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A. C. Bradley - Shakespearean Tragedy

A >> A. C. Bradley >> Shakespearean Tragedy




Cornwall seems to have been a fit mate for Regan; and what worse can be
said of him? It is a great satisfaction to think that he endured what to
him must have seemed the dreadful disgrace of being killed by a servant.
He shows, I believe, no redeeming trait, and he is a coward, as may be
seen from the sudden rise in his courage when Goneril arrives at the
castle and supports him and Regan against Lear (II. iv. 202). But as his
cruelties are not aimed at a blood-relation, he is not, in this sense, a
'monster,' like the remaining three.

Which of these three is the least and which the most detestable there
can surely be no question. For Edmund, not to mention other
alleviations, is at any rate not a woman. And the differences between
the sisters, which are distinctly marked and need not be exhibited once
more in full, are all in favour of 'the elder and more terrible.' That
Regan did not commit adultery, did not murder her sister or plot to
murder her husband, did not join her name with Edmund's on the order for
the deaths of Cordelia and Lear, and in other respects failed to take
quite so active a part as Goneril in atrocious wickedness, is quite true
but not in the least to her credit. It only means that she had much less
force, courage and initiative than her sister, and for that reason is
less formidable and more loathsome. Edmund judged right when, caring for
neither sister but aiming at the crown, he preferred Goneril, for he
could trust her to remove the living impediments to her desires. The
scornful and fearless exclamation, 'An interlude!' with which she greets
the exposure of her design, was quite beyond Regan. Her unhesitating
suicide was perhaps no less so. She would not have condescended to the
lie which Regan so needlessly tells to Oswald:

It was great ignorance, Gloster's eyes being out,
To let him live: where he arrives he moves
All hearts against us: Edmund, I think, is gone,
_In pity of his misery_, to dispatch
His nighted life.

Her father's curse is nothing to her. She scorns even to mention the
gods.[169] Horrible as she is, she is almost awful. But, to set against
Regan's inferiority in power, there is nothing: she is superior only in
a venomous meanness which is almost as hateful as her cruelty. She is
the most hideous human being (if she is one) that Shakespeare ever drew.

I have already noticed the resemblance between Edmund and Iago in one
point; and Edmund recalls his greater forerunner also in courage,
strength of will, address, egoism, an abnormal want of feeling, and the
possession of a sense of humour. But here the likeness ends. Indeed a
decided difference is observable even in the humour. Edmund is
apparently a good deal younger than Iago. He has a lighter and more
superficial nature, and there is a certain genuine gaiety in him which
makes one smile not unsympathetically as one listens to his first
soliloquy, with its cheery conclusion, so unlike Iago's references to
the powers of darkness,

Now, gods, stand up for bastards!

Even after we have witnessed his dreadful deeds, a touch of this
sympathy is felt again when we hear his nonchalant reflections before
the battle:

To both these sisters have I sworn my love:
Each jealous of the other, as the stung
Are of the adder. Which of them shall I take?
Both? one? or neither?

Besides, there is nothing in Edmund of Iago's motive-hunting, and very
little of any of the secret forces which impelled Iago. He is
comparatively a straightforward character, as straightforward as the
Iago of some critics. He moves wonder and horror merely because the fact
that a man so young can have a nature so bad is a dark mystery.

Edmund is an adventurer pure and simple. He acts in pursuance of a
purpose, and, if he has any affections or dislikes, ignores them. He is
determined to make his way, first to his brother's lands, then--as the
prospect widens--to the crown; and he regards men and women, with their
virtues and vices, together with the bonds of kinship, friendship, or
allegiance, merely as hindrances or helps to his end. They are for him
divested of all quality except their relation to this end; as
indifferent as mathematical quantities or mere physical agents.

A credulous father and a brother noble,
... I see the business,

he says, as if he were talking of _x_ and _y_.

This seems a fair deserving, and must draw me
That which my father loses; no less than all:
The younger rises when the old doth fall:

he meditates, as if he were considering a problem in mechanics. He
preserves this attitude with perfect consistency until the possibility
of attaining his end is snatched from him by death.

Like the deformity of Richard, Edmund's illegitimacy furnishes, of
course, no excuse for his villainy, but it somewhat influences our
feelings. It is no fault of his, and yet it separates him from other
men. He is the product of Nature--of a natural appetite asserting itself
against the social order; and he has no recognised place within this
order. So he devotes himself to Nature, whose law is that of the
stronger, and who does not recognise those moral obligations which exist
only by convention,--by 'custom' or 'the curiosity of nations.'[170]
Practically, his attitude is that of a professional criminal. 'You tell
me I do not belong to you,' he seems to say to society: 'very well: I
will make my way into your treasure-house if I can. And if I have to
take life in doing so, that is your affair.' How far he is serious in
this attitude, and really indignant at the brand of bastardy, how far
his indignation is a half-conscious self-excuse for his meditated
villainy, it is hard to say; but the end shows that he is not entirely
in earnest.

As he is an adventurer, with no more ill-will to anyone than good-will,
it is natural that, when he has lost the game, he should accept his
failure without showing personal animosity. But he does more. He admits
the truth of Edgar's words about the justice of the gods, and applies
them to his own case (though the fact that he himself refers to
fortune's wheel rather than to the gods may be significant). He shows
too that he is not destitute of feeling; for he is touched by the story
of his father's death, and at last 'pants for life' in the effort to do
'some good' by saving Lear and Cordelia. There is something pathetic
here which tempts one to dream that, if Edmund had been whole brother to
Edgar, and had been at home during those 'nine years' when he was 'out,'
he might have been a very different man. But perhaps his words,

Some good I mean to do,
_Despite of mine own nature_,

suggest rather that Shakespeare is emphasising the mysterious fact,
commented on by Kent in the case of the three daughters of Lear, of an
immense original difference between children of one father. Stranger
than this emergence of better feelings, and curiously pathetic, is the
pleasure of the dying man in the thought that he was loved by both the
women whose corpses are almost the last sight he is to see. Perhaps, as
we conjectured, the cause of his delay in saving Lear and Cordelia even
after he hears of the deaths of the sisters is that he is sunk in dreamy
reflections on his past. When he murmurs, 'Yet Edmund was beloved,' one
is almost in danger of forgetting that he had done much more than reject
the love of his father and half-brother. The passage is one of several
in Shakespeare's plays where it strikes us that he is recording some
fact about human nature with which he had actually met, and which had
seemed to him peculiarly strange.

What are we to say of the world which contains these five beings,
Goneril, Regan, Edmund, Cornwall, Oswald? I have tried to answer this
question in our first lecture; for in its representation of evil _King
Lear_ differs from the other tragedies only in degree and manner. It is
the tragedy in which evil is shown in the greatest abundance; and the
evil characters are peculiarly repellent from their hard savagery, and
because so little good is mingled with their evil. The effect is
therefore more startling than elsewhere; it is even appalling. But in
substance it is the same as elsewhere; and accordingly, although it may
be useful to recall here our previous discussion, I will do so only by
the briefest statement.

On the one hand we see a world which generates terrible evil in
profusion. Further, the beings in whom this evil appears at its
strongest are able, to a certain extent, to thrive. They are not
unhappy, and they have power to spread misery and destruction around
them. All this is undeniable fact.

On the other hand this evil is _merely_ destructive: it founds nothing,
and seems capable of existing only on foundations laid by its opposite.
It is also self-destructive: it sets these beings at enmity; they can
scarcely unite against a common and pressing danger; if it were averted
they would be at each other's throats in a moment; the sisters do not
even wait till it is past. Finally, these beings, all five of them, are
dead a few weeks after we see them first; three at least die young; the
outburst of their evil is fatal to them. These also are undeniable
facts; and, in face of them, it seems odd to describe _King Lear_ as 'a
play in which the wicked prosper' (Johnson).

Thus the world in which evil appears seems to be at heart unfriendly to
it. And this impression is confirmed by the fact that the convulsion of
this world is due to evil, mainly in the worst forms here considered,
partly in the milder forms which we call the errors or defects of the
better characters. Good, in the widest sense, seems thus to be the
principle of life and health in the world; evil, at least in these worst
forms, to be a poison. The world reacts against it violently, and, in
the struggle to expel it, is driven to devastate itself.

If we ask why the world should generate that which convulses and wastes
it, the tragedy gives no answer, and we are trying to go beyond tragedy
in seeking one. But the world, in this tragic picture, is convulsed by
evil, and rejects it.


4

And if here there is 'very Night herself,' she comes 'with stars in her
raiment.' Cordelia, Kent, Edgar, the Fool--these form a group not less
remarkable than that which we have just left. There is in the world of
_King Lear_ the same abundance of extreme good as of extreme evil. It
generates in profusion self-less devotion and unconquerable love. And
the strange thing is that neither Shakespeare nor we are surprised. We
approve these characters, admire them, love them; but we feel no
mystery. We do not ask in bewilderment, Is there any cause in nature
that makes these kind hearts? Such hardened optimists are we, and
Shakespeare,--and those who find the darkness of revelation in a tragedy
which reveals Cordelia. Yet surely, if we condemn the universe for
Cordelia's death, we ought also to remember that it gave her birth. The
fact that Socrates was executed does not remove the fact that he lived,
and the inference thence to be drawn about the world that produced him.

Of these four characters Edgar excites the least enthusiasm, but he is
the one whose development is the most marked. His behaviour in the early
part of the play, granted that it is not too improbable, is so foolish
as to provoke one. But he learns by experience, and becomes the most
capable person in the story, without losing any of his purity and
nobility of mind. There remain in him, however, touches which a little
chill one's feeling for him.

The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us:
The dark and vicious place where thee he got
Cost him his eyes:

--one wishes he had not said to his dying brother those words about
their dead father. 'The gods are just' would have been enough.[171] It
may be suggested that Shakespeare merely wished to introduce this moral
somehow, and did not mean the speech to be characteristic of the
speaker. But I doubt this: he might well have delivered it through
Albany, if he was determined to deliver it. This trait in Edgar _is_
characteristic. It seems to be connected with his pronounced and
conscious religiousness. He interprets everything religiously, and is
speaking here from an intense conviction which overrides personal
feelings. With this religiousness, on the other side, is connected his
cheerful and confident endurance, and his practical helpfulness and
resource. He never thinks of despairing; in the worst circumstances he
is sure there is something to be done to make things better. And he is
sure of this, not only from temperament, but from faith in 'the clearest
gods.' He is the man on whom we are to rely at the end for the recovery
and welfare of the state: and we do rely on him.

I spoke of his temperament. There is in Edgar, with much else that is
fine, something of that buoyancy of spirit which charms us in Imogen.
Nothing can subdue in him the feeling that life is sweet and must be
cherished. At his worst, misconstrued, contemned, exiled, under sentence
of death, 'the lowest and most dejected thing of fortune,' he keeps his
head erect. The inextinguishable spirit of youth and delight is in him;
he _embraces_ the unsubstantial air which has blown him to the worst;
for him 'the worst returns to laughter.'[172] 'Bear free and patient
thoughts,' he says to his father. His own thoughts are more than
patient, they are 'free,' even joyous, in spite of the tender sympathies
which strive in vain to overwhelm him. This ability to feel and offer
great sympathy with distress, without losing through the sympathy any
elasticity or strength, is a noble quality, sometimes found in souls
like Edgar's, naturally buoyant and also religious. It may even be
characteristic of him that, when Lear is sinking down in death, he tries
to rouse him and bring him back to life. 'Look up, my lord!' he cries.
It is Kent who feels that

he hates him,
That would upon the rack of this tough world
Stretch him out longer.

Kent is one of the best-loved characters in Shakespeare. He is beloved
for his own sake, and also for the sake of Cordelia and of Lear. We are
grateful to him because he stands up for Cordelia, and because, when she
is out of sight, he constantly keeps her in our minds. And how well
these two love each other we see when they meet. Yet it is not Cordelia
who is dearest to Kent. His love for Lear is the passion of his life: it
_is_ his life. At the beginning he braves Lear's wrath even more for
Lear's sake than Cordelia's.[173] At the end he seems to realise
Cordelia's death only as it is reflected in Lear's agony. Nor does he
merely love his master passionately, as Cordelia loves her father. That
word 'master,' and Kent's appeal to the 'authority' he saw in the old
King's face, are significant. He belongs to Lear, body and soul, as a
dog does to his master and god. The King is not to him old, wayward,
unreasonable, piteous: he is still terrible, grand, the king of men.
Through his eyes we see the Lear of Lear's prime, whom Cordelia never
saw. Kent never forgets this Lear. In the Storm-scenes, even after the
King becomes insane, Kent never addresses him without the old terms of
respect, 'your grace,' 'my lord,' 'sir.' How characteristic it is that
in the scene of Lear's recovery Kent speaks to him but once: it is when
the King asks 'Am I in France?' and he answers 'In your own kingdom,
sir.'

In acting the part of a blunt and eccentric serving-man Kent retains
much of his natural character. The eccentricity seems to be put on, but
the plainness which gets him set in the stocks is but an exaggeration of
his plainness in the opening scene, and Shakespeare certainly meant him
for one of those characters whom we love none the less for their
defects. He is hot and rash; noble but far from skilful in his
resistance to the King; he might well have chosen wiser words to gain
his point. But, as he himself says, he has more man than wit about him.
He shows this again when he rejoins Lear as a servant, for he at once
brings the quarrel with Goneril to a head; and, later, by falling upon
Oswald, whom he so detests that he cannot keep his hands off him, he
provides Regan and Cornwall with a pretext for their inhospitality. One
has not the heart to wish him different, but he illustrates the truth
that to run one's head unselfishly against a wall is not the best way to
help one's friends.

One fact about Kent is often overlooked. He is an old man. He tells Lear
that he is eight and forty, but it is clear that he is much older; not
so old as his master, who was 'four-score and upward' and whom he 'loved
as his father,' but, one may suppose, three-score and upward. From the
first scene we get this impression, and in the scene with Oswald it is
repeatedly confirmed. His beard is grey. 'Ancient ruffian,' 'old
fellow,' 'you stubborn ancient knave, you reverent braggart'--these are
some of the expressions applied to him. 'Sir,' he says to Cornwall, 'I
am too old to learn.' If his age is not remembered, we fail to realise
the full beauty of his thoughtlessness of himself, his incessant care of
the King, his light-hearted indifference to fortune or fate.[174] We
lose also some of the naturalness and pathos of his feeling that his
task is nearly done. Even at the end of the Fourth Act we find him
saying,

My point and period will be throughly wrought
Or well or ill, as this day's battle's fought.

His heart is ready to break when he falls with his strong arms about
Edgar's neck; bellows out as he'd burst heaven (how like him!);

threw him on my father,
Told the most piteous tale of Lear and him
That ever ear received; which in recounting
His grief grew puissant, and the strings of life
Began to crack. Twice then the trumpet sounded,
And there I left him tranced;

and a little after, when he enters, we hear the sound of death in his
voice:

I am come
To bid my king and master aye goodnight.

This desire possesses him wholly. When the bodies of Goneril and Regan
are brought in he asks merely, 'Alack, why thus?' How can he care? He is
waiting for one thing alone. He cannot but yearn for recognition, cannot
but beg for it even when Lear is bending over the body of Cordelia; and
even in that scene of unmatched pathos we feel a sharp pang at his
failure to receive it. It is of himself he is speaking, perhaps, when he
murmurs, as his master dies, 'Break, heart, I prithee, break!' He puts
aside Albany's invitation to take part in the government; his task is
over:

I have a journey, sir, shortly to go:
My master calls me; I must not say no.

Kent in his devotion, his self-effacement, his cheerful stoicism, his
desire to follow his dead lord, has been well likened to Horatio. But
Horatio is not old; nor is he hot-headed; and though he is stoical he is
also religious. Kent, as compared with him and with Edgar, is not so. He
has not Edgar's ever-present faith in the 'clearest gods.' He refers to
them, in fact, less often than to fortune or the stars. He lives mainly
by the love in his own heart.[175]

* * * * *

The theatrical fool or clown (we need not distinguish them here) was a
sore trial to the cultured poet and spectator in Shakespeare's day. He
came down from the Morality plays, and was beloved of the groundlings.
His antics, his songs, his dances, his jests, too often unclean,
delighted them, and did something to make the drama, what the vulgar,
poor or rich, like it to be, a variety entertainment. Even if he
confined himself to what was set down for him, he often disturbed the
dramatic unity of the piece; and the temptation to 'gag' was too strong
for him to resist. Shakespeare makes Hamlet object to it in emphatic
terms. The more learned critics and poets went further and would have
abolished the fool altogether. His part declines as the drama advances,
diminishing markedly at the end of the sixteenth century. Jonson and
Massinger exclude him. Shakespeare used him--we know to what effect--as
he used all the other popular elements of the drama; but he abstained
from introducing him into the Roman plays,[176] and there is no fool in
the last of the pure tragedies, _Macbeth_.

But the Fool is one of Shakespeare's triumphs in _King Lear_. Imagine
the tragedy without him, and you hardly know it. To remove him would
spoil its harmony, as the harmony of a picture would be spoiled if one
of the colours were extracted. One can almost imagine that Shakespeare,
going home from an evening at the Mermaid, where he had listened to
Jonson fulminating against fools in general and perhaps criticising the
Clown in _Twelfth Night_ in particular, had said to himself: 'Come, my
friends, I will show you once for all that the mischief is in you, and
not in the fool or the audience. I will have a fool in the most tragic
of my tragedies. He shall not play a little part. He shall keep from
first to last the company in which you most object to see him, the
company of a king. Instead of amusing the king's idle hours, he shall
stand by him in the very tempest and whirlwind of passion. Before I have
done you shall confess, between laughter and tears, that he is of the
very essence of life, that you have known him all your days though you
never recognised him till now, and that you would as soon go without
Hamlet as miss him.'

The Fool in _King Lear_ has been so favourite a subject with good
critics that I will confine myself to one or two points on which a
difference of opinion is possible. To suppose that the Fool is, like
many a domestic fool at that time, a perfectly sane man pretending to be
half-witted, is surely a most prosaic blunder. There is no difficulty in
imagining that, being slightly touched in the brain, and holding the
office of fool, he performs the duties of his office intentionally as
well as involuntarily: it is evident that he does so. But unless we
suppose that he _is_ touched in the brain we lose half the effect of
his appearance in the Storm-scenes. The effect of those scenes (to state
the matter as plainly as possible) depends largely on the presence of
three characters, and on the affinities and contrasts between them; on
our perception that the differences of station in King, Fool, and
beggar-noble, are levelled by one blast of calamity; but also on our
perception of the differences between these three in one respect,--viz.
in regard to the peculiar affliction of insanity. The insanity of the
King differs widely in its nature from that of the Fool, and that of the
Fool from that of the beggar. But the insanity of the King differs from
that of the beggar not only in its nature, but also in the fact that one
is real and the other simply a pretence. Are we to suppose then that the
insanity of the third character, the Fool, is, in this respect, a mere
repetition of that of the second, the beggar,--that it too is _mere_
pretence? To suppose this is not only to impoverish miserably the
impression made by the trio as a whole, it is also to diminish the
heroic and pathetic effect of the character of the Fool. For his heroism
consists largely in this, that his efforts to outjest his master's
injuries are the efforts of a being to whom a responsible and consistent
course of action, nay even a responsible use of language, is at the best
of times difficult, and from whom it is never at the best of times
expected. It is a heroism something like that of Lear himself in his
endeavour to learn patience at the age of eighty. But arguments against
the idea that the Fool is wholly sane are either needless or futile; for
in the end they are appeals to the perception that this idea almost
destroys the poetry of the character.

This is not the case with another question, the question whether the
Fool is a man or a boy. Here the evidence and the grounds for discussion
are more tangible. He is frequently addressed as 'boy.' This is not
decisive; but Lear's first words to him, 'How now, my pretty knave, how
dost thou?' are difficult to reconcile with the idea of his being a man,
and the use of this phrase on his first entrance may show Shakespeare's
desire to prevent any mistake on the point. As a boy, too, he would be
more strongly contrasted in the Storm-scenes with Edgar as well as with
Lear; his faithfulness and courage would be even more heroic and
touching; his devotion to Cordelia, and the consequent bitterness of
some of his speeches to Lear, would be even more natural. Nor does he
seem to show a knowledge of the world impossible to a quick-witted
though not whole-witted lad who had lived at Court. The only serious
obstacle to this view, I think, is the fact that he is not known to have
been represented as a boy or youth till Macready produced _King
Lear_.[177]

But even if this obstacle were serious and the Fool were imagined as a
grown man, we may still insist that he must also be imagined as a timid,
delicate and frail being, who on that account and from the expression of
his face has a boyish look.[178] He pines away when Cordelia goes to
France. Though he takes great liberties with his master he is frightened
by Goneril, and becomes quite silent when the quarrel rises high. In the
terrible scene between Lear and his two daughters and Cornwall
(II. iv. 129-289), he says not a word; we have almost forgotten
his presence when, at the topmost pitch of passion, Lear suddenly turns
to him from the hateful faces that encompass him:

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