Unreading Lear
by David P. Gontar (May 2014)
I. Lear
It has been observed that in both its Folio and Quarto versions, King Lear bears features of a fairy tale. It has even been suggested that its archaic source is the tale of The Goose Girl at the Well. While the simplicity of nursery legend can render a symbolic form conceptually and emotionally accessible, there are drawbacks. The familiar folkloric theme of two wicked elder sisters taking advantage of a younger sibling lulls one into a mood of reduced scrutiny. For just an instant we occupy a world of innocent make-believe, only to have it dissolve and fade before our eyes in gut-wrenching tragedy. This scenario is not without consequences. For the fairy tale aura which suspends disbelief ab ibitio short circuits critical judgment. Too much tends to be taken for granted.
Switch on the lights.
Do we not recall the anguish of King Richard II when he and Bolingbroke clutched either side of a single crown? (IV, i, 172- 179) Were those two able to rule jointly? Theirs is the sort of government Lear proposes.
Professor Jane M. Ford draws attention to the 1954 psychoanalytic commentary of Arpad Pauncz in American Imago (40, 51-83):
One critic found the father/daughter theme so central to this play that he coined the term “Lear Complex,” the complex that focuses on the “neglected” adult to define the attachment of the older member of the oedipal twosome. In spite of a wide variety of interpretations of Lear’s initial decision to divide his kingdom, the most immediate result will be to force his periodic presence on his daughters, and Cordelia, whom “He always loved most,” is the only one left unmarried.” (Ford, 41)
Tremble thou wretch,
That hast within thee undivulgèd crimes
Unwhipped of justice; hide thee, thou bloody hand,
Thou perjured and thou simular of virtue
That art incestuous . . .
(III, ii, 50-55)
Progress in this venture depends most importantly on our capacity for unreading of the play and setting aside partisan analyses in the service of preconceived ideas such as Christianity and Marxism.
Having in summary form accomplished a preliminary unreading of Lear, we can advance to the figure around whom the action swirls, Edmond, and delve him, as he deserves, to the very root.
II. Edmond
Consider the following speeches.
(1) (2)
My services are bound. Wherefore should I Suspend thy purpose if thou didst intend
Stand in the plague of custom and permit To make this creature fruitful.
The curiosity of nations to deprive me Into her womb convey sterility.
For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines Dry up in her the organs of increase,
When my dimensions are as well compact, A babe to honour her. If she must teem,
My mind as generous, and my shape as true Create her child of spleen, that it may live
Who in the lusty stealth of nature take With cadent tears fret channels in her cheeks,
Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land. To have a thankless child.
Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed
And my invention thrive, Edmond the base
Now gods, stand up for bastards!
III. Cultural Materialism v. Shakespeare
At the very least, then, the foregoing considerations call for a thorough unreading of King Lear, a spring cleaning in which the staid accretions of 400 years get pared away, allowing us to face the text anew, from the ground up. Yet that is precisely what scholarly treatments, whether conservative or revisionary, so rarely provide. This is all the more astonishing and disappointing in the case of those movements priding themselves on their ability to shake the foundations and challenge stale renderings of Shakespeare. Let us turn to one of the most highly acclaimed of the left-of-center exegetical schools, cultural materialism, to see what it makes of this work. What we will discover is that it too is hobbled by its own intellectual (i.e., Marxist) presuppositions and commitments, and is thus of limited utility when what is sought is a thorough dismantling and fresh exposition of Lear. Though it professes to decrypt the text and circumvent the inevitable censorship of the literary establishment, cultural materialism turns out to be yet another elitist and institutionalized recycling of clichés and truisms surrounding our greatest tragedy. Mere substitution of socialist premises for feudal ones yields nothing of significant value.
Dollimore considers only two traditionalist options: King Lear is either a Christian exemplar or an illustration of later humanistic philosophy. Stiff-arming the former view, he maintains that the humanistic exegesis is just as unsatisfactory, for it too commits the unpardonable sins of metaphysics, essentialism and mystification.
In Lear, as in Troilus, man is decentered not through misanthropy but in order to make visible social processes and its forms of ideological misrecognition. (Dollimore, 190-191)
Must we be impaled on the horns of this dilemma? That would entail an absence of alternatives.
Here is a compendium of textual citations offered:
Cahiers Elisabethains 78, Autumn, 2010, 29)
The Oxfordian, Vol. XI, 2009, 107)
Be your tears wet? Yes, faith. I pray, weep not.
If you have poison for me, I will drink it.
Have, as I do remember, done me wrong.
(IV, vi, 64-69)
And ask of thee forgiveness . . . .
(V, iii, 10-11)
To illustrate, here is a cross section of pertinent epigrams from the Introduction to the Third Edition, followed by comments.
11. Sigmund Freud is the cited:
mirrors of each other, semi-choral antiphonies, strophe and antistrophe heaving with rival convulsions, and with the double darkness of night and madness, when I am thus startled into a feeling of the infinity of the world within me, is this power, or what may I call it? (De Quincey, 273)
If we were now to arrange the three exegetical positions we have examined, they would with respect to King Lear form the following hierarchy of adequacy.
i. Strong humanism (Nietzsche, De Quincey, Hesse)
ii. Weak humanism (traditional essentialism)
Postscript
WORKS CITED:
Elizabeth Archibald, Incest and the Medieval Imagination, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2001
Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment, Vintage, 2010
Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, 2d ed., Duke University Press, 1993
________________, _____________, 3d ed., Palgrave Macmillan, 2010
Jane Ford, Patriarchy and Incest from Shakespeare to Joyce, University Presses of Florida, 1998
David P. Gontar, Hamlet Made Simple and Other Essays, New English Review Press, 2013
Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, Yale University Press, 2007
William Shakespeare The Complete Works, 2d ed., S. Wells, G. Taylor, eds., Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2005
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