The Works Alexander Brown Bell

LECTURE - SHAKESPEARES METHOD OF WRITING HIS PLAYS

Lectures about Shakespeares literature appears to  have been a popular topic at this time. As a brief survey of the newspaper archives shows that there were several lectures and lecturers presenting along this general theme then, clearly with a similar remit of bringing Shakespeare and what was considered “literature of a high order “ to the wider working population of Britain.

He notes that this was First delivered to the local branch of the English Association at the Mechanics Institute, Bradford, Approximate date, February, 1920. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to locate any entries in the British Newspaper Archives relating to ABB giving that particular presentation of this lecture. Though there is an entry in the “Todays Appointments” column of the Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer - Wednesday 22 November 1922 - that lists this particular lecture as to be given at the Bradford branch of the English Society at the Commercial College. So he clearly presented this on several occasions around Yorkshire.

Editors Notes:

The English Association was founded in 1906 by a group teachers and scholars to develop English studies in schools and advanced studies in further education. The appreciation and study of Shakespeares literature was a common feature in the founders of the Associations research interests. The founders included the English Literature Scholars: F.S. Boas, A.C. Bradley and Sir Israel Gollancz.

Shakespeare method of Writing His Plays

Like most attempts to condense a big theme into a few words, the title of this lecture is somewhat misleading. Shakespeare is our greatest English poet, perhaps the greatest the world has ever seen; and for any man--especially a man who makes no pretension to Shakespearean scholarship--to pretend to fathom the depths of Shakespeare's mind, and explain how his imagination functioned, would be a colossal piece of impudence which you would be quick to detect and condemn. I hasten, therefore, to assure you that I do not propose to attempt such an impossible feat. 

But there are two aspects of an artist's creative work. If you have ever thought upon the subject, you will realise that there is a great element of mystery in the act of original writing. Even so simple a matter as writing a letter to a friend brings you up against it. And when you consider what I may call creative composition, the mystery becomes still greater. For forty years I have been trying to earn my daily bread by means of my pen; and I can honestly say that the process by which I do it is more mysterious to me now than when I began. Day by day I sit down at the appointed time with a blank pad in front of me, and in due course the prescribed number of pages are filled and handed to the printer; but whence it comes I cannot tell you. if you ask me to try, I must fall back on figurative language, and say that there seems to exist somewhere a vast reservoir of ideas with which, somehow, your mind is ablLike most attempts to condense a big theme into a few words, the title of this lecture is somewhat misleading. Shakespeare is our greatest English poet, perhaps the greatest the world has ever seen; and for any man--especially a man who makes no pretension to Shakespearean scholarship--to pretend to fathom the depths of Shakespeare's mind, and explain how his imagination functioned, would be a colossal piece of impudence which you would be quick to detect and condemn. I hasten, therefore, to assure you that I do not propose to attempt such an impossible feat. 

But there are two aspects of an artist's creative work. If you have ever thought upon the subject, you will realise that there is a great element of mystery in the act of original writing. Even so simple a matter as writing a letter to a friend brings you up against it. And when you consider what I may call creative composition, the mystery becomes still greater. For forty years I have been trying to earn my daily bread by means of my pen; and I can honestly say that the process by which I do it is more mysterious to me now than when I began. Day by day I sit down at the appointed time with a blank pad in front of me, and in due course the prescribed number of pages are filled and handed to the printer; but whence it comes I cannot tell you. if you ask me to try, I must fall back on figurative language, and say that there seems to exist somewhere a vast reservoir of ideas with which, somehow, your mind is able to get into contact, and that from its inexhaustible resources you are able, with greater or less ease, to draw what you want. 

Note:--This is no mere fancy. Various witnesses could be called in support, including some of the greatest writers. I venture to quote three, two of which were unknown to me when I wrote the sentences given above.-- 

 “The mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; the power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our nature are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure”. Shelley, “Defence of Poetry". 

"It [poetry] utters somewhat above a mortal mouth.”--Ben Johnson. 

‘After our subtlest analysis of the mental process, we must still say that our highest thoughts and our best deeds are all given to us.-- George Eliot, 

If you try to stand aside and watch your mind at work--I doubt whether you can do so deliberately: it is only now and then, and accidentally, as it were, that you catch a fleeting glimpse of it--the mystery only deepens until you are stricken with a kind of awe. Your mind seems to be a complete blank, Then suddenly an idea presents itself Whence does it come? How does it clothe itself in words? How is it that the form and actual cadence of a sentence sometimes shape themselves in your mind before the words come that are to occupy and fill out the body thus born in advance for them? And that is not an automatic, foolproof process, by any means, for sometimes the words, when they do come, do not fit; and you have to sit still, often for quite a long time, shuffling and discarding phrases until the right one presents itself. 

While the work of original composition Has its mystical side, however, it also has its practical side, which one learns from experience, and to some extent can be taught; and, since newspaper proprietors are not pure philanthropists, and I have earned my bread and butter by working for them for over forty years, I think I can claim without undue egotism that I know something about the job. Now Shakespeare, though he was one of the greatest geniuses that ever lived, was a man of like passions with ourselves. His mind differed from ours, not in kind, but in degree. He lived more intensely than we do, but he lived in the same world. There are certain ways in which the mind works when it is engaged in creative writing which are common, more or less, to all who essay such a task with any success; and it is with these that I am concerned tonight. I want, if i can, to try to act the part of the friend who, after you have witnessed a particularly clever conjuring trick, takes you aside and whispers to you how it is done. 

Now, although it is supposed to be difficult in these days to find anybody who has not attempted to write either a novel or a play, or both, I cannot flatter myself that I am speaking tonight to an audience composed entirely of playwrights and novelists. To those of you who are, what I have to say may prove largely a recapitulation of the common places of your own experience, To those of you who are not, I may seem to be wandering in a strange and unknown realm of thought where it is difficult to follow me. Yet I can assure you that the effort is worth making; for you will find your enjoyment of a play is doubled, and more than doubled, if you are able to appreciate the technique of its construction. So I propose tonight to take one of Shakespeare's plays, lay it on the dissecting table for you, show you something of its anatomy, and, if I can, send you back to him with a warmer love for his writings and a deeper appreciation of his genius, I have chosen "King Lear" for the autopsy; because it is peculiarity suitable for such a purpose; but any one of his maturer plays would have served, and I shall not hesitate to draw illustrations from them if these are likely to prove useful. 

Now suppose for a moment that, instead of being a slightly bored audience listening to a lecture by a metaphysical Scotsman, you were the company of the Globe or Blackfriars theatre in Queen Elizabeth's time, and that you are all agreed that it is time you put on a new play. Shakespeare is among you, and the manager of the company turns to him and tells him he must write one, and be quick about it. What, in such circumstances, is the first thing Shakespeare must do? 

Obviously, he would have to look out for an idea. A play must have a subject. It may be an historical subject, like King John, or an imaginary subject like the Love-making of Falstaff; it may even be something purely parochial, such as a quarrel about the village pump. But, before a dramatist can begin to write a play, he must have some notion in his mind what it is to be about. Novel writing and play-writing are the same in this respect. The first thing the author wants is some germ of thought out of which his novel or play can grow, some idea that will serve him as a jumping-off place. 

Now this process, which we may call the Search for the idea, is something of a paradox; for the more intense the search is the less likely it is to be successful. The familiar law is reversed here, it is a case of :"Seek not, and ye shall find," Hard work comes afterwards; but here we still touch the mystical side of the process of composition, and a wise passivity is called for. the Idea just “comes".

 You may be thinking of something entirely different when suddenly it flashes across your mind; or you may be turning over a rubbish-heap of memories when one of them jumps up before you, alive, and plastic to your purpose. A paragraph in a newspaper, or some incident across which you accidentally stumble, may give you what you want. Some quaint or comical character you have met may serve your turn. I know one case in which a man woke up one morning after a remarkably vivid dream. He could only remember one tiny fragment of it; but that fragment struck him as containing the germ of a good story. Somehow or other, the germ would not fructify. Time after time, the fragment of his dream would emerge into consciousness, and he would turn it over in his mind trying to see how he could turn it into a story; but it was no good. Then, many years afterwards, as he was walking along a quiet road on the outskirts of a country town, the idea suddenly cropped up again in his mind, But this time it was no longer a dead memory. In a flash, the theme which he had so often turned to in despair unfolded itself. The whole thing was there. In a modest way, it was like Minerva springing fully armed from the head of Jupiter; and when he got home all he had to do was to sit down and write it as fast as he could push along his pen. The sub-conscious mind, or, if you prefer it, the subliminal self, is a strange thing, and works in a mysterious way.

Whatever the idea is, once you have got it, it begins to germinate in your mind, just like a seed in the earth; and the plot of your play or story develops. Logically, the broad outline of the plot comes first, then its detailed structure, and finally the elaboration of the characters. Those of you who have studied Greek will recognise that I am touching on the verge of a very old controversy here-whether it is the characters who determine the plot, or the plot that determines the characters. No absolute rule can be laid down. Iu some authors, such as George Meredith, for instance, it is fairly obvious that character comes first, in others, such as Wilkie Collins, plot seems to be the main considerstion. For purposes of analysis, I have taken the three things, Idea, Plot and Character, in what I conceive to be their logical order; but, in practice, we have to remember that their actions and re-actions are very close and intricate, and you cannot always separate them in point of time. 

Shakespeare did not trouble much hunting round in search of ideas, in many cases they seem to have been given him by the management of the theatre: he was handed an old play, and asked to furbish it up a be bit so as to make it look like new. When his reputation was established, he had more freedom of choice; but even then he usually took some story from an earlier writer, and remoulded, it to his purpose. Literary ethics were not so exacting in those days as they are now; and, in any case, we can readily forgive Shakespeare his plagiarisms in view of the use he made of what he stole. As an old teacher of mine used to say, Shakespeare was the greatest and grandest literary thief the world has ever seen. 

So far as "King Lear" is concerned, we know that Shakespeare got the Idea and the outline of the Plot ready made,as it were. He took them either from Hollinshed's "Chronicle" or from an existing play called,"The true Chronicle History of King Leir and his Three daughters", printed in 1605 by Simon Stafford. The critics rather scoff at that play; but the impression it left on my mind when I read it some years ago was that there was a good deal of vigour in it, and that , when acted, it would be rather an effective stage piece. As literature, I admit, it is quite hopeless, But whatever Shakespeare touched he turned to gold; and, whether he founded his tragedy on that older play, or on the bald narrative of Leir the son of Baldud as set forth in Hollinshed's “Chronicle",the alchemy by means of which he transformed what he stole into the masterpiece we are considering tonight lies to a large extent beyond our ken. We can only see something of the means he used to convey to the public eye the magical transmutation that has taken place in his own mind.

Note first that in neither of the two possible sources of his play is there a hint of tragic passion, Listen to the old chronicler:

-- but the greatest griefe that Leir toke, was to see the unkindnesse of his daughters, which seemed to thinke that all was too much which their father hadde, the same being never so little: in so much, that going from ye one to ye other, he was brought to that miserie, that unneth (hardly) would they allow him one servant to waite upon him. In the end such was the unkindnesse, or (as i may say) the onnaturalnesse which hefound in his two daughters, not withstanding their faire and pleasante wordes uttered in time past, that, being constrayned of necessitie, he fled ye land, and sailed into Gallia, there to seke some comfort of his yongest daughter, Cordeilla, whom beforetime he hated.

This daughter and her husband champion his cause, invade Britain, discomfit the two wicked sisters and their husbands, with the result, as Hollinshed puts it, that:-- 

Then was Leir restored to his kingdome, which he ruled after this by the space of two years, and then died, fortie years after he first began to raigne. His bodie was buried at Leycester ina vault under ye channel of ye River of Sore beneath ye towne. 

"The true Chronicle History" also has a happy ending; but, in both cases, the story, as you can see, is essentially on the middle levels of feeling. There was even a touch of middle-class pride in the funeral pomp in that detail about Leir's burial in a vault beneath the river. If Shakespeare had tried to put the passion of his Lear into the mouth of a tame, commonplace person like the Leir of the Chronicle or the old play, the story would have broken down. You might as well try to domicile leviathan in a duck-pond.

Shakespeare was not content with a single plot. His custom was to take two or even three, and link them up more or less closely with the main one. In the "Merchant of Venice", for instance, we have four plots:--the story of Antonio and Shylock, the story of Portia and the caskets, the story of Lorenzo and Jessica, and the story of Verissa and her ring, In the case of Ring Lear, we have two plots. 

There is a story of a blind king in Sir Phillip Sydney's “Arcadia" which, it is supposed, gave Shakespeare the idea for his second plot. Anyhow, in the play as we have it, over against the story of Lear and his unnatural daughters, Shakespeare has set the story of Gloucester and his unnatural son. 

We have now got before us the skeleton, or framework, of the play; and the next question we have to consider is how Shakespeare contrived to make that dull piece of stage carpentry a living work of art. 

The first thing he did was to evolve characters that would fit in to the story. Look right through Shakespeare's plays, and you will find that the characters grow naturally out of the plot. 

In fact, the problem before the creative artist here is almost a scientific one, and may be summed up in the formula:-- Given such and such actions, from what sort of man, or woman, would those actions be likely to proceed? “King Lear" was written in what is known as Shakespeare's Dark Period. Something had happened which had hurt him deeply, and made him take a bitter and tragic view of life. In that mood, he determined to give "King Lear” a sad instead of a happy ending. It followed naturally that, if his principal character was to do what Shakespeare proposed to make him do, he must be a man whose passion at times over-clouds his reason, and a foolish manwho cannot see through outward professions to the real nature of the person making them. Gloster again, if he is to be lifelike in time part assigned to him, need not be so passionate, but must be highly credulous. Edmund must be a villain, of course; but he must be presentable in person and plausible of tongue if he is to play the part he is meant to pray in the tragedy. And so, if it were worth while, we might go through the whole list of dramatis personae, and find the same adaptation of character to the action necessitated by the plot. 

Now please do not misunderstand me here. I do not mean to say that Shakespeare, or any other creative artist for that matter, deliberately sat down and evolved his characters in the way I have just shown, working them out with mathematical exactness as if they were a sum in proportion or a mixed quadratic. The actual process is, for the most part, instinctive and unconscious. What I have shown you is mechanism, not life; and yet it is the mechanics of life. Just so a surgeon in a dissecting-room will take a leg to pieces, show you muscle, bone, and sinew,and how they act and re-act when in use. The parts are not the leg; but what the surgeon shows you enables you to understand now the leg works when you go out for a walk.

The next thing to note is that, once the characters begin to develop, they often profoundly affect the plot. The author may see that a good feature in a character is not quite consistent with his plot, and adjusts his plot to suit it. These modifications in the plot, in their turn, may entail corresponding modifications in other characters. All through the writing of a play or a novel, in fact, this interplay of character and plot goes on; and the finished product may truthfully be described as the resultant of opposing forces. 

Some writers are more interested in character than in plot. George Meredith is a good example. In his novels the plot becomes a secondary consideration; and to some extent he justifies Oscar Wilde's criticism that, as a novelist, he could do everything but tell a story. At the other extreme, I might take a friend of my own, Who, in is younger days, wrote a number of sensational novels. We were talking one day of the diverse Ways in which authors worked; and he told me that his method was always to write the last chapter of his story first. After that, he would write any scene, or passage of description, or dialogue that he fancied at the moment, then, when the pile of typewritten pages began to reach the height which he knew his publishers would require, he took the various sections thus haphazardly produced, arranged them in order, and, where necessary, link, them together with a bit of narrative. He assured me, that it was surprising how a little extra writing of that sort was required. You will recognise that, using such a queer method, the characters in my friend's novels were pound to be more or less static, although the stories, once you began to read them, were difficult to lay down. Shakespeare strikes the happy mean, His plays are delightful stories, and, at the same time, are full of Living characters. 

So much, then, for what I may call the anatomy of the mental process involved in the writing of Shakespeare's plays. I want now to dissect "King Lear" in a similar way, and show you some of the methods by means of which Shakespeare got his dramatic effects. 

Did it ever strike you how wildly improbable the plots of Shakespeare's plays often are? You do not notice it so much in the plays themselves, because Shakespeare's art makes them convincing to the spectator; but read the story of the plays in plain prose, even the delightful prose of Lamb's "Tales", and the weaknesses and absurdities of the plots hit you in the eye. Yet, if a play is to be a success, a true dramatist must be able to make even the absurd seem true for the time being; so that, while you are in the theatre, disbelief is suspended and your critical faculties are hushed to sleep. Consciously or we instinctively--I do not know which-- Shakespeare realised this; but bow did he manage to do it? 

The methods he used make a most interesting study, for they varied, according to what the play required. In "Hamlet", for instance, he begins on the most commonplace Level imaginable--two soldiers on sentry go meeting and exchanging a few words- but from that he rises imperceptibly step by step until the Ghost's appearance is not only accepted, but expected, in “Macbeth", he reverses this method, plunges us headlong into the supernatural, and leaves it to the glamour of the witches' cauldron to bemuse us into acceptance of the story. But time does not allow of enlarging on this: I shall have quite enough to do if I analyse in some detail the methods Shakespeare employs to make the story of "King Lear" credible. 

At the very outset, the dramatist is faced by two wild improbabilities. The first thing to strike us, when we analyse the plot, is: How could Lear possibly be so foolish as to disown Cordelia because she would not attempt to outvie her deceitful sisters in their protestations of love and reverence? The second is: How could Lear, a man at least eighty years old according to the play, have lived so long with Goneril and Regan without getting at least an inkling of their contempt for him? How does Shakespeare manage to make that seem not merely possible but a plausible? 

One trick he makes use of is the introduction of a secondary plot. In Gloucester he shows us an old man and a father who is even more foolish than Lear. Even as Shakespeare handles them, the scenes in which Edmund turns his father against Edgar are barely credible. We can swallow them only because we realise now credulous Gloucester was-- A Man who guided his affairs by omens and the aspect of the Stars. But, by making Gloucester's folly so extreme, Shakespeare makes Lear look sensible by comparison.

Then as regards Goneril and Regan you will notice that Shakespeare is careful to show them to us in their guide of dutiful daughters in a single scene only, and that at the beginning of the play. The revelation of their hypocrisy comes hard upon their protestations of love. Thus the spectator's mind is given no time to begin questioning and analysing, as he might have done if the revelation had been delayed.

But it is worth noting that the revelation, though it comes immediately, comes gradually. We do not see their full heartlessness at first because their attitude towards their father has so much common-sense in it. Goneril, who takes the lead, is so infernally reasonable that at first she actually steals some of our sympathy. 

The ways of old age are trying enough to youth in any case. Think what it must have meant to Goneril to see her orderly household upset by the advent of her father with a train of a hundred knights; men who owed obedience to him, not to her, and who had to be fed, lodged, and humoured, in accordance with an old man's whims. Thus her desire that his followers should be reduced in number seems on the face of it; eminently reasonable. Shakespeare was too sound a craftsman to make Goneril and Regan monsters outside the course of nature, no matter how cruel and heartless they might be. 

Imagine a household in which two daughters, naturally cold of heart, in one of whom at least common-sense and the practical reason were the predominant traits, are compelled, at least until they have reached marriageable age, always to yield and seem complaisant to a hot-tempered, tyrannical head. In the cant phraseology of the moment, their repressed feelings would form a "complex", A hatred of their father would develop in their hearts, all the more virulent because it had to be concealed under a pretence of affection. When Marriage gave them a certain amount of independence, their repressed feelings sought escape in the exercise of a masterful demeanour. They "bossed" not only their households but their husbands. When at Length Lear's division of his Kingdom made their independence of his frowns and smiles complete, can we wonder that their “inferiority complex" came to the surface and found satisfaction in we revolting hardness and ingratitude? 

There you have a glimpse of the way in which Shakespeare contrived to give the suggestion of a solid reality behind his stage figures. His method with Cordelia is different. he has to make her refusal to join sincerely in her sisters' insincere professions of love for their father convincing. One way in which Shakespeare makes her real to us is by not making her perfect, as a lesser man would have done. As he does so markedly in the leading characters of Hamlet", he shows, in her the influence of heredity. She is clearly her father's daughter, She has inherited a good deal of her father's pride, and at least a touch of his hasty temper. But her reticence in the play's opening scene has more behind it than that. Of course it is easy to explain her refusal to say how much she loved her father, when she did love him, because her sisters had said how much they loved him when they did not, by pointing to the obvious fact that, if she had not declined to outbid them in their hypocrisy, there would have been no play. But Shakespeare has not compelled the world's admiration by mechanical devices of that sort. Cordelia being what she was, her reticence was perfectly natural. It is of a piece with her behaviour throughout. She is one of the most moving figures in the play; she is the pivot upon which the whole movement turns; yet how seldom she makes herself heard. You will find it instructive to count the number of times Cordelia speaks in the play, and compare it with the volume of the play as a whole. You can explain it in part by the fact that her sisters were older women, married women, While she was unschooled in the world and its ways. She hates insincerity with a passionate hatred; but she is not worldly-wise enough to understand that there are times when it is prudent to keep that hatred concealed.

Then, to make her silence not only plausible but inevitable, Shakespeare, by a master-stroke, makes Lear furnish her with a mercenary motive for emulating her sisters. Just because her love was so true and so great she would have found a difficulty in expressing it in any case; in the special circumstances it was inevitable that the words refused to come. She lacked the "glib and oily art to speak and purpose not”.

Another reason why Shakespeare's plays convey the impression that they are bits of real life and not just things imagined is the way in which he makes his leading characters keep pace with the action. They are never the same at the end of a play as they are at the beginning. It is so in real life, We are the fruit of our own conduct. We either rise superior to the events that happen to us and grow stronger in the process, or we fall down under their pressure and are debased by it. Neither you nor I, for instance, is exactly the man he was before the war, it has left its mark upon our character for good or ill

Let me illustrate this development by taking one of the minor characters in the play as an example. In the opening scene the Duke of Albany is just a lay figure. When we see him next his qualities begin to emerge. He seems at first to be a hen-pecked husband, domineered over by his strong-minded wife, and afraid to stand up to her. But he is not that at all. Strange though it may seem, he is deeply in love with his wife. He realises the strength of her character and, being a modest, simple minded man, he credits her with some substantial reason for quarrelling with her father, for he recognises as clearly as she does the disadvantages of having Lear's hundred Knights quartered upon him. But he is a gentleman to his finger-tips. If he thinks Lear a fool, he is careful not to show it; and he is obviously afraid that his wife, though she has just cause for complaint, is carrying things with too high a hand. At the same time, he is diffident about interfering in a household matter because he has confidence in his wife's common-sense. So all he does is to strive to pour oil upon the troubled waters. 

Later on, when he discovers his wife's infamy, and how Lear has been left to the fury of the storm, his faith in his wife's good sense leaves him, and he sees her for the cold-bloodied reptile that she is. Then his inherent manliness comes out, and he does stand up to her. At the close of the play, he rises to his full stature, takes command of the situation, and stands before us at the fall of the curtain as the main pillar of the commonweal. It is a subtle study in character, finely developed, and consistent throughout.

The great character-study in the play, of course, is that of Lear himself; but, before I deal with him, I want to touch upon two of the other characters--Kent and the Fool. 

Kent may have been suggested to Shakespeare by one of the characters in the “Chronicle History"; but, as we see him at the opening of ‘King Lear", he is a mere "walking gentleman", Shakespeare uses him as a sort of lightning-conductor for a second outburst of temper on the part of the King, and thereby renders Lear's anger against Cordelia more plausible. But, as soon as Kent champions Cordelia, Shakespeare seems to fall in love with him for doing it, and gives him a place of importance in the play which he has not in the original, and, in so doing, both enlarges and enlarges the plot. 

But characters not only come to life in tne playwright's hands as he works, they have an awkward way at times of developing a will and individuality of their own which may carry the author far beyond anything he originally intended in regard to them. The great example of this in Shakespeare's plays is the character of Falstaff. Instead of remaining the subordinate character he was evidently meant to be, he became one of the most important, and so grew upon Shakespeare, and upon Shakespeare's audiences ever since, that, in what the dramatist obviously meant to be his great scene- that in which Prince Henry shakes himself free of, the loose companions he had toyed with before his coming to the throne, and bids Falstaff fall to his prayers- the effect is exactly the opposite of that he intended to produce, and our sympathies are with Falstaff in his humiliation, while Henry V, lusted of rising to heroic stature, grates upon us an unpardonable prig. If any want to see this point treated at length, I commend to your reading that Magnificent chapter on "The Rejection of Falstaff" in Professor A.J. Bradley's "Oxford Lectures on poetry",

.

We have a lesser instance of the same phenomenon, I think, in “King Lear" in the character of the Fool. The fool or the clown was a stock character in the drama of Shakespeare's day. it offered a convenient way of introducing what is known as “comic relief"; and, if you read "King Lear" carefully, I think you will come to the conclusion that, when Shakespeare introduced the Fool into the play, he had no higher intention than the one I have named. But, as he went on writing, the stock character came to life and began to assert himself, and his value as a fool to bear became evident; though his creator at first thought so little of him that he did not even trouble to give him a name. The Fool's badinage heightens tremendously the tragic effect of Lear's madness, and Shakespeare was so carried away by the character that the fool takes a leading place in the first half of the play. |The he disappears, and is never seen again. Why? 

The only reason I can give is that Shakespeare's dramatic instinct told him that, while the fool was invaluable in the scenes where Lear was at war with the elements and his fate, he would be of no use whatever in the quieter scenes that followed--would, in fact, completely ruin them. So Shakespeare just dropped him out of the play, After the mock trial of Goneril and Regan, he is seen no more.

And now, these preliminary studies over, let us turn to Lear himself. You see him at first regal, passionate, and imperious. Then, when he begins to find himself slighted in Albany's household, you see him touchy, irritable, and at times positively childish. When he meets Goneril's unkindness by pretending that he is asleep, and pinching himself to make sure that he is awake, you feel something akin to contempt for him. Yet that childishness is just the other side showing itself of that weakness in his character which produced his passionate outbursts of rage. It is the same during his interview with Regan outside Gloster's castle. You see a silly old man making an exhibition of himself in public, and your sense of decency is shocked by the spectacle of a soul in undress, so to speak. In fact, for the moment you actually sympathise with Goneril and Regan, at least so far as to realise that they must have found the old man rather a handful in their time.

When Lear is left to the mercy of the elements, and, as the storm bursts upon his head, his shaken wits begin to crumble, you find you are mistaken. Once his earthly pomp is stripped away, the real nobility of the man's nature gets a chance to show itself.

His indictment of the elements is magnificent rhetoric; but it is also little more than make us admire his courage. We get a revelation of his real self when we find his sufferings make him think of others. After his Speech beginning: -- 

Let the great gods 

That keep this dreadful pother o'er our heads 

Find out their enemies now, 

He turns to the fool beside him with words of unlooked-for tenderness. “How dost, my boy? Art cold? I am cold myself" “Poor fool and knave, I have one part in my heart that's sorry yet for thee." And take special note that, when Kent leads them to the hovel for shelter, the King makes the Fool go in first. 

Ln gratitude may have made his reason totter; but suffering has cleared his soul's vision. He be thinks himself that others are feeling the rain and cold as well as he:-- 

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are, 

That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, 

How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, 

Your looped and window'd raggedness , defend you 

From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en 

Too little care of this. Take physic, pomp; 

Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, 

That thou mayst shake the superflux to them 

And show toe heavens more just. 

Shakespeare must nave been feeling that very deeply himself at the time; For it wasn't a doctrine that it was quite safe to declaim upon the stage in those days. 

A further step in Lear's development is shown to us when he recovers from his madness. The scene is one of the tenderest that Shakespeare ever wrote. Lear wakes from sleep to find Cordelia beside him, but he is in doubt at first whether what he sees is reality or a dream. Cordelia says:-- 

O, look upon me, sir, 

And hold your hands in benediction o'er me, 

No, Sir, you must not kneel. 

And Lear cries out-- 

Pray, do not mock me, 

I am a very foolish, fond old man, 

Fourscore and upwards, not an hour more or less, 

And, to deal plainly, 

I fear I am not in my perfect mind.

Methinks I should Know you and know this man; 

Yet I am doubtful; for I am mainly ignorant 

What place this is, and all the skill I have 

Remembers not these garments, nor I know not 

Where I did lodge last night. Do not laugh at me; 

For, as I am a man, I think this lady 

To be my child Cordelia. 

Cor: And so I am, I am.

Lear: Be your tears wet? yes, faith I pray, weep not; 

If you have poison for me, I will drink it.

I know you do not love me; for your sisters 

Have, as I do remember, done me wrong: 

You have some cause, they have not. 

Cor: No cause, No cause... .

Lear: You must bear with me. 

Pray you, now, forget and forgive: I am old and foolish. 

Sad, but wonderfully lovely, is it not? And if the drama had only ended there we should come away saying what a beautiful play we had seen. But Shakespeare does not let it end there. Again we find ourselves asking: Why? As I have already told you, the “Chronicle history", on which Shakespeare is supposed to have founded his play, has a happy ending; and, Since Shakespeare wrote his tragedy, attempts have been made to give it a happy ending also, in the belief that it would thus make a stronger appeal to the popular taste. 

On such attempts Charles Lamb has poured scorn in this famous passage:-- 

A happy ending!--as if the living martyrdom that Lear had gone through--the Playing of his feelings alive--did not make a fair dismissal from the stage of life the only decorous thing for him, If he is to live and be happy after, if be could sustain this world's burden after, why all this pudder and preparation-- why torment us with all this unnecessary sympathy? As if the childish pleasure of getting back his gilt robes and sceptre again could tempt him to act over again his misused station--as if at his years, and with his experience, anything was left put to die. 

That is finely said; but it is not a satisfactory explanation because it does not fit all the facts. You cannot help feeling that, up to a point, Shakespeare actuality worked for a happy ending. Not, indeed the happy ending Charles Lamb imagines--the re-investment of the old man in his kingly robes and honour--but something far finer: a term of peace and rest and happiness with the daughter from whom his folly had estranged him, and of using his kingly power for the benefit of the poor and the oppressed. The Lear whom we find re-united to Cordelia was not the sort of man to lay much stress upon a crown.

Come, let's away to prison; 

We two alone will sing like birds I' the cage:

When thou dost ask my 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 near poor rogues 

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

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

And take upon's the mystery of things, 

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

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

that ebb and flow by the moon. 



That is not the kind of man who is going to care much whether he has baubles to play with or no. It is not only a happy ending that Shakespeare has the stage set for, but an ideally happy ending. Then, by a sudden twist, he makes everything go awry. In much the same way, he works up to a happy ending in "Romeo and Juliet", and then turns it to tragedy at the last through such a mere accident as the delay of a messenger. In "King Lear", he could easily have meted out dramatic justice to Goneril and Regan and Edmund, as he had already meted it out to Oswald; but the play would not have been the supreme thing it is if he had withheld that touch of dramatic irony which blends Lear and Cordelia in the common ruin of those who hated them.

There are various types of tragedy, Sometimes, as in "Macbeth", it is a tragedy of retribution. Sometimes, as in "Hamlet", the tragedy is inherent in the character of the hero. Sometimes, as in the "Antigone', it arises out of a conflict of wills. In “King Lear", however, we have a striking example of that ironic tragedy, of which the Supreme example is the “Edipus Rex" of Sophocles. 

This particular form or aspect of tragedy will repay careful study. there are three things about it to which I want to call your special attention. The first is that, to get the full effect of it, you must believe in the reality of the characters concerned. That is to say, they exist for you outside the bounds of the theatre. I know that the most modern school of Shakespearean criticism holds that that is all wrong-- that we must judge Shakespeare and his plays only by what appears upon the stage. Now, I do not deny that, applied to certain problems, that is a sound method of critical approach; but to say that, for Shakespeare, his characters had no existence apart from the scenes in which they appear upon the stage, is pushing a theory to an extreme it will not bear. 

For one thing, it ignores the way in which creative imagination works. Ask almost any dramatist, and he will tell you that one of the greatest difficulties in playwriting lies in the selection of the scenes which will best display his characters in action. Now, if there is one thing more than another that marks Shakespeare's genius, it is his copiousness. ideas fairly tumbled over one another's heels as they came from his pen. It is the main reason for his frequent obscurity. In face of that, can we believe that he was such "a barren rascal" that he never imagined his characters in other scenes than those he set down? No, they existed for him in the round, not merely in the flat; and that is one of the reasons why he is able to make them seem so real to us. Indeed, it is more the truth to say that the people created by our great imaginative writers are more intimately known to us than most of the people we meet in flesh and blood every day, and that they will live when these are forgotten. It is a fact that illustrates how wide is the reach of the apostolic saying that “the things that are seen are temporal, but the things that are not seen are eternal".

The next thing I want you to note about dramatic irony is that it has its counterpart in real life. It is not just a figment of the brain. You find it embodied in our proverbs, such as "There's many a slip 'twit the cup and the lip", You see it even among the little things of life, I daresay you have all found that you may carry an umbrella every day for a month and never need it; but, if you happen to leave it at home by accident, you are sure to get drenched before you get back. You find it in graver things. An only son goes abroad to make his way in the world. The struggle proves long and hard, his old father sits at home waiting eagerly for the good news that does not come. At last the young man finds his feet, and telegraphs tidings that will rejoice the old man's heart. But the news comes just too late, the brick-red envelope lies unopened by the father's coffin. 

These ironies of life constitute a bewildering and a baffling problem. When you come up against some tragic instance of them, it is not surprising if, for the moment, you feel as if there must be some grin humorist up in Heaven directing affairs. Many attempts have been made to explain it. You may exclaim with poor, blinded Gloster:-- 

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; 

they kill us for their sport. 

Or you may tailback upon the half-blind, ‘half-seeing fatalism of old Omar: -- 

The Ball no question makes of Ayes and Noes, 

But here and there as strikes the Player goes; 

And He that toss'd you down into the Field,

He knows about it all--He knows--He knows.

Or you may agree with the tired voluptuary who sums up life in the despairing cry: "Vanity of vanities, All is vanity". Or your re-action to it may be that of the battered old Jew in his Roman dungeon, waiting for the call of the executioner:" I have fought the good fight; I have finished my course; I have kept the faith." There you have the irony of life indeed, only turned the other way round. 

Shakespeare faced the spectre, and, in due course, conquered it. Take these lines from Macbeth", written when his soul was crushsd and darkened: --

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, 

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, 

To the last syllable of recorded time; 

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools 

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle.

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player 

that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, 

And then is heard no more; it is a tale 

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, 

Signifying nothing. 

Now compare them with the strangely similar and equally famous passage from "the Tempest", written when he had passed through the cloud into the clear serenity of his latest plays:-- 

These our actors, 

As I foretold you, were all spirits, and 

Are melted into air, into thin air; 

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, 

The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, 

the solemn temples, the great globe itself, 

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, 

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, 

Leave not a wrack behind, We are such stuff 

As dreams are made on; and our little life

is rounded with a sleep. 

Do you feel how different the tone is in the later passage? The one is the cry of a soul in rebellion; the other breathes resignation, at least, if not acceptance. You can feel-it even more strongly, I think, in that lovely dirge from "Cymbeline": -- 

Fear no more the heat o' the sun, 

Nor the furious winter's rages; 

Thou thy worldly task has done, 

Home art gone, and taken thy wages; 

Golden lads and girls all must, 

Like chimney-sweepers, come to dust. 

However, it is not with dramatic irony as a spiritual experience that I have to deal here, but as a fact. If it had not been a fact, Shakespeare could not have made tragedy out of it. Try to imagine something that has no counterpart in real life--such as round pegs that would only fit square holes, or clothes that, when you came to put them on, always presented the front where the back should have been--and you will see, I think that you might get farce out of it, and even a dim and wistful kind of pathos, as Edward Lear succeeds in doing in that nonsense song of his, "The Jumbilies"; but tragedy—no. Tragedy must have its roots in reality, and deep down at that. 

The next thing I want to say you to notice about this irony in life is that, though it is a reality, it is a purely subjective reality. That is to say, it exists in the mind of the person experiencing it, and in the minds of those who are in sympathy with that person, but it does not exist in that particular instance for other people.

I am afraid this sounds rather too metaphysical; so let me illustrate it by an anecdote, A lady was crossing the Atlantic in the nope that she would reach New York in time to see her daughter, who was dangerously ill, before that daughter died. During the voyage, a heavy gale from the west sprang up, and delayed the crossing. The wind grew so violent that the passengers became alarmed about their safety; and the lady in question went up to the Captain and asked him whether he would not call the passengers together for prayers that the storm might abate. The Captain took her to the side of the ship, and pointed to another steamer just passing them in the opposite direction, "Do you see that ship?" he said. ‘The passengers on board her are all praying the other way. They all want the gale to continue because it's blowing them home”.

You see the point? It was ironic for the woman that the gale should be delaying the ship, and so might prevent her seeing her daughter alive but the passengers on board the other ship were unconscious of any irony, neither, for the matter of that, were the woman's fellow-passengers, save those to whom she had confided her trouble and who sympathised with her in her haste to reach land. So you see that lifes ironies suggest sardonic humour on the one hand, they are linked up with affection on the other.

Now see how Shakespeare makes use of that aspect of dramatic irony to keep up the interest and suspense of the audience in the closing scenes of “King Lear”. In the “Edipus", Sophocles makes the effect of the irony cumulative. The tension on the spectator gradually increases till the drama reaches its tremendous close. ln "King Lear", Shakespere uses it intermittently. You do not even feel, as you do in "Othello" or "Macbeth", that the tragedy is inevitable. He has made you sympathise with the old man so that you feel the irony to the full, but he always leaves you a loophole for hope. 

Shakespeare shows us Lear's nature so changed by suffering that a future of happiness is opened out before him such as he had never known and was incapable of knowing before. The audience understands that, and wants to see him enjoy that time of "clear shining after rain". If, as Charles Lamb says, the only thing left for Lear to do was to die, the ending would have been robbed of all its poignancy. We don't want him to die: we want him to live. That is the string Shakespeare plays upon here. 

We see Lear and Cordelia as prisoners; but we know that the Duke of Albany bears them no ill-will, and that Edgar will foil Edmund's plottings and ambitions. Edmund's sudden and unnatural repentance after he has received his death-wound raises our hopes afresh; and they even give one last feeble flicker when Lear picks up the mirror and holds it to Cordelia's lips. 

But Edmund's repentance comes too late. Cordelia is dead, Then indeed there is nothing left for Lear to do but to die; and, in the fitness of that ending there is some relief from the awfulness of the catastrophe. Kent, who, alone of all the puppets on the stage, shares the audience's feelings, and its sense of the irony of the fate that befalls Lear and Cordelia, voices the thought for us:-- 

Vex not his ghost: O, let him pass! he hates him that would upon the rack of this tough world Stretch him out longer.

Return to the ABB Works Main Page: