The Difficulty of Dying in King Lear

The Difficulty of Dying in King Lear Sean Lawrence (bio) My title may seem ironic. Clearly, death is not an unusual occurrence in King Lear. A list of characters who are dead by the end of the play would have to include Lear himself, all three of his daughters, one son-in-law, Oswald, Edmund, Gloucester, the "slave that was a-hanging" Cordelia (5.3.272), and the unnamed servant who mortally wounds Cornwall immediately before being himself killed by Regan. By the end of the play, almost all of the characters who matter are dead, dying, or, in the Fool's case, have simply gone. The exceptions are Albany and Edgar, who take turns delivering the final lines in the Quarto and Folio texts, respectively. Surprisingly, however, among the characters who seek death, Goneril alone succeeds. Gloucester is not executed by Regan and Cornwall, who instead blind him, nor does he manage to dash himself against the rocks at the bottom of Dover Cliff. Lear is not destroyed during the storm, despite his cries for apocalypse, and later finds himself awoken from a sleep which he took to be death. Even Cordelia's suicide, present in most if not all of the sources to which Shakespeare had access, is replaced by an extra-legal execution. The only character who does succeed in committing suicide, Goneril, is perhaps the most despicable. For every other character, death seems strangely unattainable. Most die, but not if they're trying. [End Page 35] While Lear, like "all tragedies" according to Lord Byron, ends "in death," most deaths are strangely deferred. This unusual situation must be accounted for by any attempt to understand King Lear as a tragedy. Leo Tolstoy, in his famously perverse declaration of the superiority of the earlier, anonymous, and now mostly forgotten play King Leir, claims that Shakespeare's adaptation violates all the conventions of tragedy accepted by his nineteenth-century admirers: According to the laws laid down by those very critics who extol Shakespeare, the conditions of every tragedy are that the persons who appear should, as a result of their own characters, actions, and the natural movement of events, be brought into conditions in which, finding themselves in opposition to the world around them, they should struggle with it and in that struggle display their inherent qualities. (335–36) More recent critics also attempt to distance themselves from nineteenth-century constructions of the tragic hero. Against the emphasis on the individual and his struggles, Naomi Conn Liebler and John Drakakis argue that "what is misrecognised as a flaw of 'character' is, in fact, a projection of something which has its roots, not in the inner psychological life of the protagonist, but in the larger domain of culture" (8). Tom McAlindon observes that as a result of this commitment to the cultural over the personal, "political criticism is largely if not wholly indifferent to the affective dimension of the plays, an indifference which seems least defensible in relation to the tragedies" (85). While a general suspicion of emotional affect informs an important vein of recent criticism, and is reflected in questions about genre, queries about Lear's status as a tragic hero are neither new nor the preserve of any one critical school. Paul A. Cantor claims that "In the view of most critics, Lear is basically a pathetic old man, vain and foolish, rash in his judgment and incapable of controlling his emotions—and he is all these things from the very beginning of the play" (189). Even A.C. Bradley points out that by the end of the play, the audience has come to regard Lear "almost wholly as a sufferer, hardly at all as an agent" (280). In what follows, I will argue that Shakespeare's play is an exceptional tragedy, not comprehensible by a traditional or existentialist reading. Specifically, I will be comparing theories of tragedy derived from the philosophies of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre, on the one hand, and Emmanuel Levinas, on the other, and will be arguing that the latter's ideas provide a better framework within which to understand the tragedy of King Lear. [End Page 36] Existentialist readings leave...

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