Experiments in Criticism

I revisited Stanley Cavell’s essay “The Avoidance of Love” today. I found a profound spiritual insight in its reading of King Lear.

Cavell argues that we can answer the play’s nagging questions with an easy solution. Why does Lear act as he does in Act 1? Or Cordelia? Or Gloucester in response to Edmund’s claims? Or Edgar in reaction to his father’s woes? Why does Cordelia die?

Cavell answers: to avoid “recognition, exposure, and self-revelation.” The tragedy is that these characters go out of their way to avoid knowing themselves. Most of all, these characters avoid love, which involves recognition and self-revelation.

Cavell wonders why critics have missed this obvious explanation. G. Wilson Knight, for instance, argues that love animates the entire play: “in the ravenous slaughter of the wood or ocean, love rules creation.” Cavell might agree, but he would say that Knight misses the point if he can’t see that characters keep trying to escape love’s dominion.  

The problem with critics, Cavell argues, is the problem in the play: “It is the difficulty of seeing the obvious.”

Cavell has just dismissed the Christian reading of the play because “King Lear is not illustrated theology.” Fair enough, but he strains to avoid the word “salvation” in his conclusion. “What we need is not rebirth, or salvation, but the courage, or the plain prudence, to see and to stop. To abdicate. But what do we need in order to do that? It would be salvation” (my emphasis). We both need and do not need salvation.

Romans 1 makes the same point.

For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.

People know God but don’t want to acknowledge Him as God. We know we need salvation, but we exchange the One who grants it for others who need it.

If King Lear is about avoiding love, it’s about avoiding the one who gives love. If Lear’s conclusions about divine justice and a providential future are skeptical, it is not because he can’t see.

King Lear is a play about what comes next. Will the next generation transform the work of the previous generation and bring greater glory to the kingdom? Or will the next generation squander its inheritance and lose everything the older generation gained?

The play’s final lines offer an answer.

The weight of this sad time we must obey;
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most: we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

Edgar and Albany rule a world in decline. Their lives will be shorter. Consequently, they will lack the experience necessary to gain wisdom, the hallmark of old age. Edgar is a substitute king, and Albany is his makeshift prophetic fool. Kent, the priest or guarder of boundaries, departs for new lands.

William Elton argues compellingly for King Lear’s ultimate skepticism. Elton contends that the structure of the play reinforces Lear’s theological ambivalence. “No future!” Lear despairs. His skepticism is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But we need not equate Lear’s view with Shakespeare’s.

The play dramatizes the connection between worldview and succession. Nothing will come from nihilism, Shakespeare warns. Speak again.

William G. Elton’s King Lear and the Gods (1966) exemplifies “history of ideas” scholarship. Most critics, Elton claims, read the play as sympathetic to Christianity. In contrast, Elton sees the play as a paganized version of a Christian play. Shakespeare adapted the Lear story from an earlier King Leir, emptied it of Christian allusions, and substituted pagan references that questioned divine providence.

I’ve only read half of it, but what follows is a covenantally-tinged summary.

TRANSCENDENCE: Elton documents two interpretations of providence that clashed with orthodox doctrine. First, skeptics claimed that the gods didn’t care what happened to people. Second, theologians insisted God’s ways were past finding out and incomprehensible to human reason.

HIERARCHY: Elton identifies four worldviews in the play. The first rejects Christianity. The second superstitiously believes in Fortune and Chance. The third holds pre-Christian beliefs which, though pagan, are virtuous. The fourth believes in the gods but maintains that they are cruel.

ETHICS: Elton sees Cordelia and Edgar as adherents of Prisca Theologia (“ancient theology”). In short, they are virtuous pagans. Cordelia demonstrates fidelity to the truth and Edgar to his feelings. Elton shows that Protestants debated how eternally efficacious these virtuous pagans’ good deeds were. Cordelia and Edgar are the play’s best candidates for Christianity, and Lear rejects their interpretations of the gods as kind and just.

SANCTIONS: Elton identifies Lear’s reaction to Cordelia’s death as consonant with skeptical responses to God’s providence. A good God wouldn’t let Cordelia die. Her death invalidates beneficent providence.

 SUCCESSION: Shakespeare makes the explicit Christian references in King Leir either more ambiguous or explicitly pagan. On the other hand, Shakespeare echoes the complex theology of Philip Sidney’s Arcadia.

1. Scene one is all about Edmund. First, he asserts his power over both Goneril and Regan. Second, he pledges wrath to Lear and Cordelia.
2. Gloucester appears for the final time in Scene two. He tells his son, “Grace go with you, sir.” Gloucester has found a measure of redemption, just like Lear.
3. Cordelia and Lear lose the battle. In captivity, Lear imagines more bliss for them. Cordelia wants a showdown with her sisters. She doesn’t get it. Her final words begin with a pregnant declaration (“For thee, oppressed king, I am cast down”) and end with an unanswered question.
4. Edgar appears to judge Edmund, the covenant breaker, but ends up condemning Gloucester. He defends his actions theologically. “The gods,” he tells Edmund, “are just and of our pleasant vices / Make instruments to plague us.” Oddly, he applies that dictum to his father. Because Gloucester committed adultery, the gods took his eyes by the son that infidelity occasioned. Why does Edgar go after his father instead of Edmund?
5. Edmund’s deceit is so thorough that he’s come up with an alibi for Cordelia’s death: she committed suicide out of grief.
6. Lear enters, and the play comes to a horrific end. First, Lear connects Cordelia and the Fool (“My poor fool is hanged”). Next, he utters the most nihilistic line of blank verse ever penned: “Never, never, never, never, never.” Finally, he dies with the hope that Cordelia lives.
7. In the Folio, Edgar offers the play’s final words. His despairs about the next generation: “we that are young / Shall never see so much, nor live so long.” He articulates a tragic view of the future. Lear and Gloucester governed a better world. The one Edgar and Albany control will get worse.

1. Act 4 transitions from wrath to grace. If the play ended with scene seven, it would be a comedy.
2. Gloucester recognizes his sins: “I stumbled when I saw.” He adds, “O dear son Edgar, The food of thy abused father’s wrath, / Might I live to see thee in my touch, / I’d say I had eyes again.” Though Gloucester’s condition is worse than Lear’s, his response to misfortune is far humbler.
3. Gloucester’s humility verges on despair. He believes in the gods but imagines they are sadistic: “They kill us for their sport.”
4. The following two scenes contain different beliefs about the gods. Albany asks for the gods to intervene, or else “Humanity must perforce prey on itself / Like monsters of the deep.” In contrast, Kent sees human behavior determined by fate: “It is the stars / The stars above us, govern our conditions.” Neither view matches Gloucester’s.
5. Cordelia sounds like Christ in scene four when she says, “O dear father, / It is thy business that I go about!” Unfortunately, Lear is not a god.
6. In two different scenes, Goneril and Regan spar for Edmund’s affections.  Unlike their contest for Lear’s inheritance, their battle for Edmund is a zero-sum contest. Only one can win.
7. Edgar manufactures a miracle for his father, then commands him to “Think that the clearest gods, who make them honors / Of men’s impossibilities, have preserved thee.” Edgar’s trial accesses grace through wrath: “Why I do trifle thus with his despair / Is done to cure it.”
8. Lear enters the scene and offers steely political insight and graphic misogynist rhetoric. He says, “Nature’s above art in that respect.” He means that authentic royalty is superior to artificial royalty. Nevertheless, Lear uses figurative language throughout his diatribes. Most famously, he says, “We cry that we are come / To this great stage of fools.”
9. Cordelia again gets linked with Christ when a gentleman says to Lear, “Thou hast a daughter / Who redeems nature from the general curse.”
10. Cordelia prays for grace in scene seven: “O you kind gods, / Cure this great breach in his abused nature.”Lear asks for grace: “Pray you now, forget and forgive.”

1. Shakespeare connects the unsettled kingdoms of Britain with the troubled natural world. Inside the court, political intrigue rains. Outside the castles, the heavens rain.
2. In scene two, King Lear contrasts his daughters with the heavens. He doesn’t blame the sky for pelting him with rain because it, unlike his daughters, had no obligation to him. Yet, Lear wonders if the elements are in league with his daughters. It’s hard to see the storm and not feel the power of “the wrathful skies.” Lear eventually connects the elements with judgment and wants the gods to rain down justice.
3. Shakespeare leaves it ambiguous what causes Lear’s madness. Is he upset because the daughters he gave his kingdom to have mistreated him? Or is he mad because he realizes that he wronged Cordelia? He says he is “a man / More sinned against than sinning.” Does he acknowledge his sin against Cordelia and estimate that what Goneril and Regan did to him is worse? Does he fail to see his sin?
4. These scenes hint that Lear can be redeemed. He tells the Fool in scene two, “I have one part in my heart / That’s sorry yet for thee.” When he sees Poor Tom in scene four, he remarks, “ I have ta’en / Too little care of this!” He regrets not caring for the poor but remains narcissistic. For instance, he assumes that evil daughters mistreated Poor Tom because his condition is so poor.
5. Act three gives equal time to the Gloucester plot. Edmund betrays his father while Edgar encounters Lear, and both men receive new fathers. Cornwall adopts Edmund because of his betrayal: “[Thou] shalt find a dear father in my love.” Edgar says of Lear, “He childed as I fathered.” We know that Lear is Edgar’s godfather, so there encounter in the storm hints at a parallel adoption.
6. Gloucester asks the gods to revenge his blinding: “I shall see / The winged vengeance overtake such children.” Shakespeare piles a great deal into those few words. Gloucester loses his eyes, so he can’t “see” anything. Gloucester misinterpreted his children and gets punished for it. I wonder whether or not he interprets his own misfortunate as “winged vengeance.”
7. Gloucester asks the gods to forgive his sins and protect Edgar. Lear’s parallel scene comes in Act 4.

1. In scene one, Edmund preys on his father’s and Edgar’s fears by appealing to religion and politics. He tells Gloucester that Edgar wants him dead, even though “the revenging gods / ‘Gainst parricides did all the thunder bend.” He tells Edgar that the Duke of Cornwall seeks his life and implies Edgar has taken the Duke of Albany’s side.
2. In that same scene, we discover that Lear is Edgar’s godfather and even named the child. Ironically, Gloucester comes to Regan for help. She’s more like Edmund, the treacherous child, than she is a forgiving parent.
3. In scene three, children represent their parents, subjects their rulers. When Regan mistreats Kent, she mistreats Lear. By supporting Kent, Cordelia supports Lear. Who you serve matters. Oswald serves his mistress, Goneril, provoking conflict with Kent, Lear’s servant. Regan demonstrates wrath, Cordelia grace.  
4. Regan openly shows disdain for Lear in scene 4. “Nature in you stands on the very verge / Of his confine,” she tells him. “You should be ruled and led.” Lear threatens her, telling her, “I gave you all.” Her response–“And in good time you gave it”–reveals her problem with Lear. She knows Lear loved Cordelia more. Lear gave land to Regan and Goneril not out of grace but because they flattered him. They “earned” their land. Now Lear expects grace from his daughters. All he finds is wrath.
5. Regan and Goneril tell their father he doesn’t “need” his retinue. He argues that a person’s “needs” exceed reason. Without grace, men are no better than animals. When grace is absent, wrath quickly follows. Lear accordingly threatens his daughters: “I will have such revenges on you both” that will include “The terrors of the earth.”
6. The sisters agree that Lear “must taste his folly.” They leave him to fend for himself as a storm approaches. They’re not punishing their father, they tell themselves. “The injuries” Lear brings upon himself “must be [his] schoolmaster.” Shakespeare gives the play’s first two acts a chiastic structure. In the play’s first scene, Lear banished Cordelia. Act 2 ends with Goneril and Regan exiling Lear. 

1. Lear’s advisors don’t know his plan for dividing his kingdom. The play begins with Kent and Gloucester wondering whether Albany or Cornwall is Lear’s favorite. Of course, the rest of the scene shows that the husbands don’t matter much. Lear is more worried about his daughters.
2. The opening scene compares earthly and heavenly inheritance. Goneril and Regan don’t love their father, but they get the kingdom. Cordelia loves her father and gets nothing. Yet, France realizes that Cordelia’s virtues merit love.
3. Edmund knows he can make his father anxious by implying that Edgar is impatient to receive his inheritance.
4. Scene three shows us that Lear’s daughters are already chafing against the rules he set in Scene one. “Idle old man,” Goneril remarks, “That still would manage those authorities / That he hath given away.” Their favor turns from grace to wrath.
5. Lear has servants looking out for him. Kent returns from banishment in disguise to help out his king. The fool tells Lear to his face that Lear is the fool, and this criticism anticipates Goneril’s rebuke of her father. The fool’s criticism is grace. Goneril’s criticism is wrath.
6. The first act exposes Lear’s lack of self-knowledge. Regan said in the first scene, “He hath ever but slenderly known himself.” “Who is it that can tell who I am?” Lear wonders in scene four.
7. Lear knows he mistreated Cordelia. “I did her wrong,” he tells the fool in scene five.
8. If Lear cannot find grace from his daughters, he must receive it from the gods. “Sweet heaven, keep me in temper; I would not be mad,” he cries in scene five. The problem is that Lear’s previous invocations of the gods have involved wrath. He spoke of Apollo and Hecate in scene one when he banished Cordelia. Who can show him grace?