Indicador de lectura Comparaciones y conclusiones

Shakespeare’s depiction of Lear’s old age diverges from his source material to such a degree that old age becomes a central problem for the play.19 In Shakespeare’s source

19

For Helen Small, Shakespeare’s intensification of the tragedy occurs because of “the moral damage taking place within Lear” (73). Ellis also points out that “Lear differs from its main source by increasing the king’s chronological age and calling frequent attention to it” (34).

materials (Holinshed’s account of King Leir in his Chronicles [first edition, 1577 and second edition, 1587] and the anonymous play The True Chronicle History of King Leir

and His Three Daughters, Goneril, Ragan, and Cordella20), the king’s experience of old

age and death is downplayed. Holinshed does not provide much detail on Leir’s death, writing that after Leir and Cordeilla return together from Gallia and conquer their enemies, Leir is “restored to his kingdome, which he ruled after this by the space of two yeeres, and then died, fortie yeres after he first began to raigne” (quoted in the

introduction to The True Chronicle History of King Leir 13). Leir’s death is not

mentioned at all in the play The True Chronicle History, where, at the conclusion, Leir and the French army defeat the British forces and Leir is restored to his kingdom. However, he resigns his position once again, this time to the King of Gallia, Cordella’s husband:

KING Thanks be to God, your foes are overcome And you again possesséd of your right.

LEIR First to the heavens; next, thanks to you, my son, By whose good means I repossess the same,

Which, if it please you to accept yourself, With all my heart I will resign to you; For it is yours by right, and none of mine.

20 _{The play was printed in 1605. See Richard Knowles, “How Shakespeare Knew King Leir” (2002), for a}

review of the evidence of how Shakespeare may have encountered the older play, and the suggestion that the 1605 edition influenced Shakespeare’s composition.

First, have you raised at your own charge a power Of valiant soldiers—this comes all from you— Next, have you ventured your own person’s scathe, And lastly, worthy Gallia never stained,

My kingly title I by thee have gained. (5.8.2633–44)

His age is unmentioned in his reasons for stepping down. Instead, Leir abdicates and passes the succession to his son-in-law in recognition of the role the King of Gallia’s army played in their military victory.

In contrast, Shakespeare introduces the quality of Lear’s old age as key aspect of the play’s dramatic power. Categorized as a history in quarto and as a tragedy in the Folio, Lear’s vision of old age is tragic in its depiction of a person who is gradually

stripped of his security and markers of identity in the final period of his life. Shakespeare’s play emphasizes loss and alienation and ends with its protagonist’s enigmatic death, an event that directly follows his heartbreak over the death of Cordelia. The comparison of Lear’s condition in the final scene with his status in the first, the psychological impact of the storm scenes, and the percussive impact of the series of tragic events that conclude the play complicate any attempt to determine an exact cause of death. To live to be old, in this play, is to experience a precarious existence in which one’s needs are coldly calculated and then stripped away, lending Lear’s “reason not the need” speech its poignancy. As Stephen Orgel notes, Shakespeare eschews the

recuperative, comic twist that would be offered by the endings of his tragicomedies. Each possibility of reunion or reconciliation instead meets with disappointment:

This is a play in which Shakespeare goes out of his way to raise expectations only to—perhaps in order to—defeat them. Cordelia’s aborted survival is not the only one. The recognition of Edgar by the blind Gloucester, which is reported in a single line as an afterthought in King Lear, is where Shakespeare’s source story in

Sidney’s Arcadia starts, the perspective from which the whole story of the

Paphlagonian king is told by the reconciled father and son. In Shakespeare, on the contrary, it is precisely the revelation of Edgar’s identity that kills Gloucester. As with the scene of Gloucester’s blinding and the omission of the reconciliations of Gloucester with Edgar and of Lear with Kent, what happens at the conclusion of the play is something that happens to the audience. (“Johnson’s Lear” 194)

Part of the play’s tragic effect derives from its association of old age with

disappointment, estrangement, and madness. There is a major disjunction between the fantasies that Lear holds for his old age and what actually occurs. His initial plan to depend on Cordelia fails, as does his makeshift arrangement to divide his time between Goneril and Regan. His fantasy to turn his prison into a refuge where he will live with Cordelia like “birds i’ th’ cage” (5.3.10) is followed by the brutal death of his daughter. Options narrow for Lear until the remaining sympathetic characters view his death as preferable to the prolongation of his life. Lear’s death is closely associated with his long life and is immediately eulogized as such by those who witness his demise, with Kent observing “The wonder is he hath endured so long / He but usurped his life” (5.3.384– 85), and the play’s final lines (spoken by either Albany or Edgar, depending on the version) characterize his accumulation of experience, so often claimed as a benefit of old age, as a burden that could not be shared or apprehended by another: “The oldest hath

borne most; we that are young / Shall never see so much nor live so long” (5.3.394–95).21

Ironically, this final couplet undermines the idea that Lear, or King Lear, is relatable. In fact, these lines expressly tell the audience that there is a barrier between full sympathy or understanding of what the king has suffered. This perspective, delivered post-mortem by Lear’s sympathetic yet helpless witnesses, is jettisoned in much ofthe play’s subsequent stage and reception history, which attempts to reduce ambiguity in order to resolve the problem of knowing, and even curing, the king’s old age.