1 Intertextuality in Edward Bond’s Lear Edward Bond is an English socialist playwright of over fifty plays, most of which portrays violence and aggression man inflicts upon one another in order to stimulate changes in society. Having lived through the Second World War and through his national service in the British Army, Bond has recognized the violence that has been hidden behind the veil of man’s normal social behavior. In his intertext of King Lear, Bond reconstructs the plot of King Lear by combining King Lear’s plot and the Gloucester subplot, accentuating the cruelty inflicted over humanity. Also, Bond concludes his play very differently from Shakespeare. As he disagrees with the ways Shakespeare concludes King Lear with the downfall of the universe brought about by human cruelty and the characters’ total resignation, Bond, here, contends for the significance of writing for social utility in order to create a rational society rather than m erely illustrating and m agnifying the picture of the w orld going through its decadence as Shakespeare did. For Bond, “a rational way to achieve a rational society includes writing plays, that means teaching, that means discussion, that means persuading, that means caring” (Bond, 1976, p. 417). Arguing for the utilization of art to initiate a rational society Bond calls his theatre “rational theatre”. As Daniel R. Jones explains: "[R]ational theatre" denies the view that man is innately aggressive; that the present social order is the best man can do, … In place of such pessimism, Bond offers the vision that a good society creates good men, that the present social order is its own form of violence, and that man can change his society. (Jones, 1980, p. 517) Theatre, for Bond, is the miniature that reaches out to offer solutions to the magnitude, to the society—a level which Shakespeare did not offer his audience, because—in Bond’s view—Shakespeare was too much in thrall to established concepts of nature which denied the possibility of radical change . M oreover, Bond changes the relationship of the main characters. Cordelia is not Lear’s daughter, but a daughter of a priest whose belief in the concept of “natural” cruelty of human from which the justification of the necessity of social institutions established to keep humanity’s peace is identical to the society that Shakespeare ’s King Lear and Bond’s Lear have established. The Intertextuality in Edward Bond’s rewriting of King Lear into Lear can be considered a dem ythologization of these concepts of nature constructed by Shakespeare’s King Lear. This has been done through Bond’s redefinition of the concepts of social and natural structure, which intends to undermine the Elizabethan hierarchical social structure, redefine the idea of morality and its necessity for human beings and amplify the social criticisms implicit in Shakespeare. The idea of hierarchical social and natural structure and the “canon” Hierarchy: the ideal external nature of King Lear’s world The idea of external nature in King Lear as constructed and believed by the Elizabethans had been established as a concept of hierarchy imbued in society and nature. The structure of hierarchy called the “Chain of Being” becomes the definitive 2 structure by which the Elizabethan’s as well as the King Lear’s characters’ lives are governed. It also acts as the pattern of ideal, law and morality to which man aspires , in order to be closer to God or the gods. The Chain of Being is the ladder of creation which contains every being in heaven and on earth. All beings in the chain correspond to one another. Thus, commotion on earth would result also in commotion in heaven or contrariwise. The whole Chain consists of God, angels, human beings, animals, vegetables, and minerals respectively in form of descending hierarchies. Also, within each ladder of the Chain, there are hierarchies of such beings. In the realm of heaven, God is in his highest place of the hierarchy followed by angels, who are closest to God in their divinity and reason. After the angels, there are human beings who are on top of the earthly realm, residing between the celestial and the earthly beings. Among the earthly beings, human beings are the closest to angels. Thus, they are the most similar to divinity and are the only being on earth that is capable of reason. However, human beings are yet far from perfection, since they are also similar to animals— which possess physical appetite and sensory perception yet without reasons. Then, there are the vegetative and the mineral which are ranked on the bottom of the Chain. These beings lack sensory perception; thus, they are without reasons. The discussion of the whole Chain of Being, nevertheless, is beyond the scope of this article. Thus, only the hierarchies within the human realm and some of the relationships that would be relevant to further discussions will be discussed. The clash of nature and civilization in the society of Lear In Bond’s Lear, the concept of the correspondences between the social and the natural in King Lear has constantly been questioned. While Shakespeare and the Elizabethans posit that the natural has to be acquired through the aspiration towards perfection—being in harmony with morality, with the virtues constituting order in society—Bond argues for the clash between bio-sphere, the sphere serving human’s biological needs, and techno-sphere, the sphere constituted by laws and social morality in which man is forced to live in ways for which he is not biologically designed. King Lear’s primitive nature can also be interpreted as a condition where man is underdeveloped in his senses, intellect and decorum . King Lear 1, in his madness in the wilderness, loses his sense of reality, breaking completely away from his sense and decorum. He thinks Edgar, disguised as Poor Tom, is a father deposed by his daughters like King Lear himself: “[h]ast thou given all to thy two daughters,” (Wells, 2001, Scene 11, 43). Edgar, adopting a disguise as Poor Tom—the basest creature in the human Chain of Being—announces “Edgar, I nothing am ,” and mumbles names of the fiends relinquishing his status as Gloucester’s heir and even as a sane common man (Scene 7, 186). Both King Lear and Edgar are seen, from the Elizabethan perspective, to be deteriorated in their statuses, sense and decorum. Therefore, both characters have to break away from the primitiveness of nature and enter into social order to become “natural,” to conform to the decorum and orders set up by his society. The King has to be recovered by culture—music. And Edgar, after For future purposes, “Lear” refers to the character in Bond’s play, and “King Lear” to the character in Shakespeare. 1 3 sacrificing his status to perform a virtuous son’s duty, is restored to his rank and reconciles with Gloucester. For Bond, by contrast, that primitive nature—the bio-sphere, the natural— is the state man has been born to be evolved in. It is the state which man has to take into account in order to create a society that serves his biological desires. This biosphere is in opposition w ith the society that is regulated by law, culture and morality—what Bond calls the techno-sphere. In an interview with Karl-Heinz Stoll, Bond announces that our problem is [T]o create a society in which it is possible for people to function in a way which would be natural for them. And the only sort of society where that is possible is a society in which people have initiative for their own lives and have to accept the responsibilities for their actions. (Bond, 1976, p. 416) The society of Lear is radically different from that of the Renaissance King. The present society in Lear is a society in which the natural is thoroughly contradicted by the cultural. Bond argues that disorder derives from culture and society rather than human nature or nature itself. In his play, law, order and technological advances are in no way related to common sense. While Lear, in the first act, is on his wall inspection trip, the Councillor oddly describes the geography of the ground on which he is standing, asking “[i]sn’t it a swam p on this m ap? ” Fontanelle, Lear’s younger daughter, announces to her sister, Bodice, “My feet are wet” after hearing that (p. 2). The map—the tool developed by law and culture—does not serve to perfect human’s commonsensical perception of their surroundings. Rather, it disharmonizes them from their environment. The society Bond asks for requires a radical change from the society of King Lear and of his own time and place. Instead of having to obey the order and morality like King Lear’s society or living in the mechanical world and being deprived of common sense, the society Bond propagandizes for is that in which man, like animals, “will slip out of its cage [socialized morality], and lies in the fields, and run by the river, and groom itself in the sun, and sleeps in its hole from night to morning,” to be given complete freedom according to his biological needs (46). Even though Bond prefers the primitive nature where man can live in the way they have biologically evolved, he also accepts that the advent of social institutions make it impossible for humans to turn back to their bio-sphere. Thus, he claims that man, like his Lear, has to change the society to be a healthier place for life. In other words, they have to be responsible for the afflictions they have given each other and, at least, reduce them. Lear, in act three, states that he “made all the mistakes in the world and [he] pays for each of them” (p. 89). Here, Lear, being responsible for his actions, is Bond’s representative figure of the people in the society who initiate changes that he propagandizes for in the interview. For Shakespeare, to be natural is to be in harmony with law and order with which the authority has ideologized their subjects. Bond argues that civilization, social institutions and technology rid man of his ordinary nature, making him a violent 4 creature in search of a return to harmony with his natural existence. Social morality is the tool to “protect social institution s” by the utilization of “forces and the manufacturer of myths … or false world views” in order to maintain an “irrational society” (Bond, 1976, p. 417). Morality and civilization are not the ideal or perfection; instead, they are forces serving the tyranny of the ruler. With these destructive social institutions, like the monarchical institution of Lear which creates the moralistic false world view that his wall will “make you [his people] free” despite the destruction it has caused, man in society has become more violent because they attempt to be free from the forces and the irrationality the authorities have imposed upon them. Furthermore, Bond expands on the social criticisms which might in fact be presented implicitly in King Lear. In many Feminist interpretations of King Lear, King Lear is “a m an m ore sinning than sinned against” (Bloom , 1998, p. 496). H is daughters, Gonoril and Regan, are not considered “ingrateful” but are supposedly the daughters whose ingratitude is the product of a tyrannical father whose love contest asks them not for love but its hypocrite demonstration. In Lear, Bond even dramatizes the aggression of the two sisters further. Bodice and Fontanelle, Lear’s daughters who are equivalent to King Lear’s Gonoril and Regan, are portrayed to be ruthlessly cruel when they have their own power. Like Regan who could order Gloucester’s blinding to prevent him from helping her father, Bodice and Fontanelle, raised according to the rules of socialized morality created by Lear, a political despot, are capable of torturing Warrington cruelly. A fter having cut his tongue out and having tortured him , Fontanelle, not being satisfied with the aggression before her, announces “[o]h, Christ, why did I cut his tongue out? I want to hear him scream!” as if she could not get enough of her own ruthlessness (17). Bodice could even witness the torture quite calmly while knitting. Her knitting could be considered one of the emblems of civilization she has learned from her society. Her mumbling “plain, purl, plain,” the revision of the pattern of her knitting, is similar to the pattern of aggres sion that she and her sister have imitated from their father, and she performs it against those without power. In portraying these patterns, Bond announces through his drama that the civilization and socialized morality are the concepts by which human beings have been raised and governed, and they act as a wall restricting people from living according to their biological needs. These concepts later become innate in their being, and they use them to justify their aggression towards others who reside upon the lower ladders of society than their own. Correspondence between the social and the natural in King Lear and Lear’s eradication of absolute hierarchy The correspondence between the social and the natural in King Lear can be seen through the correspondences between the macrocosm (heaven and the universe) and the body politic, and between the macrocosm and the microcosm (human body). There are many references to the concept of correspondences between the macrocosm and the body politic in the Renaissance. John Norden, for instance, describes the R enaissance England as “the heavens and Queen Elizabeth and her C ouncil [corresponding to] the primum mobile or controlling sphere, within whose compass 5 any other motion must be contained.” 2 As the state is equivalent to heaven, the position of the king, the ruler of the state, is thus compared to the sun, the ruler of the heavens, from which the commonplace le roi soleil is derived (Tillyard, p. 97). The correspondences between heaven and earth and human body, “the idea of man summing up the universe in himself,” is another concept evidently presented in the drama (p. 99). “The constitution of [man’s] body duplicated the constitution of the earth” (Tillyard, p. 431). And the “commonest of all correspondences in poetry is that between the storms and earthquakes of the great world and the stormy passions of man” (p. 100). Thus, the chaos caused by either the macrocosm or the body politic, the supreme body of the microcosm, would have an impact on the commotion in the others; as the First Gentleman describes that King Lear, in his rage, to “Strives in his little world of man to outscorn / The to- and-fro-conflicting wind and rain.” (Scene 8, 9-10) The concept of the Renaissance correspondences is derived from its medieval forefather though it is not believed as rigidly. Rather, it takes on a double function. First, it ex presses the E lizabethan ’s desire for order. S econd , the correspondences serve as a fix ed pattern as oppose d to the m utability a nd imperfections of humanity’s real life. Thus, though there are orders and restraint as the absolute entity to which humans must aspire, the correspondences between the ladders of the Elizabethan system seek also to depict uncertainty as a part of the Chain, as one could fall from their place or move upward in the Chain. The intertwining concepts of the correspondence between the macrocosm, body politic and microcosm in King Lear inheres in the King and the response of external nature towards his being, especially in the heath scene. And as the picture of the correspondences, King Lear ’s rage—the comm otion within the m icrocosm of the body politic caused by his daughters’ ingratitude, the break of the Chain of Being—is echoed extensively in the storm breaking out in the world of external nature. The scene depicts the chaos caused by the fall of the great man to the basest status, running “unbonneted” under the turbulent storm (scene 8, 13). The correspondences are also the indication of the privileging of the protagonists’ absolute authority in canonical drama which is overturned in Bond’s Lear through the absence of the connection between the macrocosm and the body politic in his play. The typical identification with the nobility of classical and early modern drama is overturned by illustrating the nobleman’s follies and the changes in both ranks and ideology he has undergone. Here, one might argue that the locality in which Bond places his drama is not the place where Elizabethan values would be appropriate. Thus, the absences of these concepts seem normal. However, it should be noted that the locality of Bond’s Lear—though with the presences of modern-seeming technologies, such as the eye-removing machines and autopsy—is not intended to be the every-day society of Bond’s contemporaries either. Rather, Lear’s world seems mythical and is permeated with anachronism in order for Bond to be able to dramatize aggression in its bleakest forms. Thus, these absences might seem to be natural yet they are worthy of observation in considering Bond’s intertext of King Lear. Firstly, 2 Norden, J. (n.d.). A Christian familiar comfort quoted in Tillyard, 1982, p. 97. 6 the absence of the relation between the macrocosm and the body politic—le roi soleil—is a conspicuous illustration of the dethronement of King Lear’s absolute authority. In Bond’s drama, nature is the external force, having no attachment to any man’s fate. Having been defeated in the war, Bond’s Lear escapes into the woods. However, unlike Shakeapeare’s King Lear, his fall from throne to terrestrial condition does not cause any commotions in heaven or on earth. There were no storms, just Lear feeding himself on a leftover mumbling to himself rather serenely, not bellowing into the stormy night: My daughters have taken the bread from my stomach. They grind it with my tears and the cries of famished children—and eat. … and I am famished dog that sits on the earth and howls. I open my mouth and they place an old coin in my tongue. … I’m old and too weak to climb out of this grave again. (20). The self-depiction of Lear here is beneath even the level of a normal human being, and degrading if it were in King Lear’s case. Lear here is portrayed as a running-away dog, asking for favor from his daughters. Moreover, Lear’s dethronement is even portrayed as the right action for his daughters to perform, since he is such a despot. King Lear’s rage is represented by the storm, showing the relation between the microcosm and the body politic. When the king and the nobles are brought down to the bottom of the chain, nature turns into chaos. In King Lear, when the King is driven away to the heath, the rain and the sky seem to lament for his loss and for the authority he has bestowed upon the wrong descendants. Unlike Lear, who is, though, also escaping from his daughters to save his life, King Lear could retain his greatness through the storm breaking out as if the macrocosm is outraging at the crime done to its counterpart, the King. Nature, in Lear, is portrayed as the sphere to nurture humanity’s biological or psychological needs. Lear escapes into the woods for his life and is nurtured by the Gravedigger’s Boy, the figure of the golden past. Thus, nature does not represent anyone nor it deemed able to take revenge for anyone. The best nature could do in Lear is to cure him from the corruption of civilization he has grown old with and which he has set as a standard to raise his daughter and rule his subjects. Redefinition of the idea of morality and its necessity for human being The interconnections between law, order, morality and what is considered natural human behavior is another correspondence between the social and the natural in King Lear. However, Bond, in Lear, negates the significance of morality in relation to man’s well-being through his portrayal of their tyranny, in forms of law and order, imposed upon the human instinctive biological needs—the source of aggression in society. In King Lear, custom and morality act as the “expression of the inner pattern of nature, the basis of law and the practical guide for man” (Danby, 1969, p. 25). The idea of morality in Shakespeare is metaphysical and transcendental—the idea through which law and order are originated. First, there are the concepts of virtue and restraint as the striving for perfection to the upper hierarchy in the chain: the ideals needed to keep society safe, sound and in control. Morality in King Lear finds its absolute paragon in Cordelia. The virtue that is both the cause of the downfall and the 7 demonstration that her character reflects her level in the hierarchy is sincerity as shown in Cordelia’s honesty in the love trial. The other key virtue is restraint, the quality by which the best of mankind and nobility is distinguished, as Cordelia’s restraint of her sorrow in learning the fate of her beloved father is analogous to the beauty of nature and the preciousness of jewels: … Patience and sorrow strove Who should express her goodliest. You have seen Sunshine and rain at once; … As pearls from diamonds dropped … (Scene 17, 18-22) Cordelia, with her honesty restraint and gratitude, is “an integration of nature”—the traditional morality, an absolute apex of the value of nature man has to aspire to (Danby, part. 1, chap. 3). Bond, in his intertext, presents the evil of social morality as the destructive unnatural force taken for granted to be “natural” in King Lear. And his characters are regulated by social morality, which is comparable to those in Shakespeare who live their lives according to the sets of values established by social institutions. Bond also insists on the ominous political implication of the ideas of virtue and restraint created by social institutions. In Lear, Bond’s Cordelia, like her counterpart in King Lear, is the product of the same system as Lear. Bond does not see Cordelia’s gratitude and patience as virtues, but as representative of social morality which will continue the tyrannical society a monarchy like King Lear and his Lear have created. In King Lear, the idea of virtue and morality is initiated by the Elizabethan belief in the hierarchy of beings and the righteous authority of the ruler who has been anointed by the divinity to have his right as the monarch. In Lear, the ideas of virtue and morality still follow the sam e pattern, but Bond criticizes the system by show ing the destructive consequences that follow along with it. Bond re-characterizes the new Cordelia, the daughter not of a tyrannical king father but of a priest whose standard of social morality is inherited by her, to show that a person who is seen as virtuous could just be the same kind of ruler as Lear has been. This is because both Cordelias have been raised to be “true” as far as what they believe as virtue and law permit them. And the law, as Lear comments, “always does more harm than crime” and morality is “a form of violence” (pp. 98-99). Cordelia’s society is the same as Lear’s. She tells Lear that they will create the society Lear “dream[s] of.” (p. 98) She is raised to believe that to “put a fence” around their house and “shut everyone else out” is a sound way to live (p. 30). After her pastoral sphere in the woods in which she lives with the Gravedigger’s Boy has been destroyed because of Lear’s intrusion, Cordelia becomes a new despotic ruler and continues the construction of the wall. Her system of morality is not different from that of Lear when he was king. The virtue of Cordelia’s guerrilla is that only one who “hates” can be trusted, which indicates that her rule has created sets of law and regulations that would do more harm than crime as Lear says (p. 51). Furthermore, the idea of patience, as revered in Shakespeare’s drama, is undermined by Bond through his illustrations of its ominous political implications created by social institutions. In Shakespeare, as Wilson Knight has pointed out “Mankind are … continually being ennobled by suffering” (Knight, 2001, p.222). 8 There is beauty and philosophical greatness in humanity’s pain and their ability to endure brutality, as described earlier in the scenes of King Lear on the heath and Cordelia’s sorrow or even in Gloucester’s blinding, as if they were processes of perfecting humanity to its ideal form. In Bond’s play, the anachronisms dramatize the brutality to make his audiences realize that the grand emotional impact of human ’s plights in King Lear has fogged the fact that people are violent because they are living in incongruity with their natural existence. Bodice and Fontanelle are violent, as seen in their cruelty towards Warrington, because they have grown up all their life seeing the inhuman manner with which their father has treated the workers on the wall. The characters in Bond are represented to be living in a techno -sphere where everything relies on human-constructed objects, depriving man of the ability to gratify his biological desire. The maps blind the councilor from his commonsense of locality and later perform as Bodice’s straitjacket incarcerating her as the slave of her own authority. The eye-removing machine is also a tool devised by technological advance only to make human suffering more casual. The eye-removing scene here functions similarly to Gloucester’s blinding in King Lear. The scene of Gloucester’s blinding, especially for the Elizabethan audience, is cruel and graphic. However, B ond stages the eye-rem oving scene of Lear as if it w ere a casual practice, accentuating his criticism of the modern worldview towards cruelty. Since man has tried to make it look as if pain is comfortable, the casualness of the removal of Lear’s eyes implies that people in Bond’s society are even more brutal. These technological devices are developed in opposition to humanity’s instinctive and biological desires. W hat m an essentially needs is love, like King Lear, and to be raised with care regardless of regulation and decorum. For Bond, “a state of moral maturity demands a course of action that conflicts with the limits set by society” (Scharine, 1976, pp. 190-191). His Lear, at the end of the play, performs such actions. Though he announces that he is “not fit as [he] was” a politically moralistic despot, he could still make his “mark” (p. 102). In this action, Lear dem onstrates, first, the act of change to his society by trying to exterminate the limits of society—the wall—he has set up by himself. Second, he takes the responsibility for the harms he has initiated into his society and shows the later generations working around the wall that they too could change their society. Amplification of social criticism implicit in Shakespeare Justice in King Lear and Lear A traditional response … tends to treat Shakespeare as if he had the self-knowledge of modern man and fails to acknowledge the Tudor values that inform the text. … Lear …was the most radical of all critics but Lear’s insight was expressed as madness or hysteria, because at the time it was the only coherent way such perceptions could be organized. (Bond, 1970, p. 24) Justice in King Lear seems to be bestowed upon those conforming to the codes of society—the king and parents obeyed, virtue measured by gratitude, patience, and loyalty—as seen in the case of Cordelia’s reconciliation with King Lear, and 9 Kent’s and Edgar’s restoration to their positions. However, if considering the ways in which Shakespeare characterized his antagonists, as well as King Lear himself in his insanity, as “the spokesmen to subversive truth” and the eventual downfalls of his protagonists, it appears that Shakespeare in King Lear—as seen by many critics as well as by Bond—was also challenging his own canon and decorum.3 But he might not be able to criticize his system so explicitly because of the Renaissance authority and censorship. The quotation taken from Bond’s interview is distinct evidence of Bond’s account of King Lear. In Lear, justice is defined by the ways in which man can live in his natural way, the ways man’s biological and psychological requirements agree with, as Bond has pointed out in his Preface to Lear that “[j]ustice is allowing people to live in the way for which they evolved” (Bond, p. 9). The way Bond amplifies the criticism of the justice system by Shakespeare can be seen in the overturn of poetic justice, the illu stration of m an ’s desire to be free from socialized institution s an d th e magnification of the brutal comedy (called grotesque by many critics) in King Lear. The idea of absolute monarchy in Elizabethan society helps eradicate or at least reduce the wrongs done by King Lear to his daughters. However, the plights King Lear has gone through can be accounted for as reimbursement he has to pay back to those he has wronged. In the modern society of Bond, where such an idea is no longer important, King Lear’s fault can be perceived more easily. Bond amplifies King Lear’s fault in Lear by re-constructing the new conclusion of poetic justice in a different direction from that in Shakespeare. King Lear and Lear operate their power through infantile egocentricity and they have to suffer its consequence by undergoing the condition they have imposed upon others. King Lear has to undergo suffering for having done wrong to Cordelia and Kent. His escape into the heath–though seen by som e as purification—is palpably degradation—especially within Elizabethan doctrine—and is a punishment for his loss of reason. Bond makes Lear responsible for the type of society and people he has created by teaching people of a just and liberated society through the analogy of the bird whose beautiful voice is lost after having been put in a cage, and by taking action in destroying the wall though he has to pay for it with his life. The criticism of justice in King Lear and Lear’s presentation of man’s need to be free from socialized institutions and their rituals is also a social criticism implied by Shakespeare that Bond has amplified in Lear. The nature of justice in King Lear is innate as a part of the center of the society, the King. In Shakespeare’s play, nature is regarded as existing in forms of law, order and social institutions in accordance with the power of the King. However, King Lear’s absolute authority is also overturned along with the idea that King is the embodiment of justice. King Lear’s “When I do stare, see how the subject quakes” is undermined by the mockery of the trial of the “join-stool” (scene 13, 47). Justice in King Lear cannot perform its expected function as the punisher of the wrongdoer, since the mock trial of King Lear is operated by madmen and a fool. In portraying the trial thus, justice also is shown in its most 3 I would like to express my thanks to Ajarn Jeffrey Kramer (Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Liberal Arts, Thammasat University). The quotation is from a note I have taken during his lecture on Shakespeare in 2011. 10 absurd form as an exercise of power and vengeance of the powerless. The criticism of justice in Lear and Bond’s presentation of man’s need to be free from socialized institutions and their rituals is shown in the trial, a form of social ritual, of Lear set up by Bodice and Fontanelle. The criticism of justice that is implicit in King Lear is exploited by Bond. In his note written before writing Lear, Bond pictures Lear as “a man who has been in prison for a long time. He is released and goes through the tragedy of freedom.4 This is the process through which Lear, similarly to King Lear, has gone through his education and has learned to differentiate between justice and righteousness through being nurtured by nature. Thus, when he comes back to society, he acts as a healthier human being—urging the cause of man’s freedom from moralized institutions. Rather than suggesting the crudity of justice implicitly as in Shakespeare, Bond directly criticizes the system in its skeleton form. Bodice tells the judge to “goad [Lear] if it helps—but not too openly” (p.38). Lear says he gave the judge his job because he was “corrupt” (p. 40). Also, Lear sees an image of himself in the mirror as an animal in “a little cage of bars,” signifying the condition of hum an beings under the power of social institution s that entitle themselves as justice to override those under their power. Lear’s description of the image of the animal in the cage illustrates how much social institution are cages cruelly incarcerating man in unnatural manners: “who shut that animal in a glass cage … You let it lick the blood from its hair in the corner of a cage with nowhere to hide from its tormentors.” And during such description, Lear calls for the fundamental emotion that would originate “change” in his society, which is to “have pity!” (pp. 4041). In addition to his redefining the idea of society and amplifying the social criticisms Shakespeare in King Lear has not made sufficiently explicit, the final action of Lear depicts Bond’s Lear taking action. As grand as the deaths of King Lear and Cordelia are in their representation of the falling apart of the transcendental values of King Lear, Lear’s death over the wall, though he is not surrounded by his lamenting subjects, promises the second coming of “one more” revolution over the wall (p. 102). 4 Bond, E. (2000-2001). 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