United Kingdom Magzines

It is now an established fact that all the cultural productions—be it popular or serious and be it a production on the celluloid or on the stage—are actually produced on the invisible matrices of a particular culture at a particular time, and what makes the acceptance or refusal of a particular art form possible is the operation of ideology or ideologies in the society. This is more prominently understandable in the rise and development of Restoration Comedy, which coincided with the restoration of monarchy, of king Charles II­ (1660) after England had gone through a political. England had previously seen a king being murdered and a Protector clamping strictest moral restorations of Puritan faith. It was not only a restoration of monarchy but also of drama, because during Cromwell’s regime the theatres were branded as immoral. Between 1642 and 1660 English theatre virtually did not exist. The natural reaction of moral starvation was extreme profligacy. The king himself was an indolent sensualist who patronised an atmosphere of hedonistic liveliness of court. As David Daiches put it, “Charles set the tone for the court wits and court wits set the tone for…dramatic comedy.” The playwrights concerned themselves with the veneer and polished personality if men and women, that is, their manners, where ‘manners’ means a quality acquired by person from social intercourse with cultivated men and women. This type of comedy, however, owed as much to the native Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists like Jonson, Beaumount and Fletcher, as to the foreign influences of the French dramatists like Moliere, Racine, Corneille and Calderon. The comic element in the Italian Commedia dell’ Art also provided a note.

George Etherege first realized that the comedy in the manners of Moliere could be exploited in English. The Comical Revenge, the first of its kind, contained a comic plot dealing with the fools, bullies and the ladies of varying degrees. The Man of Mood is Etherege’s last and most brilliant comedy. In William Wycherley’s plays there is a savagery, a brutal insistence on the unscrupulous selfishness and obsessive animality of all men and woman. In his best plays, The Country Wife and The Plain Dealer, he almost turned a cynic and leashed his mockery at disillusioned figures who were oblivious to anything else in the world being busy in a mad race of pleasure.

William Congreve was the most representative and accomplished dramatist of the period. It was left to him to retrieve the Restoration Comedy from cynicism and boisterous virility. In his first play The Old Bachelor, he lays down his purpose, where Bellmour says to Vainlive:

“Come, leave business to Idlers and wisdom to Fools…Will be my Occupation and let Father Time shake his glass.”

The Double Dealer bears the stamp of his thinking about plot and about the theory of drama. Love for Love was the most satirical of his plays, and in its Prologue Congreve deliberately stated his intention of lashing the age. In Way of the World, his masterpiece, the construction, characterisation, dialogue are alike brilliant. This play contains some standard elements of Restoration Comedy—such scenes as those where reputations are murdered by gossip, such characters as Mrs. Millament and Mirabell, the flashes of wit in the dialogues, the amorous widow, the country square, intrigues, adulteries and all usual tensions between desire and reputations. Congreve’s credit lies in the fact that he handled the materials towards a steady resolution so that people could be able to choose the correct practical way—the way of the world.

Among other Restoration Comedy writers John Vanbrugh’s plays lack the art and elegance of Congreve’s comedy, but they are full of energy and geniality. Of Farquhar’ seven plays only two speak of his dramatic talent—The Recruiting Officer and The Beaux Stratagem.A Short View of the Immorality and Profanity of the Stage. Among minor Restoration dramatists Sir Charles Sedley, Thomas Sadwell, John Crowne, Thomas Urfrey and Mrs. Aphra Behn may be mentioned. The comedies came to an abrupt end, partly because the possibilities of a limited convention have been exhausted, partly because Farquhar died and Congreve became blind and Vanbrugh became engrossed in his architecture. These events had nothing to do with Jeremy Colier’s essay,
The verdict of posterity had not been always favourable to the foibles and follies of the Restoration comedies. It has been criticised for being trivial, dull and gross by such critics as L. C. Knight, who claims that it lacks the essential stuff of human experience. In fact, the comedies represent not so much an immoral attitude but lack of maturity. For example, the plots are too involved, which provoked Granville Barker to ask, ”How could an audience be both clever enough to understand it and stupid enough to be interested by it?” The Restoration dramatists, however, had keen interest in social achievements and follies of their extraordinary society. Besides this, its various qualities—experimentalism and scepticism, cynicism and satiric investigation, re-examination of the social contact, its moral indifference and shallow intellectualising, the modern theatre with its picture-frame stage, its actresses taking parts, its movable scenery, its artificial light—all were reflected and developed during the Restoration period. Finally, Restoration Comedy played a vital role in the refinement and improvement of the English language.

With Edward II Marlowe seems to have left away the non-English legends and myths with tragic potentialities and melodrama in favour of the native historical themes that have some sort of socio-political relevance for the time without the melodrama. Marlowe drew upon the accounts of Stowe and Holinshed and presented the much debated personality of Edward II in perfect balance with the dynamics of tragedy and the psychology of the audience whose maturity he must have invested his faith in. It may be pointed out here that Marlowe might have been influenced by the Renaissance notion of history as a teacher, a notion reinforced in England by the vogue of the “courtesy books” like the Mirror of the Magistrates. In other words, the tragedy of Edward II was expected to illustrate the ways of life a king should avoid and the kind of the ways the subjects should not take resort to in order to advance personal gains or whims. Again, it must be emphasised here that Marlowe must have been fascinated with the ‘queer’ and ‘unnatural’ personality of the king, which we now plainly categorise as homosexual. But it is not the sole trait which brings about his downfall; in fact, a number of tragic flaws can be marked in his character in the process of the drama.

The play starts at a crucial juncture of English history: it is a transition from the supposedly stable reign of Edward I to the uncertain one of his son. The situation demands at one level an abler king than the former, but unfortunately for both the king and his subjects he turns out to be anything but a king. At the very opening of the play when Gaveston is seen on the stage reading aloud the lines of the letter sent by Edward II,

“My father is deceased! Come, Gaveston,

And share the kingdom with thy dearest friend.”

The contemporary audiences could well anticipate the extent to which the new king was going to be irresponsible as he forgot that a kingdom was to be ruled better, not something to be shared and enjoyed with a person who had been banished from the kingdom by the former king for some serious charges, which the chroniclers could not clearly put in black and white out of decency or taboo. As the audience watch and hear Gaveston, they learn from him the new king’s adherence to pleasure-principle:

“Music and poetry is his delight,

Therefore I will have wanton poets and wits...”

Here Gaveston is all set to play the role played by Mephistopheles in Doctor Faustus as an agent of destruction.

With representative appearance of the Three Poor Men on the stage the audience once again can well understand the economic instability of the country created by the former king’s maintenance of a huge army in England, France, Scotland and Ireland. Edward II does not show any intention of addressing those serious problems his subjects face. Instead he throws himself into the vicious hands of Gaveston and aggravates the situation by trying to avenging the exile of Gaveston. Here the king violates the norms of the traditional hierarchy by encouraging Gaveston to insult and assault the Bishop of Coventry and by confiscating his property and installing his minion in the bishop’s place. At this both the noble class and the clergy become apprehensive of their property, position and power. Edward’s case gets further worsened with the queen Isabella’s openly complaining of his ill-treatment. The king, according to her, “regards me not…dotes upon the love of Gaveston”. It seems that Marlowe used the myths in order to convey what could not been expressed in plain terms on the stage, that is, his homosexual affiliation. The most expressive of all, however, is the one the queen employs:

“For never doted Jove on Ganymede

As he on cursed Gaveston.”

The king shows utter inefficiency as he cannot resist the collective manoeuvre of the nobles and the clergymen, who force him to subscribe to Gaveston’s second banishment. In fact, the king and Gaveston are to blame themselves more for the latter’s banishment.

The king, however, makes a correct estimate of the noble class and the papal authority when he bursts out in ineffectual anger:

“They would not stir, were it to do me good.”

The situation demands that he act as a shrewd politician, but he turns out to be anything other than that. He commits another grave mistake of using his own wife as a political agent by black-mailing and pushing her further to lean on to Mortimer, who as a Machiavellian—in the narrow sense of the term—makes most of the situation.

The king goes on committing mistakes until he loses Gaveston. But instantly he installs another fortune seeker in the form of Younger Spenser. One may note here that the adoption of Spenser becomes a psychological necessity for him as he cannot live without Gaveston. It is only after the death of death of Gaveston and the exposure of the barons and earls as power-hungry hypocrites that the sway of sympathy turns in favour of Edward II.

However, the king shows enough grit and determination to defeat the earls and barons in the battlefield, but after that commits the gravest mistake of sending Mortimer to Tower, of not executing him straight. Again, perhaps he chooses the conflict as an opportunity to get rid of the queen, whom he does not recall even after his victory. This creates an opportunity for Mortimer and the queen to regroup, raise an army and invade England defeat him.

The play Edward II reaches its emotional climax in scene i, Act V. It is in this scene that the king’s image as an irresponsible and weak person undergoes a total transformation, and he emerges before the audience as a tragic figure in his understanding of the worthlessness of a king stripped of power just like the King in King Lear. Now falls under the control of death-instinct. As Berkley tries to console him, he resolutely affirms:

“...of this am I assured

That death ends all, and I can die but once.”

But nobody perhaps, unless one is familiar with the historical account, can anticipate the gruesome, inhuman and shocking death Edward dies. The spectacle of his suffering on the stage even goes beyond the Aristotelian limit; the audience do undergo the emotional experience of “pity and fear”, but at last shudder at and get shocked.

At the beginning of the 17^th century the love poetry of John Donne expressed a strong and independent spirit. He combined in his lyrics passionate emotional intensity with keen and active intelligence displayed in logical analysis and verbal wit, especially the extensive use of puns, equivocations, and the conceit or extended metaphor. All these features in some sense work in a principle of contraries. Dr. Johnson, noted Donne’s fondness for conceits, which he called “discordia concors”, the “discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike”. This kind of peculiar poetic vision and practice, however, had much to do with the kind of culture he inherited, a culture, which, based on medieval world view and ethos, suddenly seemed to change in the face of the Copernican science and new geographical discoveries. Donne faced a moral vacuum and experienced the unstable nature of the universe. So he tried to find out a resolution, first in the Neo-Platonic theory and then finally in the traditional Christian religion. The Sun Rising may be said to be an intellectual exercise in reversing the contemporary Copernican heliocentric system, in which the sun was given a dominant centrality. Donne makes the lovers undercut that centrality by playing the part of the decentred earth and asserting their former supremacy in the geometric Ptolemic context.

It has been suggested, for instance, by J.B. Leishman that the poem was partly inspired by the 13^th elegy of the 1^st Book of Ovid’s Amores. . But speaker’s irreverence and the use of extravagant conceits are without precedent:

“Busy old fool, unruly sun

Why dost thou thus

Through the window and through curtains call on us?”

At one this kind of address of the sun reverses the tradition of hundreds of Petrarchan and Elizabethan love-poems, in which the sun is a touchstone of ecstatic tribute—“the golden eye of heaven”, “Hyperion” etc. In this respect, the poem can be marked as an inverted aubade, in which the sun is pursued through three stanzas of sustained exhilaration.

However, any potentiality comic effect is undercut by a note of seriousness, applied in a dramatic manner. Donne’s imagery, though bizarre and exaggerated as a ‘pseudo-argument’ asserts what every Platonist and Christian really believes. At certain moments, any man might be wrapt beyond mortality, in the eternal intimation of spiritual love. This belief leads Donne to gather his confidence and defy time:

“Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,

Nor hours, days, months, which are rags of time.”

From the philosophical point of view, this statement goes triumphantly over the assumed contempt for the sun, attesting that the world fittingly symbolised in the “school-boys” and “sowre prentices”, the “country ants” and the “Court-huntsmen” is indeed tinged with illusions. In calling the material world unreal, the poet is saying with Plato, that even the world’s princes and potentates are mere shadows, an imitation in time of the timeless ideals.

Such complex of ideas remains in the second stanza too. The sun and the lovers have actually changed roles, with the mistress for an instant becoming the sun, and her “eye-beams” blinding the usurped lord of light. Love is not a mere reflection of the lover’s needs, subjective and transient; it is homage to beauty revealed and revered:

“She is all States, and all Princes, I,

Nothing else is:

…compar’d to this

All honour’s mimic…”

Donne is here praising mutual love as an experience of supreme value that opposes the transitory material world and finally transcends it. But remarkably, transcendence of the physical world and mortality is accomplished not by denial of the body but by its fulfilment. Whereas Neo-Platonist like Baldasar Castiglione suggests in his The Book of the Courtier, that the lover can ascend to spiritual love only by leaving behind the impure body, Donne insists that transcendental spiritual love is also sexual indeed, that lovers transcend the physicality of existence by embracing the body.

On reaching this conclusion of supreme value, the lovers can invite the sun to carry on his business for they are beyond the reach of the co-ordinates of time in their world “contracted thus”:

“Shine here to us, and thou art every where

This bed thy centre is, these walls, thy sphere”.

This world of love contains everything of value; it is the only one worth exploring and possessing. Hence the microcosm of love becomes and more important than the macrocosm.

At the beginning of the 17^th century the love poetry of John Donne expressed a strong and independent spirit. He combined in his lyrics passionate emotional intensity with keen and active intelligence displayed in logical analysis and verbal wit, especially the extensive use of puns, equivocations, and the conceit or extended metaphor. All these features in some sense work in a principle of contraries. Dr. Johnson, noted Donne’s fondness for conceits, which he called “discordia concors”, the “discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike”. This kind of peculiar poetic vision and practice, however, had much to do with the kind of culture he inherited, a culture, which, based on medieval world view and ethos, suddenly seemed to change in the face of the Copernican science and new geographical discoveries. Donne faced a moral vacuum and experienced the unstable nature of the universe. So he tried to find out a resolution, first in the Neo-Platonic theory and then finally in the traditional Christian religion. The Sun Rising may be said to be an intellectual exercise in reversing the contemporary Copernican heliocentric system, in which the sun was given a dominant centrality. Donne makes the lovers undercut that centrality by playing the part of the decentred earth and asserting their former supremacy in the geometric Ptolemic context.

It has been suggested, for instance, by J.B. Leishman that the poem was partly inspired by the 13^th elegy of the 1^st Book of Ovid’s Amores. . But speaker’s irreverence and the use of extravagant conceits are without precedent:

“Busy old fool, unruly sun

Why dost thou thus

Through the window and through curtains call on us?”

At one this kind of address of the sun reverses the tradition of hundreds of Petrarchan and Elizabethan love-poems, in which the sun is a touchstone of ecstatic tribute—“the golden eye of heaven”, “Hyperion” etc. In this respect, the poem can be marked as an inverted aubade, in which the sun is pursued through three stanzas of sustained exhilaration.

However, any potentiality comic effect is undercut by a note of seriousness, applied in a dramatic manner. Donne’s imagery, though bizarre and exaggerated as a ‘pseudo-argument’ asserts what every Platonist and Christian really believes. At certain moments, any man might be wrapt beyond mortality, in the eternal intimation of spiritual love. This belief leads Donne to gather his confidence and defy time:

“Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,

Nor hours, days, months, which are rags of time.”

From the philosophical point of view, this statement goes triumphantly over the assumed contempt for the sun, attesting that the world fittingly symbolised in the “school-boys” and “sowre prentices”, the “country ants” and the “Court-huntsmen” is indeed tinged with illusions. In calling the material world unreal, the poet is saying with Plato, that even the world’s princes and potentates are mere shadows, an imitation in time of the timeless ideals.

Such complex of ideas remains in the second stanza too. The sun and the lovers have actually changed roles, with the mistress for an instant becoming the sun, and her “eye-beams” blinding the usurped lord of light. Love is not a mere reflection of the lover’s needs, subjective and transient; it is homage to beauty revealed and revered:

“She is all States, and all Princes, I,

Nothing else is:

…compar’d to this

All honour’s mimic…”

Donne is here praising mutual love as an experience of supreme value that opposes the transitory material world and finally transcends it. But remarkably, transcendence of the physical world and mortality is accomplished not by denial of the body but by its fulfilment. Whereas Neo-Platonist like Baldasar Castiglione suggests in his The Book of the Courtier, that the lover can ascend to spiritual love only by leaving behind the impure body, Donne insists that transcendental spiritual love is also sexual indeed, that lovers transcend the physicality of existence by embracing the body.

On reaching this conclusion of supreme value, the lovers can invite the sun to carry on his business for they are beyond the reach of the co-ordinates of time in their world “contracted thus”:

“Shine here to us, and thou art every where

This bed thy centre is, these walls, thy sphere”.

This world of love contains everything of value; it is the only one worth exploring and possessing. Hence the microcosm of love becomes and more important than the macrocosm.

Generally speaking, Indian writings in English are a product of the historical encounter between the two cultures—Indian and the western—for about one hundred and ninety years. It is not that Indian people did not experience the impact of a foreign culture. It did during the reigns of various foreign rulers. But the difference with the British rule lies in the nature of the economic system that had come into being in Europe after the Renaissance, described by Marx as capitalist system. Before the introduction of the British rule India had the feudal economic system, in accordance with which the vast population of the country, having various religious faiths and conforming to the caste system, tried to live their life, sometimes fatalistically and sometimes stoically. Above all, it was a closed society with a peculiar cultural xenophobia. In fact, India had been awaiting a political and cultural change, which became necessary after the weakening and disintegration of the Moghul Empire. British rule in India, first of all, resulted in breaking the barrier of that closed society. Then the greatest cultural impact came with the establishment of four universities and with the introduction of western educational system. The English language provided the natives with a way to the western literature and to the western culture, of course. English education created a class of native bourgeoisie, the majority of which turned to their mother tongue while giving birth to a native literature, applying the western aesthetic norms. But a few among them thought it appropriate to give expressions to their feelings and experiences in English. Thus the peculiar body of Indo-Anglian literature was created—while its contents were to Indian, its medium of expression was to be English.

Among its pioneers was teenage girl, who, besides writing many poems and a French novel, also wrote an unpublished English novel, Bianca or the Young Spanish Maiden. At the beginning of the 20^th century Ramesh Chunder Dutt tried seriously to write fictions in English. His the Slave Girl of Agra: An Indian Historical Romance. His Lake of Palms is an intimate picture of the social life of Bengal. Among other Bengali fiction writers, S. K. Ghosh’s first novel 1001 Indian Nights recounts in the manner of an oriental story-teller the supernormal deeds of Narayan Lal. It was followed by The Price of Destiny. It seeks to analyse the cause of political disaffection in India against the British.

Indian novels in English had begun to be written from various parts of India, crowded with the varied and variegated pictures of life from various lands. The cultural lives are both geographically and socially different, while the common thread is the medium of expression and the common ground is the context of the British rule. Among the writers of fiction during the colonial period mention may be made of S. b. Banerjee, B. R. Rajam, T. Ramkrishna, P.A. Madhviah, K. S. Venkatramani, Shankar Ram.

After the end of the First World War it is found that some of the novelists were influenced by the ideologies that challenged capitalism and colonialism. The most prominent of those was Marxism. In Mulk Raj Anand’s novels we find the operation of the ideology in the background. His Across the Black Waters, The Coolie, Two Leaves and a Bud, The Untouchable are faithful documents of the lives of the downtrodden. His characters also come alive as real persons of the Indian society. Among other novelist, Raja Rao is famous for his narrative techniques. He combined the narrative techniques of The Ramayana and The Mahabharata with those modern western techniques of Eliot and Joyce. His Kanthapura is put in the mouth of a grandmother. R. K. Narayan is a powerful novelist having considerable philosophical bent of mind. It is seen in his novels The Bachelor of Arts and The Dark Room.

The tragedy of partition provided the writers with the occasion to write about the plight of the people in the subcontinent in order to bring home mainly to the western world the impact of British rule, which had previously boasted of “civilising mission”. India got Independence through bloodshed and migration. Khushwant Singh wrote A Train to Pakistan. His next novel I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale presents an ironic picture of a joint Sikh family, illustrative of different Indian reactions to the freedom movement of the forties.

In fact, the partition theme in Indian novels in English set the dystopian tune, which would be later on carried on to the tone of the postcolonial theories. Postcolonialism began as a recognition of the dominant post-War economic and political conditions prevalent all over the world. Vikram Set, Upamannu Chatterjee, Ruth Jhavala, Kamala Das, Arundhati Roy, Jhumpa Lahiri and others seem to believe that condition of life—be it at home or outside, be it in India or abroad—has become as it is because of the impact of European domination of the world. The irony of the situation has been aptly described by the Australians Bill Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffins as writing back to the empire.

“It [English] is the language”, Jesperson concludes, “of a grown up man having very little childish or feminine about it”. While analysing and comparing English with many languages, as a philologist he marked out certain characteristics of English, which he found decidedly masculine. The evolution of the language as a masculine one, in fact, coincides with the rise of the Anglo-Saxon people and the subsequent world domination. Perhaps the national spirit for domination contributed much to making English a masculine language. The masculine traits of the language are as follows:

I. Sound System in English:

The sound system of the English language is characterised by certain masculine traits. The consonants are well defined. They belong to their own types, and they are precisely pronounced; for instance, ‘t’ is always pronounced as ‘t’ as in ‘bat’, ‘d’ is always a ‘d’ as in ‘desk’ and so on. These consonantal sounds are much less modified by the following vowels compared to that in some other languages. Except in the cases of diphthongs, English vowels retain their distinctive separate qualities; for instance, ‘a’ has a separate sound from ‘e’. Again, it is found that a large number of words end in two or more consonantal sounds which, though sometimes seem to make the language harsh and rough, brings in considerable energy to the language. But it must be admitted that under the impact of the refined languages like Latin and French, hard consonantal sounds have been softened. This is nowhere prominent than in the evolution of the consonant ‘r’.

II. Simplification of Endings:

It is found that modern English has forsaken certain superficialities which characterised Old English. Modern English has got rid of many endings in nouns, verbs and adjectives, which were mainly ornamental and made the language take a feminine look. For instance, the word ‘land’ has numerous endings in singular and plural in various cases like the nominative, objective, dative, possessive etc—‘land’, ‘ landes’, lande’, ‘landas’, ‘landa’, ‘landum’.

III. Monosyllabism:

A third masculine characteristic of the English language is that it has rendered many words of two syllables or more into words of one syllable. It is easily to be seen that there is always a greater force in uttering a word of one syllable than in uttering a word of two syllables. The tendency towards monosyllabism has led to the condensation of bigger sentences into smaller ones in many cases.

IV. Business-like Shortening of words and Sentences:

[Napoleon once called the Englishmen “a nation of shopkeepers”. Whether he was correct or not is a matter of great dispute; but the history of the last few centuries shows that England had been a colonising nation, and colonisation had been an off-shoot of capitalism. Perhaps overseas trading for many centuries had an impact on the language; for,] English is marked by business-like shortening of words and sentences. The brevity is one of the masculine characteristics, which makes the language concise and terse.

V. Sobriety in Expression:

Compared to other European peoples, Englishmen dislike strong or hyperbolical expressions and avoid exaggerated ejaculations and try to bring sobriety and restraint in expression. Not only that they try to keep up sobriety in intonation. This is also evident in the fewness of diminutive endings in English.

VI. Word-order:

The virile qualities of English are further illustrated by the fixed word order, except in few rare cases, where there is qualitative change in the normal circumstances.

VII. Logic:

A look at the tense system in English makes it amply clear. One finds here that the differences between the past tense (He saw) and the present perfect tense (“He has seen”) and the past perfect tense (“He had seen”) are well maintained as compared with similarly formed tenses in Danish and German. Again, logicality is also found in the comparatively recent development of the expanded or progressive tenses. Similarly, English maintains correctly a very subtle distinction between simple past tense (“I wrote”) and present perfect tense (“I have written”). This logical aspect of the language is said to be decidedly masculine.

However, it is now proved that masculinity and femininity are identities fixed by certain mechanisms of a particular culture, and the mechanisms operate in order to favour a particular class, and in the case of a male dominated society anything which women practice as subversive activity is termed derogatorily ‘feminine’. So far from being a glorified status, masculinity should be discussed in terms of the politics of marginalisation and domination in the English culture.

In King Lear we discover the presence of two parallel plots: Gloucester story intensifies our experience of the central action by supplying sequence of parallel, impressed upon us by frequent commentary by the characters themselves. The sub-plot simplifies the central action of Lear and his daughters, translating its verbal and visual patterns. it also pictorializes the main action, supplying interpreted visual emblems for some of the play’s important themes. The clarity of the subplot and its didacticism are related, furthermore, to the old fashioned literary form like the morality play, but the verbal and visual simplifications of sub-plot do not simply provide a contrast with what goes on elsewhere in the play; they help to reveal the nature of Lear’s experience by being so obviously inadequate to it. Lear’s sufferings are heroic because they cannot be accommodated by traditional formulas, moral or literary and thee sub-plot exists partly to establish that fact.

The simplification of the sub-plot can be seen first of all in its method of defining character. The behaviour of Edmund, the bastard, for example, is more comprehensible than that of Lear’s bad daughters. The contrast is between Edmund’s conventionally explicable villainy and the seemingly incomprehensible evil Goneril and Regan. The two daughters, who have been given “All”, must remain the subject of unanswered question about what in nature breeds such “hard-hearts”. Elizabethans believed that illegitimacy of birth was itself a cause evil. Lear attempts to explain his daughters’ nature on the grounds of their bastardy, which like Edmund signifies a lack of kinship with Lear’s goodness that is reflected also in Cordelia. Thus Kent says:

“The stars above us, govern our conditions;

Else oneself mate and make could not beget,

Such different issues.” (Act IV, sc. iii)

Again the sub-plot often provides emblem or pictures with clearly stated meanings. The appearance of Edgar on the heath as a poor and naked Bedlam beggar supplies the physical actuality of poverty and nakedness that preoccupy Lear, stripped off his retinue and position:

“Is man no more than this?

Consider him well.”

In Lear’s remarks such as this Edgar is projected as a subject for meditation and consequently of his own poverty. Gloucester’s entrance with the torch immediately afterwards inspires the Fool to similar emblematic imagination on a different subject:

“Now a little fire in a wild field were like an old lecher’s heart.”

The association of fire to heart’s lechery is, in fact, emblematic and points to the root of moral chaos not only in Gloucester’s life but also in the world of Lear’s daughters. Such emblems in the sub-plot portray the obsessive moral imagination of the character who creates them but at the same time they provide physical analogue for some of the play’s important themes—nakedness, sexual appetite and injustice.

Lear’s mad visions differ substantively and in a contrasted form from Edgar’s ‘lunacy’ in the sub-plot, as well as from Gloucester’s sanity. Contrary to the formal structure of Edgar’s references to animals’ lechery Lear’s hypothetical statement of animal’s coupling do not merely satirise the sin of adultery. They are animated sources of his visions:

“Thou shalt not die: die for adultery! No.

The wren goes to’t, and the small gilded fly

Does lecher in my sight.” (Act IV, sc. vi)

Gloucester’s most striking simile about his sufferings,

“As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods,

They kill us for their sport.” (Act IV, sc i)

offers another kind of contrast with Lear’s mad language. Gloucester’s figure of speech sets up an exact proportion between the terms of comparison, that is, between himself and the gods. Lear’s language does the opposite, stressing the personal motivation behind each generalisation and therefore, exceed the limits of conventional figure of speech.

The thematic function of the sub-plot becomes most explicit perhaps in the scene in which we witness Gloucester’s abortive leap from the cliff. Levin has observed that Gloucester’s fall suggests the fall of man or the kind of the fall even may be seen as a rendering of “fortunate fall”, the Christian paradox, whereby man’s Original Fall was interpreted as happy because it enabled him to receive more grace and be redeemed. Gloucester’s attempt to kill himself is deflected by Edgar. Gloucester’s fall is interpreted by Edgar as miraculous:

“Thy life’s a miracle.” (Act IV, sc. vi)

At the end of the play we see how Edgar, who exhorted his blind father to look after his fall is unable to change anything in case of a king. Lear’s sufferings outweigh any optimistic or encouraging words, whether Edgar’s or Albany’s, and they are told by Kent that pain should be allowed in death. Lear’s experience cannot be accounted for in the way that of Gloucester’s is. He is more sinned against than sinning; he and Cordelia are those “who with best meaning have incurr’d the worst”. (Act V, sc iii).