Seeing Lear's locus

A psycho-philosophical exploration of King Lear invariably leaves the empathetic reader behind. Drenched by a torrent of questions, comforted by few answers, the observer absently wonders at Shakespeare’s multifaceted characters: what do these revered, redeemed, reprehensible figures believe about themselves and the world they live in? What role does Fate play in the lives of these actors? What do they believe about human agency? About the inseparability of choice and chance? For them, is chance the beginning or the end? Quite simply, why do they do the things they do? What will become of them? We little wonder at what will become of us. But as we follow them, we are not so far removed as we think. Gradually, Lear’s story washes over us. With another turn of the Rota Fortunae so feared by king and peasant alike, we begin to fade away. Slowly, the delicate balance of conscience shifts and our questions grow more painful, our answers less steady; subjects shift and lines blur. No longer do we wonder at them—the mirror reflects back to us what we least wish to see. Donne-like, we turn inside out, violently stripped of any agency we thought we had. We can give no answer. 

By revealing the very worst of what we are capable of, Lear prods us along the same unwilling journey as its characters. We, too, experience a crisis of identity; we too are forced to contend with challenges to our beliefs about justice and human fallibility in the face of natural law. The plot itself is arguably of least importance. Experiencing tragedy deeply, the ache that comes with questioning our deepest convictions, is what matters. Only with our bare remains are we free to press life’s bigger questions: how we understand the choices we make, how we survive in this world, who “we” are. Surely we must learn something. Embracing the only art that refuses to bead up and roll down our backs, we unwittingly trust in Fate that the sting we cannot brush away is rendered beautiful in our eyes.

King Lear offers no respite from the blows that batter its actors, and, by extension, ourselves. We surrender blindly to forces beyond our control—the players to Fortune and we to the plot—and both suffer for it. Tracing no natural justice, we lament with the tortured Duke of Gloucester: "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport" (4.1.41–42). For Lear’s characters, surrender to ancient deities, the stars, and Fortune herself entifies a lack of agency, affirming the highs and lows of cyclical human existence. Seemingly leaving his fate to the heavens, the abused Earl of Kent sighs: "It is the stars. The stars above us, govern our conditions, / Else one self mate and make could not beget / Such different issues” (4.3.38–41). In Kent’s eyes, Fortuna’s are covered. Her enduring, change-bearing wheel—the Rota Fortunae pictured below—indiscriminately draws men up from the depths of despair, crowning them with plenty before dashing them again to the earth. Her inconstancy defies all attempts at understanding. Ill-used Edgar meditates:

Yet better thus and known to be contemned, / Than still contemned and flattered. To be worst, / The lowest and most dejected thing of Fortune, / Stands still in esperance, lives not in fear. / The lamentable change is from the best; / The worst returns to laughter. (4.1.1–6).

Like Lear’s characters, wading sightless through the chaos of decisions they had no part in, the audience also surrenders to the Wheel when we embrace the play. Determined to reap the rewards later, we submit our emotions to manipulation, our sensibilities to assault, and our moral compasses to gale winds. Fate is unconcerned.

In the play’s brutal world, Fortune does not busy herself moralizing. Challenging neatly-contained moral beliefs, Lear seems rather to comment on the inseparability of choice and chance: divorced from “good” and “evil,” both the audience and the characters in Lear must make their own choices. Some choose to adapt. That a precious few accept not only their own lack of control, but also their responsibility to react to their circumstances constructively, brings to mind the locus of control, a well-researched psychological construct representing a spectrum of perceived human agency. We realize those still standing at the play’s conclusion—Albany, Edgar, and Kent—live not because they are the most virtuous, but because they are determined to. All “more sinned against than sinning” (3.2.63), the three men make difficult changes motivated by self-preservation: banished by the King but still determined to serve him, Kent adopts a new identity as a lowly page; Edgar goes into hiding as wretched “Poor Tom” to escape the treachery of his half-brother. Albany too adapts as Goneril’s decline reveals the fractures in their marriage. Bristling against the derision of his sadistic wife, Albany at last quiets her venomous tongue in the final act with a quiet courage that nevertheless condemns her. With an air of the Fool’s absurdism, even the shocking death of Cordelia holds sense. Though we are loath to admit it, Cordelia fits too neatly into a box. She is too good—she is not real. Here, the Good Guy does not survive. The survivor survives.

An absurdly tragic work that in one breath exalts Fate and condemns her, Lear stands on shaky grounds. So do we. The violent artistry of the work appeals to a distinctly human need to make sense of it all. We ask the simplest and most complex question we can formulate: Why? There must be meaning here, and we are determined to see it—whether or not there is any to be found. Even the King himself, who sees least of all the characters, commands: “Get thee glass eyes, / And like a scurvy politician seem / To see the things thou dost not” (4.6.187-89). Still, we are blind whether we choose to fight or surrender. Because they are real—because they are us—the characters exist apart from the limits we to try to impose on them. Attempts to moralize fall flat; every mirror, lens, and angle reflects back at us what we already know. Stumbling through the merciless plot, the characters too try to force meaning from the text. Like Fortuna’s ancient supplicants, we grope in the dark: we beg—we plead—we pry meaning from a text blind to our pain. Finally left with the limp and lifeless body, breath squeezed out, we are still unsatisfied. Frustrated, bitter, and confused, we cry out—after suffering through every crushing scene, something must have changed, we must have learned something—something about ourselves, about the world, something to make it all better—but what? What changed? What do we see that we didn’t before? What does it all mean?

Finally, it dawns on me.

Nothing.