'King Lear' scene by scene 7
TRANSCRIPT
Act 3 scene 4
This second storm scene sees Lear’s further disintegration, mostly visibly when he tears off his clothes during the brutal storm. And in this scene the supposed ‘madman’ Poor Tom joins the weird band of the demented King, the Fool and Caius the countryman (Kent). The latter tries to get Lear in out of the storm, but the truth is that the King now welcomes it. He feels at home in the chaos:
When the mind’s free
The body’s delicate.
All that is in his head is his anger at filial ingratitude, but then he makes space for others, something entirely new, and I will now quote some of the play’s most important lines. He tells the Fool, you houseless poverty, to go into the hovel ahead of him, and when the Fool has done so Lear says
Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en
Too little care of this. Take physic, pomp.
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou may’st shake the superflux to them
And show the heavens more just.
Truly, this is one of the most radical developments of the play. The powerful, privileged, arrogant and utterly self-centred King is thinking of others empathetically, of the naked wretches at the bottom of society, and directs his criticism at himself:
O, I have ta’en
Too little care of this.
Through his own suffering has grown an understanding of others’ pain. As I said in the commentary in Episode 5, again it is stunningly radical to think that the superflux, the excess in society (wealth, land, power) should be redistributed to those wretches, thus creating a more just society.
Then Poor Tom enters and shows him that there are people even lower than the Fool and the naked wretches. Lear tells the returned Fool and Caius/Kent that the madman must have been brought to his condition by his daughters. Following this example, Lear goes even further than his previous insights into ‘houseless poverty’ in his profound understanding of what being human means.
Thou wert better in a grave than to answer with thy uncovered body this extremity of the skies. —Is man no more than this? Consider him well. —Thou ow’st the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Ha, here’s three on’s are sophisticated. Thou art the thing itself; unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. Off, off, you lendings!
And he tears off his own clothing in solidarity, despite the howling freezing wind. The question Is man no more than this? is an extraordinary one for Lear, echoing his earlier statement
O reason not the need!
Our basest beggars are in the poorest things superfluous.
He realises that he, the Fool and Kent are relatively sophisticated compared to the poor, bare, forked animal who has just staggered onto the scene. The madness which is now plainly tearing him asunder has also, simultaneously, opened him up to insights he never had before. He calls Poor Tom a learnèd Theban and, several times, a philosopher. This extraordinary rag-tag bunch of misfits heads on into the storm.
I’ll skip over the very short Act 3 scene 5 in which Edmund curries favour with Cornwall.
Act III scene 6
There are several ‘trial’ scenes in King Lear, starting of course with the very first scene of the play, in which Lear questions his daughters about their love, judges their responses and then punishes Cordelia for what he sees as her crime.
Another is the terrible scene which immediately follows this one. In scene 6 we see a heart-breaking parody of justice. Lear tells the Fool that he is going to arraign his daughters in front of the judges Poor Tom and the Fool (learned and sapient). He accuses Goneril of kicking the poor king her father and Regan as someone whose warped looks proclaim / What store her heart is made on. He follows up on that comment a few lines later with one of the deepest questions of the play:
‘Then let them anatomise Regan. See what breeds about her heart. Is there any cause in nature that make these hard hearts?’
The play that forces us to look at why people behave as they do, and where that behaviour comes from - in the old dichotomy, nature against nurture. What makes us what we are? Why are we who we are? Where does badness come from?
This ‘trial’ scene is truly pathetic. Edgar says in an aside that he is beginning to cry, and near the end Kent says of his master that his wits are gone. Edgar adds that his own pain now seems light and portable. But worse is to come. Gloucester organises help for the King, trying to get him towards Dover and Cordelia. For this loyal decency he will be punished in one of the literature’s most shocking scenes, Act 3 scene 7, which I will look at in Episode 8.