Regan. And in good time you gave it.
Lear. Made you my guardians, my depositaries;
But kept a reservation to be follow'd
With such a number: what, must I come to you
With five-and-twenty, Regan! said you so?
Regan. And speak it again, my lord; no more with me.
Lear. Those wicked creatures yet do look well-favour'd,
When others are more wicked; not being the worst,
Stands in some rank of praise:--I'll go with thee;
[To Gonerill.]
Thy fifty yet doth double five-and-twenty,
And thou art twice her love.
Gonerill. Hear me, my lord;
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?
Lear. O, reason not the need: our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous:
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man's life is cheap as beast's: thou art a lady;
If only to go warm were gorgeous,
Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear'st;
Which scarcely keeps thee warm.--But, for true need--
You heavens, give me that patience which I need!
You see me here, you gods; a poor old man,
As full of grief as age; wretched in both!
If it be you that stir these daughters' hearts
Against their father, fool me not so much
To bear it tamely; touch me with noble anger!
O, let no woman's weapons, water-drops,
Stain my man's cheeks!--No, you unnatural hags,
I will have such revenges on you both,
That all the world shall--I will do such things--
What they are, yet I know not; but they shall be
The terrors of the earth. You think, I'll weep:
No, I'll not weep:--
I have full cause of weeping; but this heart
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws,
Or e'er I'll weep:--O, fool, I shall go mad!
[Exeunt Lear, Gloster, Kent, and Fool.]
If there is anything in any author like this yearning of the heart,
these throes of tenderness, this profound expression of all that can
be thought and felt in the most heart-rending situations, we are
glad of it; but it is in some author that we have not read.
The scene in the storm, where he is exposed to all the fury of the
elements, though grand and terrible, is not so fine, but the
moralizing scenes with Mad Tom, Kent, and Gloster, are upon a par
with the former. His exclamation in the supposed trial-scene of his
daughters, 'See the little dogs and all, Tray, Blanch, and
Sweetheart, see they bark at me,' his issuing his orders, 'Let them
anatomize Regan, see what breeds about her heart,' and his
reflection when he sees the misery of Edgar, 'Nothing but his unkind
daughters could have brought him to this,' are in a style of pathos,
where the extremest resources of the imagination are called in to
lay open the deepest movements of the heart, which was peculiar to
Shakespeare. In the same style and spirit is his interrupting the
Fool who asks, 'whether a madman be a gentleman or a yeoman', by
answering 'A king, a king!'
The indirect part that Gloster takes in these scenes where his
generosity leads him to relieve Lear and resent the cruelty of his
daughters, at the very time that he is himself instigated to seek
the life of his son, and suffering under the sting of his supposed
ingratitude, is a striking accompaniment to the situation of Lear.
Indeed, the manner in which the threads of the story are woven
together is almost as wonderful in the way of art as the carrying on
the tide of passion, still varying and unimpaired, is on the score
of nature. Among the remarkable instances of this kind are Edgar's
meeting with his old blind father; the deception he practises upon
him when he pretends to lead him to the top of Dover-cliff--'Come
on, sir, here's the place,' to prevent his ending his life and
miseries together; his encounter with the perfidious Steward whom he
kills, and his finding the letter from Gonerill to his brother upon
him which leads to the final catastrophe, and brings the wheel of
Justice 'full circle home' to the guilty parties. The bustle and
rapid succession of events in the last scenes is surprising. But the
meeting between Lear and Cordelia is by far the most affecting part
of them. It has all the wildness of poetry, and all the heartfelt
truth of nature. The previous account of her reception of the news
of his unkind treatment, her involuntary reproaches to her sisters,
'Shame, ladies, shame,' Lear's backwardness to see his daughter, the
picture of the desolate state to which he is reduced, 'Alack, 'tis
he; why he was met even now, as mad as the vex'd sea, singing
aloud,' only prepare the way for and heighten our expectation of
what follows, and assuredly this expectation is not disappointed
when through the tender care of Cordelia he revives and recollects
her.
Cordelia. How does my royal lord? How fares your majesty!
Lear. You do me wrong, to take me out o' the grave:
Thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound
Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears
Do scald like molten lead.
Cordelia. Sir, do you know me?
Lear. You are a spirit I know: when did you die?
Cordelia. Still, still, far wide!
Physician. He's scarce awake; let him alone awhile.
Lear. Where have I been? Where am I?--Fair daylight?--
I am mightily abus'd.--I should even die with pity,
To see another thus.--I know not what to say.--
I will not swear these are my hands:--let's see;
I feel this pin prick. 'Would I were assur'd
Of my condition.
Cordelia. O, look upon me, sir,
And hold your hands in benediction o'er me:--
No, sir, you must not kneel.
Lear. Pray, do not mock me:
I am a very foolish fond old man,
Fourscore and upward;
Not an hour more, nor less: and, to deal plainly,
I fear, I am not in my perfect mind.
Methinks, I shou'd know you, and know this man;
Yet I am doubtful: for I am mainly ignorant
What place this is; and all the skill I have
Remembers not these garments; nor I know not
Where I did lodge last night: do not laugh at me;
For, as I am a man, I think this lady
To be my child Cordelia.
Cordelia. And so I am, I am!
Almost equal to this in awful beauty is their consolation of each
other when, after the triumph of their enemies, they are led to
prison.
Cordelia. We are not the first,
Who, with best meaning, have incurr'd the worst.
For thee, oppressed king, am I cast down;
Myself could else out-frown false fortune's frown.--
Shall we not see these daughters, and these sisters?
Lear. No, no, no, no! Come, let's away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too--
Who loses, and who wins; who's in, who's out;--
And take upon us the mystery of things,
As if we were God's spies: and we'll wear out,
In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones,
That ebb and flow by the moon.
Edmund. Take them away.
Lear. Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia,
The gods themselves throw incense.
The concluding events are sad, painfully sad; but their pathos is
extreme. The oppression of the feelings is relieved by the very
interest we take in the misfortunes of others, and by the
reflections to which they give birth. Cordelia is hanged in prison
by the orders of the bastard Edmund, which are known too late to be
countermanded, and Lear dies broken-hearted, lamenting over her.
Lear. And my poor fool is hang'd! No, no, no life:
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life.
And thou no breath at all? O, thou wilt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never!--
Pray you, undo this button: thank you, sir.---
He dies, and indeed we feel the truth of what Kent says on the
occasion--
Vex not his ghost: O, let him pass! he hates him,
That would upon the rack of the rough world
Stretch him out longer.
Yet a happy ending has been contrived for this play, which is
approved of by Dr. Johnson and condemned by Schlegel. A better
authority than either, on any subject in which poetry and feeling
are concerned, has given it in favour of Shakespeare, in some
remarks on the acting of Lear, with which we shall conclude this
account.
The Lear of Shakespeare cannot be acted. The contemptible machinery
with which they mimic the storm which he goes out in, is not more
inadequate to represent the horrors of the real elements than any
actor can be to represent Lear. The greatness of Lear is not in
corporal dimension, but in intellectual; the explosions of his
passions are terrible as a volcano: they are storms turning up and
disclosing to the bottom that rich sea, his mind, with all its vast
riches. It is his mind which is laid bare. This case of flesh and
blood seems too insignificant to be thought on; even as he himself
neglects it. On the stage we see nothing but corporal infirmities
and weakness, the impotence of rage; while we read it, we see not
Lear, but we are Lear;--we are in his mind, we are sustained by a
grandeur, which baffles the malice of daughters and storms; in the
aberrations of his reason, we discover a mighty irregular power of
reasoning, immethodized from the ordinary purposes of life, but
exerting its powers, as the wind blows where it listeth, at will on
the corruptions and abuses of mankind. What have looks or tones to
do with that sublime identification of his age with that of THE
HEAVENS THEMSELVES, when in his reproaches to them for conniving at
the injustice of his children, he reminds them that "they themselves
are old!" What gesture shall we appropriate to this? What has the
voice or the eye to do with such things? But the play is beyond all
art, as the tamperings with it show: it is too hard and stony; it
must have love-scenes, and a happy ending. It is not enough that
Cordelia is a daughter, she must shine as a lover too. Tate has put
his hook in the nostrils of this Leviathan, for Garrick and his
followers, the showmen of the scene, to draw it about more easily. A
happy ending!--as if the living martyrdom that Lear had gone
through,--the flaying of his feelings alive, did not make a fair
dismissal from the stage of life the only decorous thing for him. If
he is to live and be happy after, if he could sustain this world's
burden after, why all this pudder and preparation--why torment us
with all this unnecessary sympathy? As if the childish pleasure of
getting his gilt robes and sceptre again could tempt him to act over
again his misused station--as if at his years and with his
experience anything was left but to die.' [Footnote: See an article,
called 'Theatralia', in the second volume of the Reflector, by
Charles Lamb.]
Four things have struck us in reading LEAR:
1. That poetry is an interesting study, for this reason, that it
relates to whatever is most interesting in human life. Whoever
therefore has a contempt for poetry, has a contempt for himself and
humanity.
2. That the language of poetry is superior to the language of
painting; because the strongest of our recollections relate to
feelings, not to faces.
3. That the greatest strength of genius is shown in describing the
strongest passions: for the power of the imagination, in works of
invention, must be in proportion to the force of the natural
impressions, which are the subject of them.
4. That the circumstance which balances the pleasure against the
pain in tragedy is, that in proportion to the greatness of the evil,
is our sense and desire of the opposite good excited; and that our
sympathy with actual suffering is lost in the strong impulse given
to our natural affections, and carried away with the swell-ing tide
of passion, that gushes from and relieves the heart.