There is so much human suffering in King Lear that for nearly two hundred years the most frequent version staged was a bowdlerized one by Nahum Tate.
Tate’s version ends happily with Lear and his much sinned against daughter, Cordelia, reunited, Edgar crowned and the villains Goneril, Regan and Edmund lying dead as earth on the stage floor.
And if that isn’t enough, Tate omits altogether the part of the Fool, one of Shakespeare’s greatest comic creations.
It just isn’t the same play without this:
That lord that counsell’d thee
To give away thy land,
Come place him here by me,
Do thou for him stand:
The sweet and bitter fool
Will presently appear;
The one in motley here,
The other found out there.
All thy other titles thou hast given away; that
thou wast born with.
Despite Tate’s butcherings and emendations, his version of Lear was the popular version for nearly two centuries.
There has to be an explanation for this and it begs the question: Did Shakespeare over-extend the tragic form by having Cordelia die in the mad King’s arms?
In Poetics, Aristotle wrote that for a play to be a tragedy there must be a change in circumstance for the tragic figure. The change could from good fortune to bad fortune or from bad fortune to good.
For Aristotle, a tragic figure is one who has made a mistake or committed a sin.
Finally, and most famously, Aristotle wrote that the object of the Tragedy is to arouse a feeling of awe and wonder (translated into English as ‘pity’ and ‘fear’) in the audience and thereby purge the audience of these emotions.
But why do audiences and readers of Shakespeare accept the murder of Desdemona, the butchering of all MacDuff’s pretty ones, and the suicide of Ophelia and yet recoil at the death of Cordelia and Lear?
Surely Desdemona, MacDuff’s children and Ophelia are as innocent or moreso than Cordelia. In fact, Cordelia, it could be argued, is less passive than they are. She is an active participant in the tragedy even if she is not to be blamed for its unfolding.
Had she given her father the encomiums he wanted, she would have gotten a third (still larger than Goneril’s and Regan’s shares) of Lear’s kingdom and with that might have been able to ward off her evil sisters’ designs. Of course, she had no way of knowing what her failure to falsely flatter her father would induce, but it’s still more than sweet Desdemon, MacDuff’s wife and kids or Ophelia ever did.
Now, to be sure, the death of Lear is more painful than the deaths of Hamlet, Macbeth or Othello.
In the case of Macbeth, only tyrantophile could possibly mourn his beheading by MacDuff. The man was probably the first serial killer.
Othello’s murder of Desdemona is gut wrenchingly painful. And made even moreso by Shakespeare by this death-bed exchange between Desdemona and her mistress, Emilia:
Emilia: Who has done this deed?
Desdemona: Nobody. I myself.
I don’t belive there is anything in the English language to match the Saintliness of those three words, although Cordelia’s “no cause, no cause” comes close.
Hamlet hurts more people by far than his fratricidal Uncle Claudius does.
He drives Ophelia to suicide, kills her father, Polonius, for being a prating, pedantic old fool, and sends his own college pals, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths.
In Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth we believe the title characters deserved their demises.
We don’t feel that way with King Lear.
He is guilty only of foolishness as his fool wisely points out. And if we handed out death sentences for that, most of us would be planning our last meal.