“Too savage and unnatural” (Joseph Warton); “too horrid to be endured” (Samuel Johnson); “nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting” and “essentially impossible to be represented on a stage” (Charles Lamb): early Shakespeare critics found King Lear difficult to admire or even talk about. “We wish that we could pass this play over, and say nothing about it,” William Hazlitt wrote. The problem, as the nineteenth-century German scholar August Wilhelm von Schlegel argued, was the extremity of the plot, which defies analogy to contemporary experience:
To save in some degree the honor of human nature, Shakespeare never wishes his spectators to forget that the story takes place in a dreary and barbarous age…in which the good and the bad display the same uncontrollable energy.
In Lear, Schlegel declared, “the science of compassion is exhausted.” In 1962 the Polish theater scholar Jan Kott called it “a high mountain that everyone admires, yet no one particularly wishes to climb,” and by the play’s final scene, even that immensity—the immensity of Shakespeare’s own creative genius—“has ceased to exist”: “The stage remains empty. Like the world.” Imagine, then, entering that unworld and feeling a creeping sense of recognition: I know this place. My parents and grandparents are from here; I was born here; perhaps I never left.
Nan Z. Da spent the first six and a half years of her life in the People’s Republic of China. She was born in the 1980s, during a period known as Gaige Kaifang, the “Reform and Opening-Up,” a time of political reorganization and economic liberalization undertaken in the long shadow of Mao’s dictatorship and the Cultural Revolution. Her family left China for the United States when she was a child, and she is now a scholar of nineteenth-century American literature and a professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. But of late she has undergone an uncanny reversion: “For more than six years I have taught Shakespeare’s King Lear, a piece of literature far outside my field, in a class that introduces students to the history and praxis of literary criticism.” Da added Lear to her syllabus, she says, “because it fast-tracks students to the hardest parts of literature and literary criticism”—close reading, textual bibliography, theater history, genre theory. It is plot-heavy, overburdened with detail, and careless of minor characters, and so it “places a great strain on interpretive validity, on accurate assessment and recall.” (Pop quiz: Who is Curan? How many people meet at Dover, or hide in trees? What happens to the King of France?) But Da’s reasons for assigning the play were also personal: “In my mind I was drawing a long and elaborate analogy.”
That analogy—“Lear, China, China, Lear”—forms the spine of Da’s new book, The Chinese Tragedy of “King Lear,” serving as axiom, intuition, experimental hypothesis, and knowing provocation. “Teachers of literature and criticism have to deal with bad analogies and allegoresis all the time,” Da observes. Shakespeareans in particular are well acquainted with the impulse to claim that the writer and his plays illuminate all manner of phenomena: modernity, Western civilization, “the human.” The impulse to analogize can generate fresh insights, but it can also efface what is urgently particular in a text, a time period, a cultural tradition, a historical crisis, a personal experience. Da knows this, and knows, too, that there are ways of rendering one’s analogies intellectually respectable: biographical, archival, and bibliographic connections, historical chains of influence and transmission, performance histories, source studies, and so on.
She can tell us how Lear arrived in China at the beginning of the twentieth century (via Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales of Shakespeare, which was translated into classical Chinese by the prolific Lin Shu and Wei Yi), how the poet-critic Sun Dayu produced the first complete verse translation of the play in 1941, and how the play was adapted for Chinese stages and screens in the decades that followed. She can trace suggestive formal homologies between the tragic conventions of early modern English drama and Peking opera. Her bibliography cites scholarship in English and Chinese, including books, articles, reviews, essays, and unpublished dissertations and master’s theses on the subject of Shakespeare in China. In the end, however, The Chinese Tragedy of “King Lear” is not about how King Lear became a Chinese play; it is about why Da instinctively knew that it had been one all along.
Such knowledge is not strictly scholarly; it is intimate and embodied, like seeing one’s own nose on the photographed face of a long-dead great-aunt. In this case, what Da recognized first were the outlines of a ritual: the show trial or mock exam, an ordeal whose outcome has been fixed in advance but whose enactment is required by those in power, as confirmation of their power:
Tell me, my daughters,
Since now we will divest us both of rule,
Interest of territory, cares of state,
Which of you shall we say doth love us most,
That we our largest bounty may extend
Where nature doth with merit challenge?
As Coleridge first pointed out, Lear’s love test is a sham. In the lines that follow, the aging king divides his kingdom into portions as he goes, without waiting to hear how each daughter will respond. Clearly the fix is in. By the time he arrives at Cordelia, his youngest and best-beloved daughter, any plausible answer will secure for her and her soon-to-be husband what Lear has already determined she deserves: “a third more opulent than [her] sisters.” What is ostensibly at stake—the division of the kingdom of Britain among three branches of the royal family—is thus remote from what is actually at stake: an aging father’s demand for a public demonstration of his children’s attachment, at a moment guaranteed (indeed, orchestrated) to make that attachment seem calculated and coerced.
“Lear knows it is a bribe he offers,” Stanley Cavell argues in a celebrated essay on the play, “and—part of him anyway—wants exactly what a bribe can buy.”1 Not love, that is, but the shiny simulacrum of it: “Something he does not have to return in kind, something which a division of his property fully pays for.” For Goneril and Regan, the two elder daughters, the task is easy: exchange flattery for favor. But for Cordelia it is excruciating: “Love, and be silent,” she bids herself. Commanded to speak, she does so in the most minimal fashion imaginable: “Nothing, my lord.” Ordered to elaborate, she does so with pained precision: “You have begot me, bred me, loved me./I return those duties back as are right fit.” Writing at the end of the seventeenth century, the playwright Nahum Tate, who revised and revived King Lear for the Restoration stage, thought such stubborn “indifference” could be justified only if Cordelia’s heart were already placed elsewhere, with Edgar, the elder son of the Earl of Gloucester. But in Shakespeare’s version Cordelia says only that she does love Lear, “according to my bond, no more nor less,” and Cavell insists that we should take this bond, and her bind, seriously: “To pretend to love, where you really do love, is not obviously possible.”
As Da observes, Cavell calls Lear an “ordinary” tragedy not simply because he was an ordinary language philosopher, invested in words’ common uses, but because the disaster it tracks—what he calls “the avoidance of love”—is itself common: Who can bear to be seen with love’s truthful and unsparing gaze? But there is another problem here, no less ordinary and more overtly political. Something wrong—something unjust, misguided, shameful, and cruel—is happening in front of our faces. How bad are things, really? As one of Da’s students points out in class, the pace and sequence of events in Lear makes it hard to tell: “Look in on almost any moment…and you cannot quite see how bad the situation is.” The plot reels from complication to contretemps to catastrophe. Any reaction risks overreaction—see the disguised Kent’s ill-timed quarrel with Oswald at the start of Act Two, which precipitates Goneril’s quarrel with her father into the open, just where she wants it—until, finally, all reaction is definitively and disastrously too late. Is it too soon to panic, the play continually prods, or did we pass that point a while back?
One can learn to function, even to flourish, in the domain of fakery; the story of how Da herself first encountered King Lear as a child, and how she came to leave China not long after, is from one angle a comic fable of such flourishing. In 1989 she was a preschooler in a China actively seeking to cultivate a culture of meritocratic striving. A citywide contest was announced, a search for “the most gifted child.” First prize was a giant stuffed animal, second prize a multivolume anthology, Children’s World Classics. Nominations were to be made by schools, but Da’s mother—herself a teacher—diligently maneuvered to ensure her child a spot. Da was promptly eliminated, but her mother’s unsavory brothers had various illicit connections. “Some uncle or uncle of an uncle knew someone in the educational publishing bureau, and my mother groveled or almost groveled”; “the books were mine.” Lear—or Lin and Wei’s version of the Lambs’ version of Lear—was one of the anthology’s edifying stories. As a parable of filial devotion, it “found good company with the many other good stories in my mother’s repertoire,” Da recalls; as a story about how (not) to thrive under a propagandist, authoritarian regime, it confirmed what nobody said and everybody knew.
Da and her mother belonged to a state that had trained people in a curriculum of cynicism, bureaucratic minutiae, and fear: “Bad things happened all the time in those days to those slow on the uptake, and opportunities were lost at the last minute because of some obscure disqualification.” But Da’s mother never fully submitted to that training. She had a curriculum of her own, comprising solid facts and inconvenient questions. Beneath her savvy as a citizen of post-Mao China ran a steady stream of optimism, untouched by circumstance: “In the colorless buildings of the No. 14 High School, where she taught, and in our sunless living quarters, she was always doing something fun and important, instilling in everyone a sense of high adventure and romance.” Her resourcefulness eventually got them out of China; they followed Da’s father to the United States and left her own father, Da’s grandfather, a gifted opera singer and a humane and gentle man, to the mercies of those thuggish uncles.
“Upon such sacrifices…the gods themselves throw incense,” Lear intones as he is taken off to prison with Cordelia in Act Five: a pious sentiment, and one the play emphatically declines to endorse. It is this tough-mindedness about suffering—our own but also, especially, others’—that Da cherishes in King Lear. The idea that any loss can be redeemed so long as it is for something is one that Lear treats as skeptically as her parents do. As a child in the US, Da absorbed the family trauma in overheard snatches and asides, glimpses “of a past that appear[ed] cartoonishly evil”: her father recalled a county governor, whose estate was seized and ransacked by party officials, crawling with broken shins from the wreckage of his home; her mother’s plucky temperament gave way to inexplicable bursts of rage and grief. Questions were not always welcome, but neither were expressions of sympathy or gratitude. Da develops a blandly assuaging routine: “‘Yours was the most unfortunate generation,’ I say to [my mother] in one form or another. ‘I was very lucky to have come up in the generation that followed yours.’” It’s a version of Lear’s soothing, and suspiciously unfounded, final assertion—“The oldest hath borne most; we that are young/Shall never see so much, nor live so long”—and Da’s mother is having none of it: “You’re still very young.”
When and how did things begin to go wrong? What can we learn from those who have come before? This is the first hard lesson of Lear: in certain circumstances, wisdom and experience are of limited value; they may even make things worse. Listen to the opening lines of the play as the Earls of Kent and Gloucester, old hands at court, mull the unsettled state of the royal succession and opt, by silent mutual consent, to wait and see:
KENT: I thought the King had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall.
GLOUCESTER: 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, for qualities are so weighed that curiosity in neither can make choice of either’s moiety.
KENT: Is not this your son, my lord?
The arrival of Gloucester’s illegitimate younger son, Edmund, provides an excuse for turning the conversation elsewhere, away from a subject that seems unprofitable, and possibly unwise, to discuss any further: the king is getting old; we thought we knew what he planned to do about an heir; it appears we were wrong. A complication, not a crisis.
Such equanimity rapidly comes to seem delusional, and perhaps it always was. When has dividing a kingdom between rival sons-in-law ever been a good idea, especially when one son-in-law (Albany) is mildly recessive and the other (Cornwall) a raving sociopath? But we can’t fault Kent and Gloucester too much for their complacency; as Samuel Johnson pointed out, the play conspires in it, with its aristocratic titles and its inheritance disputes, summoning “the idea of times more civilized, and of life regulated by softer manners.” Indeed, watching King Lear at Whitehall Palace in December 1606, when it was performed before an audience including King James I, a courtly onlooker might have experienced a faint sense of ennui: we’ve seen this one before.
The title page of the 1608 quarto edition calls it
M. William Shak-speare
HIS
True Chronicle Historie of the life and
Death of King LEAR and his three
Daughters.
The top-line emphasis on Shakespeare’s authorship may reflect the need to distinguish the play from one with which it could easily have been confused—the anonymously authored The True Chronicle History of King Leir, and His Three Daughters, printed in 1605 and, as its title page boasts, “divers and sundry times lately acted.” Even that play wasn’t new: the title was first entered into the Stationer’s Register a decade earlier, in 1594, and the story of Lear and his daughters goes back to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century Historia Regum Britanniae. Monmouth’s account was well known among sixteenth-century English writers, versified in John Higgins’s Mirror for Magistrates (1574), retold in Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1587), and alluded to, briefly, in book 2 of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590). The story of a troubled royal succession in a Britain riven by internal conflict might have seemed especially topical in 1606, as James Shapiro argues in his magisterial The Year of Lear (2015), in the aftermath of the foiled Gunpowder Plot against James, the Scots king who inherited the English throne from his childless cousin Elizabeth. But it would also have seemed evergreen: a nostalgic return to a dramatic form that had delighted Elizabethan playgoers and on which Shakespeare himself had cut his teeth as a novice playwright.
One of the earliest traces of Shakespeare’s transition from acting to writing comes from a March 1592 entry in the diary of the theater impresario Philip Henslowe, noting the appearance of a “ne”—that is, new—play called “harey the vj.” It was the first of four Shakespeare wrote about the multigenerational conflict between the royal houses of Lancaster and York and the first of nearly a dozen whose plots were drawn from the pages of English chronicle history. These plays, most now known by the titles of the monarchs in whose reigns they are set—King John, Richard III, Parts One, Two, and Three of the aforementioned Henry VI—dramatize intrafamilial conflicts in which rival dukes jostle for power while conspiratorial earls mutter in the background. Speeches are made, battles fought, lives lost, and the boundaries of the realm perpetually redrawn, but the overall impression is one of ongoingness: “The King is dead; long live the King.” Seven years after Shakespeare’s death the editors of the 1623 First Folio shored up that impression by presenting them to readers in order of regnal succession, from The Life and Death of King John to The Life of King Henry the Eighth, under the shared heading “HISTORIES.” King Lear, however, wasn’t among them: it had been placed between Hamlet and Othello under the heading “TRAGEDIES.”
What is the line between history and tragedy, and when does Lear cross it? Is it when the king first announces his bogus love test, or when he disowns Cordelia and banishes Kent, or when Goneril and Regan decide to “do something” about their father’s impetuosity? Or does the turn to tragedy occur when Lear is abandoned to the elements, or when Cornwall claws Gloucester’s eyes from their sockets with his bare hands? Even as these outrages unfold, a different kind of play—one about armies and battles, in which it matters what has happened to the King of France and just how many soldiers are assembled at Dover—sometimes seems to be running in the background. (The Duke of Albany, in particular, belongs to it; he is slow to come to Lear’s aid partly because he understandably assumes that his job as coruler of Britain is to prevent its invasion by the French.) That shadow play—call it The History of King Lear—exerts a pull on characters and playgoers alike, the pull of normality and known unknowns, of winning and losing on a scale that belongs to life as we have hitherto known it.
This is another hard lesson of Lear: the lengths to which we will go to avoid confronting evil as such, seeking explanations for it and fashioning it in forms less dire, all the while ensuring that its harms increase. Well into Act Two, Lear tries to rationalize his own mistreatment. Informed by Gloucester that Cornwall is unwilling even to hear his complaints against Goneril, he sputters with indignation and then casts about for a plausible excuse:
Maybe he is not well.
Infirmity doth still neglect all office
Whereto our health is bound. We are not ourselves
When nature, being oppressed, commands the mind
To suffer with the body. I’ll forbear….
Soon after, Gloucester watches with horror as a weeping Lear is turned from his castle gates into the darkness and the gathering storm; he follows but returns moments later, uncertain how to proceed. “Shut up your doors,” Regan urges, and Cornwall echoes her in tones of what might easily be concern: “’Tis a wild night./My Regan counsels well: come out o’th’ storm.” We are one act away from the plucking out of Gloucester’s eyes.
Faced with the play’s mounting savagery, critics have found themselves in a similar posture of rationalization vis-à-vis Shakespeare. “The cruelty of [Lear’s] daughters is an historical fact, to which the poet has added little,” Samuel Johnson observed. He found it harder to justify Gloucester’s blinding, “which seems an act too horrid to be endured in dramatic exhibition,” but noted that Jacobean audiences were known to be bloodthirsty. A.C. Bradley argued that Lear “demands a purely imaginative realisation” and blamed its unpopularity among modern playgoers on their “natural” failure to grasp that its “appeal is…to a rarer and more strictly poetic kind of imagination.”
But there are those in Lear who cannot or will not make excuses for such excesses, even when doing so might seem like a kindness: Kent, the Fool, Cordelia herself. That such characters are never rewarded—indeed, that their suffering is only intensified by the clarity of their moral vision—is what Johnson found unendurable and what Da calls Chinese. The history of twentieth-century China as she relates it is filled with tales of individual bravery and truth-telling in the face of corruption, falsehood, suffering, and abuse. These stories do not end well.
One such story belongs to the literary scholar and journalist Wang Shiwei. In 1942 Wang published an essay called “Wild Lilies” in which he lamented the growing strains of hypocrisy in the embattled Chinese Communist Party, whose leaders and army had retreated to the west of the country, forming an intellectual hub in the city of Yan’an. As the Chinese translator of Engels and Marx, Wang was at the center of the hub, and what he saw worried him: increasing stratification in the party ranks, with “uniforms…divided into three colors” and “meals…into five classes,” and a burgeoning cult of personality around party leaders. Lower-ranking members, mostly students, who objected to the brutality of their conditions were mocked as spoiled children and their complaints of mistreatment dismissed as “grumbling.”
Wang, a middle-aged member of the party’s upper ranks—“I myself am graded as ‘cadres’ clothes and ‘private kitchen,’ so this is not just a case of sour grapes”—thought they deserved a hearing. “Of course youths are often hot-headed and impatient,” he allowed. “But if all young people were to be mature before their time, what a desolate place this world would be!” And sometimes the young people are right: “They experience the darkness before others experience it; they see the filth before others see it; what others do not wish or do not dare to say, they say with great courage.” Among other unmentionables: 86,000 members of the Red Army set out on the Long March to Yan’an; just eight thousand survived. According to Da, between 1930 and 1946, the party murdered 90 to 95 percent of its intellectuals. And this “was still early days”: a “consensus” estimate for the lives lost to starvation, sickness, and state violence in Mao’s China is 58 million.
Like Kent rebuking Lear on behalf of Cordelia, Wang addressed an authority he had “ever honored,” urging it to “check/This hideous rashness” and “see better.” Like Kent, he was ordered to apologize and refused. Unlike Kent, he was not ordered to pack up his belongings and leave: after a sixteen-day “trial” supervised by Mao, he was found guilty, publicly mocked by former friends and colleagues, and imprisoned. Five years later he was hacked to death by local security officials—Mao denied giving the order for his execution—and his remains were cast into a dry well. “His life was lived in King Lear and it ended in King Lear,” Da writes, “a world of perverse love, gross flattery, silencing, schoolyard cruelty, and desolate deaths.”
Kent survives King Lear, but barely—and it might have been better for him if he had not. Having spent the play’s middle acts disguised as a gentleman named Caius, tirelessly following in Lear’s wake and caring for him as best he can, he returns to the stage in his own person in Act Five, scene 3, announcing his wish “to bid my king and master aye good night.” His arrival reminds the rest of the play’s survivors that Lear and Cordelia are still in prison: “Great thing of us forgot!” Albany exclaims, with the timing of a slapstick comedian. The dying Edmund suddenly remembers something else: a few scenes back, before his fight with Edgar, he sent a captain to hang Cordelia in her cell, “lay[ing] the blame upon her own despair,/That she fordid herself.” A messenger is dispatched and races offstage.
Lear’s earliest audience members and readers would not have been terribly worried: in versions of the story that circulated from Geoffrey of Monmouth on, Cordelia ultimately triumphs over her sisters, restoring her father to his throne and reigning after him. Those who had read The Faerie Queene or The Mirror for Magistrates may have felt a tremor of premonition, for in those retellings Cordelia is eventually thrown into prison by her wicked nephews and commits suicide. But that comes later, after eight years of peaceable rule, first by Lear and then by Cordelia herself. On Shakespeare’s stage, then, we seem to have finally arrived at what Edmund earlier and ironically called “the catastrophe of the old comedy,” the generic turn to redemption and resolution—or, at the very least, to the ongoingness of history.
What we get instead is a stage direction: “Enter
LEAR , with
CORDELIA in his arms.” He is howling, beyond language, beyond thought, beyond any knowledge but this: “She’s gone forever./I know when one is dead and when one lives;/She’s dead as earth.” Kent speaks first: “Is this the promised end?”
Nahum Tate felt that it could not be, and so for 150 years, it wasn’t. In Tate’s revised Lear, which supplanted Shakespeare’s on English stages from the Restoration through the 1830s, a swashbuckling Edgar rescues Cordelia and Lear from their prison cell just in the nick of time and then marries Cordelia. (In this version there is no King of France.) Audiences strongly preferred Tate’s ending, and so did some scholars. “I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia’s death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of [Shakespeare’s] play till I undertook to revise them as an editor,” Samuel Johnson confessed. The actor William Charles Macready returned Shakespeare’s King Lear to the stage in 1838, and subsequent directors, editors, and critics have agreed that Cordelia’s end must be the end. But no amount of reverence for the Bard makes it any easier to stomach: the eighteenth-century novelist and poet Charlotte Lennox called it “neither probable, necessary, nor just”; the avant-garde director Peter Brook saw it as a culmination that “refuses all moralizing.”
Da’s maternal grandfather, Song Baoluo, who remained behind when she and her mother joined her father in the United States, becomes for her a figure of such refusal. “I tell my grandfather that I’m trying to learn about this past, and that I will tell his story,” she recalls, but “he responds dismissively. Qie.” (Sure; yeah, right.) She tries anyway, poring over two memoirs he wrote late in life. Song was born into a family of theater artists during the imperial presidency of Yuan Shikai; a child prodigy, he sang at court during the brief restoration of Emperor Xuantong, last of the Qing dynasty. As an adult he specialized in Peking opera’s grand tragic roles—deposed emperors, brave warriors, and loyal generals—and managed to ingratiate himself with Kuomintang and Communists alike, performing before both Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong. His second wife, Da’s maternal grandmother, “bore nine children for the revolutionary cause” and raised them in an atmosphere of secrecy and spite.2 During the Cultural Revolution, however, the family was marked for reform: their home was confiscated, and Song and his wife were subjected to public discipline. For a week they stood in the hot sun for six hours a day while neighbors jeered at them; then they were separated and imprisoned.
Eventually some of these losses were redressed: in the period of reparation known as pingfan, after Mao’s death in 1976, the CCP gave Da’s grandfather an apartment and returned some of his possessions. But his marriage was over—Da does not say what became of her grandmother, whose disappearance no one seems to regret—and his sons, scarred by years of scarcity and abuse, had become “good-for-nothings”: bullies, thieves, gamblers, and low-level participants in the emerging black market. In the final years of his life, Da’s mother found her father an apartment in a new development and asked the managers to treat him with deference and respect; they hung “a blown-up photograph of him in the activities center and seat[ed] him outside with a pot of jasmine tea,” but he mostly preferred to stay in bed, under an oxhide spread, a belated token of his honorary membership in the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. About the past he remained circumspect: “I don’t much care for Mao” was as far as he’d go.
Is this dignity or willful delusion? The last and hardest lesson of The Chinese Tragedy of “King Lear” is that surviving totalitarianism exacts a price in self-respect, even from the innocent. The insidiousness with which party discipline was embedded in private relationships and local communities—neighborhoods, workplaces, families—meant that state violence was experienced, and enacted, as intimate betrayal: “People victimized you because you could be victimized, and you victimized others.” The rituals of public acknowledgment and amends that marked pingfan were therefore “mostly pathetic,” at once inadequate and hyperbolic and, above all, embarrassing. In a memoir written after his exoneration by the state, Da’s grandfather gave a detailed account of the events leading up to his imprisonment. It is, Da reports, “an excessively painful achievement of recall”:
At school, at work, in your home: you did not play the political game well. If only you had found a way to be clever with minimal sacrifice of integrity, as some others seemed to have done. But that option didn’t seem available. You weren’t clever enough, and so it happened to you. Suffering only points back to an absolutely individualized mistake. You have no one but yourself to blame.
Totalitarian regimes involve everyone in their cruelties, not for efficiency’s sake but to preempt accountability; shame is a potent inducement to amnesia. On the heath Lear briefly recalls the part he played in his own tragedy, by handing power over to Goneril and Regan, and then flinches from it: “Oh, that way madness lies. Let me shun that,/No more of that.”
We end with those who remain, salvaging what they are able from the wreck of family and country. It can be difficult to tell such salvaging from scavenging; when Da’s grandfather dies, her uncles seize his delicate paintings and calligraphic scrolls, ignoring the artwork and selling off the gold-flecked rice paper and sheets of UV-resistant glass. For his part, Kent can’t face the task; when Albany asks him to help “rule in this realm and the gored state sustain,” he demurs: “I have a journey, sir, shortly to go./My master calls me. I must not say no.” It’s an awkward refusal: in the quarto edition of Lear, Albany himself must deliver the play’s final lines. But in the Folio the task falls to Edgar: “The weight of this sad time we must obey;/Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.”
Edgar’s half-brother, Edmund, is confidently, even gleefully, the villain of the play—if anyone in Lear has a good time, it’s Edmund—but Edgar never quite convinces as its hero. For one thing, he appears for most of the play in a series of bizarre and increasingly gratuitous alter egos: Poor Tom, the Bedlam beggar; a poor gentleman; a strongly accented Welshman. He assumes his initial disguise out of necessity in Act Two, but even he can’t explain why he keeps it up for so long; perhaps, as the scholar Simon Palfrey argues in Poor Tom (2014), his brilliant deconstruction of Lear from the perspective of this nonentity, the role of Tom possesses him. “Edgar I nothing am,” but Tom is legion, a cacophonous assemblage of speech fragments, musical tags, witless jokes, and antic gestures scrounged from the paranoid recesses of early modern mass culture. His advent in the play heralds its departure from all niceties and norms, and although Edgar eventually reclaims the stage, appearing fully armed to vanquish Edmund in the final scene, he doesn’t quite reclaim himself. Can he sustain the state? It seems unlikely.
Da knows she’s an Edgar, knows she is arriving too late and channeling the voices of others, knows that the sympathy and heartfelt appreciation she longs to extend aren’t adequate, and may not be ethically defensible. But the refuge Edgar finds in anonymity reminds us that King Lear invests surprising faith in small acts of decency performed by minor characters. The King of France, for one: he has a title, of course, but no proper name, and he appears on stage only to champion the dowerless Cordelia when her father has rejected her in Act One. Such true-hearted deeds light the bleakness of the play like candles. Seeing Cornwall put out one of Gloucester’s eyes, a servant commands him to stop; when Cornwall ignores him, he draws his sword and fights, only to be stabbed from behind by Regan. In the quarto, two other servants witness this act of bravery and are moved to help Gloucester as best they can, fetching “flax and whites of eggs to apply to his bleeding face.” In the next scene Gloucester appears in the care of a nameless old man, his longtime tenant, who brings him to Poor Tom and then agrees to get a set of clothes—“the best ’parrel that I have”—to cover the beggar’s naked flanks.
None of this undoes the treachery of Edmund or the sadism of Goneril, Regan, and Cornwall. Nor are all the play’s anonymous bystanders benevolent: it’s an unnamed captain who murders Cordelia. But the recurrence of gratuitous gestures of courage and care provides a quiet counterpoint to the drumbeat of disillusionment. King Lear is a play gripped by the twin impossibilities of knowing when things first went wrong and saying when we have arrived at the worst. “The worst is not/So long as we can say, ‘This is the worst,’” Edgar grimly concludes. Its gods are notoriously vicious or absent; it makes no promises of justice in the hereafter; in lieu of the Sermon on the Mount it gives us a suicidal pantomime on an imaginary cliff. But to refuse moralizing—to refuse the cheap consolation of a lesson that makes someone else’s suffering worthwhile—is not the same as refusing morality. On the contrary, when cruelty and dishonesty are at the height, it remains both possible and necessary to say, if not what is best, or even what is good, at least what is better. Speak the truth. Protest injustice. Prevent harm, if you can. Tend the wounded and comfort the afflicted. And do not be too quick to assume that analogies must fail. Of the losses, humiliations, and moral injuries her parents and grandparents endured, Da writes, “You don’t think it happens, but it happens. It happens. It already happened in real time. It can happen anywhere.”
English (US) · 