King Lear I.iii.1-27

Set theory

Enter Goneril and Oswald, her Steward.

GONERIL   Did my father strike my gentleman for chiding of his fool?

OSWALD    Ay, madam.

GONERIL   By day and night he wrongs me. Every hour
He flashes into one gross crime or other
That sets us all at odds. I’ll not endure it.
His knights grow riotous, and himself upbraids us
On every trifle. When he returns from hunting,
I will not speak with him; say I am sick.
If you come slack of former services
You shall do well; the fault of it I’ll answer.

OSWALD   He’s coming, madam. I hear him.

GONERIL   Put on what weary negligence you please,
You and your fellows. I’d have it come to question.
If he distaste it, let him to my sister,
Whose mind and mine I know in that are one,
Not to be overruled. Idle old man
That still would manage those authorities
That he hath given away. Now, by my life,
Old fools are babes again and must be used
With checks as flatteries, when they are seen abused.
Remember what I have said.

OSWALD  Very well, madam.

GONERIL  And let his knights have colder looks among you.
What grows of it, no matter. Advise your fellows so.
I would breed from hence occasions, and I shall,
That I may speak. I’ll write straight to my sister
To hold my very course. Go, prepare for dinner.     Exeunt  (I.iii.1-27)

This is a short but important scene. (And this is a longish post…. but I’ll give us a break for Thanksgiving and won’t post again till Monday.)

First a word about scenic cross-cutting in Shakespeare, the anti-Aristotelian technique (violating the unities of place and time) that Dr. Johnson defended so well.¹ Scenes in Shakespeare are defined by the characters who interact within them — that interaction usually taking the form of some demand or complaint or conflict. This one is a scene of complaint, with Oswald as a window character so that Goneril can update us on what has gone on and what is going on offstage. (In scene ii Edmund uses both Gloucester and Edgar as apparent window characters, but the information he gives them is false, which is one reason he has to address us directly. But he is himself a window character when Gloucester updates him on France’s angry departure and the king’s exit, with his power prescribed.)

A scene changes — a new scene begins — when all the characters in it have left the stage and, after a beat, new characters enter. That’s what gives the effect of cross-cutting (as it’s called in film). The new scene begins with a different set of characters. But the scenes aren’t in separate universes, which means that some characters may — indeed usually have to — exit mid-scene so that they can begin the next scene — as when Edmund exits scene i early on, after he’s introduced to Kent, which means that he can begin scene ii by entering it. By a kind of theatrical meiosis, some characters from the group that one scene comprises will join a different group in a different scene, either because they’ve exited midscene as Edmund did, or by entering midscene, as Gloucester does here. That’s what makes the separate scenes interact with each other so that the scenes come together to tell a unified story about all the characters in the play. As in Hollywood movies, in most Shakespeare plays the final scene represents the convergence of all the surviving characters, a union of all the different sets of characters that all the different scenes comprised.²

Since neither of the characters in this scene were in the previous one, the scene change here isn’t a perfect illustration of the principle of meiosis I am trying to describe. So let me give a helpful example, from Hamlet:

1. At the end of III.ii in Hamlet Polonius enters to Hamlet, Horatio, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and possibly the players. So towards the end of the scene the group that it comprises contains several characters. (The King has left much earlier.). Then all but Hamlet exit, and he has a short soliloquy.

2. Then Hamlet exits, leaving the stage empty for a beat.

3. Since Rosencrants and Guildenstern have exited earlier, before the scene ends, they can appear at the beginning of the next scene when they enter with the King. Thus although three characters from the previous scene reappear, they can signal the start of a new scene because they have exited before the previous scene ended.

4. Polonius too will enter that scene a little while later, as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern exit. The King remains, so the scene continues. He remains still longer after Rosencrantz and Guildenstern exit, and the scene continues as he soliloquizes.

5. Then Hamlet, whose exit had ended the previous scene, enters and observes Claudius. Thus the character whose exit has left the stage empty, indicating the end of a scene, can re-enter the next scene, but has to enter midscene, and not at its opening.

The idea is that the set of characters at the end of the earlier scene and the set at the beginning of the later scene are what mathematical set theorists call “disjoint”.³

Since Lear has stormed out in the middle of scene i, since another set of characters — Gloucester and his sons — have defined scene ii, we’re ready for a new scene after they exit (first Gloucester, then Edgar, and finally Edmund). We’re almost certainly waiting for Lear to re-enter here (or perhaps Cordelia and France), but the new scene is defined⁴ by Oswald and Goneril. This scene does not contain Lear: he’s been offstage since his exit (which now seems long ago) with Burgundy in the first scene. Shakespeare is making us wait for him, which we didn’t think we’d be doing. Making you wait for the re-entry of a character is a typical Shakespearean technique: when the character does finally return we’re more interested than we thought we would be, more intent on their experiences and their actions. Our attention has built up and we become more alert to them and their perspectives. Cf. Hamlet’s disappearance on his way to England and his eventual return.

But they are talking about Lear. Goneril’s description of him sounds right, based on our sense of his temper in the first scene, so her complaint preserves some continuity in his character. But because we’re hearing and seeing Goneril, and not Lear, it is her temper that is made vivid to us here, not his.

Still, if Lear is striking Goneril’s servants, he’s being pretty testy — his testiness is the polar opposite of the grand and regal anger he expressed in exiling Kent and Cordelia. This testiness indicated that Gloucester is right about the prescription (the curtailment) of his power, reduced as it is to a cranky physical aggression that would have been beneath him a scene earlier.

What’s most important here, though, is the introduction of the Fool. We won’t actually see him for quite a while: critics like Bart van Es have noticed how surprisingly long it takes before we meet him after the existence of his character has been established here. Note that we meet France and Burgundy not very long after Lear sends Gloucester to attend them. Perhaps the only other character we wait so long to meet is Edgar, first mentioned by Gloucester at the very opening of the play, but only appearing after Edmund’s soliloquy and his slander of Edgar to Gloucester. This is one of many ways that Edgar and the Fool are linked.

But Lear defends the Fool, as Gloucester does not Edgar. We don’t pay much attention to that yet — from Goneril’s perspective Lear’s debasement is manifested not only by the fact that he strikes a gentleman, but that he does it on behalf of the Fool. And that makes Lear a childish “old fool” himself. (The locus classicus for discussion of the word fool and and its complexity in the play is Empson’s “Fool in Lear”.) For her his defense of the Fool shows his descent into the trivial. But we are now aware of another thing that makes Lear angry: the chiding of the Fool.

We find out (again with Oswald as window) that Goneril has succeeded in getting Regan to agree with her about how to manage Lear; even though there are differences between them (as we already sense from their interaction in scene i), their minds “are one” about this issue. And Shakespeare prepares us for Oswald’s rudeness in the next scene by explaining in advance what otherwise would be implausibly shocking. (He also prepares us for the issue that Lear’s reservation of an hundred knights will represent fairly soon.)

All in all this scene is mainly a set up for later scenes, but we still get a lot of interesting insight into the dynamics of the interrelationships that are to come. Not least we see how much Goneril trusts Oswald, and how much he actually deserves that trust. We don’t like him, but we should acknowledge that he’s almost her Kent, and that he will end up dying for her.

It’s interesting to note that Goneril explicitly confirms the “flatteries” of scene i, here to be replaced by “checks.” She suggests that Lear is being abused — tricked, misled, scammed — by his knights and by the Fool, and she of course would know his liability to abuse, having scammed him herself.

And it is interesting to see what she refuses to “endure,” a word that Lear will use in the storm, when he is ready to endure anything nature can throw at him.

1. From Samuel Johnson’s “Preface to Shakespeare”: “The necessity of observing the unities of time and place arises from the supposed necessity of making the drama credible. The criticks hold it impossible, that an action of months or years can be possibly believed to pass in three hours; or that the spectator can suppose himself to sit in the theatre, while ambassadors go and return between distant kings, while armies are levied and towns besieged, while an exile wanders and returns, or till he whom they saw courting his mistress, shall lament the untimely fall of his son. The mind revolts from evident falsehood, and fiction loses its force when it departs from the resemblance of reality.

“From the narrow limitation of time necessarily arises the contraction of place. The spectator, who knows that he saw the first act at Alexandria, cannot suppose that he sees the next at Rome, at a distance to which not the dragons of Medea could, in so short a time, have transported him; he knows with certainty that he has not changed his place; and he knows that place cannot change itself; that what was a house cannot become a plain; that what was Thebes can never be Persepolis.

“Such is the triumphant language with which a critick exults over the misery of an irregular poet, and exults commonly without resistance or reply. It is time therefore to tell him, by the authority of Shakespeare, that he assumes, as an unquestionable principle, a position, which, while his breath is forming it into words, his understanding pronounces to be false. It is false, that any representation is mistaken for reality; that any dramatick fable in its materiality was ever credible, or, for a single moment, was ever credited.

“The objection arising from the impossibility of passing the first hour at Alexandria, and the next at Rome, supposes, that when the play opens the spectator really imagines himself at Alexandria, and believes that his walk to the theatre has been a voyage to Egypt, and that he lives in the days of Antony and Cleopatra. Surely he that imagines this, may imagine more. He that can take the stage at one time for the palace of the Ptolemies, may take it in half an hour for the promontory of Actium. Delusion, if delusion be admitted, has no certain limitation; if the spectator can be once persuaded, that his old acquaintance are Alexander and Caesar, that a room illuminated with candles is the plain of Pharsalia, or the bank of Granicus, he is in a state of elevation above the reach of reason, or of truth, and from the heights of empyrean poetry, may despise the circumscriptions of terrestrial nature. There is no reason why a mind thus wandering in extasy should count the clock, or why an hour should not be a century in that calenture of the brains that can make the stage a field.”

2. In Hamlet — very unusually — we get almost total convergence in Act III, in the Mousetrap scene. That’s part of what makes it so effective a false ending. (The only character missing is Laertes.)

3. This is not what Hamlet means when he says that “The time is out of joint,” but I wish it were. Anyhow, since we’re talking about fathers. here’s a little Dad joke: the set of theorists of theatrical sets and the set of theorists of mathematical sets intersect here.

4. Extensionally, as we set theorists say.