'King Lear' scene by scene 11

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I’ve arrived at the penultimate episode, number 11, looking at Act 4 scene 7, and Act 5 scenes 1 and 2, a relatively quiet section between the tumultuous Act 4 scene 6 and the climax of King Lear.

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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 7

After the noisy drama of the previous scene, this one is quiet but still immensely charged with emotion. At the end of Act 4, we have a logical and possible ending to the whole story, as Lear and Cordelia are reunited and forgive each other. The perfect happy ending. James Shapiro, in 1606 - Shakespeare and the Year of Lear, tells us that at the point of the reconciliation between Lear and Cordelia, we are 3 hours/2,800 lines in,

the typical length of one of Shakespeare's plays. But ‘King Lear’, which still has another 500 lines to go, does not end there, and when it does and both father and daughter are  dead, we are confronted with a desolate scene that is all the more crushing, denying us not only what we wish for, but also what we expect.

At the start of the scene there is another reunion, between Cordelia and Kent, the truth-tellers from the very first scene, two people whose lives were turned upside down by Lear’s foolishness but who never wavered, and now reunite in their determination to put things right.

Then Cordelia says to the Doctor that the gods (those elusive figures in this play) must

Cure this great breach in his abused nature.

Th’ untuned and jarring senses, O, wind up

Of this child-changed father.

Every one of those lines tells us how Lear’s equilibrium has been destroyed: his abused nature has been breached, his senses are untuned and jarring (reminding me of another kind of madness - Ophelia’s description of Hamlet that he is Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh). And Lear is ‘child-changed’ - both changed by his children, and changed into a child.

As Lear is carried in, and music starts to play to bring him gently back into the world, Cordelia speaks the language we want to hear at the end of the narrative - of restoration, medicine and repair:

O my dear father! Restoration hang

Thy medicine on my lips; and let this kiss

Repair those violent harms that my two sisters

Have in thy reverence made!

She treats him with utter respect, calling him Your Majesty.

When he comes to, he thinks she is a spirit, and his lines go to the heart of the play’s vision:

You do me wrong to take me out o' the grave:

Thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound

Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears

Do scald like molten lead.

Truly he has been bound onto a wheel of fire (a phrase taken by G. Wilson Knight for the title of his famous 1930 book on Shakespearean tragedy). The experience of that pain, prompting his tears which scald him like molten lead, has reduced the raging arrogance of the first scene to utter gentleness:

I am a very foolish fond old man,

Fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less,

And to deal plainly,

I fear I am not in my perfect mind.

And then he ‘sees’ it is Cordelia and asks for forgiveness:

I know you do not love me, for your sisters

Have, as I do remember, done me wrong.

You have some cause; they have not.

That is something he still has to understand - that of course she loves him, despite the wrong he did in the first scene.

But the final lines of the scene are not so comforting, and cast a dark shadow: Kent and a Gentleman talk about the impending battle. As the latter says,

The arbitrement is like to be bloody.

Act 5 scenes 1 and 2

Regan and Goneril fight over Edmund, a matter really of little interest to us, exposing their shallowness (in the end, Edmund is far less complex than Iago in Othello, who I previously compared him to). Edgar arrives in yet another guise, telling Albany that he can produce a champion. At the end Edmund considers which sister he should ‘take’? And that Albany must die. More importantly, he states at the end of his soliloquy:

 As for the mercy

 Which he intends to Lear and to Cordelia,

 The battle done and they within our power,

 Shall never see his pardon, for my state

 Stands on me to defend, not to debate.

Above all, this sets up the vital tension of the final scene, as we hope against hope that Cordelia will be safe. More on that shortly.

Scene 2 is very brief (I should clarify what I said about Act 4 scene 6 - this is the last time we see Gloucester, albeit for a moment), ending with Edgar (still not revealed) telling his father, who agrees with him:

Men must endure 

Their going hence, even as their coming hither:

Ripeness is all.

There will be a lot more to endure in the final, cataclysmic scene, the scene which defines the tragedy, and which is the subject of the last episode in this series, number 12.