Of Shakespeare’s big four tragedies, one of them went unperformed for quite a long time when the theaters were reopened after the Restoration: King Lear. It was just too depressing on two many levels. Only when another writer, Nahum Tate, spiffed it up with a happy ending did it get back on the boards. The pile of corpses with which Shakespeare ended the last act was swept away, and instead a happily alive Lear prepares to lead with the good council of his happily alive daughter Cordelia.
Shakespeare had no such thing, of course. Instead, he shows the mad king — at great effort, and with the compassionate love of his daughter Cordelia — moving at last to a point of emotional clarity and even serenity, king only of the cell in which he and his daughter lie, captured by an enemy army. The next time we see him, he enters the stage bearing the corpse of his murdered Cordelia — murdered despite the fact that literally no one in the play actually still wanted her dead, but the order to spare her life didn’t get there in time. And he says the only words imaginable as he carries Cordelia:
Howl! Howl! Howl! Howl!
In Shakespeare, people pretty much get what they deserve — so much so that “like a Shakespearean tragedy” is a journalistic shorthand for “someone brought down by the immutable consequences of his own flaws of character.”
Cordelia is the great exception: that irrefutable demonstration that chaos can reach anywhere and pluck anyone away at any moment, no matter how innocent, no matter how senseless her death.
As if we needed the reminder.
If you’re a reader of fine print, as I am, you’ll notice that the bench these three women are sitting on is in the form of a paperback copy of King Lear.
It comes from this notice:
It’s the little details that break your heart.
Howl! Howl! Howl! Howl!