Source Citation
Spotswood, Jerald W. "Maintaining hierarchy in 'The Tragedie of King Lear.'." Studies in
English Literature, 1500-1900 38.2 (1998): 265+. Gale Power Search. Web. 8 Apr. 2012.
In tracing the theater's role in eliciting social change in early modern England, many
recent critics have focused upon King Lear as a central text, citing the breakdown of
authority and service within the play as evidence of its subversive force. For John Turner,
Lear portrays a world that "collapses beyond repair," and presents a prehistory in which
authority and service "melt mystifyingly into one another."(1) Even Stephen Greenblatt, a
forceful proponent of the subversion-containment model, concedes that Lear is
Shakespeare's greatest example of the "process of containment . . . strained to the
breaking point."(2) Yet models dependent upon subversion and containment often present
social change as an all-or-nothing affair, occluding Shakespeare's negotiation between the
forces of change and stasis.(3) Lear may have helped to bring about the "deconsecration
of sovereignty";(4) it did not deconsecrate privilege, status, or hierarchy. Distinctions
within the aristocracy and, more importantly, between aristocrats and commoners are
enforced, both on stage and in public, through performance.(5) "[D]ifferences" in
clothing, language, and manners maintain hierarchy in a "diuided . . . Kingdome"
(I.iv.593, I.i.38-9).(6)
Recent criticism of Lear, focusing on the crisis of authority and service in the play, has
followed two distinct lines of thought. The first approach, most recently argued by
Richard Strier, claims that Lear "can be seen, in part, as an extended meditation on the
kinds of situation in which resistance to legally constituted authority becomes a moral
necessity, and in which neutrality is not a viable possibility." According to Strier, "the
quality of normative or ideal courtliness is entirely missing from the world of this play."
In its absence, "touchstones of value" become "plain speech and conscientious breaches
of decorum."(7) The second approach finds that Lear portrays the collapse of a feudal
order founded upon the tenets of authority and service. Such readings necessarily present
the sovereign as the emblem for hierarchical order. When "tragedy performs the
degradation of the cultural image of the sovereign, it deprives the monarchy of its central
bastion, its ultimate weapon," according to Franco Moretti. Abdication is figured as a
"tyrannical act" and one which unhinges all forms of authority. The former approach
presents Lear as a moral corrective of authority, while the latter finds "the principle of
authority is dissolved" altogether.(8) Using Lear as a central text, both approaches assert
that Renaissance drama, in subverting the relationship between authority and service,
acted as a revolutionary force.
In contrast to such assertions, I argue that Renaissance drama reinforces symbolic
boundaries between gentlemen and commoners, even as it reveals the performative
aspects of both roles. That is, though the likeness of a gentleman could be imitated on
stage by a common player, the attitudes voiced and performed through this stand-in
gentleman tended almost by definition to assert the privileges of the gentry. Performance
subverts authority; yet it also recuperates hierarchy, reproducing systematically structured
distinctions through what Paul Connerton has described as a "choreography of
authority."(9)
Culturally determined and symbolically bound, gentility is reproduced by individuals
trained in the intricacies of elite performance. While the accumulation of wealth and
property represents the means to gentility, elite performance often takes generations to
perfect, for there is quite a difference between "being able to recognise a code and being
able to incorporate it," as Connerton observes.(10) Though yeomen and merchants
sometimes accumulated large reserves of money and land, it was often their sons or
grandsons, educated at universities, who learned to perform the roles of gentlemen. The
extravagant public display of behavior, gesture, and dress marks the gentle status of the
elite. For elites, as Norbert Elias has observed of the French aristocracy, performance is
not superfluous, but determinate of rank:
In a society in which every outward manifestation of a person has special significance,
expenditure on prestige and display is for the upper classes a necessity which they cannot
avoid. They are an indispensable instrument in maintaining their social position,
especially when . . . all members of the society are involved in a ceaseless struggle for
status and prestige . . . Without confirmation of one's prestige through behavior, this
prestige is nothing. The immense value attached to the demonstration of prestige and the
observance of etiquette does not betray an attachment to externals, but to what was vitally
important to individual identity.(11)
Gentility reflects and affirms its superiority through spectacle. Performance naturalizes
elevated status through a stunning display of costume and intricately performed
behaviors. The lavish daily performances of gentlemen define them against the masses
while subtle alterations of costume and gesture create distinctions within the elite.
Although the performers themselves may change, as they invariably do over time,
symbolic qualities associated with gentility remain relatively stable. Elite performance
depends not upon specific actors but on fidelity to a role.
Renaissance theater experimented with this performative aspect of social identity, setting
itself apart from its medieval predecessor. Blurring the lines of distinction between
audience and performer, the mystery plays had served a ritualistic communal function
while reinforcing notions of a static and highly stratified society. Medieval drama, as
Jean-Christophe Agnew notes, reflected its feudal origins, portraying social roles as
divinely ordered and unalterable: "The mystery cycles had functioned, above all, as
ceremonial enactments of religious and mythic charters, carefully designed to replicate
governing patterns of social authority within the city and the larger society. Theirs was a
relatively static tableau drama performed to propitiate a divine and unseen audience
through the ritualized representation of widely held principles of ecclesiastical and social
order."(12) By moving physically from the streets into the confines of the theater,
Renaissance performers gained a perspective on society deniedtheir medieval
counterparts. "The stage-play was now a distinct cultural form, and playing was now a
distinct social calling," according to Louis Montrose.(13) Performance was no longer a
ritual designed to bring absent spiritual forces to the present; rather it became the calling
of professional actors who, through story and spectacle, demonstrated, among other
things, the theatrical and transitory nature of the self and of society. Renaissance drama
began exploring the possibility that social roles are products of performance rather than
of a divine author.
Sometimes assuming the part of a gentleman, sometimes taking that of a commoner, the
Renaissance actor revealed, through the medium of drama, the performative nature of
social roles. As Agnew notes, "the player was a little shop of characters. His
extraordinary plasticity offered a living lesson in the mechanics of social mobility and
assimilation."(14) However, despite the deconstructive force the Renaissance theater
exerted on the perception of social roles, it did not subvert the social order. For while the
medium incessantly disclosed the link between status and performance, the message of
the theater, according to Robert Weimann, "was still largely dominated by traditional
forms of consciousness that emphasized the very idea of hierarchy and authority as
something immutably fixed to every form of social existence, from the family to the state,
from apprentice to prince."(15) Whether impersonating a nobleman or a vagabond, the
professional actor made alterations in dress, language, and behavior, modifying his
character to conform to socially recognizable roles.(16)
In The Tragedie of King Lear individual characters challenge authority; yet systems of
hierarchy are reinscribed performatively, especially in the actions of disguised characters
like Kent and Edgar, whose essentialized aristocratic identities are maintained in their
performance of an assumed identity. Kent's foray into the lower orders, like Edgar's,
demonstrates not an alliance between gentry and commoners but the social distance
between them. Banished and threatened with death, each disguises himself by stripping
away the outward signs of status. Defined by newly adopted roles, each hides within the
social order. Borrowing "other accents" and razing his "likenesse" (I.iv.504, 507), Kent
becomes Caius. "[F]ull of labours" (I.iv.510), he is no longer recognized as "this Noble
Gentleman," "My Lord of Kent" (I.i.25, 27). G. K. Hunter asserts that "[i]t is the skill of
the actor to remind us that the new Caius is the old Kent; but the writing seems designed
to make him procure this effect by brittle virtuosity rather than 'character study'. His roles
remain effectively separate from one another as he shuffles one behind the other in the
manner of a card-sharper; he is not invited to draw them together as facets of a single
unifying personality, but to point outwards to the different social worlds he has
inhabited."(17) The play carefully keeps the laboring Caius distinct from the noble Kent.
Appearing before a gentleman as Caius, Kent contrasts his outward servile appearance
with his essential aristocratic worth, assuring the gentleman that he is "much more" than
his "out-wall" (III.i.1517-8). Kent's transformation is so complete that the gentleman
requires "confirmation" of his noble status (III.i.1517). Caius's "saucy roughnes," "plaine
accent," and lowly "weedes" are not "but furnishings" (II.ii.1108, 1122, IV. vi.2498,
III.i.1515); rather, in reflecting a specific social role, they determine for others "who that
Fellow is" (III.i.1521).
Edgar, who experiences the extremes of destitution and prosperity, demonstrates by his
movement through the social order the performability of social roles; yet each role he
enacts is clearly marked off from the others.(18) The differences between a Bedlam
beggar, a "Pezant" (IV.v.2437), and a gentleman are defined by changes in speech, dress,
and demeanor. At one point in the play Edgar comically forgets which role he is playing,
confusing Gloucester by his sudden dialect shift:
Glouster. Me thinkes thy voyce is alter'd, and thou speak'st In better phrase, and matter
then thou did'st. Edgar. Y'are much deceiu'd: In nothing am I chang'd But in my
Garments. Glouster. Me thinkes y'are better spoken.
(IV.v.2214-7)
The moment emphasizes the importance of performance in establishing social roles, for
the blinded Gloucester is not the only character who fails to see through Edgar's
disguises.
As a Bedlam beggar, Edgar exists outside the social order: his lack of civility renders him
invisible to those who formerly knew him. Taking the "basest, and most poorest shape /
That euer penury in contempt of man, / Brought neere to beast" (II.ii.1183-5), Edgar
erases all signs of his former self, griming his face with filth, blanketing only his loins,
elfing his hair in knots, and enforcing charity "Sometime with Lunaticke bans, sometime
with Praiers" (II.ii.1195). Edgar's nakedness is "social no less than physical," as Hunter
points out.(19) Rid of all signs of status, the Bedlam beggar exists beyond the network of
master and servant. Clothing himself in the "best Parrell" of Gloucester's tenant and
amending his language (IV.i.2049), Edgar changes into a peasant, climbing back into the
social order by visually displaying his low status. Edgar's tattered clothes and peasant
dialect reintroduce him to the world of masters and servants, transforming his
incomprehensible nakedness and madness into a body and mind fit for service.
Ironically, both Kent and Edgar distinguish themselves through servitude. As an earl in
Lear's court, Kent had challenged rules within the aristocracy governing ceremony and
decorum. As Caius, Kent becomes a staunch defender of status. Vowing to teach Oswald
"differences" (I.iv.593), he attempts to uphold distinctions separating gentry from
commoners. Later, Kent berates Oswald for dressing out of his station, a scene made
comic since it is the servant Caius and not the Earl of Kent who rebukes him.(20) In the
"habit" of a peasant, Edgar serves as "guide" to his blinded father, leading him to Dover
and begging in order to sustain them both (V.iii.2820, 2822). Like Ferdinand in The
Tempest, both Kent and Edgar distance themselves from the play's social climbers,
displaying their commitment to service and hierarchy by adopting the roles of common
laborers. Duteous service earns them recognition as well as their traditional "rights, /
With boote, and such addition" as their "Honours / Haue more then merited" (V.iii.29168).
While Caius, the Bedlam beggar, and the peasant are all presented as products of
performance, Kent and Edgar are not. As noblemen, both characters are portrayed as
having an essential identity antithetical to their performative roles. Kent's essential
nobility is emphasized in The Historie of King Lear, when, disguised as Caius, he is
recognized as a gentleman, though not as the Earl of Kent, by another gentleman in scene
17. In The Tragedie of King Lear, Edgar subsumes Kent's role in the last two acts of the
play, shifting the dramatic focus onto the trial by combat scene and Edgar's subsequent
return to the aristocracy.(21)
The trial by combat scene is neither "archaic" nor "semi-miraculous," as Moretti
claims;(22) rather it is powerful precisely because it recalls and reflects feudal values
upon which the aristocracy based their privilege. The "lore of the sword," as Craig Turner
and Tony Soper assert, "was still an accepted part of the culture in late-sixteenth-century
England when other medieval signs of status - certain manners of dressing and living,
wearing armor, carrying a sword - had disappeared."(23) The duel remained both a
symbolic testimony of an aristocrat's martial superiority and a legal right, elevating him
above common legal constraints, according to V. G. Kiernan:
Duelling provided a warrant of aristocratic breeding, increasingly threatened with
submergence. It preserved to the entire class a military character, a certificate of
legitimate descent from the nobility of the sword of feudal times, and of its title to officer
the new mass armies. Duelling was in itself an assertion of superior right, a claim to
immunity from the law such as a ruling class is always likely to seek in one field or
another: it is for the common herd to submit to parchment trammels and shackles. For the
man of noble birth it was all the more natural to put himself above the law because he, as
seigneur, had been in command of justice in his own domain. On a reduced scale he was
so still, in France down to 1789, in England as a JP far longer.(24)
The "courtization of warriors," the internalization of violence and the centralization of
force, was not a linear process, but one that moved in fits and starts, according to
Elias.(25) Though the trial by combat scene may confound "us with the poverty of its
reflection"(26) - and even this remains a questionable assertion since the duel continues
to hold sway in innumerable Hollywood action movies - it represented, for many in
Shakespeare's audience, confirmation of aristocratic status.
Entering the stage nameless, the "vnknowne opposite" claims gentle status by invoking
the "priuiledge" of his "Honour," "oath," and "profession" (V.iii.2784, 2760-1). His
appearance, speech, and "Sword" attest to his claim (V.iii.2770), and, as Edmund
testifies, reflect Edgar's nobility despite his anonymity:
In wisedome I should aske thy name, But since thy out-side lookes so faire and Warlike,
And that thy tongue some say of breeding breathes, What safe, and nicely I might well
demand, By rule of Knight-hood, I disdaine and spurne.
(V.iii.2772-6)
Edmund is taken in by Edgar's performance, finding his warlike exterior and refined
language sufficient evidence of his nobility. He quickly learns, however, that noble
performance is ultimately tested through martial acuity. Wearing the Gloucester armor
and defending the Gloucester name, Edmund appears truly noble. Yet his defeat by Edgar
shows the hollowness of his claim: "Despight . . . [his] victor-Sword, and fire new
Fortune" (V.iii.2763), Edmund is proven a "most Toad-spotted Traitor" (V.iii.2769). Like
Oswald before him, Edmund fails with the sword, showing that he is a product of
performance rather than genuinely gentle. As Jonathan Dollimore suggests, "nobility is
seen to be like truth - it will out."(27) Edgar's victory, which he quickly attributes to
divine intervention, naturalizes his noble status and demonstrates that his refined
behaviors are not performed but a true reflection of his inner nobility, a view quickly
affirmed by Albany: "Me thought thy very gate did prophesie / A Royall Noblenesse"
(V.iii.2806-7). Albany's words themselves prove prophetic, for at the conclusion of the
play Edgar is given sovereignty over Cornwall's former dukedom.
Dismissing the centrality of the trial by combat scene, Moretti focuses instead on the last
four lines of the play, which, he claims, undermine traditional categories of meaning and
completely dissolve a "universal, 'higher' point of view": "The close of King Lear makes
clear that no one is any longer capable of giving meaning to the tragic process; no speech
is equal to it, and there precisely lies the tragedy . . . In Lear, what scant reason remains
has been not only defeated, but derided and dissolved by the course of events. If at the
end it is allowed the last word, this is only by virtue of that archaic, semi-miraculous duel
between Gloucester's two sons; and if it returns on stage, it is only with the object of
confounding us with the poverty of its reflection."(28) Edgar's final speech not only fails
to recuperate his society, but, according to Moretti, the "chilling stupidity" of his words
and the "drastic banalization" they impose on the play "indicates the chasm that has
opened up between facts and words."Yet Edgar's inability to make sense of the tragedy
befallen his kingdom is less important than the fact that he speaks the last lines of the
play, and speaks them not only as a military hero but also as a ruler "in this Realme"
(V.iii.2936).(29) If Edgar's "four impeccably rhymed little verses, bright with
monosyllables" speak to the "nobility's inadequacy,"(30) Edgar's martial appearance and
performance in the duel add weight to his words. An adept performance, as Moretti must
know, can grant voice status.
Dollimore recognizes the significance of the trial by combat scene, finding that it invokes
"first, a concept of innate nobility in contradistinction to innate evil and, second, its
corollary: a metaphysically ordained justice." Yet the unexpected deaths of Cordelia and
Lear, according to Dollimore, subvert Edgar's and Albany's attempts to mark the deaths
of Goneril, Regan, and Edmund as the workings of divine justice, rendering social
recuperation impossible: "The timing of these two deaths must surely be seen as cruelly,
precisely, subversive: instead of complying with the demands of formal closure - the
convention which would confirm the attempt at recuperation - the play concludes with
two events which sabotage the prospect of both closure and recuperation." Lear's death
subverts dominant values as well as the social order: "the two collapse together,"
according to Dollimore.(31)
The deaths of Cordelia and Lear, as Dollimore rightly argues, are catastrophic. Yet social
recuperation is not sabotaged by their deaths; on the contrary, it is facilitated by them. In
portraying Cordelia's and Lear's deaths as more consequential, as more tragic than those
of any other character in the play, Shakespeare constructs a hierarchy of death. Social
norms do not "collapse" as Lear does at the end of the play, for Shakespeare consistently
stratifies dead bodies in the same fashion as he does live ones. As Erich Auerbach
observes, Shakespeare does not "conceive of 'everyman' as tragic."(32) A dunghill and a
vicious eulogy are all that memorialize the deaths of low characters like the nameless
servant and Oswald. A terse eulogy given by Albany similarly marks Edmund's death:
"That's but a trifle heere" (V.iii.2911). While the bodies of Goneril and Regan are
accorded more dignity, being covered after death, they are also brought on stage to allow
Albany to represent their deaths as the "judgement of the Heauens" (V.iii.2846). The
persistence of stratification and the beginnings of social recuperation take place even
before the actors have left the stage, for the "dead March" that concludes the play
solemnly memorializes the status and function of the sovereign, remembering Lear as
king and warrior (V.iii).
The interdependent nature of court society and its dependence upon ceremony is
displayed in the opening scene with the entrance of the king and his entourage. Lear leads
the procession, followed on stage by the dukes of Cornwall and Albany, his three
daughters, and his attendants. Lear quickly asserts his power, giving commands that are
directly followed. Gloucester is dispatched to "Attend the Lords of France & Burgundy"
(I.i.35), a map is ordered and quickly brought, and Lear directs his three daughters, by
order of birth, to compete for his lands by announcing their love. Responding on
command, Goneril and Regan publicly affirm Lear's munificence as king and father,
matching his gift with absolute vows of their love. While the ceremony testifies to Lear's
power, it also reflects Goneril's and Regan's high place within the social order. The
privilege of attending to the king distinguishes them from others in the court.
Cordelia, unlike her elder sisters, refuses to act on command, frustrating Lear's
celebration of his absolute power by denying the terms of his gift. As Strier has argued,
Cordelia "insists on distinguishing herself from her sisters and from the terms of the
ceremony."(33) Yet in distinguishing herself, Cordelia becomes indistinguishable, for in
the highly stratified society of Lear, to refuse to participate in the ceremonies of the court
means "forfeiting privileges, losing power, and declining relatively to others. In short, it
[means] humiliation and, to an extent, self-immolation," according to Elias.(34)
Cordelia's identity, as Lear reminds her, is inextricably bound to duty and service to king
and father: "Better thou / Had'st not beene borne, then not t'haue pleas'd me better"
(I.i.234-5). Stripped of her dowry as well as her claim to royal lineage, Cordelia becomes
"that little seeming substance . . . And nothing more" (I.i.198-200). Publicly challenging
Lear's authority as father, Cordelia suffers the consequences of a spurned courtier.
Having "obedience scanted" (I.i.279), she is "cast away" from court society only to be
"receiu'd . . . At Fortunes almes" by the king of France (I.i.254, 278-9).
The intra-elite crisis initiated in the opening scene spills over into the ranks of
commoners in III.vii, as Cornwall's servant attempts to defend Gloucester, challenging
Cornwall's authority. Cornwall's reaction, "My Villaine?" (III.vii.1979), as well as
Regan's, "A pezant stand vp thus?" (III.vii.1981), demonstrate their indignation and
surprise at having their commands questioned by a social inferior. Given the servant's
social distance from Cornwall, his action is, as Strier rightly calls it, "one of the most
remarkable and politically significant moments in the play." Yet it seems excessive to
call this brief moment "the most radical possible sociopolitical act," or "the image of . . .
peasant rebellion," as Strier does,(35) for the scene portrays not group rebellion, but
individual action.
Collective action gave commoners some measure of political clout, yet rioting rarely
produced lasting social change. Like the grain uprisings of the late sixteenth century,
most riots were conservative in nature, attempting to enforce the gentry's paternalistic
role when market forces had upset the traditional relationship between elites and
commoners. As Buchanan Sharp points out, "rioters had clearly defined objectives and
employed only that minimum amount of force or coercion necessary to achieve those
objectives."(36) When more passive means of negotiation were exhausted, the threat of
collective action often proved an effective tool. As John Walter observes, "[r]iot
metamorphosed fear into fact. Fact dissolved into fantasy. In confirming popular threats,
riot hinted at the darker nightmare of popular rebellion." Once their grievances were
redressed, the multitude typically disbanded: "Action by authority demanded inactivity
by the people."(37) Yet toward "insurrection, an undeniable attempt to overturn the status
quo, the Crown was quite merciless," according to Sharp.(38)
Like many other playwrights and writers of the early modern period, Shakespeare
frequently represents the "victory of the forces of property, order, and true religion over
the many-headed monster," as Greenblatt observes.(39) In act III, scene vii of Lear,
Shakespeare silences the threat of a "peasant rebellion" by reducing the multitude to a
single adversary. While one servant boldly answers Gloucester's plea to "Giue me some
helpe" (III.vii.1971), the other servants watch as Regan kills their fellow servant and as
Cornwall finishes blinding Gloucester. Witnessing the consequences of defying authority,
the servants silently follow their master's commands, thrusting Gloucester "out at gates"
(III.vii.1994), and disposing of the body of their fellow servant.(40) More importantly,
Shakespeare blunts the radical potential of the moment by minimizing the servant's
heroic actions. Unlike Edgar's later defense of his father against Oswald, the servant is
unable to defend Gloucester. In addition, the servant's battle with Cornwall, in contrast to
Edgar's duel with Edmund, earns him neither honor nor status. Although Cornwall has
"receiu'd a hurt" from his sword (III.vii.1996), the servant is denied the glory of his
victory. Cornwall's death occurs off-stage - he does not fall at the hands of a commoner.
"[S]laine" from behind by Regan, the servant falls ignobly before us on stage
(III.vii.1982). Thrown "Vpon the Dunghill" (III.vii.1998), the body of the dead servant
serves as a reminder to other peasants who dare to "stand vp thus" (III.vii.1981).
The first servant's "rebellion" is echoed later in the play, according to Strier, when Edgar,
disguised as a "most poore man, made tame to Fortunes blows" (IV.v.2427), defends
Gloucester against the fortune-seeking Oswald: "They fight, and Edgar's peasant cudgel
defeats Oswald's sword. This scene is clearly meant to recall the intervention of the other,
actual 'bold peasant' of act 3, scene 7. The language - 'peasant . . . slave . . . dunghill' - is
filled with echoes of the earlier scene. The effect is to reinforce the image of this sort of
peasant rebellion as a paradigm of moral action."(41) While this scene may "recall the
intervention of the other, actual 'bold peasant,'" the echoes Strier detects are not the
stirrings of "rebellion." Rather, the figure of the dunghill reminds us of the futility of a
"real" peasant uprising. In addition, though the language of this scene recalls the earlier
one, the visual dimension is clearly different. While Oswald identifies Edgar as a
commoner, calling him "bold Pezant" (IV.v.2437), the audience, who has followed
Edgar's movement through the social order, is clearly meant to recognize him as a
gentleman disguised. The audience knows that the "peasant cudgel [that] defeats
Oswald's sword" is wielded by a gentleman, not a commoner. Instead of reinforcing the
image of "peasant rebellion as a paradigm of moral action," the scene, in fact, reinscribes
authority along traditional lines. Defeating Oswald with an inferior weapon, Edgar
reduces the scene to comedy, making the upwardly mobile Oswald's claim to gentle
status seem ridiculous while reinforcing Kent's earlier outrage that "such a slaue . . .
should weare a Sword, / Who weares no honesty" (II.ii.1085-6). Further, Oswald's
elevated speech is shown to be as unnatural for him as Edgar's overdone Somerset
dialect:
Steward. (to Edgar) Wherefore, bold Pezant, Durst thou support a publish'd Traitor?
Hence, Least that th'infection of his fortune take Like hold on thee.
(IV.v.2437-40)
The peasant in this scene, despite Edgar's dress and speech, is Oswald. His sword, like his
language, is worn merely for ornamentation. Bearing a sword yet unable to defend
himself against a cudgel, Oswald is shown to lack the qualities of true gentility. In fact,
Oswald's inability to use the sword effectively reveals him to be not of the blood, not
gentle. Far from the "remarkable" and "significant" action of the first servant in act three,
Edgar's "rebellion" is both predictable and conservative. Appropriately, Edgar reverts to a
more elevated dialect when announcing his judgment over the fallen Oswald:
I know thee well. A seruiceable Villaine, As duteous to the vices of thy Mistris, As
badnesse would desire.
(IV.v.2457-9)
The effect is to naturalize the status of Edgar while marking Oswald as a social inferior
whose elevated status is monstrous and more the product of a "Taylor" than of "nature"
(II.ii.1066).
Depicting both good and bad dukes, earls, and gentlemen, the play preserves the masterservant relationship by keeping social roles distinct. Oswald quickly makes it clear that
he serves Goneril, not his "Ladies Father" (I.iv.581). Showing sympathy toward Lear,
Gloucester is clearly aware that his "Master," his "worthy Arch and Patron" (II.i.941-2),
is now Cornwall, not the former king. Sent to "Fetch" Cornwall and Regan and tell them
that Lear "commands, tends, seruice" (II.ii.1278, 1288), Gloucester returns having
"inform'd them so" (II.ii.1284). Predictably, he fears not the orders from a king "Confin'd
to exhibition" (I.ii.333), but the "fiery quality of the Duke" (II.ii.1279). Although
Gloucester later "incline[s] to the King" (III.iii.1637), he comes to the aid of his "old
Master" (III.iii.1642), in part, because he knows a "Power [is] already footed" against
Albany and Cornwall (III.iii.1637).
Checking Edmund's growing power following the war, Albany, too, relies upon
distinction to maintain hierarchical order:
Sir, by your patience, I hold you but a subject of this Warre, Not as a Brother.
(V.iii.2693-5)
Albany's need to remind Edmund of his place within the social order certainly reflects a
crisis of authority within the aristocracy, and it is a crisis that will continue, we can
assume, until authority is again centralized under a single figure. The fact that allegiance
is divided, however, does not imply that hierarchy has fallen or that authority and service
are dissolved in the play.
If Lear plays a role in effecting social change in early modern England, it is not the
wholly subversive or revolutionary role described by recent critics. The "diuision of the
Kingdome" decentralizes the realm (I.i.4), fracturing allegiance among Albany,
Cornwall, and Lear; yet the social order remains intact. Authority is not destroyed but
split between those with the greatest claims to land and wealth.(42) Although the play
grapples with problems of succession and inheritance and tests the borders of elite
society, portraying the meteoric rise of outsiders like Edmund and Oswald, it also
carefully protects status distinctions. The "historical 'task'" accomplished by Lear was not
the "destruction of the fundamental paradigm of the dominant culture."(43) On the
contrary, The Tragedie of King Lear maintains hierarchy by validating and reproducing
the "studied and elaborate hegemonic style" of the gentry.(44)
NOTES
1 John Turner, "The Tragic Romances of Feudalism," in Shakespeare: The Play of
History, ed. Graham Holderness, Nick Potter, and John Turner (London: Macmillan
Press, 1988), pp. 83-154, 116-7.
2 Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in
Renaissance England (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988), p. 65.
3 For models based on negotiation, see Theodore B. Leinwand, "Negotiation and New
Historicism," PMLA 105, 3 (May 1990): 477-90; and Peter Stallybrass and Allon White,
The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1986).
4 Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms,
trans. Susan Fischer, David Forgacs, and David Miller (New York: Verso, 1988), p. 42.
David Scott Kastan makes similar historical claims for Shakespeare's history plays. See
Kastan's "Proud Majesty Made a Subject: Shakespeare and the Spectacle of Rule," SQ
37, 4 (Winter 1986): 459-75.
5 For discussion concerning the use of costuming and speech to highlight status
distinctions on the Renaissance stage, see G. K. Hunter, "Flatcaps and Bluecoats," E&S,
n.s. 33 (1980): 16-47; Jean MacIntyre, Costumes and Scripts in the Elizabethan Theatres
(Edmonton: Univ. of Alberta Press, 1992); and Peter Stallybrass, "Worn Worlds: Clothes
and Identity on the Renaissance Stage," in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed.
Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 289-320. For discussion of behaviors and manners marking status
distinctions within the elite, see Norbert Elias, The Court Society, trans. Edmund Jephcott
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988); and Power and Civility: The Civilizing Process,
Volume II, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982). In addition, see
Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy
Theory (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984).
6 William Shakespeare, The Tragedie of King Lear. The Folio Text, in The Complete
Works: Original-Spelling Edition, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1986). All references to Shakespeare are from this edition and will appear
parenthetically in the text. My focus is specifically on The Tragedie of King Lear, the
Folio text of King Lear, as opposed to the quarto text, The Historie of King Lear. For
discussion of the distinct nature of the two plays and arguments against the standard
editorial practice of conflating the two texts, see the collection of essays in The Division
of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare's Two Versions of King Lear, ed. Gary Taylor and
Michael Warren (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983).
7 Richard Strier, "Faithful Servants: Shakespeare's Praise of Disobedience," in The
Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Culture, ed. Heather Dubrow
and Strier (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 104-33, 104, 115, 114. Other
critics who find the "theme of proper disobedience" central to Lear include Jonas A.
Barish and Marshall Waingrow, "'Service' in King Lear," SQ9, 3 (Summer 1958): 34755; and Maynard Mack, ("King Lear" in Our Time (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press,
1972).
8 Moretti, pp. 44, 51, 56. Other critics who see Lear as a radically subversive force
include Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the
Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press,
1984); Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance
Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991); and Turner.
Critics arguing from a Marxist perspective and claiming that Lear portrays the destruction
of a feudal order and the rise of a bourgeois one include Paul Delaney, "King Lear and
the Decline of Feudalism," PMLA 92, 3 (May 1977): 429-40; and Julian Markels, "King
Lear, Revolution, and the New Historicism," MLS 21, 2 (Spring 1991): 11-26.
9 Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989),
p. 74.
10 Connerton, p. 90.
11 Elias, The Court Society, pp. 63, 101.
12 Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in AngloAmerican Thought, 1550-1750 (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), p. 110.
13 Louis A. Montrose, "The Purpose of Playing: Reflections on a Shakespearean
Anthropology," Helios, n.s. 7, 2 (1980): 51-74, 52.
14 Agnew, p. 122.
15 Robert Weimann, "Society and the Uses of Authority in Shakespeare," in
Shakespeare, Man of the Theater: Proceedings of the Second Congress of the
International Shakespeare Association, 1981, ed. Kenneth Muir, Jay L. Halio, and D.J.
Palmer (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1983), pp. 182-99, 184.
16 See Hunter; and MacIntyre, especially chaps. 2 and 3.
17 Hunter, p. 37.
18 For a detailed discussion of Edgar's movement through the social order, see William
C. Carroll, Fat King, Lean Beggar: Representations of Poverty in the Age of Shakespeare
(Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1996).
19 Hunter, p. 33.
20 Kent's harassment of Oswald parallels Hamlet's mocking of Osric. Osric's only claim
to gentility, according to Hamlet, is that he is "spacious in the possession of durt"
(V.ii.3356-7), making him fit to be a "Lord of beasts" (V.ii.3355) - not a courtier.
21 For a discussion of Kent's changed role from quarto to Folio, see Michael Warren,
"The Diminution of Kent," in The Division of the Kingdoms, pp. 59-73.
22 Moretti, p. 53.
23 Craig Turner and Tony Soper, Methods and Practice of Elizabethan Swordplay
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1990), p. xxii.
24 V. G. Kiernan, The Duel in European History: Honour and the Reign of Aristocracy
(Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988), p. 53. For further discussion of the duel as a
"corporate privilege" of the aristocracy, see M. L. Bush, The English Aristocracy: A
Comparative Synthesis (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1984).
25 Elias, Power and Civility, pp. 258-91.
26 Moretti, p. 53, my emphasis.
27 Dollimore, p. 202.
28 Moretti, p. 53.
29 In the Historie of King Lear the final speech is credited to Albany, the highest ranking
figure remaining in the kingdom. In The Tragedie of King Lear, Shakespeare underscores
the symbolic importance of the trial by combat scene by giving Edgar the final lines of
the play.
30 Moretti, pp. 55, 53, 52.
31 Dollimore, pp. 202-3.
32 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans.
Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1953), p. 314.
33 Strier, p. 112.
34 Elias, Court Society, p. 88.
35 Strier, pp. 119, 122.
36 Buchanan Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority: Rural Artisans and Riot in the West of
England, 1586-1660 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1980), p. 32. For further
discussion of the "scripts" of peasant uprisings and the conservative nature of collective
action, see Natalie Zemon Davis, "The Rites of Violence," in Society and Culture in
Early Modern France: Eight Essays by Natalie Zemon Davis (Stanford: Stanford Univ.
Press, 1975), pp. 152-87; Peter Stallybrass, "'Drunk with the Cup of Liberty': Robin
Hood, the Carnivalesque, and the Rhetoric of Violence in Early Modern England," in The
Violence of Representation: Literature and the History of Violence, ed. Nancy Armstrong
and Leonard Tennenhouse (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 45-76; and E. P. Thompson,
"The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century," Past and Present
50 (February 1971): 76-136.
37 John Walter, "A 'Rising of the People'?: The Oxfordshire Rising of 1596," Past and
Present 107 (May 1985): 90-143, 92, 131.
38 Sharp, p. 44. For further discussion of responses by authorities to popular uprisings,
see Paul Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (New York: Longman,
1988).
39 Greenblatt, "Murdering Peasants: Status, Genre, and the Representation of Rebellion,"
in Representing the English Renaissance, ed. Greenblatt (Berkeley: Univ. of California
Press, 1988), pp. 15-29, 15.
40 In The Historie of King Lear two additional servants are given speech, but they speak
only after Cornwall and Regan have left the stage, offering aid and assistance to "the old
Earle" once the Duke of Cornwall's will has been done (xiv.2024).
41 Strier, p. 122.
42 de Grazia, "The Ideology of Superfluous Things: King Lear as Period Piece," in
Subject and Object, pp. 17-42.
43 Moretti, p. 42.
44 E. P. Thompson, "Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture," Journal of Social History 7, 4
(Summer 1974): 382-405, 389. For discussion of the persistence of elite authority, see
Bush; and Richard Lachmann, From Manor to Market: Structural Change in England,
1536-1640 (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1987). I am grateful for the support
provided, in part, by a Hudson Strode research scholarship from the University of
Alabama. I wish to thank David Lee Miller, Sharon O'Dair, Gary Taylor, Mathew
Winston, and the anonymous reader at SEL for their criticism on this paper.