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At the end of King Lear, Kent, who has just watched the old king die, rejects a part in the new government saying,
I have a journey, sir, shortly to go;My master calls me, I must not say no. (V, iii, 323-24)1
The journey which Kent must take reminds us, I think, of the long and dangerous journeys we have just seen completed by Lear and Gloucester—unavoidable journeys involving madness and death. The concept of madness as a journey from one point of self-understanding to another is basic to twentieth-century psychiatry and is one which Shakespeare seems to have understood intuitively. In other plays, he shows madness as a static disease; Lady Macbeth is afflicted with a “rooted sorrow” and Ophelia's mad delusions prove terminal. But in King Lear, madness becomes a journey and a vehicle by which Shakespeare can ask such ultimate questions as what is man and what is life? I would like to examine this idea of a journey into a wider understanding, which seems to me to be close to the central meaning and movement of the play.
R. D. Laing, the radical Scottish psychiatrist, says that although madness is breakdown, finally it is breakthrough as well.* In King Lear, we watch the old king move through the mounting terrors of madness until he finally confronts and seems to transcend the terror of death. His journey, and the less complete journeys of others around him, cleanse, or at least challenge, the assumptions of the whole society and because of them everything is changed.
Shakespeare deliberately reshaped his source material around the madness theme. In the Holinshed Chronicles,2 the story of Leir, the deposed king of the Britons, is a simple one of