Meditations on Lear

by Evelyn Hooven (March 2018)

Lear and Cordelia, Ford Madox Brown, 1849-54

Introduction

One of the more celebrated and influential books of Shakespeare criticism in the last half-century was, without a doubt, Maynard Mack’s King Lear in Our Time (University of California Press, 1972), originally the distinguished Yale University professor’s lecture series while Beekman Visiting Professor at Berkeley. While acknowledging his debt to those who had stimulated his views—previous critics and scholars, members of a graduate seminar, and others—Professor Mack singled out for special mention an essay on Lear which was a particular inspiration, the essay liberally quoted and paraphrased in the book, the essayist honored thus: “I am further grateful to my former student, Evelyn G. Hooven, who has understood better than most what it means, in Keats’s words, to ‘burn through the fierce dispute / Betwixt Damnation and impassion’d clay.’” (The reference is to Keats’s “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Again.”)

 

Ms. Hooven has never chosen on her own to publish her essay—assuming (until corrected otherwise!) that having signally influenced and inspired someone else’s book it had served its purpose. Having recently become aware of its existence, I judge that it is time this essay itself see the light of day. Here it appears with some editing.

 

Samuel Hux

NER Contributing Editor

 

 

 

 

ing Lear is not only a great play for the theatre but also a kind of metaphor for theatre itself. For it is intensely concerned with the ways in which spiritual awareness must be realized through the body, tried upon the pulse, must become embodied in deed and word. There is an analogy between what Shakespeare’s play is about and the very tools of the theatre medium. Just as the play insists upon and persistently emphasizes the relation between body and spirit, voice and garment, the outward journey and the inner one, so it also uses impersonation, the theatre’s most elementary force, to enhance and intensify its themes. Even as the actor lends a character or idea his voice, body, gesture, and allows this character or idea or spirit to live within him, so in this mysterious play the major agent takes upon himself, gathers unto himself the spirits and even the masks of some of the other characters. King Lear does not meet with his banished daughter Cordelia (“nor shall we ever see that face of hers again”) until he has taken within himself the spirit of the Fool, of banished Kent, of Edgar’s strange projection of a mad, beggared, unaccommodated man.

 

The question, though, of whether King Lear is suitable or even possible for the stage persists and has long persisted. Is it wrong for the stage even as Goethe’s Faust is wrong for the stage? Is this “Leviathan,” either because of its theme and dramaturgy or because of the limitations imposed by theatrical performance, simply too large for the stage? The question is sometimes turned into a dichotomy—great poetic drama versus delimiting spectacle—as though the response could be evenly distributed between those who love words best and those who love theatre best. At other times the problem is seen as the purely practical one of staging extremities and improbabilities, as though the whole puzzle awaited some rare producer who would be remarkably clever about staging the storm scenes and the fictive suicide of Gloucester and Edmund’s prestidigitations.

 

 

Too large for the stage? Perhaps it is true that the ideas in King Lear are not perfectly embodied dramatically and theatrically as they are, for example, in Oedipus Rex or Othello or Macbeth. But this imperfection, if that is what it is, does not diminish the value or even the effectiveness of the play for the theatre. An imperfection or uncertainty or imbalance similar to that in King Lear, though at once less blurred and less intense, exists also in the action of Hamlet, a play which no one seems to regard as unsuitable for the stage. For the delay in Hamlet, explain it though one will by circumstance or situation or psychology, is neither purely circumstantial nor a character flaw of indecisiveness but, rather, a metaphor for something very difficult to grasp or explain. Is it a metaphor for the change that must take place in the world of the young prince in order for him to do a deed that is, however just, also dire, unaccustomed, and irrevocable? One can only ask or suggest . . .

 

In Hamlet, and perhaps more so in Lear, there is something inaccessible that no single production can ever hope to succeed in expressing. But this means, merely, that just as no production of a Shakespeare play can ever hope to be definitive, productions of Hamlet or of Lear are likely to be even more partial than are those of other plays. The greatness of a production of Lear or of Hamlet will depend, even more than is usual in tragedy, upon the intensity and the extent of the power to suggest realms beneath and beyond what is, at any given moment or from moment to moment expressed.

 

Yet King Lear presents problems which Hamlet, for all its mysterious complexity, does not present. King Lear does not have what one might call an attractive or a dazzling surface to offer to a theatre audience. Hamlet, after all, is a young prince who has been in love with a beautiful young woman and who lives in a court which, at the last—after intrigues and ghostly clamour and a play within a play and an interrupted funeral procession—collapses amid the brilliance of envenomed swords, poisoned goblets, a vision of felicity, and the final commemorative deed of a brave soldier and princely successor, Fortinbras. This is a surface which might, if one were so inclined, distract one from the tragic idea it is expressing.

 

There is in Hamlet, as in the Oresteia trilogy, also some refuge, if that is the right word, some stable center which the audience can hold to as well as the characters, a point of view which preserves a social system among men and is respected and honored. No such refuge exists in Lear. Though Edgar and Albany make such a point of view their own, it is always inadequate. It is superseded by the action. And, at the tragedy’s end, it is as they acknowledge irrelevant. It is also possible—if one does not look and listen with all one’s force and wonder—to view Hamlet, however, with the same moral equipment which preserves one. In Hamlet one can feel (unequivocally?) the justice of the prince’s mission. Every right-thinking person knows which side to take: the young prince must avenge the hideous murder of his father. For the too tidily moral, however, there is the possibility of shifting emphasis at the end and concluding that Hamlet, too, deserved to die, for he killed Polonius and drove Ophelia mad and in self-defense (nothing more pious) gave Rosencrantz and Guildenstern his old school friends their death warrant.

 

 

But I have not spoken of another great problem, if problem it be, associated with Lear. I have said that there is no way of taking refuge, no means of distraction. And yet of all plays, one is most likely, here, to wish for refuge. For it is extraordinarily painful. So much so that beginning 65 years after Shakespeare’s death “Shakespeare’s” play was usually presented for a century and a half in bowdlerized form with a happy ending. So Samuel Johnson was not the only man, during three centuries, who found the ending unbearable. And not only are the moments from Lear’s entrance bearing Cordelia until the end some of the most painful moments possible to drama (for we are not, here, distanced by chorus or masks or operatic delivery or alexandrine couplets), but those moments seem to call into deep questioning something we have been taught to believe about the world, something we wish to believe and without which (for one has to be sustained, one has to hold onto something) the obstacles and the anguish and the blind injustice in the world appear to be senseless. We wish to believe that human suffering has some beneficent end, that it stirs, eventually, the curative and redemptive properties of the world. But if, indeed, our suffering has no purpose, if the end toward which we move is not radiant and healing and harmonious, but, rather, dark and void, then we who must leave the theatre after the brief (but also enduring) traffic is for the evening at rest and silent, we who must leave for a traffic literal and exigent and without messages, whose lives are so much longer and more obscure than this life of two hours, we do not wish to know it.

 

But let us go back a minute. Is the action of King Lear, with its agonizing final moments, so utterly unbearable? Does it strip one of what one must believe in order to go on living? Or is it, rather, that we must see it with new eyes, with unaccustomed faculties? Shall we see, if we do not avert our eyes, some rare and great radiance? Though it is for the play itself in its own sequence of detail to express that radiance, we, on the other hand, who are mere spectators can merely feel and puzzle, guess and suggest.

 

The action of King Lear resolutely declines to reinforce the notion that we were taught as children and that we still wish our fairy tales and other means of instructive entertainment to reaffirm: that the good are rewarded and the evil punished. To some, the action may appear to indicate the very reverse: that the good are punished for their goodness, that virtue is pointless and comes to nothing, even to torment, in the end. But to many of us, in our time, no such neat inversion communicates itself. Furthermore, our very eclectic and daring contemporary theatre has led us to accept—sometimes too casually—the fact that drama often has a difficult morality and that the justice done in drama can be sharply different from what we expect in life or seek from our law courts.

 

Yet, even so, the ending of King Lear has an emphasis different from that which we witness in other tragedies. We know that by the end of most tragedies and several melodramas the hero will die. Many will even look forward to the death scene and to the grandeur with which the major actor will perform the feat of dying, just as many actors will be eager to demonstrate that they have found new or memorable or lustrous ways to die. We are not so prone as were those who lived in the age of Dryden or that of Samuel Johnson to see death as an exacting, histrionic punishment for evil-doing. Perhaps we are, in one respect, a little like Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler: we are not averse to the hero’s dying, but we wish him to do it “beautifully.” It is what I can only call a sense of the mystique of death that we look forward to, that we expect.

 

Think of Romeo and Juliet who seem to be consumed by fire, seem to go in a blaze of light: at the play’s end a light can be seen from the tomb by all the middle-aged living. Cleopatra turns air and fire as she goes, ritualistically arrayed, majestic, to death and her vision of Antony. Hamlet has his vision of felicity and release. It is in his old noble cadences that Othello utters his final, reconciling awareness and takes upon himself its inevitable consequence. The catastrophic endings of many more recent plays as well occur in dramatic modes and tones related to these. We can summon up Rebecca and Rosmer in Ibsen’s Rosmersholm embracing one another at the momentous bridge and disappearing into the haunted light. We will recall the very poignant, metaphoric death of young Hedwig the innocent and the loving in Ibsen’s Wild Duck, and also the suicide of Constantin in Chekhov’s The Sea Gull, who leaves the world to his jaded elders.

 

 

 

Yet, though the deaths come in procession and the procession embodies its message, there is something else to which they call attention. For, although they are general and accumulated, they do not all occur in the same mood. They are given differing dramatic weights and emphases. What does this mean?

 

One can say—there it is: at last the radiance (if not a blaze of light) and the making of distinctions for which we have searched. The announcements and dramatizations of the deaths of differing characters come as epitaphs. Yet the difference between the hot and smoking knife that came from the heart of Goneril—who poisoned her sister and slew herself for lust—and Lear’s vision of the voice of Cordelia—who dies for love and deepest charity, that seems to continue, even after death, soft, gentle and low—is evident to anyone who will look and who will listen.

 

 

For, contrary to what, out of custom or need, we may wish to believe, the fate of a character is determined not by how he ends up but by who he is, by the self and the power of suggestion of that self. One’s real fate and reward are, if one dies, to have been such as one was and, if one lives, to be such as one is. This, and not the outcome of battles or the disposition of spoils or the downfall of the villain and the deification of the hero, is what is dramatized with almost incredible intensity in King Lear.

 

Cordelia existed and was herself. Goneril existed and was herself. Lear existed and was himself. It is a greater thing to be Lear or Cordelia than to be Goneril. It is a greater thing to suffer than to be empty of suffering. This is so not because of the differing results or rewards or distinctions, but because of the nature of one self as opposed to the other.

 

The major thing that happens to a character in this tragedy is to be such as he is and to have been such as he was. This, for spectators in a theatre, may be a difficult thing to take home. And yet, in the deepest sense, it is inspirational.

 

We have here a dramatic heightening, a profoundly moving one. It is, though, neither apotheosis nor evocation of doomsday. Nor is it a final, summarial ending.

 

We have become involved in the domain of truthfulness and dedication for their own sake. We have witnessed a strenuous attentiveness nearly beyond the limits of corporal endurance. These are not saints but selves before the eternal. Evil persists. Though the efforts are perilous and the outcomes uncertain, evil is opposed. Such opposition is intrinsically valuable. Its realm is independent of reward. It exists for its own sake. We are, again, in the presence not of saints but of selves before the eternal.

 

 

Can actors on the stage convey all that we have said and much more of which we have not spoken and still more? Perhaps not all at one time. Here the near-sacred intermingles with the homely. Challenges for the actor surely. Yet, so that the play’s size and range are humanly conveyed, who but the actor is entrusted with such an honor?

 

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Evelyn Hooven graduated from Mount Holyoke College and received her M.A. from Yale University, where she also studied at The Yale School of Drama. A member of the Dramatists’ Guild, she has had presentations of her verse dramas at several theatrical venues, including The Maxwell Anderson Playwrights Series in Greenwich, CT (after a state-wide competition) and The Poet’s Theatre in Cambridge, MA (result of a national competition). Her poems and translations from the French have appeared in ART TIMES, Chelsea, The Literary Review, THE SHOp: A Magazine of Poetry (in Ireland), The Tribeca Poetry Review, Vallum (in Montreal), and other journals, and her literary criticism in Oxford University’s Essays in Criticism.

 

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More by Evelyn Hooven here.