King Lear: Plot summary with commentary
Plot summary with commentary
HAMARTIA
Lear, the aging king of Britain, abdicates to divide his kingdom evenly among his three daughters, leaving the king without sceptre, crown and throne while retaining all the advantages and privileges of kingship. He has confused kingship with self, for the throne is not the man. His vanity has led him to a grave error, in classical terms his tragic flaw or hamartia. So, in the terms of the day, he is guilty of rejecting the divinely ordained, moral order by dissolving the throne itself, so that the rightful order of things is in tatters. Note that there will be no more unified kingdom remaining: he has dismissed all order in his human sphere. Furthermore, that order established by God is not for him to use or abuse for his pleasure, but is the metaphysical structure of the entire kingdom, indeed, the platform from which all life emanates, beyond mortal manipulation. Kingship is a position of responsible stewardship, not a personal attribute. His is a grave sin. By the way, Shakespeare’s play Richard II, now playing, deals with the same issue.
In order to effect this, he first demands tests from his daughters, protestations of love, before he divides his estate among them. Being familiar with the rituals of hierarchy, they know how to respond. Goneril, the eldest daughter, obeys first, with hyperbolic flatteries. She loves him “more than eyesight, space, or liberty,” to the point of burlesque. Then, according to Regan, the middle child, Goneril “came short” and competes with higher quality sugar. Her competitive words foreshadow their future reciprocally annihilating battle for more than just land. Vainly, Lear, even after removing the crown expects to be supported with the luxury and obedience befitting a ruling monarch. Foolishly, he has discarded the anointed position while assuming all the trappings that go with it. That’s not how the chain of command operates; his vanity assumes his ‘self’ is the king and not the position in the divine scheme of things. Critically, his vanity has dismissed the moral order of the universe. In his fatal misjudgment, his vanity, he has confused the “self” of the person with the position of the king. His vanity, pride, or hubris has got the better of him as he abandons the grace of God that anointed him, while throwing his “self” to the care of two grasping daughters, Goneril and Regan. His misjudgment, his hamartia, has confused him tragically: he has sacrificed his anointed position for sugared words. As Kent, the loyal nobleman who is condemned for his truth, warns, “Think’st thou that duty shall have dread to speak/When power to flattery bows? To plainness honor’s bound/When majesty stoops to folly.” Why is the king becoming subservient to subjects? Honour demands I speak the truth plainly. Dismissing the warning, Lear is now subservient to his venal daughters and, as we shall see, will become powerless.
Thus, an essential theme of the play is order, which has been abandoned for ego. As the chaos descends, the questions are many: Who are we without order? What are we in chaos? What do we become? Animals? That without God’s grace we are mere organic beings will be established as a major theme. Remember that Shakespeare’s world constructed the moral universe as an anointed hierarchy, without which we have only our animal natures. We will find out.
However, Cordelia, Lear’s youngest and favourite daughter, remains silent, saying that she loves her father according to the nature of their relationship, challenging her sisters’ oaths saying, “Sure, I shall never marry like my sisters,/To love my father all,” but loves him as a natural daughter would, “according to my bond.” Although he has discarded the natural order himself, Lear flies into a rage accusing the innocent Cordelia, ironically, of pride, and disowns her. By defending her with “thy youngest daughter does not love thee least,” the indefatigably loyal Kent, the honest nobleman, finds himself banished, but not after warning the king. Here are hints of Lear’s dismal future, as Kent defends his bluntness. “Be Kent unmannerly/When Lear is mad.” Lear’s growing narcissism will ultimately have him lose his mind as the king throws out those who might heal him. “Do, kill thy physician,/And the fee bestow upon the foul disease,” Kent says as he exits, but later disguises as a plain commoner and follows his monarch loyally.
A core theme in the play is that of truth which cannot rear its noisy head. Thematically, as irony would have it in this tragedy, truth-tellers either travel in disguise or leave the stage. Kent, the banished loyal nobleman who challenges Lear’s ego, travels as a plain-speaking common man; the honest Edgar, Gloucester’s legitimate son in fear for his life, travels in the undisguised disguise of nakedness (there’s a metaphor—the naked truth); the Fool disappears when Lear’s madness becomes hopeless, and Cordelia is exiled to France. His kingdom is so corrupted that truth dare not show its honest face. Establishing the theme early in the play, the Fool says, “Truth is a dog that must to kennel. He must be whipped out when lady the brach may stand by the fire and stink” (1.4.107-109).
The king of France, who will marry Cordelia, takes his banished wife to France, her kennel, without her father’s blessing. She is whipped out.
THE DESCENT
Lear quickly learns that he made a bad decision. Goneril and Regan, the vile sisters, swiftly begin to undermine the pretense of authority that Lear still holds. Unable to believe that his beloved daughters are betraying him, Lear slowly goes insane. The Fool, his acerbic truth-teller, explains his calling Lear a fool. He says, “All thy other titles thou hast given away; that thou wast born with” (1.4.145-6). The beginning of this descent, his decline, begins with Goneril’s dismissing his demand for hosting him and his one hundred knights. In his enraged tongue-lashing of her, the language becomes organic, physical, and animal without reference to any higher order or grace of God, for Lear has summarily dismissed God’s order by detaching himself and his kingdom from Him leaving him with the lower orders. With the higher order dismissed, the animal takes its place. (Use diagram of chain of being) Having only the animal left, he curses Goneril with physical ailments and sterility. He rails, “Into her womb convey sterility;/Dry up in her the organs of increase” (1.4.272-3) and later calls her “a disease that lies within my flesh” (2.4.188). Regan gets the same treatment with “Thou art a boil, a plague-sore, an embossed carbuncle in my corrupted blood” (2.4.198-200). With neither daughter does he call upon any sense of higher order, for he has abandoned it. Rather, he stoops to animal curses, the physical, biological, overtaking the spiritual. He curses procreation dividing womanhood into two:
Down from the waist
They’re centaurs, though women all above;
But to the girdle do the gods inherit,
Beneath is all the fiend’s: there’s hell, there’s darkness,
There’s the sulphury pit, burning, scalding,
Stench, consummation. (4.5.120-125)
Suffering his punishment, he is now, perhaps fittingly, indigent and losing his mind on the barren heath in a brewing thunderstorm storm, accompanied by his Fool and by Kent, ironically two loyal truth-tellers.
It is early that Lear fears for his own mental safety. “I have full cause of weeping, but this heart shall break in a hundred thousand flaws or ere I’ll weep. O fool, I shall go mad” ((2.4.261-3). Repression of emotion leads to madness, for him. This presages his dissolving mental state suggesting that recovery will not come before he weeps. Redemption needs pity. More later.
The Gentleman, a minor character of lower status often used by Shakespeare as devices, reminds us of the intensity of the storm, that Lear is “contending with the fretful element; bids the wind blow the earth into the sea…strives in his little world of man to out scorn the to-and-fro conflicting wind and rain” (3.1.4-11). Lear’s curses equal the howling storm; his madness grows. There is pathetic fallacy here as nature reflects the state of man. Kent corroborates, “Man’s nature cannot carry the affliction nor the force” (3.2.48). The dread for Lear grows. On the heath, Kent meets Lear very soon thereafter.
The battered old man, so accustomed to opulence, has been so reduced that a bed of straw seems a luxury. “Where is this straw, my fellow? The art of our necessities is strange, that make vile things precious” (3.2.71-4) These sparks of an understanding beyond himself will grow in significance. In fact, the theme of social justice is evoked through the play suggesting that justice may only arise from deprivation. However, his madness frightens him most at this point as he obsesses on his daughters, “This tempest in my mind doth from my senses take all feeling else save what beats there: filial ingratitude…O that way madness lies” (3.4.13-20) With this line, his own mind is all; he has no though for anyone else.
Here, catharsis must be introduced. It comes with the theme of social justice being established, seeming almost out of character. Note that the Fool exits for only this speech, here Lear speaks a truth. The Fool loses his role, for the truth teller must be absent as Lear discovers his own truth, and pity for others. It is necessary at the final catharsis for Lear to be redeemed for the fear and horror to be mixed with pity. Note Lear’s discovering conscience; it intensifies the tragedy, for if he had remained just a nasty narcissistic old man, his death would be only nemesis, (he gets what he deserves) with no great loss. This raises question of the role of the Fool. He is only around when Lear wants/lacks a conscience, so that in this conscientious speech, he must be absent. Note that in this speech, there is an absence of the animalistic cursing or even reference. Here he invokes heaven; his inner spark is not dead, just buried.
Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless night,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you
From such as these? O, I have ta’en
Too little care of this. Take physic, pomp,
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them
And show the heavens more just.
(3/4/26-34)
This goes beyond the bed of straw; this is a passage of remorse and pity—remorse for his own callousness and pity for the unfortunate many—a foreshadowing of redemption. And the Fool is absent for only this. He returns.
At this point, the journey through this dark night of the soul introduces Lear to the undisguised disguised Edgar as Tom O’Bedlam (define Bedlam), an almost naked, destitute, bedraggled Edgar wrapped in a ragged blanket. Edgar/Tom becomes existential man. His words are moment of clarity:
“Why, thou wert better in thy grave than to answer with the uncovered body this extremity of the skies. Is man no more that this? Consider him well. Thou owest the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Here’s three on’s are sophisticated. Thou art the thing itself. Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art” (3.4.93-99).
It’s existential. Is man no more than this? The key word here is ‘unaccommodated’. We are all accommodated in two ways: by material comforts or satisfaction of needs varying by class and by the moral order preserved by God that Lear has dispelled, an accommodation of order by God. Without either, man becomes merely “the thing itself” for the social order is eradicated. In the speech, Lear covers class: silk by the elite either ecclesiastical or aristocratic, leather or hide by the warrior class, and wool by the commoners. “Unaccommodation” obliterates all. Further implied is the reality that these poor destitute men would not be unaccommodated if the moral order had been preserved by both Lear and Gloucester. Lear has nothing to give him but pity. When all else his gone, what is left but compassion and pity?
However, the madness continues as he fantasises a trial of his daughters with Edgar/Tom assigned to be the “robéd man of justice” in his ratty blanket. Is this satire of the judicial sphere? Therefore, as irony, Tom O’Bedlam represents the lack of justice in this trope. Judicial robes are ratty blankets with pretension. However, Lear has a way to go before his recovery as the struggle becomes one of madness as he rails against women who are “down from the waist centaurs” and pity with the coming of Cordelia that is “one daughter that redeems nature from the general curse” (4.5. 153), that general curse being Lear’s original sin of pride and the concomitant assault on the Moral Order of the Universe.
Near his journey’s end re-united with Cordelia, he tries to clear his mind as he awakens saying, “Where have I been?…I am mightily abused. I should e’en die with pity to see another thus” (4.6.52-56). In a moment of self-awareness, he admits, “Pray do not mock. I am a very foolish fond old man, fourscore and upward, and, to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind” (4.6.59-62). Lear expresses both self-awareness and pity within 10 lines. This is a far cry from his ravings as banished Kent and Cordelia and verbally savaged his miscreant daughters.
What is left are the catastrophe and the catharsis.
THE PARALLEL
Meanwhile, an elderly nobleman named Gloucester, a central character, also experiences family collapse. He has two sons, Edgar, legitimate, and the younger, Edmund, illegitimate. Proud of his adultery, Gloucester brags of them both equally. Outside of the sacrament of marriage, Gloucester’s downfall begins with animal lust (Use diagrams) that begets the bastard, Edmund, for there was “good sport at his making.” While the sin of adultery, not uncommon, is worthy of condemnation, Gloucester’s sin is compounded by his being proud of his animal act. His sin of pride has corrupted him; furthermore, his adultery, giving into animal lust, has corrupted his family. The sins have produced a man of no conscience who, being barred from inheritance, finds consolation in the power of ego and his castigation of the moral imposition of being less than his legitimate brother. Privately, Edmund rails against the norms of society that call him bastard as he lauds raw, passionate, unsanctified Nature (Diagram of lower order) that gave him his start in his father’s “great sport” while dismissing the righteous, passionless, “dull-eyed bed…creating a whole tribe of fops got ‘tween asleep and awake.” “Now gods, stand up for bastards,” he calls invoking the pagan. The moral order of Nature suffers as he embraces appetites; hence, he dismisses the divine order of Nature in favour of the energy of chaos and self, as the moral order is abandoned. Edmund’s passion commits him to crime, the survival of the fittest which he would be. So, he tricks his father, Gloucester, into believing that his legitimate son, Edgar, is trying to kill him for his inheritance, forcing the good Edgar to flee, and of course, look guilty, leaving Edmund with the father’s legacy. Edmund’s power is his validation; the ability to actualise or realise ego. In both family sagas, the outrage against divine order would be obvious to the audience of the day, in this case a product of the sin of lust. Fleeing the manhunt that his father has set, Edgar/Tom disguises himself as a crazy, destitute beggar and calls himself “Poor Tom.” Like Lear, he heads out onto the heath, an outcast, a truth-teller in an undisguised disguise—the nakedness of existential man.
The themes of the subplot work in parallel to the main plot. However, Gloucester’s sin of lust as the original sin of the subplot is less than Lear’s sin of pride, the origin of all sin. Gloucester did not have the whole kingdom to give away, only his personal estate. Furthermore, Edmund is well thought of, for Illegitimate children abounded and were not necessarily shunned. They might inherit possessions from their fathers but not title wherein the order of primogeniture, the necessary passing of title to the eldest son, ruled. For example, in King John, Richard I’s son, Philip de Cognac, was accepted at court, but he could not inherit the throne, so it went to his brother John, however illegitimately. There is a story there.
When the loyal Gloucester realizes that Lear’s daughters have turned against their father, he decides to help Lear despite the danger. Regan and her husband, Cornwall, discover him helping Lear, accuse him of treason, blind him, and turn him out to wander the countryside. He ends up being led by his disguised son, Edgar, toward the city of Dover, where Lear has also been brought.
There are parallels thematically between the main plot and subplot. As order collapses, Lear accuses and rants in terms of organs and the animal nature, unprotected by God’s grace. As Edgar has his way, the lower motives of adulterous lust, avarice and cruelty engulf the characters of his story. Blindness, murder, homelessness, wrath, jealousy: a myriad of venal, carnal sins infect the kingdom as blind Gloucester is loosed to chaos upon the heath, exacerbated by Edgar’s playing one desperate sister off against the other in a grotesque, sexual competition polluted by ambition. The animal in nature seems triumphant in both stories.
In Dover, a French army lands as part of an invasion led by Cordelia to save her father. Edmund apparently becomes romantically entangled with both Regan and Goneril, whose husband, Albany, is increasingly sympathetic to Lear’s cause. Goneril and Edmund conspire to kill Albany.
The despairing Gloucester tries to commit suicide, but Edgar saves him by pulling the strange trick of leading him off an imaginary cliff. Meanwhile, the English troops reach Dover, and the English, led by Edmund, defeat the Cordelia-led French. Lear and Cordelia are captured. In the climactic scene, Edgar duels with and kills Edmund; we learn of the death of Gloucester; Goneril poisons Regan out of jealousy over Edmund and then kills herself when her treachery is revealed to Albany; Edmund’s betrayal of Cordelia leads to her needless execution in prison; and Lear finally dies out of grief at Cordelia’s passing. Albany, Edgar, and the elderly Kent are left to take care of the country under a cloud of sorrow and regret.
CATASTROPHE AND CATHARSIS
Catastrophe is the last section, the dénouement or conclusion of a drama in which there is an irreparable loss, usually the death of the hero and, perhaps, others. In King Lear, Goneril, Regan, and Edmund die in the last act, but their demise is more nemesis, retributive justice, than tragic defeat; therefore, the catastrophe is comprised of the deaths of Lear and Cordelia for whose ends we feel both horror and pity. There is no happy ending; this cannot be a comedy.
Catharsis is a little more complex. The objective of catharsis is the purgation of emotions through pity and fear. Such a purgation may be a discharge of the excess of emotions produced by an imbalance of feelings which is corrected such that emotional health is restored. Emotional health is restored by a release from feeling, a purgation or exhaustion.
That Lear’s death is horrific is self-evident, although he protests, “I am more sinned against that sinning” (3.2.60), ringing somewhat false after his capsizing the order of the kingdom by his foolish vanity. By insisting on self-pity, he suffers increasingly from both the elements of nature and the traitors that he has unleashed, having created chaos. While he feels victim, there will be no redemption, for there will be no restoration of conscience or consciousness. His would be more a story of nemesis if he is merely victim. However, he is not just victim by the concluding scene as he desperately searches for a little mist on the glass he has placed before Cordelia’s lips. Along the way, the horror has given way to pity which the audience has been prepared for.
There is a restitution of the soul of Lear, by the end, but for there to be a restitution, he cannot simply go back to being the man he was. There comes a redemption.
Act Three scene four is transformative. The wanderers, Kent, Lear, the Fool are battling the vicious storm on the barren heath where, as Kent says, “the tyranny of the open night’s too rough for nature to endure” (3.4.2-3). However, although Lear refers to his mental turmoil, he finds pity for destitute others, after choosing to shun thoughts of his daughters. It lasts but a moment, for he returns to put his absent daughters on trial in his madness. In spite of his illness, there are hints that suffering will bring redemption. In the following speech denoting Lear’s empathy with others’ suffering, the Fool absents himself:
Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless night,
How shall your houseless head and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as this? O, I have ta’en
Too little care of this. Take physic pomp,
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them
And show the heavens more just.
(3.4.26-34)
This is a far cry from his general morbidity about the world and life, as he curses God’s creation invoking general doom. “Smite flat the thick rotundity of the world, crack nature’s mold, all germens spill at once that make ingrateful man” (3.2.7-9). However, redemption is coming, but yet the form of it is unknown. Lear will not return to the former kingly role that was riddled with pride, his tragedy; he must have a new vision of both the world and self. This discovery of truth, an epiphany, through suffering is realised with Cordelia in prison.
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’s the mystery of things
As if we were God’s spies, and we’ll wear out
In a walled prison packs and sects of great ones
That ebb and flow by th’ moon.
(V.3.8-19)
What could I say that would do that speech justice?