Shakespearean Resurrection: The Art of Almost Raising the Dead

THREE: Cordelia’s Quasi Resurrection and Shakespearean Revision

THREE z Cordelia’s Quasi Resurrection and Shakespearean Revision In the death chamber for a moment Death Shamed by the presence of that living Might Blushed to annihilation, and the breath Revisited those lips, and life’s pale light Flashed through those limbs, so late her dear delight. —Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais In one version of Shakespeare’s King Lear, a dying Lear looks upon the dead Cordelia and declares, “Do you see this? Look on her. Look, her lips. / Look there, look there” (5.3.286–87).1 R. A. Foakes comments, “What he sees or thinks he sees has been much debated; to some it seems a final cruel delusion if he imagines Cordelia to be alive, to others a blessed release for him in a moment of imagined reunion.” From the first scene of the play where Lear asks her to declare her love—“Which of you shall we say doth love us most” (1.1.51)—he receives 98 Cordelia’s Quasi Resurrection and Shakespearean Revision 99 only her terse, “Nothing, my lord” (87). Cordelia would not then speak; by play’s end, she cannot speak and is again silent (Foakes 1993, 211, 219). Critical response over the centuries to Cordelia’s quasi resurrection has neatly divided along two lines, though it is fair to say that nihilist-oriented readings of the play now predominate. The failure of the opposing “redemptionist” readings of the play to tease out the possibilities of what Lear thinks he sees in those last moments reveals much about the play’s modern reception, and thereby hangs a tale. I Of the innumerable responses to Cordelia’s death, Samuel Johnson’s in the eighteenth century is easily the most legendary : “I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia’s death that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor ” (Wimsatt 1960, 98). Lear’s carrying the dead Cordelia in his arms constitutes a pagan variation of the pietà: their fortune turns from bad to worse; their final recognition becomes funereal. Johnson’s distress can be understood in light of Aristotle’s observation that recognition and peripety (reversal of fortune) are the “most powerful elements” in a tragedy (1450a1), the immediate agents of the pity and fear that audiences experience (1452a1). The ending further perplexed Johnson: “Shakespeare has suffered the virtue of Cordelia to perish in a just cause, contrary to the natural ideas of justice, to the hope of the reader, and what is yet more strange, to the faith of the chronicles” (97). Nahum Tate’s own frustration with the play’s ending led him to rewrite it in 1681, leaving Lear and Cordelia to live, and live happily ever after. Such responses coincide nicely with redemptionist accounts of the play. At one end of the continuum, Anna Jameson (1883) described Cordelia as “a saint ready prepared for heaven” (213).2 Believing that Lear’s suffering leads to his 100 Shakespearean Resurrection death of “unbearable joy” (291), Bradley (1904) wanted to revise the title: “Should we not be at least as near the truth if we called this poem The Redemption of King Lear, and declared that the business of ‘the gods’ with him was neither to torment him, nor to teach him a ‘noble anger,’ but to lead him to attain through apparently hopeless failure the very end and aim of life?” (285). Bradley’s influence was palpable : Harley Granville-Barker (1952) suggests that the play represents Lear’s “agony, his spiritual death and resurrection ” (266); and for R. W. Chambers (1940, 38–39), Cordelia becomes a sacrificial victim, a martyr in a world where good triumphs over evil. Such redemptive readings are in short supply these days, having been effectively counterpoised by readings that veer increasingly in the direction of nihilism. G. Wilson Knight (1957) called King Lear the “most fearless artistic facing of the ultimate cruelty of things,” and D. G. James (1951) similarly described it as “bleak,” offering “no crumb of Christian comfort” (80, 92–93). Barbara Everett (1960, 175) thought the play Shakespeare’s “supreme tragic horror,” and N. S. Brooke (1963) opined, “the process of the play seems...calculated to repudiate every source of consolation with which we might greet the final disaster” (57). Were it not for the postmodern readings we will...