Why Did Tolstoy Hate King Lear?

Why Did Tolstoy Hate King Lear? Katia Mitova

University of Chicago

In Shakespeare everything is exaggerated: the actions are exaggerated, so are their consequences, the speeches of the characters are exaggerated and therefore at every step the possibility of artistic impression is interfered with. Whatever people may say, however they may be enraptured by Shakespeare’s works, whatever merits they may attribute to them, it is perfectly certain that he was not an artist and that his works are not artistic productions. Without the sense of measure, there never was nor can be an artist, as without the feeling of rhythm there can not be a musician. Shakespeare might have been whatever you like, but he was not an artist.1

This shocking opinion belongs to Count Leo Tolstoy. His hundred-page exposition, entitled “On Shakespeare and the Drama,” was published in 1906 in English and in Russian and provoked two or three waves of critical reactions during the first half of the twentieth century.2 To be sure, neither the reputation of Shakespeare’s works, described by Tolstoy as “unnatural,” “untruthful,” “immoral,” and, therefore, “evil,” nor the eminence of Tolstoy as an artist and authority on human condition, were in any way harmed by this unusual and passionate criticism.

Then why dig out a pamphlet that was published only four years before Tolstoy’s death, in a period when he had renounced society and art? Why busy ourselves with antiquated curiosities3 instead of trying, for example, to rethink the phenomenal dramaturgical impact of King Lear? This article is an attempt to exploit the extremity of Tolstoy’s critical perspective precisely with the latter, positive goal in mind. Shakespeare’s historical circumstance and epistemological 1 Tolstoy on Shakespeare, V. T. Tcherkoff (ed.), New York, London: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1906, p. 80. “On Shakespeare and the Drama” was written as a preface to Ernest Crosby’s article “Shakespeare’s Attitude Toward the Working Classes” and published in Tolstoy on Shakespeare. The volume includes Bernard Shaw’s letter in support of Tolstoy’s opinion of Shakespeare. In November 1906, “On Shakespeare and the Drama” appeared in Russian in Russkoe slovo, no. 277—285. 2 About the first wave of the critical reactions to Tolstoy’s views on Shakespeare, see Aylmer Maude, Tolstoy on Art and His Critics. London: Humphrey Milford Oxford University Press, 1925. Also see: Arnold Eiloart, Shakespeare and Tolstoy. London, 1909; George W. Knight, “Shakespeare’s Spiritual Experience Compared to That of Tolstoy,” Occult Review, February-March, 1930, pp. 103-107, 177-180; George W. Knight, Shakespeare and Tolstoy, London: H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1934; E. G. Craig, “Tolstoy and Shakespeare,” Drama 10, 1934; Robert J. Kane, “Tolstoy, Goethe and King Lear,” Shakespeare Association Bulletin, 21, no. 4, 1946, pp. 159-160; George Orwell, “Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool,” Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays. London: Secker & Warburg, 1950, pp. 32-52. George Gibian, Tolstoy and Shakespeare, Hague: Mouton, 1957; Narayan Chandra Saha, “Tolstoy and Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Commemoration Volume. Calcutta: Dept. of English, Presidency College, 1966, pp. 159-169; Gary R. Jahn, “The Aesthetic Theory of Leo Tolstoy’s What is Art?,” Journal of Aesthetics, 34, no. 1, 1975, pp. 59-65; Ilse Girona, Tolstoy on Art: A Study of His Fiction and His Essays in Criticism. Doctoral Dissertation, The Committee on Social Thought, The University of Chicago, 1984. 3 Due to the extremity and elaborateness of its criticism of Shakespeare’s drama, Tolstoy’s article is a true curiosity. However, King Lear has provoked much discontent through the ages. Samuel Johnson’s confession in the preface of his edition of King Lear of 1765 is representative of the spirit of the negative reactions: “I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia’s death that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor.” Quoted from Frank Kermode (ed.), Shakespeare: King Lear. A Casebook. London: MacMillan, 1992, p. 28. For a survey of the attempts to treat King Lear as a defective morality play see Barbara Everett, “The New King Lear,” Critical Quarterly, Winter, 1960 (reprinted in Kermode’s Casebook).

KATIA MITOVA

248

approach to reality, as well as his creative individuality are as different from Tolstoy’s as they can be. I will endeavor to use this contrast as a venue to a better understanding of the divergent responses to King Lear through the ages.

1. A via negativa guide to Shakespeare All his life Tolstoy was obsessed with Shakespeare’s fame and King Lear’s fate. Diaries,

letters, and memoirs testify to it. In the 1850s, under the influence of Turgenev and Druzhinin (the translator of King Lear into Russian), Tolstoy tried – unsuccessfully – to change his unenthusiastic opinion of the play. In February 1857 he jotted, in his Diary, an elliptic paragraph about Lear, self-imitation in literature, reason, fate, and human weakness. From his wife’s diary, we know that in February 1870 Tolstoy intended to write a play, and that the reading of Shakespeare inspired him, if only for a short time. In 1891 Tolstoy read a version of King Lear, probably not Shakespeare’s, to his youngest son, Vanechka, when he was sick. In a letter of the same year, Tolstoy used the word “Lirstvo” (Learhood) to express understanding and compassion for a downcast friend. Finally, the end of Tolstoy’s own life, at the age of 82, is a striking analog of Lear’s fate. George Orwell points out the symmetry between the two men — “unaccommodated” men, to use Lear’s epithet for Poor Tom (3.4.1104):

the most impressive event in Tolstoy’s life, as in Lear’s, was a huge and gratuitous act of renunciation. In his old age, he renounced his estate, his title and his copyrights, and made an attempt … to escape from the privileged position and live a life of a peasant … [E]ven the ending of his life — the sudden unplanned flight across the country, accompanied only by a faithful daughter, the death in a cottage in a strange village — seems to have in it a sort of phantom reminiscence of Lear.5

Overall, Tolstoy’s reading of Shakespeare appears to be dedicated,6 albeit not appreciative. While considering this paradoxical situation, we have to keep in mind that the reader, the critic, the art theorist, and the fiction writer in Tolstoy are different personae whose responses to Shakespeare do not entirely concur. Tolstoy the art theorist, for example, asserts that transmitting feelings is the purpose of art and that the author’s “sincerity” is vital to his capability to “infect” the audience.7 Tolstoy the critic of Shakespeare, in turn, puts the emphasis on the way feelings are being transmitted – above all, it has to be “natural.” The author of War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and The Death of Ivan Ilyich seems to belong to the same race of great artists as Homer, Shakespeare, and Goethe. However, Tolstoy the critic probably would accept only the company of the composer of the Iliad – a work with which he consciously competed by writing 4 All King Lear quotes are from William Shakespeare. King Lear, London: The Arden Shakespeare, 1997. 5 George Orwell, “Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool,” Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays, p. 45. 6 Tolstoy’s confession that he has been struggling for years to understand and accept Shakespeare’s greatness is confirmed by his correspondence and the recollections of family members and friends. See Ilya Ginsburg, Iz proshlogo. Vospominaniia [From the Past. Recollections]. Moscow, 1925, pp. 106-114; Thomas Stevens, Through Russia on a Mustang, 1891, pp. 92-115; Hugo Ganz, “A Visit to Count Tolstoy,” The Downfall of Russia: Under the Surface in the Land of Riddles. London: Hodder and Stoughtor, 1904, pp. 285-331. 7 Leo N. Tolstoy, What is Art? (first published in 1896), trans. by Almyer Maude. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1960, pp. 51-52.

WHY DID TOLSTOY HATE KING LEAR?

249

War and Peace, Russia’s national epic. Homer, Tolstoy allows, at least “believes in what he says and speaks seriously, and therefore never exaggerates, and the sense of measure never abandons him.”8 The complex relationship between Tolstoy’s writing personae deserves a thorough discussion from the point of view of the mechanisms of literary creativity. My intent here is to make the best use of the position that the critic’s persona has assumed in “On Shakespeare and the Drama.”

Tolstoy’s criticism of King Lear has two chief points. First, Tolstoy perceives the plot of the play and its characters as “exaggerated” and “unnatural,” that is, untruthful to reality. This, according to Tolstoy, becomes obvious if one compares Shakespeare’s Lear with the preexisting anonymous play True Chronicle History of King Leir. Second, which makes the first worse, thanks to his ability to express powerful emotions “correctly,” and to the peculiar circumstances that assured his fame, Shakespeare is able to seduce the audiences into believing that there is truth in his “unnatural” worlds. Shakespeare surely does not need a defense against this kind of criticism, but it seems worth asking whether King Lear is indeed “unnatural” in any sense and just how such an “unnatural” play manages to seduce the audience.

2. Ex nihilo nihil 2.1. King Lear as a poetic paradox Almost one third of Tolstoy’s critical essay is devoted to the plot of King Lear. “As

impartially as possible,”9 Tolstoy endeavors to describe, act by act, the contents of the drama. Needless to say, he is incapable of being impartial. The obvious goal of his synopsis is to show how, from the point of view of his own understanding of art, King Lear is fundamentally defective. Tolstoy repeats the word “neestestvennii” (“unnatural”) multiple times — always to give a strongly negative evaluation of the plot, characters, and language, and not only in King Lear, but in Shakespeare’s oeuvre. Unnatural is Lear’s relation to his daughters, unnatural is his decision to retire, unnatural is the fact that Lear does not recognize the disguised Kent, unnatural that Gloucester and Edgar believe Edmund, unnatural and completely humorless are the Fool’s songs and speeches, unnatural are the storm and Lear’s madness, unnatural is Poor Tom’s behavior, and so on, and so forth.10 In Tolstoy’s theoretical outlook, the opposition natural—unnatural is identical in meaning with oppositions like aesthetic—not aesthetic, art—not art, true—untrue, clear—unclear (comprehensible—incomprehensible). To Tolstoy, that giant of realism, being in harmony with the logic of real life is the criterion for naturalness. Hence a literary plot, be it a plot of a novel or drama, should be extracted from life and not borrowed from another literary work.

Here Shakespeare’s and Tolstoy’s views on art clash. To Tolstoy Shakespeare is essentially an “insincere” author, that is, one who dares to represent feelings that he could not have 8 Tolstoy on Shakespeare, p. 80. 9 Ibid., p. 9. 10 In the English version of the essay, the key word “neestestvennii” is once translated as “unnatural,” and at another time — inaccurately — as “artificial.” The words “unnatural” and “artificial” have their exact correspondences in Russian, even the word-building is the same in both languages (“artificial”=“iskusstvennii,” “art”=“iskusstvo”; “un-natural”=“ne-estestvennii” or “not natural”). It is not a matter of chance that Tolstoy prefers using the term “unnatural” rather than “artificial.”

KATIA MITOVA

250

experienced because they are simply not possible. Only “sincere” art can produce “that sense of infection with another’s feeling, compelling us to joy in another’s gladness, to sorrow at another’s grief, and to mingle souls with another – which is the very essence of art.”11

In other words, if a work of art is to be truthful and thus able to “infect” the audience, it should be commonsensical. However, what happens – not only in King Lear, but also in Shakespeare’s other plays – cannot be explained entirely in accordance with the logic of everyday life. Borrowing a plot, for instance, creates an intertextual relationship, which means primarily a relation between two fictional realities, and only secondarily mimesis. Theater, too, has its own logic that requires suspension of disbelief stronger than prose fiction. Poetry goes even further by imposing a logic that can bestow on a single word the power of a “first mover” of the whole work. Such is the case in King Lear, where the word “nothing,” uttered by Cordelia, seems to function as much more than “a running metaphor.”12 It is surely not “natural” for “nothing” to be ruling the reality of a whole play; it is fascinating and chilling.

The action proper of King Lear begins when the king announces, “Meantime we shall express our darker purpose” (1.1.35). The “darker purpose” includes Lear’s not so secret plan to divide the kingdom, to arrange a marriage for Cordelia, and to retire “on her kind nursery” (1.1.124). It also includes a ritual, a love contest of sorts, through which Cordelia, the beloved and loving daughter, will be given the chance to shine. It seems that Lear knows what he is doing. Yet the fact that he has chosen to hear declarations of love and not vows of loyalty that would be politically appropriate for the occasion discloses his own uncertainty and vulnerability. The strong parent and king, accustomed to obedience, suddenly plays a boy who demands to be told exactly how much he is loved.13

Perhaps Lear has just grown old; after all, “fourscore and upward” (4.7.61) is a respectable age even in our times. Some detect an incestuous element in the very idea of a love contest. Shakespeare’s own “darker purpose,” in turn, might have been to show a Lear who has uncertainties about his “purpose.” A Lear who knows what he is doing would have found an easy way out of Cordelia’s unexpectedly reserved avowal. But Shakespeare’s Lear does not even seem to hear Cordelia’s vow to obey him, love him, and honor him (1.1.98), which happens to be very similar to a marriage vow. He remains entirely in the grip of the five times repeated “nothing”:

Lear … what can you say to draw

A third more opulent than your sisters? Speak. Cordelia Nothing, my lord. Lear Nothing? Cordelia Nothing. Lear Now, nothing will come of nothing. Speak again. Cordelia Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave

My heart into my mouth. I love your majesty According to my bond, no more nor less. (1.1.85-93)

11 Tolstoy, What is Art?, p. 138. 12 Robert F. Fleissner, “The ‘Nothing’ Element in King Lear,” Shakespeare Quarterly, (13) no 1, 1962, p. 67. 13 Duncan Fraser makes an interesting analysis of Lear’s playing the role of a child instead of a parent in “Much Virtue in ‘Nothing’: Cordelia’s Part in the First Scene of King Lear,” The Cambridge Quarterly (8), no 1, 1978-79, pp. 1-10.


251

Thus, in the beginning of the creation of King Lear, is the word “nothing.” While theologians and philosophers, later joined by theoretical physicists, are at pains to prove either that the world was created from nothing or that nothing can come of nothing, the Bard suggests both and hints that both apply to his creation of King Lear.14 On the one hand, the play’s world is literally a creation ex nihilo. On the other hand, Lear’s “nothing will come of nothing” is literally confirmed – we witness the vanishing of that world. “Nothing will come of nothing,” is a version of ex nihilo nihil fit that can be traced back to Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, and earlier, to Aristotle and Parmenides. It was usually translated as “nothing can come of nothing,” which is what Lear says in the Quarto. The preferred Folio version, “nothing will come of nothing,” has the dramatic power of a warning instead of being just a commonsense statement. The fact that the Folio variant has made its way into the dictionaries of English proverbs as a Shakespearean quote seems to testify to its special weight in the play.

Toward the end of King Lear it becomes apparent how successful Shakespeare’s poetic reconciliation of the two conflicting creational principles has been. Lear’s “nothing will come of nothing” turns into a curse that is fulfilled in an irreversible way. However easily words and wishes in King Lear produce events, the consequences cannot be undone. In the last act, Lear, with all his being, wants his daughter to live, but she is gone forever. Cordelia, who has started the circle by uttering the word “nothing,” must now close it with her death. And, as in the beginning, Lear has to follow her:

Lear And my poor fool is hanged. No, no, no life! Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life And thou no breath at all? O thou’lt come no more Never, never, never, never, never. [to Edgar?] Pray you undo this button. Thank you, sir. O, o, o, o. Do you see this? Look on her: look, her lips, Look there, look there! He dies. (5.3.304-9)

The “never,” repeated five times in the Folio and three times in the Quarto, appears to mirror the repetition of “nothing” in the beginning of the play. Other words from the play’s ending seem to refer to the beginning as well. For example, Lear says he would readily take poison from Cordelia’s hand because she, unlike her sisters, has “some cause” to hate him. “No cause, no cause” (4.7.75), she replies. On a meta-dramatic level, these words might apply equally well to 14 Juan Carlos Rodríguez Aguilar, in his article “The Nothing that from Nothing Came. From Epicurean to Heideggerian Nothingness in Shakespeare’s King Lear,” Anuario de letras modernas (7) 1995, pp. 109-123, proposes a compelling interpretation of King Lear as a world divided between characters who understand “nothing” in its Epicurean, materialistic sense (“nothing can come of nothing”) and characters who understand it in Heideggerian sense (“Being is a consequence of Nothing”). Lear and Gloucester of the beginning of the play, as well as Goneril, Regan, Cornwall, Edmund, Burgundy, and Oswald belong to the group of Epicurean nothing. Cordelia, Lear after the storm scene, Gloucester after the Dover cliff scene, Kent, Albany, Edgar, France, Genleman, and Doctor belong to the group of Heideggerian nothing. The abyss between the two concepts of nothing can be endured only through madness. The Fool and Poor Tom lead Lear and Gloucester respectively through that abyss. My interest in King Lear as a poetic creation suggests a slightly different approach, but in principle it concurs with Rodríguez Aguilar’s understanding of the main line of the play as a “shift of consciousness that leads him [Lear] from Epicurean to Heideggerian Nothing” (p. 114).

KATIA MITOVA

252

the “darker” beginning of the play. After so many various critical attempts to comprehend why Cordelia says the first “nothing” and why this makes Lear “disclaim all his paternal care,” no one can say that the “cause” has been sufficiently explained. But if “nothing” is the first cause of the play, then there is “no cause” to what happens in Act One, Scene One. Only Cordelia can possibly elucidate the cause of the tragedy, which she does by denying the existence of such a cause. Thus, paradoxically, the cause is the very lack of cause.

As the play progresses, the word “nothing” gradually releases its destructive store. To Burgundy’s attempt to reclaim Cordelia’s dowry Lear replies, “Nothing. I’ve sworn, I am firm” (1.1.247). For a king, there is no way back from a vow, and the way forward leads to nothingness. Accordingly, the next movement is the expropriation by Edmund of Cordelia’s original “Nothing, my lord.” This happens precisely when Edmund is about to put into motion the fake letter from Edgar:

Gloucester What paper were you reading? Edmund Nothing, my lord. Gloucester … The quality of nothing hath no such need to hide itself. Let’s see.

– Come, if it be nothing, I shall not need spectacles. (1.2.31-36)

Ironically, it is and is not “nothing” at the same time, or it is the kind of “nothing” that soon will make Gloucester see nothing. In principle, the meaning of “nothing” in Cordelia’s, Lear’s, and Edmund’s utterances is different. Cordelia’s “nothing” could be defined as philosophical. It implies a Bergsonian15

awareness of the limitless potential of non-existence versus the limitations of any form of existence. Or, simply, after the fireworks produced by her sisters, Cordelia feels that less would be more. Lear’s “nothing,” on the other hand, is pragmatic. In his mouth, “nothing” stands for Cordelia’s lack of words, and, consequently, for the third “more opulent part” of the kingdom that she is not given. Edmund, who as an exiled bastard has experienced what it is to be nothing, now tries to reverse the unjust order of things by turning his brother Edgar into nothing. The phrase “Edgar I nothing am” (2.2.192) that concludes Edgar’s soliloquy seems to imply turning something into nothing. But Edgar’s nothingness is ambiguous. Later, just before the cliff scene, Edgar tells his blind father, “You’re much deceived; in nothing am I changed / but in my garments” (4.6.8). Again, both are true: Edgar is changed into nothing, and he is changed in nothing. Poetic paradoxes, unlike logical paradoxes, do not need to be solved.

Each of the main characters contributes to the fulfillment of the many meanings of “nothing.” But only the Fool – the nobody who is allowed to say anything, to mock and parody the king – seems to be aware of the word’s poetic powers. As Rodríguez Aguilar has put it, the Fool works “an explosion within language in order that he may open the circle and allow Lear to enter Heideggerian nothing.”16 Ironically, the Fool’s speeches tend to be perceived by the characters – and oftentimes by the audience – not as talking about “nothing,” but as saying “nothing.” While keeping company to Lear and Kent, for instance, the Fool sings a song that consists entirely of proverbial sayings – popular wisdom that Lear has neglected. An exchange between the three 15 Ibid., p. 112. 16 Ibid., p. 120.


253

characters follows: Kent This is nothing, fool. Fool Then ‘tis like the breath of an unfee’d lawyer, you gave me nothing for it. [to Lear] Can you make no use of nothing, nuncle? Lear Why no, boy; nothing can be made out of nothing. (1.4.126-130)

Lear, who soon will be kicked out by Goneril as if he were nothing, continues to insist that “nothing” is ineffectual. A wise Lear would have made a positive use of Cordelia’s “nothing” response; the foolish Lear, however, – as the Fool rightly observes – has let “nothing” replace his wit: “I’d rather be any kind o’thing than a fool, and yet I would not be thee, nuncle. Thou hast pared thy wit o’both sides and left nothing i’the middle” (1.4.176-9). It is not until his storm scene speech, witnessed by the Fool, that Lear realizes his gross mistake. When disguised Kent comes into view, Lear utters “I will say nothing” (3.2.38). Coincidentally, this appears to be the turning point of the play: like Cordelia, Lear has become “nothing” and now, like her, he says “nothing.”

2.2. The freedom to doubt The negative logos of King Lear permeates the poetic fabric of the play. As a poetic device,

it is effective, though not intrusive. Tolstoy must have felt its power mostly in the lack of commonsensical causes for the focal events of the plot. A reading of King Lear as a work of implicit metafiction that includes an account of its own creation ex nihilo would have only confirmed Tolstoy’s conviction about its “unnaturalness.” The opposition between Tolstoy’s literary worlds, as we know them from his creative practice and theoretical views, and Shakespeare’s stage worlds, of which King Lear is an extreme example, seems to reflect the differences in the two respective artists’ creative approaches to external reality. Tolstoy’s relation to God’s creation can be described as co-operation,17 Shakespeare’s, as a sort of competition.

Tolstoy believed that good literature should provide insights about the order of creation, to reveal its rules and help people follow them and live in brotherhood, in accordance with God’s law. Tolstoy’s peculiar form of Christianity without personal god18 but with divine commandments went hand in hand with his belief in reason and his denial of the possibility of supernatural interventions in human life. Tolstoy cherished the wisdom of the gospels, but he was convinced that their miracles were fabricated. Jesus Christ’s resurrection, for example, which made it possible to turn Jesus’ wisdom into a religion, was in Tolstoy’s view pure fabrication on the part of St. Paul.19 In brief, to Tolstoy miracles are unnatural and, therefore, untrue. Consequently, making people believe in miracles is insincere and detrimental to their 17 Aylmer Maude, in The Life of Tolstoy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987, describes Tolstoy’s religion as “cooperation with something greater than ourselves that makes for righteousness,” II, p. 56. 18 Ibid., p. 58. 19 Tolstoy’s Diaries, ed. by R. F. Christian. New York: The Scribner Press, 1985, I, p. 237. The Russian poet Afanasii Fet submits that Tolstoy wanted to “draw pictures that would destroy the people’s faith in miracles.” Quoted from Sergei Tolstoy, Tolstoy Remembered. New York: Athenaeum, 1962, p. 206. Tolstoy, in The Kingdom of God Is Within You. Boston, MA: L. C. Page and Co., 1893, states that biblical accounts about creation and ascension have “no meaning whatsoever,” p. 84.

KATIA MITOVA

254

everyday effort to live a good life. In Shakespeare’s plays, on the other hand, there is an abundance of inexplicable events.

Several of his plays hinge entirely on some magic. Let us recall A Midsummer Night Dream, with the purple “love-in-idleness” flower that makes one fall in love at first sight upon awakening; Macbeth’s witches; The Winter’s Tale where Paulina demonstrates an uncanny power to turn Hermione into a sculpture and to restore her to life sixteen years later; and, finally, The Tempest with Prospero’s mysterious art to manipulate the world of the island and to cause storms and shipwrecks. Such miracles, performed in “black ink”20

and on stage, demonstrate how something can come of nothing in a fascinatingly “unnatural” way. Shakespeare is competing with God in creating ex nihilo. At the same time, he is displaying ironic self-awareness of the limitations of his magic. For example, Hermione’s statue is wrinkled; Prospero’s art works only within the limited space of the island, which resembles a stage or a book. King Lear, however, appears to hold a special position among Shakespeare’s miracle plays. By choosing “nothing” as the logos, Shakespeare has created a kind of anti-world, impossible to situate in time and space. In this anti-world, evil triumphs absolutely, destroying even itself. In the end, almost all the main characters, twelve out of fourteen, perish. Some of them, like the Fool, simply disappear from the shrinking universe of the play. In the final act, it is clear that all the senior characters will die. Only Albany and Edgar are saved, perhaps to comfort us that the reality we inhabit, although in no way a paradise, has better chances of survival than Lear’s world. Are the spectators supposed to be shaken, but, in the end, assured? Charles Marovitz, in the account of his and Peter Brook’s aims in their production of King Lear, insists that the audience is meant to leave the theater “shaken and not assured.”21 But why not?

In King Lear, Shakespeare has conducted an extraordinary, consistent experiment. One can hardly find an element in the play – be it an event, a word, or a gesture – that contradicts the iron inner logic of this doomed world. Tolstoy must have known this intuitively and, being the kind of artist who co-operates with God, the giver of the real world’s laws, he could not accept it. But why should Shakespeare’s anti-world bother him so much? If it is created artificially, in an artist’s laboratory, it should not have much impact in our world. It should be perceived as an alien universe, irrelevant to our lives, and thus not of interest to someone like Tolstoy. Yet, there is an obstacle to this clever escape from the problem. The characters in King Lear, despite the strange things that happen to them, are not aliens. In their emotions, they hardly differ from the inhabitants of the world to which we belong. Even Tolstoy cannot help but admit this:

however unnatural the positions may be in which he [Shakespeare] places his characters, however improper to them the language which he makes them speak, however featureless they are, the very play of emotion, its increase, and alteration, and the combination of many contrary feelings, as expressed correctly and powerfully in some of Shakespeare's scenes, and in the play of good actors, evokes, even if only for a time, sympathy with the persons represented.22

20 In sonnet 65 Shakespeare asks “what strong hand can hold his [time’s] swift foot back / Or who his spoil or beauty can forbid?” The answer comes in the couplet: “O none, unless the miracle have might / That in black ink my love may still shine bright.” 21 Clifford Leech, The Dramatist Experience. New York: Barnes and Noble, Inc., 1970, p. 125. 22 Tolstoy on Shakespeare, p. 75.


255

What are we to make of Tolstoy’s sudden recognition that Shakespeare’s “unnaturally” speaking and acting characters are, in point of fact, psychologically plausible? Moreover, in What Is Art? Tolstoy explicitly states: “Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them.” Thanks to this capacity to express feelings and to be “infected” by other people’s feelings, men are men and not beasts. Therefore, Tolstoy concludes, “the activity of art is a most important one, as the ability of speech itself…”23 Why then, if he is able to express human feelings and evoke sympathy, would Shakespeare be “whatever you like, but […] not an artist”24? Tolstoy’s contradictory judgment of King Lear seems to reveal more than a discrepancy between his theoretical views and literary criticism. If we can identify with the characters represented on stage, if they appear to be people like us despite all poetic and theatrical “unnaturalness,” how can we know that our reality is essentially different from the anti-world of Shakespeare’s play? We cannot. No theodicy can assure us that our world is not created, like King Lear, of negative logos. Tolstoy could not be certain either, and that seems to have been the obsession of his life. In the end of Book One of War and Peace, written in the 1860s, Prince Andrei Bolkonski, wounded and taken prisoner of war by Napoleon, is reflecting on the human quest for certainty:

“How happy and at peace I should be if I could now say: ‘Lord, have mercy on me!’… But to whom should I say this? To some power – indefinable and incomprehensible, to which I not only cannot appeal, but which I cannot express in words – the Great All or Nothing,” he said to himself, “or to that God [Christ] who has been sewn into this amulet by Marya? There is nothing certain, nothing except the nothingness of everything that is comprehensible to me, and the greatness of something incomprehensible but all important!”25

In My Confession, penned about two decades later, Tolstoy arrives at his solution: “I wished to be brought to the inevitable limit where the incomprehensible begins. … I wished to understand so that every unexplained proposition should appear to my reason necessarily [emphasis added – K. M.] unexplainable and not an obligatory part of belief.”26 Thus, we could surmise that Tolstoy saw King Lear as not necessarily unexplainable and therefore false. On a deeper level Tolstoy might have been horrified by the epistemological premise of Shakespeare’s experiment in King Lear. In the anti-world of the play, there is no room left for Prince Bolkonski’s hope. There is no hint that, besides the nothing that surrounds us, some kind of incomprehensible greatness might exist.27 Worse, the “nothing” that can be experienced in the 23 What Is Art?, p. 51-52. 24 Tolstoy on Shakespeare, p. 80. 25 Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, New York: Signet Classics, 1968, p. 359. 26 Leo Tolstoy, My Confession. My Religion. The Gospel in Brief. New York: Chas. Scribner’s Sons, 1907, p. 72. 27 There are critical attempts to interpret the ending of King Lear as affirmation of that incomprehensible, divine greatness. Critics who express this view usually argue that King Lear is a Christian play and see Lear’s suffering as a way to salvation. The Lear World: A Study of King Lear in Its Dramatic Context. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977, by John Reibetanz’s, a critical follower of A. C. Bradley, appears to be one of the most representative relatively recent examples. W. R. Elton offers a summary account of Christian interpretations of King Lear in King Lear and the Gods. Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1988, Ch.1. Significantly, Tolstoy belongs to the camp of the critics who see no evidence of redemption in King Lear. Derek Peat, in “‘And

KATIA MITOVA

256

theater or in life, is not comprehensible either. Apparently, it was King Lear’s epistemological skepticism that made Tolstoy so interested in

the play and so discontented with it. Tolstoy himself had walked the road of the post-Enlightenment skepticism to arrive, in his old age, at a kind of pragmatic moral teaching drawn from Christian faith. Doubt in the truths of science, philosophy, and religion limited Tolstoy’s idea of artistic freedom to following strictly the logic of life. Pre-Enlightenment doubt, however, led Shakespeare to freedom that obeys only the laws of poetry.

3. Tales of Lear In On Shakespeare and the Drama, Tolstoy was at great pains to find an explanation of the

audience’s appreciation for Shakespeare’s plays. He believed that it was a “disease” disseminated by German romantic dramatic writers and, in particular, by Goethe, “the dictator of public opinion in aesthetic questions”28:

There is but one explanation of this wonderful fame: it is one of those epidemic “suggestions” to which men constantly have been and are the subject. …Such irrational “suggestions” always have been existing, and still exist, in all spheres of human life – religious, philosophical, political, economical, scientific, artistic, and, in general, literary – and people clearly see the insanity of these suggestions only when they free themselves from them.29

To support his discovery, Tolstoy drew a parallel between those “epidemic ‘suggestions’“ (he probably had in mind “mass hypnoses”) in literature and the excitement of the medieval Crusades, belief in witches, the search for the elixir of life or the philosopher’s stone, and even the passion for tulips in Holland. Tolstoy’s strong argument, however, was supposed to be the comparison between Shakespeare’s King Lear and the anonymous True Chronicle History of King Leir (first staged in 1594 and apparently revived in 1605, about the time Shakespeare’s Lear was performed).30 Truthful to the spirit and the letter of the whole exposition of his essay, Tolstoy concludes that the old Leir is aesthetically and morally superior to Shakespeare’s play.31

Tolstoy’s judgment is, to be sure, quite problematic. His discussion, however, directs us to the intertextual relations not only between Shakespeare’s King Lear and the anonymous play King Leir, but also between Shakespeare’s play and the popular folktale “Cap o’ Rushes” (“love precious like salt, or, in other versions “like bread”), the historical figure of Lear in Raphael Holinshed’s The Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (1577), and Nahum Tate’s The History of King Lear (1681) – an altered, happy-ending version of Shakespeare’s play. How much did the existing mytho-poetic context affect the earlier reception of Shakespeare’s play?

The Elizabethan audience was probably familiar with at least one version of the folktale “Cap o’ Rushes.” Its namesake heroine, banished by her father for protesting that she loves him as that’s True Too’: ‘King Lear’ and the Tension of Uncertainty,” Shakespeare Survey, vol. 33, 1980, pp. 44-53, argues that it is in the nature of King Lear – a play permeated by uncertainty – to provoke contrary responses. 28 Tolstoy on Shakespeare, pp. 109-110. 29 Ibid., pp. 97-98. 30 See Joseph Satin, Shakespeare and His Sources. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1966, pp. 458-526; Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, vol. 2, p. 4. 31 Tolstoy on Shakespeare, pp. 56-63.


257

dearly as salt, goes through a series of hardships. When she finally marries, she serves a wedding dinner at which every dish is unsalted. The father, who is present at the feast, recognizes at last the true value of his daughter’s love. The familiarity with this folktale creates a kind of antechamber to the anti-world of King Lear. The space-time continuum of the play cannot be entered directly from life, as required by Tolstoy, but is open to those who access it through other related fictional orders. Entered through the European folktale or via King Leir, in which the events and characters, according to Tolstoy, are much more “natural” and therefore persuasive, Shakespeare’s King Lear affects the spectator mightily. The impact comes from the contrast between the audience’s expectations based on other known versions of the story and Shakespeare’s creation. From the very beginning of King Lear the differences loom large.

“In the older drama, Leir abdicates because, having become a widower, he thinks only of saving his soul,” Tolstoy relates.32 Shakespeare’s King Lear, in turn, wishes to relieve himself from royal responsibilities while at the same time keeping the privileges to which he has grown accustomed during half a century of ruling. In the older drama, Tolstoy emphasizes, King Leir is not that interested in Cordelia’s public declaration of love, but plans to make her prove her filial obedience by agreeing to marry a neighboring suitor whom she actually detests. Unlike Leir, Shakespeare’s Lear wants Cordelia’s love for himself. The first Cordelia says that she hopes that her actions will prove her love. Shakespeare’s Cordelia says “nothing.” The first Cordelia, like Cinderella, labors to earn her bread and finally meets the King of Gaul, disguised as a pilgrim, falls in love with him and they marry. In the older drama, loyal Kent is not disguised, but Cordelia receives Leir into her house without disclosing herself. After she has heard her father’s sad story, she finally reveals who she is:

… Leir: “for there are no children in the world so cruel as mine.” – “Do not condemn all for the sins of some,” says Cordelia and falls on her knees. “Look here, dear father,” she says, “look on me: I am thy loving daughter.” The father recognizes her and says: “It is not for thee, but for me, to beg thy pardon on my knees for all my sins toward thee.”33

“Is there anything [in Shakespeare’s King Lear] approaching this exquisite scene?,” Tolstoy asks rhetorically. He seems to have liked in the anonymous King Leir the power of the simple, dramatized tale. Everything from the cunning plan of the father at the beginning, through the labors and the fortunate marriage of his repudiated daughter, until the happy reunion at the end, fulfills the genre requirements of the fable. Shakespeare’s King Lear on the other hand resembles the folktale only in its starting parameters: “Once upon a time there was a king who had three daughters… The youngest of them was beautiful and good-natured, and she loved her father dearly. But one day the old king …” From this point on, King Lear’s plot reveals the tragic potential of the popular happy-ending tale about the old father’s love contest. Among other elements, the subplot, with its complications, as well as the Fool’s figure, which traditionally belongs to comedy, but here brings in a premonition for tragedy, take Shakespeare’s play far away from the comic folk version of the story.

The apparent intertextual relation between King Lear and the familiar folktale challenges the 32 Ibid., p. 56. 33 Ibid., p. 62.

KATIA MITOVA

258

horizon of the audience’s expectations. To avoid the distress of this challenge, Nahum Tate, in his 1681 adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear, rectifies “what was wanting in the Regularity and Probability of the Tale, which was to run through the whole, as Love betwixt Edgar and Cordelia; that never chang’d a Word with each other in the Original.” Thus the tragedy is turned into a romantic comedy: the blinding of Gloucester is eliminated; the Fool is entirely excluded from the play; Lear is restored to his throne only to abdicate in favor of his new son-in-law, Edgar. Hahum Tate humbly acknowledged that his changes and additions brought to the play “more Success (perhaps) than Merit,” but he felt that the gratefulness of the “innocent distressed Persons”34 in the audience was a sufficient reason for re-writing Shakespeare. Indeed, Tate’s adaptation, which practically replaced Shakespeare’s Lear until the mid-nineteenth century, was one of the most successful plays in the history of English theater. In a peculiar sense, this circumstance can be considered lucky. Tate’s Lear preserved the comic context created by the popular versions of the story – a context on which Shakespeare’s counter-story depends for its dramaturgical power.

In the spirit of Frank Kermode’s remark that Tolstoy’s theory of Shakespeare’s fame as a result from mass hypnosis deserves serious attention, 35 we could say that once again Tolstoy is perhaps right, but not in the way he believed. Undeniably, the reception of King Lear resembles a state of hypnosis. Initially, the audience is made comfortable and relaxed by the familiar context. Then, once put into a hypnotic sleep through the charms of familiarity and repetition, the spectator is ready to accept the “gross improbability”36 of King Lear’s anti-world. Under hypnosis, even the gouging out of Gloucester’s eyes onstage does not seem to break the coherence of the fiction.

4. Open ending It should be apparent by now that in On Shakespeare and the Drama Tolstoy applied the

wrong measures to King Lear, reproaching Shakespeare for the lack of a “sense of measure” and “exaggerating everything.”37 But where shall we look for the right measures? It might be true that great writers are their own measure, but assuming the position of the rhapsodist Ion, presented by Plato as capable of understanding and appreciating only one author, Homer, will not do us much good. A comparison of Shakespeare’s sense of measure with Tolstoy’s, if reformulated into the question of the artist’s freedom in regard to his work, could point to some important artistic matters.

It is possible to qualify Tolstoy’s criteria as criteria for mimesis of the kind found in the nineteenth century novel. Realistic imitation emphasizes the characters’ psychological plausibility and the causal relationship between the events, or, to use Tolstoy’s vocabulary, it is “natural.” In addition, Tolstoy requires “sincerity” and purity of genre. The author has the moral right to represent only feelings he himself has experienced. Like Levin of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy thought that it is a mistake when one art enters the domain of another, for example, when 34 All quotes are from Nahum Tate’s “Dedication” to his version of King Lear. Frank Kermode, Casebook, p. 25. 35 Ibid., p. 14. 36 S. T. Coleridge discusses the dramatic effects of Lear’s seeming “gross improbability” in his second lecture in the series Shakespeare and Milton (1811-12). Quoted from Kermode’s Casebook, p. 36. 37 Tolstoy on Shakespeare, p. 80.


259

music tries to narrate or marble attempts to represent poetic phantasms.38 King Lear as a poetic drama is already mixing the genres, but if poetry were restricted to the character’s speeches, Tolstoy probably would not have objected. Shakespeare, however, lets poetry structure the story of Lear, which in the eyes of Tolstoy is “unnatural.” Poetic phantasms cannot materialize – in marble or on stage – because this goes against their nature and looks ridiculous. It would be a miracle, and miracles do not exist. Tolstoy, who saw his calling as a kind of co-operation with God, applied natural laws to his own writing. This made him progressively restrict his own creative freedom to the point that at the end of his life he considered Russian peasant folklore the only acceptable form of literature.

On the contrary, Shakespeare, in his stage worlds, competed with the Maker. He enjoyed the power, and searched the limitations, of the word-becomes-flesh principle in literature. Shakespeare made his characters enact stories through poetry, hence the “exaggerations” and “impurity” of genre. His explorations into the creational powers of poetic language are particularly inventive in the island-like worlds of Othello, King Lear, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. Of these there are two plays in which the artist’s freedom seems to have reached its ultimate point: King Lear and The Tempest.

King Lear could be seen as Shakespeare’s greatest poetic victory over the real world; The Tempest, as his defeat. According to David Grene, the fictional island of The Tempest expresses the playwright’s reality “while he is creating it.”39 This seems to be no less true of King Lear. In Lear, however, the artist creator is hidden behind the principle of his fictional creation in the same way in which the Maker is hidden in real creation. Our ignorance of the source of the characters’ misfortunes in King Lear increases the terror that the play evokes. The world of The Tempest, in which political and poetic power are dangerously united, is built on Prospero’s magic, and when the magic is gone, it remains safely encapsulated in the realm of fantasy. King Lear’s world, on the other hand, is pushed back into the primordial time of humankind. However, its historical eclecticism, also criticized by Tolstoy, makes us perceive it as a world of all times and all time. The impression of timelessness is sealed by the image of a dead daughter held by a dying father. This “sacred pieta”40 in Act 5 functions as a monumental new closure of the old tale of the king and his virtuous, misunderstood daughter. The sad certainty of this tableau is followed by an enigmatic ending to the political aspect of the plot. The final lines of the play present a peculiar riddle:

The weight of this sad time we must obey, Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say. The oldest hath borne most; we that are young Shall never see so much, nor live so long. (5.3.322-325)

38 L. N. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, Part 7, Ch. 5. Significantly, Levin is making these comments after seeing the fantasia King Lear on the Heath. 39 David Grene, Reality and the Heroic Pattern: Last Plays of Ibsen, Shakespeare, and Sophocles. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967, p. 103. 40 Helen Gardner’s term, used in her John Coffin Memorial Lecture, “King Lear,” 1966. See Sidney Homan, Shakespeare’s Theater of Presence: Language, Spectacle, and the Audience. London and Toronto: Associated University Press, 1986, p. 193.

KATIA MITOVA

260

In the Folio, this speech is given to Edgar, in the Quarto, to Albany.41 With regard to the future of the kingdom, the play has an open ending. It is not clear who is going to rule. Does Edgar accept the responsibility? Alternatively, is he silently withdrawing, thus allowing Lear’s faithful son-in-law to succeed to the throne? No matter which of the two survivors speaks, the spectator must remain uncertain about the future of the kingdom. But perhaps there is no “future” at all. Perhaps what matters dramatically should be sought somewhere else. “The weight of this sad time we must obey” could imply that we the audience are burdened with the world of King Lear, no matter how far in the past it is from us or how fictional, no matter that “we that are young / shall never see so much.” In the last lines of the play, it is Shakespeare himself, I believe, and not Edgar or Albany, who assures us, perhaps a bit distressed by the results of his own work, that King Lear is a world apart from ours. But this assurance does not neutralize the doubt provoked by the poetic power of the play’s fictional reality – otherwise perhaps Tolstoy would have been more forgiving of the “unnaturalness” of King Lear.

The line “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say” has caused even more puzzlement. “Ought to say” according to which norms? How does this conclusion apply to Edgar or Albany? Or is this a comment on other characters’ actions? Some of those characters, like Edmund, speak the truth only when they are dying. In the opening of the play Cordelia and Lear speak on impulse; they express what they feel only after the tragic events have become irreversible. But what makes them speak the way they do in the beginning? Certainly not the rules of courtly discourse. The rules of Shakespeare’s art, then? Prompted by Tolstoy’s negative guidance, we could speculate a little along these lines. Like a painter who has just put the last touch on his painting, Shakespeare steps back and looks at his work from outside. He realizes that the consistent unfolding of his play’s inner logic has allowed the key-word “nothing” to mature dramatically and to become nothingness. He has created a world “of nothing.” In the end of the day, is he “glad” like the Creator in the Book of Genesis? He should be – as the Maker. But as a Man he must feel the “bittersweet”42 taste of this fruit from the Tree of Life that brings immortality. The world of King Lear, so populated at the beginning of the play, is left in the end with only two inhabitants. The word “nothing” as a principle of Shakespeare’s creation has given birth to a creative paradox: the more he paints, the emptier his picture becomes. And precisely because Shakespeare was above all an artist, he could not stop or reverse this process: he spoke what he ought to say as a poet. Nahum Tate, Tolstoy, and perhaps many others might have preferred Shakespeare to have composed the last act of King Lear in accordance with what he felt as a man. The final lines of the play could, indeed, be taken to imply that, in some sense, even the author, as a man, would have preferred his work to develop into a less apocalyptic direction; as an artist, however, he ought to speak in accordance with the negative logos of his 41 It seems more suitable for Edgar to utter, “we that are young...” On the other hand, the critics have argued that the last lines must have been given to the person of highest rank who survives, that is, Albany. For a summary of the major arguments, see Philip C. McGuire, Speechless Dialect: Shakespeare’s Open Silences. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985, p. 167. 42 John Keats, in his poem “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again” (1818), has captured the sweet uneasiness the play provokes in the reader: “… once again, the fierce dispute / betwixt damnation and impassioned clay / must I burn through; once more humbly assay / the bittersweet of this Shakespearian fruit…” The Poems of John Keats, ed. by Jack Stillinger. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978, p. 225.


261

creation.43

Tolstoy considers a writer’s compassion for his own characters to be a proof of sincerity — the condition of contagion in art that sums up all the other conditions. Such compassion is noble and natural at the same time. Shakespeare the poet and the playwright, however, does not hesitate to kill his innocent female characters – Ophelia, Desdemona, or Cordelia – if his art so dictates. Tolstoy insists that this is insincere and “unnatural,” but he is half-right again. This is artificial, that is, human-made. If, as George Orwell suggests, “Lear can be imagined as a puppet show,”44

this would imply the presence of a puppeteer. In King Lear the writer-creator does not use character-mediators to disguise himself as in Othello (Iago) or The Tempest (Prospero).45 The artist is the implied God-puppeteer of his own artificial anti-world. Tolstoy, who believed that a work of art should be a part of God’s creation and reflect its nature, could not forgive such a blasphemy.

43 Shakespeare has allowed for some powerful “intrusions” into the negative logic of King Lear. For instance, in Act 1.1, Kent and France speak what they feel; in Act 3.7, the nameless servant of Cornwall’s speaks and acts upon his feelings, and pays with his life for that. While these reactions do not alter the tragic events of the play, they testify to Shakespeare’s awareness of what Tolstoy would call a “natural” response to injustice and cruelty. However, the core of King Lear – nothing-turning-into-nothingness – is obviously meant to remain intact. The audience’s compassion and understanding for the sympathetic characters on stage is acknowledged, but the “darker purpose” of the play has the absolute dramaturgical priority. I am indebted to A. P. David for sharing with me his thoughts on the “intrusions” in King Lear as a moral meta-response to the negative world of the play, or, as he put it, “a kind of Brechtian assault, designed to elicit human nature.” 44 George Orwell, “Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool,” Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays, p. 39. 45 Edmund and Edgar, in their peculiar collaboration as movers of the plot, could be considered projections of the author’s creative powers. However, their role as an antagonistic pair that directs the events is not as pronounced as that of Iago and Othello, for instance.

Why Did Tolstoy Hate King Lear?

Documents

Transcript of Why Did Tolstoy Hate King Lear?