King Lear I.iv.250-266
O Lear, Lear, Lear
[GONERIL You strike my people, and your disordered rabble Make servants of their betters. Enter Albany. LEAR Woe that too late repents!]—O, sir, are you come? Is it your will? Speak, sir.—Prepare my horses. [Exit a Knight] Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend, More hideous when thou show’st thee in a child Than the sea-monster. ALBANY Pray, sir, be patient. LEAR [to Goneril] Detested kite, thou liest. My train are men of choice and rarest parts, That all particulars of duty know And in the most exact regard support The worships of their name. O most small fault, How ugly didst thou in Cordelia show, Which, like an engine, wrenched my frame of nature From the fixed place, drew from my heart all love And added to the gall! O Lear, Lear, Lear! Beat at this gate that let thy folly in And thy dear judgment out. Go, go, my people. [Exeunt Knights and Attendants] ALBANY My lord, I am guiltless, as I am ignorant Of what hath moved you. *****
We’ve seen Lear’s paternal rage against Cordelia in the first scene. Now it’s Goneril’s turn, and soon it will be Regan’s. But we’ll feel more and more the helplessness of that rage as it is turned on those who have power over him, and are abusing it, rather than on the helpless Cordelia.
This aspect of Lear’s characters is consistent and bears out the insight in Goneril’s complaint to Oswald that “Old fools are babes again” (I.iii.19). But it’s Lear’s helplessness that makes us see the reemergence of the essential, archaic childish self at his core. As with many tragic characters from Oedipus on — at least those for whom we feel pity for their “unmerited misfortune” as Aristotle says — a continuity with the child within emerges in the course of the play. The child in Lear will once again be forced to grow up quickly, which is always the hardest thing on a child. (We’ll see the same thing happening with Edgar — who will sees the connection between them, and the connection Freud makes between the child and the parent who wishes to relive childhood in the child: “He childed as I fathered”.) This is part of the way that Shakespeare keeps Lear’s character consistent with itself while making us change our attitude towards him. His outrageous complaints of Cordelia’s supposed maltreatment of him have now become warranted complaints about Goneril’s.
This is in part underlined by the fact that he doesn’t blow up at Albany, but treats him fairly — more fairly than he’s treated France.
Albany enters and there’s a beat before Lear notices him — in contrast to the Fool’s ability to anticipate Goneril’s entrance and to see what Kent is doing when he is himself offstage. The Fool is always hyperalert to what is going on around him; the only character who challenges him in this regard is Edgar, but the Fool is more alert still. But it’s worth noticing that the Fool doesn’t announce Albany’s entrance — he’s not (yet) one of the responsible parties.
This Albany is guiltless, and will remain so for the rest of the play. Here is the cheat I mentioned before; now Albany begins to be a significant character, and the casual remarks made about him before, when he was still insignificant, contribute only to the delineation of the opening situation, not of his character. But having been established, he will henceforth be a consistent and consistently decent personage.
“Speak, sir,” Lear requests but will not stay for an answer. This actually increases our sense that Lear does not see Albany as part of the group of those wronging him; Albany’s a witness, like the knights and Kent, to the frenetic energy of Lear’s confrontation with Goneril. “Speak, sir” is a recollection of Lear’s demands of his daughters in the first scene, and I think what that does for us is to put Albany in the category of those whom Lear bids speak, and whose speech does no good. He is now in the same category as Cordelia. (This is quick and the touch is very light, but I think it’s there.)
We’ve seen Lear blow up already, in the first scene, but it’s here that he begins to soliloquize or quasi-soliloquize, addressing ingratitude as later he will address the storm. Yes, he’s also castigating Goneril — “detested kite” — but even then she’s beginning to be treated as an abstraction since his speech is really about his retinue, not about her exploitation of the situation.
Not only ingratitude and Goneril (and a very vague Albany): he also addresses the small fault that showed in Cordelia (reminding us of the various uses of the word fault in the play, from its first use when Gloucester asks Kent if he smells a fault in the conception of Edmund to its last, the “fault” that Edgar commits in not revealing himself to his father); and then he addresses himself: “O Lear, Lear, Lear!” That moment of self-address, as he strikes his forehead, reiterates the alienation from himself that began when he asks who can tell him who, since he’s clearly not Lear, he is.
As I say, the estrangement of the third-person attitude he takes towards himself feels archaic; as though he’s repeating the long-ago language of his elders and betters. He had become the eldest and best, as king of England, but now, even as he takes the perspective of the all-powerful adults of his childhood that comes at the cost of being the powerless and needy object of that attitude.
Albany here plays a saving role, just as Kent did before, as a vassal who still shows Lear the respect and obeisance that’s appropriate. This helps to pair Albany and the still silent Kent, as figures loyal to Lear. Right now that loyalty does him almost no good at all.