Thoughts on King Lear

Lee Lady

William Shakespeare, King Lear
Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary
Philip Brockbank (editor), Players of Shakespeare, 1
Russell Jackson and Robert Smallwood (editors), Players of Shakespeare, 2
Frank Kermode (editor), Shakespeare: King Lear (critical essays)
Joseph Papp and Elizabeth Kirkland, Shakespeare Alive
Martin Holmes, Shakespeare and Burbage

Until recently, King Lear never made much sense to me. As with Hamlet, the plot doesn't really make sense and one doesn't know quite how to take it. In particular, at least in the beginning of the play it's rather hard to sort out the heroes and villains. If one knows anything at all about the play, one knows that King Lear is the victim of his two evil daughters. Yet in the beginning, the attitude of the daughters seems much more reasonable than Lear's rage.

There is something very arbitrary about the beginning of the play. Most of Shakespeare's plays begin with some precipitating event: Macbeth is wandering across the heath and comes across three weird sisters; a ghost appears at the royal castle in Elsinore. In only a few does one of the lead characters make an arbitrary decision that will start the play in motion. (Aside from Lear, All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure come to mind. And even there, it's not the lead character who makes the initial arbitrary decision.) And the things Lear decides on --- renouncing the throne, dividing the kingdom, holding the test of love --- seem like things that only happen in fairy tales. From Shakespeare's histories one knows that real kings (i.e. "real" within Shakespeare's paradigms) just don't behave that way. And they couldn't get away with it if they tried.

And Cordelia's extremely blunt and ungracious refusal to say anything about her love for her father. And Lear's disproportionate rage and his move to disinherit her. In the the beginning of the play it seems as if Shakespeare is saying to us, "Don't ask whether this makes any sense or not. This is the way it is."

(Previous accounts of the very ancient story of King Lear, found in Hollinshed (1587) and a play called The True Chronicle History of King Leir, which was Shakespeare's source for the story, provide a lot more detail which Shakespeare leaves out. The Bantam Books and Signet Books editions of King Lear quote from these sources. Since it was not all that common in Elizabethan times for plays to be published, it seems possible that Shakespeare was working from his memory of a performance of the earlier play. In any case, the earlier versions make a lot more sense than Shakespeare's does.)

So we have a fairy tale (or ancient Welsh folk tale) which goes something like this. (I am paraphrasing Shakespeare's version, not telling the story as if appears in earlier sources.)

Once upon a time there was an old king who in his younger years had been very powerful and wise. But now, realizing that old age was upon him, he decided to divide his kingdom and give the three parts to his three daughters. To this end, he asked each of his three daughters to tell him how much she loved him.

Although this is clearly a contest, Shakespeare shows Lear as already having decided on the details of the division before his daughters speak. Thus the contest seems, up until the moment that Cordelia speaks, to be a mere irrational whim on Lear's part serving no purpose at all.

The fact that we have not grown up in a monarchy and heard tales about kings and kingdoms from an early age is one of the things that makes certain aspects of the story here difficult for us to appreciate. But to Elizabethans, it would be apparent from the beginning that Lear was not acting very sensibly. (This is a very characteristic feature of fairy tales and children's stories, of course.) The predictable way for the story to proceed would be for the three parts of the kingdom to start waging war on each other.

But the story quickly takes a different turn.

The King's two elder daughters spoke of their love for him in elaborately eloquent and seemingly passionate speeches. But when it time for Cordelia to speak, she spoke with simple sincerity, saying, "Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave my heart into my mouth. I love your Majesty according to my bond [duty], no more nor less."

This answer was not at all pleasing to King Lear, and in consequence he now declared that Cordelia would now be given no share at all in his kingdom and Lear in fact banished her from the kingdom.

The King of Burgundy, who was present as one of the suitors for Cordelia's hand, now said that if King Lear persisted in denying her a share of the kingdom, then he, Burgundy, was no longer willing to marry her. However her other suitor, the King of France, stated that his love for Cordelia was so strong that he would marry her even without dowry.

To me, at least, the bluntness and in fact harshness of Cordelia's answer has always been one of the baffling things about the play. What she apparently means when she says, "I cannot heave my heart into my mouth" is that she doesn't consider that love is something which can be meaningfully proved with words. And later in the scene, she does justify herself something in these terms. (Lear has told the King of France that he has disowned Cordelia, and Cordelia wants it known that the reason for this is not any major sin on her part.)

Cordelia: I yet beseech your Majesty,
If I want [lack] that glib and oily Art
To speak and purpose not -- since what I will intend
I'll do it before I speak -- that you may make known
It is no vicious blot, murder, or foulness,
No chaste action of dishonored step,
That hath deprived me of your grace and favor,
But even for want of that for which I am richer:
A still-soliciting eye and such a tongue
That I am glad I have not, though not to have it
Hath lost me in your liking.

To paraphrase, "I've never been any good at flattery and I'm really glad I'm not, even though I've wound up displeasing you. I only know how to say what I really mean, and if you want to know my true feelings, look at what I do, not at what I say." ("Still-soliciting eye'' means one that is also begging for favors.)

This justification, in addition to being somewhat belated, seems to me scarcely adequate, since it could be interpreted as meaning, "Don't expect me to tell you that I have great love for you, because it wouldn't be true."

But basically I get the sense that Shakespeare is saying to his audience, "According to the tale, this is her response. We will just accept it as a fact without asking her reasons." Maybe he was in a hurry to get to the part of the play that interested him and maybe he assumed that the audience already knew the story well enough that he could leave out the details which are given in his source.

As soon as Lear decides to deny his youngest daughter Cordelia her portion, our expectations for the story change. By the logic of fairy tales and historical legends, it is predictable that in time Cordelia will return with her new husband the king of France who will fight to regain her share of Lear's kingdom, and in fact will probably wind up conquering the other two parts as well. (It wouldn't be a very good story if the kingdom were not reunited. It's not proper, at least within historical tales, for a kingdom to be divided.)

We start out, I believe, with Lear being a comic caricature of a king, flying into childish tantrums over causes which, although real, are disproportionate to his rages. (When Lear arrogantly asks Oswald, Goneril's servant, "Do you know who I am?" Oswald responds, "Yes, you are my lady's father." I think that to an Elizabethian audience, it would have been obvious that this is insulting answer to give to a king. The actor playing Oswald might emphasize as much with a sarcastic tone of voice. But even so, Lear's anger is disproportionate.) Furthermore, I believe that we start out with the assumption that Lear is not very intelligent, since he is unable to see through the somewhat obvious flattery by Goneril and Regan.

Lear's childish anger eventually results in his being out alone and unprotected on the heath. So basically the fairy tale is telling the story of a little boy who throws temper tantrums and eventually winds up causing himself all sorts of grief because of his uncivilized behavior. Furthermore, Lear's childish anger makes him unable to recognize his true friends and makes him vulnerable to evil people (in particular, the two older daughters) who masquerade as his friends.

In the fairy tale paradigm, Lear is the basically good person who has gone astray, who has misbehaved. His fate is to learn to mend his ways through suffering. Goneril and Reagan, on the other hand, are villains who must be punished and probably must die (as they in fact do at the end).

Now it seems to me that, thus far at least, as a fairy tale this works reasonably well. Shakespeare's task was to take this fairy tale and flesh it out into a drama in which the characters are moderately complex living people. But here's where things become difficult, because this sort of folk tale only works if the characters are simplistic stereotypes and characters in a play by Shakespeare inevitably evolve into something more complex than mere stereotypes.

In King Lear, the pivotal point in the play, as I see it, is Act 2 Scene 2. I see this scene as providing a considerable range of choices for the actresses playing Goneril and Regan. One can see these two as either dutiful (but not affectionate) daughters doing their best to deal with a father whose behavior is often no longer socially acceptable. I see them as women in their forties (although according to one of Lear's comments, they're still of childbearing age). They've devoted a large part of their lives now to striving for the social status they want, despite the handicap of somewhat inadequately ambitious husbands. Their father, King Lear, now eighty years old and often senile, is an embarrassment to them. Presumably they've had to put up with his temper tantrums and other unreasonable behavior for many years now and it's somewhat understandable that they are sick and tired of it. (In the earlier play which Shakespeare used as his source, the daughters were younger --- in their twenties at most --- and more obviously evil from the beginning. They hated Cordelia for being their father's pet and in fact plotted to poison her.) Taking away their fathers hundred retainers certainly reduces his status from that of a king to that of an aged dependent. But one can see this as somewhat analogous to taking away the driving license of an elderly father in today's world when he is no longer capable of driving safely.

On the other hand, Goneril and Regan can be played as ungrateful bitches, and certainly this is the most obvious line to take at the end of the scene when they lock Lear out of the castle into the storm.

But before Lear rushes out into the storm, in Act 2 Scene 2, a sort of comic bargaining takes place. The interchange is too long to quote in detail, but, to summarize, Goneril has said that that, contrary to her commitment, she is willing to allow Lear to have only fifty knights, not a hundred. Lear says, "Well, I and my hundred knights can stay with Regan."

To which Regan says, "Not so fast there! Fifty would be plenty for you. In fact, now that I think of it, twenty-five is the most I'll let you have."

Lear (where I continue to paraphrase): "The hell with you then. I'll go back to Goneril. At least shell let me have fifty. That shows she loves me twice as much as you do."  [How can anyone not realize what a comic figure Lear is?]

Goneril: "What do you need even twenty-five for? We've got plenty of servants in the house already. Why should you need more than five?"

Regan: "Why do you need any servants at all?"

At this point, Lear goes into a complete rage. The interchange may not be completely funny, but the basic structure and tempo here has a definitely comedic quality to it.

And Lear's ensuing self-pitying rage is certainly comic.

Lear: You Heavens, give me the patience, patience I need;
You see me here a poor old man,
As full of grief as age, wretched in both;
If it be you [Heaven] that stirs these daughters hearts
Against their father, fool me not so much
To bear it tamely; touch me with noble anger,
And let not womens weapons, water drops,
Stain my mans cheeks. No, you unnatural hags,
I will have such revenges on you both
That all the world shall. I will do such things,
What they are yet I know not, but they shall be
The terrors of the earth! You think I'll weep;
No, I'll not weep.  I have full cause of weeping,
But this heart shall break into a hundred thousand flaws
Or ere I'll weep. Oh, Fool, I shall go mad.

Lear certainly has a valid complaint. His status as king certainly deserves a retinue of a certain size, although perhaps not a hundred. But I have to say that at this point, my sympathies are with Goneril and Regan. Lear is one of those people who you just can't have a rational conversation with. He's the aging parent from hell, quickly alternating between playing the martyr, pretending to have a flattering love ("No, Regan, thou shalt never have my curse. Thine eyes do comfort and not burn. 'Tis not in thee to begrudge my pleasures, etc."), and being intolerably abusive. When we see this sort of thing in a sitcom, we know it's funny.

Of course Shakespeare offers the actor playing Lear a number of choices. It's a question of whether one wants to produce a piece of entertainment that people will actually enjoy and be able to relate to their personal lives, or a remote and supposedly deeply profound cultural experience that people attend out of a sense of obligation. Olivier in his 1984 television film chose to emphasize the comic aspects of the character.

For the moment, Shakespeare is still within the traditional logic of folk tales (or, for that matter, children's stories). Lear, having misbehaved so badly, must now suffer so that he can come to appreciate the love of his good daughter Cordelia. Then once he has learned the error of his ways, Cordelia and her husband the King of France will come to rescue him. Then the story will end, with the understanding that for the rest of his days, Lear will be a changed man and a loving father.

But there comes a point in most Shakespeare plays, I believe, where the characters have grown to such an extent that it is no longer possible to cram them into the pre-assigned plot. There is a point where the play goes off the rails, the plot Shakespeare is working from is no longer adequate, and Shakespeare has to simply put his characters together in the given situation and then see what they do. This is the point where the characters and play start to really come to life.

Fairly clearly Shakespeare's method of working was to start with a basic plot, usually taken from some pre-existing story, and then he would start from the beginning of his play and write to the end. And when he got caught up in the scene he was he was working on, he would, at his best moments, get so fascinated by what was going on in that scene that he would, at least to a large extent, forget about the overall direction of the play. By the time he was finished with that scene, both the characters and the overall thrust of the play would often have changed from what they were before, and Shakespeare would continue the play from the new basis. A modern writer, even before the advent of word processing, would have then gone back and revised the beginning to preserve a sense of coherence and consistency for the work as a whole. Shakespeare apparently didn't do this. (He is reported to have bragged that he never crossed out a line once written.) This is one of the things that make his best plays so alive. They insist in wandering off in their own direction rather than following the game plan.

[ Stephen King, in his book On Writing, recommends that writers think in terms of situation rather than plot. King says, "I believe that plotting and the spontaneity of real creation aren't compatible. I want you to understand that my belief about the making of stories is that they pretty much make themselves.''  He goes on (about a page later),

I want to put a group of characters (perhaps a pair; perhaps even just one) in some sort of predicament and then watch them try to work themselves free. My job isn't to help them to work themselves free, or manipulate them to safety --- those are jobs which require the use of that noisy jackhammer called plot --- but to watch what happens and then write it down.

This is what happens in Act 3 of King Lear. Shakespeare, as always in his best plays, has now come to a situation that utterly fascinates him and for the moment he loses interest in the plot logic of his overall story. It seems clear that in almost all the scenes involving Lear in Act 3, Shakespeare simply put Lear, the Fool, Kent, Poor Tom, and eventually Gloucester together, and let them do whatever they wanted.

At the beginning of Act 3, in a rage, Lear has rushed out of Gloucester's castle into the storm. As mentioned above, his retinue of one hundred knights has now somehow completely evaporated and he is left with only Kent. (What happens to the knights is a mystery. The argument in Gloucester's castle seems to indicate that he still has the full hundred knights at that point. And then later, in Act 3 Scene 7 Oswald says that thirty-five or thirty-six of Lear's knights have rushed to Dover to join him, along with some of his other attendants. But none of them were around during the storm.) Having inflicted his anger on almost everyone else in the play, Lear now directs it to the storm, in one of Shakespeare's most famous passages.

Lear: Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks; rage, blow
your cataracts; and hurricanes, spout
Till you have drenched our steeples; drown the cocks,
You sulphrous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-curriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity of world,
Crack nature's molds, all germains spill at once
That makes ingrateful man.

To see this as Shakespeare envisioned it, you have to imagine the Shakespearean stage: a mere platform, with one side against the back of the room and the audience thronging around the other three sides. No curtain, very little scenery, and no spotlights. The actors are wearing minimal costumes. On this stage, I believe that this cantankerous old man shouting angrily at the storm is definitely a comic figure. And as if this were not already funny enough, he now starts complaining to the storm about Goneril and Regan and complaining that the storm is siding with his daughters against him.

Lear: I tax not you, Elements, with unkindness;
I never gave you kingdom, called you children; you owe me
No subscription. Then let fall
Your most horrible pleasure. Here I stand your slave,
A poor, infirm, weak, and despis'd old man.
But yet I call you servile ministers,
That will with two pernicious daughters join
Your high-engendered batailles gainst a head
So old and foul as this. Oh ho! 'Tis foul.

I think that one of the things that makes Shakespeare, at this best moments, so powerful is his bravery in being willing to take his plays, as here, into the realm of absurdity.

Realism in a production of King Lear completely changes the nature of the play, because as soon as we see an actual storm, with Lear suffering, then the humor here becomes impossible.

The comedy continues (as I see it) as Lear becomes completely mad. It seems that for Shakespeare, insanity was always comic, whether the pretend insanity of Hamlet or the real insanity of Ophelia and Lear. In my opinion, one of Lear's funniest lines in the whole play is in Act 3 Scene 2, where he says, "I am a man more sinned against than sinning."  What exactly are the sins that have been committed against Lear? The fact that his daughters won't allow him to keep his hundred knights. And the fact that after he rushed out into the storm they didn't come chasing after him. (Well, in fact they locked the door against him, Which was admittedly a pretty evil thing to do.) Plus the fact that both Goneril and Regan have both been blatantly disrespectful to him in several ways. And disrespect to royalty was a more serious offense than we can easily appreciate. Still, I find it hard to sympathize with Lear's claims that he has been mistreated.

When Poor Tom (i.e. Edgar) arrives, Lear keeps insisting that Poor Tom's misfortune must be due to mistreatment by his daughters, even though Kent keeps trying to point out that Poor Tom has no daughters.

According to the plot, Poor Tom is Edgar in disguise for fear of his life. Usually the pleasure a character in disguise adds to a play is an ironic one of being able to look at the actor and see both characters at once, the "real" one and the disguise. The audience recognizes who the character really is, but the other characters in the play do not. But in Poor Tom, there is nothing that can be identified as Edgar. For practical purposes, Poor Tom is a completely new character in the play --- a second Fool.

Critics have wondered why Edgar remains disguised long after he joins Lear and disguise is no longer essential. This is the sort of question that only occurs to critics. The answer is simply that Shakespeare at this point in the play needs Poor Tom and for the moment doesn't have any need at all for Edgar (who, unliked Poor Tom, is a pretty boring and not very bright character in any case).

Edgar, after all, is not a real person. Like all fictional characters, he's pretend. He doesn't actually have motivations for his actions, he merely offers the audience (and reader) the illusion of motivation. And the audience isn't bothered by the lack of motivation for Edgar's continued disguise because they are too interested in Poor Tom to think about the question. (In a review of a more recent book or movie, the lack of motivation would be cited as a defect in craftsmanship: "Shakespeare fails to provide the audience/reader with a plausible motivation for Edgar continuing to pretend to be Poor Tom even after he is among friends with whom he is safe." In the case of Shakespeare, critics generally don't do this, first because Shakespeare is considered sacred, and second before four centuries of reading and performing the plays show that this is not a significant defect. Instead, critics work from a pseudo-syllogism, where the first two premises are: "Fictional characters must have plausible motivation for their behavior" and "Shakespeare did not screw up." From these two premises they deduce the conclusion, "Edgar actually does have a motivation for continuing his disguise, and it's up to us as critics to figure out what it is.")

Finally in Act 3 we get to the famous and wonderful mock trial scene, where Lear, the Fool, and Poor Tom all compete in zaniness. This is the sort of scene that a writer can never plan in advance. A scene like this can only come about when a writer is willing to let his characters tell him what is going to happen next.

(Another thing to remember is that Shakespeare was not only a playwright, but also the director and producer. When he created a play, he was not thinking of mere words but imagining exactly how he would go about staging everything, who the actors were, where there would be a song or dance or other piece of entertainment. In this respect, I think he was much more like a writer/comedian for Saturday Night Live or a writer for a sitcom than a "serious'' Broadway playwright. It seems to me possible that the fact that Shakespeare was thinking about the staging as he was writing was actually one of the things the helped him imagine such wonderful scenes.)

If one does not perceive the fact that Lear is in some ways a very comic character, then the contribution of the Fool to the play becomes rather puzzling. In fact, the Fool seems to be one of the most popular topics for critics writing on Lear.

Shakespeare was, as usual, writing an entertainment, and the number one purpose of the Fool is to be funny. Unfortunately, most critics and Shakespearean actors seem to have a tin ear (or tin voice, in the case of the actors) when it comes to comedy.

Some critics notice the vaudeville humor in most of Shakespeare's plays only to deplore it. And it is understandable, in a way, that we want to primarily direct attention to those qualities in Shakespeare which make him exceptional rather than those which he has in common with comedians for, apparently, at least the part four centuries. (In fact, we can be greateful to Shakespeare for recording some of the humor which in other times was not considered worth writing down, especially because it comes across rather flat in written form.) But if you ignore one component of a play, then you don't see the totality of what the play is.

To me it is apparent from reading Shakespeare's texts (and watching them performed, even when the actors completely flub the comedy) that Shakespeare loved writing comic patter and could write it very fast. (It reminds me of a comment by one of my best writing teachers, Lynne Sharon Shwartz, "I could write this sort of thing by the yard,'' although she wasn't talking about comic dialogue.) It is an intrinsic part of almost all of his plays and I believe that one cannot correctly understand what he intended these plays to be like if one ignores the humor.

There are lots of ways of playing the Fool in King Lear. But some of his lines would have, with slight adjustment for rhythm and style, worked perfectly well for Groucho Marx. For instance the following (Act 1, Scene 5), where I have very slightly modernized the language:

Fool: Can you tell me how an oyster makes his shell?

Lear: No, I can't.

Fool: I can't either. But I can tell you why a snail has a house.

Lear: Why is that?

Fool: Why, to have something to put his head in. Not to give it away to his daughters and leave his horns out in the cold.

Of course the role of the Fool in King Lear, as in many of Shakespeare's plays, goes far beyond merely being funny. As George Orwell explains it,

The Fool is integral to the play. He acts not only as a sort of chorus, making the central situation clear by commenting on it more intelligently than the other characters, but as a foil to Lear's frenzies. His jokes, riddles, and scraps of rhyme, and his endless digs at Lear's high-minded folly, are like a trickle of sanity running through the play, a reminder that somewhere or other in spite of the injustices, cruelties, intrigues, deceptions and misunderstandings that are being enacted here, life is going on much as usual.

The thing is, though, that this only really works if the Fool is funny. If the Fool is played as being serious rather than a comedian (as in the film by Peter Brook starring Paul Scofield) then he drags the play down, making it ponderous.

But if the fool is played as a comedian and it is not realized that Lear is also a comic figure, then one can easily wind up with two characters who don't seem to belong in the same play.

There's something else one may conjecture about the Fool. It seems very likely that the Fool was played by the same boy who plays Cordelia. Cordelia appears only in the beginning of Act 1 and in Act 5, and the Fool is absent at those times. And Cordelia has only about a hundred lines in the whole play. Doubling up was common for Shakespeare's actors and clearly the boy playing Coredelia would double up in some other role, and the Fool seems the logical choice.

In Act 1 Scene 4, when the Fool first enters the play, Lear says, "How now, my pretty knave? What dost thou?'' And thereafter, he frequently addresses the Fool as "lad'' or "boy.''

If in fact the Fool was played by an adolescent boy, then it would seem possible (some would say likely, from what we know of Elizabethan society) that in the performance by Shakespeare's company there was a suggestion of an erotic attraction on Lear's part toward his Fool. There certainly doesn't seem to be anything in the play to contradict this hypothesis, and the Fool is the one character in the play that Lear consistently shows affection to.

In fact, one of the things that is especially striking when one first reads the play is that whereas Lear flies into a rage whenever anyone else contradicts him, the Fool can get away with amazingly sharp criticism. Of course one just explains this by saying that it is the convention in Shakespeare's plays that jesters have a license to say whatever they believe is true without punishment. Maybe so, but if Shakespeare meant the Fool to be seen as a sort of, um, boy toy for Lear, so to speak, then not only would Lear's indulgence be more explainable, but it would also be in character for the Fool to be fairly bitchy about all the things he has to put up with.

Consider, for instance, how the following speech from Act 1 Scene 5 works if the Fool is played as an, um (excuse the phrase), flaming fag:

Fool: If you were my fool, nuncle, I'd have thee beaten for being old before thy time.

Lear: How's that?

Fool: Thou shouldst not have been old till though hadst been wise.

And this one from Act 1 Scene 4:

Fool: I marvel and what kin thou and thy daughters are. They'll have me whipped for speaking true, Thou'llt have me whipped for lying, and sometimes I am whipped for holding my peace. I had rather be any kind o' thing than a fool, and yet I would not be thee, nuncle: thou hast pared thy wit on both sides, and left nothing in the Middle. Here comes one o' the parings.

It has been often assumed that Shakespeare's main clown at the time, Robert Armin, played the Fool. But Martin Holmes in his book Shakespeare and Burbage finds this quite unlikely. A drawing from the time shows Armin as a rather sturdy guy, and Holmes thinks it much more likely that Armin played the role of Kent, which is not comic, but has some comic moments. The roles Shakespeare wrote for Armin (including Feste, Pompey, Lavache, and Thersites), as contrasted with the ones written for Will Kempe, his previous comedian, generally showed him as argumentative and antagonistic to authority, which pretty well describes Kent.

Although not making jokes or singing and dancing, Kent sometimes behaves like a comedian. Throughout most of the play, he is a Duke masquerading as Lear's servant, and a very trucculent servant at that. When Goneril's servant Oswald is disrespectful to Lear, Kent trips him and sends him sprawling. Later, in Act 2, at Gloucester's castle, when Oswald shows up again to bring a message from Goneril warning Regan about Lear, Kent draws his sword on him and starts beating him. Gloucester and Cornwall arrive with servants and restrain Kent. Cornwall asks how the fight started, and after claiming without any real reason that Oswald is a knave, Kent finally says (I paraphrase, in a line since used in god knows how many Westerns), "I don't like his face.''

To which Cornwall responds, somewhat understandably, "It might just as well have happened that you didn't like mine, or Gloucester's, or my wife's.'' To which Kent replies (I continue to paraphrase), "Well, now that I take a good look at you, I can't say that any of you look all that good to me.''

Of course all this time, the Edmund-Edgar-Gloucester story has also been going on. To me, this is a much less interesting part of the play and I don't have much to say about it until we get to the scene where Goneril and Regan accuse Gloucester, quite rightly in fact, of being a traitor. (The modern audience is likely to fail to understand how serious Gloucester's actions are. Goneril and Regan know that the King of France and Cordelia have arrived to forcibly take back Cordelia's portion of the kingdom, and probably in fact take over the whole kingdom and condemn the two sisters to imprisonment if not death. Gloucester tries to claim that France's intentions are benevolent, but this is not the way invasions usually work out.)

And at this point, Shakespeare has a wonderful idea: instead of having them kill Gloucester, which would have been pretty much within the accepted parameters of this sort of play, they will put out his eyes. This will both horrify and entertain his audience. (In the Edmund-Edgar-Gloucester part of the play, Shakespeare was following a story in Arcadia by Sir Philip Sidney. In this story, the character corresponding to Gloucester had in fact years ago been convinced by Edmund to try to kill Edgar and had driven Edgar into the wilderness. Then eventually it was Edmund himself who put out Gloucester's eyes. It's interesting in looking at Shakespeare's sources to see the way in which he uses almost all the key details from these sources, but often puts them to a different use than the original stories do. It's possible that many in his audience knew these stories fairly well and would have complained if Shakespeare had left out any of the most notable details.)

Wilson Knight in ha chapter called "King Lear and the Comedy of the Grotesque'' in his book The Wheel of Fire (1930) writes:

The gouging out of Gloucester's eyes is a thing unnecessary, crude, disgusting; it is meant to be. It helps to provide an accompanying exaggeration of one element --- that of cruelty --- in the horror that makes Lear's madness. And not only horror: there is even again something satanically comic bedded deep within it. The sight of physical torment, to the uneducated, brings laughter. Shakespeare's England delighted in watching both physical torment and the comic ravings of actual lunacy. These ghoulish horrors, so popular in Elizabethan drama and the very stuff of the Lear of Shakespeare's youth, Titus Andronicus, find an exquisitely appropriate place in the tragedy of Shakespeare's maturity which takes as its especial province the territory of the grotesque and the fantastic which is Lear's madness.

Well.  It is easy for me, in any case, to imagine Shakespeare, taking a rather Hitchcockian delight at this point in pulling out all the stops to get a maximum response from his audience, to see having Gloucester's eyes gouged out as a stroke of genius. And it is in the putting out of Gloucester's eyes that we finally see Goneril and Regan as truly evil.

With this, the character of Goneril and Regan has changed. We now see them as not only hard-hearted, but actively cruel. And with this, the overall direction of the play has changed. This was certainly essential in order to make the ending of the play work.

(In the accounts of King Lear before Shakespeare, the two older sisters were clearly evil, somewhat like the older sisters in Cinderella, and in some versions they actually attempted to poison Cordelia. But for Shakespeare to have made Goneril and Regan clearly evil from the beginning of the play would have ruined the comedy of Acts 2 and 3.)

In any case, whatever Wilson Knight may say, it is certainly hard to imagine Shakespeare's audience responding to the gouging out of Gloucester's eyes as comedy. Even from an Elizabethan audience, I would imagine a gasp of horror to be a more likely response.

And yet, amazingly enough, later on Shakespeare does manage to use Gloucester's blindness for purposes of comedy. The scene where Poor Tom (i.e. Edgar) leads Gloucester supposedly to the cliffs of Dover and then convincing him that he's jumped off the cliff, although in fact he has been on level ground the whole time, is clearly comedy, almost slapstick, and, as many critics have mentioned, tends to make a modern audience (or reader) think of Samuel Beckett.

It is conventional, following Aristotle, to see the downfall of a tragic figure as resulting from some fatal character flaw. And, oddly enough, this is also usually the way comedy works: the misfortunates of a comic figure are usually only funny is they result from some character flaw. At the end of the play, Edgar (presumably speaking for Shakespeare) tries to relate his father's blindness to an error in his ways. But Gloucester's main mistake was in trusting his bastard son Edmund. If his blindness (and subsequent death, essentially from a broken heart) is a punishment for this, it certainly seems disproportionate.

In an essay called "Lear, Tolstoy, and the Fool"   (from Shooting an Elephant, reprinted in the collection of critical pieces on King Lear edited by Frank Kermode), George Orwell writes the following:

About a dozen of Shakespeare's plays, written for the most part later than 1600, do unquestionably have a meaning and even a moral. They revolve around a central subject which in some cases can be reduced to a single word. For example, Macbeth is about ambition, Othello is about jealousy, and Timon of Athens is about money. The subject of Lear is renunciation, and it is only by being willfully blind that one can fail to understand what Shakespeare is saying.

Lear renounces his throne, but expects everyone to continue treating him as a king. He does not see that if he surrenders power, other people will take advantage of his weakness; also that those who flatter him the most grossly are exactly the ones who will turn against him. The moment he discovers that he can no longer make people obey him, he falls into a rage which Tolstoy describes as `strange and unnatural,'' but which in fact is perfectly in character. In his madness and despair, he passes through two moods. One is the mood of disgust in which Lear repents, as it were, for having been a king, and grasps for the first time the rottenness of formal justice and vulgar morality. The other is a mood of impotent fury in which he wreaks imaginary revenges on those who have wronged him. Only at the end does he realize, as a sane man, that power, revenge, and victory are not worth while. But by the time he makes this discovery it is too late.

For me, there is a warning alarm that goes off when I notice an author trying to bully the reader into agreeing with him by saying things such as, "It is only by being willfully blind that one can fail to understand what Shakespeare is saying.''

If Shakespeare had wanted to make Othello a play about jealousy, then he would have started with a protagonist who is easily given to jealousy. Othello, as I see it, is primarily a play about treachery, and Othello's fatal flaw is that he is not sufficiently interested in other people to pay attention to them and learn to distinguish between those who are trustworthy and those who are not. (But he's an outsider in Venetian society, which makes it hard for him.)

Macbeth, in my opinion, is not a play about ambition. Maybe about guilt. But I see Macbeth as a play which makes the point that once one takes one step outside the circle of morality, one gets caught in an ever more increasing web of complications.

And King Lear is such a hodgepodge of different things that one can single out many different themes and say, "This is what King Lear is about,'' but no one theme is really adequate to account for the entire play. To see the entire play as simply exploring the consequences of renunciation is, as far as I can see, one of the least satisfactory ways of looking at it. If I were asked for the one word which best says what King Lear is about, my choice would be "suffering.''

But the very question "What is this about?'' is a way of thinking that, in my opinion, is quite alien to Shakespeare. Shakespeare was a creator of entertainments, not an Ibsen or Shaw or Brecht whose purpose was to teach a lesson or change people's attitudes.