SOURCE: “King Lear's ‘Immoral’ Daughters and the Politics of Kingship,” in Exemplaria, Vol. 8, No. 2, Fall, 1996, pp. 375-400.

[In the following essay, Alfar challenges feminist interpretations of Goneril and Regan as evil, maintaining that the characters are merely a reflection of the violence in their patrilineal society.]

Traditionally, King Lear's eldest daughters are labelled villains. Most critics dismiss them as stock characters, conventional representations of “evil,” and focus on the complexity of male characters or on Cordelia. Their “evil” is defined by acts of will, power, desire, sexuality—acts which disrupt both conventional morality and the patrilineal order's¹ definition of “appropriate” femininity and consequently must be met with punitive consequences. However, the presumption that Goneril and Regan are “evil” reifies female subjectivity as stable and whole, rather than multiple and complex. While the sisters plot against their father, engage in extramarital affairs with the same man, and stand by as Gloucester's eyes are gouged out, I argue that these actions are not evidence of their innate “evil” but are symptomatic of the patrilineal structure of power relations in which they live and to which they must accommodate themselves. I also argue that the play interrogates that structure.² Kathleen McLuskie contends that a

feminist reading of [King Lear] cannot simply assert the countervailing rights of Goneril and Regan, for to do so would simply reverse the emotional structures of the play, associating feminist ideology with atavistic selfishness and the monstrous assertion of individual wills. Feminism cannot simply take “the woman's part” when that part has been so morally loaded and theatrically circumscribed.³

On the contrary, I argue, it is the goal of feminism to interrogate the moral judgements which define Goneril and Regan as monstrous. To do otherwise is to fuse sex with gender, to condemn women's assertions of will while supporting those of male characters, such as Lear. My reading of King Lear, therefore, asks whether or not Goneril's and Regan's answers to their father's command that they publicly speak the degrees of their love is not so much calculatedly malicious as it is a formal response required by the ceremony of power being invested by a still-living king. In fact, their willingness to play Lear's game in order to attain political power is condemned by subsequent critics, I argue, because they are women who transgress the traditional expectations of their gender by desiring political power, by exercising and defending that political power rather than by behaving in putatively appropriate and moral forms of femininity. They rule not by conventional “womanly” virtues of amity, reconciliation, and mercy, but by the Hobbesian values of patrilineal authority: suspicion, deception, and violence.⁴ I want to suggest, in this sense, that Shakespeare exposes the violent nature of a patrilineal system by placing power in the hands of women. Rather than offering us an absolutist vision of good against evil, King Lear discloses the patrilineal tradition which limits female subjectivity, female assertions of power and opposition. My reading of King Lear, then, challenges traditional interpretations of Goneril and Regan as spoiled and ungrateful daughters and argues that they reject a separate and culturally defined feminine “morality” in order to make their actions conform to the brutal nature of kingship.⁵

Significantly, as Ann Thompson has noted, a great deal of criticism of the play remains fixated on fathers and “male power relationships, class and property … [and] the role of Edmund.”⁶ Only recently have a few feminist critics focused on the problem of the absent mothers in the play, but even this analysis is fixed primarily on Lear and Gloucester.⁷ Other criticism which might be called feminist ignores Lear's eldest daughters, attributing their “evil” to archetypal dimensions of the characters or to the misogyny of their creator.⁸ Perhaps some of the most disturbing analyses come from feminist critics who, unintentionally, reify the image of woman as either “good” or “evil” while contributing significant analyses of women in Renaissance drama. Lisa Jardine persuasively argues that women characters so often labeled “strong” by critics are really expressions of masculine anxiety about female power.⁹ However, she then sets apart from these women Lady Macbeth and Titus Andronicus's Tamora—and I would assume by association Goneril and Regan whom she later identifies as examples of “not-woman” (109) and “the devilish scolds” (110)—as

surreally-threatening female figures … [who] carry a good deal less actual dramatic weight than the “strong” women I have discussed. … [T]hey are not really intended seriously, they are too much in excess, even of the strongest patriarchal perception of “woman's place.”¹⁰

Janet Adelman, who acknowledges that Lear's behavior toward his children resembles “the rage of an abandoned infant,” nonetheless observes that

Goneril and Regan develop into monsters. … [They] become the principle of female autonomy run mad, playing out the logic through which female autonomy must mean annihilation of the male.¹¹

Though Adelman argues that Goneril and Regan are “the cannibalistic witch-children which [Lear] has made,”¹² she never argues that Lear's rage engenders inevitable and even appropriate rage on the part of his daughters. On the contrary, her use of “cannibalistic” suggests that Goneril and Regan are, in fact, monstrous in their transgression against humanity. I submit instead that Shakespeare was no misogynist and that, in fact, as Jonathan Dollimore argues in regard to Edmund, Shakespeare's complex characterization of Goneril and Regan suggests that they are not necessarily “evil.”¹³ Rather, Goneril's and Regan's ruthlessness is motivated politically and psychologically by the brutal nature of kingship, and by Lear himself.

Because Goneril and Regan are often accused of acting in their own interest rather than in that of their kingdom, I want to emphasize what other critics have argued: Lear's reasons for splitting the monarchy, for stepping down from the throne, are presented by Shakespeare as personal as well as political. Lear's demand that his daughters measure their love for him in order to receive the largest portion of land is an exploitive use of his authority. His expectation that filial affection and gratitude will eclipse political ambition is at best naive; at worst, his command for public declarations of love breeds resentment by forcing his daughters to cement alliances with Cornwall, Albany and either France or Burgundy in a public performance. His plan fuses his daughters' value on the marriage market with a stabilizing of their positions within the monarchy. It is also evidence of his assumption that all three daughters will respond according to traditional definitions of womanhood, with love, compassion, and a desire to care for an aged father.¹⁴ While all three daughters' stability within the monarchy is seemingly secure, Lear stages a performance based on powerless and dutiful femininity which rings false before the two oldest daughters respond to his request. He miscalculates the responses of all three of his daughters, as we know, who answer first in order to achieve power and second to cement marital alliances. The scene which Lear so carefully choreographs with his opening speech disintegrates in the face of Cordelia's “Nothing.”¹⁵ As Cavell also notes, Lear's staged combination of political business and familial affection collapses because he forces one to depend on the other.¹⁶ Having set up the love contest not because he is too old to continue running the kingdom but because he desires a guarantee that Cordelia will always love him first, Lear's rage results from his realization that no such guarantee exits.¹⁷ I want to suggest that in King Lear the self-interest which Lear displays is systematic to power relations in a hierarchical, patrilineal state. Lear himself reveals that he never intended to give the largest portion of land to the daughter who said she loved him most, but to Cordelia. His admission betrays his interest in manipulating his kingdom, his power, and his daughters to satisfy his personal need for Cordelia's “kind nursery” (1.1.124); Lear's concern for the best interests of his nation, then, is suspect.¹⁸

Goneril and Regan, perceiving the conditions of their advancement to power, comply with Lear's demands, unlike Cordelia. Their replies, rather than exhibiting their insincerity, take their cue from their father's formality and tendency for hyperbole.¹⁹ Lear's opening speech sets the style, in fact, for the rest of the scene:

          Know that we have divided
In three our kingdom; and 'tis our fast intent
To shake all cares and business from our age,
Conferring them on younger strengths, while we
Unburden'd crawl toward death.
.....          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?

1.1.37-41, 48-53

Lear's speech is significant for several reasons, not the least of which is his success at making the stakes absolutely clear. The political and economic power he offers is no small motivation for his eldest daughters' obedience when they speak. His method of utterance is also significant. Exaggerating his age and weakness, Lear approaches the ceremony he has arranged theatrically. Filled with kingly importance, his use of the royal “we” is practiced and ceremonial. His ego expands, fills the hall, and orders his daughters to feed it, unmasking the investment of ego and control of women and children in settling of money and power crucial to the maintenance of patrilineal power. Lear exaggerates his infirmity—he is hardly crawling toward death—partly because he wants Cordelia near him, but also because the grand style fits the awesome nature of his retirement. As he prompts his daughters to say “which loves us most,” he also seems to say, “Take your cue from me, and make your declaration of love as theatrical as you can.” As a model of kingship, he presents his court with a spectacle in which each movement, word, and purpose emphasizes his benevolence toward his daughters and their great love for him.

When Goneril and Regan accept his proposition and declare the depth of their love for him, they play by his rules, not their own. They obey their father's command and express their loyalty. In keen imitation of her father's capacity for exaggeration, Goneril answers that she loves her father

Dearer than eyesight, space, liberty,
Beyond what can be valued, rich or rare,
No less than life, with grace, health, beauty, honor;
.....A love that makes breath poor, and speech unable.

1.1.56-58, 60

And Regan, struggling to top her sister's answer, asserts that Goneril

          comes too short, that I profess
Myself an enemy to all other joys
Which the most precious square of sense possesses,
And find I am alone felicitate
In your dear Highness' love.

1.1.72-76

Using hyperbole as the expected manner of reply, Goneril and Regan comply with the conditions of their inheritance. Their exaggeration in this respect comes at the instigation of their father, not as most critics claim, as a result of their own “evil” and malicious natures. If, as most critics also admit, Lear's division of the kingdom is “a decision that violated the accumulated wisdom of Elizabethan statecraft,”²⁰ why condemn his two eldest daughters for taking part? Instead, we must see their obedience to Lear not just as evidence of their political ambition, which it is, but also as performances which respond appropriately to the theatrics of Lear's ceremony. As Bruce Thomas Boehrer notes,

Lear's words seek to mediate between the expression of unforced loyalty and the imposition of rewards and punishments. On the one hand his daughters' love must be freely offered because … it is “beyond what can be valued” (1.1.57); yet on the other hand that very love is subject to an elaborate set of pressures and constraints.²¹

Because the contest is not meant, except superficially, to provide evidence of family love but to demonstrate Lear's power over his children, as their king as well as their father, the scene makes familial love an effect of power and the power differential Lear emphasizes.²² He uses love to satisfy his desire for control even as he relinquishes political power.

While Goneril and Regan clearly exaggerate their love for Lear, they are not yet actively hostile to him. Goneril's and Regan's brief exchange at the end of this scene further suggests that neither of the sisters intends any malicious plan in regard to Lear, but that, instead, like their father, they wish to protect their new authority:

Gon.

You see how full of changes his age is, the observation we have made of it hath not been little. He always lov'd our sister most, and with what poor judgement he hath now cast her off appears too grossly.

Reg.

'Tis the infirmity of his age, yet he hath ever but slenderly known himself.

Gon.

The best and soundest of his time hath been but rash; then must we look from his age to receive not alone the imperfections of long-ingraff'd conditions, but therewithal the unruly waywardness that infirm and choleric years bring with them.

Reg.

Such unconstant starts are we like to have from him as this of Kent's banishment.

Gon.

There is further compliment of leave-taking between France and him. Pray you let us hit together; if our father carry authority with such disposition as he bears, this last surrender of his will but offend us.

Reg.

We shall further think of it.

Gon.

We must do something, and i' th' heat.

1.1.288-308

This exchange is often read as evidence of Goneril's and Regan's malice toward their father, if not as an actual plot to do him harm. I have quoted it almost in its entirely, then, to propose that nothing of the kind is revealed or plotted. Because Lear has ensured that their “love” is a function of power, Goneril's and Regan's efforts to protect their power certainly have a potential to ride roughshod over their father. However, at this point, no active plot against him surfaces. Rather, the sisters agree that what they have witnessed is typical of his past behavior; the banishment of their sister and of Lear's closest adviser, Kent, is confirmation once more of his rashness.

Significantly, their conference acknowledges no more than what Kent himself attempted to show Lear. Banishing Cordelia and refusing her a dowry achieves nothing but heartache for Lear, who, as his elder daughters observe, does not seem to realize just how much he will miss his youngest daughter. Long-buried and just resentments come to the surface and reveal that Goneril and Regan understand that the public love test enacted a displacement of power with love. While their father may have surrendered his power to them, his actions against Cordelia betray his inability to separate power from his love for her. Having just been invested with monarchical power, if not the title, Goneril and Regan express concern over the likelihood that their father—who in his rashness has just banished the two people closest to him—will in similar displays of temper, exert the power he retains as the symbolic head of state, with no small retinue of knights, to retake political power. Therefore, having complied with the terms of inheritance which required them to act as dutiful daughters, Goneril and Regan begin to take control. They plan to forge a united front from which any attempts on Lear's part to regain the crown can be fought. Their “plot” is nothing more than an agreement to discuss further how to respond to their father's inconstancy of mind, an agreement which does not include a threat against his life. At the same time, their conversation exemplifies the suspicious nature of kingship. Just as their father refused to be undermined by Kent's objections to his acts, Goneril and Regan understand that power must ever be on guard against usurpation and subversion. They will rule, then, in a fashion similar to Lear's.

Conflict arises, however, in act one, scene four when Goneril asserts her new power over a Lear unwilling to submit to his daughter's authority. When Lear takes up residence with Goneril, it is with the understanding that, as he makes clear,

          Ourself, by monthly course,
With reservation of an hundred knights
By you to be sustain'd, shall our abode
Make with you by due turn.

1.1.132-35

It is no surprise to Goneril, then, that Lear arrives with one hundred knights or that she is responsible for their up-keep. However, their behavior and Lear's evident unwillingness to control them or himself both surprises and angers her. Because Goneril has just become joint ruler with her husband of half the nation, her frustration in this scene is motivated by her desire to reflect that power. To do so, she must maintain an authoritarian position for her servants as well as for her subjects. When Oswald informs her that Lear is undermining that authority by chastising and physically assaulting her servants, she is understandably upset.

Did my father strike my gentleman for chiding of his Fool?
.....By day and night he wrongs me, every hour
He flashes into one gross crime or other
That sets us all at odds. I'll not endure it.
His knights grow riotous, and himself upbraids us
On every trifle.

1.3.1, 3-7

Goneril's speech illustrates legitimate motivation for her anger. Rather than focusing on court business, and just when she should be occupying a position of authority. Goneril finds herself distracted by petty disputes and expected to defer to her father's royal commands as if nothing has changed. She has not, then, been given the freedom of a monarch, nor has she escaped her father's control by becoming queen. The anger which Goneril feels results from her impotence as monarch so long as her father continues to usurp the control which is now rightfully hers. Two conflicts have arisen between Goneril and Lear, though many critics see only one. More than a domestic dispute between a father and a daughter, the struggle which begins in this scene is also political; Lear's demands and the behavior of his knights manifest themselves as a political threat in Goneril's mind, “set[ting] us all at odds.” She and her sister are of one mind “[n]ot to be overrul'd” (1.3.16), and her subsequent appeal to him is an attempt to maintain a hierarchical order in which Goneril rules and Lear respects her authority.

Significantly, Goneril contains her anger long enough to state her case to her father rationally. Not yet having fully adopted the ruthlessness of patrilineal forms of power, Goneril explains to her father the disruptive nature of his behavior:

          Sir,
I had thought, by making this well known unto you,
To have found a safe redress, but now grow fearful,
By what yourself too late have spoke and done,
That you protect this course and put it on
By your allowance.
.....         
I do beseech you
To understand my purposes aright,
As you are old and reverend, should be wise.
Here do you keep a hundred knights and squires,
Men so disorder'd, so debosh'd and bold,
That this our court, infected with their manners,
Shows like a riotous inn. Epicurism and lust
Makes it more like a tavern or a brothel
Than a grac'd palace. The shame itself doth speak
For instant remedy. Be then desir'd
By her, that else will take the thing she begs,
A little to disquantity your train,
And the remainders that shall still depend,
To be such men as may besort your age,
Which know themselves and you.

1.4.204-9, 238-52

Goneril's speech is significant for two reasons. First, unlike Lear, who reacts explosively to Kent's and Cordelia's unexpected responses to his spectacle in act one, scene one, Goneril explains to her father the nature of her complaint and the resolution she hopes to achieve with him. Clearly, Goneril also asserts her independence, showing her father that she means to be more than a figure-head. As queen of her half of the kingdom, she argues that the inhabitants of her castle must behave with decorum and respect for the business of a court. She reminds Lear that he must set an example for the men in his train by respecting her position. Such persuasion suggests that Goneril has not yet entirely committed herself to the ruthlessness of her father's monarchical example. Second, while her request that he reduce the number of his knights comes only after Lear begins to lose his temper at her request for subduing his men, Goneril's attempt at negotiation is veiled none-too-subtly in a warning. She intends to reduce the number of his retainers whether he agrees or not. But that, as well, is evidence of the power she believes she is entitled to as queen. Like her father, who was, after all, her model for the exercise of monarchical power, she uses her power as an inducement for him to comply with her request “voluntarily.” Like her father, Goneril tinges her request with the shades of a threat. Nevertheless, the matter of her request is reasonable and posed in such a way that reflects her respect for her father's position as she appeals to his aged wisdom and his ability to control the men who are loyal to him. While she knows her father's temperament to be explosive rather than reasonable, Goneril humors her father rather than immediately making demands.

While traditionally critics have not believed Goneril's assessment of the situation, Lear succeeds in proving her version of events by his response. “Darkness and devils!” he explodes,

Saddle my horses; call my train together!
Degenerate bastard, I'll not trouble thee;
Yet have I left a daughter.

1.4.252-55

Predictably, Lear rejects his daughter and his paternity of her. Lear expects unquestioned obedience. Goneril wants respect and that request angers Lear because to give his daughter respect is to yield power to her. As far as Lear is concerned, Goneril's petition reflects only her disloyalty to him, reflects, in fact, that she cannot be his daughter. But Lear's power is limited; he cannot banish Goneril as he did Kent and Cordelia. As a punishment for stripping him of his power and identity, Lear assaults his daughter with his rage:

Hear, Nature, hear, dear goddess, hear!
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 honor her!

1.4.275-81

Lear spits a scorching curse at Goneril, giving his daughter the motivation which will fuel her response to him throughout the remainder of the play. Like his curse and banishment of Cordelia, his curse of Goneril reaches hyperbolic hysteria. His malediction makes Goneril into a monster. She is not only a “degenerate bastard” but a

marble hearted fiend,
More hideous when thou show'st thee in a child
Than the sea-monster.

1.4.259-61

Goneril's body shrinks, shrivels, and metamorphoses until she is no longer recognizably a woman. Instead, she is a “creature” devoid of femininity, devoid of reproductive and nurturing abilities because Lear believes that Goneril herself is devoid of conventional feminine—and obsequious—feeling. Lear's disfigurement of his daughter's body is symptomatic of his fear of the female body, which in his mind is a site of pollution and disease.²³ As Lear progresses from a curse of his daughter's womb and its seed, to his own polluted state in having fathered this “creature,” this monster of a woman, the female body as the site of “evil,” what Edgar later calls, “the dark and vicious place” (5.3.173) becomes fearful and loathsome.

The effects of Lear's curse—sterility and the cutting off of the lineage—would effectively disrupt the patrilineal system. Gayle Whittier notes that “[s]ince the bonds of fatherhood are in large part nominal bonds, they can only be repudiated by cursing, specifically, through the womb itself.”²⁴ Lear struggles with having fathered Goneril and simultaneously dehumanizes her by making her into a monster. His complicity in the conception of this woman reminds Lear of the sexual act, of the female body he entered at her conception. His rage against this daughter makes that act despicable and vile, culminating in a curse which slashes as deeply as a rape. Disassociating himself from the sexual act by disowning Goneril, Lear attempts to illegitimize her claim to the throne. Lear's curse not only mutilates his daughter's body but renders her valueless in a patrilineal order which marks women's worth through their patrimony and through their function as the bearers of children. Because the transmission of power in the kingdom depends on Goneril's inheritance of the throne and on her ability to have children, Lear could not have made a more stinging curse.

While Lear's misogyny is significant on its own, the humiliation and abuse which Goneril experiences in this scene motivate her subsequent ruthlessness and cruelty toward her father as she protects her power. Though Marjorie Garber has no lasting sympathy for Goneril, she notes of Lear's curse that “the parent, who should give life, devours; the womb becomes transformed into a consuming mouth, the vagina dentata of psychology and anthropology.”²⁵ In this light, Goneril's anger and rush to send word to Regan about their father's unwillingness to see reason becomes understandable. Lear's blistering abuse makes her determined to find an ally in her sister. It is not that Goneril, like a child, wants sympathy from her sibling after a parent's anger, but that she knows the kingdoms which she and Regan have so newly begun to rule can be taken from them. Lear makes his intentions in that regard perfectly clear. “Thou shalt find” he threatens, “That I'll resume the shape which thou dost think / I have cast off forever” (1.4.308-10). Having threatened to retake the throne and resume his monarchical authority, Lear confirms in his daughters' minds the fear which until then is merely a possibility. Their rule is not necessarily permanent, but as transitory as the love which Lear felt for Cordelia and Kent.

Goneril's and Regan's alliance becomes calculated at this point in its effort to paralyze Lear's power in order to protect their own. Their united decision to reduce Lear to fifty, twenty-five, and then no knights at all is an attempt to strip him of feudal devotees and to render him powerless to retake the throne. The sisters reveal the fear his threat engenders as they struggle with him for power—cloaked in an argument over the number of men in his train:

Reg.
What, fifty followers?
Is it not well? What should you need of more?
Yea, or so many? sith that both charge and danger
Speak 'gainst so great a number? How in one house
Should many people under two commands
Hold amity? 'Tis hard, almost impossible.
Gon.
Why might not you, my lord, receive attendance
From those that she calls servants or from mine?
Reg.
Why not, my lord? If then they chanc'd to slack ye,
We could control them. If you will come to me
(For now I spy a danger), I entreat you
To bring but five and twenty; to no more
Will I give place or notice.

2.4.237-49

The daughters' diminishment of Lear's train is clearly calculated, but not as a heartless attempt to humiliate their now powerless father. On the contrary, their calculations reflect their right to the political power with which Lear invested them. Their strategy also takes heed of Lear's actual power and reflects their grasp of the sincerity of his threats: with his men, he might be able to form a greater army to retake the throne. They attempt to lessen the threat which one hundred knights might pose against them.²⁶ Despite Lear's retention of the title, in order to continue enjoying its privileges, he gave up the material power of kingship to his daughters and their husbands, retaining merely the symbolic power. And I argue that the material power which his daughters now possess never included the requirements of mercy. Because women rule, we cannot assume that their power will derive from traditional definitions of femininity. Judging from Lear's own example, kingship means ruthlessness—not just against strangers and traitors, but against family as well. His daughters rule in perfect imitation of their father, acting to preserve the power given them. Rather than assuming that Goneril and Regan disrupt the patriarchal order as Barbara C. Millard argues,²⁷ we must see that Shakespeare exposes the violence of patrilineal structures of power by granting that power/authority to women who rule in a patrilineal fashion rather than according to naturalized gender distinctions.

While Lear, by himself, poses relatively little threat, the King of France, with Cordelia by his side and at the instigation of Kent, has invaded England, against Goneril and Regan, with the intention of reestablishing Lear on the throne. For all intents and purposes, then, the kingdom which Goneril and Regan inherited is under siege, and anyone caught acting in sympathy with Lear or France is a traitor. Certainly, any military action on France's part which threatens the stability of England's crown must be seen by those wearing that crown as an act of war.²⁸ Similarly, any action on the part of English subjects which threatens those who wear the crown must be seen as treason and rebellion. Gloucester, by this logic, in possession of a letter which reveals France's imminent arrival and having arranged for the safe passage of Lear to those who represent Cordelia in Dover, has committed treason.²⁹

Clearly, Cornwall, Regan, and Goneril view Gloucester as a traitor when Edmund makes his father's part in the letter known. Once Oswald confirms that Gloucester “hath convey'd [Lear] hence” accompanied by

Some five or six and thirty of his knights,
.....Who, with some other of the lord's dependants,
Are gone with him toward Dover, where they boast
To have well-armed friends,

3.7.15-16, 18-20

the will to survive both politically and physically motivates their torture of Gloucester. As a traitor to their government, Gloucester suffers no more than any other traitor³⁰—in fact he does not suffer death because “the form of justice” (3.7.25), or a proper arraignment, has not been conducted and later because Regan thrusts him out of doors in her concern for the wounded Cornwall. If we want Regan to show mercy to Gloucester, we are imagining that her duties as ruler should be limited by the fact of her being a woman. Instead, we must acknowledge the requirements of her role as ruler in a kingdom under attack by invaders, which include the methods by which the stability of the nation can be preserved; in Renaissance England those methods are ruthlessness, torture, and cruelty. Filial ingratitude takes a secondary part in these actions, then, rather than a primary part, as Tennenhouse claims.³¹ A politics which requires those in power to survive in the face of military threats motivates the actions which dominate the last three acts of the play. Significantly, however, the scene works to deconstruct that ruthlessness rather than to justify it; Shakespeare's choice to set the blinding of Gloucester on stage illustrates the play's anxiety about the violence of kingship and its abhorrence of that violence. Gloucester's blinding enacts images of violent power in the name of political security which cannot be dismissed by an audience.³²

The sisters' instinct for survival is also evident in their involvement with Edmund. Their affairs with him function in two possible ways. First, for many critics their liaisons testify to the sexual license which is symptomatic of female “evil.” The transgressions against putatively gender-appropriate conduct which make Goneril and Regan “evil” always include acts of unlawful desire.³³ That Goneril pursues Edmund despite her husband's good health is a symptom of the same “evil” she exhibits as she chastises her father in her desire to maintain her power. Regan's contract with Edmund, though it takes place after Cornwall's death, makes her faithfulness while her husband lived suspect and further reinforces the “evil” she exhibits while helping Cornwall gouge out Gloucester's eyes. But I argue instead that their attraction to Edmund is symptomatic of the power which both women need in order to rule. As women, they do not possess power in any culturally constructed sense but are subject to their culture's definition of femininity as weak and subservient. While neither sister behaves in traditionally feminine terms, their interest in Edmund suggests that each of them feels the need of a powerful, and therefore masculine, ally. Goneril, erroneously, believes that her husband does not possess the violent power necessary for kingship; and Regan's husband, once quite effective in his ruthless hold on power, is now dead. Edmund, however, possesses the masculinist ruthlessness which Goneril and Regan need to rule. Goneril explains most effectively her objections to Albany's method of rule after Oswald describes his less than enthusiastic reaction to her return:

It is the cowish terror of his spirit,
That dares not undertake; he'll not feel wrongs
Which tie him to an answer. Our wishes on the way
May prove effects. Back Edmund, to my brother,
Hasten his musters and conduct his pow'rs.
I must change names at home, and give the distaff
Into my husband's hands.

4.2.12-18

Goneril ridicules her husband's manhood, describing him as feminine, weak, and forgiving. In her eyes, the very nature of rule is rigid, unforgiving, violent, and consequently masculine. Her reference to changing gender roles with her husband in order to take charge of the escalating conflict illustrates her masculinist conception of power. Realizing that her husband flinches at her mode of rule, she identifies him as feminine, discards him as an ally, and searches for a substitute who will stabilize her power.

Hungry for power, Edmund is willing to assume the ruthlessness which has now become a necessity for both women. Goneril looks to him to give her the power which her husband cannot: “My most dear Gloucester!” she confides to him as he leaves her to return to Cornwall,

          O, the difference of man and man!
To thee a woman's services are due,
A fool usurps my bed.

4.2.25-28

Sexual roles, in Goneril's mind, also conform to patrilineal interests. Edmund, because he is willing to sacrifice all for power, fulfills Goneril's definition of a sexually potent man. Her husband, however, deserves her infidelity. Similarly, Regan, now widowed, turns to Edmund as an ally who exudes the same power as her husband. Regan's claim to him is the more legitimate, she feels, because her husband is dead (4.5.30-32). In fact, he has already begun officially to represent her, as she informs Albany:

          He led our powers,
Bore the commission of my place and person,
The which immediacy may well stand up,
And call itself your brother.

5.3.63-66

Both sisters seize on Edmund as a symbol of masculinist power, as a means to legitimize their own desire and exercise of power, through an affiliation with the new Earl of Gloucester.

Goneril's and Regan's power collapses, however, despite their attempts to consolidate it. The feud over Edmund which separates the sisters intensifies as their attention is forced toward war and the forces which would reinstate Lear. Regan's public announcement of her marital and political alliance with Edmund seemingly checkmates her still-married sister. But Goneril determines not to allow her sister that victory, revealing in an aside that the monarchy takes second place to her fight for Edmund: “I had rather lose the battle, than that sister / Should loosen him and me” (5.1.18-19). But in the quickness of the last act's movement, Albany's confrontation of both Edmund and his wife with their plot against him forces the crisis. Before Regan can officially make her title Edmund's, Albany takes action against all three of them:

          Edmund, I arrest thee
On capital treason, and in thy attaint,
This gilded serpent [pointing to Goneril]. For your claim fair sister,
I bar it in the interest of my wife;
'Tis she is sub-contracted to this lord,
And I, her husband, contradict your banes.
If you will marry, make your loves to me,
My lady is bespoke.

5.3.82-89

Albany's sarcasm, compounded by accusations of treason and monstrosity, work their intended purpose. Edmund is taken off guard by Edgar; Goneril, also taken off guard, stays long enough to hear the allegations against Edmund, but exits in defiance of the indictment her husband makes against her. Regan, poisoned by her sister, is doubly paralyzed. The power which all three children sought to protect is taken away by Albany and Edgar with disarming swiftness.

Such an ending suggests that “evil” is righteously overcome by good. Certainly, the majority of critics argue such a thesis. However, in contrast with similar endings to tragedies written by Jacobean dramatists not long after King Lear, the re-establishment of order out of chaos is not so easily argued. First of all, neither Goneril nor Regan accept Albany's identification of themselves as monstrous, “serpent” women. Without a hint of the self-condemning speeches of Middleton's Beatrice-Joanna and Beaumont's and Fletcher's Evadne, or even the brief lines of Webster's Vittoria Corombona, Regan and Goneril die ever-defiant of Albany's moral righteousness. Goneril's exit, in particular, illustrates her refusal both to subscribe to her husband's evaluation of her as monstrous and to give up power and submit to the accusations which he brings against Edmund and herself:

Gon.
Say if I do [know], the laws are mine, not thine;
Who can arraign me for't?
Alb.
Most monstrous! O!
Knows't thou this paper?
Gon.
Ask me not what I know. Exit.

5.3.159-62

As the last lines which she speaks, Goneril's continued scorn for the power structure which her husband now, and Lear earlier, represent, keeps her from internalizing his moral judgement of her as monstrous. Goneril's suicide is not like Evadne's in Beaumont and Fletcher's The Maid's Tragedy, who, as I have argued elsewhere, kills herself as a sacrifice to her husband, her brother, and the patrilineal order—and as a way to recoup her own honor;³⁴ Goneril's suicide is an act of resistance to the punitive consequences which Albany plans. While suicide traditionally signifies religious despair, I would argue that if Goneril feels despair, it is not religious, but political, for she refuses to acknowledge Albany's claim to power or his control of the law. Catherine Belsey argues that “[s]uicide re-establishes the sovereign subject. … As an individual action, therefore, suicide is a threat to the control of the state.”³⁵ In this light, Goneril's suicide is not enacted to reinsert herself into the “social body,” in Belsey's words, as is Evadne's. Instead, she acts to guarantee her self-definition as a monarch against the state which would control her by defining her uses of power as immoral.

Similarly, Regan's death, though instigated by her sister, is punctuated by neither apologies nor regrets on her part. Unlike so many “evil” women characters, particularly in Jacobean drama, Regan does not take an opportunity before her death to repent her “crimes.” In fact, even as she begins to feel the effects of Goneril's poison, she asserts her power, “creat[ing] [Edmund] here, / [Her] lord and master” (5.3.77-78). While she may not know she is dying, the lack of a self-deprecatory speech in the face of imminent defeat is significant.³⁶ I would argue that both Goneril's and Regan's refusal to internalize patrilineal definitions of “moral” femininity suggests a refusal on Shakespeare's part to condemn them wholly for their actions.

As for their plot to kill Lear, I would note that we have no real proof that any such plot exists; Gloucester provides only hearsay in that matter. Though he tells Kent, “I have o'erheard a plot of death upon him” (3.6.89), we know that Gloucester's ability to overhear the truth is suspect. This is the man, after all, who heard Edgar plot against his own life in a conversation with Edmund. Further, Edgar does not accuse Goneril or Regan of anything; notably, his whole attention is dedicated to the betrayal he and Gloucester suffered at Edmund's hands. While Edgar's accusations against his brother seek justice, he does not appear interested in delivering the same justice to Lear's older daughters. Goneril and Regan, whose inheritance of the crown is legitimate, seem less immediately culpable than the bastard usurper. Finally, that Goneril kills her sister and then kills herself is important because no representative of Albany's or Edgar's “moral” order takes that action. While they seem to have internalized patrilineal dictates by asserting their monarchical power in violent fashion, neither woman allows patrilineal morality to define her identity or question her authority.³⁷

It is Edmund, rather, who is made to face the wrath of the patrilineal system in the form of his brother Edgar, Edmund who internalized the structure's definition of his “nature” as “evil” (5.3.244-45). His wrongs seem to be greater because he had no legitimate claim to royal power. Yet we know that Edmund's illegitimacy is also a construct of the same patrilineal order which Goneril and Regan resist in their death. Edmund's “wrongs” are as constituted by patrilineal configurations of power as is Goneril's and Regan's “evil.” As Dollimore contends,

Edmund's scepticism is made to serve an existing system of values; although he falls prey to, he does not introduce his society to its obsession with power, property, and inheritance; it is already the material and ideological basis of that society.³⁸

Edmund's putative betrayal of his father and brother is a response to old and deep-seated resentments, as is Goneril's and Regan's betrayal of Lear. As a bastard, Edmund is not entitled to power, to legal existence. Consequently, only attaining Edgar's inheritance will satisfy him, for verbal acknowledgment pales in comparison to legal acknowledgment. And we know the quality of acknowledgment this bastard receives from his father in act one, scene one—acknowledgment to which Gloucester is “braz'd” (1.1.11), crudely laughing off the “sport at his making” (1.1.23).³⁹ Gloucester's reference to Edmund as his mother's son reveals his anxiety about the young man's paternity. Because a guarantee of paternity is of the utmost importance in a patrilineal order, Edmund can never be anything more than a source of irritation and anxiety. When Edgar, the legitimate, confronts Edmund as a traitor in the name of God, father, and brother, Edmund's skepticism and rebellion collapse:

What you have charg'd me with, that have I done,
And more, much more, the time will bring it out.

5.3.163-64

Like Evadne, Edmund accepts and internalizes the patrilineal order's condemnation of his desire as “evil.”

Edgar's entrance in act five, scene three, suggests Gillian Murray Kendall, begins the play's return to order.⁴⁰ On the contrary, I would argue. As a victim of the patrilineal order's ruthlessness, perhaps Edgar promised the greatest potential for a modification in the structure of power relations. But instead he enters as the patrilineal system incarnate, armed, wielding a sword in the very name of vengeance against one who dared threaten the patrilineal order. He chooses to ignore his brother's youth, eminence, valor and heart because patrilineal morality accepts no excuses, admits no motivation for rebellion. The “moral” codes which relegated Edmund to illegitimacy support patrilineal interests and power. True to the structure which made him legitimate heir, Edgar cannot see beyond his brother's treason to that structure. Such treason can be answered only with the sword:

My name is Edgar, and thy father's son.
The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us.
The dark and vicious place where thee he got
Cost him his eyes.

5.3.170-74 (emphasis mine)

Displacing the responsibility of Edmund's act of rebellion onto the immorality and pollution of female sexuality, Edgar betrays his own anxiety about Edmund's illegitimacy.⁴¹ His anxiety discloses his inability to envision a new order and testifies to the efficiency of the patrilineal order's moral codes. As a product of those codes, Edgar, like his bastard brother and Lear's “immoral” daughters, functions within a ruthless and brutal structure of power. I cannot assert, then, with Morris Henry Partee that “the play, which began with Lear's coupling of irresponsibility and absolute power, concludes with Edgar's declaration of a new spirit of moderation and duty”⁴²—because Edgar in fact returns to and in the spirit of vengeance against the bastard usurper. His moral duty lodges firmly with the patrilineal order which Lear and Gloucester founded on absolutist and unforgiving principles. The suffering and marginalization Edgar experienced might in some other play have taught him mercy, but such an opportunity is irrevocably lost as Edgar champions patrilineal moral authority with the violence of his sword.

I argue, therefore, that the brutality with which Lear, Gloucester, Goneril, Regan, and Edmund rule leads each of them to their annihilation.⁴³ The play seems to suggest more than that ruthless uses of power lead to annihilation, that, rather, the nature of power itself demands violence and brutality, and leads, therefore, to annihilation. Thus, patrilineal forms of power are exposed as flawed and in need of revision, which, as I have argued, Edgar cannot enact. Yet as Dollimore argues,

In the closing moments of Lear those who have survived the catastrophe actually attempt to recuperate their society in just those terms which the play has subjected to sceptical interrogation. There is invoked first a concept of innate nobility in contradistinction to innate evil and, second, its corollary: a metaphysically ordained justice.⁴⁴

Though Dollimore contends that the play resists that recuperation in the deaths of Cordelia and Lear (203), I would argue that Edgar's entrance enacts just such a recuperation. Absolute power is enacted through violence whether in the hands of men or women. In this light, the closing scene merely confirms the violent and resilient nature of power, evidencing Shakespeare's discomfort with a system of power relations for which even he cannot envision an alternative.

Like Dollimore's reading of Edmund, my reading of Goneril and Regan argues that their obsession with power is a symptom of the patrilineal tradition of brutal kingship. Arguments which contend that subversion of traditional gender performance equals monstrosity force the sisters to occupy an ideologically moral position in contemporary criticism as “evil.” Such arguments distort Shakespeare's portrayal of them, ignoring the possibility that a critical comment on patrilineal structures of power inheres in their characterization. The almost universal critical reaction against Goneril and Regan reifies the vision of woman as kind, nurturing, forgiving, and ignores the position in which these two women find themselves. Once the bidding is over and the kingdom is theirs, they are no longer just daughters or wives. They are queens, monarchs, in a system of power relations which values mercilessness, vengeance and cruelty to defend its interests. Goneril and Regan cannot, therefore, rule within the limitations of their gender. Instead, they must subscribe to the brutal nature of kingship. Consequently, Goneril and Regan do not “imperfectly replicate [Lear]” as Adelman argues;⁴⁵ rather they replicate him quite perfectly. Dreher notes that “the logic of the [play] condemns them, not because they rebel against traditional feminine passivity, but because in so doing they become cruel and inhuman tyrants.”⁴⁶ I would argue instead that the logic of the play requires Goneril and Regan to rebel against traditional feminine passivity to become cruel tyrants, to become monarchs. Significantly, however, the real, palpable violence does not begin until Lear curses Goneril, wishing her sterile, disowning her, and threatening to retake the throne in act one, scene four, establishing that Goneril and Regan have motivation for their desire to strip him of power. I would like to recoup King Lear, therefore, as a potentially feminist text which exposes the marginalization of women from acts of power and desire—as a text which interrogates the nature of patrilineal power and uncovers its brutality. Because power has been defined in traditionally masculine terms, we can see that King Lear exposes the masculinist structure of kingship as necessarily vengeful and destructive. In this respect, the “immorality” of Goneril's and Regan's choices can be read as symptoms of the patrilineal structure of power relations in which they live and as responses to the limitations placed on them, rather than as evidence of inherent “evil.”

Notes

1. I use the term “patrilineal” in place of “patriarchal” to emphasize the materiality of masculinist interests putatively stabilized by peaceful transmission of property. The term “patriarchal” describes a male-dominated culture, but fails to account for the cause of women's oppression in that culture. “Patrilineal,” on the other hand, accounts for both male domination and women's oppression through women's position as property. As Constance Jordan has shown, women are exchanged through marriage, in part, to act as a “guarantee” of peaceful relations among families; see Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), 47. But that guarantee is a phantasmic construction, rendering patrilineal interests continually insecure.

2. There are several analyses which do not insist on Lear's or Cordelia's goodness, Goneril's and Regan's “evil,” and Shakespeare's misogyny. Only Stephen Reid attempts a full defense of Goneril and Regan based on Oedipal and sibling rivalries, “In Defense of Goneril and Regan,” American Imago 27 (1970): 226-44. Claire McEachern defends Shakespeare from accusations of misogyny, but centers her defense on Cordelia rather than the two elder daughters, “Fathering Herself: A Source Study of Shakespeare's Feminism,” Shakespeare Quarterly 39.3 (1988): 269-90. Thomas McFarland's analysis of family relations avoids delineations of good against “evil”; see “The Image of the Family in King Lear,” in On King Lear, ed. Lawrence Danson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 91-118, especially 98. Paolo Valesio, in a rhetorical analysis of act one, scene one, argues that Cordelia, no less than Goneril and Regan, desires the kingdom, rejecting her father's rhetorical framework (flattery) to position herself, advantageously, against her sisters. Valesio's analysis deconstructs both Goneril's and Regan's “evil” and Cordelia's virtue; see his Novantiqua: Rhetorics as a Contemporary Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 41-60. Jonathan Dollimore notes that Lear's behavior with all of his daughters is based on a particularly brutal hierarchy, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, 2nd ed. (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 199.

3. Kathleen McLuskie, “The Patriarchal Bard: Feminist Criticism and Shakespeare,” in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 102.

4. Stephen Greenblatt makes a similar argument in regard to the Henriad in Shakespearian Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 20-65.

5. Ann Thompson urges feminist critics not to “give up” on King Lear, “Are There Any Women in King Lear?” in The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Valerie Wayne (New York: Harvester, 1991), 117-28. In agreement with her, I argue that the play “dramatizes the material conditions which lie behind power structures within the family … and the threat posed to those structures by female insubordination” (126) and appropriations of power. I have attempted, therefore, to pose a materialist/feminist reading which highlights “the oppression of women within social and political structures” (127). Consequently, I have chosen to focus solely on the two sisters and not to extend my reading to Edmund, though clearly my argument applies to his culturally derived class as a bastard and as, according to Stanley Cavell, “the central evil character” of the play; see Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 76.

6. Thompson, “Are There Any Women,” 119.

7. On Lear's gendering of hysteria, see Coppélia Kahn, “The Absent Mother in King Lear,” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 33-49. See also Janet Adelman's study of female sexuality as contamination, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (New York: Routledge, 1992), especially 103-29; and Madelon Gohlke (Sprengnether), “‘I wooed thee with my sword’: Shakespeare's Tragic Paradigms,” in The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Green, and Carol Thomas Neely (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 150-70.

8. See Harry Berger, Jr., who establishes a dichotomy between “good” characters and “self proclaim'd knave[s],” in his “Text Against Performance: The Gloucester Family Romance,” in Shakespeare's “Rough Magic,” ed. Peter Erickson and Coppélia Kahn (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), 211; and Linda Bamber who argues that Lear is an example of Shakespeare's misogyny because Goneril and Regan, along with Lady Macbeth and Volumnia, are “nightmare females … not just women who are evil; their evil is inseparable from their failures as women,” Comic Women, Tragic Men: A Study of Gender and Genre in Shakespeare (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982), 2. See also Marianne Novy who claims that “Few of [Goneril's and Regan's] lines carry hints of motivations other than cruelty, lust, or ambition, characters of the archetypal fantasy image of women as enemy,” Love's Argument: Gender Relations in Shakespeare (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 1984), 153; and Diane Elizabeth Dreher for whom Goneril and Regan are “Shakespeare's evil women … sociopaths, individuals without conscience or empathy, motivated only by power and appetite,” Domination and Defiance: Fathers and Daughters in Shakespeare (Lexington: Kentucky University Press, 1986), 105-6.

9. Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).

10. Ibid., 98.

11. Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 118.

12. Ibid., 119; emphasis mine.

13. Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, 198.

14. On Lear's “stubborn reliance on the myth of the ‘eternal feminine’” see Claudette Hoover, “Women, Centaurs, and Devils in King Lear,” Women's Studies 16 (1989): 349-59, at 88. Hoover's indictment of Lear's misogyny does not stop her, however, from labeling Goneril and Regan “evil” (93).

15. King Lear 1.1.89, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). All further references to King Lear will be to this edition and cited parenthetically in the text. However, I have deleted the editorial brackets used in this edition; the brackets remaining, which indicate modifications from the original quotations, are my own.

16. Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, 67.

17. Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 116; Mark J. Blechner, “King Lear, King Leir, and Incest Wishes,” American Imago 45 (1988): 309-25; Kahn, “Absent Mother,” 33-49; Mark Taylor, Shakespeare's “Darker Purpose:” A Question of Incest (New York: AMS Press, 1982); and Kay Stockholder, “Sex and Authority in Hamlet, King Lear, and Pericles,” Mosaic 23.3 (1985): 17-29, agree that Lear's “darker purpose” is a reflection of his desire to keep Cordelia under his control. For discussions of Lear's reaction to Cordelia's “Nothing,” see Jeffrey Stern, “King Lear: The Transference of the Kingdom,” Shakespeare Quarterly 41.3 (1990): 299-308; and McEachern, “Fathering Herself,” 269-90.

18. Johannes Allgaier focuses on Lear's authority over his daughters in the love test to argue that Shakespeare wrote a play interrogative of patriarchal authority. While Allgaier's point is that Cordelia's refusal to obey the authority of her father places her in a position of virtue which her sisters cannot share, he seems to assume that a real choice not to obey exists for all of Lear's daughters—a choice which would not require them to taste of banishment and illegitimacy. Allgaier's analysis assumes both that Lear asserts tyrannical power and that Goneril and Regan are complicit with it, accusing Goneril and Regan of “allow[ing] themselves to be raped and … becom[ing] spiritual prostitutes in the process” (1035) because of their obedience to Lear's love test; see “Is King Lear an Antiauthoritarian Play?” PMLA 88 (1973): 1033-39. That King Lear is an anti-authoritarian play is my point; however, I hope to extend that argument from the authority of a father over his daughters to argue that the play as a whole uncovers authority in its uniquely patrilineal and monarchical form as destructive and violent in nature.

19. See Valesio, Novantiqua, 41-60 passim.

20. McFarland, “Family,” 102. Dreher argues that “[t]o Shakespeare's contemporaries, [division of the kingdom] would have been shocking, grievously contrary to primogeniture and the cosmic order” (Domination, 64). See also Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare's Genres (New York: Methuen, 1986), especially 134-42.

21. Bruce Thomas Boehrer, “King Lear and the Royal Progress: Social Display in Shakespearean Tragedy,” Renaissance Drama (1990): 247.

22. McFarland also notes that Lear “fallacious[ly] assum[es] that power and love are interchangeable. … Thus Lear's initial confusion as to what pertains to a king and what pertains to a father sets in motion the [play's] tragic descent” (“Family,” 100, 104).

23. Hoover effectively illuminates Lear's misogyny, rooted in his fear and loathing of the female body and its sexuality. She reads Lear's reference to Goneril's copulation with a centaur as a symptom of Lear's associations of his daughters with sexual pollution-associations which also include references to Eve, witchcraft, and death. But Hoover's conclusion that Lear ultimately succeeds in rejecting that misogyny “as a necessary prelude to his reunion with his daughter Cordelia” reads that reunion with more optimism than I can; see “Women,” 349. Adelman's analysis of Lear's misogyny in this scene is more persuasive (Suffocating Mothers, 103-29).

24. Gayle Whittier, “Cordelia as Prince: Gender and Language in King Lear,” Exemplaria 1 (1989): 372. Whittier's article offers an important analysis of the spectre of the female body which haunts the play and exposes patriarchal nausea at female sexuality. Unlike my argument, however, hers maintains that nausea is evidence of Shakespeare's misogyny (367, 368).

25. Marjorie Garber, Coming of Age in Shakespeare (New York: Methuen, 1981), 152.

26. On the threat which Goneril and Regan perceive in Lear's retainers, Tennenhouse notes (Power, 136) that

    When Lear resigns the throne, the retainers operate only as the symbols of a power once located in Lear. Detached from the legitimate right to exercise power, they suddenly pose a potential threat to legitimate authority.

27. Barbara C. Millard, “Virago with a Soft Voice: Cordelia's Tragic Rebellion in King Lear,” Philological Quarterly 68.2 (1989): 150-53, passim.

28. Valesio notes in regard to Cordelia's arrival with a French army (Novantiqua, 58), that

    we think we are wise and moral because we blame Goneril and Regan, because we “see through” their scheming. … [Yet] the bulk of the army has been lying in ambush … thus [we have not realized] that Cordelia's scheming has escaped us.

29. Jay Halio has suggested that we should consider an argument which moves beyond attributing Gloucester's blinding to the malevolence of Regan and Cornwall. However, Halio favors a psychoanalytic analysis of Gloucester's blinding as symbolic of castration, “Gloucester's Blinding,” Shakespeare Quarterly 43.2 (1992): 221-23. I would like to pursue instead the suggestion that the immediate political situation in fact does—under patrilineal/monarchical configurations—demand ruthless treatment of anyone deemed a traitor.

30. For accounts of treason and uses of torture in Renaissance England, see James Heath, Torture and English Law: An Administrative and Legal History from the Plantagenets to the Stuarts (London: Greenwood, 1982); and Elizabeth Hanson, “Torture and Truth in Renaissance England,” Representations 34 (1994): 53-84.

31. Tennenhouse, Power; 138.

32. See Robert Matz, who argues that “torture provides a response to King Lear's potentially subversive questioning of monarchic authority,” in “Speaking What We Feel: Torture and Political Authority in King Lear,” Exemplaria 6 (1994): 223.

33. On the intersection between adultery and women's transgressive agency, particularly murder of the husband, see Frances E. Dolan, Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550-1700 (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), especially 38-48.

34. See Cristina León Alfar, “Staging the Feminine Performance of Desire: Masochism in The Maid's Tragedy,” Papers on Language and Literature 31.3 (1995): 313-33.

35. Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (New York: Routledge, 1993), 124-25.

36. See Anne M. Haselkorn who argues that “patriarchal values” are reasserted through the penitent confessions of Jacobean adulteresses, “Sin and the Politics of Penitence: Three Jacobean Adulteresses,” in The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon, ed. Anne M. Haselkorn and Betty S. Travitsky (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), 119-36.

37. It can be argued that Goneril and Regan resemble Cleopatra and Juliet in their refusal to submit to patrilineal structures of power which they do not themselves control. Cleopatra's suicide is certainly a response to the imminent arrival of Caesar, and Juliet's suicide is an act of resistance to her father's will; both women see death as a “power” they hold over themselves.

38. Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, 198.

39. See Cavell's analysis of Gloucester (Disowning Knowledge, 48-63) who, he argues,

    recognizes the moral claim upon himself … “to acknowledge” his bastard; but all this means to him is that he acknowledge he has a bastard for a son. He does not acknowledge him, as a son or as a person, with his feelings of illegitimacy and being cast out. … Gloucester['s] shame … is shown … by the fact that [he] has to joke about [Edmund]: Joking is a familiar specific for brazening out shame, calling enlarged attention to the thing you do not want naturally noticed.

    48, 49

    Cavell's sympathy with the bastard Edmund does not extend to Goneril and Regan, however. For Cavell, Regan is “evil” (53) and her “mind is itself a lynchmob” (63).

40. Gillian Murray Kendall, “Ritual and Identity: The Edgar-Edmund Combat in King Lear,” in True Rites and Maimed Rites: Ritual and Anti-Ritual in Shakespeare and His Age, ed. Linda Woodbridge and Edward Barry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 241.

41. See Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, 203.

42. Morris Henry Partee, “Edgar and the Ending of King Lear,” Studia Neophilologica 63 (1991): 175.

43. See Valesio, who argues (Novantiqua, 59) that

    The tragedy is that none of the three factions (the king, Goneril and Regan, Cordelia) succeeds in its intent, and the scepter falls from their grip after all of them have scrambled in blood and desperation to conquer it.

44. Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, 202.

45. Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 108.

46. Dreher, Domination, 106.