SOURCE: “King Lear's Reflection in The Mirror of Nobody: An Iconographical Question,” in Cahiers Élisabéthains, Vol. 54, October, 1998, pp. 55-73.

[In the essay below, Nutys-Giornal traces references of the European Renaissance character Nobody to the character of Lear, and considers the relationship between verbal and visual communication in the play.]

Walter Ong and Frances Yates have already drawn attention to the curious interdependence that existed between the verbal and visual means of communication in the Renaissance. This short study proposes to look into some practical and factual interpretation possibilities based on this conception of an interaction between the visual, and the verbal in King Lear. The theatrical experience occupies a privileged position as it shares the ability to signify by means of visual signs with paintings or engravings; this however will only be treated as a secondary matter. In the first place, I wish to consider the common stock of signs and symbols used indifferently in literary texts or in pictorial expression, admitting from the outset possible links between visual images and “conceits intellectual”¹. These links that might appear arbitrary to the twentieth century reader seem to have been exploited by writers of emblems and devices, engravers, painters, poets and even humanists, notwithstanding their general reluctance concerning the use of images². Thus artists translated ideas and intellectual conceits into visual images, whether to suit intentions of mystification or edification. To that effect pre-existing popular imagery often became a vehicle for learned culture and a means to vulgarize the latter.

The Elizabethan spectator possessed a visual vocabulary enabling him to recognize the references made to pictorial types or conceits from popular engravings, emblem-books and shop or tavern signs. These references might have ranged from a simple pun creating a moment of complicity with the audience to the use of images as a leitmotif in relationship with the underlying mood of the play. I hope to show the entrance of a popular pictorial type in King Lear, and its possible use in the characterization of the main protagonist, even as its expressiveness of a certain symbolism which might disclose to us the meaning of the play.

I. “NOBODY IS MY NAME THAT BEYRETH EVERYBODIES BLAME” (THE WELSPOKEN NOBODY)³

Shakespeare officially introduces us for the first time to Nobody in The Tempest: “This is the tune of our catch played by the picture of Nobody” (III.2.127-8). The Arden edition gives some explanations concerning a character called Nobody and mentions a possible reference to a comedy entitled No-body and Some-body, published in 1606 by the printer John Trundle, who used the picture of Nobody as a shopsign. M. T. Jones Davies in the article “Ben Jonson et la satire sociale au théâtre: Anatomie et dislocation”, argues that the image used in The Tempest might refer to the sign of a tavern displaying a man having legs and arms but no trunk.⁴ She further links the motif to Jonson's imagery of dismemberment. A closer study of the character Nobody and its related set of themes has led me to establish a possible relationship with another of Shakespeare's plays.

Bruegel the Elder presents us with a complex character, that inherited from popular imagery as much as learned culture, wearing a fool's costume in the engraving Elck or Everyman (Plate I). This engraving brought to my notice of an article by Gerta Calmann “The Picture of Nobody”.⁵ The first part of the present paper, a survey of the most significative connotations of the character and its evolution throughout the sixteenth century, is largely indebted to this article, which examines the origin and related themes of the iconographical motif.

The literary history of Nobody begins in Odyssey IX, where Odysseus tricks Polyphemus by giving his name as “no-man”. When the Cyclop blames “no-man” for tormenting him, he is met with indifference. Widely diffused in folkore,⁶ Nobody re-emerges as an important literary theme in the Middle Ages. An angevin cleric called Radulphus dedicated a Sermo Neminis (c. 1290) to the future Pope Boniface VIII, which consisted in a collection of biblical, patristic, and liturgical references to Nemo, making up a sort of biography of the character (Nemo ascendit in coelum, John iii. 13; Deum Nemo vidit, John i. 18 etc.). As is explained in the additional notes in the Arden edition of The Tempest, this sermon, seriously intended or not, was elaborately refuted by Stephano de Sancto Giorgo in a work which condemns this new heresy of Neminianism. Even upon the seriousness of this work opinion is divided. Whatever the truth, the initial sermon later served as an example for mock-sermons in German, Dutch, French and English of which some survive. The German and Dutch humanists established “Nobody” as a satirical theme, making him a sort of universal scape-goat.

The “picture of Nobody”, was first represented in a woodcut illustrating a Sermo de Sancto Nemine (c. 1500), as an empty rectangle, “since nobody is depicted therein”. The popular figure of the ragged and bespectacled vagrant “Niemand”, is a German invention dating from the beginning of the sixteenth century. Georg Schann, a barber from Strasburg, wrote a broadsheet in which he adapts the old joke to suit his lesson in domestic morals. Niemand (Nobody), said to be responsible for all the transgressions that are committed in the household, is depicted as a vagrant wearing spectacles, a padlock on his mouth and a bird's wing in his cap, surrounded by broken household objects (Plate 2). This pictorial type was bound to become an iconographical motif that would survive for over a century. Artists like Hans Holbein and Bruegel the Elder would make use of it even as the humanists and the protestant reformers. The set of themes related to the iconographical motif will evolve along three important axes that are the popular image, the protestant image of the Welspoken Nobody and the humanist satirical theme.

The popular image of Niemand represents the lowest of mankind, a beggar and madman, one of those that experience most cruelly the want of pity. He is the vagrant wayfarer that in the literature of the Middle Ages played the part of the Fool. He is depicted as obviously destitute, ugly, with torn clothes and footwear that betrays the social status of the poor, and there's a hole in his bag. The padlock on his mouth, the bird's wing, and the spectacles denote folly.

The padlock was a symbol for silence. Plutarch, quoting Pythagoras, says that silence is a divine quality and he recommended keeping one's mouth closed as if with a key or padlock. In a woodcut, Cornelis Anthonisz depicts a wise woman with a padlock on her mouth, which signified that she knew how to be silent (Plate 3). Yet he also depicts Truth, with a padlock, threatened by a soldier, signifying that the world does not always appreciate the truth so that Truth lives in peril. Of course Nobody, in essence, is unable to tell the truth in defence against false accusations. This is why the padlock is also a sign of folly. In popular usage the person who could not speak was a fool. Later imitators of Georg Schann saw Nobody as an image of patience, silently enduring hardship.

Since their invention, spectacles had been regarded with distrust. Maarten van Heemskerck depicts Fraus (deceit) as a masked woman that sells spectacles.⁷ Spectacles are often used to ridicule their wearers by Bruegel the Elder, for example, and in the illustrations that accompany Sebastien Brants' Ship of Fools. They are a symbol of deceit and ignorance. The letter that Edmund tries to hide seems to be used as a pretext enabling Shakespeare to mention and/or to show Gloucester's spectacles, sign of his spiritual or intellectual blindness (King Lear I.2.32-42 and IV.1.19-21).

The bird's feathers or wings in Nobody's cap denotes folly. Cornélis Anthonisz depicts his Flighty Youth with bird's wings.⁸ In later portraits the birds' wing has been replaced by an owl. In popular imagery, the nocturnal bird was associated with the vagrant, travelling by night. The owl was supposed to be blind by daylight and to shun obstinately the clarity of the sun and as such it became a symbol for ignorance and error. In A Collection of Emblems, George Wither shows an owl wearing spectacles unable to see “the Rayes of Truth divine”.⁹ Today we are more inclined to associate the owl with Athena as a symbol of wisdom. Yet even in the sixteenth century, the bird, able to see in the dark and object of scorn to the vox populi, might also embody the idea of higher knowledge.

The character of Folly is ambiguous, as Erasmus demonstrates in his Praise of Folly. Those who treat the fool with scorn only for being an oddity do it for the wrong reasons and are laughed at in the end. Nobody's folly in the eyes of the world corresponds to the idea of the madman being wiser then the man of sense and the popular subject of the “wise fool”. The conviction that poverty was a virtue was strengthened in the sixteenth century through the influence of Spiritual Libertines like Paracelsus and Sebastien Franck. They proclaimed that God and the world are incompatible opposites; the patient poor whose very existence threw doubt on accepted worldly values, was at times identified with “God's fool”.¹⁰

It follows that Nobody is no common beggar-fool, his apparent simplicity is simply apparent, there is no doubt that Nobody is superior to his environment. We are invited to realize that he is innocent, the padlock stressing a stoic patience in the face of false accusations. He acquires the reputation of a defender of poor servants, by letting himself be accused of their small transgressions. When Holbein used the motif, he humanized Nobody by giving him a sad, melancholic attitude as he would do later with the figures of foolish persons in the margin of the Encomium Moriae of Erasmus.¹¹ The heap of rubbish still surrounding the character comes to indicate the neglected state of the household in particular and of the world in general. As such the character appealed to humanist circles whose influence would strengthen the figure's social connotations.

Ulric Hutten, a German humanist, adapted the popular motif to his own ends. He assembled the three historical versions of Nemo or Nobody, the story from Odyssey IX, the mock-sermon on Nemo and the story of our domestic culprit, in one volume entitled Nemo published in 1510. Nemo II, a revised edition, was published in 1518. In this edition the three stories are worked into one poem. The part based on the mock-sermon serves as an outlet for his dissatisfaction with society or the world as it is and enables him to expound his humanist and religious ideas. Hutten exposes the abuses and injustice of his age for example when he exclaims: “virtue is considered nothing, and knowledge is declared ignorance”. Nobody is the only one to care:

Nobody emerges morally untainted who has tasted the poison of the courts;
Nobody liberates the city of Quirinal; Nobody comes to the rescue of suffering Italy;
Nobody wages war against the savage Turks or gladly prefers the public well-being to his own.(12)

The topsy-turviness of the world in general and of the household in particular allows the connection between these disjointed personifications and the domestic joke that follows. Among other things, Nobody seduces the wife, shares her bed and is the father of her child. Nemo II, a work commended to Erasmus and dedicated to Thomas More, amused the readers as much as it infuriated the clerks. It was translated into several languages. The poem belongs to the literary tradition which produced mock-encomia like Erasmus' Praise of Folly. These works set out to expose the essential nothingness of all temporal things and thus worldly values. Nobody or Nemo, an outlaw by conventional standards, is esteemed to be the only exception to the general madness. Robert Burton felt the need to introduce Nemo as such in his Anatomy of Melancholy:

They are a company of giddy-heads, afternoon men, it is Midsummer noon still and the Dog-days last all the year long; they are all mad. Whom shall I then except? Ulric Hutten saith, “Nemo is wise at all hours, Nemo is born without faults, Nemo is free from crime, Nemo is content with his lot, Nemo in love is wise, Nemo is good, Nemo's a wise man and perfectly happy and therefore Nicholas Nemo or Monsieur Nobody shall go free.”¹³

The woodcut illustrations that accompany the different editions of Nemo have altered slightly from the initial iconographical motif depicting Schann's Niemand. But Hutten was eager to exploit the popular pictorial type so that Nobody kept his main characteristics. In a Leipzig edition of 1518, Nobody is depicted as a ragged figure with a bird's nest on his head, trying to chase the hornets that fly around him. Hornets flying around the head of a person signified madness.

“OH HOLYE PAULE, THOU BADE MEN BE WYSE” (THE WELSPOKEN NOBODY)¹⁴

The Welspoken Nobody figuring on the Protestant broadsheet remains similar to the household Nobody. Still surrounded by broken houseware, wearing spectacles and birds' wings in his cap, he has however lost the padlock and his ragged garments recall those of a fool's costume (Plate 2). In 1533, Georg Schann adapted his character to serve his religious convictions. M. Hind indicates that this image of the Welspoken Nobody was known in England from 1534.¹⁵ The English version of the poem, probably printed by Wynkyn de Worde, is a bad translation of the German text. The woodcut to the English broadsheet is an exact copy of the German image. Gerta Calmann justly remarks that the protestant Nobody is proof of a close collaboration between religious reformers across national boundaries, much in the way of the humanists. The Welspoken Nobody, having lost the padlock, denounces papist idolatry and ceremony, and proclaims the truth of the new faith. Even though “All men can not abide to hear the truthe”.¹⁶

Bruegel the Elder is indebted to the popular tradition of the domestic Nobody and to the humanist satire for his adaptation of the complex image. Yet, his composition shares with the Welspoken Nobody a concern for mankind's ever-lacking wisdom. In the engraving, entitled Elck or Every man, executed after a drawing by Bruegel, (British Museum), Niemant or Nobody is gazing in a mirror. He appears in the middle background in a picture within a picture on the back wall. This time he wears a fool's costume but he is still surrounded with broken objects. A caption within the small picture, reads “Niemat-en-kent-he-selve”, translated “Nobody knows himself” (Plate I). Elck, “Chascun” or Everyman in front of the scene, is completely absorbed in his quest for riches, only concerned with private profit or “privatum commodum” as is mentioned at the top-right of the engraving.

Elck is bent under the weight of a huge bale. A similar motif is to be found in Sebastian Brant's a Ship of Fools, the illustration “Of Too Much Care” shows a fool supporting the weight of a world-globe. In the poem, Diogenes is esteemed a greater man than Alexander for “What profits it a man to win the world and loose his soul in sin?”¹⁷ Gerta Calmann indicates that Bruegel might have known an engraving by Hans Weiditz of which the composition is similar. The engraving, used as an illustration in a Dutch edition of De Officiis by Cicero, represents a merchant bent under the weight of a globe, a symbol of the worry and care of this world, in this particular case linked to the life of the merchant. Commerce on a small scale was considered an inferior occupation, to obtain salvation the merchant had to retire to the country.

The motif can also be found in Geoffrey Whitney's A Choice of Emblems (1586), the emblem with the motto “Nemo potest duobus dominis servire” in English “No one can serve two masters”, pictures a man carrying a globe on his shoulder and dragging behind him the tablets of the commandments, tied to his right ankle.¹⁸ Whitney essentially restates the conviction of the Spiritual Libertines that God and the world are incompatible opposites, the same underlying theme is present in the representations of Nobody. Thus Elck is shown bent under “Too Much Care” seeking private profit, oblivious of the smiling Nobody and significantly wearing a lamp in broad daylight—a symbol of his ignorance.

While Brant and Whitney's outlook seem still tinged with the Medieval De contemptu philosophy, Bruegel proposes a more subtle elaboration of the theme. He surpasses the vision of the villainous rich about to lose his soul and the virtuous poor promised to heaven. His representation of human folly is reminiscent of that of Brant, yet the latter had implied that man could order his life rationally inside the framework of the old church. Bruegel's observation of his fellow human beings inspired no doubt a more pessimistic message. However, Bruegel was not interested in only demonstrating a view of the world that he felt to be irredeemable. The words Nemo-Non on the bale indicate that Elck is not Nemo and that the latter is the clue to the picture.

Nobody or Niemant meditating before a mirror is a person of no importance, without possession or title, he can not be accused of self-love. In Bruegels' engraving he is dressed as a traditional fool because he is treated as such but his folly is virtue and he is wise. The mirror is an attribute of Superbia but of Prudentia also, and in Bruegel's time it had become the symbol of the means of self-knowledge—a means of introspection. This same self-knowledge recommended by Erasmus and later on by Montaigne. The motif eventually developed into an image of man's conscience as in an engraving by Maarten van Heemskerck (plate 6). In Richard II, we can find a similar set of images. The king, forced to give up the sceptre, exclaims:

Ay, no; no, ay; for I must nothing be;
[…] I give this heavy weight from off my head,
And this unwieldy sceptre from my hand,
The pride of kingly sway from out my heart;

(IV.I.201-06)

This state of being nothing seems in a way the condition sine qua non that leads Richard II to a searching examination of himself in the following lines:

They shall be satisfied. I'll read enough,
When I do see the very book indeed
Where all my sins are writ, and that's myself
Give me that glass and therein will I read.

(IV.I.273-6)

Commenting on the brittleness of treacherous glory he will smash the mirror to pieces. In the engraving after Maarten van Heemskerck, a man is represented holding a rod and a mirror. The caption at the bottom of the picture reads “self-knowledge inspiring the conscience with abhorrence”.¹⁹ Richard II sees himself obliged to “kiss the rod”, as the Queen contemptuously remarks, to “win a new world's crown” (V.1.24). The new world standing for life after death, Richard's humility is a pious one and not inspired by fear for Bolingbroke. Man's condition in this world is one of worry and care, be he beggar or king:

Nor I, nor any man that but man is,
With nothing shall be pleas'd till he be eas'd
With being nothing.

(V.5.38-41)

This seems to be what Bruegel is hinting at in his engraving, Nobody is pleased with what he contemplates in the mirror: nothing. It is interesting to consider the nature or “quality” of this nothing. (King Lear, I.2.33-4) Gerta Calmann explains that Elck and Nemo form part of man's paradoxical nature and are a picture of a psychological phenomenon:

His materialistic obsession isolates the individual, while the other part of his nature, divine reason, annihilates his isolation in the awareness of God. The reflection in the glass corresponds to the mystical conception of Nothing: not I, but God in me.²⁰

Montaigne equally insists on this conception of man of no worth but for the reflection of God in him, and the need to extinguish human pride by privation. A woodcut by Cornelis Anthonisz conveys this mystical meaning of the mirror of self-knowledge on a more popular level. His wise woman is contemplating the image of Christ in the mirror she holds in her hand, which signifies that she has led a pious life (Plate 3). In the text accompanying the Welspoken Nobody, man's so-called perfection forms the link with God:

He hath made us perfect and therefore be glad,
For unto perfection nothing can be added.(21)

Yet the word nothing takes on a different meaning, namely quite the opposite. The author of the poem means to hint at the essential nothingness of appearances and worldly values. In the article “Much Ado About Nothing”, Paul A. Jorgensen gives an interesting account of the highly potential nature of the word. Theological treatises affirmed the original nothingness surrounding creation and the essential nothingness of all temporal things. These works shared the purpose of defending the importance of nothingness with the literary tradition of the mock encomia like Erasmus' Praise of Folly.²² The mock encomia were to a large extent related to the principle of the world upside down. Bruegel's Nobody partakes of the mystic quality of nothing and of a certain logic of nothing linked to the image of the world upside down, another favorite subject that he treated in his The Netherlandish Proverbs. In this world virtue is considered nothing and knowledge is considered ignorance. Gisèle Venet analyses the relationship between the theme of the world upside down and the universe of King Lear, in the preface to Le Roi Lear, a French translation by Jean Michel Déprats.²³ Supported by her conclusions, I wish to consider the relations the play bears to a related theme, that of Nobody and his logic concerning “nothing”.

II. “MONSIEUR NOBODY SHALL GO FREE” (ROBERT BURTON, THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY, 1621)

The protestant Nobody and the humanist Nemo were familiar in England in the sixteenth century and at the beginning of the seventeenth century. But Nobody is no longer the counterpart of Everyman but of Somebody, man in his social setting. Somebody is considered responsible for all the abuses of society as opposed to Nobody, a person of no importance, authority or social position. The English language permitted a pun on the form of his name which influenced his further development. By the seventeenth century, he is depicted as a little man with a head and limbs, and no trunk. This type gradually establishes itself as the dominant one. Nobody is pictured in this form for the first time in 1606 on the title page of a play called, No-body and Some-body, With the True Chronicle Historie of Elydure who was fortunately three several times crowned King of England. Printed for John Trundle and to be sold at his shop in Barbican at the sign of Nobody.

The engraving shows a bearded man with a small hat, holding what seems to be a crudely represented roll of papers in his left hand, suggesting the bonds, leases and petitions pulled out of his pockets at the end of the play. The most typical characteristic is his enormous trunk-hose, starting at his shoulders and reaching down to his knees. When Nobody first appears, his companion, the clown asks him “why do you go thus out of fashion”. Gerta Calmann states that the author of the play was familiar with Nobody the scape-goat as in his interlude he quotes almost word for word the words in the banderole above the Welspoken Nobody's head. No-body is accused of the false deeds committed by Some-body, he thus continues in his traditional role and retains his humanistic characteristics that make him defend the poor and denounce the abuses of society.

The commentators on The Tempest, mention the broadsheet of the Welspoken Nobody and the picture on the title page of the play.²⁴ Gerta Calmann suggests that Shakespeare refers to the 1606 version, which was fresher in the people's minds when The Tempest was composed, though Shakespeare and his audience could have known either picture. It seems probable that Shakespeare thought the image appropriate as Ariel, playing the music, is invisible to Trinculo. The music thus seems played by nobody. There results an association of ideas between nobody and Nobody, an image or character known by the audience. I have not studied its implications throughout the play nor the link that might exist between the character and Caliban. Yet, the song sung by Stephano some lines above does seem to bear some relationship to Nobody:

Flout them and scout'em,
And scout'em and flout'em!
Thought is free. […]
Trinc.
This is the tune of our catch, played by the picture of Nobody.

(III.2.122-5)

These words certainly would have been appropriate in the mouth of the outcast Nobody flaying society's abuses.

Some commentators declare that King Lear was composed in 1606, at the time the comedy No-Body and Some-body, With the true Chronicle Historie of Elydure, was being published by John Trundle. Plays of this kind were popular in the 1580s and early 1590s, when histories of mythical English kings seem to have been in vogue.²⁵ Thus the possible relationship between the history of a mythical king and that of Nobody seemed to have been an accepted one. Shakespeare must have known the figure Nobody as he refers to the “picture of Nobody” four years later in The Tempest. The other accepted date of composition is between 1604 and 1605. Yet even then a King Lear contemporary with No-body and Some-body remains possible if we consider that plays were represented before being published. The suggested date of composition for the comedy in question is 1592.²⁶ The play was revived in 1602, and testimony to the popularity of Nobody as a comic character, can be found in Ben Jonson's Entertainment at Althorpe (June 1603), in which he introduced a character in the person of No-body'. Jonson assumed that his aristocratic audience would be amused by Nobody.²⁷

It has been established that the protestant text, A Declaration of Egregious Popishe Impostures is an important source used by Shakespeare in King Lear. Thus Shakespeare's antipapist readings might have aroused his interest for the broadsheet, The Welspoken Nobody. Indeed some lines in King Lear are reminiscent of the Protestant text going with the picture.

III.

That Lord that counsell'd thee
to give away thy land,
Come place him here by me,
Do thou for him stand;
The sweet and bitter fool
Will presently appear;
The one in motley here,
The other found out there.

(King Lear, I.4.137-44)

The Arden edition of King Lear gives several suggestions in answer to the riddle of the Fool. A commentator puts forward that “That Lord” might refer to a nobleman, Lord Skalliger who gives advice to Leir about the division of the kingdom in the old play. Yet Kittredge thinks the Fool implies that nobody gave Lear such idiotic advice.²⁸ Indeed, Lear depicted as forgetful and even senile in the first act, must have been able to devise the idiotic idea by himself.²⁹ This is where Shakespeare, in a way, innovates on the complex tradition connected with the figure of Nobody, as Bruegel had done before him. It seems that Shakespeare chose to throw some light on the question of personal responsibility or free will. The Fool is not the only one to insist on this particular question. Edmund remarks with irony that men accuse the stars of the disasters brought about by their own behaviour. (I.2.115-30)³⁰ This attitude amounts to accusing Nobody. Thus the Fool invites Lear to take the place of Nobody in order to attain the wisdom that he lacked as a king.

To portray Lear's predicament in the lines following the riddle, Shakespeare continues to give indications reminiscent of Nobody's essential characteristics. The Fool tells Lear that he is no longer in possession of a title, except that of a fool. As has been mentioned this is only title Nobody possesses:

Lear:
Dost thou call me fool, boy?
Fool:
All thy other titles thou hast given away; that thou wast born with.

(I.4.145-7)

The division of the Kingdom makes him lose all his former privileges, thus Lear has, socially speaking, become Nobody. When King Lear is preoccupied with the attitude of his daughter, the Fool takes care to remind him of his former position, and compares it to his present situation which makes him a mere nothing, another characteristic feature he shares from now on with Nobody: “Thou wast a pretty fellow when thou hadst no need / to care for her frowning; now thou art an O without / a figure. I am better than thou art now; I am a / Fool, thou art nothing” (I.4.188-91). His royal title without royal power has become meaningless, a mere facade. No longer able to command, Lear depends on the mercy of his two affectionate daughters that excel in the art of false appearances. The image of man reduced to being nothing is echoed by what happens to Edgar, obliged to adopt and share the hardships of the beggar fool:

Poor Turlygod! poor Tom!
That's something yet: Edgar I nothing am.

(II.3.20-1)

Now that we may guess Nobody's presence under the King's robes,³¹ and before going deeper into the thematic links, I will consider the occurrences of motifs and symbols proper to the pictorial representation of the character in the play.

One of the attributes of Nobody, the spectacles, I have already mentioned. In fact, the image of Gloucester wearing a pair of spectacles permits Shakespeare to give a rapid and significant revelation of a character hitherto pictured as an upright man preoccupied by Lear's strange attitude. Beside the note of cruel dramatic irony, if we consider the fact that Gloucester is to lose his eyes, the audience would equate this failing eyesight with a failing sense of judgment.³² Lear's initial strange mental derangement is sufficiently commented on by Kent, his daughters and the Fool. Yet the motif of the bespectacled figure was a popular one in itself and not necessarily linked to Nobody.

Another instance of similar imagery, is that of the owl linked to the idea of the wandering vagrant or beggar. Lear decides to share the night with the owl and the wolf rather than beg shelter from his daughter, Goneril:

No, rather I abjure all roofs, and choose
To wage against the enmity o'th'air;
To be a comrade with the wolf and the owl

(II.4.206-08)

In the popular imagery at that time, the vagabond and the owl were companions. Lucas de Leyde depicted a family of wayfarers with a little boy wearing an owl on his shoulder. In an engraving by Jerôme Bosch, the sinister vagabond in a picture over the chimneypiece, has taken on the appearance of an owl. This particular image refers to people who go on pilgrimages and are blind to the true religion (plate 8). Shakespeare might have used this popular mental scheme to indicate that Lear starts to identify himself with the destitute vagabond, an identification that is subsequently confirmed by the King's tearing off his garments, once he is face to face with the mad beggar, Edgar.

The symbolic padlock Nobody shares with Lady Truth is only suggested in the play, treated according to its meaning. Cordelia and later on the Fool have some difficulty in seeing the truth admitted by the other protagonists. Cordelia, refusing to translate her filial love into mere words, initially remains mute. When she honestly expresses her feelings about the bonds that unite a father and daughter, she is immediately muzzled by banishment. Kent and the King of France alone admit her virtue:

The Gods to their shelter take thee, maid,
That justly thinks't and hast most rightly said!

(I.1.181-2)

Fairest Cordelia, that art most rich, being poor;
Most choice forsaken; and mos't lov'd, despis'd!
Thee and thy virtues here I seize upon:
Be it lawful I take up what's cast away.
Gods, gods! tis strange that from their cold'st neglect
My love should kindle to inflam'd respect.

(I.1.249-54).

Despite a pagan environment, this imagery recalls the Christian tenet of man disowned by his fellow men, the destitute fool of fortune but the chosen one by God. This mystic theme, similar to that of the outcast Nobody, explains the “inflam'd respect” expressed by the King of France. Cordelia is virtue and truth incarnate, as Shakespeare subsequently confirms (IV.4.16-17). Her character reminds that of manhandled or banished Virtues depicted in popular engravings. In a woodcut by Cornelis Anthonisz, Concord, Peace and Love, Concord is represented reclining at some distance of a partially ruined town. Peace, an old man, and Love, a woman bearing a cornucopia, are by her side. They wonder whether she is dead or simply sleeping. Concord answers: “Whether I be dead or sleeping, neither the clergy nor the laymen mind” (plate 7). Once Cordelia or Concord is exiled, the land falls a prey to internecine quarrels and the most horrid acts are committed. When Cordelia returns from her banishment, it is to save her father and not to wage a war.

In popular engravings personifications of Truth are often threatened or molested. In a woodcut by Cornelis Anthonisz, for example, she is being menaced by Hate (plate 4). Lady Truth is in bed, wearing a padlock, and at her side is a small child lying in a crib representing Knowledge. A man accompanied by a snail, Fear, will of course hardly be able to defend her against the soldier, Hate, and his dog. The soldier is wearing strange footgear, his left foot betrays the social status of the poor and his right that of the wealthy. An identical thematic arrangement can be found in a popular German woodcut. Here Lady Truth is manhandled by the representatives of a whole population, a farmer, a merchant, a scholar, and a monk, and they seem to get the better of her (plate 5). The same preoccupation is reflected in King Lear. The Fool complains that Truth is whipped and put in a cage:

Truth's a dog must to kennel; he must be whipp'd out when the
Lady's Brach may stand by th'fire and stink.

(I.4.109-11)

In these lines the antithesis seems to be between Truth and Flattery. Shakespeare quite often associates dogs with flatterers, in the way Hieronymus Bosch did in his paintings.³³ This concern for Truth is translated in a similar image by the Welspoken Nobody:

The ladye truthe they have locked in cage
Sayeng that of her Nobodye had knowledge

(Welspoken Nobody, 21-2)

Kent proceeds by calling Goneril and Regan “dog-hearted daughters” (IV.3.45). Goneril, Regan, Edmund and the minor character Oswald, embody humanity in the way Elck or Everyman does in Bruegel's work; solely absorbed by their self-interest, higher spiritual values only seem to get in the way of their superficially sane pursuits. One does not doubt their “practical” sense, yet their lot is hardly enviable in the end.

In the engraving Elck, we find another motif which explains the imagery used by Shakespeare in King Lear. The symbolic meaning of the huge bale Elck seems to wear on his back is conveyed by approximately the same image in the theatrical text:

                              […] and it is our fast intent
To shake all cares and business from our age,
Conferring them on younger strengths, while we
Unburthen'd crawl toward death

(I.1.37-40)

The iconographical motif's signification remains the same in the Ship of Fools, in A Choice of Emblems and in Bruegel's picture. Thus Lear's choice to bestow his worldly worry and care on younger shoulders in order to prepare for death is in a sense praiseworthy. Yet this desire to be liberated from the weight that presses his shoulders does not bring with it the expected spiritual attitude to life. Lear on the contrary commits the error of too fond an attachment to the vain and worldly play of royal appearances:

Only we shall retain
The name and all the addition to a king

(I.1.134-5)

Falling a prey to his own desire for “physic” and “Pomp”, he will only regain his soul when he has been reduced to a state where appearances amount to nothing (III.4.32).

The representations of the ragged figure of Nobody or Nemo call to mind the image of the mad Lear raving in the field. In the play No-body and Some-body, Nobody is accompanied by a clown, a conceit that seems to be echoed by the couple made of Lear and the Fool.³⁴ Yet these are likely mere coincidences. A study of the thematic links suggests possible parallels between the play and the philosophical ideas “Nobody” stands for.

The most important underlying theme in the play is that of the world upside down, brought into focus by King Lear as a vagabond-philosopher. The same symbolic idea of “reason in madness” governs Nobody. The Fool demonstrates that Lear's decision to divide his kingdom brings about the kind of confusion usually associated with the world upside down. Since this division he continuously breaks into enigmatic songs and rimes. When Lear enquires after his reasons, the Fool replies:

[…] e'er since thou mad'st thy daughters thy mothers; for when thou gav'st them the rod and putt'st down thine own breeches,
Then they for sudden joy did weep,
And I for sorrow sung,
That such a king should play bo-beep,
And go the fools among.

(I.4.168-74)

The child chastising the father is a commonplace example of the topsy-turvy world, and as such it can be found in an anonymous Dutch woodcut (plate 9). This is only one example among many others throughout this play in which the King is forced to go afoot.

This popular theme of the world upside down is used in a particular way by humanists, like Erasmus in his Praise of Folly or Ulric Hutten in Nemo. They give a satirical view of society's topsy-turvy values, in order to draw attention to the human virtues and spiritual values they esteem neglected. They manipulate the word “nothing” along the same lines. Shakespeare adopts Erasmus' ambiguous treatment of folly, and seems to use Hutten's conception of the world upside down, a world where virtue is considered nothing and where wisdom is called folly.

All the characters in the play that can boast of human virtues as honesty, uprightness or some kind of moral excellence are treated with contempt, are ridiculed or accused of madness. Kent is treated as a fool, while Edmund terms “foolish honesty” his brother's disposition. Goneril calls the Duke of Albany a “moral fool” or more simply still “a fool”. In the end, Lear calls his daughter Cordelia, “poor fool”. In this world, virtue only meets contempt and harsh reproof, as in the universe of Nobody; thus it is folly to be virtuous.

Shakespeare introduces us to this universe from the start. It follows from the exchange of lines between Kent and Gloucester that Lear used to make a difference between the Duke of Cornwall and the Duke of Albany, in favour of the latter. Yet in the opening scene, Lear no longer takes into consideration the supposed virtue of Albany. Since it is impossible to deduce the difference in moral quality between the Dukes from the division Lear wishes to impose:

Kent.

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

Glou.

It did always seem so to us; but now, in the division of the Kingdom, it appears not which of the Dukes he values most; for equalities are so weigh'd that curiosity in neither can make choice of either's moiety.

(I.1.1-6)

The audience will only notice that Albany seems to have lost the favour of the King, yet Kent and the Duke of Gloucester, supposed to know the two Dukes better, may convey some distress in their attitudes. Indeed as Gloucester declares further on, Cornwall's perverse disposition “all the world well knows” (II.2.149-50). Gloucester's sound judgment as to Cornwall is lacking when it pertains to assess the moral excellency of his own children. He acknowledges with a certain proud feeling that his son Edgar “is no dearer in his account” than his bastard son Edmund. These two instances of fallacious equity hold the key to the tragedy that follows in the plot and the subplot of the play.

In the first act, Lear seems to have made a tabula rasa of past actions. Virtue no longer matters. Lear's silly demand for quantified affection produces a harvest of hollow words that he accepts as sincere and meritorious. Cordelia refuses to act in this comedy. She opposes her “nothing”, a nothing that represents nonetheless all her virtue, as in this absurd universe virtue and wisdom seem to amount to nothing:

Cor.
Nothing, My Lord
Lear.
Nothing will come of nothing: speak again.

(I.1.88-9)³⁵

Virtue is its own reward, and Cordelia receives it as her only dowry. Lear equates this “all her wealth” with nothing, being prisoner still of mere appearances. We recognize the ambivalent use of the word nothing, in accordance with the style of the mock encomia, that may denote the nothingness of worldly values or the mystic aura of original nothingness, but may also signify human virtues worth nothing on the scale of worldly values. We should consider the following lines in the light of these possibilities:

Fool.
Can you make no use of nothing, Nuncle?
Lear.
Why no boy; nothing can be made out of nothing

(I.4.128-30)

Gloucester's pun on the word thus attains a strange connotation: “The quality of nothing hath not such need to hide itself” (I.2.33-4).

In this topsy-turvy situation, the quality of nothing encloses all, as in the engraving by Bruegel. Which reminds us of some lines in Timon of Athens that may confirm this view:

Tim.
[…] My long sickness
Of health and living now begins to mend,
And nothing brings me all things.

(V.1.184-6)

When Lear has become a mere shadow, and is urged to ask “is man no more than this”, discovering his own reflection in the naked wretch Edgar, he is ripe to attain that supreme wisdom that is hard to reconcile with reason. This wisdom he grants Edgar when calling him “philosopher”.³⁶ This is associated with the theme of introspection and self-knowledge, recommended by Erasmus and Montaigne. Breugel's engraving deals with the dual aspect of self-knowledge which includes being aware of one's own folly and the folly of mankind, but also a mystic sense of being conscious of God (plate I). The first aspect should allow a just society, but in the engraving the opposite is shown in a satirical manner. Nobody observes and states the abuses of an unjust society.

Commentators have already drawn attention to a concern with self-knowledge in King Lear. Cordelia feels dismayed at having to leave her father with her sisters, for she knows them for what they are (I.1.268). When Regan comments on Lear's disposition and Cordelia's banishment, she points exactly to this problem of missing self-knowledge:

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

(I.1.292-3)

Even so in the first act, Lear complains that he no longer knows who he is. “Does any here know me? […] Who is it that can tell me who I am? (I.4.223-7). Could the answer be Nobody?

The fallen King given over to the elements is suddenly concerned with the lot of his fellow human beings and unjust society:

O! I have ta'en
Too little care of this. Take physic, Pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the Heavens more just.

(III.4.32-6)

Once Lear has drowned in madness, he indulges in drawing a bitter and satirical picture of an unjust world (IV.6.156-70). Lear shares this consciousness, or “reason in madness” with the humanistic Nobody. Lear considers the world a “great stage of fools”, a conception echoing Hutten's “comedy” which can also be found in Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy.³⁷ Nobody, or the “bitter fool”, brings the world to trial. In the trial scene at the end of the comedy No-body and Some-body, Nobody, guilty of small transgressions, goes free while Somebody, the real culprit responsible for abuses and injustice is punished. Nobody inherits his guilt in cases of broken houseware and bastard sons from the popular tradition. The initial broadsheet by Georg Schann served as a moral lesson in domestic and social affairs. Edgar seems to be raving about the same subject (III.4.78-95). This might be why Lear proclaims himself “More sinned against than sinning” (III.2.60).

The trial scene in King Lear recalls the image of Nemo passing judgment on the great and the powerful of this world. Both seem indebted to the biblical sentence “He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek” (Luke i. 52). This principle had been amply commented on by Sebastien Frank and his disciples, which led to an identification of the poor man with “God's Fool”, the eternal victim of Fortune or “The natural fool of Fortune”. Even this mystic aspect of Nobody is present in Shakespeare's play. Thus Gloucester, who has not yet learned to be patient, exclaims that the gods are injust:

As flies to wanton boys, are we to th'Gods;
They kill us for their sport.

(IV.1.36-7)³⁸

As a “pagan” observer he makes guilty of his personal disasters the gods or bad fortune and does not yet understand the need to suffer. Lear, however, after his passage in purgatory (IV.7.45-8) is able to interpret the mystic significance of suffering. When he is made a prisoner with Cordelia, he seems to rejoice at this new outrage of fortune:

Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia,
The Gods themselves throw incense.

(V.3.20-1)

In prison they will both meditate on the mystery of things, as if they were Gods' spies. But at the same time Fortune's wheel keeps spinning, and Lear will have to recognise the “poor fool” in his own daughter, a poor fool of which this world is not worthy, a fool because it is folly to be wise.

The pagan Lear ardently hopes for a sign of life in the looking-glass he has asked for, yet the mirror reflects nothing. The mirror reflecting nothing in Nobody's hand stood for the presence of God. Likewise the Christian tenet would have that Cordelia's soul lives after death, which might mean so much as that she has been called to Heaven which in turn makes her death acceptable. It seems that Shakespeare wishes to hint at exactly this issue.³⁹ Lear has to remain true to his pagan character and belief, this is why he cannot accept Cordelia's death in the first place. But on stage after having been declared “dead as earth”, to “come no more, never, never, never” for a short moment it is suggested that she lives (V.3.304-10). At this precise moment Lear dies, which could mean that he is finally “eas'd with being nothing” once he has seen his daughter live after death.

At the outset of the play, Lear's death has been alluded to as the King wishes to crawl “unburthen'd” toward death. Ironically, this is exactly what he is going to do. However, at the beginning of the play, Lear is not yet ripe to face this end. As Edgar states in the end “Ripeness is all” (V.5.11). I am willing to grant Lear's redemption in the Christian sense as a major argument in the play. This redemption is not called in doubt by Lear's indignation at Cordelia's death as W. R. Elton seems to argue, for the reasons I have already given. The Elizabethan audience would have been able to interpret the Christian message. Shakespeare provides a prelude to the Christian death of the two protagonists in the passage on life in prison, as Lear uses the image of two birds in a cage. The symbolic significance of a bird in a cage is that of the soul imprisoned in the body. Thus death may be seen as a liberation.

.....

The popular pictorial type of Nobody with its related themes of the world upside down, reason in madness, social injustice, and the mystic significance of nothing, can be traced in many passages of King Lear. This imagery bridges the gap between the popular burlesque vision of the world upside down and the mystic tragedy inspired by Montaigne. At times, Nobody's characteristic traits support possible interpretations of the theatrical text. On account of this, the relationship between Nobody and King Lear seems undeniable, although circumspection remains necessary as to the parallels based solely on visual motifs.

Then the answer to the riddle given by the Fool would be “Nobody” in stead of “nobody”.

That Lord that counsell'd thee
to give away thy land,
Come place him here by me,
Do thou for him stand;
The sweet and bitter fool
Will presently appear;
The one in motley here,
The other found out there.

(I.4. 137-44)

Notes

1. Francis Bacon on the art of memory, “Emblem reduceth conceits intellectual to images sensible”, The Advancement of Learning, II,XV,5, 1957, first edition 1605.

2. The purpose of the visual arts corresponded to the categories of rhetoric: delectare, docere, movere; to delight, to instruct and to move the public. The Elizabethans however, considered the rhetorical image as appealing to the intellect and the visual image as appealing to the senses.

3. Appendix II to Gerta Calmann, “The picture of Nobody”, in The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XXIII, London, 1960, p. 102-04.

4. M.T. Jones-Davies, “Ben Jonson et la satire sociale au théâtre: Anatomie et dislocation”, in M.T. Jones-Davies, ed., La satire au temps de la Renaissance, Colloque du S.I.R.I.R., Paris, Jean Touzot, 1986.

5. Gerta Calmann, “The Picture of Nobody”, in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XXIII, London, 1960.

6. Stith Thompson, Motive Index of Folklore, iv, 344.

7. Two ways to get rich, Maarten van Heemskerck, in Leerrijke reeksen van Maarten van Heemskerck, by Ilja M. Veldman, Frans Halsmuseum, 1986, p. 28.

8. Christine Megan-Armstrong, The Moralizing Prints of Cornelis Anthonisz. Princeton, New Jersey, 1990.

9. George Wither, A Choice of Emblems, 1635, n. 253.

10. Calmann, p. 70.

11. Calmann, p. 72.

12. Ulric Hutten, Opera, ed. Boecking, I, pp. 175-87 and III, pp. 107-18, qtd by Gerta Calmann, pp. 80.

13. Anatomy of Melancholy, New York, 1951, p. 99, The first edition was in 1621, qtd by Gerta Calmann, pp. 93.

14. Appendix II to Gerta Calmann, “The Picture of Nobody”, in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XXIII, London, 1960, p. 102-04.

15. M. Hind, Engraving in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Part I, “The Tudor Period”, Cambridge, 1925, p. 8 plate 4.

16. Appendix II to Gerta Calmann, “The Picture of Nobody”, in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XXIII, London, 1960, p. 102-04.

17. Sebastian Brant, The Ship of Fools, translated by William Gillis, London, The Folio Society Limited, 1971, first edition 1494, pp. 62-3.

18. Peter Daly, ed., The English Emblem Tradition, Index Emblematicus, part I, Van der Noot, Giovo, Domenichi, Whitney, University of Toronto Press, 1988, pp. 328.

19. The New Hollstein, Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts ca. 1450-1700, Maarten van Heemskerck, Part I, II, Roosendaal 1991, engraving n°420.

20. Calmann, pp. 92, Gerta Calmann remarks that this interpretation is supported by a symbol of cibus immortalis, two leaves of bread and a knife, which Bruegel has put in the centre of his composition, on top of the large bale.

21. Appendix II to Gerta Calmann, “The picture of Nobody”, in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XXIII, London, 1960, (70-1).

22. Paul A. Jorgensen, “Much Ado About Nothing”, Shakespeare Quarterly, volume V, 1954.

23. Gisèle Venet, Preface to le roi Lear, translation by Jean-Michel Déprats, Folio Gailimard, Paris, 1994, pp. 11-17.

24. A New Variorum Edition, ed, H. H. Furness, 1920, p. 171, qted by Gerta Calmann.

25. R. A. Foakes, Illustrations of the English Stage 1580-1642, Scolar Press, London, 1985, pp. 94.

26. Calmann, pp. 94.

27. R. A. Foakes, pp. 62, 94-5.

28. King Lear, The Arden Shakespeare, ed. Kenneth Muir, London, 1985.

29. A pictorial tradition existed in the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth century in the Netherlands, that depicted the theme of Poor Parents, Rich Children; these often served as pendants to images of The Family saying Grace. Throughout Europe artists depicted stories of filial love and devotion, but in the North some prints exhibited quite the opposite. The engraving by David Vinckboons is one example (plate 11). Two biblical exhortations can be found in the inscriptions to the print; Honour thy father and thy mother (Exodus 20:12) aimed at the children, while three verses from Ecclesiasticus (33:19-23) speak to the parents. The latter urges a father to leave his property to his family only after his death. In the inscription the father is equally advised not to be a slave to his child, but rather to find the right balance between stinginess and generosity. The threat implicit in the fifth commandment, that children who do not honour their parents are fated to have a short life is less explicitly expressed here than in earlier prints. Catalogue of the exhibition, Dawn of the Golden Age, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, 1993.

30. In a subsequent study, I consider this passage and the lines concerning Edmund's worship of Nature as a goddess (I.2.1-22), in the light of an engraving by Cornelis Ketel, The Mirror of Virtue. (plate 10) This picture deals with ingratitude and free will. The Mirror of Virtue in B. A. Heezen-Stoll, ‘Cornelis Ketel, uytnemende schilder, van der Goude’: een iconografische studie van zijn ‘historiën’, Delft, 1987.

31. Anne Owens has kindly reminded me of some lines in Henry V and Hamlet refering to the nothingness of kingship. “his ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness he appears but a man” (Henry V, IV.1.105-07). “a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar” (Hamlet IV.3.30-1).

32. François Laroque has drawn my attention to this case of dramatic irony.

33. Hieronymus Bosch would place a dog beside the man guilty of vanity. Dirk Bax, Hieronymus Bosch, His Picture Writing Deciphered, Rotterdam, 1979.

34. With regard to this question of the King and the Fool, Erasmus' development of his adage 201, “Il faut naître ou Roi ou bouffon” shares some interesting thematic problems with Shakespeare's play. Erasme, Oeuvres choisies, “Les Adages III”, Librairie Générale Française, 1991, pp. 340-52.

35. The Elizabethans would have considered this line as absurd due to the pagan character's ignorance of ex nihilo creation. Paul A. Jorgensen, “Much Ado About Nothing”, Shakespeare Quarterly, volume V, 1954.

36. Edgar knows himself to be nothing (II.3.20-1).

37. Calmann, pp. 94.

38. In this respect we should consider an emblem by George Wither, Man is deemed responsible for the misery and despair of man, and life is equated with a ball in a ball-game, yet “So, when men hurle us (with most fury) downe, Wee hopefull are to be advanc'd thereby: And, when they smite us quite unto the Ground, Then, up to Heav'n, we trust, we shall rebound”, A Collection of Emblems, 1635, A Scolar Press Facsimile, London, 1973, nr. 16.

39. Providence, the Salvation of the ancients were important matters of debate in the Renaissance. From Lear's pagan point of view there is no life after death. William R. Elton, King Lear and the Gods, The Huntington Library, 1966.