King Lear

Who is left in charge at the end of King Lear? According to the conventions of Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy, the senior remaining character speaks the final speech. That is the mark of his assumption of power. Thus Fortinbras rules Denmark at the end of Hamlet, Lodovico speaks for Venice at the end of Othello, Malcolm rules Scotland at the end of Macbeth, and Octavius rules the world at the end of Antony and Cleopatra.

So who rules Britain? The answer used to be something like this. As the husband of the king’s eldest daughter, Albany is the obvious candidate, but he seems reluctant to take on the role and, with astonishing stupidity given the chaos brought about by Lear’s division of the kingdom at the beginning of the play, he proposes to divide the kingdom at the end of the play, suggesting that Kent and Edgar should share power between them. Kent, wise as ever, sees the foolishness of this and gracefully withdraws, presumably to commit suicide or will on the heart attack that he is already sensing. By implication, Edgar, who was the king’s godson and is now Duke of Gloucester, is left in charge. So it is that in the Folio text, which is the most authoritative that we have, Edgar speaks the final speech:

The weight of this sad time we must obey:

Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.

The oldest hath borne most: we that are young

Shall never see so much nor live so long.

If we were being very scrupulous, we would have added that there is some uncertainty over the matter, since in the Quarto text it is Albany who speaks the final speech, an ascription that has been followed by many editors since Alexander Pope.

Thanks to the textual scholarship of the late twentieth century, the new answer is something like this. Ah: that’s a question over which Shakespeare himself seems to have had some uncertainty. In his original version of the play Albany speaks the final speech and thus rules the realm. But then Shakespeare changed his mind. In his revised version of the play Edgar speaks the final speech and thus rules the realm. We must posit two very different stagings. In the first one, Kent’s words of refusal of his half-share in the kingdom would have been accompanied by some gesture of refusal, such as a turning away, on Edgar’s part. In the second one, Edgar’s speaking of the final speech would have been staged so as to betoken acceptance of Albany’s offer. This alteration to the ending marks the climax of Shakespeare’s subtle but thoroughgoing revision of the roles of Albany and Edgar in his two versions of King Lear. We do not know exactly when the revision took place, but it is a fair assumption that it was as a result of experience in the playhouse and with the collaboration of the company. Presumably there was dissatisfaction on the part of dramatist and/or performers with the way in which the two roles had turned out, so various adjustments were made. Shakespeare’s plays were not polished for publication; they were designed as scripts to be worked upon in the theater. To be cut, added to, and altered.

Until recently, editors were remarkably reluctant to admit this. From the eighteenth century until the 1980s, editions attempted to recover an ideal unitary text, to get as close as they could to “what Shakespeare wrote.” There was a curious resistance to the idea that Shakespeare wrote one thing, tested it in the theater, and then wrote another. It was assumed that there was a single King Lear and that the editorial task was to reconstruct it. Generations of editors adopted a “pick and mix” approach to the text, moving between Quarto and Folio readings, making choices on either aesthetic or bibliographic grounds, and creating a composite text that Shakespeare never actually wrote.