Neil Bowen on
An extract from the forthcoming critical guide to 'King Lear':
The Coming Storm - the end of Act 2
The interactions with Regan and Goneril in the second half of this final scene use repeated phrasing, striking imagery and further visual symbols to explore the change in relationship between father and daughters. Regan repeatedly belittles her father, labelling him as ‘old’ and ‘weak’. She also distances herself from him by coldly, calculatingly using the salutation ‘sir’ in parenthesis: ‘I pray you, sir, take patience.’; ‘If, sir, perchance…’ where each ‘sir’ is a little admonitory sting. Before the entrance of Goneril, Lear repeatedly criticises his oldest child, comparing her to the vulture who pecked out Prometheus’ liver in myth, to a serpent who ‘struck me with her tongue’. For Lear, she is monstrous, and he associates her with the verbs ‘cut, scant, oppose’, portraying himself as her victim. In stark contrast, he appeals to Regan with positive language like ‘beloved’ and ascribes to her filial duty: ‘offices, bond, dues’. The contrast is summed up in Lear’s line ‘Her eyes are fierce, but thine / Do comfort and not burn’. His misreading of Regan here in this line is also heavy with proleptic irony for the plucking out of Gloucester’s eyes in Act 4. In another striking visual moment, Lear kneels to Regan and begs her to let him stay. This is another inversion – this time of power. Lear is literally on his knees and begging for mercy. However, when Goneril enters, she and Regan take each other’s hand in a visual symbol of solidarity against their father.
At this point, Lear’s grip on power is rapidly loosened. He repeatedly asks who put Kent in the stocks before Cornwall finally deigns to reply that it was him. Furthermore, Lear’s train of knights is whittled down again. Regan instructs him to ‘[dismiss] half your train’ – i.e. to 25 from the original 100 - before going back to Goneril. In reply, Lear repeats ‘Return to her?’ ‘Return with her?’ incredulously. Shakespeare uses frequent caesura here to disrupt the flow of Lear’s verse, though the rhythm remains largely iambic and therefore shows that some vestige of control remains in his mind. Like cats with a mouse, the daughters toy with Lear in their discussion of the retinue of knights, until they reach this conclusion:
GONERIL: 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?
The mathematical countdown is a literal subtraction of status, while the reference to the ‘command to tend you’ reminds Lear that he is no longer the one issuing orders. Regan’s monosyllabic and blunt final question here is an added layer of cruelty to the sum, a terminal subtraction to zero that leads to Lear’s exit into the tempest after his impassioned but increasingly impotent ‘reason not the need’ speech.
As the scene’s concludes, Regan and Cornwall echo each other as they distance themselves from Lear. They both refer to him by the rather general phrase ‘old man’, whereas Gloucester still refers to him as ‘the King’. They both command Gloucester to Shut up your doors’ or bar Lear from entering and seeking shelter, while Gloucester cannot help but remark on the terrible weather. Shakespeare uses storms elsewhere – in Macbeth, for example – to indicate disruption in the natural order. But in no other play is a storm so central to the drama, both in terms of its location in the text, and also in the way the eponymous character becomes so closely aligned to the storm that it holds not only political significance but personal significance too, as the storm symbolises the chaos now unleashed in Lear’s mind that exposes him both physically and mentally, literally and metaphorically to its disorder.