Thank you for coming. Today's lecture is on King Lear. So King Lear has its first recorded performance at court on Boxing Day 69 six and Stephen's Day 16 06. As we go through the lecture, you'll be able to judge for yourself how suitable it is for festive. Entertainment is published as a quarto in 60 No.8 and in a substantially different version in the Folio in sixteen twenty three. Part of what I'm going to be talking about today is some locations of difference between those two early texts.
But the question I'm structuring at the lecture around today is just how sad is King Lear? Just how sad is this play? So as usual, we'll start with a brief synopsis. The play is the story of an aged king of ancient Britain who decides to abdicate and who sets his daughters a rhetorical contest to see which of them loves him most. Inevitably, of course, he picks the bad ones to flatter the flattering ones, the insincere ones.
His elder two daughters, Reagan and Goneril, and banishes his loyal younger daughter because her death declaration of love is brusque and unwelcome. She leaves for France with her new husband, the king of France. The older daughters turn against their father, his cast off into a storm accompanied by his fool. And he becomes increasingly mad when Cordelia returns with French armies to reinstate her father.
They are reunited, but the battle turns against them, and she is captured and at the end killed, whereupon her father also dies. And this story of filial ingratitude is interwoven with a parallel story in which Edmund, the bastard son of Gloucester, attempts to discredit his half brother Edgar and the suffering caused to their father at the end of Gloucester. He is blinded, quite literally, by Goneril and her husband, Cornwell.
Edgar disguises himself as Tom of Bedlam to accompany his father and in the end, Edmund Goneril, Reagan, Lear, Cordelia, Gloster and apparently the Fool are all dead. So I'm conscious that, as always, this question around which I am working is an inadequate one, asking just how sad is King Lear teeters or perhaps tumbles into the banal. But Terry Egerton's observation on tragedy. Here is a useful one in his book, Sweet Violence. The title of the book comes from Sydney's Defence of Poetry.
Eagleton, in an introductory chapter called A Theory in Ruins, surveys the great critical and philosophical history of attempts to define tragedy. Concluding that the only shared, robust definition of tragedy is very sad and sometimes very, very sad. So the critical history of King Lear, I think, circles around this idea and has often been desperate to excavate something positive or optimistic from Shakespeare's play the first half of the lecture.
I'm going to try and talk about how the critical history approaches this question and tries to rework the play in order to find something positive or optimistic in it. The critical history of the play that I'm going to outline goes broadly in three movements. One, Shakespeare's play is just too cruel to Shakespeare's play is actually quite hopeful at the end. Three. No, it really is cruel. And so is life. So that's the movement of kind of critical history that I'm going to try and amplify.
Now. The earliest responses to King Lear are in the 17th century. As you know, the restoration period sees a number of Shakespeare's plays restored to the stage, all tidied up to suit the aesthetic and political tastes of the new age. And a version of King Lear is exemplary here as an example of restoration rewriting version is by name taped written in 16 81 taped rewrites.
The play. Most notoriously, he rewrite Shakespeare's ending, leaving both Lear and Gloucester alive and the marriage of Cordelia and Edgar as the final culmination of the parallel plots which are implicit in Shakespeare's plays. So Shakespeare has Cordelia and Edgar as parallel figures named tape. Kind of takes up to his logical conclusion by having them join together at the end.
Lear's invitation at the end of Tate's play is to pass our short reserves of time in calm reflections on our fortunes past cheered with relation of the prosperous reign of this celestial pair, the pair being Cordelia and Edgar. When we come at the end of the lecture to think about the ending of Shakespeare's play, we might bear in mind how very, very different types is takes. Revision is partly a question of aesthetics, but it's also partly about politics.
The theme of restoration the king being reinstated is clearly a big, late 17th century theme. It's easy to see why, but takes rewriting is also a response to a play that is too horrible and too comfortless to be enjoyable. The perennial question, why does tragedy give pleasure? The question that since Aristotle has disturbing suggestions of perversity in our enjoyment of misery and becomes even more pressing in relation to King Lear,
Tate's answer implicitly is that tragedy does not give pleasure. What gives pleasure is a kind of tragicomedy, which is what he rewrites he. We cannot enjoy the play's ending. His revision indicates, and therefore we need to have it altered in order to make it more palatable. And I think we can think of Tate's play as a form of criticism, not least because it's a very explicit example of something that all literary criticism does.
To some extent or another, it rewrites its object. Criticism is an act of rewriting justice. Revision or adaptation is here in this case. Now, Tate's view of an unbearable ending to Shakespeare's play has its most famous early critical counterpart in Samuel Johnson. In his general introduction to his edition of Shakespeare, published in 1765, Johnson is famously outraged by the ending of King Lear. Shakespeare, he says, has suffered the virtue of Cordelia to perish in a just cause.
Contrary to the natural ideas of justice, to the hope of the reader and what is yet more strange to the faith of the Chronicles. And Johnson, therefore endorses name types adaptation instead. So it's one of very few critics to think that tape is better than Shakespeare. This is Johnson, a play in which the wicked prosper and the virtuous miscarry may doubtless be good because it is a just representation of the common events of human life.
But since all reasonable beings naturally love justice, I cannot easily persuaded that the observation of justice makes a play worse, or that if other excellences are equal, the audience will not always rise better pleased from the final triumph of persecuted virtue. So Johnson says, you know what gives us pleasure is the triumph of persecuted virtue in the present case, says Johnson. The public has decided Cordelia, from the time of Tate, has always retired with victory and Felicity.
And if my sunset sensations could add anything to the general suffrage, I might relate that I was many years so shocked many years ago, sorry, so shocked by Cordelia's death that I know not whether I ever endure to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them. As an editor. So I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia's death that I do not know whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play that I undertook to revise them as an editor.
So Johnson locates his objection to Lear in the figure of the figure of Cordelia, who he imagines to be an entirely innocent victim of an unjust, tragic plot. And he argues that Shakespeare has overstepped the boundaries of something, perhaps audience expectation, perhaps taste, perhaps natural justice. And further, he argues that Tate has reinstated these boundaries. So Tate and Johnson, I'm having as representative of a group of early readers.
There are more of them than these two famous examples who subscribe to the idea that Shakespeare's play is too cruel, it's too difficult, it's too bleak, it's too sad, and therefore it needs amelioration. So the next stage is to outline a shift in that perception. And it's a shift which has a good deal to do with changing attitudes towards suffering in the romantic period.
A new valorisation of suffering, we might think, in the 18th, mid, 18th century, and that involves a more positive view of King Lear. Let's take one of the romantic critics, the German writer Schlegel. And these romantic critics are all taken from Jonathan Bates Anthology of Romantics on Shakespeare, really highly recommended book.
Schlegel describes the trajectory of King Lear as a fall from the highest elevation into the deepest abyss of misery, where humanity is stripped of all external and internal advantages and given up a prey to naked helplessness. It's the scale of this decline for Schlegel, which is something terrible, terrible in the sense of awful, sublime and therefore beautiful by interspersing.
The story of Gloster and his sons with Lear and his daughters, Schlegel says the picture becomes gigantic and fills us with such alarm as we should entertain the idea that the heavenly bodies might one day fall from their appointed orbits. So Schlegel allows that the play is miserable, sad. And does that quotation suggests that it is even potentially apocalyptic? He partly puts this down to the pre-Christian world in which the play is set.
So are arguments about why Lear is so miserable sometimes rest on the idea that, of course, it was in that miserable time before Jesus rescued sinful mankind. And that could bring pre-Christian world of ancient Britain. You might recognise if you've seen Lawrence Olivier's film version, which has the opening division of the Kingdoms and made a kind of Styrofoam Stonehenge. It may echo the critic G.K. Hunter's rather more subtle description of the play as a Stonehenge of the mind.
Stonehenge of the mind. So Schlegel Legal's explanation of how we understand the play's misery is partly its pre-Christian context and partly that the play shows us that belief in Providence requires a wider range than the dark pilgrimage on Earth to be established in its whole extent, a wider range than the dark pilgrimage on Earth to be established in its whole extent.
So the sense of scale and the sense of the play having an awesome scale, which has a terrible beauty, is a keynote of romantic reinventions of King Lear. That's the way to understand the play rather than being sad. It is big. It's it's sublime. Coleridge returns to this point in his commentary on the play, which characterises Ragle, Reagan, Goneril and Edmund in a context which it once ties into contemporary politics and to the nature worship we associate with romanticism.
He this is Coleridge now. Shakespeare had read nature to hatefully, not to know that courage, intellect and strength of character are the most impressive forms of power and that power in itself, without reference to any moral and an inevitable admiration and complacency, pertains whether it be displayed in the conquest of a Bonaparte or a Tamburlaine, or in the foam and thunder of a cataract. So Coleridge, his idea is a completely amoral one, kind of Nietzsche and one in the way.
It's about being in love with power. Power itself. Power. Power always is attractive no matter what. It's what its end. An analogy with the forces of nature also animates Haslet commentary on the play. This is Haslet. The mind of Lear is like a tall ship driven about by the winds, buffeted by the furious waves. But it still rides above the storm, having its anchor fixed in the bottom of the sea.
Or it is like the sharp rock at circled by the Eddine whirlpool that foams and beeps against it, or like the solid promontory pushed from its basis by the force of an earthquake. So those or Claus's different sort of big scale natural events piled in the haslet is trying to think about real world analogies for what he sees as the scope and force of King Lear. So natural forces are key to the scale and effect of King Lear in these very quintessentially romantic appreciations we might see.
As you can actually see in romantic rehabilitation of Shakespeare, more generally, a kind of microcosm of romantic aesthetic theories. Is that something you're interested in? And it's really worth, if I understand what keeps or Shelley or Wordsworth or Coleridge or somebody thinks about their own poetry that they're writing about Shakespeare in relation to Shakespeare is often a really clear way to see that.
So for the Romantics, then, it's the monumental and awesome scale of nature and of King Lear that cannot be constrained by bourgeois social notions of morality or justice. It's an idea which you probably recognise as being really the idea of the sublime. That's why the romantics love the Alps and love, you know, all those extreme kind of extreme nature. So it's a skit from this to an idea that King Lear could actually endorse some large version of an ultimately ordered universe.
That's the skip that romanticism kind of struggles with about its depiction of nature. Is nature the prime mover or is the prime mover behind nature? It is a skip to the idea that the play actually endorses some larger version of an ultimately ordered universe, where critics argue that Lear shows us the workings of a Christian world view. And this is it for this hour argument I'm going to think about too early 20th century critics.
Bradley and G. Wilson Knight. Bradley's essay on King Lear is part of his monumental and influential book, Shakespearean Tragedy Lectures, which were delivered during his time as professor of poetry in Oxford at the beginning of the 20th century and published in 1984. Bradley argues that the catastrophe, the ending of King Lear is unlike those of the other mature tragedies because it does not seem at all inevitable. It is not even satisfactorily motived.
In fact, it seems expressly designed, he says, to fall suddenly like a bolt from a sky cleared by the vanished storm. So he's still got that kind of nature, unpredictable nature idea there. A bolt from the fence, from a sky cleared by the vanished storm. Bradley argues that we all want Lear to settle down comfortably. He says to enjoy peace and happiness by Cordelia's fireside. But that is denied him.
And Bradley argues it's denied him because of the play's particular depiction of a wild and monstrous world and its interrogation of what makes that world so wild and so monstrous. Bradley notices that references to religion or irreligion and to beliefs in general are more frequent in King Lear than in any other play. And also discusses the way in which the play forces on its characters. The question, what rules the world? What rules the world?
So it's a classic question of agency. What makes things happen in King Lear? Something about that that I was talking about in relation to Macbeth in the lecture on that play. The plane's final result. Bradley argues, is one in which pity and terror. So we see those to be Aristotelian elements of catharsis and an Aristotelian framework is really important to Bradley.
One in which pity and terror carried perhaps to the extreme limits of art are so blended with a sense of law and beauty that we feel at last, not depression and much less despair, but a consciousness of greatness in pain and of solemnity in the mystery. We cannot fathom consciousness of greatness, in pain and of a solemnity and the mystery.
We cannot fathom. So in a reading of the play, which has become almost commonplace and therefore critically rather unexamined, Bradley argues that kingly is not fundamentally sad because it depicts the transformative powers of torment. There is nothing more noble, says Bradley, nothing more noble and beautiful in literature than Shakespeare's exposition of the effect of suffering in reviving the greatness and eliciting the sweetness of Lear's nature.
Should we not be as at least as near the truth if we called this poem? Brett Bradlees inherited a kind of romantic suspicion of the play as performance. He uses the word poem as a mark of high praise. Should we not be at least as near the truth if we called this poem the redemption of King Lear and declared that the business of the gods with him was neither to torment him nor to teach him a noble anger, but to lead him to attain through apparently hopeless failure the very end and aim of life.
So this idea that the play should be called the redemption of King Lear, rather, it's a rather hard one and short lived redemption, one might think, but to lead him to attain through apparently a hopeless failure at the very end and aim of life. Not sure whether a Bradley means that Palm on end has both termination and purpose. So that's a view of Lear, which owes much to the parallel with the Old Testament book of Jobe.
If you don't know that story in the Book of Jobe, God tests his faithful servant Joe by taking everything he has from him his family, his wealth, his camels. He sends him boils and casts him into objection despite the discouragement of his friends. The original Jobe's comforters, Joe, remain steadfast in faith through this trial.
What Bradley cannot entirely account for in this parallel is that what happens at the end of Jobe story is that he gets everything back, he gets back his camels, his sons and his prosperity twice as much as he had before. The story doesn't seem to say whether he loses the boils, but I suppose he must do because Lears losses are irrevocable. He doesn't get anything back. So that's where we would think this is a difference.
It might be worth comparing with Winter's Tale, for example, where bounties does get things back. Things that have been lost, but lives losses are irrevocable. His stoicism, therefore, and in Bradley's terms, his spiritual development through suffering may seem to us rather pointless. But Bradley does consider that Lear dies in an ecstasy ecstasy, thinking that Cordelia is still alive. We'll come back to that point in a minute. So Bradley then finds a Joe Bish comfort in the story of Lear.
And it's he who has given to us the rather miserable doctrine that through it, through suffering, suffering is worthwhile because our characters or or we ourselves gain self knowledge and gain insight, spiritual awareness. Let's look at a different Christian reading of the play more extensively elaborated in the work of Jean Wilson. Knight Wilson Knight is clearly bonkers, but in some quite interesting ways, I think. So I wouldn't suggest reading him without a sense that he is bonkers.
But in a collection of essays called The Wheel of Fire, based on articles written during the 1920s and 30s, Knight discusses King Lear. And for him, the play's suffering is part of a purgatorial progress to self-knowledge, to sincerity. So is suffering. There is purging him towards something better. That's why it's not a miserable play, because it's a terrible journey of a purgation which which results in self-knowledge. King Lear says Knight shows us the spiritual evolution of man.
And he goes on to say that goodness is the natural goal of man and the aim of evolution. Therefore, at the end, the danger of evil doers in the play is crushed. The good forces, not the evil win, since good is natural and evil, unnatural to human nature. So the good forces, not the evil win, since good is natural evil, unnatural to human nature.
What Wilson like can't quite account for is that winning and losing in those terms in this plan seem to look actually disturbingly similar for Wilson night. The play emerges as an allegory of redemption through love. Love is its fundamental theme, and death in love brings serenity and tranquillity. The play is implicitly Christian because it encourages us to endure life, to turn a stoic ally on its pain and suffering, and to look not for pleasure on Earth, but to a life after death.
So Wilson, that acknowledges the cruelty of the play, but suggests that that's a sign to us that we should look beyond this earthly world to better things elsewhere. And I want to think now about a group of kind of critical group which is conscious of the cruelty kind of existential point about the cruelty of the play, but less secure in a kind of spiritual elsewhere which can redeem that.
The 1960s saw a major knock to the attempts to recuperate King Lear as a comforting just or even a religiously orthodox play. An important in that are an article by Barbara Everett, the new King Lear, and a book by W. R. Elton King Lear in the Gods, both in the 1960s, each concluding that attempts to read the play as a parable of meaningful suffering were self deluding and wilful misreadings of a play which actually takes out every opportunity to snuff out our hope and optimism.
So I want to develop a sense about the play being deliberately cruel as a as a feature of late 20th century criticism. So we've gone through yet. The play is cruel. The play perhaps is more redemptive. And now we're back to a kind of existential cruelty. So first thing and to think about young Kott. Cot was a Polish data director who's writing in English, who's writing on Shakespeare, first published in English in 1964.
In the book Shakespeare, Our Contemporary has done much to influence British Shakespearean directors, particularly Peter Brook. We've talked a bit about Cock's views on history plays as an endless staircase or an endless succession cyclical repetition. When thinking about Richard, the third heroine to think about Kott on King Lear can get an idea of the thrust of his chapter. By looking at the title, it's called King Lear or End Game.
So it's clearly making a connexion between Shakespeare and Beckett, taking an existentialist view of tragedy, showing us the absurdist machinations of a world drained of any providential intent.
So the parallel in the parallel with Samuel Beckett that Kott develops through his essay, Lear emerges as a Waiting for Godot type drama in which inevitably Godot never arrives, and where absurdist humour, violence, objection and grim bonding merely use up the time between the play's opening and its close. Kot argues that the kingly, which had been so problematic for previous critics and readers in which it required such effortful rereading, has now.
In the 1960s found its moment for the first time. The cruelty of Lear was to the Elizabethans, he says, a contemporary reality and has remained real since. But it is a philosophical cruelty. Neither the romantic nor the naturalistic theatre was able to show that kind of cruelty. Only the new theatre, the theatre of the absurd can. In this new theatre, there are no characters. And the tragic element has been superseded by the grotesque.
The grotesque is more cruel than tragedy. So by realigning the play with the grotesque rather than with the morally charged genre of tragedy, Carter, who's able to develop his view of a deterministic or mechanistic universe in the world of the grotesque, he says. Downfall cannot be justified by or blamed on the absolute. The absolute is not endowed with any ultimate reasons. It is stronger and that is all the absolute is absurd.
Kott imagines the play performed in the style of Beckett, Ionesco and the other mid century European absurdist in King Lear. The stage is empty throughout. There is nothing except the cruel earth where man goes on his journey from the cradle to the grave. The theme of King Lear is an enquiry into the meaning of this journey into the existence or non-existence of heaven or hell. Let me just cut through to the end of that. All the remains at the end of this gigantic pantomime.
Is the Earth empty and bleeding on this earth through which a tempest has passed, leaving only stone stones. The King, the fool, the blind man and the madman carry on their destructive dialogue. So if a cop, then Lere, it's a play of the European avant garde theatre of Bacquet and Danisco, it has found its time in its coincidence of values with the existentialist modes of mid century modernism.
And in one last critique I want to talk about, I just want to move that paradigm just slightly forward, just just to finish this survey. The last critique I want to talk about is Jonathan Dalibor. More Moore's book, much reprinted, first printed in nineteen eighty four, was called Radical Tragedy. So if if court is bringing Lere forward into the mid 20th century, Dolly Moore is concerned to specify it in its Renaissance context.
His work on Lear insists on the material aspects of a tragedy which he sees as, above all, a play about power, property and inheritance, power, property and inheritance. So this play is not at all about suffering. Purgation spiritual development. All that kind of mumbo jumbo, which we've seen. It's not about waterfalls and the sublime. It's about the real world. It's the stuff of power, property and inheritance.
For Donald Moore, the crucial dynamic of the play is property selfhood attained and destroyed through the possession of property. And in the end, he argues that the play endorses Edmunds scepticism. Men are asked, the time is. There are no solid, transcendent values. There are no there's nothing beyond that. That's just the kind of pragmatism of this sceptical view.
Men are as the time is. Dorenbos critique of the play is also an extended critique of previous criticism of the play for being committed to mystifying philosophical abstraction rather than material realities. He sees the play as less about man or mankind and more about society, less individualistic and more concerned with self Marxist interrelations off base and superstructure.
So I've spent some time so far on these critical responses to layer on a kind of potted history of Labour criticism to show how the issue of how sad it is has been constructed by critics. And then to trying to just how these critics are themselves constructed by their historical, cultural and aesthetic biases. Just as we are, we get the layer we want or need by rewriting it through criticism. And although I haven't much time to say anything about it today, also through performance.
So a history then of rewriting the play to try and come to terms with its its take on the world. Perhaps, though, we are not the only ones doing the rewriting. And in the last bit of I want to think about Shakespeare writing and rewriting. King Lear. We can see from the sources of Shakespeare's play that he has taken existing versions of the King Lear story by the scruff of the neck, perhaps with the express aim of making the story saga.
So King Lear has historical sources in Holland, Chadds chronicles literary sources in Sydney's Arcadia, to a lesser extent, Spenser's fairy queen. There is a previous anonymous play called King Lear. L e i. R probably performed in the early 15 nineties and printed in 16 05. Quite possibly the immediate stimulus for Shakespeare to write his play. So there are these written sources are Hollingsworth's Chronicles and the literary ones.
There is also a circulation of gossip in the Jacobean court about an elderly nobleman called Brian Annesley, whose elder daughter Grace wants to have him declared senile. So she and her husband can have all his property and whose younger daughter significantly called Kordell, strives to resist it and to look after her ailing father. So there are a number of converging stories here, as well as, of course, a kind of Cinderella story.
The ugly sisters. The the the the the struggling or the tested younger daughter, the king's favourite. All that kind of thing. So like many of Shakespeare's works, then, this is an already well-known story. And one of the things that's well known about it is that it has a happy ending. In Hollinshead, the arrival of the French army reinstates Lear to his throne, where he rules for a further two years before dying peacefully and being succeeded by Cordelia.
The story does darken later on in Holland shed. The sons of Goneril and Reagan disdained to be under the government of a woman and rebelled against her taking her prisoner, whence she commits suicide with manly courage. Rather unlike the Cordelia. Perhaps we get Shakespeare. But the shape of the story is quite different. What happens in Hollinshead is that Lear is reinstated. That's what's important.
And then he's succeeded by Cordelia Cordelia's succeeds her father rather than, as in Shakespeare, predecease and him. The same is true of that earlier anonymous play King Lear Ali hya, which ends with the old king reinstated to his throne. So we can start to see that name tapes. 17TH Century Revision with which I began, has some clear parallels with the sources from which Shakespeare took his own play.
We can see Shakespeare rewriting his sources and in some ways, Tate, I think, independently writing them back. So like Dr Johnson, that's to say the play's first audiences would have been expecting Cordelia's survival. That's what happens to Cinderella. Suffering is short term and she's rewarded in the end. So there would have been expecting Cordelia's survival if not Lears, and that therefore there would have been surprised, perhaps even abused by the play's final twist.
It's an interesting take on the play's final tableau when Lere Cup walks in carrying the lifeless body of Cordelia. If we, too, are bewildered because this is not the way the play is supposed to turn out. Kent's remark is this The promised end takes on a kind of metal theatrical quality. There's more to say, though, about the ending of kingly as a rewriting, not just of Shakespeare's sources, but of Shakespeare's own play.
I said at the beginning that King Lear exists in two early and distinct texts. The 60 No.8 a quarter and the sixteen twenty three folio. Over the last 30 years, Lear has become the test case for issue for the theory that Shakespeare revised his plays. You may think that's a very strange thing to be arguing about. What writer does not revise his or her writing? Nabokov, the author of Lolita, said that his pencils lasted longer than that.
It raises dead and it does an interview in which Ernest Hemingway says he rewrote the end of a farewell to arms thirty nine times. What was it that had stopped, you? Asked the interviewer. Getting the words right, replied Hemingway. Quite a good argument about why you do any revising. So getting the words right in Hemingway's terms, I think, is something we can see Shakespeare doing here.
When I was thinking about poetry as a couple of weeks ago, I was talking about the ways the First Folio has shaped the kinds of questions and the kind of things, the kinds of assumptions we say about Shakespeare.
And one of the things, the marketing spiel which prefaces the First Folio has given us is an unwillingness to believe that the God, like Shakespeare wrote in any way, like any other person who was also written, Hemings and Kandal tell us, as he was a happy imitator of nature, he was a most gentle express out of it. His mind and hand went together. And what he thought he uttered with that easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.
So the idea that this just came so gushing forth, fully formed. It's one of Ben Johnson's rather nice acidic remarks. And his conversations with Drammen would he had blotted the thousand so that Shakespeare uniquely did not revise his works, was held as a tenet of Shakespearean editing until the 1970s. And editors and editorial theorists had offered all kinds of other explanations for why texts exist existed in discrepant forms.
Editions of King Lear before the 1980s typically represented a so-called conflated text in which the editor picked and chose from the two early versions to produce a text. He felt best represented that elusive item Shakespeare's own manuscript. Of course, the one thing we don't have, or one of the many things we don't have, but the idea that the two texts of King Lear represent authorial revision.
So a play at different stages of its evolution. But but but bearing Shakespeare's imprint on it at both points is now commonplace. And most critics surmise that the Folio text represents Shakespeare's revision. His second thoughts of the Korto and that that revision was probably undertaken in 16 10.
So Folio Lear becomes a play of the romance period alongside Winter's Tale, Cymbeline and The Tempest, for instance, other plays which are interested in this dynamic of the ruler and his daughter, but which turned that story in in a rather different way. Collected editions of Shakespeare since the Oxford Edition, first published in 1986, have printed two distinct plays. The History of King Lear. That's the play as it's titled In the Quarter and the Tragedy of King Lear.
The play's title in the first one. Now, I'm not going to get into the bibliography of the differences between the texts and still less why or how they might have come about. I think where textual issues are interesting, they are interesting material facts rather than as pieces in a kind of a jigsaw where a broader narrative of how they were, how they've come about can be traced. I think that's a really quite a dangerous or tendentious line to go on.
So I wouldn't bother to try and work out why the tax are different. But just to say that they are different and this is the this is the impact the differences make on the ah on a reading of the play. So some of the detail of the differences between the two texts is minor, although it is potentially interesting that. In the quarto, lere promises to express our darker purposes. And in the Foleo to express our darker purpose singular. That's got a small point, but not problem, insignificant one.
But on a broader scale, it's sometimes been argued that the Foleo revisions create a bleaker view of the play's events than pertains in the quarter. And I did that. Shakespeare rewrites the play to make it sadder in our terms and in Egerton's. One example of this might be the detail around the torture of Gloster.
At the end of Act three, having been brutally tortured on stage where cluster's eyes gouged out by his tormentors, he describes the world as all dark and comfortless, all dark and comfortless. He's thrust out to smell his way to Dover. In the quarter, though, there's a intervening small sequence of about 10 lines at the end of that scene, which shows two unnamed servants preparing to care for the wounded Gloster. They're going to get him flaks and white of eggs to apply to his bleeding face.
They pray together. Heaven help him. It's a moment of tenderness, which seems to suggest that not everyone is indifferent to Gloucester's suffering. It's interesting to think that when the play is revised for the Folio, that material is left out.
There are no servants and therefore no tenderness. But what I really want to do in the last few minutes of the letter is to look at the play's ending, to see how this idea of authorial revision might have a bearing on our central question about the play's bleakness. There are a number of differences between the ending of the King Lear plays in their two early versions. Only the Folio, for instance, has a stage direction indicating that Lear dies. He dies on the line. Look there, look there.
A line which doesn't appear in the quarter. So a line that is added in the revision. What is Lear looking at? He's been, you'll remember, trying to find signs of life in Cordelia's body. Does he think he sees them? This is Bradley's point, that Lear dies. Then like Gloucester does in a kind of rush of joy. We hear of Gloucester that his heart burst smilingly because Lear believes Cordelia is still alive.
And if if that's the case, if that's what. Look here. Look here means if that's what he's looking at and that's why he dies. Is that a happier ending? Is it better in literary tragedy or indeed in life to die deluded or comforted in the quarter? There is no stage direction for Lehr's death. He could die willingly. The quarto gives Lear the line break heart. I prefer the break, which could be interpreted as his own renunciation of life as he realises that although a dog,
horse and rat can live, Cordelia cannot. He could die in response to Kentz. Let him pass his instruction to add God not to intervene. But He could die. In fact, at any point in those last lines of the play, the Folio, on the other hand, gives the line break heart. I pretty break to Kent. It's not entirely sure. It's not entirely clear whether he is referring to himself in anticipation of that ominous journey. He cites later as reason he cannot take up office or whether he's referring to Lear.
Another speech. The play's final one in which it echoes the crisis of speech, truth and flattery, with which the play began, is also transposed between speakers. What difference does it make if the play's final moralising couplets are delivered by the Duke of Albany, Lear's son in law and the play's most senior survivor? On the one hand, but tainted by his association by being married to the murderous Goneril on the other. Albany is given the speech in the quarter text.
But why does Shakespeare revise in the Folio to have those lines delivered by Edgar, the survivor of the wronged younger generation? The play's second most significant character by proportion of line spoken after Lear. These are argument, these places where you can see Shakespeare changing his mind or reworking the play with a particular aim, presumably in mind.
We don't know what the aim was. We can only deduce it by looking at the looking at the changes and some readings of those changes altogether. Cumulatively is to make a more miserable and more sad, a more bleak play.
So I've been suggesting that the question of just how sad King Lear is, is a preoccupation of the play's critical history that critics have rewritten the play, particularly their interpretation of the ending, in order to support different philosophical glosses on its redemptive or its unmitigated harshness.
And I've suggested, I hope, that this is a process that Shakespeare has invited by changing the ending of the story as he found it in his sources, doing his own act of rewriting, but also revising the play in in the Folio version. So I've tried to indicate some of the ways in which a study of Quarto Folio revisions might show as a writer at work revising his work precisely to bring out that bleakness that the critic that criticism is often wanted to explain away.
And I've suggested that we might look to the play's conclusion for one particular locus of that work. Thank you.