King Lear I.iv.282-302

The kindly ones

[                            Exeunt Lear and the Fool

ALBANY   Now gods that we adore whereof comes this?

GONERIL   Never afflict yourself to know more of it,
But let his disposition have that scope
As dotage gives it.]

                             Enter Lear and the Fool.

LEAR   What, fifty of my followers at a clap?
Within a fortnight?

ALBANY                     What’s the matter, sir?

LEAR   I’ll tell thee. [To Goneril]  Life and death, I am ashamed
That thou hast power to shake my manhood thus,
That these hot tears, which break from me perforce,
Should make thee worth them. Blasts and fogs upon thee!
Th’untented woundings of a father’s curse
Pierce every sense about thee. Old fond eyes,
Beweep this cause again, I’ll pluck ye out,
And cast you, with the waters that you loose,
To temper clay. Yea, is’t come to this?
Ha! Let it be so. I have another daughter,
Who I am sure is kind and comfortable:
When she shall hear this of thee with her nails
She’ll flay thy wolvish visage. Thou shalt find
That I’ll resume the shape which thou dost think
I have cast off forever.    Exit
*****

Things move very rapidly here, not only on stage but in the extreme though local compression of plot. Shakespeare knows how to accelerate. Lear and the Fool had exited just three and a half lines earlier; now they return, and in the meantime he’s lost half his train. It’s barely possible to make off-stage sense of this (he’s been there a fortnight; Goneril has dismissed half his knights as a fait accompli before coming on stage to ask him a little to disquantity his train; and he discovers these things during her brief interchange with Albany telling him not to interfere, discovers what she has done and what she meant by “a little”) — it’s possible to make sense of this but we don’t have time to think any of that out. All we know is that he’s been there two weeks and Goneril’s edict cutting the number of his followers in half is final. And at the same time we know or will know that the hundred knights in some sense are still there since, as he’ll say, he and his hundred knights can stay with Regan instead.

Albany is taken by surprise as well, since he doesn’t know what Lear’s elliptical complaint is about. He hasn’t heard Goneril’s demand and he doesn’t seem to know what Lear reenters to complain about. Lear’s “I’ll tell thee” (which Theobald in his edition rightly specified as spoken to Albany) is another moment exempting Albany from our seeing him as conspiring with the machinations of Goneril and her household. Since Lear never does tell him, those words are only there to continue setting Albany up as a counter to Goneril. Audiences don’t analyze any of this — they just feel the rapid distinction, but Shakespeare wants to establish it for the last movement of the play: in order to set up the relationship between Goneril and Edmund, just as Cornwall’s death will set up Regan’s relation with him; and in order to put Albany not only against Edmund but on Lear’s side in the last scene.

Lear’s angry speech here is somewhat different from the curse he’s just pronounced on Goneril (which I discussed in my last) — now he’s as angry at himself as he is at her, and curses himself and her simultaneously. His curse should pierce her sense, but in the meantime he threatens to pluck out his own eyes if they continue to weep. His self-disgust at the tears that would betray his weakness will return in similar terms in Gloucester’s house when he says

                                     You think I’ll weep.
No, I’ll not weep.
I have full cause of weeping, but this heart
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws
Or ere I’ll weep.  (II.iv.279-83)

Lear’s curses of himself and of others define disaster in the play. Gloucester is the person who will literally have his eyes plucked out, and whose heart will burst. The blasts and fogs he calls down on Goneril will be the blasts and fogs he himself experiences on the heath. In the first scene he wanted to shake all cares and business from his age — here Goneril shakes his manhood.¹

We can tell that Lear really knows what we know about Regan — that she and Goneril are similarly cruel — from the violence he anticipates in her. He is sure she’s “kind and comfortable”² which is why… she’ll flay Goneril’s wolvish visage — not exactly kind and comfortable actions. Lear knows what Regan is like but wants to believe that she’ll turn her viciousness against Goneril, not himself.

But it is true that he does have another daughter, different from Goneril, who is kind and comfortable, and these words (this is another aspect of Shakespeare’s technique of keeping the background present) remind us, through their subliminal irony, of Cordelia, though Lear thinks he thinks he’s talking about Regan. His last phrase in the speech³ — “I have cast off forever” — echoes his curse of Cordelia, when as a stranger to his heart and himself he says he will now “hold thee from this forever”.

tl;dr We’re beginning a series of replays of the first scene, with Lear now judging and cursing with more moral accuracy than then.

1. A good example of praeteritio: I won’t say anything here about the way the word shake might have resonated with Shakespeare’s name here.

2. I.e. full of a reassuring confidence in her power comfort. In Richard II, Richard uses the word “discomfortable” for his pessimistic cousin; the definition I’m offering is the opposite of that.

3. In the Folio version: here I depart from my general practice of using both, since I think the Quarto’s version of the speech (printed in prose) which continues with the words “Thou shalt I warrant thee” dissipates the echo Shakespeare may have later realized he wanted with the first scene.