The Problem of the Heath
KING LEAR (2008)
Where do the climactic storm scenes of King Lear take place? asks Gwilym Jones.
In a recent edition of the BBC Radio 4 programme, In Our Time, three experts and the
show’s host, Melvyn Bragg, left the listener in little doubt: Lear is on a heath. This does not come
as a surprise. King Lear’s heath is evident in the popular imagination, in the language of theatre
professionals, in the published works of academics. But it is not evident in anything written by
William Shakespeare. Where, then, does the idea of the heath come from? The editor Nicholas
Rowe was the first to include it as a printed stage direction in his 1709 edition of Shakespeare
(over 100 years after King Lear was first published), but why? This has been addressed by James
Ogden, who argues, convincingly, that Rowe derived the heath from the scenery used in the
staging of Nahum Tate’s version of the play – infamous for its happy ending. The same scenery, indeed, was used for Tate’s play The Loyal General, and, as Ogden has shown, ‘There are
several similarities between [The Loyal General] and Tate’s version of King Lear, which was the
next play he wrote.’ That the idea of Lear on the heath originates in a specifically visual theatrical setting, rather than the bare stage of the Jacobean amphitheatre should itself be a clue that
when we speak of the heath, we are not addressing the text on its own terms.
The fallacy of the heath leads to a misreading of the storm scenes on, I think, two main
grounds. Firstly location is simply unimportant in Lear’s thought process – it matters only to
those who try to usher the king toward shelter, and even then it is only characterised as being
‘out of door’. Secondly, the idea that Lear is physically isolated here, as only one in a wilderness
can be, is manifestly false and recontextualises the scenes in an utterly unhelpful way. Contained
in the notion of the heath is the attractive paradox that the further Lear recedes from civilisation
and companionship, the more he understands his humanity and that of others. But Lear is not
alone in the storm. Indeed, Lear is never alone on the stage, uniquely so for a Shakespearean
tragic hero, and the part has no soliloquies. His peculiar state is that he soliloquises but his soliloquies are observed: this is dramatic madness – we might remember Ophelia and Lady Macbeth
for other examples of these witnessed soliloquies. Edgar as Poor Tom and Antonio in Antonio’s
Revenge make use of the idea, and their feigned madness would be ineffective if they were
onstage alone. The phrase ‘on the heath’ encourages us to think of Lear as physically isolated –
alone – and thereby bypasses the dramatic context of the king’s increasing insanity. By stressing the fallacious nature of the heath, then, my intention is not merely to nitpick
pedantically, but to adhere to the demands of the text itself. A comparison might be made with
Romeo and Juliet: a reader’s search for mention of a balcony in the text (or a stage direction
which places Juliet ‘above’ or ‘aloft’) will prove fruitless. It would be doctrinaire, however, to
draw conclusions from such an absence, as the demands both of the text and its staging are that
© 2013 The Shakespeare Globe Trust. Permission granted to reproduce for personal and educational use only.
Commercial copying, hiring, lending, is prohibited.
Juliet is above Romeo, at a window. What is traditionally referred to as the balcony scene, then,
has a perfectly appropriate, if supplementary name. The same cannot be said of the so-called
heath scenes.
One might ask the simple question: is it important to know where the action is taking
place in a Shakespearean play? We might, in addition to the canard of Lear’s heath, remember
the castles of Macbeth and Hamlet; the various battlegrounds of the history plays – Shrewsbury,
Harfleur, Orleans, Agincourt; The Tempest’s island; forests in As You Like It, A Midsummer
Night’s Dream and The Merry Wives of Windsor. We may recall the many ports of Pericles as
well as Venice, Verona, Cyprus, Bohemia, Belmont an the oddly unobtainable Milford Haven.
There are, of course, many more such instances, and alongside them belong myriad scenes in
bedrooms, courts, taverns, brothels, streets, gardens, ships, prisons and caves. We recognise
these locations, as readers especially but as audience members also, not simply through editorial glosses but by the same system of ‘contextual signifiers’ that tell us that it is ‘bitter cold’ at
the opening of Hamlet (1.1.6), or that ‘The moon shines bright’ in the last act of The Merchant
of Venice (5.1.1). In the storm scenes of King Lear, there is a similar array of contextual signifiers: we are repeatedly told that a) Lear and his followers are outside, but that shelter is not far;
b) that the weather is dreadful in every sense and c) it is night. Aside from the close proximity of
the hovel, there is no contextual signifier during the storm which indicates the whereabouts of
the characters. In each of the above examples of place, the location of the characters adds nuance to their lines.
In The Merchant of Venice, ‘What news on the Rialto’ (1.3.33, 3.1.1) does more than
ally place with communication; it creates a sense of a bustling mercantile community which the
play’s other instances of ‘the Rialto’ take advantage of. Location informs meaning. Similarly, in
Cymbeline, Aviragus’ lines convey a strong sense of experience shaped by environment: ‘how,
|In this our pinching cave, shall we discourse | The freezing hours away? We have seen nothing. | We are beastly.’ (3.3.37-40) Without the image of the cave, restricting and cold in the
double sense of pinching, Aviragus’ speech loses much of its potency in conveying a life outside
of civilisation. As it is, the conclusion ‘beastly’ is reached through an idea of place which limits
the speaker’s humanity: the ‘pinching cave’ imposes a limit on ‘discourse’. Belarius’ response is
also marked by an understanding of location’s influence on mindset: ‘Did you but know the city’s
usuries, | And felt them knowingly’ (45-6). When place is a significant factor in a character’s
meaning or situation, then, place is woven into the diction. If there is no such indication of place,
it is not too much to say that the character’s meaning and situation depend on other factors,
whether they be another character’s speech, the recognition of their own subjectivity or an event
not specific to location: the night, for example, or a storm.
Indeed, in response to Kent’s urgent question, ‘Where’s the King?’, the Gentleman does
not respond helpfully, but poetically: ‘contending with the fretful element’ (3.1.2-3). The Gentleman obviously knows where Lear is, but chooses instead to prioritise his mental state and his
actions. This little exchange is a microcosm of the play. By thinking of Lear as ‘on the heath’, we
make a mockery of textual evidence. Perhaps most importantly, to speak of Lear on the heath
is to bypass the powerful imagery of the storm. Lear may be going mad, but he still knows a
good metaphor when he sees one not least when comparing the weather to his mindset: When
the mind’s free, The body’s delicate: this tempest in my mind Doth from my senses take all
feeling else, Save what beats there, filial ingratitude. (3.4.11-14) The king is not alone in making such connections. Kent worries about the storm’s effects, for ‘Man’s nature cannot carry
| Th’affliction nor the fear.’ (3.2.48-9) When I argue that we should think about the text on its
own terms, then, I mean that we should speak of the characters in terms of what is happening
to them, rather than where they are, for this is how they are constructed. If we are to do away
with ‘Lear on the heath’, we might as justly imagine the characters in the night as in the storm.
The language of the night is almost as insistent in the play as the recurrence of the storm. Just
© 2013 The Shakespeare Globe Trust. Permission granted to reproduce for personal and educational use only.
Commercial copying, hiring, lending, is prohibited.
as Lear’s curses draw upon thunder and lightning, they also evoke the night. Gloucester’s concern over Lear’s safety is initially voiced with ‘Alack, the night comes on’ (2.2.493). Darkness
and the night, like the storm, are in operation in the play earlier than they take hold. Of the many
cruel ironies in King Lear, perhaps the cruellest is that Gloucester, the most vocal proponent of
the forebodings of the ‘late eclipses of the sun and moon’ (1.4.103) is the character who is confined to darkness. As his second eye is pulled out, Gloucester mourns: ‘All dark and comfortless.
Where’s my son Edmund?’ (3.7.84). The ancient trope of the blind prophet is pitilessly undermined: the character who sought to see the future through the darkness of eclipses finds himself
in complete darkness and immediately invokes the son who ‘made overtures’ of his ‘treasons’
(87). It might be argued, then, that whilst Lear is forced towards his realisations in the storm,
Gloucester, Lear’s parallel in the sub-plot, is forced towards his in darkness.
If this conclusion seems impossibly neat, forced or contrived, it is only because we have
learned to view the characters in the play through misrepresenting language which tells us
where they are. The language of Shakespeare is as dense and archaic as it is vital and moving
and should not be distorted by ideas which make its poetry harder to understand. This is the
equivalent of judging a beauty contest by looking at the entrants’ reflections in fairground mirrors. Only by dismissing the heath can we attempt to think about the play without the misrepresentative language of location. My opening question, ‘where do the climactic storm scenes of
King Leartake place?’, is something of a trick one: the impossibility of an answer is much more
interesting than the lazy reliance on tradition.
© 2013 The Shakespeare Globe Trust. Permission granted to reproduce for personal and educational use only.
Commercial copying, hiring, lending, is prohibited.