Shakespeare was baptized on this day in 1564. His birthday is celebrated on April 23, which is the date of his death in 1616. Since his birthday is unknown, but very close on the calendar to the opposite bookend, we just assign April 23 to both his vitals. The most likely date of his birth is today, April 26. Infant mortality was high. No sense dallying.
As I noted here, King Lear was almost certainly composed in 1604. I just reread it: uff da! As has been argued by others, certain scenes, preeminently the one in which Gloucester has his eyes gouged out on stage, are so difficult to behold that "doubts of its propriety as art have been expressed even by critics who are reluctant to admit that Shakespeare can ever be at fault."* By the time the assault on our sensibilities is ended, it's natural to regard the work as a statement of nihilism and despair. The last scene includes probably the most shocking stage direction in the world's literature. Edmund, who is dying, remembers that he has sent his captain to the prison with a commission to hang Cordelia, so that her murder will look like a suicide. A messenger is dispatched to recall him. One then reads:
ALBANY: The gods defend her!
Enter Lear, with Cordelia in his arms
This aggressive juxtaposition is the last note in a theme insisted upon by the whole structure of the play, including the famous double plot. It's not enough that one old man wanders the earth in misery and intermittent, subsiding sanity. There have to be two. Also, God defends no one.
All that is true. It's also true that other scenes are excruciating for their tenderness and the fellow-feeling between sufferers. Lear, locked out of doors in the storm, has perhaps for the first time the thought that someone besides him might be cold:
In, boy; go first. You houseless poverty—
Nay, get thee in. . . .
[He's now alone]
Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'r you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel. . . .
You're reading along, frequently checking the notes at the bottom of the page for help with the Elizabethan English, and then this cry from the heart. I have taken too little care of this needs no gloss. The language is similarly strong and plain when, in the next act, the strands of the double plot converge and Lear meets the blinded Gloucester in a field near Dover:
GLOUCESTER: O, let me kiss that hand.
LEAR: Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality. . . .
[Snip]
What, art mad? A man may see how this world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears. See how yond justice rails upon yond simple thief. Hark in thine ear: change places and, handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? Thou hast seen a farmer's dog bark at a beggar?
GLOUCESTER: Ay, sir.
LEAR: And the creature run from the cur. There thou mightst behold the great image of authority—a dog's obeyed in office.
Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand! . . .
Through tattered clothes small vices do appear;
Robes and furred gowns hide all.
This section is preceded by Lear's famous self-description,
Ay, every inch a king
which is intended by him as self-mockery, though Shakespeare intends an irony, since the speaker has through deprivation achieved moral kingship. The nihilism and savagery is mixed together with something like redemptive suffering. The world is so wicked that it's dangerous to be good, and the upshot is Edgar and Kent, instead of giving up, put on disguises and persist in being good. They're almost the only ones still alive at the end.
The tendency among almost all readers must be to resolve the contraries in favor of one or the other contender. The third option, which according to the poet Keats would comport with Shakespeare's own habitual caste of mind, requires there be no resolution and that the contraries be held in the mind in a kind of equilibrium. My last thought about this is that, as has also been frequently observed, King Lear seems less than almost any other Shakespearean play made for the stage. The "pitiless" storm in Act III is really a metaphor for disorder and in the theatre it cannot be as impressive as it might be in the mind of an imaginative reader. You could in the theatre pump up the volume and the special effects and the result would be that the audience is made aware of your effort. It seems that the theatrical storm has to be artificial and therefore makes a poor analog for what it poetically represents in the play. So I think the reader could strive to attain Keats's lofty solution; in the theatre, a director has to make choices. Between the storm and the scene with Gloucester and Lear, the disguised Edgar leads his father to Dover, where, as Edgar knows, Gloucester means to commit suicide by leaping from a cliff. In a scene that's a little hard to imagine when reading, Edgar leads his blind father to what he says is the cliff's edge. It's really just flat land in a field. Gloucester then "leaps," which, given the actual circumstances, can mean only that he pitches forward six feet in the field. Of course he isn't dead. Edgar, now pretending to be a passerby at the bottom of the cliff, tells his swooning father that he has survived a long drop and "Your life's a miracle." The orthodox way of playing this emphasizes Edgar's devotion to his scarred, blind, helpless, desperate father whose life, notwithstanding his attempt to end it, is "a miracle." But the critic Jan Kott, who is very much of the savagery and nihilism interpretive school, argues that the scene should be played like a grotesque pantomime. The theatre audience must comprehend that Gloucester's life is not a miracle. He fell on his face in a field. Another bit of pitiless cruelty.
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*Lionel Trilling in Prefaces to the Experience of Literature.