罗梅

（广东工贸职业技术学院，广东，广州 510510）

论《李尔王》中的“疯癫”艺术

罗梅

（广东工贸职业技术学院，广东，广州 510510）

疯癫是莎士比亚戏剧中的一个重要主题。本文通过分析《李尔王》中的三个疯癫人物李尔，爱德加和弄人，揭示了莎士比亚戏剧中疯癫艺术的主要特征：寓理性于疯癫中，在疯癫中实现人物道德的完善,并通过疯癫话语批判了黑暗的社会现实。

《李尔王》；疯癫；理性；道德完善

一、Introduction

Shakespeare is a great dramatist and poet in Renaissance.One of the important themes in Shakespeare’s plays is the madness.He has many portraits of madness,and he returned to the theme again and again.Madness concerns with diseased bodies,abnormal behavior,and diseased minds.Madness represents a loss of control,of being borne by unnatural impulses,drives and,perhaps,voices.Being mad is to have lost touch with humanity,with life and with reality.But madness in Shakespeare’s plays is not only that.“Foucault considers the development of the literary representation of madness by Shakespeare and Cervantes.Madness in King Lear and Don Quixote becomes a kind of ultimate limit.”(Stultifera Navis)He once said that Shakespeare’s and Cervantes’s experiences of madness are vital to understanding seventeenth century literary madness.Foucault feels that madness was a way of expressing and locating concerns about the darker side of life and fear about the end of the world.Shakespeare was not limited to a single book in his understanding of madness.The issue of madness is one of major importance in his plays.

二、Mad Characters in King Lear

In King Lear,the madmen include King Lear,Edgar,and Lear’s Fool.King Lear totally loses his power at the hands of his cruel daughters,Regan and Goneril.Lear is driven insane by a series of shocks.First,he is deeply hurt by Goneril who breaks her promise and treat her father cruelly.The conflict with Goneril makes him very angry.The second great shock comes in the second act when Lear finds Kent in the stocks.This causes the first physical symptoms of hysteria,“O!how this mother swells up toward my heart;Hysterica passio!down,thou climbing sorrow!Thy element’s below.”(King Lear,ActⅡ,Sceneⅳ)The third shock,the rejection by Regan, follows immediately.Lear prays for patience;he threatens revenges on the two ungrateful daughters;his refusal to ease his heart by weeping is accompanied by the first rumblings of the storm;and he knows from the thunder that what he most feared will come to pass,and he says:“O fool,I shall go mad!.”Lear's madness is derived from a mixture of sources.He shows all the classic symptoms of what has been called“mental breakdown”or in an earlier age“nervous breakdown”,a state brought on by extreme stress or trauma.

Edgar is Gloucester’s legitimate son.His half-brother Edmund frames him.Edmund forges a letter,and he deceives his father into believing Edgar has first asked him to help murder Gloucester,and then pretends to have been injured by the fleeing Edgar.Edmund makes Gloucester believe that Edgar is impatient for his inheritance and means to kill him.Gloucester declares Edgar an outlaw and Edmund his heir.Edgar,under strong pressure,simulates madness. Edgar,exiled from his father’s castle,chooses to live as a half-naked, half-witted beggar.He decides to disguise himself as a Bedlam beggar,who is known as Poor Tom.Acting mad is perhaps the best disguise for Edgar.During the raging storm into which Goneril and Regan have forced Lear,Edgar finds himself in the same hovel with the mad king and Lear’s Fool.The feigned madness of Edgar is quite different from the feigned madness of Hamlet.Both are suitable to the character and to the situation.

Lear’s Fool might be a comedian-entertainer,or simply a retarded person kept as an object of amusement.He is a servant and subject to punishment and yet Lear's relationship with him is one of friendship and dependency.The Fool acts as a commentator on events and is one of the characters who are fearless in speaking the truth.He provides wit in this bleak play and unlike some of Shakespeare's clowns who seem unfunny to us today because their topical jokes no longer make sense.The Fool in King Lear ridicules Lear's actions and situations in such a way that audiences understand the point of his jokes and his bitter sarcasm.His“mental eye”is the most acute in the beginning of the play:he sees Lear's daughters for what they are and has the foresight to see that Lear's decision will prove disastrous. The Fool serves not simply to amuse but to criticize his master.

三、Reason in Madness

In Shakespeare’s play,the madman always speaks the truth and reveals the darkest side of the society.They possess a kind of forbidden knowledge that relates to the end of the world.The end of the world is the triumph of madness.Throughout his plays the acute social critics are buffoons,villains,lunatics or persons who are shamming insanity or are in a state of violent hysteria.King Lear contains a great deal of veiled social criticism,but it is all uttered by the Fool,by Edgar when he is pretending to be mad or by Lear during his bouts of madness.

After rejected by both Goneril and Regan,Lear’s mentality collapsed completely in a storm.He shouts toward all-shaking thunder,“Strike flat the thick rotundity o’the world!Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once,That make ingrateful man!”(King Lear,Ⅲ,ⅱ)From his angry curse we can infer that he begins to realize his error and the disordered nature laws.As a matter of fact,Shakespeare himself is swearing at the degenerate society through Lear’s curse. Lear also sighs:“the art of our necessities is strange,That can make vile things precious”.(King Lear,Ⅲ,ⅱ)It is a witty remark rather than nonsense,which can be only coined by sages.One of the striking features of Lear’s madness is that it includes quite a lot of sense as Edgar points out:“O,matter and impertinency mix’d;Reason in madness!”(King Lear IV,vi)This should indicate to us,especially when combined with the extreme anger that Lear displays before the storm transformation,the nature of Lear’s madness.It is also true that in some cases the person will—at particular times or in dealing with particular other activities in their lives—be capable of being completely insane and rational.It is the state of the mind or the body being unable to cope further with the stress or trauma.Quite clearly,this is the experience Lear is going through,and one can only marvel at the psychological accuracy with which Shakespeare unfolds the extremes of emotions,the gradual descent,the breakdown.If Lear is mad at this point—and he has not yet crossed the frontier—he would be expressing reason in madness.The“reason in madness”theme is so essential to the play’s meaning.Lear’s criticism is directed against the hypocrisies and injustices of society.This is the“reason in madness”that Edgar refers to.

Edgar has to simulate madness to protect himself,so he is half-naked and his hair in knots.His raving is always disordered.But King Lear has to go mad to realizes the whole thing and understand himself fully through the feigned madman—Edgar.It is a paradox that there are so many truth in Edgar’s raving in ActⅢ,Sceneⅳwhen Lear first meets him.His raving also reveals the darkest side of the society.Edgar swears at the imperfect society:“Take heed o’s the foul fiend.Obey thy parents;keep thy word justly;swear not;commit not with man’s sworn spouse;set not thy sweet heart on proud array.”(King Lear,Ⅲ,ⅳ).Lear does not regard Edgar as a madman but his philosopher.He declares“First let me talk with this philosopher",referring to Edgar.Lear takes Tom—Edgar as a soul-mate.Edgar shows more profound insight in the state of madness than that of sane.Lear learns the lesson ironically from the fool in his madness.

Lear’s Fool has his profoundest impact on King Lear.Fool is one of the most famous characters in the play.He is specially privileged to speak the truth,which he does ironically.The Fool is the first person to criticize Lear for abdicating and dividing the kingdom.His comic asides often reveal the very foolishness of Lear’s actions.And his criticism of Lear's lack of foresight is particularly acute:“Ever since thou madest thy daughters thy mothers;for when thou gavest them the rod and puttest down thime own breeches,Then they for suddent joy did weep,And I for sorrow sung,That such a king should play bo-peep,And go the fools among.”(King Lear,Ⅰ,ⅳ)When Kent says,“This is not altogether fool”,we understand that the Fool is no idiot and also that he is no mere joke teller;this is a“wise fool,”a literal“oxymoron”—a rhetorical figure beloved in literature.The profession of the Fool is ambiguous and abounds in internal contradictions,arising out of the discrepancy between profession and philosophy.The profession of the Fool,like that of an intellectual,consists in providing entertainment.His philosophy demands of him that he tells the truth.

The madness of the elements,the professional‘madness’of the Fool,the feigned madness of Edgar,and the madness of the King himself together exemplify the break-up of society and the threat to the universe itself under the impact of ingratitude and treachery.

四、Moral Improvement in Madness

Lear’s madness is a journey as much as it is an illness.Through his madness Lear breaks down the false illusions of his courtly world. His earlier speech is concerned with power and title,and the later speech is concerned with humanity and friendship.It is a gradual process from been flatted to deserted that Lear is driven to madness. Lear suffers his own foolishness and begins to be aware of his fault. Lear banishes his seemingly ungrateful children who love them most. He breaks the natural law and is punished accordingly.After strongly hurt by his two ungrateful daughters,Lear accuses and reprimands his daughters’ingratitude:“No,you unnatural hags,I will have such revenges on you both”(King Lear,Ⅱ,ⅳ).And then he says that he would go mad.It indicates that the onset of his madness and his new perspective toward the world.

The daughters lock him out of the castle to teach Lear a lesson. He goes to a heath,and there is a long episode of the violent storm.It comes with the development of Lear’s rage.There is even a more violent storm roaring in Lear’s mind.He is“One minded like the weather,most unquietly”.(King Lear,Ⅲ,ⅰ).He says that“when we are born,we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.”His mind goes more disturbed as the storm becomes stronger.Then he comments,“my wit begins to turn”,he realizes he is going crazy—in literature,becoming insane is often a metaphor for changing the way you look at yourself and the world.First he calls on the power of the storm to sterilize the human race,and then accuses the storm of taking sides with his daughters against his dignity and being their degraded slave.And then he realizes that people have deceived him,and says the storm must be the God’s way of finding and punishing secret evildoers,and that he is a man more sinned against than sinning.Finally,when the storm ceased,Lear is no longer a proud and angry king,but only a broken hearted old man.Lear survived from the storm.However,it would not have been to recover his former self.

When he sees the hut,and before seeing the lunatic(s),King Lear realizes that what is happening to him now is what he has allowed to happen to the poor throughout his reign.“Oh,I have taken too little care of this.”He suddenly realizes that his luxuries have been maintained at the expense of his poorest subjects,and that justice is only now being served on him.One of Lear’s first speeches after his wits begin to turn consists of a prayer to‘houseless prverty’:

Poor naked wretches,wheresoe’er you are,

That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,

How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,

Your loop’d and window’d raggedness,defend you

From seasons such as these?O,I have ta’en

Too little care of this!Take physic,pomp;

Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,

That thou mayst shake ths superflux to them,

and show the heavens more just.(King Lear,Ⅲ,ⅳ)

These words are so significant because it signs that Lear changes from a conceited king to a wise man.Before hurt by a series attacks, Lear tends to like to be flattered by others.And from his words in a state of madness,we can infer that when he rules the kingdom he seldom shows his consideration for the poor.But at this moment he begins to realize that he did wrong toward the poor in his kingdom,and he shows his compassion to the poor citizens.As Lear meets his philosopher—Edgar in a room,his mind change more fundamentally. And then he begins to tear off his clothes and give them to the poor Tom.This is the first time Lear has been responsive to the needs and concerns of someone else.The audience would understand that Lear’s newly aroused concern for the poor is a sign of moral improvement from his raving in his madness.

In the ActⅣ,Sceneⅵin which the mad Lear meets the blinded Gloucester there is a wonderful blend of‘matter and impertinency’.Lear recognizes the way he has been shielded from reality by flattery.He also sees the hypocritical pretensions of society with regard to sex and with regard to its treatment of criminals.He babbles:“die for adultery!No/The wren goes to’t,and the small gilded fly/ Does lecher in my sight.”(King Lear,Ⅳ,ⅵ)Lear begins to review his kingdom in the state of madness.He talks about his world,focusing on how fake ordinary human society is.People pretend to be modest and virtuous,but even the animals commit adultery.

The conflict with Goneril and Regan makes him realize his fault to banish Cordelia.As Cordelia gets to know his father’s suffering she is so sorrowful.And she wants to see her father.The cure for Lear’s madness is Cordelia’s love.At last Lear says to Cordelia that he knows he is not in his“perfect mind”,and that he is bewildered,and that if Cordelia wants him dead he will drink her poison.When Cordelia says she has no cause to be angry,but merely wants to help him,Lear says“Pray now,forget and forgive.I am old and foolish.”The cure is completed when he kneels to the daughter and begs her forgiveness.His madness,in the end,is what sets him free of the binds that his daughters and his pride had him in.

Lear’s madness is crucial to his development—his recognition of error,his compassion for the poor,and his kneeling to Cordelia. Shakespeare makes the plays tragic deliberately so as to awaken pity and fear of the audience and to provide a purification of emotions.

五、Conclusion

The themes of Death and madness take remarkable roles in Shakespeare’s tragedies,which make the plays possess more aesthetic significance.Madness in Shakespearean plays has distinct and multiple meanings and purposes.It allows those who bounded by social rules to freely express inner passions.For the madmen,freedom and truth are always found in the madness.Madness is a kind of wisdom and insight into the reality of a society.In his plays it was regarded as a protective device to enable Shakespeare to utter dangerous thoughts.Shakespeare was following tradition in making fool and madman the vehicle of unpopular truths.He used his madmen for any fundamental criticism of society.Shakespeare was not limited to a single book in his understanding of madness;he had at his disposal the sum total of his social understanding of the issue.

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罗梅，现为广东工贸职业技术学院教师，讲师，研究方向：英美文学。