King Lear: Art Upside-Down

Summary

It is a truism that in King Lear Shakespeare takes us into a world which is upside-down. We enter a great and terrible feast of misrule where the king gives away his kingdom and becomes a subject, where parents become wards of their children, asses are borne on men’s backs over the dirt, and one goes to supper in the morning and to bed at noon. This is ‘the upheaval of all nature, the reversal of all histories’. Approaching such a paradoxical and apparently sprawling piece of art, commentators generally have sought some kind of orientation through imposing a shape or schema on the play. The most recent emblem for King Lear is the prism –‘the multiply-shaped thing’, as it is called in Rosalie Colie’s and Leo Flahiff’s book Some Facets of ‘ King Lear ’: Essays in Prismatic Criticism. As a figure for the play the prism image certainly is superior to the very old-fashioned way of charting a drama as rising action, peak, falling action – the hunt-the-climax pattern which dates back to the 1860s and the German scholar Gustav Freytag. Where, after all, is the ‘climax’ of King Lear? If we should begin to chart it as a ‘rising action’ we might simply find ourselves following it helplessly up and up and up . . .: this play after all qualifies as scene individable and poem unlimited.