Tragedy is great suffering, in three senses of the word great:
The nobility of tragic suffering consists in its combination of courage and inevitable defeat. The tragic hero’s courage is praiseworthy in part because it is futile. The human will to act with conviction and in full knowledge that defeat is inevitable—such determination elicits admiration, sympathy, fear, and amazement. The first words uttered by Romeo upon hearing the news that Juliet is dead are “I defy you stars,” as if such defiance could somehow reverse what appears to be a cosmic decree. His determination to join Juliet in death paradoxically accepts their fate even while dignifying the occasion with a bare assertion of the will. Such a futile assertion is similar to that of a later seventeenth-century poet when he declares that “though we cannot make our sun / Stand still, yet we will make him run” (Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress”). The image here—of mere mortals harnessing the sun and driving it towards the Western horizon—would be comical were it not expressive of a universal human impulse: to be the masters of our lives, whatever our circumstances.
The experience of comedy, as distinct from that of tragedy, is described by Northrop Frye as one of “detached objectivity,” where the audience perspective is essentially ironic: the characters’ experience is below our own; we laugh at their circumstances, laugh lightheartedly at their misfortunes as they make their way toward comedic resolution, and invest very little emotion in their predicament.
Tragedy is the mirror opposite: rather than occupying a
position below ours, the tragic hero is above us, somewhere between the human and the
mythical. Tragic heroes are not gods, but they are
supra-human—fictional creations who embody an ideal of dignified response
to the adversity they suffer because of some error or character flaw for which
they are morally responsible. Othello in his fierce jealousy; Macbeth and Lady
Macbeth in their murderous ambition, and Cleopatra in hers; Hamlet in
existential anguish; Juliet in a star-crossed and death-inflected love that is
“as deep” and “boundless as the sea”: these characters possess a grandeur, a
tragic dignity, that inspires awe. As Aristotle wrote in the Poetics, our experience of tragedy is one of pity
and fear: we sympathize with and admire the tragic hero, but their
quasi-mythical stature and supra-human capacity for suffering keep us at a safe
distance.
Tragedy is also about the essential human conflict between
freedom and destiny. The beginning of tragedy, according to Friedrich von
Schlegel, the German Romantic literary historian, is “the condition of freedom,”
while the end of tragedy is “the recognition of necessity.” The tragic hero, in
other words, is burdened by the knowledge that they are (or have been) free to
choose even though they are constrained by a collision of circumstance with
their peculiar character or ethos. Whereas we
moderns tend to think of character as the accumulation of choices, something
over which we have full control (hence the phrase “character-building”), such
freedom in the tragic sphere is largely an illusion.
In the great Japanese film director Akiro Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, a brilliant adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the hero encounters an evil spirit who
prophesies that he, the hero, will murder his way to the top. The hero denies
this, fiercely rejecting the notion as an impossiblity, but the spirit laughs at
what they call the hero’s “refusal to know his own heart.” The hero, in other
words, is directed by forces seemingly beyond himself, and yet these same forces
spring from deep within his own psyche. The will to resist is real; but the
hero’s character, his peculiar ethos, triumphs
finally.
The result of this collision of defeat with dignified
resistance is the hero’s spiritual regeneration. For tragic suffering is always
accompanied by greater understanding and self-knowledge. In what Aristotle
called the greatest tragic play, Sophocles’ Oedipus
Rex, the hero’s suffering stems from an unbearable
revelation—that he killed his own father and that his wife is also his
mother—combined with fierce resistance thereto. Yet succumb to and bear
it he does. And though he continues for years to struggle with the question of
his own moral culpability, at times denying any responsibility for his crimes,
Oedipus nevertheless comes to accept his fate and elicits our admiration for his
capacity to endure it.
That our destinies are certain, whatever our efforts to thwart
them, is perhaps best grasped by the Player King in Hamlet:
Our wills and fates do so contrary run
That our devices still are overthrown.
Our
thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.
Such wisdom comes to King Lear only through enormous suffering and loss. The supreme embodiment in literature of presumed entitlement, Lear’s power blinds him to his privilege, and to the frailty of human existence, his own included. Learning this lesson costs Lear everything. But the process of his education, his journey from ignorance to tragic enlightenment, is perhaps Shakespeare’s greatest literary achievement.
King Lear plays out the logic of
tragic suffering to a nihilistic extreme. Nihilism, from the Latin word nihilum, means “nothing,” and the notion of nothing
reverberates throughout the play: negation, annihilation, rejection, absence,
nakedness, darkness, blindness, madness, and utter loss. In reading or watching
or listening to the play, we follow its characters on an irreversible descent
into the abyss. On the way down, the play strips away Lear’s powers, both kingly
and domestic, as well as the love of his family, his self-hood, and his sanity.
Indeed, we do not experience Lear as a mere
entertainment; we endure it as a kind of ritual to which we are called to bear
witness.
While the quasi-historical Lear was king of an 8th-century bce Britannia, Shakespeare’s play addresses matters of
no little importance for early seventeenth-century England. It was written
probably in 1605 and staged shortly thereafter, some two years into the reign of
King James I of England and VI of Scotland. James’ predecessor, Elizabeth I, had
died childless, and there was much anxiety and unrest over who would succeed
her. James thus inherited a kingdom threatened by political fracture over the
succession crisis. As his dual title suggests, moreover, the new king ruled over
a Britain not fully united, even if his succession to the throne officially
brought together two of the island’s national identities, Scotland and
England.
Lear at the beginning of his play, then, does something that would have aroused anxiety and horror in Jacobean audiences who were keenly aware that the ancient lands of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales were largely independent political entities: he divides the kingdom. This single act, which takes place in the very first scene, proves disastrous, setting in motion a series of events that culminates in the utter destruction of Albion (an ancient name for what we now know as the United Kingdom).
For all its political machinery, however, the play is very much concerned with issues surrounding domestic power and authority, particularly the relationship between parent and child. For largely Protestant England and much of Europe, the domestic and the political in Shakespeare’s day had become intimately related. Fathers were to rule their families as kings their commonwealths, both kingdoms reflecting in miniature the ultimate rule of God over his universe. In this sense the play might be said to imagine the otherwise unthinkable dissolution of patriarchy, a political and social ideology that in Shakespeare’s day was all-pervasive.
But before we make of Shakespeare some kind of proto-feminist,
we must recall that tragedy asks us to empathize with its protagonists (from the
Greek/Latin agon or “struggle”). Tragic figures are
by definition morally deficient, suffering from some fatal flaw (what Aristotle
calls the protagonist’s hamartia). But tragedy asks
us to see in these figures our own human frailty—to judge their moral
failings in light of reflection upon our own proneness to self-centered fear,
error, and ignorance.
In virtually all of Shakespeare’s Renaissance sources for the story, Lear is restored and dies dignified, his kingdom intact, and is succeeded happily by his youngest daughter. Shakespeare’s play is a devastating departure from this traditional conclusion: Lear dies of a broken heart, the kingdom is torn asunder, and Cordelia, paragon of familial loyalty and love, not to mention hope for the future, perishes with her father. If the play elicits a powerful indictment of patriarchy, it nevertheless bestows on its central character an undeniable pathos.
So perhaps the central question concerning the play’s titular
hero is, what is his central failing, his hamartia?
What is it about Lear’s character, his ethos, that
leads to the devastation and loss of his kingdom (a national tragedy), the loss
of his family (a domestic tragedy), and the loss of his self-hood and sanity (a
deeply personal tragedy), not to mention the terrible suffering of other
characters we’ve yet to consider?
The answers to this and many other questions the play raises are far from simple. Addressing them will be our task as we respond to discussion prompts spread out over four classes.
Before we enter those discussions together as a class, I offer
below some brief remarks about, and a description of, the play’s plot structure,
followed by a list of central themes organized as binary opposites. The idea
here is to help us see the play as a thing, an
object with a discernible form. Lear, in other
words, unfolds in time as a performance, a
succession of actions and speech utterances; but it is also a quasi-static
object from which we can step back and see the play as a whole.
Comedies typically are constructed around two plots, and our
interest consists in discerning their connectedness, the latter established by
way of interwoven action, ironic mirroring, or both. Shakespeare’s skill in
juggling multiple comedic plots is evident, for example, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where the central plot
involving the trials and tribulations of young lovers runs parallel to three
other independent yet intricately interwoven lines of action. Part of the
entertainment derives from our delight and surprise at the ingenuity with which
the four plots come together.
Unlike comedy, according to Aristotle, tragedy must possess a
“unity of action,” i.e. a single plot around which
all events and dialog are arranged. Shakespeare follows this generic principle
in Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, Macbeth, Othello, Hamlet, and
other of the great tragedies. One of the more notable features of King Lear is it’s departure from this scheme. Like
a comedy, Lear contains two distinct lines of
development, each with its own cast of characters.
The most obvious parallels between characters in the two plots are as follows:
Additional parallels obtain among several of the play’s minor characters:
The play is unified, however, not only by the brilliant character-mirroring and interweaving of the action of its two plots, but also by a set of thematic antitheses that inform the ideological struggle upon which both plots converge. Here is one final chart, a by-no-means exhaustive list of the play’s thematic binaries:
King Lear is without doubt
Shakespeare’s bleakest and most pessimistic play. It is also arguably his most
aesthetically satisfying, combining an unflinching portrayal of human depravity,
intimations of human goodness (however faint), and a language whose variety and
beauty are unsurpassed by any other of his works. Perhaps it is enough, then,
that the only “something” that remains of King Lear
is the play itself.