It's Witchcraft (King Lear 1.1)

2/10/11

When Lear responds to Cordelia’s refusal to join in any reindeer games, he concocts an interesting and insightful correlation between truth, the sacred, witchcraft, the nature of the cosmos, and fatherhood.  In banishing his daughter, the King says:

Let it be so, thy truth then be thy dower!

For, by the sacred radiance of the sun,

The mysteries of Hecate and the night,

By all the operation of the orbs

From whom we exist and cease to be,

Here I disclaim all my paternal care,

Propinquity and property of blood,

And as a stranger to my heart and me

Hold thee from this forever.

In this speech, truth (Cordelia’s brand) and Lear’s fatherhood are connected by the sacred radiance of the sun, the mysteries (or miseries, in F—either way), and the operation of the orbs.  This means that the sacred radiance of the sun, the mysteries of Hecate, and the operation of the orbs are all working in tandem.  They may be opposing forces, but they are working together and producing together.   They are opposite sexes.  Together, they produce Cordelia’s truth, at one end, and Lear’s fatherhood, at the other.  These opposing forces produce opposing forces.  Lear, in his rage, recognizes incongruity between Cordelia’s truth and his fatherhood—perhaps everything that he tried to instill in his daughter.  Everything that he tried to instill in his daughter, it seems, has gone out the window.  Cordelia is now the opposite of Lear.  Must be.  In Lear’s eyes, which, as we can see, are failing him at the moment—the moment that he forces to its crisis, the moment that he disturbs the universe.

It’s not so strange that Lear is invoking Hecate in this situation.  Shakespeare is most likely writing Macbeth and King Lear around the same time--two plays about two kings; one younger and one much older.  Despite age, they are somewhat similar.  Some words from Eliot Spitzer, the former governor of New York, may help shed a certain slant of light on this.  A recent article quotes him as saying, “They whom the gods would destroy, they make all powerful.”  Obviously, a play on, “….they make mad,” (though I think the article says that this was an inadvertent mistake).  Still, talk about ruling by divine right!  Lear’s already powerful, so his madness, more or less, comes with age.  It’s the end of the line for Lear.  Macbeth’s madness comes while he is assuming the throne, or taking actions in order to assume the throne.  His wife does say that he is too full of the milk of human kindness.  Perhaps he is aware of this about himself, too.  His madness comes, then, perhaps, as a result of realizing that he may not be ready or able to rule Scotland, even though the vaulting ambition is there.

But, again, here we have two kings.  Two kings who go mad.  Two kings who receive truths, dark as they may be, from three sisters, whether they be weird or just plain cruel.  Two kings who receive truths on the heaths of Britannia.  Macbeth and Lear have some significant things in common.  Both their lives are or seem to be governed by the mysteries of Hecate and the night.  The mysteries are made palpable to Macbeth by the Weird Sisters.  For Lear, by his daughters, except, of course, he makes the wrong daughter guilty by the wrong association.  Lear goes mad, but Lear also comes to his senses and when he does, he gets his day in court (3.6).