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‘Is man no more than
this?’
King Lear and the Collapse of Civilisation
The collapse of civilisation
Freud: Civilization and its Discontents
(1930)
According to Freud, man is ‘a savage beast to whom consideration
towards his own kind is something alien’ (1962: 59).
‘The word “civilization” describes the whole sum of the
achievements and the regulations which distinguish our lives from
those of our animal ancestors and which serve two purposes –
namely to protect men against nature and to adjust their mutual
relations.’ (1962: 36)
‘This replacement of the power of the individual by the power of a
community constitutes the decisive step of civilization. The
essence of it lies in the fact that the members of the community
restrict themselves in their possibilities of satisfaction, whereas the
individual knew no such restrictions.’ (1962: 42)
The collapse of civilisation in King Lear
Kenneth Tynan on Peter Brook’s Lear in the theatre:
‘The play is a mighty philosophic farce in which the
leading figures enact their roles on a gradually denuded
stage that resembles, at the end, a desert graveyard or
unpeopled planet. It is an ungoverned world … a world
without gods, with no possibility of hopeful resolution.’
(1967: 132)
http://shakespeare.yippy.com/
The collapse of civilisation in King Lear
LEAR. Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man’s life is cheap as beast’s. (2.2.425-6)
LEAR. Is man no more but this? Consider him well.
Thou owest the worm no silk, the beast no hide,
the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Here’s three
on ’s are sophisticated; thou art the thing itself.
Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor,
bare, forked animal as thou art. (3.4.93-8)
The collapse of civilisation in King Lear
Animal imagery:
wolves, vultures, tigers, serpents, rats, bears, and a huge
number of types of dog (bitches, curs, mastiffs, grey-hounds,
mongrels, hounds, spaniels, ditch-dogs)
Inhuman actions:
blinding of Gloucester
shutting out of Lear into the storm
arbitrary deaths of Cordelia and Lear
‘The timing of these two deaths must surely be seen as cruelly,
precisely, subversive: instead of complying with the demands of
formal closure … the play concludes with two events which sabotage
the prospect of both closure and recuperation.’ (Dollimore 2010: 203)
Civilisation and authority
What keeps us from this terrifying chaos? What enforces
civilisation? The play’s answer seems to be authority…
LEAR. Who wouldst thou serve?
KENT. You.
LEAR. Dost thou know me, fellow?
KENT. No, sir, but you have that in your countenance which I would
fain call master.
LEAR. What’s that?
KENT. Authority. (1.4.23-9)
Authority
But this mythologised idea of authority comes just
seconds after a very different use of the term:
GONERIL. Idle old man,
That still would manage those authorities
That he hath given away! (1.3.16-18)
On what does Lear’s authority rest? And why does he
lose it?
Authority
LEAR. … Only we still retain
The name and all the additions to a king.
The sway, revenue, execution of the rest,
Beloved sons, be yours; which to confirm,
This crownet part betwixt you. (1.1.127-31)
Symbolic role of Lear’s hundred knights
Authority
Lear begins to speak in the third person when he realises that
his former social identity is not the same as his current one:
LEAR. Doth any here know me? Why, this is not Lear.
Doth Lear walk thus, speak thus? Where are his eyes?
Either his notion weakens, or his discernings
Are lethargied. Sleeping or waking, ha?
Sure, ’tis not so.
Who is it that can tell me who I am?
Lear’s shadow? I would learn that, for by the marks
Of sovereignty, knowledge, and reason
I should be false persuaded I had daughters. (1.4.220-8)
‘Shadow’ and ‘marks of sovereignty’ – authority is about
outward signs…
Lear’s collapsing authority
LEAR. Hark, nature, hear:
Dear goddess, suspend thy purpose if
Thou didst intend to make this creature fruitful.
Into her womb convey sterility.
Dry up in her the organs of increase,
And from her derogate body never spring
A babe to honour her. (1.4.268-74)
REGAN. I pray you, father, being weak, seem so. (2.2.359)
LEAR. I will have such revenges on you both
That all the world shall – I will do such things –
What they are, yet I know not; but they shall be
The terrors of the earth. (2.2.438-41)
Lear’s collapsing authority
The play takes on an increasingly absurd and tragicomic
tone as Lear progresses into madness.
Railing against the storm – a futile attempt to exert
control over nature.
‘When Lear strips off his clothes to reveal himself as
“unaccommodated man,” Shakespeare boldly reveals the
natural body of the king as one that appears to bear little
value in its own right.’ (Tennenhouse 1986: 139)
Lear’s collapsing authority
By the end of the play, Lear’s faith in social order is shattered.
Power and authority, he realises, are amoral:
LEAR. See how yon justice rails upon yon simple thief. Hark in thine
ear: change places, and handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is
the thief ? Thou hast seen a farmer’s dog bark at a beggar?
GLOUCESTER. Ay, sir.
LEAR. An the creature run from the cur, there thou mightst behold the
great image of authority. A dog’s obeyed in office. (Folio 4.5.14755)
Lear and real authority
The first Quarto edition of
King Lear (1608) tells us that
it was
‘played before the King’s
Majesty at Whitehall upon St.
Stephen’s night in Christmas
Holidays, by his Majesty’s
Servants playing usually at
the Globe on the Bankside.’
A corresponding reference in
the 1607 Stationer’s Register
confirms that Shakespeare’s
King Lear was performed
before the King on St.
Stephen’s Night (26
December) 1606.
James I (1566-1625)
Previously James VI of Scotland
Became King of England in 1603
Importance of lineage: ideological
project (in which plays and
pageants played a part) to cement
his claim to the throne.
Shakespeare’s company –
previously the Lord Chamberlain’s
Men – appointed the King’s Men in
1603.
James I (1566-1625)
Divine Right of Kings (Absolutism).
As James I himself put it in a speech to Parliament in 1610:
‘to dispute what God may do is blasphemy, … so is it sedition in
subjects to dispute what a king may do in the height of his power.’
The Project of Union.
In 1604, at the height of the debate surrounding the Union
of England and Scotland, James condemned Parliament for
‘preferring war to peace, trouble to quietness, hatred to love,
weakness to greatness, and division to union.’
(England and Scotland were not legally unified until 1707.)
King Lear: or, Things You Should Never
Do When You’re King
Divide a united Kingdom (note Gloucester’s reference at the
beginning of the Quarto to the recent ‘division of the
kingdoms’);
Banish your loyal subjects;
Reject your legitimate daughter, casting her off without a
dowry;
Overrule the laws of inheritance and succession.
As Leonard Tennenhouse puts it, ‘to deny primogeniture is
to undermine the Stuart argument on the metaphysical body
of power’ (1986: 137).
Lear / James
James, like Lear, was a keen huntsman.
James’s fool Archie Armstrong ‘treated the king and men of high rank
with astonishing familiarity’ (Patterson 1989: 106).
James rewarded his favourites at court by granting them monopolies
(exclusive privileges to trade in a particular commodity):
KENT. This is not altogether fool, my lord.
FOOL. No, faith; lords and great men will not let me. If I had a monopoly out,
they would have part on’t, and ladies too, they will not let me have all fool to
myself – they’ll be snatching. (1.4.146-50)
James’s authority to ‘coin’ was also being debated around 1606:
LEAR. No, they cannot touch me for coining. I am the King himself. (4.5.83-4)
Lear as carnival
St. Stephen’s Day was a key date in the festive calendar, during the
period of ‘Misrule’.
It was, according to Leah Marcus, ‘the holiday most associated with
the granting of traditional hospitality… the high were to look out
in pity upon the tribulations of the low’ (1988: 154):
‘The preservation of old holiday customs was a very important policy
matter for King James I. He had already issued royal proclamations
calling for the keeping of open house during the Christmas season
according to the traditional “laws” of hospitality; a decade or so later,
he would codify his position in the Book of Sports.’ (1988: 156)
Lear as carnival
Thus, Marcus concludes, the potential subversiveness of
these satirical references to the King would ultimately
have been contained by the festive context of the
performance:
‘For anyone who remembered what St Stephen’s
Day was about (and who could possibly forget?) the
quarto Lear was framed within a markedly
conservative ceremonial context.’ (1988: 158)
The Fool
The platea-like figure of the Fool is a crucial element in
the play’s politics.
Metatheatrical dramaturgy and intertextual casting
Images of the crown and authority as empty signifiers:
The hollow eggshells (1.4.150-6)
‘Thou hast pared thy wit o’ both sides and left nothing in the
middle.’ (1.4.179-81)
‘Now thou art an O without a figure. I am better than thou art,
now. I am a fool; thou art nothing.’ (1.4.186-8)
FOOL. Can you make no use of nothing, uncle?
LEAR. Why no, boy. Nothing can be made out of nothing.
FOOL. (to Kent) Prithee, tell him so much the rent of his land comes to.
He will not believe a fool.
LEAR. A bitter fool.
FOOL. Dost thou know the difference, my boy, between a bitter fool
and a sweet fool?
LEAR. No, lad. Teach me.
FOOL. (sings) That lord that counsell’d thee
To give away thy land,
Come, place him here by me;
Do thou for him stand.
The sweet and bitter fool
Will presently appear,
The one in motley here,
The other found out there.
LEAR. Dost thou call me fool, boy?
FOOL. All thy other titles thou hast given away. (1.4.126-44)
KENT. How chance the King comes with so small a train?
FOOL. An thou hadst been set in the stocks for that question, thou
hadst well deserved it.
KENT. Why, fool?
FOOL. We’ll set thee to school to an ant, to teach thee there’s no
labouring in the winter. All that follow their noses are led by their
eyes but blind men; and there’s not a nose among twenty but can
smell him that’s stinking. Let go thy hold when a great wheel runs
down a hill, lest it break thy neck with following it; but the great
one that goes up the hill, let him draw thee after. When a wise man
gives thee better counsel, give me mine again. I would have none
but knaves follow it, since a fool gives it. […]
KENT. Where learned you this, fool?
FOOL. Not in the stocks, fool. (2.2.231-53)
Lear as Fool
In his madness and poverty, Lear’s alienation finally
allows him to ‘see how this world goes’ (4.5.142-3):
LEAR. When we are born, we cry that we are come
To this great stage of fools. (4.5.171-2)
LEAR. …I am e’en
The natural fool of fortune. (4.5.178-9)
Civilisation and authority
King Lear does not, then, offer us a straight choice between
tyrannical authority on the one hand, and destructive chaos on the
other.
‘King Lear is the greatest Marxist play ever written.’ (Cicely Berry,
voice director of the RSC, at the British Shakespeare Association
conference, February 2012)
Authority, it seems, is simply the ownership and control of physical
resources (‘land’), and enforced only by a combination of actual
and threatened violence (soldiers), and empty ideological signs
(‘titles’, ‘marks of sovereignty’).
It could be argued that the play offers only a hollow and superficial
reaffirmation of patriarchal values at the end of the play.
King Lear and social change
Seeing the human being as an unprotected animal
suggests to Lear (however temporarily) an
alternative social order:
LEAR. Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless night,
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. (3.4.25-30)
King Lear and social change
Freud concluded Civilization and its Discontents with the
following observation:
‘The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be
whether and to what extent their cultural development will
succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by
the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction.’ (1962:
92)
At the height of the play’s cruelty, three unnamed
servants behave in a way which provides the play’s most
hopeful answer to Freud’s question (in the Quarto, at
least)…
King Lear and social change
In Act 3 Scene 7 (the blinding of Gloucester),
Shakespeare presents what Richard Strier describes
as ‘the most radical possible sociopolitical act in a
way that can only be interpreted as calling for his
audience’s approval’ (1988: 119).
As Robert Shaughnessy puts it, ‘for a servant to
“stand up thus” (3.7.83) is not only an act of
rebellion but a theatrical coup comparable to a
piece of scenery coming to life to berate the actors’
(2011: 244).
Ambiguous politics
Just as we saw with the carnivalesque inversions of Twelfth Night, the
tragicomic chaos evoked in King Lear is politically charged, but highly
ambiguous.
Is the behaviour of the servants an extension of Kent’s class-coded
fealty to Lear? Or does their willingness to defy their social superiors
suggest a revolutionary impulse?
Were the play’s subversive suggestions ultimately contained by its
festive context? What about the play’s performances in different
(public) contexts?
Would the play have left its audience with a renewed faith in the
existing social order, or might it have fostered a radical scepticism?
References
Dollimore, Jonathan (2010) Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the
Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, Reissued Third Edition,
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Freud, Sigmund (1962) Civilization and its Discontents, trans. James Strachey,
New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Marcus, Leah S. (1988) Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents,
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Patterson, Annabel (1989) Shakespeare and the Popular Voice, Oxford:
Blackwell.
References
Shaughnessy, Robert (2011) The Routledge Guide to William Shakespeare,
Abingdon: Routledge.
Strier, Richard (1988) ‘Faithful Servants: Shakespeare’s Praise of
Disobedience’ in Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier [eds] The Historical
Renaissance, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 104-33.
Tennenhouse, Leonard (1986) Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare’s
Genres, New York: Methuen.
Tynan, Kenneth (1967) Tynan Right & Left, New York: Atheneum.
Unless stated otherwise, text cited from King Lear is from the 1608 Quarto.