Reading Shakespeare, like listening to great music, every time is like the first time, or, maybe, is the first time. So it was when, on a recent chilly and gloomy February afternoon, I pulled my copy of Shakespeare’s “King Lear” off the shelf to read again this ‘play for our times’ as it has come to be called in our Pandemic world.

Expecting a play that I had been familiar with all my life, both on the page and on the stage, I found myself drawn in from the first moments and read on until I came to the last line — the last light gone from the winter sky so that I could barely see the printed page — quite speechless with — with what? Such overwhelming sadness, yes, but also with a new sense of wonder at that mystery of genius that leaves us wordless in the face of such tragedy.

Lost as to what to think, I looked to my familiar friend in things Shakespeare, the 19th century essayist, William Hazlitt. Turning to the chapter on King Lear in his Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays, I found that I was in good company — Hazlitt too was struck speechless! He begins -

‘We wish that we could pass this play over, and say nothing about it. All that we can say must fall far short of the subject; or even what we ourselves conceive of it. …. yet we must say something. — It is then the best of all Shakespeare’s plays, for it is the one in which he was the most in earnest. He was here fairly caught in the web of his own imagination. The passion which he has taken as his subject is that which strikes its root deepest into the human heart.’

He continues ‘The character of Lear itself is very finely conceived for the purpose. It is the only ground on which such a story could be built with the greatest truth and effect. It is his rash haste, his violent impetuosity, his blindness to everything but the dictates of his passions or affections that produces all his misfortunes… that enforces our pity for him.’

Rings a little strange

That word ‘earnest’ rings perhaps a little strange in our 21st century ears, but at the time that Hazlitt wrote, its primary meaning was honesty or truth. It is a word that for me recalls Melville’s description of Lear — ‘Tormented into desperation, Lear, the frantic king, tears off the mask, and speaks the sane madness of vital truth’. (Hawthorne and His Mosses). Yes, Shakespeare ‘most in earnest’.

Indeed, along with our horror and dismay at the events that Lear’s actions unleash, our pity is ‘enforce(d)’ as is the love and pity for Lear, not just of Cordelia, but of Kent and Edgar, Gloucester and the faithful Fool, as he descends into madness — ‘…/You think I’ll weep;/ No, I’ll not weep:/ I have full cause of weeping; but this heart/ Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws,/ Or ere I’ll weep. O Fool, I shall go mad.’ (2, iv, 285).

As we well know, it was Cordelia’s bleakly honest ‘Nothing, my lord’ that struck the first note of the ‘Nothing will come of nothing’ (1.i.89) that is the basso continuo, Hazlitt’s ‘ground,’ of the play, the frightening ‘Nothing’ that appears throughout in every possible guise. As the Fool says to Lear in Act 1, ‘Thou art an 0 [a zero] without a figure’. But in all the heartbreaking moments of this journey into Nothing, perhaps one of the most searing is when Edgar, disguised as Tom O’Bedlam, cries ‘Edgar I nothing am’ (2.1v.21). Words that find an echo George Herbert’s ‘Affliction [iv], ‘Broken in pieces all asunder, ….A thing forgot’, words which, in turn, are taken from Psalm 31, v.12 — ‘I am forgotten as a dead man out of mind:’.

The second leitmotif that weaves together this perfect, harmonic, almost operatic, structure is that of eyes, of sight, of inner vision, of Kent’s plea ‘See better, Lear; and let me still remain/ The true blank of thine eye’ (1.i.160), of eyes plucked out, of the blinded Gloucester who responds to the old man’s offer to show him the way-’I have no way, and therefore want no eyes;/ I stumbled when I saw: (4.i.19) of Lear, who, cast out and battered by ‘the impetuous blasts, with eyeless rage,’ begins to see the ‘Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are,

That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm

How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,

Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you

From seasons such as these? O, I have taken

Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;

Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,

That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,

And show the heavens more just.’ (3.iv.l28)

Lear begins to understand his own humanity and to call on ours. Shakespeare offers a piercingly small, yet infinitely large, image of that humanity — twice. Once when Lear is bewailing Edgar’s naked state, ‘Is man no more than this?’ and begins to tear off his own clothes, ‘Off, off, you lendings! come, unbutton here.’(3.iv.110) An unbuttoning that foreshadows the final moments of the drama and what is, perhaps ,the most poignant request ever made — ‘Pray you, undo this button: thank you sir.’ (5.iii.309) (my italics).

As Emily Dickinson writes in her lyric #446

‘This was a Poet -

It is That

Distills amazing sense

From Ordinary Meanings -

And Attar so immense

From the familiar species

That perished by the Door -’

‘Distills amazing sense/ From Ordinary Meanings -’

A play for our times, but very much for Shakespeare’s own time, it was first performed on December 26th, 1606. Shakespeare began to work on Lear while the Plague raged through London, a time also of civil, political and religious unrest that swirled around King James’ wish for Union with Scotland and the failed, but potentially devastating, Gunpowder Plot of 1605. A conspiracy that sowed seeds of distrust and fear in every community throughout the land, pitted neighbor against neighbor, brought about punitive laws against Roman Catholics and rigorous censorship, especially in the theater. It was a time when Equivocation, a fairly new word in the language, took on the meaning of deliberately saying one thing while meaning another, the 17th Century version of our Fake News. The Jesuits intentionally traveled from Rome to tell the English priesthood that it was not a sin to equivocate, to lie, in this way. A corruption of truth that Sir Robert Coke, the Attorney General, found to be a greater threat to national stability than any conspiracy. (James Shapiro The Year of Lear — Shakespeare in 1606 )

Browsing stacks

If you have a mind, you can browse the Library stacks in company with Lear. Upstairs in the Gallery there is a wealth of Shakespeare texts and studies. Downstairs you will find Jane Smiley’s 1991 novel, A Thousand Acres, the recent Learwife by J.R. Thorp and, yes, Moby Dick — Lear and his Fool reimagined as Ahab and Pip (cf. Charles Olson’s 1947 study, Call me Ishmael).

But back to the play — in all previous tellings, as far back as Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History in the 12th Century to Spenser’s Faerie Queen of 1596, and the earlier, 1590, stage play The History of King Leir, the story is given a happy ending. Perhaps for Shakespeare, tragedy was more truthful to the time? A tragedy of such woe that, as, Harold Bloom says, it is ‘not to be borne’, woe that causes the faithful Kent (and us) to cry out at the end, ‘Break, heart; I prithee, break!’ (Act V, sc.3 l.313).

Maybe the effect is not so much catharsis, Aristotle’s famous medical metaphor for purging of the emotions, but the experience of art which helps ‘us participate in a sense of shared humanity’? (Stanley Wells, VSI p.123). Maybe Shakespeare felt his times called for ‘the sane madness of vital truth’, for the need to be ‘in earnest’? Scholars have pondered, and continue to ponder, these questions. What we do know, what we all can know, is that we have, in the perpetual gift of his genius, ‘a play for our times’.

Finally, let us recall the all-but-naked Edgar, guised as Poor Tom in his ‘loop’d and window’d raggedness’, and Lear’s declaration to him — ‘Thou art the thing itself’ (3.iv). Then let us take a bridging leap over 400 years to the 20th Century to this Wallace Stevens’ poem. It seems a good way to Exit this stage:

‘Not Ideas About The Thing But The Thing Itself’

‘At the earliest ending of winter,

In March, a scrawny cry from outside

Seemed like a sound in his mind.

He knew that he heard it,

A bird’s cry, at daylight or before,

In the early March wind.

That scrawny cry — it was

A chorister whose c preceded the choir.

It was part of the colossal sun,

Surrounded by its choral rings,

Still far away. It was like

A new knowledge of reality.’

I had no idea that I would be wandering down this path when I curled up on the couch on that grey afternoon with my worn and yellowed copy of King Lear, but I hope you have found some interest while keeping me company.

Exeunt.

Belinda de Kay is the emeritus director of Stonington Free Library.