Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Smite flat the thick rotundity o' the world!
Crack nature's moulds, and germens spill at once,
That make ingrateful man!
[ FOOL: O nuncle, court holy-water in a dry house is better than this
rain-water out o' door. Good nuncle, in, and ask thy daughters' blessing: here's
a night pities neither wise man nor fool. ]
Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! Spout, rain!
Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are my daughters:
I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness;
I never gave you kingdom, call'd you children,
You owe me no subscription: then let fall
Your horrible pleasure: here I stand, your slave,
A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man:
But yet I call you servile ministers,
That have with two pernicious daughters join'd
Your high engender'd battles 'gainst a head
So old and white as this. O! O! 'tis foul!
Commentary
It’s fitting that the 200th poem on the Minstrels is by the greatest poet of all…
from ‘King Lear’.
Othello might be a better play than Lear - tighter in its orchestration, more clever in its construction, more intricate in its plotting. Hamlet is certainly a better study of character - deep and insightful, each player’s thoughts and actions depicted to a nicety. Macbeth is more dramatic; the action soars and plummets, the all-too-human characters move against a violently supernatural backdrop. The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream are more lyrical, more shimmeringly beautiful.
Indeed, compared with each of these, King Lear seems to be a failure - a mess of contradictions, a rambling, incoherent narrative; powerful, perhaps, but not a little bit disturbing; harsh, even wantonly cruel at times…
And yet…
If I had to choose Shakespeare’s supreme creation, it would be Lear. Without a doubt.
When I think of King Lear, I think of it not as a play, but as something far greater. Lear has a stark, epic grandeur that transcends the boundaries of the playwright’s craft, a raw power that demands it be placed upon the same pedestal as the roof of the Sistine Chapel, or Mozart’s final requiem mass - works that seem, somehow, to be beyond the pale of ordinary judgement or classification: exaltations of the human spirit, explorations of the human soul.
What stage could possibly do justice to a production of Lear? The storm sequence, where the aged and forsaken King hurls his defiance at the world - ah, what actor would be foolhardy enough to essay the role? The final scene, where Lear, blind and half-mad with grief, dies with Cordelia’s lifeless body in his arms - what director could ever hope to capture the pity, the sheer pity of it? Nay, the truth is this: Lear’s proper place is in the realms of the imagination, in the towering heights and endless depths of the mind. Look at it that way, and the truth is apparent: King Lear may not be as ‘good’ a play as some others, but it’s certainly the greatest of them all.
— Thomas
PS. In previous mails I’ve talked about Shakespeare’s lyricism, his dramatic skill, his philosophical genius and his insight into character. This, though, is where he puts it all together. And ooh, it sends shivers down my spine. Simply glorious.
PPS. Many of the ideas expressed in today’s critical essay were rather shamelessly filched from A. C. Bradley’s definitive collection of essays, ‘Shakespearean Tragedy’, which I had the enormous good fortune to read in high school. A highly recommended book.
Glossary
Vaunt-couriers (line 5) - forerunners
spill (line 8) - destroy
germen (line 8) - germ, as in ‘something that initiates development or serves as an origin’.
Show 3 commentsHide comments
From the Wondering Minstrels mailing list, 1999–2008.
Rafaela Sartori · 23 October 2000
Hi Thomas,
I was thinking about King Lear last night, before sleeping, on the bad, and it was a surprise for me finding it here, this morning.
About king Lear, and the other Shakespearean tragedies I’ve read, I could note such a fatalism (the “fatum” or inexorability of destiny) that I could only find in the old Greek tragedies. The diference is in the cause: while, with the Greeks, the cause was external (the humans had no fault but suffered because the destiny - e.g: King Edipus), with Shakespeare the characters did their faults and suffered for it until the end of their lifes.
In the King Lear, the fatal mistakes are Lear’s complacence and Cordelia’s “not acceptance” of her father’s complacence. I blame Cordelia for
everything
that happened, because she was so honest but didn’t know that respecting her father’s problems and taking in account his good qualities was necessary. She hurt her father so much with her honesty, while she had her entire life to proove to her father that he was wrong on believing more in words than in actions.
If I am right telling this, then I think King Lear is not a bit less beautiful and complicated than other tragedies like Hamlet. In King Lear,
Shakespeare
shows how so much honesty and rectitude can provoke bad things, like in Hamlet he showed a man that lost so
much time thinking of the death of his father and condition of his mother, lost all his happiness and hopes, and when he wakes up, it’s too late: the death is clearly his next step.
Please don’t note all my mistakes with the English neither my humble opinion. If you could give more of yours, I would be glad.
Thanks,
Rafaela Sartori
Adam Seddon · 14 March 2002
[Subject] Shakespeare and the limits of human decency
Dear Sir,
Please immediately cease putting your moronic blandishments on the internet - they make me want to weep. The combination of intellectual arrogance, poverty of expression and banality of thought make me wish that your mother had had her ‘organs of increase’ dried up before inflicting you upon an unready world. It pains me to hear your ‘thoughts’ on the closest thing we have to a secular God, and if you have any sense of decency you will stop this enterprise immediately. Oh, and if you EVER call a Shakespeare play, character, or line ‘shimmeringly beautiful’ again i’ll…i’ll…well just DON’T.
yours
Adam Seddon
someone who has thought about Shakespeare rather than regurgitated the blurb from a simplified version for nursery children.
itsmebev · 28 September 2005
Lear’s storm both heard and read reveals to us that language in all forms but speech imbued with truth of our origins is only ontological machinery. When a poet writes, the creation is only half done until it is heard. Whether it rattles the air or echoes in our thoughts the creative force of language moves the heart with sound. An utterance is a string words gathering a spell; an event leaving in its wake the ruins of fate. Like a flirtatious glance looses its mystery in this sentence, science knows that what we bring to understanding is distorted by it. Understanding is exactly that. Like a rabbit becoming game a hunter presents his wife for their mutual nourishment, knowledge like a sail stretched for duty is useful but the wind filling it is no longer wind. It is as if language flaunts on a page Lear’s storm so that if we ever hear its sound we at that moment in that space share a thing that later reports of it are at their eloquent best only epitaphs. Knowledge and utterance distinguish themselves in the record of what both Cain and Abel brought as offerings. And knowledge does to intent of speech what Cain did to his brother. And the answer to Cain is “no, you are not nor could you be your brother’s keeper”.
Don Anderson
783 Whiteoak Cr
Kingston, Ontario K7P 1L6
Canada