence for this view about language and silence, already charted by other writers, occurs abundantly in classical mythology and both western and oriental philosophies.⁴² In the context of this fruitful material, Cordelia's punctuating silence in the first scene and Lear's failure to understand it grow rich in implication.

When we first meet Lear, his bearing, his conduct, and the behaviour of his court objectify order and control. The procession, the map of Britain already divided into three portions, the formal sequences of address to his daughters, and to Burgundy and France, the rhetoric of his speeches, suggest that Lear governs a world well fortified against surprises. Ritual, it appears, has long captivated feeling and governed its expression. Consequently, Lear can demand public utterances of love from his children without making anyone but Cordelia noticeably ill at ease. Even for such personal communications, forms exist which eliminate the possibility of awkward emotional outbursts. Goneril and Regan accept these forms, indeed use them expertly. Not the least bit startled by Lear's request, each answers him immediately in words that seem prescribed by custom for the occasion. They do not pause to reflect, to calculate; their expressions of love are automatic:

LEAR
Goneril,
Our eldest-born, speak first.
GONERIL
Sir, I love you more than word can wield the matter …

(I.i.53-5)⁴³

Terence Hawkes has pointed out play on the word love in their answers, meaning both estimate and hold in affection,⁴⁴ a subtlety which could reveal to a careful listener signs of treachery. But Lear is not a careful listener. He does not hear hypocrisy; he will not understand silence. At this moment in the play, he responds only to the denotative meanings of words.⁴⁵

Cordelia's silence dramatically exposes Lear's perilous dependence upon the semblances of order. She cannot answer him because her unwieldy devotion resists the tether of language: ‘I am sure my love's / More ponderous than my tongue’ (I.i.77-8). Her reply is not automatic. And it is not wilful: ‘I cannot heave / My heart into my mouth …’ (I.i.91-2). In Cordelia's silence, Lear confronts what I have called before a basic fact of life. That ‘… there are actions of the spirit rooted in silence. It is difficult to speak of these …’⁴⁶ That ‘the ineffable lies beyond the frontiers of the word,’⁴⁷ and human efforts to control experience often limit it, ‘cutting the world down to size.’⁴⁸ But Lear does not comprehend these commonplaces. He behaves as if, in George Steiner's terms, the sum of human experience could be enclosed within the bounds of rational discourse, and ‘all truth and realness … [could] be housed inside the walls of language.’⁴⁹

Lear's confusion and anger in confrontation with Cordelia's ‘Nothing,’ her silence, ring psychologically true. For the western mind has again and again shown itself fearful of voids and stillness, the indefinite and the immense. Melville's chapter on the terrifying whiteness of Moby Dick provides impressive testament to this familiar sensation: ‘Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way?’⁵⁰ The thoughts of a contemporary writer on silence effectively interpret Melville's: ‘… silence does not seem to be as assertive, as committal, as speech … Perhaps the information given by not speaking has in it too much potentiality and possible surprise; it requires great confidence to endure it.’⁵¹ Lear cannot endure it at this point; cannot even begin to understand that stillness can contain not only potential for evil but also potential for good,⁵² not only signs of outrage but also hints of apocalypse.⁵³ Trepidation often causes us to forget that silence can affirm, however tentatively: ‘Not one / sound fears the silence that extinguishes it. / But if you avoid it, that's a pity, because / it resembles life very closely & life and it / are essentially a cause for joy. People say, / sometimes, / timidly.’⁵⁴ In eastern philosophy we find the most optimistic appreciation of the void:

Thirty spokes unite in one nave,
And because of the part where nothing exists we have the use of a carriage wheel.
Clay is molded into vessels,
And because of the space where nothing exists we are able to use them as vessels.
Doors and windows are cut out in the walls of a house,
And because they are empty spaces, we are able to use them.
Therefore, on the one hand we have the benefit of existence, and on the other of non-existence.(55)

Lear, however, finds only negation and destructiveness in Cordelia's silence, which so obviously affirms her love as it nullifies the wordy vows of Goneril and Regan.

In the tragic events which result from Lear's misunderstanding, his own silences and ultimate comprehension of Cordelia's serve as important registers to his crescent perceptiveness. Cordelia's long absence, a kind of stillness, and her moments of speechlessness when she returns, mark the play with reminders of her constancy and the profound truths Lear could not grasp at the beginning. Unchanging in her inexpressible love for Lear, she can barely articulate her grief when late in the tragedy she learns how he has suffered:

KENT
Made she no verbal question?
GENTLEMAN
Faith, once or twice she heav'd the name of ‘father’
Pantingly forth, as if it press'd her heart;
Cried ‘Sisters! sisters! Shame of ladies! sisters!
Kent! father! sisters! What? i' th' storm! i' th' night?
Let pity not be believ'd!’

(IV.iii.25-30)

Immediately before they are reunited, Cordelia, like an Old Testament figure, speaks not of her feelings, but of physical things and faith:

CORDELIA
Alack! 'tis he: why, he was met even now …
Crown'd with rank fumiter and furrow-weeds,
With hardocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo-flowers,
Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow
In our sustaining corn.

(IV.iv.1-6)

                    All bless'd secrets,
All you unpublish'd virtues of the earth,
Spring with my tears!

(IV.iv.15-17)

And when they finally meet, her humble gestures and her tears make fluent her faltering words. At the end of the play she holds the stage in prolonged and profound silence. To Lear's joyful fantasy of their future as God's spies, she responds simply by weeping, a muteness as telling and complex as her first. The stillness of her death expresses something new: ‘The silence of the dead Cordelia is a final summary of the presence of what Donne calls “absence, darkness, death; things which are not,” throughout the play, wherever a question is asked and not answered, or a command is not obeyed.’⁵⁶

While Cordelia remains constant, still, and comprehending, Lear, dynamic and generally verbose, uncovers through his incredible pain the values he had instinctively honoured but never understood. Until his tragedy, there had always stood between Lear and wisdom what Maynard Mack calls the imperative mood.⁵⁷ Other scholars have noticed as well how Lear commands, pronounces, curses, invokes, defies.⁵⁸ He does not argue, reflect, or reply to objections. He does not doubt. The silence that precedes insight finds no lodging in him. When intimations come that he has misjudged his daughters, and the imperative mood shifts slightly toward the interrogative, there is no one left in the kingdom he governed to answer his questions directly. Because of his own blindness, he now lives in a world where ‘the relation of meaning to verbal expression is in some way defective, oblique or trumped-up.’⁵⁹ Goneril and Regan, as we have seen, adeptly distort the meanings of words. Edmund creates his own definitions:

EDMUND
Our father's love is to the bastard Edmund
As to th' legitimate. Fine word, ‘legitimate’!
Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed,
And my invention thrive, Edmund the base
Shall top th' legitimate—…

(I.ii.17-21)

Kent must borrow other accents to serve Lear, and Edgar and the Fool survive by riddling.

When ritual and linguistic forms disintegrate for Lear, he draws upon his tremendous reserve of sensibility to face and defy the remaining vacuum. Silence distinguishes this process which mysteriously transmutes anguish into cognition. In fact, silence is its only witness. We experience Lear's pain and the resulting enlightenment, but the moment of their conjunction is interior and private. Only after his Knight remarks ‘a great abatement of kindness’ in Goneril's household, does Lear admit his own awareness of the slight, unmentioned until now: ‘Thou but rememb'rest me of mine own conception: I have perceived a most faint neglect of late …’ (I.iv.63-4, 70-2). He has also quietly perceived the Fool's unhappiness since Cordelia's departure, and Goneril's ill humour: ‘You are too much of late i' th' frown’ (I.iv.198). Though Lear's misjudgment of Cordelia tutors him in shame,⁶⁰ he mentions her rarely, elliptically, during her long absence from the stage: ‘O most small fault, / How ugly didst thou in Cordelia show!’ (I.iv.275-6); ‘I did her wrong,—’ (I.v.24). In Lear's relation with the Fool, as Granville-Barker astutely describes it, ‘His silences are … pregnant. He listens and finds cheer in the Fool's chatter and song, throws him an answer or so to keep it alive, snarls now and then like an old lion if a sting goes too deep. Yet his thoughts, we can tell, are away.’⁶¹ While Kent relates the story of his disgrace, Lear says nothing. And when madness comes, when Lear sees most feelingly, speech wavers and sometimes goes out:

I can scarce speak to thee; thou'lt not believe
With how deprav'd a quality—O Regan!

(II.iv.137-8)

I will have such revenges on you both
That all the world shall—I will do such things,
What they are, yet I know not, but they shall be
The terrors of the earth.

(II.iv.281-4)

No, I will be the pattern of all patience;
I will say nothing.

(III.ii.37-8)

Before the mock trial on the heath, Lear stands still and amazed, and, in its wake, prepares for an instant of respite: ‘Make no noise, make no noise; draw the curtains: so, so’ (III.vi.85-6). Later the still distraught Lear meets Gloucester near Dover and counsels: ‘Look with thine ears … Hark, in thine ear …’ (IV.vi.152, 154). The words resonate, percipient, for Lear has learned to listen to silence, in silence.

Auerbach's penetrating study of biblical narrative illuminates the dramatic presentation of Lear's growing wisdom:

[Biblical style is] the externalization of only so much of the phenomena as is necessary for the purpose of the narrative, all else left in obscurity; the decisive points of the narrative alone are emphasized, what lies between is nonexistent … thoughts and feeling remain unexpressed, are only suggested by the silence and the fragmentary speeches; the whole, permeated with the most unrelieved suspense and directed toward a single goal … remains mysterious and ‘fraught with background.’⁶²

Lear's silences point his most intense experiences of pain and insight. He may, like Job, describe his discoveries in concrete, physical terms, images which reveal how acutely he suffers and perceives on his very pulses, but the description inevitably follows the experience, which happened in silence.

At the tragedy's conclusion, Lear again confronts Cordelia silent. Understanding the implications of this stillness, he cries out against it, tries to evoke from it a different kind of message: ‘What is 't thou say'st? Her voice was ever soft, / Gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman’ (V.iii.272-3). His futile efforts make him impatient, abstracted, and, at the very moment when he shatters, omniscient. His last words direct us towards Cordelia, towards the lips that spoke so profoundly when they were still: ‘an image which presents most of what can be said about the physical limitations to an aspiring mind.’⁶³ The tragedy of Lear, begun in prolonged stillness, muted at crucial points in its development, ends deep in silence. Ends with its most compelling motif, which expresses what its language can barely articulate:

… this world of fact we love
Is unsubstantial stuff:
All the rest is silence
On the other side of the wall;
And the silence ripeness,
And the ripeness all.(64)

Notes

1. Dieter Wellershoff, ‘Failure of an Attempt at De-Mythologization: Samuel Beckett's Novels,’ from Der Gleichgültige: Versuche über Hemingway, Camus, Benn, und Beckett (Cologne 1963), translated and reprinted in Samuel Beckett Martin Esslin, ed (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey 1965) 107.

2. Luigi Pirandello Umorismo (Rome 1960) 145-57, translated and reprinted in Modern Drama Anthony Caputi, ed (New York 1966) 476.

3. Alfred Harbage, ‘Shakespeare Without Words,’ Proceedings of the British Academy 55 (1969) 131.

4. William Barrett Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (New York 1958) 77.

5. Gisèle Brelet, ‘Music and Silence’ La revue musicale 22 (1946), reprinted in Reflections on Art Susanne K. Langer, ed (New York 1961) 103.

6. Ibid 104.

7. Ibid 113.

8. My conclusions about Shakespeare's creation of Cordelia's silence are based primarily on material found in Wilfrid Perrett's definitive study, ‘The Story of King Lear from Geoffrey of Monmouth to Shakespeare’ Palaestra 35 (1904).

9. Perrett, ‘The Story of King Lear’ 10-13.

10. Geoffrey of Monmouth's British History in Six Old English Chronicles J. A. Giles, ed (London 1891) 115.

11. Parts Added to ‘The Mirror for Magistrates’: By John Higgins & Thomas Blenerhasset Lily B. Campbell, ed (Cambridge 1946) 148.

12. Holinshed's Chronicle Allardyce and Josephine Nicoll, eds (London and New York 1927) 226.

13. Edmund Spenser The Faerie Queene introduction by J. W. Hales (London 1910) 1, 290.

14. The History of King Leir, 1605 W. W. Greg, ed, Malone Society reprints (London 1907) B^r-B2^r.

15. G. R. Elliott, ‘The Initial Contrast in Lear,’ Journal of English and Germanic Philology 58 (1959) 259.

16. John Cage Silence (Cambridge, Mass. 1966) 176.

17. S. Goitein Iyyunim B'Mikra (Tel Aviv 1957) 78. This passage and the book's title were translated for me from the Hebrew by Professor Monford Harris.

18. All biblical quotations come from the Jerusalem version.

19. Erich Auerbach Mimesis Willard Trask, trans (New York 1957) 7.

20. Ibid 9.

21. In Paradise Lost (XII.624-8), Milton introduces this silence into his description of the expulsion; Eve makes her final speech ‘and Adam heard / Well pleas'd, but answer'd not; for now too nigh / Th' Archangel stood, and from the other Hill / To thir fixt Station, all in bright array / The Cherubim descended.’

22. The Chester Plays Dr Matthews, ed, Early English Text Society edition (London 1916) II, 288.

23. The Wakefield Pageants in the Towneley Cycle A. C. Cawley, ed (Manchester 1958) 81-2.

24. Ludus Coventriae or The Plaie called Corpus Christi K. S. Block, ed, Early English Text Society edition (London 1922) 276, 286.

25. York Mystery Plays L. Toulmin Smith, ed (New York 1885) 300.

26. Passages that come to mind immediately are Psalms 4:4, 39:9, 65:2; Isaiah 53:7; Revelation 8:1.

27. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Theme of the Three Caskets’ Imago 2 (1913), translated and reprinted in On Creativity and the Unconscious Benjamin Nelson, ed (New York 1958) 65-75.

28. Grimm's Fairy Tales Margaret Hunt, trans, James Stern, ed (New York 1944) nos IX and XLIX.

29. Grimm Brothers, no IX, 62.

30. Edwin Sidney Hartland The Science of Fairy Tales (London 1925) 246-7.

31. Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales L. W. Kingsland, trans (London 1961) 84.

32. ‘Prince Ivan, the Witch Baby and the Little Sister of the Sun’ in Old Peter's Russian Tales Arthur Ransome, ed (London and Edinburgh 1916) 136-54.

33. ‘Frost’ in Ransome Old Peter's Russian Tales 54-69.

34. Hartland The Science of Fairy Tales 245.

35. Ibid 259.

36. ‘The Unique Tale’ in The King of Ireland's Son Padraic Colum, ed (New York 1916) 130-47.

37. ‘Frost’ 67.

38. See, for example, Grimm Brothers, nos XXI and LXXXIX; ‘The Girl Who Sought Her Nine Brothers’ in Tales from a Finnish Tupa Aili Kolehmainen, trans, James Cloyd Bowman and Margery Bianco, eds (Chicago 1936) 116-25; ‘Guleesh’ in Celtic Fairy Tales Joseph Jacobs, ed (New York and London nd) 6-28.

39. Hartland The Science of Fairy Tales 64.

40. Detailed references to the rôle of silence in folk ritual are most accessible through Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, 6 vols (rev. & enl., Bloomington, Indiana 1955-8) and J. G. Frazer The Golden Bough (3rd ed rev. & enl., London 1911-15).

41. George Steiner Language and Silence (New York 1967) 39.

42. See, for example, E. E. Kellett, ‘Dramatic Silences’ Contemporary Review 132 (1927) 482-90; Steiner Language and Silence; Paul Goodman, ‘On Not Speaking’ The New York Review of Books (20 May 1971) 40-3.

43. All references to the text of King Lear in this paper come from the Arden edition, Kenneth Muir, ed (London 1964).

44. Terence Hawkes, ‘Love in King Lear’ Review of English Studies n.s. 10 (1959), reprinted in Shakespeare: ‘King Lear’ Frank Kermode, ed (London 1969) 179-83.

45. Cf Sigurd Burckhardt Shakespearean Meanings (Princeton 1968) 239.

46. Steiner Language and Silence 12.

47. Ibid.

48. Goodman, ‘On Not Speaking’ 41.

49. Steiner Language and Silence 13-14.

50. Herman Melville Moby Dick Newton Arvin, introd (New York 1957) 192.

51. Goodman ‘On Not Speaking’ 42.

52. Barbara Everett, ‘The New King Lear,’ Critical Quarterly 2 (1960), reprinted in Kermode Shakespeare: ‘King Lear’ 199.

53. Ihab Hassan The Literature of Silence (New York 1967) 214.

54. Cage Silence 173.

55. Quoted from Lao-tse by Barrett, Irrational Man 234.

56. Everett, ‘The New King Lear’ 199.

57. Maynard Mack ‘King Lear’ in Our Time (London 1966) 89.

58. See especially Paul A. Jorgensen Lear's Self-Discovery (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1967) 70 ff.

59. Winifred M. T. Nowottny, ‘Some Aspects of the Style of King Lear,’ Shakespeare Survey 13 (1960) 52.

60. See Kent's speeches, IV.iii.39-48.

61. Harley Granville-Barker Prefaces to Shakespeare (Princeton 1946) I, 287. Granville-Barker makes many enlightening remarks about Lear and Cordelia's silences; so does Arnold Isenberg, ‘Cordelia Absent’ Shakespeare Quarterly 2 (1951) 185-94.

62. Auerbach Mimesis 9.

63. Everett, ‘The New King Lear’ 200.

64. W. H. Auden, ‘The Sea and the Mirror’ in For the Time Being (London 1945) 8.