Chapter 12

Gonerill. Never afflict yourself to know the cause; But let his disposition have that scope That dotage gives it.

Re-enter Lear

Lear. What, fifty of my followers at a clap! Within a fortnight!

Albany. What's the matter, sir?

Lear. I'll tell thee; life and death! I am asham'd That thou hast power to shake my manhood thus: [To Gonerill.] That these hot tears, which break from me perforce, Should make thee worth them.--Blasts and fogs upon thee! The untented woundings of a father's curse Pierce every sense about thee!--Old fond eyes, Beweep this cause again, I'll pluck you out; And cast you, with the waters that you lose, To temper clay.--Ha! is it come to this? Let it be so:--Yet have I left a daughter, Who, I am sure, is kind and comfortable; When she shall hear this of thee, with her nails She'll flay thy wolfish visage. Thou shalt find That I'll resume the shape, which thou dost think I have cast off forever.

[Exeunt Lear, Kent, and Attendants.]

This is certainly fine: no wonder that Lear says after it, 'O let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heavens,' feeling its effects by anticipation: but fine as is this burst of rage and indignation at the first blow aimed at his hopes and expectations, it is nothing near so fine as what follows from his double disappointment, and his lingering efforts to see which of them he shall lean upon for support and find comfort in, when both his daughters turn against his age and weakness. It is with some difficulty that Lear gets to speak with his daughter Regan, and her husband, at Gloster's castle. In concert with Gonerill they have left their own home on purpose to avoid him. His apprehensions are fast alarmed by this circumstance, and when Gloster, whose guests they are, urges the fiery temper of the Duke of Cornwall as an excuse for not importuning him a second time, Lear breaks out:

Vengeance! Plague! Death! Confusion! Fiery? What fiery quality? Why, Gloster, I'd speak with the Duke of Cornwall and his wife.

Afterwards, feeling perhaps not well himself, he is inclined to admit their excuse from illness, but then recollecting that they have set his messenger (Kent) in the stocks, all his suspicions are roused again, and he insists on seeing them.

Enter Cornwall, Regan, Gloster, and Servants.

Lear. Good-morrow to you both.

Cornwall. Hail to your grace!

[Kent is set at liberty.]

Regan. I am glad to see your highness.

Lear. Regan, I think you are; I know what reason I have to think so; if thou should'st not be glad, I would divorce me from thy mother's tomb, Sepulch'ring an adultress.--O, are you free? [To Kent.] Some other time for that.--Beloved Regan, Thy sister's naught: O Regan, she hath tied Sharp-tooth'd unkindness, like a vulture, here-- [Points to his heart.] I can scarce speak to thee; thou'lt not believe, Of how deprav'd a quality--o Regan!

Regan. I pray you, sir, take patience; I have hope You less know how to value her desert, Than she to scant her duty.

Lear. Say, how is that?

Regan. I cannot think my sister in the least Would fail her obligation; if, sir, perchance, She have restrain'd the riots of your followers, 'Tis on such ground, and to such wholesome end, As clears her from all blame.

Lear. My curses on her!

Regan. O, sir, you are old; Nature in you stands on the very verge Of her confine: you should be rul'd, and led By some discretion, that discerns your state Better than you yourself: therefore, I pray you, That to our sister you do make return; Say, you have wrong'd her, sir.

Lear. Ask her forgiveness? Do you but mark how this becomes the use? Dear daughter, I confess that I am old; Age is unnecessary; on my knees I beg, That you'll vouchsafe me raiment, bed, and food.

Regan. Good sir, no more; these are unsightly tricks: Return you to my sister.

Lear. Never, Regan: She hath abated me of half my train; Look'd blank upon me; struck me with her tongue, Most serpent-like, upon the very heart:-- All the stor'd vengeances of heaven fall On her ungrateful top! Strike her young bones, You taking airs, with lameness!

Cornwall. Fie, sir, fie!

Lear: You nimble lightnings, dart your blinding flames Into her scornful eyes! Infect her beauty, You fen-suck'd fogs, drawn by the powerful sun, To fall, and blast her pride!

Regan. O the blest gods! So will you wish on me, when the rash mood is on.

Lear. No, Regan, thou shalt never have my curse; Thy tender-hefted nature shall not give Thee o'er to harshness; her eyes are fierce, but thine Do comfort, and not burn: 'Tis not in thee To grudge my pleasures, to cut off my train, To bandy hasty words, to scant my sizes, And, in conclusion, to oppose the bolt Against my coming in: thou better know'st The offices of nature, bond of childhood, Effects of courtesy, dues of gratitude; Thy half o' the kingdom thou hast not forgot, Wherein I thee endow'd.

Regan. Good sir, to the purpose. [Trumpets within]

Lear. Who put my man i' the stocks?

Cornwall. What trumpet's that?

Enter Steward

Regan. I know't, my sister's; this approves her letter, That she would soon be here.--Is your lady come?

Lear. This is a slave, whose easy-borrow'd pride Dwells in the fickle grace of her he follows:-- Out, varlet, from my sight!

Cornwall. What means your grace?

Lear. Who stock'd my servant? Regan, I have good hope Thou did'st not know on't.--Who comes here? O heavens,

Enter Gonerill

If you do love old men, if your sweet sway Allow obedience, if yourselves are old, Make it your cause; send down, and take my part!-- Art not asham'd to look upon this beard?-- [To Gonerill.] O, Regan, wilt thou take her by the hand?

Gonerill. Why not by the hand, sir? How have I offended? All's not offence, that indiscretion finds, And dotage terms so.

Lear. O, sides, you are too tough! Will you yet hold?--How came my man i' the stocks?

Cornwall. I set him there, sir: but his own disorders Deserv'd much less advancement.

Lear. You! did you?

Regan. I pray you, father, being weak, seem so. If, till the expiration of your month, You will return and sojourn with my sister, Dismissing half your train, come then to me; I am now from home, and out of that provision Which shall be needful for your entertainment.

Lear. Return to her, and fifty men dismiss'd? No, rather I abjure all roofs, and choose To be a comrade with the wolf and owl-- To wage against the enmity o' the air, Necessity's sharp pinch!--Return with her! Why, the hot-blooded France, that dowerless took Our youngest born, I could as well be brought To knee his throne, and squire-like pension beg To keep base life afoot.--Return with her! Persuade me rather to be slave and sumpter To this detested groom. [Looking on the Steward.]

Gonerill. At your choice, sir.

Lear. Now, I pr'ythee, daughter, do not make me mad; I will not trouble thee, my child; farewell: We'll no more meet, no more see one another:-- But yet thou art my flesh, my blood, my daughter; Or, rather, a disease that's in my flesh, Which I must needs call mine: thou art a bile, A plague-sore, an embossed carbuncle, In my corrupted blood. But I'll not chide thee: Let shame come when it will, I do not call it: I did not bid the thunder-bearer shoot, Nor tell tales of thee to high-judging Jove: Mend when thou canst; be better, at thy leisure: I can be patient; I can stay with Regan, I, and my hundred knights.

Regan. Not altogether so, sir; I look'd not for you yet, nor am provided For your fit welcome: Give ear, sir, to my sister; For those that mingle reason with your passion Must be content to think you old, and so-- But she knows what she does.

Lear. Is this well spoken now?

Regan. I dare avouch it, sir: What, fifty followers? Is it not well? What should you need of more? Yea, or so many? Sith that both charge and danger Speak 'gainst so great a number? How, in one house, Should many people, under two commands, Hold amity? Tis hard; almost impossible.

Gonerill. Why might you not, my lord, receive attendance From those that she calls servants, or from mine?

Regan. Why not, my lord? If then they chanc'd to slack you, We would control them: if you will come to me (For now I spy a danger) I entreat you To bring but five-and-twenty; to no more Will I give place, or notice.

Lear. I gave you all--

Regan. And in good time you gave it.

Lear. Made you my guardians, my depositaries; But kept a reservation to be follow'd With such a number: what, must I come to you With five-and-twenty, Regan! said you so?

Regan. And speak it again, my lord; no more with me.

Lear. Those wicked creatures yet do look well-favour'd, When others are more wicked; not being the worst, Stands in some rank of praise:--I'll go with thee; [To Gonerill.] Thy fifty yet doth double five-and-twenty, And thou art twice her love.

Gonerill. Hear me, my lord; What need you five-and-twenty, ten, or five, To follow in a house, where twice so many Have a command to tend you?

Regan. What need one?

Lear. O, reason not the need: our basest beggars Are in the poorest thing superfluous: Allow not nature more than nature needs, Man's life is cheap as beast's: thou art a lady; If only to go warm were gorgeous, Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear'st; Which scarcely keeps thee warm.--But, for true need-- You heavens, give me that patience which I need! You see me here, you gods; a poor old man, As full of grief as age; wretched in both! If it be you that stir these daughters' hearts Against their father, fool me not so much To bear it tamely; touch me with noble anger! O, let no woman's weapons, water-drops, Stain my man's cheeks!--No, you unnatural hags, I will have such revenges on you both, That all the world shall--I will do such things-- What they are, yet I know not; but they shall be The terrors of the earth. You think, I'll weep: No, I'll not weep:-- I have full cause of weeping; but this heart Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws, Or e'er I'll weep:--O, fool, I shall go mad! [Exeunt Lear, Gloster, Kent, and Fool.]

If there is anything in any author like this yearning of the heart, these throes of tenderness, this profound expression of all that can be thought and felt in the most heart-rending situations, we are glad of it; but it is in some author that we have not read.

The scene in the storm, where he is exposed to all the fury of the elements, though grand and terrible, is not so fine, but the moralizing scenes with Mad Tom, Kent, and Gloster, are upon a par with the former. His exclamation in the supposed trial-scene of his daughters, 'See the little dogs and all, Tray, Blanch, and Sweetheart, see they bark at me,' his issuing his orders, 'Let them anatomize Regan, see what breeds about her heart,' and his reflection when he sees the misery of Edgar, 'Nothing but his unkind daughters could have brought him to this,' are in a style of pathos, where the extremest resources of the imagination are called in to lay open the deepest movements of the heart, which was peculiar to Shakespeare. In the same style and spirit is his interrupting the Fool who asks, 'whether a madman be a gentleman or a yeoman', by answering 'A king, a king!'

The indirect part that Gloster takes in these scenes where his generosity leads him to relieve Lear and resent the cruelty of his daughters, at the very time that he is himself instigated to seek the life of his son, and suffering under the sting of his supposed ingratitude, is a striking accompaniment to the situation of Lear. Indeed, the manner in which the threads of the story are woven together is almost as wonderful in the way of art as the carrying on the tide of passion, still varying and unimpaired, is on the score of nature. Among the remarkable instances of this kind are Edgar's meeting with his old blind father; the deception he practises upon him when he pretends to lead him to the top of Dover-cliff--'Come on, sir, here's the place,' to prevent his ending his life and miseries together; his encounter with the perfidious Steward whom he kills, and his finding the letter from Gonerill to his brother upon him which leads to the final catastrophe, and brings the wheel of Justice 'full circle home' to the guilty parties. The bustle and rapid succession of events in the last scenes is surprising. But the meeting between Lear and Cordelia is by far the most affecting part of them. It has all the wildness of poetry, and all the heartfelt truth of nature. The previous account of her reception of the news of his unkind treatment, her involuntary reproaches to her sisters, 'Shame, ladies, shame,' Lear's backwardness to see his daughter, the picture of the desolate state to which he is reduced, 'Alack, 'tis he; why he was met even now, as mad as the vex'd sea, singing aloud,' only prepare the way for and heighten our expectation of what follows, and assuredly this expectation is not disappointed when through the tender care of Cordelia he revives and recollects her.

Cordelia. How does my royal lord? How fares your majesty!

Lear. You do me wrong, to take me out o' the 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.

Cordelia. Sir, do you know me?

Lear. You are a spirit I know: when did you die?

Cordelia. Still, still, far wide!

Physician. He's scarce awake; let him alone awhile.

Lear. Where have I been? Where am I?--Fair daylight?-- I am mightily abus'd.--I should even die with pity, To see another thus.--I know not what to say.-- I will not swear these are my hands:--let's see; I feel this pin prick. 'Would I were assur'd Of my condition.

Cordelia. O, look upon me, sir, And hold your hands in benediction o'er me:-- No, sir, you must not kneel.

Lear. Pray, do not mock me: I am a very foolish fond old man, Fourscore and upward; Not an hour more, nor less: and, to deal plainly, I fear, I am not in my perfect mind. Methinks, I shou'd know you, and know this man; Yet I am doubtful: for I am mainly ignorant What place this is; and all the skill I have Remembers not these garments; nor I know not Where I did lodge last night: do not laugh at me; For, as I am a man, I think this lady To be my child Cordelia.

Cordelia. And so I am, I am!

Almost equal to this in awful beauty is their consolation of each other when, after the triumph of their enemies, they are led to prison.

Cordelia. We are not the first, Who, with best meaning, have incurr'd the worst. For thee, oppressed king, am I cast down; Myself could else out-frown false fortune's frown.-- Shall we not see these daughters, and these sisters?

Lear. No, no, no, no! Come, let's away to prison: We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage: When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down, And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live, And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too-- Who loses, and who wins; who's in, who's out;-- And take upon us the mystery of things, As if we were God's spies: and we'll wear out, In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones, That ebb and flow by the moon.

Edmund. Take them away.

Lear. Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia, The gods themselves throw incense.

The concluding events are sad, painfully sad; but their pathos is extreme. The oppression of the feelings is relieved by the very interest we take in the misfortunes of others, and by the reflections to which they give birth. Cordelia is hanged in prison by the orders of the bastard Edmund, which are known too late to be countermanded, and Lear dies broken-hearted, lamenting over her.

Lear. 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? O, thou wilt come no more, Never, never, never, never, never!-- Pray you, undo this button: thank you, sir.---

He dies, and indeed we feel the truth of what Kent says on the occasion--

Vex not his ghost: O, let him pass! he hates him, That would upon the rack of the rough world Stretch him out longer.

Yet a happy ending has been contrived for this play, which is approved of by Dr. Johnson and condemned by Schlegel. A better authority than either, on any subject in which poetry and feeling are concerned, has given it in favour of Shakespeare, in some remarks on the acting of Lear, with which we shall conclude this account.

The Lear of Shakespeare cannot be acted. The contemptible machinery with which they mimic the storm which he goes out in, is not more inadequate to represent the horrors of the real elements than any actor can be to represent Lear. The greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension, but in intellectual; the explosions of his passions are terrible as a volcano: they are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that rich sea, his mind, with all its vast riches. It is his mind which is laid bare. This case of flesh and blood seems too insignificant to be thought on; even as he himself neglects it. On the stage we see nothing but corporal infirmities and weakness, the impotence of rage; while we read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear;--we are in his mind, we are sustained by a grandeur, which baffles the malice of daughters and storms; in the aberrations of his reason, we discover a mighty irregular power of reasoning, immethodized from the ordinary purposes of life, but exerting its powers, as the wind blows where it listeth, at will on the corruptions and abuses of mankind. What have looks or tones to do with that sublime identification of his age with that of THE HEAVENS THEMSELVES, when in his reproaches to them for conniving at the injustice of his children, he reminds them that "they themselves are old!" What gesture shall we appropriate to this? What has the voice or the eye to do with such things? But the play is beyond all art, as the tamperings with it show: it is too hard and stony; it must have love-scenes, and a happy ending. It is not enough that Cordelia is a daughter, she must shine as a lover too. Tate has put his hook in the nostrils of this Leviathan, for Garrick and his followers, the showmen of the scene, to draw it about more easily. A happy ending!--as if the living martyrdom that Lear had gone through,--the flaying of his feelings alive, did not make a fair dismissal from the stage of life the only decorous thing for him. If he is to live and be happy after, if he could sustain this world's burden after, why all this pudder and preparation--why torment us with all this unnecessary sympathy? As if the childish pleasure of getting his gilt robes and sceptre again could tempt him to act over again his misused station--as if at his years and with his experience anything was left but to die.' [Footnote: See an article, called 'Theatralia', in the second volume of the Reflector, by Charles Lamb.]

Four things have struck us in reading LEAR:

1. That poetry is an interesting study, for this reason, that it relates to whatever is most interesting in human life. Whoever therefore has a contempt for poetry, has a contempt for himself and humanity.

2. That the language of poetry is superior to the language of painting; because the strongest of our recollections relate to feelings, not to faces.

3. That the greatest strength of genius is shown in describing the strongest passions: for the power of the imagination, in works of invention, must be in proportion to the force of the natural impressions, which are the subject of them.

4. That the circumstance which balances the pleasure against the pain in tragedy is, that in proportion to the greatness of the evil, is our sense and desire of the opposite good excited; and that our sympathy with actual suffering is lost in the strong impulse given to our natural affections, and carried away with the swell-ing tide of passion, that gushes from and relieves the heart.

RICHARD II

RICHARD II is a play little known compared with RICHARD III, which last is a play that every unfledged candidate for theatrical fame chooses to strut and fret his hour upon the stage in; yet we confess that we prefer the nature and feeling of the one to the noise and bustle of the other; at least, as we are so often forced to see it acted. In RICHARD II the weakness of the king leaves us leisure to take a greater interest in the misfortunes of the man. 'After the first act, in which the arbitrariness of his behaviour only proves his want of resolution, we see him staggering under the unlooked-for blows of fortune, bewailing his loss of kingly power; not preventing it, sinking under the aspiring genius of Bolingbroke, his authority trampled on, his hopes failing him, and his pride crushed and broken down under insults and injuries, which his own misconduct had provoked, but which he has not courage or manliness to resent. The change of tone and behaviour in the two competitors for the throne according to their change of fortune, from the capricious sentence of banishment passed by Richard upon Bolingbroke, the suppliant offers and modest pretensions of the latter on his return, to the high and haughty tone with which he accepts Richard's resignation of the crown after the loss of all his power, the use which he makes of the deposed king to grace his triumphal progress through the streets of London, and the final intimation of his wish for his death, which immediately finds a servile executioner, is marked throughout with complete effect and without the slightest appearance of effort. The steps by which Bolingbroke mounts the throne are those by which Richard sinks into the grave. We feel neither respect nor love for the deposed monarch; for he is as wanting in energy as in principle: but we pity him, for he pities himself. His heart is by no means hardened against himself, but bleeds afresh at every new stroke of mischance, and his sensibility, absorbed in his own person, and unused to misfortune, is not only tenderly alive to its own sufferings, but without the fortitude to bear them. He is, however, human in his distresses; for to feel pain, and sorrow, weakness, disappointment, remorse and anguish, is the lot of humanity, and we sympathize with him accordingly. The sufferings of the man make us forget that he ever was a king.

The right assumed by sovereign power to trifle at its will with the happiness of others as a matter of course, or to remit its exercise as a matter of favour, is strikingly shown in the sentence of banishment so unjustly pronounced on Bolingbroke and Mowbray, and in what Bolingbroke says when four years of his banishment are taken off, with as little reason:

How long a time lies in one little word! Four lagging winters and four wanton springs End in a word: such is the breath of kings.