This is one of four Exploring Shakespearean Tragedy synopses, each of which collects from the original publication the full argument leading to establishment of the thought-feeling dynamis of one of the four Great Tragedies—in this case King Lear-–into a single narrative. 

King Lear

 from Ch. 3, Other Forms of Action

In King Lear, as in Othello, there is little of humanity left over to just uninvolvedly go about its own affairs. If there is an Alternate Universe, it is the inanimate universe of howling wind, chilling cold, slashing rain. There is little sense of Opposition, Goneril and Regan easily overrunning anything other than abject compliance and Edmund working secretly and unopposed to perhaps even more diabolical ends.

Again, as in Othello, we are left with Victims and Self as Victim as emphasized Other or Counter forms. Clearly, Lear has victimized himself with foolishness, and Gloucester has victimized himself with an unmotivated grinding disparagement of his illegitimate son.  But in the latter acts of the play, Kent, the Fool, and Edmund join themselves to Lear’s victimization so thoroughly as to emphasized that Lear, like his associates, is also a Victim.

Again, fine points of distinction are counter to our purposes and needs in this essay. For our purposes, we’d argue for three Counter emphases in King Lear: Victim, Self as Victim, and Alternate (literal, physical) Universe.

For our purposes, we don’t particularly need to consider a combination of Counters.  Social Alternate Universe is clearly the most distinctively emphasized Counter characteristic of Hamlet, Victim most in Lear, Self as Victim most consistently central in Othello, and Opponents most classically obvious in Macbeth from the Weird Sisters, to MacDuff, Malcolm and Donaldbane, Edward the Confessor, and the Siwards.

For our argument ultimately leading to dynamis, we can here ignore the synthetic combination of Counter emphases,  but for the record, in addition to Macbeth moving toward Pathetic Tension, we have Othello encouraging Pathos and Inner Tension, King Lear encouraging Pathos, Inner Tension, and Distance, and Hamlet encouraging Distance and Pathos, though the Pathos is largely limited to specific moments like the deaths of Polonius and Ophelia. 

from Ch. 4, Special Language

Throughout the history of literary criticism, critics have routinely noticed a very unusual feel about King Lear that separates it not only from other dramatists’ tragedies but also forcefully separates it in feel and tone from the other Great Tragedies of Shakespeare himself.  Moreover, this sense of a unique feel is centrally felt in the language and highly incorporated into that over-all, abiding sense of the play that can legitimately be called the dynamis, dynamic, or power of King Lear over its audience.

King Lear opens prosaically, that is with a good deal of prose in the first two acts.  We should sense that we are being set up by contrast. Nevertheless, note this curious exchange between Kent and Lear as Lear is imparting his coronet to his sons-in-law:

"Kent:      Royal Lear,

Whom I have ever honour’d as my king,

Loved as a father, as my master follow’d,

As my great patron thought on in my prayers.

Lear: The bow is bent and drawn, make from the shaft." (1,1,141ff.)

Kent’s lines are high Eloquence, almost the stuff of Greek tragedy.  Lear’s response is not Eloquent, but rather Elegant, using a strong picture to beautifully state a concept: The rhetorical switch is foreshadowing:  When the play hits poetic stride, it will be these two, Eloquence and Elegance which will contest for dominance.

And it has certainly hit that stride by Act III, the prosaic shunted aside in favor of long poetic set speeches, admittedly punctuated by prose Aptness of the fool like

"He that has a house to put’s head in has a good head piece." (3, 1, 25)

The fool’s comment is anticipated by two long speeches of Lear taking 20 of the 24 previous lines, the first speech beginning “Blow winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!” (Lear’s high emotion Eloquence) and the second picking up in the same vein, “Rumble thy bellyful!  Spit, fire! spout, rain!”

But the speech continues:

“I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness;

I never gave you kingdom, call’d you children,

You owe me no subscription {allegiance}: then let fall    

Your horrible pleasure; here I stand, your slave,

A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man:

But yet I call you servile ministers,

That have with two pernicious daughters join’d

Your high engender’d battles [heavenly battalions] ‘gainst a head

So old and white as this.” (3, 2, 16-23)

Let this speech stand for all the high poetry of the later acts. It is such words that have made the role of Lear so much the ultimate goal of actors for now 400 years.  And what such words show over and over is a profound pictorial sense of humanity’s small insignificance against hurricane forces standing against it, forces allied to all the human weaknesses of the individual and race, and yet forces finally confronted with the simple fact that the slave to all these forces can still, in the image of God, stand amidst the hurricane.

And that picture is ultimately beautiful rather than truthful and deep rather than superficial. In the Aptness, Assessment, Eloquence, Elegance quadrilateral, that places us definitely and definitively in the Elegant quadrant.

We place King Lear on our rhetorical circle, then, as emphasizing Eloquence and even more Elegance.  We recognize that in the Fool the play often moves suddenly and jarringly over to Aptness, and that there is a good deal of Assessment in those who minister to Lear in his madness.  But these are supportive contrasts.  The center of the play is always decisively a center of Eloquence and Elegance in Lear himself.

We have chosen for a rubric of the Elegance-Eloquence section of our circle.  “Ethereal.”  Eloquence and Elegance are both based in Beauty rather than Truth.  Eloquence is Beauty in language; Elegance is Beauty in concept.  Eloquence by itself is fascinating; Elegance by itself is mysterious. Mystery and Fascination together lift us off the ground of the mundane. 

We have chosen to call this lifting off the ground Ethereal, into the air. We might want to note for the speech just considered, however, that it also has some Assessing quality about it, especially as Lear moves on to assess the elements as servile ministers.  If we consider the speech to move from Eloquence to Elegance and then to Elegance matched with Assessment, the last phase of the speech becomes not Ethereal but Transcendent.  Lear is Ethereal in that his feet are no longer on the ground of mundane sanity.  But by the end of the speech, at least for the moment, he is Transcendent, having gone beyond a simple consideration of his abject but standing state, and has moved on and beyond to something of an intellectual dominance over the brute forces launched in battalion strength against him.

We highly recommend then a full study of rhetoric of Lear within the special language quadrilateral we have proposed for all Shakespearean tragedy.  For our purposes here, however, it is enough that Eloquence and Elegance, resulting in the Ethereal, combine in Lear as nowhere else in the Great tragedies or perhaps in all of literature.

 from Ch. 5, Tragedic Spirit

The Spirit of Fire is again strongly suggested and may even be the dominant Spirit of King Lear. Lear is, as Northrop Frye so aptly highlighted, on a “wheel of fire.” However, the distinctive emblem Spirit of Lear, the emphasis which is especially remarkable in Lear among the Great Tragedies, is Cancer or malignant growth.

While Macbeth can be argued to be a spreading cancer over Scotland, the argument would be intellectual without much backing from the text. For example, one could see the cancer exterminating Lady MacDuff and her children, but there is no follow-up emphasized in the rest of the play for Scotland. One could see cancer destroying all the good that is Macbeth’s career up to the opening scene of the play, but if this is the cancer, it has thoroughly destroyed both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth long before the end of Act II.  One could see cancer devouring Lady Macbeth’s life in incremental stages until her death at Dunsinane, but seeing that way would not reasonably describe what we see of her or what we hear in the Doctor’s announcement of her death.

Cancer could be seen in Othello’s jealousy. But in Othello, the jealousy is constantly being fed from outside Othello’s being in the person of Iago as a palpably separate source of demonic evil.

But in Lear, there is one cancerous growth after another.  Lear, from his youth, has been a pampered king, and that inattention to and correction of the small has led to a very great foolishness in old age.  In Goneril and Regan, Lear’s attempts to be equal in love toward his children has been in effect an inattention to bridling their own moral deficiencies. In dividing the kingdom between them, he has allowed the cancer to move with extreme rapidity through one phase after another until the sisters have become not only his enemies but his tormentors and torturers without even seeming to notice what they are doing. 

Cordelia herself is in many ways the perfectly loving daughter. But she doesn’t bridle her love to deal with the errant proclivities of her father and thus becomes the first casualty of his mad foolishness.  Gloucester has also allowed and indeed more than allowed, has provoked the cancerous—unnatural, malignant—response of his illegitimate son. Kent and the Fool can only watch the cancer as it eats away, having no medicine available to turn the course of events other than the palliative of Kent’s undying feudal love and the Fool’s guidance for emendation of follies.

Criticism can fight over Fire and Cancer as dominant Spirits in Lear. We need not enter that battle to say that among the Great Tragedies Cancer is emblematic for Lear.

from Ch. 7, Tragedic Dynamics

Again, King Lear and Othello seem to have great similarities in dynamis. This is perhaps most particularly noticeable in the relevance to a Spirit of Fire in each and the sense of long ordeal without any reasonable defense in both cases (except that Othello is much more an example of consistently missed chances for defense against Iago’s machinations). A key question, then, is whether carefully working through the technical details of both plays reveals a substantial difference of power over us despite an admitted similarity.

King Lear’s world is a world of Inevitability, strongly enforced as in Greek tragedy by dramatic irony. In Greek tragedy, the audience knew because they already knew the myth what the protagonist on stage didn’t know about his or her future. Moreover, dramatic technique allowed Greek dramatists to make the audience aware of other important realities that the hero didn’t know—for example, we as audience know that Oedipus has killed his father and married his mother.

The dramatic irony in Lear is not a matter of knowing the history before seeing the play. Rather, it is a matter of our knowing things about human affairs that Lear—the fool—has evidently blinded himself to. For example, Lear has blinded himself to knowing that average people are likely to tell you what they know you want to hear. Goneril and Regan are arguably far below average in moral character. They are obnoxiously above average at flattering their parent as long as he has anything to give.

This sets up the Inevitability that someone who refuses to know what we all should know about human nature is inevitably fated to hard knocks in human relations. Similarly, Gloucester from his first words on stage shows himself to have habitually demeaned and derogated his son by proclaiming him a bastard to whomever cares to know. We don’t need to hear the end of the story to know how such things work—obviously very badly, probably tragically.

Inevitability also works in Cordelia who has evidently blinded herself to niceties of rhetoric necessary to keep at peace with her almost-demented father. The practical knowledge that so many of the noble characters seem bereft of is left for the Clown to articulate, perhaps no more memorably than in his assertion “Winter’s not gone yet if the wild geese fly that way” (2. 4. 45).  (Note that the line is in prose, but the assertion is one of the special language Aptnesses of the play as a whole.)

Toward Thought Within Dynamis: From earlier chapters, we have argued that King Lear emphasizes Victims in form, Elegance in rhetoric, and Malignant Growth (or Cancer) in tragedic Spirit. (It must be admitted that there is also a large case for Self as Victim for many blinded characters in Lear: Lear victimized by his foolishness, Gloucester victimized by his false humility in demeaning his son rather than himself, Cordelia in working to her own disinheritance from sheer moral pride. These arguments all have great merit, and they are all reasons why a full study of the dynamis of Othello and Lear will have to deal with great similarities as well as significant oppositions.)

Treating only what makes Othello and King Lear distinctively different in dynamis, then, an emphasis in Lear on Self as Victim as Form of action emphasizes a sense of vulnerability and thence of the possibility of inevitable catastrophe. Victims are not like Opponents.  Opponents fight back and sometimes win. Victims are just victimized, stabbed in the back, cudgeled in the dark, swindled and robbed with impunity. (Contrastively, in Othello Iago is willing to victimize everyone, but his central victims, Othello and Desdemona, are too strong to be seen as stabbed in the back. Both must make choices for themselves which are the tragedy which Iago only enables.)

Elegance in rhetoric is an appropriate rhetoric for thought about Inevitability in that Elegance finds a deep-level beauty which it typically states with great economy. The howling wind so impressive in Lear is easy to bemoan as one of the many natural threats to man’s comfort and dignity.

 

But at a deeper level, there is also something of beauty that is brought out by the howling wind or for that matter by Poor Tom’s lacerations. The beauty is, if you will, how wonderfully we are made to experience and withstand so much, and even more, to remain human amidst such pummeling. In some senses amidst such pummeling, Lear, Kent, the Fool, Cordelia, and Edgar not only remain human, they become more nobly human.  Lear is a foolish and pampered old man—until he is defrauded and thrown out into the cold, damp, howling, threatening world where he can say

 

              “here I stand, your slave,

A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man:

But yet I call you servile ministers,

That have with two pernicious daughters join’d

Your high engender’d battles  ‘gainst a head

So old and white as this.”  (3.2. 16-23)

 

Lear is now not foolish even if quite possibly mad, not pampered and therefore more respectable, more in touch with reality and therefore considerably saner in his madness.

Malignant Growth is an appropriate vehicle for thought about Inevitability because Malignant Growth has a sense of the inexorable about it, at least once it gets the upper hand and becomes self-perpetuating, which is when we notice its malignancy at all in most cases.

Adding Feeling to Thought: On the feeling side, emphasis on Victims moves all tragedy toward the pathetic. Emphasis on Elegance moves toward deep senses of beauty which are primarily felt, not thought.  The Spirit of Malignant Growth centers on the sense of the overwhelming, especially because malignant growths are noticeable primarily when they have reached crisis stages in which they are choking out whatever is left of the natural growth order.

We have then. Overwhelming, pathetic, deeply beautiful feeling, and a sense of the Inevitable. This combination is perhaps the most complex we will consider.  But the combination works quite readily to a perception of a new and higher reality that comes only through suffering. Because it is pathetic, we sympathize and look for that redeeming quality. Because it is a matter of deep feeling and deep beauty, we look well beneath the tragedic surface to find that new, building dimension. Because it is overwhelming in catastrophe, the superficial is likely obliterated, and that leaves the possibility of finding the new dimension built beneath to be left as all that remains and all that is important. In general, we can call that building in a new dimension Ennobling.

King Lear’s distinctive dynamic variant, then, is Ennobling Inevitability.

We have already posited a short definition of the Shakespearean tragedic dynamis in general:

A cautionary admiration of man’s natural glory, encompassed by tragic processes of nature: poison, fire, rot, and cancerous growth.

Now we can customize that dynamic for any one of the Great Tragedies in particular

For King Lear:

 A cautionary admiration of man’s natural glory, encompassed by the tragic processes of nature, particularly the pathetically overwhelming processes of Cancerous Growth, with an emphasis on Ennobling Inevitability.