Further to yesterday's post regarding reading aloud with emotion, another scene from King Lear is a splendid example from which to learn. The eighty-year-old Lear, after having been denied a roof by the two daughters who had sworn their love for him in the first scene, is being guided toward a hovel in which he can be sheltered from a wild storm. However, before entering, he stops to say a prayer. But it's not a prayer for help or revenge. Rather he prays to the poor people of the kingdom, who he now realizes have been ignored during his reign:

Poor naked wretches, whereso'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 the superflux to them,

And show the heavens more just. (3. 4. 28-36)

If we read aloud, we realize that great poetry contains all the attributes of great music: the sounds, the rhythms, the ideas, and of course, the emotion.

For several reasons, poetry is easier to understand when read aloud. Of course, with Shakespeare, we're dealing with drama as well. (Philosophy, too, come to think of it. Yeats summed up the relationship between poetry and philosophy this way: "For philosophy to be remembered, it has to be turned into poetry." Shakespeare, clearly, also knew that.) So all the more reason to do so. Over the next couple of posts, I'll be writing about this idea. Today, I'd like to discuss finding emotion in reading.

King Lear is a play that has as one of its themes the fact that we find wisdom through adversity. The two main characters, Lear and the Earl of Gloucester, both find knowledge through tremendous suffering. At one point in the play, Gloucester has lost everything - his family, his earldom, and in one of the most frightening scenes in drama, his eyesight. Shortly afterward, he is being led toward the cliffs of Dover, from which he plans to jump, by a poor man who is in fact his wrongfully-accused fugitive son, Edgar, in disguise. In the following excerpt, he first gives Edgar money, and then hopes that generosity will become a more frequent occurrence. Then he has an astonishing realization:

Here, take this purse, thou whom the heavens' plagues

Have humbled to all strokes: that I am wretched

Makes thee the happier: heavens, deal so still!

Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man,

That slaves your ordinance, that will not see

Because he doth not feel, feel your power quickly;

So distribution should undo excess,

And each man have enough.

Those of us fortunate to have what we need do not "see" because we do "not feel". With literature though, we have the opportunity, at least. Therefore, the best way to read is not simply to "see" the words, but to "feel" them, and reading aloud is the best way to do that. (Tomorrow, I'll discuss another scene from this incomparable play.)