'King Lear' scene by scene 10
In episode 10 I whizz through three quick scenes first - Act 4, scenes 3, 4 and 5, and then pay proper attention to the immense and complex scene 6.
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You can listen to all 12 episodes here, and also download a free 52-page document with all the transcripts.
TRANSCRIPT:
Act 4 scene 3
This brief expository scene shows Kent hear from an unnamed Gentleman how Cordelia reacted to Kent’s letters describing what had happened since her departure from France. Lear, says Kent, now will not see his wrong daughter out of shame:
A sovereign shame so elbows him—his own unkindness,
That stripped her from his benediction, turned her
To foreign casualties, gave her dear rights
To his dog-hearted daughters—these things sting
His mind so venomously that burning shame
Detains him from Cordelia.
Our hopes are raised: Cordelia is coming to the rescue, she still loves her father, and Lear has learned his lesson: we can hope for a happy ending.
Act 4 scene 4
This is followed by the return to the drama of Cordelia, describing the drastic change in her father since she saw him last. He is certainly now Mad as the vexed sea, crowned not with a crown but with idle weeds. Three R words are key: restoration, repose, and remediate (from remedy). She ends the scene stating how much she is looking forward to being - another R word - reconciled with her father. Again, we can hope for a happy ending.
Act 4 scene 5
Another scene of little enough significance. Regan is plotting to get Edmund head of her sister. She is certainly not enormously distressed by the very recent death of her own husband.
Act 4 scene 6
In a play of extraordinary scenes, some of which make no attempt to satisfy our sense of reality, this is one of the most startling, and indeed moving. It brings together the two old men who have suffered so much (and this is the last time we see Gloucester at length), as well as Edgar, another much-changed person, who we witness leading his father to a ‘cliff edge’ to ‘die’, but who ‘survives’ and is ‘reborn’. This idea is another underscoring of the main plot, in which Lear is reborn through madness, and of course there is a Christian underpinning to this.
As the blind Gloucester is led through the fields near Dover, he tells his companion that
Methinks thy voice is altered.
And Edgar replies
Y’ are much deceived: in nothing am I changed
But in my garments.
This is not true: Edgar has been undergoing an experience which has indeed changed him, and shortly he will confront his brother in a duel and vanquish him, and by the end become the new King of Britain, something we certainly could not have predicted of the weak gullible young man we saw at the start. We hear that word which has haunted the play from Cordelia’s use of it, ‘nothing’: he was nothing, but now he has been changed to something - or someone - much more substantial. In this scene we witness him making his blind father see what is not there:
Come on, sit; here’s the place; stand still. How fearful
And dizzy ‘tis to cast one’s eyes so low!
He makes his father imagine he is at the brink of oblivion:
(aside) Why I do trifle thus with his despair
Is done to cure it.
And Gloucester ‘jumps’ off the cliff, renouncing his great affliction, his supposed last words including a blessing for his son Edgar. And then, in this rebirth or, if you prefer, resurrection he is saved by some kind of spirit, and Edgar (still disguised) states Thy life’s a miracle and, later, that
The clearest gods, who make them honours
Of men’s impossibilities, have preserved thee.
Why this scene? Well, one reason is that at least subconsciously it suggests that the life of an old man who has suffered so much might come to a conclusion with some form of consolation, and indeed when we hear later of Gloucester’s real demise, we learn that his heart burst smilingly. That will not be the fate of Lear.
Then Lear enters, fantastically dressed with wild flowers, exclaiming;
No, they cannot touch me for coining; I am the King himself.
How far they have come, these two old men, from the start of the play when they were powerful and respected. Edgar’s comment is about the King, but just right for both:
O thou side-piercing sight!
Lear’s rambling thoughts - in prose - are certainly those of a man who has lost his sanity, but shafts of light and sense shine through:
They told me I was everything; ‘tis a lie, I am not ague-proof.
Well, that is true. And then he heads off on a deranged rant about women’s sexuality,
But to the girdle do the gods inherit,
Beneath is all the fiend’s.
He is truly, in Gloucester’s words, a ruined piece of nature. And yet this leads into Lear’s most radical realisation, which is not about his own concerns but the very nature of society itself. He comments on Gloucester’s blindness and states:
A man may see how this world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears. See how yond justice rails upon yond simple thief. Hark in thine ear. Change places and, handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? Thou hast seen a farmer’s dog bark at a beggar?
And the creature run from the cur? There thou might’st behold the great image of authority: a dog’s obeyed in office.
Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand!
Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thy own back.
Thou hotly lusts to use her in that kind
For which thou whipp’st her. The usurer hangs the cozener.
Through tattered clothes small vices do appear.
Robes and furred gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold,
And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks.
Arm it in rags, a pygmy’s straw does pierce it.
This is one of literature’s great passages on the nature of power. A dog’s obeyed in office. Lear now sees that the powerful are almost inevitably hypocritical, committing injustices whose consequences they are shielded from, while poor people always suffer. This is a key moment in our understanding of Lear’s alteration. While mad, he also has insight. As Edgar says immediately after:
O, matter and impertinency mixed!
Reason in madness!
There is a connection: his madness has cracked him open and rearranged his psyche and his mind, and this has freed him up to the kind of societal and political insights we see in this scene (of course, those will not protect him from the devastating personal grief that is to come).
Touchingly, before he again heads into a demented rant, Lear recognises Gloucester, asking him to take my eyes and tells him that we must be patient in the face of pain. We started life by crying. And then he turns to one of Shakespeare’s favourite metaphors, understandably so given his own profession:
When we are born, we cry that we are come
To this great stage of fools.
In a play full of foolishness and fools (including a literal one, who has now inexplicably vanished from the scene), this seems a reasonable point of view. He echoes Macbeth (in a play written in the same year as Lear, 1606 - make sure you read James Shapiro’s book of the same name), after he hears of the death of his wife:
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
When a gentleman comes in to take him to see Cordelia, Lear calls himself a fool of fortune before running off gabbling nonsense, pursued by the attendants. A gentleman comments rightly that this is
A sight most pitiful in the meanest wretch,
Past speaking of in a king!
But, he says, there is comfort to come:
Thou hast one daughter
Who redeems nature from the general curse
Which twain have brought her to.
That positive idea, that Cordelia is somehow ‘redemptive’, and that nature can be rescued from the general curse that two have brought her to (Adam and Eve, or maybe Goneril and Regan?) teases us with the idea of a consoling ending.
There is still more in this extraordinary scene. Gloucester wishes the ‘ever-gentle gods’ (are they, really - not according to him earlier) to ‘take my breath away’). Edgar still goes not reveal himself, and says he is
A most poor man, made tame to fortune’s blows;
Who, by the art of known and feeling sorrows,
Am pregnant to good pity.
Again, here is the Christian idea that suffering can redeem us.
When Oswald enters, Edgar takes him in another guise, that of a rough countryman, and kills the sycophantic servant, a serviceable villain in a fight. Edgar discovers Goneril’s letter to Edmund which reveals her villainous plans for her husband Albany.
Surely we have now had enough in this scene. Edgar takes his father’s hand, and indeed calls him ‘father’, meaning old man, as they continue their journey.
That might seem enough drama for any scene, but the final one of the play, which I will address in the last episode, surpasses even this. Next time though, first of all Act 4 scene 7 and Act 5 scenes 1 and 2.