'King Lear': the end
And so to the end of the play. Exam candidates tend to write too much on the opening scene, at the expense of the end, and thus unbalance the essay. But the end defines every tragedy.
In his Everyman introduction to Romeo and Juliet, Tony Tanner puts that play. He puts this play in a selection of comedies (‘a rather perverse case of special pleading.’:
Romeo and Juliet fails of being a comedy by something under a minute (Juliet wakes up from her pseudo-death 27 lines after R has committed suicide).
Tanner goes on to show how much Romeo and Juliet has in common with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the comedy which Shakespeare wrote virtually simultaneously. He summarises:
In the one play, Shakespeare explores how comedy can suddenly change, and veer precipitately into tragedy. He shows how everything can go terribly wrong. In the other play he demonstrates how things can all go, magically, right.
King Lear could so easily have been a comedy, or at least a play with a comic structure, and indeed for much of its existence the regularly performed version was indeed just that. As notoriously rewritten by Nahum Tate in 1681, King Lear survived and the audiences were treated to the classical happy marriage, bizarrely between Cordelia and Edgar (who have nothing to do with each other in Shakespeare’s version). Only the four ‘bad’ characters (Goneril, Regan, Edmund and Cornwall) die, and close to the end Lear addresses Kent thus:
Thou, Kent and I, retired to some cool cell
Will gently pass our short reserves of time
In calm reflection on our Fortunes past
Cheered with relation of this prosperous reign
Of this celestial pair
And Edgar concludes, sweetly:
Divine Cordelia, all the gods can witness
How much thy Love to empire I prefer!
Thy bright example shall convince the world
(whatever storms of fortune are decreed)
That truth and beauty shall at last succeed.
THE END.
Bless.
Mind you, we can’t blame Nahum Tate unduly. The major source for Shakespeare, The True Chronicle History of Leir and his three daughters Gonorill, Ragan and Cordella also ends happily, with Lear and Cordelia reunited. It is Shakespeare who introduced the idea of Cordelia dying. In no other version of the play does she do so (go here for my notes on James Shapiro’s valuable analysis of the development from Leir to Lear, including: ‘Those in the audience who had seen King Leir or had read any of the other versions of Lear's reign in circulation already knew how the story ends ... nobody dies and all that is lost is restored.’
The real end is famously brutal and bleak. Kent speaks for all of us: All’s cheerless, dark and deadly. But it is also important to state that this play could have been a comedy.
If Romeo and Juliet fails to be a comedy by a minute, then King Lear fails to be one by not much longer. Edmund sends an officer to kill Cordelia in his speech from line 27. The Captain retorts on line 40 If it be man’s work, I’ll do it. Just over 200 lines later, he admits his writ is on the life of Lear and Cordelia. Nay, send in time. So, a comedy short of perhaps 5 minutes.
And then our expectations are toyed with. Shortly before this, a gentleman runs in panting with a bloody knife: Help, help, O Help! he exclaims, and then ‘Tis hot. It smokes. It came even from the heart of – O, she’s dead! and in that moment we are sure that it is too late, that Cordelia has died despite the rescue squad that have just set off. A split second later, the gentleman tells us and Albany that it was Goneril who died, and that Regan is poisoned. Sheer relief. The bad sisters are off to hell, and Cordelia will be rescued.
The short time between Edmund’s supposed confession and Lear’s arrival with Cordelia leaves us little time to settle down. We’re stunned that 6 lines after the messenger leaves with the token of reprieve from Edmund, Lear staggers in under the weight of the corpse of his darling daughter. The earlier O she’s dead had psychologically semi-inoculated us of this possibility.
Cordelia’s death changes everything, and determines the vision of the play. Is there anything to hold onto in all this darkness? The lines you need to be very clear about are Lear’s as he cradles his dead daughter in his arms:
And my poor fool is hang'd! No, no, no life!
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never!
Pray you, undo this button: thank you, sir.
Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips,
Look there, look there!
Following which he dies. As the critic Stephen Booth comments, Lear produces a series of tests for signs of life (her breath, the feather), and
Now again on the basis of what passes Cordelia’s lips, he listens for and thinks he hears her voice. As the tests echo one another, they also echo the test at the beginning of the play, the test in which Cordelia could not heave her heart into her mouth. As he did in the first scene of the play, Lear strains to hear Cordelia speak and hears nothing.
There are two broad schools of thought about this moment. Don’t dither: decide your own angle. Lear has earlier said This feather stirs, and thought he heard her speaking. It is obvious to the audience that she is dead. Either this is a consolation (at least he died happy), or it is a further depressing blindness in a play full of these delusions (Tony Nuttall writes that ‘the very intensity of Lear’s joy increases our sense of his error and so deepens the pathos.’)
As with all Shakepeare’s tragedies, after the death of the protagonist the end comes shockingly quickly, and we are dumped back into the real world, with Lear’s death filling our minds. Edgar typically gets it wrong at once : He faints. Kent’s heart breaks and he is ready to go on his own journey to join his master. Edgar’s concluding final speech is a mere four lines, -
The weight of this sad time we must obey;
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most: we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.
There is no consolation here, no mitigation of the dark horror of what we have seen. Again, Tony Tanner:
Although at the end Edgar and Albany are left to sustain the gored state there is no sense of restoration, restitution, let alone of regeneration. There is nothing redemptive here… we have the sense of a few benumbed and cheerless survivors surrounded by the harvest of the released chaos and evil of the play.
As Tanner adds later
We are the survivors.