Symposium: The Problem of Cordelia in Shakespeare's King Lear: NTUT 2009

Superfluity, Malignancy, and Revulsion:

The Problem of Cordelia in Shakespeare’s King Lear

A clear conscience is the source of evil – Kafka

The problem of Cordelia in Shakespeare’s King Lear has been reacted to and commented on beginning with the first serious producers and editors of the play, Tate and Johnson, the Romantics on both sides of the channel, Sigmund Freud, down to important contemporary philosophically-oriented critics like Sigurd Burckhardt and Stanley Cavell. The problem of Cordelia is in two parts. First: Why does she not humor her father in Act I, spare him humiliation, and gain for herself the most generous third of the kingdom and also his grateful companionship in his old age? Second: Is her death in any way justifiable?

Regarding the first part of the problem, it has been argued (in strikingly similar terms) by Burckhardt and Cavell that Cordelia could not have done otherwise than to confront Lear’s foolishness. I am going to disagree with that point of view and suggest that Cordelia’s intransigence is inherently mysterious, satisfies no dramatic requirement, and thus pushes the action outside dramatic representation toward the sheer superfluity and malignancy of human suffering. (In great part this is A. C. Bradley’s interpretation as well.) Regarding the second part of the problem I want to draw the modern reader back to the play’s original reception. I ask the reader to recall that from Tate’s 1681 stage version (which had Johnson’s approval) until Kean’s 1838 London production, the ending of the play was changed to allow Cordelia to escape death, marry Edgar, and live as it were ‘happily ever after’. Cordelia’s death by hanging was erased because it was considered too terrible to imagine. Her death inspired an experience of which, like the superfluity and malignancy of suffering, the Western reader is in peril of forgetting: revulsion.

It has been noted, most famously by A. C. Bradley, that Cordelia’s refusal of Lear’s royal parlor game in Act I, scene i is merely the author’s ‘let’s pretend’, or ‘once upon a time’ [1]. But if in his version he merely wanted get the story going then why devote more than 250 lines to something as simple as ‘let’s pretend’? No, the scene is tense and dramatic; it contains information vital to our understanding that there is some confusion in the kingdom as to who is or is not “in favor’ [I, i, 3-6] and that the future of the kingdom is at stake. Thus Shakespeare must have wanted to show something and not merely establish a narratological given.

Can we understand Cordelia’s refusal of her father to be a flawed aspect of her character? She has been described—from Lear himself to Coleridge to Granville-Barker to psychoanalytic critic Norman Holland—as, variously, ‘plain’, ‘untender’, ‘proud’, ‘obstinate’, and ‘stiff-necked’. The problem with investigating Cordelia’s actions as a consequence of her psychology is that she has relatively few lines in the play (only 107 by my count), and the lines she does speak declare her various resolutions (not to obey her father and to scold her sisters [I, i.], to “go about [her father’s] business” in battle [IV, iv], and to console the old man after defeat [V, I]) rather than her inner motivations. Even Bradley, the great critic of character, is resigned to define her in other than psychological terms: a “creation” [2].

I think that Shakespeare makes of Cordelia neither a full-blown character nor a pure symbol (a Christ-symbol, for example, to which she has quite often been confined) [3], but instead something (almost annoyingly) unsatisfying in these contexts.

Seeking to find an explanation for Cordelia’s refusal elsewhere than psychology or symbolism, the great Shakespearean critics Burkhardt and Cavell offer the following two analyses. Burckhardt says:

“It is idle to speculate about Cordelia’s pride, her share of responsibility for the consequences of her unbending ‘plainness’. As her asides make clear, she has no choice; the covenant under which she must speak has it’s own logic. Where there can be no lie, there can be no truth; and since the essential function of speech is to transmit truth, for Cordelia no speech is possible. Her ‘nothing’ is simply a statement of this fact, and her following attempt to return discourse to the sphere where it can be true (or false) is condemned from the start to futility” [4].



and Cavell echoes:

“The truth is, [Cordelia] could not flatter; not because she was too proud or too principled, though these might have been reasons, for a different character; but because nothing she could have done would have been flattery—at best it would have been dissembled flattery. There is no convention for what Cordelia was asked to do. It is not that Goneril and Regan have taken the words out of her mouth, but that here she cannot say them because for her they are true […]. She is not disgusted by her sisters’ flattery (it’s nothing new); but heartbroken at hearing the words she wishes she were in a position to say” [5].



I argue that the reasoning of both critics is philosophically sound but it is dramatically and ethically irrelevant. Given the stakes, given that Cordelia is insightful, that she knows her sisters are vile, that her father is given to pompousness and wrath (she grew up in this family, after all), that both the familial and political situation is at this moment dire—given all this and more—why not flatter the old man? Why not resort to non-essential speech? I grant that Lear has trapped Cordelia in a philosophical cleft stick, something like the liar’s paradox, but the circumstances are not philosophical. The circumstances are ethical and political. Faced with a father who has staged something ridiculous but heavily consequential, there is no ethical or political reason not to give in to ‘fake flattery’, to speech which is neither true nor false but simply and magnanimously spoken with the understanding that speech can have a purpose other than truth or falsity. It happens all the time. (When I see an acquaintance on the street and say to him or her ‘good morning’, just how deeply committed am I to the desire that he or she really have a good morning? This is ordinary, everyday speech—a language game—and it is odd that Stanley Cavell, who is otherwise a brilliant student of Wittgenstein, does not even consider this.) Cordelia’s way out of the philosophical cleft stick was to refuse philosophical answers to questions that are not philosophical.

There is a famous story of Mademoiselle de Sommery told by Stendhal: a man returns home and surprises his lover en flagrante. The man demands an explanation. Mademoiselle, calmly dressing herself, denies that she has been unfaithful. The man exclaims: But I see everything with my own eyes! His lover replies: Ah! Now I understand! You don’t love me anymore! You would rather believe your own eyes than believe me! [6] I grant that there is something of this going on in the play; but Lear is over eighty years old and will soon die, Cordelia could care for him, could have Kent as an advisor, could have a husband, (and, incidentally, could quite possibly be able to intercede in the difficulties Gloucester would shortly have as a result of Edmund’s villainy and his own tragic folly). Somehow, this solution never even occurs to her as an option. Let me add, at no point in the play does it ever occur to her that she might have done this and thus to have prevented a lot of misery. Why? Is she meant to be (philosophically uncompromising) goodness incarnate? There is some reason to think so.

This is sacrilege, but let’s imagine for a moment that Cordelia is not goodness incarnate but evil incarnate. Let’s assume that she does not want even to be comparable to her sisters and cares less about her father than both her sisters combined. Let’s assume she wants the entire kingdom for herself (not just a portion “more opulent” [I, i, 86]). How might she accomplish this? If she accepts the terms laid down by her father, she will be hemmed in by her two sisters’ portions of the kingdom and have to fight a war on two fronts. But, if she provokes her father to wrath, has herself banished and pitied, allies with France, waits for her sisters to (quite predictably) begin a rivalry that will weaken each; and then, in the name of her father, invades the kingdom, she would have a real chance of success. As a matter of fact, this is exactly what happens. Cordelia very nearly takes over all of Britain. She does not succeed only because of the moral and military resolve of Albany, which I don’t think anybody could have predicted.

Now, there is no textual evidence whatsoever to support the thesis that Cordelia is a villain and there is ample textual evidence that she is goodness incarnate. Everything she says and does is in some way good, just and right. My point is this: it makes no difference. Not because it is “idle to speculate,” but because Shakespeare has managed to depict a universe where good and evil resemble each other in terms of practical consequences. Good and evil do not cease to exist but the practical distinction between them becomes superfluous. This allows Shakespeare to expose his audience to what I will call malignance, and it is this malignance, I am arguing, that inspired the revulsion I have noted. I don’t deny that in a certain way the audience may feel that Cordelia is right to refuse her father’s marginally contractual generosity [7]; I only say that it would have been better not to refuse. (And not just better in hindsight (unless we suppose that Cordelia is simply blind to the dangers inherent in Lear’s division of the kingdom between herself and her two vile sisters).) But, ‘better’ and worse’ are superfluous to Western philosophical thinking which concerns itself with the good, the just in absolutist term. (Because philosophers, quite reasonably, seek clarity [8].) From Cordelia’s adherence to that absolutist position the tragedies of Lear and Gloucester (and Cordelia herself) ensue.

Following the great and strange opening scene Lear finds himself, in short order, stripped of his power, his knights, all three of his daughters, all his possessions, and all that was left of his right mind. He finds himself to be superfluous and must then undergo the suffering of which the play is an unflinching exposition. In the play the audience witnesses suffering to such an extent that, although moved, we have little sympathy left for Gloucester nor enthusiasm for Edgar’s heroics [9].

Ultimately, I don’t think the play is tragic. I don’t think it is about good and evil, truth and lies, appearance and reality, or justice and injustice. By the time Cordelia—goodness incarnate—is murdered, and by the time the audience has come to accept that Lear and Gloucester have been more than justly repaid for their viciousness, foolishness, and rashness, terrible things have become ordinary, even routine, banal, and worse, forgettable. Here I cite Bradley (regarding Cordelia’s death) at length since his description encapsulates the point I’m trying to get to:

The matter stands thus. Edmund, after the defeat of the opposing army, sends Lear and Cordelia off to prison. Then, in accordance with a plan agreed on between himself and Goneril, he dispatches a captain with secret orders to put them both to death instantly (V, iii 26-37, 244, 252). He then has to fight with the disguised Edgar. He is mortally wounded, and, as he lies dying, he says to Edgar (at line 162, more than a hundred lines after he gave that commission to the captain):

What thou have charged me with, that I have done;
And more, much more; the time will bring it out;

‘Tis past, and so am I.

In ‘more, much more’ he seems to be thinking of the order for the deaths of Lear and Cordelia (what else remains undisclosed?); yet he says nothing about it. A few lines later he recognizes the justice of his fate, yet still says nothing. Then he hears the story of his father’s death, says it has moved him and ‘shall perchance do good’ (what good except saving his victims?); yet he still says nothing. Even when he hears that Goneril is dead and Regan poisoned, he still says nothing. It is only when he is directly questioned about Lear and Cordelia that he tries to save his victims who were to be killed ‘instantly’ (242). How can we explain this delay? […] The real cause lies outside the dramatic nexus. It is Shakespeare’s wish to deliver a sudden and crushing blow to the hopes he has excited [10].



Let me emphasize with Bradley that the reason for Cordelia’s death lies outside the drama. Shakespeare here crushes hope and this, I would claim, is the origin of the revulsion felt by Tate and Johnson [11]. Cordelia’s death and the sufferings of Lear and Gloucester have, by Act V, become gratuitous. Cordelia’s goodness is gratuitous. For over a century, her death could not be endured. I am arguing that the dramatic nexus itself becomes superfluous in King Lear. What could not be endured at all for a century today can be endured—but only in bad conscience. For (and this is my thesis), King Lear is a play not about tragic suffering but gratuitous suffering; it is an exposition of inexpiable woe. Where, classically, suffering should be judged apocalyptically or theodicially (it has been often noted how many of the characters in the play try to sum up and hopefully end the downward spiral of events) [12]; in Lear suffering acquires its own autonomy. Suffering ceases to operate within a larger dimension of justice and hope and instead escapes into a vestigial dimension of ceaseless malignancy. It is interminable. It is comparative and not superlative. At the end of the play, Albany asks Kent and Edgar only to “sustain” the “gored state” [V, iii, 321]. If I could possibly conceive of Cordelia as proud (and it is possible), then I could possibly conceive of her death as, in an Aristotelian way, just and tragically satisfying (like the suicide of Iocasta) except for the way in which Shakespeare puts her to death (as Bradley so clearly describes). Cordelia’s death is decidedly and interminably unsatisfying (from either a dramatic of theo-judicial point of view), as is her refusal to humor her father’s foolishness for his sake and for the sake of her love for him. That the play is so unsatisfying is what, I am trying to indicate, creates a weird complicity (between audience and what they witness) which Tate, Johnson, and their generation found intolerable but which we today can experience with a clear conscience. I do not say that we do not experience a certain tragic dimension; it is not a question of being or not being moved. I only say that we are able to experience King Lear with the same profound equanimity as a performance of Oedipus the King and this equanimity is a disturbing sign.

At stake then is revulsion and guilt as the extra literary effects certain literary works make possible. At stake is both the philosopher’s “I think”, and the aesthete’s “I read” (or, “I watch”, or “I contemplate”). To watch (or to try to think) the representation of suffering outside any moral or theodicial context—to view it in its sheer malignancy, supported only by the phantom, vestigial generosity of life itself (or, nature)—is to feel guilt, to suffer a malaise of conscience [13]. To be sure, the 20th was the century that saw Hitler and Stalin, Hiroshima, the Gulag, Auschwitz and Cambodia; and so the 20th was a century that could “take” Lear in the original and that elevated the play above Hamlet as Shakespeare’s “greatest work” [14]. It was the century that saw (and still witnesses in the 21st) in suffering suffering’s essential disproportion, or comparitivity, which exasperates reason and theology. But perhaps, perhaps gratuitous suffering restores the ego to resources other than reason, reciprocity, familial generosity, social contract, or aesthetic satisfaction. The witnessing of gratuitous suffering restores the ego to its own guilty superfluity which alone makes possible the interminable responsibility in the sense so admirably expressed in the writings of Emmanuel Lévinas, Primo Levi, Zhang Xian-liang, Robert Antelme, others (who knows how many?) who testify to the unforgettable of which there is no knowing and for which there is no justification.

Succinctly, in Lear Shakespeare displays a category—revulsion—which cannot be reduced to either ethics or aesthetics [15].

NOTES:

1 Bradley, A.C. Shakespearean Tragedy. New York: Palgrave. 1992 (213-15). Moreover, the story of King Lear and his three daughters was as well known to 17th c. Britons as the story of Goldilocks and the three bears is known to American school schoolchildren today. [Here, I wish to thank my student Tzu, Jie-li who suggested I research the sources of the story.] The tale of an aged king who foolishly surrenders his power to flatterer-daughters is at least four centuries older than Shakespeare. The figure of Cordelia—the daughter whose love is unspeakably sincere—is present in the folklore of any number of cultures [Alfred Harbage, “Introduction to King Lear: William Shakespeare The Complete Works. New York: Viking Press. 1977 (1062-63)] Sigmund Freud compares her to Cinderella and makes both of them figures of the death wish: lovely, soothing, silent, inevitable, and true [“The Three Caskets” in Writings On Art and Literature, Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1977 (109-21)]. In 1136 Geoffrey of Monmouth included the story in his Historia Regnum Britanniae, but by the time of David Hume’s History of Great Britain (1762) it had been confined to literature. Spenser includes the tale in his Faerie Queen [II, X, 27-32]. Shakespeare himself may have acted in a version of the story entitled The True Chronicle History of King Leir, which had been staged as early as 1594. His own version of the story was first staged at the Globe Theater in 1605.)


2 Bradley, op. Cit. (275-89). For example, he states:” The character of Cordelia is not a masterpiece of invention or subtlety like that of Cleopatra; yet in its own way it is a creation as wonderful” (275).

3 See, for example, J.C. Maxwell’s elegant Christian reading of Lear in his “The Technique of Invocation in ‘King Lear’”, MLR 45 [1950].


4 “The Quality of Nothing,” in Shakespearean Meanings. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1968 (240).

5 “The Avoidance of Love”, in Disowning Knowledge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1987 (65).

6 Love. Trans. Gilbert and Suzanne Sale. New York: Penguin, 1980 (117).

7 However distasteful his demands, he is quite marginally contractual: Lear offers Cordelia a chance to recant saying, “Mend your speech a little” I, i, 94 [italics mine]. Lear is not asking for great oratory promising eternal adoration.


8 Cavell, citing Kiergegaard, will go so far as to say that even her death is justifiable in absolutist terms; op cit. 80 and 112. If I may say so, only a true philosopher could fathom such a reading.

9 Find citation


10 “King Lear”, Shakespearean Tragedy, Palgrave 1992, p. 216. [emphasis in original]

11 Commenting, in his own editions of the Works of William Shakespeare (1765 and 1773), Johnson writes: “In the present case the publick has decided. Cordelia, from the time of Tate, has always retired with victory and felicity. And, if my sensations could add any thing to the general sufferage, I might relate, that I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia’s death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor.” I ask the reader to keep in mind that Johnson and Tate were not squeamish about the tragic or about violence per se. Each was a reader of Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Seneca, not to mention Shakespeare’s own bloody early plays Titus and Coriolanus. No, there was something specifically terrible in about Cordelia’s death in Lear that neither could come to grips with.


12 Find citation; essay on use of the word “worst” in Lear—somewhere???

13 I could mention here Sade and Lautreamont (who exposed an interminably ‘thrilling’ aspect to evil), Emily Dickinson’s painful, lifelong, reclusive privacy (which the entire world has now invaded), or Franz Kafka’s endless letters to Felice (which was his version of marriage). [ –rethink this note much more rigorously or drop it altogether]


14 See Holland, The Shakespearean Imagination. Bloomington: Indiana University Press:1964 (233); but there are others (Jan Kott, Shakespeare, Our Contemporary, e.g.)

15 Were I to continue I would explore the role of the fool in Lear as a proto-modern exemplar of ‘witnessing’.