“‘TWIXT TWO EXTREMES OF PASSION, JOY AND GRIEF”: SHAKESPEARE'S KING LEAR AND LAST PLAYS

Abstract

2 6 Y ‘‘ ’ T W I X T T W O E X T R E M E S O F P A S S I O N , J O Y A N D G R I E F ’’ S H A K E S P E A R E ’ S K I N G L E A R A N D L A S T P L A Y S A R T H U R K I R S C H Academic scholarship on Shakespeare tends to focus on his plays as cultural documents, revelations of the ideas of his times that he either embraced or contested, and usually the latter because contesting received ideas is presumed to make him more original and important. But Northrop Frye’s observation that Shakespeare used only the ideas he needed is worth bearing in mind. Aside from the genius of their verse, what has mattered most to audiences and readers over the centuries, what has moved them most profoundly, and what they have most remembered, are the plays’ representation of states of emotion, ‘‘the passions’’ as they were called in the Renaissance. As Dryden wrote, Shakespeare had ‘‘the largest and most comprehensive soul,’’ and he obviously responded to the heterodoxies as well as orthodoxies of his time, but there is no evidence that he was as interested in writing about them as many of his critics are. He seems, on the contrary, to have been most interested in creating a theatrical experience like that described in Thomas Dekker’s prologue to If It Be Not Good (1612), in which Dekker praises the playwright who can move the hearts of his audience, who can make even the ignorant among them ‘‘applaud what their charm’d soul scarce understands,’’ ‘‘infus[ing] them’’ 2 7 R ‘‘With raptures, / Into a second.’’ Dekker says that such a playwright Can give an Actor, Sorrow, Rage, Joy, Passion, Whilst he againe (by selfe same Agitation) Commands the Hearers, sometimes drawing out Teares Then Smiles and fills them both with Hopes & Feares. Shakespeare depicts all these emotions in abundance and with unique intensity, but there are two, joy and grief, whose experience in conjunction he represented in scenes that can bring tears to our eyes as well as to those of the actors. In Shakespeare’s time, the association of joy and grief was a common trope and a standard topic in writings on the passions. In a book on melancholy, for example, Timothy Bright wrote that ‘‘contraries in passions bring forth like e√ects; as to weepe & laugh, both for joy & sorow. For as it is oft seene that a man weepeth for joy, so is [it] not straunge to see one laugh for griefe.’’ Thomas Nashe wrote of ‘‘many whom extreame joy & extreame griefe hath forced to runne mad,’’ and Thomas Nabbes spoke of that ‘‘forcible violence’’ that can result ‘‘in a weak and feeble subject’’ in whom ‘‘two such strong and contrary passions meet.’’ A Renaissance proverb asserted that ‘‘Sudden joy kills sooner than excessive grief.’’ The two emotions were also often assimilated in the Christian story of the su√ering of Jesus on the Cross and the joy of his resurrection, and in particular in the associated notion of felix culpa, the fortunate fall, the process in which grief is redeemed by joy. In imaginative literature of the time, the paradox of the fortunate fall could take the form of tragedy, as in King Lear, in which the su√ering and death of the hero is intensified by the simultaneous invocation and denial of the comic promise of joy and redemption , or of tragicomedy, as in the problem plays and the last plays, in which su√ering and grief are transformed into joy and renewal. In almost all instances, death or the threat of death is the ultimate context of the paradox of grief leading to joy, and in that context it is associated with the myth and rituals of death and rebirth in human life as well as in nature. All four of Shakespeare’s last plays represent the heightened feeling of joy at the revelation that characters who have been mourned as dead...