'King Lear' scene by scene 3
In the King Lear scene by scene podcast, Act 1 scene 3 (briefly) and scene 4 are the focus this time: themes of loyalty and service, and of course of blindness, which is everywhere. Also, dog-owners look away.
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You can listen to all 12 episodes here, and also download a free 52-page document with all the transcripts.
Transcript: Act 1 scene 3 & scene 4
After the enormous dramas of the first two scenes, the third one has considerably less interest. So I will quickly dispose of Act I scene iii in this talk, and move on to the meatier fourth scene.
In scene iii we see Goneril dispense orders to her servant Oswald, who says the bare minimum: later we will learn he is the worst kind of servant. In Act 2 scene ii Kent calls him, among other rich insults,
a glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue.
Service - our duty - is a persistent theme in the play, embodied first of all by Kent despite the disadvantages to him, and most dramatically by the servant who later mortally wounds Cornwall after Gloucester’s blinding at the cost of his own life: he says
I have served you ever since I was a child;
But better service have I never done you
Than now to bid you hold.
And in the Quarto version there is a short conversation between two more loyal servants who discuss how they are going to help Gloucester.
When it comes down to the test how much do we stand up for the truth, or are we, like Oswald, only thinking of ourselves, ‘super-serviceable’?
‘Who is it who can tell me who I am?’ is a question asked by Lear in the next scene. It is a question that we should all be able to answer clearly and honestly. Oswald would not be able to.
And so to Act 1 scene 4.
Kent’s absolute loyalty - at considerable cost to himself - is seen immediately, when he returns to the stage as the disguised countryman ‘Caius’. Many characters in this play change during the course of its events, but ironically Kent is not one of those. What you see is what you get, from the first scene to the last:
I do profess to be no less than I seem, to serve him truly that will put me in trust.
He can deliver ‘a plain message bluntly’.
A Knight then enters to give the unwelcome message that ‘your highness is not entertained with that ceremonious affection as you were wont. There’s a great abatement of kindness.’
Lear has sensed this all right:
I have perceived a most faint neglect of late.
But it is one thing hearing or ‘perceiving’ a message, and another entirely in accepting and absorbing the full reality of its substance. The Fool continues to deliver similar largely ignored messages, about how the King is himself a Fool, that ‘all thy other titles thou hast given away: that thou was born with’ and that ‘Thou hadst little wit in thy bald crown when thou gav’st thy golden one away’.
But, as the Fool also says,
Truth’s a dog must to kennel: he must be whipped out.
Dogs don’t have a good name in this play, consistently portrayed as the lowest of low animals: later, Lear realises he was flattered ‘like a dog’ and has come to the realisation that ‘a dog’s obeyed in office’. Truth naturally hides; it would have to be whipped out of a kennel, another parallel to the idea of blindness: facing the truth of what you are is not natural, easy or welcome.
The implications of this explode in the latter part of the scene, following the arrival of Goneril, with her unconvincing complaints about the allegedly poor behaviour of Lear’s knights, to such an extent that he asks
Are you our daughter?
Lear’s sense of identity is being unmoored from all he had assumed he was:
Does any here know me? This is not Lear.
Does Lear walk thus?
And four lines later
Who is it that can tell me who I am?
This is a play that shows us who we truly are. Everyone, from the decent Kent and Albany, all the way along the spectrum to the vicious Cornwall and Regan, is exposed and revealed, and by the end of the story there is no character who has not been tested and displayed in the crucible of the narrative. But of course it is mostly Lear who undergoes the full savage process (echoed in the brutality of Gloucester’s treatment).
The Fool’s answer to that profound question (Who is it that can tell me who I am?) is ‘Lear’s shadow’.
When Goneril slimily makes excuses to ‘disquantity your train’, Lear starts to react in ways he does not do for the lower-status and ignorable Fool and ‘Caius’ (Kent). The anger builds in him in a rush of denial, truth going to kennel. Volcanically, he calls his oldest child a ‘degenerate bastard’, a ‘detested kite’, and in a particularly horrifying tirade calls to the goddess of Nature to
Suspend thy purpose if thou didst intend
To make this creature fruitful.
Into her womb convey sterility.
Dry up in her the organs of increase,
And from her derogate body never spring
A babe to honour her. If she must teem,
Create her child of spleen, that it may live
And be a thwart disnatured torment to her.
But as well as being horrifying, this tirade is also pathetic, and sad, the tantrum of a man-child who has not got what he wanted (in the past, he always got what he wanted), and he starts crying in frustration. Bringing out again the idea of eyes and blindness that threads its way through the play, he says that he will pluck out his own ‘old fond - or foolish - eyes’ if he weeps again. But his weeping is a recognition, an insight, into the reality of his situation, which he does not want to confront, to look at.
He says
I have another daughter,
Who I am sure is kind and comfortable.
But that sureness is deeply misguided. He is blind to Regan’s viciousness in his desperation to be respected, but this is a play which constantly undercuts sureness and complacency. It is no surprise to us that when Lear has left, Goneril tells Oswald to pass on the message to Regan that their father should not be accommodated according to his desires. Albany tries to deflect her, feebly, but is brushed off in his ‘milky gentleness’.
Albany responds,
How far your eyes may pierce I cannot tell;
Striving to better, oft we mar what’s well.
It will be quite a while before Albany himself starts to see the truth.