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Matthew Jones
English 4140
Professor Berggren
04/2010
Excellent Fopperies:
Soliloquies in King Lear and Measure for Measure
The paradox of Shakespearean theater lies in its ability to communicate plausible
emotion and generate compassion while using artificial language and adhering to
theatrical conventions: the use of the soliloquy is just such an example of this predilection
for artificiality. Originating in Hellenic tragedy as speech uttered by a single character
alone and generally addressed to the audience, the soliloquy survived throughout the
Middle Ages as a dramatic device that bridged the gap between the play’s fiction and its
audience’s reality, often with some didactic purpose in mind.1 Renaissance theater,
however, relied on the soliloquy more as a self-addressed speech than an audience-aware
one, thus reflecting the humanists’ emphasis on individuality and privacy as well as
respecting the confines of the play’s fictitious world.2
Notwithstanding
conspicuous
dissimilarities
in
tone
and
genre,
both
Shakespeare’s King Lear and Measure for Measure were written around the same time
and include more soliloquies than other works of his œuvre. Both draw in varying
degrees from a medieval theatrical heritage while following contemporary artistic trends.
Yet both versions of the soliloquy, the medieval one and its Renaissance counterpart, are
nonetheless examples of speech—soliloquies as the expression of interior thought would
1
James Hirsch, Shakespeare and the History of Soliloquies (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2003)
78.
2
Hirsch 116.
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not be standard practice until the end of the seventeenth century3—that is not veridical,
which the soliloquies in both King Lear and Measure for Measure emphasize by selfreflexively alluding to theatrical conventions. The soliloquy thus becomes both the most
contrived as well as the most honest instance in King Lear and Measure for Measure:
because the soliloquy is uttered alone, the need for pretense and disguise required in
society is suspended and, consequently, Edmund and Edgar’s soliloquies in King Lear
and those of Angelo and the Duke in Measure for Measure feature the characters at their
most uninhibited. However, differences in the treatment of the soliloquy must be noted:
the soliloquies of Edgar and Edmund acquire an important explanatory power in King
Lear, crystallizing the play’s thematic concerns and elucidating its allegorical qualities,
whereas those spoken by Angelo and the Duke exemplify a moral ambiguity.
King Lear resembles other works in the Shakespearean canon in the way that
multiple plot lines echo one another. Just as As You Like It features three versions of
pastoral romance that imperfectly imitate the courtship of Rosalind and Orlando, King
Lear’s Gloucester subplot mirrors and eventually intersects with Lear’s narrative of
family dysfunction and moral dichotomy. However, Gloucester’s sons, the legitimate
Edgar and bastardly Edmund, have the majority of the soliloquies in King Lear, and, in
this regard, the subplot differs significantly from the main plot that boasts hardly any.
Edmund’s soliloquies, for instance, are the occasion for an unrestrained indictment of
“the excellent foppery of the world” (1.2.128) that anticipates Lear’s command to “crack
Nature’s molds” (3.2.8). Similarly, Edgar’s soliloquy articulates a frankly pejorative view
of society echoed by Lear on the heath: “the country gives me proof and precedent / Of
Bedlam beggars” (2.3.13-14).
3
Hirsch 116.
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The soliloquy as a mode of speech shared primarily by Edmund and Edgar
furthermore encourages a contrast of these two characters. Though their equal capacity
for soliloquizing highlights an analogous discrepancy between their true identities and the
social roles they inhabit, the nature of disguise differs for both Edgar and Edmund.
Edmund’s first soliloquy details a Machiavellian plan of action to gain power, whereas
Edgar’s monologue registers the unfortunate condition in which he merely reacts to his
half-brother’s machinations, an illustration of the consequences of cruel ambition.
Additionally, Edgar’s is a reductive disguise, one of “presented nakedness” (2.3.11): if
“robes and furred gowns hide all” (4.6.167) in King Lear, then Edgar’s removal of his
clothes symbolizes an instinct to have truth. Conversely, Edmund’s reference to his own
“cue of villainous melancholy” (1.2.145-146) reveals the deliberateness of Edmund’s
stratagems.
In addition, the contrasting soliloquies of Edmund and Edgar illustrate the polarity
that characterizes the moral temperature of King Lear. Indeed, Edgar’s notion “to take the
basest and most poorest shape” (2.3.7), to look like the Bedlam beggars with nails in their
bare arms, like so many stigmata, recalls Christ’s incarnation and crucifixion. It is,
moreover, a conspicuous association with Cordelia, who exhibits Christ-like features and
even speaks like Christ in the New Testament when she says: “O dear father, / It is thy
business that I go about” (4.4.24). It is apparent from Edmund’s soliloquy, however, that
he embraces his natural impulses—“thou, Nature, art my goddess” (1.2.1)—and thus
aligns himself with Goneril and Regan, whose unconscionable, sadistic mutilation of
Gloucester certainly earns them Lear’s dehumanizing appellations: they are “wolvish”
(1.4.315), “pelican daughters” (3.4.75)
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Though the soliloquies of Edmund and Edgar allow them the most opportunity for
introspection or self-justification, neither examines the kind of dilemma that is most often
associated with the Shakespearean soliloquy. Instead, the tone of both soliloquies is
largely presentational, even pragmatic. Lear poignantly asks: “is there any cause in nature
that make these hard hearts?” (3.6.76-77), but Edmund offers no adequate answer for his
roughness or lechery in his soliloquy, instead reasoning: “I should have been that I am,
had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing” (1.2.142-144).
Goneril likewise remains an unknowable evil character until her own end, her last words
being: “ask me not what I know” (5.3.163). The goodness of Edgar and Cordelia
similarly goes unexplained. Ultimately, it is neither reasonable nor psychologically
realistic to assume that Edmund, Regan and Goneril are extremely, organically bad or
that Edgar and Cordelia are intrinsically and incorruptibly good. Yet King Lear eschews
any explanation of Edmund’s badness or Edgar’s goodness in their soliloquies: this
portrait of unfettered evil threatening to overpower virtue thus confers upon the play an
allegorical and even monumental quality, so much so that Kent’s question “is this the
promised end?” (5.3.265) seems timely and appropriate.
If King Lear is memorable for its mythological dimensions, Measure for Measure
instead defines itself by the prosaic. Lear’s understanding of impending death (“we
unburthened crawl toward death” (1.1.43)) permeates King Lear; the travel to the coast of
Dover—the edge of Albion and, as the planned site of Gloucester’s suicide, a locus of
extinction—represents the narrative’s own inexorable movement toward death. Measure
for Measure substitutes for King Lear’s thanatology and the sterility of castles and the
heath a livelier locale, a contemporary Vienna marked by lifelike diversity and fecundity.
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Perhaps it is no less ambitious than King Lear in its exploration of human nature, but the
psychology of Measure for Measure’s characters captured in the soliloquies is decidedly
more nuanced: neither Angelo nor the Duke proves to be entirely bad or purely good
characters.
Angelo is the character in Measure for Measure with the most soliloquies, which
afford him the opportunity for his own defense though he is vilified by Isabella by the
play’s end as “an adulterous thief, / An hypocrite, a virgin-violator” (5.1.40-41). His
soliloquy (2.4.1-30) illustrates a spiritual turmoil that mitigates an otherwise sordid
character. Unlike Edmund, who fully accepts his lechery and actively lives by it,
Angelo’s sin lies in being tempted, vacillating between the heaven that has his “empty
words” (2.4.2) and Isabella who has captured his interest and imagination. Yet the kind of
agonized speculation that Angelo’s soliloquy lends itself to—“why does my blood thus
muster to my heart” (2.4.20)—remains unanswered. Such is his moral confusion that he
dispenses with binary Christian morality, suggesting: “let’s write ‘good angel’ on the
devil’s horn” (2.4.16). Furthermore, the soliloquy’s ability to muster sympathy for
Angelo’s case depends on the way in which he describes his experience as universal:
Angelo counts himself among both the fools and wiser souls that are vulnerable to
temptation in his soliloquy, whereas Edmund differentiates himself from the rest of the
world by contrasting its “excellent foppery” with his own clairvoyance.
Angelo might in some regards be considered a representative example of
Edmund’s foppish world: like the “whoremaster man” who lays “his goatish disposition
on the charge of a star” (1.2.137-139), so too does Angelo make his apostrophized blood
the responsible party in his lust. It is not mere goatish disposition, however, that compels
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Angelo to lust for Isabella: paradoxically, it is her virtue he desires, “to sin in loving
virtue” (2.3.182). In the same way that Measure for Measure itself defies genre—for,
though it ends somewhat happily, it lacks the light-heartedness of Shakespeare’s earlier
comedies—Angelo resists easy judgment thanks to a soliloquy that humanizes him.
If Angelo’s soliloquies create a sense of intimacy and verisimilitude, the Duke’s
soliloquy (3.2.264-285) is, conversely, alienating and impersonal. The change in rhyme
and meter from iambic pentameter to iambic tetrameter confer to the soliloquy an
incantatory quality, bespeaking a simplicity that ill befits a complex situation. The
soliloquy captures a conspicuous change in the Duke’s temperament, from his former
flexibility and generosity of expression—his tendency for enjambments in the first
scene—to an orthodoxy that is reflected in the rigidity of his style. Yet the Duke’s
soliloquy not only contrasts in style and tone from that of Angelo, but signals a shift in
the play’s tone, by his planned interference—“craft against vice I must apply”
(3.2.291)—that all but silences the rest of Measure for Measure’s cast.
Though the Duke’s soliloquy quite rightly indicts Angelo for his hypocrisy, it
sheds no light on the Duke as a character. In this way, his soliloquy is self-effacing,
offering no perspective on his motivations. Instead, it seems as though he has completely
assumed his friar disguise by infusing his soliloquy with religious vocabulary, with such
borrowed expressions as “the sword of heaven” (3.2.264). The Duke fails in his soliloquy
to recognize his own part in creating the circumstances for potential tragedy, by lending
his power in absentia to Angelo and thereby neglecting his ducal duties. Moreover, it
might be considered hypocrisy on the Duke’s part to criticize Angelo for being an “angel
on the outward side” (3.2.275) even as he misappropriates a sacred capacity.
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It is, furthermore, a kind of dramatic irony that the Duke, who in the play’s
beginning tells Angelo that Nature is a “thrifty goddess” (1.1.39), neglects his ducal role
and subsequently bungles his ecclesiastical one. Like Edmund, who refers to his halfbrother Edgar as “the catastrophe of the old comedy” and to his own “cue of villainous
melancholy” (1.2.145-146), there is a theatrical quality in the stratagems of the Duke,
something of the playwright’s creative appetite: “craft against vice I must apply”
(3.2.291). Yet the self-consciously theatrical mode in which Edmund operates throughout
King Lear blurs the boundaries that separate the theater’s fiction from the audience’s
reality, for he proves equally capable of eliciting his father’s unquestioning trust and
inspiring the audience’s complicity. Though the Duke’s soliloquy proves him to be as
versatile an actor as King Lear’s Edmund or Edgar, so completely does he inhabit the
ecclesiastical role that its artifice is destroyed only when his friar’s cowl is forcibly
removed by Lucio in the play’s last act.
King Lear and Measure for Measure testify to the versatility of the soliloquy, its
ability to somewhat explain the particular speaker, as in King Lear, or to complicate and
obfuscate the characters’ motives in Measure for Measure. However, both versions of the
soliloquy ultimately cast doubt on the possibility of justice. The inability to make sense
of the characters or their deaths in King Lear, which provokes Lear to ask the inanimate
Cordelia: “why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life / And thou no breath at all”
(5.3.308-309), invalidates the notion of divine fairness—instead, the gods have become
“wanton boys” (4.1.36) by the play’s end. Measure for Measure’s denouement is no less
disquieting, for the justice hinted at in the Duke’s soliloquy, which is doled out in the
play’s last act, proves to be an unsatisfactory and hollow resolution.
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Works Cited
Hirsh, James. Shakespeare and the History of Soliloquies. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh
Dickinson UP, 2003. Print. (Surprisingly, there is relatively little written on the
history of soliloquies; I relied primarily on Hirsch’s work for the wide-ranging
scope of his scholarship.)
Shakespeare, William. Measure for Measure: with New and Updated Critical Essays and
a Revised Bibliography. Edited by S. Nagarajan. New York: Signet Classic, 1998.
Print.
Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of King Lear: with New and Updated Critical Essays
and a Revised Bibliography. Edited by Russell Fraser. New York: Signet Classic,
1998. Print.