King Lear in hindsight

“We” are the empirical decision makers who hold that uncertainty is our discipline, and that understanding how to act under conditions of incomplete information is the highest and most urgent human pursuit.

- Taleb

Negative capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge.

- Keats

Marjorie Garber, making a case for reading Shakespeare “slowly,” raises the pertinent critical question of what we bring to the plays we read, how we seek to mollify them, in a sense, rather than allowing the words before us, on the page, to mollify us. There is a triteness to this line of inquiry, as though our words will magically sing to us in all sorts of ways if only we are able to resist certain professional urges to generalize, categorize, theorize, etc. Furthermore, if reading in “slow motion” is an attempt to (re)discover humanistic knowledge for ourselves, why ought we to divorce whatever it is we want to say about a text from the “general context of human experience or history” (de Man qtd. in Garber, 152).

Are close readings and the knowledge they afford us ahistorical?—and if we insist that they must be – that the value of the pedagogical exercise in question comes with a sort of seal of approval that wishes to obviate the anxiety surrounding historical or contextual contingencies, as if to understand, once and for all, that our deconstructions are always subject to (historical) deconstruction—then the type of knowledge we are inevitably making a claim for is not only not definitive in nature, aware of its mortality, but further, cannot claim or purport this understanding as any sort of achievement.

Rather, it takes this achievement and makes it its fundamental assumption as if to say that reiterating such understanding is not, and cannot be, part of its prerogative. In avoiding calling out such understanding, it is immediately suspect to what others before me have called the “hermeneutics of suspicion.”[1]

I do not doubt that we are right to be suspicious. Surely the fact that we make assumptions is our lot as human beings, as users of language, so that the humanistic knowledge I am interested in could only begin with prior assumptions anyhow and the only way language could carry on is if those prior assumptions are continually ratified. Is it our lot to ask what a particular reading of King Lear commits us to before doing the reading itself?

But this is like saying we cannot use language until we know what using it in the way we do commits us to. This is simply not how human beings use language. Divorcing ourselves from this type of critical inheritance seems to be what makes such a dramatic call for close reading necessary in the first place.

Yet we often bring our apriori understanding of history and context to a play precisely, we think, to comment on the broader thematics of the play, as though making a push for the universal over the specific and hence for a type of authority that is universal and not specific. Are close readings (say of a line or two from Lear, separated out even from the rest of the soliloquy) narrowing down our interests, guaranteeing that our afforded “humanistic knowledge” becomes parochial? This seems cause for more anxiety.

Yet let us take a look at the type of error certain apriori understanding affords us. Here is Garber commenting on the potential for close-readings as misreading:

The logic of slow-motion … like the logic of the dream, can sometimes seem alogical or counterintuitive. For Shakespeare such incertitude was not merely an occasional effect but also a fundamental technique. “This dream is all amiss interpreted,” says the conspirator Decious Brutus, brushing aside the prophetic dream of Caesar’s murder dreamt by Calpurnia and substituting his own, plausible reinterpretation: both come true (JC 2.2.83).

Malvolio finds a letter thrown in his path and interprets it as a love missive sent to him by his employer, the lady Olivia. Macbeth compels the witches to speak to him, though they warn that he should “seek to know no more” (Mac. 4.1.103): inevitably what he takes from them is a fatally partial message, the dangerous and slippery echo of his own desire.

Errors in reading are not only semiotic and syntactic but also visual and observational: Iago shows Othello a tableau in which Desdemona seems to flirt with Cassio; Claudio watches while his beloved and virginal Hero seems to be engaged in dalliance with another man …

To say that these misreading are evidence of character flaws (Othello’s self-doubt, Claudio’s lack of sexual experience, Malvolio’s vanity) is necessary but not sufficient: what is being performed here is not only character but also language, and in many cases the spectator or listener makes, at least briefly, the same mistake. If King Lear were immediately to reward Cordelia for her plain speaking, not only would there be no play, there would also be no role for language. (156-57)

My immediate response would be to ask why equating such misreading to evidence of character flaw is “necessary” at all, and that if the spectator or listener makes the same “mistake,” it is because the reader, in this case, is exercising her capacity to read language (that is, to use language) in the first place.

What does it mean to say that we are apt to characterize our first readings as misreadings? That the second or third or fourth will necessarily be better? But it is the second or third or fourth reading, precisely, that brings more historical contingency, not less. Part of reading a Shakespearean text, then, is learning to read it for the first time.

So far, no real argument with Garber; this is what she has been saying all along. But that the listener or spectator is mistaken at all (at any point I mean, from reading into the situation before her what the protagonist of the play happens to believe is true) is itself untrue. First of all, it is patently false, in some of Garber’s examples, that the reader would misread the situation at hand, as some of the characters do. That is, having “seen” Maria throw the missive in his path (2.5.17-18), we are not likely to misread the letter as Malvolio does. Neither are we likely, having overheard Iago’s inner thoughts, to insinuate what Othello (not unreasonably) does about Cassio and Desdemona.

That is, parceled off as they are from the rest of the play, these characters are innocent. Their actions only carry the burden of being objective correlatives to specific character “flaws” after the fact—after we know that a mistake has indeed been committed. (Actually, after we know a play ends badly, that is, tragically, which means that if the misreading in question actually led to a happy ending, we would have difficulty using terms like “character flaw” or “mistake” at all.) Human beings are not perfect; to say they have fallen victim to a character “flaw” is to speak of or assert their “perfect” humanity.

We as readers do not make such “mistakes,” at least not in the case of Othello and Twelfth Night because we know beforehand what sort of forces really are at play, whether Iago’s diabolical motives or Maria’s mischievous ones. What we bring to the text in these cases are not really suspicions at all, because we are certain, in the knowledge afforded us, that these cases are, in fact, misreadings. But the case of Lear is entirely different.

To say, “if King Lear were immediately to reward Cordelia for her plain speaking” assumes 1) that Cordelia is indeed speaking plainly and 2) that she should be rewarded for such plain speaking. Yet both assumptions, 1 and 2, can only be made after the play is over because we have no reason, at the point when Cordelia begins to speak, to assume she is not speaking out of turn.

Unlike Othello, we have not, at this point, been made privy to the otherwise inaccessible thoughts of Regan and Goneril, and, unlike Twelfth Night, we know of no dramatic ruse underway. Because Shakespeare chooses to begin in medias res the way he does, with little or no prior back story to the main plotline, we are supposed to read Cordelia’s intransience as precisely that. We are supposed to inhabit Lear’s thinking, not criticize it.

So even if Shakespeare lets us in on the joke, on the misreading, in the case of Othello and Malvolio, he certainly does not in the case of Lear. Even if we have reason to ascribe character “flaw” to the first two, we have no reason to with Lear. That is, in the first case, our apriori assumptions are given to us as the narrative moves along. In the latter case, however, our previous assumptions are based on hindsight (i.e., on the play ending badly) giving us reason enough to assume that when Cordelia first speaks, she speaks (too) plainly.[2]

Here, either Lear or Cordelia is at fault for the ensuing tragedy—either Lear for not perceiving that Cordelia is speaking plainly or Cordelia for speaking too plainly. This still leaves us well within the boundaries of pinning the blame for tragedy on some “flaw,” which is not very far beyond the hermeneutics of suspicion.

To say that neither one was actually “mistaken,” that both were employing language in ways deserving of empathy, may be the first step in moving beyond such hermeneutics—which is to say that sometimes the things we say can have effects beyond anything we could possibly imagine beforehand. This seems to me a truer picture of how language operates so that to do a close reading of a text does not bank on misreading per se, but must risk misreading, which means, in a sense, making ourselves as vulnerable as Lear.

There are, so far, two orders of contingencies here; those given to us within the context of the play itself – say, narrative/contextual contingencies, which means that our knowledge is contingent on what we know from within – and those contingencies we bring to the play from without, say, historical contingencies, which, more often than not, we bring in hindsight.

You may argue that no one was ever expected to see or hear or read Lear from a position of tabula rasa anyhow, which means we must consider some of the contingencies Shakespeare himself was surrounded by and how he responded to these contingencies. The following prose cuts right to the chase:

Why does [Shakespeare’s] Lear, who has, as the play begins, already drawn up the map equitably dividing the kingdom, stage the love test? In Shakespeare’s principal source, an anonymous play called The True Chronicle History of King Leir …, there is a gratifyingly clear answer. Leir’s strong-willed daughter Cordelia has vowed that she will marry only a man whom she herself loves; Leir wishes her to marry the man he chooses for his own dynastic purposes.

He stages the love test, anticipating that in competing with her sisters, Cordelia will declare that she loves her father best, at which point Leir will demand that she prove her love by marrying the suitor of his choice. The stratagem backfires, but its purpose is clear.

By stripping his character of a comparable motive, Shakespeare makes Lear’s act seem stranger, at once more arbitrary and more rooted in deep psychological needs. (Greenblatt, 2309-10)

In other known sources, including Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, Holinshed’s Chronicles, and even, the brief stanzas allotted to Lear’s tale in Spenser’s Faerie Queen (2.10.27-32), Lear is ousted from the throne by his two wicked daughters only to be restored, eventually, by his third virtuous daughter.[3]

So prior knowledge in Elizabethan times banked not only on an inequality of suitors at the outset – that is, of Lear desiring a suitor for his youngest daughter – but also, on the assured certainty of the wickedness of the older two.

So if no one has ever read the opening of King Lear without prior knowledge of Cordelia’s virtues and Regan and Goneril’s wickedness, what good would it do (now) to feign prior knowledge? What good, that is, might such a hypothetical (counterfactual? counterhistorical?) reading afford us?

I say hypothetical because if we say “counterfactual,” we do not exactly mean the term in the same way the social-scientists mean it, because feigning prior knowledge about a text does not affect the text itself; nor can we say counterhistorical, for largely the same reason. [4]

We are not changing history; we are just pretending that whatever history surrounds this particular play does not affect how we read the play because, as a work of art, we think of King Lear as a self-sufficient entity, a universe all its own. There is promise in such an assumption, particularly for literary types. And finally, we cannot say “countertextual” because, as noted earlier, we will commit to any textual contingencies afforded us in the time it takes things to go haywire in Act 1 of the play. Let us try to establish, then, what sort of narrative contingencies we can bank on.

According to my sensibilities, we are first reasonably aware that things are going haywire at line 108 of the opening Act (“Let it be so! Thy truth, then, be thy dower!”). Until then, we are, as readers, as likely (perhaps more likely) to expect a calm resolution of the misunderstanding at hand, which has yet to achieve anything we can perceive as cataclysmic. In fact, Kent and Gloucester’s initial exchange expresses the relative banality of the coming ceremony:

KENT. I thought the king had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall.

GLOUCESTER. It did always seem so to us; but now, in the division of the kingdom, it appears not which of the dukes he values most: for equalities are so weighted, that the curiosity in neither can make choice of either’s moiety. (1.1.1-6)

One could argue, alternatively, that Shakespeare raises the stakes in terms of the coming stand-off, the three-way “speech-off” that will determine, once and for all, how the kingdom will be divided, so in making all things else relatively equal (i.e., in terms of suitors), the division of land could only bank on the significance of the coming speeches.

But knowing what we know, of what Shakespeare knew about what his audience knew or expected, we see that Shakespeare does away with a dramatic plot device that once served to provide purpose to the coming ceremony, if, say, Lear were interested in Cordelia marrying the suitor of his choice. But all suitors have been created equal so at what point does a given audience recognize the staging of events as being entirely superfluous? The question is critical because it is only at such a point that we are entitled to begin comprehending Lear’s madness.

If Shakespeare wanted to present to us a version of Lear as mad, then he seems to be equating tragedy or the tragic with madness, which is not entirely incorrect, but places tragedy at certain removes from the human, or what we would take the “sane” human to be. Yet tragedy does not necessitate the presence of a madman. So the more pertinent apriori assumption to make is that Lear is sane, or, perhaps, that it is certainly possible that Lear is not mad. And the longer we (he) can hold onto his sanity, the greater the opportunity for critical engagement not only with Lear, but with Cordelia as well.

So what are we to make of, say, Marshall McLuhan’s (who, people forget, was Professor of the English Renaissance) lively reading of the play, placing it and a discussion of it at the forefront of a “Gutenberg galaxy”?—one in which the sensory shift from a world of the oral is taken up by one that favours print—more specifically, sight and the linear progression of thought across lines of moveable type.

McLuhan makes the case that King Lear chronicles some of the anxieties accompanying the seismic shift in human consciousness as Renaissance Europe moved from oral to print communication via the Gutenberg printing press technology. McLuhan sees in the Renaissance a world newly divorced from a the manifold of “sensorium” and increasingly tethered to one of action in which power is tied to linear interests expressed most soberly by the specialist, whether Lear himself (who delegates authority so that he may “still retain/ The name, and all th’ additions to a King” (1.1.135-36)—that is, still retain power as an advisor rather than a ruler) or Regan and Goneril, whose initial flattery is a divorce from an archaic world of roles and duty in favour of one in which language is uttered as an expedient augment to power.

Yet where McLuhan’s reading takes hold for us in his understanding of “reader” (or “viewer”) response, noting that Elizabethan audiences would have been wise to something not at line 108, but much earlier at line 34 when Lear expresses his “darker purpose.”

[Lear’s] “darker purpose” … the Machiavellian cant term … would have been recognized at once as left-wing Machiavellianism by an Elizabethan audience. The new patterns of power and organization which had been discussed during the preceding century were now, in the early seventeenth century, being felt at all levels of social and private life. King Lear is a presentation of the new strategy of culture and power as it affects the state, the family, and the individual psyche. (11)[5]

Again, one cannot know this. That is, what one knows, in this regard, is always speculative, or, even if it were knowable, is the type of knowledge we do not expect to discover in a Shakespearean tragedy anyhow. At best, a play of Shakespeare’s could only corroborate something which the historicist has previously asserted or speculated.[6]

Such speculations may be useful in helping us to articulate a vision of the world, as McLuhan does, so that he reads King Lear not (at least, not in this case) as high tragedy, but as historical evidence attesting to the existence of something called the Gutenberg galaxy, which may or may not be tragic.[7]

Furthermore, McLuhan, who admirably seeks to elide “valuation and therapy” for the sake of “diagnosis” (7) in The Gutenberg Galaxy, never makes the case that Lear is mad, or that audiences had any reason to suppose him to be mad. What he does say is that they had every reason to suppose him Machiavellian, which is certainly not the same thing, unless one views Machiavellianism as a type of insanity.[8]

It is obvious (within the text, I mean) that Shakespeare negates Lear’s desire to see Cordelia marry a suitor of his particular choosing by making us privy, as he does, to the conversation between Gloucester and Kent. So when Lear finally does interrogate his daughters, at line 49 (“Which of you shall we say doth love us most?”), or even earlier, at line 34, Elizabethan audiences may have had their guard up.

I do not plan to speculate any further how exactly Elizabethan audiences received this novel alteration of events as much as I do want to make myself vulnerable to a type of misreading, at precisely this point, by saying that despite whatever historical contingencies may have been alive in the minds of Elizabethan audiences taking in Shakespeare’s play for the first time sometime in 1605, at some point, such contingencies would have been strange to audiences at large, which means that the early tell-tale signs of Lear’s madness (or, simply, ulterior motives) could come only at or after line 108 (“Let it be so!”) which means that up until line 108, readers of the play today are perfectly in their right to oscillate between suspicion of Lear’s strange request, and suspicion of Cordelia’s strange response to such a request, the kingdom having been, in effect, divvied up already.

(Could Shakespeare have banked on this? That is, even if he couldn’t, because, say, Elizabethan audiences were prone to read into the play certain contingencies, how could we possibly say that whatever contingencies eventually fell away from popular (critical) consideration make the play’s tragic resonances more palpable, not less? The question is critical to criticism, as if to say that the farther away we are from immediate historical contingencies, the more privileged we are in understanding or appreciating tragedy. Yet just because of that, all the more opportunity for newer historical contingencies to have their say.

So at what historical remove are we allowed to make a claim for an ur-text, if ever? If never, then what we are saying is that in order for texts to resonate as tragedy in living language, or living criticism, certain (historical) discoveries have to be made or chartered again; but such a strategy does not risk one’s present understanding of experience as much as it banks on found historical knowledge. The latter can be used to articulate the former, but what we crave from the latter are definitive readings of history, whereas the former seems to guarantee that our discoveries are maddeningly, terrifyingly, mortal.

Hence, a critic committed to living language must risk true engagement with audiences more popular than specialized, must forgo the last word and, finally, must implicate him/herself in the endeavour. I’ll return to this idea of implication and its ramifications on how we think about tragedy.)

Yet as I mentioned, a hermeneutics of suspicion is what I seek to avoid. Why should readers, then, be suspicious at all, as things unfold I mean, prior to line 108? We arrive at court at Elsinore, for example (in a play first performed only years earlier), to a world already divvied up, or passed on; yet we are given no reason, post-facto, to ever doubt the surrounding contingencies that make the coronation ceremony of Claudius necessary.

Sometimes, we must simply go through the motions, just as, sometimes, we are forced to utter language we would rather not speak. In that particular play, Hamlet’s deviation from the banality of court is the first spark of drama we are given after the ghost-sighting (to my mind registered at his wild non-sequitir: “Seems, madam?” (1.2.76)) and the first spark of drama at Lear’s court comes not at line 75 (“Then poor Cordelia!”), but at 108 (“Let it be so!”), when all hope for the restoration of banality is lost.

Cordelia’s “interjection” could only be seen as grave, could only be viewed as “mistaken,” as a “misreading” of the events at hand after Lear explodes. We have no reason to believe, until things go south at 108, that things are not progressing as they should, that Cordelia’s mutterings, however unusual, are, at this point, entirely unconventional or inaccessible to the given conventions of this particular court.

We may decide after the fact, after becoming more intimate with the court (i.e., the text and the particular historical contingencies surrounding it), that such an outburst was, in fact, unconventional—but such an assertion is always subject to interpretation. The subsequent events make a certain interpretation likely, but not definitive and because no one is “from” the world of the play, we can only be as shocked and horrified as Cordelia or Kent when things take a turn for the worse.

(Cavell cannot imagine what else Lear (or Cordelia, I gather) could do (or say); nor can I, which suggests to me that what Shakespeare intends to do in King Lear is make a state of wonder at this particular unfolding events permanent. No historical contingency or consideration of convention can (ought to) erase it. Once it does, we have moved beyond tragedy. )

In what ways do we seek to undermine this sense of wonder? I have mentioned several. Suggesting Lear is mad is one way; suggesting he or Cordelia is “mistaken” is another; suggesting Shakespeare sets his characters off arbitrarily in order to allow his tragedy to unfold is yet another. So what? It is, rightly, the job of interpretation and criticism to judge the world, and then, not hastily, which means allowing events to take their course and then commenting appropriately.

I am not taking issue with commentary after the fact, merely with the idea that any commentary that comes before or without the benefit of apriori knowledge is somehow wrong or mistaken (that Lear or Cordelia’s reading of events, say, is mistaken). Living criticism, the kind which does not deny the discoveries the text elicits (of which, we might say, close readings form the bulk), is aware of its own vulnerability and comfortable in its own contingencies, whether historical or narrative, and seeks not to intellectualize out from behind them.

Bradley implicated hamartia in his study of tragedy. I am implicating anagnorisis, or “recognitions” instead, and not the sort that the character in a tragic plot experiences, but the type which exists at a nexus where reader, character, text, and immediate historical contingency are all implicated; but because the latter cannot be immediately known (i.e., because we do not have to be aware of the specific conditions of culture that enable us to use language before using it) one can only use past historical contingencies to make definitive claims about the present experience of a text, which is less an exercise in stating verifiable truth claims than in expressing a coherent vision of the human, a definitive version of selfhood that banks on incomplete knowledge rather than the definitive version of an all-knowing, all-seeing self.

The type of “recognition” I am looking for is the sort first raised to serious critical register by Northrop Frye in his renewed poetics which make up the Anatomy of Criticism (1957). That is, Frye’s discussion creates the discursive space for Aristotelian anagnorisis to operate outside of the mechanical inner workings of plot, where the type of recognition under scrutiny is usually the sort suffered by the central protagonist alone.

Frye, by implicating (at times) the reader equally under the shock of what Aristotle seemed to be discussing in regards to the characters within the work of art , raises the thematic implications of what we might otherwise be tempted to treat merely as a formal artifice making up his (our) particular poetics. Terence Cave, commenting on Frye’s reassessment of the term for twentieth century tastes, notes:

[Frye’s] definition assigns anagnorisis to ‘us’, the readers or spectators: we recognize the unifying shape of the whole design … In one sense, what he is doing here is parallel to the accounts of peripeteia in which the ‘surprise’ it occasions is the spectators’ rather than the characters’: anaganorisis is the structural feature producing an effect outside the fiction. But the effect in this linear, narrative movement to a grasping of ‘unifying shape’ and ‘simultaneous significance’; plot gives way to theme and interpretation. This appropriation by the reader of anagnorisis as a recognition both of overall form and of thematic coherence is a radical manoeuvre … . (194)[9]

Frye seems to raise the critical importance of anagnorisis outside of or beyond the text, which may be making more of a case for historical knowledge. Yet Frye’s notion of anagnorisis is not contingent on apriori knowledge; rather, its articulation means greater implication of the reader within the text, with the sufferings that makeup the particular moral universe at hand. This is not the same as Auerbach’s notion of mimesis, for instance, where “recognition” is more intimately tied to the protagonist, validating his/her suffering as real.[10]

Nor is it Dr. Johnson’s assumption that we feel we would do the same thing were we in the character’s position (Johnson, “King Lear”). The idea is that we don’t know, cannot know, what we would do and hence, are powerless to judge the world as it unfolds before us. We are implicated not because we catch ourselves empathizing with Regan or Goneril’s hatred at a given instance, but because evil radiates outward, clipping even good intentions in its wake. In Lear we are born into an evil moral order without knowing it. In Hamlet, we can tread more carefully, allied as we are with the good from the outset.

Such recognition is key to Cavell’s reading of King Lear, in his assertion that like Lear we seek to avoid recognition when reading the play and that the aesthetic achievement of King Lear is in exposing this human predilection of ours; how is this achieved? Cavell describes how criticism through the years has coalesced on occasion around the tricky problem of Gloucester’s blind march to Dover.

Some, like Kenneth Muir, have suggested that upon being blinded, confused as he is, Gloucester simply makes his way to Dover in supplication to Regan’s indelible charge: “Go thrust him out at the gates, and let him smell/ His way to Dover” (3.7.96-97). But Cavell’s reading indicts critics for not asking the more pertinent critical question which is why Regan should have sent Gloucester to Dover in the first place.

We know at this point that Lear is headed to Dover; we have no reason to suppose Gloucester is. Cavell’s answer is that Regan completes or finalizes a dramatic doubling of the Gloucester sub-plot within the main Lear plot. Sending Gloucester to Dover is not simply an act carried out by Regan in retaliation to Gloucester as informant, but one which marks her inability to distinguish between her father and Gloucester—thus raising the play’s recognition of evil of to a frightening new register. “In [Regan’s] mind, the man she is sending on his way to Dover is the man she knows is sent on his way to Dover: In her paroxysm of cruelty, she imagines that she has just participated in blinding her father” (53).

Yet the more troubling aspect for Cavell is that critics have failed to offer up an explanation for why she should do so in the first place. My initial reaction to Cavell’s reading was that Regan had every reason to suppose Gloucester would head for Dover, accomplice in the plot that he is, hence to seek protection at the camp there, where France’s ships will land.

Yet not only does Gloucester profess no such intention before being blinded, he not-so-cagily states that his only intention upon reaching Dover is suicide (There is a cliff … / Bring me but to the very brim of it … / From that place/ I shall no leading need (4.2.73-78). So wherefore to Dover indeed. Of course, Regan never hears these lines so it may be beyond the pale for her to ask herself why she assumed Gloucester’s march to Dover, but it certainly is not beyond the pale for me. Perhaps one day I would have posed the question to myself, perhaps not.

But if the confusion surrounding the occurrence has simply been brought to the fore by misplacing the confusion as Gloucester’s and not Regan’s, then in not coming up with satisfactory answers for Gloucester, we have all the more reason to be asking the question of Regan. Even if the answer I originally formulated – that Regan had every reason to suppose Gloucester to join her conspirators at Dover – suffices, it certainly does not suffice for Gloucester once we see he has no intention of going to Dover.

If he is “tricked” into going there by Regan, it should follow that he follows her thinking. But here he doesn’t. He contemplates suicide instead, which suggests that even if Regan supposed him to meet up with his conspirators, such an assumption is somewhat farfetched if only because the thought never crosses Gloucester’s mind. The final doubling of Gloucester, made outer here in Regan’s conflation of him with her father is begun just after the abdication scene, when Gloucester is in a huff, out of sorts and ruminating over the happenings at court:

GLOUCESTER: Kent banished thus? and France in choler parted?
And the king gone tonight? subscribed his power?
Confirmed to exhibition? All this done
Upon the gad? Edmund, how, how! what news?
(1.2.23-36)

Later Edmund, upon hearing the news of the Duke of Cornwall’s arrival at court, comments on his good fortune (“The duke be here tonight? The better! best!/ This weaves itself perforce into my business” (2.1.14-15)) and effortlessly uses Cornwall’s appearance as a harbinger to force his brother to flee (“Have you not spoken ’gainst the Duke of Cornwall?” (2.1.23)).

This obviously suggests that Edmund had no specific prior plan to disinherit Edgar, and indeed, Gloucester arrives before Cornwall does anyhow; but Edmund has already put Edgar into enough of a frenzy that upon the mere suggestion that someone is coming (in this case Gloucester (“I hear my father coming” (2.1.28)), Edgar is off. Nor does Edmund concern himself all that much with what might happen if Gloucester’s servants actually find Edgar.

Part of Edmund’s diabolicalness is in his lack of foresight. He is opportunistic, which seems to suggest he is able to manipulate the world as it presents itself to him; he has concocted no grand scheme of how things will go but possesses a tacit belief in his own ability to con players to do his bidding.

Which brings us back to his second exchange with Gloucester – the one where he utters his famous speech, still shaken as he is – taken by most these days to highlight Gloucester’s provincialism and pathetic inability to assess or face a world filled with Machiavels. Certainly Edmund has it right when he says “we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon and the/ stars, as if we were villains by necessity” (1.2.111-12).

Yet once again, such critical distaste for Gloucester is only confirmed after the fact, after we discover that Edmund, Machiavel and manipulator that he is, so easily and effortlessly gains the upper hand; even though his enterprise ultimately fails, he very nearly succeeds simply because he has the audacity to refuse such a conflation.

Gloucester hears of Edgar’s betrayal after he has seen the madness at court. He has seen the division of households. Does Edmund know this? Does he exploit this? If appealing to the sun and the moon to save us is an attempt at making whole our otherwise fractured universe, then Gloucester, in imploring the sun and the moon as he does, is asking or pleading for the foresight to intuit some master plan at hand, and not because it is foolish to do so or to believe in one, but because stepping back and bearing witness is sometimes the only recourse we have in averting disaster.

Yet in acknowledging the heavenly bodies as he does, Gloucester is further implicated in an evil he has every reason to believe comes not from himself but heaven. If Cavell cannot fathom what else Lear could do, neither can I fathom what else Gloucester here can do. If you say he could have parceled off events, respecting the King’s court as separate from his own, then what you are saying is that he too should avoid madness by doing precisely what Lear does—that is, divide his own kingdom, split off courtly duty from familial duty. Where is the logic, let alone salvation, in that?

If Regan’s conflation of Gloucester with Lear seems inconsequential (upon reading the play for the first time that is), and if it is too dramatic to insist that anyone caught unawares of such conflation is somehow an accomplice in the evil of the play, then what I am saying is that as we find ourselves witness to moments of evil, as Gloucester surely recognizes, the logic of evil so easily gains its own momentum so that before we know it, characters are where they are and we cannot quite recall how they got there. But when four hundred years of a critical tradition has routinely failed to mark the event, then we have may have reason to assume criticism has certain paroxysms of its own.[11]

It is worth asking if the particular aesthetics of King Lear banks on such recognition by those who view it. Whatever critical predilections have led to the avoidance of Regan’s conflation of identities throughout the years, the same critical tradition has also preserved two remarkable moments in its critical reception. The first, of course, is Dr. Johnson’s famous reaction to the play—a recognition, to be sure, of its evil if less an articulation of it (Johnson, “Preface”). The second is Nahum Tate’s insistence to “rectify what was wanting”[12] in Shakespeare’s original, particularly where the ending is concerned.

Tate’s 1681 adaptation of the play, the preferred version for audiences for the remainder of that century and the bulk of the next, shows – and then, in hindsight only – that certain critics did not forgo acknowledgment as much as they managed to express it in “unconventional” and even indirect ways. That is, the extremity of such avoidance is itself an acknowledgment—the sort that tells us that we are in the right to be so horrified by King Lear as to 1) leave the theatre like Johnson or 2) rewrite the ending to our liking like Tate. What sort of critical enterprise nowadays, I mean, would acknowledge a genuine aposterior disgust with the play? deny an aprior admiration?

If we believe we have moved beyond such trivial and/or childish reactions, or if we convince ourselves that such reactions are not in order or unbecoming of us, or even if we accept that this is simply what high art or tragedy is, giving either Shakespeare or ourselves too much credit, then our apriori assumptions of its greatness does not allow us to register the horror we must first acknowledge, hence to deny its greatness by extolling its greatness. I don’t mean to suggest that anyone who isn’t writing about the tragic valences of King Lear does not him or herself appreciate those valences.

But is it too much to ask of criticism to rehash or rediscover the horror of Lear’s tragedy over and over again? But then what is it to ask of criticism to read Lear over and over again in the first place? What does it mean if no one, anymore, walks out of performances of King Lear in disgust, or rewrites its ending? What if they do?

The (re)discovery of tragedy, or at least the championing of the tragic vision as something worthy of rediscovery carries with it the threat of ostracism, particularly when reminding others that tragedy enfolds both reader and character in its wake. This sort of critical enterprise, then, risks sermonizing, the quickest way to turn inquiring minds away from texts whose accessibility rests in their secularity.

If McLuhan is to be appraised for making the tragic vision of Lear resonant with what he calls “the electronic age,” the age which sits at the tail end of a Gutenberg galaxy, the age we now live in, then so too is Cavell for finding a philosophical voice that is both reproving and conversational. Yet both are vulnerable: McLuhan for not reading (at least not here) King Lear as high tragedy; Cavell for not situating tragedy—that is, for exposing the contingency of his own reading in a particular time and a particular place.[13] These are the sorts of critical inheritances and achievements that concern me.

Now it may be entirely correct and likely that Elizabethan audiences had their guard up at Lear’s wickedness, his prior evil the moment Shakespeare 1) took away any possible motive for staging the event (in wanting a daughter to marry a suitor of his choice, a possibility the early conversation between Gloucester and Kent seems to deny) and 2) as McLuhan points out, the moment he utters his “darker purpose.” The Machiavellian reference, to me, is the one I think modern audiences are likely to stumble over not simply because we are more Machiavellian (which is not to say we are more “evil”), but because the afforded “darker purpose,” to our tastes, need not be referenced as “dark” at all.

What does Lear want to do? He wants “that future strife/ May be prevented now” (1.1.42-43) by dividing his kingdom up equally. Why darker? We can attribute these words to Lear by saying something like: “Lear means that the gesture of dividing a kingdom in three, however opportune or beneficial, carries with it a tinge of sadness, as though sowing the seeds now for a future nostalgia of (re)unification.”

Fair enough. But if the words truly were more conspicuous to an audience more familiar (that is, closer to) the historical example and message of Machiavelli, then the entendre, or its ineffectiveness now, seems to be damning us, as if the evil of Lear’s act (let alone the madness at line 108) ought to be present to us sooner, as soon, that is, as the “darker purpose” is expressed.

Why is Lear’s “darker purpose” lost to us? Are we all Machiavellians now? Then what I am saying is that certain specialist schools of criticism, particularly those that “bring more” to the text than they take away, risk a type of Machiavellianism, of parcelling off the world, refusing to express wonder at it because it is out of line with critical posturing, as though in order to get on with tragedy, we simply refuse to talk about it, and hence instead to talk about these texts in ways that do not implicate us in exposing what Cavell calls our “human finitude” (16).

We might better ask: why do we demand a version of Lear where Cordelia lives and not a version of Hamlet where Hamlet lives? In Hamlet, we are made aware of certain apriori truths, or suspicions (largely through the ghost)—namely that the Court at Elsinore is corrupt (morally, not politically), so that to follow out the narrative stream banks on reaffirming the particular inner contingencies we understand of this dramatic universe. The work of discovery is one of verification.

In Lear, however, the narrative trajectory is in somewhat the opposite direction. We are at a loss for apriori knowledge, putting the play, its moral valences, together piecemeal, in what might be called posterior fashion, lending weight to Cavell’s position that Lear subjects us to a “continuous presentness,” in which we must take on faith 1) that the world we inhabit truly exists and 2) that the characters in it, at every moment, are radically free—a particularly demanding spiritual, if not critical, exercise. The surest way to deny this is to search for a cause, and surest way to do that is to look for some character “flaw,” establishing the sort of clear demarcations of good and evil we could only make after the fact anyhow.

We only know we are fully in the presence of evil, that is, when King Lear is over. The reason Cordelia’s death is so shocking is not because we are unprepared for it conventionally (though this may have been true as well, especially for Elizabethan audiences) but that we are wholly unprepared for it aesthetically, within the rapid movement of events that make up the play—for just as our moral valences are set aright (is it reasonable to show up at your in-laws’ with a train of one hundred knights? who can answer?), just as our understanding of Cordelia’s virtue comes into view, she is killed off, and we are left feeling that we did nothing to prevent it.

We scream silently at Hamlet to do the deed, knowing what we (and he) know(s), demanding verification, but we are given no opportunity to scream silently at Cordelia because we know of nothing she could do to fix things because we aren’t sure, until her death, that anything is frighteningly, tragically, amiss. Children turn on their fathers, sure; perhaps we desire to see Lear avenged, perhaps not. Perhaps, after his night in the cold, he will come to his senses, humbled, and we’ll take pleasure from the inflicted spiritual austerity.

But it is not commented on enough that the opening scene of the play actually ends happily. Cordelia is taken by France, dowerless, saving us a fair amount of moral anguish. Evil is left to contend with evil, a situation, at first glance, more comic than tragic. As we catch wind that the forces of France are set to invade, we may begin to feel a moral order taking shape, and indeed we are left with one when the play is over, with Edgar set to inherit the throne.

But if King Lear manages to verify what we have reason to expect, such verification is, as Cavell notes, severely compromised. Then why isn’t Hamlet’s death a comparable compromise? Perhaps because he vacillates, like us, and when he finally learns the truth, dies, so truth is not compromised and we are revenged on ourselves for ever doubting him, or truth, in the first place. But Cordelia never vacillates—we do; but she dies. Does the “truth” die with her? If it was indeed dowered to her, only her death reveals this. Otherwise, we cannot say for sure; we can only watch as knaves inherit the earth.

 

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[1] Paul Ricoeur coined the phrase as early as 1970 in his Freud and Philosophy, where he calls Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche “masters … of the school of suspicion.” He meant the term glowingly, for only true hermeneutical suspicion would pave the way for a “more authentic word.” Since then, Harold Bloom has added a wrinkle, coining the term “school of resentment,” and adding, most notably, Foucault to the mix. He meant the term derisively, where a poststructuralist tradition largely takes away from the aesthetic achievement of key texts in the Western canon instead emphasizing their political/social significance. See Ricoeur 8, 32 and Bloom 15-40.

[2] I may have this wrong. I may be discussing posterior knowledge rather than prior knowledge. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, commenting on the “narrative fallacy,” puts it so: “It is literally impossible to ignore posterior information when solving a problem. This simple inability to remember not the true sequence of events but a reconstructed one will make history appear in hindsight to be far more explainable than it actually was—or is.”

What I take prior knowledge to be is that which we bring prior to a reading of a text, often impossible, as Taleb reminds us, to ignore in trying to “solve” or “read” a text. Yet perhaps it is better described as being posterior knowledge, which we then apply in apriori fashion. The distinction is still muddled for me; the difference may the one between Aristotelian deduction (relying on verification in the natural world, still a form, to my mind, of posterior (rather than prior) analytics) versus Cartesian deduction (i.e., deductive verification through inductive experimentation in the laboratory). See Taleb 70.

[3] Catherine Belsey launches a fun and interesting discussion on King Lear, in particular, on some of Lear’s textual origins. See Belsey 43-44.

[4] For a fine collection of essays that employs “counterfactual” history, see Niall Ferguson’s Virtual History. In particular, Ferguson champions the counterfactual method as a bulwark against (historical) determinism, a method sympathetic to an inordinate human freedom often downplayed when talking about the past, let alone the present (or future). See Ferguson 64-90.

[5] Elsewhere, Marshall McLuhan states: “To divide and rule was the dominant new idea of the organization of power in the Renaissance. ‘Our darker purpose’ refers to Machiavelli himself, who had developed an individualist and quantitative idea of power that struck more fear in that time than Marx in ours. Print, then, challenged the corporate patterns of medieval organization as much as electricity now challenges our fragmented individualism.” See McLuhan, Understanding Media, 175-76.

[6] To do some historicist housekeeping here, I can quote Hugh Grady discussing Machiavelli and modernity: “Machiavelli is thus one to the first producers of Western value-free instrumental rationality … . Instrumental reason—the splitting off of ‘values’ from ‘facts’, the production of a technical mentality indifferent to ends focused only on means … [was] powerful and liberatory in many ways, producing vast increases in productivity and greatly enlarging the possibilities of human existence … . William Shakespeare was, as Marx recognized in his somewhat different terms and emphases, an important predecessor in defining these and related themes.”

As Marx recognized and so too McLuhan. For McLuhan, Lear’s use of a map to delineate, in typographic terms, the transference of power serves as ostensive proof not of the boundaries in question per se, but of “power and wealth” so divided, fraying earlier tribal loyalties while allowing competing interests to fester. McLuhan, who stresses the “visual” element of the map, puts the sudden imbalance in sensor y perception (which now favours sight) at the origin of the “production of a technical mentality,” so that the move to print technology away from oral modes of communication leads us to what Grady here calls “instrumental reason.”

That is, literate man, following “a line” of thought across a single visual pane of typographic characters on a page, soon finds himself reoriented to his surroundings. He too acts in “linear” or “specialist” fashion, having been liberated by a type of rationality that could only follow print technology. A world once largely indivisible is now highly divisible. See Grady 61 and McLuhan, Gutenberg, 11-18, 122-23, 241-42.

[7] The idea that McLuhan presents a “tragic vision” of “typographic man” is somewhat of a stretch, as much of a stretch, that is, as attributing “tragedy” to a Machiavellian worldview. That is, even if one were to say that Renaissance tragedy cannot be explained adequately without reference to Machiavelli (or, even, to the invention of the printing presses), neither McLuhan nor Machiavelli are making efforts to explain tragedy, so that their claims can only help us articulate a tragic vision post-facto—that is, in hindsight. Machiavelli is not the cause of tragedy, any more than the printing presses.

The contingency of their appearance on a cultural scene that caters to high tragedy does not make them the last word on tragic pathos but only two among a multitude of possible explanations, testable only in relation to how we feel or view or read about Machiavelli and the printing presses now. In this way is McLuhan’s critique timely, I think, just because his discussion of typographic man extends to the present day, to what he calls the “electronic age.”

As for Machiavelli, we are drowning in Machiavellianism, so much so that much of the semantic weight behind a phrase like “our darker purpose” is likely lost on us, unless we pretend, post-facto, that we knew all along the phrase was about Machiavelli. But this historicist sleight-of-hand situates the tragedy of King Lear exclusively in the early English Renaissance, saying something like: “Because Machiavelli does not scare us the way he did Elizabethan audiences, we have no right to assume we are perceiving the play as Shakespeare would have wanted us to.”

Perhaps; but our deafness to certain Machiavellian undertones does not make us deaf to tragedy. In fact, one could argue that we are more susceptible to tragedy nowadays, mired as we are in Machiavellianism. It is post-facto historicizing that gets in the way.

[8] J.G.A. Pocock describes the “Machiavellian moment” not as a moment of insanity; rather, it is a moment of crisis, and denotes not a single historical event but any event which exposes the contingency of our own experience thereby requiring verification, in the political sense, of whatever ruling Republican authority by the polis. The burden of Machiavellian republicanism, that is, is personified in the “new Prince,” who must balance virtù – the previous forms which he must impose on the polis (legitimately) – with fortuna, “the force which directs … events and thus symbolizes pure, uncontrolled, and unlegitimated contingency.”

To assert something like “We are all Machiavellians now” would be to assert that we are now living in “history” or in “secular” time, where the virtue of eternal authority crumbles against the weight of the contingent. What, if anything, this has to do with tragedy may be captured by Paul A. Kottman in his distinction between Attic and Shakespearean drama: “When Aristotle defined tragedy in the Poetics … he … linked [his] account to a normative understanding of their impact on the audience. In this way, the plots of tragedies … make a partial claim about the nature and conditions of those actions that cannot be separated from the way in which these actions move us; that is, the feelings induced in us are constitutive of the social bonds that connect us to our fellow audience members (katharsis). If the tragic story moves us, in other words, it does so in a way that lays bare our communal bonds—which must be strengthened, broken, or altered through these fearful and pitiful events, just as the protagonists’ social bonds … ought not go unchanged by these events. At stake is not just the community “internal” to the play—the family or civic drama itself… —but the community that stages the drama and finds itself moved by it. The way in which we are moved is—as Aristotle sensed—the arbiter of the social bonds our responses effect.”

While the atemporal oscillation between the existence and dissolution of social bonds is thematized in Attic dramas, Shakespearean drama presents the difficult problem of how those social bonds are to be reestablished after their complete dissolution in historical time. “Shakespeare’s dramas … compel us to regard the social bonds on which we depend for the meaning and worth of our lives together as being, in spite of that total dependence, fully dissolvable. The plays therefore throw into question the very inheritability, or transmissibility, of human sociality.” See Pocock 1-8, 156, 160 and Kottman 4, 6.

[9] Barry B. Adams, who disentangles Aristotle’s formulation of anagnorisis from tragedy, uses the term to anchor discussions of complex plots in Shakespeare’s comedies. Safe to say that such an approach requires a dramatic disentanglement from Frye’s notion of anagnorisis and “self-knowledge” as well. Building on Gerald F. Else’s landmark work on Aristotle’s Poetics, Adams explicitly “restricts” the term to the “less exalted realms of human experience” in order to discuss the importance of “coming-to-know across a broad range of human activity and experience.” See Adams 2 and Else.

[10] Terence Cave initiates a wonderful discussion of Auerbach’s notion of mimesis as it relates to the trope of his particular, and comparably exhaustive, study. Cave says that Auerbach’s emphasis on the move to greater and greater mimesis (read “reality” or the representation of “reality,” without such things as suspense, moral/psychological tensions—an “achievement” of “classical Greek poise,” particularly in the lines of Homer) is actually an evasion of “anagnorisis.”

The first chapter, that is, of Auerbach’s seminal study on “Odysseus’ Scar” discusses “recognition” of Odysseus’ scar as fundamentally reassuring, where doubts as to Odysseus’ identity are put to rest. Yet this version of “anagnorisis” or “mimesis” undercuts that which is salient about the trope Cave is seeking to uncover. In a particularly Derridean move, Cave notes: “Recognition … is not the recovery for good or ill of certain knowledge, nor the reassuring restoration of the co-ordinates of kinship and social position. It unmasks a crisis, a perpetual threat of imposture on the one hand and arbitrary law and coercion on the other.” And later, leaving room for wonder: “Recognition … is a sign that the story, like the wound, may always be reopened.” See Cave 14-15, 22-24 and Auerbach ch.1.

[11] To this I could add Edgar’s (as Tom) cruelty in withholding his identity from Gloucester. The idea that he is somehow wise in his decision to reveal himself only when “false opinion” (3.7.105) dissipates, or that he is entitled to enforce a type of spiritual penance/journey on his blinded father, in retaliation that is, for being so quickly and categorically shunned by him, misses the fact that Edgar too falls victim just as quickly to Edmund’s schemes as his father does.

Which means that the journey up and over an imaginary cliff, on Edgar’s part, is itself a form of abdication or avoidance, not of filial responsibility, but of explicit recognition – shame, as Cavell would have it – in understanding that you fare no better than anyone else in your ability to judge evil in the world. What better metaphysical solace than to convince yourself that the cruelty you are now inflicting on another is an example of seeing/setting the world aright (when, in fact, it shows how deeply you are implicated in the world’s wrongs, and what lengths you are willing to go to hide from that knowledge).

[12] See Nahum Tate’s dedication to Thomas Boteler. See Lynch.

[13] Cavell acknowledges this: “What I have in mind can best be brought out in the following way. Suppose that what I have said about why Gloucester is blinded, why he goes to Dover, why he tries suicide … suppose my answers are true. The problem is then unavoidable: How can critics not have seen them? For it is not that the answers I take to be correct are recherché; one needn’t have the learning of Bradley or Chambers, or the secrets of Empson, or the discrimination of Johnson, or the passion of Coleridge or Keats, to arrive at them. Their difficulty is of a different kind, an opposite kind.” See Cavell 81-82.

Works Cited

Adams, Barry B. Coming-To-Know: Recognition and the Complex Plot in Shakespeare. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2000. Print.

Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: the Representation of Reality in Western Literature. 1953. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1968. Print.

Belsey, Catherine. Why Shakespeare? New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Print.

Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon. 1994. New York: Riverhead, 1995. Print.

Cave, Terence. Recognitions: A Study in Poetics. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Print.

Cavell, Stanley. Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare. 1987. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Print.

Else, Gerald F. Aristotle’s Poetics: The Arguement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1957. Print.

Ferguson, Niall. Virtual History. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Print.

Fyre, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. 1957. New York: Atheneum, 1969. Print.

Garber, Marjorie. "Shakespeare in Slow Motion." Profession 2010 (2010. Print): 151-64.

Grady, Hugh. Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity from Richard II to Hamlet. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002. Print.

Johnson, Samuel. "King Lear." Preface to Shakespeare, by Samuel Johnson. 28 August 2010. University of Adelaide Library. 22 Web. January 2011 http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/j/johnson/samuel/preface/lear.html.

Johnson, Samuel. "The Preface to Shakespeare." Preface to Shakespeare, by Samuel Johnson. 28 August 2010. University of Adelaide Library. 22 Web. January 2011 http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/j/johnson/samuel/preface/preface.html.

Kottman, Paul A. Tragic Conditions in Shakespeare. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 2009. Print.

Lynch, Jack, ed. King Lear: Adapted by Nahum Tate. N.d. Rutgers University, Newark. Web. 1 January 2011 http://ethnicity.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/tatelear.html.

McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: the Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962. Print.

—. Understanding Media. Toronto: McGraw Hill, 1964. Print.

Pocock, J.G.A. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1975. Print.

Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Trans. Denis Savage. New Haven: Yale UP, 1970. Print.

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. Black Swan. New York: Random House, 2007. Print.

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