The Shakespeare Book

258

Banishes

Edgar/Poor Tom

Legitimate son

Loyal to

Earl of

Gloucester

Plots against

sister

Goneril

Daughter

KING LEAR

enemy’s dog, though he had bit
me, should have stood / That night
against my fire” (4.6.30–31).
That the play has limits to
its own capacity for pity, however,
is something critics have recently
pointed out with regard to the
treatment of Goneril and Regan.
But perhaps the most violent
reaction against the play has
focused on the way in which its
supposedly redemptive experience
of suffering, and the value it places
on pity, comes to nothing.
When Shakespeare’s audience
went to see King Lear, they were
expecting, at worst, to endure the
grief of his daughters’ ingratitude
and the physical deprivations of
his homelessness. Gloucester’s
blinding was an added turn of
the screw, derived from Sir Philip
Sidney’s prose romance, The
Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia
(1593). However, in all the other
versions of the Lear story, including
an earlier play The True Chronicle
Historie of King Leir (c.1594), in
which Shakespeare may even have

acted, good triumphs over evil in

the final battle and Lear is restored

to his throne. He dies of old age and

is succeeded by Cordelia. Audience

reactions must certainly have

echoed Kent’s sentiments “Is this

the promised end?” (5.3.238), when

not only do Lear and Cordelia lose

the battle, but Cordelia is murdered,

causing her father to die of grief.

A problematic end?

Subsequent critics, including

Samuel Johnson, put on record

their dismay with the play’s ending.

The 17th-century Poet Laureate

Nahum Tate felt compelled to draft

a new ending in which Cordelia

survives. In Tate’s version, a love

story develops between Cordelia

and Edgar, to whom she is

betrothed at the end. It was this

version of the tragedy that would

be performed for nearly 150 years,

to the detriment of Shakespeare’s

original version.

Tate was partly responding

to the fact that much of the

structure of King Lear is comic.

The double plot is a feature of

comedy, usually allowing a broader

perspective and the exploration of

alternative themes—although the

similarity of Gloucester’s plight to

that of Lear only serves to render

the play more claustrophobic. The

combat between the older and

the younger generation, with the

latter attempting to free itself from

parental oppression particularly

in matters of the heart, is also the

stuff of comedy. The movement

of exiled characters into a green

Howl, howl, howl, howl!

O, you are men of stones.

King Lear

Act 5, Scene 3

Plots against

sister

Lear’s tangled web

King Lear

Albany

Regan

Daughter

Cordelia

Daughter

Poisons sister

Married to

Both sisters

lust after

Edmond

Bastard son

Kills brother

Earl of Kent

Friend

Fool

Taunts

Cornwall

Married to