'King Lear': Albany and Kent
In the last essay I concentrated on the bleakness of the story and Shakespeare’s vision in King Lear; by way of contrast, this week I’m going to discuss two characters who, in the way of Westerns, we might describe as ‘the good guys.’
King Lear certainly doesn’t present us with a world in which everyone is bad or foolish. The great critic Tony Tanner states that ‘Cordelia is… along with Kent and Edgar and for the most part Albany the most steadfastly “natural” character in the play.’ Cordelia might be a bit stubborn or difficult in I i, but in the end she is a loyal, forgiving and loving daughter; her decent husband the King of France recognises these qualities, and they are why he marries her. The Fool is loyal to Lear, despite the latter’s foolishness. Edgar, at first foolish and gullible, grows in moral stature during his strange journey through the role of Poor Tom. One of the most significant, and indeed morally heroic moments in the play, is when a nameless servant attacks and eventually kills Cornwall after his torture of Gloucester. And then there are two men, two Dukes who are unquestionably morally decent: Albany and Kent.
Albany 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 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 iv, 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 I iv, 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 II and III: 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 IV scene ii 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.
As I suggested in the previous essay, however, he remains a naive truster of justice, especially divine justice, 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 V 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 servant’, 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.
The critic Andrew Gurr writes:
Albany is the last remaining figure of authority… and what does he do with that authority? He first attempts to restore order, by returning things to the position they were in before Lear’s disastrous ‘darker purpose’ was revealed. Ignoring the collection of corpses accumulating off-stage, he declares ‘All friends shall taste/ The wages of their virtue, and all foes The cup of their deservings.’ But this well-intentioned statement is a nonsense, as Lear immediately tells him. Dismissing the simple-minded thought that there is any chance of virtue ever being rewarded, Lear says – ‘And my poor fool is hanged!’ Every word of that searing sentence locks onto the events of the play. The connective ‘And’ shows it is Lear’s answer to Albany’s proclamation – how can you say such a thing when Cordelia is dead?
Finally, aware of his own unworthiness and inadequacy, Albany hands over his claim in the kingdom to Edgar.
Kent is very different: here we have the unwaveringly consistent voice of loyalty, and more importantly the crystal-sharp vision that Albany lacks. In his first full speech in I i, 144ff, we see his fearless and selfless rebuking of Lear : “Be Kent unmannerly / When Lear is mad.” · What wilt thou do, old man?
Think'st thou that duty shall have dread to speak,
When power to flattery bows? To plainness honour's bound,
When majesty stoops to folly. Reverse thy doom;
And, in thy best consideration, cheque
This hideous rashness.
And, significantly in terms of the key blindness trope, ‘See better, Lear’. Three scenes later he returns in disguise, again at considerable risk to himself, to serve his master loyally. He is, he says as a countryman ‘A very honest-hearted fellow, and as poor as the king.’ And he rightly says that he can deliver a plain message bluntly’. In Act 2 scene 2 he has his confrontation with Oswald, the very opposite kind of servant ‘A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats’ and so on. He suffers as a result, being put in the stocks. As he wisely says at the end of that scene, in a brief soliloquy, and using one of the key words of the play: ‘Nothing almost sees miracles but misery.’ In other words, you have to be lowly to see the truth. He goes on to try to protect the King on the heath in the storm scenes III ii and iv. Closely identified with Cordelia in the first scene, he then reunites with her in 4 7, stating selflessly:
To be acknowledged, madam, is o'erpaid.
All my reports go with the modest truth;
Nor more nor clipp'd, but so.
Finally, at the end of the play he has the ultimate judgement on what has happened: ‘all’s cheerless, dark and deadly.’ He leaves completely broken-hearted : ‘My master calls me, I must not say no.’
These two ‘lesser’ characters are stitched into the fabric of the story, touching repeatedly on key ideas of the play. They are similar in their fundamental decency, different in their emotional and intellectual intelligence. In the end, though, neither of them is able to mitigate or deflect the horror of this tragedy.