King Lear, scene by scene
A special issue between Fortnightlies 174 and 175. The latter will be along this time next week.
I’ve started a new podcast series, covering every scene in King Lear from start to end, and below you can listen to Act 1, scenes 1 and 2 (with the text of the first).
All episodes will be published here, with transcripts.
Listen via the players below my name, or go to Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
Act 1 scene 1:
Act 1 scene 2:
Act 1 scene 1: transcript
Shakespeare doesn’t waste time at the starts of his great tragedies; in fact, all four open disconcertingly with a sense of confusion and un-ease – Hamlet on the battlements of a haunted Elsinore castle, Macbeth with three bizarre witch-like creatures chanting on a heath, and Othello in a murky conversation down a back alley between two men, one of whom will turn out to be one of the most unremittingly evil characters in all literature. And in King Lear again we are pitched straight into the middle of a rather flustered conversation, which hits on a central theme of this play – division and disorder. In none of these plays does Shakespeare open with the central character, and we do well to pay attention to these somewhat oblique openings.
32 lines in, the play proper seems to start, with the arrival of the central character, the King, and we now expect and at first seem to receive an orderly formal court scene. It does start like that but, of course, rapidly and frighteningly descends into distressing chaos.
You could build an essay around the very first lines of all four great tragedies. In this case, it seems to be a relatively inoffensive bit of court chatter or gossip. Kent says:
I thought the King had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall.
And his colleague Gloucester replies:
It did always seem so to us; but now, in the division of the Kingdom, it appears not which of the Dukes he values most…
These lines bear some scrutiny. Kent is saying that the King prefers one senior figure over another (a divisive and unwise way to rule a kingdom), and Gloucester retorts that, no, no, the King has measured exactly the two parts of the kingdom they will get, and you can’t tell the difference (‘equalities are so weighed that curiosity in neither can make choice of either’s moiety’). As if.
Significantly, Gloucester uses the word ‘value’ : it appears not which of the Dukes he values most. And so in this apparently confusing and casual exchange we go straight to the heart of the play. We are alerted that we are about to meet a King whose judgement regularly wavers, whose favour you can’t be sure of, and who puts a value even on his own family. On the surface, it seems, he likes the appearance of equality and even-handedness (justice, we might say), but underneath you can’t know if he is actually fair (what Kent and Gloucester don’t mention is that while Goneril/Albany and Regan/Cornwall might be getting technically equal shares, Cordelia is heading for the best part).
The rest of this opening, before Lear arrives, turns to a laddish jokey conversation about Edmund, Gloucester’s illegitimate son. Once you have read or seen the play once, you know what Edmund’s true character is, but the first time around he is inscrutable, saying very little (we find out what he’s truly thinking at the start of the next scene, in his fascinating soliloquy ‘Thou, nature, art my goddess’: see the next episode). The sub-plot echoes and deepens the main one, and here as an audience we are at least sub-consciously being alerted to the idea that this play will be partly about the relationships between parents and children, elders and subordinates.
Then Lear enters. Perhaps the most ironic line of the play is spoken by Lear in his opening speech: he says he is publicly announcing his daughters’
several dowers, that future strife may be prevented now.
Of course, it’s precisely by doing this that he sends his own family, and then the whole kingdom of Britain, into terminal strife. We all know by now that this play is fundamentally about blindness. We’re two pages in and there have been two eventually catastrophic examples of this: Lear’s inability to see the surely inevitable result of this decision, and Gloucester’s blindness to his own second son.
In the words of Tony Tanner :
Lear’s sudden abdication leaves a vacuum where there should be a majestic and irresistible principle of order, custom and degree. And in that vacuum, the deep realities of human nature are afforded a dark arena in which to play themselves out … Wishing only to shake off his cares, shrug off his burdens, ‘divest’ himself of rule, Lear discovers that there is no stopping the divesting, and he will be stripped of his knights, his house, his clothes, his very reason – and finally of Cordelia. His terrible fate lies coiled and nascent in his own opening words.
He ends up, of course, with ‘nothing’, the word from Cordelia which gives him a first push down the slope of catastrophe.
Then we get the love test. The emotions in this scene might be real (needy love, disloyalty, greed, anger) but the plot is fairy-tale, and the tripartite nature of the test means that an audience doesn’t really expect it to go well – we’re waiting for the twist to come from Daughter Number Three. What matters to Lear is worth or value, and he thinks this can be measured, and measured not by deeds but words. Words, of course, don’t have to be connected to meaning. Regan tunes into this with her lines
I am made of that self metal as my sister / And prize me at her worth.
Lear delights that the first two daughters are saying precisely what he wants. Then, again with tragic and disastrous irony, the third, Cordelia herself insists on being precise – on her own precision, not her father’s.
Lear’s reaction is explosive, pathetic, over the top. As many have pointed out, it’s also infantile, a child throwing his toys out of the pram.
Let’s go forward to the exchange just before Cordelia leaves, with her new husband the King of France. Burgundy rejects Cordelia after thinking in terms of value (‘her price is fallen’), and it’s left to France, who naturally as Lear’s equal, and a foreigner, can speak his mind openly and without fear of repercussions, to state the truth in the most clear-sighted way:
Love’s not love when it is mingled with regards that stand aloof from th’entire point.
He inverts the language of value by saying that for him Cordelia is ‘most rich, being poor.’ France’s ‘love kindles to inflamed respect’ precisely because she’s got nothing and he can see her for what she is (think forward to the heath scene, Act III scene iv, when Lear sees Poor Tom and asks ‘Is man no more than this? … Thou art the thing itself.’ And he rips off his own clothes to be on the same level as the madman. Sometimes you need to lose in order to gain).
When everyone else has gone, Goneril and Regan drop the pretence (and the poetry – the last 25 lines of the scene are in prose), and speak the truth. Goneril admits that Cordelia has been treated unfairly:
With what poor judgement he hath now cast her off appears too grossly.
and Regan says he has always been like this, partial and irrational. This final section between two women is the opposite bookend to that first conversation between two men, which began with a sentence about division, disorder and confusion. It ends with agreement between two women: something must be done about their father. Every audience knows that there is trouble ahead, but any member of the audience who does not know the plot is shocked by the sheer extremity of that horror. The fuse has been lit in this remarkable opening scene.
