King Lear: The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare

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King Lear

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King Lear



The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare

Volume 17




William Shakespeare
Edited by John Dover Wilson

CAmBRiDgE UNiVERSiTy PRESS

Cambridge New york melbourne madrid Cape Town Singapore São Paolo Delhi
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New york
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information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108005890
© in this compilation Cambridge University Press 2009
This edition first published 1960
This digitally printed version 2009
iSBN 978-1-108-00589-0
This book reproduces the text of the original edition. The content and language reflect
the beliefs, practices and terminology of their time, and have not been updated.

THE WORKS OF SHAKESPEARE
EDITED FOR THE SYNDICS OF THE
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
BY
JOHN DOVER WILSON










KING LEAR


EDITED BY
GEORGE IAN DUTHIE
AND

JOHN DOVER WILSON



KING LEAR


















































CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

CAMBRIDGE
LONDON • NEW YORK • MELBOURNE

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore,
Sao Paulo, Delhi
Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK
Published in the United States of America by
Cambridge University Press, New York
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521094849

© Cambridge University Press 1960, 2008
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 1960
Reprinted 1962
First paperback edition 1968
Reprinted 1969, 1972, 1975, 1979
Re-issued in this digitally printed version 2009
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-0-521-07541-1 hardback
ISBN 978-0-521-09484-9 paperback

CONTENTS


PREFATORY NOTE PAGE vii
INTRODUCTION ix

I. Sources and Date ix
II. The King xiv
III. Cordelia xx
IV. Kent xxvi
V. The Fool xxviii
VI. Lear's Suffering xxxiii

VII. The Sub-Plot xxxviii
VIII. 'Nature' xliii
IX. Man's Double Nature xlvii
X. The Play's 'Pessimism' xlviii
XL D. G. James' View of the Play lii
THE STAGE-HISTORY Ivi
TO THE READER Ixix
KING LEAR I
THE COPY FOR KING LEAR, 1608 AND 1623 122

NOTES 140
GLOSSARY 277

TO
DAVID NICHOL SMITH
FROM THE TWO
EDITORS

vii



PREFATORY NOTE

The editing of this play, like that of'Romeo and Juliet
in 1955, has been shared by Professor Duthie and my-
self. And, as before, he drafted the whole and handed
it over to me with permission to make what additions or
changes I thought fit. The Introduction (except for a
paragraph on page xxiv about Cordelia) and the Note
on the Copy are virtually as he gave them to me; and the
text also is his, except for some slight adaptation of
the stage-directions and emendations here and there,
made with his consent. The Glossary too, apart from a
few additions, is mainly his. Since, however, the Notes
he drafted were predominantly textual in character, it
has fallen to me to supply most of the exegesis, such
.textual notes as I am responsible for being labelled
'J.D.W.'.
His earlier edition of the play, published in 1949,
was at once recognized as a landmark in the study of
Shakespearian textual criticism. Scholars may well turn
then with especial interest to his present Note on the
Copy, which embodies some of his second thoughts in
the light of subsequent work on the text. Yet in a play
like King Lear commentary presents problems almost,
if not quite, as difficult as those involved in textual
decision. And I for my part have been compelled to not
a few second thoughts by other collaborators in the
edition as a whole, namely Mr C. B. Youngand Mr J. C.
Maxwell, who read my notes in draft and to whom I
owe a good deal more than can be conveniently
recorded; while a third friend, Professor Peter Alex-
ander, has always been ready with a word of warning
or encouragement.' Needless to say, moreover, I have
kept the valuable editions of Professor Kenneth Muir

viii PREFATORY NOTE
and the late Professor Kittredge constantly before me.
Finally—a point well known to scholars—the general
reader of a modern text of King Lear should be made
aware of the great debt all editors of this play owe to
Sir Walter Greg's various essays upon it and in parti-
cular to that little bibliographical masterpiece The
Variants in the First Qgarto of King Lear (1940),
which is the foundation of the present text and will
remain the foundation of all future ones.
How many years of his life Professor Duthie has
given to the text of King Lear I do not know. I have
myself only been able to spend sixteen' months on the
commentary. For life is short and the editing of Shake-
speare an endless adventure.
J.D.W.
CHRISTMAS I958

ix


INTRODUCTION


I. Sources and Date

The story of King Lear and his daughters is a very old
one, and it had been told by many writers before it
supplied Shakespeare with the main plot of his mightiest
tragedy. Shakespeare apparently knew four renderings
of the tale. He knew it as it is chronicled in the pages of
Holinshed. He knew it as it is told in the second book of
The Faerie Qyeene. He knew it related—as coming from
the mouth of the youngest daughter, after her death—
by John Higgins in the Mirror for Magistrates. And he
knew it already presented in dramatic form, by a play-
wright whose identity we do not know, as The True
Chronicle History of King Leir, and his three daughters t
Gonorill, Ragan, and Cordelia.
The reader who wishes to go into the question of the
relationship between Shakespeare's play and its sources
should consult first the beautiful and too little known
1
lecture on the subject by R. W. Chambers, and for
details an article published in The Library* by Sir Walter
3
Greg in 1940. Greg lists some two score parallels be-
tween Shakespeare's version and the Leir play. It would,
seem, as he says, that, as Shakespeare wrote; 'ideas,
phrases, cadences from the old play still floated in his
memory below the level of conscious thought, and that
now and again one or another helped to fashion the words
that flowed from his pen'. He shows also that there are

1
King Lean the first W. P. Ker Memorial Lecture, by
R. W. Chambers (Glasgow, 1940).
3
4th series, XX (1939-40), 377 ff.
3
There was room for only a few of these in our
Notes.

x KING LEAR
places in Lear where Shakespeare seems to recall now
Holinshed, now Spenser, now Higgins. We find, too,
recollections of words and phrases from other books.
Shakespeare knew Samuel Harsnett's Declaration of
Egregious Popish Impostures, and, as Professor Muir has
1
shown, echoes it frequently in this play. There are
echoes also of Florio's translation of Montaigne.* And
the Gloucester sub-plot has its source in the story of the
Paphlagonian king in Sidney's Arcadia. Plenty of
Shakespearian reading lies behind this play. But as-
suredly he did not write it with books at his elbow. And
what he remembered from books he used for his own
new purposes, transmuting what his memory furnished.
He has his own dramatic design to work out. If he
recalls and uses words and phrases and situations from
one or other of the sources, he is never bound to follow
the plot-development of any of them. In Holinshed,
Spenser, and Higgins Lear is, after his tribulations,
restored to his crown through the military intervention
of Cordelia and her husband. He dies in the course of
nature, and is succeeded by Cordelia, who rules for a
time. She then becomes a victim of rebellion by her
nephews, is defeated and imprisoned, and commits
suicide. In the Leir play we have the restoration of the
king to his throne as the ending, with no unhappy fate
for Cordelia. Shakespeare differs here (and elsewhere
too) from all four source-documents, and is infinitely
more powerful. The plot, the tone, and the significances
of the drama he produces are his own business.
When did Shakespeare compose King Lear}
Harsnett's book was entered in the Stationers' Register
on 16 March 1603; and the Shakespearian Lear itself
was registered on 26 November 1607, the entry indicat-
x
In the revised 'Ardea* edition of the play (i95*)»
pp.253 ff.
ff
* Ibid. pp. 249 «

INTRODUCTION xi
ing that it had been performed at court on 26 December
1606. Thus we have clearly established termini. Can a
more precise date be fixed upon?
Sir Edmund Chambers 1 declares that 'these late
eclipses' referred to by Gloucester in 1. 2 'must be the
nearly total eclipse of the sun on 2 October 1605 and the
partial eclipse of the moon on 27 September 1605'; and
he says also that 'there is a fairly palpable imitation of
1.4.9-42 in Edward Sharpham's The F/eir, 1, ad fin?,
a work which 'was probably produced after 30 January
1606, registered on May 13, and printed in 1607'. The
composition of Lear, then, would seem to belong to the
winter of 1605-6: and Chambers comments further
that 'the earlier part of 1606 seems also to fit best for
Macbeth, and...the time-table left available by plagues
makes it unlikely that two Shakespearean plays appeared
almost concurrently at this date and none at all in 160 5,
which was clearer from sickness'; thus the latter months
of 1605 would seem to be indicated for Lear. And this
fits in very well with the appearance of the principal
source, the Leir play, which was registered on 8 May
1605, and published in the same year. We can readily
imagine Shakespeare studying this book (along with
other versions of the story) during the summer and
autumn of 1605. The picture seems to be clear enough,
and it may indeed be accurate; yet there are difficulties
in the way of accepting it—difficulties excellently pre-
sented by Sir Walter Greg in the 1940 article already
drawn upon.
The earliest record of a Lear drama is of two perform-
ances of a 'kinge leare' at the Rose in April 1594, in the
course of a brief and unsuccessful season there by the
Queen's and Sussex' companies jointly. As Greg says,
'It was not a new play, and since there is no trace of it in
Sussex' men's repertory during their longer season of
1
William Shakespeare (1930), 1, 468.

xii K I N G LEAR
thirty performances the previous Christmas, it presum-
ably belonged to the Queen's'. It was no doubt this
play, or a version of it, that was entered in the Stationer?
Register on 14 May 1594, as 'The moste famous
Chronicle historye of Leire kinge of England and his
Three Daughters'; but this entry would appear not to
have been followed by publication, for on 8 May 1605,
we have, entered to Simon Stafford and immediately
transferred to John Wright, 'the Tragecall historie of
Kinge Leir and his-Three Daughters'. 'These entries,'
says Greg, 'are sufficient evidence that no edition had
followed the entrance of 1594. Had there been one it
would presumably have been known: an honest holder
of the copy would not have entered it anew, he would
have obtained an assignment; while a pirate would have
stood to gain nothing by advertising his theft.' The
Stafford-Wright entry was followed in the same year by
the publication of the Leir text which we have already
referred to as Shakespeare's main source.
Now there are, about the 1605 Leir publication, two
odd things which, as Greg shows, suggest that Shake-
speare's play was in existence before 8 May 1605.
(1) In the entry, the Leir play was originally called a
'Tragedie'; this was subsequently altered to 'Tragecall
historie'. Now Leir is not a tragedy—and the title-page
gives it as a 'true chronicle history'. Reference to the
tragic in the Register may well be due to the fact that
Shakespeare's tragic handling of the story had been,
recently acted.
(2) The entry refers to Leir as having been 'latelie
Acted', and the Leir title-page carries the legend 'As it
hath bene diuers and sundry times lately acted'. Now it
is quite possible that the play performed and registered
in 1594 was not the same play as that entered and pub-
lished in 1605. Yet it is equally possible that the two
were the same, or closely related; and not only, as Greg

INTRODUCTION xiii
says, would it be foolish not to apply the principle of
Occam's razor, but the style of the play published in
1605 definitely suggests a much earlier date. Greg is
surely being very reasonable when he says,' I find it very
difficult to believe that this respectable but old-fashioned
play, dating back in all probability to about 1590, had
been "divers and sundry times lately acted" in 1605.'
But if Shakespeare's new play had been sundry times
lately acted by the spring of 1605, it is easy enough to
believe that'it was the popularity of Shakespeare's play
that suggested the publication of the old KingLeir\ and
that there was a fraudulent intention to pass off the Leir
volume as giving the text of Shakespeare's recent
successful masterpiece.
It seems eminently possible then that Shakespeare
wrote Lear late in 1604 or early in 1605. How, in that
case, did he get his intimate knowledge of the Leir play?
Are his debts to it due merely to recollection of per-
formances in the first half of the 1590's ? This cannot be
ruled out as quite impossible, but it does not seem likely.
Shakespeare's acquaintance with the old play seems
rather too close to make such an explanation plausible.
Having given his impressive list of parallels, Greg com-
ments : 'When a general similarity of structure and inci-
dent has already betrayed Shakespeare's acquaintance
with the earlier piece: then the parallels, I conceive,
point to his having read it with some care.' Presumably
he read it ia manuscript. The manuscript registered in
1594 may have been a transcript, or even a report, of the
Leir prompt-book: that prompt-book itself may even-
tually have come intothe possession of the Chamberlain's
Men: it may have lain unused in their library until
Shakespeare'read it and decided to transfigure it: and
subsequently, in some way, Stafford may have got hold
of it. This hypothetical chain of events—advanced as
possible by Greg (though he is not very enthusiastic

xiv KING LEAR
about it)—has nothing in it inherently unlikely. As for
the reference to eclipses which suggests that Lear belongs
to the later part of 1605: there is always the possibility
of the insertion of a topical allusion some time after the
composition of the play; but in any case I have never
been happy about this kind of evidence for dating.
Astrology is a significant dramatic element in Lear. Why
should it be supposed that if Shakespeare makes a
character refer to 'these late eclipses' he must needs have
in mind eclipses that had actually occurred in the recent
experience of himself and his audiences ?
I pass to a consideration of Shakespeare's play in and
by itself—the play which Maeterlinck called 'the
mightiest, the vastest, the most stirring, the most intense
dramatic poem that has ever been written'.
Indebted to Sir Walter Greg in what has gone before,
I am equally indebted, in what follows, to various other
recent critics. It happens here—as perhaps elsewhere
also—that the editor of a play in a serial edition finds
that he has little to say about it that has not been said
before, but that he wishes to tell his readers about some
of the views—the most important ones, in his opinion—
taken by others. He may wish to endorse them, or to
oppose them. And if a debt is inadvertently unacknow-
ledged, why then, 'pray you, forgive and forget'.


II. The King
In Shakespeare's play the king is an impressive, domi-
nating figure. He is aged, and he speaks of himself as
about to 'crawl toward death' (1. I. 40). Yet he is in
fact robust; for at r. 4. 8 we find him coming back from
hunting, a strenuous pursuit, and calling with hearty
appetite for dinner. There is no fatigue here. In the
centre of the play he is grievously afflicted by exposure to
the fury of the tempest; yet he survives it—and, after

INTRODUCTION xv

his ordeal, he has the strength, near the very end, to kill
Cordelia's hangman. His physical stamina is indeed
extraordinary, and any producer who thought of pre-
senting him as (in Lamb's phrase) 'an old man tottering
about the stage with a walking-stick' would be (in
Cordelia's phrase) 'far wide'. And Lear's aspect is
indeed royal. The disguised Kent is assuredly using no
flattery when at i. 4. 31 he speaks of Lear as having
'authority' in his countenance—that is, in his bearing.
The Lear we see in 1. 1 is a monarch of great age, of
powerful physique, of compelling personality. But he is
a foolish man. Consider what he does.
Determined to retain the title, status, and preroga-
tives of a king, he nevertheless wishes to relinquish the
actual task of ruling. He has decided to divide his king-
dom amongst his three daughters who, with their
husbands, will govern their respective regions, under his
titular authority. In the first scene of the play he
ostensibly holds an auction—the best portion of the
kingdom will go to that daughter who by her words
indicates that she loves her father best of the three; and
so on. But he has already made his division. Before the
play has begun, he has decided to give Goneril and
Regan exactly equal portions of the realm, and to give
Cordelia a portion richer than these.
If he has made his decision already, why should he ask
the daughters to speak of their love for him before he
formally presents them with their portions ? It might be
suggested that he wants to corroborate in his own mind,
or publicly to display as sound, his previous judgement as
to their degrees of" affection for him. But this will
hardly do. For when the first daughter has spoken, Lear
gives her her portion before hearing the second; and
when the second has spoken, he gives her her portion
before hearing the third. His real reason for making his
daughters speak of their love is just that he likes to hear

xvi K I N G LEAR
himself praised on ceremonial occasions. He knew that
Goneril would flatter him, that Regan would flatter
him; and he enjoys their flattery. He was confident that
Cordelia—his particular favourite—would excel them
in adulation. His own words give him away. 'Now, our
joy,' he says,
what can you say to draw
A third more opulent than your sisters? Speak.
The matter is already decided. Lear leans back to enjoy
the culmination of the performance he has staged. But
the words do not come, and he immediately casts her off.
And to his fault of vanity is joined the fault of rashness.
When his pride receives an affront he reacts intem-
perately. He lacks self-control. Passion usurps the
place of reason. And this is not merely the result of old
age—he 'hath ever but slenderly known himself', and
'the best and soundest of his time hath been but rash'.
None of the pre-Shakespearian versions gives any
reasonable excuse for Lear's rejection of Cordelia. But
with the love-contest the matter is different. In the old
Leir play the love-contest is not originally the king's
idea. Leir's queen has died and the funeral has just
taken place. His three daughters are unmarried. He
now wants to marry them to 'princely mates' for their
own good; for, deprived of their mother's care, they are
like 'a ship without a stern', since a father can manage
sons but does not know how to guide daughters. In
addition, he wants to resign his crown, for he is old and
tired and hopes to devote himself tothe contemplative
life. He wishes therefore to divide his realm amongst
the three daughters as dowry. He will thus kill two birds
with one stone.
One of his lords, Skalliger, advises him to modify his
plan. He recommends him
To make them each a jointure more or less
As is their worth, to them that love profess.

INTRODUCTION xvu
Leir rejects this:
No more, nor less, but even all alike.

But he subsequently decides to conduct the contest.
When he does, he speaks as if the idea is his own and has
just occurred to him—
I am resolv'd, and even now my mind
Doth meditate a sudden stratagem,
To try which of my daughters loves me best.
The old playwright is inconsistent. But the fact that the
plan is not Leir's in the first place does suggest a mitiga-
tion of his blameworthiness. And yet Leir does not need
this mitigation; for in deciding to conduct the contest he
has a motive which is at once reasonable and well-
intentioned.
The two elder daughters have suitors whom they are
prepared to accept. But the youngest, Cordelia, though
'solicited by divers peers', will accept none of them.
She will not marry anyone 'unless love allows', and
as yet none has appeared whom she can love. This
naturally causes Leir anxiety—his youngest child has no
one to look after her properly. It is this commendable
anxiety which causes him to institute the love-contest.
He calculates thus: when his daughters declare how
much they love him, they will 'contend each to exceed
the other in their love' (and, if we regard this as rather
cynical, the atmosphere of the passage permits us to
visualize a twinkle in the old king's eye). 'Then,' he
continues,
at the vantage will I take Cordelia.
Even as she doth protest she loves me best,
I'll say 'Then, daughter, grant me one request,
To show thou lov'st me as thy sisters do,
Accept a husband whom myself will woo.'
This said, she cannot well deny my suit,
Although, poor soul, her senses will be mute.

xviii KIN G LEAR
Then will I triumph in my policy,
And match her with a king of Britanny.

No doubt this is hardly honourable (quite apart from
the fact that Leir does not know his Cordelia): but it is
rational; and. the trick is a loving stratagem. Shake-
speare rejects it altogether—surely because he wants to
relate Lear's questioning of his daughters simply and
solely to a serious character-defect. In his opening
scene Shakespeare will give Lear no excuse whatever for
what he does. Shakespeare wants, at the outset, to
establish firmly in our minds the notion oihamartia. In
1
a brilliant book on Hamlet recently published Professor
Alexander makes light of that notion in connection with
Hamlet: it is certainly relevant to Lear.
The Leir playwright is, I have said, inconsistent.
Having given the king a rational and good-hearted
motive for arranging the love-contest, he makes him
react to Cordelia's honesty in an intemperate way which,
disconcerts us because Leir has so far been so reasonable.
The writer does not seem able to give a consistent
characterization of the king at the start. Shakespeare is
quite clear, to the king's disadvantage.
The absurdity of Lear's conduct in Shakespeare's
first scene is such as to induce some critics to say that the
scene is 'improbable'. Thus Coleridge declared that
* Lear is the only serious performance of Shakespeare the
interest and situations of which are derived from the
3
assumption of a gross improbability'. Professor
Charlton says, in his book Shakespearian Tragedy, pub-
lished in 1948 (in which what I have just been writing
about Leir and Lear at the beginning of the story is more
felicitously put), that 'Shakespeare's version has more

1
Hamlet, Father and Son (1955).
8
Coleridge's Shakespearean Criticism, ed. T. M. Raysor
(i93°)> h S9'

INTRODUCTION xix
improbabilities in it than has any of the older versions'. 1
i
Yet I doubt whether the 'improbabilities' of . I
trouble any audience in the theatre; for the might of
Shakespeare's poetry conveys to our imaginations 'an
elemental human world', and we do not think altogether
in terms of commonplace probability. This is going to be
a huge, momentous, universal tragedy—essentially
different from the old Leir play in which, as Professor
Charlton says, 'the anonymous dramatist set the whole
scene in an atmosphere of everyday reasonable prob-
ability'. Consider the two elder sisters, for instance. In
the old play they are, as Charlton says again, 'common-
place in their littlenesses. They regard Cordelia as a
"proud pert Peat", mainly because she copies the cut of
all the new frocks which they put on so that they may
compete with her greater natural prettiness'. How
different is this from Shakespeare's presentation of two
moral monsters! What Goneril and Regan have in their
hearts is quintessential evil. Thus Shakespeare with-
draws from them the kind of real-life actuality which
they have in the old play. He makes them more im-
probable. But by the power of his imagination, and of
the poetry which expresses it, he makes them seem
frighteningly real to us in a deeper sense.
Professor Tucker Brooke declares 2 that in Shake-
speare's Lear 'the theme is bourgeois, in spite of the
rank of the protagonists; the vices portrayed are mean
and the virtues homely'. I cannot think that this is a
proper estimate. Professor Tucker Brooke's words are
indeed very applicable to the old play. But Shakespeare's
transformation of the old play lifts the story out of the
everyday bourgeois world and into the sphere of the
elemental.
1
Charlton, op. cit. p. 198.
* In A Literary History of England, ed. A. C. Baugh
(1948), . 536.
p

xx KING LEAR

III. Cordelia

At the beginning of Shakespeare's play, Lear is foolish.
At the end, he is a man who has learned wisdom. And
it is an appalling intensity of suffering that has taught
him this wisdom. This is a play about education. It is
not essentially different to say that it is also a play about
conversion, spiritual regeneration, the attainment of
salvation. At the beginning Lear is spiritually bankrupt;
at the end he is (to use a phrase of Marlowe's) 'i' the
way to heaven'. 'The Lear that dies is not a Lear
defiant, but a Lear redeemed. His education is complete,
his regeneration accomplished.' 1
His initial folly and lack of spiritual health result in
his rejection of Cordelia. The wisdom and spiritual
health which he ultimately achieves result in his kneeling
before Cordelia. How does Shakespeare want us to
think of Cordelia?
She is conceived as a Christ-like figure. This is indi-
cated by words applied to her by other characters and by
words she herself speaks.
It is a feature of Shakespeare's art that he sometimes
makes a character express itself in words and phrases the
surface meaning of which, important in itself, is quite
clear—but the words and phrases chosen to express this
surface meaning have certain well-defined and widely-
accepted associations, so that, as the character speaks, it
becomes surrounded in the audience's imaginations with_
a certain atmosphere. Cordelia's grief over her father's
sufferings is thus described in 4. 3. 30-1:
There she shook
The holy water from her heavenly eyes
That clamour moistened.
1
J. Dover Wilson, The Essential Shakespeare (1937),
p. 126.

INTRODUCTION xxi
On the surface the meaning is simply that her beautiful
eyes shed tears which were caused by her truly filial
feeling. And it would be absurd to brush the surface
meaning aside as unimportant—it is the primary mean-
ing. But the words 'holy water', conjoined with the
word 'heavenly', could not but suggest to Shakespeare's
contemporary audiences a Christ-like atmosphere about
Cordelia. 'The reference is certainly to the holy water of
1
ecclesiastical usage', says Mr Bethell; and he points out
that holy water, 'being prepared with the addition of
salt, furnishes an especially appropriate conceit'. In the
next scene Cordelia says
O, dear father,
It is thy business that I go about,

echoing words of the child Christ quoted in the second
chapter of St Luke. In 4.7 she says to her father who, as
yet, cannot hear her,
and wast thou fain> poor father,
To hovel thee with swine and rogues forlorn,
In short and musty straw?
No doubt Shakespeare has in memory the line in Higgins
in which Cordila, contrasting her earlier life of prosperity
with her subsequent experience in prison, uses the words
From dainty beds of down, to be of straw full fain.

But surely he also has in mind the story of the Prodigal
Son who, according to one version, 'wolde faine have
3
e
filled his bellie with y huskes, that the swine ate'. The
Prodigal returned to his father and declared that he was
1
Shakespeare and the Popular Dramatic Tradition (1944),
p. 59.
* Quoted from The Newe Testament (Geneva, 1560). So
also The Bible...Imprinted at London by the Deputies of
Christopher Barker...1594—'And he woulde faine have
filled his bellie with the huskes, that the swine ate....'
N.S.K.L.-Z

xxii KING LEAR
no longer worthy to be called his son. In essentially the
same way Lear kneels before Cordelia—the parent and
child roles are reversed. The Prodigal's father symbolizes
the Divine. Once more Shakespeare invests Cordelia
with an aura of Christian purity. In the same scene, a
moment or two later, Lear comes to consciousness and
speaks to Cordelia—
Thou art a soul in bliss, but I am bound
Upon a wheel of fire...,

suggesting the Christian notions of Heaven and Purga-
tory. And this Christ-like nature of Cordelia is suggested
not only in the later stages of the play, but at the start as
well—by the same method of the use of evocative words.
Mr Bethell (to whom, as to Professor Heilman, 1 I am
greatly indebted) quotes words spoken by the King of
i
i
France in . . France cannot think that Cordelia has
been guilty of any heinous offence,
which to believe of her
Must be a faith that reason without miracle
Should never plant in me.

The surface meaning is plain enough, and of course
France is not consciously speaking in Christian terms.
But Shakespeare's contemporary audiences could not
but mark the suggestive significance of the juxtaposition
of words like 'believe', 'faith', 'miracle'. What Lear
rejects at the start is the truth and wisdom that Chris-
tianity cherishes: by the end, through suffering, he has
come to see the value of that truth and wisdom. The play
is, of course, set in pre-Christian times; there is no overt
reference to Christianity, and there is indeed only one
'
reference (5. 3. 17) to God' in the singular (and this
may be a piece of Shakespearian carelessness). The point
1
See his book This Great Stage: Image and Structure in
'King Lear' (1948).

INTRODUCTION xxiii
is that this is 'a Christian play about a pagan world'. 1
Setting the scene in an age-old pagan time, Shakespeare
traces the progress of a foolish man towards the attain-
ment of wisdom—and the wisdom Shakespeare has in
mind is the kind of wisdom he himself values most
highly. That is the wisdom of Christianity. In ana-
chronistically echoing words of Holy Writ, and words
of particular significance in Christianity, Shakespeare
knows what he is doing. He is virtually saying—this is
the kind of wisdom that all men, at all times, should
strive to attain. He means this play to be of universal
significance; it is not a period piece.
Cordelia symbolizes a set of values;' but at the same
time she is a human being, a person in the play. There are
critics who feel disposed to blame her somewhat in the
first scene. Surely, they think, she is, a little too blunt—
surely her afFection for her father might have led her to
pardon his error, and to humour him a little. On her
2
stark 'Nothing, my lord' Coleridge comments —'There
is something of disgust at the ruthless hypocrisy of her
sisters, and some little faulty admixture of pride and
sullenness in Cordelia's "Nothing".' In our own day,
the late George Gordon has reproved Cordelia in
3
kindly fashion. He speaks of the barbarous idea,,
entertained by some of the characters, that 'Age is un-
necessary' : and he says, 'Even Cordelia, if I may dare to
say it, sinned a little from youth—simply from not
properly understanding the feelings—or, if you like, the
weakness—of Age She has "l'esprit geometrique",
and will not play the old man's game. "So young, my
Lord, and true", needs some interpreting. True she was,
but—oh!—so young!' This is a humane attitude,
courteously and gently expressed.
1
J. C. Maxwell, M.L.R. XLV (1950), 142.
2
I quote from Furness, note adloc; cf. Raysor, I, 60-1.
3 See his Shakespearian Comedy (1944), p. 122.

xxiv KING LEAR
Yet does it not, and still more what Coleridge hints of
pride and sullenness', misunderstand completely the
situation in which she stands, misinterpret the very
tones of her voice? When Kent protests a little later,
Thy youngest daughter does not love thee least}
Nor are those empty hearted whose low sounds
Reverb no hollowness,
he is clearly comparing the subdued, almost whispered,
tones of Cordelia's reply to Lear with the brazen speeches
of her sisters. For no one can suppose that she liked
answering her father in this way or did not realize that
she was putting him to shame. The agony was that she
had to: he left her no choice. She was of course dis-
gusted by Goneril and Regan's hypocrisy but not
surprised: she knew them well. What afflicted her was
that the father to whom she was devoted asked her to sell
her soul, to purchase a kingdom by coining the love she
bore him into words of flattery so as to outbid her sisters.
I will not praise that purpose not to sell 1
declared her creator finding himself in a predicament
somewhat similar though, we may guess, far less dis-
tressing. For she was a young girl, the youngest of three
daughters in an age when all unmarried daughters were
little more than bond-slaves of their fathers; her father,
who had never known his will thwarted, sat in majesty
upon his throne; and she had to make her declaration,
before the whole court. And so when she heard the
outrageous question
What can you say to draw
A third more opulent than your sisters?
even though she knew it was coming, what other possible
reply could she give than a low voiced 'Nothing' ? She
could not heave her heart into her mouth.
1
Sonnet 21,1. 14.

I N T R O D U C T I O N xxv
But the warmth of the love she was unable to express
might have been felt had Lear the open heart to detect it.
Good my lord,
You have begot me, bred me, loved me. I
Return those duties back as are right fit,
Obey you, love you, and most honour you.

The balance between 'begot—bred—loved' and 'obey
-—love—honour' is no mere rhetorical trick. I cannot
think that any intelligent authority on prosody, com-
menting on the last of these lines, a very beautiful line,
could fail to note the deep emotion it evinces. The efFect
of its component parts is cumulative. 'Obey you' is
succeeded by a slight pause: 'love you' is succeeded by
a slight pause: 'and most honour you' is in its second
and third syllables long drawn out, intensely, and so
honestly! Her dwelling on 'most', disturbing the strict
parallelism of verbs noted a moment ago, is significant.
If Lear cannot hear the difference between this and the
spurious showmanship of Goneril and Regan, it is he,
and not Cordelia, who is at fault. And the whole design
of the play bears this out. On both the naturalistic and
the symbolic level Cordelia stands vindicated at the start
as at the end.
Truth speaks with 'a still small voice*,
whose low sounds
Reverb no hollowness.

And at the end of the play Lear tells us:

her voice was ever soft,
Gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman.

The verbal echo is significant. After education by
suffering, Lear can see that what he rejected was the last
thing in the world that he should have rejected. In
Cordelia there is nowhere any fault.

xxvi KING LEAR


IV. Kent
In I. I Cordelia knows that Lear is rejecting the true and
accepting the false. She also knows, or at least clearly
suspects, that what he is doing will in all probability turn
out to his disadvantage as regards his own worldly
prosperity and physical welfare. To her sisters she says,
'I know you what you are'. If she stood within her
father's favour she 'would prefer him to a better place*.
'Love well our father,' she tells them;

To your professed bosoms I commit him.

The implication in 'professed' is clear.
Now the Earl of Kent shows the same two-sided
awareness of Lear's folly. He knows that Lear's youngest
daughter does not love him least. He knows that the
words of Goneril and Regan are hollow. He knows,
that is, that Lear, with his lack of sound judgement, is
rejecting the true and accepting the false. At the same
time he knows that Lear is being foolish on the level of
practical prudence. He begs him to 'reserve (his)
state'. Lear is running his head into a noose. Lear
threatens Kent with death. Kent retorts that he does not
fear to lose his life, 'thy safety being motive'. He knows
that Lear's 'safety' is threatened by his actions in this
first scene, and he wants Lear to be safe.
Kent's perspicacity, as regards both morality and
prudence, is similar to Cordelia's; and that we should
think of the two characters as standing for the same values
is underlined by the fact that a certain pair of anti-
thetical key-words is applied to them both in this
tremendous opening scene. Cordelia certainly speaks
with 'plainness', and Lear takes this as 'pride'. Kent
declares that, when majesty stoops to folly, 'to plainness
honour's bound', and Lear thinks that Kent shows

I N T R O D U C T I O N xxvii
'strained pride'. Both are 'plain'; Lear thinks of both
as exhibiting 'pride'. Moreover, when Lear says
Let pride, which she calls plainness, marry her,
the attentive reader pr spectator realizes that Cordelia
has never actually used the word 'plainness', whereas
Kent has! Shakespeare associates Cordelia and Kent so
closely in his mind that he can write as if he were con-
fusing them. I have spoken of Cordelia as a Christ-like
figure. Inasmuch as Kent, wrongly cast out by Lear, is
irresistibly impelled by his love to humble himself,
adopting a lowly disguise, in order to protect and help
the man who had rejected him, we may think of him too
as having a Christ-like quality.
Like Cordelia, Kent may perhaps be accused by
some of a fault in not having humoured the weakness of
age in his master. Admittedly, he speaks very directly to
Lear. Should he not have pruned his terms a little, in.
deference to the human frailty of a beloved sovereign?
I cannot believe that Shakespeare means us to think in
this way. Not only are the things that Kent says true and
wise: it is also quite clear that everything he says in this
first scene is prompted by devotion to Lear's physical, as
Well as moral and spiritual, welfare. And by the end of
the play Lear has learned that Kent was quite right in
what he said.
Just as Lear's reconciliation at the end with the
Cordelia whom he had rejected at the start is imagina-
tively emphasized by the repetition of the word 'low'
(
with reference to her voice i. 1.147; 5. 3. 273), so we
find emphasized by other verbal echoes that, through his
suffering, Lear learns the wisdom that Kent had at the
beginning. At 1. 1. 145 Kent cries out—
What -wouldst thou do, old man?
Lear is king, and Kent has always honoured him as such
(1.1.139). But, readily and properly admitting Lear's

xxviil KING LEAR
pre-eminence, Kent knows at the outset (as Lear at this
stage does not) that Lear, while king, is also man—and
old, and fallible. Much later, at 4. 7. 59 ff., in the scene
in which he tries to kneel before Cordelia, Lear says—
Pray do not mock mej
I am a very foolish fond old man,
Fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less:
And, to deal plainly,
I fear I am not in my perfect mind.
After much torture, mental and physical, he has come to
realize (what Kent knew at the start) that he is an 'old
man'. And that his echo of Kent's phrase is significant,
and no accident, is attested by his words 'And, to deal
plainly,': for in 1.1 Kent spoke with a 'plainness' which
displeased his as yet uneducated master. So did Cordelia.
And in 4. 7 Lear speaks words which by their echo
suggest to us.that he now realizes that not only Cordelia,
but also Kent, was right at the outset. 1
V. The Fool

Kent realizes that Lear's behaviour results in a condition
of topsyturvydom at the court. The normal moral order
is inverted. To succeed here one has to be false; if true,
one is ejected. Those who value the normal moral order
*will invariably find the atmosphere of this court dis-
agreeable. The state of inversion is suggested by the
pattern of Kent's words as he says (1. 1. 180)—
Freedom lives hence and banishment is here.
These words bring us to the third of the important
characters who at the start have wisdom where Lear is
foolish. This is the Fool. He first enters in 1.4, and
almost immediately we have him saying: 'Why, this
fellow has banished two on's daughters, and did the
third a blessing against his will.'
1
For the dying Kent see notes at 5. 3, 234, 280.

I N T R O D U C T I O N xxix
The Fool was not present in r. i. By making him
nevertheless echo i. i. 180, Shakespeare shows us right
away that the Fool and Kent are to be grouped together
as wise where Lear is foolish. And the Christian theme
is relevant again, for, as Professor Heilman reminds us, 1
Miss Welsford, in her book The Fool, 'stresses the
Christian quality of fool literature, and in her discussion
of the Fool in Lear she constantly refers to Christianity'.
Like Cordelia and Kent, the Fool realizes the double
nature of Lear's error. Again and again he directs
attention to both aspects of it in riddling utterances
pregnant with meaning. There are so many passages
which could be quoted to illustrate this that one hardly
knows which to choose.
On the practical level Lear has endangered his own
welfare:
He that keeps nor crust nor crumb,
Weary of all, shall want some.. (r. 4. 198-9)
Lear has given away the 'crumb' of his loaf (the bread
inside the crust), that is, the government of the kingdom
and the material resources connected with it. He wants
to keep the 'crust'—'the name and all th'addition to a
king'. But the Fool sees that, having given away the one,
Lear cannot keep the other, his daughters being what
they are. Lear has really given away both crust and
crumb, and he will starve.
Over and over again the Fool utters his wisdom with
brilliant virtuosity. His criticism of the king's folly is
sometimes hard and biting; he can be contemptuous and
derisive. Yet we always know that affectionate loyalty to
Lear is the mainspring of his being. If here, or there, he
mocks Lear in a way that may seem cruel, he is neverthe-
less always trying to teach a beloved master who has
erred and thus endangered both body and soul. And we
1
Op. cit. p. 331,

KIN G LEAR

often feel that a sense of profound sorrow underlies his
thrusting witticisms. Miss Welsford speaks of the Fool's
'tactless jokes and snatches of song' as springing 'evi-
1
dently from genuine grief'. She continues: 'The
sorrow underlying his shrewd sarcasm rises to the surface
when he interrupts Goneril's plausible scolding to give
us a sudden glimpse of the horror lurking behind an
apparently ludicrous situation'—and she quotes this
passage (with minor textual differences):

For you know, nuncle,
The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long
That it had it head bit off by it young.
So out went the candle, and we were left darkling.
(i. 4. 215-18)
Goneril and Regan, whom Lear has fostered and en-
riched, are going to destroy him in the end. The Fool
knows this long before Lear himself realizes what is
happening. The Fool is shrewd; but he is also terrified.
'Out went the candle, and we were left darkling.' Lear's
folly has produced a figurative darkness in the kingdom,
and darkness can be very frightening. Is there any
horror greater than that experienced by a child at night
if his candle goes out and he is left alone in the dark ? It
is horror of this kind that Lear's folly has brought down
upon those who love and honour him.
The Fool follows Lear out into the storm because the
wicked daughters will not harbour him—because he
loves Lear—because he wants to continue to teach him—
because he wants to comfort him (he 'labours to out-jest'
the king's 'heart-struck injuries'). But, paradoxically,
he follows him out into the storm for another reason also.
The Fool needs Lear, is totally dependent on him. No
matter how well-versed in both true morality and
Worldly wisdom, no matter how hard-boiled, this com-
1
See her book The fool (1935), p. 254.

INTRODUCTIO N xxxi
plex character is also, paradoxically, a virtual child who,
in a world that he sees as hostile to him and with which he
cannot grapple By himself, is afraid to be left alone by
'nuncle'. There is a pathetic urgency in his cry, 'Nuncle
Lear, nuncle Lear! Tarry; take the fool with thee*
(i. 4. 316). He does not want to be left alone in the
dark. Like a child, he depends entirely on the trusted
guardian who loves him but sometimes punishes him.
What a remarkable character this Fool is!—at once
acutely sane and pathetically childish. He is, of course,
a Shakespearian development of a well-enough known
character-type in Elizabethan and Jacobean literature—'
the 'licensed' court fool. But what a transformation
Shakespeare makes here! And if it is difficult for us,
thinking naturalistically, to accept the notion of a
childish half-wit teaching a king true values, may we not
think that Shakespeare wants us to remember the song of
the Psalmist, who, addressing his God, says 'Out of the
mouths of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained
strength because of thine enemies, that thou mightest still
the enemy and the avenger'?
He is a 'wise fool'; but we are not necessarily meant
to take everything he says as right. It is risky, as Pro-
fessor Danby does, to speak of the limitations of the
1
Fool's wisdom. Thus when, on his first appearance, he
gibes at Kent as foolish 'for taking one's part that's out
of favour', he is using worldly wisdom to point o.ut to
Lear how dangerous it has now become to lend him any
service. Again: when, in the midst of the storm, he
begs Lear to go back indoors and ask blessing of his
daughters, he is offering common-sense advice: but at
the same time emphasizing the hopelessness of Lear's
position, since to take the advice is now not only out of
the question but wrong, since it would mean submitting
1
See his Shakespeare's Doctrine of Nature: a Study of
'King Lear' (1949), pp. 102-13, especially pp. 109-10.

xxxii K I N G LEAR
to evil, spiritual degradation. Thus rather than saying
the Fool's wisdom has its limitations, it would be more
accurate to say that the Fool's task is to try to show the
king that he has been guilty of error in two quite separate
categories, material and spiritual. His criticism oscillates
from the one to the other. And one cannot avoid the
impression that the Fool knows well enough that the one
category is, sub specie aeternitatis, more important than
the other.
The Fool is Lear's tutor. But at the end of 3. 6, with
the storm raging, the Fool vanishes from our sight for
ever. Shakespeare simply drops him. Why ?
Consider the dialogue at this point. Lear has gone mad,
and, towards the end of 3. 6—that tremendous scene—
he is asked by Kent to rest. 'Make no noise,' he replies,
'Make no noise; draw the curtains. So, so; we'll go to
supper i'th'morning.' But the Fool then utters his very
last words:
And I'll go to bed at noon.

In his insanity Lear says something which is absurd.
One goes to supper in the evening, not in the morning.
Lear, in his madness, has inverted ridiculously. That is
one significance. But there is another as well. Lear
inverts. Now the Fool, his tutor, has been continually
uttering what we may call inversion-statements, enig-
matically or ironically emphasizing the foolishness of
what Lear has done. Lear is as one who bears his ass over
the dirt: he makes daughters into mothers—the father
gives the rod into the hands of his children and takes
down his own breeches (an inversion not only ludicrous
but obscene). The Fool's inversion-utterances are an
essential symptom of his wisdom. But now, tortured and
driven mad by the storm, Lear himself can give us an
inversion-phrase—'We'll go to supper i'th'morning'.
He is now able to speak in an idiom that has been used

INTRODUCTIO N xxxiii
by the Fool all along. The Fool can do no more now
than add a cap to Lear's own remark. In the dramatic
design, the tutor-Fool is no longer required; and Shake-
speare boldly dispenses with him. The royal pupil has
not learned fully yet—he has a long way to go: but one
of his teachers has now succeeded, up to a point; is no
longer dramatically necessary; and must be dropped—
for, in a drama so intense as this one, the presence of an
otiose character would handicap the author. And in the
theatre—or in the study, as we read, enthralled, at top
speed—the absence of the Fool in the later stages of the
play is hardly noticed, if at all. Our minds are on other
things. It is a stroke of dramatic economy.


VI. Lear's Suffering
When Cordelia justifies her answer to her father in. 1.1
she may be said to be trying to teach him. The out-
spoken Kent tries to teach him. The Fool is continually
trying to teach him. But his most effective teacher is
Suffering.
Through suffering, Lear learns wisdom and attains
salvation. He learns to be patient under affliction. He
learns that, though king, he is also man. He learns
repentance, humility, and charitable fellow-feeling with,
even the lowest of distressed humanity.
He learns his lessons slowly. Often, in the process, he
advances and then relapses. Thus, at 1.1. i he knows
nothing of patience. By 2. 4. 267 he is able to cry—
You heavens, give me patience—patience I need!

But he immediately goes on to reject the idea of patience,
and, apostrophizing the gods, says—
If it be you that stirs these daughters' hearts
Against their father, fool me not so much
To bear it tamely} touch me with noble anger.

xxxiv K I N G LEAR
And in a second or two he is raving furiously—and
impotently. At 3. 2. 35 he says, 'No, I will be the
pattern of all patience.' The lesson is not yet fully
learned. He is still going to behave extravagantly. And
at 3. 6. 57 Kent has to reprove him, affectionately—
Sir, where is the patience now
That you so oft have boasted to retain?
The play has reached a late stage when the mad Lear
says to the blinded Gloucester, 'Thou must be patient'
(4.6.177). By now the lesson has been sufficiently well
learned for him to be able to preach it to a fellow-
sufferer. His feet are on the right road.
The idea of the attainment of spiritual health through
the patient endurance of suffering is both Stoic and
Christian. It has been suggested that there are Stoic
elements in this play. Thus Professor Oscar James
Campbell 1 speaks of Lear as 'a completely unstoical
man' who 'is converted to a state of mind which is a
mixture of Stoic insight and Christian humility'.
'Furthermore,' he adds, 'the methods by which his
conversion and redemption are accomplished are similar
to those advocated by the great Stoic philosophers.' But
in the end Professor Campbell concludes that 'Lear's
purgatorial experiences result in a form of salvation more
Christian than Stoical'. Lear's real redemption comes
about 'when he awakens from the delusions of his
frenzied mind to discover Cordelia and her unselfish
enduring love'. The critic goes on:.

The mere sight of her kills 'the great rage' in him, the
unstoical emotional turmoil from which all his sins and
suffering have sprung. Now he is calmly receptive to the
healing power of Christian love. For he has not arrived at
utter indifference to external events, at that complete
1
See his article 'The Salvation of Lear' in The Journal
of English Literary History, XV (June 1948), 93-109.

INTRODUCTION xxxv
freedom from emotion, the disease of the intellect, which
produces true stoic content. On the contrary Lear finds
his peace in an active emotion—in all-absorbing love. That
it is which at last renders him independent of circumstance.

One may be tempted to wonder whether Professor
Campbell need have brought in Stoicism at all. Pro-
1
fessor John F. Danby suggests that 'what has often been
taken for Stoicism in Shakespeare is not Stoicism at all
but rather the orthodox teaching on Christian Patience'.
Stoic patience is, as Professor Danby states, 'an impassive
withstanding of all that conflicts with Reason. At best it
is indifference, at worst unfeelingness.' Christian
patience is 'based on faith and suffering charity. It
expresses the sum of the Christian virtues. Its supreme
example is the activity of Christ dying on the Cross.'
Stoic patience eliminates feeling; Christian patience
essentially involves feeling. At the end of the play the
regenerated Lear has not become impervious to feeling;
on the contrary he has become capable of a self-abnega-
tion which springs from an awareness of what love and
charity really are.
As, under his grievous afflictions, Lear learns how to
be patient, he learns other lessons too. And from time to
time Shakespeare—surely deliberately—reminds us of
Christian truth. Coming to realize how terribly wrong
he had been in his past life, Lear is able to say, at 4.6.96 ff.
They flattered me like a dog, and told me I had the white
hairs in my beard ere the black ones were there. To say 'ay'
and 'no' to everything that I said! 'Ay,' and 'no' too,
was no good divinity.
It was not good theology, because—I quote Professor
Muir's note—'it went against the biblical injunction,
James, ch. v, verse 12: "But let your yea be yea; and
1
See his article 'King Lear and Christian Patience' in
The Cambridge Journal, 1, no. 5 (February 1948), 305-20.

xxxvi KING LEAR
your nay, nay, lest ye fall into condemnation.'" The
sense of common humanity that Lear acquires expresses
itself in a rebuke uttered to an imaginary beadle thrashing
an imaginary whore:
Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand!
Why dost thou lash that whore ? Strip thy own back}
Thou hotly lusts to use her in that kind
For which thou whipp'st her. (4. 6. 159-62)

"We cannot hear or read these words without recalling
the words of Christ to those who spoke to him of how,
according to the law, the woman taken in adultery
'
should be stoned: He that is without sin among
you, let him first cast a stone at her' (St John viii, 7);
and we remember also the first verse of the second
chapter of the Epistle to the Romans—'Therefore
thou art inexcusable, O man, whosoever thou art
that judgest: for wherein thou judgest another, thou
condemnest thyself; for thou that judgest doest the
same things.'
Lear's sufferings reach their climax in the storm, and
the storm is the heart of the play. Its faint beginnings are
to be found in the old play of Leir. Here a 'Messenger
or murtherer' is instructed by Ragan to kill Leir and
Perillus (=Kent). He is about to do so. Leir and
Perillus try to dissuade him. Perillus describes to him
the pains of hell, and at that moment 'it thunders'. The
messenger 'quakes, and lets fall the Dagger'. Leir and
Perillus are saved. In the source-play, then, we have
thunder and lightning which would appear to be the
voice of the Divine intervening to save Leir and his
friend: on a lower level, it serves as a mechanical device
to keep alive a hero destined to survive and to repossess
his crown. This thunder and lightning Shakespeare
transforms into his own mighty tempest, which has
much more remarkable dramatic functions. The dis-

I N T R O D U C T I O N xxxvu
harmony that has been produced in the world of men is
reflected in the world of the physical elements. The
turmoil in the mind of Lear himself is reflected in the
world of the physical elements. And the storm too is
Lear's tutor.
Lear's journey towards enlightenment begins before
the storm. But it is not until his sufferings have reached
a climax in the storm, when he is driven insane, that we
feel really confident that he is ultimately going to reach
the spiritual goal. This is a great central paradox, rightly
stressed by Professor Heilman. At the start Lear was,
literally speaking, sane; but his folly was great enough
to be spoken of by Kent as 'madness'—'Be Kent un-
(
mannerly when Lear is mad' i. I. 144-5). But when
he goes completely mad in the storm he is certainly on
the way to true wisdom; he can speak 'reason in mad-
ness'. ' Reason in Madness' is the title of one of Professor
Heilman's most important chapters. But perhaps the
phrase should be slightly modified.
It is an amazing moment when Lear, in his madness,
expresses his lately acquired awareness of the humanity
common to himself and to the lowest of the low. At
3.4.106-9; hailing 'poor Tom' as 'the thing itself he
continues:
Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare,
forked animal as thou art. Off, off, you lendings! Come,
unbutton here!

And he begins to tear offhis clothes, an action that symbo-
lizes part of his new-found wisdom. But there is another
way of looking at it. 'Prithee, nuncle, be contented,'
says the Fool; "tis a naughty night to swim in!'—words
which must surely raise a nervous titter in the theatre.
There is an element of grotesque comedy about it—a
point well made by Professor Wilson Knight. 1 If Lear's

See The Wheel of fire (1930)51937 reprint, pp. 175 ff.

xxxviii KING LEAR
conduct here indicates that he has learned an important
lesson, it is also, from another point of view, crazy. And
once again we must mention a significant verbal echo.
Attention has been drawn to it by Professor Kirsch-
1
baum. At the end of the play we have one of the most
poignant episodes ever written by Shakespeare or anyone
else. Lear has the dead Cordelia in his arms. 'Thou'lt
come no more,' he says,—
Never, never, never, never, never.
And then he turns to a bystander—
Pray you, undo this button. Thank you, sir.
He feels suffocated, and needs help—he cannot undo the
button at his throat and loosen his clothing. We are
touched by the gentle courtesy of his words. This is a
tone of which he was incapable at the start. Now 'undo
this button' echoes the 'Come, unbutton here!' which
he shouted out in the storm (3.4. 109). At the later
point Shakespeare deliberately reminds us of the earlier
point, and enables us to make a contrast. When he cries
'Come, unbutton here!' Lear has attained a knowledge
of truth, but he is frenzied and is, moreover, dramatizing
himself. When he says 'Pray you, undo this button.
Thank you, sir', he has the knowledge of the same truth,
but he is quiet and humble. Thus Shakespeare subtly
suggests to us that Lear learns full wisdom, comes to full
spiritual regeneration, not in madness but through mad-
ness. The lessons he learns in the storm have their full
effect only when he regains his sanity, towards the end.


VII. The Sub-Plot
This play, unlike Shakespeare's other tragedies, has a
fully-developed sub-plot; and the sub-plot furnishes, not
a contrast with the main plot, but a parallel to it. As if to
1
Review of English Studies, xxv (1949), 153-4.

I N T R O D U C T I O N xxxk
indicate at the outset that this is going to be so, Shake-
speare strikingly echoes near the beginning of the sub-
plot a word that has been impressively used near the
beginning of the main plot. The word 'nothing' links the
two at the start, suggesting that they are, as it were,
going to be in the same key. In Lear's interrogation of
Cordelia the word 'nothing' is emphasized unforget-
i
ably. In . 2, when Gloucester enters to the villainous
Edmund, we have this:
Gloucester. What paper were you reading?
Edmund. Nothing, my lord.
Gloucester. No? What needed then that terrible dispatch
of it into your pocket? The quality of nothing hath not
such need to hide itself. Let's see. Come, if it be nothing, I
shall not need spectacles.
Not only is this connected with I. i by means of
'nothing'. We also remember how in 1.1 Kent adjured
Lear to 'see better'. Ocular vision symbolizes moral
vision. 1 Lear and Gloucester are both, at the start,
morally and spiritually blind. Lear needs to 'see
better'; Gloucester does indeed 'need spectacles'.
The two plots reinforce each other in a remarkable
manner. Lear lacks sound judgement at the start; so
does Gloucester. Lear rejects the loving daughter and
cleaves to the false ones; Gloucester rejects the loving
son and cleaves to the false one. Both fathers bring dire
suffering on themselves through their own folly. At the
same time, both are the victims of dynamic evil, existing
outside themselves, and bringing itself to bear upon,
them. Both are assisted in their sufferings by those whom
they have wronged, Edgar being as full of loving forgive-
ness as Kent and Cordelia are. Both Lear and Glou-
cester learn wisdom through suffering, and achieve
1
See Heilman, op. cit. p. 25 and passim on 'the sight
pattern*.

xl KIN G LEAR
spiritual salvation. The wisdom that each learns is
essentially the same. Like Lear, Gloucester comes to
sympathize with the downtrodden, who are as much
human as the rich and powerful are. Gloucester in his
misery cries out to the heavens—
Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man,
That slaves your ordinance, that will not see
Because he does not feel, feel your power quickly;
So distribution should undo excess,
And each man have enough. (4. i. 66 ff.)
This reminds us of Lear's words in the storm—
Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are,
.That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
.How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them
And show the heavens more just. (3. 4. 28 ff.)
We note the parallel between Gloucester's 'superfluous'
and Lear's 'superflux'. Again: like Lear, Gloucester in
his torment learns the value of patience. He resolves on
suicide, and asks 'Tom o' Bedlam' to conduct him to a
cliff-top. For Gloucester's own good, Edgar deceives
him. Then Edgar describes to Gloucester, fictitiously,
how he—Edgar—had from below watched Gloucester
with a fiend beside him on the cliff. The suggestion in
this invention is that Gloucester was being tempted to
suicide by a devil of hell (as indeed, figuratively, we may
say he was—it working within his mind). The gods have
preserved Gloucester. So Edgar tells him; and Glou-
cester accepts this, and resolves henceforth to 'bear
affliction'. Through Edgar's benign deception Glou-
cester's soul is rescued. And Shakespeare would seem to
be asking us to think in terms of Christianity: for we can

INTRODUCTION xli
hardly help recalling the temptation of Christ by the
Devil-
Then the devil taketh him up into the holy city, and setteth
him on a pinnacle of the temple.
And saith unto him, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself
down....
Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high
mountain.... (St Matthew iv. $-6, 8)
The biblical circumstances are quite different from those
of Lear. It is no case of close parallelism. Nevertheless,
the mere fact that, in a play with so many other scriptural
references, Edgar's fiction is of Gloucester being
tempted by a fiend to cast himself down from a height
to his destruction, makes us conscious of a Christian
atmosphere enveloping Gloucester as he learns patience.
It is certainly Christian, not Stoic, patience that he
learns; for he dies a man who assuredly has not abrogated
emotion- Bu( . ^ flawed hear t
(Alack, too weak the conflict to support)
'Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief,
Burst smilingly. (5. 3. 195-8)
There are similarities between the story of Gloucester
and that of Lear. There are also obvious differences.
Thus, for instance, the fact that Edmund exists at all is
a result of sin in Gloucester—and his jesting about it in
the opening passage of the play may well prejudice some
against him. Now in his book The Dream of Learning
Mr D. G. James says this (p. 93):
There is a feature of Lear's personality which has always
impressed me and which I cannot fail to feel is at the centre
of Shakespeare's intention in this play. It is the sense, which
Lear frequently conveys, that the source of his children's
evil is in himself,
we recall Lear saying, for example,
Judicious punishment! 'Twas this flesh begot
Those pelican daughters. (3. 4. 73~4)
N.S.K.L. - 3

xlii KIN G LEAR

But I cannot think that Shakespeare wants us to take
this too seriously. If Lear begot the evil daughters, and
if therefore the existence of their wickedness is his fault,
he also begot the virtuous daughter, whose moral beauty
must, by the same token, be put to his credit. I cannot
form the impression that Shakespeare wants us to
regard the play as involving an allegory in which the
good and evil elements that fight against each other in
the individual are made objective in the two types
of children. Such a contention might be defended, no
doubt: but more plausibly, surely, in the case of the
Gloucester family; for Edmund, unlike Goneril and
Regan, is illegitimate. Here is a patent difference
between the two plots. Gloucester has sinned in a way
in which Lear has not. Yet even so, I doubt if we are
meant to make too much of this delinquency in Glou-
cester. Taking the play as a whole, we cannot doubt that
Gloucester is more sinned against than sinning.
Shakespeare's management of main plot and under-
plot together is masterly. Circumstantial differences
between the two provide the interest of contrast, at the
same time as essential similarities make more emphatic
the complex 'message' of the play.
We have seen that at the start the sane Lear was really
mad, and that when he goes mad in the literal sense he
may in earnest be said to have begun to speak wisely.
Professor Heilman notes this paradox, and also the
corresponding paradox in the case of Gloucester. At the
start Gloucester could see with his eyes, but he lacked
full mental, moral, and spiritual vision. It is when he
loses his eyes, in the literal sense, that he begins to attain
this fundamental vision. The two paradoxes correspond.
And they are specifically related to each other. In I. I
Shakespeare, through Kent, presents Lear's folly in two
ways. Lear is sane, but he behaves madly; Lear has eyes,
but he is spiritually myopic. Subsequently Shakespeare

I N T R O D U C T I O N jdiii
allocates the 'sight pattern' (in Heilman's phrase) to the
Gloucester story, and the 'madness pattern' to the Lear
story. But, recalling i. i, we realize all the time that the
two amount to the same thing. And just as Lear learns
his wisdom gradually, so does Gloucester. After he has
learned patience, Gloucester is, as Professor Danby
points out, 'constantly in danger of relapse... Edgar has
to rally him:
What, in ill thoughts again ? Men must endure
Their going hence, even as their coming hither;
Ripeness is all.' (5. 2. 9-11)
Gloucester has to be reminded, even at this late stage—•
though he is in no desperate state, for he can imme-
diately reply,
And that's true too.
But he did have to be reminded.
The two plots, then, despite differences between
them which lend independent interest to each, are the
same in fundamental significance; and Shakespeare
interweaves them with powerful effect, as, for instance,
in the tremendous episode in 4. 6 where the mad Lear
encounters the blinded Gloucester near Dover.

VIII. 'Nature*
One of the most important words in the play is the word
'Nature'; and this is a drama concerning the conflict
between two opposing conceptions of what that word
means. To some of the characters 'Nature' is a benign
force, binding all created things together in their true
relationships. 'Nature' in this sense implies that each
created thing is by all others readily allowed the privi-
leges belonging to its particular position in the universal
hierarchy, while, for its own part, it readily accepts its
obligations. 'Nature' in this sense involves harmonious

jdiv K I N G L E A R
co-existence, co-operation, loyalty, affection, self-
limitation in due degree. In 'Nature' in this sense
Cordelia believes, and Kent, and Edgar. Lear and
Gloucester believe in it too. In the opening scene,
admittedly, Lear's understanding of it is imperfect, as
is shown by Cordelia when she says
Why have my sisters husbands, if they say
They love you all?

Part of Lear's initial folly is that he fails to understand all
the implications of the principle that he himself funda-
mentally values.
When, however, on his first appear ance, Edmund says
Thou, Nature, art my goddess j to thy law
My services are bound,
he is using 'Nature' in a quite different sense. To him
(and also to Goneril, Regan, and Cornwall) 'Nature' is
a force encouraging the individual to think only of the
fulfilment of his own desires—to work only for his own
success, even if that involves him in trampling others
(perhaps his own flesh and blood) under foot. The
antithesis is between a loving sense of right relationship
and a ruthless claim to spiritual isolationism—indivi-
dualism of a heartless kind.
Various critics in recent years, working indepen-
dently, have shown the cardinal importance in King
Lear of the conflict between 'the two Natures'.
Dr Edwin Muir and Professor R. C. Bald have made
contributions here, the former in a lecture delivered in
1
the University of Glasgow in 1946, the latter in an
essay published in the Adams Memorial Studies, 1948
(pp. 337 iF.). In Professor Heilman's book the chapter
entitled 'Hear, Nature, Hear' is illuminating. And a
1
'The Politics of King Lear'—The seventh W. P. Ker
Memorial Lecture (Glasgow, 1947), in pamphlet form.

INTRODUCTION xlv
vitally important study of the matter is contained in
Professor Danby's book Shakespeare's Doctrine of
Nature: a Study of ''King Lear' (1949). Relating the
play to the philosophical thought of the time, Professor
Danby speaks of 'The Benignant Nature of Bacon,
o
Hooker, and Lear', and f'The Malignant Nature of
Hobbes, Edmund, and the Wicked Daughters'. The
conception of benignant Nature, briefly described
above, agrees with and is part of the traditional 'world
picture' which Dr Tillyard, the late Theodore Spencer,
1
and others have described.
Shakespeare lived at a time which saw new concep-
tions attacking traditional conceptions, and which saw
the latter fighting back. This conflict is mirrored in
King Lear, and in other Shakespeare plays as well. In
the course of the lecture to which I have referred,
Dr Edwin Muir spoke of the Dissolution of the Mona-
steries, which was completed in 1539, and of the'
execution of Charles I, which took place in 1649. And
he spoke of how, in the interval, 'the medieval world
with its communal tradition was slowly dying, and the
modern individualist world was bringing itself to
birth'. ' Shakespeare,' he went on, 'lived in that violent
period of transition. The old world still echoed in his
ears; he was aware of the new as we are aware of the
future....' Edmund is 'the mouthpiece of the new
generation'.* Professor Danby likewise emphasizes this
antithesis in King Lear between the old values and those
of the 'new man'. He has no doubt that Shakespeare
intends us to take Edmund to be a villain. But, while
stressing this, he appears to be greatly impressed by
the sureness, the conviction, with which Shakespeare
draws Edmund, and to be impressed also by certain
1
Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (1943)}
Spencer, Shakespeare and the Nature of Man (1943).
a
Op. cit. pp. 7, 12.