BACKGROUND OF THE IDEA
In creating the tragedy play King Lear, William Shakespeare used many sources in getting the base-line story, but it required his genius and intellect to place them together to create the true tragedy with its multiple plot lines that his play turned out to be in the end. The story of King Lear (or as it started, King Leir) is first seen in literature in the year 1135, contained in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae. Other authors placed King Leir into their stories including; John Higgins in A Mirror for Magistrates (1574), by Warner in Albion's England (1586), by Holinshed in The Second Book of the Historie of England (1577), and by Spencer in The Faerie Queen (1590). The most influential of all was probably The True Chronicle History of King Leir, which was anonymous. This play was performed as early as 1594, which is when it showed up in the "Stationers' Register." Kenneth Muir even suggested that Shakespeare "may have acted in it". Shakespeare took the best of all the sources of King Leir, added his touches and personality, and created the masterpiece we enjoy today. Geoffrey of Monmouth in Historia Regum Britanniae, gave the description of King Lear and his three daughters, and also the basis for the love test. One major difference is that unlike Shakespeare's Lear, Geoffrey's Leir does not appear to be insane and has not lost control of his mind. In fact, he regains control of the kingdom, with the help of the King of France. According to Geoffrey Bullough, "This is no senile man". Whether Shakespeare actually read this account of the daughters and the love test or read it in a later version cannot be proven, but Geoffrey of Monmouth certainly laid the groundwork for the story, regardless if it is true or not. Shakespeare molded this groundwork and used what he considered the most useful; the love test, daughters, and his being played between his two evil daughters in using him for power. Over four-hundred years later Raphael Holinshed presented a more concise version of Geoffrey's version in The Second Book of the Historie of England, which offered little else to the story.
Lear's madness may not have come from a literature source, but from the real life of Bryan Annesley. In 1603, Annesley was in his last years of his life when one of his three daughters tried to have him committed and to have his will contested. His youngest, Cordell (Cordelia), fought to have her father not deemed insane in an attempt to keep that off his permanent record. Annesley's will was upheld and Cordell received much of his wealth. This occurred during the time that Shakespeare would have been writing King Lear. This story may also have been the source for "Earl of Kent because Kent was Annesley's county, or merely because some of the action occurs round Dover". Legend remembered Lear as a pre-Christian warrior king in what is now southwest England. This area now includes Cornwall. In the old story, Lear asked his three daughters whether they loved him. Two claimed to do so extravagantly, while the third said she loved him only as a daughter should. Lear disinherited the honest daughter. The story appears elsewhere in world folklore; there is an Eastern European version in which the honest daughter says she loves her father as much as she loves salt. Lear went to live with his first daughter, bringing a hundred followers. She demanded that he reduce his followers to fifty. Lear then went to live with the other daughter, who reduced the number to twenty-five. Lear went back and forth between the daughters until he was alone. Then the third daughter raised an army, defeated the other two, and restored him to his kingdom. (The story appears in Holinshed, who adds that Cordelia succeeded her father as monarch and was deposed by the sons of her sisters.) Shakespeare took a story which had a happy ending, and gave it a sad ending. He transformed a fairy-tale about virtuous and wicked people into something morally ambiguous. He took a story of wrongs being righted, and turned it into the story of painful discovery. He included passages which deal with ideas instead of advancing the plot.
INTRODUCTION POINTS
First and foremost, King Lear is the story of an old man who moves from a position of enormous power, status, wealth, responsibility, social complexity, and security step by step into a terrible isolation from his fellow human beings, his family, and nature itself, suffers horribly from the stripping away of his entire identity, goes mad as a result of his experience, recovers briefly, and then becomes insane again in the moment before his death. In no other work of fiction (not even in Oedipus or Macbeth) do we witness a total transformation from such magnificence to total despair rendered with such emotional intensity. That intensity is heightened by the fact that Lear's story is underscored throughout by the similar experiences of the Duke of Gloucester. Second, King Lear is in many respects a relatively simple story, and its structure has some obvious similarities with old folk takes ("Once upon a time, there was an old man who had three daughters. Two of them despised him, but the youngest one loved him very much. One day he decided to test their love. . . . And so on). This apparent simplicity is brought out also in the elements of a morality play surrounding the King. The forces of good and evil are grouped around him in almost equal numbers, and the action of the play can be viewed as a struggle for the life of the old man, since to a large extent these rival groups define themselves by their attitudes to the suffering king. These elements give the particularity of Lear's unique narrative a much wider and more timeless quality. What we are dealing with here is not just a single old man (important as that point of view is), but with human beings generally. Third, the central struggle in the play (other than the main one going on in Lear's own mind) is between people who see their relationship with Lear and with others from different perspectives. Those who seek to assist Lear and strive to combat the forces who wish to abuse him (e.g., Kent, Cordelia, the Fool, Edgar, Gloucester, and eventually Albany) are motivated principally by a traditional sense of love, respect, and allegiance--a complex set of virtues summed up in the important terms "bond" and "ceremonious affection." These people see themselves as defined in large part by their significant relationships with other people, especially with Lear himself. The other group is made up of those who serve primarily themselves, whose attitude towards others is largely determined by their desire to use people for their own self-advancement (e.g., Regan, Goneril, Cornwall, Edmund, Oswald). For them, traditional notions of the importance of bonds are illusions, outmoded conventions standing in the way of their individual desire for power. Thus, they are ready to violate established bonds (like those between a father and child or between a husband and wife or between a king and subject) in order to pursue their own agendas. Fourth, by the end of the play, the opposing forces have largely annihilated each other. Those remaining have very little to say. Unlike the end of other Shakespearean tragedies, there is no clear and confident voice of authority directing things, and there is no attempt to sum up what has happened or to offer any sort of a tribute to the dead hero. Whatever the action adds up to is thus left for us to figure out.
TRAGIC HERO Prior to the twentieth century Shakespeare critics tended to interpret King Lear as a conventional or classic tragedy and saw Lear himself as an Elizabethan version of the "tragic hero." Like the ancient Greek character Oedipus, Lear is a majestic figure at the start of the play whose character flaw of hubris or pride compels him to initiate acts that lead to his ultimate demise. In this traditional reading of Shakespeare's King Lear, the hero's downfall, however, has redemptive qualities: a lesson is taught and learned and the audience experiences a sense of moral uplift at the end. Several facets of the traditional Lear as tragic hero thesis are plainly valid. Like all the classic figures of tragedy, Lear is a royal personage, a king and, indeed, a man who stands above the rest of the characters (albeit for only a few scenes). He is a commanding figure at the pinnacle of his powers. Lear is presented to us by Shakespeare as the majestic monarch, ushered onto the stage with the ceremonial pomp and trumpets. In short order, we learn that during his reign, Lear has proven himself to be an able ruler, adding to the commonwealth's prosperity and estate. Thus, Lear is worthy of his prospective status as a tragic hero. But, Lear has a basic character defect. He is excessively proud of his accomplishments as regent and, beyond that, of the love that he deserves from his three daughters. Near the play's conclusion, having been purged of excessive pride by the rough redemptive power of nature, Lear realizes too late that he has been is "a very foolish fond old man" and realizes that he is "not of perfect mind." Therefore, according to the customary view of Lear as a tragic hero, Lear is taught a lesson and the audience comes away from the play with a message about the fatal consequences of unbounded pride. But in some modern readings of King Lear, critics have come to a far different conclusion as to what Shakespeare's play is about and "who" Lear is. In these revisionist interpretations, King Lear is not a tragedy about a distinguished individual; it is, rather, a black comedy about the human condition at large, in which Lear is a kind of Everyman, a "mortal worm" and no more. We note that, unlike the tight unity of classic tragedy, King Lear embodies a major sub-plot in Edgar's evil plans to deceive his father, Gloucester, into believing that his good son, Edmund, harbors evil intentions toward him. Gloucester's path follows the same trajectory as that of Lear: indeed, the two narrative lines even intersect. The existence of this sub-plot implies that Lear's tragedy is not special or unique in any way, and this, in turn, deprives Lear of the distinction common to true tragic heroes. Lear, soon brought to a sense of guilt by the nagging of the Fool and the twinges of his conscience, finds that the effects of his original hasty action have ramified beyond the question of his guilt, and that he is involved in consequences (the plot of Goneril and Regan against him) which stir in him very different feelings. Lear cannot rest in his own remorse, which at best is never unmixed with hate and hurt feelings. As he feels the pressure from Goneril and Regan ever more insistent, the evil closing in, the question of who is to blame, whether it is the "most small fault" of Cordelia or his own "folly", ceases to be the issue. Caught up in the action which he had unwittingly precipitated, he refuses to default or compromise (in spite of the pleadings of the Fool) and presses on in heroic pride to justify himself. It is in this mood that he curses Goneril and Regan, vows dreadful vengeance, and plunges into the storm. As for the lesson that Lear garners from his experience, the seeming insight that he attains on the heath has no actual bearing on the play's outcome; it is simply a crutch that Lear uses to deny the inherent absurdity of the cosmos. Even after his exposure to the cosmic elements, Lear remains blind. His ordeal on the heath does not impart wisdom to him; it leaves him completely addled. When he is reunited with Cordelia, Lear is so mad that he cannot recognize her at first, mistaking his daughter for a spirit. True, Lear does acknowledge that this spirit is his once-spurned daughter, but held captive by the forces of evil (his two older daughters and Edmund), Lear reconciles himself to the status quo. He now wants nothing more than to be imprisoned for life with his "good" daughter. Even this is withheld from him, and when he realizes that Cordelia's life has been taken, he first denies her death and then dies himself of a broken heart. The best that can be said is that human nature, in some of its manifestations, has transcended the destructive element and made notable salvage. Not only Lear, but Cordelia, Gloucester, Edgar, and Albany have grown in knowledge and self-knowledge, have entered a new dimension, achieved a richer humanity. Even the repentant Edmund and the servant who defends Gloucester against his persecutors figure in this repeated pattern. But when Albany says in the concluding moments of the play that "we are young, shall never see so much", what does he mean? So much evil? So much suffering and endurance? Or so much nobility, self-sacrifice, and love? (The bodies of Lear and Cordelia are there before him as he speaks.) True to the tragic vision, the play answers these questions ambiguously.But the play embodies tragic truth in another important way. The goods and bads may be shown as inseperable, that is, eternally present in all human actions and in the nature of the universe, but both are real (good as well as evil), and they are distinguishable. Further, though the good cannot be said to triumph, neither can evil. A balance, however precarious, is maintained. If the play denies the comfort of optimism, it does not retreat into cynicism. Its world is hard; evil is an ever-present wolf at the door. But man is free to act and to learn. If Lear never learned what makes these hard hearts, he learned much about the workings of his own heart. He could have found it all in "the old moral catechism," but such is the nature of modern tragic man that he must learn it in his own way and on his own pulses. He had heard by the hearing of the ear, but at last he saw. What keeps the atmosphere of the play still sweet is just that substance of traditional knowledge, relearned through agonizing experience, an affirmation in the face of the most appalling contradictions.
In creating the tragedy play King Lear, William Shakespeare used many sources in getting the base-line story, but it required his genius and intellect to place them together to create the true tragedy with its multiple plot lines that his play turned out to be in the end. The story of King Lear (or as it started, King Leir) is first seen in literature in the year 1135, contained in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae. Other authors placed King Leir into their stories including; John Higgins in A Mirror for Magistrates (1574), by Warner in Albion's England (1586), by Holinshed in The Second Book of the Historie of England (1577), and by Spencer in The Faerie Queen (1590). The most influential of all was probably The True Chronicle History of King Leir, which was anonymous. This play was performed as early as 1594, which is when it showed up in the "Stationers' Register." Kenneth Muir even suggested that Shakespeare "may have acted in it". Shakespeare took the best of all the sources of King Leir, added his touches and personality, and created the masterpiece we enjoy today. Geoffrey of Monmouth in Historia Regum Britanniae, gave the description of King Lear and his three daughters, and also the basis for the love test. One major difference is that unlike Shakespeare's Lear, Geoffrey's Leir does not appear to be insane and has not lost control of his mind. In fact, he regains control of the kingdom, with the help of the King of France. According to Geoffrey Bullough, "This is no senile man". Whether Shakespeare actually read this account of the daughters and the love test or read it in a later version cannot be proven, but Geoffrey of Monmouth certainly laid the groundwork for the story, regardless if it is true or not. Shakespeare molded this groundwork and used what he considered the most useful; the love test, daughters, and his being played between his two evil daughters in using him for power. Over four-hundred years later Raphael Holinshed presented a more concise version of Geoffrey's version in The Second Book of the Historie of England, which offered little else to the story.
Lear's madness may not have come from a literature source, but from the real life of Bryan Annesley. In 1603, Annesley was in his last years of his life when one of his three daughters tried to have him committed and to have his will contested. His youngest, Cordell (Cordelia), fought to have her father not deemed insane in an attempt to keep that off his permanent record. Annesley's will was upheld and Cordell received much of his wealth. This occurred during the time that Shakespeare would have been writing King Lear. This story may also have been the source for "Earl of Kent because Kent was Annesley's county, or merely because some of the action occurs round Dover". Legend remembered Lear as a pre-Christian warrior king in what is now southwest England. This area now includes Cornwall. In the old story, Lear asked his three daughters whether they loved him. Two claimed to do so extravagantly, while the third said she loved him only as a daughter should. Lear disinherited the honest daughter. The story appears elsewhere in world folklore; there is an Eastern European version in which the honest daughter says she loves her father as much as she loves salt. Lear went to live with his first daughter, bringing a hundred followers. She demanded that he reduce his followers to fifty. Lear then went to live with the other daughter, who reduced the number to twenty-five. Lear went back and forth between the daughters until he was alone. Then the third daughter raised an army, defeated the other two, and restored him to his kingdom. (The story appears in Holinshed, who adds that Cordelia succeeded her father as monarch and was deposed by the sons of her sisters.) Shakespeare took a story which had a happy ending, and gave it a sad ending. He transformed a fairy-tale about virtuous and wicked people into something morally ambiguous. He took a story of wrongs being righted, and turned it into the story of painful discovery. He included passages which deal with ideas instead of advancing the plot.
INTRODUCTION POINTS
First and foremost, King Lear is the story of an old man who moves from a position of enormous power, status, wealth, responsibility, social complexity, and security step by step into a terrible isolation from his fellow human beings, his family, and nature itself, suffers horribly from the stripping away of his entire identity, goes mad as a result of his experience, recovers briefly, and then becomes insane again in the moment before his death. In no other work of fiction (not even in Oedipus or Macbeth) do we witness a total transformation from such magnificence to total despair rendered with such emotional intensity. That intensity is heightened by the fact that Lear's story is underscored throughout by the similar experiences of the Duke of Gloucester. Second, King Lear is in many respects a relatively simple story, and its structure has some obvious similarities with old folk takes ("Once upon a time, there was an old man who had three daughters. Two of them despised him, but the youngest one loved him very much. One day he decided to test their love. . . . And so on). This apparent simplicity is brought out also in the elements of a morality play surrounding the King. The forces of good and evil are grouped around him in almost equal numbers, and the action of the play can be viewed as a struggle for the life of the old man, since to a large extent these rival groups define themselves by their attitudes to the suffering king. These elements give the particularity of Lear's unique narrative a much wider and more timeless quality. What we are dealing with here is not just a single old man (important as that point of view is), but with human beings generally. Third, the central struggle in the play (other than the main one going on in Lear's own mind) is between people who see their relationship with Lear and with others from different perspectives. Those who seek to assist Lear and strive to combat the forces who wish to abuse him (e.g., Kent, Cordelia, the Fool, Edgar, Gloucester, and eventually Albany) are motivated principally by a traditional sense of love, respect, and allegiance--a complex set of virtues summed up in the important terms "bond" and "ceremonious affection." These people see themselves as defined in large part by their significant relationships with other people, especially with Lear himself. The other group is made up of those who serve primarily themselves, whose attitude towards others is largely determined by their desire to use people for their own self-advancement (e.g., Regan, Goneril, Cornwall, Edmund, Oswald). For them, traditional notions of the importance of bonds are illusions, outmoded conventions standing in the way of their individual desire for power. Thus, they are ready to violate established bonds (like those between a father and child or between a husband and wife or between a king and subject) in order to pursue their own agendas. Fourth, by the end of the play, the opposing forces have largely annihilated each other. Those remaining have very little to say. Unlike the end of other Shakespearean tragedies, there is no clear and confident voice of authority directing things, and there is no attempt to sum up what has happened or to offer any sort of a tribute to the dead hero. Whatever the action adds up to is thus left for us to figure out.
TRAGIC HERO Prior to the twentieth century Shakespeare critics tended to interpret King Lear as a conventional or classic tragedy and saw Lear himself as an Elizabethan version of the "tragic hero." Like the ancient Greek character Oedipus, Lear is a majestic figure at the start of the play whose character flaw of hubris or pride compels him to initiate acts that lead to his ultimate demise. In this traditional reading of Shakespeare's King Lear, the hero's downfall, however, has redemptive qualities: a lesson is taught and learned and the audience experiences a sense of moral uplift at the end. Several facets of the traditional Lear as tragic hero thesis are plainly valid. Like all the classic figures of tragedy, Lear is a royal personage, a king and, indeed, a man who stands above the rest of the characters (albeit for only a few scenes). He is a commanding figure at the pinnacle of his powers. Lear is presented to us by Shakespeare as the majestic monarch, ushered onto the stage with the ceremonial pomp and trumpets. In short order, we learn that during his reign, Lear has proven himself to be an able ruler, adding to the commonwealth's prosperity and estate. Thus, Lear is worthy of his prospective status as a tragic hero. But, Lear has a basic character defect. He is excessively proud of his accomplishments as regent and, beyond that, of the love that he deserves from his three daughters. Near the play's conclusion, having been purged of excessive pride by the rough redemptive power of nature, Lear realizes too late that he has been is "a very foolish fond old man" and realizes that he is "not of perfect mind." Therefore, according to the customary view of Lear as a tragic hero, Lear is taught a lesson and the audience comes away from the play with a message about the fatal consequences of unbounded pride. But in some modern readings of King Lear, critics have come to a far different conclusion as to what Shakespeare's play is about and "who" Lear is. In these revisionist interpretations, King Lear is not a tragedy about a distinguished individual; it is, rather, a black comedy about the human condition at large, in which Lear is a kind of Everyman, a "mortal worm" and no more. We note that, unlike the tight unity of classic tragedy, King Lear embodies a major sub-plot in Edgar's evil plans to deceive his father, Gloucester, into believing that his good son, Edmund, harbors evil intentions toward him. Gloucester's path follows the same trajectory as that of Lear: indeed, the two narrative lines even intersect. The existence of this sub-plot implies that Lear's tragedy is not special or unique in any way, and this, in turn, deprives Lear of the distinction common to true tragic heroes. Lear, soon brought to a sense of guilt by the nagging of the Fool and the twinges of his conscience, finds that the effects of his original hasty action have ramified beyond the question of his guilt, and that he is involved in consequences (the plot of Goneril and Regan against him) which stir in him very different feelings. Lear cannot rest in his own remorse, which at best is never unmixed with hate and hurt feelings. As he feels the pressure from Goneril and Regan ever more insistent, the evil closing in, the question of who is to blame, whether it is the "most small fault" of Cordelia or his own "folly", ceases to be the issue. Caught up in the action which he had unwittingly precipitated, he refuses to default or compromise (in spite of the pleadings of the Fool) and presses on in heroic pride to justify himself. It is in this mood that he curses Goneril and Regan, vows dreadful vengeance, and plunges into the storm. As for the lesson that Lear garners from his experience, the seeming insight that he attains on the heath has no actual bearing on the play's outcome; it is simply a crutch that Lear uses to deny the inherent absurdity of the cosmos. Even after his exposure to the cosmic elements, Lear remains blind. His ordeal on the heath does not impart wisdom to him; it leaves him completely addled. When he is reunited with Cordelia, Lear is so mad that he cannot recognize her at first, mistaking his daughter for a spirit. True, Lear does acknowledge that this spirit is his once-spurned daughter, but held captive by the forces of evil (his two older daughters and Edmund), Lear reconciles himself to the status quo. He now wants nothing more than to be imprisoned for life with his "good" daughter. Even this is withheld from him, and when he realizes that Cordelia's life has been taken, he first denies her death and then dies himself of a broken heart. The best that can be said is that human nature, in some of its manifestations, has transcended the destructive element and made notable salvage. Not only Lear, but Cordelia, Gloucester, Edgar, and Albany have grown in knowledge and self-knowledge, have entered a new dimension, achieved a richer humanity. Even the repentant Edmund and the servant who defends Gloucester against his persecutors figure in this repeated pattern. But when Albany says in the concluding moments of the play that "we are young, shall never see so much", what does he mean? So much evil? So much suffering and endurance? Or so much nobility, self-sacrifice, and love? (The bodies of Lear and Cordelia are there before him as he speaks.) True to the tragic vision, the play answers these questions ambiguously.But the play embodies tragic truth in another important way. The goods and bads may be shown as inseperable, that is, eternally present in all human actions and in the nature of the universe, but both are real (good as well as evil), and they are distinguishable. Further, though the good cannot be said to triumph, neither can evil. A balance, however precarious, is maintained. If the play denies the comfort of optimism, it does not retreat into cynicism. Its world is hard; evil is an ever-present wolf at the door. But man is free to act and to learn. If Lear never learned what makes these hard hearts, he learned much about the workings of his own heart. He could have found it all in "the old moral catechism," but such is the nature of modern tragic man that he must learn it in his own way and on his own pulses. He had heard by the hearing of the ear, but at last he saw. What keeps the atmosphere of the play still sweet is just that substance of traditional knowledge, relearned through agonizing experience, an affirmation in the face of the most appalling contradictions.
