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Essays, Opinion, & Commentary |
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January 1, 2008
Part II by Eugene E. Narrett, Ph.D.
These essays on Shakespeare's King Lear (1606) examine essential human qualities, relationships, conflicts and beliefs; they show that freedom is a fact of life, that everyone is tested in ways that expose their character, capacity for growth and faith that "the wheel will come full circle." They allude also to the perilous state of our culture and to the lengthy, often debased, but vital campaign for Presidency now entering its second year of posing and polls. Its tawdry qualities test our caring endurance and discernment as well as our capacity to work to make a miracle for this campaign may be the last in which citizens can take a major role and thus maintain their humanity, a task pertinent to all the qualities and issues discussed in these essays. Consider it, along with the increasingly blatant attack on Israel pushed by America's perennial power elite to be important frames of reference for studying King Lear. Some people prove their words in deeds; fewer speak wisely, sensitively measuring their words, especially reproofs to strengthen friends and amend rather than enflame enemies, or potential enemies of what they hold dear. Those who grow toward heroism develop these abilities in a high degree, none more than Lear's counselor, the Earl of Kent, a great man by many measures and as true a servant as a man can be. He demonstrates a capacity to suffer in a good if possibly hopeless cause; to do anything, even, like the falsely condemned Edgar, negate and dissemble his identity to work as a beggar if only "the right may thrive"; Kent can speak tactfully without compromising his principles as well as speak out quickly and boldly at moments of crisis. He is not perfect but he is perfectly loyal: is that enough at times like his, and ours? It is an extra burden of those who are very loving and loyal that one is disappointed at any imperfection. Does he meet "his assignment and special challenge" for his generation? Kent is on stage as the play begins; to the extent that the work is well made this indicates he will have a major role in its action and themes. Indeed, he speaks the opening lines that raise the central theme (to the play and our lives) of parental preference that has not only personal but national and international significance. (Indeed, distinction is the principle of creation). Kent's opening lines indicate that he is unsure how things stand in the royal family and the state, and that he is not ashamed to state his surprise. "I thought the King had more affected the Duke of Albany than of Cornwall" (1.1.1-2). Gloucester, a man of many words while Kent, usually, makes do with few, explains the carefully equal division of the kingdom. That's a theme as important in our time as in Shakespeare's. Does lack of preference and discrimination, and subsequent equal division "prevent future strife" or insure it? Are all nations in the "human family" equal? Can they all have equal roles as they have equal votes in the UN General Assembly? Division of the kingdom in order to prevent division within the family, today we might say "the human family," that is the choice Lear plans to make. We learn much about Kent from his silences: he does not comment on Lear's plan or Gloucester's explanation of it. Rather, he passes to seemingly simple matters: "Is this your son my lord?" he asks his colleague. In the previous essay we noted the complexity of Gloucester's wittily embarrassed reply. At its conclusion, when he asks Kent, "do you smell a fault" Kent demonstrates the delicate care of his intelligence and morals. "I cannot wish the fault undone, the issue [Edmond] of it being so proper" (1.1.17-18). Without saying so directly, Kent has suggested that the manner of Edmond's begetting was a fault, but what's done is done, the young man is here, raised as a nobleman and Kent would not wish it undone: life is a primary value, so are long-abiding friendships essential to the integrity of the state, so is the dignity of the young man. Kent's next challenge will require a very different kind of care and stance, beginning with careful listening and knowledge of character. For his master, Lear, has a flaw, natural to age, that gets exposed. One can imagine the unease Kent felt as he listened to the plans for "division of the kingdom"; historically, England was still amidst two hundred sixty years of crisis (c. 1430-1690) as a result of confused claims to the throne and rightful authority. A divided kingdom led to a nightmare of murders, war, fear, including fears of foreign invasion and impoverishment. The wish to avoid preference, so correct to modern ears, was once known to be a recipe for disaster. So is it for a father to make mothers of his daughters (1.1.295-302; 1.3.17-21; 1.4.134-200, passim) as now is a routine part of State functioning. Here we must intertwine the stories of Kent and Cordelia, Lear's youngest and most beloved daughter to explicate the relation of service (including criticism rightly given) to love and the difficulty of measuring one's resistance when predatory forces are near. One can imagine Kent's unease growing as Lear's two older daughters profess their love for him in grandiose, vague and insulting terms (Regan never even says that she loves him, 1.1.71-8), knowing, as becomes apparent, that Cordelia never will flatter regardless of circumstance. Indeed, Shakespeare introduces her to the audience via the brief asides she speaks after each of her sister's verbal confections indicating that she feels the entire process shameful and will rather "love and be silent" (1.1.64,78-80). One of the most profound and timely questions worked out in the subsequent action is whether it is adequate to love and be silent when those who do not love lavishly give "mouth honor" and thus gain power they are almost certain to mis-use. When Lear finally asks Cordelia "what [she] can say to win a third [of the kingdom] more opulent than [her] sisters," the moment of Kent's next test nears fast and stormily for Cordelia answers "nothing." Lear pretends not to understand and asks again. Again she answers "nothing." He coaxes her saying, "nothing will come of nothing" only to elicit a terse, by-the-book definition of love that sounds, in the context of what her sisters said, cold and grudging: "I love your majesty according to my bond, no more, no less." Lear clearly loves Cordelia greatly and invites her "to mend her speech a little lest it may mar [her] fortunes" (1.1.96-7). Her answer is normative for the play and for our times and I quote it because it soon finds a parallel in Kent's definition of his own loving bond to Lear; both he and Cordelia will define as well as show true service, its link to love and social integrity. In their own ways, though they strive greatly and accomplish much, each will do greatly but incompletely in meeting the time's challenge. Cordelia describes love between parent and child: "Good my lord, you have begot me, bred me, loved me. I return those duties as are right fit, obey you, love you and most honor you" (1.1.97-100). Three gifts given and returned: not identical but reciprocal; note that conception (marital sex), birth and upbringing is a basic blessing and show of love [1]. Through Cordelia, then Kent and others great and anonymous Shakespeare shows love to be a series of reciprocal duties, of deeds lovingly even joyously done throughout a life as well as at life-or-death moments of crisis. These deeds forge the "holy cords" which Kent later will invoke (2.2.76) to one who will not, perhaps cannot hear. To love according to one's bond may sound plain but it turns out to mean a great deal. A child is in debt to a parent, returning their loving care with loving obedience and honor [2]. Contrast this model with what our dominant institutions have been showing and teaching parents and children for decades. Cordelia adds a telling proof of her definition of love's nature and deeds that not only exposes the emptiness of her sisters' words (and marriages, as events will show) but that speak to us: "Why have my sisters husbands," she asks Lear, "if they say they love you all? Surely, "when I shall wed that lord whose hand must take my plight [troth] will carry half my love with him, half my care and duty" with the rest reserved as a heritage for her father (1.1.101-06). The truth that a wife owes her loving duty to her husband has been destroyed in our times. The results of this breaking surround us with pain, confusion and a culture without a humane future. The error Lear makes in seeking to avoid preference (an error quickly exposed), in dividing the kingdom and in mistaking Cordelia's words will open him to merciless abuse by his two elder daughters, evoking lines that define our days: "Is it grown the custom that discarded fathers should have such little mercy shown" to them? (3.4.72-3). Discarded fathers in Anglophone nations know that a police state has been in place since 1980; so it will be for the old, just as it was for Lear: they will have to "beg forgiveness" and "confess that [they] are old…age is unnecessary" (2.4.151-4). This is what happens in a culture that breaks the functional ties between love, service and deference to fathers and husbands, between legitimacy and illegitimacy: collapse, sadism, tyranny and loss of the "right" to choose one's time of death. Already ads for investment companies warn us, "don't outlive your money." The inference is clear [3]. About to give away all he has but his title and respect (he thinks), unsettled by the flattery of his two older daughters and by Cordelia's refusal to give him any 'sweetener' with the truth (it is, after all, a public occasion, the witnessed of contracts on the transfer of power and property, with the third share already prepared for Cordelia), Lear grows enraged. "So young and so untender" he asks pitifully, giving her one last chance to "mend her speech." "So young, my lord, and true," Cordelia snaps. True she is, but the plain truth and nothing but the truth cannot work here. Too late: "Let it be so!" Lear shouts: "thy truth then be thy dower" and proceeds to curse, disown and banish her. Kent intervenes forcefully. "Thy youngest daughter does not love thee least!" This is known to all present: "I loved her most," Lear cries desperately, "and thought to set my rest on her kind nursery" (1.1.125-6). Lear had planned to spend the rest of his life with Cordelia in her third of the kingdom. Characters as disparate as his elder daughters and the visiting King of France, a suitor for Cordelia, know this: "she was even now your best, your dearest" (1.1.215-20). Flattery is dangerously manipulative and implicitly self-serving but being "too plain" (a style Kent later will adopt), especially with those one loves may disorder. "Let pride, which she calls plainness marry her," Lear declares. Since Cordelia knows how dangerously self-serving her sisters are ("I know you what you are and like a sister am most loathe to call your faults as they are named" (1.1.272-3)], would it not be wise, loving, and worthy her duty to her father and the people of Britain to make clear to him how much he means to her to save him from their designs? If her goodness contained prudence, if her love embraced wisdom, would she not refrain, on the verge of her leaving for France, from telling her sisters how vicious their designs are and thus provoking their jealous ambitions further? Would that not give her father, the kingdom and herself better service? Her pride, however true her affections and correct her principles are, may be "a most small fault" but its consequences will be large. Clearly Cordelia should discard pride at such a moment and Lear should discriminate, having his youngest but only true (loving, faithful) daughter exercise rule as his regent. The kingdom should not be divided: bi or tri-national states do not prevent future strife but guarantee it. These all are lessons the play teaches as it uncoils from the conflicts of its first scene which also shows a variety of characters elaborated later, implicitly asking if any anger is justified and whether any can be healthily, helpfully expressed [4]. A true leader and healer, of families and states must be subtle, patient, brave and true, and must want above all to heal. The only times Kent does not contain his anger is when Lear is threatened or mocked especially by the yes-ma'm servant, Oswald, his antithesis whom Edgar eventually will sum up as "a serviceable villain." But Kent's immediate role as one who loves and serves Lear is to limit the damage if he can. He breaks into Lear's wrath (deflecting it from Cordelia) by stating his service to him in reciprocal terms as Cordelia had done in defining her love and duty. "Royal Lear, whom I have ever honored as my king, loved as my father, as my master followed, as my great patron thought on in my prayers" (1.142-4). Lear has given Kent lands, status, protection, and, to date, his interested attention and Kent, like Cordelia returns those duties with honor, love, obedience and prayer. When Lear, still enraged, commands his silence on pain of death, Kent replies, "my life I never held but as a pawn to wager in thy service, nor fear to lose it, thy safety being [my] motive" (1.1.157-9). Throughout the play Kent's actions will prove these words. But like Edgar he will have to disguise himself to do it for like Edgar and Cordelia he is cursed, stripped of his lands and banished. When he says he will "shape his old course in a country new" he speaks both literally and figuratively for England will be transformed to a place of lawless predation where he will have "to serve where [he] now stands condemned," as a ragged peasant waiting upon the newly penniless and despised king who will be broken, body and soul by the errors he and many people have made. A blend of craft, loving self-sacrifice and timely actions by many different people will be necessary to secure a saving remnant of life and spirit for the renewal that must come if utter darkness is not to follow the brutality and chaos let loose by attempts to avoid showing preference and failing to distinguish service from a selfish lust for power or to overlook a smidgen of decent pride.
Notes: 1. In his magisterial colloquium on the books of Moshe, Nachmanides (Rabbi Moshe ben Nachman, 1190-1268) comments on Genesis 1:22-3 that "blessing pertains to birth" and references the blessing that the Creator bestows on Abraham and Sarah, 17:16: "I will bless her and she will give rise to nations." 2. Maimonides, Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon (1135-1204) writes on Genesis 3:16 that a husband's duty is to love his wife and "a wife's duty is to honor her husband exceedingly and revere him"; Nachmanides adds that she must be subservient to (obey) him. 3. "The sword comes into the world for the delay of justice and the perversion of justice," Pirke Avot ("sayings of the fathers"), 5:11; family courts and abortion law alone bring a world of pervasive violence. And see my essay, "2020 Vision." The War of Terror began within our culture. 4. Among the goals of King Lear is to dramatize the four balances of anger and conciliation found among human beings, Pirke Avot 5:14. Shakespeare seems familiar with this best -- known of Mishnaic chapters (from the Group, "damages" a topic with which Lear is extensively concerned) translated into Italian by the 1550s. In Lear these types are Gloucester, Lear, Albany, husband of Goneril, Lear's eldest daughter, and Cornwall, husband of Regan, Lear's middle daughter. Kent's indignation is always measured, just, and focused on Lear's honor and the relationships of which he is the hub. Given the relevance of expressing righteous indignation ("anger hath a privilege," 2.2.72), I hope to discus its effects, specifically: are they mainly instructive and revealing of basic truths or do they complicate healing that might otherwise occur by disabling the righteous? It is a question that those who would effectively "be on guard against an autocratic government" (Avot 2:3) must try to resolve and apply. Perhaps the flaws of good people play an essential role in exposing deceit, in letting the power-mad and malicious reveal and isolate themselves as happens in Lear, regardless of damage incurred. Edgar indeed is the one character that always restrains or measures his anger, even in fighting the half-brother who seeks his life, destroys his father and wrecks the kingdom.
Note: Was Edmond's mother a doxy and his begetting a one-night fling? Was Gloucester a widower or an adulterer at the time? The play sheds no light on these and other matters. Shakespeare rarely explains everything: he is too wise and reality-based for that. The inability to know or explain all is an implicit reminder of our distance from the power of the "divinity that shapes our ends."
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