Shakespeare's The Tragedy of King Lear and the Absurdity of Suffering

The Tragedy of King Lear, while considered by many as Shakespeare's greatest play, is also his most devastating.  In this episode, we consider what Lear has to say about the meaning of human suffering.

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• 12:47 (Cont.) Shakespeare's The Tragedy of King Lear and the Absurdity of Suffering

Transcript

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Classic English Literature Podcast, the show that gives blank verse its reason.  This is our penultimate episode on Shakespearean drama, and it’s on what many consider his greatest achievement: King Lear (though I am still firmly on Team Hamlet).  This bleakest of tragedies so disturbed early audiences that it fell from repertory for nearly 60 years and only re-entered English consciousness thanks to a heavily rewritten version in 1681 by one Nahum Tate.  Especially conscientious litterbugs may remember that name from our last Christmas episode on the subcast, the Irish poet who contributed the text to the first Anglican-approved carol.  Tate took it upon himself to “correct” what he saw as the Bard’s misjudgments in the play and instead provided a happy, sentimental ending more appropriate to light comedy.  This was the version of King Lear known to audiences until well into the 19th-century, when the Romanticist literary movement, with its privileging of the unique genius of the author, influenced a return to Shakespeare’s original by 1845.  

So what was it that so troubled early theatre-goers?  For those not in the know, it’s time for the quick and dirty:

Deep in the pagan British past, King Lear decides to retire and, being without sons, announces that he will divide his kingdom among his three daughters, giving the best portion to she who loves him most.  Daughters Goneril and Regan smear on industrial amounts of chapstick and kiss the royal backside with sickening obsequiousness.  The dotty old narcissist rewards them appropriately, but when he demands his third daughter, Cordelia, declare her love, the young woman replies, “Nothing.”  

(buzzer)

Ooooh, wrong answer, Cordy!  So you’re to be married off to the King of France without a dowry while Goneril and Regan, with their husbands the Dukes of Albany and Cornwall, respectively, split Britain between them.  Lear’s friend, the Duke of Kent, tries to force the old king to reconsider, but Lear stubbornly refuses and casts Kent from court.

As a complement to this main storyline, the Duke of Gloucester reaps the whirlwind of his youthful sexual dalliances.  He has two grown sons by different mothers – Edgar is his legitimate son, but Edmund is a bastard, both legally and temperamentally, who plots to disseat his half-brother and usurp the dukedom.   He convinces his father that Edgar has conspired against his life and his half-brother that the father seeks his life, so Edgar flees to the wilderness, disguising himself as the mad beggar Tom O’Bedlam.

Meanwhile, Lear has decided that he will alternate his time living with each of his two remaining daughters in turn.  However, despite having resigned the responsibilities of kingship, he refuses to sacrifice the pomp and circumstance and so imposes his retinue of 100 knights and their servants upon Goneril, who soon tires of supporting hundreds of additional mouths.  She complains of their riotous and drunken behavior.  Lear, on the other hand, insists that his men are well-bred and the height of decorum.  Who’s telling the truth depends largely on how the director wants to stage the scene.  One way or t’other, Goneril says he must do away with half his entourage.  Insulted, Lear turns his back upon his eldest daughter and makes his way towards Regan’s place.  She’s no more charmed by his visit than Goneril was, and too insists that he do away with his retainers.  Throwing a tantrum, Lear charges out into the stormy wilderness accompanied only by his fool and Kent, who has returned from exile and disguised himself as a beggar. 

(storm)

Feeling betrayed by his elder daughters and regretting his injustice to Cordelia, Lear begins to go mad.  He rails at the storm.  Gloucester attempts to help the old king, but he is captured by Regan and Cornwall, who charge him with treason at Edmund’s insistence and they tear out the old man’s eyes.  Cornwall dies in a fight following the mutilation.  Edgar, as Poor Tom, leads his blind father to Dover, where Lear has also been brought as Cordelia and France are landing an army to invade Britain and restore Lear.  Albany, Goneril’s husband, becomes increasingly sympathetic to Lear, while both Goneril and Regan attempt to seduce Edmund.  

Albany’s army, led by Edmund, defeats Cordelia’s French forces, and the queen becomes a captive with her father.   Regan dies by Goneril’s poisoning.  Edgar reveals himself, challenges Edmund to a duel, and mortally wounds him.  Desperate, Goneril commits suicide.  With his dying breath, Edmund repents and orders Cordelia released from prison.  But the order comes too late to prevent her execution.  Lear enters, carrying the corpse of his youngest daughter, and dies embracing her.  Albany and Edgar assume the throne.

pause

King Lear was first performed before King James I on Boxing Day, that is, December 26, 1606 as part of the holiday revels.  I’ll leave it to you to decide how such a tale heightens the Xmas atmos.  

We can easily imagine the play dismaying audiences given its content and its utter lack of the happy ending Nahum Tate gallantly provided.  Actually, audiences in 1606 would have expected a happy ending – the denouement supplied by Shakespeare broke sharply with the source material.  

The play’s most immediate antecedent is an anonymous drama called The True Chronicle History of the life and death of King Leir and his three Daughters, first performed in 1594.   This play, in addition to its happily ever after, situated the action in a devoutly religious context.   Our play, in turn, renders material drawn from the ubiquitous Raphael Holinshed and his Chronicles, which in turn sourced some matter from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regium Brittaniae (remember him, Litterbugs?  The fella who gives us an early account of King Arthur?  Mouse on over to episode 8 for a refresher).  Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene includes the tale, as does a collection of verse tales from the 1574 Mirror of Magistrates.  Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia also draws on the story.

Ultimately, all of these come from a widely circulated folk tale called Love Like Salt.  A man asks his daughters how much they love him.  The elder girls flatter him, but the youngest says she loves him the way food loves salt.  Bad answer.  He kicks her out, time passes, and when they reunite, she cooks him a meal without salt.  It tastes, of course, terrible.  He realizes the value of her words and, you know, happily ever after.

In Shakespeare’s play, we can certainly see the folk tale style still obtaining, and I think that goes a long way to patching up what would otherwise be gaping holes in the story: why does Lear divide his kingdom?  Why can’t Cordelia read the room?  Why do they all meet up at the same place?  Those kinds of questions, normal for any naturalistic narrative, simply become immaterial if we accept that we’re watching a fairy tale.

So Shakespeare’s first audience knew the Lear story very well and had been primed for a felicitous conclusion.  The quarto edition of 1608 bears the same title as the anonymous play – the true chronicle history – and it is not until the Folio in 1623 that the title of the play declares its genre.  Only here does the play become “The Tragedy of King Lear.”  No wonder audiences were shocked at Cordelia’s death and the nihilistic ending.  Hence the popularity of Nahum Tate’s revision.

pause

Those of you of a more historicist bent might like to know that the recent ascension of James VI of Scotland to James I of England upon the death of Gloriana deeply affected Shakespeare’s composition of Lear.  We covered similar ground when we talked about Macbeth a couple episodes ago, exploring how that play responded to a Catholic assassination attempt against James.  In Lear, Shakespeare looks at one of James’ great political projects, indeed, perhaps even obsessions: the uniting of the kingdoms of Scotland and England into a single nation, a Great Britain.  The king addresses this directly early in his accession speech to Parliament in 1603:

Hath not God first united these Kingdoms, both in Language, Religion, and similitude of Manners? Yea, Hath he not made us all in one Island, compass'd with one Sea; and of itself by Nature so indivisible, as almost those that were Borderers themselves in the late Borders, cannot distinguish, nor know, or discern their own Limits: These two Countries being separated, neither by Sea, nor by any great River, Mountain, nor other strength of Nature, but only by little small Brooks, or demolished little Walls; so as rather they were divided in apprehension, than in Effect; and now in the end and fullness of time, United the Right and Title of both in my Person alike.

So as Macbeth explores the ramifications of assassinating a Scottish king, Lear offers a glimpse into the abyss of a divided kingdom.  And Shakespeare shies not away from contemporary allusions.  The heirs to James’ throne were, of course, his sons, Henry, the Duke of Cornwall, and Charles, the Duke of Albany.  Sound familiar?  In the play, Cornwall represents the Celtic portions of the islands, while Albany stands for Scotland and the north.  At the play’s conclusion, Edgar and Albany must restore order and they are, of course, somewhat allegorical figures for the uniting of England and Scotland.

Historically, of course, young Charles Stuart does ascend the throne and things, obviously, go absolutely swimmingly . . . 

(sound effect)

So what happens literally in Lear happens kinda sorta metaphorically to King Charles I some 40 years later – a divided kingdom and, as philosopher Thomas Hobbes would write in 1651’s Leviathan, his response to the English Civil War, “a kingdom divided in itself cannot stand."

Hobbes, of course, paraphrases the Gospel of St. Matthew, as will many notable leaders and writers in the centuries to come, such as Thomas Paine, Abigail Adams, Sam Houston, and Abraham Lincoln, when destruction faces a state.   Obviously, all this is beyond the ken of Shakespeare’s contemporaries; equally obviously Lear’s kingdom cannot stand and the play examines the suffering engendered by this fracturing.

pause

I think Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of King Lear is his play which most dwells on the experience of suffering.  Now, some may retort: “Have you seen Titus Andronicus?”  Um, yes, I have, but I’d argue that that play does not foreground suffering as much as it does cruelty.  In this early play (we usually date first performances to 1594 or so) characters are stabbed, mutilated, raped, burned alive, and cannibalized.  But the brutality here seems more sensationalized, designed to shock as in modern slasher or torture films, rather than to provide an occasion for meditating upon the meaning of human suffering.

Renaissance thought identified several categories of suffering.  Of course, it considered physical suffering – the pain endured by the body.  In Lear, we can point to, at one end, the misery of Lear and Edgar and Kent and others exposed to the elements in the great storm on the heath, the deaths by violence of Cordelia, Goneril, Regan, Cornwall, and Edmund, and, most graphically, the gouging out of Gloucester’s eyes.  

Then there is emotional suffering, and the key example here is, of course, Cordelia’s banishment and Lear’s eventual remorse for that act.  Edmund’s illegitimate status counts here.  Were we feeling generous, we would include Goneril and Regan’s spurning by Edmund and perhaps their emotional betrayal of their husbands.  Gloucester’s belief in Edgar’s supposed treachery certainly counts.  And we should not forget the pain of the bereaved for the deaths of family and friends.

On the moral or spiritual plane – what we might now call the psychological plane – characters endure a kind of existential suffering.  Lear’s fear of madness, and then his actual madness, clearly points to such anxieties.  Since the story plays out in a pagan setting, the characters see no salvific potential in their lives: the gods they invoke are petty, capricious, and cruel, and seem subject themselves to an indifferent combination of fate and chance.  But I think it’s this very point that summons the question of the meaning of suffering in Shakespeare’s own thoroughly Christian milieu.  Now that we have, as it were, shaken of the shackles of a heartlessly disinterested cosmos, does Christianity or Christian humanism offer any explanation for our recurrent anguish?

pause

The problem of suffering has long vexed philosophers and theologians – why does suffering exist?  Why must we suffer?  I can’t remember if we’ve discussed the logical problem of evil yet on this podcast.  I kind of assume we have, because I talk about it a lot in real life, but I’m not sure and frankly I can’t be bothered to crawl through the nearly half a million words I’ve flung at this podcast to find out.  Besides, I reckon if I can’t remember, then probably you don’t remember either.

In the shell of a nut, the logical problem of evil shakes out like this: if God (as envisioned in the Abrahamic religions) is all-good, all-knowing, and all-powerful – “maximally perfect” is the sexy term – then how can evil exist?  Philosophers usually distinguish between “natural evil” – things like disease or natural disasters, events which have no agency – and “moral evil” – the evil that comes from what people choose to do or choose not to do.  Now some folks, including me, aren’t so sure that, say, a hurricane is evil in quite the same way a murderer is evil.  But both cause suffering, and here we can start thinking about the problem of suffering without splitting hairs concerning the tangled moral schemes of its origins.

Perhaps the most renowned meditation on the mystery of suffering is the Biblical Book of Job, from probably about the 7th century BCE.  I find this a very disturbing book.  For those who don’t know the story, Job is a wealthy and God-fearing man, but Satan maintains that he is only God-fearing because he’s wealthy.  God permits Satan to strip Job of everything: wealth, status, family, and health to prove Job’s genuine devotion.  Throughout his tribulations, Job maintains his innocence and while he refuses to curse God for his misery, he demands to know the reason he must suffer.  God finally appears and says, basically, “How dare you question me?”  But because Job comes to understand his place in relation to God, his wealth is restored as is his family (same ones? probably not – so those people died to prove a point, I guess).

I’m disturbed by the depiction of a rather callous God in this book – that, in order to win a bet with Satan, he condones Job’s destruction.  Not consistent with the image of God many inherit from the Christian tradition, that of a loving father, and certainly, I think anyway, more consistent with the arrogance and caprice associated with the classical pantheon.  But I’m more deeply disturbed by the book’s lack of resolution, at least in the philosophical sense.  We are not really any closer to sussing out the purpose of our suffering at the end of the book than we were at its beginning.  God merely objects to our even raising the question: 

Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?

Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me.

Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding.

And that’s the mystery at the heart of Lear.  We are once again confronted with our lack of understanding, and efforts to understand are spurned: “If you don’t know I’m not going to tell you.”  And so we’ve been left on our own, looking for a black cat while blindfolded in a dark room.

St. Augustine of Hippo, the 5th century theologian whose thinking all but invented Catholic moral philosophy, proposed that suffering, or evil, results from original sin – that ill-advised moment when Adam and Eve went in search of a fruit course.  We thus inherit corruption and are condemned to suffer for it.  St. Thomas Aquinas, 13th century philosophical titan, develops this idea, noting that human free will must necessitate the potential for humans to choose wrongly, and while those wrong choices produce evil, in the grand cosmic scheme of things, the good of free will outweighs the suffering occasionally occasioned by it.  These would have been the dominant resolutions to the problem of suffering in Shakespeare’s day.  Modern thinkers, most remarkably analytic philosopher Alvin Plantinga, have continued this argument, offering what’s called “The Free Will Defense”: that the existence of evil is logically compatible with the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing, and benevolent God, as long as it is possible that God has morally justifiable reasons for permitting evil.

Unfortunately, these ideas don’t really address the horrors of King Lear.  One can easily say that the catalyst for all the misery in Lear is his selfish abdication, his narcissistic pitting of his children against each other, and the splitting of his realm.  Initially, he calls this plan his “darker purpose,” probably meaning “secret” or “hidden,” but also certainly a harbinger of the catastrophe to come.   This, of course, implies that the suffering is the result of a moral evil – a conscious choice on the part of Lear to indulge his own whims without an eye to the needs of his people.

But moral justification for “permitting” this choice is entirely absent in the play.  Note how often the so-called “good” characters (not only morally speaking, but also those with whom we are to sympathize) invoke the gods or fate (recall that the play takes place deep in Britain’s pre-Christian past – medieval theodicies would not obtain).  Gloucester’s line in Act 4 is perhaps the most famous: “As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods. They kill us for their sport.”  If the gods, though, or fate, or some supranatural force controls the events of our lives, then surely we have no moral culpability for the suffering we experience.  And I reckon that would mean that if I commit an act that causes someone else to suffer, the sufferer has not deserved that suffering.  But then neither should I suffer for my actions because, ultimately, my actions are dictated by forces beyond my control.

It is in such instances that we find our suffering ironically unpardonable: one, because I will rage against the caprice of those who cause me pain and 2) because there is nothing to pardon in the pain I cause others.  Thus, suffering becomes a meaningless experience.

Ah, but wait, you say.  What about the “Soul Building Theodicy” and the notion of redemptive suffering?  All right, I’ll play along.  To ballpark for those unfamiliar: Christians believe that God entered into human suffering through the incarnation of Jesus Christ. Christ's suffering and death on the cross are seen as a redemptive act that offers salvation and hope to humanity. Christ's sacrifice provides then eschatological hope, Christians believing that God shares in the suffering of humanity and offers the promise of ultimate victory over evil and death in the fulfillment of God's kingdom which sustains believers in the midst of present suffering, as they look forward to the day when God will make all things new and restore creation to its original harmony.  Thomas a Kempis, a German-Dutch canon, argues in his 15th century devotional book “The Imitation of Christ”:

If all were perfect, what should we have to suffer from others for God's sake? But God has so ordained that we may learn to bear with one another's burdens, for there is no man without fault, no man without burden, no man sufficient to himself nor wise enough. Hence we must support one another, console one another, mutually help, counsel, and advise, for the measure of every man's virtue is best revealed in time of adversity -- adversity that does not weaken a man but rather shows what he is.

Modern philosopher of religion John Hick elaborates upon this idea, positing that what we experience as evil – that is suffering as I’m using it here – is not actually evil.  Rather, it is a good that encourages our spiritual maturation, allows us to “build our souls” and thus attain the paradise that God has forever intended. 

And Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychologist and Holocaust survivor, writes in a later postscript to his famous book Man’s Search for Meaning that “even the helpless victim of a hopeless situation, facing a fate he cannot change, may rise above himself, may grow beyond himself, and by so doing change himself. He may turn a personal tragedy into a triumph.”

This is surely inspirational, and Dr. Frankl had indeed triumphed over one of history’s great episodes of suffering, but I don’t find it a satisfying justification for the existence of evil and suffering in the first place.  King Lear, then, addresses a third option: our suffering comes not from intelligent or intelligible beings or forces, but instead is a random feature of a chaotic and entirely materialist universe. 

King Lear is notable for its repeated, almost mantra-like use of the word “nothing.”  It appears 29 times, more than in any other play: Cordelia’s answer to Lear’s request for flattery: “Nothing.”  His response: “Nothing can come of nothing.”  Edgar says, “I nothing am.”  The word “never,” too, echoes throughout the play, and these two words suggest a nihilism, or the nullity, of both space and time.  

When Lear enters, howling and carrying the corpse of his Cordelia, Kent whispers, “Is this the promised end?”  That question blows my mind: he means something like “has the prophesied end of the world come?”, seeing in the broken king an apocalyptic image.  One may also hear it as a sly and knowing pun, the playwright aping the voice of the playgoer – “Wait, we were promised a happy ending!”  But the line feels to me like an existential cri de coeur.  Lear has declared his daughter “dead as earth.”  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.  We cannot find redemption in this world and there is no next one.  

But then he thinks he sees in Cordelia some feeble sign of life, and makes the desperate man’s final grasp at an ordered and just cosmos: 

If it be so,

 It is a chance which does redeem all sorrows

 That ever I have felt.

Cordelia’s resurrection would make his whole life’s misery a bargain.  At the beginning of his final speech, still gazing upon his daughter, Lear utters this line: “No, no, no life?”  What does this mean?  Like so much, it depends upon the way we read it, or an actor delivers it.  In the strict context of the speech, it is an interrogative: “Have you no life left?”  A bewildered mourning, emphasized by the thrice repeated negative.  Or it could be a defiant demand: “No!  Give her LIFE!”  Or it's a plea to a personified life.  Or it’s a final rejection of life, a farewell to this vale of tears.  Despite its multiplicity of readings, it always signifies the play’s vision of life’s utter meaninglessness.  

Shakespeare deftly intensifies the cruelty of Lear’s death.  The diminished king still awaits the faintest breath to stir in Cordelia.  Here’s that whole speech:

No, no, no life?

 Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,

 And thou no breath at all? Thou ’lt come no more,

 Never, never, never, never, never.—

 Pray you undo this button. Thank you, sir.

 Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips,

 Look there, look there!

The repeated nevers.  Then, and this really gets me, he asks someone to help undo Cordelia’s collar so she could breath more easily – so poignant.  And then – maybe she breathes!  Do you see this?  Look! Look!  Oh, my god.  So heartbreaking.  Lear dies – does he believe Cordelia lives?  If so, it’s a cruel delusion.

pause

And so it seems to me that the events of King Lear thwart all attempts by theodicy to justify the suffering.  Critic G. Wilson Knight, in his book of essays called The Wheel of Fire, says King Lear ”is most poignant in that it is purposeless, unreasonable. It is the most fearless artistic facing of the ultimate cruelty of things in our literature. That cruelty would be less were there not this element of comedy … Mankind is, as it were, deliberately or comically tormented by ‘the gods’. He is not even allowed to die tragically.”

We are in the realm of the absurd, the notion that the universe is random and unmeaning and that our attempts to impose order on it, to render the irrational rational, and thus to find meaning condemns us to everlasting failure.  Knight points out that this could be leavened by the presence of comedy and, jeez, I’m 4000 words into this episode and haven’t talked about Lear’s famous Fool, whose enigmatic pronouncements articulate a kind of absurd wisdom.  Even Regan notes that “Jesters do oft prove prophets” (an ironic echo from the Biblical book of Hosea).

But I’m more interested, for this particular discussion, in Wilson Knight’s implication that the tragedy of Lear is that he’s not allowed to die tragically.  What a curious observation.  What is a “tragic death”?

Well, let’s jump in the way-back machine and consult Uncle Aristotle.  In the Poetics, he offers a blueprint for tragedy based upon his observations of the works of Greek dramatists, principally Sophocles, author of the Oedipal Cycle.  The philosopher’s famous definition of tragedy goes thus: it is “an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions.”  The protagonist of this dramatic mimesis must be neither completely villainous nor virtuous, but must be “between these two extremes,…a man who is not eminently good and just, yet whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty.”  The destruction of this protagonist, which Aristotle calls peripeteia, must follow what he calls anagnorisis, meaning that the tragic hero must recognize that his impending destruction results directly from his own flawed nature, his hamartia.  This then provides the audience with catharsis, that is, the purging of pity and fear with the result of emotional balance and health.

Lear doesn’t get his promised tragic end.  I find his attitude toward his own frailty and flawed nature ambiguous.  He may understand that his vanity has rent the kingdom – though his assertion that he is “a man more sinned against than sinning” problematizes this.  He calls the world a “stage of fools” and insists that court flatterers have lied to him.  But later in the play he promises to ask Cordelia’s forgiveness.   Whatever his recognition of his tragic flaw, his downfall does not restore a natural order, does not affirm a transcendent cosmic design.  

Because there isn’t one.  The play’s most direct acknowledgement of such nihilism comes early and from the lips of the villain.  As Edmund lays his plot against his brother and father, Gloucester, taken in, fears that heavenly signs “portend no good to us.”  When Gloucester leaves, Edmund scoffs,

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that

 when we are sick in fortune (often the surfeits of

 our own behavior) we make guilty of our disasters

 the sun, the moon, and stars, as if we were villains

 on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves,

 thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance;

 drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced

 obedience of planetary influence; and all that we

 are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable

 evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish

 disposition on the charge of a star! My father

 compounded with my mother under the Dragon’s

 tail, and my nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it

 follows I am rough and lecherous.  I should

 have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the

 firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.

Edmund voices a more hard-nosed and cynical version of Cassius' “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves.”  Well, slightly more cynical.  A tacit faith in Nature over nurture tempers Edmund’s ostensible assertion of radical free will.  Like he says, “I should have been what I am” – it is his nature to be villainous so he will act villainously.  

So, where does this leave us?  If one behaves according to one’s nature, then is one morally culpable for that behavior?  If not, then Lear’s vanity cannot be a tragic flaw in the strictest sense and his downfall is merely absurd.  And I can’t, with apologies to Camus and his Sisyphus, see how absurdity offers any purging catharsis.  I leave Lear feeling more pity and fear, not less.  August Wilhelm Schlegel, poet and brother to philosopher Karl Wilhelm Friedrich, says that in the play “humanity is stripped of all external and internal advantages, and given up prey to naked helplessness.”  That doesn’t make me feel any better.

pause 

Two episodes ago, we looked at Shakespeare’s Macbeth, another play addressing issues surrounding the Stuart accession to the throne.  I pointed out the bleak soliloquy Macbeth delivers upon discovering his wife’s death.  He says,

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

In an episode of the PBS documentary series “Shakespeare Uncovered,” actor Ethan Hawke calls this speech “words to die by.”  Macbeth recognizes the absurdity of the universe, but stands defiantly against his doom all the same.  Yet in this play, we could argue that Macbeth is deceived, that there is a design, a providence, to the natural world which could be restored by just human action.  Malcolm is restored to the throne and will be, we presume, a compassionate and wise king.  

But in Shakespeare’s next play, that is Lear, it is the characters who cling to hope in a benevolent cosmos who are deceived.  Macbeth’s soliloquy anticipates and delineates the world of Lear.  Even more than medieval Scotland, Lear’s ancient Britain is a world of sound and fury that signifies nothing.

And on that bouyant note, I shall leave you, fellow travelers.  I hope you’ve been educated, edified, and entertained.  If so, please leave a positive review on your podcatcher – that’ll help the poddie’s visibility.  Tell your friends about the show and if you can afford it, please consider a financial contribution by clicking the Support the Show button.  Thanks for stopping by, everyone, and be well.