'King Lear' scene by scene 9

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Episode 9 of the King Lear scene by scene podcast looks at the first two scenes in Act 4, the first in the immediate aftermath of Gloucester’s blinding, the second an opportunity to look at the character development of Albany throughout the play.

You can listen to all 12 episodes here, and also download a free 52-page document with all the transcripts.

Transcript:

Act IV scene 1

Immediately after the blinding scene, as the second and third servants (in Shakespeare’s first version of the play) look after the brutalised Gloucester, we hear from his older son Edgar, commenting on how he is surely at the worst, and welcoming the unsubstantial air, a typically cruel juxtaposition from Shakespeare, with his father being led past him by an Old Man. Edgar, still not revealing who he is, says to himself

O Gods! Who is’t can say “I am at the worst”?

I am worse than e’er I was.

And worse I may be yet: the worst is not

So long as we can say, “This is the worst”.

Of all Shakespeare’s plays, this is indeed the one which explores most consistently what the ‘worst’ means, what being at the lowest feels like, and Gloucester voices this when he states that:

As flies to wanton boys, are we to th’ gods,

They kill us for their sport.

This terrifying vision of the world, from a viewpoint that makes it understandable, is truly nihilistic. It is not merely that the gods are absent on leave, but that they are actively malevolent. Gloucester has just stated that

I stumbled when I saw.

But now that he is blind and can metaphorically see, his insights are brutally depressing. In the final lines of the scene he echoes his master Lear’s earlier insight from Act 3 scene 4, when he said

O, I have ta’en

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.

Now Gloucester has an equally radical vision (the sub-plot again underscoring the main one). He uses another form of the word ‘superflux’:

Heavens, deal so still:

Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man,

That slaves your ordinance, that will not see

Because he does not feel, feel your power quickly.

So distribution should undo excess

And each man have enough. 

The now ironically clear-sighted Gloucester understands we can only see if we properly ‘feel.’ He asks to be guided to the cliff at Dover, entirely clear about what he needs to do next.

Act IV scene ii

One of the characters who develops as the play proceeds is Goneril’s husband Albany, and in this scene we see him come to the fore in confronting his wife’s badness. Before his entry she tells Edmund that he is frightened to do anything, due to the cowish terror of his spirit, despite Oswald stating: never man so changed. Goneril is thrilled by Edmund’s manliness, but when Albany enters he is not the mild-mannered man we had seen previously.

I now take the opportunity of this scene to give an overview of Albany, his character and his function in the narrative.

He is an interesting character, with a clear developmental arc through the story. In brief, he is someone who discovers moral clarity through force of circumstance. Initially he seems to be a passive character. We see him only briefly in Act I: all he says in scene i is an easily-missed Dear sir, forbear when Lear reaches for his sword, words which he says with Cornwall (significantly, thus, at first he seems to be bracketed with his brother-in-law, and perhaps we expect them to be in league together like their wives are). The next time he appears is in Scene 4, and his first individual line in the play is a characteristically mild, passive and ineffective comment to Lear, who calls Goneril a marble-hearted fiend:

Pray, sir, be patient. 

Albany is a particularly faithful follower of those elusive beings, the ‘Gods’, despite the evidence that they are not to be relied on. In Act 1 scene 4, after Lear has stormed off ranting that Goneril’s organs of increase should be dried up, Albany comments: 

Now gods that we adore, whereof comes this? 

A few lines later, he shows that there is a better self underneath the mildness when he says to his wife, in objecting to her treatment of her father,

I cannot be so partial, Goneril, to the great love I bear you…

but is then trampled by her dismissive and patronising Pray you, content.

And then we don’t see him for all of Acts 2 and 3: we could easily forget about him. There is no sign that he will become an important figure, anything other than what his wife calls ‘our mild husband’. However, by Act 4 scene 2 he has had enough, and arrives with ·  

O Goneril! 

You are not worth the dust which the rude wind  

Blows in your face. I fear your disposition. 

Followed by a positive torrent of outraged accusation ;

Wisdom and goodness to the vile seem vile:

Filths savour but themselves. What have you done?

Tigers, not daughters, what have you perform'd?

A father, and a gracious aged man,

Whose reverence even the head-lugg'd bear would lick,

Most barbarous, most degenerate! have you madded.

Could my good brother suffer you to do it?

adding

See thyself, devil!

Proper deformity seems not in the fiend

So horrid as in woman.

Finally he says that he would tear her apart with his own hands if she weren’t a woman:

Were't my fitness

To let these hands obey my blood,

They are apt enough to dislocate and tear

Thy flesh and bones: howe'er thou art a fiend,

A woman's shape doth shield thee.

However, he remains a naive truster of justice, especially in its divine form, and when the messenger announces that Cornwall has been killed after blinding Gloucester, exclaims:

This shows you are above, 

You justicers, that these our nether crimes 

So speedily can venge.

The end of this play will thoroughly disprove that idea.

In Act 5 he is torn between his horror at what his wife, Regan and Edmund are doing, and his patriotism. He arrests Edmund on capital treason and his own wife, this gilded serpent, and is prepared to fight Edmund if no other champion should appear (Edgar does, of course). Later in the final scene he is given the memorable words:

Shut your mouth, dame,

Or with this paper shall I stop it: Hold, sir:

Thou worse than any name, read thine own evil:

No tearing, lady: I perceive you know it.

This is scarcely the milky Albany we met earlier. Forced by the sheer magnitude of the evil which has gripped the country, he has proven his own moral mettle. However, all this decency is for naught. He is almost comically ineffective : when Kent asks where the king is, Albany replies:

Great thing of us forgot!

Speak, Edmund, where's the king? and where's Cordelia?

Well, dead by now, is the answer: it might have helped things a little if you had a slightly better memory… And five seconds before the dead Cordelia is brought in by Lear, Albany exclaims: The Gods defend her! As he is wrapping things up in the speech Know our intent, he talks of the comfort that shall be applied, and finishes with the entirely wrong

‘All friends shall taste

The wages of their virtue, and all foes 

The cup of their deservings.’ 

But then he has to break off with O see, see! as Lear realises that Cordelia is dead.  

Finally, aware of his own unworthiness and inadequacy, Albany hands over his claim in the kingdom to Edgar. In the course of this terrible story, Albany has been the ordinary man, the person many of us might have been in this maelstrom - basically decent, a little weak, and distinctly naive.