King Lear
Fourth lecture
Endings
• Strange to say, King Lear hasn’t always ended with the almost
unbearable ending Shakespeare assigned it.
• In the late 17th cent. Nahum Tate, a poet and theater director,
produced a version of the play that ended happily, with a romancelike conclusion.
• He cut the King of France from the first scene, and instead
suggested a potential love between Cordelia and . . .
• Edgar!
• And at the end of his text of the play (extensively revised
throughout), he had Lear save Cordelia from hanging.
• Edgar and Albany enter and in turn save Lear.
• Lear is returned to his kingship.
• Cordelia becomes queen and agrees to marry Edgar.
• Gloucester survives, and he, Kent, and Lear retire together, while
Cordelia and Edgar take over the kingdom.
• Obviously Tate had to write a new final scene.
• Fool is also cut.
• And this is the version of King Lear that played throughout the 18th
century.
Nahum Tate’s ending
• Tate’s ending seems a travesty to us.
• (Of course we also need to acknowledge what we do the
text of Shakespeare’s plays – the cuts and rewriting of
contemporary productions – and wonder how those will
look a century or two hence.)
• But does the trajectory of the plot demand tragedy?
• Samuel Johnson (“Dr. Johnson”), who was used to the
Tate version on stage, said he could never bear to read
Shakespeare’s actual ending until he had to edit the
play.
• Lear’s “journey” from a foolish decision, rejection,
madness, insight in madness, recovery and finally his
return to Cordelia might seem a narrative pattern that
could lead to a romance ending.
• From a purely narrative point of view, Tate’s ending may
not seem entirely inappropriate.
The meeting with Cordelia
• There was a climactic scene in the old morality plays
when the penitent protagonist was given a “garment of
repentance” by the saving Virtue character.
• IV.7: Lear brought in, freshly clothed, asleep in chair.
• Cordelia slowly wakens him with music, kisses him.
• Lear’s “true” delusion: “Thou art a soul in bliss . . .”
• And in kneeling plays the part in old the morality play.
• And slowly recovers a sense of himself.
• But only in a relational sense to Cordelia? “as I am a
man, I think this lady/ To be my child Cordelia.”
• His guilt? “No cause. No cause.”
• And then in V.3 he imagines a contented life in prison
with Cordelia.
• The meeting and penitence would be the denoument of
the morality play.
“Justice” in the Gloucester plot
• Edgar’s “miracle” scene analogous to Cordelia’s meeting with her
father.
• But despair is cured abstractly, by the staged “miracle”?
• “Bear free and patient thoughts.”
• Reiterated at V.2: 9-11: “Ripeness is all.” (Cf. Hamlet’s “the
readiness is all.”)
• But still Edgar doesn’t reveal himself.
• After the battle, Edgar and Edmund “exchange charity.”
• And Edgar holds to a sense of absolute justice: “The dark and
vicious place where thee he got/ Cost him his eyes.”
• But seems to admit his own fault in concealing himself from his
father: ll 193ff.
• The circumstances suggest a dark and rigid justice playing itself out:
Edmund and Gloucester both die.
• And Edgar, the just son, survives.
• But how does it compare to the Lear story?
Irrelevance of justice in the Lear
plot?
• By contrast, everything seems excessive in Lear story.
• Lear’s anger at Cordelia, his utter rejection by older
daughters, his suffering.
• And clearly “justice” seems irrelevant.
• The loss of Lear’s kingdom to the evil forces.
• And finally the terrible stage direction: “Enter Lear with
Cordelia in his arms.”
• The play gives us no hint that this will happen.
• And no “poetic justice” in the death of the one
“redeeming” daughter:
• A nameless gentleman had said of Cordelia: “Thou hast
one daughter/ Who redeems nature from the general
curse/ Which twain have brought her to” (IV.6.204-06).
• If death had indeed been implicit in the first scene, it was
not for this death.
“Enter Lear . . .”
• Lear enters with one long sustained cry of anguish: the
text’s “howl, howl, howl!” are more a stage direction, I
suggest.
• “O, you are men of stones” is as much directed to the
audience as to those on stage.
• And Lear’s words tell the audience what they need to
know about the actor’s body he carries on stage.
• Kent’s, Edgar’s, and Albany’s words speak also for the
audience: is this an image of the terror of the Last
Judgment?
• Lear’s words and actions try to verify Cordelia’s death:
“She’s gone forever.”
• Or is she, “What is’t thou say’st?”
• But the feather apparently doesn’t stir.
• Can we imagine a more heart-breaking scene on the
stage – or a more sustained stage meditation on the fact
of death?
“All’s cheerless, dark, and deadly”
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Kent’s despairing words.
Lear attends only to the dead Cordelia.
At l. 311 Albany cries out “O, see,see!”
What are we to see? What does the actor playing Lear
do?
Lear’s lines heart-breakingly focus on the lifelessness of
Cordelia and the finality of death.
So if death was implicit in the opening scene, we get an
uncompromising vision of it.
The gesture of the help with the button: where have we
seen this before?
And finally Lear’s insistence that we see Cordelia’s lips.
Does he think they’re moving, that she’s saying
something?
Clearly he’s deluded.
Or does he see something we can’t see?
Stage – and audience -- reaction
• Kent encourage’s Lear’s death: for him the world
is a “rack,” an instrument of torture.
• And Kent seems to envisage his own death: “I
have a journey shortly to go . . .”
• Edgar’s final formulation: what we feel, not the
usual comforting words.
• Gloucester’s earlier words about the world: “I
see it feelingly.”
• He meant the need for touch in his blindness,
but the word has resonance.
• Will Edgar ever be the same after these
experiences?
• Will the audience?