|
Prev
| Next
| Contents
KING LEAR 1
King Lear has again and again been described as Shakespeare's greatest
work, the best of his plays, the tragedy in which he exhibits most fully
his multitudinous powers; and if we were doomed to lose all his dramas
except one, probably the majority of those who know and appreciate him
best would pronounce for keeping King Lear.
Yet this tragedy is certainly the least popular of the famous four. The
'general reader' reads it less often than the others, and, though he
acknowledges its greatness, he will sometimes speak of it with a certain
distaste. It is also the least often presented on the stage, and the
least successful there. And when we look back on its history we find a
curious fact. Some twenty years after the Restoration, Nahum Tate
altered King Lear for the stage, giving it a happy ending, and putting
Edgar in the place of the King of France as Cordelia's lover. From that
time Shakespeare's tragedy in its original form was never seen on the
stage for a century and a half. Betterton acted Tate's version; Garrick
acted it and Dr. Johnson approved it. Kemble acted it, Kean acted it. In
1823 Kean, 'stimulated by Hazlitt's remonstrances and Charles Lamb's
essays,' restored the original tragic ending. At last, in 1838, Macready
returned to Shakespeare's text throughout.
What is the meaning of these opposite sets of facts? Are the lovers of
Shakespeare wholly in the right; and is the general reader and
play-goer, were even Tate and Dr. Johnson, altogether in the wrong? I
venture to doubt it. When I read King Lear two impressions are left on
my mind, which seem to answer roughly to the two sets of facts. King
Lear seems to me Shakespeare's greatest achievement, but it seems to me
not his best play. And I find that I tend to consider it from two
rather different points of view. When I regard it strictly as a drama,
it appears to me, though in certain parts overwhelming, decidedly
inferior as a whole to Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth. When I am
feeling that it is greater than any of these, and the fullest revelation
of Shakespeare's power, I find I am not regarding it simply as a drama,
but am grouping it in my mind with works like the Prometheus Vinctus
and the Divine Comedy, and even with the greatest symphonies of
Beethoven and the statues in the Medici Chapel.
This two-fold character of the play is to some extent illustrated by the
affinities and the probable chronological position of King Lear. It is
allied with two tragedies, Othello and Timon of Athens; and these
two tragedies are utterly unlike.[123] Othello was probably composed
about 1604, and King Lear about 1605; and though there is a somewhat
marked change in style and versification, there are obvious resemblances
between the two. The most important have been touched on already: these
are the most painful and the most pathetic of the four tragedies, those
in which evil appears in its coldest and most inhuman forms, and those
which exclude the supernatural from the action. But there is also in
King Lear a good deal which sounds like an echo of Othello,--a fact
which should not surprise us, since there are other instances where the
matter of a play seems to go on working in Shakespeare's mind and
re-appears, generally in a weaker form, in his next play. So, in King
Lear, the conception of Edmund is not so fresh as that of Goneril.
Goneril has no predecessor; but Edmund, though of course essentially
distinguished from Iago, often reminds us of him, and the soliloquy,
'This is the excellent foppery of the world,' is in the very tone of
Iago's discourse on the sovereignty of the will. The gulling of Gloster,
again, recalls the gulling of Othello. Even Edmund's idea (not carried
out) of making his father witness, without over-hearing, his
conversation with Edgar, reproduces the idea of the passage where
Othello watches Iago and Cassio talking about Bianca; and the conclusion
of the temptation, where Gloster says to Edmund:
Loyal and natural boy, I'll work the means
To make thee capable,
reminds us of Othello's last words in the scene of temptation, 'Now art
thou my lieutenant.' This list might be extended; and the appearance of
certain unusual words and phrases in both the plays increases the
likelihood that the composition of the one followed at no great distance
on that of the other.[124]
When we turn from Othello to Timon of Athens we find a play of quite
another kind. Othello is dramatically the most perfect of the
tragedies. Timon, on the contrary, is weak, ill-constructed and
confused; and, though care might have made it clear, no mere care could
make it really dramatic. Yet it is undoubtedly Shakespearean in part,
probably in great part; and it immediately reminds us of King Lear.
Both plays deal with the tragic effects of ingratitude. In both the
victim is exceptionally unsuspicious, soft-hearted and vehement. In both
he is completely overwhelmed, passing through fury to madness in the one
case, to suicide in the other. Famous passages in both plays are curses.
The misanthropy of Timon pours itself out in a torrent of maledictions
on the whole race of man; and these at once recall, alike by their form
and their substance, the most powerful speeches uttered by Lear in his
madness. In both plays occur repeated comparisons between man and the
beasts; the idea that 'the strain of man's bred out into baboon,' wolf,
tiger, fox; the idea that this bestial degradation will end in a furious
struggle of all with all, in which the race will perish. The
'pessimistic' strain in Timon suggests to many readers, even more
imperatively than King Lear, the notion that Shakespeare was giving
vent to some personal feeling, whether present or past; for the signs of
his hand appear most unmistakably when the hero begins to pour the vials
of his wrath upon mankind. Timon, lastly, in some of the
unquestionably Shakespearean parts, bears (as it appears to me) so
strong a resemblance to King Lear in style and in versification that
it is hard to understand how competent judges can suppose that it
belongs to a time at all near that of the final romances, or even that
it was written so late as the last Roman plays. It is more likely to
have been composed immediately after King Lear and before
Macbeth.[125]
Drawing these comparisons together, we may say that, while as a work of
art and in tragic power King Lear is infinitely nearer to Othello
than to Timon, in its spirit and substance its affinity with Timon
is a good deal the stronger. And, returning to the point from which
these comparisons began, I would now add that there is in King Lear a
reflection or anticipation, however faint, of the structural weakness of
Timon. This weakness in King Lear is not due, however, to anything
intrinsically undramatic in the story, but to characteristics which were
necessary to an effect not wholly dramatic. The stage is the test of
strictly dramatic quality, and King Lear is too huge for the stage. Of
course, I am not denying that it is a great stage-play. It has scenes
immensely effective in the theatre; three of them--the two between Lear
and Goneril and between Lear, Goneril and Regan, and the ineffably
beautiful scene in the Fourth Act between Lear and Cordelia--lose in the
theatre very little of the spell they have for imagination; and the
gradual interweaving of the two plots is almost as masterly as in Much
Ado. But (not to speak of defects due to mere carelessness) that which
makes the peculiar greatness of King Lear,--the immense scope of the
work; the mass and variety of intense experience which it contains; the
interpenetration of sublime imagination, piercing pathos, and humour
almost as moving as the pathos; the vastness of the convulsion both of
nature and of human passion; the vagueness of the scene where the action
takes place, and of the movements of the figures which cross this scene;
the strange atmosphere, cold and dark, which strikes on us as we enter
this scene, enfolding these figures and magnifying their dim outlines
like a winter mist; the half-realised suggestions of vast universal
powers working in the world of individual fates and passions,--all this
interferes with dramatic clearness even when the play is read, and in
the theatre not only refuses to reveal itself fully through the senses
but seems to be almost in contradiction with their reports. This is not
so with the other great tragedies. No doubt, as Lamb declared,
theatrical representation gives only a part of what we imagine when we
read them; but there is no conflict between the representation and the
imagination, because these tragedies are, in essentials, perfectly
dramatic. But King Lear, as a whole, is imperfectly dramatic, and
there is something in its very essence which is at war with the senses,
and demands a purely imaginative realisation. It is therefore
Shakespeare's greatest work, but it is not what Hazlitt called it, the
best of his plays; and its comparative unpopularity is due, not merely
to the extreme painfulness of the catastrophe, but in part to its
dramatic defects, and in part to a failure in many readers to catch the
peculiar effects to which I have referred,--a failure which is natural
because the appeal is made not so much to dramatic perception as to a
rarer and more strictly poetic kind of imagination. For this reason,
too, even the best attempts at exposition of King Lear are
disappointing; they remind us of attempts to reduce to prose the
impalpable spirit of the Tempest.
I propose to develop some of these ideas by considering, first, the
dramatic defects of the play, and then some of the causes of its
extraordinary imaginative effect.
Prev
| Next
| Contents
|
|
