The New York Review of Books

   there comes a power

Into this scattered kingdom, who already,

Wise in our negligence, have secret feet

In some of our best ports, and are at point

To show their open banner.

In league with this power, Kent gives the gentleman a token and instructs him to make haste to Dover where he will report to “some that will thank you.”⁵

Kent is not the only high-level collaborator with the invading army. The Earl of Gloucester too has received word, as he tells his son Edmond, that “there’s part of a power already footed” (3.3.11), and he intends to help them topple Cornwall’s regime. Edmond, however, has his own plans. He gives Cornwall documentary proof of his father’s treasonous conspiracy: “This is the letter which he spoke of, which approves him an intelligent party to the advantages of France” (3.5.8–9). Edmond is a swine, of course, but the letter is authentic.

When they receive this news, Cornwall and his wife Regan are guests in Gloucester’s house. Ordinarily their behavior would be strictly bound by this circumstance, but the state of emergency suspends all customary relations and sets the stage for moral and ethical transgression. Cornwall needs to know, and quickly, whatever Gloucester knows about the foreign invasion and why he has sent the old, mad king to Dover. “Go seek the traitor Gloucester,” Cornwall orders his servants; “Pinion him like a thief; bring him before us” (3.7.22–23). Gloucester is duly apprehended and bound to a chair. There follows a tense scene of interrogation chilling in its realistic representation of bluffing, evasiveness, and desperate urgency:

CORNWALL. Come, sir, what letters had you late from France?

REGAN. Be simple-answered, for we know the truth.

CORNWALL. And what confederacy have you with the traitors

Late footed in the kingdom.

REGAN. To whose hands

You have sent the lunatic King. Speak.

GLOUCESTER. I have a letter guessingly set down,

Which came from one that’s of a neutral heart,

And not from one opposed.

CORNWALL. Cunning.

REGAN. And false.

CORNWALL. Where hast thou sent the King?

GLOUCESTER. To Dover.

REGAN. Wherefore to Dover? Wast thou not charged at peril—

CORNWALL. Wherefore to Dover?—Let him answer that.

GLOUCESTER. I am tied to th’stake, and I must stand the course.

REGAN. Wherefore to Dover?

(3.7.41–53)

This brilliantly written exchange is almost always left out of critical accounts of this scene because of what immediately follows: the horrendous blinding of Gloucester by the fiend-like interrogators.

Shakespeare’s audience was far less squeamish about the torture of traitors than we are—or than we were until recently.⁶ The use, for the purposes of extracting information to protect the state, of the so-called “manacles” (that is, the strappado), the rack, the thumbscrew, and the horrible device known as the Scavenger’s Daughter was a matter of public knowledge and general acceptance.⁷ The common law of England forbade it, but both Elizabeth and James I claimed royal prerogative in ordering its use, upon warrant from the Privy Council.⁸ The victims for the most part were Catholics: Jesuits, stubborn recusants, and conspirators. The 1597 warrant for the Jesuit priest John Gerard explains that the prisoner “very lately did receive a packet of letters out of the Low Countries which are supposed to come out of Spain.” The examiners in the Tower are therefore authorized to interrogate him,

wherein if you shall find him obstinate, undutiful, or unwilling to declare and reveal the truth as he ought to do by his duty and allegiance, you shall by virtue hereof cause him to be put to the manacles and such other torture as is used in that place, that he may be forced to utter directly and truly his uttermost knowledge in all these things that may any way concern her Majesty and the State and are meet to be known.⁹

The spectators of King Lear would have had no occasion to see such a warrant for themselves, but they had recently had a full lesson in how far the government would go, in the hideous, well-publicized treatment of the Gunpowder conspirator Guy Fawkes. No one ventured to protest out loud.

In 1610 a company of traveling players in the north of England included King Lear among the plays, for the most part exercises in piety, which they performed at the manor house of a Catholic couple, Sir John and Lady Julyan Yorke. The playing company and its hosts were denounced for recusancy to the Star Chamber. Someone then, during Shakespeare’s lifetime, very likely believed that King Lear, though set in pre-Christian Britain, was somehow sympathetic to the plight of persecuted Catholics. The link is not immediately apparent to modern readers, but perhaps it is in the scene of Gloucester’s blinding that we can most clearly sense it. For in King Lear Shakespeare contrived to represent the practice of torture in such a way as to make it utterly recognizable—the urgent questioning of someone who has been caught conniving with a foreign power to invade the realm and topple the established regime—and utterly unacceptable.

He did so by collapsing the hygienic distance that separated the monarch and the privy councilors, cloaked in the mantle of moral authority, from the vicious underlings who carried out their orders. Torture in King Lear is conducted directly by the rulers, Cornwall and Regan, who are depicted as reptilian monsters. Moreover, Shakespeare subtly uncoupled the infliction of torture from the search for information and hence undermined any simple instrumental rationale. Before Cornwall has even got his hands on the high-born traitor, he has declared his intention to injure him, quite apart from the outcome of the process of interrogation:

Though well we may not pass upon his life

Without the form of justice, yet our power

Shall do a curtsy to our wrath, which men

May blame but not control.

(3.7.23–26)

What is at once horrible and familiar about this declaration is its nauseating blend of legalism, sadism, and public relations, as if Cornwall were already thinking about how he will excuse the fact that there were certain regrettable excesses in his otherwise legal treatment of the prisoner.¹⁰

The plucking out of the Earl of Gloucester’s eyes is an act that seems to have appalled even hardened Jacobean spectators and that the language of the play cunningly anticipates, so as to intensify its horror. This pattern of anticipation culminates in Gloucester’s response to the repeated question, “Wherefore to Dover?” “Because I would not see thy cruel nails/Pluck out his poor old eyes” (3.7.54–55). Cornwall’s response—”See’t shalt thou never,” he says, gouging out the first of the prisoner’s eyes—provokes a reaction that may, for contemporary audiences, have been more shocking than the act of torture. A nameless servant steps forward and orders his master to stop what he is doing:

  Hold your hand, my lord.

I have served you ever since I was a child,

But better service have I never done you

Than now to bid you hold.

(3.7.70–73)

Regan’s exclamation (“How now, you dog!”) and Cornwall’s (“My villein!”) both reflect their astonishment at the source of the intervention: not one of Gloucester’s servants (for they are, after all, in Gloucester’s house) but one of their own. In the ensuing scuffle, Regan grabs a sword and stabs the underling in the back—”A peasant stand up thus!”—but not before the peasant has fatally wounded the duke. And the audience is manifestly invited to endorse this radical act: the murder of a ruler by a serving man who stands up for human decency.

Though his act has important political consequences, the servant is not acting out of political motives, and still less out of personal ambition. He has an ethically adequate object—the desire to serve the duke his master by stopping him at all costs from performing an unworthy action—but no political ambition at all. He does not seek power for himself, nor is there anything to indicate that he supports the French invaders. His dying words to Gloucester—”My lord, you have one eye left/To see some mischief on him” (3.7.78–79)—suggest that in his last moments of life the servant has shifted his allegiance from Cornwall to Cornwall’s victim, but this attempt at consolation only leads to further disaster. “Lest it see more,” rages the mortally wounded Cornwall, turning back to Gloucester, “prevent it. Out, vile jelly!”

In the folio text of King Lear the scene ends with Regan driving the eyeless earl out of his own house with words almost fantastic in their cruelty—”Go thrust him out at gates, and let him smell/His way to Dover” (3.7. 91–92)—while the bleeding Cornwall disposes of the corpse of the servant: “Throw this slave/Upon the dunghill” (3.7.94–95). But the quarto text has an additional brief exchange between two other nameless servants. They too have no large political agenda or ambition, but, like their slain fellow, they express a fundamentally ethical attitude toward authority: “I’ll never care what wickedness I do,” says one of them, reflecting on what he has just seen Cornwall do, “If this man come to good” (The History of King Lear, 14.96–97).

The ruler then serves as a model and a test case: if his actions go unpunished, then, to paraphrase Dostoevsky, everything is permitted. The other servant is thinking not about the husband but about the wife:

   If she live long

And in the end meet the old course of death,

Women will all turn monsters.

(The History of King Lear, 14.97–99)

Here again the ruler is a kind of testing ground, in this case for what it means to be human.

The servants’ closing words turn from moral speculation to action. One of them proposes to find someone to lead the blinded earl wherever he wants to go; the other has a more immediate concern:

 I’ll fetch some flax and whites of eggs

To apply to his bleeding face.

(The History of King Lear, 14.103–104)

In the bleak, stripped-down world of King Lear, this simple human response is itself potentially risky. Given the ruthlessness and the fear of Cornwall and Regan, any gesture of kindness toward the traitor may be regarded as treasonous. Gloucester is anxious to avoid drawing anyone else into danger:

Away, get thee away, good friend, be gone.

Thy comforts can do me no good at all;

Thee they may hurt.

(4.1.15–17)

But the quiet reply recognizes Gloucester’s predicament—”You cannot see your way”—and the human obligation to help him.

This fundamental ethical responsibility—reduced to the simplest elements, the flax and whites of eggs applied to the victim’s bleeding face—is echoed repeatedly in other moments of solidarity and comfort, all comparably modest: “Come on, my boy. How dost, my boy? Art cold?” (3.2.66); “Give me thy hand” (3.4.42); “In, fellow, there in t’hovel; keep thee warm” (3.4.156). These small gestures are the core of the play’s moral vision. Larger ethical ambitions, such as those that motivate Cordelia’s refusal to flatter her bullying father, only lead to disastrous consequences.

At the height of the storm scene, the crazed Lear, exposed to the tyranny of the elements, has a fleeting glimpse of a relationship to power different from the one he had embodied:

  Take physic, pomp,

Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,

That thou mayst shake the superflux to them

And show the heavens more just.

(3.4.33–36)

The vision of obligation here is modest enough—”shake the superflux” (i.e., let some wealth trickle down to the wretches at the bottom)—but nothing in the play suggests that it is remotely possible to achieve. Lear lurches instead toward the conviction that there is no significant moral distinction between judges and thieves. “See how yon justice rails upon yon simple thief,” he tells Gloucester; “Hark in thine ear: change places, and handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?” (4.5.143–145) All that secures the difference between them is a monopoly of violence. Have you ever “seen a farmer’s dog bark at a beggar?” Lear asks. When you see the man running away from the cur, you behold “the great image of authority. A dog’s obeyed in office” (4.5.145– 149). Those in power may loudly declare their compassion for the sufferings of the poor, but inevitably the declarations are mere hypocrisy. “Get thee glass eyes,” Lear says bitterly to the blind Gloucester,

And like a scurvy politician, seem

To see the things thou dost not.

(4.5.160–162)

Small wonder that the close of the play is a chorus of renunciation. With Cornwall, Regan, Goneril, Edmond, and Cordelia all dead, and with Lear a crazed and broken ruin, the Duke of Albany is the sole legitimate ruler of the kingdom, but he does not want it:

  For us, we will resign

During the life of this old majesty

To him our absolute power.

(5.3.273–275)

A moment later Lear is dead, and Albany is still trying to give up his power. “Friends of my soul,” he addresses Kent and Edgar,

  you twain

Rule in this realm, and the gored state sustain.

Kent too will have nothing to do with rule:

I have a journey, sir, shortly to go:

My master calls me; I must not say no.

(5.3.293–297)

The final lines of the play are a famous textual crux, for the quarto assigns them to Albany and the folio to Edgar. Since the last words of Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedies and histories were conventionally spoken by the person in command, the stakes are significant, but here, as none of the survivors actually wants power—as if any desire for power has been stigmatized as vicious—Shakespeare evidently was uncertain how to bring his tragedy to an end. He had begun with a king who wished to withdraw from power and to reassure himself with the comfortable falsehoods he demanded from his children. In the course of the play those falsehoods are all relentlessly stripped away, like the train of followers that had given the imperious Lear a sense of his own worth. But in the wake of the devastation, what is left? Shakespeare’s solution was to turn the closing words of his tragedy away from any assumption of authority and toward the obligation to speak what we feel:

The weight of this sad time we must obey,

Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.

The oldest hath borne most. We that are young

Shall never see so much, nor live so long.