Wheels within wheels

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.

This is not the only allusion to the story of Ixion in King Lear: earlier (IV, vi, 124-125) he describes his other daughters thus: down from the waist they are centaurs/ Though women all above.  

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.

Delaunay, Ixion précipité dans les Enfers