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Comments on Act III, scene ii
Like most tragic protagonists of great stature, Lear is accustomed to thinking that the world revolves around him. If he now suffers, the universe must suffer as well. In his rage he commands floods to cover the steeples, and lightning to flatten the earth and destroy all possibility of future life. Yet, in his dire predicament, he begins to notice those around him who share his plight: "Come on, my boy: how dost, my boy? art cold? ... Poor fool and knave, I have one part in my heart that's sorry yet for thee." In his next scene (III.iv), he reflects on his neglect of the less fortunate in his kingdom:
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.
At his lowest point, Lear begins to identify with those who have always known misery as a companion, and wishes by his benevolent actions to "show the heavens more just." Unfortunately for him and his kingdom, his conversion towards pity comes too late.
Jonathan Dollimore comments: "For the humanist the tragic paradox arises here: debasement gives rise to dignity and at the moment when Lear might be expected to be most brutalized, he becomes most human." However, for Dollimore Lear's sympathy for the poor does not redeem him: "Far from endorsing the idea that man can redeem himself in and through an access of pity ... [the tragedy suggests that] in a world where pity is the prerequisite for compassionate action, where a king has to share the suffering of his subjects in order to "care," the majority will remain poor, naked, and wretched." (Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, Harvester Press, 1984)
On staging:
John Gielgud in 1931 considered that he was inadequate for the storm scene. "Lear has to be the storm." (Leggatt 8)
Too often in modern productions, however, special effects take center stage with elaborate sound and light displays unimagined by Shakespeare. In the Olivier video, we can barely understand the actor over the thunder and rain. All these pyrotechnics obscure the point of the scene, that the real storm is in Lear's mind (III.iv).
"The dialogue between Lear and the storm needs to be just that--a dialogue, not a competition in decibel levels." (Leggatt 8)
