King Lear naked on the heath in the middle of a storm, berating the heavens, daring them to drown him and everybody else too.
The scene haunts me.
I’ve read it hundreds of times, watched countless actors tackle Shakespeare’s rabid poetry, and find myself replaying the scene in my mind, like a fever dream or premonition of a hellish future, as I drift off to sleep.
Why?
Why not Hamlet’s ‘To be, or not to be’?
Why not Macbeth’s ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’?
Or Romeo’s ‘It is the east, and Juliet is the sun?’
Why not Mark Antony’s ‘Friends, romans, countrymen’?
Jacques’ ‘All the world’s a stage’?
There’s something in the marrow of this messy masterpiece, this mongrel jewel, this futile foray into bleak godless oblivion that makes my heart and breath halt.
Something particularly in the opening to Act 3, Scene 2, precisely halfway through the play when Lear turns his eyes to the sky and yells,
‘Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow!’
Let’s find out what that something is.
But first, watch the scene.
The best performance of Lear, particularly the scene on the heath, was by the late great Pete Postlethwaite at the Young Vic Theatre directed by Rupert Goold in 2008, three years before his death at the age of 61, two decades younger than Lear was supposed to be.
But in the tragic absence of such footage, I implore you to relish the second best performance: Paul Scofield in Peter Brook’s nihilistic 1971 film production.
There are plenty more Lears, but such is the role, such is the play as a whole, that it defies deft performance.
It is almost impossible to do this play justice, its sublimity and intermingling of complex human themes making it close to unperformable.
Word of warning to prospective filmmakers: you must train your craft for decades before being allowed the right to try King Lear, and even then, the odds are stacked against you.
Harold Bloom even went so far as to avoid stagings of King Lear altogether, opting to reread it in solitude, rather than be exposed to the travesty of ill performance: ‘the part of Lear should be playable,’ he says.
‘If we cannot accomplish it, the flaw is in us, and in the authentic decline of our cognitive and literate culture. Assaulted my films, television, and computers, our inner and outer ears have difficulty apprehending Shakespeare’s hum of thoughts evaded in the mind. Since The Tragedy of King Lear well may be the heigh of literary experience, we cannot afford to lose our capability for confronting it. Lear’s torments are central to us, almost to all of us, since the sorrows of generational strife are necessarily universal.’
Another word of warning to filmmakers: do not drown Lear’s words with strong storm sound effects and visuals.
Lear creates the storm with language, and needs to be heard.
Now let’s take the scene on the heath apart, with a view to sharpen our inner and outer ears, and comprehend the sense of self overheard, to borrow a term from Bloom.
Time to head into the eye of the storm.
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Smite flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!
Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once,
That make ingrateful man!
Shakespeare often writes his characters’ speeches in verse. Not always. But if the subject is regal, poignant, and demands attention, Shakespeare will fashion the thespian’s breath into a poetic form known as iambic pentameter.
Five beats to a line, a heroic flow of syllables: ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum.
Look at these lines from Othello:
It is the cause. Yet I’ll not shed her blood;
Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow,
A steady procession of uniform iambs, hemming in the great protagonist’s speech.
These lines too from Juliet:
Thou know’st the mask of night is on my face,
Else would a maiden blush bepaint my cheek
Or these lines from the Bard’s eighteenth sonnet:
Thou know’st the mask of night is on my face,
Else would a maiden blush bepaint my cheek
Stable, predictable, rhythmic, tightly and expertly contained within the form.
Now back to Lear:
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
That first line sets the tone for the rest of the speech.
It’s a force of nature.
Six strong syllables squeezed into a line that, were it completely faithful to form, would only have five.
It also is two syllables short.
And, in the first and last feet of the line, we feet comprised not of melodic iambs, moving from unstressed to stressed syllables as composes the bulk of heroic pentameters, but metrical feet known as spondees.
Two stresses together.
‘Blow, winds’ and ‘Rage! Blow!’
Each stress a command that creates the imperative as Lear commands.
Two strong spondees enveloping two iambic feet – ‘and crack your cheeks’.
Language is storm.
Fragmented, fractured, forceful one moment, rhythmic the next, then back to violent force.
This monologue is not beautiful. It’s sublime. It inspires awe and fear.
We also feel that Lear is God here.
But the gods of the Lear universe are impotent.
Lear’s fall from kingly grace, fall from fortune, fall from fatherly favour in the eyes of his daughter, fall as a man, fall as once being considered God – the pain of all these falls is overbearingly omnipresent in this angry speech.
The reference to the storm’s cheeks, not to mention quickly following up with impelling the heavens to drown the weathercocks atop church steeples, recalls Lear’s words in Act 2, Scene 4:
‘You heavens, give me that patience, patience I need.
You see me here, you gods, a poor old man,
As full of grief as age, wretched in both.
If it be you that stare these daughters’ hearts
Against their father, fool me not so much
To bear it tamely. Touch me with noble anger.
And let not women’s weapons, water drops,
Stain my man’s cheeks!’
But heaven, and the gods the dismally people them, don’t listen to Lear.
They didn’t give him the patience he requested.
And now it’s time for Lear to cry.
And when a fallen king, much like a god, cries, the whole world feels it in the form of a storm.
But are the gods listening on the heath?
Or is Lear like the speaker in Shakespeare’s twenty-ninth sonnet, troubling deaf heaven with his bootless cries?
Lear continues to create the storm with his language in the second line:
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Perfectly iambic, metre conjuring the sense of a furious downpour of water and a whipping up of wind, right until the middle of the last foot.
We’re forced to halt in the face of a extraordinarily forceful wind in the form of that word ‘spout’ – strong with all attention on it due to it’s placement not only at the end of the line but immediately after a caesura, a pause, the comma.
After the word spout, a direct address, a commandment to the skies, there’s a brief pause naturally built-in to the end of the line, then a quick gushing, a running on in the form of enjambment, flowing into the next line like a torrent of storm-driven water.
But before we look at that next line, let’s give a little attention to Lear’s choice of language. Or, rather, the language Shakespeare, the god of this universe, this text, wants Lear to use.
That word ‘cataracts’.
Perfect linguistic choice for creating a swirling eddy of water, but an odd choice for meaning because it doesn’t just refer to water.
It refers to sight.
Specifically the lack of sight.
A cataract is a medical condition, an opacity of the crystalline lens of the eye, that produces impairment in sight, but never complete blindness.
If you’ve read the entire play, you’ll know that sight is a central theme.
‘See better, Lear,’ Kent implores the senile king.
Lear’s own speech is filled with the notion of nothingness, the absence of sight.
And Gloucester, Lear’s shadow, in a harrowing scene begging for a Quentin Tarantino remake, is actually de-eyeballed.
Shakespeare wants the audience thinking about sight, thinking about sight being obscured, because sight is a metaphor for logic, reason, and good sense – all of which Lear is struggling with throughout the play, right from the start when he divides his kingdom and lavishes it upon the daughters who are adept enough with superficial language to pull the wool over his eyes, so to speak.
Cataracts are also a, now archaic, reference to the flood-gates of heaven, as in this line from Milton’s Paradise Lost:
‘All the Cataracts of Heav’n set open on the Earth shall powre Raine day and night.’
This all, in just one line, one word even, shows Shakespeare fulfilling all of the linguistic conditions necessary to be a great poet.
As Ezra Pound said, great literature is ‘simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.’
And you can charge language with meaning three ways:
- Phanopoeia: throwing a visual image onto the mind’s eye.
- Melopoeia: charging language with meaning through melody.
- Logopoeia: using shades of ambiguity and metaphor to contain multiple meanings simultaneously.
Shakespeare’s language with Lear on the heath is strongly logopoeic, as double meanings abound.
It’s strongly melopoeic because he uses metre and rhythm to create the sound of a storm.
And it’s phanopoeic due to the concrete imagery sitting side-by-side with ambiguity.
Let’s look at some of that imagery now.
Strong concrete nouns conjuring hurricanoes, cataracts, and winds aside, look at the imagery couched in this parallel structure here:
‘drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!’
Lear creates the town, making the audience see vast stretches of land and country dotted with the tips and towers of rural architecture, and in the same instant creates the flooding of the town.
We see the steeples.
We see them being drenched.
We see the weathercocks.
We see the the iron-forged cockerel-shaped weather vanes barely poking over rising waters before succumbing to an avalanche of rain.
This scene foreshadows the upcoming scene with blind Gloucester, in which bastard son Edmund makes him believe he is ascending a steep cliff:
‘Come on, sir; here’s the place: stand still. How fearful
And dizzy ’tis, to cast one’s eyes so low!
The crows and choughs that wing the midway air
Show scarce so gross as beetles: half way down
Hangs one that gathers samphire, dreadful trade!
Methinks he seems no bigger than his head:
The fishermen, that walk upon the beach,
Appear like mice; and yond tall anchoring bark,
Diminish’d to her cock; her cock, a buoy
Almost too small for sight: the murmuring surge,
That on the unnumber’d idle pebbles chafes,
Cannot be heard so high. I’ll look no more;
Lest my brain turn, and the deficient sight
Topple down headlong.’
The dark comedy of this scene is created out of audience pity.
We see a trembling blind man deceived.
He looks pathetic as he clutches his son and believes to be at a great height.
And, in a sense, he is at a great height.
In Shakespeare’s theatre, set design was in its bare infancy. There weren’t the special effects of today.
You believed a mountain to be before you because the actors told you so.
You believed a war to be taking place, the stage transformed to a battle field, because the four actors simulating a skirmish helped suspend your disbelief.
So part of the laughter here would be in Shakespeare’s self-conscious poking at common theatrical conventions.
Thus, a wise filmmaker or stage producer up to the challenge, might hold back on the special effects and let Lear’s language create the storm. In fact, let all the characters create the entire divided country with their words.
What other images does Lear’s speech bring to life?
Well, after the world, the stage, is drowned tossed in a tumult of high-winds and drowned in water, the next most naturally destructive element Lear clasps for, like a god desperately grabbing at a basket of disasters like Zeus on Mount Olympus, is that of ‘sulphurous and thought-executing fires’ in the form of ‘oak-cleaving thunderbolts’.
We see it.
We see it all.
Fire so violent even thought is destroyed.
Lightning splitting mighty oak trees in two and razing the earth to nothing.
In this way, Lear is fertile playground for Shakespeare to explore ideas of writer as creator, god, shaman, and magician, themes he goes on to explore roughly half a decade later in the form of The Tempest’s Prospero.
Lear is scorned god, imploring the gods above him in the ethereal hierarchy, to destroy all. And in the process, all they might do to harm him personally is singe his white head.
If one has any doubt as to whether Lear considers himself a god, look to the language he employs as he slides into the fourth element of earth:
‘Smite flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!’
All this punishment upon an earth whose crime is making ‘ingrateful man’.
Seems a little unfair.
But, then again, Lear is god in the Old Testament sense.
The kind of god who kicks his creations out of Eden, floods the entire world for their licentious ways, and regularly sends hordes of locusts to devour the crops of those who displease him.
Then, before Lear continues his tirade, his Fool, the tragedy’s paragon of wisdom intercepts with this gem:
‘O nuncle, court holy-water in a dry house is better than this rain-water out o’ door. Good nuncle, in, ask thy daughters blessing. Here’s a night pities neither wise men nor fools.’
Firstly, notice the Fool calls Lear ‘nuncle’.
This is a variant on the word ‘uncle’, contracted from ‘mine uncle’, but the ’n’ also alludes to the words ‘nothing’ or ‘never’, as though the Fool is really saying ‘not uncle’, and drawing attention to this pervasive, soul-destroying idea of nothingness that steams so heavily out of the play’s every pore.
The Fool tells the truth.
Everything he says in the play is a wise man, wearing the jester’s garb, speaking truth to power.
So when he calls Lear ‘nuncle’, the audience must take notice.
Lear is a symbol of nothing.
Or, at the very least, a symbol of rejected authority, both regal and familial.
Whatever Lear is, he’s defined by what he is not.
And that’s the ageing king’s greatest fear.
As he says in many variants throughout the course of the play:
‘Nothing will come of nothing.’
If you know how King Lear ends, you’ll see it’s a play where, one could say, nothing does indeed come of nothing.
And isn’t that our greatest fear as humans?
When everything is stripped away?
The idea that we are nothing and we’re destined for darkness, decay, entropy, and nothingness.
Life is just a ‘crawl toward death’ as Lear himself says in the opening scene.
This reminds one of Jacques’ ‘Seven Ages of Man’ speech:
‘At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.’
And very soon:
‘second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.’
This fear of nothing resulting only in nothing is so great that King Lear as we know it today wasn’t performed for most of its production history.
Seventy-five years after King Lear was first performed in 1605, an adapted version with a happy ending written by soon-to-be Poet Laureate Nahum Tate completely replaced Shakespeare’s original, which only returned to the stage in 1838.
Returning to the Fool’s words to Lear, he says that ‘court holy-water in a dry house is better than this rain-water out o’ door’.
Basically, empty words of flattery from sycophants, words that ultimately culminate in nothing, are much more preferable so long as you have warmth and shelter.
Lear, however, has thrown himself, with Fool in tow, from the top of Maslow’s pyramid.
He has reduced himself to nothing, because what does it matter anyway?
Scorned, dejected, disrespected. If they treat him no better than an animal, well then he’ll be an animal.
This too is our primal fear. Man is part way between god and beast, traipsing a tightrope, and, oh, how easy it is to fall to base beastliness.
Watch or read King Lear and keep an eye out for how heavy the text is bloated with animal imagery and metaphor.
The characters, and particularly Lear, use animals to comprehend their own sense of self.
Now, look at Lear’s next speech.
His first, the one that kicks off the scene, is 90% invocation to the gods, begging for destruction, only touching on his motive in the last line as he references ‘ingrateful man’.
There’s also the sense of frustration with self, though he doesn’t admit it directly, with Lear’s knowledge that he’s becoming weak in his old age.
It’s in the next speech where Lear becomes eminently human.
We see anger for what it is: a guise, so often reached for, particularly by men, to cover deeper, more uncomfortable, more harrowing and painful emotions.
We might think Lear a bumbling irritable old fool with his first speech, but anyone who has witnessed the cognitive decline of a loved one first hand, their parents or grandparents perhaps, cannot help but sympathise when he says this:
‘Rumble thy bellyful! Spit fire! spout rain!
Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire are my daughters;
I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness.
I never gave you kingdom, call’d you children;
You owe me no subscription. Why then, let fall
Your horrible pleasure. Here I stand your slave,
A poor, infirm, weak and despised old man;
But yet I call you servile ministers
That will with two pernicious daughters join
Your high-engendered battles ’gainst a head
So old and white as this. O ho! ’tis foul.’
All this destruction, yet Lear does not blame the elements.
He is the crux of his agony.
He feels betrayed.
Deceived at the deepest level.
Those he trusted, who he gave gifts too, who he knew he would one day need to depend on, have callously turned against him.
Who cares if the heavens take horrible pleasure in raining fire upon him?
He just doesn’t want his daughters to take such horrible pleasure in harming him.
He’s now slave, hammering home his infirmity and age.
Perhaps all parents eventually feel like this, no matter how hard their children try, reversing the roles established across years being no easy feat to accomplish.
It is here that King Lear, I believe, begins to turn from farcical absurdist comedy to piteous tragedy.
What makes it more tragic is that Lear, in not seeing beyond himself, in not being able to laugh at himself, soon goes beyond the point of no return, his senility sealing his fate.
Thank you for reading. If you want to see read more about Shakespeare and other writers from Hardcore Literature, please subscribe to the newsletter.
I have a video course that walks you through reading the entire works of Shakespeare chronologically that will be released soon. I’ll let all newsletter subscribers know first and give them a discount voucher.