Chapter X: Introduction: Proposition (9)

So obvious is this fundamental connection between the main and the underplot, that our attention is called to it by a personage in the play itself: [=iii.= vi. 117.] 'he childed as I father'd,' is Edgar's pithy summary of it when he is brought into contact with Lear. [_The main and underplot parallel and contrasted throughout._] But in this double tragedy, drawn from the two families of Lear and of Gloucester, the chief bond between its two sides consists in the sharp contrast which extends to every detail of the two stories. In the main plot we have a daughter, who has received nothing but harm from her father, who has unjustly had her position torn from her and given to undeserving sisters: nevertheless she sacrifices herself to save the father who did the injury from the sisters who profited by it. In the underplot we have a son, who has received nothing but good from his father, who has, contrary to justice, been advanced by him to the position of an elder brother whom he has slandered: nevertheless, he is seeking the destruction of the father who did him the unjust kindness, when he falls by the hand of the brother who was wronged by it. Thus as the main and underplot go on working side by side, they are at every turn by their antithesis throwing up one another's effect; the contrast is like the reversing of the original subject in a musical fugue. [_The underplot an Intrigue Action:_] Again, as the main plot consisted in the initiation of a problem and its solution, so the underplot consists in the development of an intrigue and its consequences. The tragedy of the Gloucester family will, if stated from the point of view of the father, correspond in its parts with the tragedy in the family of Lear. It must be remembered, however, that the position of the father is different in the two cases; Gloucester is not, as Lear, the agent of the crime, but only a deceived instrument in the hands of the villain Edmund, who is the real agent; if the proper allowance be made for this difference, [_involving a triple tragedy parallel with that of the main plot._] it will be seen that the three tragedies which make up the consequences of Lear's error have their analogies in the three tragedies which flow from the intrigue of Edmund. [(1) _Tragedy of Gloucester._] First, we have the nemesis on Gloucester, and this, in analogy with the nemesis on Lear, consists in receiving nothing but evil from the son he has so hastily advanced, and nothing but good from the other son whom, he comes gradually to feel, he has unintentionally wronged. [(2) _Tragedy of Edgar._] In the next place we have the sufferings of the innocent Edgar. [(3) _Tragedy of Edmund._] Then, as we before saw a third tragedy in the way in which the power conferred upon Goneril and Regan is used to work out their destruction, so in the underplot we find that the position which Edmund has gained involves him in intrigues, which by the development of the play are made to result in a nemesis upon his original intrigue. And it is a nemesis of exquisite exactness: for he meets his death in the very moment of his success, at the hands of the brother he has maligned and robbed, while the father he has deceived and sought to destroy is the means by which the avenger has been brought to the scene.

[_Complexity of plot not inconsistent with simplicity of movement._]

We have gone far enough into the construction of the plot to perceive its complexity and the principal elements into which that complexity can be analysed. Two separate systems, each consisting of an initial action and three resulting tragedies, eight actions in all, are woven together by common personages and incidents, by parallelism of spirit, and by movement to a common climax; not to speak of lesser Link Actions which assist in drawing the different stories closer together. As with plot generally, these separate elements are fully manifest only to the eye of analysis; in following the course of the drama itself, they make themselves felt only in a continued sense of involution and harmonious symmetry. It is with passion, not with plot, that the present study is concerned; and the train of passion which the common movement of these various actions calls out in the sympathy of the reader is as simple as the plot itself is intricate. In the case both of the main plot and the underplot the emotional effect rises in intensity; moreover at this central height of intensity the two merge in a common Climax. The construction of the play resembles, if such a comparison may be allowed, the patent gas-apparatus, which secures a high illuminating power by the simple device of several ordinary burners inclined to one another at such an angle that the apexes of their flames meet in a point. [from =ii.= iv. 290 to =iii.= vi. with the interruption of =iii.= iii, =iii.= v.] So the present play contains a Centrepiece of some three scenes, marked off (at least at the commencement) decisively, in which the main and underplot unite in a common Climax, with special devices to increase its effect; [_The different trains of passion focussed in a central Climax._] the diverse interests to which our sympathy was called out at the commencement, and which analysis can keep distinct to the end, are _focussed_, so far as passion is concerned, in this Centrepiece, in which human emotion is carried to the highest pitch of tragic agitation that the world of art has yet exhibited.

[_The passions of the main plot gather to a common Climax in the madness of Lear._]

The emotional effect of the main plot rises to a climax in the madness of Lear. This, as the highest form of human agitation, is obviously a climax to the story of Lear himself. It is equally a climax to the story of Kent and Cordelia, who suffer solely through their devoted watching over Lear, and to whom the bitterest point in their sufferings is that they feel over again all that their fallen master has to endure. Finally, in the madness of Lear the third of the three tragedies, the Goneril and Regan action, appears throughout in the background as the cause of all that is happening. If we keep our eye upon this madness of Lear the movement of the play assumes the form we have so often had to notice--the regular arch. The first half of the arch, or rise in emotional strain, we get in symptoms of mental disturbance preparing us for actual madness which is to come. It is important to note the difference between passion and madness: passion is a disease of the mind, madness is a disease extending to the mysterious linking of mind and body. At the commencement Lear is dominated by the passion of imperiousness, an imperiousness born of his absolute power as king and father; he has never learned from discipline restraint of his passion, but has been accustomed to fling himself upon obstacles and see them give way before him. Now the tragical situation is prepared for him of meeting with obstacles which will not give way, but from which his passion rebounds upon himself with a physical shock. As thus opposition follows opposition, we see _waves_ of physical, that is of hysterical, passion, sweeping over Lear, until, as it were, a tenth wave lands him in the full disease of madness.

[=i.= iv.]

The first case occurs in his interview with Goneril after that which is the first check he has received in his new life, the insolence shown to his retinue. Goneril enters his presence with a frown. The wont had been that Lear frowned and all cowered before him: and now he waits for his daughter to remember herself with a rising passion ill concealed under the forced calmness with which he enquires, 'Are you our daughter?' 'Doth any here know me?' But Goneril, on the contrary, calmly assumes the position of reprover, and details her unfounded charges of insolence against her father's sober followers, until at last he hears himself desired

By her, that else will take the thing she begs,

to disquantity his train. Then Lear breaks out:

Darkness and devils!
Saddle my horses; call my train together.
Degenerate bastard! I'll not trouble thee:
Yet have I left a daughter.

In a moment the thought of Cordelia's 'most small fault' and how it had been visited upon her occurs to condense into a single pang the whole sense of his folly; and here it is that the first of these waves of physical passion comes over Lear, its physical character marked by the physical action which accompanies it:

[=i.= iv. 292.]

O Lear, Lear, Lear!
Beat at this gate, that let thy folly in, [_Striking his head._
And thy dear judgement out.

It lasts but for a moment: but it is a wave, and it will return. [=i.= v.] Accordingly in the next scene we see Lear on his journey from one daughter to the other. He is brooding over the scene he is leaving behind, and he cannot disguise a shade of anxiety, in his awakened judgment, that some such scene may be reserved for him in the goal to which he is journeying. He is half listening, moreover, to the Fool, who harps on the same thought, that the King is suffering what he might have expected, that the other daughter will be like the first:--until there comes another of these sudden outbursts of passion, in which Lear for a moment half foresees the end to which he is being carried.

[=i.= v. 49.]

O, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven!
Keep me in temper: I would not be mad!

Imperiousness is especially attached to outward signs of reverence: [=ii.= iv. 4.] it is reserved for Lear when he arrives at Regan's palace to find the messenger he has sent on to announce him suffering the indignity of the stocks. At first he will not believe that this has been done by order of his daughter and son.

[13.]

_Kent._ It is both he and she;
Your son and daughter.

_Lear._ No.

_Kent._ Yes.

_Lear._ No, I say.

_Kent._ I say, yea.

_Lear._ No, no, they would not.

_Kent._ Yes, they have.

_Lear._ By Jupiter, I swear, no.

_Kent._ By Juno, I swear, ay.

_Lear._ They durst not do't;
They could not, would not do't; 'tis worse than murder,
To do upon respect such violent outrage.

But he has to listen to a circumstantial account of the insult, and, further, reminded by the Fool that

Fathers that wear rags
Do make their children blind,

he comes at last to realise it all,--and then there sweeps over him a third and more violent wave of hysterical agitation.

[56.]

O, how this mother swells up toward my heart!
Hysterica passio, down, thou climbing sorrow,
Thy element's below!

[=ii.= iv. 89.]

He has mastered the passion by a strong effort: but it is a wave, and it will return. He has mastered himself in order to confront the culprits face to face: his altered position is brought home to him when they refuse to receive him. And the refusal is made the worse by the well-meant attempt of Gloucester to palliate it, in which he unfortunately speaks of the 'fiery quality' of the duke.

_Lear._ Vengeance! plague! death! confusion!
Fiery? what quality?

Nothing is harder than to endure what one is in the habit of inflicting on others; it was Lear's own 'fiery quality' by which he had been accustomed to scorch all opposition out of his way; now he has to hear another man's 'fiery quality' quoted to him. But this outburst is only momentary; the very extremity of the case seems to calm Lear, and he begins himself to frame excuses for the duke, how sickness and infirmity neglect the 'office' to which health is bound--until his eye lights again upon his messenger sitting in the stocks, and the recollection of this deliberate affront brings back again the wave of passion.

[122.]

O me, my heart, my rising heart! but, down!

Lear had a strange confidence in his daughter Regan. As we see the two women in the play, Regan appears the more cold-blooded; nothing in Goneril is more cruel than Regan's

[204.]

I pray you, father, being weak, seem so;

or her meeting Lear's 'I gave you all' with the rejoinder,

[253.]

And in good time you gave it.

But there was something in Regan's personal appearance that belied her real character; her father says to her in this scene:

[173.]

Her eyes are fierce, but thine
Do comfort and not burn.

Judas betrayed with a kiss, and Regan persecutes her father in tears. But Regan has scarcely entered her father's presence when the trumpet announces the arrival of Goneril, and [185.] Lear has to see the Regan [197.] in whom he is trusting take Goneril's hand before his eyes in token that she is making common cause with her. When following this the words 'indiscretion,' 'dotage,' reach his ear there is a momentary swelling of the physical passion within:

[200.]

O sides, you are too tough;
Will you yet hold?

He has mastered it for the last time: for now his whole world seems to be closing in around him; he has committed his all to the two daughters standing before him, [from 233.] and they unite to beat him down, from fifty knights to twenty-five, from twenty-five to ten, to five, until the soft-eyed Regan asks, 'What need one?' A sense of crushing oppression stifles his anger, and Lear begins to answer with the same calmness with which the question had been asked:

O, reason not the need: our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous:
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man's life's as cheap as beast's: thou art a lady;
If only to go warm were gorgeous,
Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear'st,
Which scarcely keeps thee warm. But, for true need,--

He breaks off at finding himself actually pleading: and the blinding tears come as he recognises that the kingly passion in which he had found support at every cross has now deserted him in his extremity. He appeals to heaven against the injustice.

You heavens, give me that patience, patience I need!
You see me here, you gods, a poor old man,
As full of grief as age; wretched in both!
If it be you that stir these daughters' hearts
Against their father, fool me not so much
To bear it tamely; touch me with noble anger,
And let not women's weapons, water-drops,
Stain my man's cheeks!

The prayer is answered; the passion returns in full flood, and at last brings Lear face to face with the madness which has threatened from a distance.

No, you unnatural hags,
I will have such revenges on you both,
That all the world shall--I will do such things,--
What they are, yet I know not; but they shall be
The terrors of the earth. You think I'll weep;
No, I'll not weep:
I have full cause of weeping; but this heart
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws,
Or ere I'll weep. O fool, I SHALL go mad!

[=ii.= iv. 290. _The storm marks off the Centrepiece of the play._]

As Lear with these words rushes out into the night, we hear the first sound of the storm--the storm which here, as in _Julius Cæsar_, will be recognised as the dramatic background to the tempest of human emotions; it is the signal that we have now entered upon the mysterious Centrepiece of the play, in which the gathering passions of the whole drama are to be allowed to vent themselves without check or bound. And it is no ordinary storm: it is a night of bleak winds sorely ruffling, of cataracts and hurricanoes, of curled waters swelling above the main, of thought-executing fires and oak-cleaving thunderbolts; a night

[=iii.= i. 12, &c.]

wherein the cub-drawn bear would couch,
The lion and the belly-pinched wolf
Keep their fur dry.

And all of it is needed to harmonise with the whirlwind of human passions which finds relief only in outscorning its fury. The purpose of the storm is not confined to this of marking the emotional climax: it is one of the agencies which assist in carrying it to its height. Experts in mental disease have noted amongst the causes which convert mere mental excitement into actual madness two leading ones, external physical shocks and imitation. Shakespeare has made use of both in the central scenes of this play. [=iii.= i. 3: =iii.= ii. &c.] For the first, Lear is exposed without shelter to the pelting of the pitiless storm, and he waxes wilder with its wildness. [=iii.= iv, from 39.] Again when all this is at its height he is suddenly brought into contact with a half-naked Tom o'Bedlam. This gives the final shock. So far he had not gone beyond ungovernable rage; he had not lost self-consciousness, and could say, 'My wits begin to turn'; [=iii.= iv. 66.] but the sight of Edgar completely unhinges his mind, and hallucinations set in; a moment after he has seen him the spirit of imitation begins to work, and Lear commences to strip off his clothes. Thus perfect is the regular arch of effect which is connected with Lear's madness. We have its gradual rise in the waves of hysterical passion which ebbed after they had flowed, until, at the point separating the Centrepiece from the rest of the play, Lear's 'O fool I _shall_ go mad' seems to mark a change from which he never goes back. Through these central scenes exposure to the storm is fanning his passion more and more irretrievably into madness; [=iii.= iii. 39.] at the exact centre of all, imitation of Edgar comes to make the insanity acute. [_Decline after the Centrepiece from violent madness to shattered intellect._] After the Centrepiece Lear disappears for a time, and when we next see him agitation has declined into what is more pathetic: the acute mania has given place to the pitiful spectacle of a shattered intellect; there is no longer sharp suffering, [=iv.= vi. 81.] but the whole mind is wrecked, gleams of coherence coming at intervals to mark what a fall there has been; [compare =iv.= vi. 178; =v.= iii. 314.] the strain upon our emotions sinks into the calm of hopelessness.

He hates him much
That would upon the rack of this tough world
Stretch him out longer.

[_The passions of the underplot gather to a common Climax in the madness of Edgar._]

But who is this madman with whom Lear meets at the turning-point of the play? It is Edgar, the victim of the underplot, whose life has been sought by his brother and father until he can find no way of saving himself but the disguise of feigned madness. This feigned madness of Edgar, as it appears in the central scenes, serves as emotional climax to the underplot, just as the madness of Lear is the emotional climax of the main plot. Edgar's madness is obviously the climax to the tragedy of his own sufferings, but it is also a central point to the movement of the other two tragedies which with that of Edgar make up the underplot. One of these is the nemesis upon Gloucester, and this, we have seen, is double, that he receives good from the son he has wronged and evil from the son he has favoured. [=iii.= iv. 170.] The turning-point of such a nemesis is reached in the Hovel Scene, where Gloucester says:

I'll tell thee, friend,
I am almost mad myself: I had a son,
Now outlaw'd from my blood; he sought my life,
But lately, very late: I loved him, friend:
No father his son dearer: truth to tell thee,
This grief hath crazed my wits!

He says this in the presence of the very Edgar, disguised under the form of the wretched idiot he hardly marks. Edgar now learns how his father has been deceived; [compare =iii.= iii. 15.] in his heart he is re-united to him, and from this point of re-union springs the devotion he lavishes upon his father in the affliction that presently falls upon him. [=iii.= iii. 22; =iii.= vii.] On the other hand, that which brings Gloucester to this Hovel Scene, the attempt to save the King, is betrayed by Edmund, who becomes thereby the cause of the vengeance which puts out his father's eyes. Thus from this meeting of the mad Edgar with the mad Lear there springs at once the final stroke in the misery Gloucester suffers from the son he has favoured, and the beginning of the forgiving love he is to experience from the son he has wronged: that meeting then is certainly the central climax to the double nemesis which makes up the Gloucester action. The remaining tragedy of the underplot embraces the series of incidents by the combination of which the success of Edmund's intrigue becomes gradually converted into the nemesis which punishes it. Now the squalid wretchedness of a Bedlamite, together with the painful strain of supporting the assumed character amidst the conflicting emotions which the unexpected meeting of the Hovel Scene has aroused, represent the highest point to which the misery resulting from the intrigue can rise. [=iv.= i, &c.] At the same time the use Edgar makes of this madness after hearing Gloucester's confession is to fasten himself in attendance upon his afflicted father, and proves in the sequel the means by which he is brought to be the instrument of the vengeance that overtakes Edmund. The central climax of a tragedy like this of intrigue and nemesis cannot be more clearly marked than in the incident in which are combined the summit of the injury and the foundation of the retribution. Thus all three tragedies which together make up the resultant of the intrigue constituting the underplot reach their climax of agitation in the scene in which Lear and Edgar meet.

[_The Centrepiece a duet, or by the addition of the Fool, a trio of madness.]_

It appears, then, that the Centrepiece of the play is occupied with the contact of two madnesses, the madness of Lear and the madness of Edgar; that of Lear gathering up into a climax trains of passion from all the three tragedies of the main plot, and that of Edgar holding a similar position to the three tragedies of the underplot. Further, these madnesses do not merely go on side by side; as they meet they mutually affect one another, and throw up each other's intensity. By the mere sight of the Bedlamite, Lear, already tottering upon the verge of insanity, is driven really and incurably mad; while in the case of Edgar, the meeting with Lear, and through Lear with Gloucester, converts the burden of feigning idiocy from a cruel stroke of unjust fate into a hardship voluntarily undergone for the sake of ministering to a father now forgiven and pitied. And so far as the general effect of the play is concerned this central Climax presents a terrible _duet of madness_, the wild ravings and mutual interworkings of two distinct strains of insanity, each answering and outbidding the other. The distinctness is the greater as the two are different in kind. In Lear we have the madness of passion, exaggeration of ordinary emotions; Edgar's is the madness of idiocy, as idiocy was in early ages when the cruel neglect of society added physical hardship to mental affliction. In Edgar's frenzy we trace rapid irrelevance with gleams of unexpected relevance, just sufficient to partly answer a question and go off again into wandering; a sense of ill-treatment and of being an outcast; remorse and thoughts as to close connection of sin and retribution; visions of fiends as in bodily presence; cold, hunger: these alternating with mere gibberish, and all perhaps within the compass of a few lines.

[=iii.= iv. 51.]

Who gives anything to poor Tom? whom the foul fiend hath led through
fire and through flame, and through ford and whirlipool, o'er bog
and quagmire; that hath laid knives under his pillow, and halters in
his pew; set ratsbane by his porridge; made him proud of heart, to
ride on a bay trotting-horse over four-inched bridges, to course his
own shadow for a traitor. Bless thy five wits! Tom's a-cold,--O, do
de, do de, do de. Bless thee from whirlwinds, star-blasting, and
taking! Do poor Tom some charity, whom the foul fiend vexes: there
could I have him now,--and there,--and there again, and there.

But this is not all. When examined more closely this Centrepiece exhibits not a duet but a _trio of madness_; with the other two there mingles a third form of what may be called madness, the professional madness of the court fool. [_Institution of the court fool._] This court fool or jester is an institution of considerable interest. It seems to rest upon three mediæval and ancient notions. The first is the barbarism of enjoying personal defects, illustrated in the large number of Roman names derived from bodily infirmities, Varus the bandy-legged, Balbus the stammerer, and the like; this led our ancestors to find fun in the incoherence of natural idiocy, and finally made the imitation of it a profession. A second notion underlying the institution of a jester is the connection to the ancient mind between madness and inspiration; the same Greek word _entheos_ stands for both, and to this day the idiot of a Scotch village is believed in some way to see further than sane folk. A third idea to be kept in mind is the mediæval conception of wit. With us wit is weighed by its intrinsic worth; the old idea, appearing repeatedly in Shakespeare's scenes, was that wit was a mental game, a sort of battledore and shuttlecock, in which the jokes themselves might be indifferent since the point of the game lay in keeping it up as smartly and as long as possible. The fool, whose title and motley dress suggested the absence of ordinary sense or propriety, combines in his office all three notions: from the last he was bound to keep up the fire of badinage, even though it were with witless nonsense; from the second he was expected at times to give utterance to deep truths; and in virtue of the first he had license to make hard hits under protection of the 'folly' which all were supposed to enjoy.

He that hath a fool doth very wisely hit,
Doth very foolishly, although he smart,
Not to seem senseless of the bob.

[_The institution adapted to modern times in Punch._]

The institution, if it has died out as a personal office attached to kings or nobles, has perhaps been preserved by the nation as a whole in a form analogous to other modern institutions: the all-embracing newspaper has absorbed this element of life, and Mr. Punch is the national jester. His figure and face are an improvement on the old motley habit; his fixed number of pages have to be filled, if not always with wit, yet with passable padding: no one dare other than enjoy the compliment of his notice, under penalty of showing that 'the cap has fitted'; and certainly Mr. Punch finds ways of conveying to statesmen criticisms to which the proprieties of parliament would be impervious. The institution of the court fool is eagerly utilised by Shakespeare, and is the source of some of his finest effects: he treats it as a sort of chronic Comedy, the function of which may be described as that of translating deep truths of human nature into the language of laughter.

In applying, then, this general view of the court fool to the present case we must avoid two opposite errors. We must not pass over all his utterances as unmeaning folly, nor, on the other hand, must we insist upon seeing a meaning in everything that he says: what truth he speaks must be expected to make its appearance amidst a cloud of nonsense. [_The function of the Fool in Lear is to keep before us the original problem:_] Making this proviso we may lay down that the function of the Fool in _King Lear_ is to keep vividly before the minds of the audience (as well as of his master) the idea at the root of the main plot--that unstable moral equilibrium, that unnatural distribution of power which Lear has set up, and of which the whole tragedy is the rebound. [=i.= iv.] In the first scene in which he appears before us he is, amid all his nonsense, harping upon the idea that Lear has committed the folly of trusting to the gratitude of the ungrateful, and is reaping the inevitable consequences. As he enters he hands his coxcomb, the symbol of folly, to the King, and to Kent for taking the King's part. His first jingling song,

Have more than thou showest,
Speak less than thou knowest,
Lend less than thou owest, &c.,

is an expansion of the maxim, Trust nobody. And however irrelevant he becomes, he can in a moment get back to this root idea. They tell him his song is nothing:

_Fool._ Then 'tis like the breath of an unfee'd lawyer; you gave me
nothing for 't. Can you make no use of nothing, nuncle?
_Lear._ Why, no, boy; nothing can be made out of nothing.
_Fool_ [_to Kent_]. Prithee, tell him, so much the rent of his land
comes to: he will not believe a fool.

[=i.= i. 92.]

'Nothing will come of nothing' had been the words Lear had used to Cordelia; now he is bidden to see how they have become the exact description of his own fortune. No wonder Lear exclaims, 'A bitter fool!'

_Fool._ Dost thou know the difference, my boy, between a bitter fool
and a sweet one?
_Lear._ No, lad; teach me.
_Fool._ That lord that counsell'd thee
To give away thy land,
Come place him here by me,
Do thou for him stand:
The sweet and bitter fool
Will presently appear;
The one in motley here.
The other found out there.

_Lear._ Dost thou call me fool, boy?
_Fool._ All thy other titles thou hast given away; that thou wast
born with.

Again and again he turns to other topics and comes suddenly back to the main thought.

[=i.= iv. 195.]

_Fool._ Prithee, nuncle, keep a schoolmaster that can teach thy fool
to lie: I would fain learn to lie.

_Lear._ An you lie, sirrah, we'll have you whipped.

_Fool._ I marvel what kin thou and thy daughters are: they'll have
me whipped for speaking true, thou'lt have me whipped for lying; and
sometimes I am whipped for holding my peace. I had rather be any
kind o' thing than a fool: and yet I would not be thee, nuncle; thou
hast pared thy wit o' both sides, and left nothing i' the middle:
here comes one o' the parings.

[=i.= iv. 207.]

It is Goneril who enters, and who proceeds to state her case in the tone of injury, detailing how the order of her household state has been outraged, but ignoring the source from which she has received the power to keep up state at all: what she has omitted the Fool supplies in parable, as if continuing her sentence--

For, you trow, nuncle,
The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long,
That it's had it head bit off by it young,

and then instantly involves himself in a cloud of irrelevance,

So, out went the candle, and we were left darkling.

[=i.= v.]

In the scene which follows, the Fool is performing a variation on the same theme: the sudden removal from one sister to the other is no real escape from the original foolish situation.

[=i.= v. 8.]

_Fool._ If a man's brains were in 's heels, were 't not in danger of
kibes?
_Lear._ Ay, boy.
_Fool._ Then, I prithee, be merry; thy wit shall ne'er go slip-shod.

To say that Lear is in no danger of suffering from brains in his heels is another way of saying that his flight is folly. He goes on to insist that the other daughter will treat her father 'kindly,' that 'she's as like this as a crab's like an apple.' His laying down that the reason why the nose is in the middle of the face is to keep the eyes on either side of the nose, and that the reason why the seven stars are no more than seven is 'a pretty reason--because they are not eight,' suggests (if it be not pressing it too far) that we must not look for depth where there is only shallowness--the mistake Lear has made in trusting to the gratitude of his daughters. And the general thought of Lear's original folly he brings out, true to the fool's office, from the most unlikely beginnings.

[=i.= v. 26.]

_Fool._ Canst tell how an oyster makes his shell?
_Lear._ No.

'Nor I neither,' answers the Fool, with a clown's impudence; 'but,' he adds, 'I can tell why a snail has a house.'

_Lear._ Why?
_Fool._ Why, to put his head in; not to give it away to his
daughters.

[=ii.= iv. 1-128.]

All through the scene in front of the stocks the Fool is harping on the folly of expecting gratitude from such as Goneril and Regan. It is fathers who bear bags that see their children kind; the wise man lets go his hold on a great wheel running down hill, but lets himself be drawn after by the great wheel that goes up the hill; he himself, the Fool hints, is a fool for staying with Lear; to cry out at Goneril and Regan's behaviour is as unreasonable as for the cook to be impatient with the eels for wriggling; to have trusted the two daughters with power at all was like the folly of the man that, 'in pure kindness to his horse, buttered his hay.'

The one idea, then, stationary amidst all the Fool's gyrations of folly is the idea of Lear's original sin of passion, from the consequences of which he can never escape; [_but in an emotional form as adapted to the agitation of the Centrepiece._] only the idea is put, not rationally, but translated into an emotional form which makes it fit to mingle with the agitation of the central scenes. The emotional form consists partly in the irrelevance amid which the idea is brought out, producing continual shocks of surprise. But more than this an emotional form is given to the utterances of the Fool by his very position with reference to Lear. [=iii.= i. 16; =iii.= ii. 10, 25, 68; =iii.= iv. 80, 150.] There is a pathos that mingles with his humour, where the Fool, a tender and delicate youth, is found the only attendant who clings to Lear amid the rigour of the storm, labouring with visibly decreasing vigour to out-jest his master's heart-struck injuries, and to keep up holiday abandon amidst surrounding realities. [=i.= iv. 107; =iii.= ii. 68, 72, &c.] Throughout he is Lear's best friend, and epithets of endearment are continually passing between them: he has been Cordelia's friend (as Touchstone was the friend of Rosalind), [=i.= iv. 79.] and pined for Cordelia after her banishment. Nevertheless he is the only one who can deliver hard thrusts at Lear, and bring home to him, under protection of his double relation to wisdom and folly, Lear's original error and sin. So faithful and so severe, the Fool becomes an outward conscience to his master: he keeps before Lear the unnatural act from which the whole tragedy springs, but he converts the thought of it into the emotion of self-reproach.

[_Summary._]

Our total result then is this. The intricate drama of _King Lear_ has a general movement which centres the passion of the play in a single Climax. Throughout a Centrepiece of a few scenes, against a background of storm and tempest is thrown up a tempest of human passion--a madness trio, or mutual play of three sorts of madness, the real madness of passion in Lear, the feigned madness of idiocy in Edgar, and the professional madness of the court fool. When the elements of this madness trio are analysed, the first is found to gather up into itself the passion of the three tragedies which form the main plot; the second is a similar climax to the passion of the three tragedies which make up the underplot; the third is an expression, in the form of passion, of the original problem out of which the whole action has sprung. Thus intricacy of plot has been found not inconsistent with simplicity of movement, and from the various parts of the drama the complex trains of passion have been brought to a focus in the centre.

PART SECOND.

SURVEY OF DRAMATIC CRITICISM AS AN INDUCTIVE SCIENCE.

XI.

TOPICS OF DRAMATIC CRITICISM.

[_Purpose: to survey Dramatic Criticism as an inductive science._]

IN the Introduction to this book I pleaded that a regular inductive science of literary criticism was a possibility. In the preceding ten chapters I have endeavoured to exhibit such a regular method at work on the dramatic analysis of leading points in Shakespeare's plays. The design of the whole work will not be complete without an attempt to present our results in complete form, in fact to map out a Science of Dramatic Art. I hope this may not seem too pretentious an undertaking in the case of a science yet in its infancy; while it may be useful at all events to the young student to have suggested to him a methodical treatment with which he may exercise himself on the literature he studies. Moreover the reproach against literary criticism is, not that there has not been plenty of inductive work done in this department, but that the assertion of its inductive character has been lacking; and I believe a critic does good service by throwing his results into a formal shape, however imperfectly he may be able to accomplish his task. It will be understood that the survey of Dramatic Science is here attempted only in the merest outline: it is a glimpse, not a view, of a new science that is proposed. Not even a survey would be possible within the limits of a few short chapters except by confining the matter introduced to that previously laid before the reader in a different form. The leading features of Dramatic Art have already been explained in the application of them to particular plays: they are now included in a single view, so arranged that their mutual connection may be seen to be building up this singleness of view. Such a survey, like a microscopic lens of low power, must sacrifice detail to secure a wider field. Its compensating gain will consist in what it can contribute to the orderly product of methodised enquiry which is the essence of science, and the interest in which becomes associated with the interest of curiosity when the method has been applied in a region not usually acknowledging its reign.

[_Definition of Dramatic Criticism:_]

The starting-point in the exposition of any science is naturally its definition. But this first step is sufficient to divide inductive criticism from the treatment of literature mostly in vogue. I have already protested against the criticism which starts with the assumption of some 'object' or 'fundamental purpose' in the Drama from which to deduce binding canons. Such an all-embracing definition, if it is possible at all, will come as the final, not the first, step of investigation. [_as to its field and its method._] Inductive criticism, on the contrary, will seek its point of departure from outside. On the one hand it will consider the relation of the matter which it proposes to treat to other matter which is the subject of scientific enquiry; on the other hand it will fix the nature of the treatment it proposes to apply by a reference to scientific method in general. That is to say, its definition will be based upon differentiation of matter and development in method.

[_Stages of development in inductive method._]

To begin with the latter. There are three well-marked stages in the development of sciences. The first consists in the mere observation of the subject-matter. The second is distinguished by arrangement of observations, by analysis and classification. The third stage reaches systematisation--the wider arrangement which satisfies our sense of explanation, that curiosity as to causes which is the instinct specially developed by scientific enquiry. Astronomy remained for long ages in the first stage, while it was occupied with the observation of the heavenly bodies and the naming of the constellations. It would pass into the second stage with division of labour and the study of solar, lunar, planetary, and cometary phenomena separately. But by such discoveries as that of the laws of motion, or of gravitation, the great mass of astronomical knowledge was bound together in a system which at the same time satisfied the sense of causation, and astronomy was fully developed as an inductive science. Or to take a more modern instance: comparative philology has attained completeness in our own day. Philology was in its first stage at the Renaissance, when 'learning' meant the mere accumulation of detailed knowledge connected with the Classical languages; Grimm's Law may illustrate the second stage, a classification comprehensive but purely empiric; the principle of phonetic decay with its allied recuperative processes has struck a unity through the laws of philology which stamps it as a full-grown science. [_Dramatic Criticism in the intermediate_] Applying this to our present subject, I do not pretend that Literary Criticism has reached the third of these three stages: but materials are ready for giving it a secure place in the second stage. In time, no doubt, literary science must be able to explain the modus operandi of literary production, and show how different classes of writing come to produce their different effects. But at present such explanation belongs mostly to the region of speculation; and before the science of criticism is ripe for this final stage much work has to be done in the way of methodising observation as to literary matter and form.

Dramatic Criticism, then, is still in the stage of provisional arrangement. [_or 'topical' stage._] Its exact position is expressed by the technical term 'topical.' Where accumulation of observations is great enough to necessitate methodical arrangement, yet progress is insufficient to suggest final bases of arrangement which will crystallise the whole into a system, science takes refuge in 'topics.' These have been aptly described as intellectual pigeon-holes--convenient headings under which materials may be digested, with strict adherence to method, yet only as a provisional arrangement until further progress shall bring more stable organisation. This topical treatment may seem an unambitious stage in scientific advance, the goal and reward of which is insight into wide laws and far-reaching systematisations. Still it is a stage directly in the line of sound method: and the judicious choice of main and subordinate topics is systematisation in embryo. The present enquiry looks no further than this stage in its analysis of Dramatic Art. It endeavours to find convenient headings under which to set forth its observations of Shakespeare's plays. It also seeks an arrangement of these topics that will at once cover the field of the subject, and also carry on the face of it such an economy of mutual connection as may make the topics, what they ought to be, a natural bridge between the general idea which the mind forms of Drama and the realisation of this idea in the details of actual dramatic works.

[_Continuous differentiation of scientific subject-matter._]

But the definition of our subject involves further that we should measure out the exact field within which this method is to be applied. Science, like every other product of the human mind, marks its progress by continuous differentiation: the perpetual subdivision of the field of enquiry, the rise of separate and ever minuter departments as time goes on. Originally all knowledge was one and undivided. The name of Socrates is connected with a great revolution which separated moral science from physics, the study of man from the study of nature. With Aristotle and inductive method the process became rapid: and under his guidance ethics, as the science of conduct, became distinct from mental science; and still further, political science, treating man in his relations with the state, was distinguished from the more general science of conduct. When thought awoke at the Renaissance after the sleep of the Dark Ages, political science threw off as a distinct branch political economy; and by our own day particular branches of economy, finance, for example, have practically become independent sciences. This characteristic of science in general, the perpetual tendency to separate more confined from more general lines of investigation, will apply in an especial degree to literature, [_Dramatic Criticism branches off on the one side from the wider Literary Criticism._] which covers so wide an area of the mind and is the meeting-ground of so many separate interests. Thus Shakespeare is a poet, and his works afford a field for considering poetry in general, both as a mode of thought and a mode of expression. Again, no writer could go so deeply into human nature as Shakespeare has done without betraying his philosophy and moral system. Once more, Shakespeare must afford a specimen of literary tendencies in general, and that particular modification of them we call Elizabethan; besides that the language which is the vehicle of this literature has an interest of its own over and above that of the thought which it conveys. All this and more belongs properly to 'Shakespeare-Criticism': but from Literary Criticism as a whole a branch is being gradually differentiated, Dramatic Criticism, and its province is to deal with the question, how much of the total effect of Shakespeare's works arises from the fact of his ideas being conveyed to us in the form of dramas, and not of lyric or epic poems, of essays or moral and philosophical treatises. It is with this branch alone that the present enquiry is concerned.

[_On the other side from the allied art of Stage-Representation._]

But more than this goes to the definition of Dramatic Criticism. Drama is not, like Epic, merely a branch of literature: it is a compound art. The literary works which in ordinary speech we call dramas, are in strictness only potential dramas waiting for their realisation on the stage. And this stage-representation is not a mere accessory of literature, but is an independent art, having a field where literature has no place, in dumb show, in pantomime, in mimicry, and in the lost art of Greek 'dancing.'

The question arises then, what is to be the relation of Dramatic Criticism to the companion art of Stage-Representation? Aristotle, the father of Dramatic Criticism, made Stage-Representation one of the departments of the science; but we shall be only following the law of differentiation if we separate the two. This is especially appropriate in the case of the Shakespearean Drama. The Puritan Revolution, which has played such a part in its history, was in effect an attack rather on the Theatre than on the Drama itself. No doubt when the movement became violent the two were not discriminated, and the Drama was made a 'vanity' as well as the Stage. Still the one interest was never so thoroughly dropped by the nation and was more readily taken up again than the other; so that from the point of view of the Stage our continuity with the Elizabethan age has been severed, from the point of view of the literary Drama it has not. The Shakespearean Drama has made a field for itself as a branch of literature quite apart from the Stage; and, however we may regret the severance and look forward to a completer appreciation of Shakespeare, yet it can hardly be doubted that at the present moment as earnest and comprehensive an interest in our great dramatist is to be found in the study as in the theatre.

Dramatic Criticism, then, is to be separated, on the one side, from the wider Literary Criticism which must include a review of language, ethics, philosophy, and general art; and, on the other hand, from the companion art of Stage-Representation. But here caution is required; for all these are so closely and so organically connected with the Drama that there cannot but exist a mutual reaction. [_Topics common to Drama and art in general._] Thus we have already had to treat of topics which belong to the Drama only as a part of literature and art in general. In the first chapter we had occasion to notice how even the raw material out of which the Shakespearean Drama is constructed itself forms another species in literature. When we proceeded to watch the process of working up this Story into dramatic form we were led on to what was common ground between Drama and the other arts. In such process we saw illustrated the 'hedging,' or double process which leaves monstrosity to produce its full impression and yet provides by special means against any natural reaction; the reduction of improbabilities, by which difficulties in the subject-matter are evaded or met; the utilisation of mechanical details to assist more important effects; the multiplication and interweaving of different interests by which each is made to assist the rest. Such points of Mechanical Construction, together with the general principles of balance and symmetry, are not special to any one branch of art: in all alike the artist will contrive not wholly to conceal his processes, but by occasional glimpses will add to higher effects the satisfaction of our sense of neat workmanship.

[_Drama and its Representation separate in exposition, not in idea._]

Similarly, it may be convenient to make Literary Drama and Stage-Representation separate branches of enquiry: it is totally inadmissible and highly misleading to divorce the two in idea. The literary play must be throughout read _relatively_ to its representation. In actual practice the separation of the two has produced the greatest obstacles in the way of sound appreciation. Amongst ordinary readers of Shakespeare Character-Interest, which is largely independent of performance, has swallowed up all other interests; and most of the effects which depend upon the connection and relative force of incidents, and on the compression of the details into a given space, have been completely lost. Shakespeare is popularly regarded as supreme in the painting of human nature, but careless in the construction of Plot: and, worst of all, Plot itself, which it has been the mission of the English Drama to elevate into the position of the most intellectual of all elements in literary effect, has become degraded in conception to the level of a mere juggler's mystery. It must then be laid down distinctly at the outset of the present enquiry that the Drama is to be considered throughout relatively to its acting. Much of dramatic effect that is special to Stage-Representation will be here ignored: the whole mechanism of elocution, effects of light, colour and costume, the greater portion of what constitutes _mise-en-scène_. But in dealing with any play the fullest scope is assumed for ideal acting. The interpretation of a character must include what an actor can put into it; in dealing with effects regard must be had to surroundings which a reader might easily overlook, but which would be present to the eye of a spectator; and no conception of the movement of a drama will be adequate which has not appreciated the rapid sequence of incidents that crowds the crisis of a life-time or a national revolution into two or three hours of actual time. The relation of Drama to its acting will be exactly similar to that of music to its performance, the two being perfectly separable in their exposition, but never disunited in idea.

[_Fundamental division of Dramatic Criticism into Human Interest and Action._]