King Lear notes for 348E 2019 PDF

Preview

Summary

Summary on King Lear...

Description

1

ENGL 348E King Lear: A few additional notes

©Dr. K. Sirluck 2019

Leir in the old speech can mean “a riderless horse”. As I mentioned last class, there are many ways in which an Animal Studies approach can profitably be brought to bear on King Lear, which in its unusually constant focus on the natural world explores the collapse of differences between human and animal, and yet remains haunted by the elusive spectre of difference. Some branches of study are notable. 1) The play explores the idea of humans bereft of “civilized” accommodations, hunted like animals and forced to live as close to the order of nature as their characters will permit. Madness in particular, because it disables reason – that faculty most often cited to assert human difference from animals in Renaissance arguments – is a site for exploring the possible forfeiture of human superiority over beasts. But Lear’s loss of reason is provisional, and even his madness is dominated by an obsessive critique of the social, the political, and the cosmic forces upon which he blames his fall. Edgar’s performance of madness as Tom O’Bedlam, however spell-binding, is only a performance. Thus madness and exile in the play serve primarily to conjure up the imperfections of the sociopolitical status quo, and the failures of language to mediate or generate reality, rather than truly to erase human/animal difference. It is the condition of bare life represented on the Heath itself that more genuinely poses the question: Is man no more than this? A poor bare, forked animal? In deprivation, the human is less well equipped to endure than the swimming frog or the rat. Shakespeare’s reading of Montaigne’s “Apology for Raymond Sebonde” fills the play with questions concerning the limited effectiveness of human reason, the naked insufficiency of humans contrasted with animals, and many other issues that point to the weakness of those arguments traditionally made to separate humans and beasts. If the play then seeks to assert its own ideas of what makes up the human, these assertions are tentative and provisional rather than pedantic. 2) Another strand in the play is the animal imagery, chiefly used in comparisons between people and animals, employed by various characters to articulate the human experience or to illustrate the moral deviance from ideal laws by which they identify their foes. Chiefly, Lear and the other ‘good’ characters employ a set of animal portraits from the Bestiary tradition, from myth and Natural History, to depict Goneril and Regan as cuckoos, crabs, wolves, tigers, serpents, dogs, centaurs, vultures, monsters of the deep, etc. Cornwall, Regan and Goneril describe Gloucester as a “fox”, and Tom O’Bedlam characterizes his own vices wholly in terms of vicious animals. Lear seeks to augment his own power and ferocity in a moment of humiliated anger by identifying himself as a dragon: “Come not between the dragon and his wrath.” This repeated resort to the animal alphabet fills the play with references to the non-human creatures that surround the beleaguered human world of the play. 3) Central to the play’s representation of suffering humanity are the figures of the hunted animal (Lear, Gloucester and Edgar, all by turns hunted to death with a price

2 on their heads) and the baited bear. Lear and Gloucester share the role of the baited bear at various times. In ancient Ireland, one of the three practices central to the acquisition of sacred knowledge was called teinm laeda, the “breaking open” of a song or the “cracking open” of the pith or marrow of something, such as a hazelnut or an egg, or in one case one’s own thumb, in order to obtain divine wisdom. The cracking open of Lear, and of his delusionary world, is central to the Fool’s practice in this scene. “The druids were said to expound their philosophy in riddles. … The use of secret language forms, word games and riddles was still used [sic] by poets and grammarians in fourth-century Gaul”. [Sharon Paice MacLeod, A Study of Traditional Belief, with Newly Translated Prayers, Poems and Songs. North Carolina: Macfarlane 2012]. Celtic culture held three to be a sacred number, represented by the triskele, a design made up of three interlocking spirals, indicating the 3-fold nature of the human soul. This corresponds to Earth, Sky, and Sea: the non-human setting that forms the backdrop to the pilgrimages of Lear and Gloucester. In medieval Wales prophets and seers called awnyddion (poetic inspiration) were reported to speak in riddles and evasions, using apparently meaningless words which then had to be pieced together into coherence by the most attentive auditor. (87) In King Lear, the riddle is not only central to the Fool’s attempt to save Lear by shamanistic action, it might also be understood as inherent to the play’s overall structure. Riddles ask questions which are based on de-familiarizing and disguising something which would otherwise be easily recognizable. Riddles reveal the arcane aspect of ordinary things. They cause us to rethink our hermeneutic practices and possibly our epistemological templates in order to approach the occulted side of ordinary truths. The Fool is a little more direct than the Druids, perhaps, but the idea is the same: Lear’s task is to make sense of the nonsense the Fool offers, and in so doing to gain some new understanding of himself and of reality. Our task in deciphering the Fool’s deliberate incoherence and much of the play’s disjointed dialogue and inscrutable verse is to see the unfamiliar as familiar; and perhaps to see the truths about the world that the play gestures towards, whatever those may be for the individual seeker. Both processes foreground the play’s portrayal of the human dilemma: we suffer epistemological alienation in a world where expected formulae for interpretation no longer function. The play advises its audience to learn how to see feelingly. For example, in I, iv, 135. the Fool asks: Can you make no use of nothing, nuncle? echoing Lear’s words to Cordelia in Act 1, sc. 1: “Nothing will come of nothing; speak again”. Lear answers according to everyday logic: KING LEAR Why, no, boy; nothing can be made out of nothing.

3 The Fool says[To KENT] Prithee, tell him, so much the rent of his land comes to: he will not believe a fool. The Fool’s stinging reply chastises Lear for his materialist valuation of both Cordelia and love. On the surface, Lear has given away his land and received nothing in return from his ungrateful daughters. But under the surface of this remark shimmers one of the play’s great mysteries: The world and all that’s in it were created out of nothing. Furthermore, the blankness of nonhuman nature as the play represents it (the storm, the heath, the sea - the Celtic triskele standing for the three parts of the soul) is a sort of nothing to humans, since it corresponds to no intelligible pattern we can comprehend; yet inhuman nature is prolific and wondrous in spite of its apparent meaninglessness. Humans themselves are the great artificers of nothingness: We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep. Yet it is our task to take this formless chaos and give it meaning and value: something we must do repeatedly, since these provisional meanings fade and must be perpetually reinvented. Something can and must be made out of nothing. It is a moment by moment imperative for humans. KING LEAR replies: A bitter fool! The Fool answers; FOOL. Give me an egg, nuncle, and I'll give thee two crowns. KING LEAR. What two crowns shall they be? FOOL. Why, after I have cut the egg i' the middle, and eat up the meat, the two crowns of the egg. When thou clovest thy crown i' the middle, and gavest away both parts, thou borest thy ass on thy back o'er the dirt: thou hadst little wit in thy bald crown, when thou gavest thy golden one away. (I, iv, 159-168) The metaphor of the egg continues to develop the double-sided idea of a pregnant nothingness. An egg, shaped like a zero, is a cypher or symbol for nothing; an egg is also an unborn being. An egg is shaped like a pregnant belly, and like the globular world that we inhabit. It is paradoxically everything and nothing. Cut in two, and the meat eaten up, it is indeed an empty shell. Lear has divided his kingdom and emptied himself of kingship, emptied his realm of familial and feudal order. He is a gutted shell, like his world. Humanity in general are driven by greed and the desire to eat up all we can, so that we risk emptying our world. The egg is an ancient lesson for avoiding the greed that may unmake the world. Eat the egg before it hatches, and nothing will emerge from the shell. The egg stands for making something out of nothing, rather than nothing out of something. The egg shows us how to live. The two halves of the egg may also signify the rigid but arbitrary binary divisions that constitute Lear’s old worldview: governor and governed, master and servants, male and female, parent and child, etc. Dividing the world is a way of generating not

4 only hierarchy but also envy, paranoia, ambition, and war. The whole egg is better than the broken halves: it is still full of possibility. An egg has no top or bottom, no hierarchy. It is not a human construct, though humans hunt and eat eggs. It is an image of the whole world. At first the Fool’s mocking reminders and Goneril’s abusive and rejecting behavior seem to recall Lear to a sense of his own responsibility for the situation he finds himself in. His need to have power over Cordelia and her sisters, to control love, at whatever cost to himself or the kingdom, led him to banish love – an all too common human story. It also led him to dismantle his kingship and replace it with a regime of Misrule. When Lear grasps that he has uncrowned himself, and banished Wisdom in order to embrace Folly, he tries to punish the offender. LEAR. O most small fault, How ugly didst thou in Cordelia show! That, like an engine, wrench'd my frame of nature From the fix'd place; drew from heart all love, And added to the gall. O Lear, Lear, Lear! Beat at this gate, that let thy folly in, Striking his head And thy dear judgment out! Lear’s physical self-punishment in this moment allows him to retain a modicum of his former dignity, by becoming his own judge and chastiser. But immediately afterward he dodges responsibility and reverses the blame, focusing on Goneril’s treachery instead of his own misdeeds. Having lost material power, he now tries to reposition himself as powerful through his sovereign access to metaphysical forces: Dear goddess, hear! Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intend To make this creature fruitful! Into her womb convey sterility! Dry up in her the organs of increase; And from her derogate body never spring A babe to honour her! If she must teem, Create her child of spleen; that it may live, And be a thwart disnatured torment to her! …that she may feel How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is To have a thankless child! (I, iv, 283-296) However, his curses are impotent; language – so virulent in the opening scene - is now laughably futile. Lear cursing has become more comic than tragic. He is now an O without a figure to give it value: puffed up with residual grandiosity, but empty of realworld power. He has fallen into the jaws of the very nothingness he invoked.

5 Lear presents himself here as the injured victim of his ungrateful children, rather than as the father who has cast off an innocent child. However, the reality of his fallen status surfaces in his anxiety lest he be rendered feminine by weakness and emotion, while his two remaining daughters become increasingly “masculine” in the terms of their culture through acts of domination and cruelty. LEAR: I am ashamed That thou hast power to shake my manhood thus; That these hot tears, which break from me perforce, Should make thee worth them. Blasts and fogs upon thee! The untented woundings of a father's curse Pierce every sense about thee! Old fond eyes, Beweep this cause again, I'll pluck ye out, And cast you, with the waters that you lose, To temper clay. The question of gender is pervasive though perhaps not primary in the play. Even as Lear fights to retain the masculinity he associates with identity, kingship, and power, Goneril begins her relentless campaign to emasculate not only her father but also her husband Albany, and to set up herself and later Edmund in their stead: GON. (To Albany): No, no, my lord, This milky gentleness and course of yours Though I condemn not, yet, under pardon, You are much more attask'd for want of wisdom Than praised for harmful mildness. ALBANY. How far your eyes may pierce I can not tell: Striving to better, oft we mar what's well. Fearful of his own impotence, Lear summons up the fantasy that Regan, now powerful enough to oppose the frightening Goneril, will defend him: LEAR…. yet have I left a daughter, Who, I am sure, is kind and comfortable: When she shall hear this of thee, with her nails She'll flay thy wolvish visage. Thou shalt find That I'll resume the shape which thou dost think I have cast off for ever. However, the Fool questions this naïve hope: FOOL. Shalt see thy other daughter will use thee kindly; for though she's as like this as a crab's like an apple, yet I can tell what I can tell. KING LEAR Why, what canst thou tell, my boy? FOOL. She will taste as like this as a crab does to a crab. Thou canst tell why one's nose stands i' the middle on's face? KING LEAR

6 No. FOOL. Why, to keep one's eyes of either side's nose; that what a man cannot smell out, he may spy into. Lear’s unwillingness to see what is in front of him provokes the Fool to a relentless reiteration of the obvious. But when Lear admits he has wronged Cordelia, the fool presents him with an image that illuminates Lear’s motives. The Fool is wrestling for Lear’s soul and sanity: KING LEAR . I did her wrong-FOOL. Canst tell how an oyster makes his shell? KING LEAR. No. FOOL. Nor I neither; but I can tell why a snail has a house. KING LEAR Why? FOOL. Why, to put his head in; not to give it away to his daughters, and leave his horns without a case.

This brief exchange, seemingly absurd, contains some of the key motifs in the play. The oyster is an image of patriarchal masculinity as it most fears itself to be: soft and jelly-like inside, vulnerable to the least touch, but protected by a shell built of layers of rock-like accretion, external to itself and easily separated off. Lear’s shell has been shucked off, and the inside is disturbingly feminine in the terms of Lear’s culture. The snail is similar, a mucilaginous, slug-like creature with comically phallic horns that are actually its eyes, the snail links up with the Fool’s numerous gibes about Lear’s too avid sexual appetite, his eagerness to be led by his nose (code for phallus), his unwillingness to use his eyes, and – a little deeper - his incestuous longing to possess his daughters, and to keep them all for himself, leaving nothing for their husbands. Lear’s eagerness has left him shell-less, and homeless. He is also a cuckold, as the snail’s horns suggest, because all of his daughters have husbands, and two of them have made a fool of him. Lear responds by protesting his innocence: KING LEAR. I will forget my nature. So kind a father! His persistence in denial, despite the Fool’s efforts, leads Lear towards inner fragmentation. He now comprehends not the king’s two bodies, one of which is metaphysical, but a whole range of animal bodies – and possibly animal spirits. His gender is mutating towards the feminine, and his humanity is falling into the animal. He feels this metamorphosis as the approach of madness: “Let me be not mad, Sweet heavens”.

7 Later, however, madness becomes Lear’s strategy both for seeing the world as it now appears, stripped of all humanistic and hierarchical order, and for retaining a simulacrum of his former identity, couched in the language of raging commands hurled at the storm and in fantasies of revenge and continued power. Lear uses madness to keep a foot in both worlds, the old world of annointed kingship and the new world of beggarly revelation, while denying his own tragic agency. His terrible suffering must be the responsibility of cruel gods and centaurlike women. Cordelia must not be spoken of, for her wronged innocence skews his picture of the man victimized by false gods and dog-hearted daughters. As Lear begins to topple over or melt into the plurality of animal nature, so too do his and the other characters’ references to his wicked daughters take on a proliferating range of Bestiary-style allusions to the more vicious, ungrateful, cruel, deceitful, and lustful animals. Meanwhile, as Lear moves towards the bare-life extremity of the heath, Edgar too undergoes a divestment so complete that he appears to be entering violently into animal nature. Though Edgar is feigning madness, not truly embracing it, his bodily circumstances are the same as if he had lost his reason in losing his clothes, shelter, social status, and name: SCENE III. A wood. Enter EDGAR EDGAR I heard myself proclaim'd; And by the happy hollow of a tree Escaped the hunt. No port is free; no place, That guard, and most unusual vigilance, Does not attend my taking. Whiles I may 'scape, I will preserve myself: and am bethought To take the basest and most poorest shape That ever penury, in contempt of man, Brought near to beast: my face I'll grime with filth; Blanket my loins: elf all my hair in knots; And with presented nakedness out-face The winds and persecutions of the sky. The country gives me proof and precedent Of Bedlam beggars, who, with roaring voices, Strike in their numb'd and mortified bare arms Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary; And with this horrible object, from low farms, Poor pelting villages, sheep-cotes, and mills, Sometime with lunatic bans, sometime with prayers, Enforce their charity. Poor Turlygod! poor Tom! That's something yet: Edgar I nothing am. Exit

8 Edgar’s self-transformation or self-relinquishment parallels but exceeds Kent’s. Where Kent shaves off his beard, razing his aristocratic ‘likeness’ to become unrecognizable, Edgar tears off his clothes, hides his human face with mud, and buries his sanity in unintelligible speech. If identity is at least in part performance, there are moments in Edgar’s performance of Mad Tom when disguise seems as real as the hunted identity the madman’s gibbering strives to conceal. Where is identity in a world of disguises? Where is the human in a world where nature and nothingness eclipse it so easily? The word “Nothing” streams like the wind, or like the sea, beneath all the other utterances and cries in the play, tugging, erasing, and stripping away all that it finds. This theme is taken up again as Lear arrives at Gloucester’s home and finds his kingly and paternal identity denied by his children. When Lear is confronted by the news that Regan and Cornwall will not see him, and deny to acknowledge his rights, he wrestles with rage and humiliation, trying to ignore the insult, but unable to do so: KING LEAR. They durst not do 't; They could not, would not do 't; 'tis worse than murder, To do upon respect such violent outrage: FOOL. Winter's not gone yet, if the wild-geese fly that way. Fathers that wear rags Do make their children blind; But fathers that bear bags Shall see their children kind. Fortune, that arrant whore, Ne'er turns the key to the poor. KING LEAR. O me, my heart, my rising heart! but, down! FOOL. Cry to it, nuncle, as the cockney did to the eels when she put 'em i' the paste alive; she knapped 'em o' the coxcombs with a stick, and cried 'Down, wantons, down!' The eels, reminiscent of the oyster and the snail, all common edible creatures in Shakespeare’s day, seem to signify uncontrollable feelings, whether of lust or grief or rage. Their fate in the Fool’s little parable is typical of what is done with genuine emotions in Lear’s culture: they are knocked on the head, pushed into a pie, and baked in their pastry coffin until silent. As Lear attempts to repress his feelings they run riot and leave his reason behind. Bad feelings are like bad animals (wolves, dogs, tigers, vultures, etc.) and unruly feelin...