THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

weeds and flowers’, pronouncing himself ‘every inch a king’ to the kneeling Gloucester. In Act V he comes on to the
stage for the last time bearing the dead body of his daughter, in a scene which proved unpalatable to theatre audiences
between 1681 (when Nahum Tate’s happy ending was first introduced) and 1838 (when the tragic actor W. C.
Macready returned to Shakespeare’s original). In the revised version of the play-text (published in the 1623 Folio)
Lear’s jerky expression suggests that he is torn between the conflicting emotions of agony (‘Howl, howl, howl,
howl!’), of tenderness (‘Her voice was ever soft, | Gentle and low’), and of self assertion (‘I killed the slave that was ahanging
thee’). As he finally collapses, the body in his arms, he may have been forced to abandon the illusion that
Cordelia is still breathing but he continues to confuse rage and pity, despair and a sense of natural injustice, perhaps
even the dead Fool and the dead daughter:
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And my poor fool is hanged. No, no life.
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,
And thou no breath at all? O, thou wilt come no more.
Never, never, never. - Pray you, undo
This button. Thank you, sir. O, O, O, O! (1608 text)
When it is recognized that the King has died, Kent’s dual epitaphs emerge as scarcely consolatory (‘Vex not his
ghost. O, let him pass. He hates him | That would upon the rack of this tough world | Stretch him out longer’, ‘the
wonder is he hath endured so long. | He but usurped his life’). King Lear offers little of the tidiness of reordering of
most other tragic endings, still less of catharsis, resolution, or absolution. The villainous and the virtuous are silenced
by death or distress, and the Duke of Albany, to whom the minimal summing up falls, can only insist that the
survivors must ‘Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say’.
Like the problematic Troilus and Cressida (c. 1602) and the possibly collaborative Timon of Athens (c. 1604),
King Lear insistently explores the awkward, nasty, and uncomfortable aspects of the human condition rather than
dignifying them with the paraphernalia, the elevated language, and the rituals demanded by received ideas of tragedy,
whether ancient or modern. In significant ways, too, all three plays shift away from a discussion of the ideological,
political, and social values of seventeenth-century Europe to a consideration of more alien and alienated worlds where
all human values and all human relationships are called into question. Where a Macbeth or a Claudius had usurped a
crown, the aged and enraged Lear seems finally to have usurped life itself; where a Hamlet, an Othello, or an Antony
had departed with something approaching soldierly dignity, Lear, worn out by life and kingship, dies in a swoon,
sadly sitting on the ground.
Women and Comedy
When the brainsick Lear refers to his daughter Cordelia’s voice as ‘ever soft, | Gentle and low, an excellent thing in
women’, he seems to be belatedly distinguishing her from the more obvious strident vocal company of her sisters,
Goneril and Regan. To many critics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most of the broader sisterhood of the
women of Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies could be safely divided between the strident and the soft and between
those who exhibited a distinctly ‘unfeminine’ aggression (such as Queen Margaret or Lady Macbeth) and those who
were all too readily cast as passive female victims (such as Ophelia or Desdemona). Such distinctions are likely to
seem grossly inadequate to twentieth-century readers, playgoers, and actors. If Shakespeare, in common with most of
his contemporaries, tended to see women as defined and circumscribed in a patriarchal society by their roles as
queens, wives, mothers, daughters, and lovers, his plays show that he was also capable of exploring both gender
opposition and, more crucially, gender blurring. His women fall into neither ‘types’ nor ‘stereotypes’. In his
innovative romantic comedies in particular, where the roles of a Rosalind, a Beatrice, or a Viola would originally have
been assigned to men, he allows that women both take crucial initiatives in male-dominated worlds and confuse
distinctions between what might loosely be assumed to be ‘male’ and
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‘female’ characteristics. In general, Shakespeare’s sources for the histories and the tragedies obliged him to reflect on
power struggles between men, struggles in which women were marginalized unless, like Lady Macbeth, they denied
aspects of their femininity or, like Cleopatra, they were prepared to accentuate their physical allure in order to gain a
limited political advantage. In the comedies, where happy denouements replace tragic ones and romantic and
domestic alliances tend to supersede those engineered in the interests of state policy, negotiations between men and