Theoretical Notes on Shakespeare's King Lear (ca. 1603-05)
We that are young shall never see so much, nor live so long
King Lear’s "deep structure":
"Cinderella" folk-tale + Geoffrey of Monmouth’s 12th-century
account of the pre-Christian, ca. 800 B.C.E., King "Leir" and his
three daughters (The History of the Kings of Britain, trans.,
Lewis Thorpe [New York: Penguin Books, 1982]). In this
version, when Leir wants to know how much Cordelia loves
him, she replies, "Can there really be a daughter who maintains
that the love she bears her own father is more that what is due
to him as a father? . . . Assuredly, for my part, I have always
loved you as a father, and at this moment I feel no lessening in
my affection for you. If you are determined to wring more than
this out of me, then I will tell you how much I love you and so
put an end to your inquiry. You are worth just as much as you
possess, and that is the measure of my own love for you" (p.
82). Cordelia is then dispatched to Gaul to marry the king of the
Franks, and later, after Leir is dispossessed by his other two daughters and realizes the error of
his ways, he leaves and comes back with the Franks to "kick butt," regains the kingdom, and
Cordelia rules as queen after he dies. Interestingly, when Cordelia is queen, her two nephews
(the two sons of Goneril and Regan) plot against her, wage war, and ultimately imprison
Cordelia, where she commits suicide. It would appear that, in even this very early version of the
story, the theme is: the bastards always win in the end. [Question to ponder: do the bastards
always win?]
Historical Context > Elizabeth I: 1558-1603
So, play is written/produced during what might have been a time of intense political anxiety
over Elizabeth’s successor, James I of Scotland, the son of the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots,
whom Elizabeth had actually executed because it was believed that Mary was plotting against
her with the Spanish government. Elizabeth was a powerful–terrifying yet also beloved-monarch who ruled with efficiency and great political success for almost half a century during a
period in which much of Europe was being torn apart by civil uprisings and religious wars. Part
of her success lay in her ability to deftly maneuver herself between autocratic rule and
negotiating with Parliament, all the while cultivating a kind of tightly controlled and secret
"court culture" of titled nobility who maneuvered for her behind the scenes and were even her
spies at home and abroad. James I, by contrast, was a big believer in an absolute patriarchal
monarchy, and his court, as our Norton Anthology tells us, "by contrast with Elizabeth’s . . .
was disorderly and indecorous, marked by hard drinking and late-night feasting, a craze for
hunting, and great extravagance" (p. 1211). In addition, James and his queen maintained
separate households, and it was believed that James was homosexual, and catered too much to
certain male favorites. And King Lear is a play that certainly seems, on one level, to be a kind
of warning to monarchs who either don’t rule well, or who abdicate their "kingly"
responsibilities. In addition, the play interrogates what happens when power is allowed to fall
into the wrong hands because the person who is supposed to be in charge has become
distracted, or simply doesn’t want to rule and oversee his court. In this sense, the play is also
about what might be called the chaos of a political vacuum.
Philosophical Context > Thomas Hobbes (from Leviathan, 1651):
". . . men have no pleasure, but on the contrary a great deal of grief, in keeping company,
where there is no power to overawe them all. . . . during the time men live without a common
power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as
is of every man against every man" (Norton, p. 1591).
"Justice and injustice are none of the faculties neither of the body nor mind. If they were, they
might be in a man that were alone in the world, as well as his senses and passions. They are
qualities that relate to men in society, not in solitude" (Norton, p. 1592).
More Philosophical Context > Sigmund Freud (from Civilization and its Discontents,
1930):
". . . . men are not gentle creatures, who want to be loved, who at the most can defend
themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual
endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is
for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to
satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to
use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him
pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus [man is wolf to man]. Who in the face of all
his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion? As a rule
this cruel aggressiveness waits for some provocation or puts itself at the service of some other
purpose, whose goal might also have been reached by milder measures. In circumstances that
are favorable to it, when the mental counter-forces which ordinarily inhibit it are out of action,
it also manifests itself spontaneously and reveals man as a savage beast to whom consideration
towards his own kind is something alien. Anyone who calls to mind the atrocities committed
during the racial migrations or the invasions of the Huns, or by the people known as Mongols
under Ghengis Khan and Tamerlane, or at the capture of Jerusalem by the pious Crusaders, or
even, indeed, the horrors of the recent World War -- anyone who calls these things to mind will
have to bow humbly before the truth of this view.
The existence of this inclination to aggression, which we can detect in ourselves and justly
assume to be present in others, is the factor which disturbs our relations with our neighbor and
which forces civilization into such a high expenditure [of energy]. In consequence of this
primary mutual hostility of human beings, civilized society is perpetually threatened with
disintegration. The interest of work in common would not hold it together; instinctual passions
are stronger than reasonable interests. Civilization has to use its utmost efforts in order to set
limits to man's aggressive instincts and to hold the manifestations of hem in check by psychical
reaction-formations. Hence, therefore, the use of methods intended to incite people into
identifications and aim-inhibited relations of love, hence the restriction upon sexual life, and
hence too the ideal's commandment to love one's neighbor as oneself -- a commandment
which is really justified by the fact that nothing else runs so strongly counter to the original
nature of man. In spite of every effort, these endeavors of civilization have not so far achieved
very much. It hopes to prevent the crudest excesses of brutal violence by itself assuming the
right to use violence against criminals, but the law is not able to lay hold of the more cautious
and refined manifestations of human aggressiveness. The time comes when each one of us has
to give up illusions the expectations which, in his youth. he pinned upon his fellow men, and
when he may learn how much difficulty and pain has been added to his life by their ill-will."
Play’s Structure:
Double Plot: 1) Lear & 3 daughters + 2) Gloucester & 2 sons
Double Settings: 1) Inside/Outside + 2) Court/Wilderness + 3) Here/Out There
from Geoffrey O’Brien’s review of Jonathan Miller’s King Lear at the Lincoln Center in New
York (The New York Review of Books 25 Mar. 2004: pp. 22-24):
"The spaces of Lear boil down to In Here and Out There. The interior – the place where
power is acquired and wielded – is central in Miller’s production; the exterior scenes represent a
pushing away from that center. On a stage devoid of broad stretches of open ground, people
have to maneuver others out of the way to find a place to stand. The deeper problem of Lear,
for those allying against him, is that he takes up too much room; he needs to be thrust out so
the next generation can move about freely. . . . While the predators vie with each other for the
control of space – the literal stage space standing in for entire parts of England, as well as their
own castles – Lear and his companions wander in the undesired outer region to which he has
been expelled. The stormy heath here, largely suggested by lighting and sound effects, becomes
a dark and narrow alley, an absence rather than a plenitude of space" (p. 22).
A few things "kind of theoretical" to think about as we begin:
Re: Lear himself>
Terry Eagleton (from After Theory [New York: Basic Books, 2003]): King Lear is a play that,
through Lear’s act of casting off the "fruits of his body" (Cordelia), is about "the fantasy of
disembodiment" that arises from "the megalomania of absolute sovereignty . . . . but since an
identity which is everything has nothing to measure itself against, it is merely a void. . . . It has
eliminated the otherness which is essential for self-knowledge" (pp. 181-82). –"When we are
out of our body, we are out of our mind" (p. 183).
Re: the characters described in play as "monstrous" and "evil" (Regan, Cornwall,
Goneril, and Edmund--at one point, Lear says of his daughters that "Down from the waist they
are Centaurs,/Though women all above. . . . Beneath is all the fiend's; there's hell, there's
darkness,/There's the sulphurous pit, burning, scalding,/Stench, consumption!"--4.6.121-26; at
another point, Lear refers to Goneril as a disease in his flesh (ouch!)--2.4.220; Gloucester
mistakenly believes his son Edgar is a "monster"--1.2.94; note how many times the word
"monster" and wild animal imagery (wolves, vultures, serpents, etc.) are invoked in the play and
in what particular situations)>
Jeffrey J. Cohen, in his book Monster Theory: Reading Culture (University of Minnesota Press,
1996), has written that "We live in a time of monsters" (p. vii), meaning, we live in a culture of
horror films (think: 28 Days Later and Freddy vs. Jason), nuclear weapons, biological
engineering (i.e., cloning), serial killers, terrorism, etc., and further, fear saturates our daily lives.
According to Cohen, one way this fear manifests itself is in our fascination with monsters, both
of the murderous flesh-eating variety but also Barney and the Teletubbies. Cohen proposes
seven "theses" with which he believes we can better understand ourselves by understanding
our "monsters":
1) The monster's body "incorporates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy" (p. 4);
2) the monster always appears at times of cultural and social crisis;
3) "The monster is difference made flesh, come to dwell among us. . . . the monster is an
incorporation of the Outside, the Beyond" (p. 7), and therefore, the monstrous in culture (i.e.,
in literature) is often figured along racial, sexual, religious, etc. lines;
4) the monster shows us the places we are not allowed to go and does the things we are not
allowed to do, and therefore "polices" our thoughts and actions;
5) being afraid of the monster is really a kind of desire;
6) the monster always gets away--even if he or she or it is killed, he or she or it reappears later
in other forms; and finally,
7) "Monsters are our children. . . . They ask us to reevaluate our cultural assumptions about
race, gender, sexuality, our perception of difference, our tolerance toward its expression. They
ask us why we created them" (p. 20).
Quotations with which to "think" Shakespeare’s play:
"Love, and be silent." + "Nothing will come of nothing."
–Cordelia to herself (1.1.61) & Lear to Cordelia (1.1.90)
"'Tis the infirmity of his age; yet he hath ever but slenderly known himself."
−Goneril to Regan (1.1.294-95)
"We have seen the best of our time. Machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous
disorders, follow us disquietly to our graves."
–Gloucester to Edmund (1.2.111-14)
"Humanity must perforce prey on itself,/Like monsters of the deep."
–Albany (4.2.48-49)
"A man may see how this world goes with no eyes."
–Lear to Gloucester (4.6.150-51)
"Men must endure their going hence, even as their coming hither; ripeness is all!"
–Edgar to Gloucester (5.2.9-11)
"Know thou this,/that men are as the time is: to be tender-minded/Does not become a
sword."
―Edmund to Captain (5.3.30-32)
"The weight of this sad time we must obey,/Speak what we feel not what we ought to say:/The
oldest hath borne most; we that are young/Shall never see so much, or live so long."
―Edgar (5.3.324-27)
TENSIONS/BINARIES WITH WHICH TO "THINK" SHAKESPEARE’S PLAY:
Seeing vs. Blindness
"See better, Lear; and let me still remain/The true blank of thine eye." (Kent to Lear, 1.1.159)
"The jewels of our father, with washed eyes/Cordelia leaves you. I know you what you
are,/And like a sister am most loath to call/Your faults as they are named." (Cordelia saying
good-bye to Goneril and Regan, 1.1.270-73)
"The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long,/That it had it head bit off by it young./So, out
went the candle, and we were left darkling." (Fool to Lear, 1.4.209-11)
"How far your eyes may pierce I cannot tell:/Striving to better, oft we mar what's well."
(Albany to Goneril, 1.4.343-44)
"I am a man more sinned against than sinning." (Lear to Fool and Kent, 3.2.59)
"I have no way, and therefore want no eyes;/I stumbled when I saw. . . . O dear son
Edgar,/The food of they abused father's wrath!/Might I but live to see thee in my touch,/I'd
say I had eyes again." (Gloucester, blinded, to Old Man, 4.1.18-24)
"'Tis the time's plague, when madman lead the blind." (Gloucester to Old Man, 4.1.46)
Being vs. "Seeming"
Lear tells Burgundy that Cordelia is a "little seeming substance" (1.1.200)
"I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my
bastardizing." (Edmund to himself, 1.2.129-31)
"I do profess to be no less than I seem; to serve him truly that will put me in trust." (Kent to
Lear, 1.4.13-14)
"Doth any here know me? This is not Lear./Doth Lear walk thus? speak thus? Where are his
eyes? . . . Who is that can tell me who I am?" (Lear to Goneril, Fool, and Kent, 1.4.220-24)
"For you, Edmund,/Whose virtue and obedience does this instant/So much commend itself,
you shall be ours,/Natures of such deep trust we shall much need" (Cornwall to Edmund,
2.1.113-15)
"The prince of darkness of a gentleman." (Edgar as "Tom" to Gloucester, 3.4.136)
Bonds vs. Machiavellian Utility/Pragmatism
"I love your majesty according to my bond." (Cordelia to Lear, 1.1.91-92)
"Love's not love/When it is mingled with regards that stands/Aloof from th' entire point."
(France to Burgundy, 1.1.240-42)
"My life I never held but as a pawn/To wage against they enemies; nor fear to lose it,/Thy
safety being the motive." (Kent to Lear, 1.1.156-58)
"Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide; in cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in
palaces, treason; and the bond cracked 'twixt son and father." (Gloucester to Edmund, 1.2.1069)
"The sir which serves and seeks for gain,/And follows but for form,/Will pack when it begins
to rain,/And leave thee in the storm." (Fool singing to Kent, 2.4.75-78)
"Thou better know'st/The offices of nature, bond of childhood,/Effects of courtesy, dues of
gratitude." (Lear to Regan, 2.4.175-77)
"The younger rises when the old doth fall." (Edmund to himself, 3.3.24)
"Filial ingratitude! Is it not as this mouth should tear this hand/For lifting food to 't?" (Lear to
Kent and Fool, 3.4.15-17)
"Our flesh and blood is grown so vile, my lord,/That it doth hate what [be]gets it." (Gloucester
to Lear, 3.4.138-39)
"I will persevere in my course of loyalty, though the conflict be sore between that and my
blood." (Edmund to himself, 3.5.19-21)
"He's mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf, a horse's health, a boy's love, or a whore's
oath." (Fool to Lear, 3.6.18-19)
Justice vs. Policy
"How malicious is my fortune, that I must repent to be just!" (Edmund to Cornwall, 3.5.8-9)
"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." (Cornwall to Regan,
talking about punishing Gloucester, 3.7.24-27)
"No blown ambition doth our arms incite,/But love, dear love, and our ag'd father's right."
(Cordelia on the even of war, 4.4.27-28)
Law/Social Order vs. Nature
"Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy law/My services are bound." (Edmund to himself, 1.2.12)
"Poor naked wretches, whereso'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!" (Lear to himself
during storm, 3.4.29-34)
"This cold night will turn us all to fools and madmen." (Fool, 3.4.77)
Mind vs. Body
"Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise." (Fool to Lear, 1.5.40)
". . . we are not ourselves/When nature, being oppressed, commands the mind/To suffer with
the body." (Lear to Gloucester, 2.4.104-06)
"When the mind's free,/The body's delicate. The tempest in my mind/Doth from my senses
take all feeling else/Save what beats there." (Lear to Kent and Fool, 3.4.12-15)
"Better I were distract,/So should my thoughts be sever'd from my griefs,/And woes by wrong
imaginations lose/The knowledge of themselves." (Gloucester to Edgar, 4.6.281-84)
Truth/"plainness" vs. Rhetoric
"I cannot heave my heart into my mouth." (Cordelia to Lear, 1.1.90-91)
"Let pride, which she calls plainness, marry her." (Lear, 1.1.130)
"Think'st thou that duty shall have dread to speak,/When power to flattery bows? To plainness
honor's bound,/When majesty stoops to folly." (Kent to Lear, 1.1.148-50)
"I yet beseech your majesty--/If for I want that glib and oily art,/To speak and purpose not-since what I well intend,/I'll do't before I speak." (Cordelia to Lear, 1.1.225-28)
"Sir, 'tis my occupation to be plain." (Kent to Cornwall, 2.2.88)
Agency/Will vs. "Constructivism"/Fate
"These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us." (Gloucester to Edmund,
1.2.103-04)
"This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeit
of our own behavior, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, the stars; as if we were
villains by necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical
predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary
influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on." (Edmund to himself, 1.2.117-25)
"You see me here, you gods, a poor old man,/As full of grief as age; wretched in both!/If it be
you that stirs these daughters' hearts/Against their father, fool me not so much/To bear it
tamely; touch me with noble anger." (Lear to "gods," 2.4.270-74)
"As flies to wanton boys we are to th' gods,/They kill us for their sport." (Gloucester to Old
Man, 4.1.36-37)
"It is the stars,/The stars above us, govern our conditions." (Kent to Gentleman Messenger,
4.3.32-33)
Meaning/Belief vs. Nothingness/Nihilism
"Nothing will come of nothing." (Lear to Cordelia, 1.1.90)
"We have seen the best of our time. Machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous
disorders, follow us disquietly to our graves." (Gloucester to Edmund, 1.2.111-14)
"Can you make no use of nothing,/ nuncle?" & "I am a fool, thou art nothing." (Fool to Lear,
1.4.127-28 & 187-88)
"Edgar I nothing am!" (Edgar to himself, 2.3.21)
"Man's life's as cheap as beast's." (Lear to Goneril and Regan, 2.4.265)
"This great world/Shall so wear out to nought." (Gloucester to Lear, 4.6.134-35)
WIDER CRITICAL READING FOR LEAR ONLINE:
Carson, Christie. "The Quarto of King Lear - representing the early stage history of the
play?" an "Experts View" feature part of the British Library's Shakespeare in Quarto exhibit.
Friedlander, Ed. Enjoying "King Lear".
Gilbert. Anthony. "Unaccommodated man" and his discontents in King Lear: Edmund
the Bastard and interrogative puns, EMLS 6.2.
Johnston, Ian. Speak What We Feel: An Introduction to King Lear, part of a larger series of lectures.
Lobb, Edward. "The Turn of the Screw, King Lear, and Tragedy" Connotations 10.1.
Locket, Joseph. Lear's Lapse: Foreshadowings in King Lear I. i
Mabillard, Amanda. The Chronicle History of King Leir, from about: Shakespeare.
Meyer, Ann R. Shakespeare's Art and the Texts of King Lear, from Studies in Bibliography.
Oates, Joyce Carol. "Is This the Promised End?": The Tragedy of King Lear.
Richman, David. The King Lear Quarto in Rehearsal and Performance.
Schneider Jr., Ben Ross. King Lear in its Own Time: The Difference that Death Makes, EMLS 1.1.
Schwehn, Mark R. King Lear Beyond Reason: Love and Justice in the Family, from First
Things.
Shurgot, Michael W. "The Thing Itself": Staging Male Sexual Vulnerability In King
Lear, from SRASP, 1999.
Sohmer, Steve. The Lunar Calendar of Shakespeare's King Lear, EMLS 5.2.
Stoll, Abraham. Edgar and Kingship in the Three King Lears, from SRASP, 1999.