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King Lear and the Magic of the WheelAuthor(s): Rolf SoellnerSource: Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 3 (Autumn, 1984), pp. 274-289Published by: Folger Shakespeare Library in association with George Washington UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2870365Accessed: 18/09/2010 08:40

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King Lear and the Magic of the Wheel

ROLF SOELLNER

THE PLAY OF SHAKESPEARE IN WHICH THE FIGURES of circle and wheel are most prominent is King Lear. I believe that in this lies a particular magic. 1

Surely circle and wheel had an aura of mystery and magic from the moment man discovered them. For the Renaissance hermeticists, the circle still ex- pressed the divine spirit and symbolized the mysterious rhythm and meaning of life. The collector and interpreter of hieroglyphics, Valerianus, described the circle as the most common and the most enigmatic of sacred symbols, a paradoxical design that is at rest and yet sets itself in motion by its circularity- a motion that is both variable and purposeful and whose start is also its finish. The circle has always been regarded as the most perfect figure, representing all that God made-the universe, the earth, and man-as well as the eternity of the divine nature. Aristotle, said Valerianus, called the circle the beginning of all miracles. But in its configuration as the Wheel of Fortune, the circle was for the hermeticists and for iconographers in general also the symbol of earthly change, representing "vicissitude," the reversals of life and nature.2

The magic that I find in Shakespeare's use of the circle and the wheel in Lear is not that of hermeticism (although Shakespeare was aware of it) but of the theatre. It is a magic based on Shakespeare's successful manipulation of the iconographic, philosophic, and dramatic potential of these figures.

I

The first circle image in Lear is a visual rather than a verbal one, the "co- ronet" which Lear gives to Cornwall and Albany after disinheriting Cordelia and which he presumably breaks asunder: "This coronet part between you" (I.i. 139).3 This is certainly a prominent image, and its prominence is heightened

1 The significance of circular patterns in Lear has not escaped critics, and many have touched on them. Most to my point are the circles and wheels 'noted by W. R. Elton, "King Lear" and the Gods (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1966). Elton's interest, however, is primarily thematic; mine iconographic.

2 Johannes Valerianus Bolzanus (Valeriano), Hieroglyphica (Lyon, 1602), pp. 111-514. For celebrations of the circle in Renaissance English literature, see Marjorie Hope Nicolson, The Break- ing of the Circle (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1950), chap. 2, "The Circle of Per- fection. "

I Quotations and line numbers refer to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans

ROLF SOELLNER, Professor of English at the Ohio State University, is the author of Shakespeare's Patterns of Self-Knowledge and of Timon of Athens: Shakespeare's Pessimistic Tragedy.

KING LEAR AND THE MAGIC OF THE WHEEL 275

by the coronet's being carried on the stage ahead of Lear at his first entrance, at least according to the stage direction in the first two quartos (omitted in the Folio): "Enter one bearing a Coronet, then Lear. . . ." Critics have long been at odds about the significance of this coronet, but whatever its exact meaning, its parting by Lear visually breaks the harmony his ceremonious abdication and endowment of his daughters is meant to celebrate. I will postpone a full dis- cussion of this image, since it is easy to exaggerate its meaning for the play as a whole. Suffice it to say for now that the primary function of the coronet is to highlight Lear's action in the first scene. To the degree that its meaning goes beyond this scene, we must assess the coronet according to what follows and in the context of other circular images.

The dominant circular images in Lear are not horizontal like the coronet but vertical. As such, they belong to the category of circular images associated with the Wheel of Fortune. A wheel of this kind seems to have been inherent in the rhythm of tragedy from the beginning. The Greek tragedians, particularly Sophocles, thought of life as a rotating wheel or circle. As Leo Salingar notes, moreover, "the idea of the wheel of Fortune is crucial to Aristotle's analysis of the complex plot of tragedy, the type he most approves."4 Seneca's tragedies transmitted this notion to the Medieval and Renaissance periods, where it merged with the wheel turned by the goddess Fortuna, an image which derived from Boethius, Dante, and Boccaccio.

But since the Wheel of Fortune was a major tragic icon that Shakespeare inherited, it must at first sight appear strange that he rarely alluded to it se- riously-rarely that is, if one makes the tough-minded assumption that only explicit verbal references count. There are six such references; it is notable that three of them are in Lear.5 The first of these is when Kent is put in the stocks and addresses Fortune before falling asleep: "Fortune, good night; smile once more, turn thy wheel." The second happens a little later when the Fool wit- nesses Kent's punishment and Lear's humiliation by his wicked daughters and derives from this experience a bitter rule for all servants: "Let go thy hold when a great wheel runs down a hill, lest it break thy neck with following, but the great one that goes upward, let him draw thee after." The third occurs in the last scene of the play when Edmund is felled by Edgar's sword and acknowledges that "The wheel is come full circle." One might add a fourth instance, somewhat earlier, although the allusion is not clearly and specifically to Fortune's wheel; this is when Lear, recovering from madness, feels bound ''upon a wheel of fire.''

(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). 4 Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press), pp. 145-46.

Salingar, chap. 4, provides a very useful background for the Wheel-of-Fortune notions in both tragedy and comedy. For the Greek tragedians, see David M. Robinson, "The Wheel of Fortune," Classical Philology, 41 (1946), 207-16. For the English Renaissance, see Frederick Kiefer, For- tune and Elizabethan Tragedy (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1983). Kiefer corrects and adds to the pioneering study by Willard Farnham, The Medieval Heritage of Elizabethan Tragedy (Berke- ley: Univ. of California Press, 1936). For the general iconography of Fortune, see Samuel Chew, The Pilgrimage of Life (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1962), chap. 2; A. Doren, "Fortuna im Mittelalter und in der Renaissance," Vortrdge der Bibliothek Warburg, 2 (1924), 71-144; Howard Patch, The Goddess Fortuna in Medieval Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1927); Raymond van Marle, Iconographie de lart profane au moyen age et d la Renaissance, Vol. II (La Haye: Nijhoff, 1932), pp. 182-202; Gottfried Kirchner, Fortuna in Dichtung und Emblematik des Barock (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1970).

5 Lucrece, 1. 952; Hamlet, II.ii.495; King Lear, II.ii.173, II.iv.72, V.iii.175; Antony and Cleo- patra, IV.xv.44.

276 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

Prior to Lear, Shakespeare seems to have thought of the Wheel of Fortune as a well-worn commonplace, to be put in words only if the speaker's character or the dramatic situation warranted a hackneyed phrase. In the early histories and tragedies, where one might expect the wheel to grind most audibly, there is only one direct reference. In 3 Henry VI, when King Edward is taken captive, he boasts: "Though Fortune's malice overthrow my state, / My mind exceeds the compass of her wheel" (IV.iii.46-47). The allusion is casual, but the speak- er's character and the context of the remark suggest that Shakespeare wished it to point up Edward's cliche-ridden grandiloquence and inflated self-esteem. That Shakespeare thought of the Wheel as somewhat demode and perhaps even a little ridiculous by the time he wrote Henry V is evident from the insufferable Pistol's ranting about "Giddy Fortune's furious fickle wheel" and the lovable but pedantic Fluellen's subsequent iconographic portrait of the goddess Fortune, which demonstrates his foible for antiquities (III.vi.25-38). In Hamlet, the Player's declamation against "strumpet Fortune," with the demand to "break all spokes and fellies of her wheel" (II.ii.493-97), although serious, constitutes one of the ponderous archaisms that sets off this speech from the brilliant mod- ern idiom of the tragedy itself.

If Shakespeare made the Wheel turn overtly and emphatically in Lear, he may therefore have done so partly as a way of patinating the imagery to suggest the milieu of prehistoric Britain in which the action is ostensibly placed. But it is more plausible to assume that the plain and unvarnished commonplace struck him here as the best means of expressing a world in which elemental upheavals in man and nature become heartbreakingly common. It was, after all, the image most expressive of vicissitude. Edmund's "the wheel is come full circle" has a powerful, lapidary simplicity. But there is nothing simple or archaic about the technique that produces such effects. An analysis of the wheel images in Lear will show how subtly wrought they are, how pregnant with iconographic meanings. It will also show how appropriately these arise from the context, how well they suit the characters who use them, how emphatically they punctuate structurally significant scenes, and how effectively they are in- tegrated into stage movements and stage pictures. Shakespeare's text signals the way to bring out these effects, and modern performances ignore them at their peril.

II

The subtlety with which Shakespeare manipulated the wheel imagery in Lear owes much to his previous experimentation with indirect or implied uses of the image for episodic intensification and illumination of character, particularly in Richard II. The example of Richard's descent from the walls of Flint Castle to meet his successful antagonist is familiar (III.iii). By his words and move- ments, Richard deliberately turns this moment into an emblematic scene to suit his interpretation of the event. The King proceeds with measured steps "down" into the "base" court-words he repeats with ceremonial solemnity as well as punning application to Bolingbroke and Northumberland, and words he coun- terpoints with insinuations about the mounting ambition of his rival, whose "heart is up" as he aspires to the crown.

The picture that Richard suggests is a turn of the Wheel of Fortune, which carries Bolingbroke upward while he himself is on his way down. Richard alludes to the myth of Phaeton, who could not manage the horses of the sun-

KING LEAR AND THE MAGIC OF THE WHEEL 277

chariot of his father Helios and who thus fell from the sky. In this way Richard poeticizes his descent into an exemplary fall from great height (11. 178-83). But this pose suits ill with his conduct of affairs; the royal glitter in which he cloaks himself fails to obscure his incompetence and premature defeatism, and he too obviously twists the well-known Phaeton myth to suit his situation. In Alciati's emblem "In Temerarios," the rearing horses precipitate the bold driver from a chariot that has prominent wheels reminiscent of the Wheel of Fortune. Al- ciati's verse explains the myth as depicting the fall from Fortune's wheel that is suffered by youthful princes who are propelled by their audacity into acts of overweening ambition.6 Richard bypasses the warning against princely daring in such Renaissance interpretations of the myth for the more comforting moral of his "Wanting the manage of unruly jades." (Shakespeare's audience might have recalled by contrast the daring management of a fiercer pack of human horses, the "pampered jades of Asia," by Marlowe's Tamburlaine.) Richard's flirtation with and melodramatic enacting of de casibus symbolism arise from his pathological misconstruction of reality; his spectacular show highlights his narcissistic self-dramatization and his ineptitude as a ruler. The episode illus- trates Inga-Stina Ewbank's observation that generally in Richard II "emblem- atic situations are part of the rhetoric and character analysis of Richard . . . and yet also that rhetoric is subjected to the whole play's examination of the relationship between words and reality. "7

III

Similar tensions between words and image, character and action, illusion and reality, are implicit in the uses of the Wheel in Lear. But now the image is no longer exclusively focused on the protagonist. As a consequence the ironies cut deeper, revealing the painful contradictions not only between what men say and do but also, most excruciatingly, between what they hope for and what comes to pass.

The first two wheel images, occurring in one scene, offer by themselves a strident contrast: Kent's hope, uttered in the stocks, that the Wheel of Fortune will turn up again is satirically undercut by the Fool's subsequent advice not to hang on to a great wheel when it turns downward. This scene, the seventh of the play, which is rightly printed as continuous in the Folio, has erroneously been divided into three scenes (II.ii-iv) in modern editions. There is no warrant for this division, since the stage is not at any time cleared; Kent remains on stage, asleep, during Edgar's soliloquy and stays there for the arrival of Lear. It has often been observed that Shakespeare's gathering of three major episodes into one scene creates important thematic parallels and contrasts; but the di- visions in the editions that we read and teach from have a way of blinding us to the full dramatic dynamism and structural significance of the scene, which can be compared to a wheel's merciless downward turn. The arc of action spans the major part of a day, from some time before sunrise to nightfall, and presents

6 Andreas Alciatus (Alciati), Emblemata (Padua, 1612), no. 56. Similarly, Natalis Comes (Conti), Mythologiae (Padua, 1616), p. 299. The interpretation rests on Ovid, Metamorphoses, Bks. I-II. The iconography of Richard's descent is discussed by Martha Hester Fleischer, The Iconography of the English History Play (Salzburg: Univ. of Salzburg Studies in English, 1974), p. 70.

7 " 'More Pregnantly than Words': Some Uses and Limitations of Visual Symbolism," Shake- speare Survey, 24 (1971), 15. For contradictions between word and image in Lear, see also H. A. Hargreaves, "Visual Contradictions in King Lear," Shakespeare Quarterly, 21 (1970), 491-95.

278 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

a drastic decline in the fortunes of Kent, Edgar, and Lear. This deterioration is supported, in part satirically, by a rhetoric of ups and downs, particularly in the Fool's chatter, which satirizes, apes, and parodies the foolishness and viciousness of the ways of the world. The downgrading of Lear through neglect and contempt is accompanied by the rising of his hysterica passio, his swelling anger. In the climactic ending of the scene, Lear is shut out from Gloucester's castle by those whom he had endowed with possessions and authority. He is next described as raging with the pitiless elements; this is a new phase in his character development and properly begins a new act.

Modern indoor performances generally split up the scene by plunging Kent into darkness during Edmund's soliloquy. J. C. Adams thought that Kent was concealed from the audience even on Shakespeare's stage. He placed the ep- isode with the stocks on the inner stage (which we now conceive to be a shallow discovery space rather than a deep recession) and believed that a curtain was drawn in front of it during Edgar's appearance.8 But it is counter to normal theatrical experience that so spectacular an action as a man's being placed in the stocks would be relegated to the back of the stage. No, on the contrary I believe that on the Jacobean stage Kent was placed prominently on the fore- stage; perhaps he was put against one of the two pillars to make Edgar's failure to see him seem more plausible to the audience. (Kent and Edgar are assumed to be in different locations anyway, of course; but that there was some ar- rangement to make their simultaneity on the stage acceptable seems likely.) Edmund may have entered from the curtained-off shallow discovery space, which would have given a touch of verisimilitude to his opening lines about having escaped his pursuers in "the happy hollow of a tree," and he would presumably have remained upstage. Kent's placement in front of the pillar would also have explained why Lear does not see him immediately, so that Kent has to hail Lear first.

In any case, the stocks furnish the one stage prop of the scene and provide its most prominent visual image, which dominates its major, central section. Visually, these stocks contradict Kent's hope that the Wheel is going to turn upward: their closing-that is, the clamping of one of the wooden logs to the other, with which it is connected by hinges-resembles a wheel-like motion downward.

Earlier in Richard II Shakespeare had used the stocks, in a verbal image, to characterize the illusions fed by hope. At Pomfret Castle, when Richard whiles away the time by making his prison into a metaphor of the world, he attempts a Boethian consolation by seeking to harmonize his feelings with the turn of Fortune's wheel. He engenders thoughts that, like people, flatter themselves that they are not the first nor the last of Fortune's slaves: "Like silly beggars / Who sitting in the stocks refuge their shame, / That many have and others must sit there" (V.v.25-27). The consolation is futile, but the image betrays in Richard a touch of sympathy, gained by experience, for the suffering of the poor, the theme that Shakespeare developed so fully in the suffering Lear's discovery of himself and his world.

IV

There is an intriguing antecedent in the graphic arts for the association be- tween the stocks and the illusory hope that is depicted in both Richard II and

8 The Globe Playhouse, 2nd ed. (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1961), pp. 390-91.

KING LEAR AND THE MAGIC OF THE WHEEL 279

Lear. I refer to Peter Bruegel's drawing of "Hope" in his series of Virtues. Shakespeare may well have seen the engraving made after it (Figure 1). In the center of the design is a large female figure, Hope. On the left picture edge

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stands a high prison tower that contains two men fettered in the stocks; they seem to be praying for deliverance. They may be said, like Kent, to look through misery toward miracles, since Hope is encircled by images of disaster-sinking ships, drowning men, and burning buildings. Hope is positioned atop her con- ventional anchor, but it is buffeted by the turbulent sea-a metaphor for mis- fortune-and a large fish-a symbol of perversion and corruption-is in the process of swallowing the anchor chain and thus pulling the support from under Hope's feet. The Latin inscription of the engraving has an upbeat message of the kind Kent finds in his situation: "The assurance that hope provides is the most pleasant and most essential to an existence among so many unsupportable woes." The picture itself impresses us less for its depiction of hope than for its image of unsupportable woes.9

Like Bruegel, Shakespeare filled his scene with dominant images of misery. Although Kent lies asleep, the audience is given ample reason for doubting the validity of his courageous hope when the pursued Edgar enters and begins trans- forming himself into a madman-beggar by stripping off his clothes and casti- gating his flesh. Shakespeare has even duplicated the motif of the illusion of hope. Edgar too tries to find a redeeming value in his misfortune: being poor Tom "That's something yet. Edgar I nothing am." But Edgar's optimistic stance is thrown into dark relief by the subsequent entry of Lear. On the stage, Lear is already visibly reduced in status by being accompanied merely by the Fool

9 The degree to which Bruegel is ironic and pessimistic is disputed; but no commentator thinks that this is a bright and optimistic picture. Cf. Karl Tolnai, Die Zeichnungen Peter Bruegels (Mun- ich: R. Piper & Co., 1925); Carl Gustav Stridbeck, Bruegelstudien (Stockholm Studies in the History of Art, Vol. II, 1956); Wolfgang Stechow, Bruegel (Cologne: Schauberg, 1974), pp. 24- 27.

280 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

and one gentleman (as the stage direction has it), even though theoretically he still has his hundred men. Thus, by both visual and verbal means, the scene points up the precarious basis of hope in this disintegrating moral climate. The audience is made to feel that Edgar and Kent will have to learn that one has not reached bottom as long as he can still say "I am at the lowest."

V

The Fool's sly burlesque brings out the truth that not the goddess Fortuna but those whom Lear has endowed with land and riches have effected the Wheel's turn. When the Fool ironically advises Kent to attach himself to a great wheel only when it goes uphill and let go his hold when it rolls downward lest it break his neck, he looks with picaresque obliquity at the world these fortune hunters are seeking to create. The wheel that runs downward and threatens to overwhelm those bent on an upward course evokes the mythological punishment of Sisyphus, with the stone whose downhill thrust he cannot stop.

If Shakespeare deliberately had the Fool fuse and confuse Fortune's wheel Librairie de l'Art Librairie de P'Art

Figure 2. Jean Cousin's Book of For- Figure 3. Jean Cousin's Book of Fortune tune (Livre de Fortune [Paris, 1567]). (Livre de Fortune) [Paris, 1567]).

with the rock of Sisyphus, he played on their emblematic affinity. Significantly, the two appear on facing pages of Jean Cousin's Liber Fortunae, a manuscript emblem book of 1567 (Figures 2 and 3). On one page is the goddess Fortuna setting in motion a small wheel. On the other is a device adorned with circular stones above and below its motto "Sysyphi Saxum"-one such stone appears also at Fortuna's feet in the facing device.10 Wheel and sphere were in fact the attributes that traditionally symbolized Fortuna's changeability and global reign. Shakespeare inverted the conventional emblematic moral which made stone and

10 Cousin's manuscript book has been printed as The Book of Fortune and as Livre de Fortune, ed. Ludovic Lalanne (Paris and London: Librairie de l'art, 1883). This is a convenient source book for Renaissance Fortuna iconography since it has two hundred different Fortune emblems and de- vices. The two designs referred to are nos. 123 and 124. Since Cousin's was a manuscript book, Shakespeare is not likely to have seen it, but it illustrates commonplaces about Fortune with which Shakespeare must have been familiar, even if not always in visual form.

KING LEAR AND THE MAGIC OF THE WHEEL 281

wheel warnings against the useless amassing of riches, honors, and pleasures and made them serve instead as illustrations of Machiavellian advice to fortune seekers. The figure, of course, satirizes the Bruegelian upside-down world in which Fortune favors the mighty and vicious.11

This world, as the Fool sings in his childlike verses, is one in which "For- tune, that arrant whore, / Ne'er turns the key to th' poor." Here again an emblematic meaning is inverted. Although the goddess had the reputation of being meretricious, she was not consistently so, and the ancients entreated her to be benevolent and protective in various situations and functions. One of Cousin's emblems shows her as Fortuna Philapolis, gate-keeper and protectress of castles and towns, holding a key in her hand.12 Sarcastically, the Fool here turns the goddess into a brothel-keeper who bars the entrance of the poor; he thus aptly foreshadows the callous words of Cornwall, "shut up your doors," words which deny shelter from the pitiless storm to the improvident Lear. On Shakespeare's Globe stage, with doors that must have resembled castle gates, an actual key may have turned audibly in the lock after these words. This would have been the signal that a critical phase of the play has ended: that the evil sisters have dropped their masks, and Lear's real suffering is about to begin.

VI

The famous wheel-of-fire image with its compelling poetic magic comes also at a structurally significant stage, the most delusively hopeful moment of the play: Lear's temporary recovery from insanity. This is the peripeteia, if Lear can be said to have one, the point at which the old King's fortunes turn as much upward as they ever do and the one where he comes closest to self- knowledge. For a precious instant, all time seems suspended and the action is raised to an ideal plane. Lear awakens to the healing strains of music, believes at first that Cordelia is a spirit and he himself is bound upon a wheel of fire, but then recognizes her and, kneeling, confesses that he is a foolish, fond old man. The audience, desiring relief after so much pain, is wracked by suspense and torn between hope for Lear and dread about the outcome of the battle. Ominously, in the next scene, the forces of Lear's enemies enter with "drums and colors."

Dramatically, the wheel of fire indicates Lear's gnawing conscience and points up his agony. He feels himself to be on his way to hell, if not already there, while he imagines Cordelia in heaven. Fiery wheels were traditional in medieval accounts of hell.13 A sixteenth-century version of a wheel that turns toward a fire, although not literally a wheel of fire, is to be found in Peter Bruegel's drawing (also engraved) of Christ in Limbo, which appears to have been in- tended as the last sheet of the Virtue series. Here, just above a bubble that surrounds Christ, a spiked wheel conveys the bodies of sinners to a large tub

" I In his poem "Di Fortuna" of I Capitoli, Machiavelli recommended that the seeker for Fortune's favor jump from a downturning wheel to another that is on its way up and that he continue this practice. Elton, p. 314, aptly notes that Fortune's wheel and the upside-down world are similar insofar as the latter achieves its continual inversion by the turn of a wheel.

12 Cousin, no. 153. The idea goes back to Hellenistic and Roman times; see John Ferguson, Religion in the Roman Empire (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1970).

13 See John E. Hankins, Backgrounds of Shakespeare's Thought (Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1978), pp. 56-57; Howard Patch, The Other World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1950), pp. 84, 88, 92-93.

282 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

of water heated by a steaming fire.14 Lear's fiery wheel, as W. R. Elton has rightly insisted, is syncretic in its

origin, drawing not only on Christian visions and purgatorial accounts but also on pagan sun-wheel images, the Wheel-of-Fortune icon, and particularly the Ixion myth.15 Ixion's wheel was symbolic of the mental torture adherent to treachery and disloyalty. Gabriel Rollenhagen showed Ixion fettered by hands and feet to the top of a wheel (Figure 4); George Wither, who appropriated

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Rollenhagen's device, explained that "the never-standing-wheel /Of everlast- ing-tortures turneth round, I And racks the Conscience, till the soule doth feele / All Paines, that are in Sense, and Reason found."16 Ixion's wheel had long been associated with that of Fortune. Boccaccio, following Macrobius, inter- preted it as the Wheel of Fortune on which those are put who allow passion to govern reason-the moral, of course, is applicable to Lear. 17 In Rollen- hagen's emblem, Ixion is momentarily suspended on top of the wheel, much as one could say Lear is at his reunion with Cordelia; the wicked deed that earned Ixion his torture is kept in mind through the figures in the foreground, and the criminal himself is stretched out between a peaceful landscape with a city at the left and an arid one with gallows at the right. This is the kind of bipolar landscape one often finds in emblems of Fortuna; it symbolizes the turn from harmony to dissonance, from pleasure to pain, from joy to sorrow. Lear is now at such a transitional point.

14 See Louis Lebeer, Beredneerde catalogus van den prenten naar Pieter Bruegel de Oude (Brus- sels: Koniklijke Bibliothek, 1949), after p. 106.

1I King Lear and the Gods (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1966), pp. 236-37. To Elton's catalogue of fiery wheels one might add the flaming wheel symbolic of Donar's (or Thor's) lightning in Germanic mythology; see Jacob Grimm, Teutonic Mythology (London: George Bell, 1883), IV, 1348. As to the Ixion myth, an ancient vase painting shows the criminal bound to a wheel of fire; cf. Hankins, Backgrounds, p. 28. On the general significance of the myth for Lear, see D. T. Starnes and E. W. Talbert, Classical Myths and Legends in Renaissance Dictionaries (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1955), pp. 115-16.

16 A Collection of Emblems (1635), p. 69; cf. Gabriel Rollenhagen, Nucleus Emblematum Se- lectissimorum (Cologne, 1611), fig. 57.

17 See 0. B. Hardison, Jr., "Myth and History in King Lear," SQ, 26 (1975), 227-42. 18 Cf. Alexander Ross, Mystagogus (London, 1695), p. 227: "They then, whose actions and

KING LEAR AND THE MAGIC OF THE WHEEL 283

The in-between state of the old King is visually highlighted by the contrasting dress of Lear and Kent. Lear is in "fresh garments," in agreement with the hope inspired by his mental improvement, but Kent is still in his servant's disguise, declining as yet to divest himself of "these memories of my worser hours." And indeed it is not yet time for him to do so. One may discern a similar symbolic ambiguity in the chair in which Lear has been carried onto the stage: it recalls Lear's throne and thus his previous exalted place on For- tune's wheel. The figure at the top of the wheel was often so enthroned.19 But Lear's chair also evokes that other chair on which Gloucester was fettered in order to be blinded by his tormenters. It therefore presages Lear's further suf- fering. Shakespeare's company, economical with stage props, is likely to have used the same chair for all three occasions. Together with the wheel-of-fire image and the symbolism of the clothes, the chair indicates the precariousness of hope in this scene: pain and torture have happened and will happen again. And when they do, Lear's wheel of fortune turns into an unendurable wheel of torture. As Kent says at the end of the play, "he hates him / That would upon the rack of this tough world / Stretch him out longer." By this point Lear's wheel no longer resembles that of the guilty Ixion; by now Lear really has become a man more sinned against than sinning.

VII

What is apparently the simplest Wheel allusion, Edmund's "The wheel is come full circle" in the final scene, is actually highly complex iconographically. Commentators have a way of focusing on one of its components and seeing in that component the essence of the entire image; but only a multi-level inter- pretation can do justice to the full significance of the phrase in its context.

Edmund's wheel is often read as an acknowledgment of Providence, and it is true that Providence was occasionally thought of as a circle or wheel, as in the case of Valerianus. But nothing in Edmund's words indicates that he himself has Providence in mind. To understand him in the most literal way, as we should at least to begin with, it seems clear that he acknowledges that his wheel of life has turned toward death. Wheels of life such as Edmund refers to were common in iconography from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, and one, a woodcut by Hans Schiufelin called "The Cycle of Life" (ca. 1517), resembles Edmund's experience in certain respects (Figure 5). Schaufelin depicts a central sphere with a scene of Death's universal conquest. Around its rim, forming an outer circle, are shown the careers of two men; they may be brothers like Edmund and Edgar, and the one whose cycle is followed from his cradle to his deathbed is shown as addicted to the pleasures and honors of the world. An arrow has escaped from the inner ring to this man as he lies dying. His life is sectioned into ten stages, but in other wheels of life the number is smaller. The concept resembles the topos of the ages of man, which we know best from Jaques' speech on the seven ages in As You Like It. Edmund's life cycle, of course, is speeded up and much abridged, as compared with the usual models.

The wheel of life has an obvious affinity with the Wheel of Fortune, and this similarity was sometimes indicated by placing Fortune in the center of the wheel

resolutions are wavering, unsettled, and unchangeable may be said with Ixion to be whirled about with a wheel."

19 See Patch, The Goddess Fortuna, p. 164; Farnham, p. 16; for the use of this iconographic device on the stage, see Martha Hester Fleischer, pp. 42-43.

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rather than, as usual, Death.20 The design could be given an ethical and re- ligious emphasis by being identified as the rota nativitatis of the Vulgate version of James iii.6. This meaning related to Edmund's way of life, just as the chapter in James warned against licentiousness.21 And this context approaches the no- tion of Providence.

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Figure 5. "Cycle of Life," a woodcut by Hans Schaufelein (ca. 1517).

But Edmund himself speaks only of "fortune." When he is defeated by his disguised brother, he asks who it is that has "this fortune" over him. John Doebler notes that the stage picture supports Edmund's words so as to form a notable de casibus icon. When Edmund says "The wheel is come full circle. I am here," he lies full-length on the stage, evoking the traditional pictures of Fortune's wheel in which the fallen victim is stretched out underneath the wheel.22 For Edmund, who is a determinist, fortune and fate are synonymous, and we may note that this concept of fortune-fate was sometimes symbolized by a circle to suggest its cosmic comprehensiveness. Cousin drew such a circle in emble- matizing the world-view of the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus. The design shows an inner, chain-like wheel attached by four smaller chain links to an outer circular chain that reaches from the ground to a cloud in the sky.23 Here the individual fortune becomes integrated into a cosmic wheel of order that moves with iron necessity.

20 So in an anonymous fifteenth-century woodcut with two concentric circles, of which the middle one bears the inscription: "Rota vite que Fortuna vocatur." On the wheel of life, see Chew, pp. 149-53; Patch, The Goddess Fortuna, p. 173.

21 Cf. John E. Hankins, Shakespeare's Derived Imagery (Lawrence: Univ. of Kansas Press, 1953), pp. 18-19; Chew, pp. 149-53; Elton, p. 238 n.

22 John Doebler, Shakespeare's Speaking Pictures (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1974), pp. xi-xii. Cf. Patch, The Goddess Fortuna, pp. 159-66.

23 Cousin, no. 127. For the iconographic interchangeability of fortune and fate, see Chew, p. 59. For the philosophic background, see Vincenzo Cioffari, The Conception of Fortune and Fate in the Works of Dante (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1940), pp. 24-25.

KING LEAR AND THE MAGIC OF THE WHEEL 285

Edmund has always been assured of causality and necessity in human for- tunes. As much as he has trusted in the strength of his will to prevail over others, he has also assumed that this strength derived from his bastardy, which he has viewed as an advantage given to him by Nature. He has prided himself in not being engendered in a stale, tired marriage bed; he was the product, he says, of a "lusty stealth of nature." But at the point of his fall, Edgar gives Edmund a different interpretation of his life cycle, one that explains the failure he has suffered rather than the success he had hoped for, through the analogy of Gloucester's progress from sexual license to blindness: the "dark and vicious place" where Gloucester engendered Edmund cost him his eyes. This natur- alistic determinism suits Edmund, as his "Th' hast spoken right" shows. There is thus merit in Frederick Kiefer's suggestion that the immediately following wheel image refers to the operation of natural forces. Kiefer associates the image with Spenser's "ever-whirling wheel / Of chance" in the Mutabilitie Cantos and with similar metaphors of the permutations of time and nature, the cosmic "vicissitudes. " 24

However, whether the operation of natural forces must therefore be thought of as "unconnected with any divine impetus," as Kiefer claims, is open to question. For Edgar, Gloucester's blindness is proof that "the gods are just"- a definite, if harsh, expression of belief in a divine plan behind natural oc- currences. The vicissitudes of the cosmos permitted such an interpretation, and even the naturalistic cycles of nature could serve to confirm the design. Thus an emblem in Barthelemy Aneau's Picta Poesis (1552), an emblem entitled "The Undying Nature of Man," depicts a cosmic circle sectioned into four quarters symbolizing the seasons. At the bottom of the circle is a corpse in a grave, while above, in the topmost part of the circle, a resplendent Jove governs the cycle, demonstrating his control over it and proving that man, like the seasons, is eternal.25

But the conviction that a divine plan works itself out in the ending of Lear must come from a reader or viewer of the play and express his perspective; Shakespeare provides no commentary to enforce such a conclusion. Nor can we take it to be implied in Edmund's futile attempt to rescue Cordelia. It is true that Edmund attempts here to break out of the circle of destruction he has created and that by doing so he acts "against his nature," the kind of "nature" that decrees the ruination of the weak and the survival of the fittest. But since the attempt fails we may either take it to confirm Edmund's fatalism or see it as pointing up the dire consequences of a philosophy and way of life such as his has been. Those who go further and speak of Edmund's conversion to a belief in divine Providence go beyond the human circles that Shakespeare draws.

VIII

It is true that Edmund's wheel image acknowledges the justice of his fall according to a retributive mechanism. W. R. Elton is reminded of the Greek Dike, the goddess of retribution, and he notes that Dike was symbolized by the wheel of justice and destiny, a wheel that led later to those of Fortune and Time.26 Such retribution, particularly in tragedy, was generally assigned to the

24 Kiefer, p. 299. 25 Barthelemy Aneau, Picta Poesis (Lyon, 1552), p. 26. The emblem is reproduced by S. K.

Heninger, Jr., Touches of Sweet Harmony (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1974), p. 226. 26 Elton, pp. 108-9.

286 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

ancient Nemesis. Ruth Nevo therefore calls Edmund's "the wheel of Neme- sis."27 Although I know of no specific wheel of this kind in Renaissance icon- ography, Nemesis and Fortuna were sufficiently similar in concept that they occasionally appropriated each other's attributes, as in engravings by Durer and Holbein.28 An intriguing woodcut of the early sixteenth century by Georg Pencz, entitled "Fortune at her Wheel," gives Fortuna a Nemesis function and relates her to Providence as well (Figure 6). Here Fortuna turns a wheel at which a crowd of eminent men are lined up in expectation of ascent. And Fortuna has a bridle around her neck-the customary attribute of Nemesis, which that god- dess usually holds in her hand. Fortuna is blindfolded to indicate her irrational randomness, but since her bridle is grasped by a hand from a cloud, she obeys

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Figure 6. "Fortune at Her Wheel" (facsimile), a sixteenth- century woodcut by George Pencz.

a higher will.29 Pencz's design is in the medieval tradition of Fortune as the servant of Providence, her apparent wilfullness owing solely to man's incom- plete understanding of the divine design. We cannot simply superimpose Pencz's scheme on King Lear, of course. His emblematic graphic art is much more explicit and moralistic than Shakespeare's allusive poetry and dramaturgy, which admit of ambiguities.

Shakespeare's art is also much more dynamic. An audience in the theatre cannot possibly grasp and sort out all the possible meanings of Edmund's wheel image as he lies dying and his words flash by in a moment; yet it may feel them to be pregnant with meaning, even meanings that transcend Edmund's comprehension. The image epitomizes the merciless logic with which the play drives to its conclusion, a logic that does not deny that some things are finally inexplicable and that the terms we give them are inadequate. The wheel image reminds us that this ending is one in which evil is punished: the two wicked sisters are dead when Edgar speaks the words. The wheel has come full circle for all three. But Gloucester, more sinned against than sinning, has also died,

27 Tragic Form in Shakespeare (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), p. 302. 28 Dfirer's "The Great Fortune" is also known as "Nemesis." Cf. also Chew, p. 58. 29 Pencz's woodcut is reproduced by Chew, fig. 52 and discussed (without reference to Lear)

on pp. 149-53. The hand of God directing a blind Fortuna, who turns a wheel, is also apparent in a woodcut of the "Master of 1464," reproduced by Doren, fig. 13. The divinely sanctioned Wheel of Fortune was sometimes identified with Ezekiel's wheel in Ezekiel i.4-21, as it was by King James in the Basilicon Doron. Augustine, Calvin, and others wanted nothing of the goddess

KING LEAR AND THE MAGIC OF THE WHEEL 287

and Lear, in agony about the death of the radiantly innocent Cordelia, is to follow soon.

Ix

With the entrance of Lear carrying the dead Cordelia, the play turns back to focus once more on the father-daughter relationship ruptured in the begin- ning. Lear and his daughter are again in the theatrical center and are again surrounded by the aristocrats of the court; but the difference is excruciating.

This is the point to return to Lear's parting of the coronet. There has been some dispute about whether this diadem is intended for Cordelia and represents the one third of Lear's land, more opulent than her sisters', that she is to receive but loses because of her outspokenness, or whether it represents Lear's own crown and total realm. I do not think that the symbolism of Lear's parting of the coronet is materially affected by the answer to this question, but I prefer to think of the coronet as symbolizing Lear's rule. Most recent editors have opted for its representing Cordelia's dowry because the small diadem, usually worn by princes below royalty, is less appropriate for Lear on this ceremonious occasion than the larger crown. Other critics, like Robert Heilman, have dis- regarded the Quarto stage direction, according to which the coronet is carried in ahead of Lear, and have seen him take it from his head to break and give to Cornwall and Albany.30 For the Quarto arrangement, W. W. Greg's expla- nation seems to me best: the coronet that is carried in represents the executive power in Britain which Lear hands over to his sons-in-law while he himself wears and keeps the royal crown since he wishes to keep "The name, and all th' addition to a king" (I.i. 136).31 The ceremony seems to demand both the larger crown and the additional use of a smaller one, to highlight Lear's delusion that he can keep the dignity and authority of a king while giving up his power. I would not be surprised if the Folio version was acted in this way as well (although Greg would have Lear wear the coronet here).

In any event, the literal reference of the coronet is to the land, whether that means all of Britain or only the land intended for Cordelia; in either case the breaking is an arbitrary, willful act of human and political folly. But to see in this act merely the political aspects of Lear's folly is to stay on the surface. Marie Axton argues that the performance of Lear before King James in 1606 (noted on the title page of the 1607 Quarto) would have encouraged James to view Lear's breaking of the coronet against the background of the union of England and Scotland championed by him, a union which was never clearly resolved.32 We cannot know how James perceived the play, of course, but if he understood it as primarily an argument for national unity and thus an ar- gument against the division of kingdoms, he would have had a distorted view of it. He might then have contemplatedwhether Britain would have been a

Fortuna. 30 The best discussion of the issue is by George Walton Williams, "Lear's Coronet," Americar,

Notes and Queries, 9 (1971), 99-100. Williams sides with Greg (see below). The editors of the Arden, New Cambridge, and Riverside editions favor the coronet as intended for Cordelia. The Penguin editor, evidently influenced by Greg, annotates: "Symbol of royal rule, not necessarily the crown." Robert Heilman, The Great Stage (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1948), p. 73, speaks simply of the crown that Lear tears asunder.

31 W. W. Greg, The Shakespeare First Folio (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1955), p. 384 n. 32 Marie Axton, The Queen's Two Bodies (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977), pp. 135-

38.

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happier country if the laws of succession had been obeyed and Goneril had become queen after her father's death.

The circle that Lear breaks in dividing the coronet symbolizes his rule and is a crown of sorts even if it is intended for Cordelia. And we must remember that the crown was a complex moral-religious-political symbol. It was a sign of divine grace as well as an admonition to justice and charity. Its roundness was held to indicate the king's obligation to treat all his subjects with impar- tiality and evenhandedness. George Marcelline, discussing the insignia that James wore as King, said of his crown:

The Sphear-like forme of his Crowne doth denote the even roundnesse wherein hee proceedeth to every one, as well towards the smal as the great, the poore as well as the rich. That he is the Common Father of all his people, ordering all his af- fections in equal partage, like unto the Geometricall point, which beholdeth all his circumference in one and the same proportion."3

The breaking of the coronet translates Lear's failings as a man and king into a visual image. It highlights his irrationality toward his immediate family, an irrationality which radiates beyond the circle of aristocrats assembled around him and out into the whole country. When Lear fails as a father, he also fails as a father to his nation. Thus, the wreath of wildflowers he wears on his head when he roams over the heath symbolizes a wider circle of suffering than he could have embraced prior to his tortured search.

When Lear breaks the coronet, he removes himself from the circle of power. But he remains in the theatrical center whenever he appears. As a monarch of the stage he remains every inch a king as long as an actor generates the magnetic attraction inherent in the role. What Sir Thomas Overbury said in his portrait "Of an Excellent Actor" (Overbury presumably had Richard Burbage in mind) has been particularly true for the great actors who have played Lear:

Whatsoeuer is commendable in the graue Orator is most exquisitly perfect in him; for by a full and significant action of body, he charmes our attention: sit in a full Theater, and you will thinke you see so many lines drawne from the circumference of so many eares whiles the Actor is the Center.34

Shakespeare and his contemporaries felt the enchantment described by Ov- erbury to comprehend even wider circles than those encompassed by actors and audiences. It embraced, in a manner one might call magical as well as ana- logical, the world's circumference: the world was a stage and the stage was the world. So Thomas Heywood insisted that the world was a theatre with God in the audience, "As by the roundness it appears most fit." Those that wished to do away with the theatre might as well do away with the world.35 To feel this comprehensive magic required and requires an imaginative alliance between

33 George Marcelline, The Triumphs of James I (1610), p. 14. 34 Sir Thomas Overbury, "Of an Excellent Actor," added to the sixth edition of the Characters

printed with Overbury's The Wife, quoted from E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), IV, 257-58.

35 From the introductory poem, "The Author to his Book," Apology for Actors (1612). For Elizabethan references to the rotundity of the theatre, see Leslie Hotson, Shakespeare's Wooden O (London: Rupert-Davis, 1959), pp. 98-119. That Shakespeare's Globe was circular inside by analogy to the Vetruvian theatre is argued by Frances Yates, Theatre of the World (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1969), chap. 7. Ev. B. in a commendatory poem for Jonson's Sejanus (1605)

KING LEAR AND THE MAGIC OF THE WHEEL 289

actors and audience in which make-believe becomes reality. I find it suggestive that the one contemporary sketch of the inside of an Elizabethan theatre we have, Johannes de Witt's drawing of the Swan, encloses the stage and the "arena" around it with a circle penned by a fragile hand and partly covered

University Library, Utrecht

* a" *at a6et . i .

Figure 7. Johannes de Witt's drawing of the Swan Theatre.

by the writing on the sheet (Figure 7). It is as if de Witt had desired to draw stage and audience together into a greater unit that centers on the action por- trayed, realizing at the same time the fragility of the union that comprehends playwright, actors, and audiences during a performance. At any rate, the sketch suggestively evokes for us the theatrical circle in which Shakespeare, in broad daylight, practiced the precarious magic of his art. Within it, he created another circle, the movement of a tragedy whose wheel turns mercilessly downward as the characters experience human and cosmic upheavals. King Lear testifies to Shakespeare's masterful use of iconographic, philosophic, and dramatic means to develop a seminal situation to its starkly tragic conclusion.

speaks of "the Globes faire Ring, our Worlds best stage." Perhaps the Elizabethans and Jacobeans were quite generally used to think of the ideal theatre, the "emblematic" theatre, as round. Cousin, fig. 142, depicts the outside of such a theatre in the device "Similis Fortuna Theatro." Kirchner reproduces an emblem of Pierre Boissard's Theatrum Vitae Humanae (1596) with a round, arena- style theatre; an almost identical design is in Denis Lebey de Batilly, Emblemata (1596). Cf. Kirchner, fig. 15 and pp. 57, 194-95.