King Lear’s fall is an obvious one to point out. When we first meet Lear he is an aging yet still power-wielding monarch, and at the play’s conclusion we wave goodbye to an old man once king heading to kingdom come sans crown. And that’s just the tip of the peripatetic iceberg. Tied to every royal is the fate of a nation (which is why today’s Britons prefer their fate in the red-hot hands of William the Dashing and not in the pale hands of Charles the Bore). Despite his attempts at fostering otherwise, Lear’s nation has fallen into political madness due to the selfishness of the very people to whom Lear reasoned he should bequeath Britannia. Put together Fortune’s fun with man and country is relatively easy to pin point. But what concerns this blog post is not the question of Lear’s unfortunate fortune, but instead what I’m interested in is pin pointing Lear’s point of recognition and its implications. Now to this point, we point.
“A plague upon you, murderers, traitors all! I might have saved her!” If the object of Lear’s vitriol were indeed singular and directed only at the Captain then at least his words would half-truth be -- the other half being the half he himself would contribute to the current plagued state of events. But Lear directs his condemnation at the tragedy’s least guilty and inarguably its most redemptive and still living characters (tear drop, Cordelia. Tear drop, lowly classed brave heart): the honorable Kent, the redeeming Edgar, and the judicious Albany (an ironic and funny anachronism, don’t cha think). Lear’s condemnation is of course woefully, or more to our meta-theatrical play, pitifully ignorant. Murderers? Traitors? He might have saved her? Puh-lease. About the only thing he saved was defeat from the jaws of victory (Oh! Two snaps and a crown in yo' face!)
Here Shakespeare leaves little room for audiences to expect that in the tragedy’s final moments Lear will explicitly recognize his culpability in Cordelia’s death. So what do we get instead? In the opening scene, Lear doesn’t recognize Cordelia’s honesty and the true simplicity of her love for him. Telling his daughter to refit her words to fit his fancy, Lear says “Nothing, will come of nothing, speak again” and when she does not modify her speech he banishes her from his sight, court, and royal fortunes. So I’m interested in interpreting Lear’s recognition as an implicit one. Perhaps the moment when, after he brings in his daughter’s dead body, he mistakenly thinks Cordelia might still be alive. Here, Lear can’t recognize Cordelia in life or death. He doesn’t know her beating heart. Lear does finally recognize his daughter fully, but unfortunately for him it’s too late: “Now she’s gone forever!”
Poor guy.
1 comment:
It's an interesting question you raise, Andre--does Lear come to the recognition of his flaws and failings? We never get an explicit answer to this, and perhaps that's why some of us might find the ending not only tragic, but disappointing. But I would argue that Lear has changed in this final moment. As I said in class, it is momentous (to me, at least) that Lear finds Cordelia's death as unjust. Compared to the other living creatures of the earth (dogs, rats, horses), she has more right to live than they. This is a turn from the other line of inquiry in the play, wherein Lear and others ask if there is anything special about humanity. At the moment of his death, and too late to save Cordelia, Lear seems (to me, at least) to get the answer.
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