The Shakespeare Code

 (It’s best to read Parts One and Two first)

In King Lear Shakespeare allows all his revulsion at Queen Elizabeth’s cruelty and lust to boil into dreadful life in the love-denying, language-abusing figures of Goneril and Regan.

They both pursue Edmund in the same lustful way that Elizabeth pursued Essex.

And Regan relishes bloodshed every bit as much as the dead Queen.

It is Regan who insists that BOTH of Gloucester’s eyes are gouged out….

Cinderella has turned into the Ugly Sisters. With a vengeance….

Shakespeare also spews up all he hates about mankind….

 …..and womankind…..

…..in the words of the mad, but profoundly percipient, old King.

He also allows all the unexpressed grief for his son, from a decade ago, to well up and overwhelm him.

The dead body of Cordelia in Lear’s arms…….

……. is, in reality, the dead body of Hamnet, finally in Shakespeare’s.

It was cathartic for him.

And horrifying for us.

So horrifying, that the Poet Laureate, Nahum Tate…..

……chiefly remembered now for composing ‘While Shepherds watched their flocks by night’ …

…..substituted a happy ending for the play in the 1680’s….

……in which Lear is restored to his throne again…..

…….and Cordelia marries Edgar…

This version held the stage for…..

A HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS!!!

Even Samuel Johnson…….

……preferred Tate’s version, admitting….

……I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia’s death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor.

So can these last scenes be justified? Understood even?

At the end of Shakespeare’s original version, the stage is littered with corpses.

As Gloucester says earlier in the play….

As flies to wanton boys are we to the Gods,

They kill us for their sport.

But is this what Shakespeare himself believes?

We must remember that the play is set in Celtic times…..

Gloucester is talking about PAGAN gods!

Even the characters in the play express scepticism about the beliefs of the age they live in….

Edmund the Bastard, denying that the stars in the heavens have any influence at all on human behaviour, says

I am rough and lecherous. Fut! I should have been that I am had the maidenliest star twinkled on my bastardising….

And when Lear swears…..

By Apollo…..

…..Kent responds with…

Now, by Apollo King,

Thou swearst thy God’s in vain.

There is certainly no Calvinist God in control of events in the play.

The good perish headlong with the bad.

But is there the shadow of a Roman Catholic God?

Philip II of Spain’s reaction to the defeat of the Armada was fascinating.

He said, the following year…..

It is impiety, and almost blasphemy, to presume to know the will of God. It comes from the sin of pride. Even kings must submit to being used by God’s will without knowing what it is.

It is my belief that that Shakespeare came to the same conclusion.

God’s will is unknowable.

Anarchic even.

And that is why Shakespeare introduced the Fool to the play.

Fools were already famous for their wisdom, healing and truth-telling.

Even Elizabeth had her own Fool, Richard Tarleton…….

…….who, John Fuller tells us….

…..was master of his faculty. When Queen Elizabeth was serious, he could un-dumpish her at his pleasure. In a word, he told the Queen more of her faults than most of her chaplains, and cured her melancholy better than all of her physicians…

But Shakespeare had lived through an event that raised the Fool to the level of Christ himself…

When St. Swithin Wells was executed in 1591, with him on the scaffold was a twenty four year old Jesuit priest, called Edmund Jennings…….

– codename, Ironmonger.

He was celebrating a mass at Wells’s house when it was raided by Topcliffe and his thugs. Just like a priest in a Graham Greene novel, Jennings refused to let them in till the mass was completed.

Topcliffe demanded revenge. So, to make Jennings…

……a scoff to the people…..

…..the authorities at his trial…..

……vested him again, not with his priestly garments, but (almost as King Herod and Pilates soldiers did our Saviour) with a ridiculous fools’ coat, which they found in Monsignor Wells’s house, and they laughing told him, he was more fit in that attire to be presented to the Queen for a jester, then to a Nun for a Confessor…..

This image – of a Catholic martyr dressed as a Fool – haunted Shakespeare’s imagination.

When, in Sonnet 124, he talks about….

…..the fools of time

Which die for goodness, who have lived for crime…

….’the fools of time’ are the Catholic martyrs who have been executed…..

…..not because they are bad, but because they are good.

For them, being alive as Catholics in the reign of Elizabeth, is a crime in itself.

Jennings in his fool’s coat also had Biblical resonances for Shakespeare…

St. Paul, in his first letter to the Corinthians, writes…

For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness.

Hath God not made foolish the wisdom of the world?

St. Paul is pursuing the conundrum that, in the material world, what is thought foolish is, in fact, wise.

And what is thought wise is, in fact foolish.

And this is the conundrum that motors Shakespeare’s play…

Vicktor Frankl……

……the Jewish psycho-therapist who survived Auschwitz…..

……believed people divide basically into two groups….

….the decent and the indecent….

…..and that is certainly true of King Lear.

The indecent people…..

…….Goneril, Regan, Edmund, Cornwall and Oswald the servant….

…….start by destroying other peoples’ lives…..

……..but end up by destroying their own.

The ‘worldly wisdom’ of the indecent people has, in fact, proved foolish.

But, you might say, the decent people…. –

…….Cordelia, Kent, Edgar, the Fool, Albany, Gloucester and Lear……

……every single one of whom is called ‘fool’ at some point in the play…..

……also end up either dead or damaged.

So how can their foolishness be wisdom?

The answer is…….

…….they have found love.

Death comes to us all.

Love doesn’t.

And as Shakespeare, along with everyone else at the time…..

…..thought the world was so bad it must be coming to an end….

….life wasn’t that important.

Along with love come truth, loyalty and humour……

……all the qualities displayed, in the highest degree, by the character of the Fool himself…

As he says to Kent…

That sir which serves and seeks for gain,

And follows but for form,

Will pack when it begins to rain,

And leave thee in the storm.

But I will tarry; the Fool will stay,

And let the wise man fly:

The knave turns fool that runs away;

The Fool, no knave perdy.

All the decent characters learn to empathize with others…..

……as the Fool has to do to keep his job.

They also discover a paradox: to hold onto the truth, you must act a part…..

……something the Fool does every day of his life.

Kent has to act out the part of a rustic to protect the King…..

…….and Edgar has to act out the part of a madman to protect his father.

He makes him believe that his life has been saved by a miracle.

It’s a lie – but it gives Gloucester a reason to go on living.

And, as Frankl says, you could only survive in the camps if you found meaning in life.

And with that meaning comes the ability to endure…..

…….as Gloucester manages to do till his heart…..

….. bursts smilingly….

And as Lear, to everyone’s astonishment, also manages to do, to the very end.

He has gone through the greatest journey of all.

He is not a bad man, just a superficial, unthinking, sentimental one who has been flattered all his life and who has never properly known himself.

He has to lose everything to discover who he is.

He can only become himself when he finds out – in the storm – what it’s like to be somebody else…

Learns, in fact, the ultimate Christian lesson…

Another paradox of this play is that in a brutal, ruthless, Pagan world, the teachings of Christianity…

…..and its imagery……

…….rise up as naturally as the leaves to the trees….

The new Lear is born in a hovel among straw and swine…..

….descends into the hell of madness…

…. and rises again, from his purgatorial ‘wheel of fire’, to the heaven of Cordelia’s love.

And when Cordelia returns from France to save her father, she speaks the same words as the Christ-child in the Temple….

O dear father!

It is thy business that I go about…..

Lear learns to love – properly love – his glorious daughter.

As they are sent away to prison , the two achieve a bliss that is almost beyond this world….

Cordelia

We are not the first

Who, with best meaning, have incurr’d the worst.

For thee, oppressed king, am I cast down;

Myself could else out-frown false fortune’s frown.

Shall we not see these daughters and these sisters?

King Lear

No, no, no, no! Come, let’s away to prison:

We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage:

When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down,

And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live,

And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh

At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues

Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too,

Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out;

And take upon’s the mystery of things,

As if we were God’s spies: and we’ll wear out,

In a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones,

That ebb and flow by the moon.

Edmund

Take them away.

King Lear

Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia,

The gods themselves throw incense. Have I caught thee?

He that parts us shall bring a brand from heaven,

And fire us hence like foxes. Wipe thine eyes;

The good-years shall devour them, flesh and fell,

Ere they shall make us weep: we’ll see ’em starve

first. Come.

And so Lear finds completion in his daughter Cordelia……

……as I believe, Shakespeare found completion in his own daughter, Susanna.

From now on his plays brim over with fathers and daughters!!!

But, remember…..

Lear and Cordelia have only been able to achieve their supreme happiness because others have set out to destroy it.

Is this a law of the universe?

That, in response to a great evil, a great good will automatically arise?

Or is it the working of a God, wise enough to know he must leave his creatures to suffer so they might learn?

This play doesn’t give answers: it asks questions.

And one of them is the profoundest ever asked by any character, in any play, at any time – Lear’s question to the dead Cordelia….

And my poor fool is hanged. No, no, no life.

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life

And thou no breath at all?

For us, here, there can be no answer….

All we can do is accept what life has to throws at us…

And respond to it with as much truth as we can.

As Shakespeare has done by writing this play…

And as Edgar says at its end….

The weight of this sad time we must obey

Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say

The eldest hath borne most. We that are young..

Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

The End

To read the Postcript to these Posts, click: HERE.

To read about the ORIGINAL ENDING to King Lear, click: HERE

To read about the PLAY IN PERFORMANCE, click: HERE.