ABSTRACT
When Cordelia makes her final entrance in Lear’s arms, Kent will not believe what he is seeing. ‘Is this the promised end?’ he asks. Cordelia plays her last scene dead. Or maybe she’s playing dead. For she isn’t meant to die. It wasn’t what audiences were expecting. The old King Leir, the True Chronicle which they had seen at Henslowe’s Rose playhouse in 1594 and (perhaps) again, revived, in 1605 before it went into print, had a happy ending. That ‘true’ story (which, clearly, had saturated Shakespeare’s mind, for memory traces of Leir turn up in Lear) ended in return, recognition, reconciliation.1 So maybe Cordelia in Lear’s arms is only pretending, like Hero, Helena, Juliet, Thisbe in Peter Quince’s Pyramus and Thisbe, the Player Queen in Hamlet’s Mousetrap. Or, like Desdemona (momentarily) or Cleopatra (chronically)— and with Hermione, Thaisa, Imogen to come in plays not yet writtenperhaps Cordelia will revive. As Cerimon testifies over Thaisa’s body, ‘I have heard of an Egyptian…’
‘Playing dead’, of course, is precisely what the actor does in the scene. But it is also what the scene mocks the audience and Lear with imagining that Cordelia is doing. ‘She’s dead as earth,’ says Lear. But then: ‘This feather stirs; she lives!’. So is she ‘gone for ever!’, or will she ‘stay a little’? Does she breathe? Will ‘her breath…mist’ ‘a lookingglass’? Lear’s invitation (rough? urgent? gentle? querulous?) to Cordelia to speak (‘What is’t thou say’st’?’) and his command to his spectators to ‘Look on her, look, her lips’ opens up the miraculous possibility of resurrection. Are we, along with Kent, Albany, Edgar and the huddle of soldiers who circle King Lear, looking at a miracle or an hallucination, at a corpse stiffening in rigor mortis or at ‘a chance that does redeem all sorrows’?
