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Volume 26, Number 1, 2001 Reprinted by permission of the Law Review "IN HIS LITTLE WORLD OF MAN": LEAR'S ECLIPSE OF THE COSMOS IN SHAKESPEARE'S KING LEAR EAMON HALPIN* Sir, I love you more than word can wield the matter;It is a strangely contradictory response; for while it complains that mere language cannot adequately express a daughter's love for her father, it attempts to express precisely that love--and in the most high-flown and exaggerated terms. Thus, on the one hand, Goneril's love is "more than word can wield the matter,"2 but, on the other hand, "dearer than eyesight, space, and liberty."3 It is at once that which cannot be expressed and that which is expressed with apparent ease--ease, of course, that belies Goneril's claim that her love for Lear "makes breath poor, and speech unable."4 Goneril's lament for the inadequacy of language, it seems, is spoken not with any real conviction but in the kind of casual and unthinking manner that one might utter an oft-repeated phrase or stale platitude. In fact, Goneril's entire response has about it an air of conventionality. The exaggerated language with which she expresses her love for Lear resembles the language deployed by Elizabethan sonneteers to compliment their beloveds and ridiculed by Shakespeare in his own Sonnet 130.5 There, the hyperbolic comparisons of the conventional sonnet are overturned; the mistress's eyes are not more radiant than the brightest star but "nothing like the sun," and coral is not less but "far more red than her lips red."6 The sonnet's closing couplet indicates that the conventional imagery is rejected not so much because it overstates, but because it presents a false standard that does more to conceal than reveal the qualities of the poet's mistress.7 In fact, Shakespeare's sonnet, like Goneril's speech, is itself a complaint about the inadequacy of language. But it responds to that inadequacy by rejecting the kind of conventional imagery that makes authentic expression even more difficult than it already is; Goneril, by contrast, deploys precisely that kind of imagery while simultaneously complaining that language is inadequate to convey the depth of her love for her father. Of course, Goneril's appropriation of that imagery is not finally the result of her lack of literary sensibility. One must suppose, in the light of her subsequent behavior towards her father, that ultimately she deploys it to mislead him about the true nature of her attitude towards him; that is, she uses the language of unconditional love--either consciously or unconsciously--to disguise the fact that her love for her father is at best conditional. Moreover, she knows at some level--one assumes--that her liberal use of superlatives to characterize the degree of her love for Lear will likely make more restrained and more truthful statements from her sisters appear to be less than that which she has offered; and, in fact, both Regan and Cordelia, Goneril's younger sisters, find themselves in a predicament after hearing their older sister's testimony: How do they convince Lear that their love for him is at least equal to Goneril's, a love that, in her words, is "as much as child e'er loved, or father found"?8 In fact, Regan, the middle sister, extricates herself from the predicament quite easily, professing herself not only Goneril's equal in her love for their father but also, and quite astoundingly, "an enemy to all other joys / Which the most precious square of sense possesses."9 Cordelia, the youngest of Lear's daughters, however, finds herself unwilling to overtop the "glib and oily art" of her sisters and, famously, chooses to say nothing.10 Cordelia appears, at first glance, to have been silenced by the outrageous and dishonest claims of her sisters. However, while they certainly make it more difficult for her to speak, her silence cannot simply be laid at their feet. Much more than Goneril herself, in fact, Cordelia exhibits a profound awareness of the difficulty of speaking. Although it is Goneril who protests that her love for her father "makes breath poor and speech unable," it is Cordelia who hesitates when required to demonstrate the nature of her own love for Lear.11 Goneril's speech is characteristically "glib"; her words come quickly and easily, and, despite her professed doubt that "word can wield the matter," she wields them ruthlessly--as Regan does--to deceive her father and to advance her own interests.12 Indeed, it is their very indifference to truth that allows both Goneril and Regan to speak with such impunity. By contrast, it is Cordelia's allegiance to truth that, at least in part, makes her more reluctant to speak. Clearly, however, not all of those who are aware of the difficulty of conveying the truth choose silence. Poets--Shakespeare among them--typically complain of the inadequacy of language, but they continue, nevertheless, to strive to use words more skillfully and more originally to better express the world of human feeling. But when Cordelia is asked to speak, she only sees that she can either outdo her sister's lie and, thus, further violate the link between language and truth (Regan, as we have seen chooses this option) or remain silent. In the last instance, therefore, her silence is as much a result of her own lack of faith in the capacity of words to convey truth as it is of her unwillingness to compete with her sisters' deceptions. Moreover, while her refusal to avail of the "glib and oily art" that her sisters deploy so adeptly allows her--or apparently allows her--to preserve her integrity, her failure to avail of words to counter her sisters' ambition facilitates its triumph and helps bring about her estrangement from her beloved father. Cordelia's decision not to speak, however, is not a decision to keep hidden the love that she bears for Lear. Indeed, as she declines to speak of that love, she hopes that it will speak for itself: "I am sure my love's / More ponderous than my tongue."13 Cordelia's lack of faith in the capacity of words to convey truth is not a loss of faith in the existence of truth itself; indeed, it is precisely in unmediated truth, in the capacity of truth to manifest itself independently of language, that she rests her hope. Moreover, if her disillusion with words might appear cynical in others, her willingness to allow truth to speak for itself reveals her inherent idealism. Unlike Goneril and Regan, who assume that they can use words to keep the truth hidden, Cordelia assumes that the truth will be evident whether or not she uses words. Cordelia's idealism is naive but not because it fails to recognize the presence of evil in the world; unlike her father, the youngest sister is clearly aware of the machinations of Goneril and Regan. Indeed, it is her acute awareness of her sisters' deceit that contributes much to her decision not to speak; a more naive young woman, one might imagine, would have spoken from her heart, blissfully unaware that the dishonest words of others might cause hers to be misunderstood. Cordelia knows--knows too well perhaps--that words do not always express their speaker's intentions and that they conceal truth as often as they reveal it. Her naivete lies in her assumption that the reality of her heart can be better understood without than with words, that her love for her father is so "ponderous" that it cannot but be grasped by him. In that assumption, Cordelia betrays a misunderstanding of the historical order itself; that is, she fails to recognize that history, as the theologian Romano Guardini reminds us, is precisely "that state of being in which the higher the good the less it imposes itself."14 The conviction that "goodness always has the power to realize itself" is, he suggests, the conviction of the child.15 The bitter experience of adulthood, by contrast, teaches us that it is necessary to "appeal to man's generosity, in order to see realized what is good and unselfish."16 It is the necessity of that appeal that Cordelia fails to appreciate; in short, she knows that there are deceitful words, but she underestimates the degree to which they need to be countered by truthful ones. Of course, when pressed by her father to "mend her speech a little," Cordelia finally and reluctantly consents to speak of her love for him.17 But, in fact, she speaks not so much of her love for Lear as her obligation to him--and in a manner that strangely mirrors Lear's apportioning of his kingdom; just as he attempts to make the division of his lands exactly reflect the reality of his daughters' hearts, she makes her obligations to him the precise image of the gifts he has bestowed on her. "You have begot me, bred me, loved me. I / Return those duties back as are right fit, / Obey you, love you, and most honor you."18 That Lear deems her statement insufficient might appear to justify her original decision to remain silent. Yet Cordelia's almost legalistic apportioning of her love between her father and her future husband was never likely to have convinced Lear of her love in the first place. In fact, while Cordelia has previously expressed her determination to not do what her sisters have done, "to speak and purpose not," she, in fact, has done almost precisely that; that is, her words, like the words of both her sisters, belie the real nature of her feelings for Lear.19 Of course, Goneril and Regan deliberately create a breach between word and intention; they are all too aware that their words will conceal rather than reveal their true purpose. It is clear, by contrast, that Cordelia does not intend to deceive her father. Indeed, what she says is not untrue; she has, as she acknowledges, an obligation to obey, love, and honor her father. But while she clearly recognizes the difficulty of speaking truthfully, she appears at the same time to be unwilling to submit to the demands that language places upon us; in fact, when she says, "I cannot heave / My heart into my mouth," she implies that the effort required to put into words the nature of her love for her father would almost amount to a violation of that love.20 So when she does speak of it, she does so in a way that strangely does not touch upon the real nature of her feelings for Lear. It is as if--at some level--she seeks to protect the purity of her heart from the corrupting effects of language; but in that very attempt Cordelia ends up losing the dearest object of her love. While Cordelia's speech is obviously different from the "glib and oily art" of her sisters, the character whose speech presents the more illuminating contrast with hers is Kent--perhaps because his relationship to Lear resembles that of Cordelia to Lear in several respects. Like Cordelia, Kent obviously bears Lear genuine loyalty and love, he recognizes the danger that Lear's two scheming older daughters pose to their father, and he is rejected by Lear and banished from his court when he attempts to speak honestly and truthfully to him. However, unlike Cordelia, who initially refuses to speak on her own behalf, Kent does not hesitate to speak when he sees the unjust treatment that the youngest daughter has received from her father. Cordelia's allegiance to truth causes her to be silent; she fears that if she does speak, she will only distort the real nature of her love for Lear; the same allegiance in Kent, by contrast, obliges him to speak: "To plainness honor's bound / When majesty falls to folly."21 Moreover, he speaks not despite the possibility that his words might be misunderstood but precisely because he sees that a misunderstanding that has already occurred needs to be clarified. Cordelia's first impulse, in other words, is to distrust language's capacity to convey truth; Kent's is to make use of the resources that language places at his disposal. Although his first attempt to convince Lear of his wrongheadedness is rebuffed, Kent continues to explore how he might use words to reach the mind and heart of his king. Evidently recognizing that his plain-talk may have rendered Lear more hostile than open to his "good intent," he determines to speak to him again but in a different voice: "If but as well I other accents borrow / That can my speech defuse, my good intent / May carry through itself to that full issue / For which I razed my likeness."22 If Cordelia assumes that her intentions will be understood whether or not she speaks, Kent learns that to be understood one must not only speak but also--on occasion--speak obliquely or indirectly rather than plainly or straightforwardly. In other words, Kent recognizes and--perhaps, more importantly, accepts--the paradoxical quality of human life: that to be recognized one must sometimes be disguised; that to be heard one must sometimes speak in another voice. Cordelia, by contrast, embodies that paradoxical quality; she is, as France, her suitor and future husband, observes "most rich being poor, / Most choice forsaken, and most loved despised."23 But if Cordelia is the very sign of life's paradoxes, she herself does not appear to anticipate or really understand them, expecting from the world a degree of order and rationality that it rarely evinces. It is this very expectation in Cordelia that not only results in the breach with her father but also makes her--perhaps more than anything else--her father's daughter. daughters is precisely the reverse of that of the Earl of Gloucester to his two sons. Of course, Gloucester's character is analogous to Lear's in several respects. Most obviously, he, like Lear, appears not to be a good judge of the characters of his own children, embracing Edmund, the one who intends to betray him and disowning Edgar, the one who is, in fact, faithful to him. It is clear from the very beginning of the play, however, that Gloucester has a special affection for Edmund, his bastard child. Admitting that he "often blushed to acknowledge him," he claims that he now feels no shame at his mention and, in fact, holds him no less dear than his older, legitimate son, Edgar.24 Indeed, Gloucester in his older years looks back with some nostalgia at the sport that resulted in the engendering of Edmund: "Though this knave came something saucily to the world before he was sent for, yet was his mother fair, there was good sport at his making, and the whoreson must be acknowledged."25 It is Gloucester's sentimental and rather foolish attachment to his younger days and to the circumstances of Edmund's conception in particular that blinds him to the real character of his illegitimate son. It is Gloucester rather than Lear, therefore, who presents--as Edmund himself indicates--the figure of the "credulous father."26 By contrast, the mystery of Lear--and it is a profound one--is not why he places too much faith in his most beloved daughter but why he is so ready to believe that she doesn't bear him the love that he feels is his. It should be noted that while Lear indicates to his daughters that he wishes to bestow the largest portion of his kingdom upon the one who can demonstrate that she loves him most, the conversation between Gloucester and Kent in the play's opening lines suggest that Lear has already determined not only the division of his kingdom but how its portions are to be distributed.27 When Kent asks Gloucester which of the older daughters' husbands Lear most values, Albany or Cornwall, Gloucester indicates that it is impossible to discern because "equalities are so weighed that curiosity in neither can make choice of either's moiety."28 In other words, Goneril and Regan--if Gloucester's information is correct--are to receive equal portions and Cordelia is to receive a portion that is either equal to or larger than her sisters' portions. Thus, when Lear indicates his desire to extend his "largest bounty" to the daughter who loves him most, he appears to be prepared to either redraw the boundaries of his kingdom or reapportion the thirds that he has already drawn. But, in fact, Lear refuses to do either when Regan outdoes the profession of love offered by Goneril. Although satisfied by his middle daughter's statement, Lear merely confers on her an "ample third" of his kingdom, "No less in space, validity, and pleasure / Than that conferred on Goneril[,]" but evidently no more either.29 When he invites Cordelia to speak, Lear once more suggests that he is prepared to give one daughter a portion of his kingdom larger than those bestowed on the other two: "what can you say to draw / A third more opulent than your sisters?"30 Of course, Cordelia's unwillingness to outdo her sisters' claims makes her ineligible for any portion of her father's kingdom. But even if she had, one might reasonably assume--given the fact that Regan did not benefit from exceeding Goneril's claim--that she would have received a portion equal to but not greater than the portions her older sisters received. But one might also reasonably assume--and perhaps with greater justification--that Lear does not bestow his "largest bounty" on Regan precisely because he intends all along to bestow it on Cordelia herself. Although "last and least" in terms of birth and age, the youngest daughter is clearly beloved by her father.31 Lear plans to live with her after his abdication, and she is the only one of his three daughters to whose name he attaches the appellation, "our joy,"32 Goneril is merely "our eldest-born"33 and Regan "our second daughter."34 Moreover, while Lear at the outset invites all of his daughters to compete for his "largest bounty," it is only to Cordelia that he specifically holds out the prospect of "a third more opulent than her sisters[.]"35 Of course, if Lear has made one portion of the kingdom larger than the others, he may well have been forced to do so by the difficulty--even with the precision afforded by cartography--of dividing a geometrically irregular landscape with its own natural boundaries and demarcations into three exactly equal portions. At the same time, that he may have reserved a larger portion specifically for Cordelia certainly contributes to the tragic irony of the entire proceeding: Lear ends up disinheriting and disowning the very daughter who is most beloved by him and whom he intended to treat most generously. But however Lear has divided his kingdom, it seems clear that the apportioning has been determined before his daughters are asked to profess their love for him; and although Lear appears to have a special fondness for Cordelia, his division of his kingdom into ample thirds--whether exactly equal or not--suggests that he is already convinced that each of his daughters loves him as he believes a faithful and tender-hearted daughter should love her beloved father. Of course, it quickly becomes evident that Lear's older daughters do not love him. Thus, if Lear has already apportioned his kingdom, he has done so not according to the love that he knows his daughters have for him but according to the love that he imagines they have for him. Lear's failure to recognize the insincerity of Goneril and Regan, therefore, is not fundamentally a result of his misjudgment of their characters; rather, it is a result of his inner conviction about the fidelity and love that should exist between parents and their children. It is, in other words, the overwhelming presence of an ideal order in Lear's soul that prevents him from not really misjudging Goneril and Regan (even a misjudgment, one supposes, requires some prior knowledge), but from really knowing them as elements of a world independent of the world of his own mind. It is Gloucester's sentimental attachment to the foibles of his own past--a kind of vanity really--that temporarily blinds him to the evil nature of his son, Edmund; it is, by contrast, Lear's detachment from the world of ordinary human foibles that Gloucester so obviously inhabits that causes him not to recognize the duplicity of Goneril and Regan. Indeed, the ideal order is so powerfully present in Lear's soul that it becomes the world that he inhabits. Lear, therefore, is not vain in the usual sense; that is, he does not admire himself excessively. His fault--and it is a grand one--is that his world is a projection, a kind of mapping, if you like, of his own noble heart. That Lear has already determined how his kingdom is to be apportioned, does not, however, mean that his daughters' protestations of love are part of an empty ritual that merely makes explicit the decision that he has already made. The proceedings certainly have profound consequences for Cordelia, who finds herself both disinherited and disowned at the end of them. Her treatment indicates that Lear evidently seeks something from the protestations of love that he has required from his daughters. In fact, Goneril and Regan give their father what he wants not by revealing their true feelings for him but by providing--or by appearing to provide--a display in the outer world of that which Lear imagines in his heart to be true. Lear's demand that his daughters profess their love for him, in other words, springs not from some secret doubt in his mind about the degree of their fidelity to him, but from his desire that the order of outward appearances correspond to the ideal order that prevails in his heart. It is a demand that does not betray a hidden weakness in his own inner conviction about the nature of things; that is, he does not require that the outer world appear in a certain way so that he can feel more secure in his daughters' love. It is, on the contrary, the very strength of his inner conviction that allows him to demand that it be perfectly reflected in the world of outward appearances. It is, of course, Cordelia's failure to satisfy that demand that results in her rejection by Lear. Goneril and Regan are able to satisfy it, in part, because they don't care about whether their protestations of love accurately reflect their hearts; they care only about advancing their own interests. But, of course, their success is also and perhaps ultimately made possible by Lear's failure to recognize that his daughters' protestations of love may not reflect their hearts. Because Lear is a man whose inner conviction is so strong that he expects--even demands--that it find expression in the outer world, he is more susceptible than most to the duplicity of others. His failure, in other words, is not so much his willingness to trust the particular word of his older daughters, as it is his expectation that the world of outward appearances generally expresses for him--and without difficulty--the ideal order that prevails in his own heart. It is that expectation that causes him to lose patience with Cordelia when she hesitates to speak of her love for him. Cordelia knows that she loves her father, but she distrusts the capacity of language to express that love without distorting it. Lear, by contrast, is so convinced of the love of Cordelia that he assumes that it can be easily expressed and without distortion. Strikingly, however, Cordelia's initial refusal to express her love for Lear has as its source the very worldview that causes Lear to demand that expression in the first place. She is so convinced of the reality of her heart that she believes that any further rendering of it is unnecessary; when she declines to speak, therefore, she is refusing to make manifest not that which is hidden but that which she believes is already apparent. Cordelia, in other words, assumes a world in which there really is no distinction between the order of appearances and the order of reality itself. But that world is also the one Lear assumes; for his demand that the world of outward appearances simply conform to the inner world of his own heart is really a demand for a world without appearances or for a world in which things are simply what they seem to be. But the distinction between seeming and being is the very mark of the historical order, an order that--as Guardini reminds us--"signifies above all a state of being that is both shut off and obscure," in which "life is quite as liable to hide inside itself and to conceal its true nature," and in which everything that is living "can be known only by its outward expression."36 It is Cordelia, of course, who in her failure to recognize the need for outward expression, fails to recognize the nature of history itself. But when Lear insists that his daughters speak of their love for him, he is not acknowledging that he can know their hearts only by their outward expression; rather, he is demanding that the world of outward expression conform to the inner reality of his own heart; that the world of appearances offer him a perfect reflection of his own idealized vision of things. Thus, Lear's demand is ultimately a demand for a world of pure being, for a world that transcends the limitations of historical existence itself. His response to the treachery of his two older daughters can be usefully compared to that of Gloucester to the treachery that he imagines he has suffered at the hands of his son, Edgar. When Gloucester, having taken note of the "late eclipses in the sun and moon," speculates that the disorder in his own family, and in Lear's, might be an effect of changes in the heavenly world, he implies that the events of earthly life are merely a passive reflection of the events of celestial life and that human beings are, therefore, powerless to affect their own fortunes.38 Gloucester's instinct, in other words, is to look not to, but beyond the realm of human motivation for an explanation of the events that have befallen his family and Lear's. It is an instinct that provokes the ridicule of Edmund, who, of course, knows precisely where the responsibility for his father's misfortune lies: "This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeits of our own behavior, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars."39 If Gloucester's response to his misfortune is--as Edmund suggests--to seek to avoid responsibility for it, Lear's, illustrated most dramatically in the report that Kent receives of his former master after his departure from the house of Regan, is quite the reverse; we find a man who, having lost the power that he once held over armies and men, now contends with "the fretful elements" themselves, bidding "the wind blow the earth into the sea, / Or swell the curled waters 'bove the main, / That things might change or cease."40 If Gloucester appears to acknowledge his impotence before the order of the cosmos, Lear seeks to affect that very order, striving "in his little world of man to outscorn / The to-and-fro-conflicting wind and rain."41 It is as if Lear imagines that his betrayal by Goneril and Regan is a betrayal that he has suffered at the hands of the cosmos itself, that the very elements have become his enemies, complicit in the treachery of his ungrateful daughters: "But yet I call you servile ministers, / That will with two pernicious daughters join / Your high-engendered battles 'gainst a head / So old and white as this."42 But when Lear berates the elements, he is not--like Gloucester--seeking to blame his misfortune on a world that he believes is beyond his control. On the contrary, the source of the frustration that he evidently feels as he seeks to have nature do his bidding is precisely his confusion of the order of his own world with the order of the wider cosmos. If Gloucester appears to deflect responsibility onto an order higher than that of the world itself, Lear attempts to exert control over that higher order, an order for which he believes he has responsibility. Lear, in other words, is a ruler whose vision of his own world is so idealized that he no longer recognizes the difference between its order and the order of divine being, the transient and shifting order of the human sphere, and the fixed and eternal order that governs the cosmos. In short, if Gloucester draws attention to the difference between the order of man's own world and the larger world that transcends it, Lear appears to deny that difference. Of course, it could be argued that Lear's response to his own misfortune is an effect of the profound grief that it has produced in him, that the Lear we see on the heath is a man whom filial ingratitude and treachery have driven to distraction. But to argue thus is to underestimate the essential unity of Shakespeare's representation of Lear. If Lear is mad, he is mad--if that is the right word--from the beginning of the play; that is, his actions on the heath after the loss of his kingdom are consistent with his actions at the outset as he attempts to divest himself "both of rule, interest of territory, cares of state."43 When Lear divides his kingdom, he is, in fact, dividing territory that has only been entrusted to him and that --under the normal principles of monarchical rule--is meant to be passed on in its entirety to a single heir. But Lear treats his kingdom not as the sacred trust that it actually is but as a personal possession to be dispensed with whenever and howsoever he wishes. Indeed, as he confers the first portion of his extensive territory upon his oldest daughter, proudly gesturing as he does to its far-flung boundaries and natural splendors, "even from this line to this / With shadowy forests and with champains riched, / With plenteous rivers and wide-skirted meads," he resembles nothing less than the god of Genesis as he gives the first man stewardship over the earth and the seas.44 The biblical allusion is profoundly ironic, of course, for Lear is a ruler who has evidently confused the radically different roles of steward and creator, whose vision of his own reign is so idealized that he imagines himself to have the power not of a man but of a god. So, when Lear on the heath vainly seeks to exert his own power over nature, to extend his power beyond the limits of the temporal and the human, he is merely illustrating--albeit in a more explicit and dramatic fashion--the same deluded vision that has been his from the beginning. It is in Lear's "madness," therefore, that we see not the shreds of a once great ruler but the very essence of the man whom we meet at the play's outset, in all his grandeur and all his delusion. The nature of that delusion is further illuminated when we compare Lear to another of Shakespeare's unhappy rulers, Prospero, the hero of The Tempest, and, like Lear, a victim--or apparent victim--of treachery from within his own circle of kin.45 Prospero's loss of power, like Lear's, is often attributed to political naivete. Just as Lear unwisely decides to hand over the control and management of his kingdom to his daughters while holding onto "the name, and all th' addition to a king,"46 Prospero yields the running of his city, Milan, to his younger brother, Antonio, while retaining the title and prerogatives of duke for himself.47 Both rulers seem to underestimate or discount altogether the ambition and ruthlessness of those to whom they yield and ultimately lose their power. Prospero's downfall, however, cannot simply be attributed to a failure to understand the nature of the temporal order. In fact, it is precisely his desire for a reality more fixed and more eternal than the mundane and mutable realities of the political world that leads him to neglect "worldly ends" and dedicate himself to the "closeness and the bettering" of his mind.48 Prospero, in other words, may undervalue the temporal order, but he clearly recognizes its difference from the order of being itself. In fact, it is that recognition in Prospero that most clearly distinguishes his character from Lear's. If in Prospero we see a man seeking a reality of a higher order, in Lear we see a man who imagines that he is already in possession of it. Lear's delusion, therefore, is a delusion of metaphysical proportions; he is a man who fails to understand not merely political life but life itself. The enormity of his delusion is reflected in the enormity of the disillusion that he experiences after the treachery of his daughters renders him homeless. Because Lear imagines that the order of the world he inhabits is as fixed and immutable as the order of the cosmos, he experiences the loss of that world as the loss not merely of the trappings and privileges of political power but of being itself. Prospero's is an estrangement from the temporal world; Lear's is ultimately an estrangement from the transcendent order that endows the temporal world with meaning and purpose, an estrangement that is as profound as the conviction that Lear felt in the transparent presence of that order in the microcosm that he once ruled. Prospero rejects the temporal world because he seeks a higher order of being; Lear's estrangement from the temporal world is an estrangement from that higher order of being, an order of being that Lear had mistakenly identified with the order of man's own world. At first glance, the encounter between the two men suggests one of those moments of self-recognition that often mark the tragic hero's difficult journey towards restored dignity and honor. Lear, as we have seen, is a man who inhabits a world that is essentially a projection of the ideal order that resides in his own heart; he does not, in other words, know the world as something other than himself. But when--at the lowest ebb of his existence--he meets the forlorn and destitute figure of Edgar, Lear appears to begin to know himself through the world when before he had only known the world as a reflection of himself. His immediate response to Edgar's appearance is to ask him if he has also been the victim of the treachery of ungrateful daughters: "Didst thou give all to thy daughters? And art thou come to this?"49 But if at first Lear wonders if Edgar might also be a victim of familial betrayal, he eventually insists--and despite the attempt of Kent to tell him otherwise--that Edgar could only be such a victim: "Nothing could have subdued nature / To such a lowness but his unkind daughters."50 His unwillingness to see otherwise is, in part, a reflection of the depth of grief that his daughters' treachery has caused him; he is so overwhelmed by that grief, in other words, that it has become his only reality. But in his insistence that Edgar's condition not merely resembles but is actually his own, we also see the Lear that we saw at the play's outset, a Lear who demands that the outer world of appearances exactly conform to the inner world of his own heart. The greatest irony of the encounter between Lear and Edgar, of course, is that the reality that Lear sees--or doesn't see--in Edgar is itself an appearance, a disguise that Edgar has adopted in order to ensure his escape from those who seek his life. It is, paradoxically, a disguise that necessitates not the putting on but the stripping away of appearances, a "presented nakedness" that Edgar hopes will give him the anonymity that he needs to elude arrest by his father's guards.51 Edgar, in other words, has decided to become "nothing" in order to mask the fact that he is someone. However, if his nakedness is merely a disguise, it is not one that Lear recognizes. Indeed, if at first Lear sees a mirror of his own forlorn condition in the beggar's nakedness, he is ultimately convinced--precisely because his own condition is the only reality that he can see--that he is presented with an image of the human condition itself: "Thou art the thing itself; unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art."52 But "the thing itself," as we have seen, only appears to be so; and Lear's conviction that man stripped of the trappings and adornments of culture is a mere beast without any cosmic or metaphysical significance is ultimately an expression not of the underlying truth of his condition but of its most profound symptom--his utter estrangement from the transcendent order that he once identified with the order of his own kingdom. The vision of man that Lear forms on the heath does not, in other words, allow him to see the truth about the human condition; in fact, Lear's "new" anthropology is nothing more than the inexorable consequence or outgrowth of the deluded vision that has gripped his mind from the beginning. The Lear we find at the play's outset is, as we have seen, a man who sees in the world that he rules not a reflection of the order of the cosmos but the order of the cosmos itself, a man who has erased in his own mind the distinction between the little world of man, the order of man's own creation, and the order of divine creation. The ultimate effect of that vision is, in fact, to eclipse the larger world that transcends man's own, to deny his participation in the order that governs the cosmos and that endows his own existence with meaning and purpose. From the very beginning, therefore, the world of Lear is a world in which man, if he is honest, must confront the essential loneliness of his existence, his utter separation from the order of being for which he still yearns but can never approach; the nobility of Lear lies in his capacity to do just that, to bravely face and endure the existential reality of the world that he has created. Lear never recognizes the larger truth about that world: that it is an illusion through and through. But in his encounter with the beggar on the heath, he does acknowledge its internal truth, the inexorable reality that inheres in that world from the beginning. The world of Lear is one that imagines itself to be selfsufficient; but precisely because of its illusion of autonomy, it cannot offer a reflection of the transcendent order that ultimately gives human culture its deepest meaning and purpose. In the world of Lear, therefore, culture is finally and inexorably a sham, a shallow and illusory contrivance that insulates man from the difficult truth about the reality of his existence. In such a world, the only authentic man is an "unaccommodated man," to use Lear's own phrase, man divested of the cultural trappings that convince him that he is more than that which he really is.53 It is in the "nakedness" of Edgar that Lear recognizes that man; and when he begins to unbutton his own "lendings," he is attempting to become that man, man in his essence, stripped of the disguises that culture offers him to protect him from the truth about himself.54 Ultimately, however, what Lear recognizes is not the truth about man but the anthropology that is already implicit in the world that he has created. It is an anthropology that, as we have seen, supposes that the culture that man makes for himself is essentially alien to his own nature; that man is, in fact, at his most authentic when he is in what we call the state of nature. But nature in this vision of things can no longer be a nature that, as Lear had once supposed, is imbued with a sense of moral order and purpose; because it is no longer connected to the transcendent order that provides us with that sense of moral order and purpose, it becomes precisely the realm in which man's instinctive desires are given free reign. It is the realm in which the natural order of things is precisely that which yields the most power to the strongest. The profound disillusion that the ingratitude and treachery of his daughters causes Lear leads him to acknowledge that such a nature is, in fact, reality. However, it is Edmund, the illegitimate son of Gloucester, who more actively embraces that nature and claims it as the very source of his strength. Lear on the heath, as we have seen, embraces the image of "natural" man, man divested of the trappings and adornments of culture, because it seems to him to present a more authentic image of the human condition. But Lear's embrace of authenticity provides him with precious little comfort as he attempts--with the memory of his daughters' infidelity burned into his heart--to endure his exile on the heath. In fact, Lear experiences the state of nature as essentially a state of deprivation, a state that causes him to suffer in a way at which others can only wonder. Edmund, by contrast, embraces nature precisely because he is convinced that it will allow him to do what culture's arbitrary laws have--at least in his own mind--thus far prevented him from doing, to "grow" and to "prosper," to realize the potential with which he is endowed by nature.55 For Edmund, in other words, the state of nature is a state not of deprivation but of invigoration, a state imbued with a vitality that is the very antidote to the dullness and staleness of culture's conventions. Despite the obvious differences between the characters of Lear and Edmund, Edmund is, in fact, a symbol of the world that Lear has created for himself; for it is only when the little world of man becomes the world, when the microcosm is divorced from the order that governs the cosmos itself, that nature can be emptied of its moral content. Edmund is the man who is most at home in that changed landscape of the soul, the new man who hopes through the sheer exertion of his will to become the master of his destiny. It is in him that we see most clearly the man who is, in fact, made possible by the world that has sprung from the mind of Lear. Ultimately, however, Lear himself is the more profound symbol of that world because in his suffering he reveals more completely the reality of the human condition. Edmund is, for the most part, a kind of illusion, a symbol of the vain hope that man can live a more fully human life by ignoring the larger life that transcends his own. That such a hope is misplaced is indicated, of course, by Edmund's failure to usurp Edgar, his half-brother and father's heir, and by his eventual demise at the end of the play. It is in Lear, however, that we see most clearly that a life that is lived in isolation from the order that governs the wider cosmos is one that is less than human. In his very estrangement from that order--an estrangement that Edmund doesn't seem to feel--Lear reveals man's deep-seated need to participate in a world larger than his own. As Edmund seeks to become the master of his destiny, his humanity is diminished and, at times, barely recognizable; by contrast, as Lear bravely endures the reality that he has, in fact, created for himself, his humanity--and ours too--is more fully revealed. in the older scheme of things, who still recognizes in man's world a reflection of the larger world. Strikingly, however, his faith in cosmic order does not seem to help him to endure life's difficulties; in fact, it seems to engender in him a kind of passivity, an excessive willingness to allow fate to simply take its course. To be sure, Gloucester characterizes his desire to take his own life as a rebellion against the will of the gods, an attempt "to quarrel with their great opposeless wills."56 However, his repeated willingness to succumb to despair even after his foiled suicide attempt and his vow to "bear / Affliction till it do cry out itself" suggests a man whose instinct is not to fight but to capitulate to the forces that sometimes appear to dictate the course of human life57 If Edmund, Gloucester's bastard son, seeks to become the master of his destiny, Gloucester seems too willing to become a pawn of fate, relinquishing his own role in the working out of human affairs. Both suffer under an illusion; Edmund's is that he can ignore the larger forces that influence human life; Gloucester's is that he is merely their victim. In his lack of capacity for endurance, Gloucester contrasts not only with Lear but also with his legitimate son, Edgar. It is Edgar, for instance, who finds that his own suffering is alleviated when he beholds Lear's more profound anguish: "How light and portable my pain seems now, / When that which makes me bend makes the King bow."58 By contrast, the madness of Lear seems only to make the blind Gloucester envious of his king: "The King is mad. How stiff is my vile sense, / That I stand up, and have ingenious feeling / Of my huge sorrows! Better I were distract; / So should my thoughts be severed from my griefs, / And woes by wrong imagination lose / The knowledge of themselves."59 In Lear, Edgar recognizes the possibility that fellowship with another afflicted human being might relieve the anguish of his own mind: "But then the mind much sufferance doth o'erskip / When grief hath mates, and bearing fellowship."60 Gloucester, by contrast, can only think of alleviating his mental anguish by surrendering the very capacity that makes human fellowship possible in the first place--the capacity for imagination and self-awareness. Gloucester' greatest suffering, of course, comes to him as a result of the loyalty that he shows his king; that suffering, however, ultimately causes him to seek to relinquish his humanity through either the taking of his actual life or the sacrifice of his consciousness. In Lear, by contrast, we see a man who suffers more profoundly than any other in the play because he never willingly forsakes his humanity. While Gloucester wishes for a distracted mind to protect him from the knowledge of his own sorrows, Lear, as we have seen, readily embraces what he thinks is the difficult truth about the human condition, painful as it is to him. Gloucester envies Lear's madness; Lear's madness, however, is the result not of a weak mind but of a self-awareness that--although never complete--refuses to die. Gloucester imagines, as we have seen, that his desire to take his own life is a rebellion against the larger forces that control the cosmos. But it is Lear who, as Kent observes at the end of the play, "usurped his life," not by seeking to end it prematurely but precisely by living beyond what most could endure.61 Lear, in other words, defies life by clinging to it even when he has lost sight of the transcendent order that endows it with meaning and purpose and when most others would have succumb to the forces of despair. "The wonder," as Kent remarks poignantly, "is he hath endured so long."62 It is only when Lear loses Cordelia that he loses his own life; and in that respect, he also differs from Gloucester. When Gloucester finally learns that the beggar who has protected and guided him in his blind wanderings is actually his son, he is--as Edgar himself reports--unable to withstand the sudden transition from sorrow to happiness: "But his flawed heart-- / Alack, too weak the conflict to support-- / 'Twixt too extremes of passion, joy and grief, / Burst smilingly."63 In Gloucester, in other words, we find a man who--although noble of heart--is too weak to sustain the radical and abrupt shifts in perspective that are characteristic of the world of tragedy. After Lear is finally reunited with Cordelia, by contrast, he glimpses the possibility of a life other than the life of utter alienation and solitude symbolized for him in the figure of the beggar on the heath. It is a vision of life that Lear articulates as he and his daughter are being led off to prison after their capture in the play's final act; what he sees is, in fact, a much-constricted life, a life in which he and his daughter will merely "pray and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh / At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues / Talk of court news" and "talk with them too-- / Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out."64 It is a life, in other words, in which Lear and Cordelia--although united in their mutual love--will be more observers of, than participants in, the activity of the world. Lear's vision is--in one sense--forced upon him; that is, it is difficult for him in his circumstances to foresee anything other than a life in which he and Cordelia "alone will sing like birds i' th' cage."65 However, while Cordelia seems prepared to resist their fate and shows a desire to confront her older sisters, Lear seems quite willing--even eager--to suffer the confinement of prison, a confinement that for him is ultimately a sanctuary from the world of alienation that he has experienced in his period of exile; what Lear envisions, then, is not so much another world as a retreat from a world that no longer reflects the transcendent order that had once seemed so transparently evident to him. His vision is not an illusion, for the love that Cordelia holds out to him is profoundly real. But because it is a vision so reduced, it does not finally offer an alternative to the deluded vision that originally sprang from his mind and that ultimately caused his downfall. Lear, the loyalty of Kent and Gloucester, the self-sacrificing love of Cordelia, and even the profound guilt and regret of Goneril and Edmund as they contemplate the ruined human landscape that they have done so much to create. In fact, it is the poetry of Shakespeare that finally reveals the inner reality that Lear himself had insisted be so directly displayed at the play's outset and that Cordelia had assumed need not be displayed--the reality of the human heart; and it is the poet, therefore, who is perhaps the true cartographer of the human world, the one who, through his mappings of the heart, makes visible those ideal qualities that inform human culture and that, in fact, make it possible at all. The modern reader of Shakespeare finds Lear's vision of "unaccommodated man" convincing because it seems to confirm the vision that has been imparted to him by the philosophers of his own day. He has been told that man's life is one of existential solitude; that he must confront the essential meaninglessness of his existence; that he can only live authentically when he rejects the comforting illusions that culture offers him. As we have seen, however, the play's vision is not Lear's vision. In fact, what it shows us is that the vision of "unaccommodated man" is merely a symptom of the denial of the human world's participation in the larger world that transcends its own life; that man becomes lonely precisely when he severs the link between "the little world of man," the microcosm, and the cosmos itself; that the estrangement that he feels is not his underlying condition but merely an effect of his attempt to make his own world autonomous and self-sufficient. But, most importantly, Shakespeare allows the modern individual to begin to overcome the limitations of a condition that is perhaps uniquely his, to begin to re-imagine his life in relation to the ideal order that transcends that life and that is made visible for him in the action of King Lear. |
