Lear: Never, never, never, never, never!
This quote from Shakespeare’s King Lear shows a very canny master of emotional language at work. Now, some might look at this line of dialogue–among the most famous in English Literature, and wonder, what’s the big deal? If Shakespeare is such an “uncanny master,” couldn’t he have done better than repeat the same word five times?–come on.
But take a closer look. What is this line doing? What is its emotional and thematic context?
It comes at the very end of the play and is Lear’s response to the final horror of his descent into madness and failure. It is so cruel a moment (the death, mistakenly contrived by Lear, of his youngest, and favorite, daughter Cordelia) Lear has no words for it. He has just received the death blow to his spirit.
Incoherent screams and moans would have been appropriate, but Shakespeare’s job was to write a line of dialogue that captured the horrific end of a man, a king, tortured beyond words by knowing he was his own undoing.
The Bard correctly gauged Lear’s state: pain beyond all reach of language. So he abandoned elegance and simply had Lear roar one word over and over: “never”-as in, never again to live, be content, enjoy a moment of simple humanity, etc. He has taken a wrecking ball to his life and the lives of those who loved him, and he will never be whole again. His life, what’s left of it, drains right in front us.
Never. Five timees. An extended moan.
Often, when we assume we need high flown words and phrases, that is exactly what we DO NOT need. As in life, what’s most eloquent is often the roughest, most primitive language. At the key moment in King Lear, Shakespeare chose not to show what a fantastic word wizard he was, because he knew ordinary word eloquence wouldn’t suffice. Instead, he notched his language down to near-incoherency to achieve the highest prize of all, dramatic eloquence.
Simple as it is, the line is immortal, not for being “beautifully written,” but because Shakespeare knew when to go simple at just the right moment.
Here’s one more thought, and I believe it’s the most important of all:
This notching down of language allowed Shakespeare to do what any good fiction writer must–step aside to allow the true power in his work to emerge, namely EMOTION, the mother lode of all drama. And that’s what we’ll look at tomorrow.
