4
Well, well, th’event.
King Lear 1.4.3441
The quotation with which I begin may seem an utterly innocuous one. Spoken by the Duke of Albany at the end of a scene in which his marital relations with Goneril begin their inexorable deterioration, the words slip past almost unnoticed. They are supplementary in essence, following Albany’s own formulaic rhyming couplet which has all the formal structure of a scene ending: ‘How far your eyes may pierce I cannot tell; | Striving to better, oft we mar what’s well’ (341–2). Goneril’s reply, ‘Nay then’, is unexpected, a seemingly artificial prolonging of a scene which has reached its natural conclusion. Albany immediately interrupts with the quotation above. I want to explore the ways in which King Lear is dominated by the event. The event in Lear is unavoidable: there is no location, there is only event. Indeed, there is just one ‘event’ in the play: remarkably, Albany’s line is the only instance of the word. This singularity, as we shall see, is no obstacle to the strange logic of the event characterising the play.
In this chapter I will outline the ways in which King Lear is subtly but consistently misunderstood by the tendency to imagine the storm happening in a particular place. I propose that the storm itself is, aesthetically and structurally, what sustains the play. In the course of my argument, I will show how the storm in King Lear is characterised by an absence of location and the ways in which this absence is crucial to the play and its process of meaning. I will show that responses that bypass this absence of location, however briefly, necessarily fail to address the text on its own terms.
We will, moreover, see how King Lear continues and develops Shakespeare’s characteristic approach to storm, namely the systematic troubling of the expectation of the supernatural. As this aspect of the play is explored, I will draw on the work of critics who seek, or perhaps expect, to find the residue of supernatural cause where storm is concerned. As we have seen already, the notion that storm effects almost invariably prompted the audience to expect the supernatural is pertinent and valid with other dramatic work of the period, but is problematised by the plays of Shakespeare.2 I will argue that whilst the audience may indeed expect the supernatural, in common with other plays I am considering, King Lear subverts that expectation. In this case, the subversion is carried out in particular through Lear’s question ‘What is the cause of thunder?’ (3.4.151). The question not only introduces a sense of naturalistic meteorological inquiry, but opens the play to an investigation of the work of one of its most resonant words: ‘cause’. Such investigation will form the last part of this chapter, as I explore the ways in which cause and event inform our understanding of King Lear.
Why the event? To begin to think about the ways King Lear is subject to the logic of the event, here is a definition: ‘The (actual or contemplated) fact of anything happening; the occurrence of’.3 Even in this ostensibly basic definition, the event already seems strange, occupying the real and the imaginary: the ‘occurrence of’ the ‘contemplated’ suggests that the event is a basic condition of human thought. A more obscure usage – one present in early modern English – sees event defined as ‘What “becomes of” or befalls (a person or thing); fate’.4 Thus, the event bears finality and what Jacques Derrida might term the ‘to come’. Indeed, it is this quality of the event that Derrida draws upon in his own explication: ‘The event must be considered in terms of the “come” … Without this “come” there could be no experience of what is to come, of the event, of what will happen and therefore of what, since it comes from the other, lies beyond anticipation’.5 This ‘experience’, I will argue, is what characterises King Lear. In the play, the event ‘lies beyond anticipation’. Albany’s phrase, with which I began, is an encapsulation of this idea: an admonition of Goneril’s threat to anticipate. In several plays, Shakespeare is alive to the eccentricities of the event. Nicholas Royle has addressed uses of event in Shakespeare, contending that ‘its appearances are consistently associated with a sense of strangeness’.6 The three suns of 3 Henry VI are ‘but one lamp, one light, one sun. | In this the heaven figures some event’ (2.1.31–2). Indeed in several of Shakespeare’s plays, the event verges on the announcement of the supernatural. Hence, in The Tempest: ‘These are not natural events: they strengthen | From strange to stranger’ (5.1.228–9) and in Macbeth: ‘dire combustion, and confus’d events, | New hatch’d to th’ woeful time’ (2.3.57–8).
R. A. Foakes, unlike many editors, glosses Albany’s phrase – th’event – and does so with unerring, unnerving simplicity: ‘the outcome; equivalent to “we’ll see”’. I want to suggest that this gloss is coloured by the logic of play – a logic which marries blindness and sight, daylight and night, ‘matter and impertinency mixed’, as Edgar says, ‘Reason in madness’ (4.1.170–1). That the event, in this idiomatic context, is revealing and structured as a promise – ‘we’ll see’ – happily aligns it with madness, blindness and night.7 Furthermore, there is a subtle difference between the Quarto and Folio versions of Albany’s line: the former has ‘the event’, whilst the latter has ‘the’vent’. Foakes’s ‘th’event’ is a medium between the two. The Folio’s version prompts consideration of another definition, under e’vent: ‘To expose to the air; hence, to cool’.8
For these reasons, Albany’s line is the ideal starting place for a discussion of the storm in King Lear. To the events of blinding, maddening and darkening in the play, we may add the storm: the ironic exposure to the air of Lear’s event, which does not cool, but maddens. In the case of King Lear, the sense of strangeness in the storm as event is brought out in its status as outcome and as occasion: it informs the meaning of the lines which run through it, sometimes seemingly in dialogue with them, yet confined to one insistent stage effect. It is, to apprehend the language of the stage direction, still, both in the sense of continuing and unchanging. I choose the word event to consider King Lear in general and the storm in particular to evoke the sense that ‘what is happening’ and ‘what has happened’ is prioritised in the play over issues of location. How to address the storm in King Lear? Only by first addressing also a tradition which depends upon the storm’s marginalisation; only thereby teasing the ‘we’ll see’ from the event. This tradition has to do with the superfluous location of the heath. The storm has often been interpreted as an external symbol of Lear’s internal distress,9 itself an indication that critics are open to readings of the play, or at least its title character, based on the event of the storm. However, rather than simply offering the storm as context, whether by aligning it with the depiction of Lear’s psyche or by, for example, the gradual decline of providential pagan belief, critical responses have almost inevitably localised the storm, and hence failed to address the play on its own terms.
In using a phrase such as ‘the play on its own terms’, I am conscious that I leave myself open to rebuke.10 What I hope to show, however, is that, far from attempting to reclaim a pre-critical, pre-editorial incarnation of the play, it would benefit us to recognise that criticism and editorial practices frequently represent King Lear, however subtly, as reliant on the poetics of location. Terence Hawkes suggests that we focus ‘on the ways in which King Lear is processed by a society … rather than on any mythical “play itself”’.11 I would submit in response that the play with which we interact, that is, the play which, as a society, we engage in processing, is one inherited from a society – the Restoration and its scenic theatre – which operated under inherently different principles and conditions than either our own or the early Jacobean theatrical culture. And whilst we cannot claim a ‘real version’ of the text in this way, if we are to continue to ‘process’ it, then we ought at least to delineate the origins of what we are processing and, as much as we are able, recognise the material conditions of its original production. The phrase ‘the text itself’ is meant only to indicate this indented recognition.
King Lear is, both popularly and critically, imagined as moving through madness and realisation on a heath. Articles have already been written which address the fallacy, notably by James Ogden, whose ‘Lear’s Blasted Heath’ was first published in 1987, and by Henry S. Turner, whose ‘King Lear Without: The Heath’ appeared a decade later.12 It is a problem, however, which remains, as, even in critical discourse, when Lear is described as at a location, it is almost inevitably a heath. Or rather, the heath, as only the right heath will do: ‘When he is on the heath, King Lear is moved to pity’, writes Jonathan Dollimore, as though it were a place to visit for reawakening, a kind of spiritual retreat.13 Hugh Grady, meanwhile, argues that ‘modern subjectivity, in the guise of Cordelia, Edgar and the transformed Lear from the heath scenes on, is also the locus for the workings of the utopian’.14 Again, the heath becomes complicit in the shifts in Lear’s language and takes on a central role in any attempt at reconciliation at which the play, it is argued, hints. Those shifts in language are characterised chiefly by their relationship with the storm and the night, that is, by the external events, not by location. Despite this, the heath seems boundless in the argument of Arthur Kirsch, who mentions ‘Gloucester’s state of mind on the heath, after his blinding’.15 The heath then, continues beyond the storm – and becomes, in Kirsch’s reading, a figure for the sense of forlorn revelation which characterises the latter half of the play. For Ian W. O. House, too, the heath plays a part in characterisation, as Edgar’s ‘most effective disguise is to be quite openly part of the heath on which he lives’.16 Even critics purportedly invested in analysing the play’s treatment of the environment fall into the trap of the received version of the play.17 Stephen Greenblatt offers another perspective: ‘In the strange universe of King Lear, nothing but precipitous ruin lies on the other side of retirement, just as nothing but a bleak, featureless heath lies on the side of the castle gate’.18 Here, the heath is more suggestive of banishment.19 Greenblatt’s conflation of location with the wider ‘universe’ of the play invites us to contemplate the text’s characteristic absence of locality, although his employment of it as a point of comparison implies that the featurelessness of location is somehow important in the play’s meaning. There is, perhaps, also an indication here that critics are, at least in their scholarly writings, beginning to move away from the fallacy: Greenblatt does not favour the heath in his more scholarly works, but seems happy to use it in popular biography, which nonetheless offers readings of the plays.20 I would suggest that a conscious avoidance, if such is the case, of the heath in academic texts should not be coupled with a resurrection of it in popular works. Indeed, this is rather sinister, as though the heath should be a step-ladder for those unable to gain an unobstructed view of the play. A critical awareness of an imposition should, if one is to raise it, lead to a recognition of it as an imposition, unless we are resigned to repeating it. There is a disturbing and distorting act of displacement at work in localising meaning in King Lear and nowhere is this more pronounced than in the repetition of the heath. There is no location, there is only event.
There is a further danger, if we persist with the heath and its associative implications. Implicit in Turner’s argument is the notion that to imagine Lear on a heath is to circumvent the very process by which the king is understood to be mad.21 Lear’s journey is one of dislocation in many senses of the word: just as his followers attempt to relocate him – either out of the storm, or, in Turner’s language, to ‘the world of the play’ – Lear’s manifest refusal to recognise the locations, or the possibility of location, serves not only to dislocate him from space but from the followers themselves.22 Thus the notions of isolation, remoteness, or seclusion for which the heath stands are diminished as soon as the possibility of the heath – or any other location – is imagined. To locate Lear is to save him from madness. That the phrase ‘Lear on the heath’ has acquired the surrogate meaning of the progression of Lear’s insanity is contradictory to the fact that Lear’s mental state is not only catalysed by displacement but envisaged and articulated through the impossibility of re-placement. Only if Lear fails to accept his surroundings can the sense of isolation sought by the imposition of the heath be realised. Moreover, the notion that Lear is physically isolated in the storm, as only one in a wilderness can be, is manifestly false and recon-textualises the scenes in an utterly unhelpful way. Lear is not alone in the storm. Indeed, Lear is never alone on the stage. This is the one title role in Shakespeare’s tragedies which has no soliloquies.23 To add to Turner’s argument on the representation of madness in King Lear, the king’s peculiar state is that he soliloquises but his soliloquies are witnessed by others on stage: this is dramatic madness – we might remember Ophelia and Lady Macbeth for other examples of these witnessed soliloquies.24 Edgar as Poor Tom, of course, makes use of the notion, and his feigned madness would be meaningless if he were on stage alone.25 The phrase ‘on the heath’ encourages us to think of Lear as physically isolated – alone – and thereby bypasses the dramatic context of the representation of the king’s increasing insanity.
By stressing the fallacious nature of the heath, my intention is not to nitpick, but to adhere to the demands of the text itself. Before examining the play in closer detail, it is necessary to ask the question: is it important to know where the action is taking place in a Shakespearean play? An illustrative comparison can be made with Romeo and Juliet: a reader’s search for mention of a balcony in the text will prove fruitless. It would be doctrinaire, however, to draw conclusions from such an absence, as the demands both of the text and its staging are that Juliet is above Romeo – ‘o’er my head’ – at a ‘window’ (2.2.27; 1). What is traditionally referred to as the balcony scene, then, has a perfectly appropriate, if supplementary name. The same cannot be said of the so-called heath scenes in King Lear, which lack the indications prevalent in Romeo and Juliet. So, how crucial is location in a Shakespearean play? We might, in addition to the canard of Lear’s heath, remember the castles of Macbeth and Hamlet; the various battlegrounds of the histories – Shrewsbury, Harfleur, Orleans, Agincourt; The Tempest’s island; forests in As You Like It, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Merry Wives of Windsor. We may recall the many ports of Pericles as well as Venice, Verona, Cyprus, Bohemia, Belmont and the oddly unobtainable Milford Haven. There are, of course, many more such instances, and alongside them belong myriad scenes in bedrooms, courts, taverns, brothels, streets, gardens, ships, prisons and caves. We recognise these locations, as readers especially but as audience members also, not simply through editorial glosses but by the same system of contextual signs that tell us that it is ‘bitter cold’ at the opening of Hamlet (1.1.6), or that ‘The moon shines bright’ in the last act of The Merchant of Venice (5.1.1). In the storm scenes of King Lear, there is a similar array of contextual signs: we are repeatedly told that a) Lear and his followers are outside, but that shelter is not far; b) that the weather is dreadful in every sense and c) it is night.26 Aside from the close proximity of the hovel, there is no contextual sign during the storm which indicates the whereabouts of the characters. In each of the above examples of place, the location of the characters adds nuance to their lines. In The Merchant of Venice, for example, ‘What news on the Rialto?’ (1.3.33; 3.1.1) does more than ally place with communication; it creates a sense of a bustling mercantile community which the play’s other instances of ‘the Rialto’ build upon. Location informs meaning. Similarly, in Cymbeline, Aviragus’s lines convey a strong sense of experience shaped by environment: ‘how, | In this our pinching cave, shall we discourse | The freezing hours away? We have seen nothing. | We are beastly’ (3.3.37–40). Without the image of the cave, restricting and cold in the double sense of pinching, Aviragus’s speech loses much of its potency in conveying a life outside of civilisation. As it is, the concluding ‘beastly’ is reached through a construction of place which limits the speaker’s humanity: the ‘pinching cave’ imposes a limit on ‘discourse’. Belarius’s response is also marked by an understanding of location’s influence on the imagination: ‘Did you but know the city’s usuries, | And felt them knowingly’ (45–6). When place is a significant factor in a character’s meaning or circumstance, then, place is woven into the diction. If there is no such indication of place, it is not too much to say that the character’s meaning and situation depend on other factors, whether they be another character’s speech, the recognition of their own subjectivity27 or an event not specific to location: the night, for example, or a storm. Indeed, in response to Kent’s urgent question, ‘Where’s the King?’, the Gentleman does not respond helpfully, but poetically: ‘Contending with the fretful elements’ (3.1.2–3).28 This response, and the description which follows it, is made even odder when, not 50 lines later, the two characters split up to seek Lear, and odder still when Kent finds him first (49; 3.2.39). If the Gentleman knows the king’s whereabouts, such a progression is ridiculous, unless the notion of a whereabouts is – as is made clear by his answer to Kent – acutely troubled. Thus, as the play moves into the third act, the importance and even validity of location continue to be undermined and destabilised. To localise Lear in the storm is to acknowledge a severe difficulty in approaching those scenes, a difficulty which can be sidestepped by forcing aesthetically apposite supplements upon them, thereby altering the meaning, and the way of meaning.
This same scene also sees the emergence of Dover, the name which echoes through the second half of the play: ‘make your speed to Dover’ is Kent’s phrase (3.1.32). Even in the naming of the town, however, the idea of location is troubled. With the exception of the final instance – Gloucester’s ‘Dost thou know Dover?’ (4.1.74) – every mention of Dover is prefaced, as Kent’s is, either by ‘to’ or ‘toward’.29 Dover is a location to come, never a location which informs the play. Gloucester’s phrase captures the finality of the idea inherent in reaching the location to come: ‘From that place | I shall no leading need’ (4.1.80–1). Following this, the name of Dover is not mentioned again: location, even in the act of naming places, remains tantalising, but intangible. Hence the possibility of location informs meaning, but only in the sense of a determinate negation: not, as in The Merchant of Venice or Cymbeline, defined by where the lines are spoken, but where they are not.
The paucity of place signs in the play was noted over a century ago, when A. C. Bradley wrote that in King Lear, ‘the very vagueness in the sense of locality … give[s] the feeling of vastness, the feeling not of a scene or particular place, but of a world; or, to speak more accurately, of a particular place which is also a world’.30 Even as Bradley acknowledges the absence of ‘particular place’ in the play, then, he is moved to suggest that a ‘particular place’ is nonetheless conceived. Although he goes on to concede that the suggestion of vastness has ‘a positive value for imagination’, Bradley’s overall position on King Lear’s characteristic ‘indefiniteness’ is that it is a ‘defect’ of the play.31 Perhaps, then, his ‘feeling’ a ‘particular place’ is intentional, affected by the modern approach to drama which Alan Dessen has described: ‘Thanks to generations of editing and typography, modern readers have … been conditioned to expect placement of a given scene (“where” does it occur?), regardless of the fluidity or placelessness of the original context or the potential distortion in the question “where”?’32 It is this fluidity of location which Dessen describes that characterises much of King Lear. And yet the various realisations and psychotic episodes which Lear goes through in Act 3 are characterised not by a fluidity of location but by a singularity of event. Whilst the ‘placement of a given scene’, that is, remains slippery, the event which forms the context of those scenes – the storm – is constantly reiterated. The crucial aspect is that such events may always be approached and re-imagined in the language of characters, to inform and shape their meaning. In this way, the fixedness of the storm may be seen to constitute both the expected ‘placement’ of a scene which Dessen describes and the definiteness which Bradley craved, in that it alters only in the language of those who apprehend it. The storm is, therefore, different from the night, as the latter is represented solely by the language of those who apprehend it, whereas the storm is figured as resolute by the stage machinery, and by the direction ‘Storm still’ (3.1.0; 3.2.0; 3.4.3; 3.4.61; 3.4.98).
A similar clarification of the notion of ‘a singularity of event’ is offered when Lear awakes after the storm. Indeed, the king asks his own distorting question of where: ‘Where have I been? Where am I? Fair daylight?’ (4.7.52). The fair daylight, that is, introduced as the opposite to the ‘tyrannous night’ (3.4.147): once more, it is a language which seems to be invested in the powerlessness of location to suggest meaning. That the daylight is questionable – phrased as a question – that the fundamental sequence of night followed by day has become, in Lear’s language, problematic, is suggestive itself of the circumstances in which the king awakes. That such singularity of event, that is, shown to be beyond the domain of the human in the storm scenes, retains the power to become slippery and doubtful in the language used to apprehend it, points indeed to the relationship of character and event in the play.
So far, I have argued that the tendency to read location into Lear undermines the work of the play. I have shown that location informs meaning in some plays, but Lear is characterised by a lack of location which is part of its disorientating aesthetic. The tradition of the heath has, in turn, its own tradition, one that credits the superfluous location to Nicholas Rowe’s edition of 1709. The veracity of this conventional opinion has been questioned by Ogden, who argues, convincingly, that Rowe derived the heath from the painted scenery used in the Restoration staging of Nahum Tate’s version of the play.33 The same scenery, indeed, was used for Tate’s play The Loyal General, and, as Ogden has shown, ‘There are several similarities between [The Loyal General] and Tate’s version of King Lear, which was the next play he wrote’.34 That the idea of Lear on the heath originates in a specifically visual theatrical setting, rather than the bare stage of the Jacobean amphitheatre, should itself be a clue that when we speak of the heath, we are not addressing the Shakespearean text. Why, then, has the tradition of the heath in King Lear endured? Ogden’s essay goes on to suggest that, in addition to originating from a visual development on the Restoration stage, the heath was perpetuated by illustration, beginning with an image in Rowe’s volume.35 This practice of illustration persists (finding its current most obvious incarnation on the cover of the 2007 Arden edition of the play, which depicts an open tract of land with a bare tree)36 and, indeed, is furthered by cinematic versions.
But apart from this modality of the visible, there is something more alluring about the heath that has enabled it to endure. What is it about the image that appeals to our sense of understanding of the play? Can it be that, with its notions of wilderness, it carries the context of isolation in which Lear is imagined to be? The concept of wilderness itself is a pervasive one and readily fits in with the now outmoded Christian reading of the play. Christ, led by the Spirit of God, enters the wilderness and resists the temptations of the Devil.37 Christ’s wilderness fast lasts for forty days: an explicitly stormy duration, given that the rains of the Flood fall for the same length of time.38 The heath, the wilderness, the storm and the epiphanic moment all seem happily to fit together.
There are undeniable attractions in the heath as wilderness in reading King Lear. In the Christian readings of the play that dominated critical approaches during much of the twentieth century, the logic of suffering and redemption finds its ideal counterpoint in ‘an extensive wasteland’.39 In the Old Testament, the heath and wilderness are conflated in a fashion particularly apposite to King Lear:
Thus saith the Lord, Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, & maketh flesh his arme, & withdraweth his heart from the Lord. For he shalbe like the heath in the wildernes, and shal not se when anie good commeth, but shal inhabit the partched places in the wildernes, in a salt land, and not inhabited.40
It seems to me that this is the very same conflation which appeals to the implicit localising of the event which we see in the above quotations from Greenblatt, or prioritising of location in the way Grady does. As Greg Garrard has noted, wilderness is not only the location for Christ to be tempted by the Devil, but also the place of exile from Eden, and, furthermore, recognisable in early examples of monasticism as a place of retreat.41 This is part of the symbolic heritage upon which formulations such as those of Dollimore or Kirsch draw. ‘The Judaeo-Christian conception of wilderness, then’, writes Garrard, ‘combines connotations of trial and danger with freedom, redemption and purity, meanings that, in varying degrees, it still has’.42 Those meanings are also to be identified in the modern employment of the heath in Lear. If the logic of suffering and redemption is no longer characterised as Christian allegory by critical consensus, it is nonetheless a logic which persists in some form, as Dollimore’s essay goes on to show; indeed, suffering is essentialised in such interpretations as the aim of existence.43 As such, the logic of isolation, suffering and redemption is often grounded by the force of the metaphorical inertia of the heath. The event and the wilderness constitute two distinct concepts of any putative salvation: a wilderness implies that we can seek our salvation out; an event, that it is something that happens to us.
That Lear’s belated realisation of social responsibility – ‘I have ta’en too little care of this’ (3.4.32–3) – is imagined to take place in a wilderness allows the thought that in order for civilisation to function, we must contend with and acknowledge its limitations in the face of nature. Contained in the notion of the heath is the attractive paradox that the further Lear recedes from civilisation and companionship, the more he understands his humanity and that of others (it becomes, in this way, a parallel play to Timon of Athens). Wilderness is, of course, an extremely important concept for ecocriticism: it ‘has an almost sacramental value: it holds out the promise of a renewed authentic relation of humanity and the earth, a post-Christian covenant, found in a space of purity, founded in an attitude of reverence and humility’.44 In light of this level of metaphorical force, it is not difficult to see why the heath is still construed as an apposite location for the humbling of a remorseful king. The danger of a ‘post-Christian covenant’ attracting and endorsing further and deeper misreadings of the play based on the regurgitated fallacy of the heath should explain why a move away from considering the play in terms of location is worthwhile. Although ecocriticism may hold the concept of wilderness dear, it is a critical discourse which must increasingly represent nature as event, whether it is an event that has happened, is happening, will happen or a mixture of all three. Indeed, the qualities of nature that have been exemplified in conceptions of wilderness have themselves been problematised since the 2000s by, for example, Timothy Morton.45 The idealised nature is, in such readings, troublesome for ecology in the same way that the heath is problematic for readings of Lear. In coming to terms with nature as event, we may increase our imaginative capacity to participate in climate change debates. However, we also stand to re-engage with texts which have for centuries laboured under the yoke of nature-as-location. A historically aware approach to Shakespeare is necessary for ecocriticism to learn the subtleties of Shakespeare’s representations of nature, if those representations are to carry any weight in presentist discourse. I have not argued that Shakespeare represents nature as event because I feel that such a conclusion is crucial for ecocriticism, although it may well be. Rather, it is because that representation is grounded in his dramaturgy, which, in turn, is grounded in the material conditions of performance in which Shakespeare spent his daily life. King Lear finds Shakespeare manipulating amphitheatre drama’s systems of signification, with one effect being that nature is something which happens to characters, and through that happening characters are presented as reconceiving themselves.
I have been arguing that the tradition of the heath undermines a critical approach to the play, however attractive it is with its connotations of wilderness and isolation. Instead, we should read the play and its treatment of nature in terms of event. Steve Mentz has proposed that:
Works like King Lear can help transform sterile dualisms and static ecosystems into pluralized and dynamic conceptions of self and nature. Making sense of these competing frames requires shifting from a pastoral vision, in which nature resembles a pasture or garden, to a meteorological one, in which nature changes constantly and challenges the body at its boundaries.46
The pastoral vision has its counterpart in the wilderness. Mentz’s proposed meteorological vision prioritises event. Nature ‘changes constantly’; nature happens and audiences and characters symbolise and react. If, as I propose, it is crucial to approach King Lear in terms of the event, not location, then we must begin to explore how development of Lear’s character in the storm scenes is achieved through the storm itself. Here, then, is Lear’s first speech in Act 3:
Blow, winds and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow,
You cataracts and hurricanes, spout
Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!
You sulph’rous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers of oak cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head: and thou all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o’th’ world,
Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once
That makes ingrateful man.
(3.2.1–9)
If I have introduced these familiar lines rather late in this chapter, it is because they are familiar. By quoting them here, I hope that my argument on location and the event will allow them to be considered anew. In the wealth of critical responses to this speech, it is rarely conceded that Lear maintains his imaginary authority over the elements. One of the few writers to acknowledge this is George Williams, who notes: ‘These wild lines then must be understood as direct orders to the winds, the waves, the thunder, and the lightning. Such an interpretation accords well with what has been seen of the character of the king’.47 In response to Williams’s article, E. Catherine Dunn writes that this speech and the following one ‘appear to be curses upon himself, primarily’.48 Rather than continue such debate, however, there is now a pattern of general agreement. Usually, as in the case of Martin Rosenberg, there is a formulation such as ‘Lear contends against the storm, with many subtle weapons’.49 If it is not a matter of contending against, then it is one of defiance, or contending despite. The Gentleman’s speech from the preceding scene gives something of the same context: as we have seen, he speaks of Lear ‘Contending with the fretful element’. Indeed, it may be the case that this answer informs the reading of critics: Stephen Booth mentions that the audience have heard the description of the king contending, ‘and seen him do so at the beginning of this scene’.50 However, the Gentleman’s following lines suggest a character who is actively willing the storm on: ‘Bids the wind blow the earth into the sea, | Or swell the curled waters ’bove the main, | That things might change, or cease’ (3.1.5–7). Soon, conversely, the speaker offers the image of a Lear who ‘Strives in his little world of man to outscorn | The to-and-fro-conflicting wind and rain’ (10–11),51 one that is who apparently seeks command over his own actions before those of the weather. In Lear’s opening speech in the storm, there is no such antithesis. The storm here is Lear’s ally; he seeks destruction and the weather is his means to it.
There is, moreover, the notable irony of Lear’s language performing the storm, just as the stage effects do, so that the arrival of his realisation comes about through the missing messianic qualities of his apocalyptic tone. He comes to terms with his own powerlessness at the same time as his language creates the event. Furthermore, the speech follows on perfectly from that with which he exits Regan’s house at the end of Act 2. There he promises ‘such revenges’ on his daughters ‘That all the world shall – I will do such things – | What they are, yet I know not’ (2.2.447). It is moments later that the first sound of ‘storm’ is directed (on this occasion, interestingly, the direction is for ‘storm and tempest’, 2.2.472).52 In the next scene, the stage machinery of the tempest fills in the gaps of Lear’s aposiopetic curse: the storm constitutes, in the context of the speech of the king, the ‘terrors of the earth’ which he had promised. It might be remembered that in the original ‘part’ of Lear – the cue-script for the actor to learn – this continuity would have been readily apparent, for the gap between the curse speech and the storm speech would have been separated only by a direction to exit and enter. The passion and thoroughness implicit in the lines in the storm are indicative of the appropriateness of this completion.53 It is crucial that the speech contains the first explicitly Christian imagery of the play – ‘drenched our steeples’ – as though Lear’s ‘revenges’ extended into an era far beyond his own. There are other Shakespearean instances of anachronistic Christianity, but not ones that constitute curses, not to mention evoke the Biblical image of the Flood: ‘What they are, yet, I know not, but they shall be the terrors of the earth’. The text, then, insists that we take the storm as complicit in Lear’s meaning, whilst dismissing any impulse which would have us ask, to echo Dessen, the distorting question of where.
Lear’s attempted command of the weather in the storm is, as we have seen, anticipated somewhat ambiguously by the Gentleman’s speech to Kent. It is, however, also foreshadowed much earlier in the play, usually taking the form of a curse. ‘Blasts and fogs upon thee!’ (1.4.291) is one such instance, with ‘blasts’ open to a variety of interpretations: thunder, lightning, infection and winds, for example. Lear hints at his potential power again in rebuking Goneril: ‘I do not bid the thunder-bearer shoot, | Nor tell tales of thee to high-judging Jove’ (2.2.415). These curses are indicative of Lear’s notion of his identity, that is, as one who can command weather – bid, crucially, is very different, qualitatively, from ask.54 At their most developed, Lear’s curses take account of contemporary meteorology as well as pagan mythology:
You nimble lightnings, dart your blinding flames
Into her scornful eyes! Infect her beauty,
You fen-suck’d fogs, drawn by the powerful sun,
To fall and blast her pride!
(2.2.368)
The fogs here are vapours, raised by the sun, but the fact that they are raised from fens makes them more noxious and harmful, thus with the potential to blast (or, in the Quarto, ‘blister’). The minute detail of this part of the curse surely testifies to Lear’s proclaimed faith in the power of weather, whether or not it evinces his belief that he truly can summon that power. The curse is all the more effective when it is acknowledged that it is governed not by imagery, but by scientific consensus. The pagan mythology of the quotation resides in Lear’s invocation of the lightnings. In pre-republic Rome, it seems kings had pretensions of god-like grandeur and perhaps thought themselves able to mimic Jupiter/Jove in creating storms, and Pliny suggests that Numa actually had such power.55 Lear has imagined himself in this Jove-monarch mould. The image-making of the above passage should be considered in conjunction with the earlier curse:
Hear, Nature, hear! dear goddess, hear!...
Into her womb convey sterility.
Dry up in her the organs of increase;
And from her derogate body never spring
A babe to honour her.
(1.4.270)
Here invoking Nature, rather than Jove, Lear’s curse is nonetheless com -mensurable with his later bidding of lightning. Jove’s thunderbolt, those ‘nimble lightnings’, had the power to ‘slayeth the yongling in the wombe, without harme to the mother’.56 Lear’s curse of sterility is therefore much the same as his later curse: the lightning of Jove would not change the outer appearance, but would kill within. ‘All the stored vengeances of heaven fall | On her ingrateful top! Strike her young bones, | You taking airs, with lameness!’ (2.2.354–6) is how Lear begins his ‘nimble lightnings’ curse, belying the later ‘I do not bid the Thunder-bearer shoot’. The curse on fertility reaches its zenith in the storm as Lear demands the lightning ‘Strike flat the thick rotundity o’th’world | Crack nature’s moulds’. Again, the lightning, like Jove’s, is intended to ‘slayeth the yongling in the wombe, without harme to the mother’: in this case rid the world of ‘ingrateful man’ yet leave the world intact. The term rotundity is clearly a reference to pregnancy – the implicit image of the ever-expecting Mother Earth. The ‘terrors of the earth’ then, is finally imagined as the rendering of the earth impotent, without killing the earth itself. As Lear commanded Nature to ‘convey sterility’ into Goneril, so the curse is here extrapolated to cover the entirety of the human race, just as the wrath following the ingratitude of his daughters is ostensibly visited upon the whole world. The conclusion of the earlier curse is arguably still relevant here:
If she must teem,
Create in her a child of spleen, that it may live
And be a thwart disnatured torment to her
(1.4.273–5)
The echo of this curse is resonant in the storm. If Lear does not realise his wish for a sterile earth, the consolation is a world of ‘disnatured’ and tormenting children. The notion of nature itself producing disnature, points to the inherent dystopian quality of the lines. If we are to extrapolate the conclusion of the curse as Lear himself does the beginning, then, the inference is apocalypse. Just as the storm informs meaning in the language of curses, therefore, so it magnifies it when those curses are contextualised by the storm as an event.
The curse on the earth has been read by Janet Adelman as the point at which the masculine influence of the pagan aesthetic is destabilised by female authority:
Despite Lear’s recurrent attempts to find a just thunderer in the storm, that is, its violence ultimately epitomizes not the just masculine authority on which Lear would base his own but the dark female power that everywhere threatens to undermine that authority. No longer under the aegis of a male thunderer, the very wetness of the storm threatens to undo civilization, and manhood itself, spouting rain until it has ‘drench’d the steeples, drown’d the cocks’, its power an extension into the cosmos of Goneril’s power to shake Lear’s manhood.57
Adelman’s reading of the storm, authorising, as it does, Goneril with the power of the weather, effectively makes the same move of pathetic fallacy as Lear himself does. As outlined by William R. Elton, it is the process of demystification of the storm which correlates to Lear’s own process of forlorn realisation and acceptance.58 In the first speech in the storm, which Adelman is citing, Lear does not concede authority over the elements to his daughters. Only as Lear declares to the storm, in his next speech, ‘But yet I call you servile ministers | That will with two pernicious daughters join’ (3.2.21–2), has he indeed moved from his self-conception of commander of the weather. Rather than being, as Adelman would have it, ‘an extension into the cosmos of Goneril’s power’, however, Lear is insisting that it is an extension of his own inability to command. Adelman refuses to acknowledge that ‘the very wetness of the storm’ is the aspect which Lear most explicitly attempts to control: the attempt to drench the steeples and to drown the cocks is explicitly Lear’s, and therefore male. The fact that the storm is not ‘under the aegis of a male thunderer’ is what accounts for the fact that civilisation is not undone, as Lear has threatened or sought. Furthermore, constructions of the storm as an explicitly female power have to contend with the unfortunate metaphor of spilling germens. If one truly wishes to sexualise the storm itself and not Lear’s own misogyny, it becomes a kind of apocalyptic coitus interruptus with Mother Nature: ‘all germens spill at once | That make ingrateful man’. Adelman’s formulation of the storm as female here is preparatory work for her argument connecting it with witches.59 However, the will to connect the event of the storm in its entirety, whether causally or metaphorically, to any character of the play, or indeed gender or god, loses sight of an important fact. It is precisely such connection which Lear repeatedly undertakes, with changing emphasis or direction, and this is how the representation of his character is developed. The storm is consistent – ‘storm still’ – and consistently just a storm: the interpretation machine which seeks its origins and meaning as a storm is the domain of the characters. If we as critics engage in the same interpretation, we inevitably alter the means by which the characters are to be imagined.
If the play’s original audience expected the supernatural when the stage machinery of the storm was utilised, such expectation might have been merited given the play’s source. The conflation of storm and the curse in King Lear owes something to one of Shakespeare’s sources, the anonymous chronicle play King Leir, which was first published in 1605.60 In the source play, there are flashes of lightning and rumbles of thunder, but no sustained storm. As Elton has made clear, Leir’s thunder is rather explicitly depicted as a divine voice:
‘Thunder and lightning’ create panic in the would-be murderer’s intention and awaken his conscience. Noteworthy is the crucial difference between Lear’s defiant challenge to the thunder, culminating in a naturalistic question regarding its origin, and the Messenger’s stupefied terror: ‘Oh, but my conscience for this act doth tell, | I get heavens hate, earths scorne, and paynes of hell’(ll. 1646–7). ‘They bless themselves’, the directions read, both assassin and victim sharing the religious mood engendered by the thunder.61
The storm in Leir, then, encourages resolution, whilst the storm in Lear gives succour to curses. Thus much is indisputable. Earlier in the play, Edmund plays on the naivety of Gloucester by appealing to the same correlation of storm as divine voice that occurs in Leir: ‘I told him the revenging gods | ’Gainst parricides did all the thunder bend’ (2.1.44–6). In Psalm 83, the parallel of storm and the anger of God is invoked in the same way:
As the fyer burneth the forest, and as the flame setteth the mountaines on fyre: So persecute them with thy tempest, and make them afraied with thy storme. Fil their faces with shame, that thei maie seke thy Name, ô Lord.62
The extraordinary marginal note which accompanies these verses in the Geneva edition is ‘That is, be compelled by thy plagues to thy power’. This codicil, presumably, refers to the ‘thei’ who are to be the subjects of the storm, that are to be converted. There is a defiant, almost colonial ferocity to its tone; the language, that is of invasion (a term which, as I have noted, Lear uses to describe the storm).63 Against this grain, however, the note might be read in the same imperative vein in which the rest of the extract is written. Such a reading invokes an equally ferocious, but self-fulfilling God, encouraged by his own capacities of storm to express them further. There must always be the acknowledgement that, whenever postulating the audience’s expectation of the supernatural upon hearing and seeing the special effects of thunder and lightning, each storm is necessarily invested with the supernatural in that it is understood as the work – the judgement – of God. As Elton notes, ‘Marlowe employs thunder as a sign of divine anger: in Faustus the power of generating thunder and lightning is, as in Job, a divine attribute, and Faustus’s ability to “rend the clouds” and produce the effect will unseat Jove and gain him “a deity” (1.1.60–4)’64 Unlike Faustus, Lear’s impulse is not to unseat Jove, but to invoke him, and his tempestuous instruments. Although Lear’s ability to control the storm is imaginary, there is little qualitative difference in his summoning Jove and summoning the weather directly. This is the understanding with which Lear enters the storm: thunder and lightning, wind and rain, are agents of his and subject to his command, and to them he turns whenever he wishes to address the various dilemmas of his existence. His first speech in the storm is also characterised in precisely this way, but, as Elton postulates, it is a belief to which Lear cannot cling: ‘By the end of Act 4 Lear’s madness has run its course, as have also the tension and breakdown caused by the failure of belief on all levels; and he is ready for belief of some kind, though not, of course, for anything resembling his previous tenets’.65 Lear’s ‘belief’, that is, is represented in terms of his acknowledgement not only of his lack of power over the storm, but of a willingness to conceive of the notion that there may be no possibility of such a power.66
The ‘naturalistic question’ to which Elton refers occurs at 3.4.151: ‘What is the cause of thunder?’ It is a question which reflects on Lear’s understanding of his own being, as well as that of his environment: both of which have become problematised. I will conclude this chapter by exploring this question in terms of my argument so far. Before I do, however, I will examine one of its most insistent words: cause.
Unlike event, cause occurs as if quite relentlessly throughout King Lear, and in many different ways. In Goneril’s use, it is both secretive and dangerous: ‘Never afflict yourself to know the cause’ (1.4.238).67 For Lear, it is bodily and emotional: ‘Old fond eyes | Beweep this cause again, I’ll pluck ye out’ (1.4.293–4); ‘No, I’ll not weep. | I have full cause of weeping …’ (2.2.472–3). Elsewhere in the play, cause is both crime (‘what was thy cause? Adultery? 4.6.109) and vindication (‘your sisters | Have, as I do remember, done me wrong. You have some cause, they have not’ 4.7.72–4). Perhaps ultimately, cause is a special kind of impossibility: ‘Is there any cause in nature that make these hard hearts?’ (3.6.74–5). Cause, like event, is a word invested with ambiguity by Shakespeare, throughout the plays. In Othello, for example, the final scene’s minatory opening line operates through the word’s cryptic qualities: ‘It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul!’ (5.2.1). In Troilus and Cressida, an inherent illogicality is made explicit: ‘O, madness of discourse, | That cause sets up with and against itself!’ (5.2.149–50). On occasion, cause and event are juxtaposed. In King John, this is overtly meteorological: ‘No common wind, no customed event, | But they will pluck away his natural cause | And call them meteors, prodigies and signs’ (3.3.155–7). In Antony and Cleopatra the two words are linked again:
All strange and terrible events are welcome,
But comforts we despise. Our size of sorrow,
Proportioned to our cause,
must be as great
As that which makes it.
(4.15.3–6)
It is this changeable quality of cause in Shakespeare, and its relationship to the event, which I want to focus on in Lear’s question, ‘What is the cause of thunder?’ Several editors point out that it is a question which harks back to ancient philosophical discussions about meteorology. Wells quotes Ovid here: ‘Whether Jove or else the wind in breaking clouds do thunder’.68 There is, however, a depth to the line greater than that conventional question. ‘What is the cause of thunder?’ can be understood as seeking out the atmospheric conditions which produce storms, but also questioning which side is taken by thunder, which purpose thunder is advocating: it can, in short, be understood as ‘whose is the cause of thunder?’ Read either way, Lear’s question is indicative of the process of disillusionment that he has gone through in the storm. The more familiar reading accepts that the elements are not subject to human command and Lear seeks a reconfigured view based on that acceptance. The latter reading can be aligned with the earlier ‘yet I call you servile ministers’; that is, Lear accepts that the elements are not subject to his command and seeks a reconsidered view based on the notion that they are subject to someone else’s.
We might, also, think in terms of Aristotle’s four causes, and reframe Lear’s question as ‘What is the final cause of thunder?’ After all, there is an implicit teleology at work in early modern concepts of weather, and the final cause of nature is hinted at throughout the play. If we are to read King Lear with attention to its meteorology, then, ‘What is the cause of thunder?’ is one of the most pertinent and poignant lines in the play, and also part of the play’s radically self-questioning identity.69 To characterise the journey of Lear’s personality in the storm as a descent into madness is, of course, to oversimplify. Rather, the structures of the king’s belief are fractured. Comment has been made on how such fracturing enables Lear, apparently for the first time, to be aware of a wider societal concern which has developed under his reign: it is at this point, for example, that we may re-join Dollimore: ‘When he is on the heath, King Lear is moved to pity’.70 The meteorological aspect of Lear’s demystifying inheres in a lapse from solipsism and develops into a wider understanding of the forces of nature which prompt him to pray for his lost, weather-beaten subjects. From the starting position that he is the cause of thunder, and that his is the cause of thunder, the simple stock philosophical question opens an array of implications when that premise is dismissed. In questioning the cause of thunder, Lear is humanised, paradoxically refusing to seek shelter from the storm in the very moment that he fully acknowledges his powerlessness over it.
However the double meaning of cause underlies a crux on which the experience of the play rests. If the audience expect the supernatural at the sound and sight of theatrical storm, then Lear’s question proves a tipping point. Either this provides the naturalistic sign around which an understanding of the play can be formed with no room for the supernatural, or it provides an indication that the storm yet has the potential to take sides. Or rather, yet has the potential to be understood as taking sides: that is, as still with otherworldly power, with knowledge, with sway, with cause. Lear’s question is left unanswered, though within ten lines the storm sounds again. ‘What is the cause of thunder?’ is a question which penetrates the phonic system of signification in early modern theatre. It does so, moreover, by demanding that the audience react to, understand through, the event of the storm.