Lear Is Near

“He is greater on his knees than on his throne.”

—    Marjorie Garber (on Lear at the end of the play)

I’m at it again — writing about Shakespeare as a non-Shakespearean scholar but as one who can’t get the Bard out of his mind for long.

For years after college, I claimed King Lear as my favorite Shakespeare play. I think, as a twentysomething, I was mostly attracted to the intensity of it all — the direct punishment of so many characters for their stunning displays of hubris, with the tragedy primarily being the collateral damage to those with purer hearts — especially Cordelia. But over time, I couldn’t really tell you much about the play. It just coalesced into a symbol of literary intensity — and perhaps a cautionary tale about the vicissitudes embedded in power.

So I reread it this ice-stormy winter to see how it all held up in the mind. What it sparked. How I felt about the great multi-generational mangle of the human spirit.

Perhaps the most startling part of rereading Lear is the realization that it speaks so clearly and directly to the times we live in now. I thought this back in college, too. And I now imagine that most readers of Lear have had this thought about the times in which they read the play. A play written in the early 17th century about a 7th-century BCE king speaks of both those times as well as the times in which the play is performed or read. I suppose the startling  part is to realize how humanity has failed to advance its collective emotional intelligence over the centuries. 

In Lear, there are numerous themes at play — madness, blindness, fools and folly, the existential sense of being and nothingness. But it’s hard to ignore the plays commentary on power, its necessity to the nation, and its human pitfalls. When King Lear tries to divide what probably shouldn’t be divided (the British kingdom) a hell of a storm — real and metaphoric — rises and rages on to the play’s broken denouement. 

At the start of play, the aging Lear thinks he’s doing a decent fatherly thing by gifting thick slices of his kingdom to his daughters and their chosen spouses. The arrogance in his thinking, what he is blind to, is that (1) it’s not really what kings do and (2) it’s not wise to base the details of such a sketchy decision on his daughter’s forced proclamations of love for their old man. In this move, Lear seems simply to be seeking flattery, looking for public proclamations of his greatness from his daughters so he can retire from the exhausting business of running this pre-Christian state. One wonders: Does he really expect the truth from all three?  

It’s easy to see from a distance (as the audience) how shortsighted and foolish Lear’s plan is. It’s not all that surprising that Regan and Goneril play along expertly, speak profusely of their love for their father, with the sole purpose of securing what they imagine is in their best interest. What’s surprising — and of course, what makes this a play worthy of centuries of readers — is that one daughter, the young Cordelia, refuses to flatter, believing that in a true father-daughter relationship such flattery has no place. In essence, her love for her father is far more real and deep than that of her sisters’. But by not playing along, she ignites Lear’s rather surprising rage and sparks his power to be a punitive jerk. 

Given that I’ve also watched the Succession series on TV recently, I can’t help but make a comparison between the show and the play, as others have no doubt done — and to think more on what the two tragedies tell us about human nature. In Succession, the three children of Logan Roy and his second wife are, like Regan and Goneril (with perhaps a smidge of true love in their somewhere), playing along in the Game of Succession (for three painful seasons, to date). The game is about flattery and pretense, with the hope of winning their father’s favor as the chosen beneficiary of his immense media empire. It’s so painful to watch. With each season, the three children, frozen in the worst of the middle-school mindset, seem only to succeed in digging themselves into deeper holes of injury and servitude. As one critic noted, they always lose, even when they think they are winning. So the three children slip into lives of sycophancy as well as a kind of fear and loathing for themselves and everyone around them. They are all broken, debased, morally empty. And, yet, they push on as if there is still something to gain. There isn’t. 

By the third season, all I could think was: Why don’t they just walk away? 

Though I was also thinking I don’t care anymore what happens to any of them. There’s no Cordelia in this sordid crowd.

Of course, I’m also thinking (though I’m trying to train myself not to) about a current real-life version of this tale  — the one in which so many in the political, corporate, and media chambers of America are currently climbing all over themselves like figures in a Hieronymus Bosch hellscape, eagerly selling their humanity and turning nastier by the day in an effort to appear worthy to one former American power figure. To what end? one wants to ask them. What can you possibly expect to gain? And what possible benefit is there for the nation?

In Lear, in Succession, and in American politics today, too many of the players somehow believe that sycophantic behavior will lead to great personal reward. But it can’t. It won’t. The central tragedy in Lear is that the false hope of power blinds us to what matters most. Only when the characters are broken by their own hubris do they begin to see this world more clearly. As critic Marjorie Garber writes about Lear near the end of the play, “He is greater on his knees than on his throne.”

I find myself staring out the window now, wondering why? Why can’t we see where our worst impulses lead? And what is it in human nature that makes such turns toward deception, manipulation, lies, and outright evil so inevitable — generation after generation? Why can’t we get to the late-play wisdom of Lear and Gloucester without repeating all their mistakes first?

Lear — unlike Logan Roy and, to date, the former American power figure in question— eventually sees the folly of his actions. We don’t really know what kind of king he had been. But there are glimpses of his better self that emerge as he slides from king into a powerless everyman. Though the play is set in a pre-Christian era, it carries with it plenty of Christian symbolism about the centrality of love and care and generosity and justice. There’s the obvious allusion to the Psalms — that one should be led by the heart, not bodily desire.

In Lear, three characters — Lear, Gloucester, and (to my surprise, really) Edmund — make the turn in the end toward the Christian spirit — not the kind we see playing out falsely in the American political arena these days, but the blessed-are-the-poor version, the one we’ve been encouraged to see in Christ and seek in ourselves. But, alas, in the play, it all comes too late.

 And speaking of too late: I can’t help but connect the storms in Lear to the awful climate-change-driven storms we’re seeing now — tornadoes, fires, hurricanes, blizzards — taking out or burying whole towns and villages, tearing away the shoreline. Three decades ago, we’d have been shocked by such storms. Now we seem to accept them as inevitable, just another ruined Tuesday. We may feel terrible for those who suffer directly, but we’ve yet to take the collective action to reduce global warming. 

It’s as if we’ve accepted a future date with destruction. 

Lear is here, still — not yet ready to accept the damage done by the cocktail of hubris and power.

What I had forgotten about Lear in the decades between readings is the essential role of the Fool  — including Edgar and Kent playing fool-like characters in their efforts to save Gloucester and Lear. As Marjorie Garber points out, these three truth-tellers are essential to Lear and Gloucester’s transformation in the end. Because they are given royal permission to challenge royal power and decrees, they serve as a check on the worst human impulses and aim to instill essential wisdom through a kind of charming Socratic word-play. As I closed my Riverside edition of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets once more, I found myself thinking, we need more such fools now — the ones with truly generous aims and open hearts, the ones who can help us all turn from the path of tragedy.

I’m not sure Lear remains my favorite Shakespeare play. I’ve become quite partial to The Tempest in recent years. But, once again, I impressed with how it speaks to us about civilization and its discontents, about the complexities in the human condition, about family love and drama, about the fragility of politics — and about what awaits each generation that can’t act on its better angels. In the end of Lear, there are bodies scattered all over the place. All we are left with is Edgar and Kent, who survive with their common-good values intact. We can only hope they — and their modern like — can build the world back better. 

Side Note

The Art of the Put Down

There are numerous, oft-quoted passages in Lear. But one of my favorite (and less often quoted) is when the Earl of Kent, banished by Lear and returning in the disguise of Caius, verbally takes down Oswald, a steward to Goneril:

“A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy worsted-stocking knave; a lily-liver’d, action-taking, whoreson, glass-gazing, superserviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar, and the son and heir of a mungril bitch; one whom I will beat into [clamorous] whining, if thou deni’st the least syllable of thy addition.”

Remeasuring "Measure for Measure"

“Blue Shakespeare,” by Molly Brosnan (1990, at age 6)

“Oh, it is excellent 

To have a giant’s strength

But it is tyrannous 

To use it like a giant.”

— Isabelle, Act II, scene 2

In Shakespeare After All, Marjorie Gerber writes that Measure for Measure “has always been controversial, exciting a great deal of critical and directorial interest, and puzzlement.” 

I align with those who find puzzlement.

I recently read Measure for Measure because I had listened in on a webinar by an African-American English professor who specializes in teaching Shakespeare. As way of background, he noted that he was not particularly enamored of Shakespeare in college until “forced to read Measure for Measure.” In particular, he said, he found something oddly attractive about the character of Vincenzio — the problematic, oddly autocratic, and perhaps delusional Duke of Vienna. I think the professor said he was fascinated by the Duke’s role in shaping much of the action in the play and partaking in just about every scene either as himself or in the disguise of a rather inept and spiritually compromised friar. All in all, the professor said, Measure for Measure made it clear that Shakespeare was a kind of revolutionary.

Revolutionary?

This was enough to get me to pull out my 1975 edition of the Riverside Shakespeare and read Measure for Measure for the first time. And I have to say, I found it a head-scratcher. It struck me as a fairly annoying and more problematic play than the other Shakespeare plays I’ve read. I’m not sure where the revolutionary is shining through here. If I hadn’t known it was Shakespeare’s, I might  have dismissed it as a minor play that doesn’t deserve a long shelf life. 

On the other hand, it also fascinated me. Some wonderful turns of phrase aside, why exactly did Shakespeare write this one? What’s up with the off-kilter plot? Why this gathering of flawed and seeming unredeemable characters?

Vincenzio, the Duke of Vienna, whom most critics agree is a conundrum of a character, reminds me of so many men of power in my lifetime. They think highly of themselves as they go about making a mess of things without seeming to notice or care. They are not particularly smart or wise. They just happens to have power. And with that power, they have a predictable tendency to damage other people’s lives, then shrug it all off. They also embrace their own variation on the divine right of kings.

We don’t know anything about the Duke’s life and history. We only know that he’s the Duke and oversees the life and law (“the terms for common justice”) in Vienna. What we do know, mostly by his own admission, that he hasn’t done a good job applying the law consistently — seemingly at a loss for knowing when to be merciful and when to be the enforcer. At the start of the play, this future great city is semi-lawless. Or so we’re led to belief. However, the Duke, while admitting the point, takes no personal responsibility for the state of affairs. Rather, he invokes the vague, royal “we” in referring to the mess — as if there are others who are more responsible than he. In what seems like a whimsical act, he decides to deputize another highly flawed and inept character, Lord Angelo, to run things while the Duke pretends to head out of town on some kind of business. 

The very start of the play reveals the tragic nature of all to follow. The Duke asks the supposedly wise Escalus if he agrees with the Duke’s decision to deputize Angelo. Was it wise to have “lent him our terror, dress’d him with our love,/ and given him deputation of our own pow’r”?

In time, we’ll learn that Angelo, despite the root of his name, is not a good choice for this work, and Escalus knows this. Still, perhaps playing the cowardly sycophant, he praises Angelo to the roof.

For his part, Angelo, either wanting to please the Duke or thrilled to have momentary power, agrees to the temporary promotion. But then he immediately causes a stir by being, essentially, a draconian stickler for the law. We’re led to believe the people of Vienna are out of control, that law and order needs to be restored. Fine. But in response, what does Angelo focus on? He decides to sentence a young man, Claudio, to death for… getting his fiancé pregnant. 

Claudio’s sister, Isabella, who is a novice to a sisterhood of nuns, gets word that her brother will be put to death for his actions. Given the extremity of the sentence, she rushes in to plead with Angelo for her brother’s life. While she makes a compelling, logical argument, Angelo holds the line. Says the law is the law and there’s nothing he can do about it. All of civilization will fall apart, Angelo implies, if Claudio is forgiven. No mercy is the best policy. And so on. And he does this with a strange kind of calm and self-assurance. 

But in the process of the conversation, Angelo happens to notice that Isabella is kind of hot and he suddenly feels a growing sexual attraction. So, of course, he offers to spare Claudio’s life if Isabella will sleep with him. He doesn’t really plan to spare Claudio’s life. He’s just saying what he thinks he needs to say it to get Isabella into bed. Not surprisingly, Isabella is incensed by the proposal, says no firmly, then says she’ll let folks know what kind of cad Angelo is. But in disturbingly modern #metoo moment, Angelo laughs off her threat — pointing out that no one will believe her over him. 

OK, so far Measure for Measure seems like a rather straightforward morality play crowded with broken characters who bring on their own troubles. As a “comedy,” it still seems like it may be headed toward an all’s well that ends well kind of resolution. Not funny. Just not deadly. We imagine that Angelo will get his comeuppance, Claudio will be pardoned, Isabella can get back to her nunnery, and the Duke can take some kind of lesson about law and mercy and choosing a better deputy. Right? 

Well, not exactly.

Instead, the Duke steps in disguised as an inept friar who manages to annoy folks with his confused sense of holiness and strange logic about life and death. He tries to convince Claudio that he should, in fact, die. He also tries to convince Isabella that Claudio should die. When that doesn’t work, he steps in to plot a way for Claudio not to die. Why? It’s not clear. But it seems he does so because he likes to meddle in the lives of everyone around him. While he shares his plan with Isabella, he later pretends that Claudio could not be saved. 

As for Isabella’s troubles with Angelo, the Duke creates another strange subplot, encouraging Isabella to tell Angelo that she will, in fact, sleep with him, but that Isabella should then convince another women, Mariana, to pretend she is Isabella and sleep with Angelo. Why? Because Mariana was once engaged to Angelo, until her dowry was lost at sea and Angelo quickly dumped her. The Duke sees this deception as a way to solve Isabella’s problem and a way to trick Angelo into marrying the women he had agreed to marry or be charged with the same crime for which he sentenced Claudio to death. 

Preposterous? Yes. But let’s pretend it’s not. Let’s say Mariana, having been dumped once by Angelo, would agree to the plot because she still loves this low-life lunk for whatever reason. But how could the Duke know Mariana was still in love with Angelo? And why would Isabella encourage another women — especially one coldly scorned — to sleep with the guy? Is she really willing to put Mariana through this, not knowing how Mariana feels or what the outcome of the ruse will be? Would she really want any woman to have sex with Angelo, given his motives and character?

I doubt it.  But, this is a comedy, so we’re really not supposed to worry about outcomes. Right?

Mariana does sleep with Angelo. Afterward, the Duke reveals this trick to Angelo. Angelo then has to marry Mariana. And afterward they live, what, happily ever after? 

Meanwhile, Claudio is not put to death, though the Duke doesn’t reveal this fact until the final scene, when after revealing himself as the wise Wizard of Oz, he spouts off like some pompous jerk about his own ruse — assuming that everyone will admire him for saving the day. But he doesn’t really save the day. No one is better off than before. Angelo has been used and is now embarrassed, as he should be, for his personal failures. Claudio is alive and one imagines he and his fiancé have a chance of a life together, though we don’t really know if Claudio is going to man-up or if his fiancé really wants to get married now.  We only know that he would not likely have been in this life-or-death situation if the Duke had not appointed Angelo as the arbiter of the law. Meanwhile, the Duke forces another character, Lucio, to marry a prostitute with whom Lucio has had a child. How the Duke knows that the prostitute had a child by Lucio is not clear. What is clear is that he finds Lucio completely annoying for the way Lucio has criticized the Duke to the Duke in disguise. In other words, payback. 

Then comes the weirdest part of the entire play: the Duke, seemingly out of nowhere, proposes marriage to Isabella. And the way he proposes makes it clear that he sees himself as is being a generous man, and that he expects she’ll be delighted to be married to a deceitful Duke who encouraged her brother to accept death and otherwise manipulated everyone for reasons that are not at all clear. At the start of the play, Isabella is headed for nunhood. Nothing in the action of the play would suggest that she wouldn’t want to return to the convent now that her brother is safe. And, in fact, she doesn’t say yes to the Duke. I can’t tell if we are supposed to assume that she’d swoon at his proposal. I hope not. By any measure, the Duke is a clueless, despicable, self-absorbed, entitled fencepost with power.

What am I missing here? 

I get that, in Measure for Measure, we’re faced with a tangle of human folly. But I don’t get the sense that any character has learned any kind of lesson about life. They’ve just made a mess of things and are left to make another mess when they’re ready to start up again.

But perhaps that’s the point. I finished reading this play just before the 2020 U.S. presidential election was called for Joe Biden. Like so many Americans who do not fall for the fear-and-loathing spell caste by Donald Trump, I’m feeling completely exhausted. And I wonder if there’s any chance in my lifetime that humanity, collectively, will find its way to any form of enlightened living — or if we’ll just keep resetting the spin cycle until we’ve worn out our welcome on Earth.

Perhaps Shakespeare was feeling the same kind of exhaustion with English politics, the problems with the legal system, and, of course, the mess that supposedly pious Christian leaders can cause (over and over).  If so, the play is kind of brilliant for exposing three areas of society that remain problematic to this day.

Maybe if I read Measure for Measure during a year when I felt more optimistic about humanity, I’d find those moments in the play where I could actually laugh. And when I couldn’t laugh, I could at least shake my head, be glad that we’re now listening to our better angels, and be thankful for the progress we’re making. But I just can’t. Not yet. 

After Biden’s victory on Saturday, November 7, 2020, Dave Chappelle hosted Saturday Night Live. Although it got plenty of laughs, Chappelle’s monologue was not particularly funny. How could it be? When he accepted the hosting role for this episode, he didn’t know the outcome of the election. He might have had to repeat his monologue from four years ago when he hosted after Trump’s 2016 victory. But this time, he had the afternoon to rework his commentary in light of Biden and Harris’s victory. It was a remarkable monologue. Chappelle had to walk that line of speaking very painful truth to power — to all the folks who voted for Trump — while infusing it with humor and hope. I found it quite moving. And I also found myself thinking of Measure for Measure afterward. Chappelle led with love and hope and kindness and intelligence. It’s what we want and need from good leaders, good speakers, and good comedians. 

But in Measure for Measure, we don’t have anyone with any kind of wisdom. Escalus tries, but his form of wisdom seems to fall on deaf ears. What we have is a Duke who believes wholeheartedly in the Divine Right of Kings (and Dukes) — always thinking highly of himself and his highly flawed decision making. We have Lord Angelo who fits the same basic profile, except without as much power or cunning. So… even as the play sets out to measure the question of law and justice, human desire and religious beliefs, it can’t really go anywhere with it. Is this Shakespeare’s point? Was he, like Chappelle, using the stage to stick it to the leaders of his time under the guise of comedy? 

Mostly, I’m sitting here, looking at the last of the leaves fall off the fall trees, wrestling with the Measure for Measure and wondering if there’s any chance will ever escape the long and winding Dark Ages.