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There is an old German saying that an apple generally does not fall far from its tree. A pure nature versus nurture argument, it is usually reserved for decrying unpleasant traits inherited by a wicked person’s offspring, but this philosophy has uses for dramatists too; and in King Lear, Shakespeare often paints Goneril and Regan with the same brush. In the flattery contest of the opening scene, for example, they echo each other in manner and deed. Regan even makes the point that she is “made of that same metal as her [older] sister” (Lr 1.1.69). Younger Cordelia, may appear as an anomaly, claiming to be selfless and true, however a closer analysis reveals she shares many of the same characteristics with her sisters, especially in her capacity to petrify and emasculate, suppressing King Lear’s masculinity (not necessarily a bad thing) as she asserts her sex. Edgar, ironically by using deception, manifests a truer more selfless love.
Cordelia is a sympathetic character who values honesty above all other considerations, an unrealistic ideal in the best of times, but in the Pagan England represented, especially for a woman, clearly dooming. Still, initially, she does hold sway over her father, for it is clearly his hope she wins the flattery contest. King Lear needs her to satisfy “his desire to ‘crawl’ like a baby ‘toward death’” (Khan 248). He needs Cordelia to nurse him, “to find [a] mother[] in his daughter[],” and, if she were only obedient, she would have accepted that role, but Cordelia is her father’s daughter and her proud words are as uncompromising as Lear’s (259).

In addition, as the youngest sister in its parallel of the Gorgons of King Lear, Cordelia also has the role of Medusa. When Lear asks his daughters “Which of you shall we say doth love us most?” it is a mirror quest, like Hercules gazing into his shining shield. Lear does not seek love but rather he performs an accounting of metaperception, how he feels about how they feel about him, measuring their replies in the weight of their words (Lr 1.1.49). Goneril and Regan play along, attempting to satisfy his narcissistic wishes, but Cordelia, she who he “loved… most,” denies him, petrifying and emasculating him (Lr 1.1.120). In response, he lashes out hysterically, “enact[ing] a childlike rage against the… rejecting mother as figured in his daughter[],” disowning her, even banishing his adviser Kent when he defends her (Khan 248).

To underscore Lear’s sexual transformation, Shakespeare contrasts Cordelia’s cool logic and philosophical purity with her father’s impulsiveness. Their “Nothing” call and response (Lr 1.1.85-88) begins a string of repetitions, an interior story strand, culminating in Lear’s “Never, Never, Never, Never, Never,” so evocative of pain, hopelessness, and absolute submission (Lr 5.3.284). Once the king casts Cordelia out, Goneril and Regan pile on, further eroding his masculinity. After Goneril denies his one hundred retainers, for example, Lear complains she “hast power to shake [his] manhood thus” and “hot tears… which break from him perforce” (Lr 1.4.267-268). His debilitation and feminization mirror his loss of retainers. Regan even threatens him with “What need one?” before Lear escapes her beard-plucking clutches (Lr 2.4.258). By story’s end, such as when he offers to drink poison after returning from the darkness of presumed death, Lear’s tears are ubiquitous. His frailty as “a very foolish fond old man/Fourscore and upward” and submissiveness all support a gendered interpretation of the story (Lr 4.7.56-57).

There are two other questions pervasive in the opening scene that color the entire story: Why does Cordelia deny Lear and why—if he presumes to know his favorite so well—did he expect a different answer? Part of the answer may be Cordelia’s confusion about incest revealed in her language, when she says, “Why have my sisters husbands if they say/They love you all?” and “Sure I shall never marry like my sisters,/To love my father all” (Lr 1.1,97-101). Unlike Greek, English does not distinguish “love” into different forms like eros, agape, storge, and philia. Cordelia’s unwillingness to commit to such a potentially wide range of love might seem almost unintentional, a communication breakdown of sorts, if there were no further evidence that she has a reason to worry. Unfortunately, Lear’s later suggestion of “let’s away to prison… we two alone” casts a cloud of suspicion over how the 80-year-old plans to possess his youngest daughter, making her unwillingness to comply prudent in hindsight (Lr 5.3.8-9).

For whatever reason, however, Cordelia’s love for Lear is qualified and a personal statement she owns. Edgar, by contrast, manifests a pure selfless love, especially when he leads Gloucester to a cliff in Dover with a “high and bending head,” a place from where he “shall no leading need” (Lr 4.1.71-76). His father intends to kill himself, so Edgar purges his suicidal tendencies by orchestrating a scene where the newly-made blind man miraculously survives. It is play-acting within the play, similar to Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene, another mise en abyme, or, as Goldberg writes, “posing one kind of stage against another” (545). In fact, the audience only sees the scene through Edgar’s description as the Gloucester’s eyes:

The fishermen that walk upon the beach Appear like mice; and yond tall anchoring bark, Diminish'd to her cock; her cock a buoy Almost too small for sight: the murmuring surge That on the unnumber'd idle pebble chafes Cannot be heard so high… (Lr 4.6.18-23)

Edgar, disguised as Poor Tom, performs this intervention without expectation of reward, which is the opposite of what Lear’s daughters anticipate in exchange for their performances. Otherwise, though, there are many similarities in the Dover reunions, including a return for both fathers from “the final closing of the eyes in a sleep without end” (538). When denied, Gloucester replies, “Away, and let me die” (Lr 4.6.50), while Lear awakening says, “You do me wrong to take me out o’ th’ grave” (Lr 4.7.45). Their fathers’ utter state of hopelessness—again best articulated by Lear’s “Never, Never, Never, Never, Never” line—moves both Edgar and Cordelia, endearing them to the audience (Lr 5.3.284).

Finally, given how these two characters redeem themselves, it is unsurprising they fare much better than their siblings in Tate’s 1681 revision of King Lear, “the only version of King Lear performed on the stage from 1681 to the middle of the 19th century” (Garber). 17th century playwright Nahum Tate, after examining Shakespeare’s “utterly brilliant and utterly devastating play,” decided it needed a happy ending (Garber). In fact, Tate’s The History of King Lear finishes with a crowned “Divine Cordelia,” Edgar and Lear’s youngest daughter marrying, the king surviving, but, most of all, “Truth and Virtue… at last succeed[ing]” (Tate 69). Nevertheless, if the play’s purpose is to demonstrate the value of selfless love like Edgar’s, the Shakespeare version, because of the distinction made between Edgar and Cordelia, does a finer job.  

Works Cited

Garber, Marjorie. “Lecture 5: King Lear.” 2007. youtu.be/FgRH2vpTZUU. Retrieved 5 Jul 2020.

Goldberg, Jonathan. “Perpectives: Dover Cliff and the Condition of Representation.” Shakespeare’s Hand. University of Minnesota Press, 2002, pp 132-149.

Kahn, Coppélia. “The Absent Mother in King Lear.” Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference, edited by Margaret Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy Vickers, University of Chicago Press, 1985.

Shakespeare, William. “King Lear.” The Norton Shakespeare: The Essential Plays/Sonnets, edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al. 3rd Edition. W.W. Norton & Company. 2016.

Shakespeare, William and Tate, Nahum. The History of King Lear. London. 1749. Retrieved here archive.org/details/historyofkinglea00shak/page/68/mode/2up on 5 Jul 2020.

“By the Strength of Their Illusion”: Reflections on the Scottish Play

Although the signifier “mirror” is absent from Macbeth, and “glass” only appears twice, once as a prop instruction and once in dialogue, The Scottish Play fairly bristles with reflections, though like the mirrors of its time, they are somewhat deceptive. First, of course, is the mirror in the apparition shown by the three witches to the haunted king. Macbeth’s vision of Banquo’s kingly successors, especially “the eighth [who] appears, …bear[ing] a glass… show[ing]… many more” dooms his erstwhile ally (Mac. 4.1.118). The doctor and gentleman who watch Lady Macbeth sleepwalking in Act V, Scene I, are another mirror, this time reflecting the play’s audience. Finally, there are the transgressive mirrors addressed by Garber, those “taboo border crossings” (91) “between a thing and its reflection,” (93) such as “sleep/waking, male/female, life/death, fair/foul, heaven/hell, night/morning,” which pervade Macbeth, seasoning it with Umheimlich (91). All of these mirrors collaborate to resolve a key point into focus, one apt for the play’s time: Regicide leads only to senseless bloody chaos, and the guarantor of a healthy, stable nation is a virile king.

Arguably, the play’s protagonist Macbeth is a similarly twisted reflection of King James I. While both men have Scottish roots, Macbeth came to his throne on the wings of war with Ireland and Norway, “Pale Hecate's offerings[,] and wither'd murder” (Mac. 2.1.52). In contrast, King James I ascended to rule peacefully as the first cousin twice removed of Queen Elizabeth I. No lover of war, one of his first foreign policy gambits was to negotiate the Treaty of London ending a 19-year conflict with Spain. He even managed to steer England clear from most of the disastrous Thirty Years War. The play’s reference to Hecate, goddess of witches, and Macbeth’s interactions with the witches also relates inversely to King James I, who, while best known for the 1611 translation of the Bible, also wrote Daemonologie, a dialogue where two men, Epistemon and Philomathes, discuss topics like Satan, witchcraft, necromancy, spells, and, naturally, demons, all with an air of casual, pious misogyny. In fact, Garber asserts that Shakespeare may have included the three witches and Hecate in the play because of the king’s “interest in witchcraft” (116). The apparition with the glass and line of Banquo’s successors would have also pleased King James I, because he “traced his ancestry to Banquo” (Garber 116).

Virility is another distinction where King James I has an apparent advantage. Barmazel relates Macbeth’s political ambitions to his member, asserting both are “insufficient to the task at hand,” the two tasks being murder and procreation of a political heir (123). Macbeth’s lack of issue is notable, especially when compared to Duncan (who has two sons, Malcolm and Donalbain), Banquo (whose son Fleance escapes Macbeth’s assassination scheme), and Macduff (whose child is slaughtered by one of Macbeth’s “shag-haar'd villain[s]”) (Mac. 4.2.78). Barmazel notes that because Lady Macbeth is intimate with nursing, “the responsibility for any reproductive problems the couple might have lies squarely with Macbeth” (121). Nor is fictional Macbeth’s case helped by Lady Macbeth’s constant chiding of his manliness, saying, “When you durst do it [murder], then you were a man” (1.7.49). Moreover, her erotically-charged soliloquy in Act I, Scene V, beseeching spirits to “unsex me here;/and fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full” speaks volumes about her femininity, for she must be sexual to require such unsexing. On the other hand, she exhibits a number of frightening characteristics for a woman in those times; for example, her first appearance— “Enter Lady Macbeth, reading a letter”—would have raised Daemonologie’s witch-hunter eyes (Mac. 1.5.1). Also, in Macbeth’s defense, the prevalence of child mortality fully explains the lack of an heir, a point Barmazel admits but stresses somewhat less than her allusions to his lack of a “‘rat without a tail’…’prick’ to use with his wife” (123). Indeed, of the seven children of King James I, only three reached adulthood, and he lived six centuries after the real-life Macbeth ruled Scotland .

Overall, the evidence of Barmazel along with the writings and actions of King James I show that the tragedy of Macbeth itself is a Garber transgressive mirror that successfully counterposes the images of the two kings, making the advantages of Shakespeare’s patron readily apparent. Shakespeare also had a noble goal. Macbeth’s theme of chaos and regicide were especially relevant in the context of early attempts to overthrow his rule, such as the Gunpowder Plot of the 5th of November 1605, when Jesuits attempted to assassinate the king, blow up Parliament, and install his oldest daughter, Elizabeth Stuart, to the throne. This followed on the heels of an attempt to remove King James I shortly after his coronation, the Bye Plot, another effort to restore England to Catholic rule. Indeed, regicide attempts were common in an era of religious conflict and political uncertainty. Macbeth not only depicted the danger of such anarchy and chaos, but also used the Lady Macbeth sleepwalker scene to allow the audience to contemplate themselves in the throes of such chaos, driving home the message. Altogether, the piece served as an effective means of using art to influence King James I’s subjects and move them away from contemplating alternatives on the other side of the glass.
 
Works Cited
Barmazel, Julie. “‘The Servant to Defect’: Macbeth, Impotence, and the Body Politic.” Macbeth: New Critical Essays, edited by Nicholas Rand Moschovakis. Routledge, 2008, pp 118-131.
Garber, Marjorie. “Macbeth: The Male Medusa.” Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality. Routledge. 1988. pp 87-123.
Shakespeare, William. “Macbeth.” The Norton Shakespeare: The Essential Plays/Sonnets, edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al. 3rd Edition. W.W. Norton & Company. 2016

It is truly appalling that someone who purports to be a public servant would maintain silence in the face of so much corruption going on in the same room, however this review is not about John Bolton, but this book he has written. Bolton's perspective comes with the assumption he is the smartest person in the room. Everyone else is a dummy, inexperienced, or otherwise lacking the ability to perceive the nature of evil in the world. That may be what he is going for, but he just comes off as a monstrous, spiteful, warmongering chickenhawk. All of his choices rely on using sticks, and he has no flexibility at all. Therefore, as a diplomat, he is a useless ass, but there is such a lack of self-awareness that you watch him patting himself on the back with "clever" tactics to avoid responsibility and accountability, dodging here and there, always aiming higher, always just a little bit short, mostly because he is entirely untrustworthy and vile, though he trumpets himself a patriot. Along the way, he takes down a whole group of diplomats who are catty to a fault. In the end I really wonder what any of them are doing in government.

That being said, some come off better than others, but the fact we perceive them through the distorted Bolton lens (where his own image is so blurred) lends them no credence. He did keep good notes, however, which would be terrible news for Trump's team, except the book is also such an overwhelming self-indictment of Bolton and his terrible judgment. Do his opinions matter at all? I don't think so. Trump, fwiw, comes off as you likely expect: a man of no morality who is fixed primarily on the public's perception of himself, without genuine beliefs, malleable to a fault, hilariously disloyal, and astonishingly unintellectual.

I hate what this book says about America, but I cannot one-star the book, despite the narrator's self-absorption. I think it is important people read it, because clearly half of America's voters are brainless too. No matter how you feel about Trump (I abhor him), I strongly feel people like Bolton should never be in government. He is a dangerous man who happily has no power anymore and, I hate to admit it, Bolton being out of government is to Trump's credit. :-( That Trump also hired him (after such a long romance when his defects would be glaring) and thought Bolton's ideas worthy at all tells us much about how empty of brains is the room where it happened.

Trying to do this without spoiling it for you, so bear with me. I'm not going to reveal too much more than the synopsis.

First, I really liked the root concept of the story, the origins of the Wajinru, the merpeople. Solomon creates a compelling story of their parallel development with the "two-legs" (humans) and puts her main character Yetu in a predicament that defines whether her species will survive. The story raises many questions about the role of history in indigenous people, and even the survival of languages and artifacts when all the people are gone.

Second, I love the gender bending romance in the middle. It added a necessary stake after the story had stalled for reasons better left to Yetu to explain. I had difficulty connecting with Yetu, but she is, after all, an alien, because I am a Two-leg, so this is actually an example of good writing making me uncomfortable.

The only issue I had with the story is how it ended, which made the stakes raised beforehand, oddly unimportant, or rather, the stakes were lower than I expected. I still loved the story. It's an important story, especially for the hellish 2020 we are living. The prose is often beautiful, so it tickles the wordsmith in me, and, yeah, the worldbuilding is great. An alternative history of merpeople reminds me a lot of what Octavia Butler did for Vampires in Kindred. Nicely played. :-)