THE KING’S MAN 259
world where they discover a truer
relationship to nature and to their
own humanity, before returning
to civilization, is also a staple of
the pastoral genre. Even the Fool
naturally belongs in a play like As
You Like It rather than a tragedy.
Agony of grief
But these romantic, comic
expectations endure only to be
smashed to pieces. When Lear
enters, carrying dead Cordelia,
some fantasy about how the world
works is finally destroyed. It is not
just the futility of it—after all their
suffering, Lear and Gloucester
cannot make use of anything they
have learned, and are denied the
chance to make amends to their
children—it is rather that the play
confronts the unavoidable destiny
of bereavement and death, with no
offer of consolation.
At the end of a Shakespearean
tragedy, the hero’s demise is usually
carefully stage-managed, offering
him artistic control so that he may
leave a final impression of greatness,
but Lear dies in the middle of a
thought—and not about himself but
about Cordelia, whose death is so
painful as to be incomprehensible:
“Why should a dog, a horse, a rat
have life, / And thou no breath at all?
Thou’lt come no more. / Never, never,
never, never, never” (5.3.282–284).
Pity is revealed to be something
that no one feels enough (“O, you
are men of stones” (232)), and thatcannot rescue Lear from his agony of
grief. No other play by Shakespeare
offers such a bleak perspective on
the tragic fact of human mortality.
Shakespeare’s society was
deeply Christian, with a system of
religious practices a part of everyday
life. Yet no one can comfort Lear,
other than to will that he be spared
further pain by not feeling. It is in
this respect that King Lear remains
perhaps Shakespeare’s most
devastating play. ■A feminist reading In 1817, the English literary critic
William Hazlitt argued that
“that which aggravates the
sense of sympathy in the reader,
and of uncontrollable anguish in
the swol’n heart of Lear, is the
petrifying indifference, the cold,
calculating, obdurate selfishness
of his daughters.” Since the late
20th century, however, feminist
critics have taken issue with this
reading, arguing that the childless
Goneril at least has plenty of
motivation to act as she does
against her father. Lear’s curse
of sterility upon her in 1.4 has
allowed actors to give greaterpsychological depth to her
character, and to make her
an object of pity. Similarly, the
incestuous intensity that defines
Lear’s possessiveness over
Cordelia at the start of the play
was a theme explored by the US
writer Jane Smiley in her novel
A Thousand Acres (1991). This
retells the story from the
perspective of Goneril. Ginny
(Goneril) suffers flashbacks that
reveal how her relationship with
her father has been shaped by
the sexual abuse she and her
sister Rose (Regan) experienced
from him in childhood.In Jean-François Sivadier’s 2007
production, the play was translated
into tough, contemporary French. A
physical production, its action was as
uncompromising as its language.