King Lear and The Extreme Verge

Guest Blog: Lisa Hutchins

King Lear Lecture by Adrian Poole, 28 November 2020

How does it feel to be an ordinary person facing extremity? This seems like a piercingly contemporary question as we face up to a world that includes authoritarian rulers, a climate emergency, a global pandemic and a series of cultural and political polarisations that leave people of conflicting views unable even to agree on what constitutes objective reality. In his Literature Cambridge session on Saturday evening Professor Adrian Poole made a case for why themes of compassion and empathy central to King Lear are one reason that, at more than 400 years old, it has outlasted so many of its contemporaries to remain in regular performance and as a mainstay of critical study and debate.

Adrian took as his starting point the ‘Dover Cliff’ speech in Act IV scene 6 where Edgar leads his blinded father to believe that he is standing at ‘th’ extreme verge’ – the edge of a precipice. In fact, Gloucester is on a gentle grassy slope and, thinking he is plunging to oblivion, instead lands flat on his face in a dead faint. Edgar explains, in an aside, how this seeming cruelty to his maimed father is in fact an attempt to cure him of despair, and Gloucester later acknowledges this has worked, saying: ‘Henceforth, I’ll bear affliction.’ This could be a theatrically risky scene, as Literature Cambridge lecturer Ellie Mitchell pointed out during the discussion, due to the possibility of missing the mark on stage and plunging this dramatic moment into unintentional comedy. This important episode also brokers the transformation of Edgar into the Fool-like character Blind Tom.  

Adrian discussed how the audience shares the condition of the blind man. Like him we cannot see the activities taking place around the cliff, we can only experience them through Edgar’s verbal description. This is just one of many examples of the power of Shakespeare’s tragedies to evoke compassion and empathy in the play’s audience and it may also point to something important about his approach to the genre. We learned how some critics have argued Shakespeare does not write pure tragedy due to the inclusion of lower-class characters who often puncture the pretensions of their betters or bring relief to the audience with knockabout humour after particularly tense or gruelling scenes. But perhaps the grotesquery and black comedy produced by the Fool and Poor Tom is one of the things that makes this play, terrible in places, bearable for us to watch, and therefore allows it to reach the pitch of extremity that it does – perhaps the most extreme of all Shakespeare’s tragedies.

Adrian used Gloucester to highlight how tragedy depends for its effects on people who we might regard as ordinary, average or conventional. He drew comparisons with characters in other Shakespearean tragedies, such as Horatio in Hamlet or perhaps MacDuff in Macbeth. He pointed out that Gloucester often uses what he described as easy-going prose as Lear, the tyrant whose mind is increasingly scattered, ventures into rhetorical absolutism and hyperbole. Ordinary Gloucester nevertheless faces up to his fate of blindness without flinching from it or begging for his life and we see how he finds a way to carry on living after this extremity has been visited upon him – one severe enough to make a servant step out of his proscribed role to deprecate the violence, losing his own life for his pains.

Adrian went on to describe how both Gloucester and Edgar were essentially ordinary men whose fatal mistake was to put trust in Edmund, their illegitimate son/brother. He stressed that ‘ordinary’ is a word that depends very much on context and our collective expectations of how people should behave in certain circumstances. He pointed to the absolute, hyperbolic, language employed by both Lear and his elder daughters early in the play which he described as language taken to the extreme verge, with the courtiers colluding in the drama. By contrast, neither Cordelia nor Kent follow Lear’s script.

Inevitably this post can only capture a flavour of this detailed and wide-ranging two-hour session. There were so many other interesting threads – Shakespeare’s repeated use of one-syllable words of Anglo-Saxon origin (rather than from Romance languages); the way in which the play is rich in comparisons and paired characters; and the history of Lear in the 200 years following Shakespeare’s death, during which time the Fool was edited out for being too savage and Lear and Cordelia granted a happy ending. Any of these topics could easily have filled this page. The discussion raised even more areas to consider, including Shakespeare’s exploration of liminal states of mind, the journey Edgar makes into and out of the persona of Poor Tom, the question of whether violence is critiqued or enacted in the play (with Adrian pointing out that Gloucester’s blinding can make people flee the theatre), and the issue of what we now understand as dementia as a possible cause for Lear’s difficulties.

Adrian advised us always to approach the play as if we were seeing it for the first time, which is excellent advice to take away from a session which drew so deeply and effectively on his vast experience of critical engagement with this remarkable text.

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Adrian Poole is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity College. He will discuss Hamlet in a Literature Cambridge session on 27 March 2021 at 6pm.