SHAKESPEARE'S King Lear ends oddly. It's not so much what happens that is odd, but what is said. Or, better, what isn't said. The play's action begins in division and winds its way to its inevitable consequences: lots of people die, and Edgar, Kent, and Albany are left to cope with the aftermath. We are used to lots of dead bodies on the stage at the end of Shakespeare's tragedies. And we are also accustomed to there being someone left behind to take over, to restore order, to say the last speech of the play. In Lear, Albany offers this part to Kent and Edgar, but Kent turns it down. Edgar does not reject the role, so we assume he accepts it, and so we reach at least a degree of return to stability at the end of King Lear. So far, so good. But what to me is odd is what happens next. Rather than state clearly his acceptance of authority, Edgar gives us his interpretation of the play's events. Describing the moment as a “sad time,” Edgar calls for us to “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say” (Lear, 5.3.325).

That's a bit odd for a closing remark, and then things get even stranger because, though Edgar says this is a time to “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say,” he does not actually use the language of feeling at all. What we get instead at the end of Lear is the language of description, of interpretation, of expectation: Edgar says, “The oldest hath borne most; we that are young / Shall never see so much, nor live so long” (Lear, 5.3.327). And then, still without a word of feeling, Edgar and the rest of the cast, or at least those whose parts in the play have not been killed off, march off the stage to “a dead march,” the slow beat of a drum. We in the audience are left with the bodies, and with the sound of the drum, and with the problem of what to make of what we have witnessed.