King Lear V.iii.1-26

Exit Cordelia

V.iii

Enter in conquest, with drum and colors, Edmund; Lear and Cordelia as prisoners; soldiers, Captain.

EDMUND   Some officers take them away. Good guard
Until their greater pleasures first be known
That are to censure them.

CORDELIA                               We are not the first
Who with best meaning have incurred the worst.
For thee, oppressed King, I am cast down.
Myself could else outfrown false Fortune’s frown.
Shall we not see these daughters and these sisters?

LEAR   No, no, no, no. Come, let’s away to prison.
We two alone will sing like birds i’the cage.
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news, and we’ll talk with them too—
Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out—
And take upon’s the mystery of things
As if we were Gods spies. And we’ll wear out,
In a walled prison, packs and sects of great ones
That ebb and flow by th’ moon.

EDMUND                                         Take them away.

LEAR  Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia,
The gods themselves throw incense. Have I caught thee?
He that parts us shall bring a brand from heaven
And fire us hence like foxes. Wipe thine eyes.
The good years shall devour them, flesh and fell,
Ere they shall make us weep. We’ll see ’em starved first.
Come.

Exeunt Lear and Cordelia, with Soldiers.

*****

The end of the last scene is the last time we see Gloucester alive.

Then Edgar and Gloucester exit, and Cordelia and Lear enter in captivity. Edmund seems to defer to the authorities that are to punish Lear and Cordelia — “these daughters and these sisters” as Cordelia calls them — but we already know that he has a plan. In the meantime we are permitted to see the love and intimacy between father and daughter that had failed so spectacularly in I.i. Now they are allied indeed, as they had failed to be at the start, and Lear can still hope for some equivalent to setting his rest on her kind nursery.

Cordelia’s anticipation that they’ll see Regan and Goneril would conform to the practice of convergence at the end of the play, which I think Shakespeare understood so well and established for modern drama and film. At any rate, she has reunited with Lear, as Gloucester with Edgar in Act IV. That reunion prior to disaster is something I think Shakespeare is experimenting with. In Richard II, there’s the farewell scene between Richard and his Queen. In Antony and Cleopatra there will be a reunion at the end of Act IV, after he thinks it’s too late and that Cleopatra has died. Macbeth is particularly grim in withholding that final benefit; nor does Hamlet receive it when Ophelia dies before his return. What about Othello? Well reunion and tragedy are the same there. The general point is the overlap of what gives pleasure in tragedy and in comedy: characters who matter to each other more than any others come together, sometimes in hope, sometimes in despair. In King Lear, the hope brought by their reconciliation is almost joyous.

This despite, or because of, the fact that like Edgar before her, Cordelia thinks that have now incurred the worst. She doesn’t know that the worst is not so long as we can say this is the worst. She and her father both imagine a return to some inside world — to some appropriate domain where the sisters can hold court, and where from prison Lear and Cordelia can gossip about this ordinary world, and the ordinary social machinations and changes that occur there. The mystery of things here is the (comic) mystery of the domestic: the reunion of Lear and Cordelia is a return to the blessed ordinary that he repudiated so foolishly. “Gods spies”: these are not Edgar’s clearest gods, but a projection of the kind parental attitude that should have been Lear’s from the start, the gods that might throw incense as at a wedding, perhaps?

“Have I caught thee” is, I think, an odd echo of the second song in Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella: “Have I caught my heavenly jewel?” As a pure question in King Lear it doesn’t quite make emotional sense, but as an allusion to a love poem, as a quotation from one, it does: Lear’s happiness means that he’ll quote this (brief) celebration from Sidney.¹ Though there’s been some debate about what the term “good years” means I think it’s Lear’s version, now, of the kind gods. Time may now be measured by the aging and decay of Goneril and Regan, but the more time passes, the kinder it is to Lear and Cordelia since they will be together all that time. Lear thinks, and we think for a moment, that they have reached a point where though time breaks the threaded dances, life remains a blessing. And we can feel this — for a moment. But the play will not bless.

This is the last time we’ll see Cordelia alive.

1. I haven’t been at all interested in the various sources for King Lear in these remarks, but I’ll remind us here that Sidney’s Arcadia seems to be the major source of the Edmund/Edgar/ Gloucester story, which Shakespeare intertwines with the various stories about Lear (or Leir) that he uses.