‘Is man no more than this?’
King Lear and the Collapse of
Civilisation
The collapse of civilisation
Freud: Civilization and its
Discontents (1930)
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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
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Kenneth Tynan on Peter Brook’s Lear in the
theatre:
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‘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)
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
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Animal imagery:
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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:
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blinding of Gloucester
shutting out of Lear into the storm
arbitrary deaths of Cordelia and Lear
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‘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
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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
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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)
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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)
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Symbolic role of Lear’s hundred knights
Authority
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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)
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‘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
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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.
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‘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
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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 4.5.147-55)
Lear and real authority
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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.’
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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)
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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)
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Divine Right of Kings (Absolutism).
As James I himself put it in a speech to Parliament in 1610:
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The Project of Union.
In 1604, at the height of the debate surrounding the Union of
England and Scotland, James condemned Parliament for
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‘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.’
‘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
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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
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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)
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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)
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A bit dangerous, surely…?
Lear as carnival
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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):
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‘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)
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:
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‘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
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The platea-like figure of the Fool is a crucial element in
the play’s politics.
Metatheatrical dramaturgy
Images of the crown and authority as empty signifiers:
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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)
Lear as Fool
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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
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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
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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
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Freud concluded Civilization and its Discontents with the
following observation:
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‘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
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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).
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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
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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 classcoded 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
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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.
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.