Lear. ...Come, let's away to prison,He and Cordelia will be "God's spies." Actually, the printed original leaves out the apostrophe in “Gods”; we do not know whether it is singular or plural. Onstage it would have sounded singular, otherwise Lear would have said "the gods' spies." If so, this is the only time the play names the Christian God.
We two alone will sing like birds i'the 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 [vain courtiers], 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 Gods spies; and we'll wear out [outlive]
In a walled prison packs and sects of great ones
That ebb and flow by the moon. (V.iii.8-19)
But is it really the Christian God, in the sense of orthodox Judeo-Christian tradition? By "gods" Lear meant the pagan gods, who were the Gnostic “archons,” authorities. By "God" in the singular, Lear seems to be referring to something new, above all the pagan gods and the archons. But is he referring to the Christian God, identical with Jehovah, or to something else?
I read Lear in this speech to Cordelia as saying that now they are citizens of heaven, indifferent to the swings of fortune--including even the loss of his long-forgotten hundred knights. Instead of reacting emotionally to people's changes of fortune, they will feel "the mystery of things." But the Biblical Jehovah is quite interested in changes of fortune: He wishes to protect his people if they honor him, and punish them if they disregard or dishonor him, so that they will honor him more. (He even occasionally punishes them when they do honor him, to see if they will still honor him, after which he will reward them again.) Lear is quite beyond that god now. Hence I take the reference to be in fact to the Gnostic Father of All.
Thanks to various experiences and teachers, Lear is now is in the position of Basilides’ demiurge, who learns from his son and recognizes a presence beyond his own ego and the ego-world generally. He is in the place the Gnostics called the pleroma, fullness or completeness, a state of resurrection in this life, of rest in contrast to desire and the state of being tossed to and fro by the vagaries of fortune. From such a perspective ordinary people appear mad--or drunk or having a nightmare, to cite two Gnostic metaphors (Robinson 1988, 38). The Gospel of Truth poetically describes the fearfulness of people's lives in that place we call the world:
…There were empty fictions, as if they were sunk in sleep and found themselves in disturbing dreams. Either (there is) a place to which they are fleeing, or without strength they come (from) having chased after others, or they are involved in striking blows, or they are receiving blows themselves, or they have fallen from high places, or they take off into the air though they do not even have wings. Again, sometimes (it is as) if people were murdering them, though there is no one even pursuing them, or they themselves are killing their neighbors, for they are stained with their blood. When those who are going through all these things wake up, they see nothing, they who were in the midst of all these disturbances, for they are nothing. Such is the way of those who have cast ignorance aside from them like sleep… (Robinson 1988, 45)The world of King Lear is such a nightmare, too, until the play ends and the illusion is broken—but the audience has only to go outside to find it all over again. Even within the play, the Gospel of Truth has its echo in the contrast between Gloucester’s apparent fall from the cliff and his real jump from a small knoll, against which we may compare his fall from power. In contrast to such feelings of dread and terror is the calm of those who have attained Gnosis:
This is the manner of those who possess something from above of the immeasurable greatness...They do not go down to Hades nor do they have envy nor groaning nor death within them, but they rest in him who is at rest, not striving nor being twisted around the truth. But they themselves are the truth, and the Father is within them and they are within the Father, being perfect, being undivided in the truly good one, being in no way deficient in anything, but they are set at rest, refreshed in the Spirit...(Robinson 1988, 50-51)This "rest" is the state of calm of those who in this life have experienced the Fullness. The author of the Gospel of Truth seems to include himself in that number, for he ends by saying, “It is not fitting for me, having come to be in the resting place, to speak of anything else” (51). Similarly, Lear has learned the folly of his ways, which were governed by the need for flattery and domination. Thereby he attains peace and even joy, if only briefly.
Cardenal has a song contrasting the everyday place of torment with the Gnostic’s place of rest:
There was a city, I do not know which, Una ciutatz fo, no sai cals,Cardenal's "covetousness" is similar to the Tripartite Tractate's "lust for power" (Robinson 1988, 84)--What one covets is power over some thing or person. The contrast between God's wisdom or sanity (the “sens de Dieu”) and worldly wisdom or sanity (the “sen del mon”) is that of the apostle Paul: "If a man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him be a fool, that he may be wise. For the wisdom of the world is foolishness with God" (1 Cor. 3:18-19. The fool that is really wise is foolish from the perspective of the world. The wise fool has the calmness of the friend of God, a term from the Hebrew Bible; "For she [Wisdom] is a treasure unto men that never faileth; which they that use become the friends of God" (Wis. 7:14). The friend of God is the mystic, detached from the things of this world, in touch with his or spiritual core.
Where a certain rain fell On cazet una plueia tals
Such that all the men in the city Que tug l’omne de la ciutat
It touched became mad. Que toquet foron dessenat.
They all became mad, except one alone, Tug desseneron mas sol us;
He escaped, no others; Aquel ne escapet, ses plus;
He was in a house Que era dins una maizo
Asleep, when this happened. On dormia, quant aiso fo.
He got up when he had finished sleeping Aquel levet cant ac dormit
And it had stopped raining, E fo se do ploure gequit,
And he went outside among his fellow citizens. E venc foras entre las gens.
And they were all committing madness:… E tug feron dessenamens...
One punched, another pushed, E l’uns ferit e l’autre enpeis,
Another thought he was king Et l’autre cuget esser reis
And stood royally, hands on hips, E tenc se ricamen pels flancx,
And another jumped over the benches. E l’autre sautet per los bancx.
One made threats, another cursed, L’uns menasset, l’autre maldis,
Another swore, another laughed, L’autre juret e l’autre ris,
Another spoke and did not know what, L’autre parlet e non saup que,
Another made terrible faces the whole time. L’autre fet metolas dese.
And this man who had kept his senses E aquel qu’avia son sen
Wondered greatly… Meravillet so mot fortmen…
He was greatly astonished at them, Granz meravillas ac de lor,
But they are more so at him, Mas mot l’an il de lui major
When they see him standing there in peace. Que l vezon estar suaumen.
They think he has lost his sanity, Cuidon c’aia perdut son sen
For what they are doing . Car so qu’il fan they do not see him do no l.vezon faire,
To each of them it is clear A cascun de lor es veiaire
They are reasonable and full of good sense, Qu’il son savi e ben senat,
But him they hold for mad. Mas lui tenon per dessenat.
Some strike him on the cheek, Qui.l fer en gauta, some on the neck. qui en col.
He cannot help falling down… El no pot mudar no s degol…
This fable is an image of the world, Aquist faula es per lo mon;
A semblance of the people in it. Semblanz es als homes que I son.
This world is the city, Aquest segles es la ciutatz,
Because this world is full of madmen… Quez es totz plens de dessenatz.
The rain of Covetousness has fallen Li plueia sai es cazeguda;
Here, and thus upon us Cobeitataz, e si es venguda
Comes a tremendous proud maliciousness Un’ erguilhoz’ e granz maleza
That has laid hold of all the people… Que tota l a gen a perpreza…
For the wisdom of God is madness to them, Que l sens de Dieu lor par folia,
And the friend of God, wherever he is, E l’amix de Dieu, on que sia,
Knows they are mad, the pack of them, Conois que dessenat son tut,
For they have lost the sense of God. Car lo sen de Dieu an perdut.
And they, they hold him for mad, E ilh, an lui per dessenat,
For he has renounced Car lo sen the mad sanity of this world. del mon a laissat.
(Goldin 1973, 303-309)
For Cardenal, it would seem that the calm of the Friend of God is a lasting state, or at least one which he can access at will. The Renaissance had a different conception, which Erasmus and other Neoplatonists articulated. Like Cardenal, Erasmus says that those who experience the eternal in this are thought mad by the world, and vice versa: “there is total disagreement between the two parties on every point, and each thinks the other mad” (1971, 206). But what is it like, this experience, “the savour of the reward to come” (207)? Erasmus answers:
So those who are granted a foretaste of this—and very few have the good fortune—experience something which is very like madness. They speak incoherently and unnaturally, utter sound without sense, and their faces suddenly change expression. One moment they are excited, the next depressed, they weep and laugh and sigh by turns; in fact they truly are quite beside themselves. Then when they come to, they say they don’t know where they have been, in the body or outside it, awake or asleep. They cannot remember what they have heard or seen or said or done, except in a mist, like a dream. All they know is that they were happiest when they were out of their senses in this way, and they lament their return to reason, for all they want is to be mad forever with this kind of madness. (Erasmus 1971, 207-208)Lear’s madness is not this extreme. His speech is incoherent only to those who hear with the ears of the world; its contradictions and extremes are glimpses of higher truths, spoken in this-worldly terms as he distances himself from it. His calmness remains, but even that does not last.
After the treachery of Cordelia's murder, Lear despairs. Why is he unable to sustain his calm? Up to this point, the only desire Lear has not released is that of living out his days with a faithful daughter. At the end such a one is his connection to the divine, his partner in representing the divine world on earth (God's spies)--as though they were angels. His anima, to use Jung's term, is projected outward onto a soft-spoken but trustworthy girl. This is a step up from the flatterers, but the death of the one on whom the image is projected leaves him in unresolved anguish, in which the natural impulse is to follow the beloved in death, in the manner of Romeo and Juliet.
Figure 60. "The dragon destroys the woman, and she him, and at once they are drenched in blood." Emblem 50 of Michael Maier, Atalanta Fugiens, Oppenheim 1618.
A touching alchemical version of the death scene is the last engraving in Maier's Atalanta Fugiens (Fig. 60 above; de Rola 1988, 96). The dragon that we saw earlier now is entwined around the body of the maiden, his mouth to her lips. She is dying, crushed by the dragon's embrace. The motto reads: "The dragon kills the woman, and she kills it, and together they are bathed in the blood" (de Rola 1988, 104). Lear has destroyed Cordelia by his poor judgment; his death will follow shortly. But how has she killed him? Maier's source, the Turba Philosophorum, says that "the intestine of that woman is full of poison" (de Jong 1969, 313). The Ophites, Irenaeus says, associated the intestine by its coils with the snake (Barnstone 1984, 664). Alchemically Cordelia is Mercury, and her blood, while life to her, is deathly poison for him. For Lear to attach to her means her death, and also his death, if she should die, for then her death would infect him--such is the logic of the alchemical perspective, and of Shakespeare's play.
Lear at the end has been faulted because he seems to need Cordelia in order to experience such a heaven; her death seems to be the final disappointment that kills him. Just as he gets her back at last, he loses her. Critics have complained that Lear is simply reverting to his fantasy of having a daughter's whole love, as though she had no husband and simply focused on her father. In other words, he is back to his old narcissistic self.
A TV and video version starring Ian Holm attempted to combine this attachment to Cordelia with a more spiritual view of his relationship to her, taking as its opportunity Lear's last few words: "Look on her, her lips,/ look there, look there" (V.iii.308-309). Since he has already said that he knows she is dead, Holm portrays him as looking not at the dead body seen by everyone, but rather at something invisible to others, floating in the air, Cordelia's spirit, which he can see because he is almost spirit himself. This interpretation does rescue his last words, which otherwise seem pathetic, a refusal at the end to acknowledge a reality he had successfully faced just a moment before. But it still ties Lear's happiness to his being with her.
What I would prefer to emphasize is what came along with Cordelia's presence, that is, a sense of the "nothing," "the mystery of things"--as opposed, say, to the hundred knights or even her ghost. As Jung said, the anima--that is, the autonomous feeling-toned image of the feminine object of desire--is that which allows a man access to the divine. The same was true of the Sufi mystic ibn Arabi, who used the image of a young girl with which to clothe his communion with God (Corbin, 1969), and Dante similarly the image of Beatrice. Cordelia is now less an image of Christ than of Sophia, the divine feminine, one who nurtures our spirit in this world and links it to a higher world: "For she is a treasure unto men that never faileth; which they that use become the friends of God" (Wis. 7:14). Sophia is the serene mystic's imaginal female companion--and I think that is true whether the mystic is male or female, for the image comes with the same feeling tones for both genders, when it is consciously cultivated. In Lear's case, he projects his anima, his unconscious and inexperienced feminine aspect, onto women of flesh and blood, with Cordelia receiving the most elevated of these projections.
Lear's loss is our gain. Shakespeare's play is in our hearts and imagination. For us, Cordelia lives even as on the stage she dies. We can take the step that Lear might not be taking, to gain the place of rest independently of her fleshly presence. Imagination imbued with heart is our gate to life in transcendence. It might also be Lear's. When Lear says "Look, her lips, look there, look there," he might be looking at the dead lips, but seeing there, even in their stillness, the mystery that he always found there. Perhaps he sees more clearly now what before he only saw darkly: the place of rest and his own destiny. To have this presence he does not have to die; but he is ready and ripe for death. May the audience be as fortunate, to see such a presence in their lives.
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