King Lear

Judged on the work for structure and on this text in part. The double plot passes the subtractive test outright: without Gloucester, Lear’s error is one man’s temper; with him it is a law, and “I stumbled when I saw” (4.1) answers “See better, Lear” (1.1). What holds the axis at 8.9 is the machinery and the text. Letters drive the plot; Kent keeps a disguise he never explains; Edgar withholds himself from his father and confesses it: “Never (O fault!) reveal’d myself unto him” (5.3). The conflation adds the Quarto’s 4.3, the Folio’s Merlin prophecy (3.2) and a Kent speech joined from both (3.1). On the work alone, two tenths higher.

Score: 8.9 / 10

The disclosure can be stated and it holds: love asked to measure itself becomes a contract and breaks, and every dignity power wears is borrowed. Cordelia will love “According to my bond; no more nor less” (1.1). Lear finds the principle too late: “O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars / Are in the poorest thing superfluous” (2.4). The heath strips the borrowing to “unaccommodated man” (3.4); Dover adds “a dog’s obeyed in office” (4.6). It holds without the play’s gods. Held off the top by its own unanswered question, “Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?” (3.6): the sisters’ case is put once and dropped.

Score: 9.7 / 10

Height at the ceiling, and frequency near it from 2.4 onward. Terror in the storm, “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!” (3.2), and in the blinding, “Out, vile jelly!” (3.7); grandeur turned to pity in “Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are” (3.4); vertigo at a cliff that is not there, “The crows and choughs that wing the midway air / Show scarce so gross as beetles” (4.6); beauty in “I am a very foolish fond old man” (4.7). Then Lear’s last speech, fifty of its fifty-seven words of one syllable. Held a step off the top by ground-level stretches: the plotting of Acts I and II, the heralds before the duel in 5.3.

Score: 9.7 / 10

Myth built, not evoked. The folktale love-test, three daughters and the youngest true, is the engine, and the play breaks the folktale’s law: the true daughter is not rewarded. Fortune’s wheel is load-bearing and recurs, from “turn thy wheel” (2.2) to “a wheel of fire” (4.7) and “The wheel is come full circle” (5.3). The last scene calls up the Last Judgment and stops short of it: “Is this the promis’d end?” (5.3). Lear stays particular throughout, down to “Pray you undo this button” (5.3). Held below the summit because Edgar’s archetypes come in sequence rather than as one figure: Bedlam beggar, peasant, then a nameless champion, evoked rather than built.

Score: 9.6 / 10

Every source restores the king: King Leir (printed 1605), Holinshed, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Spenser. In the chronicles Cordelia dies later, by her own hand. The play hangs her before her father’s eyes and gives the chronicle ending to her murderer as a cover story: “To lay the blame upon her own despair / That she fordid herself” (5.3). It grafts on Sidney’s Paphlagonian king to make a second family, sets a Fool at the centre of a tragedy, and ends a pagan world without providence. The stake was real: Tate’s happy ending of 1681 held the stage for about a century and a half. Held below the summit by a proven form and an inherited Machiavel.

Score: 9.4 / 10

Change the form and the play loses what it knows. On a bare stage Dover cliff puts the audience where the blind man is, “Methinks the ground is even.” “Horrible steep.” (4.6); only theatre can make that fall. The verse breaks as the order breaks: Lear speaks almost wholly verse in Act II and a quarter prose in Act IV. The storm breaks into seven short scenes, and the play’s arithmetical centre falls inside it, in 3.2. “Nothing” sounds twenty times in Act I and once in Act V. Held below the top band by the Quarto and Folio question: this shape is neither 1608’s nor 1623’s, and the Folio cuts the mock trial of 3.6.

Score: 9.5 / 10

Evidence rather than promise: four centuries of re-examination without exhaustion. Johnson’s note (1765), Lamb’s claim that the play cannot be acted (1811), Keats’s sonnet (1818), Bradley (1904), Tolstoy’s attack (1906) and Orwell’s answer (1947), Cavell’s “The Avoidance of Love” (1969), and The Division of the Kingdoms (1983), which reopened the text itself. The yield is in the play as well. What Lear sees at “Look there, look there!” (5.3), joy or delusion, cannot be settled; nor whether “my poor fool is hang’d” means Cordelia, the Fool or both. The pairings keep producing: Cordelia’s “you must not kneel” (4.7) against Lear’s “When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down” (5.3).

Score: 9.8 / 10

A published work, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The force is great: tragedy enlarged to kingdom and cosmos and refused every consolation; madness and folly made ways of telling the truth, the naked beggar become “this philosopher” (3.4); a second plot of equal weight, fully integrated. The reach was delayed, and delay is credited and discounted: Tate’s version held the stage from 1681, and the tragic ending returned only in the 1820s. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the redirection since is documented, through Keats and Shelley, Turgenev’s King Lear of the Steppes, Beckett’s Endgame as Kott read it, Brook’s 1962 production, Bond’s Lear, Kurosawa’s Ran and Smiley’s A Thousand Acres.

Score: 9.4 / 10

Survival is demonstrated over four centuries, in two early printings and continuous editing since 1709. The surface is Jacobean in places: Gloucester’s “late eclipses in the sun and moon” (1.2), Edgar’s devils out of Harsnett’s pamphlet of 1603 on exorcism, the Fool’s “If I had a monopoly out” (1.4), a divided Britain staged before the king who had just united the crowns. None of it is needed to follow the play. The cost lies elsewhere: for about a century and a half the play survived in print while the stage played Tate, and some of the Fool’s jokes now need notes. The depth pays nothing for its moment; the eclipse costs a step.

Score: 9.6 / 10

Judged on Shakespeare’s English, with no translation between. The range of command is wide: the ceremonial verse of the love-test, “more than words can wield the matter” (1.1), against “Nothing”; Lear’s syntax breaking under its own threat (2.4); the Fool’s jingles; Edgar’s four registers, from Tom’s catalogue prose to the Somerset of “Chill not let go, zir” (4.6) and the knight’s challenge; Kent’s “three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave” (2.2); the monosyllables at the end. Repetition is 0.14 per cent, all of it deliberate. Held below the top band by construction: the letter plot, deaths reported from offstage, and the king forgotten in his own last scene, “Great thing of us forgot!” (5.3).

Score: 9.5 / 10

The two most distant elements, the Fool’s riddle of “why a snail has a house” (1.5) and Cordelia dead in Lear’s arms, obey one law: the contest over nature, named forty-nine times, from “Thou, Nature, art my goddess” (1.2) and “Hear, Nature, hear!” (1.4) to the question of 3.6. The two theologies, “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods” (4.1) and “The gods are just” (5.3), are held under that law. The plot is less strict: Kent is forty-eight (1.4) to Lear’s “Fourscore and upward” (4.7), and Albany fights a French army while granting its cause (5.1). In this text Kent’s speech in 3.1 joins two versions, and the seam shows.

Score: 9.4 / 10

The orders are many and one question holds them: what a person needs. Consciousness and madness, “O, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven!” (1.5); two families; the state in partition and invasion; law, “handy-dandy” (4.6); the economy of “shake the superflux to them” (3.4); service and labour, the First Servant who dies stopping a duke (3.7) and the sampire-gatherer’s “dreadful trade” (4.6); sex, “Let copulation thrive” (4.6); age, “Age is unnecessary” (2.4); the gods and the “promis’d end” (5.3). They are integrated, not listed: the storm reaches king and beggar alike. History is held weakly. The setting is legendary and pre-Christian, and the Fool jokes about it: “I live before his time” (3.2).

Score: 9.6 / 10