Word: lear
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...always in keeping with the part. And as he exits before intermission and enters after it, he keeps repeating, "A king, a king!" This occurs but once in the text, but its repetition serves to make clear the precise nature of the idee fixe that forms part of Lear's insanity...
What I have in mind is Lear's very last five lines--the most daring and unorthodox valedictory speech ever penned, though made up of nothing but short, everyday words: "Thou" It come no more,/ Never, never, never, never, never!/ Pray you undo this button. Thank you, sir./ Do you see this? Look on her! look! her lips!/ Look there, look there...
...Lear has Cordelia's lifeless body before him, and mourns her. Carnovsky delivers all these lines in the same mood--one of depression. This is, I believe, a misinterpretation. Shakespeare wants a change of mood here, and he makes it possible by inserting the infinitely touching but essentially irrelevant "button" line...
...concluding distich, Lear dies a happy man. (His words here are not madness; despite the textbooks, Lear has recovered from his dementia before his death.) Suddenly he sees something on her lips, and he has a final moment of beatific joy. "Pour on; I will endure," he had yelled at the storm. Like Job, he does endure; and like Job he gets his reward, if only for an instant. He waited; and Godot has arrived...
What does he see on Cordelia's lips? We don't know. For us, as for John Henry Newman, "Omnia exeunt in mysterium." But for Lear, the ultimate question is answered, and the answer comes as a sudden flash of enlightenment analogous to the Buddhists' satorl. This ecstatic discovery is what Lear should convey to us in his last two lines...