Practice one written by a student who scored 44:
Passage 1 sees the stage dominated by the splendour and decadence of Lear as he outlandishly displays his own vanity, setting off the motions of the play. Frequently appearing in his speech is the language of economics, “the vines of France and milk of Burgundy”. Shakespeare’s construction in Lear’s language sends a chilling warning to the audience; the fact that an autocratic feudal king is preoccupied with economics foreshadows the confusion and disorder that is to come in the play.
Asked what more could she add to her sisters’ sycophantic flattery, Cordelia, simply replies “nothing”, contrasting everything the play has offered up until that moment. The one simple word fractures the grandiose ceremony that has encapsulated the whole stage; its dramatics breaking the spell of the iambic pentameter speech. The effect of this word on stage is poignantly picked up by the audience, and in turn the seeds of its power are planted into their minds, as this will be the very haunting word that will torture and unmake both Lear and Gloucester, men of immense power in Britain who are accustomed to taking themselves to everything.
Though vastly different from the oily glib of Regan and Goneril, from another perspective the silence of Cordelia could be seen as a form of rhetoric in itself. The reduction of speech that is “nothing, my lord” here is not a refusal of speech but an acknowledgement of the limitations of language. The awe-encompassing love and duty of Cordelia for and to Lear is not physically palpable; even Cordelia, constructed by Shakespeare later on to be the very embodiment of perfection – in action and speech – cannot convey the grand foundations of her tower of love for Lear. This notion is repeated in other scenes of the play: Lear reducing the answer of “what needs one?” to a rage of “ask not the need”; and his carrying out of Cordelia’s cadaver, howling – the emotions enthralling his mind, reducing his language to further convey the extent of the pain and anguish. The rhetoric of silence, Shakespeare shows to the audience – silence both in the absence and reduction of speech – takes the place of the ineffable and the unutterable.
Cordelia, after the momentary silence, does finally profess her love, a love that is “according to [her] bond, no more nor less”. Her appeal is one riddled with language such as this, language of duty and bondage. Like how Lear’s lexicon of economics earlier in the scene is reflective of his insatiable greed, this shows to the audience insight into the Cordelia’s views and values. Cordelia’s theology is an uncorrupted version of Lear’s. It is the belief of ‘nature’ that is neither Christian nor pagan, but instead a doctrine of structure ascending from primordial matter to God. It takes for granted that parents are to be honoured, king’s to be paid homage and human decencies to be observed. Thus to Cordelia, words to are not needed and cannot convey the extent of her love for her father and lord, it should simply be taken for granted as a priori, like sunshine or rain.
Lear however, caught up his power and desire, does not see this. What he sees is defiance – “So young, and so untender?” – filial ingratitude which in actuality seems to pervade everywhere in this Britain except in Cordelia. This is the very thing that drives Lear past the brink of madness, a thing shown by Shakespeare to be not only an offence against man and king, but a violation of the natural order. The pain of Lear at this point – of witnessing what he sees as his favourite betraying him – is starkly blatant. His banishment of Cordelia is spoken as a father, with the personal singular pronouns of “my” and “thee” clearly evident. However, the emotions of the audience are divided – the empathy is eroded by Lear’s lack of foresight and his own persecution of his daughter.
To maintain his image of power after an appeared attempt at its undermining (Lear at this point is still unaware of his divestment of power that came with the demarcation of his lands), Lear conjures the image of the dragon. “Come not between the dragon and his wrath”. The dragon is the symbol of Wales, a symbol of the kingship of old Britain, the Britain of the Celts. By aligning himself with this image, Lear has drawn the line, painting himself to stand for the older order, to defend it from the ranks of the new order. This act in itself is ironic, as Lear does not know who the enemy is. Cordelia, as clearly exemplified by her language of order is of the old order; the new order lies in Edmund, Regan and Goneril, a generation of Machiavellians who are bent on making their own destinies at a total disregard to any moral adages. Substantiating the irony is that Lear is presented by Shakespeare to be representing the very values of the new order, an order whose lives are devoted to gain, whose members are indifferent to minor moral qualms such as going against the natural order. Lear wanted to conjure an image of majesty, instead the audience sees old man who wants to sate his rapacious desire for autocratic power. Ultimately it is not Lear who leads the old order into conflict; it is ironically the man who he warns with the image, Kent.
The violent atmosphere of passage 1 is contrasted to the pathos of passage 3 as an insane Lear is reunited with the blind Gloucester. Dressed in wild flowers and still claiming to be the “King himself”, Lear enters the stage, immediately prompting Edgar to label him a “side-piercing sight”. The three men on stage are the lowest of the low; they have sunk to the very nadir of their existence. Yet despite being equal in their misery and misfortune, rank is still preserved, as Gloucester “falls to his knees”. Gloucester’s faith in the ordered world remains undaunted, as in his eyes these events are merely the acts of the gods.
The lowering of Lear’s situation is mirrored in turn by the reducing of his speech; the erstwhile poetry is gone, replaced by the prose of a madman. He recounts to Gloucester and Edgar of the storm that he had just gone through, of the “rain that came to wet [him] once and the wind to make [him] chatter … the thunder that would not peace at [his] bidding.” Lear could not stop the elements because he could not stop himself. Being King, the divine representative on earth, the cosmos acts as an externalisation of Lear. The rage at his daughters at the end of Act III could not be abated with ease as their heartlessness contradicted the very things he stood for. The pain and anguish within is reflected without (much like the madness within his mind is mirrored in turn by the chaos in the world around him); Lear could not cry, instead nature cried for him. Shakespeare’s evoking of the drastic effects of filial ingratitude is one of the bitterest lessons in King Lear.
The rage and confusion within Lear could not be merely summoned away; instead they had to be faced, in the storm that “would not peace”. At that point, with the doors shut up, with civilisation no longer available to him, the unaccommodated Lear went from the castle to the heath to face the storm, the culmination of everything raging within him. This progression is not only one of accommodation, but also one of technology. Lear goes back to the very basics of human society, where in the most primal state of human being, cold and wet and huddled by a fire, he looks into the eye of the storm, and in doing so views the inner sanctums of his psyche.
Only by such a self-reduction, Shakespeare shows, a stripping away of the unnecessary, and going back to the basics, does one find what makes one cognate and what it means to be human. The Lear that comes out is one who is “not ague-proof”, one who is aware of his own limitations, but who is “every inch the king”. In losing his mind, he gains insight, realising that the court around him had “flattered him like a dog”. Despite the insanity of his present state, his words, like the Fool’s are of a disconcerting incomprehensibility which underlies wisdom. Lear has become a human king, a man kingly in his new found wisdom; in nothingness he had found everything.
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