If Shakespeare wrote two King Lears, he created three. There is the Quarto hero, the Folio hero, and the hero who exists somewhere in the interaction. The last of these is not the same Lear who emerges variously in various confusing editions. That Lear is an editor's creation. The Lear I am referring to contradicts himself at the same time, could never be seen on any stage, and dies two very different deaths. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay In an essay on the textual problems of Hamlet, Stanley Urkowitz wrote that comparing Q1 with Q2 is "rather like [examining] a museum or gallery showing the variant states of Rembrandt's great etchings... Either can stand alone, but when seen side by side they show how the work has grown and changed, and we can better appreciate the particular virtues of each proof." In this hypothetical Rembrandt exhibition, a museum visitor might also wonder what the differences between the etchings themselves mean. A mole on an attractive woman's nose that grows larger from one incision to the next suggests something about Rembrandt's conception of beauty. The reviews could say as much about Rembrandt's art as they do about his discrete productions. There are several important differences between The Story of King Lear from the 1608 Quarto and The Tragedy of King Lear from the 1623 Folio. As every critic who has written on the subject has pointed out, the Folio "is missing about 285 lines and contains about 115 not found" in the Fourth. The mock trial scene of 3.6 is entirely missing from the Folio. The Albany and Fool parts are substantially cut off. It is often argued that Edgar's character is given more importance. The emphasis on the war between France and Britain in F shifts to the civil war between Albany and Cornwall in Q. As the tide of criticism has shifted, since the publication of Division of the Kingdoms by Gary Taylor and Michael Warren in 1983, to the belief that these differences represent authorial revision, high-ranking commentators such as Urkowitz, E. A. J. Honingman, and Stanley Wells believe that Q and F are each consistent and coherent in their own right. R. A. Foakes, under the "general direction" of David Kastan, attempts to both merge and preserve the two versions in his Arden edition. "Words and passages found only in the Quarto are framed in this edition by the superscript Q, and words and passages found only in the Folio by the superscript F." This half-hearted device hides the problem quite cleverly - until Lear dies in 5.3. What I wish to do in this essay is to take a closer look at Lear's two deaths and speculate on what they mean when taken as an incongruent whole. From the criticisms I have encountered, it seems that most scholars are content to argue that, in fact, Lear's two deaths give two different Shakespearean interpretations of the play, that these interpretations are to a greater or lesser extent incompatible, and that therefore there are two different games. All this is important, and I will try to address it on solid textual grounds, but what seems most exciting to me - and, perhaps, a little original - is the idea of ​​this third death, this third Lear, and this third King Lear. I will suggest a possible reading of such a Lear, if only to open up an interesting (and perhaps new?) way of looking at King Lear and the King Lear that each reader feels lives and dies behind these veils of text. Q and F, Albany utters his ignorant proclamation of poetic justice moments after Lear enters carrying Cordelia's corpse: "All friends shall taste / the wages of their virtue, and all enemies / the cup of their merits" (5.3. 301-3). Having assumed greater authority, he feelsthat it is in his power to cope with grace and perdition. It would be ridiculous, if only the audience could laugh. "All enemies" have already tasted "the cup of their merits." Edmund, Goneril, and Regan each died violent deaths. And certainly Cordelia's corpse indicates that at least one "friend" will never be able to "taste the wages" of her "virtue", especially in a pagan world devoid of The Heavenly Shadow of Christ In addition to showing that Albany is an idiot, the phrase presents the most painful of contrasts with what Albany supposedly points to when he cries, "Oh see, see!" “And my poor fool is hanged” (5.3.304). The “E” brings together Lear's statement and Albany's madness for the audience. It also alludes to the possibility that Lear is directly "and" knowingly refuting Albany out of character for the grieving father, who now more than ever is a man "more sinful than sinner." The reference to the "poor fool" is usually interpreted as Shakespeare's (as opposed to Lear's) allusion to the true disappearing fool. in 3.6, like "poor fool" it is also a term of endearment. But it seems plausible, given Lear's mental state, that he is actually suffering from a momentary hallucination. Lear hallucinates many times throughout his madness, most notably in Q's mock trial scene, and there are dozens of references to defective eyesight. Shakespeare also prepared us for how deeply Lear would grieve over his fool's death, when Lear says on the moor, "Poor fool and knave, I have a part in my heart / I still feel sorry for you" (3.2.72-73 ). This line accords well with Lear's last line in Q, "Break, heart, please break" (Q 5.3.303), of which more will be said later.* A hallucination here would paint Lear as partly unaware of his miserable state. It would be much worse to lose his daughter than his jester. Although F and Q share the ambiguous line, the question of Lear's ability to understand how low his destiny is and how terrible the gods who created his world are is answered differently in the two original texts. “No, no life” are Lear's next words. in Q, and "No, no, no life" in F. The Folio echoes the extra "no" later with two extra "never[s]", the cumulative effect of which is to make Lear a little less in control of his life. tongue. "No, no life" is a statement, which partly implies a certain resignation to the fact; "No, no, no life" sounds more like the defense cry of a madman. If I feel like I'm exaggerating the distinction, it may help the reader to say the words out loud. In any case, Q's three nevers versus F's five should make the point clear. The two variations, each coherent in itself, together suggest a playwright revising his text with the clear purpose of infusing a dying king with the last touches of madness from which he has suffered in the last three acts." Because a dog, a horse should , a mouse has life / And you don't breathe at all?" Lear asks of Cordelia's corpse (and probably the gods too) in both Q and F. This is a good question, and one that Lear never gets an answer to. Technically speaking, the answer most likely lies in Albany's forgetfulness. "How nice that we forgot about it!" (5.3.235) he said, some 60 lines earlier, when Lear and Cordelia had strangely slipped from his (and Edgar's) mind. If he had remembered this earlier, he could have convinced Edmund to confess his sinister order to kill the heroes in time to save them, which could very well have been the premise of Nathum Tate's infamous and popular rewrite. In a sense, then, Albany and Edgar deserve Lear's anxious condemnation in F: "A plague upon you murderers, traitors all" (5.3.230). In another and more important sense, no one really does. To borrowDeepak Chopra's definition of synchronicity, "a conspiracy of improbabilities" is responsible for the tragedy that is 5.3. A thousand little things, a thousand coincidences, came together to kill Cordelia. Why was she captured? Why was the executioner so willing to complete his task? What in the stormy world of the play made this inexplicable end to Lear's one love necessary. Just as Shakespeare made it rain "too hard / Nature to bear" (3.4.2-3), it is as if Shakespeare, more than any of his characters including Edmund, had sent Cordelia to her death. The very absence of a compelling reason becomes the reason. It is a gratuitous death in the most disturbing sense of the phrase. It has no other meaning than what Lear will - or will not - give it. "Or you will come no more," says Lear in Q (and similarly in F), without attempting an answer to his question: "Never, never, never. Please cancel this button. Thank you, sir" (also in F). There is only one other use of the word "undo" in King Lear. It comes when the blind Gloucester pontificates to his disguised son about the material inequalities of the world. He asks the gods to do so "Let the superfluous man on a diet of lust... quickly feel your power: / Then distribution should nullify the excess / And every man have enough" (4.1.72-74). once "superfluous man on a diet of lust" (no more, for sure), who by his kindness and deference to an inferior (be it a servant, Kent or Edgar) to some extent "undoes the excess" that Lear has learned the lesson of respecting inferiors as equals. But the application of the lesson is entirely disproportionate to the circumstances. Anyone who unbuttons or undoes his button would probably interpret Lear's deference as the ramblings of a king who has lost all sense of himself. Even the request in himself is a little crazy. Shakespeare clearly refers to the storm, during which Lear tries to free himself from his "loans". This connection makes sense in that we assume that he is referring to Lear's button and not Cordelia, and secondly that we read into it the idea that Lear is exposing himself once again to the harsh rain of the gods. Perhaps Lear is making the connection in his mind (unconscious or conscious). This last line of thought is much better for the Fourth, in which Lear ends the line with "O, O, O, O!" This is the first obviously significant difference between the two death scenes. "Oh, oh, oh, oh!" it could provide the public with a way to understand the button request; Lear may simply need more air to fully feel and air his grief, just as he needs to be naked to fully feel the wrath of the Heavens. What emerges from this reading of Q is a mature Lear, mostly in control of his faculties, capable of understanding that his loss is permanent, inexplicable, and beyond words. "Oh, oh, oh, oh!" resonates with the fool's Act I jibe that Lear is a "figureless O; I am better than you now. I am a fool, you are nothing" (1.4.183-5). Lear realizes that he is an “O,” if you will. He has become the man who can answer his own troubling question: “Who can tell me who I am?” (1.4.221). Leaving aside for the moment the fact that, in his atrocious and conscious pain, Lear is literally reduced to "nothingness" (zero, 0, O), the audience attending a performance of Quarto's opera can see a Lear who has come on terms with himself, and just like Shakespeare's other great tragic heroes he will die at the point where he knows he has reached the end of his journey. In this context, Lear's last line before his death in Q, "Break, prithee, heart break ," reads and sounds like the last voluntary command of a dying king who somehow, against all odds, has still in control of himselfsame. If the gods haphazardly rule the world despite kings, then a king asserts himself against the gods by ruling over himself. A grumpy Lear had told Regan, "I have full reason to weep, but this heart / Shall break into a hundred thousand faults / Or else I will weep" (2.2.473-75). Now, Lear has lost control of his crying ("O, O, O, O!") but has gained control of his heart. As Lear himself says, in the Fourth he "dies bravely, like a groom", ("groom pleased in F") (Foakes, 4.6.194). A groom, one assumes, approaches marriage as a man.*This triumphant death is all the more triumphant in counterpoint to Gloucester's failed suicide attempt "This world," he says, thinking of himself atop a cliff that Edgar has drawn in his imagination, "I renounce and before thy [the gods'] eyes / Patiently shake off my great affliction" (4.6.42). An audience who has never seen King Lear before will learn in a few moments that these lines are, to put it crudely, pathetic. Gloucester fails in the most "miserable" and absurd way, mocked by his son and the gods for his pride and blindness. By implicit contrast, Lear deserves whatever pride he has left—or, to choose a better word than pride: dignity—and can see clearly at the moment of his death. What Lear sees in the Folio, at this very moment, is false. . “Look at her, look, at her lips, / look there, look there!” At the beginning of the scene, Lear held a real or imaginary feather to Cordelia's lips and said in both Q and F: This feather moves. She lives. If so, it's an opportunity that redeems all the pain I've ever felt. (5.3.262-4)This suggests that what Lear sees on Cordelia's lips is exactly what Lear wants to see on Cordelia's lips. If before, in his madness, Lear erroneously claimed in the Folio that he "had the power / to seal the lips of the accuser", (4.6.164), now in F his imagination claims the power to make the lips move again of an innocent dead man. As Cordelia says, “restoration hang / your medicine on my lips,” (4.7.26) Lear looks to her lips for the antidote to his agony when he says “never” five times. Even though "it's a possibility that redeems all the pain / I've ever felt," it's an illusion. This is the last moment Shakespeare, in F, gives us of his great fallen king. To redeem all of Lear's sorrows by hallucination is to suggest that the greatest of our sorrows can only be transcended through the comforting artifices of the imagination. Many have argued that Lear's last statement in F serves much the same purpose as the last in Q, that by drawing attention to Cordelia's lips Lear shifts attention away from himself and, in full recognition of the tragedy of moment, dies an even more noble death and with greater awareness. If it is true that Lear understands perfectly that Cordelia is dead in F, it appears clear, however, that this is by no means triumphant. Shakespeare has already told us in no uncertain terms that Lear is capable of the deepest pathos. To label his last words a miserable reiteration of that fact would be to deprive Lear of what Shakespeare tells the audience about him only in Q: the ability to reclaim himself, even through, or perhaps as a result of, grasping. all the horror in the world. Furthermore, Lear's last words in F forbid both Lear's audience on the stage and Lear's audience in the stands from watching him advance courageously to his end; we are told to "look there", to look away, towards the most bleak image of a lost paradise. The argument that Lear knows that Cordelia is dead also fails. In a scene where Lear constantly alternates between sanity ("My poor fool is hanged" is true) and madness ("My poor foolstupid is hanged" is hallucinatory), the confused and grammatically confused phrase "Look at her, look, her lips, / look there, look there!" certainly seems like the last outburst of a man who has surrendered to a madness that fulfills the desires. Furthermore, the play provides a model for the joyful death we can assume Lear passes through, if, as I am arguing, he believes that Cordelia is alive again in F. According to Edgar's account, the "imperfect heart, / Alas, too weak to bear the conflict" , / Between two extremes of passion, joy and pain, / they burst smiling" (5.3.195-197). Notably, this comes after discovering that her once-lost and always-loved son Edgar is alive and well. There is another example of a heart "Between two extremes of passion, / joy and sorrow", which could be argued to imbue Lear's death with a beauty of its own. After receiving Kent's letter, Cordelia apparently took on the following appearance, as reported by an impartial gentleman: You saw the sun and the rain at the same time, her smiles and her tears were like a person's best way. Those happy smiles that played on her ripe lips seemed not to know what the guests were in her eyes, which from there opened as pearls of diamonds fell. In short, pain would be a much-loved rarity, if everyone could become one. (4.3.17-24) The rain is so prominent in Lear, while the sun explicitly breaks through the clouds only here, that finding the two reconciled together on Cordelia's face highlights the unbearable horror of Lear's loss. The beautiful passage also suggests that Shakespeare somehow believes that the pure poetry of the hallucination of Lear's "breath" on Cordelia's "ripe lip" can transcend the void created by her loss. Only the public could validate such a Shakespearean hypothesis; a critic will always have an almost impossible time forcing his clumsy apparatuses around these noble vapors. But although Lear's "final sorrow would be a much-loved rarity / if all could become one," his death in F is, at best, insanely beautiful in a work that only once, only in the gentleman's passage above , contains the idea that beauty can somehow compensate for aimless misery. Unless, of course, the entire Folio edition of King Lear is to be so good as to compensate us for our misery. In both cases, Shakespeare's art becomes the locus of all values, subverting the possibility of any real redemption or any reality-based happiness in a real world. The meaning of the Folio edition becomes the meaninglessness of the Folio edition. Cordelia lies dead and Lear foolishly follows her into nothingness for the sole reason that "pain" can be wonderful. This is Shakespeare the nihilist, committed to his art of deceiving his audience, as he does Lear, into looking at something so beautiful that it makes us forget that there is nothing "there," on the silent lips. If Shakespeare, as the new revisionists claim and hopefully my analysis somehow supports, carefully transformed the draft of Q into the work we know as F, at least as far as Lear's death is concerned, he has resolved in two distinctly There are several problems that the story of King Lear presents. In Q, Lear dies as Gloucester wishes; in F, Lear dies just like Gloucester. The problem with this analogy - besides the fact that Shakespeare never intended for anyone to make it - is that when Gloucester tries to jump off a cliff that doesn't exist, he still has the illusion that Edgar might be dead and gone, whereas in D , Lear dies with the full knowledge that Cordelia no longer exists. And when Gloucester's heart finally "bursts", it bursts with the awareness of Edgar's healthy presence, while in F,..