Understanding Catastrophe in King Lear

The opening scene of King Lear famously depicts the division of the Kingdom, where the ageing King Lear seeks to divide his Kingdom between his daughters (and, more to the point in his patriarchal world, his current and prospective sons-in-law) so ‘that future strife / May be prevented now’ (I.i.43-44). Lear, as part of the wider public ceremony, sets up a ‘love- test’:

—Tell me, my daughters, Since now we will divest us both of rule,

Interest of territory, cares of state

Which of you shall we say doth love us most That we our largest bounty may extend

Where nature doth with merit challenge? (I.i.48-53)

Goneril and Regan instantly comply and ‘profess’ (I.i.72) to love Lear ‘Beyond what can be valued’ (I.i.57). Cordelia, however, refuses the rhetorical inflation, insisting that ‘I love your majesty / According to my bond, no more nor less’ (I.i.92-93). She tells Lear that she has

255 _{See also Hugh Grady, Shakespeare's Universal Wolf: Studies in Early Modern Reification (Oxford: Clarendon}

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‘Nothing’ (I.i.89) to add to the words of her sisters (‘Nothing will come of nothing’ (I.i.92), replies Lear). Loving Cordelia ‘most’ (I.i.124) and having intended to set his ‘rest / On her kind nursery’ (I.i.124-125), Lear vents his wrath and banishes Cordelia, leaving Albany and Cornwall to ‘digest’ (I.i.129) her portion of the Kingdom. Lear goes on to ‘invest’ Albany and Cornwall with his ‘power’ (I.i.131) but intends to ‘retain / The name, and all th’addition to a King’ (I.i.136-137).

Kent admonishes Lear for banishing Cordelia after she refuses to ‘heave’ (I.i.91) her heart into her mouth and produce the ‘glib and oily’ (I.i.226) rhetoric Lear demands. But for Kent, for the sovereign to renounce his ‘power’ (I.i.149) and split the Kingdom is, in and of itself, catastrophic. Though undertaken with the aim of preventing rivalrous power-

struggles, Kent insists that the violation of social order can only result in chaos. ‘Reserve thy state, / And in thy best consideration check / This hideousness rashness’ (I.i.150-152): ‘thou dost evil’ (I.i.167).

The order Kent valorizes is not only social and political; it is also natural and divine. By abdicating the throne, dividing the Kingdom and disowning Cordelia, Lear not only ruptures the order of both state and family, he also threatens the orderly system of hierarchy that obtains in nature and the cosmos. When Lear invokes the cosmic ‘orbs’ (I.i.110) and the ‘mysteries’ (I.i.111) of the natural world, Kent chastises him for swearing ‘thy gods in vain’ (I.i.162). Lear has violated the providentially ordained order he is supposed to embody on earth. Kent implies as much when he states that the ‘madness’ of Lear allows him to break with decorum and openly indict the actions of his monarch: ‘be Kent

unmannerly / When Lear is mad’ (I.i.146-147). This ‘unmannerly’ intervention adumbrates the wider collapse of order, allowing Kent to addresses the ‘divine’ figure of the King as ‘old man’ (I.i.147).The pagan world of King Lear obviously predates the Incarnation and the

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advent of Christianity. It is ‘the gods’ and not ‘God’ who appear in the rhetoric of the play – and those gods named individually are all drawn from classical myth: ‘Hecate’ (I.i.111), ‘Apollo’ (I.i.161) and even ‘blind Cupid’ (IV.vi.134). But the cosmic order represented in the play, and the social world it permeates and sanctions, is by no means incompatible with the hierarchic universe found in early modern theocentric political thought – not least as

propagated by James I. This would similarly have it that the subversion of social and political order is a violation of Godly precepts and can only result in unmitigated disaster for

humanity.256

For the arch-traditionalist Kent, the division of the Kingdom violates a providentially ordained social and political world. With the breaking of that world order, chaos ensues. This conservative understanding of catastrophe is also taken up by Gloucester. Gloucester similarly fears that the division of the Kingdom heralds ‘death, dearth, dissolutions of ancient amities’ (I.ii.145) – or the collapse of the old (‘ancient’) order and various unifying relationships between individuals (‘amities’). Gloucester believes that unusual natural and astrological events are intimately related to the emergent social and political chaos. He frets that

These late eclipses of the sun and moon portend no good to us. Though the wisdom of Nature can reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself scourged by the sequent effects. Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide: in cities, mutinies; in

countries, discord; in palaces, treason […] We have seen the best of our time,

machinations, hollowness, treachery and all ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves (I.ii.103-112).

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Leonard Tennenhouse contends that the original purpose of King Lear was the exemplary torture of a royal miscreant, who by splitting his Kingdom and renouncing his divinely sanctioned position, has violated the taboos that safeguard the mystique of sovereignty. See his Power on Display (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 102-146. I return to Christian ideas of natural and cosmic order in Chapter Three, pp. 134-141.

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What the speech reveals is the profound intertwining of the natural and cosmological hierarchy with the social and political hierarchy. The ‘late eclipses’ Gloucester worries over portend the collapse (the ‘falling off’) of traditional society, the subversion of its natural and divine ‘bonds’, which degenerate from order into ‘discord’: ‘We have seen the best of our time’.257

Gloucester is reacting to the ‘plot’ against his life formed by his ‘legitimate’ (I.ii.19) son, Edgar – a plot, in reality, cooked-up by his bastard ‘whoreson’ (I.i.22) Edmund, who has designs on the ‘land’ he cannot inherit. The plot, as far as Gloucester is concerned, is

testament to the collapse of hierarchical relationships and civilized – or as Lear imagines it, ‘sophisticated’ (III.iv.104) – social life. This unleashes a self-interested, individualist ethos which propagates ‘hollowness’ and ‘treachery’. The collapse of all social values seemingly presaged by late eclipses raises the prospect of a bellum omnium contra omnes – a war of all against all where, as the Duke of Albany states, ‘humanity must perforce prey on itself / Like monsters of the deep’ (IV.ii.50-51) in a state of appetitive homo homini lupus. It is the same nightmare Thomas Hobbes would go on to imagine: humanity in a cruelly anarchic ‘State of Nature’, from which traditional social authority and constraint is the only possible

salvation.258

Over the action of the play, however, the idea that disaster results from the violation of a providentially sanctioned world order is transformed into something even more

pessimistic – that catastrophe simply is the ‘lot’ of a degraded humanity, which is prey to

257 _{The word ‘disaster’ is etymologically related to a calamity brought about by the evil influence of a star or}

planet. ‘disaster, n.’. OED Online. Accessed April 26, 2018.

http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/53561?rskey=0OAKY4&result=1. See also Alexandra Walsham, ‘Deciphering

Divine Wrath and Displaying Godly Sorrow: Providentialism and Emotion in Early Modern England’, Disaster,

Death and the Emotions in the Shadow of the Apocalypse, 1400-1700, ed. Jennifer Spinks and Charles Zika

(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), p. 23.

258 _{For a recent interpretation of the intersection between Hobbes and Shakespearean drama see Andrew}

Moore, Shakespeare between Machiavelli and Hobbes: Dead Body Politics (New York and London: Lexington Books, 2016), pp. 63-82.

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arbitrary forces beyond its ken. Perhaps ironically, it is Gloucester who, after being viciously blinded by Cornwall and Regan, provides the most trenchant statement of that despair, when he insists that ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods / They kill us for their sport’ (IV.i.38-39). Lear provides a similarly nihilistic image of that condition, which is both tragic and absurdly comic: ‘When we are born, we cry that we are come / To this great stage of fools’ (IV.vi.178-179).

This nihilistic interpretation of catastrophe leaves little room for meaningful human agency. Lear preaches ‘patience’ (IV.vi.174) to Gloucester in the face of tragi-comic

absurdity – a reaction echoed by Edgar when he tells Gloucester that ‘Men must endure’ (V.ii.9) as, finally, ‘Ripeness is all’ (V.ii.11).259 Such responses would have it that resigned endurance is the only response to an inherently catastrophic world, which, far from an immanently meaningful cosmological order, appears as a torturously ‘tough rack’ (V.iii.313) on which human subjects are stretched, broken to pieces and finally destroyed – for no reason whatsoever.

Neither interpretation of catastrophe is, however, adequate. On the one hand, the conservative reading exculpates a hierarchical order that itself is obviously liable to produce disaster. Lear may act rashly in dividing the Kingdom – but his rashness is, as Goneril and Regan so piercingly observe, ‘a long-engrafted condition’ (I.i.298). His rashness has been socially and culturally ‘conditioned’ by the ‘long-engrafted’ (or artificially implanted) autocratic power and authority that devolves to the King.260 Perhaps more urgently, as the play progresses Lear also begins to see that hierarchical ‘authority’ (IV.vi.154) as such is politically suspect and socially unjust. Not only is the ‘great image of authority’ that a ‘dog’ is ‘obeyed in office’ (IV.vi.154-155), but – as Lear perceives – ‘Through tattered clothes great

259 _{This is the view which, as I will show in Chapter Four, Edward Bond is most concerned to contest.} 260

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vices do appear; / Robes and furred gowns hide all’ (IV.vi.160-161). Such sentiments leave little room for the backward-looking, conservative nostalgia evinced by Kent and Gloucester. On the other hand, the nihilistic interpretation provided by Gloucester (and, at other times, by Lear and others) would serve to release humanity from any responsibility whatsoever for disaster, implying as it does that people are at the mercy of implacable forces beyond intervention. Both Lear and Gloucester are culpable for the disaster that overtakes the Kingdom: Lear for dividing the Kingdom and trusting to the sincerity of Goneril and Regan, disinheriting Cordelia and banishing Kent, and Gloucester for his own utterly insensitive treatment of Edmund, treatment itself authorized by the system of primogeniture and its ‘order of law’ (I.i.18).261

But while the traditionalist and nihilistic interpretations are both flawed, neither should be dismissed outright. Both frame the emergence and experience of new, and potentially catastrophic, ‘dispositions’ (IV.ii.32): capitalist self-interest and humanist reason – those irruptive social and historical phenomena commonly understood as modernity. Through the ‘images of revolt and flying off’ (II.iv.279) that suffuse the play, King Lear conveys the ‘great decay’ (V.iii.296) of a mystified hierarchical system as it gives way to a disenchanted, capitalist worldview, a rapacious ideology that, once set in motion, seems divorced from human control. I turn in the next section to an analysis of Edmund, who embodies the newly emergent, modern view of the world and its dialectical reversal into reifying domination.

261 _{Gloucester says that the ‘whoreson’ – by which he means son of a whore – ‘must be acknowledged’ (I.i.23-}

24). Gloucester is less than discreet when talking about Edmund and his mother: he even boasts to Kent about his sexual ‘sport’ (I.i.22) in front of Edmund.

106 2.1. The Catastrophe of Modernity in King Lear

It is often observed that King Lear depicts a historical – and, indeed, a generational –

transition, from a pre-modern (feudal) to a more recognizably modern (capitalist) society.262 The ‘old’ order is based on hierarchy, embodied by the figure of the sovereign, and is characterized by superstitious beliefs, most obviously in the gods/God and other non-

human entities that determine human life (whether beneficently or cruelly). The ‘new’ order is less hierarchical and more individualistic, with a new set of scientific, rational beliefs that overturn the more superstitious ideas inherited from the past. The old order is – for the most part – taken to be represented by the older characters – Lear, Gloucester, Kent and, though in a perhaps more complicated way, the Fool.263 The new order, on the other hand, is represented by a younger and more hard-hearted generation – Goneril, Regan, Cornwall and Edmund.

Using the dialectical reading of modernity provided by Adorno, the reactionary interpretations of catastrophe provided by Kent and Gloucester evince a pre-modern, mythical worldview, where a hierarchical society is understood to manifest a deific order – an order Lear refers to as the ‘mystery of things’ (V.iii.16). But the play also depicts a modern, disenchanted worldview that interrogates the type of mystified thinking other characters cleave to in the midst of catastrophe. This iconoclastic worldview is epitomized by Edmund.

During his reading of astrological signs, Gloucester contests the ‘wisdom of Nature’ – by which he means the type of scientific ‘reason’ (I.ii.103-104) that would seek to provide a

262 _{See in particular Paul Delaney, ‘King Lear and the Decline of Feudalism’, Materialist Shakespeare: A History,}

ed. Ivo Kamps (London: Verso 1995), pp. 20-38.

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more ‘naturalistic’ interpretation of the material world and its mysteries. This is precisely the type of worldview that Edmund embraces when he gleefully ironizes his credulous father:

This is the excellent foppery of the world that when we are sick in fortune—often the surfeit of our own behaviour—we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars, as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly

compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence, and all that we are evil in by a divine thrusting-on. (I.ii.118-119)

Far from being providentially ordained, the disasters which trouble the world have, as Edmund perceives it, a human cause.264 This is a humanistic shift in perception. Where, for Gloucester, humanity is dominated (‘compelled’) by deterministic forces (‘spherical

dominance’) beyond its control, for Edmund the individual subject is free to act on the world as he or she wishes (which also comprises the choice to be ‘evil’). This turns the world and the various phenomena that constitute it into an instrument of the willed purposes – or as Edmund calls it, ‘business’ (I.ii.180) – of a rationally interposing and self-fashioning human subject. Edmund boasts that, for him, everything is ‘meet that I can fashion fit’ (I.ii.182). Edmund, armed as he is with a rational understanding of the world, is able to ‘fashion’, to frame, the world and himself in a way that suits (is ‘meet’ with) his own ends.265 He is, quite simply, free.

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Edmund also refers to the ‘goatish disposition’ (I.ii.127) of humanity, which may recall the Greek meaning of tragedy – ‘goat song’. Edmund may be saying that the ‘tragic’ (catastrophic) disposition of humanity is largely of its own making.

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Some cultural historicist critics have revised the modern, humanist subject-object split when it comes to pre-Cartesian early modern period texts. See in particular Gail Kern Paster, ‘“Minded Like the Weather”: The Tragic Body and Its Passions’, The Oxford Handbook to Shakespearean Tragedy, ed. Michael Neill, David Schalkwyk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 202-217. Paster contends that, in King Lear, the subject is corporeally embedded in a mutually interpenetrating cosmological order. Paster, however, has to more or less dismiss Edmund, who questions the sort of cosmological order his (ignorant) father posits. My own conviction is that the play does open out a more modern conception of the subject-object split.

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Reason allows Edmund to overturn the belief that humanity is prey to divine forces beyond its understanding. But he also pours scorn on the hierarchical society which that cosmological order is supposed to sanction. For him, traditional social and political authority is nothing but convention. In the soliloquy that opens Act One, Scene Two of the play, he declares:

Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law My services are bound. Wherefore should I Stand in the plague of custom, and permit The curiosity of nations to deprive me,

For that I am some twelve or fourteen moon-shines Lag of a brother? Why bastard? wherefore base? When my dimensions are as well compact, My mind as generous, and my shape as true, As honest madam’s issue? Why brand they us With base? with baseness? bastardy? base, base? Who, in the lusty stealth of nature, take

More composition and fierce quality Than doth, within a dull, stale, tired bed, Go to the creating a whole tribe of fops, Got ’tween asleep and wake? Well, then, Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land: Our father’s love is to the bastard Edmund As to the legitimate: fine word, legitimate! Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed, And my invention thrive, Edmund the base Shall top the legitimate. I grow; I prosper: Now, gods, stand up for bastards! (I.ii.1-22)

Edmund provides a deeply sceptical, rationalistic critique of the ‘plague of custom’ and the ‘curiosity of nations’, customs which mean that he – as an illegitimate bastard – is

marginalized from civilized social discourse and barred from inheriting land. His is a form of (as he calls it) ‘base’ life – life that is lived outside of received social and political legitimacy and meaning. His response – in an ironic, even quasi-satirical twist – is to make all human life ‘base’.

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Edmund, in his quest for self-promotion, turns the customary order into nothing more than an instrument of his own designs. His falsified ‘conspiracy’ manipulates the disavowed intergenerational tensions that are produced by the traditional system of primogeniture. This desacralizing instrumentalization of the social order also means the desacralizing instrumentalization of the subjects who make it up. Through his

demystification of superstitious beliefs and traditional social forms, Edmund turns other subjects into mere objects – most obviously his father and brother, who become means to his ends. Without the legitimacy conferred by the social order, potentially any and all subjects are ‘base’ – are not afforded the authority and even protection that a ‘lawful’ place in the hierarchy should underwrite. When he ironically calls upon the gods to stand up for bastards, Edmund is not only inverting the usual order by claiming grace for those outside the social and cosmic hierarchy; he is also saying that now, with everybody reduced to the illegitimate status of baseness, all subjects are ‘bastards’ and will need divine favour – which he knows not to exist. Edmund, as part of his humanistic perspective on the world, ends up delegitimizing all human life. His rationalist critique reveals the way in which the

‘sovereignty, knowledge and reason’ (I.iv.223-224) purposed with freeing the subject from traditional authority can degenerate into ‘slaughter’ (I.iv.312). He embodies the dialectic of Enlightenment.

It is worth pausing over the word ‘business’ and its relationship to the

universalization of base life. Edmund is not only depicted in the play as a proto-humanist figure; he is also a nascent, self-interestedly acquisitive capitalist, who seeks for his own advancement in the world (typified by his use of the word ‘prosper’). There is an obvious relation in King Lear between humanist reason and the commodity-form. By making all life base, Edmund collapses any and all qualitative distinctions between individuals, creating a

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world of total fungibility that brings about the transvaluation of all values (‘Fine word, legitimate’, as Edmund says – but perhaps only a word and open to transformation). This makes the subject (potentially) interchangeable – a commodity with no obvious inherent value or meaning. Through his rationalistic deconstruction of hierarchy, Edmund plans – quite literally – to exchange himself for his brother, whose own life is (as far as Edmund is concerned) no more sacrosanct than his own form of base (‘illegitimate’) life. The rhetoric of disenchantment and the rhetoric of reification are symbiotic in King Lear: proto-humanist