[ALBANY My lord, I am guiltless, as I am ignorant Of what hath moved you.] LEAR It may be so, my lord. Hear, Nature, hear, dear goddess, hear: Suspend thy purpose if thou didst intend To make this creature fruitful. Into her womb convey sterility, Dry up in her the organs of increase, And from her derogate body never spring A babe to honor her. If she must teem, Create her child of spleen, that it may live And be a thwart disnatured torment to her. Let it stamp wrinkles in her brow of youth, With cadent tears fret channels in her cheeks, Turn all her mother’s pains and benefits To laughter and contempt, that she may feel How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is To have a thankless child. Away, away! Exeunt Lear and 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. *****
Edmund has invoked Nature at the beginning of scene ii — “Thou, Nature, art my goddess” — and now Lear invokes her too as a “dear goddess”; this is another strange linkage but ultimately an important one, anticipating the choreography where the instantaneous marriage (as he’ll call it) of Edmund, Goneril and Regan in the last scene of the play makes for a strange repetition of the Lear, Goneril and Regan trio in the first scene. Lear’s invoking the same goddess that Edmund did strengthens the comparison.
On the other hand, to continue with somewhat anticipatory observations, one that probably goes best here is this: that though of course Lear and Gloucester are parallel characters — the type you could call first-order, obvious parallels, like Edgar and Cordelia1 — we never get a similar scene where Gloucester berates either of his sons to his face. Gloucester is the version of the character who suffers without being able to curse, but Lear’s curses are expressions of great pain and so his is the experience of emotional pain that we focus on.
As does the scene — he’s quick not to be interested in Albany, who’s another (sympathetic) witness. That’s necessary for what’s to come. Lear gives Albany no reason to resent him, and so we don’t have to choose between them at all. He can do that once, wrong Cordelia and Kent in the first scene, but now the lines and alliances are established, and such scenes are over. Henceforth Lear will only curse those who have studied deserving his curses. If Albany were to defend Goneril he’d be defending a wrong-doer, and we would not take his part, as we did Kent’s. But he hasn’t, so he’s left out of the conflict between Goneril and her father. Again: this is a peripheral observation: we’re focused on the father and daughter; but Albany is now an available character for the side whose side we take. (Shakespeare still wants us to notice it, which is why he has Lear and his train exit the stage for a minute, so we can see that Albany has in no way contributed to Goneril’s imperious behavior.)
And yet the language of Lear’s curse shows far more depth and far more acknowledgement of Goneril’s humanity than when he cursed Cordelia in the first scene. There he refuses to pity and relieve Cordelia, but he doesn’t distinguish her — that’s the point — from him who makes his generation messes to gorge his appetite (even if he is unconsciously or unwittingly describing himself). But here you do get the strangest pity, when he imagines the sorrows he is calling down on Goneril — no babe should honor her, as babies do even the most evil parents, as none will honor the Macbeths, but as Aaron’s child in Titus absolutely honors him. Sadder still is the way he imagines her vulnerable to his own sorrows: her child being a thwart, disnatured torment to her, as she is to him.
But stranger, and more moving, than that is the deeply sorrowful picture that comes next, and that does not apply to him at all: that her child should stamp wrinkles in her brow of youth, and turn all her mother’s pains and benefits to laughter and contempt. The strange empathy he feels here is not for someone whom he wants to see mirror his own grief but for someone who will feel what he as a male can only observe, has only observed: a mother’s pains and benefits. The lines are moving, not for the anguish we feel on his behalf but for the anguish he makes us feel for a possible her. A way of putting this is to say that this is one of those passages whose power when read out of context is just as great as in context. All a mother’s pains and benefits: we should be aware of these as the deepest of human experiences. She is the thankless child, but more important she would become the mother Lear imagines.
None of this moves Goneril (the thankless child), but that doesn’t matter. Lear is ascending to the anonymous generality of the world, the region that the play will represent as the exterior world to which Lear tried to banish Cordelia and Kent and into which he will soon banish himself, the place where the gods become anonymous — in contrast with Albany’s “gods that we adore” (but still adumbrated by his not naming them), even though Lear (and Edmund) still call on the goddess Nature — halfway between a named god and nature itself. So again, I’ll repeat what I said before: that the general and the anonymous become more and more the world of the play — what I’ll also try to describe as the endless space of the unspecific comparative.
They end up marrying in Tate’s version (Cordelia does not go off to France).
"Hear, Nature, hear, dear goddess, hear."
I am reading Olivia Laing's "The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise," and this paragraph about Sebald's "The Rings of Saturn" made me think of your blog:
"I remembered the temple but I'd forgotten that the chapter ended with an apocalyptic vision of dying trees, not just the catastrophic devastation of the Great Storm but the diseases that preceded it in the 1970s: first Dutch Elm disease and then a kind of dieback I thought was the exclusive province of my own century, which caused the crowns of ash to become sparse, and the foliage of oaks to thin and display what Sebald calls 'strange mutations'."
Given Laing's tendency to Shakespearing around on the slightest pretext -- Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, Hamlet -- it seems like an unusual oversight. But maybe I don't understand.
"It was then also that I noticed the crowns of ash trees were become sparse, and the foliage of oaks was thinning and displaying strange mutations."
-- from"The Rings of Saturn," end of chapter nine.
http://johnshaplin.blogspot.com/2012/07/apocalypse-by-wb-sebald.html