Neil Bowen on
A summary of Kiernan Ryan's chapter on 'King Lear' in 'Shakespearean Tragedy' (2021)
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A Play Fit for a King
The play was performed before King James in 1606 during the Christmas holidays, specifically St. Stephen’s night (Boxing Day) traditionally associated with providing hospitality and giving alms to the poor. How did Shakespeare and his company get away with performing a play as seditious and subversive as this? Lear’s experiences in the play compel him to ‘call into question sovereignty itself and the unjust social order on which it’s predicated’ and his ‘relelentless suffering is rewarded not withe deliverance, but yet more anguish and a harrowing death’.
Ed.’s note: Is it possible that the play’s criticism of splitting of the Kingdom went down well with King James?
Samuel Johnson found the end of the play too distressing and couldn’t understand why Shakespeare changed the source material so that Cordelia dies. Bradley also struggled with the play’s apparent excessive cruelty and why Shakespeare didn’t provide a clear reason for Edmund’s delay in attempting to save Cordelia and Lear.
As well as those changes, Shakespeare also invented characters who weren’t in the source material - e.g. the fool and Oswald. Plus Shakespeare converted Lear’s folly inoto full scale madness, adding the storm scene. According to Ryan he also ‘expunged virtually every trace of his source’s Christian spirit, leaving the cast of King Lear marooned in a bleak, pagan universe’. But the boldest change was to the ending. Whereas in the source the characters survive, Shakespeare’s play ends in ‘unrelieved misery’.
Shakespeare also added the parallel Gloucester plot, magnifying the impact of Lear’s fate. Like Lear, Gloucester’s world is turned upside down as he realises the human cost of his privileged life and is ‘seized with compassion for victims of poverty and oppression he helped to create’.
The suffering of the poor is embodied in the figure of Tom O’Bedlam. The suffering of several characters - Gloucester, Edgar, Cordelia, Kent - signals that Shakespeare was not criticising an individual monarch but rather the social system and its set of values/beliefs.
Worth remembering that ‘the great image of authority’, James’ son, Charles I, was put to death in 1649. ‘King Lear’. More than most of Shakespeare’s plays ‘King Lear’ ‘helped to foster the climate of dissidence that made revolution possible’.
Nahum Tate’s happier version, a ‘sentimental travesty’, supplanted Shakespeare’s on the English stage from 1681 to 1838. As Charles Lamb commented, Shakespeare’s play with ‘too hard and stony’ for public taste.
There is indeed, something hard and stony about Shakespeare’s vision in the play, something indeed ‘monstrous’. Frank Kermode has described Shakespeare’s attitude to his characters in this play as a kind of ‘authorial savagery’.
What is the point of all the inhumanity, suffering, cruetly dramatised in the play? If we assume Shakespeare shared the values of his time, then we’re likely to ‘mistake the characters’ mood at the end for the vision of the play as a whole, and come away feeling like Kent. But if we assume Shakespeare was a radical visionary, then we can recognise the ‘inspiring and empowering vision of Shakespeare’s most audacious tragedy’.