The Tragedy of King Lear, by Shakespeare

The Tragedy of King Lear

Let me confess to one of my stranger eccentricities. I read Shakespeare. Not only that, I get a kick out of it!

This is for two reasons: The first is that I have a rather lofty (probably misguided) idea of what literature should and shouldn’t be. If I ever have the originality to have any of my own work published (that will be the day!) I want it to imbibe the tradition that precedes it. If I’m ever ply my trade effectively, then best be schooled by the maestro himself Ol Will Shakespeare. The second reason is I actually enjoy it. It would be cliche to say the his work is beautiful, for the language is often brutish, whimsical, witty and  obscure all in equal pitch, but it is true some of his poetry really does have that shine and splendor so harked about. However, for me, it is the magisterial command of language that really enthralls me. Each word is the finely tuned spring of a piano key, that will sing out the glorious symphony or mournful dirge according to the suited occasion. Metaphor, analogy, allegory, simile, pun and homonym all paraded with the pomp of a royal cortege, and with the added finery of philosophy, folklore, wit and wisdom accompanying it. 

So that being said what is the Tragedy of King Lear really about? Even for Shakespeare it is a rather convoluted plot: Princes masquerading as bedlamites, earls as servants,  Kings and Queens, Dukes, suitors, servants, retainers, soldiers, stewards, fools and madmen. However, the gist of the story is this: Lear is tired old king in want of his faculties; his kingdom is in disarray, no son, but competing claimants to the throne, he decides best thing he can do is abdicate and divide the kingdom between his three Goneril, Regan and Cordelia. The daughter who will get the biggest windfall and inheritance, depends on who says the nicest things about their doting dad. Goneril and Regan are smooth operators when it comes to courtly displays of affection, and thus use all the subtle rhetorical tricks to beguile their dear old dad. However Cordelia the youngest is not. Quite honestly she admits she loves her father as any daughter should, no more no less, and has no poetry to add to this. Lear goes ballistic: ‘Come not between the dragon and his wrath’ he thunders. ‘I loved her the most,’ ‘here I disclaim all paternal care.’ After disinheriting his youngest, the mad king hands over power to two eldest and their respective husbands. He comes quickly to rue the day he ever did that, as Goneril and Regan, quickly turn into a pair of vindictive shrews, and Lear becomes a crabby old man suffering dementia. Lodging with the pair of them is insufferable, and he takes off into the night proclaiming: ‘How sharper than a serpents tooth to have a thankless child.’ After spending time in the wilderness a plot surfaces to have him executed. With the prospect of being shipped off to dover by loyal retainers and with his own offspring vying for his blood, he descends into full blown madness. However in all the hurly burly tumult, his beloved Cordelia reappears from her exile in France, and father and daughter are reconciled. However, swift capture leads to a trademark tragedy. 

I would think Shakespeare himself would want the moral of his play to be this: ‘The weight of this sad time we must obey: Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.’ Yet, as with all his plays it is so much more! Feminists will praise the ‘thankless’ daughters a heroines subverting the patriarch. Marxists, will question royal bloodlines, and subtle and not so subtle politics of class wars. Psychoanalysts will ponder the idea of surrogate mothers, regressed infantilism, and of course Oedipus. Finally, there may even be room for a new school of literary thought. Geriatric literary criticism; where young scholars, scrutinize the treatment of old senile folk by their ungrateful children. For me however, the play is first and foremost about loss. I think it was Tolkien who said all great art is really about one thing and that is Death with a capital D. Behind all the politics, plots,  coups and exiles is Lear’s final question: ‘Why should a dog a horse a rat have life, and thou no breath at all?’

Death for a latter-day playwright like Beckett (who I incidentally detest) makes life, and art for that matter stupid and absurd. For Shakespeare the opposite is true. Death only heightens life’s vitality, and takes it to the lofty peaks of Mount Olympus. However, Shakespeare is not Homer, Virgil or Ovid, nor is this a Classic of Greece or Rome. As the first modernist Shakespeare was all too aware, the gods have all departed! Man has been left to fend for himself in a hostile and alien world, with no guidance other than the fire of his own heart. Witness Lear’s existential cry to the abyss. ‘Blow winds and Crack your cheeks! Rage, blow, you cataracts and hurricanoes, spout till you have drenched our steeples  [...] Crack natures moulds, all germens spill at once that make ungrateful man.’ ‘When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools’

As another great author said: ‘There is wisdom that is woe, but woe that is madness’ and for this king particular, it is difficult to tell whether he is wise or raving. Lear, like all great heroes, and especially Shakespearean ones, greets death and God’s eternal absence with a glorious display of wrath and indignation. Humanity through such impotent rage and suffering is made great. 

However, returning once more to the beauty of the language, Lear has his tender moments, which more than make up his anger. This is one of my favourite all time pieces of poetry spoken by the king now reunited with his beloved daughter Cordelia but facing the prospect of a lifetime of imprisonment: 

Come, let’s away to prison;

We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage.

When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down

And ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live,

And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh

At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues

Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too,

Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out;

And take upon ’s the mystery of things

As if we were God’s spies; and we’ll wear out,

In a wall’d prison, packs and sect of great ones,

That ebb and flow by the moon.

This is why I read Shakespeare, and why I actually love his work so much! In God’s absence the kingdom of Art is the closest thing to eternity we have yet.