The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [133]
Each of these six stories presents the tragic theme with a slightly different emphasis. Between them they may serve to extend this introductory survey of Tragedy to include more or less the full range of basic variations of which this extraordinarily important plot is capable.
King Lear
At the start of King Lear we are left in no doubt that the hero is about to make a potentially tragic error, His wishes to divest himself of the cares and responsibilities of kingship, while still wishing to enjoy the honours and privileges which attach to being a king. He plans to divide his kingdom between his three daughters, and puts them to a test by asking them how much they love him. But when Goneril and Reagan make flowery, empty protestations of their love, it is obvious that he is allowing himself to be deceived. When Cordelia, the youngest, makes a plain little declaration that she loves him no more and no less than is right and proper, he can no longer recognise the truth at all. He angrily rejects her, his `good angel'; she goes off into exile with the equally honest Kent, and the seeds of Tragedy are sown.
Although it is Lear's judgement which has been darkened, and which has led him into acting heartlessly and rejecting true love, it is already evident that he is primarily a victim of his own weakness rather than an active monster. The real sources of darkness in the story, the monsters unleashed by his weakness, are his heartless, false daughters Goneril and Reagan who inherit the power in his kingdom; while as a shadow to the drama of filial treachery which is about to unfold we also see the ageing Gloucester being likewise fooled by the `sweet words' of his villainous bastard son Edmund, as he rejects his loving and true son Edgar.
The Dream Stage of Lear's fantasy, while he can imagine that he still enjoys the honour of a king and the love of his two dark daughters, does not last long. Soon Frustration sets in, as Goneril and Reagan begin to treat their father with increasing contempt, until they reject him altogether.
The Nightmare Stage begins, with the poor, weak old man wandering through a stormy night on the desolate heath, accompanied only by the Fool and by the loyal Kent, who has returned from exile to serve his king in disguise. From now on the conflict between love and treachery, light and dark, carries the play into reaches of complexity such as are rarely touched on by the more straightforward type of Tragedy. Firstly, as a premonition of what is to come, we see the drama of Gloucester who, after rejecting his true son Edgar, rejoins the forces of light by ministering to the helpless Lear, for which he has his eyes torn out by the dark sisters. Now as helpless as Lear, he is rescued by his rejected but still loving son Edgar, who comes to him in disguise and cures him of his desire to commit suicide. Then, similarly, the rejected but still loving Cordelia arrives from France to rescue her father and nurse him back to sanity, in such a way that for the first time in the story Lear begins to see the truth and to recognise and feel real love.
Finally there is a battle, in which the forces of darkness seem to be victorious, with Lear and Cordelia taken prisoner. But almost at once the forces of darkness fall out amongst themselves. The three chief dark figures, Reagan, Goneril and Edmund, having been drawn down into the vortex of their own multiple treachery, all destroy each other. Unfortunately, as a last legacy of the evil that has possessed them, they have left the order by which Cordelia is hanged. The supreme, shining symbol of pure and selfless love, the `good angel' of the entire story, has been put to death - and Lear dies broken-hearted. We end this bleakest of all Shakespeare's plays with the sense