Explication, Discussing the King

Discussing “The Words of the King”

An Explication

     Before explaining my personal interpretations of “The Words of the King” and what ideas I attempted to portray I would like first to say that this story was an experiment. I wished to write a paper discussing Shakespeare, but could not narrow down my topic. I obsessed over too many themes and details present in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, King Lear, and The Tempest. I wanted to discuss moonlight versus sunlight, madness, old age, nothingness, but it couldn’t be done in just one paper. So instead, I chose to write a short story that encompassed all of these themes and motifs. This form doesn’t allow for much assertion, but it does require an important understanding; if one doesn’t fully comprehend the meaning and purpose behind a motif, it cannot be used in turn to much fruition. The following explication of my intended purpose is not, obviously, the definitive interpretation; it is simply mine. Feel free to find, in “The Words of the King,” whatever you wish to see.

     From the beginning there are a few obvious allusions to works of Shakespeare. The subtitle, “On the Cause of Thunder and the Smells of Mortality,” was formed from two lines in King Lear that I found most striking. In Act 3, Scene 4 in the midst of a wondrous and devastating storm (and plenty of thunder) Lear speaks only directly to Edgar as Poor Tom, at times completely ignoring Gloucester; nearly every time Lear speaks he asks a question or wishes to ask a question. He poses, “Is it the fashion that discarded fathers / Should have thus little mercy on their flesh?” “Is man no more than this?” and eventually, “What is the cause of thunder?” To this last, Lear receives no answer. In “The Words of the King” I sought to find the cause of thunder. Now read again the following excerpt: “The old man erupted. Laughter sprawled out of his mind and it stole all the air from the cramped room. Through the rolls of thunder, he spoke, sputtering but strong, ‘The Ham and the King are the same.’” In this, I hoped to convey that the thunder, or the whole storm itself, served to allow, or force, man into realization. The storm brings understanding; in “The Words of the King” the thunder was represented by insane peals of laughter to develop the idea of the storm as madness. Therefore, true wisdom and enlightenment are found in madness, a theme prominent throughout Shakespeare’s works.

     The subject of true wisdom, then, brings us to the second part of the subtitle, “the Smells of Mortality.” In King Lear this phrase is fleeting; Gloucester asks to kiss Lear’s hand and Lear says “Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality” (Act 4, Scene 6). Here, he speaks of his own flesh as literally mortal, but he is disgusted by it. Hamlet feels the same in Act 5, Scene 1 as he reminisces about poor Yorick, the court jester and holds his skull. This is where the theme truly shows its truth: as if the later King Lear were an echo. Hamlet holds Yorick’s skull and says, “My gorge rises at it;” his memories of his old friend’s jests are tainted and disgusting; the image of mortality taints the wisdom of foolishness. These two moments together, form the idea of true wisdom as immortal. In “The Words of the King” Stephen Leon (the old man) uses Lear’s phrase twice: once to describe his son and again to describe the nurse. In both these instances he decries the two in a way that suggests he himself does not smell of mortality, even so on the brink of mortal death. However, he is the wisest of all the characters; it his wisdom that is immortal. Stephen’s wisdom lasts his body in the form of his note to his daughter. Ultimately, the two ideas present in the subtitle of “The Words of the King” claim that true wisdom is madness and that madness is immortal.

     The Shakespearean theme pertaining to the meaning of “nothing,” I think, was made clear in “The Words of the King,” if only to say that there are two different kinds of nothingness: empty, purposeless nothing and infinite, creative nothing. The first time we hear Stephen speak of nothing is when his daughter walks in and he calls her—instead of my everything—“my nothing.” This use of the word is much like that in Theseus’ speech in Act 5, Scene 1 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “The poet’s pen / Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name.” This use of the word is an example of the infinite, poetic, creative nothing. Later on in “The Words of the King,” Elisa tells Stephen to leave their house of his memory, “There is nothing here.” This instance is a static one, for it could mean either nothing, depending on how one reads it. Elisa could be claiming there is literally nothing useful, only emptiness in Stephen’s memories; she could be saying there is infinite nothing and the infinite nothing is no place for Stephen’s morose remembrance to abide. This all depends on the reader’s opinion of Elisa, but thinking on her earlier conversation with Mr. Leon (His eyes were still directed toward space. “Readiness is all, Dear.” / “Ripeness.”) and its echo later on from the definite wise daughter, it seems Elisa could easily be considered a wise character; her nothing could very well be the creative. The final and most important use of the word nothing is used in the last scene, the scene in which Stephen dies. “He simply allowed the nothingness to finally overcome his mind.” I was extremely careful with the wording of this sentence, because I wished it to be the culmination of the whole “nothing” idea and I wanted it to match that of Shakespeare. The key, here, is that the nothingness did not envelop his body; it enveloped his mind, because that is where true infinite nothing—as well as madness—comes from. The final sentence, “And no one ever understood what it meant: except for the one, his nothing,” most obviously speaks to his wise daughter. Yes, but it also speaks further to the idea that madness can only be understood in nothingness. This, ultimately, is what Shakespeare strove to teach us.

     Perhaps the most easily understood and the most archetypal motif in “The Words of the King” is the idea of sunlight versus moonlight. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream moonlight is used most prominently to embody magic and illusion; sunlight, in turn, represents blatant reality. Remember though, that Hamlet learned the truth about his father by moonlight, speaking once again to Shakespeare’s idea that magic and illusion are true reality. Therefore, sunlight would have to be the foolish fool’s (i.e. Polonius) reality, not the absolute. To speak to this in “The Words of the King,” Stephen asked the nurse to close the blinds in order to shut out the sunlight; the sunlight that lit up Elisa and made her so beautiful, was reflected and skewed by the glass table so it was not true; Stephen claimed later that Elisa was most beautiful in the twilight; and finally, he died and entered nothingness while bathed in moonlight. Moonlight, magic, dreams, and nothingness are where true beauty lies, where absolute truth can be found.

     If I had to label my story—a tragedy, a comedy, a romance—I don’t know that I really could. Before I started, I wanted to make a combination genre to exemplify the presence in Shakespeare’s works of tragedy in comedy and comedy in tragedy. I suppose by writing a genre-less story, I have accomplished that, but in the end, my story was written primarily on instinct. That’s how writing is done; a writer may have a goal at the start, but I can guarantee that in every good work, that goal will change into something else—usually more real—by the end. Knowing this, I can respect Shakespeare ever more, because he built his writing on beautiful ideas and imaginings that he must have already had in his mind. While I agree with Stephen Leon’s claim, “‘I was born to study the words, not to live in them,’” I do think it would be absolutely wonderful to speak to the man who held all of these ideas in his mind on the instinctual base. Shakespeare functioned with a mind full of nothing, and gave it to us in poetics.