Yet I am doubtful: for I am mainly ignorant One of the points of difference between this play and its near contemporary Macbeth is the extent to which in King Lear the minor characters are individualized. Macbeth, as we observed, is somewhat more in the Marlowe tradition, in the sense that one colossal figure fills the stage, and the rest, with few exceptions, are sketched only so far as is necessary for their function as foils to the evil Titan they subserve. In Lear, Edgar and Edmund, Gloucester and Albany, Kent and the Fool are limned to the life. They revolve upon their own axes, besides circling in their orbits around the central figure. The part of Edgar must be one of the most difficult to enact in the entire range of Shakespearean rôles. It demands a versatility such as only the most accomplished actors can compass. Hamlet's feigning of madness is child's play to the relentless realism with which the chivalrous Edgar transmutes himself into the loathsome Bedlamite. His "nothing's more than matter." Contrast with Macniteness of minor char beth: defi acters. the nadir of pessimism. The outstanding characteristic of the Fool we The Fool: have already noted. His function is to intensify our perception of the horrors of the situation, not to dull it or relieve our strain. As in war-time the memory of the days of peace deepens our sense of present horror, and any note from the old symphony reminds us how the bells are jangled; so jests, that in other days would add spice and sweetness to life, in such a context as the world of Lear only acidulate the The "relief" comes from Kent and Edgar. bitterness of death in life, and pile horror upon horror. Lear's motley follower is a master of irony. Were he to curse God and die, it would be more tolerable than the inhuman vividness, the merciless veracity, with which he paints the things of his world as they are. Koheleth's "vanity of vanities" sounds like a love-song beside the icy despair of this "bitter fool." The real relief comes not from him, but from the faithful Kent. In this awful play, only Kent and Edgar safeguard our threatened sanity, by reminding us of that other real world, in which truth and manly fealty still exist. Though his loyalty is made excessive by its touch of superstition,- though he does not quite escape, as his master does, from the ironical illusion of divinity about a king,-yet Kent is by nature true as steel. Through his fidelity we are enabled to retain our faith in the worth of life. If it were a world made up of none but Gonerils and Regans, of Cornwalls and Edmunds, then the sun would be turned into darkness and the moon into blood, and the stars would fall from heaven, and we should beseech the mountains and the rocks to fall upon us and hide us. But through that hell of Mammon-greed and Moloch-homicide, where love is perverted into the lust of Beelzebub, and the fair face of the earth itself grows hideous in the sullen glare of Tartarean flames, the humanity of Kent and Edgar keeps alive our almost spent and gasping faith in the hidden heart of man. Kent it is who sees how merciful is death,-how far better than any more stretching on the rack of this tough world. Like the Stoic Horatio, he parts from us with the assurance that his loyalty is not bounded by the grave. He will follow after his departed leader, lest in the undis covered country there should still be need for fealty like his : I have a journey, sir, shortly to go; My master calls me; I must not say no. To live by sympathetic imagination through the experiences of Othello and Desdemona, Hamlet and Ophelia, Gloucester and Edgar, Lear and Cordelia, is terrific even for the reader. What these giant creations, and, still more, what the limning of that evil world in which they are entangled, cost the man Shakespeare, their creator, is more than it hath entered into the heart of man to conceive. We feel, with Professor Raleigh, that even Shakespeare's mind is now in danger; even that noble and most sovereign reason comes perilously near to being like sweet bells jangled. The explanation of the poet's years of darkness is holden from us; the tales of despised love which so many students have read into the Sonnets are all groundless, and, even though they were not, they could not solve for us this mystery. V iii 321 f. The strain upon Shake speare. Dark Lady of the Sonnets, preface. There is much sound insight mingled with Shaw's the pert trifling of the essay in which Bernard Shaw seeks to convince us that the creator of Lear was predominantly a happy man. Shakespeare, it is certain, was too great to be a pessimist. He does not die of a broken heart, and his last state is not one of moody railing at the world. Always there is the joy peculiar to genius, the ecstasy of creation, which, as Tasso has said, the poet alone shares with God.2 By grace of this, the man who passed through the fiery hell of Macbeth and Lear overlived that awful, and to any less man blasting, experience. The 2 Non merita nome di Creatore, se non Iddio ed il Poeta. of normal life. life, would mean insanity. Even to be righteous overmuch is a danger: St. Francis may become St. Simeon Stylites. We have to cling to the precious The balance inconsistencies, the seeming weaknesses and foibles, that keep us sane. It is better to eat with Pharisees and publicans, and to be called a winebibber, than to feed on locusts and wild honey in the inhuman solitude of the wilderness. Well was it for Shakespeare that his daily walk was among the kindly haunts of men; for so he was enabled to master the devil that tempted him in that lonely place where his soul fought out the struggle of Lear in the storm. Dante, they said, was the man who had been in hell; and Dante never quite got out again, because they could always see it in his face. But the man Shakespeare did not reveal to his fellows what he had seen and known. His triumph was that after Lear he still could laugh. The miracle of Shake speare's ness." The enigma of the soul of Shakespeare has here its most bewildering proof. The creator of this universe of torment passed among his fellows as "the "gentlegentle Shakespeare." With Lear's Gethsemane embodying itself in his mind, he sat in taverns and drank wine with mortal men. Is there not something of bathos in the search for a personal experience of his that could account for the mood in which he wrought this magnificence of terror? Not the lost love of fifty women could have revealed to him so much of bitterness. It was because his soul was perfectly balanced and attuned that he was able to body forth this form of horrors before unknown, to look upon it, depict it, and live. You may create such a world in your thought by taking the dark phases of human character, by eliminating all that redeems them, and veraciously projecting them to their logical and bitter end. But beware how you tread the burning marl whereon even Shakespeare was scorched nigh to blasting. In the great comedies, we have life simplified in one direction—namely, by the subordination of earnestly working evil. In the great tragedies, on the other hand, life is simplified by the virtual suspension of earnestly working good. Edmund and Goneril and Regan live in us all; there is, as Socrates said, a wild beast in our nature: but happily there dwells a Jekyll with the Hyde. Edgar, the legitimate man, sojourns always in the same soul with Edmund, his illegitimate brother. It is the strife, the mutual limiting, of the brute and the god that keeps them both in balance, and enables us to turn towards the world the face of a man. Such simplification of human character as the master-dramatist has presented upon the stage, if it were found in daily The notes of the comic and tragic worlds. |