A King Lear of the debtors' prison: Dickens and Shakespeare on mortal shame

Social Research, Winter, 2003 by Alexander Welsh

These conversations, with their speculative conditions ("if you were in prison," "might be your father or your uncle"), prepare the reader for the end of the principal action in Little Dorrit. In the wake of the financial crash after the collapse of Merdle, Clennam himself is arrested for debt and asks to be taken to the Marshalsea. There he is met by young Chivery and taken to the very room formerly occupied by William Dorrit and its many "associations with the one good and gentle creature who had sanctified it" (2.26.601). Chivery, his would-be rival, is the one to tell the hero of Little Dorrit's love; and before long she appears in person, "in her old, worn dress." It is now quite clear that if the shadow of the Marshalsea wall stands for shame (and sometimes worse, the recourse to shamelessness), this loyal Cordelia-figure is the antidote: "As they sat side by side, in the shadow of the wall, the shadow fell like light upon him" (2.29.631,633). Or more than an antidote, she is like a revelation that shame is a given of the human condition and something that has to be lived with. When Amy next appears, at the very end of the novel, the Dorrits too have lost everything. "I have nothing in the world. I am as poor as when I lived here," she announces. And with a rhetorical question, she frames her proposal to the prisoner: "O my dearest and best, are you quite sure you will not share my fortune with me now?" (2.34.681). Thus, riches are vanity, the shame of poverty is beside the point, and Little Dorrit has known these truths all along.

Clearly Dickens in Little Dorrit has deliberately imposed the quest romance of his hero upon the tragic (or bathetic, if you prefer) history of William Dorrit. In so constructing his novel, I believe, he produced not a superficial but a profound reading of King Lear, and especially those aspects of the play that broadly reflect human experience, despite the outlandishness of almost all the actors' roles. It is a rare tragedy of any period that concludes in natural death from old age. Sophocles may have wanted to do something like this when, at the end of his life, he composed Oedipus at Colonus; but Shakespeare moves us still more, and without recourse to the supernatural. Moreover, King Lear bears a closer relation than any other Shakespearean tragedy to the romances that were among his last compositions for the stage: Pericles, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest, all of which enlist daughters to allay the potentially tragic experience of fathers. Dickens instinctively grasped that a quest romance also lurked in this exhausting tragedy, and that Shakespeare's strategy of introducing more than one plot makes possible its discovery. But first, what shadows of the Marshalsea wall might be said to fall upon the stage of King Lear?

In Little Dorrit the stigma of imprisonment for debt overlays the shame of old age. In Shakespeare's time, the commonplace literary materials for shame were sexual: the threats of cuckoldry or illegitimacy for males, unchastity or the incapacity to bear children for women. The changes rung on such themes were endless, and King Lear is no exception. Thus even the fast unfolding first scene leaves room for the Gloucester subplot. In 30 lines or so, Gloucester half humorously, half boasting, introduces his bastard son Edmund. The latter's point of view awaits his wicked soliloquy in scene 2, in which he dismisses the constraints of his condition as "the plague of custom" and "the curiosity of nations" (1.2.3-4) rather than binding law. Edmund's worship of nature (or mock-worship) is at bottom a boast of shamelessness. His humor is still evident at the last, after the sexual advances of Regan and Goneril: "I was contracted to them both; all three / Now marry in an instant" (5.3.227-28). The jokes, however, accompany a melodramatic plot to seize the inheritance of his haft-brother Edgar, and for this purpose Edmund scripts an argument against reverence being paid to old age: "I begin to find an idle and fond bondage in the oppression of aged tyranny, who sways not as it hath power, but as it is suffered" (1.2.49-51). Once the plot is under way and Edgar has been framed, their father realizes a cause for shame he has not experienced before. "What," Regan will exclaim, "did my father's godson seek your life? / He whom my father named, your Edgar?" "O lady, lady," Gloucester replies, "shame would have it hid" (2.1.91-93). The man who can make light of begetting Edmund is brought up short by this apparent disrespect for his age, and the connection between this subplot and the quandary of Lear's old age begins to be drawn.