King Lear
King Lear is larger than the other tragedies in its moral scope. It is a play of good and
evil, a parable with little psychology of character. It begins like a fairy tale: the old
king asks his three daughters to say which loves him most. His youngest, Cordelia,
loves him but is not prepared to outbid her sisters to gain a richer portion of the
kingdom. The subplot also has a fairy-tale ending, in which the good brother Edgar
defeats the evil brother Edmund in single combat. Virtue triumphs here, but not in
the main plot. This ends with a brief scene introduced by the stage direction: ‘Enter
Lear, with Cordelia in his arms.’ Lear asks: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.
Pray you, undo this button. Thank you, sir.Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) edited Shakespeare in his middle fifties. He relates
that he was many years before so shocked by Cordelia’s death that ‘I know not
whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play’ – until he had to edit
it. For ‘Shakespeare has suffered the virtue of Cordelia to perish in a just cause,
contrary to the natural ideas of justice, to the hope of the reader, and what is yet
more strange, to the faith of the chronicles.’ Johnson’s reaction was uncommon only
in its strength; Nahum Tate had adapted Lear in 1681 to give it a happy ending in
which Edgar marries Cordelia, and this version of the play held the stage until 1839.
Why does Shakespeare depart from his sources and have Cordelia hanged?
In this play Shakespeare seems to have wished to show the worst pain and the
worst evil that could be felt and inflicted by human beings. As usual with him, this
is put in ter ms of the family. What ‘the worst’ is is asked by Edgar, and when Lear
carries the dead Cordelia onstage, Kent asks ‘Is this the promised end?’ – a reference
to the horrors that are to precede Doomsday. Evil persecutes good through most of
the play. Lear’s sufferings when cast out into the storm by his daughters Goneril and
Regan drive him mad. Lear’s son-in-law Cornwall puts out the eyes of the loyal Duke
ofGloucester,sending him ‘to smell his way to Dover’. These elder daughters are
monsters of cruelty and lust. Edmund, the bastard son of Gloucester, ousts his
brother and his father. The tirades of Lear on the heath, his meeting with Gloucester
on the beach, and the play’s last scene are terrible to read or to see. There is nothing
in English to equal the scenes of Lear, the Fool and Edgar on the heath. The later
stages ofKing Lear, with their mixture of human cruelty, loyalty, tenderness, absurd-
ity, bring from the maddened king a series of clear and terrible outbursts reflecting
upon life at its most basic and its most extreme. This sublimity, beyond anything in
secular literature, justifies the awed respect with which Shakespeare can fairly be
regarded.
Virtue does not triumph in Lear, yet vice fails miserably. Cordelia, Kent and Edgar
are as simply good as Goneril, Regan, Edmund and Cornwall are simply evil. After
Cordelia is hanged, Lear dies and Kent is about to follow his master. Edgar is left to
say the last lines:The weight of this sad time we must obey,
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most: we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.130 4 · SHAKESPEARE AND THE DRAMA