King Lear—what the First Quarto calls the historie and the Folio calls the tragedie. Looking down at that pristine page, John feels a sudden pang of longing for his teaching copy. Its spine long broken, its pages yellowed and folded, it was exactly the sort of thing the clay-brained clotpole he hired to help him pack his office wanted to throw out. Idiot kid, he hadn’t conceived the treasure that book had been, each scene—and nearly every line—fortified with half a century’s worth of notes, some penciled in the careful hand of John’s earliest days as a teacher, others, much later, dashed off in ink, questions and observations and concordances, notes where the editor’s choices diverged from his own—the Quarto’s they cannot touch me for coining instead of the Folio’s they cannot touch me for crying, the Folio’s consumption in the sulfurous pit of hell instead of the Quarto’s consummation—his own extra glosses to help explain to his students the difference between a natural and an artificial fool, or describe the Elizabethan notion of fortune’s wheel, or the divine right of kings.
For a stinging moment, the thought of that lost book hurts him nearly past endurance. But Kent’s observation about the King’s affections awaits an answer, and John can hardly help but read Gloucester’s gossipy reply: It did always seem so to us; but now in the division of the kingdom, it appears not which of the Dukes he values most.
The last time he’d tried to read Shakespeare, some jester had played a joke on him, substituting a foul copy or a trick version for the true text of the play. Since then he’s been wary of getting cozened like that again. But now the lines in his lap seem blessedly clear. When plainspoken Kent tells Gloucester he cannot conceive him, and the weak old lecher Gloucester quips that his bastard son’s mother could, John chuckles at the joke even as he cringes for Edmund’s feelings and hopes he hasn't overheard his father’s crude boast.
Attend the lords of France and Burgundy, announces Lear as he and his retinue sweep into the scene. And already King Lear is entering his council room, already announcing, Mean time we shall express our darker purpose. Already a welcome thrill is arcing through John’s brain, so that instead of succumbing to his grim new insights about the limitations of language and the meagerness of theater, instead of being frustrated by how little scholarship and background knowledge he has left to bring to that opening scene, he is swept along by the story itself.
Which of you shall we say doth love us most the vain old king demands, and John watches in disgust as Goneril and Regan flatter and grovel, watches in fear as forthright Cordelia refuses to coddle the dragon even in his wrath. So young, my lord, and true.
Better thou Hadst not been born than not t’ have pleas’d me better. With its odd mix of domesticity and histrionics, King Lear has never been John’s favorite of the great tragedies. But he finishes the first scene grateful to have entered Lear’s world and left his own behind. As the words wrap around him and the plot pulls him on, it’s as if Lear’s troubles were a balm for all his own.
Thy dow’rless daughter, King, thrown to my chance, Is queen of us, of ours, and our fair France. This is the excellent foppery of the world Not so young, sir, to love a woman for singing, nor so old to dote on her for any thing In addition to his relief at the asylum he’s found inside the play, he finds himself amazed at the excruciating beauty of it. Line after line strikes him, so fresh and astonishing he wonders if he ever actually read King Lear before.
He finds so much that touches him, so much he yearns to share. His pang when Lear cries, Who is it that can tell me who I am? His spark of epiphany when the Fool replies, Lear’s shadow. His wince of recognition and regret when the Fool advises his royal master, Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise—so many moments John wishes he could teach or discuss with Sally or tell the world about.
But there are also things he does not understand, such as the extent of his own anguish when, in the midst of the Fool’s riddling about crabs and noses, Lear interrupts his prattle to lament, I did her wrong.
I did her wrong. Such a simple declaration. Four words, four syllables, two easy iambs—and yet that little sentence comes near to skewering him, such a painful puzzle he gladly lets his thoughts veer elsewhere.
Of course he’s never seen a perfect production of King Lear, though the Eyre performance at the National Theatre came close, with Ian Holm capturing the tenderness of the old tyrant, if not quite all his majesty. He’d seen the Peter Brook production, too, that time with Nancy in Stratford-upon-Avon. It had been hailed as a masterpiece, though Nancy was bored by its glacial pace, and John found it too brutal, too austere—impossible to believe a Lear so cold could ever have deserved the love that Cordelia, Kent, Edgar, Gloucester, and the Fool professed for him. Maybe Richard Burbage, the actor for whom Shakespeare wrote Lear’s role, managed to do the old king justice, though John had long agreed with all those other critics, from Lamb to Bloom, who claim that King Lear’s character is too vast for any stage, that only in the human imagination can his plight and personality have ample room.
The art of our necessities is strange, And can make vild things precious. Looking up from the page, John gazes dispassionately at the few new-fallen leaves spotting the darkening lawn while thunder cracks, and Lear’s storm drenches the heath. When he looks down again, the Fool is singing heigh-ho, the wind and the rain, and prophesying confusion. Then John is back inside Gloucester’s castle, watching in dread while Gloucester confides his loyalty to King Lear to his treacherous son, Edmund. And anon John is back in the storm as Kent points to the pitiful hovel and pleads, Good my lord, enter here.
When loyal Edgar, disguised as lunatic Poor Tom, bursts out of the hovel to writhe in the mud at King Lear’s feet, John stands in Lear’s stead, gazing down upon that poor, bare, forked animal and asking the question that drives the play, Is man no more than this? He feels those words shudder through him, the bleak summation of his entire life, his futile hopes, his failed quest, feels the cold downpour on his bare head, the chill drops fingering their way beneath his sodden cloak, the wind-driven rain blast his face like sand, feels the outrage of despair and the universe’s vast indifference, and then, a moment later, he feels a sweep of gratitude which can only be called love when Gloucester enters with his torch to guide them to a dry hovel hard by, urging, No words, no words, hush.
Hang him instantly, Regan is suggesting of Gloucester while her sister Goneril hisses, Pluck out his eyes, when some ignorant wench pokes her head into John’s room to announce that it is movie and popcorn time. But John growls and swats the air, and even before the interloper has loped on down the hall, he is back in Gloucester’s castle, listening in horror as Regan and Cornwall taunt their old host, watching aghast as Regan, the daughter Lear had so recently called kind and comfortable, curses Gloucester and plucks his white beard. When Cornwall sets his foot upon the first of Gloucester’s eyes, John gasps out loud. A second later he knows a thrill of relief to hear Cornwall’s servant cry, Hold your hand, my lord!
Despite the hope that quickens at the thought that Gloucester might still be spared, John reads on in helpless horror as kind and comfortable Regan slays that nameless peasant and wounded Cornwall pries out Gloucester’s other eye, reads on, appalled, as kind and comfortable Regan orders the newly-blinded Gloucester thrust out at gates to smell his way to Dover.
It is when Gloucester’s loyal son, Edgar, still disguised as a mad Bedlam beggar, claims, The lowest and most dejected thing of fortune Stands still in esperance, that John realizes he cannot remember whether Edgar is ever reunited with his father, cannot even recall if Gloucester lives or dies. Yanking his gaze from the page, he clutches the book in both bent fists and strains against the mean bonds of his mind, struggling to recall any hint or inkling that would help restore his memory of Gloucester’s fate. Or Lear’s fate, for that matter, or Edgar’s or Cordelia’s—for suddenly he realizes he cannot recall any aspect of the ending of the play.
He has studied Shakespeare’s work for the length of Shak
espeare’s lifetime, but he has forgotten how King Lear ends. Clinging to the book as if it alone can save him, he strives with all his power to recall the climax of the play. He suspects that things do not work out well—King Lear is a tragedy, after all—but strain as he might, he cannot recall what happens next. Desperately, he scans the room, seeking any refuge. But it seems he is on the deck of a tilting ship as it lifts and lists and plunges into dark water.
“Oh, gods,” he moans, burying his eyes and forehead in his cupped palms, grinding his thumbs into his temples. “Please,” he whispers, nearly whimpering, though whether he is pleading for himself and his tattered memory or for the fates of Lear and Gloucester, Edgar and Cordelia, he cannot say. He only knows that something huge is at stake, as if the outcome of everything that ever mattered rests upon the conclusion of that play. Suddenly, it seems that even more momentous than the fact that after fifty years he has forgotten how King Lear ends, is that—however it ends—that ending means everything.
Consumed by his need to follow wherever the play leads, he keeps reading, reads with deep foreboding and bated hope, and sometimes he is Gloucester, blood dripping from the empty sockets of his lost eyes as he shuffles toward the cliff’s edge in his mind. Sometimes he is Edgar, promising that the worst is yet to come as he leads his father toward that false abyss. And sometimes he is the King himself, railing against lechery, wiping the scent of mortality from his hand, counseling the ruined Gloucester to patience: When we are born, we cry that we are come To this great stage of fools.
He can’t remember how the story ends, but after fifty years of studying it, Elizabethan English is his native tongue. Not once does he have to pause to unravel the syntax of a line or consult the glosses for a word’s meaning, not once does he even feel the absence of his own marginal notes. Only the story is new, and he reads it like a smug bridegroom, terrified and in love, hoping for the best with his whole untutored heart. No longer critical, no longer mercenary, he reads with no more motive than his thirst to be immersed in the language, no more desire than his hunger to discover what happens next, no other wish but that the characters he cares about so deeply will win the ends that they deserve, no need but that the play will somehow help him to make sense of the folly and conundrum of his own precious life.
When Lear and Cordelia are finally reunited, John knows such an upwelling of gratitude it is as if all sorrows that ever he has felt have been redeemed. When Lear confesses to his daughter, I am a very foolish fond old man,
Fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less;
And to deal plainly,
I fear I am not in my perfect mind,
John wonders if he might drown in the pity and joy he feels. And when Lear relies on the prick of a pin and the wetness of Cordelia’s tears to assure himself he is neither dead nor dreaming, John is moved nearly to tears himself to think that pain and sorrow are the clues Lear uses to prove that he still lives.
But a few lines later, when Lear tells Cordelia, Pray you now forget, and forgive: I am old and foolish, John stops reading as if he, himself, has just been pricked awake.
Or mortally stabbed.
Forget, and forgive. He is outraged to find that lie lurking in King Lear, too. Forget, and forgive—not only in the romances but in fierce and seething Lear? Forget, and forgive, like some fatuous religious tract or foolish fairy tale. As if forgetting were a virtue, and forgiveness were more important than understanding.
Forget and forgive. He’d known it was there. Hadn’t he? Surely he had known that vapid sentiment tainted King Lear, too.
Had he forgotten?
Or perhaps he’d known but had not understood. Maybe he hadn’t recognized what was there beneath his very nose. Has his whole life been like that? he marvels and mourns. Has he been so busy studying that he missed the lie of everything?
The thought of a daughter floods him. Girl, infant, woman—his memories of her flicker like flames in wind. But though he cannot make her face resolve into a single image, he is suddenly stricken with both her being and her absence. He feels the lack of her like an ache in a lost limb. It seems that things have not ended well between them, although for all his life, he remembers not how or why.
But how or why is nothing to his urgent need to reach her, to find her and try to save her—now, before it is too late. “Run, run, O, run!” he groans, struggling to his feet. But wavering upright beside his chair, he is suddenly flummoxed by how to start. Beyond the window glass, another golden leaf glides down as if emergencies did not exist, as if life itself would last forever even as it drops away. Still clutched in panic, John scrutinizes the placid grass, straining to calculate all the arcane phone numbers and addresses he’d need to reach her.
It’s when he begins to consider how he might apologize or make amends for things he cannot recall that he sees how hopeless his situation is. He feels the prick and wetness of his failure, feels the awful inescapable emptiness of what is. “I did her wrong,” he says, his voice breaking out unfettered in the still green room.
I did her wrong. Though what wrong those words are meant to name he cannot tell, still saying them seems to offer him some small ease, as if a noose were loosened or a burden lightened, as if a tender hand were stroking his old brow.
Soothed and newly broken, he sinks back into his chair, back into Lear. And still the words leap up to meet him, still they pull him in and sweep him on, past Regan and Goneril’s machinations for Edmund’s twisted affections, past Edmund’s icy calculations about which sister he should take, to the very moment where Edmund arrives in post-battle triumph to order his officers to take the captives Lear and Cordelia away to prison.
But shaking off the officers, Lear ignores Gloucester’s evil son. Speaking only to Cordelia, he vows, 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 take upon ’s the mystery of things,’” John whispers, rapt and ravaged. Lifting his eyes from the page, he gazes out at the autumnal world while the rest of Lear’s line sounds in his mind like a celestial song, As if we were God’s spies
He has forgotten the ending of the play, but he has not forgotten how to hope. Despite his years of scholarly reading and critical training, despite his own rejaundiced heart, still esperance pops up unbidden, irrepressible as the few fool-hearty dandelions that dot the leaf-strewn turf beyond the windowpane. So on he reads, tugged along by hope as Edmund’s treachery is exposed and Edgar arrives to duel his heinous brother.
When the Gentleman enters with a bloody knife to announce, O, she’s dead! John’s first thought is that Cordelia has been slain, and he wonders how any father could endure such loss. A moment later, when he learns that the knife came from the heart of Goneril instead, he still dares hope that Cordelia and her father will be spared.
His waxing optimism that Edmund may do some good despite of his own nature matched with an ever-thickening dread when Edmund confesses his plan to have Cordelia hanged and lay the blame on her own despair that she foredid herself, John turns the page. But when Lear comes howling back from prison with Cordelia flopping like a rag doll in his arms, anguish blankets everything again.
O, you are men of stones! Lear accuses the stricken spectators when they fail to howl along with him. Bending over his daughter’s body, he mourns, She’s gone for ever! and, She’s dead as earth. The final scene of The Winter’s Tale flickers through John’s mind, the stone statue of Leontes’s long-dead wife awaking, the human woman descending from her pedestal to greet her daughter, forgive her husband, take up her mortal life once more. For a moment John hopes for a similar ending now, especially when the feather in Lear’s trembling hand seems to show that Cordelia lives. If it be so, It is a chance which does redeem all sorrows That ever I have felt.
But instead, all chances are extinguished and every sorrow confirmed. Ins
tead, Cordelia is gone forever, and the only crumb of comfort left anywhere is either the illusion created by the return of King Lear’s madness, or the promise of an afterlife that only Lear can glimpse when he cries, Look on her! Look her lips, Look there, look there!
But before Lear can say what it is he sees, his fierce old heart has stopped, and suddenly John is alone once more—an old man weeping over the heap of ink and paper in his bony lap as he whispers the play’s last lines along with Edgar.
“‘The weight of this sad time we must obey,
Speak what we feel, not what we have to say:
The oldest hath borne most; we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.’”
Then, nothing.
Nothing but the stillness of his green room and the I am of his still-beating heart. Nothing but the small stir of his next breath and the monotonous leaking of his scalding tears—such a meager trickle compared to that torrential waste and loss and woe.
But such excruciating beauty, even so. He’d forgotten how much beauty, if he’d ever really known, beauty to flay his soul, beauty to leave him open and emptied and strangely whole, older but not the oldest, wiser only in that he recognizes he can never be wise enough. And so he sits, gutted and stunned and trying to understand, until a brisk stout lass who claims her name is Matty comes to lead him off to dinner.
In the dining room, the rabble shovels pork chops as if Cordelia were living still. The fulsome scents affront him, but he strives to bear free and patient thoughts, suffers himself to be settled at a table. The food they set before him is carrion and hay, but he eats it anyway.
He wonders what Lear sees—or thinks he sees—in that moment before he dies, wonders if it’s an intimation of some true heaven or merely one last deception of the poor king’s broken mind. He wonders if a true insight can come from a delusion, wonders if anything can be called an epiphany if it does not outlive the moment of its conception. Then he wonders if true epiphanies occur in any other way.