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The Language of Lear
 I
recently watched Laurence Olivieras King Lear again, and apart from
the excellence of all the performances I was most struck by the strangeness
of the language. King Lear is Shakespeare’s greatest
play,  but
it has never been among his most popular — or his most quoted.
And the reason goes beyond its grim subject and painful ending.
The old king divides his kingdom
between his two evil daughters, Goneril and Regan, who soon turn on him;
while he banishes his youngest daughter, Cordelia, who returns to rescue him
when he is insane, almost alone, and desperate. But this seeming fairy-tale
comes to a crushing conclusion. It combines the bleakest suffering with the
most ineffable joy in literature. Watching the scene in which Lear asks
Cordelia to forgive him is like witnessing a miracle.
Except for
Macbeth, few of Shakespeare’s later plays have been
staged or filmed very often. The popular plays tend to be comedies or earlier
tragedies. Their plots are easier to follow, and their language lends itself to
memorization. As You Like It, The Merchant of
Venice, Romeo and Juliet, Julius
Caesar, and Hamlet, great as they are, don’t
challenge either the ear or the understanding as Lear does.
Of course Elizabethan English was
so different from ours that most of us need footnotes in order to follow any
of these plays. But footnotes don’t help very much with
Lear. The play must have been nearly as hard for its first
audiences to grasp as it is now.
![[Breaker quote for The Language of Lear: Shakespeare's new grammar]](2005breakers/050616.gif) The
general outline of the story is clear, but the
language is constantly perplexing. Many of the words are rare, and the
sentences hardly parse. It’s as if the playwright were inventing a new
language, with a new grammar of his own — one that makes
Julius Caesar or Hamlet seem to be written in
epigrammatic prose.
But Shakespeare’s
“later” style, like Beethoven’s, is famous for its knotty,
dense, sometimes almost impenetrable quality. Here is a sampling from the
first half of Lear:
You can make some sense of such
phrases, and in the study their obscurity may almost disappear, but nobody,
however sophisticated, could ever follow them perfectly at first hearing. On
the other hand, their dramatic force is never wholly lost, in their context.
Why would Shakespeare make
things so difficult for his audience? Because he wanted to. It was part of the
effect he was seeking, a sense of life’s swirling mysteries that we
can only comprehend in part. The language, like the story itself, overwhelms
us. And yet the play’s most unforgettable passages are written in the
simplest English.
The critic Stephen Booth has
written of “indefinition” as an essential quality of
Shakespeare’s mature tragedy. Even the seeming loose ends of the
plots — the quiet, unexplained disappearance of Lear’s Fool, for
instance — may have a purpose. When Lear laments, “And my
poor fool is hanged,” we don’t know whether “fool”
means the Fool or is an endearment for Cordelia.
A.C. Bradley, one of the greatest
of all Shakespeare commentators, has two lectures on this tremendous play,
wherein he deals with its many puzzling difficulties, which make it hard to
present adequately on the stage, yet still somehow intensify its tragic
power. One thing is sure: there is no danger of overpraising King
Lear.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2005 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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