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I
There are ten recorded deaths in King Lear: those of Lear, Goneril, Regan, the Duke of Cornwall, Cordelia, the Earl of Gloucester, Edmund, Oswald, the unseen and unnamed man who kills Cordelia, and Cornwall's Servant.1 Of these, the only deaths that take place onstage, in sight of the audience, are those of Lear, Oswald, and Cornwall's Servant. Cornwall himself receives his death blow onstage, but he exits with Regan and dies offstage. Edmund is borne offstage to die, while Cordelia is killed offstage, and her body is carried onstage in the last scene. The paradox of death's unknowability, coupled with its promiscuous ubiquity in tragedy, is enacted again and again in the play, stressing the paradox with each example and further complicating the mystery that arises out of the ubiquity of death in life and art. We, the living, know we must die but have no way of knowing what death is or means beyond the obvious-but-culturally-determined perception that death is or seems to be opposite to life.
The context of each of the deaths of the play is unique, both in terms of the surroundings in which the deaths take place and, more interestingly, in terms of the emotional and dramatic energies that are released by the fact of death in almost every case. A strange and curious exception to the dramatized, visible deaths in the play is the death of Lear. Alone among those who die onstage, Lear in his last moments shows no awareness that he is dying. His death takes place in an atmosphere of dreadful confusion. Albany attempts to impose order and structural formality on the spectacle by according to Lear his rights as lawful monarch of Britain. But his words only make Albany seem blind to the crushing reality before him:
For us, we will resign,
During the life of this old majesty,
To him our absolute power; [to Edgar and Kent] you, to your rights;
With boot, and such addition as your honors
Have more than merited.
(V.iii.297-301)
In contrast to this hollow promise is the reality of the steady and rapid descent into death of Lear himself, deluded perhaps into believing that Cordelia is not dead. Lear's last words ring with pathos and add to the...