Shakespeare's Tragic Justice

C. J. Sisson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315306377
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Teatro shakespeariano

The problem of justice seems to have haunted Shakespeare as it haunted Renaissance Christendom. In this book, first published in 1963, four aspects of the problems of justice in action in Shakespeare's great tragedies are explored. This study is based on the lifetime's research of Elizabethan habits of mind by one of the most distinguished Shakespearean scholars, and will be of interest to students of English Literature, Drama and Performance.

IV

The quandary:
KING LEAR

If Hamlet is a diploma-piece for the literary critic as for the actor, King Lear is a work of dramatic art which reduces criticism to intellectual humility. It imposes itself upon the receptive mind and imagination with the submissive awe that is moved by the crash of thunder and the explosions of lightning among snow-clad Alpine peaks, or by the first vision through a powerful telescope of the ringed planet of Saturn in illimitable space. When Gustav Hoist sought to reflect Saturn in music in his Planets, his mind was haunted by the colossal ancient figure of the Greek god with which Keats opened Hyperion, yet from that still monument he moved into the clash and clangour of the vast revolving rings which he heard breaking the music of the spheres in harsh dissonance. The intellectual concept of age with which he began yielded to the pressure of more immediate, more powerful intuition in contemplation. The tumult yields to a deep, warm melody of love, which dies away into an infinity of silence. And the image of Shakespeare’s King Lear comes unbidden to hover through the powerful music.

Certainly, with King Lear, the critic-interpreter, beaten down by that overwhelming disturbance of the emotions which Dr. Johnson recorded, finds his powers of intellectual abstraction superseded by the ceaseless renewal of the huge, tidal attraction of this planet of art upon the feelings and the soul. ‘This tempest will not give me leave to ponder,’ says Lear, and we are stunned as he was. Dr. Johnson was writing as an editor, forcing himself, as in duty bound, to detached textual considerations in revising the last scenes of the tragedy. No play offers equal difficulties to the textual editor, for other than those textual reasons to which in the main emotional responses are irrelevant. In the very act of considering the words and their possible variations, the editorial mind slips lightly out of gear, and more mysterious powers enter into possession in long and dreaming trains of thought and imagination.

Pray you undo this button. Thank you sir.

Do you see this? Look on her, look her lips—

Look there, look there—

And upon these words Lear dies. There is some debate upon the question whose button is to be undone, and upon the significance of varying Quarto and Folio readings. But between the editor and his problems there intervenes the moving certainty that here we are watching Lear slip round the corner of this known world of time and space into a kind of fourth dimensional world, with a glimpse before he disappears of what he sees already around that corner of eternity, his beloved Cordelia awaiting him there, her lips smiling again for Lear.

Our modern minds are resistant to such a conception of the old King’s death, and are apt at best to gratify him with a hallucination or an illusion. Yet for the Elizabethans, and for Shakespeare, the unseen other world of eternity was not only more certain in men’s belief, but it was closer to the world of human reality, the dividing line more unstable, less sharply defined, with frequent traffic between the two worlds. A man prepared his baggage for his passage through death to that other world as he would prepare for a journey from Stratford to London, not booted and spurred, but shriven, anointed, having made his peace with God as well as his last will and testament, indeed as part of that peace. For so the Order for the Visitation of the Sick admonishes a man ‘to make his Will ... for the better discharging of his conscience.’ Even Falstaff, we are told by Mrs. Quickly, ‘made a finer end, and went away an it had been any Christom child.’ The malefactor upon execution was sent to his account, not with his account irrevocably closed as in modern materialistic humanitarian thought. The next world was indeed only around the corner from this world, as all men knew. And Lear for long had ‘but usurped his life,’ as Kent tells us, already on the verge.

Drawing back with unwilling effort from such a spiritual and emotional intuition, the textual question finds the intellect affected, perhaps prejudiced. In the Quarto text of 1608 all we have of these three lines is the first, in the form

pray you undo this button, thank you sir. o.o.o.o.

And upon this series of groans, Lear dies. It was thus that the death of Lear was played by Christopher Simpson with his company in their repertory for 1609 on their long Yorkshire tour, on which they also played Pericles, having bought their Quarto play books from the wide choice available in the London bookshops. What are we then to say concerning the two crucial lines missing in the Quarto? We may not dismiss the Quarto text, for all its faults, as defective and devoid of authority. The Folio text indeed shows clear signs of abridgment and revision, and the Quarto text is our sole authority for some three hundred lines wanting in the Folio. It seems clear that these two lines were added during the later history of the play between 1608 and 1623, and we may well ask why in a general abridgment even a small addition was made. It is impossible to think the question insignificant in so highly wrought a play, or to believe that the lines were added only to accompany further stage-business with a mirror or a feather, after Lear’s certainty of Cordelia’s physical death, and after his words

Never, never, never, never, never.

Such an anticlimax would verge on the ludicrous. There is ground for conviction that Shakespeare added these lines deliberately, and with a far deeper intention. So we see Lear in death, broken certainly upon the rack of the tough world, but turning again home, love transcending death.

Nowhere, in the whole range of Shakespeare’s work, is the desire so acutely felt as in King Lear to be able to consult Shakespeare himself upon the words he had written and upon their significance in his mind.

The desperate painfulness of the tragic ending of King Lear led the stage, when the brave Elizabethan days were past, to accept for almost two hundred years Tate’s sentimentalized version with a happy ending, Lear surviving and Cordelia suitably married to Edgar. It is a rare, indeed an amiable, confession of weakness that led A. C. Bradley to wish that Shakespeare had saved Lear and Cordelia from the general wreck to enjoy peace and happiness together, though he is careful to insist that his wish rests upon principles of dramatic perfection, not upon sentiment. Yet never did Shakespeare take a more deliberate or a more striking decision than to reject version after version of the story, in Spenser, in Holinshed, or in the old play in which this happy ending closes an episode in British history. We may well feel that if there has been revulsion against Shakespeare’s desperate conclusions here, no less instinctive and powerful was Shakespeare’s revulsion against the epilogue to this happy ending in Holinshed, the renewal of civil war, the defeat of Cordelia Queen of Britain, and her death at her own hands. Shakespeare’s story, at any rate, had a conclusion in which everything was concluded, and if Cordelia was hanged, she did not hang herself as in Holinshed.

There is no subject upon which Bradley is more guarded, and more inconclusive, than the question of poetical justice. Yet through a maze of words it would seem that his conception of dramatic principles, as applied to King Lear, is offended by the gross disproportion between cause and effect in the catastrophe of this tragedy. He agrees that we may not measure the consequences of flaws in character in precise proportion to their results, and the logic of tragedy is not the logic of justice. Yet for him, here in King Lear, the vast sway of moral equilibrium in the universe is wanting, and there is consequently aesthetic dissatisfaction. Bradley’s dissatisfaction finds itself reflected in the not uncommon estimate of the play as a tragedy of pessimistic outlook upon the world of men, and undue stress is still frequently laid upon Gloucester’s words:

As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods;

They kill us for their sport.

Too much stress has certainly been laid on what is described as the fairy-tale basis of the story of King Lear, with a consequent tendency to interpret the play in terms of cloudy symbolism for want of problems of human reality. What King in his senses, it is argued, would in real life divide his kingdom among his three daughters, abdicate, and spend his days thereafter in rotation with each in turn? How could a drama of living men and women emerge from such a fanciful theme? The modern world indeed might come closer in reality to Lear’s action, in the avoidance of destruction of an estate by death-duties, with the device of deeds of gift to children. But in Elizabethan days funeral expenses were a far greater tax upon an estate than the claims of the Exchequer. Admittedly, the story was history, and was fact, to Shakespeare and the Elizabethans. Holinshed tells it, with a portrait of King Lear himself, bearded and helmeted, and a revolting woodcut of Cordelia, to illustrate it. There are parallels in classical history, and indeed in the early Elizabethan drama, as in Gorboduc. But we may perhaps distinguish between history and fairy-tale legend.

What we cannot do, is to deny the evidence of recorded contemporary events that such actions, not by kings certainly, but by men of great estate, were of frequent occurrence in Shakespeare’s time. Some bear unexpected resemblances to the story of Lear as Shakespeare tells it. There was, for example, the Yorkshireman Ralph Hansby, who divided his great estates among his three daughters upon their marriage. He had no son, and he abdicated his greatness to continue it only in the advancement of his daughters. Two of them were ungrateful, but the third was his Cordelia, who married Sir John York. The career of Lady Julian York, a steadfast, loyal, obstinate soul, may be followed in state records up to her long imprisonment by King James for recusancy. Cordelia, we may well hold, would have been a recusant, Catholic or Puritan, in Shakespeare’s day, averse by her nature to commodious conformity, to her great loss. In the story of the life of Brian Annesley, it has been recorded that the name of the youngest of his three daughters was actually Cordelia.¹

Closest of all in some respects is the story of Sir William Allen, a very wealthy old Londoner, about which there is the fullest detail in Chancery records, a very lamentable story indeed.² Sir William was for long a leading figure in the Company of Merchant Adventurers. He had his day of quasi-royalty, for he was Lord Mayor of London, and was knighted by the Queen in his year of office, in 1571. He lived on to be over eighty years of age, and found his great possessions a heavy burden from which he desired relief. He had moreover found himself growing forgetful in his great old age.

1 G. M. Young. ‘Shakespeare and the Termers,’ in Proceedings of the British Academy Vol. xxxiii. The Hansby-York material is unpublished.

2 P.R.O. C24/210/Verzelyn v Allen; C24/211/Allen v Verzelyn.

Methinks I should 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.

Sir William had three daughters, all married, one of them to a Frenchman, Francis Verzelin. So he divided his great properties among the three daughters, and arranged that he should stay with each of them in turn, at one of the houses that had been his own. But once they had entered into possession, they treated him very ill, and grudged him all service and comfort. Being so very old a man, he felt the cold bitterly, and desired warmth. But his daughters, so the Court was told, ‘limited his fire,’ kept him short of wood and coal, and treated his childish querulous protests with scorn and disdain. Coal was very dear, they said, an unnecessary expense. So Goneril and Regan with Lear’s knights. ‘What need one?’ said Regan, ‘this house is little.’

Dear daughter, I confess that I am old;

Age is unnecessary, on my knees I beg

That you’ll vouchsafe me raiment, bed and food.

And he kneels to Regan. What could be said for these pelican daughters?

Goneril	His knights grow riotous, and himself upbraids us
	On every trifle...
	You strike my people, and your disordered rabble
	Make servants of their betters.

So Sir William’s daughters complained that he was rude to their servants, called them ‘fussocks,’ awkward, unhandy—surely very mild abuse.¹ So at last he died, in great misery, and died with a father’s curse upon them. There was no Cordelia among these three.

Sir William probably was in truth an obstinate, self-willed old man, as indeed Lear was with perhaps more justification, by virtue of his kingship. Sir William had a wife, Lady Mary Allen, who possibly resisted in vain his dangerous decision. A mother knows her own daughters, and a woman is more practical-minded, more critical of ideas. Lear, it may be noted, has no Queen in the play to defend her own crown as well as his. Like Hansby and Allen, he also has no son. There was none of power to question his self-will in the solitary absoluteness of his royalty. We must not put from our consideration the part of truth in what Goneril and Regan have to say in their judgment of his character and of his action in the very first scene, even in the first flush of their rich succession.

Regan:	’Tis the infirmity of his age; yet he hath ever but slenderly known himself.
Goneril:	The best and soundest of his time hath been but rash, then must we look from his age to receive not alone the imperfections of long-ingrafted condition, but there-withal the unruly waywardness that infirm and choleric years bring with them.

1 N.E.D. cites fussock as first occurring in the 18th century.

It is something more than a coincidence that the Lear story first emerged on the London stage soon after the great stir which the story of Sir William Allen made in London. The case occupied the Court of Chancery for a long time in 1588 to 1589, and the early play, The True Chronicle History of King Leir, upon which in some measure Shakespeare founded his great tragedy, followed perhaps a year later. It may well be that this first play was designed to take advantage of the reflection on the stage of a current cause célèbre in actual London life. At all events, it must be conceded that no Elizabethan would accept the dismissal of the preliminary action of the play as a fairy-tale theme, remote from actuality. We may reas...