King Lear – William Shakespeare, 1605-1606 ★★★★½

Grimmest of the Grim

Of all Shakespeare’s plays, King Lear hits the hardest. It offers the grimmest scenes, the coldest ending, and the bleakest worldview, turning the classic elements of tragedy on its head. Instead of offering catharsis, it presents despair.

But is it bottomless despair? That depends on the audience. In its early stagings, what the audience saw was quite different than what appears today. Theatrical managers as late as the 1800s famously pulled back on the carnage and even gave their audiences a revised happy ending.

Reading the play today is to understand the impulse. MacBeth wipes out an entire family, but no one in that play is as reduced by the human toll as we see Lear and Gloucester become. Hamlet may touch on existential themes, but the lack of any overarching morality is bracing here:

GLOUCESTER
Though the wisdom of Nature can reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself scourged by the sequent effects. Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide: in cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond cracked ’twixt son and father. [Act I, scene ii, lines 104-109]

King Lear rules England in dark, pagan times. He has three daughters to whom he wishes to split his kingdom and then retire. Two daughters, Goneril and Regan, blandish him with empty words of devotion, but the youngest daughter Cordelia holds back, glibness failing her. It’s not in her nature. In retaliation, he disowns her.

Cordelia displeases her father King Lear in the play's opening scene. "LEAR: So young and so untender? CORDELIA: So young, my lord, and true." [I, i, 107-108]. Her sisters sit smugly behind Lear, having performed their roles well.
Painting by Ford Madox Brown from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Lear

Then, when he tries to fall back on his other two daughters and be treated as their sovereign, he is told off instead for lacking wisdom. It turns out he can die in the rain for all they care.

King Lear has two key plots going. The first one features Lear and his devoted Fool making their way across a barren heath in search of shelter. The other features Lear’s loyal noble Gloucester and his sons, Edgar the first-born and Edmund, a bastard. Here, too, there is much resentment:

KENT

I cannot conceive you.

GLOUCESTER
Sir, this young fellow’s mother could; whereupon she grew round-wombed, and had, indeed, sir, a son for her cradle ere she had a husband for her bed. Do you smell a fault? [I, i, 11-15]

King Lear is based on a play written over a decade prior, King Leir, which has the same rough plot but a very different ending. That in turn took its inspiration from Geoffrey Monmouth's 1135 account History Of The Kings Of Britain. Shakespeare beat all past accounts for the darkness of his narrative.
Image from https://www.shakespeare-online.com/plays/kinglear/kingleir.html

There is also one major subplot, a rivalry between Goneril and Regan which heats up after they freeze their father out. In upsetting the natural order of things, the pair unleash a storm that eventually engulfs them as well, rather amusingly given what is revealed of their natures.

Every Shakespeare tragedy depicts a particular fault; in King Lear you get multiple choice. There is ingratitude, multiplied among Lear’s daughters and scheming Edmund. There is also Lear’s own folly, demanding toadying obsequiousness from his children and leaning too hard on past prerogatives after giving up a king’s job.

Lear eventually discovers giving up his kingship has consequences. "They told me I was everything; 'tis a lie" he declares in Act IV, scene vi. Above, Stephen Yoakam as Lear is led away by two soldiers in a 2017 Guthrie Theater production in Minneapolis, MN.
Photo by T Charles Erickson from https://www.mprnews.org/story/2017/02/23/review-guthrie-stages-heartbreaking-powerful-king-lear

“Go to, go to, better thou/Hadst not been born than not to have pleased me better” [I, i, 235-236] he tells a shaken Cordelia in parting.

Lear is a tough-love character through much of the play. It is reasonable criticism early on when Goneril and Regan complain Lear insists on having a hundred knights follow him from castle to castle.

Lear’s rambunctious retinue wears out their welcome at the castles Goneril and Regan share with their husbands, the Dukes of Albany and Cornwall. We don’t see any of this directly, except one early scene when Lear’s loyal Earl of Kent kicks the churlish Oswald, Goneril’s steward. Mostly these knights are just described as being around somehow, even when they aren’t part of the action, just beyond the view of the stage. There is an abstract quality to the play, in this and other ways, like the way Lear begins to talk as he loses his mind.

The Fool is one of Shakespeare’s most enigmatic characters, whose displays of loyalty come from mocking Lear and his growing confusion. For the audience, the Fool’s presence is reassuring since he shows us Lear can be humbled and reasonable. He once warns the Fool of “the whip” (I, iv, 108) he has at the ready for lashings, but never uses it.

The Fool and Lear endure the ravages of a storm after being forced out of Regan's castle. "You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,/Vaunt couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts,/Singe my white head!" [III, ii, 4-6].
1851 Painting by William Dyce from https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/King_Lear#/media/File:William_Dyce_-_King_Lear_and_the_Fool_in_the_Storm.jpg

Instead the two trade observations, often dark, sometimes playful:

FOOL
The reason why the seven stars are no more than seven is a pretty reason.

LEAR
Because they are not eight?

FOOL
Yes indeed, thou wouldst make a good fool. [I, v, 33-36]

The Fool’s main function within the play itself seems to be keeping Lear in some state of equilibrium. This proves a losing struggle, though, and the Fool disappears from the play entirely near the end of Act III.

Lear’s ranting across its five acts is a signature element of the play, an element that may make it hard to relate to though it also makes for a hell of a part:

LEAR
But yet thou art my flesh, my blood, my daughter,
Or rather a disease that’s in my flesh,
Which I must needs call mine. Thou art a boil,
A plague sore, or embossed carbuncle
In my corrupted blood. But I’ll not chide thee:
Let shame come when it will, I do not call it,
I do not bid the thunder-bearer shoot,
Nor tell tales of thee to high-judging Jove. [II, ii, 412-419]

Above, Pal Aron as Edgar and Corin Redgrave as Lear in a 2004 Royal Shakespeare Company production. Over the decades, the play has been staged many ways, but one thing hasn't changed: The vertiginous challenge of playing Lear, which has some 3,500 lines.
Photo by John Haynes from https://www.rsc.org.uk/king-lear/past-productions/in-focus-bill-alexander-2004

Religion, or lack of it, is a major theme of the play. Today’s scholars are apt to see King Lear as existential, even atheistic, which separates it from plays like Hamlet or MacBeth, which even feature ghosts. Lear is set in pagan times, yet there is little recourse to gods except, as in the above example, where Lear is guilt-tripping Regan.

Divine abandonment seems omnipresent. As Gloucester puts it “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods,/They kill us for their sport.” [IV, i, 38-39] One can wonder how that line went down in more devout times.

Scholars of long ago, like A. C. Bradley, saw a religious message in the play’s conclusion, which presents life as a bitter vale of tears. “The only real thing in it is the soul, with its courage, patience, devotion,” Bradley wrote, noting its compatibility with Christian anti-materialism.

With Edgar, who makes the redemption of his father Gloucester his goal, there are fragile moments of optimism in commiseration shared:

EDGAR
When we our betters see bearing our woes,
We scarcely think our miseries our foes.
Who alone suffers, suffers most i’ the mind,
Leaving free things and happy shows behind.
But then the mind much sufferance doth o’erskip
When grief hath mates, and bearing fellowship. [III, vi, 100-104]

In this famous 1875-76 painting by Gustav Pope, blonde Cordelia confronts her sisters Regan and Goneril, but which is which? Goneril has been identified as the woman on the left by virtue of her death-stare at her younger sister, Goneril being the eldest and most jealous of Cordelia's bond with their father.
Image from https://www.reddit.com/r/shakespeare/comments/sj5i3i/is_there_any_consensus_about_which_lear_sister_is/

But Edgar spends most of the play in rags, and whether it is an act or no, behaves as madly as Lear. It is only at the end of the play that he gives the play as little as it enjoys in the way of a happy ending.

King Lear is depressing but also fantastic. Sitting through all five acts as written (there are also different extant versions between quartos and the First Folio) is no doubt a test. But Shakespeare’s strength as a scenarist has never been on such impressive display as here. Action builds without let up, the confrontations between Lear and his daughters escalate continuously, the second plot involving Gloucester and his sons is as riveting and gasp-inducing as the main one.

The whole business of Goneril and Regan’s rivalry is masterfully developed. You hardly see it coming, but once it unfolds it has a wonderfully satisfying dispatch about it.

It’s so fitting the way they both latch onto Edmund, the only character who matches them for villainy:

EDMUND
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? Neither can be enjoyed,
If both remain alive. [V, i, 56-60]

Edgar (George Reilly) and Edmund (George Hartpence) fight it out near the end of King Lear, in a 2002 production by the ActorsNET of Bucks County. While a talky play, it does have a few rousing action scenes as well.
Image from https://georgehartpence.com/king-lear

It is strange to realize that for most of its history, late into the 19^th century, English audiences got such a different version of King Lear, with many scenes removed or lightened in tone, yet the play still retained such a hold over Western culture.

What we get today feels like Shakespeare with the bark stripped off, no niceties observed. In Lear himself, you get what one of the play’s minor characters observes is “A sight most pitiful in the meanest wretch,/Past speaking of in a king.” [IV, vi, 200-201] Yet Shakespeare keeps the audience invested in Lear, however vivid his faults, and ensures their investment all the way through to its bleak end. For all its despair, the play gives us people who make life seem worth living and believing in.