On the Blinding of Gloucesterlanglitatgroby.weebly.com/.../the_blinding_of_gloucester.pdf · 2018. 9. 11. · represents, "We shall further think of it," Goneril's rebuke de- scribes

On the Blinding of GloucesterAuthor(s): Edward PechterSource: ELH, Vol. 45, No. 2 (Summer, 1978), pp. 181-200Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2872511 .Accessed: 28/05/2011 18:16

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ON THE BLINDING OF GLOUCESTER

BY EDWARD PECHTER

We are in the midst of a revolution in Lear criticism. Only six years ago A. L. French declared:

I can confidently say that there is a received reading of Lear- 'received' in the sense that pretty well everyone seems to accept it. It is a reading that reached full explicitness in Bradley * [who] proposed that we should change the title to "The Redemption of King Lear", because the intention of the gods was 'neither to torment him, nor to teach him a "noble anger," but to lead him to attain through apparently hopeless failure the very end and aim of life'. In the Bradleyan context, 'redemption', and . . . 'purification' . . . don't have any specifically theological overtones; but in his successors such overtones become deafen- ing and are generally associated with a sort of unctuous religi- osity which I, for one, find most distateful in itself as well as absurdly inappropriate to the spirit of Shakespeare's play.'

French writes more in prophetic anger than in sorrow, but he is no longer prophetically alone. A large number of powerful articles and books in the last few years have turned the voice crying in the wil- derness into a chorus. The "new King Lear," as Barbara Everett called the Redemptivist reading in a pioneering essay in 1960, has become instant old.2

What has replaced it is a view that emphasizes the play's power to inflict suffering, both on its characters and on its audience. In this sense the current King Lear constitutes-and in many cases quite consciously-a return to the frank and famous admission of Samuel Johnson: "I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia's death that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor."3 We have

Edward Pechter 181

ELH 45 (1978) 181-200 0013-8304/78/0452-0181 $01.00 0 1978 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

come to repossess Johnson's anguish as our own. We have ceased to smile at his qualified endorsement of Tate's happy ending and have come to recognize that the Redemptivist reading is simply a sophisticated re-Tatification of the play. Though Cordelia loses the battle and dies, and though Lear dies, their spiritual transcendence is all that matters, her love and forgiveness remain the most fundamental reality of all, despite everything, at the burning core. All of which is to say that she does indeed "retire . . . with victory and felicity," as Johnson described Tate's happy ending, after all.

What Tate and the Redemptivists (and in their own way the Absurdists) attempt to do is to protect us from the play, render us in- vulnerable-whether through plot changes or through the imposition of systems of meaning-to the extraordinary power of King Lear to make us suffer. Through them we can speak what we ought to say, not what we feel- indeed, not even feel it. No wonder Edgar so often emerges as an authorial mouthpiece in the Redemp- tivist view; his endeavour throughout the play is to control experience by reorganizing it into "patterns" of significance. (And no wonder, incidentally, that Edgar has fared so badly in the contemporary reevaluation of the play.)

There are, of course, two notorious instances of the play's brutality towards us: the blinding of Gloucester (or more precisely our being made to witness Gloucester's blinding), and the crushing of our hopes at the end with Cordelia's murder. But the play's violence pervades generally and inheres deeply in the way it presents its characters and involves its audience. Shakespeare usually unfolds character gradually; as Bernard McElroy puts it, "We get to know a fair amount about him [the protagonist] before he performs his most crucial actions."4 But in this play we are confronted with sudden and inexplicable eruptions of savage will. I am thinking of the beginning, of course, but the whole play is like that-as pervasively in the imperative mood, Maynard Mack tells us, as Hamlet is in the interrogative: "In King Lear we are not permitted to experience violence as an externalization of a psychologi- cal drama which has priority in time and significance, and which therefore partly palliates the violence when it comes."5 When at the end of the first scene Regan says about the threat Lear represents, "We shall further think of it," Goneril's rebuke de- scribes a model for nearly all the characters throughout the play: "We must do something, and i' th' heat."6

And so must we, so we are made to feel-that's the point I would

182 On the Blinding of Gloucester

emphasize. Of course as spectators we can't do anything, not physically in any event, or no more than the "very pretty lady" in Pepys's Diary who "called out to see Desdemona smothered."`7 In the main our range of response is limited to mental action-sympathy, antipathy, perhaps judgment; and no other play of Shake- speare's-no other play, to my knowledge-involves an audience so directly and so deeply with its characters.8

This may help to explain the quasi-allegorical strain in much of the Redemptivist criticism from Bradley onwards, the tendency to see the play's characters in terms of antithetical absolutes. To take a minor example, but one I shall want to come back to, when Maynard Mack comments about Kent's violent attack upon Oswald that "the 'gentleman of blood and breeding' puts Goneril's 'gentleman to rout by power of nature" (105), he is one among many critics who detect an ethically symbolic significance in the en- counter between the two servants. Kent himself is the source of this view in this scene; "No contraries hold more antipathy / Than I and such a knave,'" he tells Cornwall and the others. And Kent is the source of a similar kind of interpretation later in the play when he distinguishes between the good and evil among Lear's daughters:

It is the stars, The stars above us, govern our conditions, Else one self mate and make could not beget Such different issues.

This kind of response to King Lear is inevitable, both for the characters within the play and for us watching it. It is totally false to pretend that we stand aloof from this kind of impassioned utterance, clucking about dramatic irony. There is something absolutely natural (to use a term of some importance in King Lear) about wanting to justify intense feelings in terms of a larger structure of objective reality. We see Kent (or Lear or Albany or Edgar elsewhere), driven by the violent stress of their experience to presume a knowledge of supernatural powers that seems to give coherent meaning to their agony, and we too answer to the genuine human need-a need too deep for reason-and find ourselves requiring some kind of intellectual control within which to locate our response-our sympathy for Kent, our revulsion from Oswald, say-if we are not to be overwhelmed.

In this respect at least, the play is better served by the Redemptivists than it is by the current Revisionists, or by those

Edward Pechter 183

Revisionists who, for example, turn the confrontation between Kent and Oswald into so subtle an exercise in dramatic ambivalence that it is impossible to determine whose side we're on, if either.9 Yet the allegorical reading does, finally, wither under analysis. If the play invites and even necessitates such a view, it does not allow us to sustain it. On the contrary, like Edgar, welcoming what he thinks is the worst and then meeting his blinded father, we are never permitted by the play to rest secure in the philosophical or ethical or theological shelters we have built to preserve ourselves. If there is a single pattern in the play it is this: first the provocation of a passionately direct response, then the felt need to justify that response, finally the awareness of deep-seated error in this justifi- cation. We are made to pay for our mistakes in King Lear, and it hurts, over and over again, to have to beat at this gate that lets our folly in.

Recent critics have been concerned not only to describe the play's power to hurt us, but to demonstrate that this effect proceeds from a willful, intentional strategy of the play, its "method" or "design."10 The ending is the most obvious case in point. As many critics have pointed out, the notion of a happy ending figured forth in the images of Cordelia and Dover is insistently hammered into the audience's consciousness. In an article called "Cordelia's Return in King Lear," Waldo MacNeir counts "six distinct refer- ences to this theme between II.ii and III.vii .. . suggesting stability, repose, and relief from torment if the protagonists . . . can reach the sanctuary offered by Cordelia."11 As Nicholas Brooke puts it, commenting on Kent's meeting with the Gentleman at the beginning of Act III:

Dover re-echoes through the next two Acts as an emblem of renewal, towards which everyone moves as towards the light at the end of a tunnel. It functions, effectively enough, as an arbitrary symbol derived simply from the facts of the story, and given significance by its context, and by the harmonious rhythms that go with it (though it may also carry associations of a 'port in a storm', together with its traditional place as 'home' to English travellers abroad). Thus a regenerative movement is set going (developing from Kent's soliloquy in II. ii) before the storm reaches its full violence. That violence will not, we are assured, be the play's final comment; an impulse towards tragicomedy (implying a happy ending) is felt already here, and it will grow strongly in Act IV.12


But the play develops these expectations only to shatter them, and this leads to the fundamental question about King Lear: Why do we tolerate it, even value it, in its capacity to cause us pain? Do we seek pain? For Johnson it was unreasonable to do so, and we have our own clinical terms to describe such a pathology. Yet as French points out, once we recognize as illusory the Redemptivist view, which always involves -one version or another of the suffering- builds-men topos, it is not clear what is left.13 Most of the current Revisionists, by ignoring or evading the question, seem to imply that suffering is in itself a good experience, and in some cases this is made explicit in the name of such evidently fashionable counters as Reality, Absurdity, our-inhabiting-an-imbecile-universe, the The- ater of Cruelty and the like. These terms can point to some quantity of truth about the play, probably no less (and no more) than their sentimental counterparts, love, forgiveness, renewal; but they too remain vague, evasive and anesthetic. In contrast let me propose a remark of Lionel Trilling's, that "whenever the characters of a story suffer, they do so at the behest of their author-the author is responsible for their suffering and must justify his cruelty by the seriousness of his moral intention."'4 Whatever may seem fusty in this, at least it raises in a general form the question that has to be asked about King Lear, a question that S. L. Goldberg alone among modern critics tries seriously to answer: "Cordelia's death shatters Lear, of course; but as Johnson saw, it shatters the emergent pattern we have glimpsed, which gradually aroused and then seemed about to satisfy our desire for some vindicating design. And as Johnson quite fairly asked, why should Shakespeare do that?>" (8).

Goldberg's answer is a complicated one, worked out in detail throughout his demanding and tremendously impressive book, and it involves recognizing a complicity between audience and character that makes us come to accept the punishments to which this play submits us as somehow right. "It may perhaps be," Goldberg says, "that the last scene is so unbearable not because it denies us the justice we want, but because it gives it to us" (14). This is fundamentally how I see the play, and I should like to record an enormous debt to Goldberg's book; but even he, it seems to me, finally fails to perceive how literally and deeply complicit the play makes us in its developing action, and one measure of this is the way in which the justice he speaks of at the end is abstracted from the immediacy of our involvement with that part of the play,

Edward Pechter 185

Cordelia's death remaining, in his view, arbitrary, our sense of responsibility for it limited to the way in which we had responded only to earlier parts of the play.

I keep returning to the ending as if I have forgotten that it is Gloucester's blinding which is my subject. But the two are insep- arable, and not only in being the climactic, definitive examples of the play's power to make us suffer. For the blinding itself achieves its full power only in the context of our developing expectations about the play's conclusion-our "sense of an ending," to use Frank Kermode's punning phrase. Although these expectations sur- rounding Cordelia and Dover are only "gradually aroused," and although they "(grow strongly in Act IV," they have already been aroused to substantial strength by the end of the third Act. The brutal repetition of the question, "Wherefore to Dover?" is central to our experience of the scene, for it is addressed by the play to us as well as by Gloucester's torturers to him; and in having to answer it, we are made not only to share Gloucester's agony, but perhaps to accept it as, for its horrendousness, something unambiguously like justice itself.

We first hear about Cordelia from Kent at the end of II.ii. He is speaking from the stocks, and the humiliating position accounts for a great deal of the power of his speech, not only because of where he is but how he got there. The speech, in other words, grows out of the experience of the whole scene, whose pattern I should like to trace.

The scene begins with Kent's jabbing insults to Oswald, moves quickly to a sustained tongue lashing and climaxes with an actual beating. It is a wonderfully exhilarating few minutes, for us as well as for Kent, the more so in contrast to the preceding scenes which have perplexed, pained and frustrated us, denied us anything like a full release of feeling. As Helen Gardner remarks, "The scene of Kent's quarrel with Oswald . . . always arouses delighted laughter in the theatre and affords genuine relief to the audience's feelings."15 The play has established Kent as a reliable, choric figure from the very beginning, and despite the judgments on his violence here in the contemporary Revisionist view, it seems to me clearly central to this scene's strategy that we trust him unambiguously, participate with him in his triumph. In the face of Oswald's astonished retreat, "Why dost thou use me thus? I know thee not," Kent's answer, "Fellow, I know thee," has an irresistible authority,


especially in its echo of Cordelia's assertion at the end of the first scene, "I know you what you are," and the contrasting echo of Lear earlier, not in assertion but in question, "Does any here know me? . . . Who is it that can tell me who I am?" Though Kent has de- scended from the metastases and couplets that had characterized his style (like Cordelia's and France's) at the beginning of the play, his voice is still rich with rhetorical ethos, resonant with the authorita- tive tone that we fain call master. If as I pointed out the scene is consistently allegorized (nature vs. nurture, nature vs. art, good servant vs. bad servant, good vs. evil), it is the scene itself that encour- ages such a response, even demands it. At the very least we feel that Kent strikes blows for justice, and the thrill of moral rectitude contributes substantially to the easy fullness of our laughter here.

The scene changes when Edmund, Cornwall and the others enter, descending gradually from the climax of Kent's triumph, sinking finally into his humiliating disgrace. For a time Kent main- tains his tone of violent rebuke, but he is reduced systematically, first to irony, then to a kind of apology, a kind of pleading, at last to silence and an acceptance of his punishment. As Kent's power diminishes, Cornwall's is consolidated. It is Cornwall's turn now to say, "These kind of knaves I know." We may with Mack and other Redemptivists declare the point to be that the evil forces have the power and that a dog is obeyed in office; but if Shakespeare wanted to furnish us with such a comforting (because uninvolving) sense, he has gone about it very oddly. Cornwall is made no dog here. On the contrary, the scene presents his interposition as temperate and remarkably tolerant. "What is your difference? speak," Cornwall asks, but Kent's righteous indignation can manage first only more threats of violence and finally an evasively general denunciation of Oswald. Gloucester then intervenes and re-asks Cornwall's question, "How fell you out? say that." (That sympathetic Gloucester, as ever the cautious peace-maker who "would have all well," is seconding Cornwall's role here, incidentally, is one indication how wrong the Redemptivists are about this part of the scene.) Kent's answer to Gloucester is the one I have already noted: "No contraries hold more antipathy / Than I and such a knave." A fine affir- mation of the moral order, this, of the instinctive abhorrence of Good for Evil: Impossible to think that one self make and mate could have begotten such different issues as the King's and Goneril's servants. But if it strikes us as hollow here, it is because we are growing detached from Kent, sensing in his evasiveness not

Edward Pechter 187

so much a righteous refusal to answer to Cornwall as an inability cloaked in self-righteousness. His invocation of the allegorical is made in the absence of much literal substance. "Why dost thou call him knave?" Cornwall asks reasonably enough. "What is his fault?" Kent's answer, "His countenance likes me not," is embarrassingly empty. It is around this point in the scene (though not before) that the Revisionists are right to insist on our sense (though only a retro- spective sense) of Kent as the unprovoked aggressor who, in Gold- berg's words, "evidently feels free to let his aggression loose . . . as if his moral responsibility for it were actively subsumed by a larger authority outside himself' (70-71). Yet to stand in judgment of Kent is to judge ourselves, who in the earlier part of the scene had felt free to let our own aggression loose, and for the same reason; as if the simplistically moralistic, symbolic structure felt to exist in the drama absolved us from any responsibility for constrainingor even examining the nature of our own response.

To generalize now about the scene's strategy, the shape of its experience for us: It is a simple shape, an arc, up and down. We are made to respond and then punished for our response, like Kent himself. "Anger hath a privilege," Kent says, and the word suggests our deeper involvement, not just with Kent but with Lear himself. Anger is Lear's way, the instinctive rage against a hostile, ungrate- ful, unjust universe, and this scene makes it clear that it is our way as well. We are often piously assured of a moral superiority to Lear, but our active involvement with Kent in this scene, our own felt need to strike, or at least to enjoy Kent's striking ("He'll strike, and quickly too," as Lear says about Caius-Kent at the end), makes such a stance difficult to justify. If we are not Lear ("the most inacces- sible and unknowable hero of all the central tragedies,"' as E. A. J. Honigmann rightly calls him16), this is less a matter of our exqui- site refinement than of our caution. None of us would dare to face experience with such resolute and unambiguous directness in asserting the demands of the self. Yet the scene in a way validates our caution as well, shows what's wrong with Lear's response. This is less a question of ethics than of effectiveness. The demands of Lear or Kent play precisely into Goneril and Regan's hands. Before long we shall see with increasing clarity how Lear's felt need to attack injustice becomes a violent rage for revenge that is self- lacerating, maddening, suicidal. Self-assertion is self-destruction. In an epigonic way, we sense in this scene how our own active involvement has deeply betrayed us, left us vulnerable to a humilia-


tion like Kent's. "We'll teach you," Cornwall says with a sadistic relish as he calls for the stocks. "Sir, I am too old to learn," Kent says. Whether Kent can learn here or not ("I'll teach you differences," he had said before tripping up Oswald earlier in a scene anticipating this one), whether Lear can learn elsewhere or not, it is we who have the choice of profiting from error. And if only on the basis of the simplest kind of prudence-once burned, twice shy- the effect of the scene is a chastening one; having paid once for a foolishly and nakedly direct involvement, we shall be wary indeed of imposing once again our own needs, our own sympathies, our own structures of significance and value-our own selves-upon the material of the dramatic action.

And it is precisely at this point, in Kent's soliloquy, that the play begins to involve us again, now and for the first time with the question of the ending.

Good King, that must approve the common saw, Thou out of heaven's benediction com'st To the warm sun! Approach, thou beacon to this under globe, That by thy comfortable beams I may Peruse this letter. Nothing almost sees miracles, But misery: I know 'tis from Cordelia, Who hath most fortunately been inform'd Of my obscured course; and shall find time From this enormous state, seeking to give Losses their remedies. All weary and o'erwatch'd, Take vantage, heavy eyes, not to behold This shameful lodging. Fortune, good night; smile once more; turn thy wheel!

For all the bitterness (or is it resignation?) in Kent's last line, the speech offers a kind of promise here: What goes down must come up. The speech may be felt to refer back to the arc of experience we have been made to travel in the earlier part of the scene, and the restrained optimism is in a way reinforced by Edgar's self-preserv- ing stripping in the next scene. The richest source of hope, of course, is in the sentence that introduces Cordelia: "Nothing almost sees miracles, / But misery," powerful in its sententious generality and bearing an astonishingly compressed charge of feeling in terms of the play's developing conceptual and imagistic patterns. Yet in the next lines, the miraculous nature of Cordelia is left tantalizingly vague, aborted in an incomplete predication. We have a clear notion of Cordelia's intention in the gerundive phrase;

Edward Pechter 189

she is seeking to give losses their remedies. But how does intention become action? She "shall find time," but time to do what? By itself the finding of time implies a kind of passivity, or at best a pre- liminary to action. The limitations of the phrase are perhaps inevitable, at least to judge from the opening lines of 1 Henry IV, where every rhetorical effort made by the King to transform the phrase into an assertion of active power to control experience is doomed to failure, bootless. We have no basis here, of course, to anticipate any failure on Cordelia's part. What we do have, however, is a problem in determining the terms of her hoped-for suc- cess. In context the most powerful word of her introductory line turns out to be the one which is always ignored: Nothing almost sees miracles, but misery.

There is, in short, a problem in Kent's soliloquy, and the oc- casional supposition of textual corruption, for which there is no real evidence, merely acknowledges its existence. Directorial bits of ad- vice that Kent is sleepy, or that he needs more light to see clearly, or that he is reading pieces of a letter at random, may solve the problem from an actor's point of view, but they do not help an audience. On the contrary, they make the soliloquy's vagueness only the more tantalizing. It is as if the scene deliberately with- holds information, promising us something willfully indefinite. It is like waiting for one of Henry James's late verbs, except in terms of dramatic action rather than syntax. While we wait, of course, we anticipate, imagine possible completions, like Marvin Rosenberg who speaks about "the letter from Cordelia, already coming to her father's rescue" (150). Cordelia is already doing nothing except in our minds; it is we who are made to jump to a conclusion, project the sense of an ending.

I am insisting upon this problem, but I do not mean to exaggerate its seriousness. Audiences in the theater can live with a lot more uncertainty than readers, teachers, critics and editors, and as it turns out, the uncertainty is quickly enough clarified. The scene with Kent and the Gentleman at the beginning of Act III is almost exclusively rhetorical, functional in terms of our expectations and needs; and specifically it solves the problem of vagueness in Cordelia's agency. We find here what she will find the time to do- indeed, has already (for the word is justified now) found the time to do: She is leading a military invasion.

The scene should be quite satisfying, both in terms of clarifying our uncertainty and promising us relief. It begins promisingly with


the reaffirmation in familiar terms of Kent's authority, as he informs the Gentleman, "Sir, I do know you, / And dare, upon the warrant of my note, / Commend a dear thing to you." But what follows is far from wholly satisfying, and it is worth asking why.

There is division, Although as yet the face of it is cover'd 20 With mutual cunning, 'twixt Albany and Cornwall; Who have-as who have not, that their great stars Thron'd and set high?-servants, who seem no less, Which are to France the spies and speculations Intelligent of our state. What hath been seen, 25 Either in snuffs and packings of the Dukes, Or in the hard rein which both of them have borne Against the old kind King; or something deeper, Whereof perchances these are but furnishings- But, true it is, from France there comes a power 30 Into this scatter'd kingdom; who already, Wise in our negligence, have secret feet In some of our best ports, and are at point To show their open banner.

We begin with the Albany-Cornwall division. MacNeir notes how frequently Shakespeare associates the French invasion with the "dissension among those whose business it was to resist any foreign invasion, thus arousing a false hope for Lear's cause" (174). Yes and no, I think. The fact is, the Albany-Cornwall division is rumor only, for which we have no real evidence. Not that we dis- trust Kent when he tells us that it is covered with mutual cunning, but it is not the sort of thing on which one is invited to build substantial hopes. This is especially so if we remember the earlier evocation of this presumed division, the ear-bussing argument that Curran provides Edmund with in II.i, and which Edmund immediately uses to his advantage with Edgar. Rumor is opportunity for Edmund (and Regan and by extension their group); he weaves it into his purposes; he thrives upon it, master of intrigue.

Even if we forget the details of the earlier scenes, we are made aware of a problem in this scene itself in the astonishingly clumsy writing that follows. First (22-25) we hear a stutter of interrupting and qualifying relative clauses, culminating in an awkward redun- dancy (is the abstract "speculations / Intelligent" meant to gloss over the hard reality of "'spies"?). What follows (25-29) is a noun phrase (though for a moment we probably think we are hearing the beginning of a question), with an appositive range of three alterna-

Edward Pechter 191

tives that is perplexing, to say the least, in the latter two (have both Dukes borne a hard rein against Lear? what could be deeper?). Be- fore we can determine whether these alternatives are exclusive (the really crucial factor is . .. ) or cumulative (all contribute to . . . )j Kent breaks off altogether: "But, true it is . . . " The words are a great relief; at last we'll get something indubitable. And we do; there is already a French force landed, at Dover and elsewhere. But even the truth of this is problematical. The image of a foreign invasion is ambiguous, and it requires, if we are allowed to associate ourselves with it in an unqualified way, precisely the sort of ex- planation and background motivation that we seemed to be getting in the earlier sentence, before Kent decided to break off. In retro- spect the relief of that interruption turns out to be illusory.

If we dismiss the French invasion as merely a problem that Shakespeare inherits from his sources, we ignore the fact that Shakespeare does pretty much what he pleases with his sources (consider the violence he does them one and all at the end of the play). Moreover, to judge from the way the foreign invasion is treated here and later on, the play, far from trying to cover up an awkwardness, seems on the contrary to want to keep it consistently in front of us. In the same way the clumsiness in the earlier part of the speech seems to me a willful contrivance, or at least part of a consistent effect. One result of all the relative clauses earlier was to make it unclear for a time just on whose side the spies were working; but that is the kind of irony that runs throughout the speech. Though the lines between the sides are, as always in this play, decisively drawn, there is a disturbing similarity of visage and tone on either one. We hear about their cunning, but devious Kent is showing his. We hear of the Dukes' packings, but who is indulg- ing in intrigues if not Kent himself? We hear of furnishings for something deeper, but we see Kent himself giving pretexts for the French invasion that may be entirely irrelevant and deceptive. I noted earlier how Kent's evocation of the division between the Dukes may suggest a momentary likeness between him and Edmund. Do we not detect as well, in the awkward evasiveness of these lines, with their invitations to the actor to indulge in whis- pers and perhaps even an anxious glance or two to the rear, something of Goneril and Regan's tone, hints of their fear, traces of their self-protective eruptions into action?

Such similarities might be argued to form the basis of some pro-


found moral critique of the mode of action which Kent embodies in this scene. In such a context there may well be something disturbing in the little movement by which Kent establishes his reliability to the somewhat doubtful Gentleman:

Gent. I will talk further with you. Kent. No, do not.

For confirmation that I am much more Than my out-wall, open this purse, and take What it contains. If you shall see Cordelia,- As fear not but you shall-show her this ring, And she will tell you who that fellow is That yet you do not know.

Is the ring taken from the purse or is it given in addition to the purse, whose contents, we must then assume, are money? Especial- ly in the latter case, we are invited to think back over Kent's beating of Oswald to his tripping of Oswald earlier, and to Lear's response: "Now my friendly knave, I thank thee: there's earnest of thy service. Gives Kent money," and back even further, through some indefinite but insistent echo, of the love-auctions at the very beginning, an echo located in the way the cash nexus defines and measures service, fellowship, love. These resonances are, I think, sensed but remain less definite than my description or any description indicates. Probably the similarity between Kent and his enemies suggests nothing more than a foreboding about the enterprise on which we see him embarking here, the sense that Kent is adopt- ing the enemies' rules and thus conceding to them the advantage of their own mastery. In any event, I do not mean to exaggerate the importance of this kind of shadow in the scene, though there is in fact more than what I have pointed to. I am describing only under- tones that suggest dissonances but by no means destroy the domi- nant. None of this prevents the scene from achieving its primary purpose of raising our hopes, of getting us in imagination to join with Kent in his enterprise. All it does is to integrate an element of doubt and hesitancy into our choice. That is enough, however, to take away any defense we might have of ignorance when the play turns brutally to punish us for the folly we commit.

It is through the figure of Gloucester that we are punished, and through him that the lines in the play converge in the third Act. In the next scene but one, it is he, like Kent earlier, who is committed to helping Lear

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Go to; say you nothing. There is division between the Dukes, and a worse matter than that. I have receiv'd a letter this night; 'tis dangerous to be spoken; I have lock'd the letter in my closet. These injuries the King now bears will be revenged home; there is part of a power already footed; we must incline to the King. I will look him and privily relieve him; go you and maintain talk with the Duke, that my charity be not of him perceiv'd. If he ask for me, I am ill and gone to bed. If I die for it, as no less is threatened me, the King, my old master, must be reliev'd. There is strange things toward, Edmund; pray you, be careful.

Though Gloucester's short, simple, complete sentences suggest a rhetorical antithesis to Kent's awkwardly incomplete and hypotac- tic style, we may well detect some echo in the felt anxiety of secret conspiracy that underlies both. In any case, there are unmistakable verbal echoes ("a power . . . who. . . have secret feet," "a power already footed"), and both endeavours are predicated upon the presumed Albany-Cornwall division and the French invasion. No wonder if it is sometimes assumed that the letter Gloucester received "this night" is from Kent, though this is never verified in the play, and we are dealing really with a more general kind of con- tinuity. Not just a letter, it is Kent's mantle that Gloucester inherits. He replaces Kent as the choric figure, the intermediary between us and the action, the character through whom our involvement with the play is experienced, defined and finally understood. He "helps to give us," as L. C. Knights puts it in a wonderful though presum- ably unintentional pun, "our bearings. "17

There are deeper continuities between Gloucester here and Kent earlier. If we had sensed a foreboding of self-defeat in the scene with Kent and the Gentleman, such a sense is confirmed here, for it is obvious that Gloucester's plot is simply strengthening his enemies. At the end of the scene, Edmund hastens away gayly to inform Cornwall, so to thrive. A more complicated sense of foreboding is raised in Gloucester's assertion that, "These injuries the King now bears will be revenged home." The word, like Kent's anger earlier ("Anger hath a privilege"), evokes a profoundly disturbing resonance and reaches out to establish a relationship between Gloucester and Lear himself, whose own need for vengeance is at the source of his own torture. A few moments later, at the beginning of the next scene, Lear says of filial ingratitude, "<Is it not as this mouth should tear this hand / For lifting food to 't? But I will punish home." By punishing home, Lear means punishing to the full, of course, but it is impossible to resist the secondary sense


that points to the radical integrity of the family, as in the memorable metonymy of Lear's savagely ironic kneeling to Regan earlier, "Do you but mark how this becomes the house." Does it matter, if father and child is one flesh, whether the mouth tears the hand or the hand crushes the mouth? In the face of Edgar-Tom later in the scene, on whom he projects his own situation ("What! has his daughters brought him to this pass?"), Lear says, "Judicious punishment! 'twas this flesh begot / Those pelican daughters."

We have to wait to hear these words, but we have had enough experience of the play prior to and including the scene of Gloucester's involvement not only to anticipate the self-lacerating consequences of his decision, but to -sense some deep ambivalence at its very center. Knights abstracts a single sentence from the scene, "If I die for it, as no less is threaten'd me, the King, my old master, must be reliev'd,"> as the essence of a "decision" that is "deliberate and heroic" (107). But such a sentimentalization (though it is typical of critical response to Gloucester) is precisely what the scene will not allow. Even in the sentence Knights quotes, the echo of "must" from a few lines earlier leaves the question of motivation profoundly in doubt: "These injuries the King now bears will be revenged home; there is part of a power already footed; we must incline to the King." This is a single utterance, and it is over-simplifying to speak about Gloucester's pity, charity, relief, without acknowledging the element in it of self-protectiveness as well. The French force has already landed ("a worse matter than" the Albany-Cornwall division, Gloucester had called it, and the phrase may suggest that the Earl wishes to gloss over a problem, but it can scarcely be cited as evidence for the play's allowing us to do so), and Gloucester has chosen the side he assumes will ulti- mately conquer. Even without putting too much emphasis on the ambivalence in Gloucester's motivation, there is something too exclusively instinctive in his must's, too uncomplicated by anything like a full consideration of the meaning as well as the consequences of his action, to justify "heroic" as an epithet. The commitment flows smoothly into the characteristic cautiousness of "If he asks for me, I am ill and gone to bed," or "pray you, be careful."

Gloucester is not a hero. Gloucester is l'homme moyen sensuel- as Francis Schoff points out, the phrase has an extraordinarily literal applicability here.'8 My point is not to diminish Gloucester; on the contrary, it is precisely his essentially unheroic, prudential reactiveness that makes Gloucester important for us at this point.

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For we come to this scene chastened by past experience, by our rash participation in the clamour-venting, angry mode of Kent in his confrontation with Oswald, full of wariness about future involve- ments. But there is a point at which even recessiveness must assert itself, passivity act, and Gloucester embodies that point for us now. Even as he finally ignores all the danger he senses, so do we all the danger and ambivalence we sense. So must we-incline to the King, do something, and i' th' heat.

Punishment comes in the blinding at the end of the Act. "Where- fore to Dover?" Like Kent earlier ("What are your differences? speak."), Gloucester cannot or will not answer the question, and in his case the evasion registers fear as well as guilt. But when he finally does answer to the third asking, he reaches for the first (and last) time in the play a stature that is unqualifiedly heroic in the traditional sense:

Because I would not see thy cruel nails Pluck out his poor old eyes; nor thy fierce sister In his anointed flesh rash boarish fangs. The sea, with such a storm as his bare head In hell-black night endur'd, would have buoy'd up, And quench'd the stelled fires; Yet, poor old head, he holp the heavens to rain. If wolves had at thy gate howl'd that dearn time, Thou should'st have said "Good porter, turn the key." All cruels else subscribe: but I shall see The winged vengeance overtake such children.

The elements of recoiling self-protectiveness here disappear altogether and not, one senses, because he calculates their ineffec- tiveness only; it is as if he recognizes their inadequacy. The voice that delivers these lines must be strong, assured, rich in alliteration, inversion, suspension of predication, Latinate and archaic diction- an assumption of the high style which, given his tendency noted earlier to short bursts of anxious declaration, like so many reactive cries of pain, is quite astonishing here, but completely convincing as well. The extravagant descriptions of Lear's suffering and of the storm are felt to be hyperbole in the service of truth, and they leave no room for self-pity on Gloucester's part. But to speak exclusively of Gloucester's heroic compassion, a difficult over-simplification in connection with the scene of his nascent involvement earlier, becomes absolutely impossible here. However we may have glossed over "revenged home"y and the like in III.iii, we are not allowed to


ignore the expression of vengeance at the end of this speech, in the way in which it dictates both the moment and the nature of his torture (the vengeance cry is the predication of the blinding), and in the insistent repetition, "See't shalt thou never," "If you see vengeance." As Gloucester evokes retribution, the intense images in his speech of Regan's physical cruelty assume another dimension of significance, not just a measure of Gloucester's compassion, his ability to feel sufferingly with, but also of his own active violence, his desire to inflict upon. However one understands the last lines of the speech, the syntax implies a distinction not just between Regan's group and the chastened sadism of "all cruels else"; it is Gloucester, too, who refuses in his own way like Regan and the others to call back the willed thunder. Do we not sense that he would raise his fist at this point, but that his corky arms are fast bound; that he would do such things, what they are he knows, and they would be the terrors of the earth?

In the face of this, we cannot see the blinding as simply the representation of a horrible world in which the machinery of power is vested in the hands of the ruthless. Gloucester powerless has his own violently vindictive instincts as well. Gloucester and Regan are mighty opposites, but one self make and mate begot them. To put it another way, within Gloucester himself the compassionate and vindictive instincts are inseparably part of the same human nature. Goldberg notes "the kinship between the love of justice and the love of cruelty. Both 'loves' are clearly fascinated and made restless by other people's vulnerability, the one to compensate it, the other to exploit it" (110). The hand that reaches out to help another is-inevitably, it seems-the same hand that would crush that other's torturers, and-whether it would or no-that crushes the self. At this crucial point, strictly speaking in the very midst of the blinding, the play makes us witness the episode of the loyal- disloyal servant, as if to confirm our terrible awareness. The episode is typically sentimentalized and allegorized, cited as Shake- speare's evocation of natural instincts of kindness amidst brutality-"a disinterested gesture of human pity" or "the voice of nature, simple and unspoiled, against the corrupt representatives of a sophisticated civilization'9 Certainly we do feel the servant's decency, in his reluctance to raise a hand against his master, and in the language by which he refuses to implicate Regan. Yet something as deeply natural as pity provokes the servant's action here: ""Nay then, come on, and take the chance of anger." It is the ene-

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my's nature, the complex, spoiled, corrupt and sophisticated Corn- wall's motivation that the word most immediately recalls ("yet our power / Shall do a court'sy to our wrath"), but of course it relates to Lear and Kent and even Gloucester as well. As the servant dies, his "disinterested pity" points not to tears but blood. "O! I am slain. My Lord, you have one eye left / To see some mischief on him. Oh!" His compassion for Gloucester expresses itself in the offering of at least part of the winged vengeance the Earl had sought. Like all instances of clamour-venting in the play, the effect here is not to protect against brutal punishment, but to instigate its inexorable exaction: "Lest it see more, prevent it. Out, vile jelly! / Where is thy lustre now?"

Gloucester is still demanding vengeance, calling upon Edmund to "enkindle all the sparks of nature / To quit this horrid act." But after Regan's news ("Thou call'st on him who hates thee"), Gloucester's "walking fire" is at last extinguished. "O my follies" is an expression of guilt about his treatment of Edgar, but in the larger context of the scene it may well be sensed as an acceptance of his torture, his recognition of a kind of justice in it. In any case, whatever the meaning of the experience for Gloucester, the importance of the scene is primarily in what it makes us come to feel, recognize, understand. Goldberg says about Gloucester's line, "I am tied to th' stake, and I must stand the course": "And so must we-which is surely the crucial dramatic point of the blinding scene" (82). He goes on to talk about our ambivalent feelings about justice, all of which is relevant enough but too general. "Wherefore to Dover?" is in a very specifically pointed way a question that we must answer as well as Gloucester, for the Dover plot represents a commitment of ours as well as of his. What do we think during the agonizing seconds of the question's hanging there, or rather of its increasingly brutal threat: "Wherefore to Dover? . . . Wherefore to Dover? Let him answer that.... Wherefore to Dover?" The pause and intensification allow for-indeed, demand-a specificity of response, which in fact Gloucester provides. Do we not have to recognize in the violence of Gloucester's response some kindred element in ourselves that has contributed to our own expectations? What is our anticipation of Cordelia's military victory except Kent's violent assault writ small, as it were, suitably modified to our own reduced and chastened demands, but no different in kind? Was this the warning in the Fool's apocalyptic prophesy in the middle of the third Act, where by anaphora and parallel syntax


good and bad actions become indistinguishable, both contributing to (or reflecting) equally the primal chaos? Is every action, every involvement, physical or mental, inevitably the chance of anger?

Or to put it another way, where can we go from here? We could detect in the way the play had involved us with Kent and then punished us for our involvement a sort of turning point, an educa- tional experience if you will, however painful. But it is unclear what we can learn from the experience that culminates in the blinding, whose climactic quality we sense rather as a terminal point. After Lear and Kent, Gloucester's frightened and circum- spect involvement had seemed the least in response to the worst, the point at which even deeply ingrained caution must incline towards action. But now the servant, moved to act in the face of this unconscionable brutality, redefines both worst and least to what seem to be-as they had never earlier quite seemed to be- the absolute limit. We have been made systematically to reduce our expectations, no less than has Lear, but reduction still implies something, and we find ourselves now face to face with the quality that has echoed throughout the first three acts, the quality of nothing. "O Regan, Goneril! / Your old kind father, whose frank heart gave all," Lear says, but he hasn't and we haven't and it seems we must. But how? Do we not already sense the irony that awaits Edgar's horrified awareness in the next scene, that the worst is not so long as we are alive to say this is the worst? What new terrors may threaten to provoke new engagements on our part, engagements meant to preserve but doomed to destroy the self? Disengagement, then? renunciation? Bradley's coda was right in a way; this is a play about the need for renunciation. But again, how? For Empson was right too; this is a play about the foolish impossibility of renunciation.20 Can Lear, or Kent, or Gloucester, or any of the characters in the play renounce totally the felt need to perceive "differences" (to recall Cornwall's question to Kent, Kent's assertion to Oswald after tripping him), whether moral differences, or social, or ontological, accepting experience in complete passivity, denying themselves that last, least and most fundamental action of mind, the aggressive imposition of significance onto the external world? And how can we divest ourselves, denude ourselves similarly of the felt need to order the experience we confront, a need manifested in that apparently irre- duceable core of involvement, the anticipation of where it is going, the sense of its ending? In what way can we sense an ending that

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will not, yet once more, tie us to the stake? Yet in Regan's final, brutal repetition, thrusting Gloucester out at gates, the play re- minds us that an ending we must surely have, and at the same place too. But blinded now, we have to smell our way to Dover.

Concordia University

FOOTNOTES

A. L. French, Shakespeare and the Critics (Cambridge, 1972), p. 144. 2 Barbara Everett, "The New King Lear," Critical Quarterly, 2 (1960), 325-39;

Paul J. Alpers, "King Lear and the Theory of the 'Sight Pattern,' " in Reuben A. Brower and Richard Poirier, eds., In Defense of Reading (New York, 1963), pp. 133-52; Nicholas Brooke, Shakespeare: King Lear (London, 1963), and "The Ending of King Lear," in Edward A. Bloom, ed., Shakespeare 1564-1964 (Providence, 1964), pp. 71-87; John D. Rosenberg, "King Lear and His Comforters," Essays in Criticism, 16 (1966), 135-46; John Shaw, "King Lear: The Final Lines," Essays in Criticitm, 16 (1966), 261-67; Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (New York, 1969), pp. 267-353; H. A. Mason, Shakespeare's Tragedies of Love (London, 1970); Michael Goldman, Shakespeare and the Energies of Drama (Princeton, 1972); Marvin Rosenberg, The Masks of "King Lear" (Berkeley, 1972); S. L. Goldberg, An Essay on "King Lear" (Cambridge, 1974); Robert Egan, Drama Within Drama (New York, 1975), pp. 16-55.

3 Dr. Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. W. K. Wimsatt (Penguin Shakespeare Library, 1969), p. 126.

4 Shakespeares Mature Tragedies (Princeton, 1973), p. 164. f "King Lear" In Our Time (Berkeley, 1965), p. 91. 6 All quotations are from the New Arden edition of King Lear, edited by Kenneth

Muir (London, 1964). 7 Mynors Bright, ed., The Diary of Samuel Pepys (3 vols.; London, 1906), 1.102.

The entry date is 11 October 1660. 8 Stanley Cavell argues at length for the unique intensity of our involvement with

King Lear in the latter part of his chapter in Must We Mean What We Say? Cavell, in addition to two very recent writers on the phenomenology of performance, also points to the limitations of an audience's participation in the action of a play. See Michael Goldman, The Actor's Freedom: Towards a Theory of Drama (New York, 1975), pp. 3-51; and Helen Keyssar, "I Love You. Who Are You? The Strategy of Drama in Recognition Scenes," PMLA, 92 (1977), pp. 297-306.

9 See Rosenberg, The Masks, p. 146; Goldberg, An Essay, pp. 70-71. 'I See Goldman, Shakespeare and the Energies of Drama, p. 100; Egan, Drama

Within Drama, p. 18. 11 "Coredelia's Return in King Lear," ELN, 6 (1969), 172-76, 175. 12 Shakespeare: King Lear, p. 32. 13 Shakespeare and the Critics, pp. 193-94. 14A Gathering of Fugitives (Boston, 1956), p. 32. 15 "King Lear" (London, 1967), p. 8. 16 Shakespeare: Seven Tragedies: The Dramatist's Manipulation of Response

(London, 1976), p. 108. 17 Some Shakespearean Themes (London, 1959), p. 107. 18 "King Lear: Moral Example or Tragic Protagonist?" SQ, 13 (1962), 157-72, 170. 19 Derek Traversi, "King Lear (II)," Scrutiny, 19 (1952-53), 126-42, 142; Paul N.

Siegel, Shakespearean Tragedy and the Elizabethan Compromise (New York, 1957), p. 166.

20 William Empson, The Structure of Complex Words (London, 1951), pp. 125-57.


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