King Lear
Act V

ACT V

SCENE i

More than with the war, Regan is obsessed with Edmund not having “found my brother’s way / To the forfended place” (V.i.10-11) — that is, Goneril’s, uh, bed, let’s say. She puts the moves on Edmund and grills him jealously about his relationship with Goneril, which he denies is anything other than honorable.

Albany enters, insisting that he fights not against the King but only because of French invasion. Goneril enters, jealous of her sister’s chances with Edmund. A council of war is planned. When Albany is momentarily alone, the disguised Edgar delivers the letter regarding the murder pact against him.

Edmund gives a status report and reveals that he has sworn himself to both Goneril and Regan but is undecided between them. “So cool a negativity is unique, even in Shakespeare…. His insouciance is sublime” (Bloom 502). When Albany has served his purpose he’ll be killed, and there will be none of his planned mercy for Lear nor Cordelia.

SCENE ii

Cordelia leads her French army forth, accompanied by Lear. Edgar leaves Gloucester at a tree and soon returns with news that Cordelia and Lear have been captured: “King Lear hath lost, he and his daughter ta’en” (V.ii.6), thrusting Gloucester “in ill thoughts again” (V.ii.9).

So the entire war “all takes place behind the scenes and exactly one line of text is devoted to the account of it…. The brevity of it is a measure of how insignificant the mere clash of arms becomes in comparison with the moral convulsion that is its cause, and the strife between and within the human beings who are its agents” (Goddard, II 157).

SCENE iii

Edmund gloats over the capture of Lear and Cordelia, but Lear is simply happy that he and Cordelia have reconciled:

Come let’s away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage;
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too–
Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out–
And take upon ‘s the mystery of things
As if we were God’s spies; and we’ll wear out,
In a wall’d prison, pacts and sects of great ones,
That ebb and flow by th’ moon.
(V.iii.8-19)

“Lear ends with authority and force put off, with love and tenderness put on” (Goddard, II 138).

Edmund sends Lear and Cordelia to prison with written instructions for the captain: pretty clearly orders to murder the two. Albany and the sisters enter, and Albany objects to Edmund’s detention of the prisoners. All parties bicker viciously now, and Regan has occasion to assert, “Jesters do oft prove prophets” (V.iii.71). Albany calls for the arrest of Edmund and Goneril, “This gilded serpent” (V.iii.85), for their treason. Edmund and Albany will fight. Albany has also wisely discharged Edmund’s soldiers, which were technically Albany’s. Regan grows more and more ill. Some bad seafood?

In accordance with the rules of trial by combat, a disguised Edgar, whose “name is lost” (V.i.119), appears in order to take Albany’s place in a duel with Edmund. They fight, and Edgar fatally wounds Edmund. Goneril is outraged, but Albany produces the letter revealing the treacheries. Goneril is defiant: “the laws are mine, not thine. / Who can arraign me for ‘t?” (V.i.156-157). (Sound familiar, 2026?) Goneril runs off; Albany sends an officer after her.

Edmund admits to his crimes and, as Edgar reveals his identity, they acknowledge the (sort of) final justice here. Albany hears Edgar’s story, which ends with the recent fact that when he revealed his identity to Gloucester less than half an hour ago, the old man had a heart attack in happiness and died. “The recognition encounter, which kills Gloucester, is one of Shakespeare’s great unwritten scenes…. Why did Shakespeare choose not to dramatize the event?” (Bloom 481). In any case, significantly, Edgar’s name was lost and finally comes to light (Anderson 356) or is reclaimed (Garber 692). One’s “Good Name” was always an obsession of Oxford.

A man holding a bloody knife reports that Goneril has killed herself after having poisoned Regan. Edmund, still slowly expiring, notes the appropriateness that they all die together: “I was contracted to them both; all three / Now marry in an instant” (V.iii.227-228). Albany commands that the bodies be brought forth.

The arrival of Kent triggers Albany’s memory about Lear and Cordelia. Edmund, “The dying nihilist reminds himself that in spite of all he was and did, he was beloved [V.i.238-239]” (Bloom 505). He confesses, though, that he and Goneril ordered Cordelia to be hanged and her death reported as suicide.

Despite efforts now to countermand the orders — “Some good I mean to do, / Despite of mine own nature” (V.i.241-242) — Lear enters with the dead Cordelia in his arms:

Howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones!
Had I your tongues and eyes, I’ld use them so
That heaven’s vault should crack. She’s gone for ever!
I know when one is dead and when one lives;
She’s dead as earth. (V.iii.255-259)

Cordelia has been seen as a Christ figure, speaking earlier of her “father’s business” and this moment serving as a “gender-reversed” or “inverted” Pieta (Garber 661, 692).

Lear will have no interaction with anyone else except to curse them. He wants a mirror to test Cordelia’s breath and then thinks he sees a feather stir, indicating that she’s alive; but it seems to be just his imagination since a moment later he thinks he hears her voice and says, non-sequitur, “I kill’d the slave that was a-hanging thee” (V.iii.272). He is told about the deaths of the other daughters but although he seems to recognize Kent somewhat, Lear appears to be mad again. Edmund’s death is announced, but who cares?

It is part of Shakespeare’s genius not to have Edmund and Lear address even a single word to each other in the entire play, because they are apocalyptic antitheses: the king is all feeling, and Edmund is bare of all affect. (Bloom 479)

Albany, who already proved himself a good guy, yields his power to Lear and insists justice will be meted out. Albany has been identified as King James (Clark 888), but I’d say William Stanley, Earl of Derby, is a better match: husband of Oxford’s perhaps resentful daughter Elizabeth and seemingly Oxford’s secretary in the later years, “penning comedies” and so becoming at least a weak candidate as “Shake-speare.”

Lear says, “And my poor fool is hang’d” (V.iii.306). Some say this refers to his daughter: that it is “impossible for Lear to think of anything but Cordelia now” (Asimov II 51). Others instead say that calling Cordelia “poor fool” “jars” (Goddard II 162) and that either we finally have an acknowledgement of the long absent Fool, or that the two — the Fool and Cordelia — are blurred in his confused mind. In fact, the Fool and Cordelia could have been played by the same boy actor in Shakespeare’s time (Garber 672). See also Bob Marks’ King Lear Notes regarding the Cordelia/Fool link.

It has been speculated that the death of Cordelia may contain an element of the pathos connected to the death of the Countess of Oxford (Clark 886, Ogburn and Ogburn 1130). It is also worth considering it another case of a late play personifying the works: here the hanging representing the works being strangled or rendered voiceless (Ogburn and Ogburn 1126, 1159, 1162). When Lear calls for a feather to see if Cordelia still breathes, the idea is that “if the plays live” then the author/father is “recompensed for all his suffering” (Ogburn and Ogburn 1164). Similarly, though, Lear’s loss of kingdom can work “as a metaphor for Shakespeare’s forfeiture of his works (which were attributed to another) and the terrible sense of annihilation into which this tragedy plunged him” (Beauclerk 305).

Lear seems to detect signs of life in Cordelia, which, if she represents the works, “has us poised for the return of truth [that] Time shall unfold” (Beauclerk 288).

But Lear dies of a broken heart, or, if deluded about Cordelia, “perhaps happily” (Asimov II 51). Note how the 1608 Quarto edition of the play has him going out:

No, no life,
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat of life
And thou no breath at all? O thou’lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never.
Pray you undo this button, thanke you sir.
O, o, o, o, o.

Like Hamlet’s final and invariably censored “O, o, o, o” in the First Folio (!), this close-to-death moment may also have served as de Vere’s signature, the four Os being his court code number 40. Why five here? Unknown. But it’s the four in the Folio.

Preempting revival attempts, Kent says, “O, let him pass, he hates him / That would upon the rack of this tough world / Stretch him out longer” (V.iii.312-314). “This ending of Lear can easily be viewed as the cruelest and most unbearable in Shakespeare” (Asimov 51).

Albany appoints Kent and Edgar as rulers of Britain, but Kent cannot live in this world any longer: “I have a journey, sir, shortly to go: / My master calls me, I must not say no” (V.iii.320-321). [The impulse resembles Horatio’s at the end of Hamlet.] Kent will follow his monarch’s death shortly, something that it seems Oxford did also (Ogburn and Ogburn 1165).

In legend or history, Edgar would rule after some time and rid Britain of wolves (Bloom 479). He offers the final mournful words:

The weight of this sad time we must obey,
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say:
The oldest hath borne most; we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.
(V.iii.324-327)

FINAL PERSPECTIVE

In King Lear, Measure for Measure, The Tempest, and Hamlet, we get Oxford’s “concluding thoughts” (Anderson 339). For one, “Love is no healer in The Tragedy of King Lear; indeed, it starts all the trouble, and is a tragedy in itself…. Maternal love is kept out of the tragedy” (Bloom 484). The play suggests that we are all either fools or villains (Bloom 493).

Surely Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex lurks in the back of Shakespeare’s mind. These two plays are the prime works involving the putting out of eyes, and both dwell relentlessly on considerations between metaphorical and literal blindness. But perhaps even more disturbing is the at best ambiguous matter of the gods. “For those who believe that divine justice somehow prevails in this world, King Lear ought to be offensive” (Bloom 493). Although various characters refer to the gods as “blest,” “kind,” “mighty,” “ever-gentle,” “just,” and even “avenging,” they are also called “cruel”: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, / They kill us for their sport” (IV.i.38-39). Moreover, they may simply be neglectful (I.i.256), as they seem to be in Oedipus. (It is a striking shift to go from teaching Homer’s Iliad, where the gods are, as it were, omnipresent, to Sophocles’ play where, like the perspective of some 20th-century existentialists, whether they — or “He” — exist(s) or not doesn’t matter.)

More crucially, in King Lear Oxford’s “anxiety over his identity is dramatized by means of the fool, the bastard, and the king without a crown” (Beauclerk 167). Although not read autobiographically by the traditional Shakespeareans, they at least perceive “that physical suffering can bring mental revelation — that people will not begin to see until they learn to feel” (Wells 270). “Shakespeare believes that suffering and affliction, to those at least who will give ear, bring power to see things as they are” (Goddard, II 164).

Compare the silly gits of the early comedies, the superficial characters of The Two Gentlemen of Verona or even A Midsummer Night’s Dream, to characters Oxford can create after having been beaten about by “love,” marriage, politics, others’ jealousy, literary theft (even in 1575), and especially the disgrace of banishment. There is a real-life reason for “Shakespeare’s Dark Period.”

“Either we experience this emotional truth and our hearts ‘break,’ opening us up to a new dimension of consciousness, or we remain in the old, hidebound mentality of viewing the plays as entertaining abstractions” (Beauclerk 288). The shaman’s breakdown is also a breakthrough (Beauclerk 289-290). We are pointed again towards Shakespeare as spiritually enlightened.