ABSTRACT
King Lear’s final scene, in which he grieves for Cordelia and then dies, is perhaps the most devastating in all of tragic drama. Susan Snyder observes that “tragedy enacts our ambivalent response to death and to what death makes absolute, the failure of power and the end of hope,” positing that King Lear’s “undeniable special potency may derive from this direct appeal to the very springs of tragic power. No tragedy of Shakespeare moves us more deeply, involves us, so that like Dr. Johnson we can hardly bear to look at the final catastrophe” (450). Shakespeare makes us mute and powerless witnesses to death and mourning, unmitigated by the mediating tropes we have encountered in earlier plays. Unlike Hamlet, whose intellectualized, wary grief for his father is drawn out for the length of the play, Lear’s impassioned mourning for his daughter, all wail, howl, and rage, is compressed into but a few lines. Unlike Constance, who dies of grief offstage, Lear dies before our eyes. Unlike Ophelia, whose mourning for her father is ameliorated by madness, Lear, to borrow Constance’s words, is “not mad / Too well, too well [he] feel[s] / The different plague of each calamity” (3.4.59-60). For the entire play, Lear exists at the extremes of passion, from his rage in the opening scene, to his humiliation at the hands of Goneril and Regan, to his descent (or ascent?) into madness, to his rapture upon being reconciled with Cordelia, and finally to his excruciating sorrow when she dies. His last words have been the focus of much critical attention, ranging from speculation about sources to debates over the religious implications of his dying words.1 In this final chapter, I focus on how Lear’s mourning over Cordelia also resonates with the Virgin Mary’s laments for Jesus as depicted in the medieval English Passion plays. Visually the moment evokes an inverted pietà: instead of the bereaved mother embracing her son’s body, we witness the aged father cradling his daughter’s. There are poetic echoes as well. Lear rages, interrogates the heavens, wishes for death, and cries out for vengeance. We have seen that the Virgin Mary of medieval English drama undergoes a similar arc of emotion: she angrily questions God and asks death to take her. She does not call for vengeance, but Mary Magdalene, her dramatic surrogate, does. In both instances the parents are inconsolable. Mary refuses to
cease mourning for Jesus despite the admonitions of St. John and her own son. Lear’s hope that Cordelia might live to redeem his sorrow dies with her last breath. In both plays the “bitterness” of the mourners, to borrow Peter Dronke’s words, “is unrelieved” (116). Exhausted by convulsions of passion, joy and grief overwhelming him in successive waves, Lear expires only moments later. The laments of the mourning women of medieval English drama, and especially the Virgin’s, are a surprising analogue for Shakespeare’s King Lear, one that re-conceives the debates over the inscrutable power of Lear’s final lines. These debates have previously focused upon whether Lear’s last words articulate Christian hope or pagan despair, a question that has been most succinctly addressed by W.R. Elton and Arthur Kirsch. Elton reads Lear in the context of seventeenth-century theological texts on grief, using these contemporary accounts to argue against those who find in Lear’s final words a sense of redemption and Christian hope: “Lear’s new belief is negative and exclusive, one of abnegation, contemptus mundi, and forfeit ... his “newfound ‘faith’ is pathetically and suddenly withdrawn from him by the murder of Cordelia” (262). Elton attends to Lear’s closing cries, arguing that,
Arthur Kirsch embraces Elton’s argument that Lear articulates pagan despair, but he implies that the issue itself is beside the point:
According to Kirsch the import of Lear’s final moments rests in its emotional rather than intellectual or theological dimensions: “[t]he experience of feeling-physical as well as emotional feeling-is at the core of King Lear, as the enlargement of our own capacity to feel is at the core of any persuasive explanation of why we can take pleasure in such a tragedy” (154). But the universalizing assertion that we are all “pagan” in our initial response to death elides the historical religious tensions denoted by this word in sixteenth-century England. Similarly, Elton’s assurances that Lear’s sentiments are
pagan rather than Christian, and his reliance on the words of a seventeenth-century English Bishop show the need for a more developed historical framework. As we have seen, the Virgin Mary of medieval English drama is also inconsolable in the face of her son’s death. The resonance of Lear’s lament with that of the Virgin’s indicates that the debate itself may not properly formulated, especially in the context of the discursive practices of post-Reformation England. Early reformers cast mourning for the dead as pagan, heathen, and therefore sinful and contrary to faith as much for political as theological reasons: it was part of a longstanding rhetorical practice of assaulting every vestige of Catholic mourning and burial ritual. Mourning for the dead in the eyes of the reformers was bound up with England’s foreign enslavement to Catholic Rome. In his fifth Lincolnshire sermon in 1553, Hugh Latimer rewrites English history from a decidedly Protestant point of view regarding mourning customs: “In the time of popery, before the gospel came amongst us, we went to buriales, with wepyng and wailing, as thoughe there were no god.”2 Latimer uses “popery” as a metonym for pre-Reformation, medieval England, a time when the country was, according to him, held captive to heathen mourning for the dead. “The Gospel” stands for the liberating forces of Protestantism. He aligns “wepyng and wailing, as thoughe ther wer no god” with the Catholic form of burial. In his sermon, he invokes Saint Paul, urging his fellow Englishmen, to weep “measurably as it becommeth christians,” implying that those who mourn for the dead are not only un-English, but unChristian as well. Seven years later Thomas Wilson interpreted his personal imprisonment in Rome as a metaphor for England’s medieval enslavement to the Catholic church. In his “prologue to the reader” of the 1560 publication of his Arte of Rhetorique, he exults: “God be praised, and thanks be given to him only, that not only hath delivered me out of the lion’s mouth, but also hath brought England, my dear country, out of great thraldom and foreign bondage.”3 In Reforming rhetoric, then, heathen, pagan, infidel, Catholic, and effeminacy were virtually synonymous. When Thomas Becon’s dying man in The Sicke mannes Salve asserts, “Let the infideles mourne for their dead: the Christian ought to reioyse, whan anye of the faithfull be called from this vale of misery unto the glorious kingdom of God,” the reference to infidels means Catholic as much as it means non-Christian.4 Curiously, the Church of England was still attempting to hold out against the pagans well into the twentieth cenutry. Phillipe Ariès relates a piece from the 18 December 1962 issue of Le Monde:
The concept of a natural form of sorrow that was more sincere when independent of ritual expression appears to be tied to the nascent ideal of a unique “English” identity. Ritualized sorrow was characterized as effeminate, “popish,” and antithetical to the Protestant national ideal of “Englishness.”5 Shakespeare’s Hamlet typifies this contrast in the characters of mother and son. Gertrude’s ritualized mourning for her husband seems grotesquely short-lived and insincere while Hamlet’s unstructured grief seems endless and profound. Like Hamlet, the ending of Shakespeare’s King Lear probes the nature of grief in a society in which this vehement and debilitating passion has lost its public footing. As I argued in Part One, the pre-Christian residual practice of lamentation for the dead which had merged with medieval Catholicism, when considered objectively, does not articulate “despair.” It performs the profoundly disturbing emotions attendant upon death in order to assist the dead, the mourners, and the community in negotiating change and restoring order in society. The practice was contained within Christian teleology by being acculturated to the Virgin’s mourning over Christ which evolved into the central organizing symbol of the complex emotions of bereavement prior to the Reformation. Despite religious corruption (sometimes exaggerated by reforming zeal), the preReformation system of intercessory prayer had served important psychological and communal functions in England: it had kept the memory of the deceased alive in the community; it gave the living a sense of spiritual agency in the destiny of their loved ones; and it provided a cyclical pattern of cathartic ritual for the bereaved. Other public forms of consolation were emerging, but in the first generations after the Reformation, the Reformed dispensation seems to have made the end more dreadful. Marlowe provokes a questioning of this excruciating new system of justice when his hero, who is at once sublime and ridiculous, but not malevolent, begs for a place of punishment that no longer exists: “Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years, / A hundred thousand, and at last be saved” (5.3.164-5). For Faustus there is no reprieve because he is unable to utter the proper words in his final moments on earth. While Faustus cannot utter the proper words, those in the audience may not have known what the proper words were. The prayers that once assisted the dead and might have had the salutary effect of also healing the living were no longer legitimate. Michael Neill perceives this “profound source of post-Reformation angst” in the “preoccupation with death, decay, and the sovereign preservative of memory” in Hamlet (“Exeunt,” 180). From this vantage point, might Lear’s dying voice be a critique of the emerging post-Reformation construction of mourning and death?
