Today's contribution is the work of resident Shakespearean Pauline Harlem, the internationally-acclaimed author of Anagrams for Fun and Profit (2005) and The Naked Anagrammatist (2007).
William Shakespeare, culture hero and playwright, is so often idolized for the great iconic moments and the big megaphonic speeches that quieter but equally luminous effects may go unnoticed. A good example of such an oversight is the extremely brief scene that graces the end of the History of King Lear -- eleven lines in total that have never been granted the praise they deserve.
As King Lear winds to a close, readers (or playgoers) are exhausted. Not only are their emotions wrung, but their capacities have been taxed just trying to track the crowded details of the plot. Even the author had trouble keeping King Lear's entangled stories in mind -- perhaps because he revised the play several times. Yet although Shakespeare may have slipped on a detail or two, he never lost sight of the main lines of the parallel plots. In the one, Cordelia marshals her army against that of Lear's enemies, which is led by her wicked sisters Goneril and Regan; in the other plot, old Gloucester, cruelly blinded, is carried to Dover by his faithful son Edgar. Gloucester intends to put an end to his own life. Edgar has a different agenda; it's his plan to rescue his father from suicidal despair and by doing so save the old Earl's soul.
In the third-from-last scene of the play, Cordelia tenderly and reverently reveals herself to her father. The tragedy's very last scene is long and complex, encompassing a formal duel between Edgar and his half-brother Edmund in which Edmund is mortally wounded, plus the suicides of the wicked sisters and the murder of the good one, and finally the deathbed speeches of Lear himself. Between the weighty matters of the last and of the antepenultimate scenes, Shakespeare tucks in a brief enactment that can easily be overlooked -- but which shouldn't be. It's one of the pinnacles of playwriting, as splendid a piece of art as the world will see between the last big bang and the next -- or until all molecular motion ceases -- and even afterward.
Shakespeare carefully sets off the scene from its surroundings. It both begins and ends with a child taking a father by the hand and attempting to draw him to safety -- an image of care and concern with deep roots in both "real life" and the western literary tradition. First Cordelia wordlessly leads her maddened father across the stage. Just as the pair exit, Edgar stumbles on stage with his own father in tow. The brief exchange between father and son pauses while Edgar secludes Gloucester. Then comes the conflict between good and evil figured in the offstage roar of battle. Edgar returns, exchanges another couple of sentences with his father, and then takes his hand and leads him on. It's an unobtrusive scene, brief and understated -- and for Shakespeare, relatively languageless. But every single word tells.
Here is the scene exactly as it appeared in the quarto of 1605. For you internet wanderers who have accidentally found your way to this blague and who've never been offered the opportunity to look at Shakespeare in the raw, unedited and unmodernized, this passage offers some good examples of the playwright's quirky spelling and of his characteristically minimalist punctuation. (The medial u's -- standard in Elizabethan printing -- should be read as v's; i.e. "thrive" for "thriue.")
Alarum. Enter the powers of France over the stage, Cordelia with her father in her hand. Enter Edgar and Gloster.
Edg. Here father, take the shadow of this bush
For your good hoast, pray that the right may thriue
If euer I returne to you again ile bring you comfort. Exit.
Glost. Grace goe with you sir. Alarum and retreat.
Edg. Away old man, giue me thy hand, away,
King Lear hath lost, he and his daughter taine,
Give me thy hand, come on.
Glost. No farther sir, a man may rot euen here.
Edg. What in ill thoughts againe men must indure,
Their going hence, euen as their coming hither,
Ripeness is all come on.
Let me provide just a bit of historical context. Before Shakespeare tackled the story of King Lear, it had been told many times on stage, in poetry, and in mythic history. In every previous versions, the armies that are led by Cordelia triumph in the battle that comes to pass in this scene. Because the story is nowadays so familiar, it's hard for us to imagine exactly how surprised and shocked early audiences would have been at the battle's outcome. Doubtless they would be entirely confident that Lear will succeed. Even today, anyone reading or hearing the scene's first lines would reasonably assume that the armies of justice will conquer and that the long British nightmare will finally end. Shakespeare deliberately raises such hopes only to dash them. Edgar's first sentence lulls us into false security. "Pray that the right may thrive" is plainly a signal to the audience that everything is going to come out just fine. There's an even stronger "foreshadowing" of success in Edgar's definitive announcement that "if ever I return to you again, I'll bring you comfort." Sly old Will has set a grand trap. And it's not just the plain import of the sentences; it's the warm and cozy vocabulary: "host," "pray," "right," "thrive," "comfort," "grace." It's all light and clarity and optimism. But King Lear is a play, as the audience well knows, in which "the worst is not/ So long as we can say 'This is the worst'" There's no bottom to this play's misery. And so Edgar, briefly absent, returns to the stage with the blunt, four-word message that is an arrow to every sentient heart: "King Lear hath lost." And onto this mountain of grief Shakespeare piles even worse news: that Lear and his innocent, loving daughter have been "taine" -- ta'en, taken, or as we would say, captured. In the first moments of the scene the audience might be comforted that Lear is in the charge of his daughter and Gloucester in that of his son, and that young and sensible people have finally come to the aid of the old fools. But good things do not last -- not in this play. The forces of evil that King Lear unleashes are far from exhausted. They will continue to ruin lives and blight hopes right to the end.
It's Shakespeare's usual practice to lead his audience to anticipate one thing, but to give them another; this scene, like many such, is carefully constructed to overturn easy expectations. It seems impossible but it's true that in these eleven lines Shakespeare has embedded a second reversal that is equally momentous as the first.
Here we are at last, at the very end of the play; the audience has every reason to believe that it will be gratified with a big, climactic, flashy battle. It's always been the way. But once again, expectations are defeated and the audience gets both less and more than it anticipated. Instead of lances and swords and duels to the death -- he allows us simply some offstage clatter. Why? Before he wrote King Lear, Shakespeare had staged many such battles. But he wasn't a film director with an unlimited budget and with all sorts of technological resources at hand; all he had at his disposal was a sunlit stage thirty-four feet wide and a handful of supernumeraries. Not nearly enough. Shakespeare adepts will be well aware that the playwright had already expressed, some half a dozen years before, his great frustration with the limitations of his martial scenes. In Henry V, the Chorus, speaking for the author, had apologized for inadequate representations of warfare: "our scene must to the battle fly,/ Where - O for pity- we shall much disgrace/ With four or five most vile and ragged foils/ Right ill-disposed in brawl ridiculous/ The name of Agincourt." In King Lear, Shakespeare shocked his audience with the outcome of the battle, but he shocked them even more, if possible, by not giving them the battle at all. King Lear is too serious, too desperate, too sad for yet another ridiculous brawl. Nor did Shakespeare take the other easy option -- the long narrative of the sort with which messengers had been regaling audiences from the days of Aeschylus. Instead, Shakespeare offers his audience a profoundly revolutionary experience: noise, followed by four monosyllables. "King Lear hath lost." Could any artist be more economical -- or more devastating.
These eleven lines therefore constitute an entire tragedy in little. Hope, followed by loss and despair -- succeeded by a moderately uplifting moral. Hearing the horrid news, Gloucester once again falls into suicidal thoughts. "No further, sir. A man may rot even here." The defeated old man is weary of the world and anxious to leave it behind. But Edgar will have none of his despair. "What, in ill thoughts again?" he says. (The word "ill" is stronger in Elizabethan English than it is now; it's closer in meaning to our "evil.") "Men must endure/ Their going hence, even as their coming hither." Shakespeare doesn't say, "You must endure." It's the more general, "men must endure"; not the individual, but the species. We're on this planet and we're human and the world may be, as Chaucer says, "a thoroughfare of woe" and we're born in pain and we die in pain, but it's our burden and our obligation to endure, to hold on. It's not exactly an optimistic statement, but it's realistic, and stoic, and appropriate to the context, and it's wise. And then Edgar/Shakespeare adds a further expression of condensed and gnomic wisdom: "ripeness is all." "Ripeness is all" -- to expand the metaphor -- signifies that we human beings can't opt out, can't surrender until the cycle of life draws to its natural close. We, or men, or humanity, must continue the struggle to the last breath. Shakespeare doesn't say, if you commit suicide, you're going to go to hell. He doesn't, at this point in the magnificent eleven lines, threaten Gloucester with eternal damnation. Instead, he exhorts him to persist, to endure, to live life to the bitter end. And when Edgar says to Gloucester, "Come on," and father and son leave the stage hand-in-hand, we appreciate and admire, even in the midst of all the horror, the perennial human virtues of endurance and loyalty and love.