Hook: the ending audiences could not bear
In the older play Shakespeare used, the king wins back his throne and lives happily with his loyal daughter. Shakespeare's audiences may have expected the same. Instead, in the last scene, Lear walks on stage carrying Cordelia's dead body.
This lesson reads Acts 4 and 5 closely and asks what kind of tragedy this is. Is it a story of redemption, in which suffering teaches Lear to love? Or is it a vision of a universe with no justice at all? Critics have argued about it for centuries.
(Content note: Acts 4 and 5 include an attempted suicide, a poisoning, killings and the deaths of the main characters. They are summarized here without detail.)
Acts 4 and 5 in brief
Act 4. The blinded Gloucester, despairing, says the gods treat humans as boys treat flies:
As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods. / They kill us for their sport.
He asks a beggar (his son Edgar, still disguised as Poor Tom) to lead him to the cliffs of Dover, intending to end his life. Edgar leads him to flat ground and describes an imaginary cliff edge; Gloucester falls forward, and Edgar, now pretending to be a stranger at the bottom, persuades him he has survived by a miracle and must endure. Lear, wandering in madness and crowned with wild flowers, meets the blind Gloucester: the two plots meet. Lear's mad speech mixes nonsense with sharp truth about justice and power; Edgar calls it Reason in madness. Meanwhile, Goneril and Regan both pursue Edmund. Cordelia lands with a French army. In 4.7, Lear wakes in her care, and, slowly, recognizes her:
I am a very foolish fond old man, / Fourscore and upward
When he says she has cause to hate him, she answers No cause, no cause.
Act 5. The French lose the battle; Lear and Cordelia are captured. Lear imagines prison as a paradise where they will sing like birds i' the cage. Edmund secretly orders their deaths. Edgar, in armour, challenges and fatally wounds Edmund. Goneril poisons Regan and then kills herself. Dying, Edmund says The wheel is come full circle and tries to cancel his order. Too late: Lear enters carrying Cordelia, hanged. He cannot accept it:
Thou'lt come no more, / Never, never, never, never, never!
He asks someone to undo a button, then, looking at her lips, cries Look there, look there! and dies. Gloucester has already died offstage, his heart, Edgar reports, giving way between joy and grief when Edgar revealed himself. The survivors are left to rule a broken kingdom.
Is King Lear a classical tragedy?
Where it fits: Lear's hamartia is clear: the love test and the rejection of Cordelia, rooted in pride and a need for flattery. The peripeteia comes when his daughters shut him out. His anagnorisis is gradual: in the storm (I have ta'en / Too little care) and fully in 4.7.
Where it strains: in Aristotle's model, the hero's suffering follows from his error. But Cordelia, who did nothing wrong, dies; Gloucester's punishment is grotesquely out of proportion; and Cordelia's death comes from a delay (Edmund's cancelled order arrives too late), not from anyone's character. Lear's recognition is followed not by peace but by an even greater loss.
Two great readings:
- A. C. Bradley (Shakespearean Tragedy, 1904) argued that Lear is redeemed: suffering teaches him love and humility, and he suggested the play could almost be called The Redemption of King Lear. On this reading, Lear's final Look there may mean he dies believing Cordelia lives, in a moment of joy.
- Many 20th-century critics found the play closer to nihilism: the gods are indifferent (flies to wanton boys), justice is random, and the final Never, never, never, never, never is a line of five stressed syllables that refuses all comfort. Lesson 14 follows this reading into the theatre of the 1960s.