'King Lear' scene by scene 4
In the King Lear scene by scene podcast, this time three short scenes which mark Lear’s growing isolation, and a sense that darker forces are gathering strength.
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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
In this fourth episode I look at three successive short scenes - Act 1 scene 5, Act 2 scene 1 and Act 2 scene 2
Act 1 scene 5
Although short, this scene does point the way to the further development of central themes: sight, madness and understanding (and the relationship between these ideas). We witness Lear with the tiny band of loyal supporters he has been reduced to, now just Kent (Caius) and the Fool (later they will be joined by Poor Tom/Edgar). After Kent sets off to deliver a pleading letter to Gloucester, there is a series of pointed questions from the Fool to the Lear about his behaviour, and specifically his intelligence or ‘wit’. He tells him that eyes are there to see, when your nose cannot ‘smell out’ truth. But as ever this as has no effect on Lear, who instead seems to be lost in himself, in the moving simple statement
I did her wrong -
He has seen this himself, the first insight in a series of understandings which leads Lear on a journey to enlightenment, and, simultaneously, madness, the danger of which he expresses about 20 lines later:
O, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven.
Keep me in temper. I would not be mad!
Act 2 scene 1
Act 2 starts with a sense of gathering clouds: in this scene we witness the coming together of the two darkest characters in the play, Edmund and Cornwall. In a brief exchange between the former and a minor courtier, Curan, Edmund is asked:
Have you heard of no likely wars toward, ‘twixt the
Dukes of Cornwall and Albany?
This might remind us of the very first line of the play, when Kent said to Gloucester:
I thought the king had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall.
and Gloucester replied:
It did always seem so to us: but now, in the division of the kingdom, it appears not which of the dukes he values most.
All too predictably, the divisiveness which was apparently built into Lear’s character as a ruler is now breaking into public view between the two most powerful men in the kingdom, a conflict which will become more and more evident as Albany starts acting on his conscience and as the two brothers-in-law head in different directions.
When Curan leaves, again we witness Edmund’s opportunistic speed of thought, à la Iago from Othello (see my comments on Act 1 scene 2 in episode 2)
Will the Duke be here tonight? The better? Best!
He moves from the comparative to the superlative instantly, just as Lady Macbeth reacts when she hears that Duncan is coming to stay at their castle and pushes her husband towards the night’s great business.
There follows Edmund’s easy manipulation of his brother Edgar as he stages their fight, followed by the chilling ruthlessness of wounding himself to provide ‘evidence’ of his brother attacking him to their father, Gloucester, who on arrival proves just as gullible as Edgar. ‘Look sir, I believe’ says Edmund with ridiculous obviousness (to us), and Gloucester automatically believes the version concocted by his ‘loyal and natural boy’. Like Iago, Edmund seems to take sadistic delight in his own plotting.
The rest of the scene just shows Cornwall and Edmund instinctively falling in together, with the former praising the latter’s ‘Child-like office’ which he has been shown to his father. Of course, ‘filial ingratitude’ is what marks this play, not the natural loyalty of being a child. Meanwhile, his father is clueless and oblivious - in the central trope of the play, blind.
Act 2 scene 2
This scene opens with Oswald’s superficially friendly greeting to Kent:
Good dawning to thee, friend: art of this house?
The Act ends ends not with dawning but with a much darker vision, as Cornwall urges Gloucester to come in out of the ‘wild night’: the last word of the Act is ‘storm’. That storm hits immediately in Act 3 scenes 1 and 2 and dominates the central part of the play.
In this scene, Oswald’s greeting is smashed back in his face by Kent, who sees Oswald for what he really is, a time-serving yes-man, or in his own startling words
A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking knave; a whoreson, glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue.
What enrages him about the unimportant Oswald? Probably his embodiment of everything that Kent despises. Kent has put his entire life on the line in the cause of loyalty. Oswald is a ‘smiling rogue’ and Kent has had enough of such dishonesty, having seen it up close in Goneril and Regan at the start of the story. By contrast,
My occupation is to be plain.
Cornwall senses the trouble this countryman might cause, this man who ‘must speak’ truth, and slaps him in the stocks - a direct challenge to the King.
There is a short interlude when Kent is on his own in those stocks, and he reads a letter from Cordelia, with whom he will later be reunited.
He ends with a reference to fortune’s wheel turning, but this play will deny us the easy comfort of such a completion:
Fortune, good night;
Smile once more, turn thy wheel.
Instead, later in this Act the Fool advises Lear that
All that follow their noses are led by their eyes but blind men, and there's not a nose among twenty but can smell him that's stinking. Let go thy hold when a great wheel runs down a hill.
That is an image of a wheel as a terrifying runaway catastophe, and near the end of the play in Act 4 scene 7 we hear from Lear as he comes to and sees his daughter Cordelia, imagining her an angel:
You do me wrong to take me out o' th' grave.
Thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound
Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears
Do scald like molten lead.