A powerful brew of terror and pity

It may not leap as quickly into popular imagination as Hamlet, from which the public responds readily to a standardyoung prince in black with a big soliloquy and a skull in his hand,but it takes us to the very heart of English tragedy. Its greatfigures of the fool and the harrowed king, along with the stretch of the play's action over a vast landscape from palace to blasted heath to the cliffs of Dover, help render it unique. Perhaps I should have said "British tragedy", because theimagined world here is that of pagan Britain, devoid of any Christian consolations. Lear himself is an old monarch in anancient world, incalculably remote from Shakespeare's Elizabethanaudience, however familiar they might have been in those dangerous times with pity and terror, the emotions traditionally aroused bytragedy. Shakespeare, as was his mature practice by the years of the great tragedies, wove his play from many sources, going right backto a folk tale of a father and three daughters: the Cinderellastory, we might say. Other writers had woven the story into theirimaginings of ancient Britain. Incidentally, it seems to have hadno connection with the Irish myth of Lir and his children. Advertisement: Story continues below None of the earlier versions of the Lear story had the virtuousdaughter murdered, and we may wonder why the playwright pushed histale this far, at last leaving the ruined king to murmur or wail:"Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,/And thou no breath atall? Thoult come no more,/Never, never, never, never, never." Lear's enemies are all dead, yet he has nothing. The rollingpower of Shakespeare's mature writing has driven us to thischilling vacuum. Doctor Samuel Johnson, feeling his way into theplay from the 18th century, reeled back from Rosetta Stone Language the extremity of itscruelty, commenting that "I was many years ago so shocked byCordelia's death, that I know not whether I ever endured to readagain the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise themas an editor". Indeed, the play was often performed at that timewith a happy ending, provided by the versatile minor poet Nahum Tate. Johnson feared that the play refused any sense of naturaljustice to its audiences without Tate's softening. Perhaps we aretougher, these late years. Even for us, though, the plucking out of aged Gloucester's eyes must be horrific, leading to the villainous Cornwall's grim "Out, vild jelly. Where is thy lustre now?" A second family story intertwines with and parallels thestripping away of Lear by his two evil daughters 151; that of Gloucester and his two sons, the savagely plotting Edmund and thedispossessed Edgar. Families are distorted in this world: there areno discernible mothers, although we are made aware that Edmund is abastard. Cordelia's fault is her modest honesty, mingled, it may be, witha natural shyness. When the unwise old king asks his threedaughters for a rhetorical performance before receiving a third ofthe kingdom each, she can say nothing. And that nothing becomes agoal to which everything swirls horribly downward. There is dignity, struggling, but this is an endgame, as SamuelBeckett would have conceived it. But there is also that vivid character, the Fool. He combineswit and wisdom, jest and good advice, so marvellously, before hesimply vanishes at the end of act three. He flickers through the great storm scenes at the heart of the play. And he counterpoints the king's heroic travails. Intriguingly, the first time I saw King Lear, this plumrole was played by Barry Humphries, long before the invention of Dame Edna. He was all knees and comical elbows. The truly dominant part is that of Lear himself. Rejected and ejected, the king wanders and suffers. He rails against fate but,above all, fears the coming of madness. His emotional power isprodigious, truly demanding. Only great poetry and prose could keep this terrible dramapersuasive, deeply moving.

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