DR. F1JRNESS'S KING LEAR.*
Ir this volume, dedicated to the New Shakspere Society, may be taken as a sample of the work which that association originates, promotes, or is in sympathy with, it cannot be said to have no raison. (rare. There has, we fancy, been a disposi- tion to believe, and to spread the belief, that the New Shakspere Society had nailed its colours to the mast of some metrical or chronological theory respecting the development of Shake- • King Lear. A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare. Edited by Horace Howard Furness, Ph.D., LLD. Vol. V.—Elng Lear. J. B. Lippincott and Co., Phlladephla and London. 1880. speare's genius and the succession of his works ; but, in point of fact, it is pledged only to enthusiasm for Shakespeare, and a, desire to encourage the study, and further the elucidation, of his writings. Nothing, at all events, could be more catholic than the spirit of Dr. Furness, or more judicially comprehensive than his extension of the right of speech to critics of different schools. This edition of King Lear strikes us as, for all practical purposes,. perfect. Few existing dramas—almost none, except the master- pieces of Shakespeare—deserve editorial treatment on such at scale. The river of text flows between broad meadows and park- lands of annotation. A series of appendices swells out the volume to portly, though by no means unwieldy, dimensions. Yet we have hardly met with a superfluous or irrelevant sentence. A miracle of genius like Lear, allowed by all who can form a judg- ment on such a point to be one of the very greatest achievements. of the human mind, is not a thing to be read over in a couple of hours and returned to the shelf. We like to have it kept long before us, to contemplate it from various points of view, to inspect the quarry from which it was hewn, to consider the principles of its construction, to go round and round it, in the company now of one specially-qualified guide, now of another. This advantage is bestowed upon us with singular felicity and completeness by Dr. Furness. Not only is the text, as printed, the result of exhaustive critical research, not only is every plausible emendation, every pertinent comment, inserted in the foot-notes, but we have separate essays on the date of composi- tion, the source of the plot, the duration of the action, the costume of the characters, and so on. We are told whab mad-doctors have thought of the insanity of Lear, and how celebrated actors have personated him on the stage. An exceed- ingly interesting and useful selection is given of opinions by English, American, and German critics; a list of the editions collated, and another of the books that have been written on the play, present a bird's-eye view of the literature of the subject; and the whole is wound up with, what no such volume should be without, an index.
All this might have been done, with a mere result of pon- derousness,—an imposing and appalling display of "such read- ing as is never read." But Dr. Furness's hand, is light, and strong common-sense is his effectual safeguard from pedantry. The labour he has undergone must have been enormous, but it was a labour of loving enthusiasm, and, having always been himself genuinely interested, he has never failed to interest his readers. In a variorum edition, it was right and natural that critics and commentators should be granted a liberal hearing ; even extravagant fancies, if ingenious, have an interest, since they illustrate the influence of Shakespeare's creations upon variously constituted minds ; but, though Dr. Furness's own judgment is sound and steady, and though the rectifying word that brings soaring fancy to the ground like a shot bird is not often with- held, he does sometimes err on the side of benignity. An in- stance in which his method is quite right is afforded in connec- tion with the Fool; an instance in which, but for excess of good-nature, he would have dealt more sharply with an absurd critic, occurs in connection with Cordelia.
The Fool in Lear is one of Shakespeare's notable characters, indispensable in the conduct of the story, conceived and executed with errorless insight and accuracy. He belongs to
that particular period in the dramatic evolution during which the old King is passing through the preliminary stages of his malady, when grief has not yet issued in utter madness. The fundamental notion of Shakespeare's time as to the pre- vention of insanity, or its cure before it became incurable, was that the mind had to be called off by main force from the
fixed idea that was maddening it. Hence chaining, flogging, dungeoning, starving. It was a rude method, but there is no reason to doubt that it was put into operation with kind inten- tion, and that it was frequently successful. It is precisely this plan that the Fool in Lear adopts. By derisive taunts of the
most biting kind—taunts and mockeries that, in ordinary cir- cumstances, would be cruel and detestable—he seeks to apply a counter-irritant to the great agony that shakes Lear's reason on its throne. Sharp, however, as is his sarcastic punishment of the King—like a vexing of the flesh with whips of nettle and wild-briar—the Fool places a limit on his severity. He never jests about Cordelia except once, when, with curious significance,. he reminds Lear that the curse meant for his third daughter has become a blessing to her. He continues his mockery, instinct with bitter world-wisdom, until Lear has become a raving or a drivelling maniac,—incurable; then the continuance of his
taunts would be revolting, because purposeless and heartless, and he falls out of the play.
Such is the main—we say not the sole—purpose of Shakespeare with this character. It would obviously have been inconsistent with his design to have given the Fool qualities of aerial brightness and delicacy like those of Ariel, or to have made him an impersonation of tender thoughtfulness. There is accordingly a great deal that is coarse and indelicate in what he says, and, except that he pined away when Cordelia, left England, and that he took the old King's part in all sin- cerity and downrightness, we are made acquainted with nothing implying that he was gentle or refined. It has been almost a fashion with critics, however, to run wild with enthusiasm about the Fool. He is the "dearest of all fools," noble, delicate, loving, whose very form is almost that of an angel. "Look at him !" says one ; "it may be your eyes see him not as mine do, but he appears to me of a light, delicate frame, every feature expressive of sensibility even to pain, with eyes lustrously intel- ligent, a mouth blandly beautiful, and withal a hectic flush upon his cheek." Another describes him as a "fragile, hectic, beau- tiful-faced boy." A third and fourth critic might be quoted who join the cry that he is a boy.
To all these excited persons Dr. Furness gives audience due, or more than due; and then, "humbly, but firmly," records his conviction that the Fool in Lear "is not a boy, but a man." Entirely satisfactory evidence that this is so is tendered in the remark that "his wisdom is too deep for any boy, and could be found only in a man." That he is called "lad" or "boy" by Kent or Lear proves nothing at all ; he himself calls Lear "boy," and those who speak with him naturally adopt his tone, to keep up the fun. We cannot quite assent to Dr. Furneas's opinion that the Fool is one of "the tenderest" as well as shrewdest of men. He is true, faithful, good-hearted ; but tenderness means more than that, and the mere circum- stance of his pining for Cordelia does not go far enough to prove it. We have spoken of Shakespeare's main purpose with him ; in relation to secondary purposes, we would remark that it was not an element of tenderness Shakespeare wanted to introduce in his person, so much as an element of boisterous mirth. This, though its effect is in part jarring, relieves the intense gloom of Lear's situation, which, at this early stage in the dramatic evolution, must not become overpowering. On the whole, however, Dr. Furness reduces the prismatic vapours of exaggerative enthusiasm on the subject of the Fool to their true value. We are glad, also, to observe that he regards Lear's words in the last scene of the last act, "My poor fool is hanged !" as spoken of Cordelia, and not of the Fool. In the general imaginative harmony of the play, it comes in exceedingly well that the mind of the reader should recur for a moment to the honest fellow who had pined for Cordelia and stood by Lear ; but that the banging of Cordelia, and of Cordelia alone, was present to the death-stricken, flickering mind of her father, as he hung over her corpse, is to our thinking so manifest, that argument on the point is superfluous. Whoever wants argu- ment, however, will find it in the masterly and conclusive observations on the point which Dr. Furness quotes from Malone.
But there is one case in which Dr. Furness's benignity gets the better of him. He finds place for one particular criticism, without stating whether he agrees with it or disagrees, to wit, Mr. D. J. Snider's criticism on the part played by Cordelia in the drama, which appears to us to fall unmistakably into the class of criticisms that deserve to be either ignored utterly or laughed to scorn. Mr. Snider thinks that Cordelia "falls into guilt," as well as her sisters. The reader is, we trust, conscious of amazement and incredulity in asking how. Is it that she was rather too coldly reticent in the expres- sion of her affection for her old father P No. There would have been some common-sense and plausibility in that. "Cordelia," replies Mr. Snider, "assails the established State." For that criminal proceeding she died. She attacked "the highest ethical institution of men,—the State," and thus com- mitted "unwittingly," but not less really, "the greatest wrong." Mr. Snider's notion as to the value of " institutions " is re- markable. Lear, it seems, went mad not only through the intolerable agony of paternal affection turned into wormwood and fire, but because he had lost the inestimable advantage of "objective institutions." "It was the loss of these, through the conduct of Began and Goneril, which shattered his reason." This is mere nonsense, intended by nature to be laughed at :—
"The treatment," he says, "of children by parents and of parents by children is the theme; both fidelity and infidelity are shown in their most extreme manifestation. Two families are taken, that of the monarchand that of the subject ; the former develops within itself its own collisions, free from any external restraint, and hence exhibits the truest and most complete result ; the latter is largely influenced and determined in its course by authority, bat an authority which is itself poisoned with domestic conflict. The exhaustiveness of the treatment is worthy of careful study. Regan is faithless to parent ; Goneril is faithless to both parent and husband ; Cordelia is true to both, yet assails another ethical principle,—the State."
That affords a remarkable illustration both of the possible extravagance of criticism, and of Dr. Farness's editorial capacity to "bear all things." We should have expressed our view of it in Shakespeare's own words,—" Via good man Dull."
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