(Random impressions on hearing and reading King Lear once more)

This is a play.  It is about two old men who are betrayed by their children after they pick the wrong ones to favour.  It opens with a fruity discussion about the conception of the bastard.  Did that word have its bad sense back then? 

Edmund is a bastard in both senses.  He is also the pivot between the stories of the two old men.  In a play of black hats and white hats, he is about the blackest.  He is a glitch in the social fabric – and he sets out to rip the whole thing to bits.

The reticence of Cordelia is odd.  But we must remember the remark of Bradley.  She was brought up with Goneril and Regan for sisters.  And then there is the old chestnut – but for that, there would be no play.

It is immediately obvious that the king is past it all.  He looks and sounds sclerotic.  He has left his ‘retirement’ far too late.

And King Lear betrays his office.  The first duty of a king is to preserve the kingdom.  The next is to ensure a safe succession.  Lear fails in both.  His is a shocking and dangerous folly.  And he dresses up his indulgence in a stupid and pointless game of charades.  There is more than enough fuel, here, for a tragedy.

His explosion is almost as quick as that of Leontes.  In less than ten minutes, he casts off his favourite daughter and his most trusted counsellor.  Their fault?  They declined to take part in his silly games.

The King of France has a very white hat.  (Which may be as well, because France probably did not exist then.)

The sisters show their evil immediately.  Their first moves are not to look after their father, but to protect themselves against his excess and distemper.  They are cold and loveless.  You wonder how they got and now treat their husbands.  Their protestations of love were of course faked.

One husband is a kind of corrective.  The other is as bad as his wife.

Kent is a model of loyalty.  He gives as good as he gets.  He does a great line in invective.  He is someone the audience can support.

Gloucester is cut from other cloth.  He is the journeyman courtier and politician, and he is gullible.  But he does not sell out.  He is certainly more sinned against than sinning.

Edmund, the bastard, is a poor man’s Napoleon.  He is the ultimate gambler and anyone else is just a piece that he seeks to move about the board for his benefit.  Other people serve no other function.

The fool is a kind of chorus, a mirror to the cracked king, and a source of relief to the audience.  He is also a throwback to the older and more popular forms of theatre, like the morality plays – or commedia dell ‘arte.  It may also be as well at times that he reminds us that we are watching theatre.  Auden thought that the fool uses humour as ‘a protection against tragic feeling’.

Edgar, the innocent son of Gloucester, is a white hat, and targeted for that reason.  He becomes another fool (who can bang on too much for out taste).  He will live to triumph over evil.

Oswald is a greasy shocker, the complete opposite of Kent.  Kent’s denunciation of him is a precious highlight of invective, which is nearly a lost art.

The bastard’s betrayal of his father is pure evil.  He does it for his advancement.  And it leads to horrifying results.  Who said that ‘motiveless’ malignity was the worst kind of evil?

Lear is now quite mad, but not so mad that he cannot reflect that he has taken too little care for the poor and oppressed.  (That may be an unusual reflection for a king of that or any other period.)

The storm scene is like an explosion of Mahler or Jackson Pollock.  Is man no more than this?  (It is usually far too long and too loud – even on CD.  It has to be grotesque, but not in volume.)

The revenge on Gloucester is a deliberate affront to the audience.  Cornwall speaks of revenges ‘we are bound to take’.  So – here is a categorical imperative for evil – derived from Satan?

Goneril and Regan are now beyond redemption.  Regan gets the most nauseating line on our stage about how a blind man may get to Dover, but the line ‘tigers not daughters’ comes from a husband.  (Indeed, we now recall from an earlier tragedy the ‘wilderness of tigers’ that was so inhumanly cruel to another faded commander in his stricken condition.)

And so, on to Dover.  It is about now, if you are like me, that survival becomes a life and death issue for the audience.  It may to some resemble surviving Apocalypse Now.  Who can say ‘I am at the worst’?  ‘It is time’s plague when madmen lead the blind.’  Reality and morality all dissolve in chaos.  The very notion of humanity is repudiated.  We have returned to the primal slime we thought we had left behind.

Has our stage seen this since the Greeks about two thousand years beforehand?  The descent is spattered with lines that stay with you.  ‘It smells of humanity.’  At times. the audience in the stalls shares with the characters on the stage the sense that they are going where no one has been before.

The predators are now fully engaged in preying on each other.  Do they do this in the jungle?

As in the Roman plays, the repeated reference to the ‘mighty gods’ reminds us that this ‘great stage of fools’ has nothing of what we call religion at all.  (Not that the current models supply workable armour against evil.)

When Cordelia returns, she is a paragon.  Of what?  Her inability to play the game led to all Hell breaking loose.  Now she is a model of perfection.  Who has to die.  A heretic might ask whether it has all been worth it.

Near the end, the evil of the sisters and the bastard teeters on caricature.  (‘An interlude!’  ‘If not, I’ll ne’er trust medicine.’)  But the duel is good theatre – and a form of relief.  The Greeks never made it to this kind of drama.

Edmund convinces a captain he appoints to murder Cordelia of the merit of the defence of superior orders – and he then fires Albany.  Some may take with a grain of salt his apparent contrition at the end.

There has long been contention about the blinding of Gloucester and the murder of Cordelia.  It is all too much for some.  It is as well to remember the caution of Dr Johnson that ‘our author well knew what would please the audience for which he wrote.’  They did not just whip and put people in the stocks back then.  They hanged, drew and quartered them in public.  It was a very popular event – as would be the guillotine much later in France.

And Goneril has the perfect bell-ringer for Donald Trump.

So if I do. The laws are mine, not thine.

Who can arraign me for’t?

‘Is this the promised end?’

Well, at least Albany has been released from one of the worst marriages ever – and he has lived to tell the tale.  That in itself is something.

Philosophy does not have much to say about Shakespeare, but Auden quotes Pascal to good effect.

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed.  The entire universe need not arm himself to crush him.  A vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this.

All our dignity, then, consists in thought.

And ‘thought’ is not a term that comes readily to the mind when we reflect on King Lear.  But it is something to bear in mind when we think of Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, or Donald Trump – not one of whom has ever seen this play, or heard its poetry, or absorbed its teaching.