Fortuna, Ixion and King Lear
In the last post we visited Tartarus, the classical hell, and
met a few of its inhabitants: notably Ixion, former king of the Lapiths in
Thessaly. Readers will recall that Ixion’s big mistake was to abuse the
hospitality of Zeus by attempting to seduce his wife, Hera. His lustful
intentions were however discovered, and Ixion was tricked by Zeus into having
sex with a cloud instead. The cloud later gave birth to the race of the
centaurs; Ixion was punished for his hubris by being bound to a revolving wheel
of fire in Tartarus.
Why this form of punishment specifically? Some commentators
see in the wheel of Ixion the vestiges of a more ancient sun-god myth; others,
including Robert Graves, suggest that the fire was a later addition, and put
more emphasis on the crucifixion aspect of Ixion’s torture. Some suggest that
the wheel is symbolic of the eternal nature of his punishment.
Across centuries and cultures, wheels have symbolised destructive
power, whether they are attached to a mighty Juggernaut or are little and green; the most
common allusion to the wheel in medieval and early modern literature, however,
is in the form of The Wheel of Fortune, or Rota
Fortunae. It is an allegory of the inexorable workings of fate, a metaphor
which explains in simple terms the vicissitudes of the human condition: you may
be a king today, but tomorrow you could find yourself on a storm-lashed heath
without a crown or even an umbrella. As the cowboy said, sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes the bear eats you. The goddess Fortuna sometimes gives the
wheel a bit of a spin, changing your luck for better or worse. When, in King
Lear, Kent finds himself humiliatingly condemned to the stocks, he calls upon
Fortune to Smile once more. Turn thy
wheel… (Lear II, 2, 167).
Fortuna has traditionally been personified as a fickle
woman: from comparison with the inconstant moon in Carmina Burana’s O Fortuna velut luna; to Frank Loesser’s Luck be a Lady: A lady doesn’t wander all
over the room/ and blow on another guy’s dice. In Macbeth, Fortune is described as acting like a rebel’s whore; in Antony
and Cleopatra she is a false
housewife; in Hamlet, she is a strumpet, and the subject of a somewhat contrived dirty joke: on being asked how they are doing, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
tell Hamlet that they are neither at the top of Fortune’s cap, nor at her
shoes. When Hamlet obligingly offers the feed line: Then you live about her waist, or in the middle of her favours? Guildenstern
delivers the punchline, Faith, her
privates we, doubtless thinking back of the net.
Back in Lear, the
revolving wheel is obvious in the relationship of the half-brothers Edgar and
Edmund: at the beginning of the play, the illegitimate son Edmund is aggrieved
at his comparatively low status and the obvious contempt of his father,
Gloucester; he contrives the exile of his legitimate brother and the downfall
of his father, with the aim of inheriting his wealth and power. Edmund is now at
the zenith, and Edgar at his nadir: Fortune spins once more, however, and when Edmund is mortally wounded by his brother, he accepts that the wheel is come full circle (Lear
V, iii, 203).
Fortune, the stars and the gods are all at one time or
another blamed for the ups and downs of the characters: Gloucester complains that
as flies to wanton boys are we to the
gods;/They kill us for their sport (IV, I, 36f); Kent that stars above us govern our conditions
(IV, iii,33). But the villainous Edmund can see that this is so much nonsense.
In a soliloquy, he mocks his father’s astrological explanation of Lear’s foolish behaviour towards Cordelia and Kent (I, ii, 118-135), clinching the
argument with reference to his own nature: I
should have been that I am had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled
on my bastardizing.
There is a tension here, and elsewhere in Shakespeare,
between external and internal influence, between the workings of fate and
personal responsibility. As Cassius remarks in Julius Caesar, The fault,
dear Brutus, is not in the stars/ but in ourselves… (I,ii,140f). Human
agency, rather than Dame Fortune, brings about the downfall of both Gloucester
and Lear: a downfall which has its origins in their own flawed characters and
actions.
So when in Act IV Lear declares to Cordelia: Thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound/
Upon a wheel of fire that mine own tears/ Do scald like molten lead (IV, vii
46-48) the wheel imagery is not so much (or not only) an allusion to the Wheel of Fortune,
but to the punishment of Ixion. Lear recognises that the hell in which he finds
himself is not a temporary downward turn, but eternal punishment for his own
folly: his only consolation is that Cordelia is not in Tartarus with him.
As we have seen, Ixion was the progenitor of the centaurs,
who developed a reputation for bad sexual etiquette, such as the attempted
rape of the bride at their cousin’s wedding. They symbolise the untamed,
incontinent beast literally underlying civilised and domesticated humanity, and
in the case of Regan and Goneril, what Shakespeare sees as a most unladylike
lust, ruthlessness and ambition. Lear is explicit about the location of good
and evil in women:
But to the girdle do
the gods inherit,/ Beneath is all the fiends’ (IV,vi, 127-8)
The sexism of these expected gender roles is of its time;
the misogyny of the language of King Lear is something else altogether,
however. From the opening scene
where Gloucester asks Kent, Do you smell
a fault? in reference to the
circumstances of Edmund’s conception, there is a queasy insistence on
associating foul odour and burning pain with women, or more precisely, their
genitalia, culminating in the extremes of
There’s hell, there’s
darkness, there is the sulphurous pit, Burning, scalding stench, consumption…
(IV, vi, 129f)
Some critics see in this language a description of a sexually
transmitted infection: D H Lawrence for one attributed Shakespeare’s
misogynistic language in Lear and
other works to the “shock of his consciousness of syphilis”; Anthony Burgess in
the fictional biography Nothing Like the Sun came to a similar conclusion.
When Edgar tells Edmund: The gods
are just, and of our pleasant vices/ make instruments to plague us:/ The dark
and vicious place where thee he got/Cost him his eyes (V, iii, 170-3) he is
making the point that their father Gloucester’s sexual desires have resulted in
his destruction.
Lear too, though his daughters were got ‘tween lawful sheets, is being punished for the sexual activity
that created them. In his fevered mind, women are promiscuous temptresses, men
are hypocritical slaves of lust, deserving of painful retribution: Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thine
own back;/ Thou hotly lusts to use her in that kind/ For which thou whipp’st
her (IV, vi, 161-3).
We cannot now know whether the misogyny of Lear’s language is
rooted in Shakespeare’s self-disgust, or derived from a (highly unlikely) late
conversion to Puritanism/Calvinism, or indeed is purely character-driven,
without any resonance in his own life; but for whatever reason, the imagery of King Lear points to the female of the
species as the sulphurous pit, the dark and vicious place, – Tartarus;
and the male protagonist, tortured eternally on the burning wheel of his own
lust, another Ixion.
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| Delaunay, Ixion précipité dans les Enfers |
