FREE ESSAY ON THE ENDING OF KING LEAR

THE ENDING OF KING LEAR

Few Shakespearean plays have caused the controversy that is found with King Lear's ending
scenes. Othello kills himself, Macbeth is executed, and of course in hamlet, everyone
dies. Lear, however, is different from other Shakespearean classics. Is Lear mad or
lucid? Is Cordelia really dead? Is Edmund's delay explainable? What is the nature of the
Lear world that occasioned all of this? How does Knight's thesis relate to the ending?
Critical commentary varies and appears exhaustive. Bradley speaks of evil, but thinks
Lear dies in a moment of supreme joy; Knight argues that however vicious and cruel the
Lear world is, the death of Cordelia represents the future triumph of love. Frye writes
of Lear's madness as our sanity if it were not sedated as if the universe is
fundamentally absurd. Andrews writes that the meaning depends on the F vs. Q variations,
and that the audience must be left uncertain. Snyder says that Lear dramatizes the phases
of dying that we all endure, and that Lear dies because he is warn out by the exhaustion
of life. Rackin comments that the play moves through a dialectical process of
reconciliation of opposites that culminate in Lear's triumph of faith. Hennedy notes the
existential approach saying that Lear dies secure in knowledge that Cordelia lives after
death, having experienced transcendence. The paradox of (in a Christian sense) that hopes
comes from the cross. Donner writes that the cathartic experience the end of the play
affords us is the belief that justice had not been done; how could it, and we can not
forget the tremendous potential man has for evil that no one but God could forgive.
Harris argues that the promised end is dramatized by the ending of Lear, and the final
words of the play make the meaning clear-the power of art transcends what language can
only try to express. Foakes thinks that Hamlet now is less suited for the twentieth
century than Lear, insofar as Lear's existential content is what matters, so now the
question becomes why would Cordelia want to live in Lear's world? The play is about
protesting a world gone mad.
The situation is further intensified by the Tate emendation that playgoers witnessed for
over a century. Arguing from the perspective of post-restoration and neo-classical taste
that literature must teach virtue, Tate dropped the Fool, gave Cordelia and Edgar a love
interest, thus sparing her life along with her father:
Edgar: My dear Cordelia! Lucky was the Minute 
Of our approach, the Gods have weighed our Sufferings,
W'are past the Fire, and now must shine to Ages
Albany notes,
Take off their chains thou Injur'd Majesty,
The Wheel of Fortune now has made a circle...
What comfort may be brought to cheer your age?
And heal your savage Wrongs, shall be apply'd
For to your Majesty we do resign
Your kingdom...
Lear's last words according to Tate are:
Though, thou hast some business yet for life;
Thou, Kent, and I, retir'd to some cool cell
Will gently pass our short Reserves of time 
In calm reflections on our fortunes past,
Cheer'd with relation of the prosperous reign 
Of this celestial pair; thus our remains
Shall in an even course of thoughts be past? 
Enjoy the present hour, not fear the last
Quite a difference from Edmund's inexplicable delay in revoking his doom, leading
inevitably to the death of Lear and Cordelia.
Perhaps today our taste have changed since our metaphysics have, and if the mimetic
theory of Aristotle still holds, then Foakes has charted the change when he notes that
Hamlet has been replaced by Lear as the play most representative of our century. "In the
1960's, the central question about the tragedy of King Lear, took on new form." And as
Herbert Blau put it, "In our time it became possible to ask again about the death of
Cordelia not why she should die, but why she want to live?" To escape the implied horror
this question poses regarding this century, demands perhaps an existential interpretation
of the universe. Lear then holding Cordelia asking us to "Look there..."(V,iii,308)
defines his own lucidity in a mad world where humanity preys upon itself.
What brought Lear to such a moment in Act V? In the Wheel of Fire, Knight believes the
universal apparatus in the Lear world to be humanlike. Humans thus chart their own
progress and become victims of the mad world they helped to define. Humanity does pray
upon itself.
An instructive parallel is Romeo and Juliet. Could Romeo be a youthful Lear? I believe
so. Romeo's history is one of rash, impulsive behavior. Friar Lawrence, for instance,
finds Romeo's "conversion" from Rosaline to Juliet more than perplexing:
Holy Saint Francis! What a change is here!
Is Rosaline that thou didst love so dear,
So soon forsaken? Young men's love then lies
Not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes
(II,iv,65-68)
He warns of the dire consequences of impulsive behavior:
These violent delights have violent ends
And in the triumph die, like fire and powder,
Which as they kiss consume. The sweetest honey
Is loathsome in his own deliciousness 
And in the taste confounds the appetite.
Therefore love moderately...
(III,iii,29-33)
Romeo opts for suicide rather than banishment, and tells the Friar that philosophical
exhortations mean little when confronted with the pragmatics of a permanent separation
from Juliet. The Friar retorts, "Thou fond mad man, hear me a little speak." (III, iii,
53). The madness is dramatized in Act v. Entering the tomb and thinking Juliet is dead,
Romeo now actualizes his earlier threat. His monologue offers an interesting parallel to
Lear.
Romeo:
How oft when men are at the point of death 
Have they been merry! Which their keepers call
A lightning before death, O, how may I
Call this a lightning? O my love, my wife!
(V, iii, 88-91)
Is Lear merry? Bradley thinks that Lear dies in a moment of supreme joy. The issue is
further complicated by variant readings. Q substitutes "Sir" followed by "O O O O ", with
"Do you see this? Look on her, look at her lips,/ Look there, look there" (V, iii,
309-310) being deleted. Keeping F allows for the possibility Cordelia is either alive or
at least Lear thinks so, making Bradley's thesis at least plausible. Comparing the final
words of Romeo and Juliet with Lear may help to resolve this issue. The Prince, absolving
the Friar of his part, notes,
A glooming peace this morning with it brings.
The sun for sorrow will not show his head.
Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things...
(V, iii, 305-307)
Albany (or Edgar) says:
The weight of this sad time we must obey;
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
(V, iii, 322-323)
Both ending suggest further discourse. In Romeo and Juliet, what circumstances bring
about the horrors? The Sonnet Prologue speaks of "star crossed lovers" but in Lear,
Edmund dismisses such as superstitious nonsense, and like Iago to Roderigo, believes
humans chart their own destiny by making opportunities for themselves.
Romeo, according to the Friar, defies his own madness; he is rash and impulsive like Lear
whose "hideous rashness" causes him to banish Kent who warned against. The wheel has come
full circle, and Shakespeare has noted such before in, As You Like It's famous "Seven
ages of man" speech by Jacques. Interestingly the first stage ("...the infant./Mewling
and puking) comes "full circle" in senility to the last stage ("...second childishness
and mere oblivion./ sans teeth, sans eyes, sans everything."). (II, vii, 139-166). Romeo
has come full circle to Lear.
"Is this the promised end?" asks Kent. The answers that if Kent were to look at Romeo's
youth, he might have recognized a young Lear, and with characteristic bluntness reminded
Lear of his past. Such conduct leads to death and fashioning of a universal horror that
defies rational explanation. What ought to be said is in our own day the lesson of the
holocaust. Donner said, "Shakespeare has deliberately made us feel that justice has not
been done, that the sufferings inflicted have been to great for human beings to bear, and
the crimes committed too terrible to be condoned- too terrible to forget. I believe
Shakespeare wanted us to feel, and so to know that we must not forget and must not let
"new sorrows Strike us on the face." That is what we ought to say and what art says. If
we do not, we deny the function of art not only to enhance life, but to "teach and
delight". Our denial makes us participants in the madness that engulfs Lear. IN the words
of Prufrock, we have to "dare to eat peach," for doing so we disturb the universe.
Harold Bloom has published, Shakespeare, the Invention of the Human. This study argues
that Shakespeare invented personality, and that any modernist attempt to lower that
achievement to current sociopolitical trends does violence to that achievement.
"Personality, in our sense, is a Shakespearean invention, and is not only Shakespeare's
greatest originality but also the authentic cause of his perpetual pervasiveness."
Bloom initially states that Lear is beyond commentary, but nonetheless proceeds to offer
many revisionistic concepts, not the least of which is the belief that divine justice
does not prevail at the end, this he terms "offensive". He believes that the key to
interpreting Lear's end and for that matter any moment of the play rests with love; we
must note that initially Lear is loved by all of the good characters in the play: The
Fool, Kent, Gloucester, and Edgar. Thus cement binding (or not) the Lear world is to much
love: "Shakespeare's implication is that the only authentic love is between parents and
children; yet the prime consequence of such love is only devastation...the play manifests
as intense anguish in regard to human sexuality, and a compassionate despair as to the
mutually destructive nature of both paternal and filial love." This love is what Bloom
calls a love that is so deep it cannot be avoided. Thus for Bloom the line that best sums
the tragedy is Edgar's, "he childed as I father'd," meaning not hate but love between the
generations. Hence, Lear's great love for his children and Edgar's for Gloucester
occasion the very tragedy that love is supposed to negate.
The death of Cordelia has only pain to make meaningful, a premise quite the opposite of
Bradley's belief cited above. The Lear world is love gone mad and therefore poised to
self-destruct. Frye noted in the body of this essay that perhaps Lear's madness would be
our sanity if it were not sedated. Bloom argues that traditional "sedatives" such as a
moral cleansing and recognition do not apply. The Fool therefore is needed in the play,
Bloom believes, to insulate us from Lear's madness that is with in all of us.
Thus, the endings of Lear as seen by Bloom are not in the redemptive mode occasioned by
flashes of insight, but are "emanations of his wholeheartedness." Thus Shakespeare
endowed Lear with sensibilities, broad enough to achieve the potentially infinite, so as
to include of necessity emanations of recognition, but in the final analysis what remains
in the Lear world is its own ashes consumed on the alter of paternal love. There are no
gods to accept the offering.
So, is dialectic sustained to the point where opposites are reconciled? If Bloom is right
that Shakespeare invented what it means to be human, a synthesis may not be possible.
Shakespeare gave us Bottom and Edgar, Iago and Richard III, and history gave us Mother
Theresa and Adolf Hitler. Love, it would seem, does turn upon itself, and by doing so
destroys what it is supposed to preserve.
Works Cited Page
Bradley, A.C. Shakespearean Tragedy. New York: Fawcett Books, n.d.
Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead Books, 1998
Frye, N. On Shakespeare. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986
Knight, G.W. The Wheel of Fire. New York. Meridian Press, 1963.
Donner, H.W. Is This the Promised End? Reflections on the tragic ending of "King Lear"
L(Winter 1969).
Foakes, R.A. King Lear and the Displacement of Hamlet. Huntington library
Quarterly(1980)
Hennedy, H. Recognizing the Ending. Sp, 71 (1974)
Rackin, P. Delusion as Resolution in King Lear. Shakespeare Quarterly. XXI (1970)
Snyder, S. King Lear and the Psychology of Dying Shakespeare Quartely. XXXIII(1984)