King Lear: The Virtues that Come from Nothing

Return to Zero: Lear and Gloucester

After raving through suffering and storm, King Lear is seared by an insight, one as dramatic as the lightning flashing in the sky. Led by the disguised Kent to the barest of shelters, a hutch or “hovel,” Lear hesitates before the entrance. To use an image from earlier in the act, the once mighty king is now a cleaved oak. Yet exposed to the harsh elements, scorned by his two eldest daughters (and soon to be pursued by their murderous agents), his royal garb soiled and soaked, his retinue reduced from one hundred knights to the prophetic Fool and the loyal Kent he foolishly banished, Lear’s anger suddenly gives way to care. Largely self-absorbed and self-pitying throughout the play, Lear awakens to the needs of others. He first urges Kent and the Fool into the hovel before him. Then he observes,

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 windowed 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 may’st shake the superflux to them
And show the heavens more just. (III.iv.32-41)^[1]

Lear thinks of the exposed (“houseless heads”) and the hungry (“unfed sides”) of his former kingdom. He realizes that he should have done more for them. He should have shared the plenty of the realm, his plenty, with those in need. Not long ago preoccupied with kingly “pomp,” flying into fits of invective when his daughters curtailed his luxuries and neglected his prerogatives, Lear now sees the loss of pomp as a royal’s needful medicine. He learns the hard way what is required of a truly just king. In the first scene of the play, Lear warned Cordelia, who refused to compete with her sisters’ deceitful hyperbole, that “Nothing will come of nothing” (I.i.99). Yet it is when Lear himself loses his material somethings, when he becomes a kind of nothing in terms of possessions and political power, that he gains this insight into justice.

In The Intimate Universal: The Hidden Porosity Among Religion, Art, Philosophy, and Politics, William Desmond writes insightfully about Lear’s transformation in the storm. Early in the play, Lear is “regal, sovereign, irascible, impatient, used to getting his way, his will. He acts foolishly, sovereignty sleep-walking in the direction of impotence, into its own undoing.” Lear becomes subject to a political gravity that often pertains in tragic drama, one in which “untrue going above,” in pride or self-delusion or ruthless grasping, results in being “brought down.” Aristotle calls this reversal of fortune peripeteia; Christian theology speaks of a fall. This dynamic also has its inverse, Desmond holds. For “true going down is going up.” A fallen character, a character who has hit rock bottom, one who has been stripped of pretension and self-delusion or simply shaken from a customary position or perspective, can gain new openness, a new awareness of dependence and interrelationship, a broader view of things and of what really matters. A fall can knock the blinders off such a character. Anagnorisis or discovery often accompanies peripeteia on the stage of tragedy, and perhaps also in the world beyond the stage.

Rock bottom can simply be rock bottom, of course. One might only find despair or loss there, and no compensating self-knowledge or broader perspective. One might be broken or undone, disfigured by despair or resentment. And if virtue is gained, it might still be accompanied by a scar or a limp. Desmond does not deny any of this. His is no saccharine formula in which every fall is fortunate. But he also holds to the ancient wisdom that suffering can, at times, lead to insight, that especially the willful might only, unfortunately, learn through suffering.^[2] There is, then, a kind of “true going down” that allows for a new beginning. There is a “return to zero” that affords a “return from zero.” Stephen Conlin elaborates on this concept of Desmond’s in his essay “Beyond the Zero: The Concept of the Meonic in Philosophy,” observing that the “point of maximally intense contraction of self and soul [is where] ‘something’ mysterious… communicates, often forcefully.”

For Lear, what is communicated in his return to zero is his kinship with others whom he would have earlier seen as lowly inferiors, what is communicated is a sense of their worth and a desire to help them, a self-reproach for not helping them more when he had the wherewithal. Brought low, Lear has this high insight. Reminded of his fragility, of his animality, Lear feels the transcendent pull of an ethical absolute. (Desmond, like Eric Voegelin, sees humans as creatures of the “between,” the metaxu, including this particular “between” of finitude and transcendence.) On the far side of further storminess, and after his reunion with Cordelia, Lear’s return from zero seems to reach beyond his bond with humans to a wider renewal of his sense of goodness and beauty in the world, a sense of “the mystery of things” (V.iii.17). Even faced with imprisonment, he imagines that they “will sing like birds i’ th’ cage” (V.iii.10).

A similar dynamic seems to be at work in the tragedy’s parallel plot. Gloucester, like Lear, rejects his loyal child (Edgar) and elevates the disloyal (Edmund). Betrayed by the latter, his eyes scooped out of his skull, Gloucester, too, has a new care for the needs of others. “So distribution should undo excess / And each man have enough,” he says (IV.i.80-81). In Loving Justice, Living Shakespeare, Regina Schwartz, always sensitive to the biblical echoes in Shakespeare, writes of Lear’s insight in the storm: “With its emphasis on the houseless heads, the unfed sides, the naked wretches, Lear intones the biblical understanding of justice as caring for the vulnerable, giving to those in need.” She notes that the same “lesson in shaking the superflux, gleaning the fields, is also learned by Gloucester when he suffers. When he could see, he was blind to his wrongdoing toward his loyal son Edgar. But in his blindness, he worries about clothing the naked madman who leads him.” For Gloucester, too, there seems to be an insight in the “return to zero.”

Of course, in tragedy, such insight born of suffering is usually too belated. Neither Lear nor Gloucester will return to power again. Their insights in old age do not help the needy neglected during their reigns. (It is tragic, too, that it took such suffering, such an extreme return to zero, to lead to insight.) Gloucester is gripped by suicidal despair even as he seeks to clothe the madman. This is not to say that Lear’s and Gloucester’s insights are entirely fruitless. These insights, along with the gestures of care that attend them, are shared with the audience, who undergo their own vicarious “return to zero” during the tragic drama and then “return from zero” as they leave the theater, hopefully with a greater sense of who and what matters. This is Desmond’s compelling understanding of catharsis.^[3] But here, too, such catharsis always comes at the risk of simply being disturbed at (or, at the other end of the spectrum, sadistically entertained by) the suffering laid bare on stage, and this is especially true in King Lear, which many critics have held to be the starkest of Shakespeare’s major tragedies.

A particularly sweet fruit of Lear’s insight in the storm comes in his reconciliation with Cordelia at the end of the play. He finally recognizes her—and her honest goodness—rightly. Yet he is not afforded the simple pleasures he imagines for their imprisonment together. Instead, she is murdered in front of him at Edmund’s order. Desmond discerns a visual echo of the Pietà in Lear carrying his daughter’s lifeless body onstage in the final scene. Desmond says we cannot simply lift an easy moral from the play. We must attend to Lear’s final howls. And these howls are particularly disturbing if we hear them as coming from Lear’s renewed openness to others: words of care and love turned to howl.^[4]

Return from Zero: Edgar

For many, it is cold comfort that Edgar survives at the end of the play to patch up the kingdom. Still, Edgar is much more intrinsic to the drama than other final scene rebuilders, such as Fortinbras in Hamlet or Malcolm in Macbeth. For Edgar himself has returned to zero and returned from zero. Framed for plotting patricidal treason by his (truly patricidal and fratricidal) brother, with a death sentence on his head issued by his father, Edgar strips away his clothing, mires himself in filth, pricks himself with briars and splinters, and adopts the persona of the beggar “Poor Tom.” He, like Lear and Gloucester, is “returned” to zero by the plots of others. But, in contrast to Lear and Gloucester, he also “returns” himself to zero in a way that they do not. He willingly undergoes it. He does not disguise himself and then escape the kingdom—to, say, Cordelia’s France or another sympathetic court, where he could perhaps turn his unjust banishment into comfortable asylum or even military support. He notes that the ports may be watched, but surely this would still be one of the safest paths if cautiously pursued, especially given that this has rapidly become an uncertain and “scattered kingdom” (III.i.31). Shakespeare perhaps nods in this direction when he introduces a rumor that Kent and Edgar have found refuge together in Germany (IV.vii.106). Edgar instead uses the disguise of Poor Tom to pursue one of the least safe paths. He uses his disguise to stay close to the suffering of Lear and Gloucester, to help them through these sufferings. This means undergoing significant suffering himself. Immediately after giving his famous speech about justice, Lear meets a “poor naked” wretch in the form of Edgar’s Poor Tom, who had earlier taken shelter in the hutch. And, of course, the “naked madman” whom Gloucester wishes to clothe is again Poor Tom, the very son he thought he had condemned to execution. In short, Shakespeare links Edgar to the insights of Lear and Gloucester. In his loyalty to them, Edgar seems to act on such an insight himself. There is reason to think, then, that he will carry this insight into his efforts to repair “the gored state” (V.iii.389).

 More than a few critics will frown at this interpretation of Edgar. He is rarely lauded in the criticism. Many see him as a kind of flat chump. His first appearance on stage can easily be seen that way. Edmund launches his plot to frame Edgar by melodramatically claiming that astrological signs portend trouble between fathers and sons. Edgar laughs incredulously at Edmund becoming a “sectary astronomical” while credulously walking into his half-brother’s trap (I.ii.157-8). Edgar allows Edmund to turn him into a bit actor in I.ii and II.i: hide there, draw your sword, pretend to fight, run away. Edgar seems like a naïve know-it-all who is all too easily outmaneuvered by his cagier brother.

Furthermore, while most readers rightly recoil from Edmund’s murderous plots, it is easy to sympathize with the frustrations from which they arise. In the opening exchange of the play, Gloucester deals with the awkwardness of introducing Kent to his illegitimate son by making a series of lewd jokes about Edmund’s mother. Edmund shows composure and makes a good first impression on both Kent and the audience. Edmund’s soliloquy in I.ii begins with understandable frustration at being treated as lesser simply because of “the plague of custom” regarding legitimacy (I.ii.3). He claims that he is just as capable as any legitimate son, and he goes on to prove himself dynamically capable throughout the play. When we first meet Edgar shortly thereafter, he does seem a “fop” by comparison, as “dull, stale, [and] tired,” as bumbling “’tween asleep and wake,” as Edmund imagines relations in the legitimate marriage bed to be (I.ii.13-16). Samuel Taylor Coleridge notes the appeal of Edmund in his lectures on Shakespeare: “courage, intellect, and strength of character are the most impressive forms of power, and. . .to power in itself, without reference to any moral end, an inevitable admiration and complacency appertains, whether it be displayed in the conquests of a Buonaparte or Tamerlane, or in the foam and the thunder of a cataract.” If one treats Edgar as a static character from this scene onward, then he simply hangs around in the background before somehow getting the better of Edmund in a duel, an outcome that does not convince beyond ensuring that Edmund both lives and dies by the sword.

I would argue, though, that Edgar is far from static. In embracing his “return to zero,” Edgar willingly divests himself of title and privilege. Again, despite being disinherited by his father, he could have played the game of power politics in a sympathetic court. There is currency in being denied one’s “legitimate” title, especially in a time of political turmoil. It can provide pretense for the grasping aims of others. Edgar instead chooses vulnerability and uncertainty. Edgar is remade by this embraced vulnerability, by the suffering he undergoes. He is schooled in humility, perseverance, and ready patience, while Edmund concurrently veers into hubris and reckless overreach. Desmond says little about Edgar, but he does claim that the character becomes “wise” in proclaiming “I nothing am” (II.iii.21). Edgar’s is thus the “true going down” that yields wisdom and virtue. Edmund’s is the “untrue rising above” that leads to comeuppance. Edgar’s virtues are perhaps less glamorous than Edmund’s cunning and risk-taking, but they prove more substantial. The final victory over Edmund seems more convincing—and compelling—when viewed as secured by these virtues.

Another, more difficult, criticism of Edgar arises from the strangest scene in the play. In IV.vi, after Gloucester is tortured, blinded, and left to die, Edgar—still disguised—finds him and leads him away. Gloucester is in the deepest despair, and he asks his new guide to take him to the White Cliffs of Dover to cast himself from their heights. Edgar instead stages his blind father’s fall from Dover. He claims that they are struggling uphill to the clifftops when they actually remain on flat ground. After Gloucester “jumps,” Edgar pretends to be a different person at Cliff’s bottom who is amazed that the old man has survived such a leap. He goes on to convince Gloucester that he was actually led to the summit by a horrific demonic entity and that, having survived such a calamitous plummet, his “life’s a miracle” (IV.vi.69).

Edgar claims via an aside that this ruse is his attempt to deliver his father from despair, but many have seen Edgar’s actions as not only bizarre but also as manipulative. Why doesn’t Edgar simply reveal himself to his father to heal his despair? No less a reader than Stanley Cavell, in his classic essay “The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear,” has claimed that Edgar is “avoiding recognition,” and that this is always a form of “mutilating cruelty” in the play. Indeed, Cavell sees Edgar as extending the “blinding” torture of Cornwall and Regan by remaining in disguise. He sees Edgar’s “evil” avoidance of recognition as of a piece with these sadists’ desire to avoid Gloucester’s accusing gaze. To be sure, Cavell does not equate these characters tout court, but he does think that Edgar’s interaction with the blind Gloucester “shows how radically implicated good is in evil.”

While I have learned much from Cavell’s essay, I find this to be a rather ruthless reading of Edgar, one that does not really “recognize” him. Even if Edgar is trying to avoid recognition out of guilt for falling for Edmund’s trap and thus exposing his father to torture, which is hardly clear, Cavell levels out the difference between Edgar’s purported act of avoidance—which comes amidst ongoing care for the old man—and plucking out his eyes and leaving him to die. Even less plausible to me is Cavell’s suggestion that Edgar may delay recognition because he “wants his father still to be a father, powerful, so that he can remain a child.” It is hard to square this with what Edgar has willingly undergone up to this point. He is, after all, presumably changing his father’s bandages, helping him to relieve himself, and encouraging him through continual pain and sorrow.

I have often wondered if Shakespeare got carried away by the idea that different mindsets can “see” the same set of objective conditions in radically different ways. Before the fall, Gloucester is viciously (and undoubtedly still painfully) blinded, thinks his son is dead, and wants to die himself. After the fall, Gloucester is blind, thinks his son is dead, and wants to carry on. The fall can seem like a kind of staged parable.^[5]

But I also agree with Cavell that we should not sidestep the characters in this scene, and Edgar’s claim that he is trying to “cure” his father does raise eyebrows (IV.vi.43). Is this the best way? Still, “avoiding recognition” in the play is neither univocally evil nor univocal in intention. For it is precisely the inability of Lear and Gloucester to truly recognize, and to recognize truth, that, on the one hand, enables the self-interested duplicity of Goneril, Regan, Cornwall, and Edmund, and that, on the other hand, necessitates Kent and Edgar to disguise themselves and the Fool to speak in disguised jokes. In I.i,, Cordelia and Kent show the dangers of trying to be forthright, of standing boldly undisguised before a vision disfigured by pride and insecurity. Cordelia alone persists in this undisguised truth, and she is forced from the land for much of the play. Lear’s and Gloucester’s disfigured vision confuses the bad as good and the good as bad. The irony of the disguises of Kent and Edgar is that they are necessary to counteract such distortions. Their disguises allow their loyalty and goodness, if not their identities, to be “seen” by Lear and Gloucester. For much of the play, the truth must filter through disguise. This is the mark of a warped and tyrannical world. (Since it is not only Edgar but also Kent who persists in disguise to the end of the play in a way that is question-begging for any strict plausibility, one suspects that Shakespeare wishes to underscore this point—that the disguises are maintained at least in part for symbolic purposes.)

If we take Edgar at his word that he is not being cruel but honestly trying to heal his father, then some interesting contrasts become visible in the structure of the play. One can read Edmund’s pernicious trickery of Gloucester early in the play as counterpoised by the beneficent trickery of Edgar later in the play. There is, then, a trickery that hurts, but there is perhaps also a trickery that heals—or at least aims to heal. Terry Eagleton, in his reading of the play in Hope Without Optimism, concludes, “When truth itself becomes fraudulent, only a homeopathic admixture of illusion can restore it.” Against the torture of Cornwall and Regan, which left Gloucester not only with renewed care for the suffering of others but also in suicidal despair, one can perhaps see Edgar as trying to guide his father through a second return to zero that would allow a fuller return from zero, a broader sense of openness to the future. “Faking” a miracle may seem like bad faith nonetheless, but the words of Edgar after Gloucester’s supposed fall do image the truth of the situation, albeit a truth disguised in sensational images. Gloucester himself soon acknowledges that he was in the grip, if not of an external demon, then of the “worser spirit” of himself (IV.vi.242). That worser spirit was indeed leading him to the cliff. (Poor Tom’s ravings about the “foul fiend” earlier in the play perhaps suggest that Edgar himself has grappled with such besetting spirits in his exile.) Edgar’s description of the fall can also be seen as imaging Cornwall and Regan’s monstrous abandonment of Gloucester to death, only to be miraculously reunited with Edgar.

Perhaps, too, Edgar is laying the necessary groundwork for their reunion. Is it a sure thing that the despairing Gloucester would have been healed by Edgar’s immediate revelation of his identity? Is there a more fundamental recognition that Gloucester needs first, a recognition that will open the horizon of the future beyond despair and thus allow him to truly recognize his son? To be sure, as Cavell points out, Gloucester does say that to reunite with Edgar would return his eyes to him, would effect an immediate healing, but would it convince if that were to play out immediately in the wake of his eye gouging (IV.i.22-25)? Perhaps the necessity of gradual treatment, along with the jagged ups and downs of Lear’s and Gloucester’s returns from zero, testify to the real damage done to them, safeguarding against any blithe supposition that their harrowing loss was simply balanced by gained wisdom and reconciliation. Here the illuminating comparison is with Cordelia’s rehabilitation of the mad Lear, who must sleep, be bathed, and given new garb before she reveals herself to him, and even then she must proceed carefully without talking to him about distressing recent events (IV.vii.91-93). In both cases, the point is that reunion with the estranged child is the central remedy but one that must be prepared for and offered at the right time. Of course, what is going on in a scene this strange cannot be definitively argued, but there are compelling ways to read it beyond cruelty and manipulation.

The disguises of Edgar and Kent may be necessary, but this does not mean that they are ideal. They are necessary precisely because the ideal of straightforward honesty has been denied in the tragedy’s world of self-blinded complacency and eye-plucking power grabs. It is not good when the truth must work disguised. In this regard, it is more fitting that Edgar (as in the Folio) rather than Albany (as in the Quarto) pronounces at play’s end: “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say” (V.iii.393). The immediate implication is that the survivors should openly vent their mourning. But there is also the implication that the time for disguises is to be set aside, that the truth no longer needs to, nor should, present itself in disguise. Note, too, that Edgar’s rejection of conventional grieving—“what we ought to say”—recalls Edmund’s railing against convention in his early soliloquy, when he questioned Edgar’s worthiness to rule. To my mind, Edgar’s legitimacy by the play’s end has little to do with convention. It has to do with the virtues he has learned in his return from zero.

NOTES:

[1] My quotations from King Lear are from the text available on the Folger Library website.

[2] In King Lear, the return to and from zero recalls via biblical allusion and morality the kenosis of Christian spirituality. Varieties of such returns can be seen across traditions, though, as in the famous words of the chorus in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon: “Zeus puts us on the road / to mindfulness, Zeus decrees / we learn by suffering. / In the heart is no sleep; there drips instead / pain that remembers wounds. And to unwilling / minds circumspection comes” (Sarah Ruden’s translation in The Greek Plays, edited by Mary Lefkowitz and James Romm).

[3] As this conception of catharsis suggests, there are many different returns to zero. In Spiritual Exercises for a Secular Age: Desmond and the Quest for God, for instance, Ryan Duns, SJ, explains how the “return to zero” can be undertaken as a meditative spiritual exercise.

[4] Desmond offers an extended reflection on Lear’s howl in the second chapter of his book Perplexity and Ultimacy: Metaphysical Thoughts from the Middle. I offer a synthesis of and commentary on Desmond’s writings on tragedy in my book Wonder Strikes: Approaching Aesthetics and Literature with William Desmond.

[5] The staged fall is also one of the many meta-theatrical moments in Shakespeare’s oeuvre. For a trenchant critique of Cavell’s approach to Edgar that discusses this meta-theatricality, see Nicholas Luke’s recent article “Avoidance As Love: Evading Cavell on Dover Cliff” in Modern Philology.   

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