examined the work of the instructor, let us turn to Shakespeare’s maniacs and see how the pupil has bettered the instruction.
The most powerful character among the maniacs, by far the grandest figure in our drama of insanity, if not indeed in the whole of English drama, is King Lear. “Grandly passive”—the description is Professor Dowden’s—“played upon by all the manifold forces of nature and society,” he “passes away from our sight, not in any mood of resignation or faith or illuminated peace, but in a piteous agony of yearning for that love which he had found only to lose for ever.”[66:1] This alone would make him a noteworthy figure, but he has far greater claims on our admiration and wonder. He is as lovable, even in his greatest weakness, as the most affectionate of all Shakespeare’s characters, yet more terrible than his darkest villains. He takes hold at once of our sympathy, our pity and our imagination, and the tragic feelings evoked by the drama conflict in us with the more human emotions roused by his own essential humanity.
At the beginning of the play he is often said to be already insane, especially by those medical writers who are somewhat inclined to pervert Shakespeare in order to read in him their own opinions. “The general belief is that the
insanity of Lear originated solely from the ill-treatment of his daughters, while in truth he was insane before that, from the beginning of the play, when he gave his kingdom away.” Thus Dr. Brigham, in the “American Journal of Insanity,” and thus more than one of his kind. But if what they assert be true, and Lear is really mad in the first scene of the play, then “King Lear” is not, in the Shakespearean sense, a tragedy at all. Lear is not mad, however, at this point, as an examination of the scene will shew. His apparently arbitrary division of the kingdom has really been planned before the opening of the play; the protestations of love on the part of his daughters are only planned as an impressive setting for the bestowal of the richest portion upon his best-loved child. Nor was it the King’s original intention to live with each of his daughters in turn: “I loved her most,” he says of Cordelia, “and thought to set my rest on her kind nursery.”[67:1] His powers are indeed failing; his childishness, his vanity, his wayward temper have more sway over him than of old; but at the very worst his state is but one of incipient senile decay. His daughters themselves recognise this. “’Tis the infirmity of his age,” says Regan to Goneril, “such unconstant starts are we like to have from him as this of Kent’s
banishment,” and Goneril adds that they must “look . . . to receive, not alone the imperfections of long-ingraffed condition, but therewithal the unruly waywardness that infirm and choleric years bring with them.”[68:1] Here, then, he stands, impatient and passionate, “a very foolish, fond old man,” but sane in every sense of the word. Only a physician could detect in his “unconstant starts” a predisposition to insanity, with which, since it is not part of the play, we need not concern ourselves.
When the King next appears, his passion is for a time calmed, and his state, apart from the short scene with Oswald (i., 4, 84, etc.), one of tolerant indulgence. The caustic comments of the fool he listens to and encourages; it is only when Goneril appears that his tone changes to one of ill-concealed irritation. “How now, daughter! what makes that frontlet on? Methinks you are too much of late i’ the frown.”[68:2] He pierces the thin disguise of urbanity which cloaks her speeches, and attacks with all the fierceness he can summon the ingratitude which it conceals. It is by no chance that he strikes his head as he exclaims:
“O Lear, Lear, Lear.
Beat at this gate, that let thy folly in,
And thy dear judgment out.”[68:3]
He invokes the most terrible of curses on his ungrateful daughter. His words are here and there broken, but their sense is only too clear. Hot tears escape him in spite of himself; his manhood he feels to be shaken, and when alone with his Fool and the faithful Kent (now disguised as “Caius” the servant), he feels that passion and shock have done their worst. Even as he listens to the jests of the Fool, he knows that the curse is coming upon him. The “self-consciousness of gathering madness” breaks through all restraint: