King Lear and The Patterns of Romance

King Lear and The Patterns ofRomance ARLEN COLLIER The first great romance epic, is, of course, The Odyssey. Unlike The Iliad, its tragic companion, The Odyssey ends in restoration, with Odysseus restored to his kingship and blood-feuds in Ithaca at an end. The turning point in Odysseus' journey, that central incident which turns defeat into success, is his descent to the underworld. After The Odyssey, the descent becomes the crucial part of the structural pattern for the great Western epics that follow it. Vergil takes his hero Aeneas to the underworld on his way to founding Rome, and Dante's protagonist must first descend to the inferno before his triumphant stand before the throne of God. Derived out of this archetypal descent-pattern is the pastoral movement and the ritual death and rebirth plot structures of Renaissance romance literature, where the hero flees or is forced out of the corrupt court or city into the pure and simplistic countryside where he works out his own problems, undergoes purgation, and as a redeemed soul returns to the court or city either to purge it or to find it already purged.1 This movement is a device in comedy, tragi-comedy, and romance. It is used by author after author in the Renaissance: Ariosto, Montemayor, Sidney and Spenser to name a few. In a truncated form, the archetypal pattern comes to the stage in the pastoral plays of Guarini and his English followers. This pattern is the basic plot for the anonymously written King Leir which preceded Shakespeare's play. In the earlier work Leir, along with his honest lord Perillus, is forced to flee from Britain across the Arlen Collier teaches at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. 1 Frank Kermode in his introduction to English Pastoral Poetry: From the Beginnings to Marvell (London, 1952) elaborates upon this idea. See also Maynard Mack, King Lear in Our Time (Berkeley, 1965), pp. 63ff. 52LEAR AND THE PATTERNS OF ROMANCE channel to France where he undergoes physical extremity before being taken in by the King of France and Cordelia. They all return to England, fight the forces of evil, win, and restore Leir to the throne. The comic resolution is thus preserved. This is also the pattern in the Nahum Tate revision of Shakespeare's play in 1681. In this version, France does not marry Cordelia. She is saved for marriage to Edgar at the end of the play. Lear, after being restored to the throne, yields it up again to Edgar and Cordelia, and he, blind Gloucester, and faithful Kent retire to a cell to live happily ever after. This poetic justice comes about, as Edgar says in the play's last speech, to prove "That Truth and Vertue shall at last succeed." 2 It is interesting that both the version before Shakespeare's and the one after follow the traditional pattern of romance, while Shakespeare deliberately violates it. Shakespeare's ending to the play shocked Samuel Johnson and the audiences of the eighteenth century so much that for almost a century they preferred Tate's version which returned to the typical archetypal pattern.3 A period steeped in classical tradition would have expected the classical patterns to have been carried through after they once had been instigated. In my mind, there is no question but that Shakespeare deliberately sets us up for this cruel twist of our expectations. He understands well the patterns of romance and pastoral that he is using. This pastoral movement appears in many of his comedies, both early and late. But as Maynard Mack, in King Lear in Our Time, has noted, in the world of King Lear the antithesis to the court is no longer a place of sunshine, felicity, and the trappings of the golden age, but rather it is metamorphosed into a stormy heath, bleak and cold.* Lear finds no peaceful Meliboe in the shepherd's cot that he enters on the heath, but 2 Nahum Tate, The History of King Lear (Reviv'd with Alterations) (London, 1681; rpt. London: Cornmarket Press, 1969), p. 67. sDr. Johnson's famous remark: "Cordelia, from the time of Tate, has always retired with victory and felicity...