King Lear

Erasmus’ Folly tells us that there are two kinds of madness—one is the thirst for gold, lust, and power. That is the madness of Regan, Cornwall, Edmund, and the rest. Their madness is what Lear rejects. The second madness is the desirable one, the state of folly in which “a certain pleasant raving, or error of the mind, delivereth the heart of that man whom it possesseth from all wonted carefulness, and rendreth it divers ways much recreated with new delectation” (Praise of Folly, in the sixteenth-century English translation of Sir Thomas Chaloner). This “error of the mind” is a special gift of the goddess Folly. Thus Lear is happy when his mind is free, when he is running around in his madness like a child on a country holiday: “Look, look, a mouse! Peace, peace, this piece of toasted cheese will do’t.” Lines such as that bring a smile to our faces, not least because the mouse isn’t really there. Lear repeats his “look, look” at the end of his life. Cordelia is dead, but he deceives himself into the belief that she lives—that the feather moves, that her breath mists the looking-glass. His final words are spoken in the delusion that her lips are moving: “Look on her, look, her lips, / Look there, look there!” Her lips are not moving, just as there is no mouse, but it is better for Lear that he should not know this. Philosophers say that it is miserable to be deceived; Folly replies that it is most miserable “not to be deceived,” for nothing could be further from the truth than the notion that man’s happiness resides in things as they actually are. Lear’s Fool says that he would fain “learn to lie.” Lying is destructive in the mouths of Goneril, Regan, and Edmund at the beginning of the play, but Cordelia—who has a special bond with the Fool—has to learn to lie. At the beginning, she can only tell the truth (hence her banishment), but later she lies beautifully and generously when Lear says that she has cause to do him wrong, and she replies, “No cause, no cause.”

The closing section of Erasmus’ Praise of Folly undertakes a serious praise of Christian “madness.” Christ says that the mystery of salvation is hidden from the wise and given to the simple. He delighted in simple people, fishermen and women. He chose to ride an ass when he could have mounted a lion. The language of his parables is steeped in simple, natural things—lilies, mustard seed, sparrows, a language analogous to that of Lear in his madness. The fundamental folly of Christianity is its demand that you throw away your possessions. Lear pretends to do this in Act 1, but actually he wants to keep “The name and all th’addition to a king.” Only when he loses his knights, his clothes, and his sanity does he find happiness.

But he also becomes kind. Little things show us this: in Act 1, he’s still always giving orders. Even in the storm he continues to make demands: “Come, unbutton here.” But in the end he learns to say “please” and “thank you”: “Pray you undo this button: thank you, sir.” He has begun to learn true manners not at court, but through the love he shows for Poor Tom, the image of unaccommodated man, the image of himself: “Did’st thou give all to thy daughters? And art thou come to this?” True wisdom comes not in Gloucester’s and Edgar’s words of Stoic comfort or Albany’s hapless faith in divine providence, but in moments of folly and love, as in this exchange:

EDGAR    Bless thy five wits!

KENT    O pity! Sir, where is the patience now That you so oft have boasted to retain?

Patience is the boast of the Stoic. It’s a retainer like the hundred knights. To achieve true wisdom, you must let it go. You must let even the wits, the sanity, go. What you must keep are the pity and the blessing. Pity and blessing are at the very heart of King Lear. Pity means the performance of certain deeds, such as showing kindness to strangers. Blessing is a performative speech act, an utterance that effects an action by the very act of being spoken. Typically blessing is accompanied by a small but forceful gesture, a kind of action that is of vital importance on the bare boards of the Shakespearean theater.

The play ends on a note of apocalypse, millennial doom. A trumpet sounds three times to announce the final showdown. Then when Lear enters with his beloved daughter dead in his arms, loyal Kent asks, “Is this the promised end?” He is thinking of Doomsday, but the line is also a sly allusion on Shakespeare’s part: in all previous versions of the Lear story, several of which would have been familiar to members of his audience, Cordelia survives and Lear is restored to the throne. The death of Cordelia is all the more painful because it is not the end “promised” by previous literary and theatrical tradition.