Part 25 (1/2)
[Footnote 160: What immediately follows is as striking an ill.u.s.tration of quite another quality, and of the effects which make us think of Lear as pursued by a relentless fate. If he could go in and sleep after his prayer, as he intends, his mind, one feels, might be saved: so far there has been only the menace of madness. But from within the hovel Edgar--the last man who would willingly have injured Lear--cries, 'Fathom and half, fathom and half! Poor Tom!'; the Fool runs out terrified; Edgar, summoned by Kent, follows him; and, at sight of Edgar, in a moment something gives way in Lear's brain, and he exclaims:
Hast thou given all To thy two daughters? And art thou come to this?
Henceforth he is mad. And they remain out in the storm.
I have not seen it noticed that this stroke of fate is repeated--surely intentionally--in the sixth scene. Gloster has succeeded in persuading Lear to come into the 'house'; he then leaves, and Kent after much difficulty induces Lear to lie down and rest upon the cus.h.i.+ons. Sleep begins to come to him again, and he murmurs,
'Make no noise, make no noise; draw the curtains; so, so, so.
We'll go to supper i' the morning. So, so, so.'
At that moment Gloster enters with the news that he has discovered a plot to kill the King; the rest that 'might yet have balm'd his broken senses' is again interrupted; and he is hurried away on a litter towards Dover. (His recovery, it will be remembered, is due to a long sleep artificially induced.)]
[Footnote 161: III. iv. 49. This is printed as prose in the Globe edition, but is surely verse. Lear has not yet spoken prose in this scene, and his next three speeches are in verse. The next is in prose, and, ending, in his tearing off his clothes, shows the advance of insanity.]
[Footnote 162: [Lear's death is thus, I am reminded, like _pere_ Goriot's.] This interpretation may be condemned as fantastic, but the text, it appears to me, will bear no other. This is the whole speech (in the Globe text):
And my poor fool is hang'd! No, no, no life!
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more, Never, never, never, never, never!
Pray you, undo this b.u.t.ton: thank you, sir.
Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips, Look there, look there!
The transition at 'Do you see this?' from despair to something more than hope is exactly the same as in the preceding pa.s.sage at the word 'Ha!':
A plague upon you, murderers, traitors all!
I might have saved her; now she's gone for ever!
Cordelia, Cordelia, stay a little.
Ha!
What is't thou say'st? Her voice was ever soft, Gentle, and low, an excellent thing in woman.
As to my other remarks, I will ask the reader to notice that the pa.s.sage from Lear's entrance with the body of Cordelia to the stage-direction _He dies_ (which probably comes a few lines too soon) is 54 lines in length, and that 30 of them represent the interval during which he has absolutely forgotten Cordelia. (It begins when he looks up at the Captain's words, line 275.) To make Lear during this interval turn continually in anguish to the corpse, is to act the pa.s.sage in a manner irreconcilable with the text, and insufferable in its effect. I speak from experience. I have seen the pa.s.sage acted thus, and my sympathies were so exhausted long before Lear's death that his last speech, the most pathetic speech ever written, left me disappointed and weary.]
[Footnote 163: The Quartos give the 'Never' only thrice (surely wrongly), and all the actors I have heard have preferred this easier task. I ought perhaps to add that the Quartos give the words 'Break, heart; I prithee, break!' to Lear, not Kent. They and the Folio are at odds throughout the last sixty lines of King Lear, and all good modern texts are eclectic.]
[Footnote 164: The connection of these sufferings with the sin of earlier days (not, it should be noticed, of youth) is almost thrust upon our notice by the levity of Gloster's own reference to the subject in the first scene, and by Edgar's often quoted words 'The G.o.ds are just,'
etc. The following collocation, also, may be intentional (III. iv. 116):
_Fool_. Now a little fire in a wild field were like an old lecher's heart; a small spark, all the rest on's body cold.
Look, here comes a walking fire. [_Enter_ GLOSTER with a torch.]
Pope destroyed the collocation by transferring the stage-direction to a point some dozen lines later.]
[Footnote 165: The pa.s.sages are here printed together (III. iv. 28 ff.
and IV. i. 67 ff.):
_Lear._ Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your loop'd 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 the heavens just.