"And that’s true too": New Essays on King Lear 9781443815871, 144381587X

Table of contents :
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
INTROÏT
I. LANGUAGE AND STYLE
“CRAFT AND CORRUPT ENDS IN PLAINNESS?” DRAMATIC RHETORIC IN KING LEAR
THE DOUBLE BIND IN KING LEAR
II. MYTHS, MONSTERS AND THE GROTESQUE
“O, RUINED PIECE OF NATURE” (4.6.130) KING LEAR, TRAGEDY OF SUBVERSION?
KING LEAR
“STRANGE THINGS TOWARD” THE DISMEMBERED PERSPECTIVE OF KING LEAR
III. PHILOSOPHY, SATIRE
“YET I AM DOUBTFUL” KNOWLEDGE AND IGNORANCE IN KING LEAR
“CAN YOU MAKE NO USE OF NOTHINGNESS ?”
KING LEAR IN THE LIGHT OF LUCRETIUS
IV. EXILE, SEXUALITY
“STRANGERED WITH OUR OATH” (1.1.205)
“THE LUSTY STEALTH OF NATURE” DESIRE AND BASTARDY IN KING LEAR
KING LEAR AS A VICIOUS CIRCLE
CODA
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
SELECTIVE INDEX

Citation preview

“And that’s true too”

“And that’s true too”: New Essays on King Lear

Edited by

François Laroque, Pierre Iselin and Sophie Alatorre

“And that’s true too”: New Essays on King Lear, Edited by François Laroque, Pierre Iselin and Sophie Alatorre This book first published 2009 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2009 by François Laroque, Pierre Iselin and Sophie Alatorre and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-1367-2, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-1367-9

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii General Introduction.................................................................................... 1 LAROQUE, François, ISELIN, Pierre Iselin and ALATORRE Sophie Introït ........................................................................................................... 6 King Lear Revisited ELLRODT, Robert Part I. Language and style “Craft and Corrupt ends in plainness?”: Dramatic Rhetoric in King Lear..... 36 COCOUAL, Ifig The Double Bind in King Lear .................................................................. 56 GUÉRON, Claire Part II. Myths, Monsters and the Grotesque “O, ruined Piece of Nature”: King Lear, Tragedy of Subversion? ............ 68 ALATORRE, Sophie King Lear: Fabric of the Human Body and Anatomy of the World .......... 90 CUNIN, Muriel “Strange things toward”: The Dismembered Perspective of King Lear .. 104 ISELIN, Pierre Part III. Philosophy, Satire “Yet I am doubtful”: Knowledge and Ignorance in King Lear................ 122 POPELARD, Mickaël

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“Can you make no use of nothingness?”: The Role of Nothingness in King Lear............................................................................................. 141 LEVIN, David King Lear in the Light of Lucretius: Nullam rem e nihilo ....................... 165 POLLOCK, Jonathan Part IV. Exile, Sexuality “Strangered with our oath”: The Dynamics of Banishment in King Lear ... 180 DROUET, Pascale “The lusty stealth of nature”: Desire and Bastardy in King Lear ............ 194 BRAILOWSKY, Yan King Lear as a Vicious Circle.................................................................. 212 LAROQUE, François Coda ........................................................................................................ 226 “Great Stage of Fools”. King Lear and the King’s Men WILSON, Richard Notes on Contributors.............................................................................. 245 Index........................................................................................................ 249

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank Éditions Gallimard, Presses Universitaires de Rennes (PUR) and Presses Universitaires de Paris-Sorbonne (PUPS) for kindly giving us permission to republish articles that had already appeared in French and that, to our minds, represent the best of the current critical production in France. Otherwise, the help provided by Sermin Lynn Meskill and Angela Hurworth was invaluable for the translation of some articles into English. We are grateful to them for their kind cooperation. Credits: ELLRODT, Robert. King Lear Revisited (reprint from Shakespeare. Tragédies, 2 vols., Jean-Michel Déprats et al. eds., Gallimard, Pléiade, 2002); COCOUAL, Ifig. “Craft and Corrupt ends in plainness”: Dramatic Rhetoric in King Lear (reprint from article in Delphine Lemonnier et Guillaume Winter eds., Lectures du Roi Lear de William Shakespeare, Presses Universitaires de Rennes [PUR], 2008, p.33-51; CUNIN, Muriel. King Lear: Fabric of the human body and Anatomy of the World (reprint from article in Pascale Drouet & Pierre Iselin eds., “The true blank of thine eye”. Approches critiques de King Lear, Paris, Presses Universitaires de Paris Sorbonne [PUPS], 2009, p. 131-46); ISELIN, Pierre. “Strange things toward”: The dismembered perspective of King Lear (reprint from article in Études Anglaises, 61-4, 2008, p. 400-414); POPELARD, Mickaël. “Yet I am doubtful”: Knowledge and Ignorance in King Lear (reprint from article in PUPS, 105-29); LEVIN, David. The Role of Nothingness in King Lear (reprint from article in PUR, 2008, 6594); POLLOCK, Jonathan. “King Lear in the shadow of Lucretius: Nullam rem e nihilo” (reprint from article in PUPS, p. 147-60); DROUET, Pascale. “Strangered with our oath”: The dynamics of Banishment in King Lear (reprint from article in PUPS, p. 229-45); LAROQUE, François. Vicious Circles in King Lear (reprint from article in PUPS, p. 247-62); WILSON, Richard. “Great Stage of Fools”. King Lear and the King’s Men” (reprint from article in PUPS, p. 17-37).

GENERAL INTRODUCTION FRANÇOIS LAROQUE, PIERRE ISELIN AND SOPHIE ALATORRE

“And that’s true too” (5.2.10-13): Gloucester’s famous last words about death and suicide have produced a great wealth of criticism, and have been assumed to condense the skeptical philosophy at work in a play teeming with all sorts of uncertainties. Like Burgundy, every reader or spectator can eventually confess: “I know no answer” (1.1.202). In the Lear world, meaning, truth, causation, motives, the origin and the end are as many essential questions which the play’s text answers only in a partial and contradictory manner, making closure or a stable perspective improbable. The play’s uncertain axiology and restless shifts of focus contribute to the indecisiveness, the uneasiness, but also the fascination the play has generated on scholars and spectators. It is no surprise, then, if the figure of Montaigne is so omnipresent in the intellectual background, the less so in these essays, written mostly by French scholars. The purpose of this volume is indeed to try and enlarge the readership to the English-speaking world, so that these new essays on Shakespeare’s tragedy may be discussed and become truly part of the ongoing critical debate about King Lear. The thirteen contributions gathered in this book explore some of the gaps and chasms of Shakespeare’s darkest tragedy, which arouses neveranswered questions and eludes explanation. Several theoretically-informed approaches here tend to cast light on current questions of language, history, politics, theatre, genre, sexuality and gender. The division into headings federates papers on neighbouring themes, which should not make us overlook the numerous interrelated echoes they present in the other chapters. Robert Ellrodt opens this volume by reminding us of the richness and universality of King Lear, a play that insists on the double nature of man, both a monster and a compassionate human being. Of course, King Lear is first and foremost a history. But it is also a tragedy of intense rage, illusions and suffering, which has given way to Christian interpretations

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based on the theme of “redemption,” and has sometimes encouraged critics to emphasize the religious skepticism permeating the work as a whole. And while Ellrodt sums up the main arguments of this neverending debate, it is clear that the text accepts all interpretations since it necessarily “evolves according to the beliefs or the mood, sometimes changeable, of the reader.” In the first part, entitled “Language and style,” Ifig Cocoual examines Cordelia’s initial words so as to deal with the ambiguities of the play’s language against a theoretical Renaissance background. He shows how, in her critique of the hyperbolical rhetoric of her sisters, Lear’s youngest daughter joins a long series of “ethically aware women speakers” in Shakespeare’s oeuvre, from the French princesses in Love's Labour's Lost through Katherine in Henry V to Juliet, who rebels against the order of discourse (“What’s in a name”?). In this tragedy of inelocutio, Cocoual claims that the fool may indeed be seen as the real authorial figure in the play—a play where preposterousness is given pride of place as Claire Guéron also argues in an article that focuses on the characters’ verbal dilemmas. Guéron highlights the idea that no answer is right, least of all Cordelia’s “nothing”—the most dangerous option of all. She thus pinpoints a general pattern in which communication is used to put people in metaphorical stocks, or to bind them to a metaphorical stake. The second part of the book, “Myths, monsters and the grotesque,” is interested in the question of early modern representations and of Shakespeare’s uses of imagery and myths. Sophie Alatorre explores at length the play’s rich mythical imagery, arguing that Shakespeare uses clichés only to engage in a subversive presentation of humanity and of human relationships. She analyses the way Fortune is perverted before tackling the themes of lack and nakedness graphically encapsulated in Gloucester’s empty eye-sockets, and she eventually explains how Lear’s older daughters contribute to upset the traditional gender roles. What if part of the play’s subversive techniques originated in the playwright’s particular attention to the beard, one of the obvious attributes of virility? These intriguing questions look ahead to Muriel Cunin’s own concerns with the motif of the gaping female body which leads Gloucester to his fall. This is indeed evocative of all the obsessive fantasies about death, evil and female genitalia in early modern Europe. Cunin probes the gloomy Shakespearean world of “anatomy and atomisation” only to notice that Gloucester’s blindness make introspection suddenly possible as though his removed eyes had rolled inwards to “[look] fearfully in the confined deep” (4.1.77). Thus, for Cunin, King Lear obliquely leads us into a big anatomy theatre. In the “Dismembered perspective of King

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Lear,” Pierre Iselin goes even further. Having examined how various critics, from Baudelaire to Bakhtin, place the “grotesque” within the context of the English Renaissance, he recalls the history of a word first used in the field of decorative arts in order to follow through the various forms and motifs of the grotesque in King Lear. In particular, he allows us to perceive how sexuality and cruelty debase man to the level of an animal, showing that the “grotesque mapping of the body” as well as the play’s “prolific language of amalgam” both pave the way for the theatre of the Absurd. In the third part, devoted to “Philosophy and satire,” Mickael Popelard paraphrases Donne’s “Meditation XVII.” He assumes that “self-knowledge” is “a part of the main” and suggests that the question of Lear’s anagnorisis, or “self-knowledge,” should not be dissociated from that of knowledge as a whole. Contending that King Lear is no less concerned with truth and knowledge than a romance like The Winter's Tale, Popelard focuses on such notions as Epicureanism, cynicism or skepticism, to reach the conclusion that Lear, by the end of the play, probably gains more wisdom and lucidity than actual knowledge. David Levin also chooses to probe the philosophical and theological debates of Shakespeare’s time, but by foregrounding the importance in the play of the concepts of nothingness and ex nihilo creation. To him, nothingness is not only a means of negative characterization, it also plays a central role in the movement of the plot as a flawed conception of nothingness blinds some characters to “the extraordinary power of the negative.” Levin argues that the depiction of Lear’s fall from grace leads to negative characterization. This is responsible for a complex relation to nothingness, a dramatic movement towards nothingness, and a rebirth through kenosis. If Jonathan Pollock’s attention to nothingness and chaos echoes Levin’s concerns, it is guided, this time, by the thread of atomism and Epicurean philosophy. Indeed, one cannot help remembering Goneril’s biased description of Lear’s so-called debauched court: “epicurism and lust / Makes it more like a tavern or a brothel” (1.4. 235-36). Pollock first shows that the negative connotation of the word “epicurism” is ancient, owing to the opprobrium in which Epicure and his followers were held by the Stoics and the early Fathers of the Church. He proves quite convincing when he shows how Shakespeare relied on Lucretius’s ideas (probably through Montaigne’s influence) and used them to flesh out the philosophical dimension of his tragedy. In turn, Pollock analyses Shakespeare’s treatment of Nature, thunder, division, and notably demonstrates that if something (a cloud of atoms evaporating in the air?) really escapes through Cordelia’s lips when she breathes her last, this may well be explained in terms of atomist thought.

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The fourth part insists on such fundamental existential issues as “Exile and sexuality.” Pascale Drouet explores the theme of banishment, dwelling on the connection between exile and tyranny. As she notes the absence of any legal procedure in the play, she studies the tragedy’s verbal violence before defining its land of exile as “a sort of wasteland devoid of microcosmic and macrocosmic landmarks.” For Drouet, banishment thus generates two types of problematic relationships: the inside/outside dialectics and the endurance/exhaustion polarity. As to Yan Brailowsky’s article, it is not so much concerned with geographical exile as with filial rejection. Bastardy, Brailowsky shows, is much more than the product of desire. In King Lear, it is the source of a singular eloquence, if not the source of language itself or of what he calls a bastard language, at a time when English still had to be legitimized as a courtly language gradually replacing Latin, French and Italian. Indeed, the relationship between desire and bastardy is quite vast and exceeds the confines of the specific situation of Edmund, the sole known bastard character in the play. Relying on Lacan’s well-known theme that “desire is the desire of the Other,” Brailowsky eventually claims that Edmund, Gloucester and Lear are all desperately longing to know the figure of the Other, be it Edgar (for Edmund), Death (for Gloucester), or Lear himself (for King Lear). François Laroque also focuses on the theme of desire (“the small o object”), but he adopts a different perspective. Seeing the tragedy as a vast, tragic “vicious circle,” he reveals the importance of the play’s concentric circles—including “the mysterious circle of the deus absconditus,” the wheel, the crown, Gloucester’s orbits, or the “O” defined by Shakespeare himself as the “indistinguished space of woman’s will” (4.6.266)—in order to unveil a rich network of analogies and correspondences which enable the playwright to render the detailed experience of the private as a more detached and global form of vision. Concluding his essay on the intriguing polysemic connotations of the verb “to turn” (used sixteen times in the play), Laroque finally draws us into the Shakespearean circles of hell so that we, spectators and readers alike, can find the tragedy’s true meaning, a meaning inscribed in the letter “O,” which stands both for the Globe and for women’s “dark and vicious place” (5.3.170). Richard Wilson’s piece which closes the volume begins by adopting a historical perspective in order to put things back in their original context. From the day when Shakespeare became the head of the King’s Men, Wilson tells us, he put himself in the double-bound position of performing freely to order, of praising without praise. Such double bind is what King Lear actually is about. So Lear’s sardonic lament that “When we are born,

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we cry that we are come / To this great stage of fools” (4.6.183) sounds as a powerful phrase that serves to foreground the play’s status as a theatrical piece. This is what Wilson keeps in mind when he evokes Shakespeare’s hectic career as well as the playwright’s own vision of his profession. Eventually, dealing with the play’s affinities with the world of fairy tales and with Cinderella in particular, Wilson manages to convince us that, with King Lear, the Bard actually responded to the “bad business of speaking freely on command” with a Cinderella story that holds a mirror up to “The Wisest Fool.” Editors speculate that the Fool presented the “looking glass” to King James for which Lear calls (5.3.260), reversing crown and coxcomb: “The one in motley here, / The other found out there” (1.4.127-28)…

INTROÏT KING LEAR REVISITED1 ROBERT ELLRODT

King Lear is a play which is rightly famous for its richness and universality but it is also a tragedy that insists on the double nature of man, both a monster and a compassionate human being. If King Lear is first and foremost a history, it is also a tragedy of intense rage, illusions and suffering, which has given way to Christian interpretations based on the theme of “redemption,” and has sometimes encouraged critics to emphasize the religious skepticism permeating the work as a whole. This introduction to the play summarizes the main arguments of this never-ending debate and makes it clear that the text accepts all interpretations since it necessarily “evolves according to the beliefs or the mood, sometimes changeable, of the reader.”

A tragedy where the passions exceed the “top extremity” King Lear has been the object of extreme judgments.2 Simone Weil went so far as to write: “The tragedies of Shakespeare are of the second order, except Lear. Those of Racine of the third order, except Phèdre.” The author of La Pesanteur et la grâce (Gravity and Grace) thus revealed a marked preference for “the tragedy of immobility,” Greek tragedy, and for a poetry defined as: “impossible suffering and joy, joy which, because of its purity, causes pain, suffering which, because of its purity, soothes” (Weill 1948, 171-72). It is truly between “these two extremes” that the heart breaks in Lear.3 The Romantics, in England and in France, had recognized the pre-eminence of this work: according to Coleridge, it was “the most tremendous effort of Shakespeare as a poet” (Hawkes 1959, 186) and for 1

Translated into English by Sermin Lynn Meskill (IUT, Paris XIII). (5.3.198a), Déprats and Venet 2002. The text is based on the folio of 1623 (F1) with interpolations from the quarto of 1608 (Q1), not incorporated in F1. Citations referring to these interpolated passages from Q1 are signalled by a lower-case “a” after the line number. 3 Gloucester’s heart, 5.3.196-98, and Lear’s heart, 5.3. 312. 2

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Keats, the example of that “intensity” which has the virtue of “making all disagreeable evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty and Truth”.4 In the eyes of Victor Hugo, Lear was an “unprecedented construction,” comparable to a cathedral (Massin, 1969, 253). Nevertheless, Tolstoy persisted in denouncing its defects (Orwell would say why) and Emile Faguet denigrated “the horrible, bulky melodrama” performed at the Antoine Theatre: “When one has read or seen King Lear, one must read Le Père Goriot. Now there is something nuanced” (Orwell 1953. Faguet cited by Grivelet 1960, 268). After Olivier’s performance in Paris in 1946, Gide wrote: “I have found this play just short of execrable: of all of the great tragedies of Shakespeare, the worst, and by a great deal. >…@ How it must have pleased Hugo! All his own huge failings were there on display >…@” (Gide 1954, 30; Grivelet 1960, 268). Today, the dissonant voices have been silenced: everyone has agreed to recognize the richness and the universality of Lear. Another important contrast has emerged: today, the greatness of the tragedy is as visible on the stage as it is in the reading. In 1681 Nahum Tate had written—and bowdlerized—the tragedy in order to give it an ending in keeping with “poetic justice”: Lear regains his throne and Cordelia marries Edgar. This was the version of the text performed until 1838. The Romantics read and admired the original text, but, like Charles Lamb, were of the opinion that the play was impossible to stage. In the twentieth century some eminent critics still saw in Lear a drama “always threatening to go beyond the powers of any stage” (Edwards 1968, 128). The cinema would extend the stage, but, well before its advent, in France as in England, the authentic Lear triumphed in the theatre. Yet, it is only after 1950 that this tragedy, considered the darkest, appeared to offer our century the mirror where it most willingly recognized itself. This was also the moment when the prevailing interpretation emphasized the political crisis rather than the discords within a family, and, in place of the idea of the redemption of Lear, substituted a vision of the human condition influenced by Beckett’s theatre.5 According to Umberto Eco one can never prove that a reading is true, but some readings turn out to be unacceptable ( Eco 1990, 130). In the case of Lear, whether it be about the dominant theme or the general meaning of the play, the significance of certain episodes or the nature and 4

Keats, Letters, December 21, 1817. See also the sonnet “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again.” 5 On this evolution, see Foakes 1993, 1-11.

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evolution of the characters, contradictory readings are plentiful and one can show that each is false, or at least leaves out some part of the whole. Each character speaks in accordance with his or her vision of the world as well as his or her personal aims. Some critics assert that, since every statement is opposed by its contrary, this implies that the dramatist leaves us in uncertainty. This is to forget that the coexistence of contraries can express the complex and paradoxical nature of reality. One passage in the work gives us an idea of a reading that is at once singular and multiple. When Edgar informs his father that King Lear has lost and that he must flee, Gloucester says: “No further, sir; a man may rot even here” (5.2. 9). Edgar responds: […] Men must endure Their going hence, even as their coming hither: Ripeness is all. Come on!

Gloucester then acknowledges: “And that’s true too” (5.2.10-13). Under their apparent platitude, these words—the last Gloucester speaks on stage—provide the key to a larger interpretation. Whether he stays or flies, it is true that the suffering body of Gloucester will rot in the earth and that this is the only certain fate in a tragedy that makes no mention of an afterlife. But it is also true that to submit to fate without anticipating it (Gloucester like Hamlet was tempted to do so) can bring a man, at the moment of death, to a “ripeness” without hopelessness. Yves Bonnefoy even uncovers, despite an allusion to Providence, a “fatalistic” acquiescence to the unknown in the phrase of Hamlet’s, “[T]he readiness is all” (5.2.192), while Lear, through the idea of “ripeness,” preserves a faith in the essential values of human existence (Bonnefoy 1978, 14 and 22). One thing however is certain: Lear clearly asserts the double nature of man. Yes, the shivering nakedness of “poor Tom” can incite the king, in the storm and in his madness, to see nothing in man but a “forked animal” (3.4.100-01) and lead Goucester to think “man a worm” (4.1.33). Yes, the cruelty that inhabits the “hard hearts” (3.6.37) generates the animal images strewn in abundance throughout the play. But to remember that man is a “monster”6 if he is not open to feelings of compassion and reverence, if he breaks the “bonds” which assure the cohesion of the social body, is also to affirm the presence within him of a moral nature. Similarly, one should not see in the tragedy an opposition between two conceptions of nature: 6

4.2.49a and 41c. On familial and social relationships, see 1.1.94-102a and 2.2 353-54.

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the one, Christian, which perceives natural law as the expression of the divine will, the other “naturalistic,” inspired by the currents of scepticism and atheism which traversed the Renaissance (Danby 1949).7 It is a question, rather, of the union of opposites even in nature. Nature is the source of selfish and violent impulses, in Lear as in Edmund, but also of the “unpublish’d virtues of the earth” (4.4.16) for the troubled mind and body. It posits an essential equilibrium in man, for madness opens “this great breach in […] abused nature” (4.7.15). It is this union of contraries that a “global” interpretation of the play needs to highlight. But it is necessary to examine another source of complexity first: the relationship between Lear and history.

Lear and History King Lear is, in the first place, history. For Shakespeare’s contemporaries the hero was no less real that the other kings mentioned in Holinshed’s Chronicles where the dramatist had found inspiration for so many history plays. Lear had been called to rule over Brittany—by which is understood Great Britain—in the year 3105, in the time when Joas was king of Juda, eight centuries before Jesus Christ. Holinshed used Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (c. 1135), but Shakespeare also knew the versions available in The Mirror of Magistrates (1559) and in Spenser’s The Fairie Queene (II.x). He would take more liberties with this material than the anonymous author of The True Chronicle of King Leir, a play performed in the 1590s and published in 1605. Shakespeare, in fact, thoroughly transformed the historical plot.8 He retains the source of the crisis: an old king, Leir, means to divide his kingdom among his daughters during his lifetime, but he first expects from them a declaration of their love for him. The answer of the youngest and best loved, Cordeilla, disappoints and irritates him: she will be disinherited, but the king of Gaul falls in love with her and marries her. In Holinshed’s version, Leir anticipates his succession but does not give up his rule immediately. As he grows older, the dukes who married the elder sisters become impatient: they wrest power from the old man and his ungrateful daughters leave him with only one manservant. Leir flees to Gaul and there finds Cordeilla and her royal husband. All three, at the head of an army, return 7 This was criticized, notably by Rosenberg 1972, 75. A more elegant study of the dissolution of the order of Nature and the breaking down of its codes has been made by Venet 2002, 174-90. 8 See the study of the sources in the Arden edition by Foakes. On the parallels with the Brutus of Layamon (or Lawamon), see Alamichel 1992, 162-75.

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to (Great) Britain and put to rout the forces of the usurpers. Leir reigns for two years before his death; Cordeilla then reigns for five years, but, deposed and imprisoned by her two nephews, she commits suicide. The first play to stage the history of Leir was rightly called a “chronicle,” and not a tragedy, since the end is precisely the return to power of the legitimate king. The 1608 pirated edition of Shakespeare’s Lear was still presented as a “chronicle” in 1608, said to be “true” to entice the reader (all “history” in the period claimed to be true), and even free to justify changes with no precedent in the other narratives: the defeat of the army led by Cordelia, followed by her murder, which would bring about Lear’s death. The author of the anonymous play had already tried to tighten up the plot: Leir gave up his power just after announcing the division of the kingdom. But, persecuted, he leaves for France. Shakespeare brings him only to Dover where the army that comes to save him lands. Perhaps this change was dictated by the king’s madness, a pure invention, but of major importance. Another fundamental innovation: the intersection of two intrigues; the second, inspired by the king of Paphlagonia in Sidney’s Arcadia, is of romance origin. The double intrigue serves a double purpose: reinforce the theme and open an historical perspective that goes beyond Lear’s death. In the same manner that the king credits the flatteries of Goneril and Regan but banishes the sincere Cordelia, his counsellor Gloucester lets himself be deceived by his bastard son, Edmund, and blames his legitimate and loyal son. This blindness leads Lear to lose his reason and Gloucester to lose his eyes. While Lear, like Gloucester, becomes, according to Coleridge’s phrase “persona patiens” in the play (Hawkes 1959, 198), Edgar by way of his successive disguises and Edmund, through his political and amorous intrigues (Goneril and Regan both fall in love with him), serve to propel the action until the duel that opposes them. The dying Edmund’s belated repentance does not save Cordelia and, after Lear’s death, Albany seems to summon Edgar to reign, or at least to “govern”.9 Such a radical change to the historical sources can be found neither in Shakespeare’s other plays based on the chronicles, nor in the Roman tragedies based on Plutarch. A past that was beginning to become legendary10 allowed more room to manoeuvre and Shakespeare sought to

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See Note on 5.3.319. Lear belongs to the bloodline of the Trojan, Brutus, whose existence was placed into doubt by Polydore Virgil as early as 1534 in his Anglica Historia, but throughout the sixteenth century the chroniclers following Geoffroy of Monmouth,

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create a feeling of distance. In this pre-Christian Great Britain only the pagan gods are invoked, sometimes under the name of the Greco-Roman divinities, since the Celtic mythology was less known; but these divinities personify the forces of nature—Apollo, the sun, Hecate, the night, Jupiter, the thunder god—and the invocation is often addressed to Nature herself or the Heavens. The absence of any allusion to cities, with the exception of Dover (in which we do not even enter at all), or to economic activities, the choice of empty landscapes, the heath, the cliffs or the fields, create the impression of a faraway world, of a forgotten era. When Lear marks on the map the borders of the conferred territories, contrary to the rebels in 1 Henry IV (3.1.69-111), he gives no geographical detail, speaks in terms of forests and rivers, of plains and fields (1.1). We do not know where the capital of this king, the legendary founder of Leicester, is located. During the characters’ travels from castle to castle, no landmark is given: the indeterminacy of space adds to the universality of the tragic. However, it would be a mistake to imagine the world of Lear as a primitive world. A mistake made by directors who have sought the uncouthness and magnitude of a megalithic setting evocative of Stonehenge. Lear feels himself to be as different from the “barbarous Scythian (1.1.114)” as a Roman patrician. To the most antique past of Great Britain, Shakespeare, like his contemporaries, attributes feudal institutions and customs. This society, composed of lords, vassals, knights and servants, is founded on the bonds of personal allegiance. One is respectful of rank and forms of courtesy: this is manifested by the way the aristocratic characters address one another. The combat between Edmund and his accuser is organized according to a ritual, like the confrontation between Bolingbroke and Mowbray in Richard II (1.3). In the processions, from the solemn entry to the funeral march and the parades of warriors (5.1. 2, 3), or in the public speeches of Lear or Albany, all is order, rule, hierarchy: the tempest in the minds and in the elements, the chaos of passions and violence need to appear as the dissolution of this order, even if it is only a façade. The author has given Gloucester and his sons Saxon rather than Celtic names. Is this intentional? It is one of the clues that give some consistency to a daring hypothesis. Between 959 and 975 a Saxon king named Edgar rid England of all the beasts of prey and reunified a kingdom divided into numerous territories and ravaged by civil conflicts. Giving Lear a successor bearing the name of Edgar may have been a symbolic choice and Camden, in the seventeenth century, never rejected the myth outright. See Burke 1969, 71 and 127.

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and, at a time when the memory of this king was still alive, the spectators would have expected a return to order in his reign, typical at the end of Shakespearean tragedies.11 History, for Renaissance men, was a source of models for conduct in the world and the Elizabethan stage used theatrical illusion to collapse the past, present and future into one another. The fool is thus able to say to the audience: “This prophecy Merlin shall make, for I live before his time” (3.2.95). It is therefore not surprising that there were topical allusions in King Lear.12 The play was performed in 1606 before James I. Lear justifies dividing the kingdom in order to prevent civil wars: the immediate effect is to make them almost certain (see 1.1.43-4 and 2.1.11). To show the dire consequences of this division would have pleased the sovereign who strove to induce Parliament to confirm by law his proclamation of a union between the kingdoms of England and Scotland (Halpern 1991, 219-20).13 Lear, although not a true history, is very much a play shaped out of history. The political and social topicality of the play is considered conservative by some, subversive by others. For the first group, there is in King Lear a confrontation between two types of society and two political philosophies. Lear and Kent, Gloucester and Edgar represent a feudal society, hierarchized, but still attached to moral values such as loyalty, devotion, generosity. The individual appetites aroused by the Machiavellianism of the Renaissance animate Edmund and Cornwall, Goneril and Regan as well as the steward Oswald. The Tudor politics of centralisation, in conjunction with nascent capitalism, had led to the decline of the aristocracy. Shakespeare’s links with Southampton and Essex’s circle renders this interpretation plausible. It did not prevent, on the contrary, attacks against the monopolies liberally granted by James I upon his courtiers.14

11

See the study by Flahiff in Colie ed., 1974 and Note on 5.3.319. The choice of subject may even have been inspired by a current event. In October, 1603, the eldest daughter of Sir Brian Annesley pretended that her aging father was mad in order to take control of his estate; his youngest daughter, named Cordell, was opposed to her sister’s scheme and Sir Brian’s will in her favour was attacked in July, 1604. 13 In Basilicon Doron (1599), the Scottish king alluded to the evils resulting from the division of the kingdom after the death of Brutus. As King of England, James quickly assumed the title of King of Great Britain, but in 1606 the opposition of the English Parliament to the Union was strong. 14 See, for example, 1.1.141a. 12

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More recently, while presenting King Lear as “a play about power, property and inheritance” there has been perceived a subversion of the dominant ideology of the period (Dollimore 1984, 197). It has been emphasized that Lear treats his kingdom as his personal property and argued that the play’s critique of absolutism is “economic rather than political” (Halpern 1991, 224). And finally, it has been noted that in Cordelia’s attitude can be seen a conscious attack on the patriarchal order—whereas she fights to defend the “rights” of her father (4.5.28) and treats him with deference (4.7). From these various studies, inspired by “cultural materialism” in Great Britain, or “feminism” in the United States, one can nevertheless derive one general idea that “the true subject of King Lear is not the destruction of the ancient feudal order by new standards, but the disintegration of a superannuated order collapsing on account of its own contradictions” (Holderness, Potter and Turner 1988, 101). This vision corresponds to the predominance of a satiric vision of society at the turn of the century (Ellrodt 1960, chapters 1 and 2). The criticism aimed against social injustice in King Lear has also given rise to varying interpretations. Some have first seen an echo of primitive Christian communism, awakened by the Lollards and the Anabaptists and spread during the seventeenth century by various sects before finding its epitome in the Levellers. Marxist-inspired criticism took up and developed this theme using the same sources, but placing the emphasis on the rejection of all hierarchy (Cohen, 1980, p. 106-118). The school of “cultural materialism” has argued that the call to pity aimed to “demystifiy” a humanist ideal of social justice the inefficacity of which is clear since charity contributes to maintaining existing structures of power (Dollimore 1984, 4 and 194). But, conversely, others have shown that the request made to the rich to give up the “excess” in their style of life and to “distribute” their “superflux” to the “wretches” out of compassion (4.1.65; 3.4.34-35) is a feature of the homiletic literature of the period, whether it be Anglican or Puritan: the civil and religious authorities based themselves on these principles to bring help to the most needy. Yet, neither the legitimacy of riches, nor the principle of hierarchy, nor the necessity of order in the body politic was ever called into question. The fact that paternalism remained the obligatory framework for social thought did not exclude an appreciation of the equal dignity of all men. Lear and Gloucester suddenly plunged into destitution are not touched by the revelation of new truths; they discover that they had “forgotten” in prosperity certain fundamental truths extolled in the same terms by a London minister, exhorting the faithful “not to be unmindflul of our brethren the poore members of Christ, seeing that […] even our excesse

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would content their neede […] Ye I say that live in this excesse with superfluity, have some remorse to the poore in their misery” (Quoted by Kronenfeld 1992, 755-84). Therefore, there is nothing revolutionary in the call to pity and even the denunciation of injustice in King Lear. The theme was topical: the numbers of the poor and vagrant suddenly rose between 1580 and 1630. It is nevertheless remarkable that a dramatist called attention to the destitution and suffering of the poor in a tragedy dedicated in theory to the misfortunes of the great.15 Kozintsev’s film, offering an image of the misery of the populace, gives to the Shakespearean text (while magnifying the effect) a more faithful rendering than the cold nihilism of some contemporary stagings. It has often been said that this tragedy represents the world upside down. It is true that the bonds of authority and deference between father and children are inverted, literally in the case of Goneril and Regan, symbolically in the scene of reconciliation between Lear and Cordelia. The same is true of the relations between king and subjects. But there exists a basic difference between the world of Lear and the world created by the carnival of fools and the “sottie.” The sovereign and his loyal followers—Kent, Gloucester, Edgar—are brought low, but the poor and the weak are not momentarily raised: they remain submissive to the powerful of the world. The fool himself retains his privilege—to speak the truth—only in sharing his fate with the exiled monarch. The scene where Lear calls the fool and the madman to sit in judgement of Goneril is a parodic inversion of justice, but this same parody illuminates the powerlessness of these improvised makeshift judges. The inversion is not at all carnivalesque,16 but comparable to Chapman’s evocation of a universe which returns to chaos: “The world is quite inverted, Virtue overthrown / At Vice’s feet […] / The rude and terrible age is turned again.”17 Without denying the historical and political aspects of the play, we may at the same time claim that the focus in King Lear is concentrated, on 15 Margot Heinemann (1992, 78) underlines that “this is a note not heard in the earlier Histories.” Nor in the previous tragedies. 16 Which does not exclude some borrowings from the tradition noted by Laroque 1988, particularly 204 and 289-90. 17 The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles Duke of Byron, 1608 (1.2.14-17). The political tragedy of Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, Gorboduc (1562) whose influence on King Lear is probable, also represents the abdication of the king in favour of his sons as a perversion of the course of Nature: “When fathers cease to know that they should rule/And children cease to know they should obey” (1.2.205-07).

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the one hand, on the individual and his relations with those close to him, and, on the other, on the nature and the condition of humanity. In the plays written previously about the War of the Roses, England was represented as a collective body victim of her own struggles: “England hath long been mad and scarr’d herself” (Richard III, 5.5.23). Even in Macbeth the evil of tyranny affects the whole of Scotland, which is no longer “our mother, but our grave” (4.3.166). In Lear, it is the madness of the king that fascinates us. The battle where the fate of the kingdom is decided is waged off stage, for what moves us is the effect it has on Gloucester, Lear and Cordelia. In the “general mourning,” the image of the dead Cordelia and Lear expiring is much more present than that of the “bloody State” (5.3.293-95).

Character interpretation and the dynamics of the action Today, we no longer expect from Shakespeare’s characters the kind of verisimilitude Emile Faguet praised in Père Goriot. But to reduce them to a function or to an emblematic meaning would be another mistake: they can only be convincing if their language rings true. The epoch still defined “character” in the Theophrastan sense as in the moral sense of Aristotle. The dramatist portrays certain character types, such as Kent, the honest servant who pathetically tries, just before his death, to make himself known to the king whom he has served in disguise (5.3.256-64). True to type is his spontaneous hatred of Oswald, himself the generic effeminate sycophant and one of the new breed of servants. The character can even become emblematic in a play where the influence of the Moralities was acknowledged and where the forces of good and evil confront each other through two groups of characters. However, only Cordelia lends herself to a symbolic interpretation. Exiled from the start, she does not reappear until the denouement. On stage she speaks few words, far fewer than her sisters. In those moments that are heaviest with meaning her discourse embeds itself in the simplest forms of negation and affirmation: “Nothing, my lord” (1.1.86), “And so I am, I am” (4.7.68). Her words resound without her voice ever being raised on this stage where others scream; Lear remembers that “Her voice was ever soft, / Gentle, and low” (5.3.247-48). Some see in her a symbol of divine grace when the king is told: “Thou hast a daughter / Who redeems nature from the general curse” (4.6.202-03; cf. 4.4.23 and notes). Still, she is not an allegorical figure. Every human action calls forth a series of associations: it owes its underlying signification to the resonances that it awakes. Psychological criticism, beginning with Coleridge, has at times emphasized a kind of inflexibility, of hardness even, in the attitude of the

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heroine toward a loving father in the first act. But Cordelia needs to have the intransigency of the one who speaks the truth : “So young, my lord, and true (1.1.105); the truth that is rejected: “Thy truth then be thy dower” (1.1.108). She is the one who sees the lie, distinguishes reality from appearances: “I know you what you are” (1.1269). When she announces: “Time shall unfold what plighted cunning hides” (1.1.280),” she speaks as if she were Time itself, as in the prologue of The Winter’s Tale.18 Once the passions are let loose and the masks are ripped away, the perspective is a completely different one. Cordelia is at once the one who exerts control over the passions (4.3.14-15) and the source of compassionate love toward the humiliated king, this “child-changed father” (4.7.17). Oddly, while we neither hear her speak one word to the king whom she has married (1.1), nor speak of him, she becomes a mother image and a representation of life in her call to all the restorative virtues of nature (4.4.16). When Lear’s eyes open up to reality and when he recognizes his daughter she, who represents truth, resorts to lying out of mercy for him. To this father, to this king, who reminds her that she has reasons not to love him, the one who was cursed and banished by him answers: “No cause, no cause” (4.7.73). Confronted with the shame of a public solicitation of love, the purity was in silence and denial; in the face of repentance and humility, the purity is in “forgetting” and “forgiving” (words spoken by Lear, 4.3.83) to assert the inalterability of love. But, after the battle is lost, Cordelia, again an image of the truth, does not, like the king, give herself up to the illusion of happiness together in the ageless time of a blissful captivity. She holds fast to a language of Stoicism, suggests a last confrontation with Goneril and Regan (5.3.7), but she knows that no victory is promised to love and truth in this world. She responds to the idyllic vision again with silence— the silence of lips forever dumb when she reappears, dead, in the arms of her father. To humanize Goneril and Regan instead of making them monsters is today the aim of most directors. They have arguments that make sense— the impossibility of housing two bands of armed men in the same house under two leaders (2.2.411-17)—and some reasons to fear that Lear will seek to take back his power (1.4. 293-94): Shakespeare leaves his characters to justify their actions. Nevertheless, Cordelia’s words at the close of the first scene are a clear warning addressed to the spectators. This is why we cannot trust Goneril’s statements when she claims that Lear’s knights engage in “rank and not-to-be-endured riots” (1.4.176; see also 18

4.1.1-2. Concerning the common origin Veritas filia temporis, see Panofsky 1962, 83.

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1.4. 209-14; 1.4.231-34 and 50-68). Lear’s word may certainly be equally suspicious (272-5), but the only knight whom the dramatist has placed on the stage must be representative, and his speech and his conduct (58-77) support Lear’s description, not the accusations made by Goneril. The pact between the two sisters (1.1283-305) and the provocation planned to unleash the king’s fury (1.3) reveal a conscious perfidy. In the interview at Gloucester’s castle, the text barely justifies the effort of some actresses to appear more conciliatory than Lear: from the first his two daughters insist without mincing words on his “dotage” (2.2.320-25 and 372). Nevertheless, from their first false declarations of love the author seeks to differentiate them: Regan means to outdo her elder sister and already seems to disclose her sensuality when she measures all against those joys “the most precious square of sense possesses.”19 Goneril’s rival for Edmund’s love, she expresses an obsessive jealousy when she is eager to know if he has had access to “the forfended place” (5.1.11).20 The torture of Gloucester stimulates her sadism: she wants the bonds to hurt him, pulls out the hairs in his beard, insists on gouging the second eye. It has been suggested that she sees her father in Gloucester: this does not make her less cruel. The love rivalry between the two sisters is a plot necessity to shed light on Albany and lead to the duel between the two brothers. But each one falls in love in her own way. The imperious Goneril seeks a “man” who corresponds better than her own husband to her ideal of brute force: she enlists him in her service (4.2.22-29). Regan, more feminine, burns with desire to give and give herself (5.3.69-73). Goneril takes the initiative from the first very dialogue with her sister (1.1.283-305), suggests to Edmund that he murder Albany (4.6.258-64). Regan dies poisoned by her; Goneril kills herself with a dagger (5.3). Cordelia’s sisters do not evolve in the course of the play, but their “hard hearts” (3.6.37) are gradually revealed to the world. Cornwall is also of a piece, not a stupid brute, but a depraved Renaissance nobleman under his noble appearance (3.5), adroit at corrupting Edmund (if that was necessary). His outraged amazement when a “peasant” dares speak back to him is that of an aristocrat (3.7.77-79). Albany, for one, needs to change as a result of the necessities of the action: he must be slow in discovering the true nature of his wife (1.4). Once informed and indignant, he remains master of himself (4.2.45c). It is understandable that Edmund should portray him as hesitant (5.1) and that 19

1.1.73. The “joys” procured by “the most precious square of sense” may allude to “the forfended place”, the female sex (5.1.11): Regan seems to renounce the strongest pleasures of the sense in favour of love for her father. 20 On this rivalry, see notes on 4.5.25 and 5.1.37.

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Goneril does not find in him a perfect image of virility: each character speaks from his or her own point of view. In fact, Albany adroitly manoeuvres to isolate Edmund (5.3.77-79) and he is ready to confront him in single combat (5.3.86-88). Is his decision not to govern a weakness in his character? It is an indication of a certain philosophic detachment with regard to action, but it is also a dramatic necessity if Edgar is meant to reign. Gloucester’s fate is parallel to Lear’s; their personalities, however, are very different. Without doubt they both represent the same lack of discernment, ironically emphasized when Gloucester boasts he does not need glasses (1.2.35). This credulous and superstitious father is from the start an Old Comedy senex who complacently recalls the good old days of yesteryear (1.1). As Ruth Nevo has observed, Lear sinned in his mind, Gloucester has sinned in the flesh, and therefore loses his sight whereas Lear loses his reason (Nevo 1972, 290). He reveals himself first, as opposed to Kent, anxious not to offend those in power; he remains silent during the banishment of Cordelia, gives way to Cornwall (2.2, 4), all the while endeavouring to help Lear “in secret” (3.3.4, 6), for he is a good man. “[T]ied to th’stake” (3.7.53), he acts with courage and dignity. But while the ordeal rouses a vehement indignation in Lear, the blind Gloucester is passive in despair: he seeks death, but only lest he should fall to quarrel with the “great opposeless wills of the gods” (4.6.35-40) and he allows himself to be persuaded that a miracle has saved him (4.6.55). Always ready to relapse into hopelessness (5.2), he submits to the will of others. The meeting at Dover with Lear becomes a symbolic confrontation when the old king, lucid in his madness, reveals the world as it is to an old man who stumbled when he saw (4.1.18-19); Gloucester, still passive, answers: “I see it feelingly” (4.6.147). Edgar and Edmund make up another couple of opposites. The bastard is more captivating than the legitimate son: nature has been very generous to him and his first monologue shows that he knows it. At the beginning of the play when his father alludes to his illegitimate birth in his presence, calling his mother a whore, and states that he will exile this son again after having already kept him away for nine years, our sympathy is with him. When he invokes Nature, stands up again the injustice of custom with reference to illegitimate children (1.2.1-15), some of the spectators of the period would have been as affected by his arguments as we are today: Montaigne testifies to this.21 Yet, his understandable bitterness cannot justify his scheme to destroy his brother Edgar, expose him to banishment 21

See notes on 1.2.2-5 and 1.2.47-52.

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and death, since, according to tradition in Elizabethan theatre (on this point quite removed from psychological verisimilitude), he proclaims his own vices and publicly recognizes the “nobility” of the one he deceives (1.2.137-38, 186). It was a rule written into the laws that the sins of the parents “contaminated” illegitimate children22: Edmund is subject to this convention here in the same way as Don John in Much Ado About Nothing. Yet, in King John, as in real life, a bastard such as Faulconbridge (though, it is true, of royal blood) could play the role of the hero. Here, Shakespeare defers to convention because it serves his dramatic design, but he embellishes Edmund with certain qualities such as charm, courage and wit without making him less criminal. Cornwall spares him the sight of his father’s torment (3.7.6-9), but he leaves in order to kill the blind man, supposedly in order “to dispatch / His ’nighted life,” but actually because his pathetic condition “moves / All hearts” against his tormenters (4.5.12-15). It is for a similar reason (5.3.46-51) that he gives the order to assassinate Lear and Cordelia. Yet Shakespeare knows that this blackness of soul prevents neither bursts of chivalry, as in his farewell to Goneril (4.2.25), nor a certain strength of spirit. If Edmund accepts the challenge of the unknown, it is because the despised bastard, now so close to the throne, is anxious for his own glory. It is in order to conduct himself as a real knight that he grants the victor his pardon (5.3.165-66). Is the will to accomplish something good before dying (243) less believable? Is he really moved by Edgar’s narrative (199)? One may doubt it; but when the bodies of the two dead queens are brought to the stage, there is a haughty, but nostalgic irony in his comment: “I was contracted to them both; all three / Now marry in an instant” (5.3.203-04). The feeling that “Edmond was belov’d” (214) makes his decision “some good […] to do, / Despite of mine own nature” (5.3.218-19) plausible. The return of the word “nature” is characteristic, recalling the initial invocation (1.2.1). All the evil he has done seems to have emerged out of his “given” nature”: will he overcome these constraints in the final moment? One can imagine it, but it is never said, nor even suggested. Edgar is contrasted with his brother Edmund as Cordelia is with her sisters, in a manner reminiscent of the Morality plays. Gloucester’s legitimate son, as sententious as Albany is pious and moralising, has everything to make him unpopular today. Some directors have sought to make the two brothers similar. Others have ascribed to Edgar a disloyalty 22

Sir John Fortescue, De Laudibus Legum Angliae (1546), cited by Zitner 1974, 26. When his daughters reveal themselves to be monstrous, Lear wishes to believe them illegitimate: see 1.4.222; and 2.2.305-06.

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and ferocity in the duel that has no basis in the text.23 Short of rewriting the play it is necessary to admit that Edgar is indeed, as Edmund himself says, “a brother noble, / Whose nature is so far from doing harms, / That he suspects none” (1.2.161-63). He becomes, as he presents himself (the Shakespearean hero has the right to define himself), a “man, made tame to Fortune’s blows, / Who, by the art of known and feeling sorrows,/Am pregnant to good pity” (4.6.218-20). The fact that he waits to reveal his identity to his father—whom he helps and saves from suicide (4.6) and without doubt from a more painful death than at the hands of his enemies (5.2)—has been attributed to spite.24 But neither his behaviour nor the pain that he expresses in his asides at the sight of the old blind man (4.1.10-28, 51), nor his speeches, betray such a state of mind. If he recalls that the adultery of Gloucester, in giving birth to a bastard, is the source of a chain of events that has led him to lose his eyes, it is only after the death of his father and in addressing the unnatural son (5.3.163-64). His ethics are those of his time and he takes up a Biblical argument (Wisdom, xi. 16). That he has chosen to disguise himself first as a mad beggar, that he speaks in a peasant dialect when he confronts Oswald, seems to place him in an initiatory course that leads him to identify with the most destitute, then with the lowly, before re-emerging as a knight and a defender of the right. But it is true that these metamorphoses are an artifice of the dramatist and are not convincing, except for the first change into “poor Tom.” The importance of Edgar, then, is not in his character, but in his multiple functions. Dramatic function, since the movement of the wheel of Fortune, the emblem of medieval tragedy nearly always present in Elizabethan tragedy, brings him low in elevating Edmund until he puts an end to the rise of the Bastard: “The wheel is come full circle” (5.3.165). Edgar is the one who knew to wait for “the mature time,” the “time [that] shall serve” (4.6.269; 5.1.39). It is a choric function since the commentary calls attention to a constant feature of the action: the awakening of a hope or of an expectation which is immediately disappointed and the inexorable progress from worse to worst. Believing that he has nothing more to dread in his extreme destitution, Edgar learns, in seeing his father with his 23 Particularly Peter Brook in his 1971 film, James Dunn in California (1960) and Jan Bull in Norway (1971). 24 According to M. Rosenberg (1972, 247), Edgar, in waiting to reveal himself, “tortures his father” and commits more than the “fault” he acknowledges (5.3.184). To argue this is to forget that the continued use of the disguise is an element of the plot; in As You Like It do we criticize Rosalind for not revealing herself to her father before the end?

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gouged eyes before him, that no one can say he is at the “worst” (4.1.2). Hardly has he pulled his father out of despair, than the mad king comes on stage, “thou side-piercing sight!” (4.6.85). And it is after his victory over Edmund, at the moment when the officer is about to give the counter command, that Lear appears, holding the dead Cordelia in his arms (5.3.232). The subtlety is in the intermingling of the main plot commented upon by Edgar, which leads to entropy25 in a scene strewn with corpses, and a secondary plot, led by him, which has its point of departure in emptiness when the hero chooses to be “nothing” (“Edgar I nothing am” 2.2.182), but which provides an opportunity for renewal in bringing the criminal characters to their doom. Finally, symbolic function, for Edgar, under the appearance of a naked madman, “poor Tom,” triggers Lear’s madness in presenting him the image of a man reduced to “the thing itself” (3.4.99) and acts as the Fool in order to carry on with him the dialogue of lucid madness.

Folly and Lucidity: Lear and madness In none of the sources of Lear does the king lose his reason. In the story of the king of Paphlagonia, the loyal son, the model for Edgar, does not feign insanity. The presence of the Fool next to Lear is also a major innovation. The meeting of the three forms of insanity in Act 3 is a representation of a cosmic and mental chaos without precedent in the English Renaissance theatre, nevertheless full of scenes of madness.26 The monarch who enters the stage majestically and announces his “darker purpose” (1.1.35) offers no sign of mental senility or insanity. He demonstrates selfishness and naïveté in wishing to unburden himself of his responsiblities all the while preserving “the name, and all th’addition to a king” (1.1.134). He shows a lack of judgement, not only with regard to his daughters, but also with regard to the consequences of dividing the kingdom. When the father betrayed in his love, the ruler publicly humiliated, utters curses, it is the result of the impatience of his character, made worse by his age. Goneril comments on this, but Regan notes : “he hath ever but slenderly known himself” (1.1.292-93). To represent Lear as “a tragedy of wrath,”27 is to simplify things. The tragic fault, hamartia, is above all the lack of knowledge: knowledge of oneself and knowledge of

25

The word is Calderwood 1986, 15. See Ellrodt 1994, 191-98. 27 Title of Chapter XIV, Campbell 1930. 26

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others. As in the Aristotelian tragedy, the hero must be led to an anagnorisis, or recognition, through his trials.28 Is it necessary to explore the unconscious? When Lear says to Cordelia: “Now, our joy” (1.1.81), it is clear that he awaits her declaration of love with a more eager desire. Is it an incestuous desire that provokes the intensity of his response? Is her refusal to express herself felt as a refusal to give herself? It is true that Lear first gives his daughter a second chance to prove her love (93-94) and that his fury bursts when she declares that she must divide her love between her husband and her father. But it seems that this aged king wishes above all to find a mother in a second childhood (cf. 1.1.123-24 and note). The staging of the division of the kingdom reveals that Lear likes playing a part.29 He lives in a world that he thinks he makes according to his own humour and he refuses to see what is unpleasant to him. Powerful, he pushes away from his purview those who contradict him, Cordelia, then Kent (1.1.122, 155). Powerless, he will go from Goneril to Regan, then will flee them both in the storm (2.4.299). The insistent reminder of reality is the role of the Fool. We know that there is a “perpetually reversible relationship” between wisdom and madness (Foucault 1976, 46). In King Lear, the Fool is the voice of common sense and common wisdom. His language is indirect, embellished with images and riddles to better express the unpleasant truths without revealing the whip. But he alone sees the world upside down, as in the prophecy of Merlin (3.2), because he sees clearly. Rather than being a professional clown he is one of the “innocents” or simple-minded (called naturals) who became pupils of the king or a peer. Lear often calls him boy, he has preserved from childhood an absence of inhibition and a taste for riddles. Does he really seek to “entertain” Lear? He seems rather to pester him with critiques and reproaches: he denounces his unthinking acts and his vain expectations. The Fool’s reason never wavers until he is frightened by the violence of the elements and by the appearance of the possessed (3.4.79). The Fool accuses Lear of that which the king has begun to accuse himself of without wishing to admit it. The Fool, whom he loves, had pined away after the departure of Cordelia; he has noticed it, but he interrupts the knight who tells him: “No more of that” (1.4.69). Exasperated by Goneril, he begins to understand that the “most small fault” (1.4.234) of his favourite daughter had taken his own nature “out of joint”, as Pascal would say about reason (Pensées, II.82). Yet at that very 28 29

See Cave 1990, 159-60. He is one of the player kings discussed by Righter [Barton] 1967.

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moment, Lear, who had invoked Apollo until then (1.1.158), speaks like Edmund to Nature, hailed by the name of “dear goddess” (1.4.243). And he intends also to make of her the instrument of his desire: to punish the unthankful. But as he calls to her to make his daughter sterile, or to give her a child who would be a “disnatur’d torment” (1.4.251), his own wish is against nature. Until his reconciliation with Cordelia, Lear vacillates between blindness and insight, in the same way as he vacillates between bursts of anger and the effort to master himself. Confronting Goneril again in Gloucester’s castle, he goes from renewing his curses to prayer—“do not make me mad” (2.2.393)—and to the recognition that she is his flesh, his blood, or rather, a disease in his flesh (396-97). He claims to be patient (405), but he calls to the Heavens to fill him with an exalted anger and he can barely hold back his tears (451-61). Exposing himself to the fury of the elements which he had invoked against Goneril (2.2.337-38), he summons heavenly fire to destroy the universe and scatter the seeds of creation, an impious prayer, similar to the wish spoken to the witches by the tyrant Macbeth.30 He identifies himself with the storm in order to defy it by way of the power of speech, but he continues to pity himself, “[A] poor, infirm, weak, and despis’d old man” (3.2.20). And yet it is the ordeal of powerlessness, cold and deprivation that leads Lear to think of others: of his Fool shivering next to him (3.2.68-74), of the “poor naked wretches” to whom he has given too little thought during his reign (3.4.2833). Another aspect of the “recognition” process is the discovery of a true self through the destruction of a false self. Lear had played the role of an absolute and dreaded monarch, of a generous and loved father. As deference toward him disappears, he ceases to recognize himself since he doesn’t know himself as he sees himself or as he still wishes to be: “This is not Lear […] Who is it that can tell me who I am?” “Lear’s shadow,” answers the Fool (1.4.198-204). When he is left with only fifty of his hundred knights, then twenty-five, then none, it is the fragments of his identity that are being torn away from him, for the symbolic number represented the fullness of those prerogatives which constituted him in his eyes.31 The Fool had already told him that he was no more than an “O without a figure” (1.4.164-65). It is in relation to Edgar, himself reduced to “nothing” (2.2182), that Lear first finds again a “minimal” identity, that of naked man. But it is 30

3.2.1-9 and note 5. See Macbeth, 4.1.49-60. Symbolically, as well, Cordelia will send a “century” of knights in search of him (4.4.6). 31

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also the moment when he enters madness. He had a premonition of it after the first confrontation with Goneril (1.5.42). Finding his manservant in the stocks he had felt a pain rise to his heart, hysterica passio (2.2.234). He had hurled in the storm shouting: “O Fool! I shall go mad” (2.2.461). A pregnant conjunction of related yet different words that foreshadows the cry of the perceptive Fool: “This cold night will turn us all to fools and madmen” (3.4.73). In the storm, Lear realizes that his “wits begin to turn” (3.2.68); the cosmic chaos will be nothing after the “the tempest in [his] mind” (3.4.12). He knows it: “O, that way madness lies” (3.4.21): but he adds, “let me shun that” (3.4.21). He even shows a new clear-sightedness when, imagining all those who suffer, he prays. The actor John Gielgud got on his knees at this moment. Is it the harsh irony of the gods? The next moment, the mad naked man appears and Lear asks him: “Didst thou give all to thy daughters?” (3.4.47) revealing the obsession fixed in his wandering wits. A comment by Kent confirms this: “His wits begin t’unsettle” (3.4.154). Begin only, for his address to the “poor, bare, forked animal” is still coherent (3.4.100-01). But its meaning is ambiguous. The weakness of man and the precariousness of his condition needed to be uncovered before this proud king. But is he completely wrong when, claiming for himself the “superflux” that comes with civilisation, he says to Regan: “Allow not nature more than nature needs, / Man’s life is cheap as beast’s” (2.2.441-42).32 Lear’s desire to undress himself (3.4.101-02) alludes ironically to the scene where the monarch wishes to “divest” himself both of his power and his cares (1.148); this is a necessary stage in the “recognition” of his true condition: the truth is naked. Nevertheless, this is not an act of wisdom: undressing is also the characteristic gesture of the madman (Doob 1974, 31). The truth is twofold. However, during the night of the storm Edgar’s feigned madness introduces a false case of possession: poor Tom plays at being possessed, but inspired by such cases as the recent book by Samuel Harsnett had denounced as false.33 Edgar, we know, also used a fake miracle on the cliff. We could make a case for Shakespeare’s scepticism but Tom’s feigned insanity is more unsettling than entertaining at the moment when Lear’s reason begins to turn. The English public of the period, even if they had doubts about the powers of exorcists, believed in the reality of demonic possession, attested to in the Old as well as the New Testament (see, for example, 1 Kings xvi, Matthew viii, 28). Tom’s raving is, furthermore, associated with feelings of guilt: the possessed imputes to 32

See also note 28 of Act 3 (references are to the Pléiade edition. See bibliography). 33 See notes 29, 32, 34, 38 and 40 of Act 3.

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himself all the deadly sins (3.4.85-99). For Edgar, as for Hamlet, feigning is an aspect of a real problem. The address to “nightmare” (3.4.113), the enigmatic allusion to Nero and to the “Lake of Darkness” (3.6.6-7), seems to hint at an obscure obsession, perhaps also to the “dark and vicious place” where Edmund had been conceived (5.3.163). But, in the following Act the same disgust for sexuality expresses itself in Lear’s satirical curses. One thinks of Hamlet, of Othello, and of the sonnets to the Dark Lady: the obsessions of the playwright may be revealed through these characters.34 Yet Lear succumbs to madness with dignity: Gielgud and the best actors in the role have understood this. The grotesque is there, but to emphasize it is to weaken the tragic element. The king addresses his “philosopher” with extreme courtesy and enrols him among the hundred knights he still believes escort him (3.4.146). The questions he asks make sense, whether they refer to “the cause of the thunder” or the search for “a natural cause” for Regan’s “hardness of heart.”35 He observes customary forms when he creates a jury in which a beggar and a madman fill the part of the highest magistrates of the land (3.6.37). We note that the Fool, as opposed to Edgar, is wary of participating in Lear’s hallucination and thinks that in joking he can burst the bubble of the illusion: this is his last call to reality (3.6.44). The king is now prey to fantasies and to fits of rage (3.6.51a to 42 in Pléiade) before falling asleep, exhausted. Listening to the conversation between Lear and Gloucester at Dover, Edgar cries out to himself: “O matter and impertinency mixed,/ Reason in madness!” (4.6.172-73). The description is apt: the mistake would be to believe that it is all reason or all madness. Lear’s hallucinations persist, his talk is often subject to nothing other than mere associations of ideas and words.36 On the other hand, the denunciation of hypocrisy and injustice is perfectly coherent: Lear takes up, as we have seen, themes found throughout the satiric and homiletic literature of the period and the Shakespearean imagination gives them a particular power. But even here a certain excess is inherent in the genre. The one who curses, the king who wished to punish, swings to the other extreme when he states that “none does offend” (4.6.166). Does the nausea toward sexuality which finds an expression in the allusion to the “sulphurous pit” (4.6.127), the female sex, lead to seeing all women as “centaurs” (4.6.123)? What about Cordelia? It is true that to denounce the “indistinguish’d space of woman’s will” 34

Or the obsessions of a certain moment in the history of the passions: see Ellrodt 1960, chapter II, section 1. 35 See, respectively, 3.4.147; 3.6.36-37. 36 See notes 27, 28 and 31 to Act 4.

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(4.6.265), as Edgar also does, enables the Baroque imagination to place into relief a heroine pure and unique against a foil of black and universal corruption. The cure, like Lear’s madness, is natural: sleep, the virtues of plants and, in the Quarto, music (4.4.11-18; 4.7.19, 25a). Lear awakes believing he has been pulled out of the grave and thinks that Cordelia, bending toward him, is a heavenly spirit while he himself is in a Hell of torments. Like Hercules after his attack of madness in the tragedies of Euripides and Seneca, he is initially in a state of amnesia, wondering where and who he is. When finally the revelation comes, expressed with perfect simplicity in a language where the weight of a painful past, the timid tenderness of the present weigh down and slow down the succession of words magically linked by their subdued sounds, the movement of the phrase, the enjambment of the line: Do not laugh at me, For, as I am a man, I think this lady To be my child, Cordelia. Cordelia. And so I am: I am. (4.7.65-68)

So, a triple “recognition” is achieved. The father recognizes his daughter—this is the first example of anagnorisis. He recognizes his error—the model is Oedipus’—and Cordelia’s forgiveness expunges it. He recognizes himself—the model is Socrates’ and Erasmus’—as he is “a very foolish, fond old man” (4.7.58).37 As he is and as he is no longer, from the moment that he realizes it. Age also has its twofold truth. The tragedy has shown all its weakness, cruelly and publicly proclaimed by Goneril and Regan. But Cordelia does not want to let her father kneel; by kneeling herself with respect in order to receive the benediction of the one who had cursed her, she returns to Lear his lost fatherhood and royalty. The play could have ended with this scene and Lear would have been the first of the tragi-comedies of recognition—Pericles, A Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline. But the inexorable movement toward the worst starts again. Captured after losing the battle, the old king strangely cherishes a dream of happiness in prison beside his beloved daughter: the illusion is of a poignant sweetness, but clearly unrealistic (5.3.8-19). Lear falls into a 37

Lear had already seen himself as a “poor old man”, to denounce the ingratitude of his daughters (2.2.247, not out of humility; similarly, he passes from self-pity to a feeling of compassion which includes “the other” 4.7.50-51).

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happy state of oblivion, the prelude to a bitter awakening. To come to the tragic end is to come to the heart of the controversy concerning the interpretation of the tragedy.

The Nature and significance of the tragic in King Lear The tragedy of King Lear is a complex work whose borrowings from a number of genres have been noted. The King who listens to flatterers and rejects the Truth, Cordelia, and the good counsellor, Kent, are reminiscent of the Moralities. The first and the last scenes, the failed suicide of Gloucester and the meeting between the blind man and the mad king, are also indebted to emblematic tableaux. The humiliation of the proud king, his wandering and his ruin, his return to power go back to popular tales and the romance tradition (Hornstein 1964, 13-21). The banishment and refuge at the heart of a hostile nature (in the storm) or an indifferent one (at Dover), where the pariah discovers, nevertheless, hidden truths and a lost identity, are the themes of a “dark pastoral.”38 Clear, too, is the kinship with Senecan tragedy, whether with regard to furor, revenge (which at one point obsesses Lear), choric commentary or the multitude of sententiae.39 But, in opposition to Classic gravity, the intrusion of the comic is insistent and the effect is not only one of contrast as in the Porter scene in Macbeth: the characters and the tragic situations seem to be overwhelmed by the grotesque; concerning this point, Jan Knott simply pushes to the extreme the argument of G. Wilson Knight. And yet, in this work of undeniable diversity, there exists a simple tragedy, a pure tragedy, a tragic of an incomparable aesthetic power. The simple tragedy is born of the intensity of the suffering, physical or moral, when the characters, victims of the brutality of men, of the elements or of their own passions, are not derided. Regan, of course, mocks the blinded Gloucester, but he has confronted his tormentors with surprising courage and his torture raises indignation and compassion. When the mad Lear runs mad on the stage, the expected reaction is not laughter, but the reaction of the Gentleman: “A sight most pitiful in the meanest wretch, / Past speaking of in a king” (4.6.201-02). By emphasizing senility in the King and Gloucester and stressing the punishments Edgar inflicts upon himself (2.3), the wounded body, the 38 The expression is employed by Mayoux 1982, 147 and Venet 1993, 22. Rosalie Colie (1974, 303) had discussed the statement by Maynard Mack that Lear is a huge anti-pastoral. Finally, according to Russell A. Fraser (1962, 94), Edgar is reduced to the state of a “ wild man”. 39 See, in particular, Miola 1992.

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mutilated body, the suffering body is constantly exposed on the stage. Lear knows that “the mind/ [suffers] with the body” (2.2.282-83). He wakes up from insanity with an image of martyrdom—the wheel of fire (4.7.44)— and dies “upon the rack of this tough world” (5.3.289). Nevertheless, it is not toward horror that the dramatist gestures but rather toward compassion, to the “heart” mentioned sixty times.40 In this Shakespeare remains faithful to the Aristotelian conception which makes pity an element of the tragic, but he evokes it with more insistence than his contemporaries, more attracted by terror. Since his “Histories,” throughout his theatre can be heard the cry of revolt against the inhumanity of man toward man: Shakespeare even gives his future tyrant a vision of pity as “a naked new-born babe, / Striding the blast” (Macbeth, 1.7.21-22). This suffering is only pathetic when Edgar and Albany describe themselves as on the point of bursting into tears (3.6.20; 5.3.194-96). The Elizabethans believed that a direct appeal to the emotions was an intrinsic element of tragedy.41 Yet Lear avoids sentimentality through a stripping of language in the most emotionally charged moments. In order to say the inexpressible the poet rejects all rhetoric, goes back to the cry to express rage—“kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill” (4.6.185), to the most ordinary words for tenderness and forgiveness in the dialogue between the reunited Lear and Cordelia (4.7.46-83), to three phrases of unsurpassable concision to introduce the apocalypse in the “chorus” of Kent, Edgar and Albany: “Is this the promis’d end?—Or image of that horror?—Fall, and cease” (5.3.238-39). And Lear’s despair before the end is hammered home by the repetition of the same word: “Thou’lt come no more, / Never, never, never, never, never” (5.3.282-83).42 But to elevate oneself above pathos to the purely tragic it is necessary for the hero to have both an extraordinary “capacity” for suffering and to refuse to accept his fate passively—as in the challenge to the storm, “Pour on, I will endure” (3.4.18), where we can perhaps hear both “I will endure” and “I will last.” Like Pascal’s man, Lear appears nobler than the universe, for the power that the universe has over him is one of which the universe is unconscious. From this point of view, Gloucester is a character who is less tragic than his king, even though he is there to fulfil another

40

See McAlindon 1991, 175-83. In the Induction to A Warning for Fair Women (anonymous, published in 1599), Tragedy declares: “I must have passions that must move the soule, / Make the heart heave, and throb within the bosome, / Extorting teares out of the strictest eyes” in Cannon 1975, 98, l. 44-46. See also Cunningham 1951. 42 Concerning the last passage cited, see S. P. Zitner 1974, 3-22. 41

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aspect of the tragedy: to acquire through trial a better understanding of the world and of oneself. To the extent that misfortune is the result of an error or a fault, it is not unexpected that the punishment be in excess of the cause, or that the hero is “more sinn’d against than sinning” (3.2.59). Tragedy, since Aeschylus and Sophocles, has staged undeserved suffering: nothing is more foreign to it than poetic justice. Lear is aware of this before rebelling against it: “Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia, / The gods themselves throw incense” (5.3.20-21). Tragedy accepts reality, hence the death of the innocent. The great writers, from Shakespeare to Richardson or Thomas Hardy, have been able to resist our all too human desire to keep Cordelia alive, or Clarissa Harlowe, or Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Nothing allows us to state that the end of Lear bears witness to a pessimism other than that of a Christian vision of existence in this world, seen as a vale of tears: it has been amply shown (Myrick 1964, 56-70). But nothing either in this tragedy suggests that we believe, with the faith of Simone Weil, that the suffering of the innocents “resembles the acceptance of evil in the creation of a God who is innocent”. As she has admitted in fact, Lear is a “tragedy of gravity,” not of grace (Weil 1948, 2). A long-lived quarrel has opposed those who suggest a Christian interpretation—whether it be the “redemption” of Lear or the redemption of nature by Cordelia, as a Christ figure—and those for whom the expression of religious scepticism and a deep pessimism concerning the human condition predominate. This debate will never be closed because the text is “open” and interpretation evolves according to the beliefs or the mood, sometimes changeable, of the reader. We can only put aside the bad arguments. The fact that the gods invoked never grant any prayers corresponds to the tragic design of the action: all hope, we have seen, is immediately extinguished.43 But, if the gods are pagan ones, we cannot draw any conclusions for or against a Christian god, even less so if we conceive Him to be a Deus absconditus. Only Gloucester, in an instant of despair, accuses the gods of killing men like mischievous children killing flies (4.1.36-37), but he repents and divine justice is never called explicitly into question as it is in Greek tragedy or Job’s complaints.44 43

See 3.7.69; 3.6.5 (the goodness of Gloucester will be strangely rewarded); 5.2.2 and 5.3.231. 44 In Euripides’ Herakles Zeus is accused of being “a deaf god or even an unjust god”; line 348 in the Greek text [just before the Chorus]. Interesting parallels between Lear and Job have been suggested by Nevo 1972, Chapter VIII, and Pack 1991, p. 251-76. The famous ending of Tess of the d’Urbervilles—“The President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess”—recalls

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What is certain is that King Lear contains no specific allusions to an afterlife beyond the present terrestrial life. This does not mean that the playwright did not think as a Christian. The play is rife with Biblical echoes, as my numerous footnotes to the play reveal. He was also undoubtedly attached to values that could be called humanistic, as distinguishing man from brutes. Animal images, with their overbearing presence in the play, qualify evil characters—Edmund, Goneril, Regan— as well as poor Tom, because he represents man “brought near to beast” (2.2.170). The evil characters die through “this judgment of the heavens” which “touches us not with pity” (5.3.206-07). If Cordelia’s death seems unbearable, it is precisely because she is more than “ a dog, a horse, a rat” (5.3.281). At the end of the play, the circle of the survivors who have manifested the values of loyalty, of respect for the natural and social bonds, courage and compassion gathers around Lear, whose guilt has been redeemed, and Cordelia, the innocent victim. It is not an image of decadence that we are faced with, but one of human dignity. The tragic effect proceeds from the extreme concentration of our attention on Lear in these last moments. He enters carrying in his arms his darling daughter whom he had rejected: the stage directions are clear about this, in the quarto as well as in the folio (5.3.256). Yet too many modern productions show him entering alone, with others carrying her body, when he is not made to drag it grotesquely behind himself. This is missing the image of inverted Pietà that is suggested here,45 or, if one prefers, the combined image of strength and weakness. This old man has killed the soldier who was hanging Cordelia and in Albany’s eyes, this “great decay” is still “old majesty” (5.3.272 and 274). The “chorus” already mentioned welcomes Lear’s entry as “ the promised end “(5.3.239), or rather its “image” (5.3.240)—a wonderful ambiguity. Gloucester, who has been haunted from the beginning by the prophesied decline of the world, had seen in the person of Lear himself an image of “ruined Nature,” announcing that “this great world / shall so wear out to naught” (4.6.133-34). But the promised “end” is also for the spectators the end of the tragedy. The limits of horror and suffering have been reached. The end will not be the Christian apocalypse, the end of time. According to Frank Kermode, it is possible to see in the tragedy the “successor of apocalypse,” but “when the end [of Lear] comes, it is not Gloucester’s “They kill us for their sport” (4.1.37). Before the tragic end, Hardy reunited heroine and the husband she had rejected and grants them one night of happiness amidst the ruins of Stonehenge: Lear experiences a similar brief period of happiness (5.3.8-19). 45 The suggestion has been made by Gardner 1962, 26.

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only more appalling than anybody expected, but a mere image of that horror, not the thing itself. The end is now a matter of immanence; tragedy assumes the figurations of apocalypse, of death and judgement, heaven and hell; but the world goes forward in the hands of exhausted survivors” (Kermode 1967, 82-83). Yet the fearful ending can also be secretly desired in King Lear, although not in that Age of Reason in which, from Nahum Tate to Johnson, the world tried to forget that life was tragic. Desired by the spectator, not through a fascination for the macabre, which has always existed, nor, as Nietzsche thought, through the union between the Dionysiac and the Apollonian46: Apollo’s light does not shine on this gloomy scene. Desired because death, which is the end of suffering, also proves to be the “end” of love, as its fulfilment. In a manner different from the ends of Romeo and Juliet, Othello or Antony and Cleopatra (Ellrodt 1998, 424-28), the intimate union between Eros and Thanatos is effected in Lear: the suffering hero is not aware of it, but the spectator can feel it if the performance allows for it to be expressed. Freud’s interpretation in his essay, “The Theme of the Three Caskets,” is well known: “Lear carries Cordelia’s dead body on to the stage. Cordelia is Death. If we reverse the situation it becomes intelligible and familiar to us. She is the Death-goddess who, like the Valkyrie in German mythology, carries away the dead hero from the battlefield. Eternal wisdom, clothed in the primaeval myth, bids the old man renounce love, choose death and make friends with the necessity of dying” (Freud 1953, 301). Yet Lear, through a series of illusions—the feather that quivers on her lips, the murmur that he thinks he hears, shows his absolute refusal to accept that Cordelia be gone “for ever” (5.3.245), until his very last call “Look there!” (5.3.286). The characters present on stage, meanwhile, do not doubt her death for one minute, and for the spectator to doubt it would be to exchange tragic emotion for a vulgar form of melodramatic suspense. Lear’s illusion must be obvious; the spectator does not fall prey to it, but he does not share his despair either. On the stage he sees, according to Freud, the “old man yearn for the love of woman,” while only “the silent Goddess of Death will take him into her arms.” But he also sees the initial group gather again: the king and his three daughters, summoned by him to declare their love. It is for this reason that the playwright has the corpses of Goneril and Regan brought on stage a few moments before. The tragic justice, which always strikes the culprit, has done its work. The 46 The Birth of Tragedy. One finds, nevertheless, in Lear, “this direct and powerful manner.”

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inescapable tragic injustice has struck the innocent, but must it cause its despair? Cordelia’s lips are mute forever, but they no longer have to assert the constancy of a mutual love that is now certain. Deep down, we welcome her sacrifice and Lear’s death with moral and aesthetic consent: from the initial division to the union in death, the “wheel has come full circle,” the catharsis is accomplished. The actors and interpreters of King Lear, on the stage, on the screen, and in contemporary criticism, often leave us on an impression of horror, present and to come. Performed or read with full respect for its complexity and paradoxes, this darkest of Shakespearean tragedies does not contradict the mitigated optimism of Marek Halter and Paul Ricœur: “Radical as evil might be—and Auschwitz has shown this !—, goodness is more deeply engrained than evil in the hearts of men.”47

Bibliography Alamichel, Marie-Françoise. 1992. “Lawamon et Shakespeare: de Leir à Lear,” Études Anglaises, 45. Bloom, E.A., ed. 1964. Shakespeare 1564-1694, Providence: Brown University Press. Bonnefoy, Yves, trans. and ed. 1978. Hamlet and King Lear, Paris: Gallimard. Burke, Peter. 1969. The Renaissance Sense of the Past, London: Arnold. Calderwood, James L. 1986. “Creative Uncreation in King Lear”, Shakespeare Quarterly, 37. Campbell, Lily. 1930. Shakespeare’s Tragic Heroes: Slaves of Passion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cannon, Charles D. ed. 1975. A Warning for Fair Women (anonymous, published in 1599). The Hague-Paris: Mouton. Cave, Terence. 1990. Recognitions: A Study of Poetics. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Cohen, Walter. 1980. “King Lear and the Social Dimensions of Tragic Form” in H. R. Gawin, ed., Shakespeare: Contemporary Critical Approaches. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Colie, Rosalie. 1974. Shakespeare’s Living Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cunningham, J. V. 1951. Woe or Wonder: The Emotional Effect of Shakespearean Tragedy. Denver: University of Denver Press.

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Paul Ricoeur on the film Les Justes, Le Monde, 8 December, 1994.

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Danby, John. 1949. Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature: A Study of King Lear, London: Faber & Faber. Déprats. Jean-Michel and Gisèle Venet trans. and eds. 2002. Shakespeare’s Tragedies, vol. II, Paris: Gallimard. Dollimore, Jonathan. 1984. Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Doob, Penelope. 1974. Nebuchadnezzar’s Children: Conventions of Madness in Middle English Literature. New Haven: Yale University Press. Ecco, Umberto. 1990. Les Limites de l’interprétation, Paris: Grasset. Edwards, Philip. 1968. Shakespeare and the Confines of Art. London: Methuen, 1968. Ellrodt, Robert. 1960. Poètes métaphysiques anglais. 3 vol., Paris: Corti. —. 1998. “De Sappho à Shakespeare: Essai sur l’amour et la mort” in L’Europe de la Renaissance. Essays in Honour of Marie-Thérèse Jones-Davies, Paris, Touzot. —. 1994. Délire et lucidité dans Le Roi Lear”, op cit., 3. —. 1993. King Lear, Paris: Gallimard, collection “Folio theatre”, 22. Foakes, R. A. 1993. “Hamlet Versus Lear” in Cultural Politics and Shakespeare’s Art, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1961/1976. Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, Paris: Gallimard, coll “Tel.” Fraser, Russell A. 1962. Shakespeare’s Poetics in Relation to King Lear, London: Routledge. Freud, Sigmund. 1953. “The Theme of the Three Caskets”, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, James Strachey, ed., London: The Hogarth Press, Vol. XI. Gardner, Helen. 1962. King Lear, London, Athlone Press. Gide, André. 1954. Journal 1939-1949, Paris: Gallimard. Grivelet, Michel. 1960. “La Critique dramatique française devant Shakespeare”, Shakespeare en France, Études Anglaises 13, N°2. Halpern, Richard. 1991. The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Hawkes, Terence, ed. 1959. Coleridge on Shakespeare. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Heinemann, Margot. 1992. “‘Demystifying the Mystery of State’: King Lear and the World Upside Down”, Shakespeare Survey, 44. Holderness, Graham Nick Potter and John Turner, eds. 1988. Shakespeare: the Play of History, Basingstoke: Macmillan.

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Hornstein, L. H. 1964. “King Robert of Sicily: Analogues and Origins”, PMLA 79. Kermode, Frank. 1967. A Sense of an Ending, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kronenfeld, Judy. 199. “So distribution should undo excess…”, English Literary History 59. Laroque, François. 1988. Shakespeare et la fête, Paris: PUF. Massin, Jean. 1969. William Shakespeare in Oeuvres Complètes, ed., vol. XII, Paris: Club Français du Livre. Mayoux, Jean-Jacques, 1982. William Shakespeare, Paris: Aubier. McAlindon, Thomas, Shakespeare’s Tragic Cosmos, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991; Miola, Robert S. 1992. Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy: The Influence of Seneca. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Myrick, Kenneth. 1964. “Christian Pessimism in King Lear” in Shakespeare 1564-1964. Ed. E. A. Bloom, Providence: Brown UP, 5570. Nevo, Ruth. 1972. Tragic Form in Shakespeare. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Orwell, George. 1953. “Lear, Tolstoy, and the Fool”, Shooting an Elephant. London: Seeker & Warburgh. Pack, Robert. 1991. The Long View: Essays on the Discipline of Hope and Poetic Craft. Amherst: Massachusetts University Press. Panofsky Erwin. 1962. Studies in Iconology, New York: Harper & Row. Righter [Barton], Anne. 1967. Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play, London: Chatto & Windus, and Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Rosenberg, Marvin. 1972. The Masks of King Lear, Berkeley: University of California Press. Venet, Gisèle. 1985/2002. Temps et Vision Tragique: Shakespeare et ses Contemporains, Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne Nouvelle. Weil, Simone. 1948. La Pesanteur et la grâce, Paris: Plon. Zitner, S. P. 1974. “King Lear and its Language” in Some Facets of King Lear. Essays in Prismatic Criticism. Eds. R. Colie and F. T. Flahiff, London, 3-22.

I. LANGUAGE AND STYLE

“CRAFT AND CORRUPT ENDS IN PLAINNESS?” DRAMATIC RHETORIC IN KING LEAR IFIG COCOUAL

Starting with a close reading of the initial words of Cordelia, whose “nothing” is often glossed over or mistaken for its referent, this essay tries to unravel the threads of King Lear’s ambivalent metalinguistic discourse. Against a Renaissance background in which Catholic and Puritan conceptions of rhetoric are at strife, the play suggests that verbal plainness can be devious (in more senses than one), that anti-rhetorical discourse can be rhetoric's best weapon, that the meaning of words—not given, but constructed through negotiation—is tied up with power, that literalness can be complex or obscure or even dangerous, and that preposterousness can make a lot of (political) sense. Rhetoric in the Renaissance is inextricably embedded in other discourses— of logic and politics, of theology, and the ideology of sexual difference (Parker 1985, 70).

“Nothing, my lord” (1.1.87)—at the semantic core of the play lies an intriguing void, a thunderous silence that triggers off a political and hermeneutic storm as well as a discursive and poetic outburst: Thy truth then be thy dower, For by the sacred radiance of the sun, The mysteries of Hecate and the night, By all the operation of the orbs From whom we do exist and cease to be, Here I disclaim all my paternal care, Propinquity and property of blood, And as a stranger to my heart and me Hold thee from this for ever. The barbarous Scythian, Or he that makes his generation messes To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom Be as well neighboured, pitied and relieved, As thou my sometime daughter. (1.1.109-21)

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With its [p] alliteration and recurring plosives (l.115), Lear’s grand conjuring of cosmic powers, his hyperbolical denial of kinship, is akin to a verbal storm—a storm that is made literal later on in the play, as if words had a kind of dangerous performative power, as though images in King Lear had a parlous bent for materializing. As shown by the King's reaction, plot-wise, quite a lot rides on Cordelia’s “Nothing”—a word, incidentally, which has also echoed through various readings and overall interpretations of a play that has often been seen as a study in nihilism. In Stanley Cavell's analysis, “it is one thing, and tragic, that we can learn only through suffering. It is something else that we have nothing to learn from it” (Cavell 2002, 340); though (or precisely because) characters might not have a lot to learn from the dramatic action, there is plenty for readers and spectators to think about in King Lear—starting, as suggested by our initial reference to Cordelia's “Nothing,” with its very linguistic fabric: “[T]he language of King Lear [...] is not only the vehicle for King Lear's questions, but one of them” (Zitner 1974, 3). Language is indeed one of the play's vital opening questions: “What shall Cordelia speak? Love, and be silent.” (1.1.62)—now, easy though it may be for both readers and spectators to sympathize with or even root for Lear's youngest daughter while romanticizing her dramatic refusal to play the court's rhetorical game in the play’s opening scene,1 her first asides and public utterances alike are much more complex than the fairy-tale quality of the play's initial oppositions might lead us to assume. Incidentally, even the most sophisticated readings of the play sometimes go so far as to take Cordelia’s “Nothing” literally or, somewhat casually, to mistake the word for its referent, somehow premising that Cordelia actually says nothing; in S. P. Zitner’s reading, for example, “By asking for words only, and by making words the test and matter of his own words, [...] Lear makes Cordelia’s silence inevitable and just” (Zitner 1974, 8). Like several others, this elegant reading seems to somewhat disregard the words that Cordelia does say—in effect silencing her through the logic of critical metadiscourse. This essay, which deals with the ambiguities of the play's language and with the ambivalence of its metadiscourse, starts with a close reading of Cordelia’s initial words—an analysis that takes us beyond the psychological-diegetic level and on to the linguistic-discursive plane where much of what makes Shakespeare Shakespeare happens: “Shakespeare’s language is more eventful than anybody else's appears to be, [it] all but bursts with activity generated by 1

For Terry Eagleton, “Within this stage-managed charade, where ‘all’ has been so radically devalued, Cordelia's murmured ‘Nothing’ is the only sound currency” (Eagleton 1993, 85).

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incidental relationships among its elements” (Booth 1997, 5-6); Cordelia's “Nothing” (1.1.87) and her “bond” (1.1.93) are just such elements which set up an intricate web of textual and intertextual relationships. Starting with Cordelia's “Nothing,” then, this reading tries to unravel the threads of the play's metalinguistic discourse, to range over the space of its metalinguistic writing against a theoretical Renaissance background where “[t]he dramatically intense question [...] is whether to use language morally or esthetically. What is it that matters most—language's faithfulness, or its forcefulness? [...] This is a recurring dilemma in a Renaissance that is haunted by Jerome's celebrated dream of being chastised by Jesus for being a Ciceronian rather than a Christian.”2 Through this textual jaunt across the court and heath of King Lear, it will possibly appear that plainness can be devious (in more senses than one), that anti-rhetorical discourse can be highly rhetorical, that the meaning of words is not given but constructed through negotiation, that the literal can be complex or obscure or even dangerous, that disguise is not necessarily deceptive, that preposterousness can make a lot of sense— and that incomprehensibility can lead to a better understanding. The plot, of course, seems to foster a kind of pro-Cordelia, proplainness bias, thus apparently investing her rejection of her sisters' flowery rhetoric with quasi-authorial authority; for starters, Lear's demand that his daughters show off how much they love him (1.1.51) is often regarded as a dead giveaway, a symptom of oncoming dementia–an impression that is strengthened by Kent's prescient comment on Lear's decision to disown Cordelia (“be Kent unmannerly / When Lear is mad.” 1.1.146-147). Besides, “in the tragedies from Julius Caesar (1599) onward, the obviously 'rhetorical' speakers are usually either fools or villains” (Mc Donald 44-5); Goneril and Regan, who duly and elaborately say what their father wants to hear, are indeed subsequently shown to be arch-manipulators, übervillains, heartless monsters, while Cordelia walks off with the fairy-tale king who can see beyond appearances and through the pretence. And yet, even from a diegetic-psychological standpoint, things are a little more complicated, which makes it harder to see Cordelia's antirhetorical discourse as authorial or authoritative. For one thing, Lear's 2

“La question qui se pose [...], avec une intensité dramatique [...], concerne le bon ou le bel usage que l'on peut faire du langage. Qu'est-ce qui importe avant tout, la fidélité du langage ou sa force? [...] Ce dilemme traverse toute la Renaissance, hantée par le rêve fameux de saint Jérôme, réprimandé par Jésus-Christ: 'Tu n'es pas chrétien; tu es cicéronien.'” (Timmermans 1999, 97, my translation).

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initial behaviour may not be that crazy after all; his decision to make things public is a way to try and prevent “future strife” (1.1.43), while his demand that his daughters play a part in his own piece of courtly drama might not come across as all that preposterous in a “role-dominated [society]” (Hawkes 1995, 47) where the private is made quite public and the personal very political (and theatrical). Meanwhile, Goneril and Regan can be regarded as “two of the strongest women characters Shakespeare created, [who] rarely receive their critical due” (Foakes 1997, 42); their refusal to let Lear keep a large retinue has even been vindicated in some productions of the play which challenge the alignment of the spectator with Lear and Kent's point of view. As regards Cordelia, her response to Lear's request has not always elicited praise from readers and critics (from Coleridge, who found “some little faulty admixture of pride and sullenness in Cordelia's ‘Nothing’” Foakes 1993, 47), to Stephen Booth, who points to her “smug expressions of self-righteousness” in his reading of the first scene (Booth 1983, 63). Her bluntness, it is worth noting, was anything but an ethical yardstick since, according to the views of the Elizabethan rhetorician George Puttenham, for example, “under-ornamenting is even more ['unsavoury'] and uncivilized than over-ornamenting” (Platt 1999, 291). Besides, Cordelia is far from a cardboard character and her role in the plot is more ambiguous than her saint-like image may suggest. Insofar as the play, unlike its “sources,” seems to shroud a lot of the characters' motives in mystery (hence Tolstoy's criticism of the play and proclaimed preference for King Leir), suspicious or skeptical readers might wonder about Cordelia's suppressed or submerged motivations.3 As for her solemn promise that she “shall never marry like [her] sisters / To love [her] father all.” (1.1.103-04), it is broken by the plot: That, however, is exactly what comes to pass. She accepts the King of France as her husband, but audiences never again see them together [...] Unlike her sisters, Cordelia refuses to give Lear the words he wants to hear, refuses to tell him she loves him “all,” but she gives her life for him. In death, she gives Lear “all,” not “half,” her love. Audiences and readers alike mourn for her not as France’s wife but as the most loving and most loved of her father’s daughters (Mcguire 1994, 101). 3

W.W. Greg for one raises questions about the timing of, and real reason for Cordelia and her husband's invasion (in Muir xxx). There are other intriguing plot elements, obscurities and contradictions (see Muir xxx and xlv-xlvi), which psychological sleuths or detective critics might be interested in; the point here is that the plot does not automatically endorse Cordelia's (relative) silence and behaviour—which might go some way toward making us take her anti-rhetorical discourse with a pinch (or a ladle) of salt.

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In terms of discourse and point of view, Cordelia's very first words are spoken as an aside (1.1.62), which seemingly amounts to a kind of Hamlet effect, a captatio benevolentiae move aligning the audience with the isolated character who shares their reflections on highly public proceedings. However, her inceptive question (“What shall Cordelia speak?” 1.1.62) is not so much a way of making for spectators’ involvement as a hypophora, a figure of speech where the speaker asks and answers their own question (“Love, and be silent,” 1.1.62). Cordelia thus seals off discursive space, and the closure effect is here enhanced by the semantics of the final word “silence.” Now, of course the idea that truth should be plain or silent was a Renaissance commonplace (see Andresen), which suggests another construction of Cordelia's initial aside—not so much an anguished, clueless question as a search for arguments, a dramatic instance of rhetorical inventio at work. Incidentally, though he might disagree on who exactly could be casting about for topoi, Stephen Greenblatt has a similar take on Cordelia's opening words, which, he writes, […] have an odd internal distance, as if they were spoken by another, and more precisely as if the author outside the play were asking himself what he should have his character say and deciding that she should say nothing [...] But this attempt to remain silent—to surpass her sisters and satisfy her father by refusing to represent her love—is rejected. (Greenblatt 1993, 176)

Cordelia's advertized reluctance to speak might also be seen as a literalization, an implementation of Goneril's inexpressibility topos (“I do love you more than word can wield the matter [...] A love that makes breath poor and speech unable,” 1.1.55-60)—a linkage which, in Anne Barton's view, is ironical: The irony lies in the fact that [Cordelia's] broken statements [“Love, and be silent,” 1.1.62 and “I am sure my love's / More ponderous than my tongue,” 1.1.77-78] only echo what her sisters have so fulsomely been saying. In Cordelia's case, the declaration of the inadequacy of language happens to express a true state of feeling. Her love for her father does indeed make her breath poor and speech unable; it is not a mere rhetorical flourish. But how can one tell the difference between sincerity and pretence, especially when both employ the same disclaimers? (Barton 1971, 25)

How indeed, given that the speaker's character, in oratory as in drama, may very well be a discursive construct? In Aristotle's Rhetoric, for

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instance, “character” is not so much something that exists outside of, or prior to, discourse as something that is created by and through discourse: Of those proofs that are furnished through the speech there are three kinds. Some reside in the character [ETHOS] of the speaker, some in a certain disposition of the audience [PATHOS] and some in the speech itself [LOGOS], through its demonstrating or seeming to demonstrate. Proofs from character are produced, whenever the speech is given in such a way as to render the speaker worthy of credence—we more readily and sooner believe reasonable men on all matters in general and absolutely on questions where precision is impossible and two views can be maintained. But this effect too must come about in the course of the speech, not through the speaker's being believed in advance to be of a certain character. [...] we do not exclude the speaker's reasonable image from the art [of rhetoric] as contributing nothing to persuasiveness. On the contrary, character contains almost the strongest proof of all, so to speak. (Aristotle 1356a, 74-5)

Undecidability (feelings-wise) thus seems to be the order of the day. This means that we should be cautious about so-called critical insights into a character's “true state of feeling.” Discourse, after all, is not just a reflection—however flawed or cryptic—of characters' genuine, innermost thoughts and feelings, but also the site of, and a tool in, a power struggle. So, if we accordingly focus on speech acts (on what Cordelia does with words) instead of what she might really feel,4 we may come to see her censure of rhetoric as just another rhetorical gambit among others. If Goneril's “topic of inexpressibility” was, Frank Kermode tells us, “standard fare in the eulogy of kings and emperors” (Kermode 2001, 185), Regan […] follows with the well-established topical formula that Ernst Curtius calls “outdoing,” or the “cedat-formula”—“let her yield”: her sister has expressed her sentiments quite well, “Only she comes too short” [1.1.72]. Cordelia, coming third in order of praising, would have a hard task, but shuns this competition, meaning nevertheless to outdo her sisters by exposing their rhetorical falsity (Kermode 2001, 185).

“I want that glib and oily art / To speak and purpose not—since what I well intend, / I'll do't before I speak” (1.1.226-228). Cordelia's is a position 4

“Speech-act analysis enables us to take (imaginary) psychical acts into account– these acts effect a change in the characters' relationships—thus it is unnecessary to look for causal psychology behind the words” (Ubersfeld 1996, 97, my translation).

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of discursive and symbolic power, since she makes her sisters' words and style the object or target of her own discourse; the seemingly self-effacing metadiscursive stance can be devastatingly effective, as when Antony tells the people of Rome that he is “no orator, as Brutus is, / But, as [they] know [him] all, a plain blunt man” (Julius Caesar, 3.2.210-11)—a denial of rhetoric that may very well be rhetoric's lethal weapon, since “a figure is [...] most effectual when it appears in disguise” (Longinus, 17.1). Cordelia's metadiscourse could also be seen as part of a negotiation about the legitimate mode of address5 that advertizes her own, plain delivery. This is just another style, for in King Lear “plainness can also be a mere style” (Zitner 1974, 8), and Cordelia's discourse is closer to the fashionable “rhetoric degree zero” of Senecans and Atticists (see Magnien) than to her sisters' more Ciceronian or Asiatic brand of rhetoric. Plainness and reluctance, the censure and apparent absence of rhetoric, can thus be considered just another style, another rhetorical strategy. In effect, Cordelia's gambit turns the rhetorical contest into a twofold negotiation: a metadiscursive or rhetorical one that revolves around the proper or more legitimate style, and a metalinguistic or semantic one that turns around the question of the very meaning(s) of such keywords as “love” and “bond.” In her critique of the ornate, hyperbolical rhetoric of her sisters, Lear's youngest daughter joins a long series of ethically aware women speakers in Shakespeare, from the (French) princesses in Love's Labour's Lost6 and Henry V7 to Juliet, for whom “Conceit, more rich in matter than in words, / Brags of his substance, not of ornament. / They are but beggars that can count their worth” (Romeo and Juliet, 2.5.30-32). Some critics accordingly portray Cordelia as a Juliet-like rebel against her father's world and universe of discourse: Lear's disillusioning “madness” expels him into a licensed space outside the perceptual framework contrived by class society [...] It is the space fleetingly sprung open in the play's first scene by Cordelia, whose rebellious refusal to express her feelings in the language of her father's 5

In Pierre Bourdieu's analysis, “the definition of the symbolic relation of power which is constitutive of the market can be the subject of negotiation and [...] the market can be manipulated, within certain limits, by a metadiscourse concerning the conditions of use of discourse” (Bourdieu 1991, 66, translation by G. Raymond and M. Adamson). 6 “[M]y beauty, though but mean, / Needs not the painted flourish of your praise. / Beauty is bought by judgement of the eye, / Not uttered by base sale of chapmen's tongues.” (2.1.13-16). 7 “O bon dieu! Les langues des hommes sont pleines de tromperies” (5.2.116-17).

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world summons the might of the unspoken to reject that world's coercive, quantifying definitions of love and relationships [...] it is the space continually inhabited by the classless and timeless figure of the Fool, with whom Cordelia is subliminally identified at the end (Ryan 1993b, 79).

Cordelia's discursive practice may have something in common with the Fool's, as we see below, but far from rejecting the “quantifying definitions of love and relationships” of her father’s world, she actually shares them—indeed, Juliet's last words above alert us to a significant difference between hers and Cordelia's discourse: Goneril and Regan's sister does know how to “count,” as she intends to divvy up her love: “Haply when I shall wed, / That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry / Half my love with him, half my care and duty” (1.1.100-102). In Stephen Booth's close reading of this passage, When Cordelia's turn comes to bid in Lear's auction, she voices our contempt for the oily speeches of Goneril and Regan and for the premises behind the whole charade. We are relieved to hear the bubbles pricked, but Cordelia's premises do not present a clear antithesis to the faults in Lear's. Her ideas are only a variation on Lear's; she too thinks of affection as a quantitative, portionable medium of exchange for goods and services (Booth 1983, 63).

The plot shows how vain Cordelia's desire to split her love into two equal halves is, since she ends up giving her father all her love (and her life to boot). Her rejection of hyperbolical praise also reveals a desire for literality as well as a search for the right meaning of words—a search which the play shows is bound to fail, for meaning seems to be the product of violence, the result of an imposition, the outcome of a power struggle— as the dispute over love testifies to. “I love your majesty / According to my bond, no more nor less” (1.1.92-93)—the keyword “love,” whose meaning Lear wants a theatrical and rhetorical demonstration of, is itself ambiguous: Primarily, the word “love” refers to the general area of “affection,” so that “to love” usually means, then as now, “to have affection for” something. But the secondary usage of “love” (deriving from Old English lofian, “praise,” as opposed to lufian, the basis of the primary one) pointed towards a general area of meaning characterized by the notion of “assessment,” and could thus produce a meaning such as 'to appraise, estimate, or state the price or value of' something. [...] [T]he possibility of pun exists which, once activated, immediately situates “love” on the level of calculation, and thus virtually reverses, and so betrays, its meaning (Hawkes 1995, 7).

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“The literal only seems single in meaning” (Platt 1999, 293) and the virtual syllepsis8 inscribed in all words makes meaning a matter of différance. This passage reads like a re-interpretation of the word love—a negotiation which Booth sees as paradoxical: “Cordelia does and does not contradict herself; her absolute allegiance (“no more nor less” 1.1.93) to relativism (“half my love” l.102) is final, definitive, absolute—but only relative to the contextually, and thus tenuously, determined meaning of words” (Booth 1983, 24-5). Context is all, indeed, and Cordelia's definition of “love” is underpinned (or undermined) by “bond” (1.1.93), another slippery word, a legal term that appears as a bulwark against arbitrary royal power.9 Her “scrupulous precision” (Eagleton 1993, 85), however, carries less “'positive”' overtones and can be seen as a symptom of a Puritan attitude to language and rhetoric.10 The “bond” that underwrites her definition of love also figures prominently in the trial scene of The Merchant of Venice (4.1) where Portia, after her famous speech on mercy, tries to gainsay Shylock's literal, Puritan interpretation of the text that binds him to Antonio (4.1.199-259). Faced with Shylock's obsession with the literal, “obvious” meaning of the bond, the crossdressed heroine moves on to literal overkill, which reverses the meaning previously ascribed to the bond—thereby turning the tables on her legal and rhetorical opponent (4.1.296-328). What Shylock took to be an obvious, “given,” literal meaning was in fact just one possible interpretation—or construction—of the text, and “in extending Shylock’s literalism ad absurdum, Portia makes a mockery of plainness. [...] In Merchant, singleness—in language, interpretation, and thought—is punished as it usually is in Shakespeare” (Platt 1999, 293). In terms of plot and character, the Shylock figure in King Lear is the

8

A figure of speech whereby one word is used in two senses (generally a literal and a figurative meaning) at the same time (as opposed to the syntactic syllepsis, which is more of a zeugma). 9 For Kathleen McLuskie, Cordelia's “legal language suggests a preference for a limited, contractual relationship [...] The conflict between the contractual model and the patriarchal model of subjects' obligations to their king was at issue in contemporary political theory and Cordelia's words here introduce a similar conflict into the question of obligations within the family” (Mc Luskie 1996, 104). 10 “The Puritan battle-cry of 'plain speech' [...] represented not merely a stylistic preference but a cognitive and hermeneutic absolute. Naked language is synonymous with nuda veritas, unadorned truth, and is sacrosanct not only in all worldly discourse but [also] in the (severely literal) reading of the Bible” (Elam 1984, 301). Needless to say, not every single Protestant favoured plain style and literal interpretation all the time (see Timmermans 1999, 97-8.)

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eponymous king, but Cordelia and Shylock's insistence on bonds11 reveals that they share a literalism that is often made dubious in Shakespeare’s plays, both as a linguistic chimera and as the sign (or symptom) of a Puritan attitude to language and rhetoric. Fittingly, then, Cordelia's refusal to play the rhetorical game amounts to denying playing a part, to an “antitheatrical gesture” (Greenblatt 1993, 169). But even that gesture is theatrical, or theatricalized. Cordelia willy nilly performs on the court stage, since “Lear’s paranoid drama [...] fashions a verbal nexus to which there is no ‘outside,’ double-binding Cordelia so that to play her role or refuse it, speak or keep silent, become equally falsifying” (Eagleton 1993, 85). There is no escaping theatricality, then, and in dramatic terms Cordelia’s reluctant performance, or performance of reluctance, steals her father’s show and her sisters' thunder (though not their shares of the kingdom). The case of Kent provides another, possibly less charged view of the unavoidability of rhetoric and theatre. His plainness, like Cordelia's, is a role he consciously plays (“To plainness honour's bound / When majesty falls to folly.” 1.1.149-50). Again, easy though it may be to root for plainspoken, straightforward speakers such as Kent or Cordelia, who appear to speak truth to power, verbal plainness in Shakespeare is often exposed as a construct—one rhetorical strategy among others. Cornwall's reply to Kent's provocative assertion that “'tis [his] occupation to be plain” (2.2.90) offers a strategic reading of plainness: This is some fellow Who, having been praised for bluntness, doth affect A saucy roughness and constrains the garb Quite from his nature. He cannot flatter, he; An honest mind and plain, he must speak truth; An they will take it, so; if not, he's plain. These kind of knaves I know, which in this plainness Harbour more craft and more corrupter ends 11

Of course, Shylock's bond is a written, material contract, while Cordelia's must be immaterial, but her bond can be interpreted as a conventional, socially—if not legally-binding one—as shown by other references to “the bond [...] 'twixt son and father” (1.2.108-109) and the “bond of childhood” (2.2.367) in the play. That Cordelia's insistence on her bond is not so much an old-world/aristocratic as a protocapitalist/Puritan one is suggested by her critique of rhetoric and attempt at literal accuracy. Be that as it may, the (material or immaterial) “bonds” that both characters put so much stock in are precisely what ''disgraced'' words in the analysis of one Feste (Twelfth Night, 3.1.20).

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Dramatic Rhetoric in King Lear Than twenty silly-ducking observants That stretch their duties nicely. (2.2.93-102)

Obviously enough, Cornwall is not one of the “good guys,” his is not an axiologically privileged voice or perspective in the play, but this reading of plainness is seen as valid by S. P. Zitner, for instance, for whom “Cornwall's rejection of ‘plainness,’ while it is unjust to Kent, is finally just; language is a garb, not the thing itself. Kent can only respond that courtly verbal niceties are a worse cloak still” (Zitner 1974, 9).12 The sartorial image (the allusion to the “garb,” 2.2.95) is relevant in a dramatic-ironic way, since Kent's disguise, his sartorial complexity (which only the audience know about), makes his plainness iffy. Bluntness is just one of his styles or roles, after all, one “dialect” (2.2.107) among the “other accents” that he borrows to “diffuse” his speech (1.4.1-2) or confuse his listeners (“What mean'st thou by this?” Cornwall asks, 2.2.106)—a construct, not a given. In this respect, R. A. Foakes's introductory word of caution is useful: “the play generally favours directness and simplicity, but the temptation to align plain speaking with goodness and rhetoric with flattery or hypocrisy should be resisted, for Kent's bluntness in 2.2 earns him the stocks, and arguably does Lear a disservice” (Foakes 1997, 9). Kent, though, is so obviously one of the “good guys” that trying to make him an (ever so slightly) ambiguous character must be beside the point—what is interesting, however, is that he may well be an instance of the play's ambivalent defence of rhetoric.13 Kent's disguise goes hand in hand with a verbal mask—a new language for a new (theatrical) self. If his plainness is a disguise, just as Poor Tom's nakedness is a kind of disguise, it could be then that “the entire self [is] rhetorical”14—as well as theatrical. Which is not necessarily cause for lament, since rhetoric's ambivalence is the order of the day; together with the fool, Kent/Caius and Edgar/Poor Tom make up a polyphonic trio that exposes, parodies and possibly subverts the politically dominant characters' discourse. Yet all are ambivalent characters: the fool has been 12

Incidentally, getting a “villain” to say something profound and deeply relevant may be an ironical way for the play to “diffuse” its own “speech” (1.4.1-2)— and/or to make spectatorly identification more fluid, and possibly less mystifying. 13 Shakespeare turns “the technique of disputatio in utramque partem [arguing on both sides of the question] on rhetoric itself, showing that the very art that taught him his ambivalence—and one so connected with drama—has an intrinsic doubleness to it” (Platt 1999, 294). 14 See Platt 289, where he discusses Puttenham's definition of Allegoria, or “the Courtier.”

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described as taunting Lear into more madness as he tries to lay bare the brutal facts of the king's new situation;15 Edgar's “cruel” game with his blind father has not gone unnoticed, and Kent's “behaviour works to prevent Lear from understanding his situation, rather than enabling him, as [he] desired in the opening scene, to 'see better'” (Foakes 1993, 186); he might even have to “share with the Fool any responsibility for hurrying Lear out of his wits” (Goldsmith 1974, 65). In his new rhetorical self as the disguised, subtly plain speaker, Kent has more than a little of the pharmakon-like ambivalence of Shakespearean folly about him—an ambivalence which, by the way, is also the ambivalence of rhetoric itself,16 Goneril's “medicine” (5.3.97) possibly referring to poison (as in the Quarto). Rhetoric, for all its duplicity in King Lear, is to be defended “not because it is natural [...] but because it is not natural. Rhetoric and fiction are necessary artifices that allow us to fashion ourselves and our cultures, transforming the raw and brutal into the ‘kind and gentle’ (Cicero). For Shakespeare, rhetoric is violent, artificial, and potentially distorting. Yet human experience would be brutal, bare, and amorphous without it” (Platt 1999, 294). Through a kind of reductio ad absurdum, the play displays what happens when literalization occurs; “Shakespeare's way with violence [...] is to literalize metaphors” (Hapgood 1991, 237), and the image of the lack of vision, for example, is made gruesomely literal in the case of Gloucester (3.7), who is betrayed by a purloined letter (3.5.10-12) and by his own son, Edmund, the master-communicator in the play, who writes, forges, and intercepts letters. In another twist on the idea that the literal kills, missives are shown to be lethal weapons in the play, as when Edmund's “note” (5.3.28), a set of stage directions meant to make the murder of Cordelia look like suicide, is to be interpreted literally by the Captain (“carry it so / As I have set it down,” 5.3.37-38), whose murderous deed is akin to an act of writing: “About it, and write 'happy' when thou'st done't” (5.3.36). As in Hamlet, the letter kills (say, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern), but what appears to be a lethal tool eventually eludes attempts at mastery when even Edmund, the “letter's master”17 in King Lear, is betrayed by a note (Goneril's miscarried love15 In Campbell's analysis, the Fool's “jests, far from mitigating his master's woes, intensify them by forcing the King to realize the depth of his folly” (cited in Goldsmith 1974, 65). 16 In Gorgias's Encomium of Helen, “The effect of speech upon the condition of the soul is comparable to the power of drugs over the nature of bodies” (cited in Platt 1999, 277). My emphasis. 17 Romeo and Juliet, 2.3.10.

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and-murder letter, which Edgar intercepts over Oswald's dead body, 4.6.251-72). Though it is often a harbinger of the violence, singleness and finality of death in Shakespeare, the letter is inherently twofold, possibly duplicitous, as shown by the antanaclasis in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, when Julia looks for “each letter [i.e alphabetical character] in the letter [i.e. epistle]” (1.2.120) that she has torn to pieces. Another form of antanaclasis (the use of identical signs with different meanings) is to be found in the echo linking Cordelia's “Nothing, my lord” (1.1.87) and Edmund's “Nothing, my lord” (1.2.32)—though maybe the difference in meaning or intended effect is illusory, and Cordelia uses a similar form of aposiopesis (the figure of reluctance which is supposed to make the listener want to hear more)—but in her case it backfires. Incidentally, aposiopesis is possibly the master device of inelocutio, which is […] a mise-en-scène of inarticulateness, made up of hesitations, digressions, omissions, self-interruptions, and the general fragmentation of the body of discourse accompanied by the frenzied dis- and re-orientation of the body tout court. [...] The kinds of awkward effects best designed to portray affects are themselves part of, perhaps the highest and most sophisticated part of, the rhetorical repertory. It is one of the more surprising features, but undoubtedly one of the greatest resources, of the figural repertoire, that at a certain point [...], the whole system of elocutio suddenly implodes or self-destructs in advocating modes of discursive disintegration, fragmentation, reticence, compression and opacity. The simulacrum, or simulatio, of the struggling speaker about to lose control of his own discourse, and perhaps of his thought processes, under the pressure of passion, is perhaps the highest achievement to which the rhetoric of pathos through ethos can aspire, since there is nothing so delicate and so difficult to get away with as an artfully constructed artlessness (Elam 1992, 151-2).

Although Cordelia's discourse does not feature all the components of what Elam dubs inelocutio, it is often (described or reported as) inarticulate, broken, reluctant: Kent Made she no verbal question? Gentleman Faith, once or twice she heaved the name of father Pantingly forth as if it pressed her heart; Cried 'Sisters! sisters! Shame of ladies! sisters! Kent! father! sisters! What, i' the storm? i' the night? Let pity not be believed!' There she shook

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The holy water from her heavenly eyes, And clamour mastered her; then away she started, To deal with grief alone. (4.3.25-33)

The paradoxical concept of inelocutio, however, may be even more relevant to the overall rhetoric of the play itself; indeed, if Shakespeare's plots can be regarded as “virtual mises-en-scène of the activity of tropes” (Parker, cited in Platt 1999, 291), it may well be that King Lear is a study in “discursive disintegration, fragmentation, reticence, compression and opacity” (Elam): “important speeches in King Lear seem at times to break off as if through [linguistic] inadequacy; others are brought up short by enforced silences” (Zitner 1974, 4-5) and “the language constantly strains meaning beyond its normal limits'', ''syntax is strained to the point of contortion,” while “characters express themselves so cryptically that they risk becoming incomprehensible” (Wells 2001, 53). Just as it is often paradoxically described as highly poetical despite a relative absence of “beauties,” of poetry that survives quotation out of context”18, the play's language (like Cordelia's) could be seen overall as highly rhetorical even though it does not include many purple patches. In fact, King Lear may be a study in inelocutio—and preposterousness, as when the Fool, who “disputes everything regarded as evident” (Kolakowski, in Kott 1967, 131) and turns common sense into nonsense,19 turns prophet: This is a brave night to cool a courtesan. I'll speak a prophecy ere I go: When priests are more in word than matter, When brewers mar their malt with water, When nobles are their tailors' tutors, No heretics burned but wenches' suitors; When every case in law is right No squire in debt, nor no poor knight; When slanders do not live in tongues, Nor cut-purses come not to throngs, When usurers tell their gold i' the field, And bawds and whores do churches build, Then shall the realm of Albion 18 W. Nowottny, cited in Wells 2001, 52. See also Kermode: “It is curious that this play, which it is surely impossible for anybody who cares about poetry to write on without some expressions of awe, should offer few of the local excitements to be found, say, in the narrower context of Measure for Measure” (Kermode 2001, 184). 19 For an idea of just how demystifying or even subversive this critique of the common sense of dominant discourse might be, see Bourdieu 2001, 192-93.

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Dramatic Rhetoric in King Lear Come to great confusion: Then comes the time, who lives to see't, That going shall be used with feet. This prophecy Merlin shall make, for I live before his time. (3.2.79-96)

Exit

As if Shakespeare's master-rhetoricians were bound to be misunderstood, as if their seemingly artless art was bound to be taken literally, their inelocutio rhetoric taken for a simple absence of elocutio, Lear's Fool has often been taken for—well, a fool: “So well does [the Fool] disguise his thoughtful comments in the veiled language of imagery and old songs that he has misled some observers into actually taking him for a fool” (i.e. “a naive natural or even half-wit boy”), while the critical consensus is that Feste and Touchstone, for example, are “clever artificial fools, not naturals” (Goldsmith 1974, 60-3). This preposterous political prophecy of Lear's Fool's has often driven editors to the brink of madness—so much so that several of them have felt the need to reorder the lines (in various ways, depending on the dominant ideology of the day) in order to make sense of them.20 A political kind of sense-making, since Merlinesque prophecies were notoriously ambiguous, unhinged, dangerous political texts which were often said to have brought about the events they predicted in the seventeenth century.21 If the Fool in 3.2 becomes a choric figure that breaks out of the fictional frame, as several critics have pointed out, the Merlin reference also makes him a writer figure, Merlin being “as powerful an image of the writer as the Middle Ages produced and, indeed, an embodiment of the principle of writing itself” (Bloch 2). “Buffoonery is not only a philosophy, it is also a kind of theatre” (Kott 1967, 130)—and maybe the Fool is a subversive, prophetic authorial figure within the play. His sudden exit, and the mystery his disappearance or death is wrapped in, also testify to his ability, like Feste in Twelfth Night, to resist “narrative recuperation” and be “outside of representation and vigilance,” thus demonstrating the power of theatricality to constitute “a site of evasion from subjectification” (Coddon 1993, 312-6). Indeed, Lear's elusive, specular fool keeps making other characters (Kent, Lear) play his part, projecting his supposedly stable social identity onto others: “Dost thou call me fool, boy?” (1.4.141)...

20

See Egan 117-8. For a close reading of the prophecy, see Booth 1983, 50-2. In Thomas Hobbes's analysis of the Civil War, for example, prophecy was “many times the principal cause of the event foretold” (cited in Hill 1991, 91).

21

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Another hint that the fool is an authorial figure, and that the preposterous prophecy is akin to a play within the play,22 is the concluding “preposterous” or hysteron proteron (logical or chronological inversion): “This prophecy Merlin shall make, for I live before his time” (3.2.95-96). As a matter of fact (or of interpretation), Lear's story too is characterized by a form of hysteron proteron, for it “begins where most stories end'” (Kettle 1993, 17), and the play “persists in resuming completed incidents and relapsing into past circumstances” while “Shakespeare presents the culminating events of his story [Lear entering with Cordelia in his arms] after his play is over” (Booth 1983, 29 and 23) . In the first act, the Fool even gives a capsule summary of the plot that recalls Puttenham's own proverbial example of a “preposterous”: “May not an ass know when the cart draws the horse?” (1.4.215-16). Now the “preposterous,” or “hysteron proteron,” was not an innocuous device—it was considered a form of linguistic pathology, or even as a subversion of linearity which questioned social and gender hierarchies, the teleological Tudor myth, as well as the very representational ability of language in an Elizabethan-Jacobean context whose discursive and social orders were based on linearity and priority.23 In the complex, self-reflexive theatrical creation of Dover Cliff by Edgar (4.6), another apparently preposterous inversion occurs, and the (fictional) natural world appears as a rhetorical construct, language being performative rather than representative in such sophistic rhetoric. Edgar shows that language is not (just) a representational tool: “meaning is not a representation, nor is language a tool—it is a part of the world we live in, if not that world itself” (Rastier 2001, 131).24 An idea (and a rhetorical practice) that is potentially subversive, when the gods, just like Dover Cliff, appear as a part of Edgar's show—that is, as discursive constructs (“Think that the clearest gods, who make them honours / Of men's impossibilities, have preserved thee.” 4.6.73-74). Though the play leaves little room for any convincing use of the concept of anagnorisis—since at the end Lear still wants Cordelia for himself (5.3.9-19) and Albany seems intent on repeating Lear's initial 22 See Booth 1983, 51: “the prophecy duplicate[s] the general pattern of the play by failing to come to a conclusion when it signals one.” 23 See. Parker 1992, 188 and the following quote: “To look carefully at the 'preposterous' in Shakespeare [...] is to see the presentation of an order authorized as 'natural' as instead rhetorically produced” (Parker 1992, 213). 24 For a different take on the Dover Cliff scene (in terms of representational modes and kinds of perspectives), see Goldberg 1993.

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division of the kingdom (5.3.317-18)—, it does offer truths of sorts— provisional, partial, sometimes preposterous truths, like the skeptical, contingent “truths” of rhetoric. As rhetorical constructs, truths then have no more (but no less) authority than a (Shakespearean) fool's. To the extent that linguistic ambiguity can be related to political subversion, King Lear—a nearly unreadable25 work—is a potentially subversive play calling for an anti-commonsensical “hermeneutics of difficulty” in which clarity is a “construct, not a given'' and ''interpretation is incoercible” (Rastier 2001, 112-3). In such hermeneutics, we are doomed to meaning—but in a good, heuristic way, since in King Lear extensive use of inelocutio and “unreadability” are what (deviously) leads to hermeneutic consciousness. Drama is thus less of a misrepresentation than a metarepresentation, a demystifying process26—while rhetoric is not only persuasive but also heuristic. “In the unlikely event that King Lear has anything to teach us, it may be the necessity of recognizing that what makes sense may not be true” (Booth 1983, 18); it could also be that what makes sense always makes more than one sense—which is to be tragically revelled in.27

Bibliography Andresen, Martha. 1974. “'Ripeness is all': sententiae and commonplaces in King Lear,” in Some Facets of King Lear. Essays in Prismatic Criticism. Ed. R.L. Colie and F.T. Flahiff, London: Heinemann, p.14568. Aristotle. 1991. The Art of Rhetoric, translation by H.C. Lawson-Tancred, London: Penguin.

25 “[O]ne reason why King Lear has been mistaken for an unactable play is that it is so nearly an unreadable play” (W. Nowottny, in Wells 2001, 52). 26 “The drama empowers ordinary people in the audience to think and judge for themselves of matters usually considered 'mysteries of state' in which no one but the 'natural rulers'–the nobility and gentry and professional élites—should be allowed to meddle” (Heinemann 1991, 76). 27 “There are [...] two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of free play. The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering, a truth or an origin which escapes play and the order of the sign, and lives the necessity of interpretation as an exile. The other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms play and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name of man being the name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics [...]—in other words, throughout his entire history—has dreamed of full presence, of reassuring foundation, of the origin and the end of play” (Derrida 1967, 427, translation by Alan Bass).

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Barton, Anne. 1971. “Shakespeare and the limits of language,” in Shakespeare Survey 24, p. 19-30. Bloch, R. Howard. 1983/1986. Etymologies and Genealogies: A Literary Anthropology of the French Middle Ages, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Booth, Stephen. 1983/2001. King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition, and Tragedy. Christchurch: Cybereditions. —. 1997. “Shakespeare's Language and the Language of Shakespeare's Time,” in Shakespeare Survey 50, p. 1-17. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1982/1991. Ce que parler veut dire. L'Économie des échanges linguistiques, Paris: Fayard (translation by G. Raymond and M. Adamson, Harvard University Press). —. 1982/2001. Langage et pouvoir symbolique, Paris: Seuil, (Language and Symbolic Power, Ed. J. Thompson, Harvard University Press, 1991). Cavell, Stanley. 1969/2002. “The avoidance of love: A reading of King Lear,” in Must We Mean What We Say? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 267-356. Coddon, Karin S. 1993. “'Slander in an Allow'd Fool': Twelfth Night's Crisis of the Aristocracy,” in Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 33.2, p. 309-25. Derrida, Jacques. 1967/1978. L'écriture et la différence, Paris: Seuil (Writing and Difference, translation by Alan Bass, University of Chicago Press). Eagleton, Terry. 1993. “Language and Value in King Lear” in Ryan 1993a. Egan, Gabriel. 2004. Shakespeare and Marx, ''Oxford Shakespeare Topics'', Oxford: Oxford University Press. Elam, Keir. 1984. Shakespeare's Universe of Discourse, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1992. “Inelocutio. Shakespeare and the rhetoric of the passions,” in Rhétoriques du texte et du spectacle. Actes du congrès 1991 de la Société Française Shakespeare, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, p. 143-56. Foakes, Reginald A. 1993/1995. Hamlet versus Lear: Cultural Politics and Shakespeare's Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. Ed. 1997. King Lear. The Arden Shakespeare. Goldberg, Jonathan. 1993. ''Perspectives: Dover Cliff and the Conditions of Representation'', in Ryan 1993a, pp. 145-157. Goldsmith, Robert H. 1955/1974. Wise Fools in Shakespeare, Liverpool University Press.

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Greg, Walter W. 1940. “The Variants in the First Quarto of King Lear,” M.L.R (cited in Muir). Greenblatt, Stephen. “The Cultivation of Anxiety: King Lear and his Heirs,” in Ryan 1993a, pp. 158-179. Hapgood, Robert. 1988/1991. Shakespeare The Theatre-Poet, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hawkes, Terence. 1995. William Shakespeare, King Lear, ''Writers and Their Work'', Plymouth: Northcote House. Heinemann, Margot. 1991. “Demystifying the Mystery of State': King Lear and the World Upside Down,” in Shakespeare Survey 44, p. 7583. Hill, Christopher. 1972/1991. The World Upside Down, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Kermode, Frank. 2000/2001. Shakespeare's Language, London: Penguin. Kettle, Arnold. 1993. “'The Humanity of King Lear,” in Ryan 1993a, p. 17-30. Kott, Jan. 1964/1967. Shakespeare Our Contemporary, London: Methuen. (Pseudo-)Longinus. 1890. On the Sublime, 17.1, translation by H. L. Havell, London: Macmillan. McDonald, Russ. 2001. Shakespeare and the Arts of Language, Oxford: Oxford University Press. McGuire, Philip C. 1994. Shakespeare: The Jacobean Plays, Basingstoke: Macmillan. McLuskie, Kathleen. 1985/1996. “The patriarchal bard: feminist criticism and Shakespeare: King Lear and Measure for Measure,” in Political Shakespeare. Ed. J. Dollimore and A. Sinfield, Manchester: Manchester University Press, p. 88-108. Magnien, Michel. 1992. “D'Érasme à Montaigne, une querelle pour le Siècle : autour de l'imitation de Cicéron,” in Rhétoriques du texte et du spectacle. Actes du congrès 1991 de la Société Française Shakespeare, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, p. 53-78. Muir, Kenneth. Ed. 1964/1993. King Lear. The Arden Shakespeare. Parker, Patricia. 1985/1993. “Shakespeare and rhetoric: 'dilation' and 'delation' in Othello,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory. Ed. P. Parker and G. Hartman, London: Routledge, p. 54-74. —. 1992. “Preposterous events,” in Shakespeare Quarterly 43.2, p. 186213. Platt, Peter G. 1999. “Shakespeare and Rhetorical Culture,” in A Companion to Shakespeare. Ed. David Scott Kastan, Oxford: Blackwell, p. 277-96. Rastier, François. 2001. Arts et sciences du texte, Paris: P.U.F.

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Ryan, Kiernan. Ed. 1993a. New Casebooks. King Lear. Contemporary Critical Essays, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. —. 1993b. “King Lear: The Subversive Imagination,” in Ryan 1993a, p.73-83. Shakespeare, William. 1964/1993. King Lear. Ed. K. Muir, The Arden Shakespeare. —. 1982/1998. Henry V. Ed. G. Taylor, The Oxford Shakespeare. —. 1993/1998. The Merchant of Venice. Ed. J.L. Halio, The Oxford Shakespeare. —. 1997. King Lear. Ed. R.A. Foakes, The Arden Shakespeare. —. 1998. Julius Caesar. Ed. D. Daniell, The Arden Shakespeare. —. 1998. Love's Labour's Lost. Ed. H.R. Woudhuysen, The Arden Shakespeare. —. 2000. Romeo and Juliet. Ed. J.L. Levenson, The Oxford Shakespeare. —. 2000/2001. King Lear. Ed. S.Wells, The Oxford Shakespeare. —. 2008. The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Ed. R. Warren, The Oxford Shakespeare. —. 2008. Twelfth Night. Ed. K. Elam, The Arden Shakespeare. Timmermans, Benoît. 1999. “Renaissance et modernité de la rhétorique,” in Histoire de la rhétorique des Grecs à nos jours. Ed. Michel Meyer, Paris: Le Livre de Poche, pp. 83-243. Ubersfeld, Anne. 1996. Lire le théâtre III. Le dialogue de théâtre, Paris: Belin. Wells, Stanley. Ed. 2000/2001. King Lear. The Oxford Shakespeare. Zitner, Sheldon P. 1974. “King Lear and its Language,” in Some Facets of King Lear. Essays in Prismatic Criticism. Ed. R. L. Colie and F. T. Flahiff, London: Heinemann, p. 3-22.

THE DOUBLE BIND IN KING LEAR CLAIRE GUÉRON

From the dramatic first scene of the play, in which Cordelia is banished for “holding her peace,” Shakespeare’s great tragedy features a pattern of false choices. In this paper, I suggest that such dilemmas, or double binds, serve as backbone to the plot and as a metonymy for tyrannical oppression and ontological ambivalence. Along with these structural and thematic functions, the double bind provides insights into some of the often noted inconsistencies in the characters’ behaviour. The double bind, in King Lear, highlights the many forces that limit human freedom, and the dire consequences of attempting to resist these forces.

“[T]hey’ll have me whipped for speaking true, thoul’t have me whipped for lying, and sometimes I am whipped for holding my peace,” the fool comments wrily in King Lear. The traditionally emblematic role of the fool in Shakespearian drama suggests a wider scope for this comment than its use as a description of the plight of the fool, tethered to the vagaries and inconsistencies of his master’s will. In a play where, as Gloucester comments, “’Tis dangerous to be spoken” (3.3.10), characters high and low face verbal dilemmas, in which no answer is right, and saying “nothing” as Cordelia does in the love trial scene is sometimes the most dangerous option of all. The connection established early on between saying nothing and becoming nothing provides a clue to the meaning of these verbal double binds in the play. I will argue that the verbal double bind is the locus where tensions in power relations and identity are revealed and played out.

Double binds: traps of logic The Fool’s statement quoted above harkens back to the love trial that opens the play, as Terry Eagleton points out in “Language and Value in King Lear.” Eagleton shows that after her two sisters’ profession of allencompassing love, Cordelia is stuck: “Cordelia is characteristically exact

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to maintain that she can say nothing to outdo her sisters, for who can trump ‘all’?” he writes (1993, 85).1 After Goneril has said she loves her father more than anything in the world, and Regan has managed to top that by saying she hates everything that is not her father, there is literally nothing left for Cordelia to say. Eagleton identifies this quandary as a “double bind”: “Lear’s paranoid drama, like the Malvolio-taunting scene of Twelfth Night, fashions a verbal nexus to which there is no ‘outside,’ double binding Cordelia so that to play her role or refuse it, speak or keep silent, become equally falsifying” (1993, 85). The mathematical precision of Cordelia’s answer is mandated by the cold logic underlying the language of the love test: this is a language of counting and reckoning, and it sets a pattern for the rest of the play. Such situation are scattered throughout the play. Kent, for instance, is chided by Cornwall for speaking plainly, then chided for speaking in turgid and overblown verse (2.2.90-111). The upshot is that he is put in the stocks, a physical and visual counterpart to the verbal trap. In the same way, Gloucester describes himself as “tied to the stake” (3.7.53) when, after sending the King to the safety of Dover where Cordelia and the French army have just landed, he is being mercilessly hounded by Regan, Cornwall, and Goneril. Here too, the bear-baiting image is appropriate, and not just because Gloucester is actually bound to a chair during this scene. There is no safe answer to the repeated question, “wherefore to Dover?”. One possible answer, “to join forces with the French” is treacherous, the other, “to protect him from you,” the one he eventually gives, is disrespectful, to say the least. The strong images of imprisonment contained in these episodes help pinpoint a general pattern in which communication is used to put people in metaphorical stocks, or to bind them to a metaphorical stake. Every twist in the plot, and the ratchetting up of cruelty that comes with it, seems to be punctuated by this kind of trap. Lear’s dealings with his two elder daughters, in particular, contain a toned down version of the love trial. This is especially true of the encounter with Regan, which provides one of the most powerful examples of the double bind in the play. Once he has succeeded to get Regan and Cornwall to come down and meet him, Lear answers Regan’s perfunctory greeting (“I am glad to see your highness” 2.2.317) with the following words: Regan, I think you are. I know what reason 1

See also Barton 1994, 60: “When Cordelia says, ‘Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave / My heart into my mouth,’ she is being honest [...]. But she has already been anticipated in this very protestation by Goneril.”

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The Double Bind in King Lear I have to think so. If thou shouldst not be glad, I would divorce me from thy mother's tomb, Sepulchring an adulteress. [To Kent] O, are you free? Some other time for that.—Beloved Regan, Thy sister's naught. O, Regan, she hath tied Sharp-toothed unkindness like a vulture, here. [Lays his hand on his heart] I can scarce speak to thee; thoul't not believe With how depraved a quality—O, Regan! (2.2.326)

The reference to Goneril’s fall from grace, and the seemingly incidental reference to Kent’s release from the stocks, identify Lear’s speech as yet another trap. Just as the love trial was fixed, since the land had already been portioned out, Lear’s speech to Regan contains a logical fallacy. Lear’s threat that he will disown his dead wife and make his daughter a bastard if she does not love him is invalidated by his previous rejection of his two other daughters. After all, since Lear’s daughters were “got ’tween the lawful sheets” (4.6.114), they share the same mother. So by Lear’s own standards, Regan is already a bastard, whatever she says or does: her mother has already been branded a whore. Regan’s awareness of this appears in her horrified reaction at the curses her father directs at her absent sister: “O, the blest gods! / So will you wish on me when the rash mood is on” (2.2.357-58). The only way out of this quandary is for Regan to ally with her sister, thus angering her father further. Here again, the double bind edges the plot forward, with an unresolved problem of logic erupting into strife and separation.

Rigged trials and the impossibility of denial: tyranny as the illusion of choice The double bind serves several functions in the play. One is to show how tyranny works by providing the illusion that the victim is given a choice. This appears most clearly in a type of double bind that takes the form of a rigged trial, the kind Lear deplores in act 4, scene 6. Twisted logic becomes an expression of parental tyranny when Gloucester implies that he would never believe any protestation of innocence on the part of his son Edgar: “Would he deny his letter, said he”? (2.1.82). Denial is just as damning as admission in this upside down world. In a similar vein, Kent twice dares Oswald to deny the insults he throws is his face, threatening to beat him “if [he] denie[s] the least syllable of [his] addition” (2.2.23). Oswald denies nothing, but he is beaten anyway. Denial never

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carries any weight in the play. Gloucester’s attempts to deny that he is a traitor are unavailing and met with yet another form of imprisonnement, being bound to a chair (3.7.34). The ultimate example of vulnerability to a charge of betrayal is that of Lear’s wife, unable to deny that she is an adultress, for the very good reason that she is dead. The linguistic marker of this kind of double bind is the question that is not meant to ellicit information. King Lear’s question to Cordelia is the first example: “what can you say to draw a third more opulent than your sisters?” (1.1.85-86). This is not a question but a puzzle, tantamount to saying try to figure out what you need to say. Then there are questions whose very form dictates a given answer: Regan’s question to Gloucester “Wast thou not charged at peril—” (3.7.51) is invalidated as a request for information first because it is incomplete, but mainly because of its interro-negative form, which identifies it as a statement. As for Regan’s question to Gloucester, “wherefore to Dover?” (3.7.51), it is equally invalidated as a question by the statement “be simple answered for we know the truth” (3.7.43). The question Regan asked Gloucester before that was “[...] what confederacy had you with the traitors late footed in the kingdom?” (3.7.43-44). This is a question that cannot be answered as it stands without implicitly admitting guilt.2 Gloucester cannot anwer the question as it is phrased without admitting first that the French army is headed by traitors and second that he is involved in betrayal of some kind or other. These questions constitute traps because their syntactical form and semantic content are at odds with their pragmatic use. In speech-act terms, they count as something other than requests for information. It is remarkable that in these rigged trials, guilt is often based on who one is, rather than what one has done. In the quarto’s mock-trial scene, the charge of “kicking the king” quickly morphs into the charge of “being Goneril.” “Is your name Goneril?” (3.6.49) asks the fool. “She cannot deny it” (50) comments Lear. This echoes Lear’s second falling out with one of his daughters, when Goneril rebukes him over the behaviour of his knights. An irate Lear then sarcastically asks his daughter her name: “your name, fair gentlewoman?” (1.4.227). Asking one’s own child her name amounts to, or “counts as” a disowning, a “strangering” to use Lear’s own coinage (“strangered with our oath” 1.1.205). And of course, there is no possible answer. If Goneril identifies her name as “Goneril,” she tacitly accepts her father’s repudiation of her. If she says nothing, the implication is that she is nobody. Hence she attempts a clumsy self-definition, “she 2

In U.S. law, this type of question is objectionable as “assuming facts not in evidence” as H. M. Guéron has pointed out to me.

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who else will take what she begs” (1.4.239), one that amounts to a threat, and sends Lear raging out to his remaining daughter for comfort. This emphasis on names brings us to the second function of the double bind, that of exposing the multiple role-playing that is the foundation of identity.

Identity and Role-playing The double bind reveals how intricately role-playing and identity are entangled in the episode in which Kent is stocked after being criticized for speaking plainly, and then for aping the effete language of the courtier. Kent’s shift from plain speech to overblown verbosity can be related to his disguise. When Cornwall accuses Kent of being a crafty fellow pretending to be plain-spoken (2.2.94-102), he is not far from the truth. Kent’s plainness is after all part of his disguise. As the Earl of Kent pretending to be a plain servant, he is indeed practicing a form of deception. His trouble in finding an appropriate form of speech is part of the difficulty of sustaining a disguise. His behaviour follows the inconsistencies of his speech. Kent ends up in the stocks because he is trying to reconcile two roles. One is his role as a common fellow, which puts him in a position where he is vulnerable to punishment. The other is his real identity, that of a gentleman who gives free vent to his indignation and strikes his social inferiors when he feels like it. The issue is further entangled by its not being clear which of the two roles corresponds to his “real” identity. After all, in both his identities, he is playing the part of the King’s servant. His disguise is not much more than the withholding of his name and social status. In a broader sense, the double bind points to identity as the balancing of many roles. Cordelia is caught between her role as a daughter who owes her father all, and her role as a bride-to-be who owes her husband some love. As for Lear, Alexander Leggatt interprets the love test as his attempt to take on the double identity of father and husband to his own daughter: “Arguably, what he really wants is a marriage with Cordelia, with the love test functioning as the bride’s promise to her husband” (Leggatt 2005, 148). Multiple loyalty is a recurrent issue in the play. Edmund, for instance, pretends to deplore the double bind that pits his loyalty to his father against his loyalty to his country: “I will persever in my course of loyalty, though the conflict be sore between that and my blood” (3.5.2123). As for Regan, she parries Gloucester’s intercession in favour of the king’s servant with a defence of her sister’s servant (2.2.143-48). Social identity subtly segues into the biological and the metaphysical.

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Multiple role-playing is only the social facet of a fundamentally divided self. In the play, the fact that people originate from both a mother and a father is turned into a subject of wonder. Regan’s attempt to clear her mother’s name by befriending the sister she has little so little sympathy for testifies to an identity grounded in the existence of two parents, a possible source of conflict. Edmund’s embracing of his bastardy can be construed as a refusal to slight his mother. Beyond individual identity, the duality of human nature is at issue. A passing reference to the fundamental hybridity of man appears in Lear’s description of “unaccomodated man” as a “forked animal” (3.4.106). Kent refers to the age-old conflict between prudence and valour when he says that his fight with Oswald resulted from his having “more man than wit about [him]” (2.2.40). As for Goneril, her spat with her father over her name reflects a tension between two visions of individual origins. Her self-definition, “she who else will take the thing she begs” is what Daniel Vanderverken refers to as a “self-defeating speech-act” (Vanderverken 1980, 247-72), one that contains an invalidating contradiction. In pragmatic terms, to beg something, while maintaining that you will take it whether it is given or not, is not begging. It amounts to, or counts as, demanding. Goneril’s self-canceling statement emanates from, and is symptomatic of, the conflicting roles she is trying to reconcile. Beyond the dutiful daughter vying with the autocrat, the engendered self is being pitted against the self-fashioned self. Man as a split being was of course not a new idea in Shakespeare’s day. The struggle between the good and evil forces in human nature was the focus of the medieval morality play, an influence on the works of Elizabethan playwrights. The struggle is played out in the contrast between Cordelia and her sisters, the former being described by a gentleman as “redeem[ing] nature from the general curse / Which twain have brought her to” (4.6.202-03). This facet of man’s split being seems to me central in the altercation that leads to Gloucester’s blinding.

Violence as an alternative to becoming “nothing” The danger involved in multiple identities is that they may cancel each other out, leaving a “nothing” in their place. Alexander Leggatt reads Cordelia’s answer to Lear in the first scene as an attempt to resist anihilation: “we have seen the reality of Cordelia resist Lear’s attempts to make her nothing” (Leggatt 2005, 156). Leggatt sees the fear of being “nothing” as a powerful force in the play: “But the rage and the suffering are triggered in large measure by the fear of reduction to nothing,” he writes (156). I would argue that it is this fear of reduction to nothing that

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triggers the lapse into barbarity that is the blinding of Gloucester. “Tied to the stake,” as he sees it by Lear’s daughters and Cornwall pressing him to say why he sent the King to Dover, Gloucester finally gives the following answer: Because I would not see thy cruel nails Pluck out his poor old eyes; nor thy fierce sister In his anointed flesh stick boarish fangs. The sea, with such a storm as his bare head In hell-black night endured, would have buoyed up And quenched the stelled fires. Yet, poor old heart, he holp the heavens to rain. If wolves had at thy gate howled that stern time, Thou shouldst have said, 'Good porter, turn the key, All cruels else subscribed'; but I shall see The winged vengeance overtake such children. (3.7.55-65)

These are the lines that prompt Cornwall to put out Gloucester’s eyes, taking the old man’s figurative speech to a horrible new level of literality. After her husband puts out one of Gloucester’s eyes, Regan urges him to put out the second one, too. Though Cornwall behaves like a cardboard cut-out villain, pouncing on the opportunity provided by Gloucester’s unfortunate phrasing, Regan’s reaction is prompted by something deeper. Gloucester’s reasoning follows the pattern of what Thomas Blundeville refers to as “reasoning from the Place of the Lesse” (Blundeville 1599, 94), a logical pattern that appears several times in the play. It is also an example of proverbial, or set-piece reasoning, something Judith Anderson identifies as prominent feature of Renaissance writing. Anderson has pointed out a tendency, in the Renaissance, towards a reification of language, not just through the widespread availability of printed material, but also through the popularity of set pieces such as sententiae, proverbs, and commonplaces (Anderson 1996, 35). She suggests that the reification of language, its reduction to a collection of set pieces, results in meaning predating the event: “The essential significance of an experience seems to be settled beforehand [...]. Experience merely provides an occasion on which to fit the precept/praeceptum, ‘already possessed’” (Anderson 1996, 36). In Lear, such reified forms of language, while distinct from it, are closely associated with the double bind. Letters, for instance, are often involved in the rigged trial scenes I have discussed. Because the written word is evidence in a way the spoken word is not, it becomes emblematic of the power of language to trap an individual and reduce him or her to

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silence. Brandishing the letter in which Goneril divulges her plan to have him murdered, Cornwall says: “Shut your mouth, dame / Or with this paper I shall stop it” (5.3.152-53). Kent’s punishment is an example of another kind of “frozen” speech, the cliché, landing someone in a trap. To return to Gloucester’s speech, we can notice quite a few set pieces in the indictment of Lear’s daughters. The speech begins with the conventional image of the vengeful woman as a harpy. In the expression “hell-black night,” Gloucester uses a Homeric epithet, the heroic forerunner of the cliché. He proceeds with two conceits, the Ovidian image3 of the sea putting out the stars, and the Petrarchan4 conceit of human tears as adding to the rain. As for the image of kindness to wolves, it is reified by being a practically verbatim repeat of Kent’s indignation at being stocked: “Why, madam,” he says to Regan, “if I were your father’s dog / You should not use me so” (2.2.133-34). Furthermore, Gloucester’s charges against Regan and Goneril are an illustration of Anderson’s point that proverbs are often completely divorced from the reality of experience. The fact is that Gloucester has yoked together two wildly improbable and contradictory descriptions of Regan and Goneril which can be summed up as follows: 1.You are monsters who would tear out your own father's eyes. 2.You are angels who would give shelter to a wolf. These mutually contradictory statements cancel each other out, adding up to nothing. As in the opening scene, a father figure is involved in the process of reducing a daughter figure to nothing, prompting her to define herself on the spot. Here again, Lear’s daughters are being made to take on two mutually exclusive identities. Just as Cordelia could not give “all” to her father and “all” to her husband, the sisters cannot be both “all good” and “all evil.” Faced with such a choice, we wonder why Regan chooses evil. The answer may lie in what Stephen Greenblatt sees as the power of violence, in both Renaissance life and fiction, to define the boundaries of the self. In a discussion of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine he writes: For experiencing this limitlessness, this transformation of space and time into abstractions, men do violence as a means of marking boundaries, effectiong transformation, signaling closure. [...] To burn a town or to kill all of its inhabitants is to make an end and, in so doing, to give life a shape and a certainty it would otherwise lack. The great fear, in Barabas's words, 3 4

See for example Golding 1567, VII (Medea). 250-80. See for example Wyatt 1986, 464.

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The Double Bind in King Lear is “That I may vanish o'er the earth in air, / and leave no memory that e'er I was” (1.499-500). As the town where Zenocrate dies burns at his command, Tamburlaine proclaims his identity, fixed forever in the heavens by this act of violence (2Tam 3.2.3196-99). In this charred soil and the blazing star, Tamburlaine seeks literally to make his mark in the world, to stamp his image on time and space. Similarly, Faustus, by violence not on others but on himself, seeks to give his life a clear fixed shape. (Greenblatt 1980, 227)

Something of the kind may be at work in Regan’s sudden outburst of violence. Alexander Leggatt takes the opposite perspective and makes suffering the self-defining activity: “No being who suffers and feels can be called ‘nothing’,” he writes (Leggatt 2005, 162).

Conclusion The double bind can thus be seen as the place where two recurrent features of Renaissance thought intersect. One is the notion that human beings are hybrid creatures, with a brittle grasp on a central core of identity. The other is the notion that identity is both bound up in language, and threatened by it. More specifically, the “reification of language” Anderson has identified is a trap in and of itself, forcing thoughts and images into people’s minds. In the play, forged letters, proverbs and set pieces dictate people’s behaviour, often leading to disastrous results. The double bind is thus at the heart of the political, metaphysical and linguistic issues raised by the play. Within a sixteenth-century framework, it explores some of the forces that limit human freedom, such as tyranny, human nature, and language itself.

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Bibliography Anderson, Judith. 1996. Words that Matter–Linguistic Perception in Renaissance English. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Barton, Anne. 1974/1994. “Shakespeare and the Limits of Language,” Essays, Mainly Shakespearian. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 51-69. Blundeville. Thomas. 1599. The art of logike Plainely taught in the English tongue, London: Imprinted by Iohn Windet, 1599. Eagleton, Therry. 1986/1993. “Language and Value in King Lear” in New Casebooks, King Lear. Ed. Kiernan Ryan, Macmillan, 84-91. Foakes, R. A., ed. 1997. King Lear. The Arden Shakespeare, London: Cengage Learning. Golding, Arthur, trans. 1567. The Fifteen Books of Ovid's Metamorphoses, London. Greenblatt, Stephen. 1980. Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Leggatt, Alexander. 2005. Shakespeare's Tragedies–Violation and Identity, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Vanderverken, Daniel. 1980. “Illocutionary logic and self-defeating Speech Acts,” in Speech Act Theory and Pragmatics. Eds. Searle et. al., Dodrecht, Boston and London: D. Reidel Publishing, 247-72. Wyatt, Thomas. 1962/1986. “My Galley,” translated from Petrarch's “Rime 189,” Norton Anthology of English Literature, 5th ed. Vol 1. Ed. M. H. Abrams. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co.

II. MYTHS, MONSTERS AND THE GROTESQUE

“O, RUINED PIECE OF NATURE” (4.6.130) KING LEAR, TRAGEDY OF SUBVERSION? SOPHIE ALATORRE

King Lear offers a world of perverted representations which foreground the themes of Fortune, lack and sexuality in order to make its theatrical audiences as well as its readers directly face the dislocation of a patriarchal, feudal society. Through mythological images and clichés, Shakespeare reworks the medieval notion of the Rota fortunae and uses Lear as a graphic stage impersonation of the otherwise commonplace image of the “naked truth.” To the notable exception of Cordelia, he emphasizes the duplicity of his female characters, who are at once aware of their beauty and sexual appeal and who stand in the play as powerful dominating figures. However, if love, in King Lear, is presented as impure and identified with lust, and the family regarded as the hotbed of sin, hatred, revenge and crime, it does not mean either that society is all in ruins. Shakespeare’s tragedy is deeply subversive, not quite nihilistic.

In 1611, the lexicographer Randle Cotgrave gave the following definition of the word “subversion”: “a subversion, ruine, overthrow,” a term that seems rather adequate as a reflection of the general atmosphere of Shakespeare’s tragedy, where the ruins of life may recall a possibly better past while also desperately blurring the outlines of the future. Whereas the name Lear may be read as the anagram of “Real,” the title part ironically fails to decipher a reality that appears so complex that it is hardly understandable. King Lear is a world of paradoxes, a crippled universe shaken by “strange mutations” (4.1.12) where words sometimes sound hollow and silence is deafening. It is a world invaded by discord and nourished by rancour; a world in which the gods pour out their anger, where Nature becomes both sterile and deadly, and where men look for an impossible harmony. Shakespeare’s tragedy stages the dislocation of humanity while also suggesting another vision of a corrupt society by playing with norms and pre-conceived ideas in order to upset and disturb its spectators and readers alike. Whether it is Lear’s desacralized royalty, the bastard’s monstrous pedigree or the two sisters’ venomous lust, everything in King Lear depends on unnatural relationships and perverted representations. By

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following through the exploration of three of the main themes that underlie the tragedy—Fortune, lack and sexuality—I will argue that Shakespeare uses clichés and norms in order to generate a subversive vision of a humanity in which even the ars moriendi seems partially ignored. As Kozintsev’s film shows,1 it is only when he is on the threshold of death that Lear will be able to overcome his anguish thanks to the sublime love he feels for his daughter Cordelia.

Fortune Even though the tragedy is peppered with Christian references, Christian destiny seems curiously absent from a play in which pagan allusions are teeming. If, from the beginning, the “o,” the hole, in the word Fortune may be taken to suggest the annihilation of Lear’s kingdom, suddenly frozen by the forces of nothingness, it also illustrates the whims of her turning wheel that brings great misfortunes to some while providing others with endless bounties. Her vicissitudes are a commonplace in classical literature, and the blind goddess remained a preeminent figure in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.2 Many critics have already called attention to the importance of Fortune in Shakespeare’s plays, and it is here directly associated with images of transgression. The blinded Gloucester seems to be standing for an ironical, if tragic, male version of Fortune, as he sounds responsible for his own doom. Shakespeare’s deity does not necessarily raise negative feelings and sinister impressions. At least, not systematically, if one remembers Edgar’s rather optimistic vision of her workings: […] To be worst, The lowest and most dejected thing of Fortune, Stands still in esperance, lives not in fear. (4.1.2-4) 1 See Grigori Kozintsev’s 1971 version of King Lear, in which Estonian actor Jüri Järvet played the role of the mad king, and whose standout feature was the melancholy score by Shostakovich. 2 For the Renaissance representation of Fortune, see The fountaine of ancient fiction (1599): “She is oftentimes also depainted, as holding the bridle of a horse in one of her hands, and in the other a small and long peece of wood of a certain measure, which we call an ell or yard: unshadowing thereby, that men ought to rule & restrain their tongues from evill and corrupting speeches, and that they should administer justice and true measures with whom they deale or doe converse” (Lynche 1976, sig. Bb).

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When he catches sight of his blinded father, he immediately changes his mind. That “arrant whore” (2.2.242) roughly handles the various characters of the play, who rightly fear her inconstancy and her power. She proves that the real stage director in the Lear world (“this great stage of fools” 4.6.179) is totally subservient to her desires, and the old King himself eventually recognizes that he has become “the natural fool of Fortune” (4.6.187). The tragedy develops as Fortune keeps spinning the wheel of human destiny (“The wheel is come full circle” 5.3.172). This corresponds to the medieval notion of the Rota fortunae, in which the four places likely to be occupied by a king, and which are made explicit in the Latin formula regnabo, regno, regnavi, sum sine regno, correspond to the four seats offered by the deity’s wheel: the ascending position, the dominating one, the declining one, and the lowest one which is that of the deposed monarch (Chapman 1950, 1-7). The last position fits Lear who, having fallen very low, may well have come to the same conclusion as Henry, another Shakespearian protagonist : I may conquer Fortune’s spite By living low, where Fortune cannot hurt me. (3 Henry VI, 4.6.19-20)

Against all odds, Henry’s wise formulation does not prove relevant to Lear. The fallen characters become the prisoners of a hellish vortex, of a bottomless hole like the vertiginous void spied from the “extreme verge” (4.6. 25) of Dover cliff, in a play where, as Edgar says (4.1.27-30), the worst is never reached. Fortune’s wheel therefore acts in a more ruthless way than it usually does. It also indirectly intervenes when Lear depicts himself as the damned, tortured Ixion (4.7.46-48), “whose rented limm’s are turn’d eternally” (Watson 1984, Passion 62, 116) in Hell, on a wheel of fire. If Kent leaves it up to her, as he is about to fall asleep in a most uncomfortable position (“Fortune, good night: smile once more; turn thy wheel” 2.2.171), his optimistic vision of Fortune finds itself dashed a few lines later. The Fool indeed mentions a great wheel rolling down a hill, and threatening to break the neck of those who do not let go (2.2.247-48). In Timon of Athens, Shakespeare through the poet’s voice imagines an ivory-handed Fortune sitting on a throne upon a hill: I have upon a high and pleasant hill Feign’d Fortune to be thron’d. (1.1.66-67)

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This picture, which has no equivalent, either in the emblems or in the paintings of the time, may well complete and clarify the Fool’s description in King Lear. Moreover, the image of the wheel rolling down a hill is an obvious reminiscence of the myth of Sisyphus, banished in hell. Such an interpretation becomes coherent if one is aware that, in King Lear, Shakespeare alludes to two other tormented figures, Prometheus3 and Ixion,4 in order to delineate a hellish topography that renders both the corruption and the chaos of his tragic universe. Lear repeatedly faces the assaults of Goneril who, vulture-like, devours his heart. He is also in a position comparable to that held by Ot-hell-o, who blamed the devil Iago for tormenting him (“thou hast set me on the rack” 3.3.340).5 Just like the Moor, Lear imagines his own endless suffering by being “bound / Upon a wheel of fire” (4.7.46-7). In the fourth and tenth books of Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Sisyphus is placed alongside Ixion.6 If, in Shakespeare, the wheel replaces the rock, he seems to echo Jean Cousin’s Livre de Fortune (1567), where Fortune’s and Sisyphus’ rocks already appear side by side (Soellner 1984, 280). Such associations allowed Shakespeare to play on every possible representation of Fortune in order to enlighten the play’s tragic flaws. In Edmund’s soliloquy, she is part of an unprecedented pair, “Briefness and Fortune” (2.1.18), where Briefness is a divinity invented for the occasion. The bastard ignores the familiar Elizabethan proverb “Keep time in all” (Dent, T308.1). Briefness, often confused with haste, was regarded as ominous, as Montaigne also says: As in too much speede, festinatio tarda est: “Hastinesse is slow.” Haste makes waste, and hinders and stayes it selfe: ipsa se velocitas implicat:

3

“[…] O, Regan, she hath tied / Sharp-tooth’d unkindness, like a vulture, here. /[Lays his hand on his heart] / I can scarce speak to thee […]” (2.2.323-325). 4 “Thou art a soul in bliss, but I am bound / Upon a wheel of fire that mine own tears / Do scald like molten lead” (4.7.46-48). 5 Still in Othello, see 5.2.277: “Blow me about in winds, roast me in sulphur.” 6 See Arthur Golding, Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Sisyphus appears twice in book IV. The first mention occurs on line 569. The second is worth quoting: “When Iuno with a louring looke had vewde them all throughout, / And on Ixion specially before the other rout, / She turnes from him to Sisyphus, and with an angry cheere / Sayes: wherefore should this man endure continuall penance here?” (IV.575-78). See also “The tenth Booke”: “Ixions wheele stood still: and downe sate Sisyphus vppon / His rolling stone […]” (X.47-48). Sisyphus alone reappears for the last time in XIII.31.

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King Lear, Tragedy of Subversion? “Swiftnesse entangles it selfe.” (Montaigne translated by Florio 1894, III. 10)7

In the tragedy, haste stands in sharp contrast to the Christian virtue of patience,8 which both Lear and Gloucester find so hard to acquire. Moreover, it seems that Shakespeare’s unusual couple merges with still another representation of Gloucester’s blind goddess. In act 3, Lear’s alter ego connects Fortune with the themes of revenge and divine punishment, and relies on “the winged vengeance” before being savagely enucleated: “[…] I shall see / The winged vengeance overtake such children” (3.7.6465). Fortune would then borrow Mercury’s winged sandals to fall on the wicked and force them to enter the realm of Hades. This composite figure, the result of the condensation between two divinities, is not new, however. It is already present in Alciati’s Book of Emblems, number 99, depicting Mercury and Fortune side by side (“Ars naturam adiuvans”): they are supposed to form an alliance when things go wrong.9

Lack We have just seen that, in Shakespeare’s tragedy, Fortune echoes the flaws of human life or the cracks suggested by the repeated use of the word “nothing”: these terms are placed alongside a common gap and they point to a “fault,” to an emptiness which the playwright explores and exploits in the course of his play. If “nothing” is a word repeated by Cordelia and the King (1.1.87-90), it is in fact Lear’s desperate line, “never, never, never, never, never” (5.3.307), a line which he speaks just before his death, that is generally kept in mind. “Never” here reverberates like an echo in Edgar’s last words, whereas the tragedy ends on the sound of a funeral march. The Lear world is the world of “nothing,” of “never,” it is the abysmal world of the void,

7

See Montaigne 1962, 985 (Book III, Chapter X): Comme en la precipitation ‘festinatio tarda est,’ la hastiveté se donne elle-mesme la jambe, s’entrave et s’arreste. ‘Ipsa se velocitas implicat.’ 8 See, too, Disticha Catonis I . xxxviii: “maxima enim patientia virtus” (patience is the greatest virtue). 9 “Ut sphaerae Fortuna, cubo sic insidet Hermes: / Artibus hic, variis casibus illa praeest: / Adversus vim fortunae est ars facta: sed artis / Cum fortuna mala est, saepe requirit opem. / Disce bonas artes igitur studiosa iuventus, / Quae certae secum commoda sortis habent.”

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comparable to the hellish pit where the howling souls of the damned are being sent. Visually speaking, if the themes of lack and deprivation are symbolized by the character of Poor Tom, reduced to be an outsider who seems to be less than nothing (“Could thou save nothing?” Lear asks in 3.4.63), and even more strikingly perhaps by the holes in Gloucester’s orbits, they are also more subtly inscribed in the very mechanism of the tragedy. The power and the health granted to the characters actually depend on the throes of Fortune. Still, if Cordelia is the first who experiences this paradoxical sense of lack and deprivation in act 1, she is also the one who, because she loses everything, is the final winner in the losing game of the Fool: France Fairest Cordelia, that art most rich being poor (1.1.252)

One may like R. A. Foakes read these words as a biblical reference to Saint Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. They are also the counterpart of Ovid’s formula, “inopem me copia fecit,” which is translated by Arthur Golding as “My plenty makes me poore” (Greenfield 1954, 281-86). As Lear becomes deprived of his former power, he suggests how naked he is now as he is trying to get rid of his superfluous clothes: Lear Unaccomodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. Off, off, you lendings: come, unbutton here. [Tearing at his clothes, he is restrained by Kent and the Fool.] (3.4.105-107)

Lear’s conscious, wilful undressing is superimposed on an unexpected, unwanted bareness symbolised by the presence, soon followed by the absence, of the real crown (“Alack, bareheaded?” 3.2.60). It is also strongly contrasted with the splendour of his older daughters’ gorgeous dresses, a magnificence repeatedly stressed in the play.10 Goneril’s glass does not only reflect her vanity, it also mirrors the utter despair and deprivation of her father in act 5, when he orders: “Lend me a lookingglass” (5.3.259). If the “looking-glass” thus seems to pass from Goneril’s 10 “Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear’st” (2.2.458). On this specific motif, see Greenfield 1954, 281-86.

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hands to Lear’s, this may be a way of alerting the audience to the disturbing ambivalence of this particular prop, since it is used here as a symbol of frivolity and as an object which serves to reveal a truth which is too cruel not to hurt. The old king wants to tear off what remains of his dress and, from the third act onwards, he refuses any sort of artifice. After Cordelia’s death, his request that Edgar undo one of his buttons (5.3.308) echoes his previous “come, unbutton here” (3.4.107). In doing so, he expresses his intention to reduce the last signs of his power to nothing, even though, paradoxically, most of the characters still call him king—albeit an “old and miserable” (5.3.47) king, as Edmund puts it. His physical nudity remains imaginary but it can be read as a physical counterpart to his spiritual destitution: Lear wanders about in a state of poverty, of bestiality even. Such nakedness, which inevitably suggests inferior social rank, may also describe man’s natural condition. As such it could also symbolize some kind of spiritual superiority as in the commonplace image of the “naked truth.” In Renaissance iconography, nakedness was less and less associated with vice: far from the medieval nuditas criminalis (Panofsky 1939, 156), it even frequently alluded to the ecclesiastical virtues. Conversely, the profusion of clothes came to signal vices such as pride or luxury. Lear, without his gorgeous attires, may be mistaken for a martyr, for “a man / More sinned against than sinning” (3.2.60). In a recent article (Rivère 2008, 109), his crown, from the beginning, is considered a burden as the phrase “unburdened” suggests (1.1.40) and the old man soon finds himself in a position analogous to that of Botticelli’s suffering Christ (c. 1500)11 who wears a crown of nettles on his head (4.4.3-7). This sheds light on his downfall and decay, while incidentally reminding us of Ophelia’s mental derangement. In Hamlet, the heroine dies while trying to hang her crown of flowers to a tree (4.7.169-73). In Shakespeare’s plays, the fool’s trophies are but crowns of weeds and wild flowers… Curiously, the “nettles” (4.4.4) gathered by the king were plants which Pliny the Elder had praised for their medicinal virtues (“Of the nettle,” 22.13). So, even though this remains subliminal, he may thus be trying to ease his pains in such an oblique, roundabout way.12 If Lear 11

See for instance the following Internet site: http://peinture.video-du-net.fr/images/tableaux-celebres/prerenaiitalien/Botticelli _christ.jpg 12 The legions of Julius Caesar were said to have introduced nettles into Britain, thinking they would need it to flog and rub their limbs to keep warm in the colder Northern climate. In the first century A.D., the Roman naturalist, Pliny the Elder,

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wears his transient, green crown, it is above all because it is for him a way of showing that, even if he has divested himself of his kingdom, he remains “every inch a king” (4.6.106). This is how he appears to Edgar (4.6.80), who is not deceived, and exclaims: “O thou side-piercing sight!” (4.6.85). Crucified by his two daughters, Lear stages his Passion only to exorcise it in public. However, such an exorcism seems doomed to fail in a discordant universe, in which words are emptied of their usual meaning and introduce a yawning gap between what is said and what is done. Significantly, Edmund, who had so far identified with the figure of the machiavel, reveals his own humanity by betraying his emotion (5.3.198-99) at hearing of Lear’s trials. The bastard is moved by indirect discourse while, paradoxically, words that are directly uttered do not really seem to touch or even reach him. Edgar must first produce “a brief tale” (5.3.180), before he can mention “the most piteous tale” which Kent has just told him. The opacity of such reported, indirect speech, emblematizes the treatment and status of language in the play. In Lear’s kingdom, treachery and flattery rule the world. The old monarch fails to decipher what his loving daughter does not tell him, relying instead on the lies spread by his eldest children. It is much too late when he starts associating them with deception (“They flattered me like a dog” 4.9.96-97). He used to be a royal lion, and he has now become a dog. Cordelia is the only one who believes in the virtue of silence and advocates a politics of self-restraint. What constitutes her strength is (mis)understood by others as a lack, or as a flaw. King Lear is a tragedy where the myth of the centaur is used by Lear in a misogynous diatribe that portrays his older daughters as Ixion’s monstrous offspring, as both violent and lecherous creatures (4.6.121-22). So, Cordelia stands for a kind of noble centaur. She is an avatar of Chiron, the civilised hybrid creature educating princes and healing men.13 Like him, she is happy to teach her knowledge to a noble man, viz. her old father the king. More exactly, she tries to re-educate him since, throughout the play, the roles are

prescribed the juice of nettles as an anti-allergen believed to alleviate the plant’s own sting. 13 In 1531, Alciati had represented Chiron in his most famous Book of Emblems (1531). His conception of Chiron, depicted in emblem XII, was strongly reminiscent of Machiavelli’s description: if the monster can be seen as a great educator, he can also show the full extent of his violence when confronted to his enemies.

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inverted and children rule over their doting parents.14 Like Chiron, she cures the wounded and she is savvy about the soothing power of plants. Like Chiron, Cordelia passes her science over to men whom she loves and respects and she remains silent if she has nothing important to say. All this comes as no surprise if one thinks that, in many sixteenth century emblem books, the figure of the Centaur was very often mistaken for that of the Minotaur—another hybrid beast.15 As a consequence, the Centaur came to emphasize the virtue of silence, originally linked by Ovid to the labyrinthine aesthetics of secrecy: […] This shameful infamy, This monster borne him [Minos] by his wife, he minds by policy To put away; and in a house with many nooks and crinks From all men’s sight’s and speech of folk to shut it up he thinks. (Golding 2002, Book VIII, 207-10)

Eventually, when words can no longer be uttered, Lear becomes aware of the qualitative importance of language: begging those present that they look at the lips of his dead child, he does not merely expect her to breathe one more time. He expects her to speak, so as to listen once again to the sound of her perfect voice, smooth, low, and harmonious altogether (“her voice was ever soft, / Gentle, and low, an excellent thing in woman” 5.3.270-71). In that sense, he embodies the exact opposite of Timon who, towards the end of Timon of Athens, wants to do away with language (“Lips, let sour words go by, and language end”).16

14

See what Lear says to Kent: “I loved her most, and thought to set my rest / On her kind nursery” (1.1.124-25). 15 See for instance Ruscelli 1584, 383. The engraving is supposed to show a Minotaur, designated as such (“il Minotauro”) in the commentary but which is actually transformed into a Centaur. The metamorphosis may have been voluntary, though. The lower, bestial part symbolizes strength while the human head stands for cleverness (whereas the Minotaur, with his bestial head, cannot possibly stand for any form of enlightenment). The one bearing the impresa could then be identified with the Centaur without fearing to be mocked at for his shortsightedness. See also the French version of Alciati’s manual: Lefevre’s Livret des emblemes which shows a wise Centaur in emblem VIII, “Tenir encloz secret”. Chiron then reappears in Aneau’s Les Emblèmes. 16 See Timon of Athens, 5.2.105.

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Sexuality At first sight, the borders between the masculine and the feminine seem rather clearly defined in the play’s universe. Women wear superb clothes, exacerbating their femininity. Goneril’s impressive appearance which, given her tainted soul, is thus fairly remote from the Platonic ideal of beauty, is blamed several times in the course of the play as when the Fool declares “[…] there was never yet fair woman but she made mouths in a glass” (3.2.35-36). As for men, they fight and seduce, just like Edmund, who is consumed by his own desire—a desire for revenge, for blood, but also for sex and love, even though all this dooms him to dis-aster in the etymological sense of the term, i.e. identifies his destiny with that of a falling star.17 However, it soon becomes clear that, in Shakespeare’s world, the masculine and feminine poles are blurred more than ever. As a man abused by his own daughters, Lear has probably failed to fulfil his paternal duties and his frailty is all too obvious to his older daughters who soon turn him into their favourite prey. Here, the tragedy may well echo one of Whitney’s emblems, representing a goat feeding a cub with its own milk:

17 Edmund is not “a sectary astronomical” (1.2.150), since he dismisses all predictions made possible by the moon and the stars (and which, ironically, will become true by the end of the play). See his sardonic quip (1.2.128-33) at those who, like his father or astrologers like John Dee or Simon Forman, cast horoscopes or nativities.

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78 Emblema LXIV

The ravening wolfe, by kinde my mortall foe, Yet lo, infors’de, I foster up her whelpe: Who aferwarde, as it did stronger growe […] Yet, coulde I not contente it with my teate, But that my selfe, hee rent to be his meate […] (Whitney 1989, 49)

In Shakespeare’s tragedy, the mother is made conspicuous by her very absence (Kahn 1986, 33-41) and it is the father who rears his children, unaware of the danger he runs in so doing. Not surprisingly then, Goneril is assimilated to a wolf (“thy wolvish visage,” 1.4.300), a beast that already symbolized lechery in Othello (“as salt as wolves in pride” 3.3.402). More generally, it was often associated to treachery by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, as Edward Topsell, here translating the German naturalist Conrad Gesner, shows: The neck of a wolf stands on a straight bone that cannot well bend. Therefore […] the wolf must turn round about when he look backwards. The same neck is short, which argueth a treacherous nature. (Topsell 1967, I.571)

Being both earthly and hellish, the wolf is also the stereotype of the devouring beast (Oppian 1963, ll. 26-670): fears of cannibalism run through a tragedy where humanity seems threatened by a regression to a state of bestiality. Men, here, are metamorphosed in malo, and their transformation does not put an end to their sufferings. The cruelty of the play is exemplified by the behaviour of Goneril and Regan who ruthlessly take advantage of the credulousness of others. If Lear rightly observes the wolfish features of Goneril’s face, he keeps following the same logic, though unconsciously, when he compares himself to a fox in the last act of the play (5.3.23): the wolf was indeed known as the predator of the fox (Topsell 1967, 178 and 572). Lear, seen as a hunter in the first act (“[…] When he returns from hunting” 1.3.8), becomes a mere prey, a fox which must be smoked out. The man who was then previously supposed to embody the glamour and charisma of majesty now turns into a diminutive creature, weakened by his female predators: whereas tears are generally attached to the weaker vessel, the order of things is inverted in the tragedy. The neo-Platonic idea of beauty as the vestment of good, which is continued in the Renaissance stereotype of women using their exterior beauty as a means of enhancing their supposed virtues, is here subverted by Shakespeare. In King Lear,

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appearance and reality are not compatible, and under their flattering makeup, Lear’s eldest daughters contrast their hearts of stone with their frail father’s “flawed heart” (5.3.195). No wonder, then, that the old monarch tries in vain to understand this anomaly: Then let them anatomize Regan; see what breeds about her heart. Is there any cause in nature that make these hard hearts? (3.6.73-75)

Lear’s undeserving daughters undergo a petrification which apparently prevents them from weeping; so much so that they cannot possibly shed the crocodile tears which Shakespeare often mentions in other plays.18 In King Lear, most of the characters are seen stiffening as well as dissolving, and the audience has to make sense out of this perpetual tension. If abundant mineral images serve to characterize Goneril and Regan, both Lear and Cordelia, who desperately seek to put out the pagan fires of hell with the water of their Christian tears, are defined by their sobs and emotional spasms. Lear is not only seen crying out of grief, he also weeps for rage when he is faced with Goneril’s ingratitude. From time to time, his tears are even made hot by his burning hate (“These hot tears”, 1.4.290, “[…] Old fond eyes, / Beweep this cause again […]”, 1.4.29394); but if he sheds tears due to his emotions, the latter are so extreme that they paradoxically contribute to dehumanize him. As a male Niobe, his grief is so intense that only the petrification of death seems likely to put an end to his sufferings (Bate 2001, 191 and 196).19 As to his youngest daughter, she apparently corresponds to the traditional representation of mourners. Towards the end of the play, she even becomes the embodiment of compassion: And now and then an ample tear trilled down Her delicate cheek. (4.3.12-13)

Her tears symbolize her integrity and must be seen in opposition to her sisters’ flattery, which is denounced by the Fool. The latter, following Erasmus’ precepts in the Praise of Folly, is endowed with the privilege of

18

See Othello 4.1.244-45: “If that the earth could teem with woman’s tears / Each drop she falls would prove a crocodile.” 19 Niobe appears in Book VI of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. See Golding 2002, VI.182-399.

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telling his king the bitterest truths (Erasmus 1915, 64)20: “O, nuncle, court holy-water in a dry house is better than this rain-water out o’ door” (3.2.10). One may here remember that, on the stage of the Globe, Cordelia and the Fool were probably played by the same actor (Stroup 1961, 12732).21 These two characters, as paragons of desperate wisdom and lucid madness, would therefore be but one and the same sweet voice (“[…] Her voice was ever soft” 5.3.270), that of a boy actor. Such a voice cannot be reduced to that of Lear’s bad conscience, for it is rather that of a reality which the king ignores. Cordelia and her alter ego may then represent the two tragic faces of Janus, the god of thresholds and transitions, in a petrified universe where nothing is transmitted any longer, since Lear divides instead of giving. Logically then, when the Fool disappears off-stage, Cordelia occupies the space in order to shed some charitable tears blessed by heaven: “There she shook / The holy water from her heavenly eyes” (4.3.30-31). She soon alludes to her own “importun’d tears” (4.5), which are actually nothing else than the stigmata of the “dear love” she feels for her father. Nonetheless, Cordelia is not just reduced to the normative representation of a woman in tears. She (h)arms herself in order to reconquer her father’s kingdom. Like Spenser in The Faerie Queene, Shakespeare has the young woman leave her own sphere in order to invade the (promised) land abandoned by Lear.22 In the upside down world of the play, the weaker sex becomes strong while the stronger sex is weakened. In a Christian perspective, Lear is identified with the figure of the Prodigal Son, ashamed to have wronged one of his parents, while his younger daughter becomes the father who, in the Biblical parable, easily forgives those who previously misbehaved towards him.23 20

See The Praise of Folly: “This must be confessed, truth indeed is seldom palatable to the ears of kings; yet fools have so great a privilege as to have free leave, not only to speak bare truths, but the most bitter ones too; so as the same reproof, which had it come from the mouth of a wise man would have cost him his head, being blurted out by a fool, is not only pardoned, but well taken, and rewarded.” 21 See, too, what Lear says just before his death: “And my poor fool is hanged” 5.3.304. Such an allusion can be grasped if one keeps in mind that Cordelia’s lifeless body is also the Fool’s. 22 See Spenser 1998, 264 (II.x.31): “And after all an army strong she leau’d, / To war on those, which him had of his realme bereau’d.” Spenser insists on the King’s old age but never alludes to his madness. Leyr eventually recovers his kingdom and dies peacefully. As to Spenser’s Cordelia, she commits suicide by hanging. 23 For the parable of the Prodigal Son, see Luke 15:11–32. See the in-depth analysis developed by Susan Snyder (1966, 361-69), who bases her argument on

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As to Lear’s older daughters, one can say that, far from adhering to the topoi and to the traditional values associated with the feminine world, they strongly contribute to disturb the masculine positions around them. Goneril is keen on emphasizing her natural beauty (“her beauty” 2.2.355) with adornments and artifice, thus re-appropriating her own body. While she is doing so, she destroys the sacred link between her soul and God (Klapish-Zuber 1999, 666). As a new Omphale, she gives her husband the distaff in order to take hold of his sword.24 It is true that, in Renaissance love poetry, the loved woman was sometimes addressed as a “fair warrior.”25 However, Albany never shows any signs of tenderness towards Goneril, who seems to despise her husband, probably because she did not choose him26: Edmund is the only man she really desires. While, for most of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, desire was unthinkable without forms of teasing and delay, Goneril rejects the tradition of female patience in order to reach rapid sexual satisfaction as she seems unable to wait any longer. This leads us to notice that Shakespeare stages a couple characterized by its inverted values, a pair in which Albany, in sharp contrast with his spouse, is associated with maternal food. If Lady Macbeth wants her milk to be turned into “gall,”27 Albany’s gall is already transformed into milk, which causes his wife’s despair. For Shakespeare, milk is often associated with a form of perverted femininity. In Timon of Athens, Timon overtly links it with treachery.28 In King Lear too it signals something deviant in connection with men and masculinity. From the beginning of the play, Goneril blames Albany for his “milky gentleness” (1.4.337) before accusing him of being but a “milk-livered man” (4.2.52) who offers his right cheek to receive more blows (4.2.52). His very manhood is then openly questioned by his wife: “Marry, your manhood, mew!—” (4.2.69).

the question Cordelia asks her father: “And wast thou fain, poor father, / To hovel thee with swine and rogues forlorn, / In short and musty straw?” (4.7.38-40). 24 “I must change names at home and give the distaff / Into my husband’s hands. Ere long you are like to hear— / If you dare venture in your own behalf— / A mistress’s command […]” (4.2.17-20). 25 For example, see Spenser’s Amoretti, 57.1: “Sweet warriour! when shall I have peace with you?” or Othello, 2.1.180. 26 See R. A. Foakes’ Introduction to King Lear p. 42-43. 27 “[…] Come to my woman’s breast, / And take my milk for gall (1.5.44-45).” Compare with Lear, whose heart gradually empties itself of love and whose gall increases (1.4.261-62). 28 “[…] Let not the virgin’s cheek / Make soft thy trenchant sword: for those milk paps / That through the window-bars bore at men’s eyes / Are not within the leaf of pity writ, / But set them down horrible traitors” (4.3.118-22).

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The beard, one of the main attributes of virility, is mentioned twice as far as Gloucester is concerned (Fisher 2001, 155-87).29 The latter protests precisely because Regan pulls his hairs out of his chin. The stage direction, “Regan plucks his beard” (3.7.34), is redundant, incidentally, since it anticipates exactly what an outraged Gloucester declares: By the kind gods, ’tis most ignobly done To pluck me by the beard. (3.7.35-37) An adverb such as “ignobly” emphasizes what is seen as an outrageous deed.30 The old man can hardly bear it since, a few lines later, he decides once again to explain what spectators can already see by themselves: […] Naugthy lady, These hairs which thou dost ravish from my chin Will quicken and accuse thee. (3.7.37-39)

Words are loaded with strong, ominous meanings. If the verb “ravish” does here suggest a form of rape, Gloucester’s reaction may be also be thought of as slightly over the top. However, it is not so. If the daughter’s deed is sacrilegious and strikes a blow at her father’s dignity, it is because, in the Renaissance, the beard was directly associated with the reproductive capacities of the men who wore it. Now, in the first lines of the play, Gloucester prides himself on the sexual prowess that adultery seems to have represented for him: if he loses his beard, he loses everything he was proud of until now. Indeed, according to Thomas Hill: [t]he bearde in man […] beginnith to appeare in the nether jawe […] through the heate and moysture, carried unto the same, drawn from the genitours: which draw to them especially, the sperme from those places. (Hill 1571, 145-46. Quoted by Fisher 2001, 174)31 29

Beards are explicitly mentioned in all of Shakespeare’s plays, except in Richard III, Henry VIII, Titus Andronicus and Pericles. 30 See also Kent’s reactions when confronted to Oswald: “Spare my grey beard, you wagtail?” (2.2.65). 31 The same argument is developed by Ulmus 1602, 208 (quoted by Fisher 2001, 174). In this connection, see Hall 1653, 48: “a decent growth of the beard is a signe of manhood […] given by God to distinguish the Male from the Female sex.” John Bulwer (1654, 208) says exactly the same thing: “the beard is the sign of man […] by which he appears a man.”

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The “bearde” then was regarded as a basic marker of masculinity, so that plucking Gloucester’s hairs from his chin amounts to a symbolic castration. A second castration, belonging to the same symbolical order, is soon revealed: Gloucester’s eyes are plucked onstage, as in the case of the culprits who had been convicted of sexual crimes in medieval trials. Even though Gloucester’s blinding is shown to the spectator, thus creating a general feeling of pity, horror and revulsion, it seems that Shakespeare’s aesthetics comes here close to the obscene. Derived from the Latin obscenus, the word first meant “of ill omen, sinister,” and then it became understood as the thing “which must not be shown onstage.” If we keep in mind the idea that the prefix “ob-” first signified “in front of,” we then realize that what was called obscenus was not related to what occurs onstage, but rather to what occurs in front of the stage, concealed from public view. Shakespeare never shows any sex or perverse demeanour on stage as in his plays sexual intercourse always occurs offstage (Daileader 1998, 107-13). It is in fact omnipresent, as his wordplay constantly refers to it to recreate frightening representations of the female genitals, this sulphurous pit of “hell” which is responsible for man’s damnation. In such a misogynous perspective, woman is the devil incarnate: See thyself, devil : Proper deformity shows not in the fiend So horrid as in woman. (4.2.60-62)

Albany sees his wife as a demon hiding inside and then protected by a woman’s body (4.2.67-68). In King Lear, hell is a place where disquieting images of strange bodily practices and forbidden intercourse are licensed and freely represented. Such images are the remnants of the medieval vision of Hell. No wonder then that Goneril should so often be associated with the phallic image of the snake, the embodiment of devilish temptation in the Bible. In Shakespeare’s bestiary, Goneril’s counterpart is no other than Edmund himself, “a most toad-spotted traitor” (5.3.136). The image of the toad, linked to that of the bastard, is particularly striking: the spots covering the toad were supposed to be venomous and, during the Middle Ages, this animal was an infernal beast representing the satanic emblem of desire.32 32

See Othello, 4.2.62-63 (“Or keep it as a cistern for foul toads / To knot and gender in! […]”) and Troilus and Cressida, 2.3.158-59 (“I do hate a proud man, as I do the engend’ring of toads”).

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Love, in King Lear, is presented as impure and repeatedly identified with lust: “Do you smell a fault?” (1.1.15) a gloating, cynical Gloucester asks while alluding to a “fault” that has led to the begetting of the bastard child. In this crude joke, the word “fault” is synonymous with “crack,” “flaw” or “cut,” one of Shakespeare’s favourite slang terms to designate woman’s vagina (Astington 1985, 33-34). Does not a fault directly lead to hell, after all? Kent, just like the spectator, immediately grasps the lewd connotations in Gloucester’s speech: “I cannot wish the fault undone, the issue of it being so proper” (1.1.16-17). The tragedy’s first exchange already depicts Lear’s gloomy universe—a world ruled by animal instincts, where true love is despised. Lear’s hundred knights are representative of this luxurious humanity. According to Goneril and Regan, these tumultuous followers cause “riots”—a recurring term in the play and a word which was then synonymous with debauchery.33 If, contrary to Gloucester, Lear never did anything beyond repair, he nonetheless begot monsters, that is in Randle Cotgrave’s definition of the term, “deformed creature[s]; […] thing[s] that [are] fashioned, or bred contrarie to nature.” Both Goneril and Regan are compared to cruel and lascivious centaurs—masculine creatures, traditionally, and they behave in a ruthless way vis a vis their father (4.6.121-24).34 The description of their lower parts, assimilated to the darkness of Hell, reflects masculine anxieties about love in its physical dimension as it seems that, for them, sexual intercourse generates gloom. Under his disguise as Tom of Bedlam, Edgar invents for himself a past life dedicated to vice and lust, during which he did “the act of darkness” with his mistress (3.4.85). Significantly, the act of coition, or copulation, is not named as such. This terror surrounding sex in King Lear resurfaces in similar terms when Edgar, turned commentator of the action, alludes to Edmund’s dubious origins: 33

For instance, see how Richard Brathwait uses the word “riot” in A Strappado for the Divell (1615), “To the Lands-lord wheresoever”: “Must he (I say) for all his lifes disquiet, / Maintaine thy whoredome and excessiue riot, / Must he support thee in thy vaine delights” (182-4). 34 Bate 2001, 194: “Ovid was the locus classicus for centaurs. Their ‘duplex natura’ (Metamorphoses, xii.503) was the perfect image for humankind’s double nature as both beasts and rational creatures; as ‘semi homines’ (xii. 536) and ‘biformis’ (ix.121), they are arrested in a perpetual state of semi-metamorphosis, an emblem of the process which is Ovid’s theme. All this also makes them an ideal emblem in King Lear, Shakespeare’s fullest exploration of dual nature, of humanity’s approximation to the bestial.”

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The dark and vicious place where thee he got Cost him his eyes. (5.3.165)

Since the roles of young women were then played by boy actors, the ambivalence of most of Shakespeare’s female characters, half-way between manhood and womanhood, becomes all the more obvious. Gloucester, as to him, is seen the other way round and is clearly feminized, or emasculated, by his enucleation, as Lear acknowledges when he exclaims: “Ha! Goneril with a white beard?” (4.6.96). This cue actually fashions the image of a bleeding body, neither completely masculine nor completely feminine, and as such, conjures up the related image of the hybrid monsters of classical mythology. The grotesque, once again, is hardly distinguishable from the horror pervading the whole scene. Incidentally, the cruelty of Lear’s daughters is such that Lear eventually goes as far as questioning his paternity: If thou shouldst not be glad, I would divorce me from thy mother’s tomb, Sepulchring an adultress. (2.2.318-21)

By making his late spouse a would-be adulteress, he tarnishes her reputation, trying in vain to put a distance between himself and his bastardised progeny, thus mirroring Edmund’s condition. But a little distance will not do at this stage. Hell has opened its pit with Lear’s rejection of his child and it is now impossible for him to go back. Suspicion and paranoia have contaminated his mind and he puts in doubt everything he used to think legitimate, sound and true to type.

Conclusion “Fathers, from hence trust not your daughters’ minds / By what you see them act” (1.1.168-69). This wise piece of advice is uttered by Desdemona’s father, Brabantio, in Othello. Ironically, Kent’s recommendations to the irate king in 1.1 should in all logic have been followed by Lear, this tragic senex iratus who is both seduced and lost by the flattery of his daughters. When it finally dawns upon him how much he has erred in a world where formal court ceremonies and conventions are no longer relevant, it is too late. Once he has opened his eyes on what his daughters really expect from him, he seeks to turn the last normative representations of an upside down society, and he does so until the very

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end of the play. When he re-appears, with the dead Cordelia in his arms, the whole scene is turned into an inverted Pietà (Goodland 2006, 201-20). Visually, the allusion is unmistakable as the old father advances centre stage holding his daughter in his arms with tears streaming down his cheeks. This time, the usual feminine lament is voiced by a man who begot female centaurs. Another subliminal reference to the centaur is found in Cordelia’s proposal to send one hundred men to look for her lost father (4.4.6). In such a context, the word “century” reminds us of a plant famous for its medicinal virtues, just as the “centaury”35 alludes both to the centaurs— Boccacio explains that they were one hundred (II.468-72)—and to the grass which took its name from the centaur Chiron, according to Natale Conti’s Mythologiae (Conti 2006, 611).36 As a consequence, the seemingly wise Cordelia-Chiron also subverts traditional representations. If, like her sisters, she must be a centaur, then she will be one deprived of both cruelty and lust. The upsetting of values observed by Katharine Goodland goes far beyond that of Lear’s mourning: In a complete reversal of the dynamic of medieval drama, the role of the mourner who responds to and interpret death for the community in King Lear now belongs unequivocally to the male tragic protagonist. (Goodland 2006, 215)

It is the system inherited from feudal traditions which is questioned here. In such a universe, where men encroach upon a territory once exclusively belonging to women, and where love is synonymous with pretence, the true fools are those who still have access to meaning. In this perspective, the early disappearance of Lear’s fool hardly allows us to hope for a better future for humanity. Still, if the Lear universe foreshadows a world in ruins (“ruined piece of nature”), then the ultimate paradox consists in saying that everything is still possible. So, remnants, relics and ruins sometimes allow the best, or the noblest feelings, to arise: And ruin’d love, when it is built anew, Grows fairer than at first, more strong, far greater. (Sonnet 119) 35

See R. A. Foakes’s Introduction to King Lear (322). “But Achaeus and Erasistratus insist that Chiron never died from that wound; for after the herb “centaury” or centaureum was applied to the wound, he was supposedly cured. This same herb later tool the name of the Centaur himself, since he was the one who was supposed to have figured out how to use it.”

36

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Watson, Thomas. 1582/1984. The Hekatompathia, in English and Scottish Sonnet Sequences of the Renaissance. 2 vols, vol. I, Holger M. Klein, dir., Hildesheim: Georg Olms. Whitney, Geoffrey. 1989. A Choice of Emblems. Aldershot: Scolar Press.

KING LEAR: FABRIC OF THE HUMAN BODY AND ANATOMY OF THE WORLD MURIEL CUNIN

King Lear is marked by a complex interplay between interior and exterior epitomised by the interacting motifs of anatomy, architecture and cartography. The interior of the body becomes literally spectacular while the link between physiological and psychological inwardness is constantly stressed. Organs and entrails are presented as expressive of inner feelings even as the discourse of contamination and infiltration insists that the open porous body is dangerous and must be closed. The continuous exchange between interior and exterior and the all-pervasive corporeality of the play thus turns the theatrum mundi into a theatrum anatomicum. I could never content my contemplation with those generall pieces of wonders, the flux and reflux of the sea, the encrease of Nile, the conversion of the Needle to the North, and have studied to match and parallel those in the more obvious and neglected pieces of Nature, which without further travell I can doe in the Cosmography of my selfe; wee carry with us the wonders, we seeke without us: There is all Africa, and her prodigies in us. (Browne 1909, sect. 15. Quoted by Hillman 2007, 19)

While taking up the traditional notion of the link between microcosm and macrocosm these lines from Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici are nevertheless quite removed from Galen’s vision, being part of an age when the relation between the big and the small was undergoing deep changes. The analogy between the human body and the cosmos was repeatedly questioned and the former was more and more regarded as a self-contained world gradually closing in upon itself. The notion of interiority emerging in the early modern period went hand in hand with what Yves Bonnefoy calls the “excarnation” of the world (Hillman 2007, 4) while “the sense of an ‘invisible wall’ between the inside and the outside of the body” led to “an increasingly strict demarcation” between man and the exterior world (Hillman 2007, 7). Norbert Elias calls “the isolated person in the form of […] the we-less I, in his voluntary or involuntary loneliness” homo clauses (Elias 1991, 199). Paradoxically,

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this fantasy of a clear divide between inside and outside developed precisely in an age when treatises of anatomy multiplied, promoting the opening of the body and the exhibition of its “fabric.”1 The interior of the body thus tended to become literally spectacular. In King Lear, where “the boundaries between inside and outside [...] are continually violated,” (Hodges 1985, 137) this complex interaction is of paramount importance. If Lear is regarded by some as “emblematic of subjectivity” (Turner 1997, 161) it may also be due to the play’s exploration of the depths of human cosmography. Both man and world are relentlessly anatomized and exposed onstage.

Inside/outside Cordelia’s reticence and abrupt words in the love test scene are often regarded as a token of sincerity but they are also a sign of what Norbert Elias calls “the advance of the threshold of shame” (Elias 2000, passim). Elias’ phrase admittedly refers to “sensitivity towards everything that came into contact with the body” (Elias 2000, 139) and not to reserve, but the young woman’s refusal to expose her inwardness is precisely couched in bodily terms: “I cannot heave / My heart into my mouth” (1.1.91-92). Thus the link between physiological and psychological interiority is immediately apparent as feelings literally lie within such organs as the heart, the liver, the stomach, etc.2 Ironically, Regan, who is at first so quick to profess her love for her father becomes eventually incapable of answering “from a full-flowing stomach” (5.3.75)—possibly because the stomach in question is full of the poison that Goneril has given her. Her sick body closes in upon itself and Regan, unable to spit her venom now that it is drowned in poison, can only utter a few suffocating words, “sick, O, sick!” (5.3.96). Nothingness (“O”) is literally shut in by the repetition of the enclosing word “sick”: Regan too has become “a shelled peascod” (1.4.190) cut off by pain from the outside world. Cordelia, for her part, deliberately closes her body as though trying to protect its interior, but closure is only apparent3: as she is “pierced to [a] demonstration of grief” (4.3.9-10)4 her tears reveal her inner feelings (4.3.12). Contrary to her 1 The term, used in Vesalius’ groundbreaking De humani corporis fabrica (1543), crops up frequently in early modern anatomical treatises. 2 This connection between “subjectivity and entrails” is typical of the early modern period (Hillman 2007, 18-19). 3 Lear’s mistake is precisely that he fails to see it and mistakes outward appearances for inwardness. 4 My emphasis.

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sisters, she tries nevertheless to be “a queen / Over her passion, who, most rebel-like, / Sought to be king o’er her” (5.3.13-15), which, according to Elias, is part of the civilizing process.5 In contrast, the play begins with the foundational image of a full womb (“she grew round-wombed”, 1.1.13) followed by the question “do you smell a fault?” (1.1.15). The association between image and question is no accident: the motif of the gaping female body leading Gloucester to his fall is evocative of all the fantasies about death, evil and the female genitals that developed in the sixteenth century along with the discourse of contamination and infiltration launched by Girolamo Fracastoro’s treatise, De contagione et contagiosis morbis et curatione (1546): “as a general rule, men were seen as creatures whose fluids or violence were constantly erupting to infect the world, whereas women brought pollution on society by receiving it in their ever-open wombs” (Muchembled 2003, 91). This is precisely what Lear means when he flays female lust: “Down from the waist they are centaurs, though women all above. But to the girdle do the gods inherit, beneath is all the fiend’s: there’s hell, there’s darkness, there is the sulphurous pit, burning, scalding, stench, consumption!” (4.6.121-25). It is also Lear who calls for contagion to enter Goneril’s ever-open body: Strike her young bones, You taking airs, with lameness! [...] You nimble lightnings, dart your blinding flames Into her scornful eyes! Infect her beauty, You fen-sucked fogs, drawn by the powerful sun To fall and blister! (2.2.352-57)

The notion of bodily infiltration “led to a medical debate on sickness as contagious evil, paving the way for a deeper fear of demonic invasion” (Muchembled 2003, 70 and Harris 2006). Distrust of the body accounts for what Muchembled calls “the demonizing of smell” (Muchembled 2003, 99): pestilential stenches are associated with disease and accompany the devil’s appearance. Therefore, Gloucester’s “do you smell a fault?” is pregnant with meaning. Similarly, Lear expels Cordelia from his body as though she were a pathogen: Here I disclaim all my paternal care, Propinquity and property of blood, And as a stranger to my heart and me 5

Elias defines this process as a pressure towards self-discipline and self-restraint (Elias 2000, passim).

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Hold thee from this for ever. (1.1.114-17)6

Of course, the real pathogens are Regan and Goneril, as Kent remarks: “Do, kill thy physician, and thy fee bestow / Upon the foul disease” (1.1.164-65). Once the scales have fallen from his eyes, Lear regards Goneril as a disease attacking his flesh and blood: But yet thou art my flesh, my blood, my daughter, Or rather a disease that’s in my flesh, Which I must needs call mine. Thou art a boil, A plague sore, or embossed carbuncle In my corrupted blood. (2.2.410-14)

Gloucester, for his part, describes Edgar as “outlawed from my blood” (3.4.163). Interiority thus takes a very corporeal form as shown by Gloucester’s bewildered questions about Edgar (“[…] had he a hand to write this? / A heart and brain to breed it in?” 1.2.56-57) or by the recurrent motif of the bursting heart (2.1.90; 2.2.310, 473-74; 4.6.138; 5.3.175; 5.3,195-98, 311). In the depths of despair, Lear’s whole being is absorbed into a single organ, as the apparent juxtaposition of “me” and “my heart” suggests: “O me, my heart!” (2.2.310). The motif of the porous body threatened by pathogenic invasion is echoed by the image of imperfect bodily architecture, far from the ideal Vitruvian model (Vitruvius 1960, III.1). The theme of the “fabric” (construction) of the human body or of the world is frequent in the Renaissance, as witnessed by such titles as Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica (1543) or Mercator’s Atlas sive Cosmographicae Meditationes de Fabrica mundi et fabricati figura (1595). Architecture is what connects anatomy (the fabric of the body) and cartography (the anatomy of the world), as Henry Wotton stresses when he mentions “the Fabrique of our own Bodies, wherein the High Architect of the World [has] displayed such skill” (Wotton 1968, 7). In King Lear, the architectural fabric of the body is mentioned by Kent, who calls his outward appearance “my out-wall” (3.1.41) and who threatens to destroy Oswald’s fabric and to turn him again into raw material: “I will tread this unbolted villain into mortar and daub the wall of a jakes with him” (2.2.63-65). In the first example the body is a protective wall, whereas in the second one this wall is destroyed so that Oswald’s interior is exposed and ironically used to daub another 6

My emphasis.

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wall.7 The tension between interior and exterior runs through the play: the architecture of the body is no longer protective and what is inside (innards and inwardness) is—sometimes violently—turned into spectacle. No place is a proper shelter, neither Gloucester’s house, that becomes the stage of his torture (3.7), nor the prison fantasized by Lear as a closed, protective body (5.3.8-19), that becomes the stage of Cordelia’s murder. The only possible refuge seems to be the tomb (3.4.99-100; 4.7.45). Lear makes two tragic flaws: the first one is to attack Cordelia’s closed body by forcing her to externalize her inner feelings; the second one is to attack the territorial integrity of the body politic by dividing a kingdom which he describes as an idealized pastoral landscape: Of all these bounds, even from this line to this, With shadowy forests and with champaigns riched, With plenteous rivers and wide-skirted meads, We make thee lady. (1.1.63-66)8

The map symbolizing the kingdom is so “charged with the phenomenological values of interiority” (Gordon 2001, 123) that it becomes a topography of Lear’s inwardness. The latter, once more, is evoked in very physical terms: the third of the map representing Cordelia’s portion is to be digested by Cornwall and Albany (“With my two daughters’ dowers, digest this third,” 1.1.129) just like Lear has to stomach his disappointment. By making a spectacle of the body politic and of his own inwardness, Lear invites us to a journey to the centre of the human body. The link between theatre, anatomy and cartography is wellknown: in his Atlas, Mercator draws a parallel between the fabric of the body and the fabric of the world,9 which both reveal the greatness of God’s works; in his Microcosmographia (1615), Helkiah Crooke describes the body as a small world, “an epitome of the whole creation” (Quoted by Caterina Albano in Gordon 2001, 89); in his Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain (1611), John Speed synthesizes these various links by making a parallel between body and soul, landscape and State, anatomy 7

Like Goneril’s body, Oswald’s is open to evil influences, as the word “unbolted” shows. 8 According to John Gillies, “the effect here is entirely consistent with the ‘landscape’ effect of a Saxtonian map in which features such as ‘forests,’ fields and rivers were represented by mimetic codes [...] with a strong ambience of pastoralism” (Gordon 2001, 117). 9 See above.

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and cartography, and by comparing his work as a geographer to that of an anatomist dissecting the body politic in a theatre: Our intendment is to take a view as well of the outward Body and Lineaments of the now-flourishing British Monarchy [...]. And here first wee will (by example of best Anatomists) propose to the view the whole Body, and Monarchie intire [...] and after will dissect and lay open the particular Members, Veines and Joints, (I meane the Shires, Rivers, Cities, and Townes). (Gordon 2001, 93)

Lear’s attack against his own kingdom, that is to say against the body politic, is therefore an attack against his own body.

Anatomy and atomization Indeed, the division of the kingdom leads to a separation of the king’s two bodies, turning Lear into “[a] physis now devoid of any metaphysis” (Kantorowicz 1957, 40. Quoted by Hodges 1985, 75). This violent process is evocative of dissection. But whereas John Speed dismantles the fabric to rebuild it in cartographic form, Lear’s anatomy only leads to the atomization of the body (natural and politic) and to the stripping of the landscape, that becomes a kind of anti-pastoral no man’s land where naked and unprotected beings are exposed. King Lear puts emphasis on the body opened and turned into public spectacle. The theme of nakedness in the play has often been analyzed but it is worth stressing that it is connected with the motif of the open body and the theory of bodily infiltration, since clothes (and particularly underclothes) play an essential “symbolic role in the constitution of the closed body” (Muchembled 2003, 147). The initial image is that of the body politic stripped by Lear of the attributes of power (“now we will divest us […] of rule,” 1.1.49) before he strips his daughter of his love (“to dismantle / So many folds of favour”, 1.1.218-19). The initial metaphor is then literalized when Lear decides to “abjure all roofs” (2.2.397) and to expose his “unbonneted” head (3.1.10) and “his little world of man” (3.1.10) to the raging elements. A naked, homeless man is but an open building exposed to the wind: Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are, [...] How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these? (3.4.28-32)

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Through its “looped and windowed raggedness” the unprotected body allows the gaze to penetrate and to discover what lies hidden inside, breaking the last limits between interior and exterior: Tremble, thou wretch, That hast within thee undivulged crimes [...] Caitiff, to pieces shake, That under covert and convenient seeming Has practised on man’s life. Close pent-up guilts Rive your concealing continents... (3.2.51-58)10

The motif of dissection and dislocation is a striking characteristic of the play and Caroline Spurgeon’s often quoted lines are well-known: King Lear shows “a human body in anguished movement, tugged, wrenched, beaten, pierced, stung, scourged, dislocated, flayed, gashed, scalded, tortured and finally broken on the rack” (Spurgeon 1990, 339). There is a fine line between naked man and eviscerated man and the Fool crosses it by calling Lear “a shelled peascod” (1.4.190). Flesh and blood are constantly mentioned as reminders of the literally visceral link uniting parents and children: “thou art my flesh, my blood, my daughter” (2.2.410); “’twas this flesh begot / Those pelican daughters” (3.4.73-74).11 But skin is only a fragile boundary between inside and outside12 and one that comes under regular assault (“[…] with her nails / She’ll flay thy wolfish visage” 1.4.299-300; “I would not see […] / [T]hy fierce sister / In his anointed flesh stick boarish fangs” 3.7.55-57). Gloucester’s enucleation is a radical way of questioning the modes of communication between the interior and the exterior: blindness leads him to intro-spection as though his removed eyes (“out, vile jelly”, 3.782) had rolled inwards to “[look] fearfully in the confined deep” (4.1.77).13 The body is persistently 10

See also “Through tattered clothes great vices do appear; / Robes and furred gowns hide all” (4.6.160-61). 11 See also 3.4.141. 12 The early modern way of thinking of the skin is quite ambiguous, as David Hillman remarks: “is the skin a positive, protective element [...] or does a sense of imprisonment or claustrophobia begin to creep in [...]?” Is it “‘an organ of interchange, or permeable membrane, traversable in two directions’” or “‘a porous layer with a multitude of possible openings’” making the body vulnerable? (Hillman 2007, 8). 13 The perspective description of the Dover cliff (4.6) symbolizes the plunge into the unknown—be it death or interiority. The link between anatomy and perspective is stressed by Sebastiano Serlio as follows: “And as those paynters are much

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subjected to all sorts of mutilations, as shown by the motif of the eaten heart14 (“she hath tied / Sharp-toothed unkindness, like a vulture, here,” 2.2.323-24) or by that of beheading (“it’s had it head bit off by it young” 1.4.207). Albany threatens to tear Goneril to pieces (“[My hands] are apt enough to dislocate and tear / Thy flesh and bones” 4.2.66-67) but she eventually stabs herself and the smoking dagger brought onstage immediately after her suicide (“’Tis hot, it smokes, / It came even from the heart of–O, she’s dead!” 5.3.222-23) is strongly evocative of the scalpel of the anatomist. This is reminiscent of Edgar’s prophetic words, “to know our enemies’ minds we rip their hearts” (4.6.255), echoed by Lear’s metaphorical dissection of Regan: “Then let them anatomize Regan; see what breeds about her heart. Is there any cause in nature that make these hard hearts?” (3.6.73-74). Since dis-location is, etymologically, a displacement, a change of place, physical violence also expresses itself in terms of space. Cordelia’s rejection and the division of the body politic hurt Lear’s public, as much as his private bodies and take on a cosmic dimension when he curses his daughter “[…] by the sacred radiance of the sun, […] / By all the operation of the orbs” (1.1.110-12) and when Kent deems that the deposed king “out of heaven’s benediction [comes] / To the warm sun” (2.2.159160). Lear’s anger and frustration entail physical, architectural and cosmic dislocation: “O most small fault, / […] Which like an engine wrenched my frame of nature / From the fixed place” (1.4.258-61).15 Thus, the storm scenes, marked by a continual interplay between inside and outside (“[…] this contentious storm / Invades us to the skin”, 3.4.6-7), pit Lear’s desire to deny the existence of space against his companions’ attempt to relocalize the scene (Turner 1997, 176). Indeed, as John Gillies remarks, “the ‘geography’ of Lear’s ordeal is far less important than its ‘placial’ quality; a quality that has no meaning independently of the phenomenological perfecter that have seene, and perfectly beheld, right Anatomies, then others that only content themselves with the outward bare shew of the superficiencies, so it is with perspective workers” (Serlio 1611, Book II, fol. 6r. Quoted by Sawday 1995, 85-86). Significantly, the corpse on the title page of Vesalius’ treatise is drawn in perspective. 14 Jean-Pierre Camus, “Le Coeur mangé” in Les spectacles d’horreur (1630) and Vérité Habanc, Nouvelles histoires tant tragiques que comiques (1585). 15 A similar image of spheres leaving their orbs and plunging the world into chaos can be found in Antony and Cleopatra: “[M]y good stars that were my former guides / Have empty left their orbs, and shot their fires / Into th’abyss of hell” (3.13.147-49). The parallel with Gloucester’s empty orbs is obvious. All quotations, except those from King Lear, refer to the edition of The Complete Works by Wells and Taylor.

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fact that it is ‘outside’ the ‘household’ setting” (Gillies in Gordon 2001, 125). In the heart of chaos, even as the world is about to collapse (“strike flat the thick rotundity o’ the world,” 3.2.7; “this great world / Shall so wear out to naught,” 4.6.130-31), mirroring the annihilation of Lear’s “little world of man” (3.1.10), Kent tries to convince him that he is still somewhere, in a place where there remains one last landmark, viz. the hovel (“hard by is a hovel,” 3.2.61). But Lear will not enter it despite his faithful friend’s repeated injunctions.16 Faced with Lear’s ramblings Kent tries desperately to bring him back on the right track (that of reason) by urging him to enter the hovel: the obsessive repetition of “enter” (3.4.1 and 4.5.22) is a form of counter-measure against Regan and Cornwall’s “shut up your doors” (2.2.494 and 498). Just as Lear calls for the destruction of the world (3.2.1-9), Poor Tom eats the landscape and all it contains: “Poor Tom, that eats the swimming frog, the toad, the tadpole, the wall-newt and the water; that in the fury of his heart, when the foul fiend rages, eats cowdung for salads; swallows the old rat and the ditchdog; drinks the green mantle of the standing pool […]” (3.4.125-29). Whereas the opening indoor scene conjures up an idealized pastoral setting mapped and digested by Cornwall and Albany (1.1.129), the outdoor storm scenes evoke a crude geological and geographical reality through its most animal and bodily manifestations.17 Poor Tom is as one with his environment and literally incorporates and interiorizes it. After Cordelia’s death Lear adopts again the apocalyptic tone of the storm scenes, combining the motif of the petrified heart with that of collapsing architecture: “O, you are men of stones! / Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so / That heaven’s vault should crack” (5.3.25557). Stemming from the initial image of ingratitude as a “marble-hearted fiend” (1.4.251)18 and from the theme of the fabric of the human body, these two motifs run through the play. Cordelia’s classicism (an open heart

16

Yet the hovel plays an ambiguous role: far from being only a shelter that may bring Lear back to his senses it symbolizes madness in his eyes, which is why he refuses to enter it (3.4.6-14). Significantly, Poor Tom emerges from it. 17 “[T]he major placial division between inside and outside coincides with a division between landscape as comfortably objectified and land as uncomfortably travelled. The landscape of vagrancy and madness is no longer a landscape that is primarily beheld,” writes John Gillies in “The Scene of Cartography in King Lear” (Gordon 2001, 126). 18 This image stands in sharp contrast with the biblical “viscera misericordiae” (Luke, 1: 78). See Hillman 2007, 37.

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and a closed body) is pitted against the grotesque19 violence, the devouring sexuality and the hysteria of her sisters (closed hearts in open bodies). Regan and Goneril are womb-women akin to those evoked above by Robert Muchembled; stricken by “hysterica passio” (2.2.247), Lear fears their “pollution” (to use Muchembled’s terms) and curses them accordingly: “Into her womb convey sterility, / Dry up in her the organs of increase” (1.4.270-71). Body and being are continually associated with the image of the house: Kent asserts that he is much nobler than his “out-wall” (3.1.41) suggests; Edgar compares Poor Tom’s appearance to daub on a wall (“I cannot daub it further” 4.1.55); Regan tells Edmund that he can take advantage of her soldiers and of herself because the citadel of her body is his (“dispose of them, of me, the walls is thine” 5.3.77); Lear compares his head to a “gate that let [his] folly in” (1.4.263) and his whole being to a building ripped off its foundations (1.4.260-61). Therefore, chasing Lear out of his house amounts to chasing him out of himself and to driving him literally beside himself. The motifs of architecture and petrification combine into the metonymy of the “hard house” (3.2.63) associated with Regan and Goneril.20 Thus, it is her own fall that Goneril senses when she compares her hopes to a collapsing house: “Being widow and my Gloucester with her / May all the building in my fancy pluck / Upon my hateful life” (4.2.85-87). The building falls down, the world explodes (“crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once,” 3.2.8) and the limits of the body are ready to burst open and to release the being hidden inside: “O sides, you are too tough! / Will you yet hold?” (2.2.38687).

Nosce te ipsum. “All the world’s a stage”21 in an Anatomy theatre With its naked bodies, its barren, windswept landscape (“for many miles about / There’s scarce a bush” 2.2.491-92) and its “shut [...] out” characters (3.4.18), not only does King Lear turn the world upside down

19

“Conflict between interior and exterior becomes […] the new coordinates of a confrontation between ‘the grotesque’ and ‘the classical’ body” (Sawday 1995, 19. The play’s emphasis on entrails is of course evocative of Bakhtin’s vision of the grotesque body in Rabelais and his World. 20 For another example of the house/being association see Lear’s ironical question: “Do you but mark how this becomes the house?” (2.2.342).The house stands here for the family. 21 As You like It, 2.7.138.

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but it also turns it inside out like “a chev’ril glove.”22 Therefore, Oswald’s words, “[They] told me I had turned the wrong side out” (4.2.9) take on a clearly metadramatic meaning: as Devon Hodges remarks, in this play “the outside becomes the inside, the inside the outside” (Hodges 1985, 85). The vision of Lear’s and Edgar’s brutalized bodies silhouetted against a desolate background establishes a clear connection between body and setting, between anatomy and cartography. It is reminiscent of a few illustrations in Charles Estienne’s treatise, De dissectione partium corporis humani (1546). One of them shows a recumbent open-skulled man, the position of his body mimicking the structure of the ruined building in the background and it calls to mind Gloucester’s words about Lear, “O ruined piece of nature” (4.6.130), and Lear’s comment that he is “cut to the brains” (4.6.189). Another engraving shows a man whose open thorax reveals his heart and it is all the more evocative of Lear’s plight as the anatomized figure is sitting on a throne. Yet another shows a man sitting on a ruined building, pulling open the skin on his thorax and abdomen to reveal his entrails: the little window at the top of the ruined building and the small basement window mirror the gaping thorax and the incisions on the abdomen; the whole picture is evocative of “the looped and windowed raggedness” of the “poor naked wretches” previously mentioned (3.4.2831). Thus, King Lear takes us obliquely into a big anatomy theatre. The parallel between playhouse and anatomy theatre was an obvious one in early modern England: the two types of buildings had a strikingly similar architecture and dissection was a genuine spectacle that was performed in music (Sawday 1995, 75). The title page of Vesalius’ treatise is also very dramatic: a thick crowd presses around a kind of stage on which stands a dissection table where an open-wombed woman is lying, watched by a skeleton. As Jonathan Sawday remarks, “a drama of life and death is, then, being played out within the circular confines of the temple of anatomy” (Sawday 1995, 71). The famous engraving of the Leiden anatomy theatre is another instance of what Sawday calls “moral anatomy” (Sawday 1995, 65): it shows skeletons holding banners covered with edifying sententiae, including the famous nosce te ipsum. A clear-sighted “physician” (1.1.164) Kent immediately clashes with Lear, who, precisely, “hath ever but slenderly known himself” (1.1.29495). Cordelia’s and Kent’s brutal candour is the scalpel flaying the skin of power and leading Lear towards the naked truth, whose allegory he thinks he sees in the shape of Poor Tom (“thou art the thing itself,” 3.4.104). Edgar’s transformation into Poor Tom is a complex process that combines 22

Twelfth Night, 3.1.11-12.

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stripping (“presented nakedness” 2.2.182), self-mutilation (“strike in their numbed and mortified bare arms / Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary,” 2.2.186-87) and acting (“my face I’ll grime with filth,” 2.2.180). He exposes his nakedness to “the winds and persecutions of the sky” (2.2.183), thus becoming a kind of anatomical figure in the theatre of the world (“this great stage of fools,” 4.6.179). He acts as a mirror of truth to Lear and seems to foresee what Helkiah Crooke later wrote in his Microcosmographia (1615): Anatomy is as it were a most certaine and sure guide to the admirable and most excellent knowledge of our selves,23 that is of our owne proper nature. And therefore we reade, that valiant courageous Princes, worthy and renowned Nobles, yea, and invincible Emperors, being mooved and incited with this desire of the knowledge of themselves, did most studiously practice this worke of Anatomy. (Quoted by Hillman 2007, 134)

The link between theatre and anatomy based on the theatrum mundi metaphor is stressed by Shakespeare in Henry V, where the Chorus, describing the material limits of the Globe Theatre, draws out a physiological metaphor: it is up to the audience to use their imagination in order to “digest / Th’abuse of distance” (Chorus II, 31-32) between text and stage and the Chorus promises that “we’ll not offend one stomach with our play” (Chorus II, 40).24 Various atlases and anatomy treatises use the same analogy, the former in their titles (for instance Abraham Ortelius’ Theatrum Orbis Terrarum of 1570 or John Speed’s Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain of 1611), the latter in their title pages showing the inside of anatomy theatres. Kent makes the same parallel when he describes Lear as stretched “upon the rack of this tough world” (5.3.313): the whole world is turned into an anatomy theatre in the centre of which Lear is lying with outstretched limbs, like the corpse on Vesalius’ title page. The illustrations of De fabrica emphasizing the agony of the dissected figure are clearly echoed by Shakespeare’s rack imagery, with all the theatrical

23

See Montaigne’s famous words: “Je m’estalle entier : c’est un skeletos où, d’une veuë, les veines, les muscles, les tendons paroissent, chaque piece en son siege. […] Ce ne sont mes gestes que j’escris, c’est moy, c’est mon essence” (Montaigne 1979, 50). Florio’s 1603 translation reads “I wholy set forth and expose my selfe: It is a Sceletos; where at first sight appeare all the vaines, muskles, gristles, sinnewes and tendons, each severall part in his due place. [...] I write not my gests, but my selfe and my essence” (Book II, chapter VI). Quoted by Hillman 2007, 18. 24 Quoted by Hillman 2007, 41.

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undertones of the word.25 In the end, the “gored” body politic (5.3.319) is superimposed on Lear’s dead body in the theatrum (anatomicum) mundi.

Conclusion Leaving for prison together with Cordelia, Lear romanticizes their cell as the protected, enclosed space where his wounds will heal. But his fantasy is not only that of a perfect fusion between father and daughter, far from the sound and the fury: news from the court will enter the cage (5.3.13-14) and they will chat about the fortunes made and unmade or, as Lear says, “who’s in, who’s out” (5.3.15). This phrase summarizes the complex interplay of interior and exterior at work in the play at large: they cannot be dissociated and they are simultaneously opposed and valid. The very structure of Elizabethan public playhouses—half-open half-closed— symbolizes this complexity and the famous Shakespearean metaphor of the “chev’ril glove” shows clearly enough that it is impossible to separate what forms a whole—the glove and the inside of the glove. Marked by a continuous exchange between inside and outside, King Lear is a play where inwardness—an emergent notion itself—is turned into a genuine spectacle. Corporeality is so pervasive in it that the anatomy imagery turns the theatrum mundi into a theatrum anatomicum. What make human beings different from “men of stones” (5.3.255) are their blood, their entrails and their hearts or, as Joachim Du Bellay wrote: “Le gouster, le toucher, l’œil, l’oreille, et le nez, / Sans lesquels nostre corps seroit un corps de marbre, / Une roche, une souche, ou le tronc d’un vieil arbre.”26

Bibliography Browne, Thomas. 1643/1909. Religio Medici. Facsimile. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Elias, Norbert. 1939/2000. The Civilizing Process. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. —. 1987/1991. The Society of Individuals. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 25

See The Tempest, 4.1.153-56: “The solemn temples, the great globe itself, / Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve; / And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, / Leave not a rack behind.” 26 “Taste, touch, sight, hearing and smell / Without which man’s body would be a body of marble, / A rock, a stump or an old tree trunk.” See Joachim Du Bellay’s “Hymne de la surdité” (Du Bellay 1910, 223).

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Estienne, Charles. 1546. La Dissection des parties du corps humain divisée en trois livres. Paris: Simon de Colines. Gordon, Andrew and Bernhard Klein, eds. 2001. Literature, Mapping and the Politics of Space in Early modern Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harris, Jonathan Gil. 1998/2006. Foreign Bodies and the Body politic. Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hillman, David. 2007. Shakespeare’s Entrails. Belief, Scepticism and the Interior of the Body. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hodges, Devon L. 1985. Renaissance Fictions of Anatomy. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Kantorowicz, Ernst. 1957. The King’s Two Bodies. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Montaigne, Michel de. 1588/1979. Essais. Ed. Alexandre Micha. Paris: GF-Flammarion, 1979. —. 1603. Montaigne’s Essays. Translated by John Florio. Renascence Editions, http://uoregon.edu/~rbear/montaigne/book2.html. Muchembled, Robert. 2000/2003. A History of the Devil. Translated by Jean Birrell. Cambridge: Polity Press. Sawday, Jonathan. 1995. The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Shakespeare, William. 1988/1992. The Complete Works. Eds. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Spurgeon, Caroline. 1935/1990. Shakespeare’s Imagery and What it Tells Us. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Turner, Henry S. 1997. “King Lear Without: The Heath,” Renaissance Drama, n° XXVIII (1997): 161-93. Vesalius, Andreas. 1543. De humani corporis fabrica. Basel: Johann Oporinus. Vitruvius. 1960. The Ten Books on Architecture (De architectura). Translated by Morris Hicky Morgan, New York: Dover Publications. Wotton, Henry. 1624/1968. The Elements of Architecture. Facsimile. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.

“STRANGE THINGS TOWARD” THE DISMEMBERED PERSPECTIVE OF KING LEAR1 PIERRE ISELIN

The theme of the grotesque in King Lear has a long critical history and has been defined in diverse and contradictory modes. This paradoxical play of Shakespeare’s is characterised by its resistance to generic classification and acts out a pageant of “fantasticall pictures,” verbal and scenic images of inversion, distortion, dismemberment and hybridity, which elude unequivocal interpretation. Operating as a sparagmos of fixed perspective, the grotesque is the site of malignant proliferation.

Long before Bakhtin and Kayser expressed nearly opposed attitudes to the conception of the grotesque, it was clear that the notion could not be consensually defined. The history of Shakespearean criticism amply demonstrates that, before and after these fundamental texts, the concept was the focus of divergent definitions, and that it produced contradictory critical reactions to the extent that it was appropriated by certain critics in a flagrantly idiosyncratic and partisan mode as befitted their arguments. What is particularly striking in the history of criticism is the absence of references to previously formulated definitions. For instance, in the Preface to Cromwell, Victor Hugo claims that the presence of the grotesque in the theatre exists in necessary counterpoint to the sublime, that there is an incongruous confrontation of horror and the gaudy in tragedy, which constitutes “one of the supreme beauties of drama” to which the paradigmatic scene between the King and his Fool testifies. However, George Wilson Knight in his provocative essay, “King Lear and the Comedy of the Grotesque” in 1930, fails to allude to Hugo’s ideological and poetical manifesto. He extends the notion of the grotesque to the entire play, arguing that the comic element is indissociable from the 1

Quote from 3.3. 18-19. Translated into English by Angela Hurworth (University of Picardie).

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tragedy. He does not therefore reduce it to the single moment of the Tempest scene between Lear, the Fool and Edgar (in his role of Poor Tom), where the tragic pathos and the comedy of nonsense are meshed, but extends it to the play’s cruellest scenes, for example, the gouging-out of Gloucester’s eyes or the death of Cordelia, which are marked by black humour or horrid laughter. The grotesque is not founded on the switch from comic to tragic, according to a defined poetic geography, but rather on their fusion: it represents, at one and the same time this vale of tears and life’s merry-go-round. According to Knight “this recurrent stress on the incongruous and the fantastic is not a subsidiary element in King Lear; it is the very heart of the play. We watch humanity grotesquely tormented, cruelly and with mockery impaled” (Knight 1949, 120). Curiously enough, Jan Kott, in his study of the play, the chapter “King Lear, or, Endgame” (Shakespeare, Our Contemporary) does not cite Knight. His definition of the grotesque centres on a comparative reading of Shakespeare and the “new grotesque,” referring to Beckett in particular, who “deals with the problems, conflicts and themes of tragedy, such as: human fate, the meaning of existence, freedom and inevitability, the discrepancy between the absolute and the fragile human order” (Kott 1962, 104). The salient image is that of a “man who has been thrown on to the empty stage” (117), where “both the tragic hero and the grotesque actor must always lose their struggle against the absolute” (104) “that which is beyond man is stronger than he is” (136). The ideological and axiological dimension leads the grotesque to be associated with the Theatre of the Absurd, since it “cruelly mocks the historical absolute, as it has mocked the absolutes of gods, nature and destiny” (111). Baudelaire’s “comic absolute” (965) is appropriated by Kott in the form of a blind, absurd mechanism, a game where every choice is the wrong one, where historical necessity appears as buffoonery. King Lear makes a tragic mockery of all eschatologies: of the heaven promised on earth, and the heaven promised after death; in fact of both Christian and secular theodicies; of cosmogony and of the rational view of history; of the gods and natural goodness, of man made in the “image and likeness.” In King Lear, both the medieval and the orders of established values disintegrate. All that remains at the end of this gigantic pantomime is the earth—empty and bleeding (Kott 1962, 116).

At the other end of the scale from this resolutely modern and sombre reading, William Farnham in The Shakespearean Grotesque (1971)— where but a few pages are devoted to King Lear—takes neither Hugo, Knight or Kott into account, or Bakhtin or Kayser. Instead he places the grotesque within the context of the English Renaissance and Shakespeare’s

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version of it within the historical perspective of the classical and medieval visual arts, in particular that of manuscript illumination and gargoyles, and envisages medieval grotesque from its beginnings as the representation of a conflict, a rudimentary drama, ludicrous or sinister, where man, “the poor, bare, forked animal” to which Lear is reduced, confronts the animal or vegetable world: The Romanesque man, with his common grotesque vision of forcing his way, sometimes clothed and armed but often naked and defenceless, through a wild thicket—a wilderness—where he is threatened by vicious beasts and monsters hostile both to him and to each other, can dramatize himself as being in conflict with a world that suffers conflict within conflict. (Farnham 1971, 28)

The history of the concept, applied in but a single literary sense and to a single Shakespeare play, produces differing definitions, verging on aesthetic judgement and combining premeditated eccentricity and deformation, even horror, and an axiological evaluation which, according to these authors, opposes it to values such as the classic, the beautiful, the sublime, the tragic or the absolute. Whether this peculiarity be perceived by Kayser as exclusion from an ordered universe, disintegration (Auflösung) of categories and incoherence, or by Bakhtin as a creative overflowing, a joyful proliferation and a fecund amalgam, it is in overall opposition with the vision of the classical, contained body, “elevated, static and monumental” (Stallybrass, 1986a, 21), and is underpinned by the dual principles of distortion and alienation. Dark or joyous, eccentric or mad, the essential elements of the grotesque are its intensity and ambiguity (Iehl 1997, 15). This brief sketch of the history of the term shows how a word which was used to describe decorative art in the beginning, became loaded with more general notions as well as with connotations which implied a value judgement. In A Worlde of Words (1598), Florio translated the Italian term “Crotesca” as “a kind of rugged unpolished painters worke, anticke worke,” emphasising the semantic connection between “grotesque” and “antic” (the term utilised by Shakespeare), since the two terms, by metonymic transfer, refer to the mural paintings discovered in the archaeological excavations of Nero’s domus aurea opposite the Colosseum in Rome. These are the “peintures fantasques” described by Montaigne using the term “crotesques” in his essay “On Friendship” (Essais, I, xxviii). In Florio’s translation (1603), which paraphrases Montaigne’s text, the equation between the two terms is again made explicit:

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Considering the proceeding of a painters worke I have; a desire hath possessed mee to imitate him: He maketh choice of the most convenient place and middle of everie wall, there to place a picture, laboured with all his skill and sufficiencie; and all void places about it he filleth up with antike Boscage or Crotesko2 works; which are fantasticall pictures, having no grace, but in the variety and strangenesse of them. And what are these my compositions in truth, other than antike workes, and monstrous bodies, patched and hudled together of divers members, without any certaine or well ordered figure, having neither order, dependencie, or proportion, but casuall and framed by chance? Desinit in piscem mulier formosa supernè. Hor. Ars. Poe. 4 A woman faire for parts superior, Ends in a fish for parts inferior. (Florio 1603/1942, 195)

By quoting Horace’s unfavourable criticism, Montaigne humorously refers to the very style of his Essais, “having no grace, but in the variety and strangenesse of them,” comparing them to the central and coherent planning represented by the work of his friend La Boëtie. The “grotesque” decried by Vitruvius, and later by Vasari as the impossible combination of forms invented without recourse to any rule (Chastel 1988, 31), becomes from this time on a poetic trope, here with a specular dimension. Characterised by variety, proliferation, marginality, instability and wildness, even monstrosity, connoted as eccentric, disordered, bizarre and even ridiculous, the grotesque comes into being in the literary idiom as a kind of paradox: a figure used by an author who presents his work as offcentred, disjointed, forever displaced. In the light of these definitions, contradictory though they may be, the aim of this article is to identify the forms and motifs of the grotesque in the tragedy of King Lear, on the one hand at the level of verbal images and scenic images, on the other to show how the hypertrophy of the grotesque contributes to the transcendence of generic definition and to disallow closure in a play which presents such a disconcerting conclusion. Whether in the form of ludicrous incongruity or terrifying monster, the figure of the hybrid stalks the play. Two figures are inscribed in counterpoint throughout King Lear from the very first scene. The first is comic—the Nose—and the other monstrous—the Dragon, but they are both equally open to reversals of perspective which invert the comic or 2

The 1632 edition has “Grotesko.”

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horrible effect. Gloucester’s salacious question “Do you smell a fault”2 (1.1.15) introduces the protean motif of the nose and that of the sense of smell which runs throughout the play, and subliminally inserts the triple theme of stench, dogs and hunting, not to mention female sexuality, qualified from the first as “fault” (Astington 1985, 330 and Laroque 2008, 99). The grotesque reduction of a man to his nose and his olfactory sensations gives rise to the Fool’s mocking comments about the place of the nose in the middle of one’s face (1.5.23), the blind man’s sense of smell (2.2.258-61) and the stench of a bitch, alluding to Goneril: Fool. Truth’s a dog that must to kennel; he must be whipped out, when the Lady Brach may stand by the fire and stink […] (1.4.109-11)

The allusion becomes morbid when Lear evokes the odour of his own mortality (4.6.129); then borders on the horrible when Regan, pastmistress of black humour, having blinded Gloucester gives the order: “Let him smell / His way to Dover” (3.7.91-2, italics mine). And it is precisely there, on the cliffs of Dover that the Nose, monstrously multiplied, appears on the face of the demon as described to his father by Edgar: Edgar. As I stood here below methought his eyes Were two full moons. He had a thousand noses, Horns whelked and waved like the enraged sea. (4.6.69-71)

The logic of the grotesque which governs the metamorphoses of the nose and the transformations of the olfactory sense, seems to lead to the obsessive insistence on the motif of the scent, and thus to the characteristics of hounds on the scent. After Lear (1.4.78-9), it is the turn of Kent to whip an overly-servile Oswald with canine insults “the son and heir of a mongrel bitch […] Knowing naught, like dogs, but following” (2.2.21-22, 78), before finding himself being treated far worse than his master’s dog (2.2.133-34). Then in his ravings, the old king hears his three little dogs barking at him: Trey, Blanch and Sweetheart (3.6.60-61), whose names conjure up those of his three daughters (Foakes 1997, 290). He follows the scent of his daughters and makes them break cover (“there I found’em, there I smelt’em out,” 4.6.101-02), sees himself as a little dog whom they pet (4.6.96-97), and, furthermore, gives a cynical definition of authority: “a dog’s obeyed in office” (4.1.54-55). As for Edgar, the object of a manhunt, he is at one and the same time “learned Theban” (3.4.153), 2

Italics mine. All references are to the edition by R.A. Foakes (see bibliography).

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and “noble philosopher” (3.4.168)—possibly a reference to Cratus, a disciple of Diogenes the cynic—and at the same time a maniac who, ironically serves to exorcise the king’s demonic possession by summoning up a motley pack (3.6.62-70), and who, by parodying the Seven Deadly Sins, evokes a bestiary in which the dog stands as the emblem of madness: Edgar. […] false of heart, light of ear, bloody of hand; hog in sloth, fox in stealth, wolf in greediness, dog in madness, lion in prey. (3.4.91-92)

In this rapid overview of the olfactory and cynegetic dimension of the play, and in the chain of verbal images it unfolds, we perceive how instinct, sexuality, servility and cruelty debase man to the level of an animal, and to what extent the process of identification is reciprocal (Garber 2008, 182-94). If dogs are close to men, it is possible that men are very close to being dogs. The overturn of the hierarchy of man and beast is accompanied here by a dual movement of abjection and identification, since a dog is a figure of the other, to whom humanity is denied, but also of oneself. Lear thus perceives himself both as the victim of an attack by dogs and as a hunting dog. Edgar flies before the pack by transforming himself into a wild man, more like an animal than a human being. He is therefore the author of his own abjection, which is both alimentary and sartorial (3.4.125-26): Edgar. I will preserve myself, and am bethought To take the basest and most poorest shape That ever penury in contempt of man Brought near to beast. My face I’ll grime with filth Blanket my loins, elf my hair in knots And with presented nakedness outface The winds and persecutions of the sky. (2.2.177-83)

Ironically, the trope used by Lear at the beginning of the play, the term “divest” (1.1.49) is literalized when he is actually exposed to the elements bareheaded, and confronts Poor Tom’s nakedness. At this moment, he praises man’s nudity for it appropriately defines the true place of man in the cosmos. He who wished to “Unburdened, crawl towards death”, 1.1.40) is now facing a man reduced to his elementary self: “the thing itself” (3.4.104). Lear symbolically exposed his nakedness in cravenly calling for compliments and declarations of love from his daughters, a plea designed to exorcise and mask his neediness: “his abject status, the wormlike crawl he is making toward death, and his need for support and expression of love.” (Zak 1984, 236).

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The dramatic about-turn which occurs at this moment endows the grotesque which a satirical dimension, for the pomp and ceremony of the first scene are inverted and produce a critique of artifice: Lear. Is man no more than this? Consider him well? Thou ow’st the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Ha? Here’s three on’s us are sophisticated; thou art the thing itself. Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. Off, off, you lendings: come, unbutton here. (3.4.101-07)

This radically cynical philosophy of clothing allows us to perceive a parable founded on a double paradox: not only is the animal element in man hidden, or/and even denied, but also the fact is that civilised man is indebted to the animal for that which renders him civilised, since man can only hoist himself above an animal-like state if he steals elements belonging to the latter, and the debt is never paid, unless he allows himself to be immersed in bestiality. The rampant bestiary in King Lear3 thus only emphasises the distance between man and animal in order to abolish and replace it by hybridity. Such hybridity, though it is impossible, is not unthinkable. The ill-defined borderline between the two worlds, innate to the concept of the fantastical grotesque, links what is abject and what is familiar, the obscene and the respectable, the ignoble and the noble. In theatrical terms, the transformation of the old king into a wild man, crowned with weeds evokes the vegetal compositions representing heads by Arcimboldo: Cordelia. Alack, ’tis he. Why, he was met even now As mad as the vexed sea, singing aloud, Crowned with rank fumiter and furrow-weeds, With burdocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo-flowers, Darnel and all the idle weeds that grow In our sustaining corn. (4.4.1-6)

The concetto, visual in nature, is an affirmation of the metamorphosis which is based on metonymy and paradox as it is in painting. It “results here from the ambivalence between detail and whole, between the natural and the fantastic image” (Morel 2007, 228, translation mine). 3

Goneril, for example is in turn a kite (1.4.112), a wolf (1.4.300), a vulture (2.2.132), a serpent (2.2.350), a pelican (2.4.74), a wild board (3.7.57), a tiger (4.2.41), a dog (4.2.46) and a toad (5.3.136).

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However there is another kind of “painting” present throughout the play, although it exists in the margins. This painting mixes laughter and horror, and constitutes self-representation under cover of the features of the absolute Other, Satan. This inhabits the play from the moment Lear threatens Kent: “Come not between the dragon and his wrath!” (1.1.123), the instant where rage, a form of ephemeral madness, transforms the loving father into the hideous figure of a gargoyle, associating him with the barbaric Scythian and the ogre who devours the fruit of his own loins: Lear. The barbarous Scythian, Or he that makes his generation messes To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom Be as well neighboured, pitied and relieved, As thou my sometime daughter. (1.1.117-21)

The dragon reappears in ostensibly ludicrous form in the scene where Edmund impugns the deterministic nature of horoscopes and superstitions linked to astral signs and alludes to his own conception “under the dragon’s tail […] under Ursa Major” (1.2.129-30). In this comic reversal, old-fashioned superstitiousness is seen through the lens of the new philosophy, and the determinism imputable to the Zodiac, a gigantic celestial bestiary, is relegated to the realms of archaic modes of thought which alienate man from his responsibility and prevent him from being the master of his own destiny. However Edmund imputes the bestial, unbridled sexuality of his father (“his goatish disposition,” 1.2.127) to another kind of determinism—a disposition which seems to be hereditary, for Edgar has “outparamoured the Turk” (3.4.89-90) and Edmund, on dying, celebrates his grotesque double marriage to both Goneril and Regan: Edmund. I was contracted to them both; all three Now marry in an instant. (5.3.227-28)

As for Gloucester, he is turned into the sign—amusing and painful in turns—of guilty sexuality, the Vice from the Morality plays (“old lecher,” 3.4.110), a brothel sign (“blind Cupid,” 4.6.134), Goneril / Gonohrroea with a white beard (4.6.96), and in his blindness he is the incarnation of “the act of darkness” (3.4.85): Edgar. The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices Make instruments to plague us.

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Alienation in itself—here that of the presence of the other, the bestial, the feminine—testifies to the existence of another more disturbing form of the same, that of demonic possession. F. W. Brownlow and Stephen Greenblatt have both shown in their own different ways the extent to which Shakespeare drew on the pamphlet by Samuel Harsnett, A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (1603), particularly by adopting the names of the demons—Frateretto, Hoppedance, Obidicut, Hobbididence, Modo, Mahu and Flibbertigibbet. If for Harsnett the miracle of exorcism is merely a piece of theatrical pretence, a “tragedie of devils” (Harsnett in Brownlow 1993, 203), in King Lear demonic possession is a disguise taken on by Edgar, alias Poor Tom. In a complex specular relation, the true theatre presented by Shakespeare enacts and claims as threatrical the kind of possession that Harsnett wants to banish from church practice because it is a false form of theatricality. Seen in this light, the storm itself works as a mirror for the pamphlet, especially since the text relates the exorcism of a certain Nicholas Marwood, suffering from melancholy and who was reputed to be possessed by such sickness following a terrifying storm: Marwood, Westons patient, beeing pinched with penurie and hunger, did lie but a night or two abroad in the fieldes, and beeing a melancholicke person, was scared with lightning and thunder that happened in the night, and loe, an evident signe that the man was possessed. (Harsnett in Brownlow 1993, 222)

In the same way, exorcism itself is described as a frightful storm cannily orchestrated: Thirdly, it [the booke of Exorcismes] served wonderous aptly ad terrorem et stuporem incutiendum populo: in steede of thunder and lightning to bring Jupiter upon the stage, by these dreadful frightful Exorcismes, thundring, clapping and flashing out the astonishing of Gods names, Jehovah, Tetragrammaton, Adonai, and the rest, to amaze and terrifie the poore people, and to possesse them with an expectation of some huge monster-devil to appeare. (Harnsnett in Brownlow 1993, 287)

Thus in King Lear, the storm seems to function like an exorcism with Lear playing the part of the exorcist. Its dreadful nature, its convulsions and quakes, the “undivulged crimes” which stake their course, released

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from the body, the discourse on sin, all these are signs which bring to mind the ritual frowned upon by the official Church in England: Lear. Let the great gods That keep this dreadful pudder o’er our heads Find out their enemies now. Tremble, thou wretch, That hast within thee undivulged crimes, Unwhipped of justice […] Caitiff, to pieces shake, That under covert and convenient seeming Has practised on man’s life. Close pent-up guilts Rive your concealing continents and cry These dreadful summoners grace. I am a man More sinned against than sinning. (3.2.49-60)

Moreover, Lear calls upon a live storm, an organism with a human form whose winds swell the cheeks (“Blow winds and crack your cheeks”, 3.2.1), a reminder of the illustrations in the bottom corners of geographical maps; thunder is represented as a rumbling stomach (“Rumble thy belliful,” 3.2.14) and the fury of the wind is sightless (“eyeless rage,” 3.1.8). Such meteorological violence, transformed into an eschatological horror scene, has a countenance and corpulence, which Lear, an overthrown demiurge, invokes to flatten the rounded belly of the earth, thus gendered feminine (Adelman 1992, 106-07), (“strike flat the thick rotundity o’ the world,” 3.2.7), and annihilate the human species (“all germens spill at once,” 3.2.7). We note here the slippage between “Goneril” which evokes “gonos,” the Greek term denoting generation and insemination and “gonorrhea,” considered at the time as a symptom of “syphilis” (Adelman 1992, 298). The crisis of orality which is manifest in the form of perverted appetite is resolved in a morbid spouting of humours, or in a monstrous colic (“choler,” OED 3). In his state of vengeful rage, the man who thought he had power over the elements repeats his curse of sterility against Goneril (1.4.267-81), upon whom he had wished by default a “child of spleen” (1.4.274). The feminine body, which the dominant ideology of the Renaissance represented as “naturally grotesque” (Stallybrass 1986b, 126),4 invades the imaginary space of the 4

Valerie Traub writes in relation to this: “Because of our dualistic system of thought, all women, regardless of their individual maternal status, are implicated in male fantasies of maternal omnipotence, nurturance, seduction, engulfment, and betrayal. To the extent that they are gendered, both the “grotesque” and the “classical” body are masculine projections—one, an anxious debasement, the other, a defensive idealization of the physical body from which we are born and to

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play and threatens to contaminate the masculine body, as we see in the near-phobic fear and emphatic refusal of tears by Lear: Lear. […] touch me with noble anger, And let not women’s weapons, water-drops, Stain my man’s cheeks. No, you unnatural hags, I will have such revenges on you both That all the world shall—I will do such things— What they are yet I know not, but they shall be The terrors of the earth! You think I’ll weep, No, I’ll not weep. Storm and tempest (2.2.463-72)

François Laroque has aptly described the symptoms of “sexual nausea” (99) which invade the space of the play, and the logic of this “tragic Eros” (86) whose obsessive motifs are, on the one hand, impotence, punishment, castration and mutilation, and on the other feminine sexuality of a dark and invasive variety, “which destabilises masculine sexuality and destroy the family unit” (102)5. The sexual metonymy, which operates as a verbal sparagmos, reduces “the organs of increase” (1.4.271) to a miniature “hell” (4.6.123) and slices open the body of Goneril just as the anatomist’s scalpel which will expose the cause of Regan’s evil: Lear. Then let them anatomize Regan; see what breeds about her heart. Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts? (3.6.73-75)

In the anatomising of his own humours, Lear will propose retrospectively a metamorphosis imputed to a mechanic force which has made each tiny detail proliferate into something monstrous, so monstrous that the entire being has been deformed, and the heart flooded by bile, the humour which characterises anger: O most small fault, How ugly didst thou in Cordelia show, Which like an engine, wrenched my frame of nature From the fixed place, drew from my heart all love And added to the gall. (1.4.258-62)

which, in the Shakespearean (and Freudian) equation of womb and tomb, we return.” (Traub 1992, 64) 5 My translation.

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Later this self-diagnosis of hysteria will more insistently underline the threat which hangs over the masculine body: Lear. O, how this mother swells up toward my heart! Hysterica passio, down, thou climbing sorrow, Thy element’s below. (2.2.246-48)

The upward trajectory of the little animal that is the uterus towards the region of the heart is doubly subversive here, for in an uncontrollable spasm, not only is the lower body going to prevail over the heart, but above all it is the feminine body (“mother”) which irrupts into the masculine body. Moreover, the case of Maynie, the priest who had to leave his holy order because he believed that he was contaminated with the same evil, provides a link between hysteria and demonological discourse (“an evident signe that Maynie had a devil,” Harsnett in Brownlow 1993, 223). The lower body, the feminine element and the diabolic are the defining limits of an incontrollable sphere—the devil’s part: “Heere you have the Canon for lodging the devil, that you be sure to lodge him not in the head nor stomack, but in the inferiour parts […]” (Harsnett in Brownlow 1993, 252). In this grotesque mapping of the body, femininity emerges even more strongly as a dividing line between artifice and monstrosity, and female sexuality as a hidden stinking hell: Behold yon simp’ring dame, Whose face between her forks presages snow, That minces virtue and does shake the head To hear of pleasure’s name— The fitchew, nor the soiled horse, goes to’t with a more riotous appetite. Down from the waist they are centaurs, though women all above. But to the girdle do the gods inherit, beneath is all the fiend’s: there’s hell, there’s darkness, there is the sulphurous pit, burning, scalding, stench, consumption! Fie, fie, fie! Pah, pah! Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to sweeten my imagination. (4.6.116-27)

During the trial where lechery appears in the dock, a moment when language takes on hybrid forms, switching from verse to prose, from discourse to exclamation, the imagination produces multiple forms of the hybrid: not only is woman a hybrid, half-human, half-horse, but a hybrid of a hybrid, since the centaur—the symbol of lechery—is already a halfhuman, half-animal hybrid. The misogyny of the discourse associates blackness, monstrosity, stench and dissimulation, and the other face of

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anxiety adopts the features of an effeminate male, evoking child-bearing, hysteria, maternal milk as well as tears (Iselin 2008, 152-53). Lear’s three daughters appear armed for combat, leading their armies into battle, while “milk-livered” Albany (4.2.60) is a lesser warrior than his wife (4.5.4-5). Metonymy and chiasmus contribute to the grotesque metamorphosis of a masculine body becoming feminized and the transformation of a female body into a masculinized, diabolic entity: Albany. See thyself, devil: Proper deformity shows not in the fiend So horrid as in woman […] Thou changed and self-covered thing, for shame Be-monster not thy feature […] Howe’er thou art a fiend, A woman’s shape doth shield thee. Goneril. Marry, your manhood, mew! (4.2.60-69)

The universe inhabited by Lear is a place where the hybrid, the diabolic and the uncanny are intertwined; it is the space of hauntings and nightmares and the grotesque, to take up Kayser’s definition once more, holds threatening and sinister sway: “[…] not only something playfully gay and carelessly fantastic, but also something ominous and sinister in the face of a world totally different from the familiar one—a world in which the realm of inanimate things is no longer separated from those of plants and human beings, and where the laws of static symmetry and proportion are no longer valid” (Kayser 1963, 21). Nevertheless, one could argue that other verbal and scenic images contribute to render his definition less sombre. Even if the laughter in the play is jarring, it is still laughter for all that. During the first part of the play, the images of the whip, the spinning top, the Fool’s cap, existing in counterpoint to those of the crown, the sceptre and court apparel, and the motley language of capering madness, disguises borrowed from comedy, the disorder of the tavern imported into the world of the court, all such elements endow the incongruities with an air of carnival. The transformation of the king into a senex iratus, then into an “old man,” (1.1.147), is of course punctuated at intervals by Kent’s sententious speeches, but the more frequent interventions of the Fool with their comic verve plus his occasional musical interjections, played out on the margins of serious discourse, have the function of introducing a measure of distance and poetry into the action. The paradoxical switching of roles between the king and the Fool, the madman and the wise man, the

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father and the child, reaches its ultimate stage with the image of the old man being whipped, trousers down, by his daughters: Lear. When were you wont to be so full of songs, sirrah? Fool. I have used it, nuncle, since thou mad’st thy daughters thy mothers; for when thou gav’st them the rod and putt’st down thine own breeches. (1.4.162-65)

As regards the incongruous spectacle of Kent in the stocks, he is the subject of obscene commentaries, where the ambivalence of the term “stocks” and the homophony detected between “cruel/crewel” transform the instrument of torture into stocking garters, wooden socks, with Kent as a circus animal exposed to onlookers: Fool. Ha, ha, look, he wears cruel garters. Horses are tied by the heads, dogs and bears by the neck, donkeys by the loins by the loins and men by the legs. When a man’s overlusty at legs, then he wears wooden netherstocks. (2.2.198-201)

Goneril’s court, besides, becomes more or less a tavern, where debauchery and disorder hold sway; the man who was the representative of authority now embodies the subversive forces of Carnival, with his retinue of one hundred knights: Goneril. Here you do keep a hundred knights and squires, Men so disordered, so debauched and bold, That this our court, infected with their manners, Shows like a riotous inn. Epicurism and lust Makes it more like a tavern or a brothel Than a graced palace […] (1.4.232-37)

In this inverted world, the Fool calls his master “my boy” (1.4.134); later his master greets him as “sapient sir” (3.4.22), and Poor Tom becomes this “learned justicer” (3.4.21) who will play his part in the absurd trial of the ungrateful daughters, before the ironic thought comes to him that it is impossible to distinguish between judge and thief (4.6.14950). The instability of roles and definitions finally affects language itself, when meaning evaporates in favour of mere acoustic similarity. The exchange between Lear, the Fool and Poor Tom is thus characteristic of what has occurred: Lear.

[…]’twas this flesh begot Those pelican daughters.

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The Dismembered Perspective of King Lear Edgar. Pillicock sat on Pillicock hill, Alow, alow, loo, loo! Fool. This cold night will turn us all to fools and madmen. (3.4.73-77)

On the one hand, the parable of Lear inverts the polarities of the gift with regard to The Chronicle of King Leir, where the pelican, a Christlike figure, sacrifices her blood to save her offspring (Iselin 2008, 34): I am as kind as is the pelican, That kills itself, to save her young ones' lives […] (2.3.43-4)

On the other hand, the linguistic domain of the Fool is, as it were, invaded by Edgar’s reply, as the nonsensical logic of the signifiers (the paronomasia “pelican”/“pillicock”) overturns the moral discourse about ingratitude into the obscene discourse of sexuality, “pillicock” and “pillicock hill” referring respectively to the penis and the mons veneris (Foakes 1997, 276). The Fool’s conclusion demonstrates the prolific language of amalgam, characterised by eccentricity and creative hypertrophy. So within this exchange we note that the two visions of the grotesque cohabit—the carnival conception of Bakhtin, defined in terms of luxuriousness, overspill and overflowing, and that of Kayser, marked by dissolution, hybridity and madness. The coming-together of these three forms of madness onstage and their dramatic combination contribute to a complex definition of the grotesque, seen as the disintegration of the concept of personality, distortion being an active ingredient of subversion, but also as a fecund amalgam, a form of organic increase and extension. The three types of discourse, that of natural folly, folly as playful entertainment, and demonic possession, even simulated, come together to create a discursive polyphony, a combination of voices with more or less sombre tonalities. This subverts any generic distinction between the comic and the tragic, and the very principle of alienation, inherent in the grotesque, applies to the definition of the notion when the play is performed on stage. The refusal to adopt a stable perspective, even as regards the principle of distortion at work, can thus be considered as “mise en abyme” of the grotesque, a radical irony which hinders any attempt at closure. If, as Remshardt writes “representing the grotesque content is always an act of “dismembering the real,” the sparagmos of an orthodox perspective” (Remshardt 2004, 115), then the representation of the grotesque in King

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Lear appears as a complex dismemberment not only of the real, but of the fantastic mode itself, opening the way to extreme radical interpretation, and to its close association with the Theatre of the Absurd.

Bibliography Anon. 1605. The True Chronical History of King Leir and His Three Daughters, Gonorill, Ragan and Cordella. Electronic text. http://www.elizabethanauthors.com/king-leir-1605-1-16.htm Adelman, Janet. 1992. Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeares’s Plays. Hamlet to The Tempest. New York and London: Routledge. Astington, John H. Autumn, 1985. “‘Fault’ in Shakespeare.” Shakespeare Quarterly. Vol. 36, n°3: 330-34. Bakhtine, Mikhaïl. 1964/1970. L'Œuvre de François Rabelais et la culture populaire du Moyen Âge et sous la Renaissance. Paris: Gallimard, 1970. Baudelaire, Charles. 1855/1951. “De l’essence du rire.” Œuvres complètes. Paris: Gallimard-Pléiade. Brownlow, F.W. 1993. Shakespeare, Harsnett, and the Devils of Denham. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Chastel, André. 1988. La Grottesque. Paris: Le Promeneur. Costa de Beauregard, Raphaëlle. 2008. “The grotesque in King Lear: from sensation to emotion. ” Willam Shakespeare, King Lear. Ed. Henri Suhamy. Paris: Ellipses, 75-87. Farnham, William. 1971. The Shakespearean Grotesque: Its Genesis and Transformations. Oxford: The Clarendon Press. Foakes, R.A., ed. 1997. King Lear. London: Thomson Learning, The Arden Shakespeare. Garber, Marjorie. 2008. Profiling Shakespeare, London and New York: Routledge, “Shakespeare’s Dogs,” 182-194. Greenblatt, Stephen. 1988. “Shakespeare and the Exorcists.” Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Oxford: The Clarendon Press. 94-128. Hugo, Victor. 1827/1963. “Préface de Cromwell.” Théâtre complet. Paris: Gallimard-Pléiade. Iehl, Dominique. 1997. Le Grotesque. Paris: PUF. Knight, G. Wilson. 1930/1949. “King Lear and the Comedy of the Grotesque.” The Wheel of Fire. London: Routledge, 160-76. Rpt. in Frank Kermode, ed. 1969/1992. Shakespeare: King Lear. Casebook Series. London: Macmillan, 107-23.

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Iselin, Pierre. 2008. Ch. X: “Tragédie et grotesque.” King Lear. L’Œuvre au noir. Eds Pierre Iselin, François Laroque and Josée Nuyts-Giornal. Paris: PUF, 150-7. Kayser, Wolfgang. 1957/1963. The Grotesque in Art and Literature [1957]. Trans. Ulrich Weisstein. Bloomington: Indiana UP. Kott, Jan. 1962. Shakespeare notre contemporain. Trans. Anna Posner. Paris: Julliard. Laroque, François. 2008. Ch. VI: “L’amour et la sexualité.” King Lear. L’Œuvre au Noir. Eds. Pierre Iselin, François Laroque and Josée Nuyts-Giornal. Paris: PUF, 86-102. Florio, John, trans. 1603/1942. Montaigne’s Essayes, or Morall, politike and militarie discourses. The First Booke, Ch. XXVII, “Of Friendship.” London: Dent, Everyman’s Library. Morel, Philippe. 2007. “Les têtes composées d’Arcimboldo, les grotesques et l’esthétique du paradoxe.” Arcimboldo, 1526-1593. Ed. Sylvia Ferino-Pagden. Paris: Musée du Luxembourg-Skira, 221-31. Remshardt, Ralf E. 2004. Staging the Savage God: The Grotesque in Performance. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Rosenberg, Marvin. 1972. The Masks of King Lear. Newark: University of Delaware Press and Associated University Press. Stallybrass, Peter and Allon White. 1986. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca: Cornell UP. —. 1986. “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed.” Rewriting the Renaissance. Ed. Margaret Ferguson et al. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Traub, Valerie. 1992. Desire and Anxiety: Circulation of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama. London and New York: Routledge. Zak, William F. 1984. “The Player King.” Sovereign Shame: A Study of King Lear. Lewisberg (PA): Bucknell University Press. Rpt. In Shakespeare Criticism 61.

III. PHILOSOPHY, SATIRE

“YET I AM DOUBTFUL” KNOWLEDGE AND IGNORANCE IN KING LEAR MICKAEL POPELARD

Because poor judgement and intellectual short-sightedness are responsible for Lear's tragic fate, King Lear has sometimes been described as a tragedy of ignorance. In particular, critics have often commented on the notion of “selfknowledge” with regard to Lear. In this paper, however, I shall be arguing that the question of knowledge should not be limited to Lear only, as much of the plot (and subplot) depends on the way knowledge is pitted against ignorance. In King Lear, Shakespeare foregrounds the difficulty, or impossibility, of gaining access to knowledge, while simultaneously suggesting that power and domination are predicated upon knowledge. Because uncertainty is the norm in King Lear, every unshared piece of information, every exclusive fragment of knowledge potentially translates into a decisive strategic advantage.

When Cordelia is finally reunited with her father at the end of the play, she suddenly finds herself confronted with the King’s madness. Puzzled as she is at this “great breach in his abused nature” (4.7.15) she has no choice but to turn to the doctor for help: “What can man’s wisdom / In the restoring of his bereaved sense, / He that helps him take all my outward worth” (4.4.8-10). Cordelia is so powerless that she can only trust to the healing virtues of nature, which, she believes, her tears will extract from the earth. As opposed to Cordelia, the doctor may rely on his extensive medical knowledge. The few words he speaks leave us in no doubt that he is a scholar and “a sapient sir” (3.6.22). So competent and knowledgeable is the doctor that he knows why the King has become mad and how his condition is to be treated. Unimportant or peripheral to the plot as this scene may perhaps seem,1 it nonetheless throws into relief the play’s recurring—and, it will be argued, structuring—interplay between knowledge and ignorance. Here, Shakespeare pits Cordelia’s anxiety and ignorance against the doctor’s composed assurance. But this is not the only time in the play when the fools, the blind and the ignorant engage in a 1

The scene is not present in the Folio, where some of the doctor's lines are given to the gentleman instead.

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dialogue with those characters who turn out to be endowed with a superior form of moral, philosophical or political knowledge. For Robert B. Heilman, King Lear is part of a cycle of three major tragedies which successively raise the question of “self-knowledge” while providing conflicting answers to it. Although Othello, Lear and Macbeth are all placed in a position where they need to know themselves and obey the ancient Delphic injunction, they seem to display ever greater reluctance to explore their inner selves: Three times in a two-year period [Shakespeare] delineates tragic heroes in whom self-knowledge would be an appropriate magnanimity, a grace of spirit, or a mode of salvation; as he advances from one play to another he derives an increasing amount of dramatic tension from the protagonist’s resistance to this kind of knowing. It is almost possible to say, in truth, that at each return to the theme he has a stronger conviction of man’s preferring or needing other satisfactions than those of mastering the truth of self. (Heilman 1964, 97)

I should like to suggest, however, that the question of Lear's anagnorisis, or “self-knowledge,” should not be dissociated from that of knowledge as a whole. In the play, self-knowledge is only one aspect of a multi-faceted interrogation about knowledge in general. Paraphrasing Donne’s famous “Meditation XVII”—albeit in a completely different context—one may say that “self-knowledge” is “a part of the main,”2 a mere province in the entire continent of natural philosophy. As Bacon makes it clear in The Advancement of Learning, a philosophical treatise he composed a few years only before the quarto text of King Lear was published in 1608, self-knowledge is “but a portion” of natural philosophy. It is part of a much larger intellectual domain—i.e. natural philosophy—which is concerned with the study of nature as a whole: We come therefore now to that knowledge whereunto the ancient oracle directeth us, which deserveth the more accurate handling, by how much it toucheth us more nearly. This knowledge as it is the end and term of natural philosophy in the intention of man, so notwithstanding it is but a portion of natural philosophy in the continent of nature. (Bacon 1605, t. 2, § 9, 1)

2

John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, “Meditation XVII”: “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”

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The doctor’s medical knowledge and Lear’s gradual progression towards self-knowledge do not stand in marked contrast. On the contrary, they complement each other because both fields pertain to the study of human nature. According to Bacon, medicine, psychology and moral or political philosophy all lie within the compass of that subdivision of philosophy which he calls “human philosophy” and which is specifically concerned with man. Different as they may look at first sight, Kent and the doctor have at least one thing in common since they both take advantage of their expert knowledge of human philosophy3 to save the King. It should not come as a surprise, therefore, that Kent explicitly describes himself as the physician of Lear’s mind: “Kill thy physician and thy fee bestow / Upon the foul disease” (1.1.165-66). From the doctor'’ medical expertise to Kent’s psychological insights, the play explores several provinces of the unified yet variegated continent of human philosophy. In a sense, it is almost possible to say that Cordelia is to the doctor what the King is to Kent in the first scene of the play: she needs the doctor’s assistance just as much as the King needs the help of Kent. Unlike Lear, however, Cordelia is perfectly aware of her own limitations. It will perhaps be objected that her moral clear-sightedness should preclude any comparison with Lear’s folly, and it may even be tempting to present her as the very essence of truth. But a closer look at the play reveals that neither Cordelia nor the King should be considered as allegorical figures standing for truth, knowledge or ignorance. They are flesh and blood characters who may not be confined within the theoretical frameworks of moral or intellectual emblems (Linville 1990, 309-18). True, King Lear abounds in contrasting pairs that reenact the play’s original opposition between Lear’s foolishness and Kent’s or Cordelia’s perceptiveness: the Edmund-Gloucester relationship is a case in point, as are the pairs formed by Goneril and Albany or Edgar and Edmund. But the latter relationship suggests that this recurring pattern may be turned upside down, or rather “handy-dandy” (4.6.149) as Lear puts it. At the end of the play, Edmund’s knowledge suddenly fails him. For the first time ever, he seems to be out of his depth, as he proves unable to control the situation. He now faces an “unknown opposite” (5.3.151) whom he does not recognize as his own brother. But what is truly remarkable is that 3

Psychology (Kent) and medicine (the doctor) are two of the many branches of human philosophy. That Kent is a very shrewd reader of people's minds is made evident when he attempts to disillusion the King in 1.1. He is not taken in by Goneril's and Regan's deceptive speeches and proves to be perfectly aware of the dangers of rhetoric, an art which Bacon also classifies as one of the branches of human philosophy: see for instance 1.1.152-54.

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Edmund’s defeat happens to coincide with the only moment in the play when something escapes his knowledge. Not only is he vanquished on the field of battle, but he is also outfoxed by Edgar, as Goneril remarks: “thou art not vanquished / But cozened and beguiled” (5.3.151-52). It is no accident, therefore, that Edmund’s incomplete knowledge should coincide with the moment of his defeat. In this essay I will argue that knowledge and ignorance play a larger role in King Lear than has sometimes been recognized: far from applying to Lear only, the constant interaction between the two notions pervades the play as a whole, thus contributing to its impetus. Focusing on the first scene of King Lear, William Dodd contends that the play’s incipit is strongly reminiscent of Elizabeth’s emotional relationship with her people. The Queen, he explains, used to play upon a whole gammut of different emotions so as to consolidate her political power, now professing her love to her people, now flying into a rage against her courtiers. The verb “affected” (1.1.1), which Kent uses to refer to Lear’s feelings towards Albany and Cornwall, could also have applied to Elizabeth’s attitude towards her own subjects. Yet Dodd goes on to explain that the play may also contain a thinly-veiled allusion to James’s more intellectual reign, as he argues that “James saw himself as more his subjects’ schoolmaster than their lover. He had a distaste for physical contact with curious crowds and as a mode of interaction with councilors and courtiers preferred intellectual discussion to emotional role-playing” (Dodd 1999, 483-84). By simultaneously using the verbs “thought” and “affected,” Shakespeare brings together two of the play’s most recurrent themes while drawing the reader’s attention to their possible connection in the tragedy. The opening scene does not just dwell on the King’s or Gloucester’s feelings for their respective children, it also foregrounds the question of knowledge. That love and knowledge are yoked together is also made manifest by the Earl’s pun on “conceive,” which he chooses to take in the biological and sexual sense of the word, thus deliberately ignoring Kent’s intellectual meaning: “Kent: I cannot conceive you. / Gloucester: Sir, this young fellow’s mother could” (1.1.11-12). In this witty exchange, as well as in the abovementioned incipit, it seems impossible to draw a clear-cut separation between love and knowledge. In other words, if King Lear deals with the themes of filial love and gratitude, it is also very much concerned with the theme of knowledge, and more particularly with the difficulty of gaining access to knowledge.

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It has been argued that The Winter’s Tale betrays a rather unusual preoccupation with the subjects of truth and knowledge. Critics like Walter S. H. Lim have commented on the play’s “inordinate preoccupation with the subjects of truth and knowledge, and with the difficulties (or impossibility) of gaining access to both” (Lim 2001, 327). I would like to contend that King Lear is no less concerned with truth and knowledge than is The Winter’s Tale. As befits one of Shakespeare’s darkest tragedies, King Lear too seems mainly concerned with the difficulties of accessing knowledge. It is striking that the protagonists seldom (if ever) gain access to a solid body of permanent truths.4 When the play opens, Kent and Gloucester confess that they have very few certainties left: “it did always seem so to us, but now in the division of the kingdom, it appears not which of the dukes he values most, for qualities are so weighed that curiosity in neither can make choice of either’s moiety” (1.1.3-6). Appearances were deceitful and whatever fragments of knowledge they thought they had have now vanished into thin air, giving way to doubts and ignorance. What the opening scene suggests is that knowledge is not some unassailable rock that may serve as a firm basis for theoretical castles, but rather a shaky construction whose foundations are built on sand. The exchange between Kent, Gloucester and Edmund therefore sets the tone for the rest of the play and the famous line that Gloucester delivers in act 4—“’Tis the time’s plague when madmen lead the blind” (4.1.49)—does not just apply to himself. It also serves as a general comment on a play which abounds in both metaphorical and real blindmen and fools. Even Edmund, who can hardly be described as either blind or foolish, unwittingly testifies to the difficulty of attaining knowledge as his answer to Kent plays on the homophony between “know” and “no,” thus further strengthening the sense of uncertainty that so pervades the first scene of the tragedy: “Do

4

One cannot fail to be struck by the fact that “I know not” is one of the most frequent answers in the play, to such an extent that it almost becomes a kind of leitmotiv: Edmund: “I know no news my lord” (1.2.30); Third Knight: “My lord, I know not what the matter is”(1.4.55); Curan: “Nay, I know not” (2.1.7); Gloucester: “Hark, the Duke's trumpets; I know not why he comes” (2.1.79); “I know not, madam; 'tis too bad, too bad” (2.1.96); Oswald: “I know thee not” (2.2.10); Lear: “I will do such things / What they are yet I know not; but they shall be / The terrors of the earth” (2. 2.469-71); Gloucester: “He calls to horse; but will I know not whither" (2.2.487); Regan: “Belike / Some things, I know not what” (4.5.22-3); Edgar: “And yet I know not how conceit may rob / The treasury of life, when life itself / Yields to the theft” (4.6.42-44); Lear: “I know not what to say […] nor I know not where I did lodge last night” (4.7.54 and 67).

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you know this noble gentleman, Edmund? / No, my lord” (1.1.24-25). Here, as so often in the play, knowledge is equated with nothingness. It is Lear’s predicament, of course, that best illustrates the difficulty— or impossibility—of acquiring (self)-knowledge. On this “great stage of fools” (4.6.179) with which he compares the world, Lear is certainly one of the most obdurate. Lamenting their father’s lack of judgement, Goneril and Regan explain that “he hath ever but slenderly known himself” (1.1.294-95). Because poor judgement and intellectual short-sightedness are responsible for the King’s tragic fate, King Lear may also be described as a tragedy of ignorance. Lear does not know himself, but he does not know his daughters either and he is a very poor judge of the situation. Critics have often commented on the King’s childish mind and limited intellectual faculties. As Wilson Knight explains: “Lear’s fault is a fault of the mind, a mind unwarantably, because selfishly foolish” (Knight 1949, 162). Orwell, for his part, is even more critical of Lear’s judgement and he argues that the King does not utter one sensible word until he becomes mad (Orwell 1950). Unlike Macbeth or Hamlet, whose superior minds eventually bring about their own downfall, Lear is so much devoid of intellectual and psychological finesse that he looks like a childish, immature, yet despotic, monarch.5 His original sin, which is also his most serious intellectual mistake, consists in trying to quantify his daughters’ love by staging an absurd rhetorical contest. Wrongly assuming that love may be measured in a rational, systematic way, he fails to see that rhetoric—that “glib and oily art” (1.1.226) as Kent defines it—allows his eldest daughters to disguise their own “darker purpose” (1.1.35). What Lear does not know here, is that silence is by no means incompatible with true love. As Kent shrewdly remarks: “Thy youngest daughter does not love thee least, / Nor are those empty-hearted whose low sounds / Reverb no hollowness” (1.1.153-55). By believing that feelings necessarily and automatically translate into words, Lear reveals how little he knows about human nature. According to Robert B. Heilman, “Lear’s very first error is typically rationalistic: the introduction of a mensurational standard where it is not applicable. He insists upon the untenable proposition that love can be measured as if it were a material quantum of a certain size or shape” (Heilman 1948, 59). Lear’s error is all the more surprising as he is in no 5

See G. W. Knight: “Lear is mentally a child, in passion a titan,” The Wheel of Fire, 164. For her part, Barbara Everett argues that Lear's immaturity is a “truism of criticism”: “Lear is divested of that degree of civilised intelligence, subtlety and rationality that Hamlet and Macbeth possess […] That he shows the consciousness of a child with immense power and will is a truism of criticism.” Everett 1960, 325-39.

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lack of teachers: Kent, of course, but also the Fool and even, to a certain extent, Goneril and Regan, keep drawing the King’s attention to his own folly. The Fool laughs at the King’s ignorance and poor judgement, mocking his “little wit” and eventually reducing the King’s intellectual faculties to “nothing.” Lear’s lack of judgement is like a gaping chasm where his identity disappears completely. By dividing his kingdom in so foolish a way, Lear has lost everything. He is no longer a fool, he is nothing: “Now thou art an O without a figure; I am better than thou art now. I am a fool, thou art nothing” (1.4.183-85). Here, Shakespeare probably draws from the ancient tradition that presented fools and madmen as prophets endowed with a form of knowledge which could only be derived from a supernatural origin (Fuzier 1984, 115-23 and Rigaud 1984, 125-32). For all his apparent “folly,” the Fool is superior to the King because he possesses a form of political and psychological knowledge that Lear is completely lacking in. And yet, despite the Fool’s repeated efforts, Lear refuses to acknowledge his error of judgment. Similarly, Kent’s plea falls on deaf ears too, as the King will not open his eyes: “See better Lear, and let me still remain / The true blank of thine eye” (1.1.158-59). The visual metaphors, which are so present in the play, recall that Lear is by no means the only character who does not see clearly what is implied in the situation in which he finds himself. Gloucester’s knowledge is just as imperfect and incomplete as Lear’s and he blames himself for all the errors he made while he still had his eyes: “I have no way, and therefore want no eyes: / I stumbled when I saw” (4.1.20-21). That the Earl has little more intellectual dexterity than the King is made evident in the way he falls for Edmund’s ploy. Gloucester is just as easily tricked by Edmund as Lear is deceived by his two daughters. It is to be noted that both the Earl’s and the King’s faults are of an intellectual nature: Gloucester’s reasoning is flawed because he fails to see that the conclusion he derives from Edmund’s fabricated evidence is by no means the only possible scenario— it is not even the most plausible one.6 But the Earl’s lack of critical sense is not just reflected in his inappropriate response to Edmund’s stratagem, it 6

As Bradley has pointed out, there are many unlikely details in the story that Edmund would like his father to swallow: “No sort of reason is given why Edgar, who lives in the same house with Edmund, should write a letter to him instead of speaking, and this is a letter absolutely damning to his character. Gloster was very foolish, but surely not so foolish as to pass unnoticed this improbability; or, if so foolish, what need for Edmund to forge a letter rather than a conversation, especially as Gloster appears to be unacquainted with his son's handwriting.” Foolish seems to be the adjective that best describes Gloucester's attitude (Bradley 1905, 236).

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is also evidenced by his discourse on astrology, which amply demonstrates how gullible he is. It is true that Shakespeare’s contemporaries probably believed in some kind of astral influence on individual destiny, but Gloucester’s astrological determinism is so extreme that his views must have sounded old-fashioned even to a Jacobean audience. Besides, from a purely dramatic point of view, his astrological musing concludes a scene which can hardly be said to illustrate his intellectual brilliance. In psychology as well as in natural philosophy, Gloucester appears to be gullible and rather dim-witted. Like Lear, he embodies this “excellent foppery of the world” (1.2.118) which Edmund so harshly criticizes. So far, I have tried to show that Shakespeare depicts both Gloucester and Lear as characters of little knowledge and limited judgment, but it does not follow, of course, that every single character in the play displays as much intellectual numbness as either of them. In fact, it is quite the reverse which is true as Shakespeare seems to be drawing a line between two different sets of characters. On the one hand, Lear, Gloucester, and, to a lesser extent, even Edgar or Albany at times, fail to understand the complexity of the situation they are confronted with. On the other hand, Kent, the Fool, Goneril or Regan all seem to know what to think and what to expect. Neither Lear nor Gloucester realise that they are mistaken. What they think they know, the play eventually exposes as self-delusion and folly. Lear, for example, believes that it is the very essence of a child to show gratitude and loyalty to his or her father: if children fail to do so, they cease to be children in the true sense of the word (1.1.114-17, 1.4.223-25, 1.4.246). Like Prospero in The Tempest, who cannot reconcile his brother’s treason with his own definition of brotherhood,7 Lear gives too much importance to the abstract notion of filial gratitude at the expense of what children are really like. Edmund, Goneril or Regan, on the contrary, know that abstract definitions tend to differ from concrete reality. Their psychological and political pragmatism stands them in good stead when it comes to manipulating the gulls they are surrounded by. Blaming her father for the unruly and disrespectful behaviour of his retinue, Goneril urges him: “Come, sir / I would you would make use of your good wisdom, / Whereof I know you are fraught, and put away / These dispositions, which of late transport you / From what you rightly are” (1.4.210-14). Her speech is all the more ironical as Goneril and Regan have already described their father as a foolish and quick-tempered old 7

See The Tempest, 5.1.130-31: “For you, most wicked sir, whom to call brother / Would even infect my mouth […].”

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man. Lear, they said, had never been wise, and it is unlikely that old age will remedy his folly: The best and soundest of his time hath been but rash; then must we look from his age to receive not alone the imperfections of long-engrafted condition, but therewithal the unruly waywardness that infirm and choleric years bring with them (1.1.296-300).

In the rest of the scene, the King even pretends to be seized by a fit of complete and hyperbolic skepticism. Like Descartes in his Discourse on Method, Lear acts as if he knew nothing and he goes as far as doubting his daughters’ existence and his own identity. His little life, it seems, is “rounded with a sleep”: Lear. Does any here know me? This is not Lear. Does Lear walk thus, speak thus? Where are his eyes? Either his notion weakens, or his discernings are Lethargied—Ha! Waking? 'Tis not so. Who is it that can tell me who I am? Fool. Lear's shadow. Lear. I would learn that; for by the marks of sovereignty, knowledge and reason, I should be false persuaded I had daughters. (1.4.217-25)

Goneril is not amused by Lear’s feigned ignorance, and she urges him to display that kind of wisdom which is the mark of old age. In Lear’s case, however, old age does not coincide with either knowledge or wisdom, as the Fool aptly remarks: “thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise” (1.5.41). The exchange with Goneril therefore performs a double function: while preparing the audience for the King’s subsequent fit of madness and intellectual anguish on the heath, the scene also serves as yet another instance of the opposition between folly and wisdom, reason and madness, that lies at the heart of the play. In King Lear, no one can be said to be treading on solid intellectual ground, but knowledge and information are not shared equally either. Much of the plot and subplot depends on what may perhaps be described as epistemic or cognitive tension as Shakespeare constantly pits shrewdness against naïveté, or wisdom against folly. In this regard, it will be noted, for example, that Albany takes over from Lear by playing the part of the dumbfounded and “ignorant” observer: “My lord, I am guiltless as I am ignorant / Of what hath moved you” (1.4.265-66). Unlike Lear’s, however, Albany’s “ignorance” is real and unfeigned. Goneril makes it clear that

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Albany does not know what politics is about. With this “milky gentleness and course [of his],” Albany turns out to be just as naïve and gullible as Gloucester. According to Goneril, who sees her husband as a “moral fool” (4.2.58), Albany’s goodness demonstrates how little political wisdom he has, and she takes up the same idea again when she blames him for not knowing how villains should be dealt with, in an attempt to teach him a lesson of hard-nosed political pragmatism: Milk-livered man! [...] Who hast not in thy brows an eye discerning Thine honour from thy suffering, that not knowst Fools do those villains pity who are punished Ere they have done their mischief. (4.2.52-56)

Refusing to equate cruelty with wisdom, Albany, of course, refutes Goneril’s reasoning altogether. And yet, for the most part of the play, those characters that see themselves as intellectually superior—namely Goneril, Edmund and Regan—tend to be more successful than the “fools” whom they mock. In the words of Enid Welsford: “On the whole, Shakespeare tends to give more intellectual ability to his sinners than to his saints” (Welsford 1935, quoted by Kermode 1969, 126).8 But what is it exactly that Goneril, Regan and Edmund know which their opponents do not know? Using Bacon’s vocabulary, one may perhaps best describe their intellectual superiority by saying that they understand the true nature of “the radius reflectus,” i.e. man himself. They know more about human nature than Lear or Gloucester do. More particularly, Edmund, Goneril and Regan are experts in what Bacon calls “civil knowledge.” Unlike Lear, they know that words can be deceitful. They also know that knowledge translates into political power, thus applying Bacon’s famous precept of natural philosophy to the field of politics: “Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed; and that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule” (Bacon, Novum Organum, I.3). Because uncertainty is the norm in King Lear, every unshared piece of information, every exclusive fragment of knowledge potentially translates into a decisive strategic advantage. It is no surprise, therefore, that most characters in the play should try so hard to 8 It is to be noted, of course, that Lear, who is a paradigm of intellectual shortsightedness, sees himself as “a man, more sinned against than sinning” (3.3.60).

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control what others do and do not know. Much as Goneril despises Albany for proving unable to grasp the intricacies of realpolitik, she does not want him to know the ins and outs of the situation: “Never afflict yourself to know more of it” (1.4.283). The more Albany is kept in the dark, the easier he can be manipulated. Kent, Lear or Regan behave in exactly the same way when they refuse to impart the little knowledge they have gleaned. Lear asks Kent not to reveal his plan to Regan: “Acquaint my daughter no further with anything you know that comes from her demand out of my letter” (1.5.2-4). Similarly, Kent does not want his friends and his enemies to know who he really is, because his assumed identity provides him with a strategic advantage. Should he be recognized, his plan would fail: “Pardon, dear madam; / Yet to be known shortens my made intent. / My boon I make it that you know me not / Till time and I think meet” (4.7.8-11). However, as Foakes points out, Kent’s secret plan— what he calls his “made intent” (4.7.9)—remains undisclosed until the end of the play. It seems fair to say, therefore, that his primary motivation is to continue to know more about the situation than his enemies do.9 One cannot but be struck by the way knowledge translates into power and military advantage in King Lear. That knowledge and power go hand in hand is perhaps best exemplified by the blinding of Gloucester. As he sits on a chair waiting to be tortured, Gloucester does not know yet who betrayed him. His defeat is twofold, both physical and intellectual, as, unlike Regan, he “does not know the truth”: “Be simple-answered, for we know the truth” (3.7.43). Paradoxical as this may seem, it is the torturers here, rather than the man on the rack, who know most of the answers (with the exception of the King’s final destination). And yet, Regan eventually evens things out by telling Gloucester who the traitor was: “Out treacherous villains, / Thou call’st on him that hates thee. It was he / That made the overture of thy treasons to us” (3.7.86-88). By doing so, however, she reinforces the counter-movement that has already started. Gloucester, indeed, now knows just as much about the situation as she does. Besides, his newly inflicted torture is bound to arouse universal pity, just as the King’s misfortune is said “to turn [the sinners’] lances in [their] eyes”: “Whose age had charms in it, whose title more, / To pluck the common bosom on his side / And turn our impressed lances in our eyes / Which do command them” (5.3.49-52). As in King John, where the common people strongly disapprove of Arthur’s death,10 cruelty is a sword 9

For a different interpretation of this passage, see Cavel 1976. King John, 4.2.187-200: “Young Arthur's death is common in their mouths, / And when they talk of him, they shake their heads / And whisper one another in 10

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that is double edged. The torture scene, where Regan eventually loses her intellectual advantage over Gloucester, is also the moment when the sinners’ power starts to crumble for good and Regan immediately acknowledges what a mistake they have made: “it was great ignorance, Gloucester’s eyes being out, / To let him live” (4.5.11-12). From that point onwards, the “saints,” whom Enid Welsford saw as somewhat intellectually inferior, gradually gain in lucidity as the tragedy moves to its conclusion. Lear, Gloucester and Edgar learn the hard way those political and moral truths which the “sinners” knew from the start. As Barbara Everett points out: “That society may be corrupt, that loyalty may be broken, that justice may become meaningless in the light of this corruption: none of this is particularly new or exciting statement.” Unoriginal though these ideas may sound, they are nonetheless new to Gloucester, Edgar and Lear, who now take a new, less naïve, perspective on life. Because letters serve as a powerful symbol of the way information and knowledge circulate in King Lear, it must be noted that they tend to pass from the sinners’ hands into the saints’.11 Edmund’s plot originates in the few sheets of paper which he pretends to conceal from his father. Edmund’s letter, of course, symbolizes his intellectual superiority: he is the one who reads in people’s hearts and he makes the most of his thorough knowledge of human psychology to manipulate his enemies, much like Richard in Richard III. But letters eventually change hands in the play, thus conveying the sense that the wheel of fortune is beginning to turn. The letter Kent reads in the stocks is one of the signs pointing towards the ultimate defeat of the “sinners”12 whereas the note that Edgar finds on Oswald is instrumental in his subsequent victory over Edmund. It is no accident that Edgar borrows from the lexical field of medicine when he discovers Oswald’s letter, for he now seems to be endowed with as much power, knowledge and authority as the doctor in the following the ear / And he that speaks doth grip the hearer's wrist / Whilst he that hears makes fearful action / With wrinkled brows, with nods, with rolling eyes […]” 11 Written texts, whether in the form of letters or books, often served to symbolize knowledge and scholarship in the Renaissance. Humanists like Thomas More and Erasmus or men of science like William Cuningham in the frontispiece of his Cosmographical Glass, to cite but one example, sought to consolidate their prestige and scholarly authority by having painters and engravers depict them with a book in their hands. See, for example, the portrait of Erasmus by Quentin Metsys (Rome, Galleria Nazionale), the painting showing Thomas More's family after a painting by Holbein (London, The National Portrait Gallery), or the portrait of Sir Henry Unton by an unknown artist (London, The National Portrait Gallery). 12 After reading Cordelia's letter, Kent hopes Fortune will turn its wheel: “Fortune, good night: smile once more; turn thy wheel” (2.2.171).

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scene: “To know our enemies’ minds we rip their hearts / Their papers is more lawful” (4.6.255-56). In Oswald’s letter, the exclusive information he hits upon immediately translates into military supremacy as it allows him to throw Edmund off guard. It should not come as a surprise, therefore, that Edmund’s defeat happens to coincide with the only moment in the play when his knowledge of the situation turns out to be incomplete and inadequate. Here, strength is predicated upon knowledge: “This is mere practice, Gloucester. / By the law of war thou wast not bound to answer / An unknown opposite. Thou art not vanquished, / But cozened and beguiled” (5.3.149-52). According to Robert Heilman, King Lear tells the story of an old king who eventually gets to “master the truth of self” (Heilman 1964, 97). Folly and madness give way to judgment and self-knowledge, as Lear gradually realizes what a fool he has been: “O Lear, Lear, Lear! / Beat at this gate that let thy folly in and thy dear judgment out!” (1.4.262-64). And yet, despite Lear’s complete transformation, the play does not seem to substitute solid philosophical knowledge for Lear’s initial folly. It is true that, as his madness climaxes, Lear glimpses important philosophical truths and acquires a form of self-knowledge which he was hitherto completely lacking in. As Wilson Knight explains: “his purgatory is to be a purgatory of the mind, of madness. Lear has trained himself to think he cannot be wrong: he finds he is wrong” (Knight 1949, 162). The long series of humiliating rebuffs he went through did not leave him unscathed. By helping him to shake off his initial arrogance, suffering has taught him pity and compassion and Lear could perhaps subscribe to Edgar’s definition of himself: “Now good sir, what are you? / A most poor man made tame to fortune’s blows, / Who by the art of known and feeling sorrows, / Am pregnant to good pity” (4.6.216-18). Regan turns out to have spoken as a prophet when she exclaimed: “O sir, to wilful men / The injuries that they themselves procure / Must be their schoolmasters” (2.2.300-02). Suffering is Lear’s “schoolmaster” because it teaches him what he did not know so far. While the King used to be very fond of the trappings of power, he now sides with “the poor naked wretches,” rejecting pomp and luxury: Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you From seasons, such as these? O, I have ta'en Too little care of this. Take physic, pomp;

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Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayst shake the superflux to themselves And show the heavens more just. (3.4.28-36)

Because Lear now questions what he once thought he knew for certain, his speech suggests that he has learnt a great deal indeed. Deconstructing his most deeply entrenched beliefs, he has almost become a philosopher himself and it is only natural that he should prove so interested in Poor Tom, whom he successively refers to as “this same learned Theban” (3.4.153), “Noble philosopher” (3.4.168), and “thou sapient sir” (3.6.22). Lear’s encounter with Poor Tom leads him to sympathize with “the poor naked wretches” (3.4.28) and to take a new perspective on life. As Kiernan Ryan has shown: “through a relentless process of internal disruption and dislocation, King Lear wrests itself free of the presiding ideologies at war within its world, aligning itself instead with the mad, the blind, the beggared, the speechless, the powerless, the worthless” (Ryan 1993, 81). It may even be argued that Lear’s indictment of the rich man’s privileges bears some similarity to the first book of Thomas More’s Utopia: “The usurer hangs the cozener. / Through tattered clothes great vices do appear; / Robes and furred gowns hide all” (4.6.159-61).13 Edgar, of course, is right in pointing out that Lear is both mad and wise and there is truth in his paradox: “O matter and impertinency mixed, / Reason in madness” (4.6.170-71). It can hardly be denied, therefore, that Lear has gained a form of superior knowledge since Kent urged him to “see better” (1.1.159) in the first scene of the play. Besides, Lear’s denunciation of injustice is unlikely to have been considered solely as the incoherent ravings of an old lunatic by Shakespeare’s contemporaries. It is more likely that it was meant to be taken for what Edgar says it is, i.e. a combination of “matter and impertinency” (4.6.170). For one thing, it should be noted that the views that Gloucester eventually reaches after being blinded are very similar to those of Lear.14 For another, the play was performed before the 13 In Utopia, Thomas More shows that the poor have no choice but to steal if they want to survive because society keeps them in a state of most complete destitution: “Well, first of all there are lots of noblemen who live like drones on the labour of other people, in other words, of their tenants, and keep bleeding them white by constantly raising their rents [...]. Now a sacked retainer is apt to get violently hungry, if he doesn't resort to violence. For what's the alternative? He can, of course, wander around until his clothes and his body are both worn out, and he's nothing but a mass of rags and sores” (More 1965, 45). 14 See for example 4.1.66-74: “Here, take this purse, thou whom the heaven's plagues / Have humbled to all strokes. That I am wretched / Makes thee happier.

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King on St Stephen’s night, a night traditionally associated with the Christian obligation to help and support the poor (Marcus 1988). Although it certainly does not follow that the play’s meaning should be tied to one particular performance, the context should at least preclude us from dismissing Lear’s tirade as the mere ravings of a lunatic. On the contrary, Lear seems to have developed a philosophical mind. Depending on the facet of Lear’s newly acquired disposition one chooses to judge him by, the King is likely to appear as a follower of quite different schools of thought. Because he seems to reject the stoics’ indifference and equanimity in the face of adversity15 and because he does not seem to care about the Gods, Lear may perhaps be described as a follower of Epicureanism. According to Pierre Hadot, epicureanism implies a love of life in its most simple form,16 the like of which Lear precisely celebrates when he is about to be sent to prison with Cordelia: “Come, let’s away to prison; / We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage / […] So we’ll live / And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh / At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues / Talk of court news” (5.3.8-9). On the other hand, because Lear rejects luxury and pomp and because he seems to be fascinated with Poor Tom’s ascetic way of life, the King also tends to align himself with the Cynics. In fact, it is impossible to isolate any particular system of tenets which could serve as the philosophical message of the play, for the very simple reason that the tragedy concludes with a note of intellectual uncertainty, rather than confident knowledge. For all Lear’s flashes of insight, he has not become “a learned Theban” (3.4.153) or “a philosopher” (3.4.150, 168) in the true sense of the word. When he finally recovers from his bout of madness, Lear seems to have become oblivious again to the injustices suffered by the “poor naked wretches” (3.4.28). What is more, the old King sounds intellectually insecure. His initial folly and intellectual arrogance have given way to doubts and philosophical humility: Pray do not mock me. I am a very old and foolish fond old man,

Heavens deal so still! / Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man / That slaves your ordinance, that will not see / Because he does not feel, feel your power quickly: / So distribution should undo excess / And each man have enough.” 15 In his famous line about “the men of stone”: “Howl! Howl! Howl! O you are men of stone” (5.3.255). 16 In the words of Hadot, epicureanism is based on “an experience—that of the flesh, and a choice—that of pleasure and individual interest, but tranfigured into the pure pleasure of being” (Hadot 1995, 197). My translation.

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Four score and upward, not an hour more nor less, And to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind. Methinks I should know you and know this man; Yet I am doubtful; for I am mainly ignorant What place this is; and all the skill I have Remembers not these garments; nor I know not Where I did lodge last night. (4.7.59-68)

In these lines, Lear deals with petty and trivial details which do not sound as important as the philosophical questions he raised in the storm.17 Here, he is not concerned with the nature of man or with the cause of thunder, but rather with the colour of a piece of clothing and the shape of a familiar face. And yet, the old man’s uncertain state of mind sets the tone for the last act of the play, as the King’s doubts contaminate both Edmund (“'Tis to be doubted, madam” 5.1.6) and Regan (“I am doubtful that you have been conjunct / And bosomed with her” 12-13). Much more than positive knowledge or adherence to any given set of beliefs, it is skepticism that dominates the last scene of the tragedy. The old man’s reaction to the death of his beloved daughter, whom he believes to be still breathing, exemplifies the “tension of uncertainty” (Peat 1983, 49-50) that pervades the end of King Lear. Lear is unsure whether his daughter is alive or dead, and his initial certainty (“I know when one is dead and when one lives; / She is dead as earth” 5.3.258-59) yields to doubt when he gets the impression that the feather stirs: “This feather stirs, she lives” (5.3.263). If the scene has given rise to so much scholarly brain-racking, it is probably because it is intrinsically ambiguous. As Foakes points out: “it is impossible to say what Lear sees, or thinks he sees, but these lines complicate the ending by their very ambiguity” (Foakes 1997, 391).18 There is no denying that Lear is considerably wiser for all the sufferings he has been put through. But at the end of his spiritual and intellectual journey, his doubts greatly outnumber his certainties. As he is about to leave this “great stage of fools” (4.6.179), it is only fitting that the King 17

See the questions Lear asks Edgar in the storm: “Is man no more than this? Consider him well” (3.4.99-100) or “First let me talk with this philosopher. / What is the cause of thunder” (147-48). 18 In a similar vein, Peat argues that “Shakespeare creates tension between an awareness of impending catastrophe and the possibility of a ‘happy’ resolution […] Throughout the remainder of the scene, the possibility that Cordelia lives remains open and the audience continue to alternate between hope and despair” (Peat 1980, 49-50).

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should express his feeling of uncertainty through a conditional clause: “This feather stirs, she lives: if it be so, / It is a chance which does redeem all sorrows that ever I have felt” (5.1.263-65). If vision is the metaphor of knowledge, then the last lines of the play suggest that neither Edgar nor Albany will ever acquire more knowledge than Lear: “The oldest hath borne most; we that are young / Shall never see so much, / nor live so long” (5.3.324-25). All in all, it seems fair to say that Lear has gained more wisdom than actual knowledge. Addressing Kent shortly before dying, Lear refers to his eyes again, thus echoing the first scene of the play, in which Kent urged him to “see better” (1.1.159): “Who are you? / Mine eyes are not of the best, I’ll tell you straight” (5.3.276-77). Lear’s eyes, it seems, are no better now than they were at the beginning of the play. However, his blindness is of a different nature for Lear is physically, rather than morally or intellectually, blind. More than either Diogenes or Lucretius, Lear recalls the philosophers Montaigne describes in The Essays. According to Montaigne, humility is the mark of genuine philosophy as true philosophers resemble “eares of corne, which as long as they are empty, grow and raise their head aloft, upright and stout; but if they once become full and bigge with ripe corne, they begin to humble and droope downeward” (Montaigne 1613, t. 2, ch. XII). Shakespeare seems to follow the French writer when he dramatizes Lear’s initial arrogance, later to be replaced by a form of intellectual humility which may be regarded as a mark of true wisdom and superior lucidity.

Bibliography Bacon, Francis. 1863. The Complete Works of Francis Bacon. Ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath. Boston: Taggard and Thompson. —. 1605. The Advancement of Learning. London: H. T Tomes. Bradley, A.C. 1905/1991. Shakespearean Tragedy. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Cavel, Stanley. 1976. “The Avoidance of Love,” in Must We Mean What We Say. London: Cambridge University Press. Dodd, William. Winter 1999. “Impossible Worlds: What happens in King Lear, Act 1, Scene 1?”, Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 50, n° 4: 477-507. Descartes, René. 1637/1962. Discours de la Méthode. Edited by Etienne Gilson. Paris: J. Vrin. Donne, John. 1623/1987. Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions. Edited by Anthony Raspa. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Everett, Barbara. Winter 1960. “The New King Lear,” Critical Quarterly, vol. 2, n° 4: 325-39. Fuzier, Jean. 1984. “King Lear et le théâtre de l'asile,” in Folie, Folies, Folly dans le monde anglo-américain aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, Actes du colloque de Paris des 22 et 23 octobre 1982, 115-123. Aix en Provence: Presses universitaires de Provence. Hadot, Pierre. 1995. Qu'est-ce que la philosophie antique? Paris: Gallimard. Heilman, Robert B. Spring 1964. “'Twere best not know myself: Othello, Lear, Macbeth,” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 15, n° 2: 89-98. —. 1948. “'The Unity of King Lear,” The Sewanee Review n° 67. Kermode, Frank, ed. 1969. King Lear, A Casebook. London: MacMillan. Knight, G. Wilson. 1949. “King Lear and the Comedy of the Grotesque,” in The Wheel of Fire, Interpretations of Shakespearian Tragedy, with three new essays. London: Methuen and co, 160-76. Lim, Walter S. H. Spring 2001. “Knowledge and Belief in The Winter's Tale,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, vol. 41, n° 2: 317-33. Linville, Susan E. Autumn 1990. “'Truth is the daughter of Time': Formalism and Realism in Lear's Last Scene,” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 41, n° 3: 309-18. Marcus, Leah. 1988. “King Lear on St Stephen's Night 1606,” in Puzzling Shakespeare: Local reading and its Discontent. Berkeley: University of California Press. Montaigne. Michel de. Essays. 1580/1613. Translated by John Florio. London: Blount and Barret. More, Thomas. Utopia. 1516/1965. Ed. Paul Turner. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Orwell, George. 1950. Shooting an elephant and other essays. London: Secker and Warburg. Peat, Derek. 1980. “And that's true too: King Lear and the tension of uncertainty,” Shakespeare Survey n° 33: 43-53. Rigaud, Nadia. 1984. “L'image du fou dans trois pièces jacobéennes,” in Folie, Folies, Folly dans le monde anglo-américain aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, Actes du colloque de Paris des 22 et 23 octobre 1982. Aix en Provence: Presses universitaires de Provence, 125-32. Ryan, Kiernan. 1993. “The Subversive Imagination,” in New Casebooks: King Lear. Ed. K. Ryan. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 73-83. Shakespeare, William. 1997. King Lear. Edited by R. A. Foakes. The Arden Shakespeare (Third Series). London: Thomson Learning.

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—. 1999. The Tempest. Edited by Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. The Arden Shakespeare (Third Series). London: Thomson Learning. —. 1989. King John. Edited by A.R. Braunmuller. The Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Welsford, Enid. 1935. The Fool: His Social and Literary History. London: Faber and Faber.

“CAN YOU MAKE NO USE OF NOTHINGNESS ?” : THE ROLE OF NOTHINGNESS IN KING LEAR DAVID LEVIN

Lear’s world is ruled by blind power, a decadent Nature, wilful evil, and rampant ambition: in Christian theology, all of these elements imply a turning away from God, the true source of being, towards chaos and annihilation. As a result, the world of the play takes on a certain negative grandeur, as the undefined object of several absolute negations. Nothingness plays an essential role in the movement of the plot. It may be argued that the tragic flaw that Lear and Gloucester share is a presumptuous attitude towards nothingness which finally offers the only shelter where virtue can hide from evil, as Edgar and Kent lose themselves in order to be reborn.

The title of this article refers to the Fool’s sly question to the King in the second scene of the play,1 but could also, without great exaggeration, sum up the current state of the question of nothingness in Shakespeare criticism. Though nothingness is often cited as one of the essential themes of several plays, most notably King Lear, the concept itself—as opposed to the word “nothing” and its myriad meanings—is almost never treated as a subject worthy of interest on its own merits.2 This article will argue that Shakespeare does not merely mention nothingness and its paradoxes in passing, but gives them a central and complex role, both structural and dramatic. From a structural point of view, nothingness serves to define the world of King Lear: it is an ever-present metaphysical threat and a means of negative characterization. It also plays a central role in the movement of the plot, as a flawed conception of nothingness blinds some characters to the reality of the world they live in, and especially to the extraordinary power of the negative. Lear’s conviction that “nothing will come of 1

“Can you make no use of nothing, nuncle?” (1.4.128-29). All Shakespeare quotes are from The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works (see bibliography). 2 A search for “nothingness” on the “World Shakespeare Bibliography Online” (http://www.worldshakesbib.org) gives only 37 hits, many of which are readings of Shakespeare from a Buddhist or existentialist perspective, rather than studies of the author’s specific approach to the notion.

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nothing” (1.1.190) and Gloucester’s musings on “the quality of nothing” (1.2.33-36) will leave them defenseless against the rhetorical and theatrical uses of nothing that their subjects and children will trick them with, some to satisfy ambition, some to serve them despite their madness. Furthermore, the acceptance of nothingness is also a condition of dramatic rebirth, as Edgar and Kent erase themselves to become Tom and Caius, and Lear’s belief that he is “everything” is slowly torn from him until he is reduced to “a very foolish, fond old man” (4.7.60). Before we begin, however, there are a few semantic and conceptual difficulties which must be addressed. Speaking about nothingness in Shakespeare is a slippery proposition for reasons that go beyond the paradoxical nature of the concept itself. Firstly, the word did not exist in his time: it first appeared in John Donne’s A Nocturnall upon Saint Lucy’s Day. Being the Shortest Day (1627), according to the OED. Before then, the concept of nothingness was expressed primarily by the word “nothing.” Secondly, the conceptual relationship between nothing and nothingness was quite different from the one we find natural today. The creation of the word “nothingness” divided what had been considered a unified concept into two close but separate domains. Indeed, today, the words are often opposed: “nothingness” is absolute non-being, the void before and beyond creation; “nothing” expresses relative non-being, absence, lack, the insufficient, or the insignificant. This sharp contrast was foreign to Shakespeare’s time. The Elizabethans never referred to the paradoxical state of non-being which the modern term expresses in the -ness suffix, but rather a specific type of nothing. This conceptual continuity is often apparent in the writings of his contemporaries. For instance, in “The Scholler and the Souldiour,” Nicholas Breton concludes a jokingly nihilistic presentation of the emptiness of all our highest values by considering the highest of nothings, “nothing at all”: Oh, there are [several] Nothings, one in respect nothing: An other Nothing, in a manner: An other Nothing, to trust to: An other Nothing, durable: The first, a newe Nothing, called nothing at all >…@. Well, the cheife nothing of all, which is the nothing at all, that is the nothing that I see here to delight me […]. (Breton 1597, sig. A2)

It appears that nothingness is not a separate state but rather the “cheife nothing,” alongside the “nothing durable,” “nothing in a manner,” and “nothing to trust to”: absolute nothingness and relative nothing coexist on the same scale. In his Devine Weekes, Guillaume de Saluste du Bartas

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clearly indicates the two ends of this chain of nothings. On the one hand, he evokes the infinity of pure nothingness, from which God created the world: This Trinitie (which rather I adore In humbleness than busily explore) In th’ infinite of Nothing builded all. (Bartas 1605-1606, 5)

This boundless Non-Being is to be compared to “meere nothing,” which is what infinite Being excludes: For ’t ’s nought but All, in ’t selfe including All: An vn-beginning, mid-lesse, end-lesse Ball; ’Tis nothing but a World, whose superfice Leaves nothing out, but what meere nothing is. (Bartas 1605-1606, 12)

These two quotes reveal the vast ambiguity of “nothing” in Shakespeare’s time: one word covered the entire negative spectrum, from the great void to mere nothing. As a consequence, the relationship between nothing and nothingness was often treated in ways we may find puzzling today. For example, the authors of encomia paradoxica played upon this ambiguity with a relish that is lost upon the modern reader. In his work The Prayse of Nothing, Edward Dyer often skips from the nothingness from which God created the world to a thousand types of mere nothing. For instance, he commends “nothing” for being the source of the pure world of Creation, far preferable to our fallen, decaying world: It being pronounst by the Psalmist, that [the heavens] shal ware old as doth a garment, which proueth their vertue by succession of times, to diminishe, and not to be of such efficacie in working, as when they were created of nothing. (Dyer 1585, sig. B2)

Several lines further, “nothing” becomes a political principle, since so many princes act “for nothing”: “In like manner, haue many enormities beene perpetrated for nothing, with no lesse furie, then as though all the powers of nature, had consented to beate reason from the stearne, and to sincke the vessell of sound iudgement” (Dyer 1585, sig. B2v). Much of the work is based on similar shifts in meaning. However, the difference in the values of the word “nothing” between our time and Dyer’s makes this comic mechanism seem even more belabored than it may have at first.

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Even in serious philosophical and theological texts, the ambiguity of the word “nothing” could give rise to strained logic. When Philippe de Mornay wishes to make the idea of ex nihilo creation conceivable for the reader, he invokes several examples of activities where man produces value from that which has none: God (say they) cannot make any thing without matter thereof. >…@ Nay rather thou shouldest reason thus. Man, who is lesse than a Worme in Comparison of y’ highest, draweth gold out of the Rocke, or out of the duste of the earth. (Mornay 1587, 156)

The comparison between Creation and gold panning seems a somewhat comical sophism today precisely because our concept of nothingness implies the negation of all things, and is thus incomparable. In Elizabethan English, it had a strong kinship with things vile and worthless, as they were all species of the same genre. When we use the words “nothing” and “nothingness,” therefore, we will ask the reader to bear this generic unity in mind: nothing will often include nothingness, and nothingness will never be separate from nothing. This may be conceptually confusing, but such ambiguity was typical of Elizabethan usage, and we shall see that Shakespeare often plays upon it himself. When we wish to oppose the two, we will speak of “absolute” or “pure” nothingness, and “mere” or “simple” nothing. Moreover, this conceptual uncertainty is not the only difficulty which Shakespeare’s use of the word “nothing” presents. Indeed, the word afforded the Elizabethan speaker a wealth of incoherent and even incongruous meanings and connotations. Edward Tayler effectively sums up several of these uses: Probably sounded in a way that made Elizabethans hear something of “noting,” certainly pronounced in London with a long “o,” the word may have had punning associations with surveillance, as with the persistent “noting” of Much Ado, or with music, as it does in Richard II’s soliloquy in prison. Signifying what lies between a maid’s legs, as when Hamlet brutally jokes to Ophelia of “country matters,” the word “nothing” points to sex, and through sexuality it may, on Freudian occasions, point toward psyche. Signifying “privation,” the theological nothing that constitutes the bottom line of the scale of being (in the technical sense of Augustinian neoplatonism), the word commands respect in manners, morals, and metaphysics, as in Macbeth where the protagonist chooses, tragically, to see that “nothing is / But what is not” (1.3.141-42). (Tayler 1990, 31-32)

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The word further referred to zero, a new and troubling number in Shakespeare’s time. Not only did it have no Roman numeral equivalent, but its uses seemed incompatible, as Nick Davis writes: The “new” thoroughgoing place-notation of number, and particularly the “new” zero […] were […] generally held to be highly paradoxical and resistant to conceptualization; for example, how is it that “0” can indifferently stand, depending on context, as a support for the number one hundred (“C”), as a support for the number ten (“X”), and as a support for nothing at all (“?”), a question which King Lear poses with considerable urgency. (Davis 1998, 123)

Among this slew of possible values, it is often difficult to be certain that “nothingness” is an intended or valid interpretation. What should we look for, if nothingness is not fundamentally different from nothing, nor even easily distinguishable from it? We will have to start with a working definition of nothingness in Shakespeare. In his work, there are two elements that point specifically to what we would call nothingness: the reference to the nothingness that preceded and may follow the existence of the world,3 and the comparison of some incomplete being (for instance, Man or falsehood) to some absolute being (God or Truth), where the first appears to be nothing, or worse, the very absence or negation of the latter.4 It is highly probable that the author’s familiarity with the concept came primarily from its theological uses, rather than its precise role in scholastic debate or its philosophical history.5 Indeed, the most prevalent representations of nothingness in Christian thought are those of creation and annihilation; there is also a more problematic question of relative nothingness, especially 3

In reference to creation (“O anything, of nothing first create!” Romeo and Juliet, 1.1.173) and annihilation (in Macbeth, 4.1.52-61, The Winter’s Tale, 4.4.479-480, and King Lear, 3.2.1-9). 4 For instance, the Duke’s consolation in Measure for Measure is entirely based on proving that life is nothing when considered rightly: “Reason thus with life:/ If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing/ That none but fools would keep. […]/ Thou art not thyself;/ For thou exists on many a thousand grains/ That issue out of dust.” (3.1.68, 19-21.) 5 Such a technical interest in the difficulties of nothing is of course not impossible, as references to Greek philosophy abound in Elizabethan literature. For instance, Shakespeare might have become curious about the knowledge of “on kai me on” (being and non-being) that Marlowe’s Faustus mentions as one of the highest achievements of philosophy. See Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, 1.1.12. However, there is no such precise reference to the history of the question of nothingness in Shakespeare’s writing.

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that of Man or the world before God, which took on considerable urgency in sixteenth and seventeenth century theology.6 Though Man “is” or appears to be something when he considers himself, he is nothing when he tries to conceive God’s “true” being. Theatrical performance creates worlds on precisely such a model: something in themselves, they are “nothing” when compared to reality. Indeed, Paul Jorgensen notes “the remarkable persistence with which the concept of nothingness […] appears in [Shakespeare’s] statements on poetry and dreams” (Jorgensen 1954, 294), tentatively linking the author’s presentation of literary imagination to the Christian doctrine of creation. Fully justifying this interpretation of nothingness in King Lear would require a much more detailed analysis of the incarnations of the concept in Shakespeare’s work and the writings of the time. Suffice it to say that we will speak of nothingness when Shakespeare’s nothing extends to include the All, whether absolutely or relatively. Finally, to conclude this long introduction, a brief caveat: the purpose of this article is not to paint King Lear a uniform shade of black. The analysis of its negative aspects does not preclude any final interpretation, even those which find in the play a tale of redemption or a triumph of human spirit. Indeed, the insistence on nothing and nothingness we find in the play does not imply the absence of positive characterization, hints at possible salvation, etc.; on the contrary, given Shakespeare’s predilection for paradox, they almost require some contradictory counterweight. However, our focus here will be squarely on nothingness. This concept is undeniably a central structural aspect of the play. The world of King Lear is defined by its relation to nothingness more than by any positive characteristic. We know it is a universe on the brink of chaos, in imminent danger of falling into nothingness, but we have little information about the cosmic order we stand to lose. The critics have often underlined the structural value of “nothing.” For James L. Calderwood, such a role is self-evident: “As everyone knows, “nothing” is a kind of vortex that draws the ordered world of King Lear downward, reducing Lear to nakedness and madness and Gloucester to blindness” (1986, 6). John D. Rosenberg insists upon the repetition of negative forms which structure our conception of its ontology:

6 In Protestant thought, of course, but also for Catholic thinkers such as Montaigne (“Tant sage qu’il voudra, mais en fin c’est un homme ; qu’est il plus caduque, plus miserable et plus de neant?” in Montaigne 2007, II.ii.365) and even the CounterReformation polemicist cardinal Pierre de Bérulle: “Dieu tire la créature du néant et la produit et laisse dans le néant, […] ex nihilo in nihilo” (1995, 52-53).

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King Lear asserts nothing, though it questions everything. Il poses for our staggered imaginations the possibility that the cosmos is immoral, perhaps malevolent, more likely a vast nothing—a word which in its several variations echoes like a diabolical chorus throughout the play, provides the Fool with his bitterest jests, and culminates in Lear’s fivefold repeated never (Rosenberg 1966, 137).

Edward Tayler perceives in the repetition of negation the only structure of King Lear: The repetition of “no” (“know”) and “nothing” lends shape to the play, provides it with its principal meanings. Without these repetitions, registered at least subliminally in the minds of the audience, King Lear would be reduced to a howl of pain and its plot to the ensemble of its incidents—improbable enough, perhaps in some respects even incoherent. (Tayler 1990, 17)

We shall argue that the role of nothingness depends less on repetition than on a subtle form of negative definition, where the world of the play seems threatened by several forms of nothingness immediately recognizable to an educated Elizabethan audience: annihilation, evil, and a decadent Nature that promises not renewal but decay. This world, though positively defined in a very elliptical way,7 thus takes on a limitless, paradoxical, negative dimension, as it becomes the object of several absolute negations. The spectator is challenged to “piece out”8 the world of King Lear not just from nothing, but from several representations of nothing, and must conceive a world defined more by its relation to nothingness than any clear structure of being. The clearest reference to nothingness comes during the storm in the third act, where it appears as a threat to the fictional world. When Lear wishes to inflict the greatest possible punishment on his wayward daughters, he presents a complex depiction of annihilation: Lear. Blow winds and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout 7

There is almost no political life, as Goneril and Regan devise policy only for dealing with Lear, Cordelia, or each other; precious little social life, as the people beyond the walls of the castles never appear and are rarely mentioned; no arts or sciences beyond the fool’s songs and Gloucester’s astrological grumblings; no romantic love beyond France’s stiffly rhetorical recognition of Cordelia’s virtue, etc. 8 The Prologue to King Henry V asks the audience to “[p]iece out our imperfections with your thoughts” (l. 23).

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The Role of Nothingness in King Lear Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks. You sulph’rous and thought-executing fires, Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts, Singe my white head! (3.2.1-6)

He demands not only the end of the world, but of any possibility of existence9: And thou, all-shaking thunder, Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ the world, Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once That make ingrateful man! (3.2.6-9)

Thus he damns the higher values (faith and thought), then the origin of all being, both masculine (“germens”) and feminine (“rotundity,” “moulds”). This multiple annihilation of the real, the possible, and even the worlds of religion and intelligence opens unto only “one” nothingness, to be sure, but the multiple perspectives upon nothingness expand our conception of the fictional world to a vast, albeit purely negative, grandeur. It is rare, however, that nothingness should be so openly craved: it is more often alluded to in terms that reflect the philosophical or theological debates of Shakespeare’s time. In the first scene, the notion of nothingness appears in the context of the polemic between Christian theology and ancient philosophy, when Lear claims that “nothing will come of nothing” (1.1.90). Edward Tayler sums up this long-standing debate: Petrarch stoutly denounces those who would “defend the very famous or rather infamous little line of Persius,” de nihilo nihilum, in nihilum posse reverti (Satires 3.84), which elegantly condenses the central assumptions of the classical philosophers but denies creation ex nihilo.(Tayler 1990, 2526)

Lear’s assertion thus echoes a well-known philosophical position—and a dangerous blasphemy—which appears under different forms in Aristotle, Democritus, Epicurus, and of course Lucretius, who wrote: “Nothing of 9

Indeed, the destruction of the universe is not necessarily final. In the opinion of the ancient atomists, for instance, worlds are born and die in infinite numbers. According to Leucippus, atoms form into whirls, where they separate according to like, forming bodies and worlds: “the production of worlds, their increase, their diminution, and their destruction, depend on a certain necessity” (Diogenes Laertius 1853, 390).

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nothing ever yet was born” (Lucretius 2008, 17). Contemporary thinkers took pains to warn the public against such heresy: R. B. (Richard Bostocke?), in The difference betwene the auncient Phisicke […] and the latter Phisicke (1585), accordingly attacks the “false Philosophie of Aristotle,” which teaches “that of nothyng, nothynge can be made,” and Du Bartas (in Sylvester’s version) begins his account of creation with the obligatory disparagement of “fond Democritus” who could not see that “all this All did once (of Nought) begin.” Arraigned against Lear are hundreds of Christian voices such as these, the orthodox chorus denouncing the classical conception of nothing and praising the divine “Lord of Nothing” who, in the manner of a Renaissance playwright ex nihilo fit ens creatum. (Tayler 1990, 26)

It is interesting to note that Lear does not simply reject the notion of a godly use of nothingness: his opposition to ex nihilo creation is more active and dramatic. The notion of divine creation is strongly underlined in this scene, but as it were in reverse: rather than creating man to give him Eden, then a wife, Lear will deprive his daughter of her share of a realm that resembles the promised land,10 undo her marriage by refusing to pay her dowry,11 and then reduce her to nothing: “[H]er price is fallen” (1.1.198). The world of King Lear seems to spring less from an ex nihilo creation than from a reduction ad nihilum. This hint of an anti-Creation is further borne out in the play’s representation of evil. This notion is often linked to nothingness in Christian theology, as evil can be conceived of as the rejection or the absence of God. In the play, such characters as Goneril, Regan, Edmund, and Oswald do more than sin against authority: they represent several aspects of evil, especially concupiscence and ambition. According to Saint Augustine, this last sin is a perverse desire to be one’s own maker, and turn away from God: [T]he devil would not have been able to lure man into the manifest and open sin of doing what God had prohibited had not man already begun to be pleased with himself. That is why Adam was delighted when it was said: “Ye shall be as gods.” But Adam and Eve would have been better fitted to resemble gods if they had clung in obedience to the highest and true ground of their being, and not, in their pride, made themselves their

10

“Of all these bounds, >…@ / With shadowy forests and with champaigns riched, / With plenteous rivers and wide-skirted meads, / We make thee lady.” (1.1.63-66). 11 “What in the least / Will you require in present dower with her, / Or cease your quest of love?” (1.1.192-94).

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The Role of Nothingness in King Lear own ground. […] By striving after more, man is diminished; when he takes delight in his own self-sufficiency, he falls away from the One who truly suffices him. (Augustine 1998, 610)

Arthur Kirsch writes that this ambition to be one’s own cause rather than accept one’s God-given role is doubly tied to nothingness: “‘Alack, I love myself’—can be explained in >…@ Augustinian >…@ terms. For Augustine, self-love, the soul’s desire to be its own beginner, to be everything, both results in and is born of emptiness, of nothingness” (Kirsch 1984, 288). This link between nothingness and evil considered as causa sui would not be surprising to an Elizabethan public well used to dire warnings about the ills of ambition. According to Donne, this conceit undoes all human bonds: Prince, subject, father, son, are things forgot For every man alone thinks he hath got To be a phoenix, and that then can be None of that kind of which he is, but he. (Donne 1995)

The nefarious effects of ambition seem boundless, according to William Rankins : “Oh ambition the source of mischeefe, the fosterer of vyle dissention: The ruine of cities, the ouerthrow of common wealthes, the disturber of all estates, and the finall confusion of al peaceable gouernements” (Rankins 1588, 7). In King Lear, this ontological aspect is underlined several times. Goneril is explicitly represented as a new “nature” which rejects its origin: Albany. […] I fear your disposition; That nature which contemns its origin Cannot be bordered certain in itself. (4.2.32-34)

This indetermination is immediately presented as a destructive force: She that herself will sliver and disbranch From her material sap perforce must wither, And come to deadly use. (4.2.35-37)

Edmund rejects any heavenly influence on his actions: “I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my

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bastardizing.” (1.2.131-33). Though he is speaking of astrology, the willful pretention to define his own existence is unmistakable. Indeed, his statement may be understood in two ways: Edmund is either “that [he is]” because he is evil by nature and necessarily, or by conscious decision. In the first case, his rejection of celestial influence suggests a shattered world, where man acts entirely in accordance with his “nature,” with no link to a heavenly power, which is presented as a powerless “twinkling,” an illusion, or even the refuge of moral cowardice.12 Transcendence is often referred to in the play, but always as powerless or absent, as James Calderwood writes: Even within the play, which is explicitly pagan, Christian values are often expressed—repentance, expiation, humility, patience, forgiveness, the sin of despair and suicide, the recurrent hope that the “heavens,” like a just and merciful God, will send down “visible spirits” to tame offenses before it is too late. But men’s hopes count for very little in this play. Lear cries “O, let me not be mad, not mad, heaven!” and subsequently goes mad (1.5.45), or he calls to the heavens “Make it your cause; send down, and take my part” and has his soldiers reduced to zero (2.4.191). (Calderwood 1986, 8-9)

The critic perceives a form of dramatic sadism in this characterization: “The consolations of Christian philosophy are temptingly offered but cruelly withdrawn” (Calderwood 1986, 9). The second interpretation of Edmund’s words is even more theologically troubling, as it implies a fully free and conscious decision to be evil, which no divinity could redeem. It appears as a new fall of man, not out of temptation but from an act of free will. In King Henry V, Shakespeare expresses the full horror of such a rejection of God when the King’s confidant Scroop is revealed to be a traitor. Such a decision is purely, inexplicably evil: King […] [H]e that tempered thee, bade thee stand up, Gave thee no instance why thou shouldst do treason Unless to dub thee with the name of traitor. […] I will weep for thee, For this revolt of thine, methinks, is like Another fall of man. (2.2.118-20)

12

“Edmund. This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeit of our own behaviour, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars” (1.3.119-22).

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Edmund seems to theorize this type of free choice of evil. Thus, by rejecting definition, origin, and heavenly influence, the evil which Edmund, Goneril, and Regan express is a movement towards nothingness. Finally, the world of King Lear is defined by a relation to nothingness through the representation of a decadent Nature. Indeed, the realm the old King leaves to his daughters in the first scene seems an Eden. Lear’s speech echoes God’s blessing to Adam and Eve in Genesis13: “To thine and Albany’s issues / Be this perpetual” (1.1.66-67). However, this Eden becomes a desert14 full of misery and madness when Edgar flees the castle (2.2.184-91). To blend into this brutal and absurd Nature, Edgar renounces all the prerogatives of human society: My face I’ll grime with filth, Blanket my loins, elf all my hair in knots And with presented nakedness outface The winds and persecutions of the sky. (2.2.180-83)

The natural world suddenly resembles an outer circle of Hell. The Nature Edgar discovers is nothing more than the chaotic clash of natural forces, deprived of order and reason. Her blind violence is on display in the tempest of the third act. This unbridled power is presented as a sort of night of the night, which terrifies even “Night’s black agents”15: Kent. Alas, sir, are you here? Things that love night Love not such nights as these. The wrathful skies Gallow the very wanderers of the dark, And make them keep their caves. (3.2.42-45)

This goddess is a force of self-destruction, a tyrant who cannot withstand her own ferocity: “Kent. […] The tyranny of the open night’s too rough / For nature to endure” (3.4.2-3). Thus, she is the exact opposite of the principle of regeneration which she embodies in many of Shakespeare’s comedies. In his article “Nature and Shakespeare,” Edgar C. Knowlton lists the principles which seem to guide the action of this generous Nature: 13

“And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it” (Genesis, 1.28). 14 “[F]or many miles about / There’s scarce a bush.” (2.2.491-92). 15 Macbeth, 3.2.53

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1. The first item from its central significance and frequency of use: Nature, the creator. This is equivalent to the Dame Nature of tradition, the vicar of God. >…@ 2. Nature directs that all creatures shall serve the process of creation. (Knowlton 1936, 720-21)

In the comedies, Nature is the power which gives being and guarantees order, for she fosters feelings of kinship, piety, and love. She is therefore often opposed to the evils of civilization, and several Shakespearian comedies revolve around the stock comic conflict between young lovers and old authority, where irrepressible Nature defeats stultifying custom.16 In King Lear, on the contrary, Nature is a power of degradation which turns the world away from the original purity of creation. According to Gloucester, the corruption of the flesh has utterly perverted humanity, which turns against its origin: “Gloucester. Our flesh and blood, my lord, is grown so vile / That it doth hate what gets it” (3.4.141-42). Similarly, in Edmund’s mock-philosophical manifesto, the comic relationship between Nature and Culture is reversed: custom is a principle of order, and Nature becomes a rejection of all social unity. To serve this goddess, one must serve oneself: Edmund. Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law My services are bound. Wherefore should I Stand in the plague of custom, and permit The curiosity of nations to deprive me? […] Why brand they us With base? […] Who in the lusty stealth of nature take More composition and fierce quality Than doth within a dull stale tired bed Go to the creating a whole tribe of fops Got ’tween a sleep and wake. Well, then, Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land. (1.2.1-4, 9-16)

The illegitimate love which renewed the species in King John17 here becomes the “lusty stealth of Nature” (l. 11). Unlike the Bastard in the earlier play, who received both his father’s vigor and his spirit to the point 16

For instance in Love’s Labour’s Lost: “Berowne. >…@ Young blood doth not obey an old decree.” 4.3.213-215. 17 The vigorous bastard, son of Richard the Lionheart, is clearly preferred to his anemic though legitimate brother: “Bastard. […] My father gave me honour, yours gave land. / Now blessed be the hour, by night or by day, / When I was got, Sir Robert was away!” 1.1.164-66.

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where Queen Eleanor adopts him on the spot,18 the physical prowess that Edmund speaks of (the “composition and fierce quality”, l. 12) implies no nobility of sentiment, no moral perfection. Nature is therefore a blind and violent power, here, and serves no Providence. Indeed, it is striking that in the comedies, Nature often determines the characters’ virtues,19 whereas in King Lear, it is characters’ actions that determine the value of Nature. Thus, Goneril and Regan bring her dishonor, while Cordelia redeems her: Gentleman. […] Thou hast one daughter Who redeems nature from the general curse Which twain have brought her to. (4.6.201-03)

Edmund’s pretention to found his egotistical enterprise on “Nature” is not pure sophism, therefore. In this play, humanity bears the responsibility for the value of the world, sometimes despite the violence of an amoral and degraded Nature. Thus, a world which is not defined positively in any great detail becomes negatively immense, as it seems to have been created by a reduction ad nihilum, threatened by evil’s movement towards nothingness, and governed by a blind and destructive Nature. This structural value is reflected in a series of dramatic uses, some of which are central to the movement of the plot. Indeed, a peremptory attitude towards “nothing,” posited on a false conception of nothingness, is the tragic flaw that sets both the main plot and the Gloucester subplot in motion. This peculiar blindness to the value of nothingness is apparent in the exchange from which we took our title. When the fool asks the King: “Can you make no use of nothing, nuncle?” (1.4.128-29), almost all of the meanings of Elizabethan “nothing” are in play. This brief question underscores Lear’s theological blindness as a pagan king who refuses the idea of ex nihilo creation; reminds him that his abdication has reduced him to zero, an “O without a figure” (1.4.183-84), a visual representation of what he is not; and suggests that his vision, his mental clarity,20 and perhaps his sexual prowess are not what they once were. However, Lear ignores all but the philosophical sense of the word, as if the fool wished to engage in a debate about the tenets of atomism and the antinomies of the 18 “The very spirit of Plantagenet! / I am your grandam, Richard; call me so” (1.1.167-68). 19 “Duke. The hand that hath made thee fair hath made you good.” Measure for Measure, 3.1.179. 20 As “nothing” and “noting” were probably near-homonyms.

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concept of creation: “Why, no my boy: nothing can be made out of nothing” (1.4.130). Lear extends Lucretius’ rejection of the concept of absolute nothingness to all possible uses of nothing. Though the dramatic value of the line is hardly philosophical—Lear is engaging in playful banter with the Fool, it does suggest a pattern of thought which appears at key moments in the play. Lear stakes out a position on nothingness which causes him to reject out of hand the myriad meanings of nothing. It is crucially important that the relationship between pure nothingness and mere nothing here is purely verbal and dramatic, rather than conceptual: Lear’s dismissal of ex nihilo creation never becomes a basis for metaphysical deduction, but rather an excuse to reject any and all expressions of “nothing.” He misses the Fool’s sly wordplay here, just as he failed to hear the simple truth of Cordelia’s “nothing” in the first scene. The expression of both truth and trickery will be ignored in the name of a preordained ontology. “Nothing” appears to be the blind spot of Lear’s reason and therefore of his power, which opens up a troubling, insubstantial space beyond the King’s ken and unbeholden to his authority. The characters will have to make use of this chaotic freedom in one way or another, either to exploit the King’s folly, or serve him despite it. The dramatic value of this philosophical flaw is evident in the first scene of the play. The King’s love test puts Goneril and Regan in an uncomfortable rhetorical position, as they must try to express the greatest possible love for their father in order to receive the largest part of the realm. Their greed is confronted with a theological problem, as their future rests on their capacity to express infinity. They will respond by playing upon the paradoxes of non-being to suggest the illusion of unbounded love for Lear, exploiting his peculiar blindness to the realm of nothing. Indeed, they will try to represent the infinite by rejecting the world, much in the way that some negative theologians attempted to approach the divine by negating creation. For instance, Thomas Aquinus describes a negative path to the thought of God that takes away all possible characteristics until nothing is left: Finally we remove even the idea of “being” itself, insofar as the idea of “being” is present in creatures, and then God remains in a dark night of ignorance, and it is in this ignorance that we come closest to God in this life […]. For in such mists, they say, does God dwell. (IV Libros Sententiarum P. Lombardi, Lib. I, dist. 8, q. 1, art. 1. Quoted in Mondin 1963, 99)

He is referring here to the followers of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, whose thought became popular in fourteenth-century England through the

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widely circulated anonymous treatises The Cloud of Unknowing and Dionise Hid Divinite. The former work calls for a negative ascension towards the divine by negating all earthly being and even all the characteristics of God: “put a cloud of forgetting […] betwixt thee and all creatures that ever be made. […] For although it be good to think upon the kindness of God, and to love Him and praise him for it, yet it be far better to think upon the naked being of Him, and to love Him and praise Him for Himself” (Anonymous 2008, 52-53). This via negativa should allow the soul to move toward absolute truth despite the shortcomings of our human sense, and embrace God in nothingness. Goneril defines her “love” in a similarly negative and nebulous way: Sir, I do love you more than word can wield the matter, Dearer than eyesight, space and liberty, Beyond what can be valued, rich or rare, No less than life, with grace, health, beauty, honour. As much as child e’er loved, or father found, A love that makes breath poor and speech unable, Beyond all manner of so much I love you. (1.1.55-61)

At first glance, she seems to be expressing a unique, immense, and inexpressible love for her father, and Lear will understand her just so. However, this love is nothing in the world, for it is without expression and without measure. Moreover, it opposes everything that could allow it real existence or expression: perception, space, freedom, all sources of value, and life itself. Rather than characterizing her love, Goneril evokes an object without qualities, too vast for genre and category, which resembles a nothing defined only by what it negates. Finally, this “love” is purely negative in its action. Goneril seems to promise Lear that she is ready not only to die, but also to abandon all value, embrace dishonor and even damnation for his love. What Goneril calls “love” is only a name: the “unqualitied”21 object she describes could more adequately be called a sick obsession or a nihilistic rejection of the world. However, she is not lying: she will indeed love her father with such an empty, negative, and obsessive form of “love.” In this passage, she ably puts the paradoxes of nothingness to use, by erasing the meaning of the word that her father commands her to define in its highest expression, to present a bare canvas where the naïve King can imagine an infinite love for his person.

21

Antony and Cleopatra, 3.11.44.

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Regan will try to squeeze a bit more negativity out of this rhetorical strategy: Sir I am made of that self mettle as my sister, And prize me at her worth. In my true heart I find she names my very deed of love: Only she comes too short, that I profess Myself an enemy to all other joys Which the most precious square of sense possesses, And find I am alone felicitate In your dear highness’ love. (1.1.55-76)

Here, the definition of love becomes even more improbable, and seems to consist in an absolute hatred of all human happiness. Thus, the two sisters play upon the paradoxes of nothingness to express a love which seems quite close to the absolute absence of love, and even a universal hatred. Cordelia, on the contrary, does not desire to obtain “more” by promising infinity: Lear. […] [W]hat can you say to draw A third more opulent than your sisters? Speak. Cordelia. Nothing, my lord. (1.1.86-87)

We will not be the first to point out the rich ambiguity of this line; however, the role of nothingness here has rarely been analysed. On the one hand, Cordelia refuses the ceremony of flattery that her father demands, but on the other, she develops her sisters’ rhetorical ploy to its logical conclusion: simply “nothing.” Furthermore, her love is not expressed in blurred definitions and vague negations, but rather in strict definition and exact measure: I love your majesty According to my bond, no more nor less. […] Why have my sisters husbands, if they say They love you all? Haply when I shall wed, That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry Half my love with him, half my care and duty. (1.1.92-93, 99-102)

She refuses to make use of nothingness, and underscores the manipulative rhetoric of her sisters with her call for strict accountability. However, she

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expresses her refusal to play upon “nothing” with the word “nothing.” Finally, her promise to “do […] before [she] speak[s]” (1.1.228) will deprive her of the ability to act: by refusing to manipulate her blind father in his own best interest, Cordelia cuts herself off from the very obligations she wishes to fulfill. In his anger, Lear will disown her, renouncing all family ties, and she will only be able to comfort him in his madness by leading a foreign invasion of England. Her brutal challenge to her father’s blindness to “nothing,” her incapacity to ruse and cog and exploit the paradoxes of non-being makes the true expression of her love impossible, until France miraculously perceives her virtue and lends her his “power” (3.2.13). This dramatic use of nothingness is thus a means of evoking infinity without saying anything specific, a manipulation of definitions which projects an infinite yet “unqualitied” object which the naïve listeners will define according to their preconceived beliefs. The refusal to exploit the rhetorical power of the negative doesn’t shield one from it: the value of Cordelia’s blunt “nothing” depends just as much as her sisters’ glib paradoxes on the interpretation of the listener. Willfully blind to the subtleties of negative rhetoric, Lear will perceive an expression of love in an expression of hate, and vice versa. However, this rhetorical manipulation is not the only one which “nothing” permits. In the second scene, Edmund needs only the merest of nothings to turn his father’s world upside down. He comes onstage carrying a false letter attributed to his brother Edgar, which hints at a plan to murder their father and seize his lands. The word “nothing” sets the Gloucester plot in motion: Gloucester. Edmund, how now, what news? Edmund. [Pockets the letter] So please your lordship, none. Gloucester. Why so earnestly seek you to put up that letter? Edmund. I know no news, my lord. Gloucester. What paper were you reading? Edmund. Nothing, my lord. (1.2.26-32)

The same line that expressed Cordelia’s true filial love becomes a fratricidal slander. Indeed, the word “nothing” can take on any negative meaning according to what it negates: Cordelia negated the empty rhetoric of her sisters and the absurd ceremony that her father imposed, and her “nothing” was sublime self-sacrifice; Edmund only negates the import of the letter he is busily stuffing into his pocket. Indeed, his use of “nothing” is uncharacteristically poor, in Shakespeare’s writing, as only one of the

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word’s many meanings is valid. Edmund’s capacity to make use of “nothing” is so great that with a “tricksy word”22 and a gesture, he can convince his father that his loyal son is a traitor, and that the unlikely sentiments in the letter are true. It is to be noted that just like Goneril and Regan, Edmund is not lying: the letter is indeed nothing, and it truly expresses the thoughts and intentions of its author. The theatrical trifle which so flusters his father is linked to “nothing” in three ways: by the use of the word, of course, but also in being the lowest level of theatrical manipulation, a lie which is immediately obvious both to the audience and to the characters onstage; finally, it is immediately linked to a philosophical prejudice similar to Lear’s. Gloucester will base his interpretation on a lighthearted analysis of the qualities of nothing. He repeats the word “need” three times, with three different shades of meaning: “No? What needed then that terrible dispatch of it into your pocket? The quality of nothing hath not such need to hide itself. Let’s see—Come, if it be nothing, I shall not need spectacles.” (1.2.33-36). He plays on three aspects of the notion of nothing: that which is invisible, worthless, and incapable of causation. He comes to the same conclusion as Lear, though he applies a corollary of Lucretius’ maxim: if the letter is visible, causes action, and seems important, it cannot be nothing. Again, a preordained ontology leaves “nothing” out, and puts its proponents at the mercy of those more attuned to its uses. In the main plot, Lear is unable to hear the value of Cordelia’s “nothing;” in the subplot, Gloucester cannot see the paucity of Edmund’s visual manipulation. Thinking he has outwitted his son, he mocks him with his playful reasoning on the possibility of seeing nothing, just as Lear answered “nothing can be made out of nothing” to the Fool. However, Lear’s mad reasoning will cost him his reason, and Gloucester’s jokes about seeing nothing carry some dramatic irony as well. This particular type of madness, however, is also a condition of mimetic theatrical performance. Every theatergoer interprets what transpires on stage according to a preordained ontology and predetermined patterns. We believe, for instance, that what the characters do is more essential than what they say, that what happens in Act 1 will have some bearing on Act 2, that the King we see rules an invisible kingdom. Here, Edmund toys with these naïve assumptions by creating a new, illusory world for his father from nothing. By exploiting the simplest of theatrical tricks, he will undo his family, shatter trust, claim undue inheritance, and bring his brother to take up “the basest and most poorest shape / That ever penury, 22

The Merchant of Venice, 3.5.67.

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in contempt of man, / Brought near to beast” (2.3.181-83). This hints at a world of inconceivable causality, where the effect cannot be deduced from its causes, and everything can be redefined by nothing, both for the audience and for the characters. For the spectator, this type of uncertainty is one of the attractions of Shakespeare’s theater. For the characters on stage, it is a form of hell. Indeed, in such a world, where the use of nothing can determine political reality and family relations, the more virtuous characters have to resolve to make use of it themselves. However, they will do so firstly by accepting their own nothingness. For instance, Kent goes beyond Cordelia’s sterile refusal to use nothing. He accepts to erase himself to serve his master, and becomes something of a paradox: to be frank and loyal, he will lie and betray his oath of fealty.23 In the first scene, when he rises against the King, he knows full well how far he can bait his rage. First, he swears nothing but death will keep him from speaking truth to power: “[W]hilst I can vent clamour from my throat / I’ll tell thee thou dost evil” (1.1.166-67). Realizing he has pushed Lear too far, he stops venting, and will never again speak a word against the King.24 When he appears again in Act 1 Scene 4, he does so in a disguise which he presents as a form of self-erasure: Kent. If but as well I other accents borrow That can my speech diffuse, my good intent May carry through itself to that full issue For which I razed my likeness. Now, banished Kent, If thou canst serve where thou dost stand condemned So may it come thy master whom thou lov’st Shall find thee full of labours. (1.4.1-7)

This self-effacement, reminiscent of Christ’s kenosis, seems to make Kent surprisingly fertile: the words “full,” “issue,” “carry,” and “labour” all refer to childbirth. The exact nature of this rebirth is open to question: as often, the positive aspects of Shakespeare’s theatrical worlds are more suggested than fleshed out. Similarly, when Edgar is chased from his father’s castle, he takes refuge in being nothing: “Poor Turlygod, poor Tom, / That’s something yet: Edgar I nothing am.” (2.2.191-92). James L. Calderwood perceives 23

Lear banishes him “on [his] allegiance” (1.1.168). Except by tentatively agreeing with the Fool’s jibes: “This is not altogether fool, my lord.” (1.4.144). 24

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this character’s changes not as development but rather as a series of erasures: From that nothing emerges Poor Tom. But by the same token, remove the rags of his disguise and Edgar would have to confess “poor Tom I nothing am.” Thus Edgar leaves various non-identities behind as he creates new somethings—Poor Tom, the “fiend” at the top of the cliff, the meeting with Lear, the thick-spoken peasant who cudgels Oswald to his grave, and the knight who kills Edmund. Each is a kind of nothing or “not this” from which at last the real Edgar magically issues as prospective king. (Calderwood 1986, 6)

This final revelation is made possible by a theatrical use of nothing: self-erasure allows virtue to survive and to act despite the rule of folly and evil. It is in the depiction of Lear’s fall from grace that negative characterization, a complex relation to nothingness, a dramatic movement towards nothingness, and a rebirth through kenosis appear most clearly. Indeed, the tragic grandeur of the character is almost entirely due to the representation of his annihilation, rather than any clearly demonstrable heroic quality. George Orwell writes with only slight exaggeration: “In his sane moments Lear hardly ever makes an intelligent remark” (1957, 116. Quoted in Berry 1984, 421). According to G. W. Knight: “A tremendous soul is, as it were, incongruously geared to a puerile intellect” (Knight 1930, 162. Quoted in Berry 1984, 421). However, even this “immense soul” is defined firstly by the representation of Lear’s loss. His “puerile intellect” itself makes this long negative development possible, because he seems to be able to maintain his illusions of royal grandeur despite reality, reason, counsel, the violence of the elements, and even into madness. Since he clings obstinately to a lost universe which revolved around him, Lear not only suffers annihilation, but he does so absolutely and often. Brian Rotman perceives the repetition of this motif in the play: “>King Lear@ dramatise>s@ reductions to nothing, charting the annihilation of human warmth, the dissolution of social, natural, familial bonds, the emptying of kindness, sympathy, tenderness, love, pity, affection into hollow shells” (Rotman 1987, 78). Indeed, the annihilation of the old King first entails the reduction to zero of all the inessential aspects of his being (pomp, power), then a series of attacks coming ever closer to his center, his “heart” (family relations, his body, his reason, his love for Cordelia). Above all, however, what is repeatedly negated is the belief that he is “everything,” the center of the world, that flatterers instilled in him: “They told me I was everything” (4.6.103-04). Thus, the notion of nothingness is

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central to his tragic decline, because at every new slight or spurn, Lear loses the infinite illusion that he wishes so desperately to maintain. The structure of this slow reduction to nothingness is thus double: it is both a movement that leads from infinite illusion to madness to humble rebirth, and a series of repetitions of the theme of nothing. From the very first scene where Lear appears after his abdication, the fool compares him to a zero insistently. Lear’s face suggests three images of zero to the fool, which are the crown, an empty eggshell, and the King’s empty head: Fool. >…@ Nuncle, give me an egg and I’ll give thee two crowns. Lear. What two crowns shall they be? Fool. Why, after I have cut the egg i’ the middle and eat up the meat, the two crowns of the egg. When thou clovest thy crown i’ the middle and gav’st away both parts, thou bor’st thine ass on thy back o’er the dirt. Thou hadst little wit in thy bald crown when thou gav’st thy golden one away. […] Thou hast pared thy wit o’ both sides and left nothing i’ the middle. (1.4.148-56, 177-79)

The comparison to zero soon becomes explicit: “Now thou art an O without a figure; I am better than thou art now. I am a fool, thou art nothing” (1.4.183-85). Lear’s status seems to be the lowest in the realm: “I had rather be any kind o’ thing than a fool, and yet I would not be thee, nuncle.” (1.4.176-77). He is a famished prodigal, an empty shell, a sexual impotent: “He that keeps nor crust nor crumb, / Weary of all, shall want some. [Points to Lear] That’s a shelled peascod.” (1.4.188-90). In the Quarto, Lear himself evokes this reduction to nothing, at first as a ridiculous or scandalous hypothesis: Does any here know me? why, this is not Lear. >…@ Who is it that can tell me who I am? Lear’s shadow. (1.4.217, 221-22)25

Lear’s shadowy nature is not the sign of a presence but rather that of an absence, and the actor speaking these lines is playing Lear’s non-being. The King will be ever more often associated with images of loss, emptiness, and absence, as well as the themes of annihilation, devouring, lack, abjuration, and sacrifice. Lear is annihilated according to several parameters: in his illusion, his reason, his fatherhood, and his flesh. He even becomes unspeakable and utterly excluded from human society, as Gloucester reveals: “When I 25

In the Folio, the Fool speaks the last line.

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desired their leave that I might pity him, they took from me the use of mine own house; charged me on pain of perpetual displeasure neither to speak of him, entreat for him, or any way sustain him” (3.3.2-6). Any kindness towards him incurs royal condemnation. In the end, the death of Cordelia and (perhaps) of his last hope of redemption concludes this long movement of negative construction. The notion of nothingness is essential to this movement. It is because each chip at his belief that he possesses power by essence is an absolute negation of himself and of his imaginary universe that Lear’s annihilation takes on such immense negative scope. Thus nothingness plays a central role in the construction of the fictional world of the play, and it is not surprising that the characters have to recognize it and make use of it if they wish to prosper or simply survive. Those who peremptorily reject nothingness as Lear and Gloucester do will expiate their ontological misconception through suffering and humiliation; even Cordelia’s virtuous refusal to make use of nothing will ultimately be sterile. Indeed, the world of the play is defined by its relation to nothingness, and appears to be declining towards oblivion, ruled by decadent Nature and rampant ambition. Nothingness is the matter of several theatrical manipulations, but also a shelter against evil for those who accept to lose themselves. These multiple perspectives upon the infinity of nothingness give the world of King Lear an unparalleled negative grandeur.

Bibliography Anonymous. 2008. The Cloud of Unknowing. Ed. Evelyn Underhill, Charleston, SC: Bibliobazaar. Augustine. 1998. The city of God against the pagans. XIV.13. Translated by R. W. Dyson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bartas, Guillaume de Saluste du. 1605-1606. Bartas, His Devine Weekes and Workes, I. Translated by Josuah Sylvester, London: H. Lownes. Berry, Ralph. Winter, 1984. “Lear’s System,” Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 4: 421-49. Bérulle, Pierre de. 1995. “Conférences et fragments: Œuvres de piété” in Œuvres complètes. Ed. Michel Dupuy, Paris: Les éditions du Cerf, 1161. Breton, Nicholas. 1597. “The Scholler and the Souldiour”, in The Wil of Wit, Wits Will, or Wils Wit, Chuse You Whether. Containing Fiue Discourses, the Effects whereof Follow. London: Thomas Creede. Calderwood, James L. Spring, 1986. “Creative Uncreation in King Lear”, Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 1: 5-19.

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Davis, Nick. 1998. Stories of Chaos: Reason and its displacement in Early Modern English Narrative, Brookfield: Ashgate. Diogenes Laertius. 1853. The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, IX. Translated by Charles Duke Yonge, London: H. G. Bohn. Donne, John. 1995. “First Anniversary” in The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, Vol. 6. Ed. Gary A. Stringer, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Dyer, Edward. 1585. The prayse of nothing, London: H. Jackson. Jorgensen, Paul A. Summer, 1954. “Much Ado about Nothing,” Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 3: 287-95. Kirsch, Arthur. Summer, 1984. “Macbeth’s Suicide,” English Literary History, Vol. 51, No. 2: 269-96. Knight, Wilson G. 1930. The Wheel of Fire. London: Methuen. Knowlton, Edgar C. September, 1936. “Nature and Shakespeare,” PMLA, Vol. 51, No. 3: 719-744. Lucretius. 2008. On the Nature of Things. Translated by W. E. Leonard, Charleston, SC: Bibliobazaar. Marlowe, Christopher. 1993. Doctor Faustus A and B texts (1604, 1616). Eds. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mondin, Battista. 1963. The Principle of Analogy in Protestant and Catholic Theology. The Hague: M. Nijhoff. Montaigne, Michel de. 2007. Essais. Paris: Gallimard. Mornay, Philippe de. 1587. A Worke Concerning the Trewnesse of the Christian Religion. Translated by Sir Philip Sidney and Arthur Golding, London: G. Robinson for T. Cadman. George Orwell, George. 1957. “Lear, Tolstoy, and the Fool,” Selected Essays. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Rankins, William. 1588. The English Ape, The Italian imitation, the Footesteppes of Fraunce. London: Robert Robinson. Rosenberg, John D. April, 1966. “King Lear and his comforters,” Essays in Criticism, Vol. 16, No. 2: 135-46. Rotman, Brian. 1987. Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Shakespeare, William. 1998. The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works. Eds. Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson and David Scott Kastan, Walton-on-Thames, Surrey: Thomas Nelson and Sons. Tayler, Edward W. Winter, 1990. “King Lear and Negation”, English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 20, No. 1: 17-39.

KING LEAR IN THE LIGHT OF LUCRETIUS: NULLAM REM E NIHILO

JONATHAN POLLOCK

The negative connotation of the word “epicurism” is ancient, owing to the opprobrium in which Epicure and his followers were held by the Stoics and the early Fathers of the Church. In this article, I argue that Shakespeare relied on Lucretius’s ideas (probably through Montaigne’s influence) and used them to flesh out the philosophical dimension of his tragedy before turning to Shakespeare’s treatment of Nature, thunder and division. The text of King Lear indeed shows that if something (a cloud of atoms evaporating in the air?) really escapes through Cordelia’s lips when she breathes her last in the end, this may well be explained in terms of atomist thought.

It is in King Lear that we find the first occurrence of the word “epicurism” in Shakespeare’s works. The context in which it is employed leaves little doubt as to its meaning. Having divided his kingdom between his two elder daughters and dispossessed Cordelia of her share, Lear goes to live with Goneril for a month. The company he keeps is hardly to her liking: Here do you keep a hundred knights and squires; Men so disorder’d, so debosh’d, and bold, That this our court, infected with their manners, Shows like a riotous inn: epicurism and lust Makes it more like a tavern or a brothel Than a grac’d palace. (1.4.232-37)

Here, then, “epicurism” rhymes with disorder, debauchery, infection, riotous behaviour and lust, and an Epicure is seen as somebody taken to lounging about in taverns and brothels. In his Epistles, the Latin poet Horatius calls his fellow writer Tibullus “a pig from Epicurus’ herd” (Epicuri de grege porcum, I.4.16); and in Every Man Out Of His Humour, Ben Jonson describes Carlo Buffone as “an impudent common iester, a violent rayler, and an incomprehensible Epicure” (Prologue, 357-58).

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What motivates this last attribution is not only his inveterate taste for debauchery but also his brazen avowal of atheism: “He will preferre all Countries before his natiue, and thinkes he can neuer sufficiently, or with admiration enough, deliuer his affectionate conceit of forraine Atheistical policies” (367-69). Over the centuries, the deforming mirrors of Stoicism and Christianity had thus reduced the principal doctrines of Epicurean philosophy to the twin vices of sybaritical behaviour and atheism. By adopting a less biased point of view, these doctrines may be summarised as follows: the pursuit of pleasure as the sovereign Good (it must be said, however, that true pleasure, in the eyes of Epicurus, is conditioned by the exercise of virtue); the idea that the gods abstain from interfering with the affairs of men; and the belief that the world in its entirety is none other than the result of a fortuitous aggregation of atoms. Should we then conclude that Shakespeare is happy to convey a vulgar and degraded image of atomist thought? It is surely not a coincidence that the accusation of “epicurism” is put in the mouth of a character whose actions are entirely motivated by the supposedly Epicurean vices of lust and cupidity; nor that Goneril’s speech sounds strangely like the diatribes levelled by the City of London’s puritanical magistrates at the theatres and their servants; nor that the King denounces this kind of hypocrisy when he exhorts an imaginary “rascal beadle” to leave off whipping a prostitute and to whip himself for lusting after her (4.6.156-59). No, a closer reading of King Lear leads one to suspect that Shakespeare’s understanding of Epicurean philosophy was of a far greater complexity than what is suggested by Goneril’s calculated outburst. Giovanni Florio did not coin the word “epicurism” (the Oxford English Dictionary gives examples dating back to 1575), but it is likely that Shakespeare came across the term in Florio’s 1603 translation of the Essays of Montaigne. The influence of the Essays on Shakespeare’s thought and vocabulary in general, and on the composition of King Lear in particular, has long been established; however, to my knowledge, the specifically Epicurean dimension of this influence has not yet been sufficiently explored. Certainly, Montaigne was too Pyrrhonian a thinker to want to espouse Epicurean dogmatism; nevertheless, the Essays constitute a breviary of atomist doctrine. In as much as they belong to the genre of the cento, their texture is woven from quotations taken from a huge number of sources, but no single source is more often quoted (158 occurrences) than the work of Lucretius, De rerum natura. A manuscript version of this poem, written by a Roman disciple of Epicurus in the first century B.C., had been discovered in an Alsatian monastery in 1417 and

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this led to the publication around 1473 of the princeps edition at Brescia in Italy. Hence, the poem’s influence first made itself felt in the writings of the Italian humanists of the quattrocento, such as Giovanni Pontano, Lorenzo Valla and Angiolo Poliziano (Hadzsits 1935). Baptista Pius brought out a new edition at Bologna in 1511, then again at Paris in 1514, which greatly interested the poets of La Pleïade, Pierre de Ronsard and Joachim Du Bellay. Then in 1563, Denis Lambin published a new edition at Paris, based on a collation of several manuscripts. In his poem La Sepmaine, Guillaume de Saluste du Bartas translated the passage in which Lucretius claims that nothing comes of nothing and included it in his rendering of the “second day” of Creation. But it is mostly thanks to the Essays of Montaigne that Lucretius’ poetic exposition of Epicurean philosophy enjoyed a wide diffusion at the Renaissance, despite still attracting the anathema of theologians of every sort. Of course, it is possible that Shakespeare consulted the De rerum natura directly, since British scholars and noblemen are known to have possessed the Lambin edition, but whatever his source—Lucretius’ didactic poem, Cicero’s dialogues, Montaigne’s Essays, Sir Philip Sydney’s Arcadia, or even the atomist pamphlets of Giordano Bruno, it is clear that the “epicurism” to which Shakespeare alludes in King Lear goes far beyond Goneril’s hypocritical remonstrations to her father. Nothing proves that Shakespeare had read the De rerum natura before composing King Lear, but everything leads us to think so. To be convinced, one needs only consider the commonplaces or topoï with which Lucretius opens the first of his six books. The poet begins by appealing to “alma Venus” (I.2)1 the divine embodiment of the generative forces of Nature and an adulteress locked in Mars’ embrace. He then eulogizes a “Graecian man” (Epicurus, although he is never named outright) for withstanding all alone the gods’ thunderbolts and the “threatening rumbles” of the heavens (I.69). This is followed by an evocation of the myth of Iphigenia, sacrificed by her royal father Agamemnon in order to launch the attack against Troy and to maintain his daughter “pure in an impure way (casta incesta)” (I.98). Only then does Lucretius announce the first principle of atomist physics: “nullam rem e nihilo gigni diuinitus umquam”—“Nothing is born of nothing, by divine miracle” (I.150). In an effort to sound the depth of Lucretius’ influence on the composition of King Lear, let us see what becomes of these topoï once Shakespeare inserts them into the pre-existent dramatic framework of the story of the British king. 1

The translations are my own.

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The hymn to Nature Whereas Lucretius sees in the goddess Nature a power of pacification and life-giving fecundity, Gloucester’s bastard son Edmund invokes her aid against the customs and traditions of patriarchal society: “Thou, Nature, art my goddess: to thy law / My services are bound” (1.2.1-2). Writing at a time of civil war in Rome, Lucretius exhorts Venus to seduce Mars and thus to put an end to the fratricidal combats. The goddess to whom Edmund plights his troth, on the other hand, does nothing to allay his martial ardour. She is defined rather by her ability to subvert the Law in all its forms: not only the laws of heritage, succession and social legitimacy, but also moral law and the supposedly natural “bonds” of family affection. In his essay, “Lear ou les voi(es)x de la Nature,” the French psycho-analyst André Green points out that the Nature to whom Edmund vows allegiance is none other than his own: that of a libido which remains impervious to legal, moral or sentimental considerations (Green 1992, 181-200). The Epicureanism of Edmund is in actual fact nothing but unabashed egotism, although it does have this in common with atomism that it allows for the possibility of individual freedom, as opposed to those who believe human behaviour to be entirely determined by physical and astrological factors. According to Lucretius, the necessary, though hardly sufficient, condition of personal autonomy resides in the ability of the atoms composing our minds to deviate ever so slightly from their previous course. Edmund contents himself with railing those who, like his father, shirk their own responsibilities by blaming their vices on the influence of the stars. Despite his vow of allegiance to the goddess Nature, in reality Edmund commits himself to evil because he eschews all law, whether natural, human or divine. Lucretius, on the other hand, praises Epicurus for having emancipated mankind from the laws of fate (fati foedera), but advocates knowledge of and obedience to the laws of nature (foedera naturai).2

The cause of thunder The topos of the lone man defying the rumbling thunderbolts of the gods takes on a double aspect in King Lear. Of course, one thinks of the pitiful figure of the old king, mad with rage, shut out of Gloucester’s castle by his iniquitous daughters, and subjected to the most formidable storm in living memory. But one should not overlook the figure of Edgar, reduced 2

See Lucretius, De rerum natura, II.54.

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to the rank of destitute vagabond, playing the part of an “Abraham man,” simulating madness and calling himself Poor Tom in order to escape from his pursuers. Could it be that Lear identifies Poor Tom, draped in a blanket as if in a toga, with the Grecian man (Graius homo) celebrated by Lucretius? He calls him: “learned Theban,” “Noble philosopher,” “good Athenian” (3.4, 153, 168, 176). Given Tom’s state of extreme indigence, critics tend generally to see a reference to the Cynics: Diogenes, for example, or Crassus (though Lear lives before their time). It should be borne in mind however that the last book of De rerum natura opens upon a eulogy of Athens, the cradle of law, agriculture and civilisation, and above all the native city of Epicurus, the first man to “break open the locks of nature” (I.71) and reveal “the hidden secret of things” (I.144). It is then not entirely unreasonable that the mad king put the following question to the “good Athenian”: “What is the cause of thunder?” (3.4.151) Of course, Epicurus was not the only philosopher of nature, and the editors of King Lear direct the reader to a plethora of possible sources, such as The Book of Sidrach or Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Nevertheless, Lucretius devotes a third of the last book of his poem to this sole question, the twin phenomena of thunder and lightning being precisely, out of all the diverse aspects of the natural world, those to which Epicurus and the Epicureans gave the greatest importance. There was obviously a reason for that, and that reason was theological. In the first two acts of the play, Lear appeals to the heavens and the gods whenever he finds himself confronted with what he takes to be an attitude of revolt, disrespect or ingratitude towards his royal person. In so doing, he gives voice to that particular kind of religious sentiment which identifies physical beings (the sun and the planets) with gods, and which sees in exceptional natural phenomena a mode of supernatural intervention. In such a perspective, lightning is perceived as a form of divine retribution. Lucretius asks: And whose heart (animus) does not pound with awe at the gods (formidine diuom), whose members do not shake with fear when the earth trembles and is set ablaze by a terrifying thunderbolt, and when rumblings (murmura) fill the vast sky overhead? Do not whole peoples and nations tremble, are not despotic kings paralysed with religious fear at the thought that, for a vile action, a proud word, the time of punishment has come? (V.1218-25)

Such are Lear’s feelings, when the storm is at its height: “Let the great Gods, / That keep this dreadful pudder o’er our heads, / Find out their enemies now” (3.2.49-51). Yet, one cannot help but admit that, very often,

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the gods seem to be strangely lacking in discernment. Falsely naïve, Lucretius asks: If Jupiter and the other gods really do shake the luminous temples of the sky with such terrible noises and throw down fire wherever they please, why then do they not strike down all those who commit abominable crimes, why do they not insure that these criminals expire in flames, their chests pierced through with lightning, a tough lesson for mortals to learn from? Why, on the contrary, is the man whose conscience is pure all of a sudden wrapped in flame, caught up in a celestial vortex of fire in spite of his manifest innocence? (VI.387-95)

During the storm, the figures of evil, Goneril, Regan, Cornwall and Edmund, remain warm and dry within Gloucester’s castle, whereas the representatives of good, Kent, Edgar, Lear and his fool, are exposed to the fury of the elements. “I am a man / More sinn’d against than sinning” (3.2.59-60), Lear declares, after having reprimanded the wind and rain, the thunder and lightning, That will with two pernicious daughters join Your high-engender’d battles ’gainst a head So old and white as this. (3.2.22-24)

Does that mean that the Gods are immoral, or amoral? In their eyes, are we “As flies to wanton boys,” as Gloucester suggests? Do they “kill us for their sport” (4.1.38-39)? Or would it not be wiser to conclude, as Lucretius does, that the “ignorance of the causes” of natural phenomena leads us to “attribute everything to the power of the gods, thereby making them absolute monarchs of the world” (VI.54-55)? People thus create for themselves “cruel and omnipotent masters,” not knowing “what can exist and what cannot, why finally to each thing is assigned a limited power (finita potestas) and an immutable boundary (alte terminus)” (VI.63-66). And Lucretius concludes: “Their reason is blinded, and they err aimlessly more than ever” (VI.67). Kent’s admonishment to Lear is confirmed: “Thou swear’st thy Gods in vain” (1.1.162). The truth lies elsewhere: according to the Epicureans, the gods do exist, but if they are to enjoy untrammelled felicity (as befits their condition), then they should be spared all motives for worry or anger; it is therefore to be assumed that the gods live far away, in the spaces between worlds, and show no interest whatsoever in human affairs.

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On the edge Despite his hubris, Lear is well aware that nature has granted him a “limited power and an immutable boundary” (VI.63-66). He chooses to bestow his kingdom upon his children precisely so as to be able to “Unburthen’d crawl toward death” (1.1.40). By casting him as an old man of over eighty, Shakespeare places his hero at the very term of life and exposes him, in the words of Montaigne, to the “breakdown of human forces which extreme old age inevitably brings in its wake” (Montaigne 1962, 312). In the same essay, “Of Old Age,” Montaigne alludes to “the bourn (borne) beyond which we will not go, that which the law of nature has prescribed cannot be overtaken” (Montaigne 1962, 312). Montaigne continues with a quotation from Lucretius: whenever we draw near to this bourn, “claudicat ingenium, delirat lingua, [labat] mens, / omnia deficiunt atque uno tempore desunt”—“the intelligence starts to limp, the tongue grows delirious, the mind slumps, / everything diminishes and is suddenly lacking” (III.453-54). Lucretius employs the Latin verb deesse, which literally means to “un-be” or to “lack being.” In fact, the whole of Shakespeare’s play is focused upon the “bourn” beyond which things and beings cease to exist. Regan thrusts the fact upon her father: “O, Sir! You are old. / Nature in you stands on the very verge / Of her confine” (2.4.335-37). But Lear is not the only character to stand at the very limits of life and reason. Gloucester, likewise, having been led “within a foot / Of th’extreme verge” (4.6.25-26) of the “dread summit of this chalky bourn” (4.6.57), throws himself down from what he believes to be a cliff, and survives for a while in the interzone that Jacques Lacan, evoking Sophocles’ Antigone, calls “between-two-deaths” (Lacan 1986, 315-33). Edgar regresses to bestiality, and the representatives of evil transgress the limits of humanity and monstrosity: Goneril and Regan end up by devouring each other “Like monsters of the deep” (4.2.51). But such individual cases are to be understood within the larger context of a general disintegration, due to age and dementia, of the body politic, and even of the macrocosm in its entirety. As Gloucester puts it, upon meeting Lear at Dover, “O ruin’d piece of Nature! This great world / Shall so wear out to naught” (4.6.130-31).

The process of division In reaction to the final peripeteia of the tragedy (Cordelia’s hanging and Lear’s relapse into madness), Edgar and Albany, always prompt to

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discover signs of providential justice in the course of events, invoke the end of time: Kent. Is this the promis’d end ? Edg. Or image of that horror? Alb. Fall and cease. (5.3.261-62)

The tone is evocative of the final pages of De rerum natura, in which Lucretius describes in lurid detail the plague which decimated Athens, the city of Epicurus: “Neither religion nor the divine powers had any weight any longer; the present state of suffering dominated everything” (VI.128586). Lucretius describes the plague very precisely as a force of physical and social disintegration, a power of division and atomisation which effectively undoes the bonds which hold people and things together. It could be said that King Lear triggers off a similar process by dividing his kingdom—an absurd decision from a political point of view—and dividing himself from Cordelia and Kent. The mechanism of division quickly gathers momentum and Gloucester’s predictions are confirmed: “Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide: in cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond crack’d ’twixt son and father” (1.2.106-09). Edmund parodies Gloucester’s pessimism, but in order to bring about a further division between his father and Edgar: “death, dearth, dissolutions of ancient amities; divisions in state; menaces and maledictions against King and nobles; needless diffidences, banishment of friends, dissipation of cohorts, nuptial breaches, and I know not what” (1.2.145-49). By the end of Act 2, Lear has cut himself off from his three daughters, and is “shut out” of Gloucester’s castle. By the end of the following act, it is Gloucester himself who is divided from his two sons and thrown out of his own house. Civil and foreign war threaten to destroy “this scatter’d kingdom,”3 with the arrival of Cordelia at the head of a French army. Fortunately, Lear is reconciled to Cordelia, and Gloucester is given into Edgar’s care: new conjunctions and connections are made in spite of the previous ruptures. In the British camp, however, the process of division continues unabated: first between Albany and Cornwall, then between Cornwall and the servants who revolt against Gloucester’s blinding, then between Albany and Goneril, next between Goneril and Regan, and finally between Albany and Edmund.

3

R. A. Foakes does not include this line in his edition of King Lear. It comes from the 1608 Quarto, scene 8.22.

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Now, from an Epicurean perspective, division is the very condition of change and death: “Quod mutatur enim dissoluitur, interit ergo”— “Whatever is changed is dissolved, and therefore perishes” (III.756). In which case, Lear’s declarations as regards the perpetuity of the shares into which he divides his kingdom—“To thine and Albany’s issue / Be this perpetual” (1.1.66-67); “To thee and thine, hereditary ever, / Remain this ample third of our fair kingdom” (1.1.79-80)—do not only denote overweening pride, but also faulty logic. Besides, almost immediately, the third part is subjected to further division, as a consequence of Cordelia’s despoilment. According to the atomists, everything is divisible except for precisely those elements which they defined as being “indivisible,” the atoms themselves (the Greek word atomos means “inseparable”), and for the void (inane) which, as such, offers no means of being divided, although it is infinite in scope and represents the principal condition of atomic movement. To posit the indestructibility of the void and the atoms within it is to claim that nothing returns completely into nothingness: the end of a thing is brought about by the disconnection of its component atoms, not by the destruction of the latter. But if nothing goes back to nothing, nothing comes of nothing, either. Epicurean dogma excludes not only the idea that there is divine providence at work in the world, but also the very possibility of creation ex nihilo: “Nothing is born of nothing, by divine miracle” (I.150). That is of course Lear’s response to Cordelia’s obstinate silence (she refuses to take part in the rhetorical love contest by which she is to win her share of the kingdom), as well as to the Fool’s sarcastic remarks: “nothing will come of nothing” (1.1.90); “nothing can be made out of nothing” (1.4.130). Within the context of the play, the validity of such a claim is seriously undermined by the wilful blindness of the speaker. In putting the canonical formulation of the first principle of Epicurean physics in the corrupt mouth of a pagan king, Shakespeare adds a decidedly metaphysical dimension to the conflict between Lear and his daughter. For as much as Shakespeare wishes to present her as a providential figure, Cordelia is living proof that love and the world can emerge ex nihilo: “Thou hast one daughter,” says the gentleman to Lear, “Who redeems nature from the general curse / Which twain have brought her to” (4.6.20103). She herself quotes the Gospel according to Saint Luke: “O dear father ! / It is thy business that I go about” (4.4.23-24).4 And the final

4 In his edition of the play, Kenneth Muir quotes Luke, 2, 49: “Knew yee not that I must goe about my father’s businesse?” (155).

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tableau of the play is a variation on the Christian Pietà: the dead child cradled in her progenitor’s arms.

The mortality of the soul Is that to say that Shakespeare chooses to represent the triumph of Christian values over pagan and atomist lore? Cordelia’s passion is not followed by her resurrection. Lear dies in the deluded expectation that Cordelia is about to say something, but in fine her lips articulate nothing. And even if the old king does not delude himself, even if something really does escape from his daughter’s lips at that final moment, it is perfectly explicable in terms of atomist thought. According to Lucretius, “The dying exhale a slight breath (tenuis aura) mixed with heat (vapor)” (III.232-33), which is all that remains of their soul, once it is separated from their body—nothing more than a cloud of atoms which evaporates in the air. This is where we touch upon the heart of the scandal that Epicureanism represents in the eyes of the churches: the doctrine of the soul’s mortality. This idea obliges Lucretius to reconsider the religious myths of his day and to conclude: All the torments that the tradition places in the infernal pit are to be found in this life. […] Tityus does not lie sprawling in Hell, preyed upon by birds that could not possibly find enough to peck at in his enormous chest for eternity! […] Tityus is among us, he is the man mortified by love, lacerated by vultures and devouring anguish, or the man stretched out on the rack of other passions. (III.978-94)

Sed Tityos nobis hic est: he is none other than King Lear tortured by the thought of Goneril’s cruelty: “O Regan! she hath tied / Sharp-tooth’d unkindness, like a vulture, here” (2.2.323-24). Interestingly, the text of the De rerum natura presents a lacuna in this series of infernal examples. In an attempt to fill the gap, the 1563 edition refers to a commentary by Servius, who appears to have read an allusion to Ixion. “By the wheel and its victim,” Servius assures us, “Lucretius represented merchant traders […]: negotiatores qui semper tempestitatibus turbinibusque volvuntur” (Serres 1977, 209-10).5 Once again Lear comes to mind, and his declaration that he is “bound / Upon a wheel of fire” in Hell, whereas in fact he is still of this world. Indeed, the images and stage-effects that Shakespeare creates in King Lear are precisely those to which Lucretius alludes. According to the Latin poet, there is no need to relegate to a mode 5

My translation.

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of existence post mortem the plethora of tortures to which the living are subjected: “prison, the terrible fall from the top of a cliff, the whip, henchmen, the stocks, pitch, red hot spits, firebrands. […] In short, it is in the here-and-now that fools (stultorum) experience Hell” (III.1016-23).

The end of the world According to Lucretius, the elementa which compose the human soul are no different from those which constitute natural phenomena. That is why the soul can “foam just like waves seething under the onslaught of violent winds” (III.493-94). From this point of view, it is possible to be literally and rigorously “minded like the weather” (3.1.2): “this tempest in my mind” (3.4.12) of which Lear complains is no different from that which “tears his white hair, / Which the impetuous blasts, with eyeless rage, / Catch in their fury, and make nothing of” (3.1.7-9). For Lear, the elements are “minded” like him, they are of the same mental disposition as he is. This explains his readiness to personify them: Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow! You cataracts and hurricanes, spout Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks! (3.2.1-3)

According to Lucretius, “there is no lack of corpuscles which may surge forth from infinite space and swallow up our world in a mighty vortex or inflict upon it some other form of ruin” (V.367-70). The Latin poet puts special emphasis upon the elements of fire and water: “Breathing nothing but war, rivals equally matched, they fight for the empire of the vast world, since it is said that fire was once the victor and water once ruled the plains” (V.392-95). This is precisely what Lear demands of the cataracts of the skies, that they make the rivers flow over (flumina abundare), that they drown the fields (camposque natare) and recall the Flood (ad diluuiem reuocare).6 Lear’s targets are the creative and germinal powers of Nature herself: And thou, all-shaking thunder, Strike flat the thick rotundity o’th’world! Crack Nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once That makes ingrateful man! (3.2.6-9) 6

Lucretius, De rerum natura, VI, 267, 292.

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The germens of matter have also their equivalent in the De rerum natura, as Lucretius, contrary to Cicero, never employs the words atomi or individua to designate the atoms, preferring the term semina, “seeds” or “semen.” The dissemination of such seeds can indeed bring about the end of the world. However, in the event of such a calamity, they will not lose their germinal powers. For if a cosmic tempest is bound one day to bring about the end of our universe, a similar tempest also brought about its emergence: There was a new tempest (noua tempestas), an incredible mass of all sorts of atoms (principiis), jumbling together in utter discord their distances, passages, connections, weights and shocks, movements and meetings in a warlike fray. Because of the variety of their forms and figures, they could not all remain united in this chaos, nor pass on to one another harmonious movements, but instead some parts began to break away, like matter to join with like matter, so as to define a world (discludere mundum). (V.436-44)

The process of division is therefore at one and the same time an operator of death and an operator of creation: discludere mundum. From an Epicurean point of view, the state of political, meteorological and psychological chaos that Shakespeare explores in King Lear carries within itself the seeds of a new configuration of things. Yet, nothing at the end of the play leads us to believe that those seeds will one day bear fruit.

Bibliography Fraisse, S. 1962. Une conquête du rationalisme. L’influence de Lucrèce en France au XVIe siècle. Paris: Nizet. Green, A. 1992. La Déliaison. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Hadzsits, G. D. 1935. Lucretius and his Influence. New York. Horace. 1968. Épîtres. Ed. Jean Preaux, Paris: PUF. Jeanneret, M. 1997. Perpetuum mobile. Métamorphoses des corps et des œuvres de Vinci à Montaigne. Paris: Macula, Argô. Jonson, Ben. 1925-1952. Every Man Out Of His Humour, in Works. Vol. 4, ed. C. H. Herford, Oxford: P. & E. Simpson. Kany-Turpin, J. 1991. “Une réinvention de Lucrèce par Guillaume du Bartas,” in La littérature et ses avatars. Discrédits, déformations et réhabilitations dans l’histoire de la littérature. Paris: Klincksieck, 3139. Lacan, J. 1986. Le Séminaire, livre VII : L’éthique de la psychanalyse. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, coll. Champ freudien. Lucretius. 1997. De rerum natura. Ed. J. Kany-Turpin, Paris: Flammarion.

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Montaigne, Michel de. 1962. Œuvres complètes. Eds. A. Thibaudet and M. Rat, Paris: Gallimard, coll. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Serres, Michel. 1977. La naissance de la physique dans le texte de Lucrèce. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Shakespeare, William. 1972. King Lear. Ed. Kenneth Muir, London: Methuen. . 1997/2005. King Lear. Ed. R. A. Foakes, London: The Arden Shakespeare.

IV. EXILE, SEXUALITY

“STRANGERED WITH OUR OATH” (1.1.205): KING LEAR AND THE DYNAMICS OF BANISHMENT1 PASCALE DROUET

This paper focuses on the connection between banishment and abuse of power, and on the process of de-territorialization as part of a lex talionis dynamics in King Lear. It shows that wandering and adversity are experienced on a no man’s land where what still remains perceptible are the vertical metaphors of social downfall and human degradation, together with the “elsewhere” created by imagination or fantasy. It is further concerned with the reversals of fortune and their cyclical patterns, and with the fact that the dynamics of reversal and return is driven to the margins to better highlight two main effects of banishment, namely madness and death.

What does one really mean when one says “I banish you”? Banishment immediately brings to mind exclusion, exile or expatriation, putting a ban or proclaiming an outlaw; it is variously defined as “a formal and authoritative prohibition” and “the action of authoritatively expelling from the country.”2 First, it seems obvious that it is a form of indictment. For Michel Foucault, banishing—which also implies the destruction of home and family, the obliteration of birthplace, and the confiscation of lands and properties—is one of the four major forms of punitive tactics (Foucault 1994, 456).3 Second, it is a declaration endowed with performative power and, as such, it must be obeyed—failure to do so by the one proclaimed persona non grata results in the death penalty. Third, it is supposedly a lawful decision which should only be taken by those with legitimate authority.

1 This paper is drawn from “‘Strangered with our oath’ (I.1.205): la dynamique de la mise au ban dans King Lear” (Drouet 2009, 229-45). 2 The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, “ban,” IV. 7., 1:162; “banishment,” 1., 1:163. 3 The other forms of punitive tactic are branding, compensating and confining.

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Shakespeare’s plays, whether comedies or tragedies, history plays or romances, have no shortage of banished characters. Let us mention, for instance, Bolingbroke and Mowbray in King Richard II, Falstaff in King Henry IV, Part 2, the Duke Senior of As You Like It, Prospero in The Tempest, Romeo in Romeo and Juliet, the outlaws of Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Coriolanus in the eponymous tragedy. King Lear is no exception, but it somehow stands apart since it presents a cluster of major characters who are banished, whether these be disowned and then expelled from the kingdom (Cordelia, Kent and Edgar) or banned from entering their kin’s houses or their own places, thereby undergoing some sort of domestic expropriation (Lear and Gloucester). Departing from his main source, Shakespeare exclusively locates his tragedy in Britain. In King Lear, there are no traces left of “Gallia”/France as land of exile, then of asylum, where Leir joins Cordella in The True Chronicle Historie of King Leir and his Three Daughters (1605). Paradoxically, and with the exception of Cordelia, exclusion is experienced inside the realm; as if by a sinister sleight of hand, the inside was transformed into the outside. The characters who have been banished thus fall into the category that Michael Böss calls “inner exile” and defines as “resident individuals/groups suffering political, social and cultural repression, marginalisation or exclusion but [who] have not been able or willing to leave their community/country” (Böss 2005, 20). This paper starts with an analysis of the connection between banishment and abuse of power, focusing on the absence of legal procedure, the symptomatic quality of both physical and metaphorical violence, the recurrence of the word “wrath,” which signals a shift from law to private revenge, and the process of de-territorialization—to take up the term coined by Gilles Deleuze—as part of a lex talionis, or backfiring movement. It then shows that wandering and adversity, which result from banishment, are experienced on an unmapped territory, a no man’s land where spatiotemporal landmarks, skylines and linear trajectories are negated, where one can only perceive the vertical metaphor of social downfall and the degradation of human beings into animals, together with the “elsewhere” created by imagination, fantasy or madness. It is further concerned with the reversals of fortune and their cyclical patterns, so that one may wonder whether one of the play’s specificities does not consist in driving the dynamics of reversal and return to the margins in order to highlight two main effects of banishment, namely madness and death.

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“This hideous rashness” (1.1.152): Banishment and Abuse of Power When Cordelia is hastily disowned by her own father, Kent assumes the voice of justice and firmly addresses the king with the advice: “Reserve thy state, / And in thy best consideration check / This hideous rashness” (1.1.150-152).4 Lear’s reaction is deemed “rash”—“characterized by or proceeding from undue haste and want of consideration”5 which implicitly points to the absence of legal procedure and abuse of power. It suggests that Cordelia’s banishment proceeds from private initiative and short cut resulting from a whim. All the more so since banishment was not part of the English common law, as opposed to abjuration and outlawry. Those who were proclaimed outlaws in absentia were the criminals who did not attend their trials and evaded capture; they were consequently outlawed, which meant deprived of their goods and lands, of any legal right, and were consequently considered as civiliter mortui (deprived of civil right). As regards the practice of abjuration, it referred to the criminals who were punished with exile and had to take a public oath that they would leave their country forever, thus forfeiting both family and properties (Kingsley-Smith 2003, 8-15). The way Cordelia and Kent are banished partially resembles abjuration, while Edgar’s case is redolent of outlawry. Nevertheless, the criminal natures of the respective acts for which they are indicted, as well as the legitimacy of such punishments, remain questionable. Cordelia and Kent trigger Lear’s wrathful reaction because they opt out of the game of ingratiation: they refuse to flatter him and they speak their minds instead for the sake of “truth” (1.1.109) and “plainness” (1.1.149). Lear interprets those plain speeches as a denial of allegiance to him, as a form of resistance, as an uncalled-for counter-discourse and as a sin of pride—since the king refers to “pride” to condemn both Cordelia (1.1.130) and Kent (1.1.170). As he accuses them of hubris, Lear anticipates and already justifies their nemesis: banishing them falls within a pattern of retribution. Such retribution is to be understood literally as “punishment or nemesis,” but also ironically as “repayment, recompense, return for some service, merit.”6 Lear respectively admonishes “Thy truth then be thy dower” (1.1.109) and “Take thy reward” (1.1.173) to Cordelia and Kent. 4

All Lear quotations are from R. A. Foakes’s edition of King Lear. See Bibliography. 5 The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, “rash,” A. 3., 2: 2418. 6 Ibid., “retribution,” 2., 1., 2: 2524.

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He does not resort to the law but calls the gods as witnesses—the authorities he chooses to defer to are from above and have the advantage of being mute, and he cloaks his abuse of power in a cosmic invocation: For by the sacred radiance of the sun, The mysteries of Hecate and the night, By all the operation of the orbs From whom we do exist and cease to be, Here I disclaim all my paternal care Propinquity and property of blood, And as a stranger to my heart and me Hold thee from this for ever. (1.1.110-17)

France’s ironical reference to what is legal and what is not when he asks Cordelia to become his wife and queen—“Be it lawful I take up what’s cast away” (1.1.255)—underlines the incongruity and illegitimacy of Cordelia’s ordeal, and suggests that Lear’s sense of law and justice is upside down. As for the subplot, it may seem easier to understand Gloucester’s legitimate reasons to disown and banish his son: Edgar is accused of conspiring homicide and, worse, parricide (2.1.46). Yet, like Lear, Gloucester is about to abuse his own power by making his legitimate son an outlaw without prior trial: “Let him fly far: / Not in this land shall he remain uncaught, / And found—dispatch!” (2.1.56-58). To legitimize this manhunt, Gloucester uses Cornwall’s name—“By his authority I will proclaim it, / That he which finds him shall deserve our thanks” (2.1.6061), “All ports I’ll bar, the villain shall not scape; / The Duke must grant me that” (2.1.80-81). But Cornwall is precisely the one who takes liberties with the law. In the present case, he allows Gloucester to give a free rein to his own private sense of justice when he tells him: “make your own purpose / How in my strength you please” (2.1.112-13). The verbal violence and hyperbole are obvious signs of such abuses of political or patriarchal power. Let us take, for example, Lear’s insults to Kent, which are shocking to both Albany and Cornwall: “O vassal! Miscreant!” (1.1.162), “Hear me, recreant” (1.1.168), or the unnatural image of barbarism and cannibalism that Lear uses to drive home the inexorable quality of his repudiation: The barbarous Scythian, Or he that makes his generation messes To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom Be as well neighboured, pitied and relieved, As thou my sometime daughter.

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184 (1.1.117-21)

The way Lear ultimately portrays his own daughter reveals hatred and disavowal—“those infirmities she owes, / Unfriended, new adopted to our hate, / Dowered with our curses and strangered with our oath” (1.1.20305). This bellicosity recalls Gille Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s analysis: “[F]eelings become uprooted from the interiority of a ‘subject,’ to be projected violently outward into a milieu of pure exteriority that lends them an incredible velocity, a catapulting force: love or hate, they are no longer feelings but affects” (Deleuze and Guattari 2008, 392-93). Such an excessive vexation, which leads to the expelling of the persona non grata away from a known and mapped territory, becomes palpable with the recurrence of the word “wrath.”7 When Kent tries to intervene between Lear and Cordelia, he is ordered: “Come not between the dragon and his wrath!” (1.1.123). As Kent disregards the order, he is banished with Lear’s justification: “[…] thou hast sought […] / […] / To come betwixt our sentences and our power” (1.1.169-71). These lines can be viewed as a chiasmus, with “power” echoing “dragon,” and “sentence” substituting itself for “wrath,” with a significant shift from the latter to the former. If construed as “judgement or decision of a court in any civil or criminal case,”8 this “sentence” turns “wrath” into something legal and hence indisputable. In “Impossible Worlds: What Happens in King Lear, Act 1, Scene 1,” William Dodd observes that “wrath” can be tyrannically connoted: We may guess that the dragon here is the emblem of the British kings. As such it is a figure for the righteous anger of offended monarchs, usually represented by the roaring of lions. But the wrath of rulers, for Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences, was not only the “natural,” and therefore justified, roaring of the king of beasts. As the blustering Herod of the mystery plays testifies, it could easily turn into the rage of tyrants. And when restyled as the wrath of dragons, it would for many evoke the Apocalypse, the wrathful dragon being one of the devil’s incarnations at doomsday. At this crucial moment Lear’s behaviour is thus connoted as diabolically tyrannical. (Dodd 1999, 503)

His interpretation is confirmed by Kent when he tells Lear: “[…] whilst I can vent clamour from my throat / I’ll tell thee thou dost evil” (I.1.1667

Ibid., “Wrath”: 1. “Vehement or violent anger; intense exasperation or resentment; deep indignation”, 4. “Anger displayed in action; the manifestation of anger and fury, esp. by way of retributory punishment; vengeance”, 2: 3833. 8 Ibid., “sentence”, 3. b., 2: 2729.

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67). Significantly, when Gloucester finally gains insight and realizes that he made a mistake, he too uses the term “wrath”: “O dear son Edgar, / The food of thy abused father’s wrath” (4.1.23-24). But it is when Cornwall resorts to it that “wrath” becomes most acutely associated with abuse of power. Before gouging out Gloucester’s eyes, he says: Though well we may not pass upon his life Without the form of justice, yet our power Shall do a courtesy to our wrath, which men May blame but not control. (3.7.24-27)

Banishment is the result of a private disavowal of the law and follows a raging return-to-sender pattern; it is part of a dynamics inspired from the lex talionis in which “the sentence takes the form of a counter-attack” (Foucault 1994, 462).9 Any form of resistance calling into question (whether implicitly or explicitly) the legitimacy of authority is permanently excluded. Territorial expulsion is the concrete, brutal answer to moral or ideological rejection. With an ironical twist, those who banish or outlaw people in the first act of King Lear—namely Lear and Gloucester—are in turn rejected in the second and third acts. Lear disowns Cordelia and dispossesses her—“Thy thruth then be thy dower” (1.1.109), but he is then deprived of the only symbolical power he was left with: “[his] reservation of an hundred knights” (1.1.134). Goneril wants to be rid of her father’s followers precisely because they have encroached upon her territory, that is, they have territorialized her house and (according to her) debased it. She reproaches Lear: Here you do keep a hundred knights and squires, Men so disordered, so debauched and bold, That this our court, infected with their manners, Shows like a riotous inn. Epicurism and lust Makes it more like a tavern or a brothel Than a graced palace. (1.4.232-37)

So, with Regan’s assistance, Goneril answers the territorialization of her house with a radical form of de-territorialization: Lear’s train, which worked as a symbolic micro-court and ultimate bastion of his reign, is dismissed. To cut Lear off from his train of a hundred knights is the best way to deprive him of any kind of symbolic power, and thus prompt him 9

My translation.

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to leave and thus to put himself to the ban. As for Gloucester, after outlawing his legitimate son, he loses the control of his own house and is forbidden to offer Lear hospitality—the repeated order is: “Shut up your doors” (2.2.494, 498). The host has been turned into a hostage, the process of de-territorialization is at work and Gloucester has a foreboding of its unnatural outcome: […] I like not this unnatural dealing. When I desired their leave that I might pity him, they took from me the use of mine own house; charged me on pain of perpetual displeasure neither to speak of him, entreat for him, or any way sustain him. (3.3.1-6)

In veiled terms, the expression “perpetual displeasure” announces the abuse of power that Gloucester will be subjected to, that is, his enucleation and expropriation. As he is about to be subjected to Regan’s and Cornwall’s torture, Gloucester says to himself: “I am tied to the stake and I must stand the course” (3.7.53). The metaphor he uses echoes the cruel lot that should have awaited his son after Gloucester outlawed him— “Bringing the murderous coward to the stake” (2.1.62)—and highlights the backfiring process at work. Blind Gloucester is thrown out of his own house before he, in turn, becomes the victim of a manhunt. The incentive that Regan offers to have Gloucester murdered—which she makes clear to Oswald: “If you do chance to hear of that blind traitor, / Preferment falls on him that cuts him off” (5.5.39-40)—ironically echoes what Gloucester himself intended for Edgar: “By his [Cornwall’s] authority I will proclaim it, / That he which finds him shall deserve our thanks, / […] / He that conceals him, death!” (2.1.60-63). Banishment—whether that of Kent or Edgar, Lear or Gloucester— generates a new spatiotemporal dynamics that takes the form of a geographic, social and mental wandering throughout a place that increasingly becomes a sort of “nowhere.”

“Necessity’s sharp pinch!” (2.2.400). From Horizontality to Verticality As he is about to divide his kingdom into three parts, Lear presents it as an ideal, Edenic place redolent of a horn of plenty abounding in “shadowy forests,” “champaigns riched,” “plenteous rivers” and “wideskirted meads” (1.1.64-65). Jane Kingsley-Smith observes: “Presiding over the map of Albion, he [Lear] is reminiscent of the Genesis God presiding over his Creation and wielding division as a creative power. Just as in the beginning all was good, so in Lear’s fantasy Albion is uniformly

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fair” (Kingsley-Smith 2003, 123). His fantasized picture is to serve as a foil to the parts of the kingdom closer to realistic representations, such as the heath, a sort of no-man’s land, stretching from Gloucester’s house to the Dover cliffs, where the cold, starving homeless, the “Bedlam beggars” (2.2.185) by whom Edgar/Poor Tom is inspired, and the “[p]oor naked wretches” with “houseless heads and unfed sides” (3.4.28, 30) evoked by Lear, go roaming.10 The banished characters are ousted into a territory out of sight—as when Lear repeats: “Hence and avoid my sight” (1.1.125) and “Out of my sight” (1.1.158); they are discarded to an unmapped elsewhere, to what Yves Bonnefoy calls “ces contrées d’en dehors les cartes” (Bonnefoy 2003, 14). The carefully defined boundaries Lear had initially envisaged and the doors that are violently barred—a trope of territorial banishment—contrast with the land of exile which stands as an open place, vague and frontierless, represented by the heath, a sort of wasteland devoid of microcosmic and macrocosmic landmarks. The heath stands for “the undifferentiating chaos in which the king, the lugged bear, the wolf and the beggar all whirl about” (Kingsley-Smith 2003, 126). And when Kent/Caius speaks about “[his] obscured course” (2.2.166), he not only refers to his disguised identity but also to the unclear trajectory he has been following through the heath. To put it differently, the land of exile as depicted in King Lear has no skyline; the horizontality which stretches out is endless and void of metaphorical sense. As Deleuze and Guattari note (about the game of Go): “the movement is not from one point to another, but becomes perpetual, without aim or destination, without departure or arrival” (Deleuze and Guattari 2008, 389). The heath is a place of mobility and indeterminacy, of the pitiless to-and-fro movement from territorialization to de-territorialization and vice versa; there, the arbitrary and transitory quality of man’s relation to his surroundings, as well as to space and time, cannot be ignored. It is a place where time seems out of joint: the uncertainty of the present is the only notion of time left. The past has been erased and there is no future looming ahead. Lear fails in his attempt to recapture his control over the kingdom and over time. The absence of skyline, the broken linearity and the loss of spatiotemporal landmarks, which—literally and metaphorically—darken the banished people’s no man’s land, are also related to a vertical axis: the dynamics of banishment goes hand in hand with the dynamics of the fall, which sends one down to the very bottom of the social ladder where the dregs of 10

On this topic, see Pascale Drouet, “‘I speak this in hunger for bread’: Representing and Staging Hunger in Shakespeare’s King Lear and Coriolanus” (Angel-Perez 2008, 2-16).

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society lie. The positively connoted notion of the infinite has been replaced by what is negatively experienced as interminable. The downfall due to banishment is immediately perceptible as an announcement or confirmation. Edmund’s injunction to his brother, “Brother, a word; descend, brother, I say” (2.1.20), which reads like a stage direction, is tinged with irony and anticipates Edgar’s downward trajectory, both socially and humanly. The “sometimes” son of the earl of Gloucester is now deprived of social existence and acknowledgement— “Edgar I nothing am” (2.2.192)—and the only solution he finds to escape the hunt is to debase himself and take “the basest and most poorest shape / […] Brought near to beast” (2.2.178-80). As to the earl of Kent, he is put in the stocks, undergoing “[a] low correction / [such] as basest and contemnedst wretches / For pilferings and most common trespasses / Are punished with” (2.2.139-42). Such a shameful dynamics of debasement is later stressed by Edgar when he reveals Caius’s true identity to Albany: “Kent, sir, the banished Kent, who in disguise / Followed his enemy king and did him service / Improper for a slave” (5.3.218-20). As regards Lear himself, he faces powerlessness and experiences radical debasement when he is confronted to the raging elements and tells them: “Here I stand your slave” (3.2.19). Cordelia’s reference to straw—“[…] and wast thou fain, poor father, / To hovel thee with swine and rogues forlorn / In short and musty straw?” (4.7.38-40). This underlines the shocking degradation associated with the fall of the king. Gloucester’s physical fall, even though he does not fall from the top of the cliff but only from his own height, is metaphorical of the debasing treatment he has suffered from Cornwall and Regan. Edgar’s words to him resonate throughout the play and come to emblematize the lots of Lear, Kent and himself: Ten masts at each make not the altitude Which thou hast perpendicularly fell. Thy life’s a miracle. (4.6.53-55)

Life, that is the ability to straighten up and stand up, is generally seen as a form of upward verticality. The miracle in King Lear lies in the fact that life persists although characters keep falling down. The exclusion from society becomes synonymous with a humanity that disintegrates and moves closer to the worst, as made manifest in pathetic cues like “World, world, O world” (5.1.11), “O thou side-piercing sight!” (4.6.85), “Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones!” (5.3.255). The fall seems interminable, as if feeding upon itself, in counterpoint with the absence of another form of upward verticality, that of transcendence. It generates

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radical collapses (madness and death wish) that project some of the characters into an impalpable elsewhere (imaginary or unknown) from which there is no return.

“Is this the promised end?” (5.3.261): Reverse, Return, Irreversibility At first sight, banishment is not necessarily negative. The unknown land of exile is usually pictured, from an external point of view, as a dangerous place where one should protect oneself against “[the] disasters of the world” (1.1.175), “foreign casualties” (4.3.45)—“a wild exposure to each chance / That starts i’th’way [before thee]” as Coriolanus’s mother would have put it11 but, conversely, it can fall in the stoic tradition of consolation ad exulem and be seen positively, as a salutary development, which is the view of banished Kent: “Freedom lives hence and banishment is here” (1.1.182). For Kingsley-Smith, it is “a clear echo of the usual pastoral movement from alienation to companionship, oppression to liberty” (Kingley-Smith 2003, 109-10). Such a positive projection could have been confirmed by Cordelia, who is supposed to find love as both wife and queen in the French kingdom. Unfortunately for her, this exilic dimension was disposed of by Shakespeare. And when Cordelia tells her father: “For thee, oppressed King, I am cast down; / Myself could else outfrown false fortune’s frown” (5.3.5-6), her “else” could refer to the elsewhere of exile and to what would have become of her had she not come back to side with Lear—she would have had the fighting spirit expected when one means to live (or survive) in a foreign country. As for the pastoral, it is (mis)located on an inhospitable heath of raging elements; it radically reverts into a dark (or anti-)pastoral. The green world is no more than a utopian projection. The reversal of fortune proves irreversible. There is, however, some sort of pattern of return, of going back to the beginning at the end of King Lear. There is no return in terms of reversed geographical trajectory since, in the play, exile is not experienced outside but inside the kingdom, yet identity, social status, civil rights and political power are ultimately restored. Albany is the agent and voice of such a restoration: For us, we will resign During the life of this old majesty 11 The quotation is from Parker’s edition of Coriolanus, 4.1.37-38. See bibliography.

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The Dynamics of Banishment in King Lear To him our absolute power; [to Edgar and Kent] you to your rights, With boot and such addition as your honours Have more than merited. (5.3.297-301)

The way Albany addresses the assembly—“You lords and noble friends, know our intent” (5.3.295)—echoes Lear’s initial words when he announced his self-destitution and the transference of power—“[…] ’tis our fast intent / To shake all cares and business from our age / Conferring them on younger strengths” (1.137-39). But the circular pattern suggested by this restitution proves in fact more regressive than regenerative. The whole kingdom has been contaminated by the gloomy atmosphere of the no man’s land and then ravaged by the civil war. It is but “this great decay” (5.3.296). Kent observes, “All’s cheerless, dark and deadly” (5.3.288). The realm as it is returned to Lear has nothing in common with the land of plenty depicted earlier, as it was divided; it is now “[a] gored state” (5.3.319), a wasteland very similar to any land deprived of perspective. The Edenic projection of the cornucopia now gives way to a sinister metaphor: “the rack of this tough world” (5.3.313), and when Kent asks, “Is this the promised end?” (5.3.261), one cannot help hearing at the same time “Is this the promised land?” At the end of the tragedy, the lasting impression is not so much that of a return to order than that of a devastated land in which several radical collapses (madness and death wish) happen as the ultimate consequences of banishment. Gloucester and Cordelia both die just at the moment when banishment and repudiation are about to be repealed. Unlike Edgar, who testifies to the human capacity to endure—“O, our lives’ sweetness, / That we the pain of death would hourly die / Rather than die at once!” (5.3.18385), Gloucester falls prey to despair. Even if his suicide is a sham, his mental space is now so disconnected from hope and joy that the reunion with the son he had unjustly disowned is too intense for him. Edgar reports: I asked his blessing and from first to last Told him our pilgrimage. But his flawed heart, Alack, too weak the conflict to support, ’Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief, Burst smilingly. (5.3.194-98)

Edgar tells his story to his father, that is, he fills in the narrative ellipsis of his experience as an outlaw, but as he is doing his best to be exhaustive, he

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exhausts both his narration and his father. As for Cordelia, it is her wish to restore the king’s royal prestige and the hopeful perspective of reconciliation with her beloved father that led her on the road to death. She had formerly been “cast away” (1.1.255), but she is now—literally—“cast down” (5.3.5). Lear is unable to survive Cordelia’s murder and expresses his unbearable pain, his ultimate collapse, in terms of a cosmic crack: Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones! Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so That heaven’s vault should crack: she’s gone for ever. (5.3.255-57)

Exhausted by the revelation he made of his true identity and the story of his wandering and devotion to the king, Kent could have died Gloucester’s death—“His grief grew puissant and the strings of life / Began to crack” (5.3.215-16), but what finishes him off is his master’s death—“I have a journey, sir, shortly to go; / My master calls me, I must not say no” (5.3.320-21). This series of deaths (Cordelia’s murder which causes Lear’s heart-attack which leads to Kent’s intent to commit suicide) may suggest that the roots which the characters depend upon and which make their lives meaningful are human rather than spatiotemporal. The characters are strongly attached not so much to their mother country as to a specific human being who is dear enough to make them obliterate spatiotemporal landmarks and forget about the geographical dialectics of margin and centre—this is put into relief in the Quarto version, which reads “Friendship lives hence and banishment is here” instead of “Freedom lives hence and banishment is here” (1.1.182). Kent and Lear illustrate this case, the former when he decides that he will disguise himself and follow his master, the latter when he pictures the prison cell as a cocoon, simply because Cordelia is there with him. Lear gives grim captivity the soft colour of recaptured intimacy and relegates the so far crucial question of “Who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out” (5.3.15) to the background, as if it were some sort of show barely worth noticing.

Conclusion In the end, banishment generates two types of dialectics: first the inside/outside dialectics, but also, more significantly, one that has to do with the endurance/exhaustion polarity. What makes all the difference is not the decision to cross the frontier, but the ability to push one’s limits further and further. Throughout the play, Edgar puts into practice the stoic remarks he makes to his father: “Men must endure / Their going hence

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even as their coming hither. / Ripeness is all” (5.2.9-11), but the last words of King Lear (whether these be his or Albany’s) are far less optimistic about the human capacity to endure: “[…] we that are young / Shall never see so much, nor live so long” (5.3.324-25). Even if banishment leads to the second type of dialectics, it remains central in King Lear as the tragedy of power and of a man who, paradoxically, is “put to the ban” because of his position of power and authority, and who is thereby unable to have a genuine relationship with others because of his sensitiveness to flattery and honours. He lives in the mirror of his self-centeredness, as in Yves Bonnefoy’s portrait of Lear: Lear admires himself, prefers himself; he is interested in others only to the extent that they are interested in him, and so he is blind to their own true being; he does not truly love others, in spite of what he may think. (Bonnefoy 2004, 23-24)

Like Lear, the man of power paves the way for his own banishment because of the mood swings and bursts of anger he thinks he is entitled to, and the abuses of power he can commit with impunity. As Daniel Sibony observes, This man resents the “power” which cuts him off from his pleasure. He then transfers this power to others, to be avenged… from himself, from that power, from that sovereignty, which here stands for any emblem of symbolic success. He is a name. You can be buried beneath your name, beneath your “success.” (Sibony 2003, 161-62)12

While hoping to free himself of the heaviness of power and “Unburdened crawl toward death” (1.1.40), Lear unknowingly creates a dynamics of exhaustion and is eventually weighed down by the test of endurance he cannot bear.

Bibliography Angel-Perez, Élisabeth, and Alexandra Poulain, eds. 2008. Hunger on the Stage. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Bonnefoy, Yves. 2003. “Roland, mais aussi bien Angélique,” Préface à L’Arioste, Roland furieux I, Traduction de Francisque Reynard, Paris: Gallimard.

12

My translation. Italics and inverted commas are Sibony’s.

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—. 2004. Shakespeare and the French Poet. Edited and with an Introduction by John Naughton, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Böss, Michael. 2005. “Theorising Exile,” in The Dolphin 34, Re-Mapping Exile. Realities and Metaphors in Irish Literature and History, 15-46. Ed. Michael Böss, Irene Gilsenan Nordin, Britta Olinder, Denmark: Aarhus University Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 2008. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi, London/New York: Continuum, 2008. Dodd, William. Winter 1999. “Impossible Worlds: What happens in King Lear, Act I, Scene 1”, Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 50, Number 4: 477-507. Drouet, Pascale and Pierre Iselin, eds. 2009. “The true blank of thine eye”: Approches critiques de King Lear. Paris: PUPS. Foucault, Michel. 1994. Dits et écrits, 1954-1988. Vol. II, 1970-1975. Paris: Gallimard. Jackson, Ken. Spring 2000. “‘I know not / Where I did lodge last night?’: King Lear and the Search for Bethlem (Bedlam) Hospital,” English Literary Renaissance, Volume 30, Number 2 “Re-contextualizing Shakespeare”: 213-40. Kingsley-Smith, Jane. 2003. Shakespeare’s Drama of Exile. Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan. OED. 1979. The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, 2 vols. London: Book Club Associates/Oxford University Press. Ryan, Kiernan. 2006. “King Lear”, in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, Volume I, The Tragedies, 375-92. Ed. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. Shakespeare, William. 1994. Coriolanus. Ed. Brian Parker, Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, The World’s Classics. —. 2007. King Lear. Ed. R. A. Foakes, London: Thomson Learning, The Arden Shakespeare (Third Series). Sibony, Daniel. 2003. Avec Shakespeare. Éclats et passions en douze pièces. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Tennenhouse, Leonard. 1993. “The Theatre of Punishment,” in King Lear, 60-72. Ed. Kiernan Ryan, Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave.

“THE LUSTY STEALTH OF NATURE” DESIRE AND BASTARDY IN KING LEAR YAN BRAILOWSKY

Rather than broach the issue of legitimacy, political or otherwise, this paper discusses what bastardy meant in the early modern period. It reflects on Edmund’s claim that desire and bastardy are “naturally” linked. Bastardy is not only the product of desire, or even desire itself. In King Lear, it is the source of singular eloquence—a bastard language. The relationship between desire and bastardy exceeds the confines of what occurs to the sole known bastard character in the play. Rather than portraying an emblematic bastard figure, King Lear reveals the widespread morbid appeal of self-destructive “bastard desires” and identities in early seventeenth-century England.

John F. Danby (1949) argued, in his study on Shakespeare and the Doctrine of Nature, that King Lear explored two contrasting views of Nature. One was shared by many of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, notably Francis Bacon or Richard Hooker, and thought Nature was linked with reason, custom and religion; the other would become more popular a few decades later with Thomas Hobbes, for whom Nature is an independent and brutal force. This division mirrors the split between Lear and Gloucester’s children: whilst Cordelia and Edgar show their fathers respect and embody benign nature, malignant nature is exemplified by Edmund, Goneril and Regan whose filial piety proves deceptive. Both fathers’ obsession with their children’s real or alleged bastardy—be it in the legal or in the moral sense—seem to justify these initial distinctions. Speaking about bastards, Edmund claims: [We] in the lusty stealth of nature take More composition and fierce quality Than doth within a dull stale tired bed Go to the creating of a whole tribe of fops Got ’tween a sleep and a wake.

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(1.2.11–15)1

As shown by Alison Findlay in her book on Bastards in Renaissance Drama (1994), Edmund’s speech rested on a commonplace: bastards are the children of love and not the fruit of the performance of matrimonial duty: Bastards’ natural gifts are explained with reference to their conception. Jerome Cardan (1580) puts forward the view that children born out of wedlock are more robust because, when they are conceived, “the seeds [of the parents] are mingled on account of very vigorous love.” Thomas Milles (1613) agrees and adds a less clinical explanation, saying that bastards “are begot [...] with more agreeable conformity of willes, and far sweeter Union of the spirits” than legitimate children. (Findlay 1994, 130)

The list of like-minded contemporary authors goes on. But to what extent do desire—“the lusty stealth of nature”—and bastardy feed, or even prey, upon each other? While desire denotes longing for fulfillment, bastardy suggests a feeling of loss produced by half-hearted recognition: a parent may own his/her bastard child, the child remains “illegitimate.” The interplay between hope and loss is all the more significant as Lear builds upon a series of losses, be they material or symbolic, starting with the conspicuous absence of maternal figures from the stage.2 In the anonymous Chronicle Historie of King Leir, published in 1605, less than a year before Shakespeare’s Lear was first performed, the play opens with a scene in which the ailing monarch mourns his queen.3 Leir makes his entrance and speaks to his nobles, requesting their “grave advice” (l. 5). His Queen has just died, he has one foot in the grave, and because he fears that fathers do not know how to take care of daughters, he believes it wise to quickly fit them with good husbands. Shakespeare does not make Lear’s motives so explicit, nor does he make his daughters’ motherlessness a prime motive for his decision to divide his kingdom.

1

I quote from the latest Arden edition, edited by R. A. Foakes (1997), which offers a conflated version of Q and F. All quotes from Shakespeare in this paper are from King Lear, unless noted otherwise. For other plays, I will quote from the latest Arden edition. Some portions of this paper have previously appeared in my book on King Lear (Brailowsky 2008). 2 For Coppélia Kahn (1986, 36), “the absence of the mother points to her hidden presence.” 3 See Bullough (1973, 337–402). I will quote Leir from this edition, indicating lineation in parentheses.

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Contrariwise, Shakespeare’s play opens with a short scene in which Gloucester and Kent briefly mention Lear’s decision to divide his kingdom, before cutting short any serious-sounding political discussion, and lengthily indulging in salacious banter on Edmund’s bastardy. In lieu of starting off with Leir’s frank speech, Gloucester repeatedly (obsessively?) alludes to the “whoreson’s” absent mother through a number of unflattering periphrases. The scene suggests more than a mere causal relationship between Gloucester’s lechery and a rise in illegitimate births, however. Bastards “challenge the predominant patriarchal culture,” according to Findlay (1994, vi). In King Lear, Edmund eloquently subscribes to this viewpoint when he expresses his aversion for “Legitimate Edgar” (1.2.15) in his first soliloquy. In a Folio addition to his speech, Edmund further exclaims: “Fine word, ‘legitimate’!” (1.2.18). In this paper, I wish to concentrate on what bastardy “meant,” and reflect on Edmund’s claim that desire and bastardy are “naturally” linked. Bastardy is not only the product of desire, or even desire itself. In King Lear, bastardy is the source of singular eloquence, if not the source of language itself—a bastard language. As I shall try to show, the relationship between desire and bastardy exceeds the confines of what occurs to the sole known bastard character in the play. Even if Edmund does express, or is the object of, desire, he is not alone to “stand up” for lust in this play—one can “smell a fault” (1.1.15) elsewhere, notably with Gloucester, Lear and the King’s elder daughters. Likewise, Edmund is not the only bastard: all of Lear’s and Gloucester’s children are, at some point, suspected of bastardy. Rather than portraying an emblematic Bastard, King Lear reveals the widespread morbid appeal of self-destructive bastard desires and identities in early seventeenth-century England, at a time when a generation of illegitimate children born in the late sixteenth-century was reaching maturity.

Slander and stealth That bastards were the product of the “lusty stealth of nature” was well-known—or, at any rate, it was a commonly held belief, backed by contemporary statistics which signaled an increase in the rate of illegitimacy in the late years of Elizabeth’s reign. The distinction between what is known and what was believed rests on historians’ observation that “Illegitimacy is baffling [...] because it is highly complex, though apparently straightforward, and because no very convincing general account of why illegitimate births occur as they do, and why they vary as they do” (Laslett and Oosterveen 1973, 255). Therefore, what is important

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is not so much to try to determine the objective reasons behind bastardy, but rather to explore what bastardy meant, both explicitly and implicitly. First and foremost, bastardy explicitly posed the problem of the bastard child’s legal status. Thus, Edmund’s claim that bastardy and desire are naturally related, ironically points to the fact that his legal status is the product of “the plague of custom” (1.2.3), not of nature. What bastards commonly desired, i.e. what they longed for, was first and foremost official recognition—paternal love came a distant second: Edmund’s designs are unmoved by Gloucester’s assurance that his legitimate heir was “no dearer in [his] account” (1.1.19). Using both legal and political terminology, Edmund questions culturally-defined groups’ legitimacy to determine his personal affairs: Wherefore should I Stand in the plague of custom, and permit The curiosity of nations to deprive me? (1.2.2–4, my emphasis)

Edmund demonstrates an acute sense of self-awareness, evidenced by the way in which first person pronouns are emphasized at the end of his lines, suggesting the manner in which they should be read. In his view, national law ought to give way to the rule of natural law, as signified by the spondee and personal pronouns in the opening line of his apostrophe to Nature: “Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law / My services are bound” (1.2.1–2) Contrary to the legal implications of illegitimacy, moral considerations were not necessarily an explicit issue. Although there are other examples of Shakespearian evil bastard brothers, as with Don John in Much Ado (1598), bastards could also be heroes. Thus, in King John (1596), the Bastard is shown as a positive force, a true “English patriot” (Manheim 1988, 126). According to Michael Neill, in early seventeenth-century England, negative connotations of bastardy were a relatively recent “addition” to their name. What mattered was the bastard’s inability to inherit: The filius nullius [...] was not so much the son of nobody, as the heir of nobody. [...] the condition of illegitimacy began to incur a significant degree of publicly articulated moral opprobrium only towards the end of the sixteenth century, when it attracted the attention of Puritan reformers on the one hand and of Poor Law administrators, keen to protect the parish from the charge of unwanted infants, on the other. (Neill 1993, 273)

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For this reason, Kent’s comment on Edmund in the opening scene is bitingly ironic. When he calls Gloucester’s “issue [...] so proper” (1.1.16– 17), [his] banter turns on a cruel pun, since to be a “proper” person in seventeenth-century England (as James Calderwood has pointed out) is “to be propertied [...] to possess,” while Edmund’s alienation from what Lear calls “propinquity and property of blood” (1.1.115) renders him an “unpossessing bastard” (2.1.67), fundamentally improper. (Neill 1993, 283)

In King Lear, land is the basis for property, and landed property is what defines men: one has a Christian name only when one is not a landowner—all other characters are known by their toponym. In short, Kent, Gloucester, Albany, Cornwall, France or Burgundy are their land. This motif explains why Edmund’s perpetual scheming manifests itself with his desire to have Edgar’s land: “Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land” (1.2.16), “Let me, if not by birth, have lands by wit” (1.2.181). Gloucester will oblige, assuring Edmund: “of my land [...] I’ll work the means / To make thee capable” (2.1.83–5), shortly after having disowned his legitimate heir. Appropriately enough, the manner in which Edmund expresses his desire to disinherit his brother and to convince Gloucester of Edgar’s treachery is through slander, which literalizes the object of his envy, since at the heart of the word “slander,” one finds the term “land.”4 This interpretation is obviously etymologically unsound, since slander is derived from the Old French esclandre, itself an altered form of the Latin scandalum (OED, 1989), but in case of Lear, this Isidorian derivation remains symbolically meaningful. Envy was commonly found among bastards, according to Bacon: “Deformed persons, and eunuchs, and old men, and bastards, are envious” (Bacon 1625, Essay IX, “Of envy”). True to this dictum, Edmund envies his brother’s lands and title. But Bacon suggests another notable feature of bastards which we also find in Edmund’s first soliloquy: not only is he “base,” he is also a “deformed,” “unnatural” child, despite the fact that bastards are also often euphemistically referred to as “natural children.” Revealingly, the Bastard’s speech begins with an apostrophe to Nature, followed by a description of his natural, i.e. physical (as opposed to mental or moral), qualities:

4

Envy and desire are often two sides of the same coin. See, for instance, the collection of essays edited by Pascale Hassoun-Lestienne (1998).

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[...] my dimensions are as well compact, My mind as generous and my shape as true As honest madam’s issue. (1.2.7–9)

At first glance, this would seem to contradict Bacon’s contention that bastards were envious and “deformed persons.” But if Edmund claims he is not deformed, it is because his deformity is not of the physical kind, but lies solely in his mind—unlike Richard III, for instance, who was obsessed with bastardy of both kinds (Hunt 1997).

Equivocal Nature By combining an outwardly comely body with an inwardly twisted mind, Edmund stresses the arguably equivocal “nature” of bastards, as they are simultaneously both natural and unnatural. Cotgrave mentions a French proverb: “A bastard may be good, but nature makes him bad” (Cotgrave, 1611).5 For Neill, [There are] linguistic contradictions that expose cultural double-think, the bastard could be at once “spurious” (“unnatural”) and yet a “natural child”—just as the term “natural child” itself in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century usage could be used to distinguish either legitimate or illegitimate offspring—an ambiguity nicely caught in Gloucester’s embrace of Edmund as “loyal and natural boy” (2.1.84). (Neill 1993, 285)

One can thus set not only Nature against nurture, or “custom,” one can set Nature against itself. Edmund is natural in appearance (i.e. “proper,” manly, and so on), but unnatural in his designs (i.e.“deformed,” harboring parricidal and fratricidal thoughts). Thus, in King Lear, appeals to Nature paradoxically seem to be destined to further morally unnatural causes—in this case, that a son should turn against his father and brother. After all, bastards ought to have an edge of some type to survive: an ability to eschew ethical considerations imposed by custom or “the curiosity of nations.” In a pre-Darwinian reflection, John Donne argued that “sith Lawes robb them [bastards] of Succesion and civill benefits they should have some thing else equivalent [...] so Bastards de jure should have better witts and abilities” (quoted by Findlay 1994, 130)—if only the ability to learn how to dispossess others. 5

In Cotgrave’s French: “Bon bastard c’est avanture, mais meschant c’est de nature.”

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Edmund is not alone in his morally unnatural exploitation of malignant nature. When Lear curses Goneril, he repeatedly apostrophizes Nature to turn Goneril’s progeny into an unnatural, or “disnatured torment”: Hear, Nature, hear, dear goddess, hear [...] Create her [Goneril’s] child of spleen, that it may live And be a thwart disnatured torment to her. (1.4.267–75)

The distinction between natural and unnatural children is thus constantly blurred. As early as in scene one, Lear claims Cordelia is “a wretch whom nature is ashamed / Almost t’acknowledge hers” (1.1.213– 14), and France echoes Lear’s pronouncement, establishing a link between freaks of nature, moral twistedness and the unnatural: “Sure her offence / Must be of such unnatural degree / That monsters it” (1.1.219–21). As noted by Adelman (1992, 108), when Lear believes that his natural children have grown rebellious, he accuses them of being unnatural, i.e. of bastardy—Goneril has become a “degenerate bastard” (1.4.245), and Lear exclaims to Regan: “I would divorce me from thy mother’s tomb, / Sepulchring an adulteress” (2.2.320–21). In their respective calls on Nature to wreak havoc on their kin, Lear and Edmund do not wish to return to a natural world of primitive anarchy, when there was neither rules to be enforced, nor ruler to enforce them. Instead, they both wish to regain what they believe is their property. Edmund goes one step further. Not only does he reject the ordinary rule of law, he mocks all beliefs in laws of transcendental origin. In his study of European patterns of marriage and kinship, Jack Goody noted how bastardy, far from being a natural concept, was one of the Church’s obsessions, particularly in the sixteenth century: While God is called upon to stand up for bastards [by Edmund in King Lear], their disabilities if not their creation were largely a matter of the ecclesiastical law. It was a problem that came to the fore in the sixteenth century when the Catholic reformers attempted to counter the growing threat of Protestantism. (Goody 1983, 192)

To quote but one example, Agrippa argued in his Commendation of Matrimony (1545) that “the frutes of matrimony were of god not of nature. And of this the bastarde children be called naturall: but those that come of matrimony, be onely lawfull” (quoted by Findlay 1994, 129). Edmund rejects all such beliefs. Accepting divine right, as well as any other right derived from sources external to oneself, would deny his claims. If he was (pre)destined to be and remain illegitimate and dowerless,

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simply because his “nativity was under Ursa Major” (1.2.129–30), there would be no point in rebelling: This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeits of our own behaviour, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon and the stars, as if we were villains on necessity [...] drunkards, liars and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence [...] (1.2.118–25)

The Bastard stands against “heavenly compulsion” (1.2.122) or astrological influence. His desires are of a decidedly “base” nature, literally down-to-earth, as demonstrated by his craving for land and property, but also by his unbridled lust.

Bastard language By undermining such fundamental notions as divine intervention, the influence of the stars, the difference between the natural and unnatural, the relationships between kin and kin, King Lear calls on us to rethink the very concept of bastardy. I have discussed the legal consequences of bastardy. I now wish to suggest a number of implicit meanings of the term, using contemporary sources and wordplay. As a bastard, and as shown by John Florio’s gloss for the terms spurio and adulterino in his English-Italian dictionary (Florio 1611), Edmund is a counterfeiter and an adulterator. Firstly, he pretends to feel for what he may well despise. In itself, this is unsurprising: all actors are counterfeiters, and even Edgar calls himself a counterfeit when he plays the Bedlam beggar, claiming the sight of a mad Lear is so heart-breaking it will “mar my counterfeiting” (3.6.60). Secondly, Edmund actually produces counterfeit objects by writing a letter in his brother’s “hand” (1.2.56 and 67) or “character” (62). More generally, as the fruit of adultery (and as an adulterer himself), he is continually tempted to adulterate, i.e. falsify or corrupt, the truth (Neill 1993, 281). Edmund’s ability to write and carry letters (albeit counterfeit ones), coupled with his fondness for apostrophizing the audience, can cast him in the unlikely role of the world-weary philosopher, providing the audience with instruction (as, for instance, with his tirade against superstitious beliefs in astrology quoted earlier). One of the Bastard’s first lines in the play is an ominous covert pun directed at Kent: “Sir, I shall study deserving” (1.1.30). In addition to claiming that he will endeavor to be worthy of Kent’s regard, Edmund is playing on the homonymic antonym “disserving,” expressing, in effect, his intention to be of disservice to all

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(Barish and Waingrow 1958, 350). This line therefore suggests that Edmund is carefully working on his wicked schemes, but it may also literally tell us that Edmund is actually studying (what we would now call political science, for instance, or philosophy, law, and so on), as if he were Hamlet’s evil alter ego, momentarily called back from his studies by his father. If Hamlet is a contemplative philosopher, as evidenced by his ceaseless disquisitions on the nature of man, Edmund is likewise keen on philosophizing on man, society and the universe—only Hamlet is Prince of Denmark, a hero, and Edmund a “base” bastard, or anti-hero, the one perhaps too prone to doubt, and the other too ready to spring into action.6 Edmund is a “conveyer” ready to use any means to “convey business”, as when he tells his father: “I will seek [Edgar], sir, presently, convey the business as I shall find means and acquaint you withal” (1.2.101–02). He is also a “conveyer” in that he serves as a messenger to “transport purposes,” like Oswald.7 Lastly, Edmund also ceaselessly moves from one place to another, and from one status to another. As shown by Patricia Parker’s analysis of Shakespeare’s Richard II, in which the deposed king famously exclaims to the traitors assembled around him: “Conveyers are you all!” (R2, 4.1.316–7), the notion was linked with usurpation, translation, carrying, “going between,” treachery, disloyalty, and, more importantly, with bastardy (Parker 1996, 154). The term “conveyer / conveyor” was particularly rich in meaning in Elizabethan parlance, and the OED defines it not only as “One that conveys, carries, or transmits,” but also as “A nimble or light-fingered thief,” and “One who transfers property” (OED 1989)—as with Edmund’s theft of his father’s letters and title. The bastard’s innate propensity for theft is further suggested by the fact that he is the fruit of “the lusty stealth of nature” (1.2.11), as “stealth” was a by-word for “theft,” etymologically and semantically.8 Edmund’s position as prime “conveyer” of the written word in King Lear goes hand in hand with his ability to displace the meaning of words themselves, notably through puns. Anthony Gilbert (2000) has analyzed what he calls Edmund’s “interrogative puns,” in a reading which attempts to deconstruct puns in Edmund’s first soliloquy, unearthing in the process a number of rhetorical figures such as antanaclasis and polyptoton, as in the play between “bastard,” “base,” “bastardy / base-tardy” (a reference to 6

On comparisons between Hamlet and King Lear, see Foakes (1993) and Brailowsky (2008). 7 Suspecting foul-play between her sister and Edmund, Regan argues that Oswald could just as well “transport her purposes by word” as by letter (4.5.22). 8 In his drivel as Poor Tom, Edgar suggests animal comparisons for stealth: “[...] hog in sloth, fox in stealth, wolf in greediness [...]” (3.4.91).

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tardiness and a pun on “lag of a brother,” 1.2.6), “legitimate / legiti-mate” (Edmund claims he is Edgar’s leg-, i.e. “legal,” “mate” or equal), and so on, in a potentially endless series of puns. In a world in which kings are turned out-of-doors, upstart bastards become earls, legitimate children are spurned and disinherited, letters are counterfeit and oral promises of love are broken, one no longer knows what to believe. In other words, bastardy is not only a legal and moral category, or a moral “fault” which must be “acknowledged,” as Gloucester claims to have done time and time again (1.1.15 and 19), its existence affects language itself, causing it to double meanings. It is as if words turned against themselves, saying one thing, while meaning another, issuing from an uncertain origin. The very notion of a bastard language springing from disputed linguistic quarters, one might add, was still a contemporary concern. English was still in the process of legitimization and consolidation as a courtly, “literary” language, displacing other languages in the process (notably Latin, French and Italian). It is perhaps not surprising that Lear, in addition to questioning the notion of legal legitimacy and primogeniture, should also dispute the foundations of language in scenes in which characters seem to be uttering pure nonsense (notably with Edgar/Tom or with Lear on the heath, in acts 3 and 4). In fact, one could argue that a process of bastardization of language occurs throughout the play, and not only in Edmund’s flamboyant soliloquies. This process can be observed, for instance, when Lear first seeks to elicit proofs of love. In the opening scene, Lear makes a request to his daughters that is not unlike Volumnia’s in Coriolanus, when she asked her son to woo the plebeians—hypocritically if need be, using [...] such words that are but roted in Your tongue, though but bastards, and syllables Of no allowance to your bosom’s truth. (Cor., 3.2.55–7)

Nicholas Crawford (2004, 244) calls this an instance of “bastard language [...] language whose issuance lacks the full integrity and tangibility of the speaker.” One can interpret Lear, Goneril and Regan’s speeches in the opening scene in this manner, as disembodied language which not only “expresses the mind’s growing alienation from the body” (Crawford 2004, 243), but a language which expresses a form of alienation necessary for the production of desire. In his study on Shakespeare’s Language, Frank Kermode noted how Goneril is using what rhetoricians called “the topic of inexpressibility,”

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Desire and Bastardy in King Lear standard fare in the eulogy of kings and emperors [...] Regan follows with the well-established topical formula that Ernst Curtius calls “outdoing,” or the “cedat-formula”—“let her yield”: her sister has expressed Regan’s sentiments quite well, “Only she comes too short.” (Kermode 2000, 185–6)

Hyperbolic expressions of this kind are necessary to produce desire, by designating the existence of an object of desire which cannot be expressed, let alone attained.

Bastard desires In the case of Lear, one could even argue that it must not be attained. In the scene when Lear divides his kingdom, the king’s legitimacy is not questioned, nor is he ever suspected of bastardy. Yet he expresses Edmund’s “bastard desire” to be recognized or acknowledged by his kin. What is more, Lear might even be harboring the same illegitimate, lustful thoughts for his daughters than Gloucester’s illegitimate offspring—only Edmund is conscious of his doings: “To both these sisters have I sworn my love” (5.1.56). In other words, one can take Lear’s “love test” in the first act at face value, with its incestuous connotations, and attempt to construct “a fictional pre-history of the play” (Leslie 1998, 35). One such fictional reconstruction is A Thousand Acres, a Pulitzer-prize winning novel by Jane Smiley (1991), which rewrites the Lear tale through the eyes of Ginny/Goneril. In Smiley’s story, the reader learns that the elder daughters have been sexually assaulted by Larry/Lear, their father. Viewed from this angle, the father’s request that his daughters tell him how much they love him strikes the reader as utterly inappropriate, rather than an instance of whimsical behaviour occurring “When majesty falls to folly” (1.1.150), as in Lear. The reasons for the youngest daughter’s silence and the father’s outburst of violence then becomes, in Smiley’s rewriting, not proof of the youngest daughter’s love for her father, but of her anger and disgust. Other critics have eschewed fictional reconstructions of this kind, suggesting instead that the scene portrays a different type of psychoanalytic transfer, or “conveyance,” in which Cordelia is the “daughter-mother,” rather than the “daughter-wife”: [...] we might suppose that the emotional crisis precipitating the tragic action is Lear’s frustrated incestuous desire for his daughter. [...] I want to argue that the socially-ordained, developmentally appropriate surrender of Cordelia as daughter-wife—the renunciation of her as incestuous object— awakens a deeper emotional need in Lear: the need for Cordelia as

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daughter-mother. (Kahn 1986, 39–40, my emphasis)

This reading stems from Kahn’s interpretation of Lear’s “hysterica passio” (2.2.247), and from evidence of male anxiety and subsequent attempts to impose patriarchal authority throughout the play.9 There is yet another explanation for Lear’s actions and bastard desire: they can also derive from envy, in line with Bacon’s suggestion quoted earlier that “old men, and bastards are envious.” One could argue, for instance, that Lear is envious of his daughters’ love for their husbands. In the old Leir play, the love test is the king’s “sudden stratagem” (l. 78) to trick his youngest daughter into accepting to marry the King of Brittany, despite her wish to remain celibate. The other sisters have already chosen their husbands. The love test is not meant to determine, as in Shakespeare’s Lear, to whom the king the “largest bounty may extend” (1.1.52), for Leir has already decided to divide his kingdom evenly: “No more, nor less, but even all alike [...] / Both old and young shall have alike for me” (l. 78). Leir wants his youngest daughter to marry; his design was not, as with Lear, “to set my rest / On her kind nursery” (1.1.124–5), as if he were “reserving” her, rather than one hundred knights. In Shakespeare’s play, the love test becomes a way to ascertain the king’s daughters’ exclusive love for him. Lear’s stratagem fails, and his desire to hear Cordelia’s declaration of love is thwarted by her acknowledgement of a natural bond of kinship, which teaches her to measure her love: “I love your majesty / According to my bond, no more no less” (1.1.92–93), in an equanimous expression recalling that of the King in Leir, quoted earlier (“no more, nor less”). Cordelia will give Lear “Nothing” (1.1.87 and 89) or, at best, “half [her] love” (1.1.102). In the end, Lear will have to make do with only half his daughters’ love, as illustrated by the manner in which his train is progressively cut until it is reduced to nothing—“What need you five and twenty? Ten? Or five?” says Goneril, before Regan asks: “What need one? ” (2.2.450 and 452). Regan’s one-liner is followed by Lear’s famous “O, reason not the need” speech (2.2.453ff.). This speech, which implicitly opposes need and desire, can be contrasted with an earlier speech by Goneril, in which Lear’s eldest speaks of epicurism, lust and desire—the first time Shakespeare uses the term “epicurism” (Pollock 2009, 147). Epicure distinguished natural, and non-natural desires, and Lear’s desires clearly veer towards the latter, seeking to fulfill artificial and unrealistic desires

9

On the female genitalia as a source of anxiety and desire, see Laroque et al. (2008, 101).

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(such as glory or immortality), all the while wallowing in a surfeit of natural, but unnecessary, pleasures. In the words of Goneril: Here do you keep a hundred knights and squires, Men so disordered, so debauched and bold, That this our court, infected with their manners, Shows like a riotous inn. Epicurism and lust Makes it more like a tavern or a brothel Than a graced palace. [...] (1.4.232–37)

Against these arguments, Lear opposes human desire, or desire that makes men and women human: “Allow not nature more than nature needs, / Man’s life is cheap as beast’s” (2.2.455–56). In the scenes that follow, Lear will become such a beast, roaming half-naked on the heath in the middle of a storm— turning into the detested figure of the beastly Other, uttering nonsense.

The desire of the (bastard) Other For Lacan, desire is constructed in discourse, through language—as shown, in part, by the well-wrought manner in which Lear expresses his desires in the first two acts. Lacan’s famous dictum, “Desire is the desire of the Other,”10 suggests desire does not have as object a material body, as if what Lear really desired was simply to engage in an incestuous relationship with Cordelia, his favorite daughter, or as if what Edmund really desired was to become Regan and Goneril’s lover. Rather, the object of desire is the radical Other, that which is both different and fundamentally unattainable. King Lear offers three notable illustrations of this principle, in the likes of Edmund, Gloucester and Lear, who happen to be the only characters who explicitly mention bastardy in the play. In the case of Edmund, the radical Other is Edgar, who is not only Gloucester’s legitimate but also his eldest son. In his first soliloquy, Edmund enviously rails against legitimacy and primogeniture, suggesting that it is Edgar who fulfills Edmund’s desire—by stealth. Even when Edgar plays the role of Poor Tom, he is actually stealing his brother’s idea, for it was Edmund who had said that he would play the role of Poor Tom: “My cue is villainous melancholy, with a sigh like Tom o’Bedlam” (1.2.135–36). Similarly, Edmund will not be allowed to enjoy Regan or 10

“Le désir de l’homme est le désir de l’Autre” (Lacan 1966, 628).

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Goneril’s love, or even his own newly acquired lands and title for long. His brother will again step up to strip him of everything, first by giving Albany intercepted letters which incriminated Edmund (Edmund is thus hoist by his own petard), then by challenging Edmund in a medieval trial by combat. There is much irony in the fact that Edmund should wish to imitate his brother in wanting to reach “the top,” as his brother seemed to do the reverse, reaching “the basest” position of the Bedlam beggar. In fact, just as Edmund rehearses his brother’s transformation into Edgar-Tom, EdgarTom later imitates or takes the place of his lusty brother, claiming he used to be an adulterous bawd, “One that slept in the contriving of lust and waked to do it” (3.4.87–88). More ironic still, Edmund’s motto, “the base shall top the legitimate” (1.2.20–21), sworn before the gods, is ultimately illustrated by the fact that the basest character, Tom of Bedlam, eventually becomes heir to Gloucester and even, perhaps, king of Britain, in a pattern which upholds, in the words of Margreta de Grazia (1996, 30–1), “the precise course of primogeniture and succession.” In the case of Gloucester, death is symbolized by Dover cliff which fulfills the earl’s morbid desire, due to his shame at having fathered a bastard. Gloucester’s suicide attempt comes last in a string of attempts at ridding himself of this shame, i.e. of something which he does not wish others to see (his lust, and the fruit of his lust, Edmund). He first tried to pass off his adultery as a joke with Kent. He then hoped he could discredit his elder and legitimate son, Edgar, basing himself on Edmund’s counterfeit letter, which he read with great eagerness, as shown by his insistence on sight: “Let’s see [...] Let’s see, let’s see” (1.2.35 and 43). Edgar’s purported “unnatural, detested, brutish [villainy]” (1.2.76–77) would have excused his adultery. As this proves ineffective to allay Gloucester’s shame, the earl himself seems to suggest that he should be blinded by Cornwall (Brailowsky 2008, 61–63.), perhaps hoping that by losing his sight, he would also dispel his shame. Alas, even blinding does not curtail Gloucester’s ability to see and be seen, quite the contrary: “I stumbled when I saw” (4.1.21). Worse still, his blinding adds to his shame: in addition to fathering a bastard, he wronged his legitimate son. At this point, Gloucester no longer seeks the pleasures of the petite mort his “lusty stealth of nature” desired in his youth. Rather, he seeks death itself, the ultimate tool capable of ridding him of “[his] snuff and loathed part of nature” (4.6.39). Why does Gloucester wish to hurl himself off Dover cliff ? As it happens, Dover is the most minutely described location in King Lear. In addition to providing dramatic suspense by delaying Gloucester’s suicide, Edgar’s hypotyposis serves to insist on the

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earl’s blindness, real and symbolic. But Dover cliff serves another purpose: Jonathan Goldberg (1993) calls “Dover” the locus of desire, underlining the illusion of theatrical performance and of visual representation. Like desire, Dover is the place which one hopes and thinks one can attain, but which cannot be attained, let alone represented. In the end, Gloucester’s (imaginary) fall from Dover cliff not only literalizes the idea of man’s Fall (Gloucester was tricked by “the fiend, the fiend,” 4.6.79), the experience proves as brief and anticlimactic as a petite mort. In the case of Lear, the Other is none other than Lear himself, at once father and ruler, demi-god and a “foolish, fond old man” (4.7.60). In his wish to be freely acknowledged as a loved father and as all-powerful ruler (an impossible acknowledgment, as it is a double bind), Lear reverses the process of constitution of his identity. By dividing his kingdom, he begins by severing his body politic. His daughters then proceed to further divide up what remains by reducing Lear’s retinue. Unsurprisingly, we then learn that the king’s heart, the seat of emotions and of the soul according to Hippocratic physiology, “Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws” (2.2.474)—a sign not only of physical and emotional, but also of mental fragmentation. At this point, Lear has become mad: his lecherous “bastard self” has taken over, and wanders half-naked on the heath, making repeated references to “adultery” (4.6.109-10), wishing to “let copulation thrive” (4.6.112), and obsessing about female genitalia (4.6.120–25). Yet, in an earlier statement, Lear condemns adultery: “O, they cannot touch me for coining. I am the King himself” (4.6.83–84). As recalled by Neill (1993, 281), “the Latin adulter came to mean not just an adulterer (or, in Vulgate Latin, the offspring of adultery: a bastard), but (usually in the form adulter solidorum) “a counterfeiter or adulteror of coin;” while adultero similarly acquired the sense “to falsify, adulterate, or counterfeit.” The alternation between verse and prose in this scene further suggests the king’s alternating rejection of, and owning up to, bastard desires. The ensuing confusion echoes Oswald’s baffled words about Albany: “What he should dislike [most desire (Q)] seems pleasant to him, / What like, offensive” (4.2.10–1).

Bastard texts As suggested by these last quotes, King Lear itself is a bastard text. Sometimes called a “History” (Q1), sometimes a “Tragedy” (F), blending verse and prose, with “matter and impertinency mixed” (4.6.170), important textual differences between Q and F point to rewritings or

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revisions critics have sometimes attributed to Shakespeare (Taylor and Warren, 1983). Others, such as Foakes (1997) in the Arden edition, prefer conflated, i.e. bastardized, versions of King Lear, skirting the issue of the text’s “legitimacy.” Even Findlay (1994) takes but a cursory glance at this issue, and at Shakespeare’s bastard characters in general. In the words of Sonia Nolten: Most incomprehensible of all is Shakespeare’s exclusion from a discussion of “bastard texts,” which never mentions the fact that he, unlike Thomas Heywood, saw fit to allow all but his poems to “passe as filius populi... bastard [and] without a father to acknowledge [them]”. (Nolten 1995, §4)

Generic indeterminacy, conflicting editions, bastard texts... all play an important part in the manner in which Lear is to be interpreted. What matters is not only what the characters desire, and how they desire it, but also what the audience is after—hope and redemption? Cruelty and despair? Whereas Nahum Tate (1681) removed all references to bastardy and violent desire (such as adultery) in his adaptation, Gothic and romantic fiction would rediscover how desirably dangerous lechers could be. In the words of Thersites, another famous Shakespearean bastard: “I am a bastard too; I love bastards: I am a bastard begot, bastard instructed, bastard in mind, bastard in valour, in every thing illegitimate” (Troilus and Cresida, 5.7.16–18).

Bibliography Adelman, Janet. 1992. “Suffocating Mothers in King Lear.” In Suffocating Mothers. Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s plays, Hamlet to The Tempest. New York: Routledge, 103–129. Bacon, Francis (1625). The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall. London, Printed by John Haviland for Hanna Barret. http://uoregon.edu/ rbear/bacon.html Barish, Jonas A. and Marshall Waingrow. 1958. ‘‘‘Service’ in King Lear.” Shakespeare Quarterly 9 (3): 347–355. Brailowsky, Yan. 2008. William Shakespeare: King Lear. Paris: SEDES. Bullough, Geoffrey. 1973. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. Volume 7, London, New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul / Columbia University Press. Cavell, Stanley. 1987. “The Avoidance of Love: A reading of King Lear.” In Disowning Knowledge: In Six Plays of Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 39–123.

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Cotgrave, Randle. 1611. A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (1st ed.). London: Adam Islip. Crawford, Nicholas. 2004. “Language, Duality, and Bastardy in English Renaissance Drama.” English Literary Renaissance 34 (2): 243–62. Danby, John Francis. 1949. Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature: a Study of King Lear. London: Faber and Faber. De Grazia, Margreta. 1996. “The ideology of superfluous things: King Lear as period piece.” In M. de Grazia, M. Quilligan, and P. Stallybrass, eds. Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 17–42. Findlay, Alison. 1994. Illegitimate Power: Bastards in Renaissance Drama. Manchester, Manchester University Press. Florio, John. 1611. Queen Anna’s New World of Words, or Dictionarie of the Italian and English tongues. London: Printed by Melch. Bradwood, for Edw. Blount and William Barret. Foakes, R. A. 1993. Hamlet versus Lear: Cultural Politics and Shakespeare’s Art. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Foakes, R. A., ed. 1997. King Lear. Arden Third Series, Walton-onThames, Thomas Nelson and Sons. Gilbert, Anthony. 2000, Sept. ‘‘‘Unaccommodated man’ and his discontents in King Lear: Edmund the Bastard and Interrogative Puns.” EMLS 6 (2): 1–11. http://purl.oclc.org/emls/06-2/gilbedm.htm Goldberg, Jonathan (1993). “Perspectives: Dover Cliff and the Conditions of Representation.” In K. Ryan ed., King Lear. New Casebooks, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 145–57. Goody, Jack. 1983. The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hassoun-Lestienne, Pascale, ed. 1998. L’envie et le désir: Les faux frères, Volume 24 of Morales. Paris: Autrement. Hunt, Maurice. 1997. “Shakespeare’s King Richard III and the Problematics of Tudor Bastardy.” Papers on Language and Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature 33 (2): 115–41. Kahn, Coppélia. 1986. “The Absent Mother in King Lear.” In M. W. Ferguson, M. Quilligan, and N. J. Vickers, eds. Rewriting the Renaissance: the discourses of sexual difference in early modern Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 33–49. Kermode, Frank. 2000. Shakespeare’s Language. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Lacan, Jacques. 1966. Écrits. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

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Laroque, François, Pierre Iselin, and Josée Nuyts-Giornal. 2008. King Lear, l’œuvre au noir. Paris: PUF / CNED. Laslett, Peter and Karla Oosterveen. 1973. “Long-term Trends in Bastardy in England: A Study of the Illegitimacy Figures in the Parish Registers and in the Reports of the Registrar General, 1561-1960.” Population Studies 27 (2): 255–286. Leslie, Marina. 1998. “Incest, Incorporation, and King Lear in Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres.” College English 60 (1): 31–50. Manheim, Michael. 1988. “The Four Voices of the Bastard.” In D. T. Curren-Aquino (ed.), King John: New Perspectives. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 126–135. Neill, Michael. 1993. “‘In Everything Illegitimate’: Imagining the Bastard in Renaissance Drama.” The Yearbook of English Studies 23 (Early Shakespeare Special Number): 270–92. Nolten, Sonia . 1995. “Review of Illegitimate Power: Bastards in Renaissance Drama.” Early Modern Literary Studies 1 (1): 9. http://purl.oclc.org/emls/01-1/rev_nol1.html OED. 1989. Oxford English Dictionary (2 ed.). Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Parker, Patricia. 1996. Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pollock, Jonathan. 2009. “Lear à l’ombre de Lucrèce: nullam rem e nihilo.” In P. Drouet and P. Iselin, eds. ‘The true blank of thine eye’: Approches critiques de King Lear. Paris: PUPS, 147–60. Schmidgen, Wolfram. 2002, Spring. “Illegitimacy and Social Observation: The Bastard in the Eighteenth-Century Novel.” ELH 69 (1): 133–166. Smiley, Jane. 1991. A Thousand Acres. New York: Knopf. Tate, Nahum. 1681. The History of King Lear. London: Printed for E. Flesher. http://dewey.library.upenn.edu/sceti/printedbooksNew/index.cfm?textI D=lear_tate Taylor, Gary and Michael Warren. 1983. The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare’s two versions of King Lear. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

KING LEAR AS A VICIOUS CIRCLE FRANÇOIS LAROQUE

This article re-examines King Lear’s circular imagery to insist on its being closely entwined with textual as well as sexual elements. This is best summarized and illustrated by Shakespeare’s repetitive, not to say obsessive, use of the letter “O” and of the [o:] sound in the tragedy. This is for him a way of bringing together prosody, acoustics, textual images and typography in the invention of a new dramatic alphabet that makes the most of the resources of language. Such strategy, which works towards indeterminacy and constant equivocation, is one already put forward by the Chorus at the beginning of Henry V, one that allows the spectator confronted with nothingness or the void to “make imaginary puissance” (l. 25).

King Lear is often referred to as a circular tragedy,1 with what some see as its Druidic circle, whether productions reconstruct a Druidic circle like that of Stonehenge on the stage, or whether they emphasize the hermetic and emblematic symbolism of the wheel in the play through a magic circle (Foakes 1997 and Soellner 1984, 274-89). Shakespeare’s great tragedy is indeed inscribed within several concentric circles whose circumference corresponds to various levels of the structure and meaning of the text: first the mysterious circle of the deus absconditus, then the circles of stars and planets, the zodiac, the cycles of time and of the seasons, the Wheel of life and Fortune, the wheel of physical torture (“wheel of fire” 4.7.47, “rack” 5.3.313), the regal crown that finds its carnivalesque counterpart in the crown of weeds and wild flowers in act 4. We can further mention the coronet (1.1.140), first intended as a gift to Cordelia, and then given by Lear to his two older daughters and, finally, the circle within which all the characters in the play are enclosed, namely the theatre’s “wooden O” (Henry V, Chorus, line 13) where the plot unfolds (Laroque, Iselin, Nuyts-Giornal 2008, 127-28). These textual insertions and the meaning which they generate can even be felt inside the letter which carries them along in some kind of dramatic alphabet—a letter which after all corresponds to the graphic as well as 1

Soellner 1984. The author begins by stating that “the play of Shakespeare in which the figures of circle and wheel are most prominent is King Lear” (274).

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acoustic materialisation of all these word and sound games which characterize a play whose structure and situations belong to comedy as well as to tragedy (Snyder 1979, 137-79). As figures of repetition and perversion, they seem to outline a succession, or rather a nest of “vicious circles.” The latter refer us back to the theatre of the Vice, to its properties, proprieties—and perhaps also to its prosperities—in a dramatic speech where empty flattery, wordplay and general ambiguity seem to prevail. This type of cynical comedy is based on an aesthetics that moves away from the centre in a double movement of deformation and defamation thanks to a technique of close-ups that focuses on body parts, on the mouth, on the nose, the eye or the genital organs. We are here in the world of the grotesque, a strange, hybrid world with its ventriloquist mouth, its squinting eye and its sex synonymous with darkness as in the case of the monstrous eye of the vagina.2 Indeed, such figures are recorded as structural leitmotifs within various insets with, at the heart of the play, what Edgar calls “the dark and vicious place” (5.3.170) or “O, indistinguished space of woman’s will” (4.6.266) which foreground the female “O,” or “nothing,” whose variants are successively parsed as the zero figure (“0”) or as the letter “Z,” which Kent defines as the “unnecessary letter” (2.2.62). Shakespeare suggests that vice is vacuity and his acoustic variations on the sound [o:] look forward to what the French poet Mallarmé will call “le creux néant musicien.”3

Forms and figures In the play, the first “vicious circle” in the sense of counterfeit or fake logical reasoning, is found in 1.2, in Edmund’s feigned adoption of Montaigne’s ideas on the errors of custom that, according to the French philosopher, are contrary to the laws and lessons of “Nature, our great and powerful Mother” (Montaigne 2003, 232), the better to adopt the realistic philosophy of Machiavelli, whom he uses to justify his limitless ambition and his burning desire to give a free rein to his own appetite. Edmund justifies what he calls “the plague of custom” (1.2.3) or “the curiosity of nations” (1.2.4) which make inheritance depend on the laws of primogeniture, before arguing that “vile” and “base” is better than “legitimate” since, as a love-child, he has inherited more vigour and energy than the child begotten “’tween a sleep and wake” (l. 15). From 2 3

See below Pierre Iselin, p. 104-28. “The concave musical nothing” (Mallarmé 1956, 74).

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then on, Edmund puts all ordinary values upside down and subverts patriarchal hierarchy: Our father’s love is to the bastard Edmund As to the legitimate. Fine word, ‘legitimate’! Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed And my invention thrive, Edmund the base Shall top the legitimate. I grow, I prosper: Now gods, stand up for bastards! (1.2.17-22).

So, it is through tricks and manipulation that the would-be adorer of goddess Nature is able to make things more favourable for him. In order to give his views some sort of immediate enforcement, he forges a letter signed in his brother’s name. And, when “Edmund the base” says he will “top the legitimate,” this amounts to forcing the Wheel of Fortune to move the way he wants, i.e. in his own direction. What is more, the numerous sexual innuendos in his soliloquy suggest that Edmund’s assertive masculinity can only triumph over the apparently naive and weak personality of his half-brother Edgar, whom he will gull with a sort of gloating pleasure. Beside, in his eyes, the generation gap is a natural fact and it is only too normal that the young should take over from their fathers: “[…] sons at perfect age and fathers declined, the father should be as ward to the son and the son manage his revenue” (1.2.72-4). In this second scene, Edmund is a ventriloquist who, in the letter allegedly written by Edgar, makes the latter say what his own [i.e. Edmund’s] real thoughts are, so that this strategy of indirection, somewhat reminiscent of Polonius’s “By indirections find directions out” in Hamlet (Hibbard 1994),4 is a perverse scheme aimed at subverting family hierarchy, and at ruining his half-brother’s legitimacy as well as the authority of the father. Such ventriloquism stands poles apart from Cordelia’s “nothing,” a word which Kent is desperately trying to parse in a positive way for the angry Lear: Answer my life my judgement, Thy youngest daughter does not love thee least, Nor are those empty-hearted, whose low sounds Reverb no hollowness. (1.1.152-55)

4

2.1.65.

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What the king has failed to understand so far is that the emptysounding words of hypocrisy and flattery present themselves as “full” like the orotund rhetoric of Oswald, Regan’s servant: Lear Why came not the slave back to me when I called him ? 3 Knight Sir, he answered me in the roundest manner, he would not. (1.4.50-53)

Oswald may here be imagined with pursed mouth, the image generally used to designate those false-hearted manners, like the faces of Lady Vanity watching herself in her mirror as the Fool says in act 3: For there was never yet fair woman but she made mouths in a glass… (3.2.35-6).

But, like in a rebus, the idea of the circle in the play is also worked out vicariously through a series of objects, things or elements. In that connection, the stocks where Kent/Caius as a punishment for his cheeky insults towards Oswald, whom he has used as his whipping boy to release his humours and his almost fanatic “plainness,” had a pair of holes through which the wrists or ankles were placed and then chained.5 This was thought of as of a lock,6 as a way of humiliating someone who obeys his king only—a king that Regan and Cornwall despise now that he has given away all his regal attributes and possessions. Kent mentally escapes from the shameful, plebeian imprisonment of the stocks by referring to another two images of circularity, the cosmic cycle of night and day (“Approach, thou beacon to this under-globe […]” 2.2.161) and the Wheel of Fortune, which he invokes in the hope of some better days (“Fortune, good night: smile once more; turn thy wheel” (l. 171). His stoic fatalism is the exact opposite of Edmund’s uncompromising ambition. In the imagery he uses in the course of his battle of wits against Oswald, Kent resorts to smaller circles like tennis balls (“bandy looks” 1.4.81) a football (“you base football player” 1.4.85-6) or bowls. The latter are indeed referred to by Gloucester when he claims that “[his disposition] 5

See OED. “stocks 8. pl. An obsolete instrument of punishment, consisting of two plates set edgewise one over the other (usually framed between posts), the upper plank being capable of sliding upward down. The person to be punished was placed in a sitting posture with his ankles confined between the two planks, the edges of which were with holes to receive them.” See Boose 1991, 179-213. 6 As far as representations of the lock in contemporary engraving and iconography are concerned, see the Dutch engravings representing the character of “Nobody.” On this, see Josée Nuyts-Giornal, in Laroque, Iselin, Nuyts-Giornal 2008, 134-35.

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will not be rubbed nor stopped” (2.2.152) a propos of the rather sadistic pleasure of the Duke who incidentally is the one who will pull out his eyes later on in the play! Such imagery, imported from the realm of games and sport as well as from the world of daily life, is not far removed from the sphere of cooking—eggs are constantly mentioned by the Fool in the bitter jests he uses to make Lear aware of his recent bouts of folly: Fool Nuncle, give me an egg and I’ll give thee two crowns. Lear What two crowns shall they be? Fool Why, after I have cut the egg i’the middle and eat up the meat, the two crowns of the egg. When thou clovest thy crown i’th middle and gav’st away both parts, thou bor’st thine ass on thy back o’er the dirt. Thou hadst little wit in thy bald crown when thou gav’st thy golden one away. (1.4.148-56)

The two empty crowns which correspond to the two empty halves of the eggshell serve to encapsulate the opposition between the king’s bald crown and his golden crown, the emblem of kingship. Such opposition, which is prompted by Lear’s abdication, stresses the frailty of the human skull as opposed to the hardness of metal and it illustrates the gap between the king’s body natural and his body politic.7 They also have a proleptic function insofar as they foreshadow Gloucester’s blinding. Indeed the eggyolk indirectly suggests the “vile jelly” (3.7.82) of the eye torn out of its orbit. One can also note how close the words “eye” and “egg” are. On stage, such acoustic proximity is reinforced by dramatic action when the Third Servant applies the whites of eggs on Gloucester’s bloody sockets at the end of 3.7 (“I’ll fetch some flax and whites of eggs / To apply to his bleeding face” 3.7.105-06). The empty orbits somehow refer to absent testicles, so that the excision of the eye clearly works as a metaphor for castration. Gloucester will indeed be punished the way he sinned in an “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” Old Testament-like retribution: The gods are just and of our pleasant vices Make instruments to plague us: The dark and vicious place where thee he got Cost him his eyes. (5.3.168-71)

7

In her analysis of the king’s two bodies Delphine Lemonnier does not mention this gap in her article in Lemonnier-Texier and Winter 2008, 220-25.

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At the end of act 4, Edgar has been changed into the commentator of the action and into the play’s moralizer. It is in this new part and guise that he will confirm this vision of a just retribution for sin in the way he tells Albany of the circumstances of his last meeting with his father: […] in this habit Met I my father with his bleeding rings, Their precious stones new lost […] (4.3.188-89)

If the image of those empty, bloody orbits is here that of a ring from which the stone has been excised, then it is difficult not to recall the popular sense of stones as testicles which confirms the reading of the blinding as a metaphoric castration. Another equivalent is the wordplay on “dollar[s]” (2.4.244) and “dolour,” which is used again when the old Gloucester is compared to a brothel sign (“blind Cupid,” 4.6.134) and his eyes to coins: Oh ho, are you there with me? No eyes in your head, nor no money in your purse? Your eyes are in a heavy case, your purse in a light, yet you see how this world goes. (4.6.141-44)

In the perspective of Lear’s lucid and little charitable folly, Gloucester’s eyelessness turns him into a destitute beggar, into a vagrant whose purse is now flat. These different types of microcosmic circles otherwise work as smallscale models of the great astronomic orbits—those of sun and moon—with which they offer definite analogies. An illustration of this idea is found in a dropped initial in a collection of facetious poems, Musarum Deliciae (1650), with its circles within the “O” and the bodily (the eye) and planetary (the sun, the moon) analogies in the margin.8 So, when Lear invokes “the sacred radiance of the sun […] / By all the operations of the orbs” (1.1.110-12) or indirectly refers to himself as Ixion bound upon a wheel of fire (a pagan image hinting at some ancient cult of the sun),9 or

8

This print in Musarum Deliciae, a poetic collection published by Sir John Mennes (1650), serves to illustrate Charles Lapworth’s poem “On the Letter O,” may be viewed on p. 389 on the Internet site below: http://books.google.com/books?lr=&hl=fr&id=VLw4AAAAIAAJ&dq=John+Men nes+Musarum+Deliciae&pg=PA6&lpg=PA6&q=On+the+letter+O#PPA389,M1 9 See Elton 1988, 237-38, note 160: “Iconographically, the burning wheels of the sun were familiar in the Renaissance; cf. a panel by Piero di Cosimo (ca. 1510) at

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when Kent, re Oswald, whom he jeers at, indirectly evokes “[his] great aspect / Whose influence, like the wreath of radiant fire / On flickering Phoebus’ front” (2.2.105-06), we are facing a discourse that emphasizes a blazing wheel of fire as opposed to the solar eclipse evoked by Gloucester before his eyes are pulled out: Gloucester […] The sea, with such a storm as his bare head In hell-black night endured, would have buoyed up And quenched the stelled fires […] (3.7.60)

It is Regan who will ask that “his nighted life” (4.5.15) be put an end to, an image that strengthens the micro-macrocosmic correspondences in the play, making the blind Gloucester a man in whom the stars of sight have been put out. This indirectly heightens the irony of the passage where the earl alludes to his glasses (“I shall not need spectacles” 1.2.36) and of the other passage in which Lear advises him to get himself “glass eyes” (4.6.166), an ambiguous term which could either designate a glass eye or a pair of seeing glasses. Something of this rather dark and painful humour is found, in a grotesque or fantastic context, when Edgar describes the demon that has supposedly led Gloucester to the brink of Dover cliff : As I stood here below methought his eyes Were two full moons […] (4.6.69-70)

Before that, Kent had tried to provoke Oswald, threatening to “make a sop o’the moonshine of [him]” (2.2.31). The word “moonshine,” that designated eggs fried with onions, is indeed a cooking term which seems appropriate for this grotesque theme of the eye. The soft and the flaccid are indeed linked to the anamorphosis of the circle whose lines are elongated according to the principles of something like Salvador Dali’s “paranoia critique” with its famous soft watches or the grim, perverted world of Francis Bacon’s portraits. In such a chain of correspondences, the figures of the body are connected to those of the zodiac and the cosmos in general, and they enable the playwright to render the experience of the most intimate as a more exterior and global form of vision. Blindness means the world of night, like the tempest (“eyeless rage” 3.1.8) as well as sexual pleasure (“act of darkness” 3.4.85) enjoyed in woman’s “dark and vicious place” Strasbourg, which shows Prometheus lighting his torch at the sun’s wheels […] Cf. Verstegen’s illustration of the sun as a wheel of fire […]”

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(5.3.170). On the other hand, the world of objects—the wheel, the ball, the bowl, the marble—is only mentioned as part of a general rebus whose function it is to repeat in a subliminal mode the idea of the inescapability of the tragic circle. It is this eternal return of the same under different aspects that one finds behind the series of masks and disguises that characterizes custom and costume alike. But, beyond the surface analogies, one may wonder how the vicious circle itself is apprehended and represented in the play, since in the two cases of the “O” and of the “0” (zero), one may consider either the outer line of the circumference or the inner void or emptiness which lies inside. So I will now pass on to these questions of topology in the play.

The “small o” object To the critics who stick to the idea of the double text of the play, King Lear is supposed to have been substantially revised by Shakespeare himself and these revisions are part of the folio text published in 1623. Indeed, the repeated allusions to the question of the letter in the play seem to substantiate this point. When Lear bids Gloucester to read the challenge he has just written, the latter replies: Were all thy letters suns, I could not see one. (4.6.136)

The circle of the sun blinds as much as it gives light, and one thinks here of the couplet at the end of Sonnet 65, where the Poet says to the Young Man : [O none] unless this miracle have might That in black ink my love may shine bright.

The marriage of day and night is celebrated by the presence of oxymoronic rhymes (“bright” / “night”) just as it is in the paradoxes and the coincidentia oppositorum of a play like Romeo and Juliet. This is part and parcel of this quest for the impossible by means of which Shakespeare tries to render a world of extreme feelings and situations. Here he addresses less an audience than a small group of friends and readers. In a similar manner, when the Fool compares the king to “an O without a figure” (1.4.184-85), he alludes to mathematics (multiplication table) and to typography, using the letter “O” as the signifier of the void, or nothingness. Later on, it is the “Z” letter which in Kent’s mouth serves to designate absence or uselessness. Now, when Edgar mimics the thick

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accent of the rustic, he converts his “S’s” into “Z’s” (“And ’ch’ud ha’ been zwaggered out of my life, ’twould not ha’ been zo long as ’tis by a vortnight” 4.6.234-36). The letters “O” and “S/Z” thus become the hallmark of insignificance as in the name Oswald where the first two letters are thus being indirectly erased. The other game played with letters and signs refers us to the complex technique of typographic illustrations, as in the famous Menschenalphabeten, whose letters are made of human body parts as one can see in Peter Flötner’s images.10 The “O” formed with two bodies of naked women clearly suggests a female vulva. In a similar manner, in Champ Fleury (1529), the treatise which illustrates the typographic principles of Geoffroy Tory (1480-1533), the design for the “O” letter has been directly inspired by Vitruvius’ architectural patterns where the human body is circumscribed within a circle, a shape then considered as the image of perfection.11 Now this image partly corresponds to the one used by Lear to describe his sufferings: “I am bound / Upon a wheel of fire […]” (4.7.47) while it is most of the time associated with the Ixion myth (Hardison 1975, 227-42) with its various representations in the emblem books.12 But Shakespeare is not only happy with such surface games. So, from Act IV onwards, he tackles the question of perspective and depth since, when it is not a letter, the border all around the “O” thickens as it were to create the illusion of a hole, and this is how the circle or round becomes a “pit” (4.6.124), i.e. “a hole or cavity in the ground” (OED). Furthermore, when Gloucester alludes to what Edgar later calls “pleasant vices” (5.3.168), he says of his pregnant mistress that “she grew round-wombed” (1.1.13), while Lear, in his destructive rage and fury, addresses the tempestuous elements, asking the “all-shaking thunder” that he “[s]trike flat the rotundity of the earth” (3.2.7), in the hope of flattening out the round belly of fecundity and life. From then on, we pass from convexity to concavity with the discovery of the vertiginous Dover cliff (“Hadst thou been […] / So many fathoms precipitating […] Ten masts at each make 10

See the corresponding Internet site: http://www.zeno.org/Kunstwerke/B/Fl%C3%B6tner,+Peter:+Das+Menschenalpha bet 11 This illustration is found on the above Internet site, p. 49 of the online edition of the book: http://www.typogabor.com/Media/CHAMP_FLEURY.pdf 12 See the Internet site of Galia, the online catalogue of BNF, where Gabriel Rollenhagen’s Nucleus Emblematum Selectissimorum, may be found (see the emblem, p. 57): http://gallica2.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k85937.image.langEN.f73.pagination

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not the altitude / Which thou hast perpendicularly fell” (4.6.49-54); then comes the dark hole of woman’s genitalia (“there’s hell, there’s darkness, there is the sulphurous pit […]” 4.6.124-25) before Gloucester’s empty orbits are sounded (“my father with his bleeding rings / Their precious stones new lost […]” 5.3.188-89). Such digging below the surface, which goes along with the decay of the old fathers and with their descent into some endless, bottomless pit, makes us realize that the text itself may be a kind of hole. In such a connection, King Lear certainly appears as a text full of holes where the feeling of being sucked into a vortex makes itself more and more felt as the action progresses. But it is less vice than foolishness; the old fathers’ irresponsibility has put the play “out of joint” (Hamlet, 1.5.186), so that it is only after the second scene that vice begins to fill out the void created by the failure of patriarchy. Indeed—and this has been known since Aristotle—nature abhors a vacuum! The last series of images linked to the vicious circle are those connected to the verb “to turn” (it is used sixteen times in the play) with its rich polysemic connotations. Turning the key in the keyhole, giving a turn of the screw, feeling dizzy (“lest my brain turn” 4.6.23), all these phrases suggest change, transformation or metamorphosis. Beg as they may (“Good porter, turn the key” 3.7.64), the gates remain definitely shut for the poor or for those who, like the king expelled by his own daughters or, like Gloucester who is thrown out of doors after being blinded, must endure the cold of the night and of the howling storm outside (“Ne’er turns the key to the poor” 2.4.53). In King Lear, one can hear many keys turning in many keyholes, many doors being banged shut. But it is also a play where one peeps through the keyhole since voyeurism is suggested by the many references to the bed, to the sheets, to the embraces of love and to carnal intercourse. The word “spy” seems to recur obsessively through the tragedy: Fool Thou canst not tell why one’s nose stands i’the middle on’s face ? Lear No. Fool Why, to keep one’s eyes of either side’s nose, that what a man cannot smell out he may spy into. (1.5.19-23)

“Do you smell a fault” (1.1.15) Gloucester asks Kent at the beginning. Regan’s belated answer to this is quite a shock: “Let him smell / His way to Dover” (3.7.92-3). So, l’odor di femmina, which so entices Don Giovanni as a promise of pleasure, boils down here to the smell of the female sex which reduces man to an animal-like primitivenesss. One smells dirty linen, one gets an eyeful of “it,” one spies into other people’s

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vices. If one cannot smell, one can always cast one’s eyes into the pit. Where Edgar feels dizzy (“I’ll look no more / Lest my brain turn and the deficient sight / Topple down headlong” 4.6.23-4), Lear is submerged by a smell of sulphur: […] there’s hell, there’s darkness, there is the sulphurous pit, burning, scalding, stench, consumption ! Fie, fie, fie ! Pah, pah ! Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to sweeten my imagination […] (4.6.123-27)

Edgar’s trompe-l’œil and Lear’s olfactory hallucination are put side by side in order to suggest that these are in fact two successive versions of the same thing, namely the vertigo or nausea caused by the vision of the hole. Besides, as in Boaistuau’s teratology,13 which shows an androgynous devil with a face in the place of his genitals, Lear can see a face between ladies’ legs: Behold yon simp’ring dame, Whose face between her forks presages snow, That minces virtue and does shake the head To hear of pleasure’s name— (4.6.116-19)

In her letter to Edmund, Goneril, like this “simp’ring dame,” passes herself off as a prisoner of her marriage bed, begging Edmund to come and deliver her by giving him the key of her cell and that of her “chastity” into the bargain: If your will want not, time and place will be plentifully offered. There is nothing done if he return the conqueror; then am I the prisoner, and his bed my gaol, from the loathed warmth whereof, deliver me and supply the place for your labour. (4.6.260-63)

The repetition of the world “place” clearly refers to her vagina. So obscenity lurks below the apparently unruffled surface of the text. Edgar’s discovery of the secret letter on Oswald’s dead body makes him exclaim: “O indistinguished space of woman’s will” (4.6.266). He defines woman as the vicious circle once she has given up all shame and self-control in 13

Indeed in his Histoires prodigieuses (1560), a print shows the Calicut demon in India, “a monstrous, frightening […] devil,” a hybrid, androgynous creature with a face like a grinning beast in the place of its genitals. This print may be seen on the following Internet site: http://www.bium.univ-paris5.fr/monstres/debut2.htm

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order to pursue her desires in a frantic way, as Goneril does here with a blind determination which sounds like the energy of despair. Indeed, the vicious circle leads to an impossible triangulation which can only find its solution in death, when Edmund sums up the situation in a lapidary and lucid way: I was contracted to them both; all three Now marry in an instant. (5.3.227-28)

Since it cannot be a marriage license, it must then be a Faust-like contract. Inside a magic circle, one decides to barter one’s soul for an orgy of immediate pleasures. Edmund appears as a variant of the Marlovian “overreacher,” as Shakespeare reminds us that the letting loose of appetite, ambition and frantic jouissance is paid at the high price of self-destruction. Ironically, there is no wedding ring to celebrate such bloody marriage, except Gloucester’s “bleeding rings” (5.3.188). The signs of sin on his face denote adultery and its cruel, ruthless retribution.

Conclusion King Lear is not exactly a no-exit tragedy since it is basically a breathtaking drama where the events follow one another at an incredible pace. The images of the vicious circle, of the pit and the hole, are energized and made mobile thanks to the repeated use of the verb “to turn.” In his “Theatre of Vice” Shakespeare shows the triumph of appetite, of hypocrisy, of cynicism as well as their punishment, but virtue is not rewarded either since Cordelia also dies at the end. The overall structure remains marked by the theme of self-enclosure and circularity, which results from repetition as well as from the torsion and deformation of the grotesque, and they point to blocks, to forms of paralysis as much as to difficulties of understanding. The truth can only be heard in an oblique, indirect way and it must go through loops and détours before it is allowed to manifest itself into the open. Oddly enough, the orotund is here identified with falsehood, hypocrisy and lies, while the void—nothingness—becomes the via negativa through which the truth may ultimately be reconstructed in a language that sheds flattery in order to reach at simplicity, sincerity and “plainness.” The crisis of language which breaks out with Cordelia’s “nothing” is inscribed within the very letter, since “O,” “Z” and “0” (zero) become the signs of erasure, of non-existence even.

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The ultimate vicious circle in the play remains woman’s “dark and vicious place” (5.3.170) synonymous with the gate of hell in the king’s hallucinated misogyny in a soliloquy where demonology and gynecology coincide. The feminisation of both Lear and Gloucester reveals the frailty of patriarchy as much as the terrifying power of the feminine in a tragedy whose textual effects may be read in the repetition of the letter “O” which proliferates both in the names of the characters (GOneril, Oswald, COrnwall, COrdelia) and in the text itself. It is also found in wordplay, sounds and rhymes: Albany Most monstrous ! O ! [to Edmund] Knowst thou this paper ? Edmund Ask me not what I know. (5.3.156-59)

As far as the “O,” which follows the adjective “monstrous” here is one of the folio additions, one realizes the importance of such “feminine endings” whose extra-metric syllable “O” / “Know” is stressed, contrary to the rule. The verb “to know” which is also a “no” in the play (Laroque, Iselin, Nuyts-Giornal 2008, 120) also reveals the importance of negation and amphibology inside a circle which has now become more sonorous than really “vicious.”

Bibliography Boose, Linda. Summer, 1991. “Scolding Brides and Bridling Scolds: Taming the Woman’s Unruly Member,” Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 42, n°2. Elton, William R. 1966/1988. King Lear and the Gods. Lexington, Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky. Foakes, R.A., ed. 1997. King Lear. London: Thomson Learning, The Arden Shakespeare. Hardison, O. B. Summer, 1975. “Myth and History in King Lear,” Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 26, n°3. Hibbard, G. R., ed., 1994. Hamlet. Oxford: OUP, World’s Classics. Laroque, François, Pierre Iselin and Josée Nuyts-Giornal. 2008. King Lear. L’Œuvre au noir. Paris: PUF, 2008. Lemonnier-Texier Delphine and Guillaume Winter, eds. 2008. Lectures du Roi Lear de William Shakespeare. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Mallarmé, Stéphane. 1956. “Autres poèmes et sonnets” in Œuvres complètes. Ed. Henri Mondor, Paris: Gallimard.

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Michel de Montaigne. 1991/2003. “On the Cannibals,” The Complete Essays, I, xxxi. Eds. and trans. M.A. Screech, London: Penguin. Snyder, Susan. 1979. The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare’s Tragedies. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Soellner, Rolf. Autumn, 1984. “King Lear and the Magic of the Wheel,” Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 35, n°3. Thomson, Ann, and Neil Taylor, eds. 2006. Hamlet. London: Thomson Learning.

CODA “GREAT STAGE OF FOOLS” KING LEAR AND THE KING’S MEN RICHARD WILSON

In 1603 King James’s abdication of censorship and division of his court into three royal households created a matrix for King Lear when the three sister theatre companies competed to perform “freely to order.” Shakespeare responded to this double bind with a version of Cinderella in which the “dirty protest” metadramatised his own professional predicament. Like Perrault at the court of the Sun King, the playwright adopted the “Cinders” mask to escape the absolutist impasse of praising without praise. But unlike the folktale, Shakespeare’s tragedy of self-abjection could not have a happy ending, because the mirror it held up to the “King of Fools” exposed the madness of his game.

As large a charter as the wind […] knowe ye that Wee of our speciall grace certeine knowledge & mere motion have licenced and aucthorized and by these presentes do licence and aucthorize theise our Servauntes Lawrence Fletcher William Shakespeare Richard Burbage Augustyne Phillippes John heninges henrie Condell William Sly Robert Armyn Richard Cowly and the rest of theire Assosiates freely to use and exercise the Arte and faculty of playinge Comedies Tragedies histories Enterludes moralls pastorals Stageplaies, and suche others like as theie have already studied or heareafter shall use or studie aswell for the recreation of our lovinge Subjectes, as for our Solace and pleasure when wee shall thincke good to see them duringe our pleasure. (Royal Patent for the King’s Men, 19 May 1603. See Gurr 2004, 254)

King James’s “fast intent” (Lear, 1.1.36) to divide in three his theatrical kingdom, trumpeted within days of his arrival in London with a royal warrant chartering Shakespeare’s company as the King’s Men on May 19 1603, is often described as a fanfare for Stuart absolutism. The

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effect of this “swift, thorough and autocratic” (Wickham 1963, part 1, 92) decision to incorporate the three leading acting companies in the “several dowers” (42) of separate royal households, with the Admiral’s Men attached to the Puritan-tutored Prince Henry and Worcester’s Men assigned to Catholic Queen Anne, was to provoke an artificial competitiveness by freezing their identities and imposing “a durability they never had under Elizabeth” (Gurr 2004, 169).1 Analogies with James’s triangulation of religion to ensure that “future strife / May be prevented now” (41-2) emerged as with “oily art” (225) or ‘saucy bluntness’ (2.2.89) the sister troupes did develop distinctive repertoires. For the “darker purpose” (34) of this scheme to divide and rule London’s theatre-land was similarly to extend his “largest bounty… Where nature doth with merit challenge” (51-2), by favouring the king’s own preferred performers with a “third more opulent” (74) of the professional spoils, in return for “cooperating to produce a more conservative royal authority” (Tennenhouse 1986, 149). Elizabeth’s theatrical patronage had never favoured a monopoly, Leeds Barroll notes, “but when Shakespeare and his fellows now proceeded to present at court the first five or six plays in a row” the other two troupes must have been “genuinely alarmed” (Barroll 1991, 47-48). And according to many critics, the King’s Men duly obliged their new master when they “entered wholeheartedly into the fiction” of his royal game, and with competitive entries like King Lear dramatised James’s patriarchal “conception of the absolute king” (Kernan 1995, 14 and 96). When he became “His Majesty’s Servant” (Schoenbaum 1975, 195) with the title of Groom of the Chamber, the story goes, Shakespeare tied his work “directly to the myth” (Tennenhouse 1986, 159-60) of divine right James “was citing as a way of authorizing” his “Free and Absolute Monarchy” (Stuart 1994, 63), and now wrote plays that “served the specific interests of the Crown.”2 The idea that this “royal takeover” (Gurr 2004, 169) arose from the king’s personal belief that actors should express his power, as the “outward and visible signs of [his] sense of office” (Orgel 1985, 22-23), is disputed by some critics, however, who argue that the fact that the charter was so hurried suggests “someone must have intruded” the actors onto the Crown agenda, “a powerful intercessor” 1

The assignment of the Lord Admiral’s Men to Prince Henry and Worcester’s Men to Queen Anne took place in February 1604, though they did not receive official patents until 1606 and 1609 respectively. 2 For the debate about the character of Stuart absolutism, see Somerville 1996, 168-94.

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(Barroll 1991, 35 and 41) who was perhaps William Herbert, the pushy young Earl of Pembroke who, to show who loved him most, at the coronation “actually kissed his Majesty’s face” (Scaramelli 1864, vol. 10, 76-77). If the King’s Men did owe their sudden elevation to such “unruly waywardness” (295), that may explain the surprise omission from the patent of any mention of the Master of the Revels who had censored theatre under the Tudors. The Queen’s Men would also be freed from the censor and placed under the poet Samuel Daniel. What bewilders scholars about these manoeuvres, therefore, is that it was just at this point of absolutist interference, when the acting companies were nationalised by royal decree, that their tripartite division seemed to promise the players emancipation, as the Elizabethan censorship system was relaxed and decentralized, and with niche markets the three sister companies were encouraged to go their own separate ways (Clare 1987, 182).3 No wonder, then, that critics are puzzled by this “somewhat careless” (Barroll 1991, 43) proclamation, as by shaking off “The sway, revenue, execution” of the Elizabethan Revels Office and “Conferring them on younger strengths,” while still retaining “The name, and all the additions” (Barroll 1991, 1357) of the royal patron, the monarch known as “The Wisest Fool in Christendom” appears, as so often, to have been making himself truly the king of fools: Fool All thy other titles thou hast given away: that thou wast born with. Kent This is not altogether fool, my lord. Fool No, faith, lords and great men will not let me; if I had a monopoly out, they would have part on’t. (1.4.130-04)

King James’s theatre charter was an unprecedented abdication of cultural authority, according to Andrew Gurr, since for the first time “Royalty itself now asserted directly that the pleasures of playgoing were not just the monarch’s but the people’s” (Gurr 2004, 168). The perplexing incompatibility of this “relaxation or confusion in the standards of censorship” with the king’s declared absolutist programme “can perhaps 3 Clare speculates that the relaxation was possible because “the government of James I had little to fear.”

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only be resolved by the supposition that Stuart autocratic ambitions (at least in theatrical affairs) were matched by a degree of incompetence, or venality,” suggests Richard Dutton (1991, 145). “Full of changes” and “unconstant starts” (287-98), the Scottish king was himself in the dark, it is said, about the exact power he was throwing away, when out of his ‘mere motion’ he divested himself of these “cares of state” (48) and authorised his servants “freely to use and exercise the art and faculty of playing.” Yet the very “first verses that ever the King made” (James VI 1955-58, vol. 2, 132), as an aspiring poet at the age of fifteen, had been a clarion for just such intellectual freedom: “Since thought is free, think what thou wilt.” And it was in tune with that enlightened edict of artistic toleration that the King’s Men were to be liberated, it now appeared in the division of their kingdom, from all other authorities. Equipped with their royal patent they would be free to perform wherever the wind would take them: “aswell within their nowe usual howse called the Globe within the County of Surrey as also within the liberties and freedom of anie other Cittie universitie towne or Boroughe whatsoever within our said Realmes and dominions” (Gurr 2004, 254).4 Under the queen Shakespeare had dreamed her successor would grant “liberty / Withal, as large a charter as the wind” (As You Like It, 2.7.47-8). But now that he received just such a windy charter the drama that the king’s playwright made of the mixed signals James gave out concerning absolutism and freedom hints how he was as baffled as the critics about the largesse of the gift: Kent I thought the king had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall. Gloucester It did always seem so to us; but now, in the division of the kingdom, it appears not which of the dukes he values most; for equalities are so weighed that curiosity in neither can make choice of either’s moiety. (1.1.1-6)

“He hath ever but slenderly known himself. The best and soundest of his time hath been but rash” (291-3): if Lear’s division of his kingdom does metadramatise the uncertainty in which the dramatist was caught by the king’s reorganisation of the London theatre, with its contradictory orders to his new “Servants” to “freely” perform “aswell for the recreation 4 See, too, Gurr 2004, 171: “Now equipped with their royal patents they could perform at whatever inn would take them.”

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of our lovinge Subjectes, as for our Solace and pleasure,” the confusion perhaps offers a professional context for one of the crucial questions in Shakespeare criticism: whether “King James got his £10 worth” for King Lear, as Alvin Kernan put it in Shakespeare the King’s Playwright, when it was acted before him at Whitehall on St Stephen’s night, December 26 1606 (Kernan 1995, 102). The fact that Lawrence Fletcher, a new sharer in the company and the only one listed ahead of Shakespeare in the patent, had been “comedian to his Majesty” (Honan 1998, 300) in Edinburgh, and so “could only have been added on the king’s instructions,” is seen as proof the King’s Men could not help but fall in with the wishes of a ruler who had himself composed a masque and a treatise lecturing poets how to write (Gurr 2004, 168).5 Even in Scotland James kept an eagle-eye on “the comedians of London,” and protested that they mocked him as “the poorest prince in Christendom” (Dutton 1986, 142). But now he brought his own clown to England he tried to see every court play, enjoying twenty in 1603-4 alone, including a Henry V from which the author took care to cut wry digs at “Scots Captain Jamy” (3.3.19) and “the weasel Scot” (1.2.170) who eats up England (Gurr 2004, 169 and 182). “Our bending author” is how Shakespeare characterised his own accommodating stance in the Epilogue on that occasion. But the self-demeaning image of “Such smiling rogues,” who “Renege, affirm, and turn their halcyon beaks / With every gale and vary of their masters” (2.2.65-71), encapsulates the problem which seems to be staged in King Lear, with its language of service yet “potentially sensational” (Gurr 2004, 183) opening lines blaring the names of the two real dukes of Albany and Cornwall—Princes Charles and Henry—as rivals for the crown. The problem was the oldest one for the artist, of speaking truth to power, but given urgency by King James’s contradictory warranty to praise without praise, perform “freely” for “our Solace,” and speak both what was expected yet also what was felt: Now, our joy […] […] what can you say to draw A third more opulent than your sisters? Speak. (1.1.81-5)

How to speak “free and patient thoughts” (4.6.80) for a “free and absolute monarch”? As the leading dramatist of the King’s Men, Shakespeare rose to the perverse and irrational challenge of speaking “freely” by compulsion, the story runs, with a procession of plays that 5

For the seriousness with which James took his own literary career, see Rickard 2007.

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artfully negotiated the paradox of “A love that makes breath poor and speech unable” (58). Thus, with Othello at Halloween 1604 he flattered a pedantic know-all, it is suggested, by setting the story around the Battle of Lepanto, about which the king had written an epic in verse (Kernan 1995, 60-61). Then in Measure for Measure at Whitehall on December 26 Shakespeare created a Christmas comedy to publicise “what King James had written about state-craft” (Waters Bennet 1966, 137). Likewise, when Macbeth was showcased at Hampton Court on August 7 1606, before James and his Danish brother-in-law King Christian IV, this “royal play” (Paul 1950, 317-31) provided “a theatrical version” of the king’s tome about witchcraft by the lurid light of the Gunpowder Plot: “James Stuart must have been enormously pleased,” Kernan concludes, since Macbeth was the perfect Stuart play, “celebrating his ancient lineage […] and making divine-right kingship identical with sanity and nature” (Kernan 1995, 88). On all these grand gala occasions “our bending author” was truly a royal favourite, whose “great succession of Stuart plays” constituted “one of the master oeuvres of European patronage art,” it is suggested, comparable to Velazquez’s paintings for the court of Spain, Monteverdi’s operas in Venice, or Molière’s comedies at Versailles (Kernan 1995, xxiii). But what this royalist interpretation misses out is that from the day he became a King’s Man Shakespeare made the logical contradiction of performing freely to order, of praising without praise, the very subject of his work: Lear Tell me, my daughters– Since now we will divest us, both of rule, Interest of territory, cares of state– Which of you shall we say doth love us most? (1.1.46-9)

We have the man Shakespeare “They told me I was everything” (4.6.102): editors key King Lear to James’s absolutist project to unite his triple crown and restore a mythic British empire.6 Certainly, the freedom the king rashly gave the actors was soon curtailed when Robert Cecil, the Machiavellian chief minister, took control of the bureaucracy of the stage. “No one was better placed than Cecil to appreciate the increasing importance of pageantry and theatricals,” explains Dutton (1986, 145). But the idea that Shakespeare 6

See, in particular, Dutton 1986, 139-51.

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performed Stuart propaganda on command runs up against the “intricate games he now played with realism” (Gurr 2004, 147), and the negative image of performance itself that darkens the work he devised for the new reign, which, as Anne Barton writes, represents the theatre as “a thing devoid of value, as it is in Lear’s bitter evocation of the play metaphor: ‘When we are born, we cry that we are come / To this great stage of fools’ (4.6.183)” (Barton 1962, 184). New Historicists have argued that these plays square artistic freedom with political absolutism by prescribing “a single law for the state and theatre [...] For Shakespeare […] it was his law, and the king’s” (Goldberg 1989, 239) But what complicates all the Jacobean dramas is how Shakespeare “foregrounds the play’s status as a piece of theatre—the extent to which it is a written text acted by paid actors speaking someone else’s words” (Betteridge 2005, 142). If Measure for Measure reflected James’s conference of bishops on the “great stage” at Hampton Court, for instance, the mirror was distorted by the perception that man, “Dressed in a little brief authority,” “Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven / As makes the angels weep” (2.2.120-5).7 If Othello saluted the royal author of Lepanto who was “a Homer to himself” (Gabriel Harvey’s annotation to Lepanto quoted in Rickard 2007, 65), the homage was undercut by a plot that is “a pageant to keep us in false gaze” (1.3.19) stage-managed by Iago, a fantasist who abuses others as his “Players” (2.1.115), and whose name approximates to James.8 And if “what the stained-glass in the Great Hall at Hampton Court did” for the Tudors, “Macbeth did […] for the Stuarts” (Kernan 1995, 77), the royal commission was ironized by a tragedy in which life now appears “but a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / And then is heard no more” (5.5.23-5). “We cry that we are come / To this great stage of fools”: Shakespeare returned to the same traumatic crisis throughout his career, when an aristocratic audience at first coerces then condemns the antics of the “poor player” as “A tale / Told by an idiot full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing” (25-7). At a time when players were moving away from private patrons to public playhouses he created a sequence of plays-within-plays that are callously disrupted by their courtier spectators as “the silliest stuff that ever I heard” (Dream, 5.1.207). As Meredith Anne Skura observes in Shakespeare the Actor, whatever it was that terrified Shakespeare 7

Cf. Thomson 1992, 169: “Seen in the context of James’s first full year on the English throne, [Measure for Measure] is nothing short of a caveat Rex from the nation’s leading playwright to the new monarch.” 8 Barton sees Iago’s plot as a “ghastly play within the play” (1962, 185).

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whenever he “Made [him]self a motley to view” (Sonnet 110) was “of a piece with his ability to imagine the story of other beggars who cannot move their stony-hearted auditors” (Skura 1993, 145). What overshadows the idea of the play in King Lear, however, is that here the entire universe is conceived as such a theatre of cruelty, in which “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; / They kill us for their sport” (4.1.37). Thus, when Shakespeare was commissioned, according to the theory, to put power on display with a performance that began with loyal protestations like Kent’s to “Royal Lear / Whom I have ever honour’d as my king, / Lov’d as my father, as my master follow’d, / As my great patron thought on in my prayers” (1.1.39-42), his picture of his own profession was soured by a self-destructive sensation of theatre as now a paltry game to “trifle with despair” (4.6.33), like Lear’s mock trial or Edgar’s chicanery with his father’s attempted suicide. As Stephen Booth observes, in King Lear the cliché that “All the world’s a stage” (As You Like It, 2.7.138) has become so fraught “because the play as play—as an event in the lives of its audience—is analogous to the events it describes,” which from the king’s staging of his love test as a grand ceremonial pageant all seem to be prescripted, “like the catastrophe of the old comedy” (Booth 1983, 64), as Edmund jeers (1.2.123), or “An interlude!” in Goneril’s contemptuous words (5.3.90)9: Sir, I love you more than words can wield the matter; Dearer than eye-sight, space, and liberty; Beyond what can be valued, rich or rare; No less than life, with grace, health, beauty, honour; As much as child e’er lov’d, or father found; A love that makes breath poor, and speech unable; Beyond all manner of so much I love you. (1.1.53-9)

“Of all these bounds, even from this line to this, / With shadowy forests and with champains riched, / With plenteous rivers and wideskirted meads […] to thine […] / Be this perpetual” (1.1.61-5). For years the Globe players had been London-based; but it was one of the catches of their royal charter that this supposed manumission bound them to ‘heavy duty’ with the court in provincial venues like Pembroke’s West Country 9

Cf. Peat 1980, 48: “As Edgar has trifled with Gloucester, so Shakespeare has trifled with us”; and Halio 1992, 22: “The trick Edgar plays on his father’s imagination is also the trick Shakespeare plays on ours—except that here he means us to be conscious of everything that is happening, including the way in which our imagination is being made to work.”

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mansion at Wilton, where in 1603 they were paid £30 to act at Christmas (Gurr 2004, 59). “We have the man Shakespeare with us,” Lady Pembroke is said to have boasted to entice the king to come to see As You Like It.10 The dramatist had probably been summoned to Wilton to entertain ambassadors greeting the new monarch, then holding court in nearby Bath. And whether or not Shakespeare did amuse his Wiltshire patrons by inserting a topical masque about union and playing Adam in his comedy; or took part in A Midsummer Night’s Dream when the King’s Men revived it on New Year’s Day for the nine-year-old Prince Henry; he was certainly in the court line-up in August 1604, when he and his colleagues were obliged to attend the Somerset House peace conference as waiters on the Spanish embassy. To lubricate this summit the diplomats showered bribes, and although biographers are unable to say for certain “what form his ‘tip’ may have taken,” they speculate that the “broad silver-gilt bowl” he bequeathed in his will to his daughter Judith was the glittering reward bestowed for his discrete service over these eighteen days upon “the man Shakespeare” (Law 1910, 59-60 and Schoenbaum 1975, 246). “What hast thou been? A serving-man, proud in heart and mind; that curled my hair; wore gloves in my cap” (3.4.79-81): the dramatist had been issued with four yards of crimson cloth for the livery he wore the first time at the coronation on March 15 (Schoenbaum 1975, 196). He probably had to pose beneath one of the triumphal arches heralding James as a new Augustus. But judging by the sonnets he wrote at this time which scorn these “pyramids” (123) of “smiling pomp” (124), Shakespeare felt no satisfaction in the “obsequious” role he was forced to perform beside the Oswalds of the court: “Were’t ought to me I bore the canopy,” he shrugs, “With my extern the outward honouring? [...] No, let me be […] in thy heart […] poor but free” (125). His craven posture in “rustling silks” appears instead to have provided this conscripted “serving-man” (88) with a problematic for King Lear, in the experience of one who remains “poor but free” at heart. “No troupe acted more for James,” we are reminded, “than the King’s Men.” In the year preceding the tragedy about “this great stage of fools” the Revels Office listed eleven court appearances by His Majesty’s players (Schoenbaum 1975, 196). Thus it is all the more telling that the drama Shakespeare devised at this instant of greatest access to the royal palace should be his own retelling of Cinderella, the most familiar of all stories of rags to riches, yet the simplest expression of the beggary to which truth is reduced: 10

Reportedly Mary Countess of Pembroke, in Schoenbaum 1975, 126.

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Thou hast seen a farmer’s dog bark at a beggar? And the creature run from the cur? There thou mightst Behold the great image of authority: a dog’s obeyed in office Through tattered clothes small vices do appear; Robes and furred gowns hide all. (4.6.150-9)

Poor but free Ever since Coleridge noted that Shakespeare’s play about the girl in “tattered clothes” has the moral economy of a “nursery-tale” critics have averted their eyes from its similarity to homely Cinderella (Bate 1992, 389).11 The likeness was not lost, however, on Freud who also compared Lear’s test to the casket scene in The Merchant of Venice, where Bassanio prefers “meagre lead” that moves him “more than eloquence” (3.2.104-6) (Freud 1985, 233-47). And in Why Shakespeare? Catherine Belsey insists on this resemblance “between one of the grandest of all tragedies” and the tale where “a prince chooses between three sisters and opts for the youngest and humblest, making the right choice in spite of outward appearances.” In stories like Cinderella or its English version Cap o’ Rushes the correct choice “is always the unassuming one,” Belsey affirms, for “humility and reticence are endorsed.” Thus, by applying the folkloric “law of threes,” Shakespeare invites us to side with Cordelia, who could not have spoken other than she did, so Belsey maintains, when her father demanded to know “what can you say to draw / A third more opulent than your sisters?” and with feudal exactitude she replied, “Nothing, my lord […] I love your majesty / According to my bond” (1.1.84-92). In Belsey’s Lacanian critique the tragedy adapts the story on which Cinderella is itself based—where a daughter says she loves her father “as meat loves salt”—to probe the limits of language and the rule that “Wherein we cannot speak, therein we must be silent”: drawing on the old folktale about the deceptiveness of words yet spoiling its happy end, “King Lear builds a monumental demonstration” of what lies outside speech but can never be spoken. There is an elective affinity, we therefore deduce, between Cordelia’s reticence, Lear’s disrobing, and Edgar’s violent selfabjection, and the playwright’s discursive dismantling in the poverty of a storyteller’s rags (Belsey 2007, 45 and 62-63). This is a persuasive reading. But what it overlooks is precisely the thread of intention 11 For Cinderella as an analogue of King Lear, see Perrett 1904, 10-13; Bullough 1973, 271; Coupe 1996, 2-6; and Welch 1996, 291-314.

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Shakespeare took from the “curious tale” (1.4.28) of Cinderella, and wove into his own negative dialectic of investiture and divestment, or sight and blindness, which carries the irony that adoption of sackcloth and ashes is itself always an exhibitionistic provocation and deliberate choice. Like the self-destructive potlatch of the French immigrant riots discussed by Slavoj Žižek, which torch the possessions of the rioters themselves, the selfmortifying “Cinderella posture” has to be decoded as a type of metalinguistic or phatic gesture, the desperate emptiness of which functions as “a test of the system itself” (Žižek 2008, 79). Thus, “Plainness and reluctance, the censure and apparent absence of rhetoric, can be considered just another style,” as other critics object; and as Cornwall astutely remarks of Kent (Cocoual 2008, 39): This is some fellow Who, having been praised for bluntness, doth affect A saucy roughness and constrains the garb Quite from his nature. He cannot flatter, he, An honest mind and plain, he must speak truth! An they will take it, so; if not, he’s plain. These kind of knaves I know, which in this plainness Harbour more craft and more corrupter ends Than twenty silly ducking observants That stretch their duties nicely. (2.2.87-96)

“Nothing will come of nothing” (1.1.88): in Shakespeare, where language has no outside and nothing is outside the text, the anti-theatrical gesture of silence is itself always a pointed signifier, as Kent admits: “I can keep honest counsel, ride, run, mar a curious tale in telling it, and deliver a plain message bluntly” (1.4.28). So, although a long line of critics side with Cordelia, as if her “Nothing” meant that she literally spoke not another single word, her resemblance to the eponymous “Cinders” alerts us to the masochistic ploy of “plainness” that is a motif of all narratives of the “Love Like Salt” type, where the father’s incestuous desire is thwarted by his daughter’s calculated “dirty protest” in the protective smuts she cleans off for her prince, her self-abasing strategy “To take the basest and most poorest shape / That ever penury, in contempt of man, / Brought near to beast” (2.3.7-9). For as folklorists point out, it was no accident that these popular tales of the paradoxical power of grime were first printed in the Enlightenment France of Louis XIV, where the stain of incest could figure the tyranny of unconditional power, and its sublimation the civilité of the Sun King (Zipes 1996 and Thelander 1982, 467-96). There were politic Aesopian reasons why

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Mother Goose brooded in the culture of the absolutist state. And it is the recital of the conte de fée in the Paris salons of the 1690s which might offer a key to what Shakespeare made of Cinderella at Whitehall. Charles Perrault, the architect who first recorded Cendrillon, had been Colbert’s aide for twenty years, historians remind us, “suggesting and supervising cultural policies to glorify the king” (Zemon Davis 1987, 252). Thus, the best gloss on King Lear may be Louis Marin’s, when in his classic study of representation at Versailles, Portrait of the King, the semiotician analyses the tale known as Donkey Skin, to show how this variant of the sight/blindness paradox, rewritten by Perrault, “turns absolute power against itself.” What Donkey Skin tells is “the story of the desire of all power to be absolute,” Marin considers. But when the princess flees marriage to her father in her rough disguise the “path of the mask” also offers the narrator his own escape from the conundrum that “The King must be praised without praise” (Marin 1988, 69). “Hide yourself well: / The skin is so frightful no one will believe / It encloses anything beautiful”: in Donkey Skin a threadbare vulgarity, “like a dirty monkey,” cloaks Perrault’s sly praise of Louis when the monarchy is reconstituted as a happy family (Marin 1988, 138, 150 and 164). Such is the beauty of “Love Like Salt.” But though she “walks off with the fairytale prince,” when Cordelia tries the same trick her prima donna act is itself what critics now take “with a pinch of salt” (Cocoual 2008, 35-36). The reason is that in the world of the seventeenth-century court, between the mirror and the map Shakespeare shows the fairy-tale solution to be vain in every sense: Lear So we’ll live And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues Talk of court news […] Edmund Take them away. (5.3.11-19)

“This king unto him took a peer, / Who died and left a female heir… With whom the father liking took, / And her to incest did provoke”: in Pericles, soon after Lear, Shakespeare again deployed the incest motif with “a song that old was sung” (Pro.1.21-6) like Cinderella, to speak the

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unspeakable about unnatural power.12 There too the riddle of telling truth to kings is posed as a deadly quiz, in which Pericles is caught in a double bind that to win the princess he must guess the forbidden love he dares not name. He knows that “Who has the book of all that monarchs do [is] more secure to keep it shut than shown,” yet fears the king “Will think me speaking though I swear to silence” (1.1.137-8; 1.2.19), and is driven schizoid by the knot of what he feels and ought to say. Thus Pericles reads like a decoding of King Lear, in which the old story, sung “On ember-eves and holy ales,” spells out what the tragedy encrypts: “Bad child, worse father, to entice his own” (Pro. 6.27). Leaving father and child to their “uncomely claspings” (1.1.171), Pericles is King Lear as told by the suitors. For despite her vow never to marry like her sisters “To love [her] father all” (1.1.103), Cordelia ends like King Antiochus’s daughter, abandoned by France to love her father all (Maguire 1994, 101). Shakespeare cut the detail in the 1608 Quarto that she is deserted by her husband due to danger at home, and in the Folio this “Prince Charming” simply vanishes along with “the powers of France” (Q.SD: 23), to leave father and daughter alone. But when Lear enters howling “with Cordelia dead in his arms” (SD: 5.3.255) like some perverted Pietà, as everyone says, we see at last how these two absolutists of art and power have both come to deserve each other, even as the shock of their incestuous “clasping” paralyses our affective responses and stuns our aesthetic applause: Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones: Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so That heaven’s vault should crack. (5.3.256-8)

“And my poor fool is hanged” (304): Lear’s confusion of his dead daughter and his clown clinches Cordelia’s subliminal association with the King’s Men that began as with “my young lady’s going into France” the Fool “much pined away” (1.4.62-3); and in the Folio the king dies begging “men of stone” to “Look” at nothing (309), like some mad Pygmalion, in a final self-reflexive image of the stage. “Free and absolute” power and “free and absolute” art have combined to produce what Frank Kermode calls this “craftiest” of endings, where Lear begs us to “undo this button” (309), as if a sovereign’s deconstructive order to his player to perform “freely for our pleasure” must undo them both (Kermode 2000, 199-200). 12 For incest in Pericles as a figure for tyranny, and for James’s desire to be “free and absolute,” see Jordan 1997, 35-47.

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Kent sees the dying man detained “upon the rack of this tough world”; and this metaphor of confession extracted by torture reminds us of the cruel material context of this representational crisis, in the 1606 Oath of Allegiance which, like Lear’s truth game, either “strangered” (1.1.204) or promised freedom to James’s Catholic subjects in return for words of love.13 But the harsh “rack” Kent says God “hates” (312) for stretching out “the promised end” (262) also refers to the wheels of the stage-machine of “this tough world”—the “Wooden 0” (Henry V, Pro.13)—and a selfincriminating suggestion of collusion between the “gorgeous palaces” and “this great globe itself” (Tempest, 4.1.152-3) returns this tragedy of vicious circles to Shakespeare’s own recurring self-reflexive question, and the performative quandary right at the start: “What have you done? […] What have you performed?” (4.2.40-41). “What shall Cordelia do? Love and be silent” (Q. 1.1.54); “What shall Cordelia speak? Love and be silent” (F. 1.1.59): as Stanley Cavell comments, the discrepancy between Quarto and Folio variants of Cordelia’s first words seems to betray Shakespeare’s alarm “about what it is that speech does and what the absence of speech does, about why both can be lethal” (Cavell 2005, 54-55). Either way, it is the fatal aggression of her plain style that is contrasted to her sisters’ suavely hyperbolic deployment of the “topic of inexpressibility” that was standard, Kermode notes, in the eulogy of emperors and kings (Kermode 2000, 185). Critics have long viewed Cordelia’s refusal to enter these panegyric games as a marker of Shakespeare’s professional embarrassment, “as if the author outside the play were asking himself what he should have his character say and deciding she should say nothing” (Greenblatt 1990, 97). But the “pride and sullenness” they detect in the daughter’s refusal to humour her father other than “according to [her] bond” (1.1.92) can also be viewed, in light of King James’s ultimatum to the stage, as the dramatist’s own working out of the dead-end of the suicidal “Cinderella gambit” to “grime” the face with “filth,” like those who with “roaring voices, / Strike in their numbed and mortified bare arms / Pins, wooden pricks, nails” (2.3.14-16), his reflection upon the implications of the ‘sad fact’ that, as Žižek writes of the suburban rioters, “when the only choice is between playing by the rules and (self)destructive violence,” opposition to the system can only take the shape of the “meaningless” gesture “to shift / Into a madman’s rags; to assume a semblance / That very dogs disdained” (5.3.185-7), in order to remain “poor but free” (Foakes 1993, 47 and Žižek 2008, 76). 13

For the contradictions in James’s Oath of Allegiance, see LaRocca 1984, 22-36.

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“Our basest beggars / Are in the poorest things superfluous […] If only to go warm were gorgeous, / Why nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear’st” (2.4.259-64): with a scenario of “Fathers that wear rags” (46), and a sovereign crowned with weeds, the plot of King Lear can be viewed as a reworking of Cinderella’s “pumpkin” hour of disenchantment for the actor, his reversal from king to beggar as stripped of illusion he kneels down for praise. “The King’s a beggar now the play is done,” explains the King in the Epilogue to the 1604 All’s Well That Ends Well; and such is the “trick” Lear rehearses after Regan tells him to go back to Goneril: ‘Do you but mark how this becomes the house… “On my knees I beg / That you’ll vouchsafe me raiment, bed, and food”’ [148-50]. But near the end it will be no such “prank” (1.4.213) when he says to Cordelia, “I’ll kneel down / And ask of thee forgiveness” (5.3.10-11). So, as Skura observes, though there is no Epilogue to Lear audiences must have recognised that its Fool takes up the bleak refrain from Feste’s in Twelfth Night: that for the actors at the end of the show “the rain it raineth every day” (3.2.75). Thus Lear’s self-exposure in his “loop’d and window’d raggedness” and “houseless poverty” (3.4.27-32) “makes this of all plays the most focused on the actor’s body and hunger for recognition,” and compels the audience to respond like the king to “A poor unfortunate beggar” (4.6.68), with compassionate disgust. That is how Lear reacts to Poor Tom, the “PlayerBeggar” who, with his “hair elf(ed) in knots,” represents the masochistic extremity of such a theatrically “presented nakedness” (2.3.10-1). And baring its own devices, with its gouged eyes and maimed limbs the “horrible object” (17) and “side-piercing sight” (4.6.85) of the “dirty protest” that is King Lear “enforces” (2.3.20) our charity as offensively as any such stinking “Bedlam beggar” (14) pleading for relief: “so repellent, nasty, and noisy,” as Skura concludes, “that you pay him to go away” (Skura 1993, 147-48). “Bad is the trade that must play the fool to sorrow, angering itself and others” (4.1.39-40): whatever the sources of that sorrow and self-hate, in King Lear Shakespeare responded to the bad business of speaking freely on command with a “Cinderella” story that holds a mirror up to “The Wisest Fool.” Editors speculate the Fool did indeed present the “looking glass” to King James for which Lear calls (5.3.260), reversing crown and coxcomb: “The one in motley here, / The other found out there” (1.4.127-

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8).14 So, though someone sensibly deleted from the Folio Lear’s pointed query, “Dost thou call me fool, boy?” (1.4.129), the lament was allowed to stand “That such a king should play bo-peep, / And go the fools among” (1.4.154-5). And there is enough Brechtian alienation in the Fool’s uncanny prediction that Merlin will foresee the time when “the realm of Albion” will “come to great confusion” (3.2.89) to sense already those “chronic apprehensions about being the King’s servants” which made the Shakespeare company’s allusions to Stuart politics “distinctly edgy.” In the years after offering King Lear at court the King’s Men “flaunted their freedom from sycophancy,” Gurr demonstrates; yet their “royal protection enveloped and finally swallowed them up completely” (Gurr 2004, 173 and 193). “Let go thy hold when a great wheel runs down hill, lest it break thy neck with following it” (2.4.66-7) counsels the jester; but Shakespeare was prophetic when he foretold how the monarch and his comedian would go out into the night of history together, both victims of the Civil War: “That sir which serves and seeks for gain […] Will pack when it begins to rain, / And leave thee in the storm. / But I will tarry; the fool will stay, / And let the wise man fly” (2.4.72-6). “But goes thy heart with this?” (1.1.194): this beggarly service was not, perhaps, the heartfelt declaration of love James might have expected when he proclaimed himself the King of Fools. But it was perhaps the wisest way to answer his fool’s errand, and obey “The weight of this sad time […] Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say” (5.3.322-3).

Bibliography Barroll, Leeds. 1991. Politics, Plague, and Shakespeare’s Theater: The Stuart Years. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Barton, Anne. 1962. Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play. London: Chatto & Windus. Bate, Jonathan, ed. 1992. The Romantics on Shakespeare. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Belsey, Catherine. 2007.Why Shakespeare? London: Palgrave. Betteridge, Thomas. 2005. Shakespearean Fantasy and Politics (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press. Booth, Stephen. 1983. King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition, and Tragedy. New Haven: Yale University Press.

14 For accounts of Lear’s mirror, see Foakes 1997, 385-6. For the connection with the Fool, see in particular Shickman 1991, 85-6.

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Bullough, Geoffrey. 1973. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare: VII: Major Tragedies. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Cavell, Stanley. 2005. “The Interminable Shakespearean Text,” in Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 54-5. Clare, Janet. 1987. ‘“Greater Themes for Insurrection’s Arguing”: Political Censorship of the Elizabethan and Jacobean Stage,’ Review of English Studies, 38: 182. Cocoual, Ifig. 2008. “Craft and Corrupt Plainness? King Lear as a Devious Defence of Dramatic Rhetoric,” in Lectures du Roi Lear de William Shakespeare. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Coupe, Laurence. 1996. “King Lear: Christian Fairy Tale,” English Review, 6: 2-6. Dutton, Richard. 1986. “King Lear, The Triumphs of Reunited Britannia, and The Matter of Britain,” Literature and History, 12 : 139-51. —. 1991. Mastering the Revels: The Regulation and Censorship of English Renaissance Drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press. Foakes, R. A. 1993. Hamlet versus Lear: Cultural Politics and Shakespeare’s Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. ed. 1997. The Arden Shakespeare: King Lear. London: Nelson. Freud, Sigmund. 1985. “The Theme of the Three Caskets,” The Penguin Freud Library: 14: Art and Literature. Ed. Albert Dickson, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Goldberg, Jonathan. 1989. James I and the Politics of Literature. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Greenblatt, Stephen. 1990. “The Cultivation of Anxiety: King Lear and His Heirs,” in Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture. London: Routledge. Gurr, Andrew. 2004. The Shakespeare Company: 1594-1642. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Halio, Jay, ed. 1992. The Tragedy of King Lear. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Honan, Park. 1998. Shakespeare: A Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. James VI. 1955-1958. The Poems of James VI of Scotland. 2 vols., Edinburgh: William Blackwood. Jordan, Constance. 1997. Shakespeare’s Monarchies: Ruler and Subject in the Romances. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Kermode, Frank. 2000. Shakespeare’s Language. London: Allen Lane. Kernan, Alvin. 1995. Shakespeare, the King’s Playwright: Theater in the Stuart Court, 1603-1613. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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LaRocca, John. 1984. “ ‘Who Can’t Pray With Me, Can’t Love Me’: Toleration and the Early Jacobean Recusancy Policy,” Journal of British Studies, 23: 22-36. Law, Ernest. 1910. Shakespeare as a Groom of the Chamber. London: George Bell, 1910. Marin, Louis. 1988. Portrait of the King. Trans. Martha Houle, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 138-65. Maguire, Philip. 1994. Shakespeare: The Jacobean Plays. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Orgel, Stephen. 1985. “Making Greatness Familiar,” in Pageantry in the Shakespearean Theater, ed. David Bergeron, Athens: University of Georgia Press. Paul, H. N. 1950. The Royal Play of “Macbeth”. New York: Macmillan. Peat, Derek. 1980. ‘“And that’s true too”: King Lear and the Tension of Uncertainty’, Shakespeare Survey, 33. Perrett, Wilfrid. 1904. Palaestra: 35: The Story of King Lear from Geoffrey of Monmouth to Shakespeare. Berlin: Mayer & Müller. Rickard, Jane. 2007. Authorship and authority: the writings of James VI and I. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Scaramelli, Girolamo. 1864. Calendar of State Papers Venetian. 35 vols., London: Historical Manuscripts Commission. Schoenbaum, Samuel. 1975. William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shickman, Allan. 1991. English Literary Renaissance, 21: 85-6. Skura, Anne Meredith. 1993. Shakespeare the Actor and the Purposes of Playing. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Somerville, Johann. 1996. “English and European Political Ideas in the Early Seventeenth Century: Revisionism and the Case if Absolutism,” Journal of British Studies, 35: 168-94. Stuart, James. 1994. The Trew Law of Free Monarches, in James VI and I: Political Writings, ed. Johann Sommerville. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tennenhouse, Leonard. 1986. Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare’s Genres. London: Methuen. Thelander, Dorothy. 1982. “Mother Goose and Her Goslings: The France of Louis XIV as Seen Through the Fairy Tale,” Journal of Modern History, 54: 467-496. Thomson, Peter. Shakespeare’s Professional Career. 1992. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Waters Bennet, Josephine. 1966. “Measure for Measure” as Royal Entertainment. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Welch, Dennis. 1996. “Christabel, King Lear, and the Cinderella. Folktale,” Papers on Language and Literature, 32: 291-314. Wickham, Glyne. 1959-1963-1981. Early English Stages. 3 vols., London: Routledge. Zemon Davis, Nathalie. 1987. Society and Culture in Early Modern France. Cambridge: Polity. Zipes, Jack. 1996. “Spells of Enchantment,” in Folk and Fairy Tales. Ed. Martin Hallett and Barbara Karasek, Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview. Žižek, Slavoj. 2008. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. New York: Picador.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Sophie ALATORRE is Lecturer in English literature at the University of Provence (Aix-Marseille I). She co-edited a book on translation (Through Other Eyes, CSP, 2007) with Richard Trim and she has contributed several articles on early modern literature. Her forthcoming publications include a monography on the imagery of mazes and labyrinths in the Renaissance (L’image du labyrinthe à la Renaissance, Champion, 2009) and an edition of three Ovidian tales (Renaissance Tales of Desire, CSP, 2010). She is currently editing a volume of conference proceedings entitled Images and Fear. Yan BRAILOWSKY is Lecturer in Early Modern literature and history at the University of Paris X at Nanterre. He is the author of a book-length study on King Lear (Paris, Sedes, 2008) and has co-edited Language and Otherness in the Renaissance (Nanterre: Presses Universitaires de Paris Ouest, 2008), with Ann Lecercle. He has published several articles on prophecy and millenarianism in Shakespeare’s dramatic works. Ifig COCOUAL teaches in preparatory classes to the (French) Grandes Ecoles at La Bruyère High School, Versailles. He has published an article on the poetics of fragmentation in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (in Etudes canadiennes 27.51, 2001). Muriel CUNIN is Lecturer at the University of Limoges, where she teaches in the department of Enlish studies. She has recently published Shakespeare et l'architecture. Nouvelles inventions pour bien bâtir et bien jouer (Paris, Honoré Champion, 2008). Her main research is about the relationships between architecture and drama in early modern England but she is now interested in the study of the relationships between architecture and intimacy, inwardness and selfhood in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. Pascale DROUET is Lecturer in Shakespeare Studies at the University of Poitiers. She has published a number of articles on the question of vagrancy and roguery in early modern English literature, including a

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monograph, Le vagabond dans l’Angleterre de Shakespeare, ou l’art de contrefaire à la ville et à la scène (L’Harmattan, 2003). She is the editor of Shakespeare au XXème siècle: Mises en scène, mises en perspective de King Richard II (PU de Rennes, 2007), The Spectacular In and Around Shakespeare (CSP, 2009) and joint editor of “The true blank of thine eye”: Approches critiques de King Lear (PUPS, 2008). In 2007, she launched the e-journal Les Cahiers Shakespeare en devenir (http://edel.univ-poitiers.fr/licorne/sommaire.php?id=3680). Robert ELLRODT is Professor emeritus at the University of Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris III. He has widely published on John Donne and the Metaphysical Poets, as in his Seven Metaphysical Poets. A Structural Study of the Unchanging Self (Oxford: OUP, 2000). He has also contributed several translations of the poetry of John Donne (Imprimerie Nationale, 1994), Keats (Imprimerie Nationale, 2000) and Shelley (Imprimerie Nationale, 2006), of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Actes Sud, 2007) and more recently of Marlowe (Doctor Faustus) and John Ford (’Tis Pity She’s a Whore) in François Laroque, Jean-Marie Maguin and Line Cottegnies eds., Théâtre Élisabéthain, 2 vols. (Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2009). Professor Ellrodt is currently finishing a book on Shakespeare and Montaigne. Claire GUÉRON is Lecturer at the University of Bourgogne (Dijon). She has recently completed her doctoral dissertation on roots and exile in Shakespeare's Tragedies and Histories (“Turning and re-turning. The experience of uprooting and banishment in Shakespeare’s writing. The examples of Richard II, King Lear, Timon of Athens and The Tempest”), and she has published three articles on related topics. She is now working on horses and horsemanship in the plays and sonnets. Pierre ISELIN is Professor of Elizabethan literature at the University of Paris-Sorbonne. He has written extensively on music and language in Shakespeare’s drama, and is the author or the editor of several book-length studies of plays like Twelfth Night (Didier-Erudition, 1995), Hamlet (Didier-Erudition, 1997), As You Like It (Didier-Erudition, 1998). He is co-author of King Lear. L’Œuvre au Noir (PUF 2008) with François Laroque and Josée Nuyts-Giornal, and has co-edited “The true blank of thine eye”: Approches critiques de King Lear (PUPS, 2008) with Pascale Drouet. He is also a performer of early music and conducts The Sorbonne Scholars.

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François LAROQUE is Professor of English literature at the University of Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris III. He is the author of Shakespeare’s Festive World, Cambridge, CUP (1991), of Court, Crowd and Playhouse (London, Thames and Hudson, 1996). He has published new editions and translations of Marlowe (Doctor Faustus) and Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet, 2005, The Merchant of Venice, 2008 and The Tempest, forthcoming). He is the co-author of King Lear. L’Oeuvre au noir, jointly written with Pierre Iselin and Josée Nuyts-Giornal. His most recent work is a co-edition with Jean-Marie Maguin and Line Cottegnies of an anthology of non Shakespearean drama (1490-1642), Théâtre Élisabéthain, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2009). David LEVIN is Lecturer in English studies at the University of Paris Ouest–Nanterre. He recently received his Ph.D. for a thesis on “Nothing and nothingness in Shakespeare’s work” which he is now revising for publication. Jonathan POLLOCK is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Perpignan. He is the author of Qu’est-ce que l’humour (Klincksieck, 2001), Le Moine (de Lewis) d’Antonin Artaud (Gallimard, 2002), Le rire du Mômo: Antonin Artaud et la littérature angloaméricaine (Kimé, 2002). He is currently finishing a book on the influence of Lucrece on English literature and another one on Ezra Pound. Mickael POPELARD is Lecturer in English Studies at the University of Caen-Basse Normandie (France). His interests include Renaissance literature as well as the history of science. He has published articles on Marlowe, Francis Bacon, and Shakespeare. He has also translated a selection of Darwin's letters into French (Origines, Lettres Choisies 18281859. Ed. Dominique Lecourt, Paris: Bayard, 2009). His forthcoming publications include a book on Francis Bacon and the figure of the scientist in Renaissance England. Richard WILSON is Professor of English literature at Cardiff University. He is the author or editor of numerous books on Shakespeare and Renaissance culture, including Will Power: Essays on Shakespearean Authority (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), Region, Religion and Patronage Lancastrian Shakespeare (co-edited with Richard Dutton and Alison Findlay. 2 vols., Manchester University Press, 2003), Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion and Resistance (Manchester University Press,

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2004) and Shakespeare in French Theory. King of Shadows (Routledge, 2007).

SELECTIVE INDEX Proper Names Adelman, Janet 113, 119, 200, 209 Aeschylus, 29 Agrippa, Cornelius, 200 Albion, 49, 186, 241 Alciati, Andreas, 72, 75n, 76n Anderson, Judith, 62, 63, 64, 65 Apollo, 11, 23, 31 Arcimboldo, Giuseppe, 110, 120 Augustine, St, 149-50, 163 Bacon, Francis, 123-24, 131, 138, 194, 198-99, 205, 209, 247 Bakhtin, Mikhaïl, 3, 99n, 104, 105, 106, 118-19 Bartas, Guillaume de Saluste du, 142-43, 149, 163, 168, 177 Baudelaire, Charles, 3, 105, 119 Bérulle, Pierre de, 163, 146n Blundeville, Thomas, 62, 65 Boaistuau, Pierre, 222 Bonnefoy, Yves, 8, 32, 90, 187, 192 Botticelli, 74, 74n Bourdieu, Pierre, 42n, 49n, 53 Brathwait, Richard, 84n, 87 Breton, Nicholas, 142, 163 Browne, Thomas, 90, 102 Bruno, Giordano, 168 Bullough, Geoffrey, 195n, 209, 235n, 242 Cardan, Jérôme, 195 Cavell, Stanley, 37, 53, 209, 239, 242 Centaur(s), 25, 75, 76, 76n, 84, 84n, 86, 86n, 92, 115 Chastel, André, 107, 119 Cinderella, 5, 226, 234-35, 235n, 236-37, 239-40, 244

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 6, 10, 15, 33, 39, 235 Conti, Natale, 86-87 Cosimo, Pierro di, 217n Cotgrave, Randle, 68, 84, 199, 199n, 210 Cousin, Jean, 71, 87 Cupid, 112, 217 Daniel, Samuel, 228 Davis, Nick, 145, 164 De Grazia, Margreta, 207, 210 Descartes, René, 130, 138 Deleuze, Gilles, 181, 184, 187, 193 Dodd, William, 125, 138, 184, 193 Donne, John, 3, 123, 138, 142, 150, 164, 199, 246 Du Bellay, Joachim, 102, 102n, 168 Dutton, Richard, 193, 229-31, 231n, 242, 247 Eagleton, Terry, 37n, 44, 45, 53, 56, 57, 65 Elias, Norbert, 90, 91, 92, 102 Elizabeth Ist, 125, 196, 227 Epicure, 3, 166, 205 Erasmus 26, 79, 80, 87, 133n Eros, 31, 114 Estienne, Charles, 100, 103 Euripides, 26, 29n Findlay, Alison, 195-96, 199, 200, 209-10, 247 Florio, John, 72, 87, 101n, 103, 10607, 120, 139, 167, 201, 210 Foucault, Michel, 22, 33, 180, 185, 193 Freud, Sigmund, 31, 33, 144, 235, 242 Gesner, Conrad, 78

250 Golding, Arthur, 63n, 65, 71, 71n, 73, 76, 79n, 87, 164 Greenblatt, Stephen, 40, 45, 54, 63, 64, 65, 112, 119, 239, 242 Guattari, Felix, 184, 187, 193 Gurr, Andrew, 226-29, 229n, 230, 232, 234, 241-42 Hades, 72 Hadot, Pierre, 136, 136n, 139 Hardison, O. B, 220 224 Hall, Thomas, 82n, 87 Harsnett, Samuel, 24, 112, 115, 119 Hecate, 11, 36, 183 Heywood, Thomas, 209 Hill, Thomas, 82, 87 Hobbes, Thomas, 194 Holinshed, Raphael, 9 Horace, 107, 177 Ixion, 70, 71, 71n, 75, 175, 217, 220 James Ist, 229-32, 234, 239-43 Jeanneret, Michel, 177 Jonson, Ben, 166, 177 Jupiter, 11, 112, 171 Kahn, Coppélia, 78, 87, 195n, 205, 210 Kayser, Wolfgang, 104-06, 116, 118, 120 Kermode, Frank, 30-31, 34, 41, 49n, 54, 119, 131, 139, 203-04, 210, 238-39, 242 King’s Men, 4, 226-30, 234, 238, 241 Knight, G. Wilson, 27, 104-05, 119, 127, 127n, 134, 139, 161, 164 Kott, Jan, 49, 50, 54, 105, 120 Lacan, Jacques, 4, 172, 177, 206, 206n, 210 Leggatt, Alexander, 60, 61, 64, 65 Leir, 9, 10, 32, 39, 118-19, 181, 195, 195n, 196, 205 Lucretius, 3, 138, 148-49, 155, 159, 164, 166-69, 169n, 170-73, 175, 176n, 177 Machiavel, Machiavelli, 75, 75n, 213 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 213, 224

Index Marlowe, Christopher, 63, 164, 24647 Mercury, 72 Mercator 93, 94 Merlin, 12, 22, 50, 51, 241 Milles, Thomas, 195 Minotaur, 76, 76n Molière, 231 Monmouth, Geoffroy of, 9, 10n, 243 Montaigne, Michel de, 1, 3, 18, 54, 71, 72, 72n, 87, 88, 101n, 103, 106-07, 120, 138-39, 146n, 164, 166-68, 172, 177-78, 213, 225, 246 More, Thomas, 135, 139 Nemesis, 182 Nero, 25, 106 Niobe, 79, 79n Nobody, 215n Oedipus, 26 Omphale, 81 Oppian, 78, 88 Ortelius, Abraham, 101 Orwell, George, 7, 34, 127, 139, 161, 164 Ovid, 65, 71, 71n, 73, 76, 79n, 84n, 87, 170 Panofsky, Erwin, 16n, 34, 74, 88 Parker, Patrica, 36, 49, 54, 202, 211 Paul (Saint), 73 Perrault, Charles, 226, 237 Poliziano, Angiolo, 168 Prodigal Son, 80, 80n, 88 Pliny the Elder, 74, 75n Pontano, Giovanni, 168 Prometheus, 71, 218n Puttenham, George, 39, 46n, 51 Pygmalion, 238 Revels Office, 228, 234 Ricoeur, Paul, 32n Ronsard, Pierre de, 168 Rotman, Brian, 161, 164 Ruscelli, Girolamo,76n, 88 Sawday, Jonathan, 97n, 99n, 100, 103

New Essays on King Lear Schoenbaum, Samuel, 227, 234, 234n, 243 Seneca, 26, 34 Shakespeare, William All’s Well That Ends Well, 240 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 234 Antony and Cleopatra, 31, 97n, 156n As You Like It, 181, 229, 23334, 246 Coriolanus, 181, 189, 189n, 193, 203 Hamlet, 8, 25, 32, 33, 40, 47, 53, 74, 119, 127, 127n, 144, 202, 202n, 209-10, 214, 221, 224-25, 242, 246 Henry V, 2, 42, 55, 101, 147n, 151, 212, 230, 239 Julius Caesar, 38, 42, 55 King Henry IV, Part 1, 11 King Henry IV, Part 2, 181 King Henry VIII, 82n King John, 19, 132, 132n, 140, 153, 197, 211 Love’s Labour Lost, 2, 42, 153n Macbeth, 15, 23, 27, 28, 53, 81, 123, 127, 139, 144, 164, 231-32, 241, 243 Measure for Measure, 49n, 54, 145n, 154n, 231-32, 232n, 244 Much Ado About Nothing, 19, 144, 164, 197 Othello, 25, 31, 54, 71n, 78, 79n, 81n, 83n, 85, 88, 123, 139, 231-32 Pericles, 26, 82n, 237-38, 238n Richard II, 11, 144, 181, 202, 246 Richard III, 15, 82n, 133, 199, 210

251

Romeo and Juliet, 31, 42, 47n, 55, 145n, 181, 219, 247, Sonnets, 25, 234, 246 The Tempest, 119, 129, 140, 181, 209, 239, 246-47 The Winter’s Tale, 3, 16, 26, 126, 139, 145n Timon of Athens, 70, 76, 76n, 81, 88, 246 Troilus and Cressida, 83n, 209 Twelfth Night, 45n, 50, 53, 55, 57, 100n, 240, 246 Two Gentlemen of Verona, 48, 55, 181 Sibony, Daniel, 192, 192n, 193 Sisyphus, 71, 71n Snyder, Susan, 88, 213, 225 Socrates, 26 Soellner, Rolf Sophocles, 29, 172 Speed, John, 94, 95, 101 Spenser, Edmund, 9, 80, 80n, 81n, 88 Spurgeon, Caroline, 96, 103 Stonehenge, 11, 30n, 212 Tate, Nahum, 7, 31 Tayler, Edward, 144, 147-49, 165 Thanatos, 31 Tityus, 175 Tolstoy, Leon, 7, 34, 39, 164 Topsell, Edward, 78, 89 Tory, Geoffroy, 220 Ulmus, Marcus Antonius, 82n, 89 Valla, Lorenzo, 168 Verstegen, Richard, 218n Vesalius, Andreas, 91n, 93, 97n, 100-01, 103 Vitruvius, 93, 103, 107, 220 Watson, Thomas, 70, 89 Welsford, Enid, 131, 133, 140 Whitney, Geoffrey, 77, 78, 89 Zitner, S. P., 19n, 28n, 34, 37, 42, 46, 49, 55

Index

252

Common Names Adultery, 20, 82, 201, 207-09, 223 Alienation, 106, 112, 118, 189, 198, 203, 241 Anagnorisis, 3, 22, 26, 51, 123 Anagram, 68 Anamorphosis, 218 Architecture, 90, 93, 94, 98-100, 103, 245 Ars moriendi, 69 Astrology, 129, 151, 201 Atheism, 9, 167 Atoms, atomist, 3, 4, 148n, 166-69, 174-75, 177 Banishment, 4, 18, 27, 173, 180-82, 185-92, 246 Bastardy, 4, 61, 194-97, 199-204, 206, 209-11 Beard, 2, 17, 82, 82n, 83, 85, 87, 111 Bestiary, 83, 109-11 Black humour, 105, 108 Cannibalism, 78, 183 Carnivalesque, 14, 212 Castration, 83, 114, 216-17 Childbirth, 160 Christinanity, 167 Coincidentia oppositorum, 219 Concetto, 110 Cornucopia, 190 Counterfeiter, 201, 208 Cynicism, Cynics, 3, 136, 170, 223 Damnation, 83, 156 Dialectics, 4, 191-92 Dissection, 95-97, 100, 103 Divine right, 200, 227 Dog, 30, 63, 75, 98, 108-09, 117, 119, 235, 239 Dragon, 107, 111, 184 Emblem, 78, 83, 87-89, 109, 124, 184, 192, 216, 220 Envy, 198, 198n, 205 Epicureanism, 3, 136, 136n, 169, 175

Eunuch, 198 Female genitalia, 2, 205n, 208 Feudal tradition, 86 Folly, 21, 45, 47, 47n, 79, 80n, 87, 99, 118, 124, 128-30, 134, 136, 139, 155, 161, 204, 216-17 Fortune, 2, 20, 68, 69n, 70-73, 87, 102, 133, 133n, 134, 151n, 18081, 189, 201, 212, 214-15 Grotesque, 2, 3, 25, 27, 67, 85, 99, 99n, 104-08, 110-13, 113n, 11516, 118-20, 139, 213, 218, 223 Exile, 4, 14, 18, 179-82, 187, 189, 193, 246 Ex nihilo, 3, 144, 149, 154-55, 174 Exorcism, 112 Hamartia, 21 Hell, 4, 26, 31, 70-71, 79, 83-85, 97n, 114-15, 152, 160, 175-76, 224 Hippocratic physiology, 208 Hybrid, hybridity, 61, 64, 75, 76, 85, 104, 107, 110, 115-16, 118, 213, 222n Hysterica passio, 24, 99, 115, 205 Hysteron proteron, 51 Inelocutio, 2, 48-50, 52, 53 Incestuous, 22, 204, 206, 236, 238 Jouissance, 223 Legitimacy, 13, 169, 182, 185, 194, 197, 203-04, 206, 209, 214 Lex talionis, 180-81, 185 Looking-glass, 74 Marriage, 60, 111, 149, 200, 210, 219, 222-23, 237 Medicine, 47, 124, 124n, 133 Menschenalphabeten, 220 Metamorphosis, 76n, 84n, 110, 114, 116, 221 Morality play(s), 19, 61, 111 Mother, 15-16, 18, 22, 58, 61, 78, 87, 115, 119, 189, 196, 204-05, 209-10, 213, 237, 243, 195n

New Essays on King Lear Misogynous, 75, 83 Mythology, 11, 31, 85 Natural law, 9, 197 Natural Philosophy Obscene, 83, 110, 117-18 Odor di femmina, 221 Overreacher, 223 Pastoral, 27, 94-95, 98, 189 Patriarchy, 221, 224 Pietà, 30, 86, 175, 238 Poor Law, 197 Pragmatic, 59, 61, 65 Primogeniture, 203, 206-07, 213 Protestantism, 200 Proverb, 62-64, 71, 199 Rebus, 215, 219 Retribution, 170, 182, 182n, 216-17, 223 Rhetoric, 2, 28, 36-54, 127, 142, 158, 215, 236, 242 Rota fortunae, 68, 70 Self-knowledge, 3, 122-24, 134 Senex iratus, 85, 116

253

Sententiae, 27, 52, 62, 100 Shame, 16, 91, 120, 207, 222 Skepticism, 2, 3, 6, 130, 137 Smell, 84, 92, 108, 196, 221-22 Snake, 83 Sparagmos, 104, 14, 118 Speech act, 41, 65 Stoicism, 16, 167 Syllepsis, 44, 44n Theatre of the Absurd, 3, 105, 119 Theatrum (anatomicum) mundi, 90, 102 Theology, 36, 141, 146, 148-49, 184 Topology, 219 Usurpation, 202 Vagina, 84, 213, 222 Vanity, 213, 215 Voyeurism, 221 Wolf, 64, 78, 109, 110n, 187, 202n Zero, 42, 145, 151, 154, 161-62, 164, 213, 219, 223 Zodiac, 111, 212, 218