ACT V

Whether it is something as “big” and obvious as Gloucester’s blinding, or “small” but significant as Goneril and Regan holding hands or Lear sitting on a stool instead of a throne, Lear is full of stage action which seems to “freeze” into dramatic tableaux visual symbols of the play’s themes. This is paralleled, complemented, and strengthened by the plethora of proverb-like “commonplaces” in the text. Characters, in other words, are constantly uttering lines which reflect sayings familiar to Elizabethan audiences or lines which would fit in perfectly as verbal accompaniments to contemporary engravings, etc. These sayings could be as generalized as Cordelia’s prophetic “Time will unfold what plighted cunning hides” in I, i, or as picturesque as Lear’s “When we are born we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools” in IV vi.

This is so much the case that it is easy to stress the allegorical status of Lear, and especially of individual characters (Goneril and Regan as paradigms of evil rather than complex, evolving characters). Nevertheless, even though the sayings, are, almost by definition, meant to be “universal” they are thoroughly integrated into the particularized scenes and hence into characters speaking such lines in the scenes. As a result of the way the reader\audience is tracking the play’s meaning, therefore, Shakespeare evokes an intriguing skepticism regarding the proverbs. If, for instance, the speaker is Edgar, we surely take the comments about the gods being just (and hence rewarding adultery with blindness!) in the context of his tormented conscience and guilt-complex. In his aphorism regarding endurance, we might ask whether he has experienced enough in life to preach to his father in this way. Albany’s relief that the gods have judged Cornwall, jumps him to the conclusion that all crimes will be judged from above. (If not all of them are, might none of them be judged?) His conclusion is really a reflection of his hope more than anything else.

Perhaps Lear’s description of life as a “stage of fools” gets across the main point. For it no doubt captures the nature of life at least partly. Part of the reader\audience’s job is to figure out which part in what way. (Similarly, Edgar’s stoic aphorism about endurance is not rooted in his experience; his theological judgment, too much rooted in his experience.) Shakespeare helps us in a dramatically impressive way through a series of similar sayings coming out of other characters. Gloucester reflects it himself in iv, i when he says “ ‘Tis the time’s plague, when madmen lead the blind.” This does not say the same as Lear (does it?) but it certainly mirrors it. The very character of Fool has a part to play in this. But so also do the variations on fool throughout the play. In IV, ii, just to give one example, Goneril refers to Albany twice as a fool in quite different ways “My fool usurps my bed” and “a moral fool.”

Gloucester’s “As flies to wanton boys, are we to th’ gods” is typical of the mirroring effect of “theological” images. It fits his predicament perfectly, but certainly cannot, without further ado, be taken to embody the meaning of the whole play, namely, that there is an evil world order. After all, the latter is different from saying there is no moral world order. The only certain conclusion regarding the theological images thrown up by the play (and this is far from insignificant) is that they contain almost every possible variation. The trend, however, is that of perpetual reversal. In other words, every time the audience is set up for the “victory of good” or at least “nothing worse can happen,” there is immediately a reversal. In this case we can identify completely with Edgar (at the beginning of Act IV), when, immediately after expressing the sentiment “there’s nowhere to go but up,” his father crawls in, blinded.

Lear’s entrances constitute another example of mirroring in the play. Think of the diversity the original royal entry; the first entry of the abdicated king into the new queen’s house; his appearance in the storm after he has left his last daughter; his mad entry at Dover before Edgar and Gloucester; his sleeping entry before Cordelia; and the final entry in scene iii. Here the entry is prepared not only by Albany’s “Great thing of us forgotten.” Because the first-time reader\audience member might think that the gentleman running in just before that crying “O, she’s dead” refers to Cordelia not Goneril. Moreover, Shakespeare prepares the entrances of other characters to similar effect. In I, iv, for instance, the entry of Goneril has been building for the whole act, and, in that same scene, Albany enters on “Woe, that too late repents,” a minor but allusive detail of the sort that recurs throughout the play.

After the blinding of Gloucester and the madness of Lear, the “good” characters do start to turn the tide so it seems. Cornwall is killed by a conscientious servant; Oswald, a particularly distasteful character, is the second character of note to die, and his death is the cause of bringing Albany irrevocably over to the “other” side; then Edgar kills Edmund, and upsets the (ultimately contradictory) dreams of Goneril and Regan. In the end, however, Edgar takes over not to renew the health of the nation (as in the history plays) but merely to “sustain the gored state.” In this play it is hard to get away from the idea of nursing an old, sick being which might never be healthy again. Given his highly ambiguous behaviour to his father, and his self-pitying, guilt- ridden nature, Edgar, moreover, is scarcely a “heroic” figure. Ultimately, perhaps the most consolation we get at the end lies in the recurrent image of fortune’s wheel: no matter how good things seem, they will inevitably run to the bottom again; but once at the bottom, they will start to rise to the top.

This image of fortune (the goddess fortuna) might be discussed further. What did it mean? And what meaning might it still contain? It is, of course, thoroughly pagan and anti-Christian. Shakespeare consciously set the play in pre-Christian, pagan Britain, but what does that mean? It would be a mistake to follow that through in such a way that the characters came across as too “primitive” for “sophisticated” audiences to relate to. And clearly Lear’s court showed many signs of luxury and polished manners. Maybe the most obvious point of the setting was precisely to distance the audience from reflex Christian judgements about the meaning of life? What is the most important Christian message for those who have suffered? 

It is no doubt easiest to see those judgements centering around Cordelia. Does she embody some Christ-like figure who provides consolation to the audience and Lear? A lot of that depends on how the actor plays her very few lines. In V, iii, for instance, to what extent does she accept Lear’s dream of a life of “two birds in a cage”? She is crying, but perhaps part of her tears still lies in her incapacity to go along with Lear’s wishes. No matter how far she goes, however, the fact remains that she dies (in a particularly ridiculous, gratuitous manner), and how does her death console her father? Even if he does think he sees signs of life at the end, we know that is an illusion, good enough to console him, but surely not to those who know the truth. At the very most she seems to be a moral exemplar. The critic, Frank Kermode, once identified the defining feature of King Lear in this way it is “the cruellest play” because it implies that “we can’t count on divine or human justice to intervene in the worst moments of life.” Can that conclusion be countered?