‘King Lear’, Shakespeare:The Invention of the Human by Harold Bloom
Below are extracts taken from the above essay. Harold Bloom is a famous literary critic, but this is,
nevertheless just one man’s interpretation of Lear. Often, Bloom responds to other critics when
defending his own view. Read through the extracts, but remember that they are there for you to
actively engage with: if you agree with them, find evidence to support your opinion. Alternatively,
consider and justify another opinion.
King Lear ‘ announces the beginning and the end of human nature and destiny’
It is part of Shakespeare’s genius not to have Edmund and Lear address even a single word to each
other in the entire play, because they are apocalyptic antitheses: the King is all feeling, and Edmund is
bare of all affect. P. 479
Edgar’s role is one which ‘exemplifies the pathos and value of filial love far more comprehensively
than Cordelia’s can, because of the necessities of Shakespeare’s plot.’ P.481
Lear’s excessive love for Cordelia inevitably sort to be a controlling love until the image of authority
was broken, not redeemed, as Christianizers of this pagan play have argued p. 484
Dr Johnson (a well known 18th century essayist and critic) said that he could not bear Act V of the play
because it outraged divine justice and so offended his moral sense, but the great critic may have
mistaken his own reaction. What the drama of King Lear truly outrages is our universal idealisation of
the value of familial love – that is to say, both love’s personal and love’s social value. The play
manifests an intense anguish in regard to human sexuality, and a compassionate despair as to the
mutually destructive nature of both paternal and filial love.
In what ways is paternal and filial love seen to be mutually destructive in King Lear?
Whose view, if either, do you agree with?
Every attempt to mitigate the darkness of this work is an involuntary critical lie. When Edgar says of
Lear “He childed as I father’d” the tragedy is condensed into just five words … [This does not refer
to] a parallel between two innocences (Lear’s and Edgar’s) and two guilts (Lear’s elder daughters’ and
Gloucester’s) because Edgar does not consider his father to be guilty. “He childed as I father’d” has in
it no reference whatsoever to Goneril and Regan, but only to the parallel between Lear-Cordelia and
Edgar-Gloucester. There is love, and only love, between those four and yet there is tragedy, and only
tragedy, among them. Subtly, Edgar indicates the link between his own rugged recalcitrance (his
inability/ refusal to express himself) and Cordelia’s. Without Cordelia’s recalcitrance, there would
have been no tragedy, but then Cordelia would not have been Cordelia. Without Edgar’s stubborn
endurance and self-abnegation, the avenging angel who strikes Edmund down would not have been
metamorphosised out of a gullible innocent. We can wonder at the depth and prolongation of the selfabasement, but then Edgar would not have been Edgar without it. And there is no recompense;
Cordelia is murdered, and Edgar despairingly will resign himself to the burden of kingship.
Critics have taken a more hopeful stance, to argue for redemptive love and for the rough justice
visited upon every villain in the play. The monsters in the deep all achieve properly bad ends …But
there is no satisfaction for us in the slaughter of the wicked. Except for Edmund, they are too barbaric
to be tolerated, and even Edmund, fascinating as he is, would deserve, like the others to be indicted for
crimes against humanity. Their deaths are meaningless – again, even Edmund’s since his belated
change fails to save Cordelia. Cordelia’s death, painful to us beyond description, nevertheless has only
the pain to make it meaningful. Lear and Gloucester, startingly both die for more of joy than of grief.
The joy that kills Lear is delusional … Gloucester’s joy is founded upon reality, but pragmatically the
extemes of delight and of anguish are indistinguishable. Lear and Gloucester are slain by their
paternal love, by the intensity and authenticity of that love … [their love] may be stronger than death,
but it leads only to death, or death-in-life for the extraordinary Edgar, Shakespeare’s survivor of
survivors. P.485-6
I blink at a supposed Shakespeare who is out to subvert Renaissance ideology and who hints at
revolutionary possibilities.
Edmund … attributes his vivacity, freedom from hypocrisy, and power of plotting to his bastardy …
(Why brand they us/ with base … Who in the lusty stealth of nature take/ More composition and
firece quality/ Than doth within a dull, stale, tired bed,/ Got to th’creating a whole tribe of fops’ [but]
that is Edmund in his ‘fierce quality’, not the mortally wounded Edmund who has the continued
accuracy to say ‘Tis past, and so am I.’ Edgar, at that moment, take an opposite view of that ‘lusty
stealth of nature’
The Gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us;
The dark and vicious place where thee he got
Cost him his eyes.
The dying Edmund accepts this, but it can be judged very disconcerting as the ‘dark and vicious place’
does not appear to be an adulterous bed but is identical with what Lear stigmatizes in his madness:
‘But to the girdles do the Gods inherit,/ Beneath is all the fiends’. P.490
Are Shakespeare’s perspectives in Lear incurably male? The only woman in the play who is not a
fiend is Cordelia, whom some recent feminist critics see as Lear’s victim, a child he seeks to enclose as
much at the end as at the beginning. Such a view is certainly not Cordelia’s view of her relationship
with her father and I am inclined to credit her rather than her critics. P.491
The worship of Lear by Kent, Gloucester, Albany and most of all his Godson Edgar is directed not
only at the great image of authority but at the central image of familial love, or patriarchal love (if you
would have it so) … [The fact that] the domestic is necessarily a tragedy … may be the central
nihilism of this play. P. 492
“Fools” in Shakespeare can mean “dupes”, “beloved ones”, “madmen”, “court jesters”, or most of all
“victims”. Lear’s suffering is neither redeemable or redeemed. Carefully stationing his play nine
centuries before Christ (the time of Solomon), Shakespeare knows he has a (more or less) Christian
audience, and so gives them a pagan, legendary king who loses all faith in the gods. If you were James
1, you could be provoked by King Lear that Christian revelation was implied as a deep human need by
the hoplessness of Shakespeare’s play. But I would think that skeptical Jacobeans (and there were
more such than modern criticism concedes) could be stimulated to just the opposite conclusion: Faith
is absurd or irrelevant in regard to this dark vision of reality. Shakespeare, as always, stands apart
from such reductiveness , and we cannot know what he believed or disbelieved. P.493
Suffering receives its full reality of representation in King Lear; hope receives none. Hope is Cordelia,
and she is hanged at Edmund’s command; Edgar survives to battle wolves, and to endure a heroic
hopelessness. And that, rather than ripeness, is all.
From King Lear: The Tragedy of Isolation Northrop Frye (1967)
At the beginning of King Lear we see the hero preparing to take the fatal step of depriving himself of
his social context. He will exchange the reality for the ‘name’ of king, and instead by his subjects for
his qualities [i.e. his status as King], he will be loved by his daughters for himself alone. All seems to
go well until, with Cordelia’s ‘nothing’, he finds himself staring into the blankness of an empty world.
Those who love Lear love him according to their bond, the tie of loyalty which is their own real life.
Who is Lear to be loved apart from that? That is, what is the identity of a king who is no longer a king?
The royalty of Lear [i.e. that which he has given up] held his society bound to that greater nature
which is symbolised by the stars in their courses, the world of order and reason that is specifically the
world of human nature. With the abdication we are now wholly confined to the lower physical nature
of the elements, an amoral world where the strong prey on the weak … In this situation Lear is joined
by the Fool and Kent, who is also a fool, as the Fool himself informs him, for we are now in a world
where it is genuinely folly to be genuinely loyal.
On the heath a mad shadow confronts a mad shadow world, for the storm is described in a way that
makes it not simply a storm but chaos come again, the cracking of nature’s moulds. The turning point
of the scene is Lear’s prayer, a prayer which does not address a god, but the beggars of the earth. In
this prayer Lear finds his human identity again, though in a very different context from kingship, and
immediately after it Poor Tom appears.
It is Poor Tom who shows Lear the end of his journey to find his own nature. What is the nature of
man? Ther are many answers, but Lear is now in an order of nature so disordered that Edmund is
called a ‘loyal and natural boy’. The Fool, who is really a loyal and natural boy is all that is left of the
‘desperate train’ which Regan pretends to be afraid of. The question then takes the form: what is left
of a man when we eliminate his social and civilized context and think of him purely as an object in
physical nature?
‘Is man no more than this? Asks Lear wonderingly, but he has had his answer. ‘Thou art the thing
itself,’ he says, and starts tearing at his clothes to remove what is left of his relation to human society.
In Shakespeare the word nothing, when it means something called nothing, usually refers to the loss of
essence, not to the end of existence. ‘Edgar I nothing am,’ says Edgar, meaning that he ceases to be
Edgar though he goes on living …
Goneril and Regan, however brusque and insensitive, show a certain hard common sense in their
attitude towards Lear, and are not revealed as evil until they separate him from what is left of his
society. The outcry about their cruelty in cutting off his ‘train’ seems excessive at first, but is deeply
rooted in the convention of the play. The act shows that they do not merely ‘seek his death’, they seek
his annihilation. To murder Lear, and thereby get rid of the noisy old nuisance, would show less real
malice than wiping out the society he commands and letting him go on living. The latter obliterates
the idea or real form of Lear: it strikes at a deeper life than his physical one. [In dismissing his train,
they are negating his identity, status and sense of self, rather than merely his physical body].
W.R.Elton, Double Plot in King Lear (1966)
Because in Renaissanace drama differences in rank may imply other personal distinctions, the royal
Lear represents the higher portion of the human creature, his reason being closer to the divine; while
the more lowly Earl of Gloucester represents its nether portion … anger and madness assail the King,
who suffers most in the mind, putting out his reason’s light; while the ‘dark place’ of physical lust and
‘nether crimes’ as well as the physical darkness of blinding, attend Gloucester. Mankind’s upper half,
closer to the angels, and the nether half, bestial, are symbolised, for example in Lear’s centaur speech.
… Lear’s intellectual error of anger receives the conventional punishment of madness and
Gloucester’s physical sin of lechery receives the conventional retribution of blindness.
From one point of view, indeed, Lear may be seen .. to dissociate … into his children, Goneril and
Regan (selfish wilfulness) and Cordelia (courageous adamancy), as Gloucester may be seen
successively to dissolve into his components, Edmund (lust) and Edgar (pathos). Here, fatherhood,
…involves not only the problem of identity but also that of identity in multiplicity.
[In Lear …] Cordelia reflects the aspect of steadfast love, Edgar that of unchanging pity, Kent of virile
loyalty, Gloucester generally mirror, centaur-fashion, Lear’s all too human side, as the heavens mirror
Lear’s royal demigod or Promethean side.
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From Charles Moseley ‘Trial and Judgement: the trial scenes in King Lear’
Lear moves from the assumption that power and prerogative is what makes a king to the perception
that it is justice.
[The first scene] really is a trial scene: a trial of love, as Lear plans it.
Lear’s rightful authority is undeniable. He is a picture of Justice. But the scene (which Lear, a king
who loves the grand theatrical gesture, the impressive exit, has obviously stage managed in advance, as
the prepared map, the prepared speeches by Goneril and Regan, and the expectations of Burgundy
indicate) shows the utter negation of justice and judgement, and thence a kingship that has withered to
the mere exercise of tyrannical power for self-gratification. Lear’s misunderstanding of what he is
allows him the foolish illusion that he can ‘unburthen’d crawl towards death’ – a king cannot cease by
nature to be king. What was already a bad expedient – horrifying to the first audience – of splitting the
kingdom is made much worse by Lear’s hasty action in giving Cordelia’s proposed share to her sisters
– and the crown, its circle symbolic of natural order and perfection, is given to them to be ‘parted’.
Kent’s protest, ‘Be Kent unmannerly when Lear is mad’ shows that the outward rationality hides a
madness deeper than anything that comes later. The King, head of the human body politic, has her
abdicated his primary responsibility, the ruling of the people committed to his charge with equity and
justice. When the head is mad, the body raves.
In the trial of Goneril and Regan … subconsciously Lear is seeking to understand what he never tried
to grasp in his days of power whose last moents we saw in the state scene of 1.1. Indeed, this is a mad
echo of that scene; here he seeks a counsellor rather than rejects one, seeks understanding of what
‘breeds about her heart’ rather than flattery … This scene’s visual and formal echo of 1.1 underlines
the madness of that ‘sane’ scene and the movement to sanity through the madness that is taking place
in Lear’s mind.
In 3.7 … Cornwall is not only a tyrant but an appalling sadist. And here he ends, killed by his own
servant. The two together are a play in little – the ‘tragedy’ of Cornwall, a man released into action
by Lear’s repudiation of his obligations, who causes havoc in the name of power and turns himself
from (one presumes) a pefectly acceptable nobleman into a monster.