essay questions king lear

100+ King Lear Essay Topics

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What is a King Lear Essay?

A King Lear essay is an academic paper focusing on William Shakespeare’s tragedy “King Lear”. The play is rich with themes of power, love, betrayal, and madness. Because of its depth and numerous subplots, it offers a wealth of topics for deep analysis and exploration. Whether you’re discussing character development, the play’s historical context, or its many symbols, a King Lear essay allows for a broad spectrum of discussion and analysis.

Choosing the Perfect King Lear Essay Topic: A Quick Guide

Selecting a topic for your King Lear essay requires a deep understanding of the play’s themes and characters. Here’s a brief guide to help you:

• Read the Play Thoroughly: Understand the story, its characters, and underlying themes.
• Identify Your Interest: Choose a theme or character that resonates with you.
• Research: Look for academic papers and discussions around that theme or character to get different perspectives.
• Be Specific: Narrow down your topic to ensure you can cover it in depth.
• Seek Feedback: Discuss your topic idea with peers or professors to refine it further.

King Lear Essay Topics Lists

Character analysis.

• The transformation of King Lear: From pride to madness.
• Cordelia’s role: Innocence and morality amidst deceit.
• The Machiavellian nature of Edmund.
• The tragic fall of Gloucester and its parallels with Lear.

Themes and Motifs

• The consequences of betrayal in King Lear.
• The role of nature and storm in representing Lear’s internal turmoil.
• Blindness vs. insight: A study of perception in King Lear.
• The juxtaposition of wisdom and foolishness throughout the play.
• The significance of the Fool and his role in the narrative.
• Clothes and their portrayal of identity and deception.

Historical and Cultural Context

• King Lear in the context of Elizabethan societal values.
• Comparing King Lear to other Shakespearean tragedies.

Literary Devices

• Use of irony in King Lear.
• The role of dramatic monologues in developing character depth.

Comparative Studies

• King Lear and Oedipus Rex: A comparative tragedy study.
• King Lear in modern adaptations: A study of film and theater renditions.

Character Exploration

• The multi-faceted nature of King Lear’s madness.
• The motives and morality of Edmund, the illegitimate son.
• Goneril and Regan’s descent into cruelty and deceit.
• Cordelia: The epitome of virtue in a world gone mad.
• Kent’s unwavering loyalty: A character study.
• The Fool: Wisdom in simplicity and jest.

Thematic Analyses

• Familial love versus political ambition.
• The frailty of human nature in the face of deceit.
• Madness as a reflection of societal disorder.
• Nature’s fury as a mirror to human emotion in King Lear.
• The consequences of blind trust.
• Age and youth: Conflicts and misunderstandings in King Lear.

Symbolism and Imagery

• The storm: Chaos within and without.
• Eyesight and insight: The tragedy of literal and metaphorical blindness.
• The role of animals in depicting human depravity.
• The significance of the crown and the loss of royal dignity.

Gender and Society

• Femininity and power: A look at the roles of Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia.
• Gender roles and expectations in Elizabethan society versus King Lear.
• The portrayal of women as villains and victims.
• The interplay between masculinity, power, and vulnerability.

Historical Context

• The political underpinnings of King Lear in Shakespeare’s time.
• The significance of the play’s setting between Paganism and Christianity.
• Comparing the two versions of King Lear: Quarto vs. Folio.
• The role of monarchy and succession debates in King Lear’s narrative.

Comparative Analyses

• King Lear and Macbeth: A study in tragic flaws.
• The tragic heroes: Oedipus vs. King Lear.
• Power dynamics: Comparing King Lear with Game of Thrones.
• Parent-child relationships in King Lear and Hamlet.

Literary Devices and Techniques

• Dramatic irony in the downfall of King Lear.
• Use of soliloquies in understanding characters’ psychologies.
• The role of subplots in enriching the main narrative.
• The interplay of prose and verse in King Lear.

Modern Interpretations and Adaptations

• Analyzing Akira Kurosawa’s “Ran” as an adaptation of King Lear.
• King Lear in the digital age: Modern retellings and interpretations.
• Setting King Lear in a corporate world: A thematic exploration.
• How contemporary theater stages King Lear.

Philosophy and Morality

• Existential themes in King Lear.
• The play’s exploration of justice and divine retribution.
• Nihilism and despair in King Lear’s darkest moments.
• Ethics of power and leadership as depicted in the play.

Staging and Performance

• The challenges and nuances of staging King Lear’s storm scene.
• Role of costumes and set design in bringing out the play’s themes.
• Evolution of King Lear’s character portrayal in theater over the centuries.
• The role of music and sound in enhancing King Lear’s tragic atmosphere.

Miscellaneous Topics

• The psychology of betrayal in King Lear.
• The cultural impact of King Lear in literature and art.
• Analyzing King Lear’s themes in the context of family therapy.
• The archetype of the tragic hero through King Lear.
• The exploration of mortality and legacy in King Lear.
• Nature, nurture, and the environment in the world of King Lear.

Role of Secondary Characters

• The significance of Edgar’s transformation into “Poor Tom”.
• Oswald’s loyalty: A contrasting perspective.
• Albany and Cornwall: A study in contrasting leadership styles.
• How secondary characters elevate the play’s primary themes.

Narrative Techniques

• The use of letters and written communication in forwarding the plot.
• King Lear as a play within a play: Performance and perception.
• The significance of off-stage events and their impact on the narrative.

Psychological Perspectives

• King Lear: A case study in cognitive decline and dementia.
• Sibling rivalry and Freudian interpretations in King Lear.
• The psychological toll of power and authority.

Religious Undertones

• Divine justice vs. earthly justice in King Lear.
• Pagan beliefs and Christian morality: A dichotomy in King Lear.
• The concept of redemption and sacrifice in the play.

Societal Critiques

• King Lear as a critique of feudalism.
• The role of class and hierarchy in the tragic events of the play.
• Shakespeare’s view on authority and governance through King Lear.

Artistic Interpretations

• The visual imagery of King Lear and its impact on audiences.
• The role of silence in King Lear: What’s left unsaid.
• Representations of King Lear in art, music, and other forms of media.

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by William Shakespeare

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• "Which of you shall we say doth love us most?"  That's the question King Lear asks his daughters so he can determine which one will get the biggest piece of land when he retires.  Discuss the consequences of King Lear's decision to stage this love test.  Does it turn out the way he hopes?  How does this decision impact the way events unfold in the play? 

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A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.

Acts Summaries & Analyses

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Discussion Questions

What does King Lear ’s use of literal and metaphorical blindness suggest about the play’s vision of the world? What’s the meaning of seeing in this play?

Why does Lear ask his daughters the fateful question at all? What does the first scene reveal about Lear’s character, and how does Lear’s question relate to the terrible events that follow?

Lear’s Fool disappears without a trace after the storm scenes. Why might this be? What does the Fool mean to the first half of the play, and why might he not fit into the second half?

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96 King Lear Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best king lear topic ideas & essay examples, 📌 most interesting king lear topics to write about, 👍 good research topics about king lear, ❓ king lear essay questions.

• King Lear Themes, Characters, & Analysis Essay As explained by Al Zoubi and Al Khamaiseh, during the ceremony, Goneril and Regan, the oldest and the middle daughters, use flatter and insincere speech to prove their love to the father.
• Major Themes in the Play “King Lear” by William Shakespeare The madness is connected to the trouble that befalls the King later in his helpless state as he faces all sorts of mistreatments from the two daughters whom he gives the mandate to run the […]
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• Shakespeare and His View on Kingship: Macbeth, King Lear and Othello At the same time, it is beyond doubt in the basement Macbeth’s character is clean and as a soldier, he is true to his job and his king.
• Shakespeare’s “King Lear” and Smiley’s “A Thousand Acres” In King Lear and A Thousand of Acres, the destinies of both King Lear and Larry Cook encounter unfair attitudes toward daughters and death, as a result. Lear and Larry are in despair because of […]
• King Lear’s Cataclysm: Analysis of Shakespeare’s Plays He does this by allocating his land and property to his three daughters to the degree to which they are able to convince him that they love him.
• Deception in King Lear, The Odyssey and Gilgamesh The forms of deception in the book seem to come effortlessly to Odysseus, and the stories he tells throughout the book serve to protect him and his family.
• Quotes From Tragedy of King Lear by Shakespeare Chapter three in the book of Genesis tells about the temptation of a woman by the serpent and the violation of the prohibition on eating fruits from the tree of knowledge of Good and Evil.
• Individual’s Sense of Entitlement and Destructive Behavior in “King Lear” A sense of entitlement can arise from the way a person is treated or from their temperament and as such, it is a dangerous attitude to acquire or encourage because it may lead to disparaging […]
• Personal Conflict of King Lear in Play by Shakespeare From the beginning of the story, he managed to set the readers against the king, which makes the majority of them support the daughters in the conflict between them and the king, the conflict that, […]
• “King Lear” by William Shakespeare: A Play Review by Jeremy Bryson Gloucester, in response to the attack on Edmond, promises to bring Edgar to justice, and also states that he is going to make Edmond his heir.
• Language of Henry V and King Lear by W. Shakespeare The most obvious similarities in the language of the two plays are that it takes a good actor to be able to deliver the lines at all, and a superb actor to be able to […]
• The Role of Trickery in Shakespear’s “King Lear” The trickster and the person being tricked, the switching that the trickster uses in order to play a trick on the person will also be put to light.
• Shakespeare’s King Lear: A Bad Judgment Turns Tragic However, in this play, we can be witnesses to a fact that all of the pain that King Lear had undergone can be cathartic.
• Shakespeare’s “King Lear” Adaptation by Ian Pollock The panes are arranged in a way that helps to quickly and intuitively follow the major events and receive a clear picture of those before the actual reading of the utterances.
• “King Lear ” by William Shakespeare At the end of the day, the character learns the price of such a fatal mistake which is betrayal and loss of everything he loved in his life. The theme of the transformational power of […]
• Society Role in Literature: King Lear and Things Fall Apart The difference is that the leader of the plan is much tougher physically and emotionally, and it is evident that he would not give up his values and morals.
• Literature Studies: King Lear by William Shakespeare Bad luck is clear in the story through the inconsistent relationship between King Lear and his daughters as well as from the role of dishonesty and power in the play.
• Comparison of “Tuesdays With Morrie” by Mitch Albom and “King Lear” by William Shakespeare He is viewed as a man of wisdom, owing to the lessons he has learned from his sufferings since childhood, which he, in turn, teaches Albom.
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• The Importance of Responsibilities in Shakespeare’s “King Lear”
• Relationship Themes Evident in William Shakespeare’s “King Lear”
• The Importance of Sight and Blindness in Shakespeare’s “King Lear”
• The Important Contextual Influences on Shakespeare’s “King Lear”
• The Madness of Edmund in “King Lear” by William Shakespeare
• The Many Effective Images Incorporated Into William Shakespeare’s Play “King Lear”
• The Metaphor of Being Blind in “King Lear” by William Shakespeare
• The Natural Response of a Person to Judgement in “King Lear” by William Shakespeare
• The Opposing Views to Lear’s Temperament in the Play “King Lear”
• Patience Standards Portrayed in “King Lear” Drama
• The Play “King Lear” and the Audience’s Minds During Watching a Play by William Shakespeare
• The Power of Religious Redemption in William Shakespeare’s “King Lear”
• The Protagonist’s Attainment of Self Knowledge in Shakespeare’s “King Lear”
• The Use of Paradox as Related to the Theme of Truth in “King Lear”
• The Theme of Insight and Sight Between Gloucester and Lear in “King Lear” by William Shakespeare
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• The Road to Self-Knowledge in “King Lear” by William Shakespeare
• The Role of Femininity in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” “Othello,” and “King Lear”
• Cultural Heritage Portrayed in “King Lear” Play
• The Significance of Nature in “King Lear” by William Shakespeare
• The Similarities of Events That Lear and Gloucestor Experienced in Shakespeare’s “King Lear”
• The Story of Treachery and Deceit in Shakespeare’s “King Lear”
• The Themes of Sanity and Madness in “King Lear” by William Shakespeare
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• The Themes of Deception and Shame in William Shakespeare’s “King Lear” and Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex”
• The Test of Love in “King Lear” by William Shakespeare
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• The Themes of Gender and Sexuality in Sigmund Freud’s “Dora” and William Shakespeare’s “King Lear”
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King Lear questions

First of all let’s look at the broad categories questions usually fall into:

CHARACTER THEME OPEN STYLE

You may be asked to discuss the following when it comes to characters:

• a tragic hero? (does he recognise his flaws and gain self-knowledge?)
• his nobility (is he a good man? / strengths & weaknesses / virtues & flaws)
• his relationship with his daughters & treatment of / by them
• the extent to which he is responsible for the tragedy which occurs
• our level of sympathy for him

Gloucester:

• his nobility / is he a good man? / strengths and weaknesses / virtues and flaws
• his relationship with his sons & treatment of / by them
• his dramatic function in the play

Lear & Gloucester:

• how and why their stories mirror each other
• the extent to which they bring about their own downfall
• our level of sympathy for them
• too good to be true or a believable character?
• virtues and flaws / our level of sympathy for her
• dramatic function in the play?

Goneril and Regan:

• treatment of their father
• extent to which they present a very negative view of women
• an admirable villain? or a sociopath?

Edmund and Edgar:

• contrast in their characters and personalities

Kent and The Fool

• dramatic function and believability

All characters:

• contrast the extremes of good and evil presented in the characters in the play
• the play is very pessimistic about human nature
• the play is very pessimistic about human relationships / family / parent – child dynamics

The major themes in the play are:

• Loyalty & Betrayal

Appearance vs Reality (Deception/Manipulation)

Good and Evil

Forgiveness

For each theme – no matter what the wording – ask yourself

WHO does this theme apply to? HOW / WHY does this character have to deal with this issue? Do they CHANGE over the course of the play? Are there any SCENES which highlight this theme specifically? What are our FINAL IMPRESSIONS of this issue?

OPEN QUESTIONS:

• Relevance to a modern audience
• Pessimistic play?

STYLE QUESTIONS:

• Language & Imagery
• Dramatic Irony
• Compelling Drama – scene or scenes

SAMPLE QUESTIONS

In each case you are given a statement which you can fully agree with, partially agree with or completely disagree with. In the most recent Chief Examiner’s Report, students were advised to avoid taking an overly simplistic approach (“I agree 100% that…”). It’s understandable that this would be your first instinct under exam conditions, but remember that a single sentence rarely sums up accurately the complexity and nuance of an entire play. Yes, you’ll look for evidence that supports the statement, but you’ll also need to display an awareness that different phases in the play contain different truths. Your attitude to a character, theme, relationship in the play will change and morph as the play unfolds and the plot develops…

“ King Lear is a man more sinned against than sinning ” – Discuss

“ Lear is a ‘foolish fond old man’ who deserves everything he gets ” – Discuss

“ Lear embarks on a harrowing journey through suffering to self-knowledge. At the end of the play he is a better and wiser man “

“ The play King Lear is a realistic tragedy that depicts the tragic consequences of one man’s folly “

“ King Lear is not a tragic hero, but rather a victim of circumstances “

“Gloucester is a weak and gullible man, but at heart, a decent one”

“Gloucester serves an important dramatic function in making Lear’s circumstances more credible”

“Discuss the dramatic significance of the Gloucester story in the play King Lear”

Lear and Gloucester

“Neither Lear nor Gloucester are deserving of the love and service they receive from their followers”

“Cordelia shares with her father the faults of pride and obstinacy”

“Cordelia’s dramatic function in the play is twofold: her wisdom highlights her father’s foolishness; her goodness  highlights her sisters’ malevolence” 

Goneril and Regan

“Lear’s evil daughters allow Shakespeare to present a very negative view of women in the play”

“Edmund is a sociopath: a charming liar, incapable of remorse, who views men and women merely as obstacles or aids to his ambition”

“Edmund is an admirable villain. At the beginning of the play he has nothing; by the end he is almost King”

Edmund and Edgar

“Gloucester’s sons represent the very best and the very worst in human nature”

Minor characters: Kent & The Fool

“The Fool serves as Lear’s conscience in the play. When he disappears, it is because Lear no longer needs him”

“The fool is an unnecessary distraction in the play King Lear”

“Kent is too loyal to be believable as a real human being”

General character questions

“The play King Lear offers characters who represent the very best and the very worst in human nature”

“Shakespeare’s King Lear presents a dark and pessimistic view of humanity”

“Cosmic justice is denied, yet human justice prevails in the play King Lear”

“The relationship between parents and children is unrealistically portrayed in the play King Lear”

Loyalty (&/or Betrayal)

“It is only the loyalty of loved ones that enables Lear and Gloucester to endure their sufferings”

“The theme of blindness – both physical and emotional – is dramatically presented in the play King Lear”

“In King Lear, whilst characters are initially fooled by appearances, they gradually come to see the truth”

“In King Lear, ‘sane’ characters frequently behave in a crazy manner, whilst ‘mad’ characters at times seem perfectly sane”

“Love as a redemptive force is a major theme in the play King Lear”

“ The play King Lear memorably explores the meaning of love “

“King Lear examines the nature of good and evil but neither force emerges triumphant”

“Learning through suffering is central to the play”

“ The importance of self-knowledge and forgiveness is strikingly evident in the play King Lear”

“The play King Lear explores what it means to be a good King”

OPEN QUESTIONS

“The play King Lear offers us one central experience: pessimism”

“Shakespeare’s vision of the world is not entirely pessimistic in the play King Lear”

“King Lear is one of the greatest tragedies ever written”

“Scenes of great suffering and of great tenderness help to make King Lear a very memorable play”

“The two plots of King Lear are closely paralleled in theme, character and action, to great dramatic effect”

“What, if any, relevance, does the play King Lear hold for today’s readers?”

LANGUAGE / STYLE

“King Lear is a play filled with striking images and symbols which heighten our experience of the play”

“Dramatic irony is used to tragic, and occasionally comic effect, in Shakespeare’s King Lear”

“The way characters speak accurately reflects their personality in Shakespeare’s King Lear”

“ King Lear contains many scenes of compelling drama, but the extremity of the cruelty and violence presented prevents the audience from achieving catharsis. Rather than a release, we feel haunted by what we have witnessed “

8 responses to “ King Lear questions ”

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King lear study guide.

The story of King Lear and his three daughters existed in some form up to four centuries before Shakespeare recorded his vision. Lear was a British King who reigned before the birth of Christ, allowing Shakespeare to place his play in a Pagan setting. Predated by references in British mythology to Lyr or Ler, Geoffrey of Monmouth recorded a story of King Lear and his daughters in his Historia Regum Britanniae of 1137. Dozens of versions of the play were then written up, highlighting certain events, such as the love test, or expanding upon the story, such as creating a sequel where Cordelia committed suicide. Most of these versions had a happy ending, though untrue to the story, where peace was restored under the reign of Lear and Cordelia. Shakespeare however had no interest in writing a tragicomedy.

The main version that Shakespeare had likely read and from which he had definitely borrowed was The True Chronicle History of King Leir and his Three Daughters. He also borrowed from Raphael Holinshed's Chronicle of England, Scotland, and Ireland (who adopted the story from Monmouth), Edmund Spencer's The Faerie Queene , Sir Philip Sidney's The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (from which Shakespeare drew his subplot), and John Higgins' A Mirror For Magistrates. He stole pieces and ideas from these versions to create the type of story he wanted to tell. For instance, The True Chronicle provides the basis of the story, though sentimentalizing it by ignoring the sequel. "Leir" is betrayed by two of his daughters but is reconciled to his youngest at the end. "Cordella" is accompanied by a Fool-type character who is loyal to her and Leir is reseated on the throne after beating Gonerill and Regan's armies. Moreover, Shakespeare left out main components of the earlier stories of Lear and created wholly new ones as well. Most considerable of the changes was the creation of a subplot and Lear's descent to madness.

In Shakespeare's time, numerous events, historical considerations, relationships, and cultural trends influenced his writing of King Lear. Scholars tend to believe that the play was written after Othello and before Macbeth, thus assigning it to 1604-1605. Further proof of this comes from the apparent influence the 1603 texts, A Declaration of Egregious Popishe Impostures, by Samuel Harsnett, and John Florio's translation of Montaigne's Essays, had on Shakespeare's conglomeration of the story. Critics have noted that more than one hundred words found in King Lear which Shakespeare had never before used can be found in Florio's translation. In addition, Montaigne's famous essay, "Apology for Raymond Sebonde," apparently refers to the same major themes which Shakespeare's King Lear presents. He also borrowed from a very convenient contemporary true story of a gentleman pensioner of Queen Elizabeth, Sir Brian Annesley, whose daughters tried to get him declared insane in late 1603 so that they could legally take control of his estate.The youngest daughter, named Cordell, intervened on his behalf.

As Shakespeare's players were the king's men, he knew they would have to perform for King James I and his court. Subsequently, Shakespeare imbued his plays with certain aspects that would appeal to James. For instance, the dangers of a divided kingdom was often the topic of James' speeches because of his wish to unite Scotland with England. Further topics from the time which Shakespeare took into account were the honor and wisdom endowed to the elderly as opposed to the rash ambition of the young as well as the ritualistic reverence showed to royalty. Shakespeare himself had moved into his period of writing tragedies as he felt they were more respected by critics although audiences generally preferred comedies. After his publication of Julius Caesar , he was looked at as the greatest tragedian since Sophocles and was at the zenith of his literary capacity. The play was first performed for the King in December of 1605. It was first published in a quarto in 1608 and titled M William Shak-speare His Historie, of King Lear. A completely revised version was reprinted by Shakespeare in a 1623 First Folio edition, now referred to as The Tragedy of King Lear. The two versions were conflated in the eighteenth century until editors realized how significantly different the two were and now each edition and the conflated text can be found.

King Lear Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for King Lear is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

"Themes of King Lear are skilfully presented through imagery and symbolism"

King Lear is rife with animal imagery, as the play is known for interrogating whether mankind is anything "more" than animal after all. Most often, animal imagery appears in the form of savage or carnivorous beasts, usually associated with Goneril...

A tragic hero moves the reader to pity,since his misfortune is greater than he deserves,and also creates fear,since his tragedy might easily befall one of us.To what extent does Lear fit the definition of a tragic hero?

Check this out:

http://bailieborocslibrary.weebly.com/blog/lear-develops-more-as-a-tragic-hero-than-gloucester-discuss

Edmund's "Up With Bastards" soliloquy in King Lear

The repetition makes Edmund sound harsh and angry.

Study Guide for King Lear

King Lear study guide contains a biography of William Shakespeare, literature essays, a complete e-text, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About King Lear
• King Lear Summary
• King Lear Video
• Character List

Essays for King Lear

King Lear literature essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of King Lear.

• The Heroines of Crime and Punishment, King Lear, and To the Lighthouse
• Folly of the Fool
• Sight and Consciousness: An Interpretive Study in King Lear
• An Examination of the Inverse Tropes of Sight and Blindness in King Lear
• Gender, Power, and Economics in King Lear

Lesson Plan for King Lear

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to King Lear
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• King Lear Bibliography

E-Text of King Lear

King Lear E-Text contains the full text of King Lear

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Wikipedia Entries for King Lear

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King Lear: Essay Questions and Sample Essay

Subject: English

Age range: 16+

Resource type: Other

Last updated

9 August 2021

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Shakespeare’s tragedy about madness and family is an established favourite for senior students. Ten senior-level essay questions offer a choice of arguments about character, theme, language, and context, and a sample essay responds to the question:

King Lear is enduringly relevant because it shows us that when we suffer from distorted perception we need others’ care, not their exploitation.

Does this satisfactorily explain the relevance of the play?

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Aspects of tragedy: sample question commentary

This resource explains how a question taken from the sample assessment material addresses the assessment objectives, with some suggestions of how the task might be approached. This explanation is not intended to be an exhaustive list of every point that could be made but the explanation will provide a workable way into the question and the intention is to offer some support for teachers preparing students for the exam.

Paper 1A, Section A

This type of question from Section A of Paper 1: Aspects of tragedy invites students to write about the significance of an extract from Othello or King Lear. One hour is recommended for this question. This is a Closed Book paper and so students will need to know their texts well and be able to refer to them in the examination.

Sample Question

Read the extract below and then answer the question.

Explore the significance of this extract in relation to the tragedy of the play as a whole.

Remember to include in your answer relevant analysis of Shakespeare's dramatic methods.

How the question meets the Assessment Objectives

In this question, as throughout the paper, the assessment objectives are all assessed. The key words and phrases in the question are: explore, significance, tragedy of the play as a whole, analysis and dramatic methods, and these are clearly connected to the assessment objectives. The key word here is 'significance' as it is an invitation to students to target AO2 , 3 , 4 and AO5 , to show what is signified in terms of contexts and interpretations and how those meanings are shaped. AO2 is also set up in the reminder to students to include relevant analysis of Shakespeare's dramatic methods to show how the methods open up meanings about tragedy. AO3 will be addressed through the ways the students show their understanding of both the dramatic and tragic contexts of King Lear, and in the way they will elicit from the extract contextual ideas about when the text was written and how it has been and is received. AO4 will be hit as students will be connecting with the concepts of the tragic genre (and therefore other texts) through the 'aspects' which they are exploring. AO5 will be addressed when students grapple with meanings that arise about tragedy in the extract and in relation to the whole play.   AO1 will be tested though the ways the students organise their writing and express their ideas as they are exploring significance and analysing dramatic methods.

Possible content

It may be helpful for students to begin by briefly establishing an overview of the passage and identifying where it occurs within the play. For example: 'At this stage of the play, Lear has journeyed to Regan and Cornwall's castle, after his acrimonious argument with Goneril. Regan has received news of this from Oswald, and has decided not to be at home when Lear arrives. Kent has been stocked by Regan and Cornwall partly as a snub to Lear. The fool has tried to warn Lear that Regan will be as like Goneril 'as a crab's like an apple'.

The possible content of the mark scheme provides some ideas that students might write about. However, there are clearly many others and if students are reading their texts through the lens of tragedy they will be able to identify many ideas themselves.

Students might explore the following aspects of tragedy:

• Lear's tragic stature
• his loss of control and restraint
• the representations of goodness on stage
• Lear's pride and outrage
• Lear's realisation that Regan and Cornwall have disrespected him in stocking his messenger
• the gloomy castle setting
• the visual sight of Kent in the stocks to show Lear's entrapment
• Lear's anger – his fatal flaw perhaps
• the Fool's cryptic commentary on Lear's decline
• the description of the behaviour of Regan, Cornwall and Goneril which places them as tragic villains
• the references to cruelty and unkindness
• the mention of Lear's future madness
• the Fool's jokes and song which heighten the tragic atmosphere.

Any of these ideas can be linked with other parts of the play, for example Lear's anger here might be connected with his anger in the banishing and disinheriting of Cordelia or of his grotesque curse of Goneril; the Fool's warning shots (a sign of his love for Lear) might be linked with his later attempts to save Lear from madness and his decision to tarry with him on the heath despite the violence of the storm

Significance

Students might develop any of the points mentioned above and suggest what meanings arise from the ideas they select. Comment might be on

• the tragic decline of Lear
• Lear's uncontrollable anger and how this can be interpreted
• the loyalty of Kent and the Fool and views about this
• the 17th-century contextual significance of the Fool to the court
• Lear's inadequacy
• how Lear elicits audience sympathy – or otherwise
• the significance of the location to the tragedy
• the significance of being a host in the 17th-century in relation to the tragedy
• the significance of the family relationships to the tragedy
• 'unkindness' – and the implications of this concept in the 17th-century and to the tragedy
• the treatment of old people from both a 17th-century and a 21st-century perspective
• notions of punishment in the 17th-century and how the stocking of Kent could be viewed now
• Kent as a tragic figure in his own right, his representing honesty (having more man than wit about him), his endorsing the play's pessimism etc

Dramatic methods

Any comment on dramatic method needs to be connected to the task about tragedy.

Students might explore the following dramatic methods:

• setting of the dark location outside the castle
• visual effect of Kent in the stocks and Lear and the Fool's reaction perhaps signifying Lear's entrapment
• irony of first words from Lear, given that the audience know how deliberate Regan's departure has been
• Kent's elevated salutation 'Hail to thee noble master' shows his respect and loyalty to Lear
• the Fool's comic insult reflecting the foolishness of Kent's earlier behaviour when he got himself stocked
• the use of stichomythia showing Kent's determination to tell the truth in comparison to Lear's denial
• the use of emotive language in Kent's long speech reflects his outrage at the treatment of Lear by Regan and Cornwall ('reeking post', Stew'd in his haste', 'poisoned', 'coward cries')
• the matter-of-factness of Kent's listing of the events that led to his being stocked reflects his plainness to which his honour is bound
• the Fool's cryptic lines which foreshadow later events
• the Fool's jokes and songs which heighten the tragic atmosphere, etc.

Students will also have to understand how to use their knowledge to relate to other parts of the play given that this is a Closed Book exam. Although it should be possible to refer to specific parts of the wider tragedy of King Lear and to quote, some comments might be more generalised.

This resource is part of the Aspects of tragedy resource package .

Document URL https://www.aqa.org.uk/resources/english/as-and-a-level/english-literature-b/teach/sample-question-commentary-paper-1a-section-a-king-lear

Last updated 16 Dec 2022

The problem of artistic consummation, being the problem of magnitude in the highest degree, is imperiled by its own scope, but fortunately there is a part of King Lear that by assent is its most tragic region, the region where suffering takes on such dimension that even Shakespeare could find no better word than “madness” to contain it. Furthermore, since the madness of Lear is almost entirely Shakespeare’s invention 2 and is crucial in the transformation of the many stories of King Lear into the only Tragedie of King Lear , it brings us face to face with both the tragic art and the tragic artist. Now, to speak of a consummate poetic accomplishment is to imply that the kind of criticism which views all a writer’s problems as unique has overlooked a part of the whole of truth. For, to speak of an artistic attainment as possessing magnitude in the highest degree is to imply the existence of attainments somewhat analogous and in this and that common respect somewhat inferior; it implies either this or the existence of a critic who has some a priori conception of a poem more wonderful than any yet written, in which case the critic should change to a more wonderful profession and contribute its culminating splendor. For us at least, it is certainly easier and wiser to say that every writer in each particular act of composing faces problems that have various levels of universality, and, if this were not so, we could not recognize any uniqueness in his achievement; the chances are we could not even recognize what he had written. In only certain senses, then, does Shakespeare forever elude us and refuse to “abide our question,” for, if there are general problems confronting every writer, we should be able to ask questions that Shakespeare of all men made no attempt to elude.

At a high level of universality, to write anything well, whether it be intellectual or imaginative, is to assume at least two obligations: to be intelligible and to be interesting . Intelligibility, too, has its levels of obligation, on the lowest of individual statements, and even on this level the obligation is never easy to fulfill and perhaps even to genius could be a nightmare if what the genius sought to represent was “madness.” Only to a limited degree, however, can individual statements be intelligible—and in many instances and for a variety of reasons the individual statements are meant to be obscure, as in “mad” speeches. Since full intelligibility depends upon the relations of individual statement to individual statement, the concept of intelligibility, fully expanded, includes order and completeness ; for a fully intelligible exposition or poem having relations has parts, and all the parts ought to be there and add up to a whole. The second major obligation, that of being “interesting,” includes unexpectedness and suspense , for expository as well as imaginative writing should not be merely what the reader expected it would be—or why should it be written or read?—and the unexpected should not be immediately and totally announced (in other words, expository and imaginative writing should have suspense), for, if the whole is immediately known, why should the writer or reader proceed farther?

But the accomplished writer gives his selected material more than shape—he gives it proper size . For a piece of writing to have its proper size is an excellent thing, or otherwise it would be lacking in intelligibility or interest or both. Thus, if Lear’s anger had been transformed into madness in a single scene, all the odds are that such a transformation would seem beyond belief, and it is just as certain that the play would have died in the memory of men for want of suspense. On the other hand, the madness of Lear could have been drawn at such length that the spectator, like Kent, could not continue to view the suffering or, worse still, until the spectator began to suspect an author was manipulating suffering for suspense—and in either case the spectator would feel that he had seen too much. Moreover, the size of any literary particle is not a matter of quantity only. Every art has ways of making a thing seem bigger or smaller than the space it occupies, as Cordelia is more wonderful by far than the number of lines she utters and is even tragically present when she is tragically absent, and as Lear becomes more gigantic when he can utter only a few lines or broken lines or none at all.

We have come close to the special realm of imaginative or poetic writing, with its special obligations, two of which we shall refer to as vividness and probability . As poetic writing is the representing or “making” of human experience, so the poet is the writer who possesses the powers and devices that transfer “life” from flesh to words. These possessions of a poet are not merely a knowledge of “life”; Machiavelli knew much about successful and unsuccessful rulers and wrote The Prince , and analysts know much about madness and come no closer to King Lear than case reports. Shakespeare “made” many rulers, successful and otherwise, and one he “made” mad. In so far, then, as a poem possesses “life,” it has vividness . A poem, however, makes not “life” only but a “world.” Hence any of its parts, when related to the others, must seem probable . Not any living being may enter Lear , and the few who may are severely limited in freedom of thought, speech, and action. What may happen in a poem must be compatible with the general conditions of “existence” as postulated by the poem; and what actually does happen and the order in which it happens must appear as adequately caused by the constitution of the individual characters and by the circumstances in which they are placed. The same legendary figure may enter two worlds and in the early Elizabethan play may spell his name “Leir” and survive his misfortunes, but, having ventured upon the thick rotundity of Shakespeare’s world, he cannot be saved, and certainly not by the alteration of any neoclassical poet.

In certain ultimate senses the world that is each poem is bound together so that it binds the hearts of those who look upon it, of whom the poet is one. To look upon a poem, then, as distinct from looking upon much of the succession of life, is to be moved, and moved by emotions that, on the whole, attract us to it and are psychologically compatible. All of us, therefore, seem to be asking for less than we expect when we ask that poems have emotional unity ; but this is so commonly the language of the request that we shall assume it means what we expect it does—that the emotions aroused by any good poem should be psychologically compatible and also of a kind out of which attachments are formed. We may ask for many other things from poems—biographical information, or political or theological wisdom—but, in making any of these further requests, we should recognize that we are asking for what only certain good poems give, and then generally not so well as something else. What is here taken as ultimate in poetry is what is true of all good poems: they give a high order of distinctive pleasures, and it may be said summarily of high and distinctive pleasures that no man seems in danger of exceeding his allotment.

In a way a poet is untroubled about all this—about writing or writing poetry, for these are abstractions that cannot be engaged in, and he is trying to find the first or next word, and after “thick rotundity” he listens to “of” and is troubled, and then hears “o’ ” and so moves on to other troubles, leaving behind him “the thick rotundity o’ th’ world.” In a way, then, even in a long life a poet never writes poetry—just a few poems; and in this sense a poet’s problems do not begin until he closes in upon a piece of paper with something less abstract in mind than writing or writing poetry. He may wish, as many lyric poets have wished, to write a drama or a novel, but the story is so distinct from the lyric that few poets, despite a tendency of poets to be expansive in their ambitions, have been eminent in both poetic arts. Shelley and Keats had a maximum of aspiration but hardly a minimum of gift for plot and character, and even Browning, with his surpassing delineation of men and women in dramatic monologue, could not make anything happen in a drama. Coming closer to the paper on which King Lear was written, we also know that to have the characters tell their own story on a stage raises problems very distinct from those required for putting the story between the covers of a novel. It may seem that the distinction between manners of presenting a story is largely classificatory; yet stories are so locked artistically to those selected to tell them that great novels seldom remain great when they are strutted upon the stage, and vice versa. Particular manners of presentation are particular artistic problems, and particular artistic gifts are needed to solve these problems, and, if not, who are those who are both great novelists and great dramatists? And, more particular still, who among dramatists wrote both great comedies and great tragedies, although tragedy is only drama that moves certain emotions in us? Yet these two dramatic arts are so distinctive that Shakespeare is the single answer to the question of what dramatist eminently possessed both the tragic power and the power of moving to laughter. Even more specialized, personal, and unique are the problems to be focused on in this study—what confronted Shakespeare and Lear, who stood outside when a storm arose and a daughter ordered a door shut. Mind you, before this particular moment Lear had been a successful king and Shakespeare had written great tragedies, but neither had ventured far into madness.

This was a lonely moment in art; yet the moment that is the poet’s moment is not his alone, and his problems that seem highly unique would not even occur if he were not concerned, however secretly and for whatever reasons, in loading each particular vein with what can generally be recognized as ore. It is true that he would have no poetic problems at all if each particular moment of art did not have to enter the general world of art, for unattended self-expression is another occupation, altogether lonely.

We propose to follow Lear and Shakespeare across the heath to the fields of Dover on what for both was a unique experience, and then to be even more particular, considering the individual scenes leading to this meeting of Lear and Gloucester when in opposite senses neither could see. And, for smaller particulars, we shall consider an incident from one of these scenes, a speech from this incident, and, finally, a single word. In this declension of particulars, our problems will be some of those that were Shakespeare’s because he was attending Lear and at the same time was on his way toward a consummation in the art of tragic writing.

At the end of Act II night has come, an external storm threatens, and an external door is shut; in Act IV, scene 6, Lear, “fantastically dressed with weeds,” meets Gloucester and Edgar upon the tranquil fields of Dover, the tempest now a tempest of the mind and at its worst. To view this large expanse of suffering as a single dramatic unit is also to see that, in the form of organic life called a poem, “parts” are “parts” and in certain senses “wholes.” By the end of Act II the major external causes of Lear’s madness have occurred; by Act IV, scene 6, they have brought Lear to “the sulphurous pit” and unrestrained madness, from which, even in the next scene, he is somewhat “restored.” For a variety of reasons we shall state the unity of this dramatic episode in terms of a change that it brings about in Lear’s thoughts and beliefs concerning man, the universe, and the gods, a change in thought that is both a cause and a projection of his madness.

Prior to this episode (and presumably always before it), Lear believed in a universe controlled by divine authority, harmoniously ordered and subordinated in its parts, a harmony reflected in the affairs of men by the presence of political and legal institutions, and social and family bonds. Men were the most divinely empowered of divine creations, and the special power of kings was a sign of their special divinity. At the end of this episode (Act IV, scene 6), the world that Lear tells Gloucester he should be able to see even without eyes is one in which man is leveled to a beast and then raised to the most fearful of his kind: the source of man’s power, as with the beast’s, is sex and self, but above the girdle which the gods inherit is the special gift of reason; only it is a kind of sadistic ingenuity by which man sanctifies his own sins—the universally inevitable sins of sex and self—by declaring them anathema for others (“Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand! / Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thine own back”). Therefore, as king, Lear dismisses the phantom of the adulterer arraigned before him, because, all offending, “none does offend, none—I say none!”

The moment we imagine Shakespeare’s pen in our hand and Act III unwritten, we begin to sense the immensity of the problem that arises merely from the first general requirement of all good writing, intelligibility. For the problem is to make clear that the mind of Lear progressively loses its clarity and comes at last to a moment everyone will recognize as “the worst” and be willing to take as “madness.” Analogically, what is needed are recognizable circles of the inferno descending to the pit and ways of knowing when the pit has been reached. To present a character becoming more and more disintegrated emotionally, therefore, is fundamental but not enough, since emotions under pressure lack outline and precision, with the result that the best of lyric poets know their task is to find “objective correlatives” for what otherwise would remain in prison or confusion. In the next section, dealing with the scenes leading to Lear’s madness, we shall see how Shakespeare uses actions, which are more discernible than emotions, to mark the descent into the pit; here we are concerned with the fact that Shakespeare added “thought” to action and emotion, and “thought” in many ways is more precise than either of the other two. In solving this problem of intelligibility, then, Shakespeare was “abundant,” utilizing the maximum of means, and one way we have of knowing at what circle Lear is stationed for the moment is to learn what Lear for the moment believes is the nature of men, beasts, and gods.

When intelligibility was first discussed, it was expanded to include the concepts of “order” and “completeness.” Order, being a matter involving all the parts, is a matter for later consideration, but we may already observe that the change in Lear’s thought during this large episode is a complete change. Lear does not have merely different thoughts about the nature of the universe and of those who crawl upon it; the beliefs he has about the universe at the end of Act II are philosophically opposite to those he expresses upon the fields of Dover, and a complete change is one that goes as far as it can. Thus, because the change in Lear’s thought is so bitterly complete, we recognize the pit when Lear has reached it. Shakespeare also took care that we should know where Lear started. Lear’s last speech in Act II is the first one he gives in which thought of a general nature is directly expressed; it is appropriate to his character and the accumulated situation that at this moment he should say man is not man without some gorgeous possessions not needed to keep his body warm, and the speech is also a location point before the heath by means of which we can more easily see what a falling-off there was.

Ultimately, however, it is only of secondary importance that Lear’s thoughts clarify our understanding; they lack the power of poetry if they are not moving. Let us begin less intensely, and therefore with the second requirement of all good writing, to be interesting, for, if we are not interested, we surely will not go farther and be moved. Until his last speech in Act II, Lear’s thoughts have all been particular and have been concentrated upon the indivdual natures of his daughters and their husbands. This is appropriate to the circumstances and Lear’s character, which is driven rather than given to philosophical speculation; yet, partly as a result, Lear is a character, even by the end of Act II, with whom we have only slight bonds of identification; he is an old man over eighty years, who, so late as this, is in the process of discovering that two of his daughters are nonhuman and that the one who could say “nothing” was alone worthy of all his love. In contrast to Hamlet and Othello , King Lear is a tragedy in the course of which the protagonist becomes worthy of being a tragic hero, and one dimension that Lear takes on is the power of thought. Moreover, his thoughts upon the heath and upon the fields of Dover are of universal significance and therefore “interest” us, for the question of whether the universe is something like what Lear hoped it was or very close to what he feared it was, is still, tragically, the current question.

Earlier we said that material of general, human interest could be handled by an artist in such a way as to take on an added interest—the interest of the unexpected or surprising. It is surprising in life or in literature for a serious man to reverse his philosophical beliefs about the common human problems, but Lear’s change in thought is dramatically as well as philosophically unexpected, for the beliefs that have become the protagonist’s by Act IV, scene 6, are his antagonists’—Goneril’s, Regan’s, and Edmund’s—who also hold that sex and self are the sole laws of life. Lear has indeed “veered around to the opposite”; it is as if the tortured came to have the same opinion of the rack as the inquisitors.

There is, finally, the contribution that this change makes to the special emotional effects produced by tragedy. Now the tragic writer is also upon the rack, pulled always two different ways, for the deep emotions he stirs he also alleviates. A certain alleviation of fear and pity is necessary to make the emotional effect of tragedy one that we are consumed rather than repelled by; and proper tragic alleviation excludes any supposed consolation that might come from the avoidance of disastrous consequences after we have been asked to suffer emotions such as are aroused by clear premonition of disaster.

By the time that we and Edgar are confronted with the “side-piercing sight ” upon the field of Dover, the grounds are many for fearing that Lear and all that is admirable are condemned by some hopelessly formidable perversity of power ultimately beyond challenge. Othello’s fate was his own—at least many of us could have escaped it; but Lear’s tragedy comes to a point where it threatens what we should wish to be with inevitable inclusion. As a very minimum, we know suffering such as the sufferer can account for only by believing the worst that can be thought of everything, including himself. The minimum, therefore, has some kind of maximum of fear and pity—we are almost certain that such suffering will leave him without the power to better his fortune and without the mental resources needed to gain a clear picture of what is the truth, if this is not it. And, indeed, in the end Lear is deprived of Othello’s modicum of consolation—that of seeing the situation as it was—for he is not even permitted to believe that he and Cordelia can be God’s spies (pitiful, imprisoned spectators of a conspiratorial universe), since in the same scene the role of a nonparticipant in the universe proves to be nonexistent, Cordelia is murdered, and the mind and body of Lear are asked to suffer no further vexation.

We perhaps do not think sufficiently of the other task of the poet who makes intense emotions—the task of constantly taking away something from them lest they become intolerable or change to some other emotions not intended or desirable, just as the unrestrained grief of Laertes at the grave of Ophelia produced contempt and indignation and not compassion in the heart of Hamlet. Our fear and pity for Lear are both magnified and mitigated. These terrifying thoughts are held by him when he is mad, and their validity is further denied by all those in the play who are intelligent, loving, and somewhat disengaged—their complete validity is called into question by even the existence of people such as Kent, Edgar, and Albany. In addition, the action is arranged from beginning to end (that is, from the beginning of Act III to Act IV,scene 6) in such ways that fear does not become horror, or pity some kind of excruciating anguish. In the first scene in Act III, before we see Lear on the heath we are given subdued assurance that friends are organizing to rescue him and the kingdom. This scene can be criticized for its execution, because it is a scene merely of talk between Kent and a Gentleman, whose talk is obviously directed to us as much as to themselves, but the intention to save us from horror is right. Moreover, throughout the scenes leading to Lear’s madness there are continuing preparations to remove him to Cordelia, and, oppositely, the intervening actions of the antagonists do not make their complete success probable, for Cornwall is killed, Albany becomes disillusioned, and jealousy turns Goneril and Regan upon themselves. And, finally, although scene 6 is constructed to magnify our fear and pity by confronting us with both Gloucester and Lear and their combined anguish, it is also designed to alleviate our suffering and serves as a superlative example of the paradoxical task of the tragic artist. The thoughts to be expressed by Lear upon the fields were Gloucester’s as he approached the cliffs of Dover (“As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods. / They kill us for their sport”), but Gloucester has been purged of these thoughts just prior to Lear’s expression of them, and, since Lear and Gloucester have been made parallel in so many ways, one might assume that Shakespeare had constructed this scene to assure the beholder that the beliefs he is about to hear from Lear are not the final beliefs of either. We must recognize, however, that a certain number of critics read King Lear in such a way that Gloucester’s lines are taken as a condensation of Gloucester’s and Lear’s and Shakespeare’s ultimate “philosophy,” although this seems to me to be an interpretation of another book, possibly one written by Hardy. Surely, though, by the end of the scene, if our feelings and the creator do not deceive us, the world is such as to make a man a man of salt—but for purposes more magnificent than the laying of autumn’s dust.

So far our view of King Lear has been both panoramic and confined. In looking upon the large expanse of lines from the end of Act II to Act IV, scene 6, we have confined ourselves to the reversal in Lear’s thoughts and feelings that occurs therein and makes it a single, though large, tragic episode. Lear and Shakespeare had conceptions of the tragic that mark them as men who saw “feelingly,” but, as a dramatist, Shakespeare had his own set of dismaying problems—the dramatic problems of objectifying tragic thoughts and feelings into commensurate actions and then of dividing and arranging these actions into parts which would be themselves little tragedies and yet stations on the way to some more ultimate suffering. In making these problems ours, we become more particular and yet, in certain ways, closer to the general qualities of great writing which, in order to have a name, must also have a local habitation.

Many a tragic drama has itself met a tragic ending for lack of drama, and the odds increase that this will be the case when the tragedy in some central way involves internal changes, changes in thoughts and states of mind. Byron, too, wished to depict a soul in torment, and he produced Manfred , but, despite the subtitle, “A Dramatic Poem,” it is largely a series of soliloquies addressed to the Alps in inclement weather. Drama is movement, and, in the four scenes depicting the increasing tempest in Lear’s mind, the stage is also in flux—the actors on it move naturally and interestingly, and other characters enter mysteriously and leave on secret missions. Moreover, these actions are designed not merely to keep the stage from becoming static while everything else is dynamic; they are in a higher sense dramatic actions, actions involving an agon, “objective correlatives” to the conflict in Lear’s mind. Lear challenges the storm; he arraigns his daughters before a justice so perverted that it is represented by the Fool and Edgar disguised as a madman; he imagines impotently that he is raising an avenging army and is distracted by a mouse; and he assumes he is judging a culprit guilty of adultery and finds no sin because he finds the sin universal. Such are the inventions of a dramatic poet, and by them he makes the passage of Lear’s tortured soul intelligible, probable, and tragically moving. Scholars are still in search of the exact meaning of certain speeches in each of Shakespeare’s great tragedies—and we should like to assume that those who saw these plays for the first time did not have perfect understanding of all of the lines—but so great was Shakespeare’s power to conceive of action from which thought and feeling can be readily inferred that all of us know Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth more intimately than we know many men whose remarks we understand perfectly.

Yet a master of tragic drama would also sense that, in scenes depicting a great change in thought and state of mind, action should be kept to a certain minimum, lest too much outer clangor obscure the inner vibrations and tragedy pass over into melodrama. He would sense, too, that language suggesting madness, if sufficiently understood, would put tremendous demands upon our powers of concentration. Three scenes lead to the madness of Lear and are alternated with three leading to the blinding of Gloucester. Unlike the “internal” Lear scenes, the other three are action cut to the bone; and unlike the clogged language of Lear, the Fool, and Poor Tom, the speech of the conspiracy is lean, bare, and cruel. Removing us momentarily from Lear, these scenes relieve both our understandings and our feelings, but tragic “relief” quickly becomes tragic illusion, when the master-touch is upon it. We turn our eyes away from an old man seeking in suffering to discover the final cause of suffering, only to have it dawn on us that we have turned to a horrible replica of the action that was the immediate cause of this suffering, another old man tortured by his offspring and by Lear’s as well. Suffering, then, as it works out its lonely and final course upon the heath, is combined with action such as initiated it. Moreover, in another way the two tragedies are one—Gloucester’s attempts to rescue Lear from his suffering are the immediate cause of bringing on his own. Thus the interplay of these two tragedies gives to both more than either singly possesses of intelligibility, suspense, probability, and tragic concern.

But, although Gloucester’s tragedy is also Lear’s, our concentration is upon those scenes in which Lear goes mad and which collectively make intelligible the scene upon the fields of Dover, where his madness is complete. It is not enough, therefore, that action in these scenes is kept at a certain minimum and within this guarded minimum is maximal, or that the action also is dramatic, involving conflict. It has also to be action everywhere suggesting “madness,” and, secondly, it has to be arranged in such a way as to lead Lear to “madness.” Let us consider first the materials and then the order out of which such disorder is made.

Certainly, Shakespeare’s choice was right in introducing no totally new material in these scenes that center in the depth of Lear’s mind; they are made out of materials already in the play—Lear’s Fool, Edgar who previously had decided to disguise himself as a madman, and the storm. Distraction that is great and is not the general confusion of a battle but centered and ultimately internal is rightly made out of a certain minimum of material that can be assimilated and out of material already somewhat assimilated. Moreover, such a reduction of material not only helps our understanding at a moment in literature when it stands most in need of help; actually, art attains the maximum of unexpectedness out of restricted sources (as a good mystery story limits the number of possible murderers) and out of material already introduced and about which we have expectations (as the best mystery stories are not solved by material that has been kept from us by the detective and the writer until the end). While on the heath, Lear might have been attacked by a gang of robbers and, in culminating suffering, have thought this some symbolic act, signifying that all men are beasts of prey; surely, it is much more surprising that it is the legitimate son of Gloucester, counterpart of Cordelia, who makes him think this.

Out of a proper economy of material, then, a maximum of madness is made, and everyone who has read King Lear has sensed that the heath scenes are composed of complex variations upon the theme of madness—a noble man going mad, accompanied by a character professionally not “normal,” meeting a character whose life depends upon his appearing mad, amid a storm such as makes everyone believe that the universe and even the gods are not stable. We add that Kent, too, is present in these scenes and that a point constantly calm is useful in the art of making madness.

The musical analogy of a theme with variations must be used only up to a certain point and then dropped lest it stop us, as it has stopped some others, from going farther and seeing that these scenes are a part of a great poem and that in this part a noble man goes mad, which is something more than orchestration, although orchestration has its purposes. Ultimately, we are confronted with a poetical event; and the storm, the Fool, and Poor Tom are not only variations on madness but happenings on the way which collectively constitute the event. That is, the setting and two characters, all previously somewhat external to Lear, successively become objects of his thought, and then become himself transubstantiated. The storm becomes the tempest in his mind; the Fool becomes all wretches who can feel, of whom Lear is one, although before he had not recognized any such wide identity; and then a worse wretch appears, seemingly mad, protected against the universe by a blanket, scarred by his own wounds, and concentrating upon his own vermin. He is “the thing itself,” a “forked animal,” with whom Lear identifies his own substance by tearing off his clothes, which are now misleading. We know Lear, then, by Lear’s other substances, which are dramatically visible.

There is another substance present with Lear, for the madness that comes upon him is more terrible than the madness that translates everything into the ego; in the mind of Lear, when his madness is complete, all substances—the universe, man, and Lear himself—have been translated into the substance of his daughters, and perhaps something like this is what is technically meant by a “fixation.” Although actually never appearing, Lear’s daughters are the central characters in the inverted and internal pilgrim’s progress that occurs upon the heath, and ultimately we know the stage of Lear’s progress by his daughters’ presence. In the first appearance of Lear upon the heath (Act III, scene 2) the daughters are already identified with the storm and the underlying powers of the universe, and Lear dares to defy them and to confront the universe, even though he now sees what he began to see at the end of Act II, that the ultimate powers may be not moral but in alliance with his daughters. Either possibility, however, he can face with defiance: in his first great speech to the storm, he calls upon it, as he had called upon the universe before, to act as a moral agent to exterminate even the molds of ingratitude; his second speech is one of moral out rage (“O! O! ’tis foul!”) against universal forces that may have joined “two pernicious daughters” in a conspiracy against his head. In the beginning of his next scene (scene 4), he has still the power of defiance, but it is only the storm as a storm that he can confront; he knows that he no longer dares to think of his daughters, for “that way madness lies.” Almost at that moment Poor Tom emerges from the hovel, and with him in Lear’s mind another substance (“Hast thou given all to thy two daughters, and art thou come to this?”). The shattering of the resolution not to think on this substance leads Lear down the predicted way, and first to a complete identification with a mad beggar; then his mind, rapidly disintegrating, leaves equality behind and, in deferential hallucination, transforms the mad beggar into a philosopher of whom he asks the ancient philosophical question, “What is the cause of thunder?” At the end of this scene, then, Lear’s thoughts return to the storm, but it is no longer a storm that he might possibly endure. By many signs Lear’s final scene in Act III is the final scene on Lear’s way to madness. Poor Tom places Lear’s mind in the underworld with his opening speech : “Frateretto calls me, and tells me Nero is an angler in the lake of darkness. Pray, innocent, and beware the foul fiend.” With this speech, Lear’s thoughts literally enter the pit, and here he finds the forbidden women. What he knew at the opening of the earlier scene that he must avoid now becomes his total occupation, and the mind now revels in what the mind once knew it could not endure. Elaborately and in elation Lear arraigns his daughters upon the shores of the lake of darkness, 3 and, just before drawing the curtain, he asks the final philosophical question, “Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?”

It is later, properly much later, when we see Lear again, since by then he has found in madness an answer to the questions that led him there. Then, looming upon his mind, is a universe the basic substance of which is female:

Down from the waist they are Centaurs, Though women all above. But to the girdle do the gods inherit, Beneath is all the fiend’s [Act IV, scene 6, II. 126-29]. 4

In the opening of this section we promised to say something about these scenes as being tragic wholes as well as parts of a fearful and pitiful event, and already a good deal has been said indirectly about their separate natures. But their natures are not only separate; they are tragic, each one arousing and then to a degree purging the emotions of fear and pity. In the first of these scenes, our immediate fear and pity for Lear as we see him trying to outface the elements are intensified by his second address to the storm in which he realizes that the universe may be allied with his daughters “‘gainst a head / So old and white as this!” But, shortly, Kent enters, and that makes things somewhat better; then Lear has an insight into the nature of his own sins, and although his sins are pitifully small by comparison, still self-awareness of sin is a good no matter the degree or the consequences—and it is a good to Lear, purging his feelings so that at the end of this little tragedy he turns to the Fool in new tenderness and in a new role, for the first time considering someone else’s feelings before his own (“How dost, my boy? Art cold? / I am cold myself”). And such, in a general way, is the emotional movement of the other two scenes in which Lear appears in Act III—they begin with Lear alarmingly agitated; the agitation mounts (with the appearance of Poor Tom or with the prospect of arraigning his daughters in hell); but in the enactment of the enormous moment he (and we) get some kind of emotional release for which undoubtedly there is some clinical term, not, however, known to me or to the Elizabethans or to most people who have felt that at the end of each of these scenes both they and Lear have been given mercifully an instant not untouched with serenity on the progress to chaos. “Draw the curtains. So, so, so.”

There are many tragedies of considerable magnitude the effects of which, however, are almost solely macrocosmic. The greatest of tragic writers built his macrocosms out of tragedy upon tragedy upon tragedy.

The third time that we shall consider Lear upon the heath will be the last, for the full art of tragedy has three dimensions, like anything with depth. The tragedy with depth is compounded out of a profound conception of what is tragic and out of action tragically bent, with characters commensurate to the concept and the act—and, finally, it is composed out of writing. The maximal statement of an art always makes it easier to see how many lesser artists there are and why; and thus the author of The American Tragedy could not write—a failing not uncommon among authors—and the author of Manfred , although a very great writer in many ways, was so concentrated upon his personal difficulties that he could form no clear and large conception of the tragic, and his tragic action is almost no action at all.

In addition to the remaining problem of writing, one of the general criteria introduced early in this essay has not yet been dealt with directly—vividness, or the powers and devices that make a literary moment “come to life.” For a consideration of both, we need units smaller even than scenes, and so we turn to what may be regarded as a small “incident” in one of the scenes and, finally, to a speech from this incident and a single word from the speech. It is easy to understand why the moments of a drama usually singled out for discussion are those that are obviously important and splendid with a kind of splendor that gives them an existence separate from their dramatic context, like passages of Longinian sublimity; but this study is so committed to the tragic drama that it will forego the sublime—although few dramas offer more examples of it and concentrate, instead, upon an incident and a speech, the importance and splendor of which appear largely as one sees a tragic drama unfold about them.

On a technical level, this incident is a unit because it is a piece of dramatic business—in these lines, Shakespeare is engaged in the business of introducing a character:

KENT: Good my lord, enter here. LEAR: Prithee go in thyself; seek thine own ease. This tempest will not give me leave to ponder On things would hurt me more. But I’ll go in. [ To the Fool ] In, boy; go first.—You houseless poverty— Nay, get thee in. I’ll pray, and then I’ll sleep. Exit [ Fool ] Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp; Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayst shake the superflux to them And show the heavens more just. EDG.:[ within ] Fathom and half, fathom and half! Poor Tom! Enter Fool [ from the hovel ] FOOL: Come not in here, nuncle, here’s a spirit. Help me, help me! KENT: Give me thy hand. Who’s there? FOOL: A spirit, a spirit! He says his name’s poor Tom. KENT:What art thou that dost grumble there i’ th’ straw? Come forth. Enter Edgar [ disguised as a madman ] EDG.: Away! the foul fiend follows me! Through the sharp hawthorn blows the cold wind. Humh! go to thy cold bed, and warm thee. LEAR: Hast thou given all to thy two daughters, and art thou come to this? EDG.: Who gives anything to poor Tom? whom the foul fiend hath led through fire and through flame, through ford and whirlpool, o’er bog and quagmire; that hath laid knives under his pillow and halters in his pew, set ratsbane by his porridge, made him proud of heart, to ride on a bay trotting horse over four-inch’d bridges, to curse his own shadow for a traitor. Bless thy five wits! Tom’s acold. O, do de, do de, do de. Bless thee from whirlwinds, star-blasting, and taking! Do poor Tom some charity, whom the foul fiend vexes. There could I have him now—and there—and there again and there! [ Storm still (Act III, scene 4, ll. 22-64)].

Now, the business of introducing a character can be transacted quickly in brackets—[ Enter Edgar, disguised as a madman ]—and when the character is some straggler in the play or not so much a character as some expository information, like a messenger, then the introduction properly can be cursory. But in the drama of Lear’s madness, Poor Tom becomes “the thing itself,” and the mere size of his introduction is a preparation for his importance. And artistic size, as we said earlier, has qualitative as well as quantitative aspects.

From the time Poor Tom first speaks until the end of this passage, his name is given five times, and it is given the first time he speaks. Yet a complete introduction does more than fasten on a name, especially if the person is distinctive and we should be warned about him. Three times before Poor Tom appears, he is said to be a “spirit,” and after he appears he says three times that “the foul fiend” is pursuing him, so that, leaving out for the moment his confirmatory actions and speeches, we surely ought to be forewarned by his introduction that he is “mad.” It is not always needful to be so elaborate and repetitive, even when introducing a character of importance, but when, in addition, the moment of introduction is tense emotionally and the character is abnormal, we are grateful, even in life, to have the name repeated. Or, if confirmation is sought from literature, we may turn to the opening of the first scene of Hamlet and note how many times in the excitement the names of Bernardo, Marcellus, and Horatio are called back and forth and how often the ghost is referred to before he appears. This introduction, then, has one of the qualities of all good writing, intelligibility, and in circumstances not favorable to understanding.

Moreover, this is an introduction achieving a maximum of unexpectedness and suspense, effects desirable in themselves as well as qualitative signs that the character being introduced is dramatically important. The king is about to escape from the storm into the hovel, but, before doing so, he turns to the heavens with a prayer in behalf of all “poor naked wretches.” Nor from above but from within the hovel a supernatural voice cries out, “Fathom and half!” If a lesser pen had turned Poor Tom loose upon the stage at this moment with no further identification, we would have been dismayed, and, furthermore, the suspense latent in the unexpected would not have been realized. When he does come forth, we have identified and awaited him, but unexpectedly and in consternation Lear identifies him—identifies him as himself. Then, surely, it is unexpected that the alter Lear goes into the singsong of a mad beggar whining for a handout.

As merely unexpected, the entry of Poor Tom is a diversion and serves a purpose: that of momentarily affording us much needed relief. The art of tragic relief is itself worth a study, although all its highest manifestations are governed by two conjoined principles—the moment of relief should be psychologically needed, but the moment of relief should be a momentary illusion which as it is dispelled, only deepens the tragedy. Mere unexpectedness thus becomes consummate unexpectedness, with what seems to be a turning from tragedy an entry into darker recesses; and the entry of Poor Tom, viewed first as a piece of technical business, is the appearance of greater tragedy. Lear’s prayer, among its many dramatic reasons for being, is preparation for the appearance of something worse. The audience, after it becomes confident in its author quietly assumes that, when something big is said and something big immediately follows, there is a connection between the two, although not too obvious as Shakespeare himself said earlier in King Lear , the entry should not be so pat as “the catastrophe of the old comedy” (Act I, scene 2, 11. 145-47). The prayer comes out of suffering which has identified Lear with the Fool and with a whole class whose feelings before were unknown to Lear, “poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are.” And “wheresoe’er” might unexpectedly be within the hovel at hand, which was to be a refuge from suffering, and the wretch who emerges, poorer and more naked than the Fool, might be fraught with greater suffering. “Fathom and half, fathom and half!” he has called from within, and this is certainly a mysterious cry and, in the circumstances, not a rational utterance, but it is also a sounding of depth. Of the two tragic emotions, it is fear that is aroused by this cry, and it is fear that sends the Fool running out of the hovel, and it is at least in alarm, a diminutive of fear, that Kent commands the “spirit” to come forth. Then Lear’s tragic complement appears, and almost in the next moment the pity aroused by the sight of unprotected madness is transposed to the object about which all pity should be centered in a tragedy—the tragic protagonist, who in startled compassion asks the new thing if the two of them are not identical in substance. Poor Tom’s answer to the tragic question on the surface and at first seems no answer at all, but what nevertheless might be expected of a mad beggar, a routine whine for alms, a routine that one of the most ancient professions has invariably divided into two parts—first a self-commiserating account of the beggar’s own suffering and then a prayer that the possible giver be spared any such suffering, the prayer being, as it were, anticipatory repayment which, by implication, can be taken back and changed to a curse. Surely, the art of panhandling here comes to life, and literary moments that come to life have been called “vivid.” But it is Shakespeare’s art, referred to by so many as “abundant,” to make two moments come to life in one, and, from a mad beggar’s routine emerges an answer to Lear’s question and hence a moment filled with tragedy and latent with tragedy to come. As Poor Tom’s account of himself proceeds, it becomes apparent, although not to Edgar, that he is describing Lear and his own father. At first the multiple identification is scarcely noticeable, since it depends only upon similarity in immediate and outer circumstances—others besides Poor Tom are led through fire and flood. Then the similarity becomes both more inclusive and deeper as tragic flaws and tragic courses of action become parallel—Lear and Gloucester, in pride of heart, are also trotting over four-inched bridges and coursing their own shadows for traitors. And, since the prayer for the possible almsgivers that immediately follows (“Bless thy five wits! … Bless thee from whirlwinds, star-blasting, and taking!”) approaches the tragic ultimate in vain request, perhaps enough has been said about the introduction of “such a fellow” as was to make both his father and Lear think “a man a worm.”

Given the confines of this paper, the speech to be considered must be short, for the focus finally is upon the smallest unit of drama, a speech, and the smallest unit of speech, a single word. Moreover, given our other commitments, the speech should also be in essence dramatic and tragic. Let us take, then, the speech in which Lear first recognizes his identity with unprotected nakedness scarred with self-inflicted wounds:

Hast thou given all to thy two daughters, and art thou come to this? 5

This is not one of those speeches, somewhat detachable as sententious utterances or lyric poems from which are collected The Beauties of Shakespeare ; yet upon the heath it is one of the great moments. It is tragic drama contracted to its essences—fear and pity. The question is asked in consternation and commiseration; and it arouses in us, who are more aware of implications than Lear, fear and pity in some ways more enormous than his.

These two qualities of the speech—its shortness and its enormousness—at the outset may be considered as somewhat separate and paradoxical qualities. The speech is short not only in over-all measurement but in the individual words composing it, for all of them, with the exception of “given” and “daughters,” are monosyllables, and all of them are short qualitatively, being ordinary, colorless words. Of conceivable adjectives that could be attached to the daughters who had brought Lear to this place, none could be more simple, neutral, or needless seemingly than the number “two.” What, if anything, can be said of such a complete contraction of language? Well, as a simple beginning, it is easy to understand, and the moment demands understanding. Then, too, just as language, it is unexpected. In forty-odd lines called an “incident,” there are the “superflux” of prayer, the eerie cry of Poor Tom, the scurrying prose of the Fool and Kent, the singsong and shivering rhythms of Poor Tom that rise into an actual line of song—and then this, to be answered by a long beggar’s whine, colorful but seemingly confused, since the speaker, as announced, is from Bedlam. This is a great deal of dramatic dialogue for forty lines, and perhaps might be contrasted to certain modern schools of writers who have found the essence of drama and reality to be iteration and reiteration of monosyllables. But Shakespeare’s contractions are not exhaustions of his language, which was almost limitless in its resources. Ultimately, the kind of verbal contraction here being considered is right because the immediate moment of tragic impact is a contraction—abdominal, in the throat, in the mind impaled upon a point. The vast tragic speeches of Shakespeare are anticipations of impending tragedy or assimilations of the event after its impact, like scar tissue after the wound. Thus every appearance of the ghost in the first act of Hamlet, being awaited, is immediately preceded by a long, imaginatively unbounded speech; but, when the ghost reveals his tragedy, his son, who makes many long speeches, can only exclaim, “O my prophetic soul! / My uncle?” Othello enters Desdemona’s chamber with a culmination of tragic resolutions, and his opening speech (“It is the cause,” etc.) has the magnitude of his fears and his resolutions; but he has no speech, not always even complete sentences, with which to answer the prayers of Desdemona; and her last prayer, that she be allowed to pray, he answers with the ultimate words, “It is too late.” In Shakespeare, as in life, the instances are many that the enormous moment, precisely at its moment, contracts body, mind, and utterance.

From life, however, come only the suggestions for art’s patterns, not art’s final accomplishments. Specifically, life makes it right that Lear’s speech at this moment is not a “speech” ; yet art demands that no moment of such import call forth, as it often does in life, some truly little, inadequate response. It is the task of the artist to give the enormous its proper dimensions, even if, as in this instance, the illusion has to be preserved that only some little thing was said. Our task, therefore, is to look again at these few, short, ordinary words to see how they add up to what our feelings tell us is something very big. Here, as elsewhere, there can be but the suggestion of a complete analysis; and, in respect to words, the accomplished writer lifts this one and this one and this one and listens to both sound and significance.

Rhythmically and metrically, Lear has asked a tremendous question. Its return to iambic rhythm after seven lines of mad cries and scurrying conversation should in itself encourage the actor to add some dimension to its delivery, and metrically it is seven feet, for, although there is a pause after the fourth foot (“two daughers”), it is all inclosed within a question, and the second part (“and art thou come to this?”) mounts above the first. A seven-foot mounting question is a big question. Moreover, the fact that the words, with two exceptions, are monosyllables gives them collectively a pounding effect, especially when they are blocked by so many dentals, only three of the fourteen words being with out d, t, or th, and these (“given all” and “come”) stand out as it were by their phonetic displacement, two of them being the verbs and “all” being probably more important than either. The fourth foot (“two daughters”) has also properly been lengthened, “daughters” being terminal to the first half of the question and being, in addition, the largest word uttered. Rhythm, too, makes this foot speak out, for only a schoolboy would scan it as a foot with a feminine ending (“two daugh ters”), although no one seemingly can be sure how “daughters” was pronounced at this time, anyone ought to be sure that in this place the second syllable of “daughters” gets as much emphasis as the first and the whole foot is as long roughly as this scansion (“two daugh ters ”).

Grammatical mode of utterance brings us closer to significance. Some dimension, some significance, goes out of the speech if it is not a question but a declaration: “Thou gavest all to thy two daughters, and now art come to this.” Gone is some of the immediacy of the moment, too big at its occurrence to be believed and recorded as fact. To a degree, then, fear and pity are made out of grammar, and, if we say that each point so far discussed is a little matter and singly is no great accomplishment, then all we have said is that much of art is composed of little brush strokes and that this is especially true when what is being composed is “the seemingly simple.”

Yet there is one big word within this speech—the one right word, the one word that is not a touching-up of another word which could itself have remained with out the notice of aftertimes. The right word is also in the right place; it is the last word, “this.” Perhaps we are accustomed to thinking of the mot juste as a word giving a definite, irreplaceable image, and certainly the right word should be irreplaceable and in some sense definite; only there are moments so tremendous that their exact size is without any definite boundary. There are moments, moreover, which have a size that is unmentionable, moments which cannot, at least at the instant, be fully faced or exactly spoken of by those who must endure them. Poetry may make a perfection out of what would be an error in exposition, and moments such as these may set at naught the rule of composition teachers that “such,” “it,” and “this” should not be used with out a definite, grammatical antecedent. Likewise, what has been said about “this” has a relevance to “all” in the first part of the question that is for this moment the exact question:

Hast thou given all to thy two daughters, And art thou come to this?

There is always a test that should be made of such matters—can we, after searching, find something at least as good? The test does not always lead to humiliation, and always it should lead to some improvement of ourselves, but the most rigorous test of Shakespeare is Shakespeare himself. Marcellus’ first question to Bernardo, both of whom have twice seen the ghost, is the forced mention of the enormous and unmentionable: “What, has this thing appear’d again to-night?” The ghost of Hamlet’s father, as it is awaited, is “this thing,” “this dreaded sight,” “this apparition,” sometimes “it,” more often “’t,” but never the ghost of Hamlet’s father. In the first soliloquy Hamlet’s thoughts move past the canons of the Everlasting, past the general unprofitable uses of the world, until they come to the loathsome point focal to his whole universe: “ That it should come to this! / But two months dead! Nay, not so much, not two.” So a second time in Shakespeare we have “come to this.” And at the end Hamlet comes to his own tragic moment which he believes cannot be avoided: “If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all.” In themselves, “it,” “to come,” “be,” “will,” and “all” are some of the smallest, least precise and colorful words in our language; but words are so important that from the least of them can be made the uttermost in meaning and emotion—the suffering of man triumphed over by some slight touch of serenity. “Let be.”

1. Wilfrid Perrett, The Story of King Lear from Geoffrey of Monmouth to Shakespeare (Berlin, 1904), pp. 9 ff.

2. “Lear’s madness has no place in the old story; it is Shakespeare’s own invention” (George Lyman Kittredge, The Complete Works of Shakespeare [Boston, 1936], p. 1196). According to Perrett, certain versions of the story contain suggestions of madness (op, cit., pp. 225-26), but the suggestions, as Perrett says, are remote and are limited to phrases (such as “crazed thoughts”) and, moreover, they are probably stereotypes not intended to suggest actual madness, just as we speak only in figurative cliché when we say, “He was mad with rage.”

3. In the Folio Lear’s arraignment of his daughters is omitted (II. 18-59 in Kittredge). The Folio also omits Edgar’s soliloquy concluding the scene. The Folio is far more accurate in editorial detail than the Quarto but is considerably shorter, most scholars surmising that it represcnts a version of the play that had been cut for acting purposes. As dramatic magnifications of states of mind and feelings already embodied in the play, both Lear’s arraignment of his daughters and Edgar’s soliloquy are made of material that is often cut if a cutting has to be made for stage purposes. Certainly, it is not difficult to understand the omission of the soliloquy, but the deletion of the trial upon the edge of hell removes from the scene at tremendous amount of its drama and tragedy.

4. All quotations from Shakespeare, unless otherwise specified, are from Kittredge’s The Complete Works of Shakespeare .

Copyright notice: ©1952 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice, including copyright information, is carried and provided that the University of Chicago Press is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the University of Chicago Press. Norman Maclean The Norman Maclean Reader Edited and with an Introduction by O. Alan Weltzien ©2008, 284 pages, 190 halftones Cloth $27.50 ISBN: 9780226500263 For information on purchasing the book—from bookstores or here online—please go to the webpage for The Norman Maclean Reader . See also: A website for Norman Maclean Our catalog of fiction titles Other excerpts and online essays from University of Chicago Press titles Sign up for e-mail notification of new books in this and other subjects Read the Chicago Blog

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June 6, 2024

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William Shakespeare with characters from his tragedies; illustration by John Broadley

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This essay appears, in somewhat different form, as the introduction to Shakespeare Is Hard, But So Is Life (Head of Zeus, 2024).

In his best-selling biography of Elon Musk, Walter Isaacson tries to explain how a man who attempts such “epic feats” can also be “an asshole.” He finds himself seeking help from William Shakespeare: “As Shakespeare teaches us, all heroes have flaws, some tragic, some conquered, and those we cast as villains can be complex.” How better to fill the gap between epic and asshole than with the lesson Shakespeare was apparently trying to teach us when he wrote Hamlet and King Lear ? The only other time the word “tragic” appears in Isaacson’s book is when Musk is regretting his choice of outfit for an audience with the pope: “My suit is tragic.” When tragedy encompasses such trivialities, it’s not so hard to believe that those great plays really are trying to teach us something as trite as the possibility that humans are complex or that powerful people may have some serious defects. Who knew?

Isaacson is not unusual in making such statements about what Shakespeare’s tragedies mean: they exist to instruct us, and their main lesson is that everything would be OK if only we could “conquer” our shortcomings. We can read in The Guardian , of the Harry Potter novels, that “some of the most admirable adult characters, as in Shakespeare, are also revealed to have a tragic flaw that causes them to hesitate to act, to make foolish errors of judgment, to lie, or even to commit murder.” The New York Times informs us that

with Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus or Shakespeare’s Hamlet, their tragic flaws, enacted, became the definition of tragedy. It may be angst (Hamlet), or hubris (Faustus), but it’s there and we know, watching, that the ruinous end will be of their own making.

The former British prime minister Boris Johnson, who has supposedly been writing a book about Shakespeare, and who compared himself in the dying days of his benighted regime to Othello beset by malign Iago, claims that “it is the essence of all tragic literature that the hero should be conspicuous, that he should swagger around and that some flaw should lead to a catastrophic reversal and collapse.”

Also in The New York Times Stephen Marche tells us that

we go to tragedy to watch a man be destroyed. Macbeth must be destroyed for his lust for power, Othello for his jealousy, Antony for his passion, Lear for the incompleteness of his renunciation. They are tragic precisely because their flaws are all too human.

In a review of a biography of Andrew Jackson, the president is called a “‘Shakespearean tragic hero,’ inflexible as Coriolanus, whose tragic flaw was ‘his incessant pursuit of virtue in the political realm.’” Maureen Dowd notes that Barack Obama “has read and reread Shakespeare’s tragedies” and “does not want his fatal flaw to be that he compromises so much that his ideals get blurred out of recognition.”

This stuff is part of the language. Like most clichés, it perpetuates assumptions, not just about Shakespeare but about the world: your ruinous end is of your own making. Tragedies happen not because human beings are dragged between large historical, social, and political forces that are wrenching them in opposite directions, but because individuals are branded from birth with one or another variant of original sin. In seeking to understand ourselves, we can forget the epic and think of the assholes—who receive satisfyingly just deserts. As Johnson put it in 2011, Shakespeare “was, frankly, the poet of the established order” because the troublemakers in his plays “get their comeuppance.” The tragically flawed heroes meet the gory deaths their flaws deserve. Alongside “many insights into the human heart,” Johnson tells us, Shakespeare provides “such ingenious defences for keeping things as they are, and keeping the ruling party in power.”

The most obvious problem with all that is, even if it were true, it would be crushingly dull. Moral tales in which people do bad things because they have wicked instincts and then get their comeuppance are ten a penny. The clichés shrink Shakespeare to the level of Miss Prism in The Importance of Being Earnest , the author of a three-volume novel of “more than usually revolting sentimentality” who explains that in her book “the good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.” If the definition of tragedy lies in the tragic flaw of the protagonist, we are reduced to a monotonous game of matching the shortcoming to the character: Hamlet = angst; Macbeth = ambition; Othello = jealousy; Lear = reckless vanity.

Fortunately none of this bears even a passing resemblance to the experience of seeing or reading a Shakespeare play. It is terrifyingly clear to us as we encounter these dramas that we are not in a moral universe of comeuppances and rewarded virtue. “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods:/They kill us for their sport,” says Gloucester in King Lear . Macduff’s children are slaughtered. Ophelia is driven to drown herself. At the end of Othello , there are two innocent corpses on the stage: Desdemona’s and Emilia’s. Lear’s terrible question over the dead body of Cordelia echoes through these tragedies: “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,/And thou no breath at all?” Much of the time in Shakespeare, there is no answer.

There is nothing in Cordelia’s or Ophelia’s or Desdemona’s or Emilia’s characters that has led them to extinction. It is simply that in this cruel world, while the bad may indeed end unhappily, so may the good. At the end of King Lear , we have the rather pitiful Albany doing a Miss Prism act: “All friends shall/Taste the wages of their virtue and all foes/The cup of their deservings.” This assurance of just deserts is immediately undercut by one of the most devastating images of absurd injustice, Lear raging at a universe in which his blameless daughter will not take another breath, in this world or the next: “Never, never, never, never, never!”

If the tragedies are supposed to show us the playing out of the innate flaws of their protagonists, they are not very good . Does anyone ever come out of the theater thinking that if only Hamlet had been less angsty, nothing would have been rotten in the state of Denmark? If Macbeth is already consumed by a lust for power, why does his wife have to goad him into killing Duncan? If Othello has an innate instinct for psychotic jealousy, why does Iago have to stage such elaborate plots to get him to believe that Desdemona is cheating on him? Lear may indeed be old and foolish, but he was surely not always thus—the shock of his decision at the beginning of the play to divest himself of the kingdom stems from his having ruled successfully for a very long time. (In the traditional story that Shakespeare adapted and that his audience would have known, Lear had reigned for sixty years.)

As for Shakespeare being “the poet of the established order,” it is certainly true that he was extremely adept in his navigation of a treacherous political landscape in which his greatest predecessor, Christopher Marlowe, was most probably murdered by the state and another fellow dramatist Thomas Kyd died after torture. He did so largely by avoiding references to contemporary England and setting his plays either in distant Catholic countries (where of course they do things no good Protestant ruler would countenance) or in the past. His political skill was rewarded. As of May 1603, after James I’s accession to the throne, Shakespeare was an official of the court as Groom of the Chamber. He and his fellow shareholders in the King’s Men (as they were now called) were each issued with four and a half yards of red cloth for the royal livery in which they were allowed to appear on state occasions. It is hard to think of Shakespeare as a liveried servant, but for him that red coat was surely also a suit of armor that protected him from the violence of his surroundings.

The wonder, though, lies in what he did with that position. He took his royal master’s obsessions and made unprecedented dramas out of them. James was interested in witches, so they appear in Macbeth . The king was—after the Gunpowder Plot in which Catholic conspirators tried to blow him up, along with his entire court and Parliament—worried about the way Catholic suspects under interrogation gave equivocal answers to avoid incriminating themselves. So the Porter in Macbeth , imagining himself as the gatekeeper to Hell, says, “Faith, here’s an equivocator that could swear in both the scales against either scale, who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven.” As a Scot, James was anxious to establish the idea of Britain as a political union, with himself as “emperor of the whole island.” So Shakespeare shows in King Lear the terrors of a disunited kingdom. James was fascinated by demonic possession, so Shakespeare brushed up on its alleged symptoms in contemporary accounts and has Edgar, in his guise as Poor Tom, enact them on the blasted heath. *

But if these plays start with the need of the King’s Man to suck up to his royal patron, they emphatically do not end there. A hack propagandist of the kind that Boris Johnson imagines Shakespeare to be would have shown, in Macbeth , that equivocation is just what you might expect from traitorous Catholics. Instead he makes the slipperiness of words and the inability to trust people universal aspects of life under rulers who imagine their power to be absolute. Almost everyone in Macbeth plays games with truth and lies, because that’s what you have to do in a murderous polity.

Poor Tom, in King Lear , may be there to flatter the sovereign’s desire to see a man who is (or is pretending to be) possessed by demons. But we don’t care about that because his performance becomes a heartbreakingly real enactment of mental distress: “The foul fiend haunts poor Tom in the voice of a nightingale. Hoppedance cries in Tom’s belly for two white herring. Croak not, black angel. I have no food for thee.” What begins with a brilliant opportunist keeping an eye out for what will appeal to his new master ends as some of the strangest, most searingly painful language ever spoken on the stage.

And even though Shakespeare undoubtedly started King Lear as a fable on the dangers of splitting up the kingdom, he lets it run off into the most devastating mockery of all arbitrary political power. Lear tells Gloucester that the “great image of authority” is a cur biting the heels of a beggar. It is perhaps not surprising that someone who thought Lear’s declaration that “a dog’s obeyed in office” is Shakespeare supporting the established order proved to be such a dog in office himself.

So what does Shakespeare teach us? Nothing. His tragic theater is not a classroom. It is a fairground wall of death in which the characters are being pushed outward by the centrifugal force of the action but held in place by the friction of the language. It sucks us into its dizzying spin. What makes it particularly vertiginous is the way Shakespeare so often sets our moral impulses against our theatrical interests. Iago in Othello is perhaps the strongest example. Plays, for the audience, begin with utter ignorance. We need someone to draw us in, to tell us what is going on. A character who talks to us, who gives us confidential information, can earn our gratitude. Even when that character is, like Iago, telling us how he is going to destroy a good man, we are glad to see him whenever he appears. Within the plot he is a monster. Outside it, talking to us, he is a charming, helpful presence. Drawn between these two conditions, we are not learning something. We are in the dangerous condition of unlearning how we feel and think.

Hamlet talks to us too. He is entertaining, brilliant, sensitive, charismatic, startlingly eloquent—and he has a filial purpose of vengeance that we understand. So what are we to do with his astonishing cruelties—his cold-blooded mockery of the corpse of a man (Polonius) he has just killed by mistake, his mental torturing of Ophelia, his casual dispatch of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, announced to us as a fleeting afterthought? How far would the play have to tilt on its axis for Hamlet to be not its hero but its resident demon?

Shakespeare can, when he chooses, turn our attitudes to characters upside down and inside out. In the first act of Macbeth , Lady Macbeth is bold, vigorous, and supremely confident that she can “chastise with the valor of my tongue” a husband whom we already know to be a fearsome warrior. She makes herself “from the crown to the toe top-full/Of direst cruelty!” In the second act she takes charge while her husband is breaking down under the strain of Duncan’s murder—it is Lady Macbeth who returns the daggers to the chamber and smears the sleeping grooms with blood. In the third act she is still a commanding presence, able to deal with the disaster of the royal banquet and dismiss the courtiers when Macbeth is freaked out by Banquo’s ghost.

We then lose sight of her until the fifth act, when she is suddenly almost a ghost herself, a somnambulist reenacting in tormented sleep the moments after the murder. There is no transition, nothing to lead us gradually from the direly cruel and potent murderer to the fragile shell of a person, floating in “this slumbery agitation”—a phrase that almost cancels itself and thus captures her descent to nothingness.

Even as the action of the play continues to hurtle forward, we are thrown back into this gap between the dynamic woman we last saw and the strange creature she is now, in this liminal state between life and death. We have to try to fill that gap for ourselves, but we can’t quite do it because the stage is suddenly filled with drums and flags and Birnam Wood is about to come to Dunsinane and we have no time to think. Nor do we know quite what to feel—should we still despise her for her ruthless malice or give ourselves over to the poignancy of her mental dissolution?

Usually, if a dramatist shows us an act of extreme violence perpetrated by a character, it is a point of no return. After the enactment of butchery there can be no way back to emotional delicacy and poetic grace. Yet Hamlet stabs Polonius to death, calls the dead man a fool and a knave, tells his mother, in one of Shakespeare’s most brutal phrases, that “I’ll lug the guts into the neighbor room,” and exits dragging the body along like the carcass of an animal. It makes no sense that even after this shocking display of callousness, Hamlet still gets to be the tender philosopher considering the skull of Yorick. But he does. He is still the “sweet prince.”

Lady Macduff’s young son is stabbed to death before our eyes by Macbeth’s thugs. We watch a child—perhaps the most intelligent, charming, and engaging child ever seen onstage—being slaughtered in front of his mother. Yet fifteen or twenty minutes later we have the psychokiller Macbeth at his most affecting, playing the still, sad music of humanity: “And all our yesterdays have lighted fools/The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle.”

Othello wakes the sleeping Desdemona and twice calls her a strumpet. We listen to her heartbreaking plea: “Kill me tomorrow; let me live tonight.” In most productions, she tries to run away and Othello has to manhandle her back onto the bed. Then he takes a cushion and, as she continues to struggle for life, begins to smother her. But this is not quick. A short, staccato phrase of Othello’s, “So, so,” suggests that, as she continues to fight him, he either stabs her or pushes the cushion down even more violently on her face. But still Shakespeare prolongs the agony, for her and for us. Emilia appears at the door and gives Othello the news of Rodrigo’s murder. All the while Othello is still trying to kill his wife. We hear Desdemona’s voice again. Emilia opens the curtains and sees Desdemona dying. She gets two more lines and then expires. As Othello says himself: “I know this act shows horrible and grim.”

It is hard to think how Shakespeare could have made it more horrible. Depending on the production, it can take around ten minutes from start to finish. What could we feel except loathing and disgust? And yet Shakespeare forces us also, within just a few more minutes, to feel compassion for “one that loved not wisely, but too well;/…one not easily jealous but, being wrought,/Perplexed in the extreme.” It is not just Othello who is perplexed in the extreme. As audiences or as readers, we are left in a no-man’s-land where what we feel does not map onto what we have seen, and where extreme ugliness of action alternates with extreme beauty of language.

And all the while that language is unsettling us further. Some of this is accidental: the passage of time has altered meanings, making the effects even stranger and more disconcerting than Shakespeare meant them to be. Words become treacherous because we think we understand them but in fact do not. In the opening scene of Hamlet alone, “rivals” means companions and “extravagant” means wandering. In the first scene of Othello , “circumstance” means circumlocution, “spinster” means someone who spins wool, “peculiar” means personal, and “owe” means own. We can never be quite sure of the linguistic ground beneath our feet. Especially as we experience these words aurally in the theater, stepping stones turn out to be trip hazards.

This effect may be unintended in itself (Shakespeare cannot have known how the English language would evolve over four centuries), but it merely exaggerates what Shakespeare is doing anyway: simultaneously offering and withholding meaning. One way he does this is with a figure of speech that is peculiar in his own sense, personal to him. A distinctive strand of his writing is his fondness for expressing one concept with two words, joined together by “and.” No one has ever made such a humble three-letter word so slippery.

For example, when Hamlet thinks of Fortinbras’s army going off to invade Poland, he remarks that the warriors are willing to die “for a fantasy and trick of fame.” Laertes warns Ophelia against “the shot and danger of desire.” Shakespeare uses this device sixty-six times in Hamlet , twenty-eight times in Othello (“body and beauty”), eighteen times in Macbeth (“sound and fury”) and fifteen times in King Lear (“the image and horror of it”). With these conjunctions, every take is a double take. When we hear “and,” we expect the two things being joined together either to be different yet complementary (the day was cold and bright) or obviously the same (Musk is vile and loathsome).

Shakespeare does use such obvious phrasing, but often he gives us conjunctions that are neither quite the same nor quite different. A trick and a fantasy are alike but not exactly. The shot and the danger are closely related but separate concepts, as are sound and fury. Sometimes our brains can adjust fairly easily: “The image and horror” can be put back together as a horrible image. The “shot and danger” is a dangerous shot. But sometimes they can’t. When Hamlet tells the players that the purpose of theater is to show “the very age and body of the time,” we get the overall idea: they should embody the life of their own historical period. But the individual pieces of the phrase don’t cohere. The time does not have a body—it is the thing to be embodied by the actors. The “age of the time” borders on tautology. When Hamlet talks of his father’s tomb opening “his ponderous and marble jaws,” we must work quite hard to get to what is being signified, which is the heavy marble construction of the tomb. That banal little word “and” leaves us in a place somewhere between comprehension and mystery.

Shakespeare also does this with the basic construction of his sentences. As readers or members of an audience, we are hungry for information, and exposition is one of the basic skills of the playwright. But Shakespeare loves to spool out facts like someone gradually feeding out the line of a kite, adjusting to the tug and tension of the words. He leaves us waiting even while we are being informed. A sentence has a subject, a verb, and an object. Shakespeare delights in separating them from one another to the point where they are almost cut adrift. Early in Hamlet , Horatio is giving us some important backstory: how Old Hamlet acquired Norwegian lands and how Fortinbras is trying to get them back. He starts simply: “Our last king…” He then takes eight words to get to the verb “was” and then another fifteen words to get to “dared to the combat.” And then we have another fifteen words before we find out that Old Hamlet killed Old Fortinbras in this duel.

Or in the second scene of Macbeth , we need to know that Macbeth has triumphed against the rebels on the battlefield. The Captain, bringing the news, tells us that “brave Macbeth…carved out his passage” through the ranks of the enemy. But between “brave Macbeth” and “carved out his passage” there are nineteen words. Lear, in the crucial caprice that catalyzes the tragedy, demands: “Tell me, my daughters…Which of you shall we say doth love us most.” Except what he actually says is:

Tell me, my daughters, Since now we will divest us both of rule, Interest of territory, cares of state, Which of you shall we say doth love us most.

We have to hang on for the dramatic point. This happens again and again in these plays: the language is used to keep us in states of suspended animation. The propulsive rhythms keep the words moving forward with a relentless energy. (Otherwise, we would lose patience and conclude that Shakespeare is really quite a bad writer.) But the import of the words lags behind. This is Shakespeare’s marvelous kind of syncopation: the meter is regular but the meaning is offbeat.

Frank Kermode, riffing on T.S. Eliot, wrote of how a strange piece of language opens up “the bewildering minute, the moment of dazzled recognition” for which all poetry searches. These plays work toward those bewildering minutes when we both recognize something as profoundly human and are at the same time so dazzled by it that we cannot quite take it in. Some of these moments are elaborately linguistic: Hamlet’s contemplations of whether or not he should continue to exist, Macbeth’s articulation of the ways in which his violence has utterly isolated him from humanity itself. But some are almost wordless. There is Lear’s terrible “Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh!” over the body of his dead daughter and Othello’s “Oh, Oh, Oh!” when he realizes that he has murdered his wife for no reason. Shakespeare can make his eternal minutes from the most exquisite artifice or from the most primitive of sounds, knowing as he does that when words fail, after all the astounding articulacy we have been experiencing, the failure is itself unfathomably expressive.

None of this has anything to do with moral instruction. Moral destruction may be more like it: creating the “form and pressure” of the times through a great unraveling, in which what we know becomes un-known. If we have to go back to Aristotle’s theories of tragedy to understand what Shakespeare is doing, the place to go is not his idea of the fatal flaw—a concept Aristotle drew from Greek plays that could hardly be more different from Shakespeare’s. It is, rather, to Aristotle’s identification of the emotions that tragedy seeks to draw out of us: pity and terror. In Shakespeare’s tragedies, we have to supply the pity ourselves because there is precious little of it on offer to the people caught up in the violence of arbitrary power. But there is an abundance of terror. “Security,” says one of the witches in Macbeth , “is mortals’ chiefest enemy.” To feel secure is to be unprepared for the duplicity of reality. Shakespeare gives us crash courses in every kind of insecurity: physical, emotional, psychological, cognitive, even existential.

Ross, in the same play, explains to the soon to be murdered Lady Macduff:

But cruel are the times when we are traitors And do not know ourselves; when we hold rumor From what we fear, yet know not what we fear, But float upon a wild and violent sea…

This could be applied to all these tragedies, in which fear itself cannot be defined or contained. The plays are wild and violent seas on which even the boundaries of terror cannot be charted. If you had to live in one of them, your best course would be to listen to what a messenger tells Lady Macduff: “If you will take a homely man’s advice,/Be not found here; hence with your little ones.”

These violent wildernesses are not created by the flaws in Shakespeare’s characters. The jumpy guards on the battlements at Elsinore as Hamlet begins are not watching out for ghosts: war is already coming, as Young Fortinbras threatens to invade if the lands Old Hamlet seized from Norway are not returned. Before Macbeth even meets the witches, Scotland is beset by civil war and invasion. The play proper opens with the question: “What bloody man is that?” The still-bleeding Captain delivers gory descriptions of a man being cut in two and of his severed head being displayed on the battlements. Macbeth and Banquo are said “to bathe in reeking wounds.” As the action of Othello is beginning, messages are already arriving in Venice with news of the coming Turkish assault on Cyprus—war has begun. The only one of the four protagonists in the tragedies who can be said to unleash large-scale violence by his own actions is Lear—but even then, the speed with which his kingdom falls apart after his abdication makes us wonder whether it would not have descended into chaos anyway if he had merely died of old age.

What we encounter, then, is nothing so comforting as imperfect men causing trouble that will be banished by their deserved deaths. It is men who embody the hurly-burly that, contrary to the predictions of the witches at the start of Macbeth , is never going to be “done.” Hamlet and Macbeth, Othello and Lear are distinguished in these dramas by the illusion that they can determine events by their own actions. They have, they believe, the power to say what will happen next. But no amount of power can ever be great enough in an irrational world. The universe does not follow orders. That, as Miss Prism might have said, is what Tragedy means.

It is nice to imagine a time when these plays could be loved for their poetry alone. It would be a delight to think that their pleasure would be that they speak, as Horatio has it at the end of Hamlet , to an “unknowing world/How these things came about.” But there is not yet a world that does not know the violence of these plays or the fury with which reality responds to all attempts to force it to obey one man’s will. There is no place in history where “Be not found here” is not good advice for millions of vulnerable people. We return to the tragedies not in search of behavioral education but because the wilder the terror Shakespeare unleashes, the deeper is the pity and the greater the wonder that, even in the howling tempest, we can still hear the voices of broken individuals so amazingly articulated. They do not, when they speak, reduce the frightfulness. They allow us, rather, in those bewildering moments, to be equal to it.

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Fintan O’Toole is the Advising Editor at The New York Review and a columnist for The Irish Times . His most recent book is We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland . (June 2024)

See my “Behind ‘King Lear’: The History Revealed,” The New York Review , November 19, 2015.  ↩

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Senate Inquiry Finds BMW Imported Cars Tied to Forced Labor in China

The report also found that Jaguar Land Rover and Volkswagen bought parts from a supplier the U.S. government had singled out for its practices in Xinjiang.

By Ana Swanson and Jack Ewing

A congressional investigation found that BMW, Jaguar Land Rover and Volkswagen purchased parts that originated from a Chinese supplier flagged by the United States for participating in forced labor programs in Xinjiang , a far western region of China where the local population is subject to mass surveillance and detentions.

Both BMW and Jaguar Land Rover continued to import components made by the Chinese company into the United States in violation of American law, even after they were informed in writing about the presence of banned products in their supply chain, the report said.

BMW shipped to the United States at least 8,000 Mini vehicles containing the part after the Chinese supplier was added in December to a U.S. government list of companies participating in forced labor. Volkswagen took steps to correct the issue.

The investigation , which was begun in 2022 by the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Ron Wyden of Oregon, a Democrat, highlights the risk for major automakers as the United States tries to enforce a two-year-old law aimed at blocking goods from Xinjiang. The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act bars goods made in whole or in part in Xinjiang from being imported to the United States, unless the importer can prove that they were not made with forced labor.

In a statement, Mr. Wyden said that “automakers are sticking their heads in the sand and then swearing they can’t find any forced labor in their supply chains.”

“Somehow, the Finance Committee’s oversight staff uncovered what multibillion-dollar companies apparently could not: that BMW imported cars, Jaguar Land Rover imported parts and VW A.G. manufactured cars that all included components made by a supplier banned for using Uyghur forced labor,” he added. “Automakers’ self-policing is clearly not doing the job.”

The part in question is known as a LAN transformer and is part of a system that allows a vehicle’s electronic components to communicate with one another. The automakers did not buy the component directly from Sichuan Jingweida Technology Group, also known as JWD, the Chinese manufacturer that was said to have used forced labor. Rather, it was part of an electronic unit they bought from Lear Corporation, a supplier of automotive electrical systems.

Lear said in a statement that it did not have a direct relationship with JWD, but bought the parts through another supplier. When Lear learned that JWD had been added to the forced labor list, the company said, “we promptly notified our customers of products containing these components and worked with our supplier to expeditiously re-source the manufacture of these components to another sub-supplier.”

It added, “We take these matters seriously and share the committee’s desire to combat forced labor.”

The Chinese government runs programs that send groups of people in Xinjiang to work at private companies and farms, and human rights experts say some of these arrangements are coerced. Reports published in the last few years by researchers from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and Sheffield Hallam University had linked JWD to government-sponsored labor transfer programs, including transfers of hundreds of Xinjiang people to the company in 2018. In December, the U.S. government added JWD to a list of companies that have worked with the Xinjiang government to recruit, transport or receive forced labor.

Lear notified all three carmakers in January that it had sold them the JWD part. Volkswagen subsequently voluntarily disclosed to U.S. customs agents that cars then in transit to the United States contained the part. The company arranged to replace the part in U.S. ports before they entered the country.

But the committee said BMW, even after receiving its letter from Lear, continued to import that part and thousands of Mini vehicles containing it until at least April. BMW appeared to have stopped its imports only after the committee repeatedly questioned it about JWD, according to the report.

BMW said in a statement that it had taken steps to halt imports of the components and would voluntarily replace the parts in vehicles that contained them. “The BMW Group has strict standards and policies regarding employment practices, human rights and working conditions, which all our direct suppliers must follow,” the company said.

Jaguar Land Rover also received the letter from Lear in January, but told the committee that its North American subsidiary was not informed about it, according to the report. The company continued importing the JWD component until shortly after April 22, when Lear reiterated the information to Jaguar Land Rover.

Jaguar Land Rover said the parts were used in older vehicles no longer for sale and were imported only as replacements. The company, which is based in Britain, said that when it learned that the parts were on the forced labor list, it immediately stopped shipping them and earmarked them for destruction.

“JLR takes human rights and forced labor issues seriously and has an active ongoing program of human rights protection and antislavery measures,” the company said in a statement.

Volkswagen also continues to maintain a facility in Xinjiang through a joint venture with a Chinese state-owned company. Volkswagen told the committee that an outside firm audited the facility and found it free of forced labor in 2023, but it declined to provide Congress a full copy of the audit.

Volkswagen said in a statement that “we acted as quickly and responsibly as possible to replace the part” and comply with the law.

“Volkswagen takes allegations of human rights violations very seriously and is committed to preventing the use of forced labor in our supply chain,” the company said.

China denies the existence of forced labor and human rights abuses in Xinjiang. According to the U.S. government, from 2017 to 2019 the Chinese authorities in Xinjiang detained over one million ethnic Uyghurs and other minorities in re-education centers.

Today, high rates of imprisonment and many forms of political indoctrination continue, according to a report from the Congressional Research Service. The New York Times has also documented China’s program of mass detentions in Xinjiang.

China is the world’s largest car market and the fastest growing. The country accounted for about one-third of the cars that BMW and Volkswagen sold in the first quarter, and about one-fifth of Jaguar Land Rover sales.

But foreign carmakers have been fighting to maintain market share amid an onslaught of new Chinese competitors focused on electric vehicles. And it has become increasingly difficult for foreign carmakers to maintain a good rapport with the Chinese government while adhering to human rights standards of the United States and Europe.

Cars have tens of thousands of components, and the JWD part lies several layers deep in the supply chain of these major automakers. Still, the Senate committee said the incidents underscored the inadequacy of current systems used to identify forced labor, like questionnaires, self-reporting and limited audits of direct suppliers.

Richard Mojica, a customs attorney at Miller & Chevalier, said automakers faced an “enormous” task in trying to trace their full supply chains, partly because they are heavily dependent on the cooperation of direct suppliers, which does not always happen.

The United States “has not yet detained automobiles and automotive components in meaningful quantities,” he said. But an uptick in government enforcement could push carmakers and their suppliers to map out these supply networks with more urgency.

Companies buying cotton , tomatoes , solar panels , critical minerals and other goods from China have also grappled with exposure to Xinjiang in their supply chains.

On Thursday, the Biden administration added 26 Chinese textile companies to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act’s entity list , citing their ties to forced labor. Mr. Wyden said he would call on U.S. customs to step up enforcement and crack down on violators.

Ana Swanson covers trade and international economics for The Times and is based in Washington. She has been a journalist for more than a decade. More about Ana Swanson

Jack Ewing writes about the auto industry with an emphasis on electric vehicles. More about Jack Ewing

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