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King Lear: Christian Fairy Tale

The article explores King Lear as both a play of conventions and a play on conventions. It debates the relation between tragedy and comedy, reality and fantasy. Seeking to link Cordelia's plight with that of Cinderella, it argues that both stories are more fantastic than realistic. Above all, it proposes that Christianity itself, the ultimate 'source' of Lear, involves an imaginative logic which takes us beyond narrow definitions of tragedy.

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Perhaps it goes without saying that Shakespeare's comedies are not realistic. Think of A Midsummer Night's Dream or Much Ado About Nothing: they follow a set formula of young love triumphing over adversity by the most unlikely means. We accept that the story follows a formula, beginning 'once upon a time' and ending with the characters living 'happily ever after'. Indeed, it is this structural principle which, strictly speaking, defines them as 'comedy' – not the clowning, joking and bawdy, which are additional treats, as it were.

On the other hand, we often talk of the tragedies as something more than a game or 'play'. Perhaps this is because we have a prejudice in favour of classical, Greek notions of dignity and seriousness, thinking of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex as the ideal to which Shakespeare was aspiring. Thus we expect Hamlet and King Lear, for instance, to reveal the rational truth about adult life, not to feed our childish imaginations. We accept the Dream as 'juvenile' but want Lear to be 'mature'. Even though the latter has its Fool and more than a few moments of farce, we think that, because it leads to misery and death, it is more 'real'. We overlook that what is involved is, again, a structural principle, no more true to life than that of comedy. What counts in both cases is the convention: what is suggested by the particular form chosen.

Once we have accepted the notions of convention and choice, we will be less inclined to impose our prejudices on this or that play, and grant Shakespeare the right to produce whatever he finds imaginatively effective. This may include playing off one form against another, savouring the tension between tragedy and comedy, which are, after all, complementary rather than exclusively opposed. (In the words of Williiam Blake: 'Excess of sorrow laughs; excess of joy weeps.') In doing so, as a playwright working within a Christian context, he is only following the example of the Bible. The fall of Adam and Eve from their innocent state of happiness in the garden of Eden (tragedy) necessitates the crucifixion of God's son, Jesus (tragedy), which in turn allows for the resurrection of the one true Christ and the salvation of all humanity (comedy).

Tell me the old, old story…

For a 'mature' tragedy, King Lear has as absurd a plot as you could wish. A foolish old king (Lear) poses a preposterous love test. Two wicked elder daughters (Goneril and Regan) indulge him; the youngest (Cordelia) refuses, and is banished. In another family, again with a foolish father (the Duke of Gloucester), the honest son (Edgar) is maligned by his scheming half-brother (Edmund) and has to flee for his life, resorting to disguise as a beggar (Poor Tom) in order to survive, but never having his identity suspected. Soon the king's wicked daughters begin to show their true colours by taking over the kingdom themselves....

Need we go on? It should be obvious that we are in the world not of reality but of fairy tale. Only while this one begins 'once upon a time', it would be difficult to describe the characters as living 'happily ever after'. Given that this is a Christian rather than a classical drama, per­haps we should allow for things not being as simple as they seem.

Fairy tales are usually comic in shape, but it is interesting to note the affinities between a popular example, 'Cinderella', and the tragedy of King Lear. In the most familiar version, a mixture of the transcriptions of Charles Perrault in 1697 and the Brothers Grimm in 1812, the plot is as follows. A young, beautiful heroine is spurned and savagely mistreated by a wicked stepmother. Her elder sisters are given anything they wish, while she is denied everything. But eventually she meets and, after much confusion of identity, finally marries her prince. Love and innocence triumph over hatred and experience.

But what of King Lear – written nearly a century before Perrault and two centuries before Grimm? True, we have two selfish, grasping sisters, and even a 'Prince Charming' (the King of France) who wishes to marry the heroine at whatever cost. These happen to anticipate the fairy tale we know, but of course Shakespeare himself was working with a much earlier version. According to the novelist and cultural historian Marina Warner, in her book From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers (1994) this was the already archaic tale discovered and transcribed by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century. In this tale, called 'Love Like Salt', most of the comic trappings are absent, with one single theme predominating: the parent-child conflict and its outcome. This, then, is what we might call the old, old story.

In the Perrault and the Grimm versions, the parent responsible for the heroine's suffering is the stepmother; the father is a shadowy and, presumably, very weak figure – if the way he allows the girl to be treated is anything to go by. But in Lear, the father takes centre stage: there is no wife, and it is he who is directly responsible for Cordelia's plight. This is best explained by Shakespeare's use of the archaic source. In the Monmouth version we find not only the same focus on the father, but also his same outrageous demand for protestations of love from his three daughters, drawing a similarly cryptic challenge from the youngest. After pronouncing the word 'Nothing', Cordelia elaborates only to the extent of appealing to her natural, filial 'bond'; the young heroine of the earlier story declares that she loves her father 'as meat loves salt'. Both replies provoke outrage.

There are differences, however, the most important being the endings. Though 'Love Like Salt' treats the heroine's wedding as only incidental to the main plot, the point is made quite clearly that she survives to enjoy a permanent reconciliation with her father. Cordelia, however, returns from exile for only a brief moment of forgiveness before the hatred that Lear has unleashed, by his unnatural demands, destroys them both. Thus we call the one a 'comedy' and the other a 'tragedy'. But – and this must be emphasised – what unites them is the element of fantasy, of make-believe.

The valley of decision

We could put this last point another way by saying that King Lear is a kind of game – a  'play' – in which we are invited to explore what might just happen if a father were to offend against nature, a king against kingship. As Lear himself unwittingly foretells, in his angry riposte to Cordelia's reply: 'Nothing will come of nothing.' We are compelled from then on to witness both king and kingdom reduced to 'nothing'.

It is at Dover that this process of destruction reaches its climax. But it is there also that we are given signs of a meaning beyond catastrophe. As we read in the Bible, though human wickedness is great, 'the day of the Lord is near in the valley of decision' (Joel 3:13-14). The decision, of course, is not left to 'the Lord' alone: his people have to choose the path of salvation or damnation, hope or despair. Dover might be seen, then, as an image of choice, a valley of decision', rather than a real place.

When Lear wakes up there, in the French camp, we must bear in mind that, in banishing Cordelia and giving away a divided kingdom, he has denied the order of nature. Now, signifi­cantly, he is unsure whether he is in hell ('bound upon a wheel of fire') or, seeing his faithful daughter, in heaven ('Thou art a soul in bliss'). Postponing both, he opts after defeat to treat the prospect of captivity with Cordelia as a means of escape to an earthly paradise. He hopes to regain the innocent world which Adam and Eve originally inhabited. He wants to undo the consequences of the fall:

                                   so we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news (V.iii.11- 14).

It is probably better for the reader to share Lear's sense of possibility than to trust to the reality represented by Edgar, whose faith in the merely natural order of things seems inflexible, un-Christian. Thus he forces his father, Gloucester – first morally, now physically, blind – to see the error of suicidal despair, by deceiving him into thinking he has plunged over Dover's cliffs. Later he announces to his scheming half--brother Edmund:

The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us.
That dark and vicious place where thee he got
Cost him his eyes (V.iii. 170-3).

The imaginative logic of the play takes us beyond such natural 'justice', such law.

Cinderella, Cordelia, Christ

If we want to understand the love that transcends all law, we have to see what Cordelia comes to signify in the course of Act IV. First she is described, appropriately enough, in regal terms, as 'a queen / O'er her passion': unlike Lear, she is a true monarch, ruling herself as she might be expected to rule her people. Later, she is likened, more boldly now but yet rightly, to a goddess, whose tears are said to be 'holy water' from 'sacred eyes'. Finally, and most importantly of all, 'Thou hast one,' her messenger tells Lear, 'Who redeems nature from the general curse / Which twain have brought her to' (IV.vi.206-9).

Here we have to respond fully to the Biblical associations: the 'twain' are not only the 'she-devils' Goneril and Regan, but also Adam and Eve; the 'general curse' describes not only the chaos of the kingdom but also the fallen condition of all humanity; and the 'one' is simultaneously Lear's youngest daughter and Jesus Christ. Like him she is sacrificed; as with his death hers is seen as redemptive, cleansing Britain of Lear's legacy of sin. In other words, we have gone beyond the 'gods' invoked stoically by Edgar ('The gods are just, and of our peasant vices make instruments to plague us" and aggressively by Edmund ('Now gods, stand up for bastards!') to the one 'God' whom the play finally celebrates. Thus Cordelia may be said to atone to the Father on behalf of the father.

From Cordelia as Cinderella to Cordelia as a Christ-figure may seem a long leap, but in the vastly creative world of Shakespeare's drama it is not impossible. Nor should we forget that the Christian story is one of the most marvellous examples of the game, the serious game, of 'What if?' What if, it asks us, the meek were to inherit the earth? What if the only way to gain your life were to lose it? What if, most outrageously of all, a slaughtered lamb (the crucified Jesus) were to rise and overcome 'the dragon', Satan, and marry the 'bride' who is his church, as we read in the Book of Revelation? Here is the resilient logic of fairy tale: failure leading to triumph, tragedy leading to comedy.

King Lear offers no definite vision of the future. We are left only with the worthy moralising of the new king ('The weight of this sad time we must obey...'), because Edgar belongs to the tragic convention of law. The sacrificial love of Cordelia transcends this world, and it is up to us to try to comprehend it. As with the fairy tale, we have to enter into the contract of imagination: we have to rethink both 'maturity' and 'reality'. As with the Christian story, we have to be able to see the spiritual potential in the most extreme tragedy. Or, to put it another way: we have to be willing to understand why Shakespeare's visionary predecessor, the medieval Italian poet Dante, should call his great work about a journey from hell to heaven a 'comedy' – a work which is now universally known as The Divine Comedy.

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The first version of this article appeared in The English Review in April 1996. I reprint it here, slightly revised, not only because it may be of interest but also because ER is a journal which deserves to have maximum publicity. Like E-Magazine, it is written mainly for A Level English Literature students, but may be enjoyed by students at all levels as well as by general readers.

The article was inspired by conversations with Tony Walker of Southport College.

I am also grateful to Marina Warner for her encouragement of my interest in myth and fairy tale over the years.

Laurence Coupe

Violence and the Sacred: Murder in the Cathedral

Is it possible that, with Murder in the Cathedral, T. S. Eliot achieves the impossible: a perfectly coherent religious play for the twentieth century? Laurence Coupe expresses doubts about the coherence, but still finds the play compelling.

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TWO YEARS before T. S. Eliot's play Murder in the Cathedral was staged for the Canterbury Festival of June 1935, he gave a lecture on the Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold. Arnold had proclaimed: 'No one can deny that it is of advantage to a poet to deal with a beautiful world.' Eliot disagreed: the task of the poet was 'to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory.' When, having established his reputation in secular verse, Eliot turned to creating a religious drama, he did not necessarily abandon this threefold principle. Though Murder in the Cathedral is designed to celebrate God and his world ('glory'), it does so through forcing its audience to confront the worst ('boredom' ... 'horror'). Indeed, I would go so far as to say that, even though Eliot now intended the former to outweigh the latter, the play itself is finally more negative than positive.

Greek form, Christian meaning

The first 'character' we meet in the play is collective: it is 'a Chorus of women of Canterbury'. This is a convention borrowed from classical Greek tragedy. The women fulfil the traditional function of reporting events so far:

Seven years and the summer is over,
Seven years since the Archbishop left us,
He who was always kind to his people.

This reportage is, of course, really only a reminder: as with Greek tragedy, the story is already known, and we are starting very near its end. Sophocles is not setting out to surprise his audience by the audacity of his plot with Oedipus Rex; he is retelling and restructuring familiar material. Similarly, Eliot is addressing people who know full well that in 1170, in the very cathedral where they are gathered, Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, returned from exile in France after refusing to surrender church authority to state power, only to be murdered by King Henry II's knights.

In both cases -- Sophocles' and Eliot's -- the fact that there is a chorus with whom to iden­tify and that the outcome is known offers the advantage that the audience is a truly informed one. On the other hand, the suspense we may feel when watching Shakespeare, as an Othello or a Macbeth agonises and blunders his way through his dramatic crisis, is missing. Here there is no significant choice. Oedipus has already married his mother and killed his father when the play begins: all that remains is for him to realise that it is this double error which has brought the plague on Thebes. Thomas has already made the decision to return to England and so to certain death: as he says himself, 'I have therefore only to make perfect my will.'

But there is one major difference between the two dramas, and that is Eliot's Christianity. The play is taking place in a church: the Chorus is also a choir; there are three Priests standing by; Thomas will be attacked spiritually by four Tempters before he is attacked physically by four Knights. Moreover, the play incorporates liturgical prayers and chants (Te Deum, Dies Irae etc) and is divided into two by the sermon which Thomas delivers on Christmas Morning. Thus the audience is also a congregation, and what is at issue is not only a reminder of an important story, but a demand for a reaffirmation of faith. The Chorus acknowledges itself as 'type of the common man', of the 'small folk' who 'do not not wish anything to happen', but it is 'drawn into' a larger 'pattern' and 'forced to bear witness'. The demand is for us to make the same commitment. Like the women of Canterbury, we have been content with the 'boredom' of existence – 'living and partly living' -- because, in Thomas's words, 'Human kind cannot bear very much reality.' Now we, must be prepared to face the 'horror' that they face when they realise the murder has been committed:

We are soiled by a filth that we cannot clean,
      united to a supernatural vermin.
It is not we alone, it is not the house, it is not
      the city that is defiled,
But the world that is wholly foul.

Only then may we appreciate their final praise of God, when they see the world anew, having understood the meaning of martyrdom. Realising that 'Thy glory is declared even in that which denies thee' -- the very darkness declaring 'the glory of light'--  they reflect:

They affirm Thee in living; all things affirm Thee in living; the bird in the air, both the hawk and the finch; the beast on the earth, both the wolf and the lamb; the worm in the soil and the worm in the belly.

Blood for blood, death for death

If Murder in the Cathedral is ultimately a Christian ritual, and concerns the victory of the spirit, it gains its powerful effect from being rooted in the imagery of the earth. The opening of Part II is typical in its emphasis on the importance of the seasonal cycle and the desperate need for rebirth. The chorus cries out from the depths of the winter:

What sign of the spring of the year?
Only the death of the old; not a stir, not a
      shoot, not a breath.
Do the days begin to lengthen?
Longer and shorter the day, shorter and
      colder the night.

Christmas is, of course, also the pagan mid­winter solstice, and so it may seem fitting that the collective mind should turn to thoughts of ritual renewal:

And war among men defiles this world, but
      death in the Lord renews it,
And the world must be cleaned in the winter,
      or we shall have only
A sour spring, a parched summer, an empty
      harvest.

Thus we have to view Thomas simultaneously in two perspectives: as Christian martyr and as primitive sacrificial victim.

Eliot, long before he had become a Christian, had carefully studied the work of the Cambridge anthropologist Sir James Frazer. Frazer had argued that the origins of religion lay in fertility sacrifice, but unlike him Eliot thought that this conjecture, far from invalidating Christianity, gave it a greater credibility. It had real foundations in archaic thinking. Hence the women of Canterbury fuse the two languages of fertility and faith:

We thank Thee for Thy mercies of blood, for
      Thy redemption by blood. For the blood
      of Thy martyrs and saints
Shall enrich the earth, shall create the holy
      places.
For wherever a saint has dwelt, wherever a
      martyr has given his blood for the blood
      of Christ,
There is holy ground, and the sanctity shall
      not depart from it.

Thomas is in their eyes at once a god of vegetation, dying in winter to be reborn in the spring, and a Christian martyr who repeats the absolute atonement, the ultimate 'Passion' on the Cross, of Jesus Christ. He restores the crops even as he redeems the people's souls.

No blasphemy is intended by Eliot. Indeed, Thomas explicitly argues, in his Christmas Morning sermon, that the essence of Christianity is sacrifice: 'Is it an accident, do you think, that the day of the first martyr [St Stephen] follows immediately the day of the Birth of Christ? By no means. Just as we rejoice and mourn at once, in the Birth and in the Passion of Our Lord; so also, in a smaller figure, we both rejoice and mourn in the death of martyrs.' As he approaches his own martyrdom, he states the case more vividly in verse:

This is the sign of the Church always,
The sign of blood. Blood for blood.
His blood is given to buy my life,
My blood given to pay for his death,
My death for his death.

The martyr is one who 'bears witness' to the Lord's sacrifice by making his own. All he asks is that we -- as represented by the Chorus -- are prepared in turn to 'bear witness' to him.

Eliot's ritual

The ambiguity of Murder in the Cathedral -- that it ends in death but simultaneously ends in triumph -- may be seen as reflecting the ambiguity of Christianity itself. Certainly Eliot is working on the premise that only Christ's violent death can give life to humanity. We might want to label the play 'Christian tragedy', but it is noteworthy that Eliot himself does not do so. Nor, I think, will that often confusing term 'tragi-comedy' serve us: Waiting for Godot is now the twentieth-century model of the genre; and in Godot the two structures effectively cancel each other out, the 'boredom' over­whelming both 'horror' and 'glory'.

It is tempting, then, to rest content with some such neutral term as 'religious drama'; but even that raises its own difficulties. We know from Eliot's own published speculations about the writing of plays that he did not approve of drama which explicitly addressed contemporary social issues, such as communism and fascism, unemployment and war. But did he succeed in producing a work which is exclusively religious? Is the ritual completely self-contained, and convincing as such?

Sacrifice and society

If the main interest of the plot is the martyr's preparation for death and the people's gradual understanding of the reasons for his sacrifice, then an important subsidiary interest is the conflict between church and state. Indeed, there would be no Murder in the Cathedral if there had not been that specific historical struggle between the King and his ex-Chancellor in the late twelfth century. Despite the fact that Eliot begins his plot right near the end of the story, he is very careful to get all the background details correct -- as for instance in the speeches of the Tempters and the Knights. But more gen­erally the play also acknowledges a social con­text both deeper and wider: one of 'boredom' and 'horror' but precious little 'glory'. The Chorus reflects:

There have been oppression and luxury,
There have been poverty and licence,
There has been minor injustice ...
Several girls have disappeared
Unaccountably ...

This is a world in which everything connects: not only as part of Thomas's larger cosmic 'pattern' – 'that the wheel may turn and still / Be forever still' -- but as part of a callous political order. The women of Canterbury are victims of habitual violence -- exploitation, injustice, abuse -- as well as witnesses of exceptional violence.

After the Knights kill Thomas they rationalise their action by appealing to the audience's common sense: there must be 'a just subordination of the pretensions of the Church to the welfare of the State'. That being the case, Thomas may be accused of provoking the attack, and our verdict must be 'Suicide while of Unsound Mind'. This is the very language of the society depicted above by the women of Canterbury. On the one hand we are meant to note the irony: in invoking worldly justice to vindicate their sin they serve as mere agents of the divine plan, since there would be no martyrdom unless there were misguided people prepared to find reasons for murdering Thomas. On the other hand, we may doubt whether the play's triumphant closure signifies the end of the systematic aggression represented by the Knights, it being the basis of the oppressive regime which they serve.

There are, then, two types of violence in the play. There is the endemic brutality of the social order, and there is the decisive act of martyrdom. The latter is meant to release us from the former. The critic Rene Girard would say that the distinction is between 'impure' and 'pure' violence. Discussing Oedipus Rex in his thought-provoking book Violence and the Sacred (1977), he argues that the 'content' which Sophocles inherits is an archaic story about identifying the one man who is responsible for the plague -- that is, all the ills of the community -- and then removing him. Oedipus is, as we say, the 'scapegoat'. But the actual tragedy which Sophocles produces is less clear-cut: the impression we get is of a world where everybody is fighting everyone else, and in which Oedipus is not really so exceptional. Oedipus Rex enacts the tension between the desire to go back to one moment of 'pure' violence which will solve all our troubles, and the acknowledgement that 'impure' violence persists. But what, in this light, may we conclude about Eliot's drama?

An end to violence?

The paradox of Thomas's death, in Eliot's version, is that, as murdered, he dies a criminal, a traitor, a madman; but as martyred, he dies a saint, a saviour, a witness to Christ. To the Knights he is a political embarrassment; to Christians everywhere, from the twelfth to the twentieth century, he represents 'the Law of God above the Law of Man'. As the Third Priest puts it, on the very day of the death:

Even now, in sordid particulars
The eternal design may appear.

'Impure', everyday violence turns, miraculously, into 'pure', redemptive violence.

Thus we have to see Thomas preparing him­self for this moment, when sainthood emerges from 'sordid particulars'. He has to be seen to be ritually tempted, four times -- even over­coming the last and most grievous temptation, to 'do the right thing' (that is, die) for 'the wrong reason' (that is, spiritual pride). He has to be seen to acquire an understanding which takes him beyond the expediency of the Priests, who think that even at the last moment, as the Knights approach, they can bar the cathedral doors and prevent the murder:

It is out of time that my death shall be known;
It is out of time that my decision is taken
If you call that my decision
To which my whole being gives entire consent.

It is by separating himself from the business of not only the state but also the church (as a worldly institution), and steeling himself for sacrifice, that Thomas can become the martyr of Canterbury and saviour of the 'small folk'. Only then, when 'boredom' has turned to 'horror', may the 'glory' be glimpsed.

But doubts remain. Perhaps they can be clarified by pointing out that the Christianity of Eliot's play is a very narrow, morbid set of beliefs. It assumes that Christ's crucifixion was a blood sacrifice. It assumes that only through violent death could humanity be saved. It assumes that that is what God, as angry Father, demanded. But there is another Christianity, recognised by (amongst others) Rene Girard. In this light, the message of Jesus -- as opposed to the doctrine of St Paul - is all about an end to the 'sacrificial' view of the world. The salvation offered by Jesus comes through general love – a change of heart represented by the Parables and the Sermon on the Mount – not a specific act of violence. Faith centres on Resurrection as a symbol of a new way of living, not Crucifixion and Resurrection as sacrifice and atonement. In this light, we could say that Murder in the Cathedral bears witness to a death-centred doctrine -- what we might call a 'theology of the Cross' -- which is certainly recognisable as Christianity but which is, strictly speaking, a distortion of the spiritual revolution -- 'the kingdom of God'-- initiated by the central character of the Gospels.

It is significant that Thomas in his sermon, in offering a hint of what is to come, says: 'It is possible that in a short time you may have yet another martyr, and that one perhaps not the last.' Sacrifice begets sacrifice. Blood will have blood. It is one thing to acknowledge that for most Christians the possession of faith means being prepared to die for it; it is another to centre Christianity itself on ritual murder. For in the latter case, which I would say is Eliot's case, there would seem to be no end to the 'horror' of violence, since the sacrifice must always be repeated in order to purify the world of the kind of savagery endured by the women of Canterbury.

If I am concluding, then, that Murder in the Cathedral is a play flawed, not by the fact of death but by the dogma of death, then I am also saying that that is what is interesting about it. The impoverished doctrinal theme and the powerful dramatic form work in a strangely productive tension. The resulting experience should provoke an immediate response and merit serious reflection. Christians and non-­Christians alike may feel grateful for that.

***

The first version of this article appeared in The English Review in November 1995. I reprint it here, slightly revised, not only because it may be of interest but also because ER is a journal which deserves to have maximum publicity. Like E-Magazine, it is written mainly for A Level English Literature students, but may be enjoyed by students at all levels as well as by general readers.

Laurence Coupe

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The Presence of the Past in Waiting for Godot

This article relates a literary past to the present of Beckett's play; taking his cue from Eliot's essay 'Tradition and the Individual Talent', Laurence Coupe demonstrates how Beckett 'takes on' canonical texts (Shakespeare, Dante, the Bible). Far from these being academic allusions, Beckett manages to treat them as vitally relevant to his own needs and to appropriate them for our own age.

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Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, though about half a century old, is still regarded as a very strange play. To acknowledge what is familiar about it need not deprive the play of its power; rather, it might help affirm its creative credentials. For if we still find it challenging, this is surely some-thing to do with its radical relation to established literary texts. As T. S. Eliot pointed out in his influential essay of 1919, there is no easy way to separate 'Tradition and the Individual Talent'. The literary legacy -- the 'canon' -- would become a dead weight were it not for those modern writers who, far from evading it, make it crucially relevant to their own needs. Beckett is one such writer: with him the past becomes present.

Welcome to purgatory

Waiting for Godot, then, must be seen in context. Indeed, there is a context announced for it already, in the author's own earlier work. I am thinking of his short story 'Dante and the Lobster', included in Beckett's first prose volume More Kicks than Pricks (1934). The plot centres on a day in the life of one Belacqua Shuah, a Dublin student researching into Dante's Divine Comedy, a major visionary poem of the early fourteenth century concerning the afterlife. Belacqua is attracted to that text because he likes pondering the themes of damnation and salvation; in the poem Dante imagines himself travelling from the depths of hell to the heights of heaven. Moreover, Shuah has an affinity with it because he shares his own first name with that of one of Dante's characters: the figure whom the poet meets as he travels up the mount of purgatory, which lies halfway between the infernal and celestial realms. Dante's Belacqua is being punished for the sin of idleness, which meant that he delayed his repentance until the very last moment. Now he is forced to repent at length, lingering alone on the mountain, with the bliss of heaven a long way off. Here in this world, Beckett's Belacqua also lingers and loiters a good deal. Indeed, it takes him all his time to prepare his lunch (burnt toast, gorgonzola, salt, mustard and cayenne) and then to collect a lobster from the fishmonger for his aunt. After several awkward episodes, he arrives at her house, where he is surprised to find that the creature is still alive. His aunt mocks him for his naivety, explaining how lobsters are cooked as she prepares it for the pan of boiling hot water. The story ends as follows:

       She lifted the lobster clear of the table. It had about 30 seconds to live.
       Well, thought Belacqua, it's a quick death, God help us all.
       It is not.

'Dante and the Lobster' gives us Beckett's vision in brief. Living is a matter of suffering, as in purgatory, but without the consolation of an assured future. All one knows for certain -- though, like Belacqua Shuah, we may try and take refuge in cliche -- is that life is long, and pain is profound. The name of Dante may not have been on the lips of all the critics when Waiting for Godot was first performed in English in 1955. But perhaps we can see, with the advantage of having the complete works, that the familiar landscape of all Beckett's writing is the mount of purgatory, as depicted in the second of the three books of the Divine Comedy. Again and again, his characters are 'waiting', as Vladimir and Estragon wait for 'Godot'. And we do not even crudely have to identify that elusive figure with the God whom the nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche announced to be dead, in order to see that between Dante and Beckett the emphasis has shifted. Where once purgatory was the route from hell to heaven -- a stage on the journey of redemption -- it now marks the boundaries of our meaningless and intolerable lives.

Consider Lucky's tortuous speech in Act I of Waiting for Godot. If, in essence, his is a theo­logical argument such as we frequently find in Dante, it is one that is taking place after the death of God. Though we constantly assume the existence of a sky-father who 'for reason unknown' rewards some souls and punishes others, humanity is seen to 'waste and pine'. Though we seek to blind ourselves to this truth by physical activity, we will, 'in spite of... the tennis', eventually have to face the fact that we live in an 'abode of stones'.

When in Act II Pozzo and Lucky appear for the second time, and soon collapse in a helpless heap on the ground, Vladimir is delighted because this gives him and Estragon something to do, relieving the tedium of their existence. He desperately enthuses to Estragon:

Vladimir: We wait. We are bored. [He throws up his hand.] No, don't protest, we are bored to death, there's no denying it. Good. A diversion comes along and what do we do? We let it go to waste. Come, let's go to work! [He advances towards the heap, stops in his stride.] In an instant all will vanish and we'll be alone once more, in the midst of nothingness!

Thus our condition, in this 'abode of stones', is revealed to be paradoxically both purgatorial and purposeless. Beckett's vision derives from Dante's traditional Christian universe; but without divine meaning the cosmos turns out to be chaos.

If Eliot is right about tradition then what both 'Dante and the Lobster' and Waiting for Godot have allowed us to do is to read the present in terms of the past and the past in terms of the present. Belacqua in purgatory, in no hurry for salvation, has now caught something of the character of Belacqua in Dublin, burning his toast and reluctantly fetching his aunt's lobster. Nor can the landscape of purgatory itself ever be the same now that we have seen Vladimir and Estragon, tormented by time, as they wait by a bare tree on a bleak country road.

'Do not presume...'

Behind Waiting for Godot lies The Divine Comedy; behind The Divine Comedy lies the Bible. The scriptures too are invoked by Beckett. But the experience of the play is not that of catching the odd, disposable allusion; rather, a pattern starts to emerge. Early in Act I Vladimir, having been ticked off by Estragon for leaving it too long to empty his bladder, quotes a half-remembered line: 'Hope deferred maketh the something sick, who said that?' His friend neither knows nor cares, being pre-occupied with his boots, but the reference is vital. Turning to the Biblical source we read the following: 'Hope deferred maketh the heart sick, but when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life' (Proverbs 13:12).

In the beginning Adam and Eve lived in the garden of Eden and did not know suffering or death. Then, prompted by the serpent, they chose to defy God and eat the fruit of 'the tree of the knowledge of good and evil'. The result was that they were driven out of the garden, and the way was barred to 'the tree of life' (Genesis 2-3). Vladimir and Estragon have inherited this loss. The road they are travelling leads nowhere; and though the tree by which they wait, which is bare throughout Act I, suddenly in Act II acquires 'four or five leaves', this is hardly a guarantee that the 'life' of Eden has been restored. Moreover, though Vladimir may remark at the end of the play that 'Everything's dead but the tree', his and Estragon's main interest is whether or not it will do to hang themselves on: it will not. Contrast this painful symbolism with Dante's welcome of a sure sign of salvation coming out of suffering: 'The tree renewed itself, which before had its boughs so naked' (Purgatory, XXXII, 59-60).

So all our two wanderers are left with is the realisation that they have fallen:

Estragon: We've lost our rights?
Vladimir [distinctly]: We got rid of them.

Significantly, when the former is asked by Pozzo for his name, he replies 'Adam'. Again, when Estragon later tries to attract the attention of Pozzo and Lucky by calling out 'Abel' and 'Cain' (the names of Adam and Eve's sons), Pozzo responds to both titles: as Estragon remarks, 'He's all humanity.' In other words, he has unknowingly admitted our fallen condition, in which we are all as much capable of evil (Cain) as of good (Abel).

But what of Christ, and the possibility of redemption? Vladimir is certainly interested in the crucifixion, and the story of the repentant thief; or, at least, he hopes that telling it 'will pass the time':

Vladimir: Two thieves, crucified at the same time as our Saviour. One –
Estragon: Our what?
Vladimir: Our Saviour. Two thieves. One is supposed to have been saved and the other... [he searches for the opposite of saved] ... damned.

In a rare interview Beckett once quoted St Augustine's reflection on this story: 'Do not despair, one of the thieves was saved: do not presume, one of the thieves was damned.' What appealed to him, he said, was 'the shape': a typically ambiguous observation, since the symmetry of the statement allows for it to be read both optimistically and pessimistically. On the whole, of course, the evidence of Waiting for Godot is that Beckett's interpretation of what is often called the good book is decidedly gloomy. When Estragon compares himself to Christ, Vladimir objects (typically, on geographical rather than theological grounds):

Vladimir: Where he lived it was warm, it was dry!
Estragon: Yes, and they crucified quick!

Unaccommodated man

However negative the Biblical context of Waiting for Godot, one could hardly accuse Beckett of avoiding the challenge of the scriptures. The faith to which they testify may not be available to him, but they offer a pattern of meaning against which to test his despair. Dante is re-read in a similar way. If we look carefully, we might also detect the presence of Shakespeare, another pillar of the tradition. Indeed, in this case the influence might, at first, seem even more direct. But again, we have to be careful in comparing source and use.

Take King Lear. In Act 3 the old king, driven to madness, wanders on the heath followed by the motley entourage of his Fool, the banished Earl of Kent and 'Poor Tom' (the Duke of Gloucester's maligned son, in disguise as a beggar). The dialogue reaches heights of absurdity comparable to that of Vladimir and Estragon, Pozzo and Lucky (another quartet of misfits); but again, mixed in with the madness are moments of awful truth. Pointing to 'Poor Tom' and appealing to the other three, Lear asks:

Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou ow'st the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Ha! There's three on's are sophisticated; thou art the thing itself; unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare forked animal as thou art.   (III.iv.105-11)

At such moments of insight in the bleak, storm-tossed wilderness we may not feel there is much effort needed to see Beckett as traditional. Waiting for Godot seems to be exactly about this vision of humanity.

We may recall also the last great speech by the blood-steeped hero of Macbeth. Besieged in his castle and hearing of his wife's death, he manages to attain a lucidity as terrifying as that of the old king on the heath:

Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.   (V.v.24-28)

Could there be a better description of the progress of Vladimir and Estragon throughout the two acts of Waiting for Godot?

Indeed, Vladimir's own conclusions are not unlike Lear's and Macbeth's. Remembering Pozzo's insight ('They give birth astride of a grave...'), he elaborates:

Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lin­geringly, the grave-digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. [He listens.] But habit is a great deadener. [He looks again at Estragon.] At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, he is sleep­ing, he knows nothing, let him sleep on. [Pause.] I can't go on! [Pause.] What have I said?

Absurdity then and now         

Do we conclude, then, that whereas the Bible and Dante have to be forcibly taken over by Beckett, his world-view has already been anticipated exactly by Shakespeare? This would be, I feel, misleading. For the vision of 'unaccommodated man' is Lear's, not the author's of King Lear; and the vision of the 'tale / Told by an idiot' is Macbeth's, not the author's of Macbeth. After all, the last words of both works go to other characters, representa­tives of a new beginning. Moreover, the same playwright also wrote Much Ado About Nothing and Twelfth Night: festive comedies, in which such nihilism is very firmly put in its place. By contrast, Vladimir speaks -- if the evidence of Waiting for Godot as a whole, and 'Dante and the Lobster', is to be believed -- with Beckett's full authority.

Another way of putting this is that, though the absurd vision is only one dimension of Shakespeare's repertoire, in our age it has become central. Thus, while the great tragedies may offer Beckett a model of despair, he can only use it by extending it beyond the dramatic limits originally imposed. An insight born of extremes -- Lear's anguish, Macbeth's guilt -- has been treated as absolute and universal. Shakespeare too has had to be read against the grain. But then, this is just the kind of daring that we need from an 'Individual Talent' if 'Tradition' is to be kept alive.

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The first version of this article appeared in The English Review in September 1994.

I reprint it here, slightly revised, not only because it may be of interest but also because ER is a journal which deserves to have maximum publicity. Like E-Magazine, it is written mainly for A Level English Literature students, but may be enjoyed by students at all levels as well as by general readers.

Laurence Coupe

Story and vision in the poetry of Thomas Hardy

Laurence Coupe discovers that the typical Hardy poem illuminates a moment set against a narrative framework. He argues that it is the tension between them that produces its special kind of beauty.

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Conventionally poetry is divided into lyrics (short poems expressing an emotion or idea), narrative poems (telling a story) and dramatic poems (characters speaking as if in drama). But this rigid distinction doesn’t always apply: nowhere more so than in the poetry of Thomas Hardy, a poet whose works often look like lyrics but have an underlying narrative impetus that is often missed. In the ‘Preface’ which he wrote for his second volume of poetry, Poems of the Past and the Present (1901), Thomas Hardy declared: ‘Of the subject-matter of this volume – even that which is in other than narrative form – much is dramatic or impersonative even where not explicitly so.’ It is important to bear this mind as one approaches Hardy’s poems: even if they do not announce themselves as stories, there is a lot more going on in them than the poet simply telling us how he feels or what he believes. The title of that volume gives us a clue: one of Hardy’s main concerns is the relation between ‘past’ and ‘present’. Given that we live in time, we inevitably make sense of our lives through narrative. This is something that he, more than nearly all other ‘lyric’ poets, fully understands.

Note also Hardy’s use of the word ‘impersonative’. Typically his own invention,  he uses it to suggest a character, with his own story, as if in a play or novel. Before Hardy established himself as a poet he had already had a long and successful career as a writer of prose fiction. Indeed, many were written while he was still making his way in that genre. There is certainly something of the novelist’s skill evident in the poems, which seem deliberately to defeat our expectation of pure lyrical utterance. There is always some other sort of narrative ‘business’ going on, even when we assume that Hardy is simply expressing himself.

True, Hardy in his notebook once quoted approvingly his friend Leslie Stephen’s opinion that the aim of the poet should be ‘to touch our hearts by showing his own’. But ‘showing’ is a lot more subtle a process than ‘telling’, as any good novelist knows. It demands that the reader be drawn into the story, sympathise with the protagonists and enter into the world they inhabit.

Fools of time

No matter how closely a poetic utterance may seem to reflect whatever information we have about his life, we have to be careful not to simply equate speaker and author. It is no coincidence that a form of which Hardy was particularly fond was dramatic monologue. Here the ‘I’ is that of an impersonated character, who speaks in a specific setting and situation to another, silent character.

The classic instance of this form in Hardy’s work is the series of poems he wrote after the death of his first wife, Emma, and included in the section entitled ‘Poems of 1912-13’ in the volume Satires of Circumstance (1914). Of course, it would be foolish to deny that there is a connection between that event and that series of poems. However, it would be wrong to assume that each and every utterance is simply the expression of personal grief coming directly out of the experience of marital mourning. Hardy takes personal experience and crafts it into a more universal expression of bereavement.

We should not be misled here by Hardy’s use of the word ‘satire’ in the title just mentioned. If, in the conventional sense, it brings to mind poetry that exposes the folly of individuals and institutions, we should consider the effect of pairing it with the word ‘circumstance’. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 may declare ‘Love’s not time’s fool’, but what Hardy seeks to demonstrate is that most of us are indeed the fools of time, especially when falling in and out of love. ‘Circumstance’ – by which he means the uncontrollable conditions of mortal life – will always render us vulnerable and frequently ridiculous. But of course Hardy’s ‘satires’ are wholly his own, and are informed by his profound compassion.

In ‘The Going’, the persona begins by trying to justify himself for not realising, right up to the moment of death, that the deceased was fatally ill:

Why did you give no hint that night
That quickly after the morrow’s dawn,
And calmly, as if indifferent quite,
You would close your term here, up and be gone…. 

These lines expose his fallibility, but the ultimate point of the poem is to convey the depth of his regret, as is made clear in the desperation of the rapidly rhyming, shorter lines which succeed these:

Where I could not follow
With wing of swallow
To gain one glimpse of you ever anon! 

Using a different verse form, but with similar effect, ‘The Voice’ conveys the abject state of mourning, the failure of the bereaved soul to find sanctuary from his pain: ‘Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me…’ The abrupt generality of ‘woman’ compels our attention. The alliteration of ‘much missed’, intensifying the loss, is complemented by the repetition of ‘call to me’, whereby the echo of the words uttered only raises the cruelly taunting possibility that it is the beloved’s voice which is replying to him. ‘Can it be you that I hear?’ he desperately asks.  Memories of happier days, when the ‘woman much missed’ would wait for him, wearing her distinctive ‘air-blue gown’, only add to the speaker’s torment. Such memories fuel his obsessive quest for the absent one, and we are left with a vivid presentation of his state of bewildered loss, enacted by the uncertain verse form:

Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward
And the woman calling.

‘Never again’

We may rightly categorise ‘The Going’ and ‘The Voice’ as dramatic monologues: there is a speaker (the bereaved one), and there is a silent listener, silent in this case because dead (the loved one). However, each poem implies a larger framework of narrative, a past state in which the man and woman were happy together, contrasted with a present state in which they are apart. Hence the desperate wanderings of the persona in ‘The Voice’ to locate a bodily presence which offers more than the mere echo of his own words.

In the case of ‘The Going’, the relationship between past and present, and so the overarching narrative, is rather more complex. For we have three, not two, moments in time to consider. The first is the distant past when the young man and the young woman were blissfully happy:

You were the swan-necked one who rode
Along the beetling Beeny Crest,
And, reining nigh me,
Would muse and eye me,
While life unrolled us at its very best.

The second is the recent past in which the mature man and woman became estranged:

Why, then, latterly did we not speak,
Did we not think of those days long dead,
And ere your vanishing strive to seek
That time’s renewal?

The third is the present, in which the persona is tormented by the contrast between the first and second moments:

Well, well! All’s past amend,
Unchangeable. It must go.

The sense of a narrative context is important for understanding another of the ‘Poems of 1912-13’: ‘At Castle Boterel’. Here, though, the temporal setting is slightly different. Firstly, we have the personal memory – that of the occasion when, in ‘dry March weather’, the persona and his beloved got down from the chaise they were being driven in, to ease the pony’s load, and simply enjoyed climbing the road together. Though this may seem a trivial enough incident, the persona begs to differ:

But was there never
A time of such quality, since or before,
In that hill’s story?

Secondly, we have the persona’s present lament: visiting Castle Boterel again, the persona imagines that he sees a ‘phantom figure’, that of the beloved, in the very same spot as she was when with him, all those years previously. He can only

          look back at it amid the rain
For the very last time; for my sand is sinking,
And I shall traverse old love’s domain
Never again.

However, both moments, that of memory and that of lament, are placed in the context of a larger temporal framework:

Primeval rocks form the road’s steep border,
And much have they faced there, first and last,
Of the transitory in Earth’s long order. 

The particular story concerning the persona’s quest is seen against the background of the larger movement of events, which is subject to ‘Time’s unflinching rigour’. Human beings have to make what sense they can of their lives through telling their stories, while remaining aware that there is a larger story which contains theirs. They may defy it, as does the persona when he affirms that what the rocks ‘record in colour and cast / Is – that we two passed.’ But the closing phrase of the poem, ‘Never again’, gives the last word to ‘Time’.

‘Looking away’

Again and again, Hardy presents us with situations and stories in which characters find themselves subject to the cruelties of life in time. He shows us how we carry our stories around with us, and how they can dictate how we respond to the given moment. Much of our emotional energy is spent in our anguish about what has been and what might yet be. In ‘A Broken Appointment’, the persona is waiting for a woman who fails to meet him as promised, thereby showing she did not care for him. He describes himself as ‘a time-torn man’. In ‘The Self-Unseeing’ the adult speaker recalls a childhood occasion on which he danced to the sound of his father’s violin while his mother sat looking on:

Childlike, I danced in a dream;
Blessings emblazoned that day;
Everything glowed with a gleam;
Yet we were looking away!

Of the two poems just quoted, the first might be categorised, along with ‘The Going’, ‘The Voice’ and ‘At Castle Boterel’, as a dramatic monologue. The speaker addresses an absent personage, who may or may not be listening (most likely not, it seems). The second poem belongs to the broader category of the lyric. We use the term ‘lyric’ to refer to most short poems expressing a state of mind or feeling. While the poet may not adopt a role, as in dramatic monologue, it is still necessary to remind ourselves that the speaker is not necessarily the same as the poet: the ‘I’ may well be ‘impersonative’. Just as importantly, even though the lyric may offer itself as an isolated moment of reflection – on an event, on another person, or on a theme – there will inevitably be an implicit narrative.

‘Some blessed Hope’

Sometimes the parameters of time are suggested by the title itself. In ‘Afterwards’, the title suggests that the present will in due course become the past; what takes place now will be reflected upon ‘afterwards’. With the first stanza, what is implicit in the title becomes explicit:

When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,
And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,
‘He was a man who used to notice such things’?

The persona is envisaging a future when he will not be here: the gate of the present moment will have been shut for ever; he will, in short, be dead. The question that occurs to him is this: when that has happened, will other people look out onto the sights of their world – the fragile beauty of Spring, in this instance – and remember him fondly as someone who, while he was alive, appreciated them – and, perhaps, taught others to do so? Or, to put this in another way again: in the future he will belong to the past; but will his name be invoked by way of a reminder to live in the present? He trusts that, though his question is here a rhetorical one, it will be answered positively in due course.

Narrative for Hardy is not always confined to individual lives. ‘The Darkling Thrush’, first published in The Times on 29^th December 1900, and subsequently included in Poems of the Past and Present, takes history itself as its context, the bigger narrative in which people’s private narratives are positioned.

Though this is a lyric poem, it also has a narrative trajectory. The persona has been wandering amidst the bleak and gloomy setting of the countryside in winter, and now pauses to look about him:

I leant upon a coppice gate
When frost was spectre-gray.

He cannot help but project human qualities onto the scene and, simultaneously, the historical context:

The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.

The direction of human history, as of individual life, is towards the ‘winter’ of death – the decline of civilisations, the encroachment of mortality. However, halfway though the poem Hardy brings in a contrary vision: the persona, who describes himself as ‘fervourless’, without passion or enthusiasm, becomes aware of ‘a full-hearted evensong / Of joy illimited.’ His melancholy sojourn has been rewarded, it seems. Out of the death of the year, the death of the century and the death of the persona’s spirit there arises, suddenly and miraculously, the promise of new life. This is all the more surprising since it emerges from the gloom by way of an ‘aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small / In blast-beruffled plume’. This moment of vision cuts across the narrative of despair: though there seems to be ‘so little cause for carolings / Of such ecstatic sound’ that the persona cannot help but conjecture that the thrush’s song signified

Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

The religious quality of the language – ‘evensong’, ‘carolings’ and, of course ‘Hope’ (here capitalised, it is one of the Christian virtues) – cannot help but suggest the possibility of redemption. Hardy, an agnostic, leaves the implications of this language hanging in the air, along with the bird’s song; and the poem itself lingers in our minds. Is it possible that life is more than a story that ends in defeat? Hardy himself is silent; his persona is ‘unaware’.

But the point is that ‘The Darkling Thrush’, like so many of his other poems, continues to offer its readers a sense of the poignant beauty of the world, always accessible even where the narrative we inhabit seems remorselessly tragic. Insofar as we remain open to that beauty, and revere it, human life is justified and the poet’s work has not been in vain. 

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This article originally appeared in E-Magazine in September 2009.

Laurence Coupe