SOURCE: “Lear and Cordelia's Tragic Love Revisited,” in Critical Review, Vol. 37, 1997, pp. 61-80.

[In the follow essay, Crick attempts to regain his comprehension of King Lear by considering Lear and Cordelia's relationship.]

I know of no more heartrending reading than Shakespeare.

Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

As a ‘form of life’ literary criticism is ever in danger of becoming a version of Horatio's singing gravedigger: ‘custom hath made it in him a property of easiness.’ I recently caught myself at it while teaching the first scene of King Lear yet again. It was an especially painful disclosure because I had long harboured the conviction that my grasp of this astounding opening—surely the most masterful in Shakespeare's dramas—was secure, and that the two lectures I was in the habit of devoting to it were the most insightful things I had to offer in an undergraduate course devoted solely to his work. My sense of this had a history to it extending back even further than the twenty-three years Yorick's skull had mouldered in the grave. It was during the teaching of this scene that I first dared to entertain the notion that there were any grounds at all for my lecturing in a university. When this memory recurred in the intervening years, triggered by subsequent encounters with King Lear, I hastened to recast it. I reminded myself how misplaced my self-satisfaction and pride were, and set about cherishing the old realization under a new guise. I told myself, and sometimes the students, that my experience was a testimony to Shakespeare's incomparable power to teach us to attend and to imagine with greater care and steadfastness than we knew we possessed.

It is difficult at the best of times to keep your critical bearings as you grope your way through a major Shakespeare play, but when the long-cherished conviction that you know something others do not know collapses at a stroke, the horror of going on regardless, and of ‘forcing ourselves to say things we cannot fully mean’ is hard to endure.¹ The shame is especially galling when all the characters in the very scene in which you have lost your way seem driven to say what they cannot mean and mean what they cannot say. This essay is written in the tenuous hope of recovering from critical vertigo, and out of a suspicion that this desperate experience is all-too common, and may even be a defining feature of literary-critical activity which we are inclined to edit out of our lectures and publications.

The familiar opening line of Shakespeare's Sonnet 129, ‘Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame’, may well have a wider bearing on the state of our souls than the overtly sexual experience the poem specifies. When a ‘guiding intuition’ one has been tracing out for three decades comes under threat our avowed love of Shakespeare comes to look very like ‘lust in action’. As the penultimate line of the poem warns us, ‘All this the world well knows, yet none knows well’ enough to avoid the pitfalls of what I am about to encounter yet again. The recovery process is as fraught with uncertainty as the attempt to trace the unfolding of forgetting and forgiving in Shakespeare's Romances, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest. I intend to go on reminding myself of the risks incurred even as I now turn to pointing out lapses and deflections I sense in the commentary of others, knowing that I cannot hope to avoid the same fate.

In so many respects Stanley Cavell's The Claims of Reason exemplifies what it feels like to be forced to radically reconstitute the way one thinks, but it is too intimidating a record of that effort and my hold on it far too shaky for it to guide me out of my predicament. I have as Cavell would say ‘rummaged’ in it, and his work shadows this essay throughout, but I must turn to performances more accessible and more comparable to my own.

In his preface to Shakespeare's Tragedies of Love, H. A. Mason sets out to explain a ‘damaging truth’ akin to my experience. He began, he says,

with a very clear scheme of considering the role of love in Shakespeare's plays and of distinguishing the circumstances in which we could describe the treatment as tragic.²

But while giving public lectures on selected plays he found ‘the projected book’ ‘undermined’ by his interaction with the student audience. The book he published purports to be the upshot of that dialogue, and the inclusion of those negotiations as an intimate part of the reading story Mason realizes may seem irksome:

When the reader's evidence is all of pain and difficulty overcome and none of visible undergoing and suffering, it may seem gratuitous to harp on the reluctance with which these chapters were embarked on, save that when I have completed my say it will be found that my ‘something’ is as nothing compared with what I am unable to face and grapple with.

(Mason, 165)

I certainly sympathize with the essayist's anxiety to avoid exposing himself to the charge of staging a plunge into the unknown difficulties he already has well in hand. But this temporal balancing of process and product is not, as it turns out, the crucial critical issue Mason actually encounters in the dramatic framing of his argument. It is precisely where he is most insistent on his feelings of ‘distress, pain and bewilderment’ that Mason (appropriating a phrase from a letter of Henry James’) asks his reader, ‘Do we think Shakespeare could stand a stiff cross-examination here?’ (Mason, 206, 208.) There is no good in coming the stern schoolmaster over Shakespeare at exactly the moment where you are ostensibly representing yourself as unable to figure out ‘what Shakespeare ought to have been doing’ (Mason, 206). The wording gives the game away. How, after all, could anyone but a university lecturer accustomed to getting away with murder presume to think the normal state of affairs would be one in which we could venture to say what Shakespeare ought to be doing? The title of the chapter from which I have selected these brief excerpts is ‘Radical Incoherence?’ ‘Shakespeare's or Mason's?’ is the inevitable retort. Despite my irritation I am compelled to realize how even our most determined efforts are likely to end in reversing Lafew's advice (from All's Well That Ends Well, II. iii. 4-6): ‘when we’ try to ‘submit ourselves to an unknown fear’, we end up ‘ensconcing ourselves in seeming knowledge’.

My second illustration of the dire predicament with which King Lear presents Lafew's modern philosophical person comes from a book I have enjoyed and am indebted to: Graham Bradshaw's Shakespeare's Scepticism. I will restrict my comments to the opening two chapters, ‘Nature and Value’ and ‘Framing Perspectives’, in which Bradshaw introduces his way of reading Shakespeare before he turns to a more detailed consideration of four plays. Bradshaw's general thesis is a quintessentially post-modernist one. With ample illustration from a variety of texts, he sets out to demonstrate a familiar critical orthodoxy: Shakespeare's art is exploratory or interrogative, and the ‘dynamic clash of different perspectives … produces in us the sense of being pulled in different, and even contrary directions’.³ The worst mistake one could make in reading Shakespeare, it follows, would be to be to attempt to extrapolate a ‘single view’ of a given play, and Bradshaw offers numerous examples of partial interpretations being mistaken for a grasp of the whole. ‘Understandable’ Bradshaw allows; but ‘reprehensible’ nevertheless (Bradshaw, 64). My difficulty or unease arises when I try to move from Bradshaw's savouring of elaborate ‘ironic perspectives’ to a series of passages in which he uses the same verb, ‘impales,’ to express his, or our, responses to Shakespeare's ‘dynamic perspectivalism.’ (Bradshaw, 44, 55.) I am told that a play such as Antony and Cleopatra, for instance, ‘impales us on the opposed terms of a more momentous contrast and judgemental dilemma’ (Bradshaw, 36). The trouble with this brand of scepticism lies in the doubt it perpetuates. One doesn't doubt Samuel Johnson's or Hazlitt's feelings when they utter their distress on reading King Lear, but I am never really convinced that Bradshaw feels what the recurrent use the word ‘impaled’ should convey. The closest he comes to being ‘impaled’ is in the way he responds to Cordelia's death:

The triteness of either kind of answer aggravates our distress at an ending which requires both kinds of answer: I take it that my own suggestions are uncomfortably close to platitudes because we are being impaled on a contradiction which is all the more horrible for being so simple and elementary.

(Bradshaw, 87)

The really distressing question is how can we tell whether it is Shakespeare's representation of Cordelia's death or the discovery that one is reduced to mouthing platitudes that constitutes the impalement? Of course no one who seriously proposes to honour Edgar's directive to ‘speak what we feel, not what we ought to say’ is exempt from the possibility of being immured in platitudes. Nevertheless, attempting to discuss the shock of Cordelia's death by re-deploying the concept of ‘reflexivity’ (for that is the framing perspective in this segment of Bradshaw's book) can hardly answer to S. L. Goldberg's challenge:

try to judge it in relation to one's deepest sense of human possibilities, and who can tell what disquieting moral capacities or incapacities might reveal themselves?⁴

It is to Goldberg that I now turn in making my way, crab-wise, towards an encounter with the disquieting human possibilities aroused by Lear's declaration of a ‘darker purpose’.⁵ The danger for me is no longer holding on to the cherished illusion of being the proud possessor of a unitary insight, but rather how one faces the ‘flat common sense’ question Colonel Assingham poses his wife in the fourth chapter of The Golden Bowl: ‘What's the good of asking yourself if you know you don't know?’ It seems to me we find it all too easy to side with her (doesn't James?) in their marital-philosophic fencing. We assent to her retort: ‘One can never be ideally sure of anything’, but not to his counter: ‘Then, if we can but strike so wild, why keep meddling?’ It is only a reading or misreading (strong or weak) we say, brazening it out, and dismiss his dogged resistance as ‘a want, alike, of moral and of intellectual reaction, or rather indeed … a complete incapacity for either’. Goldberg reveals a deeper awareness of these problematics of literary-critical engagement than either Mason or Bradshaw, and a more responsive capacity for the concomitant moral (in the largest sense of the word) life which they, and more importantly Lear and Cordelia's love, demand of us.

Given the already distended nature of my introductory remarks I must reluctantly concentrate on but one in a series of Goldberg's profoundly moving realizations of Mason's ostensible subject: love as tragically conceived. I have chosen Goldberg's commentary on Adam's reactions to Eve's fall rather than his responsiveness to Cleopatra's question. ‘Think you there was or might be such a man / As this I dreamt of?’ for reasons that will become immediately clear:

Like King Lear's love for Cordelia at the very end of Shakespeare's play, Adam's is entirely concentrated on seeing and responding to its object, attending to that with his entire self, and loving it in the very anguish of his attention. In short, I think we see Adam's ‘resolution’ as what I call a life moral one, and in the most literal sense of ‘life’. He both discovers and commits the whole of his being—or to speak more accurately, the whole of his being commits itself—to what he sees standing before him: this particular person in these particular circumstances, to whom and to which he must answer with all of himself. … But probably the most profoundly right thing about the passage is the way Milton imagines the resolution coming to Adam. It comes, that is, before Adam is conscious of having reached a decision, before he is aware of reasons for and against it, let alone weighing those reasons and exercising his famous free will. The resolution comes unheralded and yet somehow as inevitable, as if it has somehow formed itself, almost unwilled, as the answer to reality that Adam, being what he is, discovers he had to make.

(Goldberg, 56-7)

In this passage and the one I am about to quote, Goldberg develops persuasive analogies between Milton's and Shakespeare's representation of tragic love which I am strongly tempted to rely upon. Here is the way he formulates the second analogy:

There is nothing contingent about the grounds of such a ‘resolution’ as Adam's—or, in a situation not unlike Adam's, the ‘resolution’ of another unfortunate lady, Shakespeare's Cleopatra. Nor is such a resolution simply an act of will. In such situations as theirs, the resolution is a discovery-and-confirmation of the shape of their whole being and experience—the unfolding shape, as it were, that forms their existence into the life they now find, make, wish and accept as their own. The resolution defines the distinctive identity and fate each has been given and then chooses.

(Goldberg, 58)

My hesitation stems from two sources. Though all three relations are certainly ‘almost insupportable both to heart and mind’, and though each bears the mark of ‘strange and enigmatic’ experience Goldberg identifies as the tragic (Goldberg, 62), Milton's art seems to lend itself more readily than Shakespeare's to Goldberg's conceptualization as an opposition between ‘conduct morality’ and ‘life morality’. In this dialectic the second term is the dominant one, and Goldberg's most impressive illustrations all turn on the priority of latter over the former. In Shakespeare's case I find the distinction much harder to preserve or even to make.

Whether one sides with Goldberg in rejecting the conclusion such a dialectic might well have produced in less subtle hands—that Paradise Lost is a ‘deeply flawed’ poem, since Milton's theological premises are so utterly at odds with the life morality that generates the poetic realization of Adam's love—isn't the issue, unless Mason's charges of radical incoherence prove more substantial than I find them to be. My deepest concern lies in the essential kinship implicit in Goldberg's comparison of the love of father and daughter to the love of husband and wife. Here is where Shakespeare's capacity to unsettle any and all judgements is felt most nakedly and profoundly.

Before plunging into the first scene of King Lear and then marching to Dover there is one further anxiety to declare. Though the past few pages prove, if nothing else, I have read some Shakespeare criticism, the critical intent was most definitely not to establish my credentials as a Shakespeare expert, let alone a drama or a Renaissance scholar. I have spent most of my adult life in the university teaching the history of literary criticism, and major English novelists such as Austen, Dickens, George Eliot, Henry James, Conrad, and D. H. Lawrence: in short, ‘the great tradition’ as F. R. Leavis called it. I can only hope that the mention of the man and the book will not cause the reader to fear that my evident doubts and fears at tackling King Lear have turned suicidal. Nothing I have written thus far betrays a wide acquaintance with or dependence upon contemporary theory, but I am sufficiently in the know to realize that a respectable academic need not have read the book in question to treat its very title as a short-hand dismissal of our scandalously conservative critical past. Despite the all but universal contempt in which such a conception of tradition is now held, I believe Leavis's detractors have done nothing to controvert the essential truth of his conclusion, that these ‘great novelists are the successors of Shakespeare’.⁶ While I have no desire to downplay his placing the emphasis squarely on the issue of how ‘the poetic strength of the English language’ is to be found in the genre, I am bent upon drawing comparable attention to a continuity of human concern. Much of Leavis's essay on Little Dorrit is devoted to the painful comic seriousness of the inquest Dickens conducts into the state of his culture, but ‘the particular situation … central to Little Dorrit’ he makes a point of calling ‘horrible and tragic’ (Dickens the Novelist, 251, 250). What Leavis means, of course, is Dickens' portrayal of the ‘intimate’ relation ‘between father and daughter’ which Leavis praises for its ‘boldness, penetration and delicacy’ of ‘insight into the human soul’ (Dickens the Novelist, 250-1). I note with apprehension Leavis's determined refusal to enforce his ‘calling the art of the great Dickens Shakespearian’ with an appeal to even a single particular from Shakespeare's writing (Dickens the Novelist, 248); so I am probably ignoring a warning sign when I find myself drawn irresistibly to ponder the analogies between Lear's fantasy withdrawal into prison—‘We two alone will sing like birds i' th' cage: / When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down, / And ask of thee forgiveness’ (V. iii. 9-11)—and several strange and pathetic moments in the lives of the Father and Daughter of the Marshalsea. In pursuing the tempting analogies—the daughter's tears, the kneeling, the poignant need for forgiveness, the father's mental dissolution—I will try to respect one of the too easily ignored first principles of The Great Tradition:

What one great original artist learns from another, whose genius and problems are necessarily very different, is the hardest kind of ‘influence’ to define, even when we see it to have been of the profoundest importance.⁷

Jane Austen's Mansfield Park will perhaps serve my purposes just as well, without offering the risk of over-stating my thesis, since the relation of Fanny and her uncle or adopted father, Sir Thomas Bertram, does not constitute the core of the novel. I do think Shakespeare's presence plays across Austen's mind as she veers towards and then away from the tragic—or as the novel phrases it in the final chapter, ‘guilt and misery’. After capturing the heroine's attention by a spirited reading of a Shakespeare play in Chapter 34, and despite Fanny's determination to resist his performance, Henry Crawford receives his audience's approval with the following remark:

Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is part of an Englishman's constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them every where, one is intimate with him by instinct.—No man of any brain can open at a good part of one of his plays, without falling into the flow of his meaning immediately.

The obvious discrediting of Crawford through the choice of the particular text (Henry VIII) should not distract the reader from the author's acknowledgment of Shakespeare's ubiquitous presence, evident in the suggestive wording, ‘intimate with him by instinct’. The trace of the potentially tragic and, I hope to argue, the Shakespearean peculiar to Mansfield Park is uttered with an unparalleled directness by this most discreet of authors (Chapter 24):

An advantage this, a strengthener of love, in which even the conjugal tie is beneath the fraternal. Children of the same family, the same blood, with the same first associations and habits, have some means of enjoyment in their power which no subsequent connections can supply; and it must be by a long and unnatural estrangement, by a divorce which no subsequent connection can justify, if such precious remains of the earliest attachments are ever entirely outlived. Too often, alas! it is so.—Fraternal love, sometimes almost everything, is at others worse than nothing.

Substitute paternal for fraternal and you find yourself confronting the ‘unnatural estrangement’ and ‘divorce’, and the ‘sometimes almost everything’ and ‘worse than nothing’ which constitute the opening scene of King Lear.

The resistance I anticipate is not merely a matter of the contrast between the primitivism of the play and the civility of the novel, or even the crossing of generic boundaries. Ultimately it is Nietzsche's smashing of what he called ‘the wretched bell-jar of human individuality’, and his scream of near-pathological derision for the ‘bourgeois mediocrity’ of writers like Jane Austen, who are fools enough to pride themselves on ‘having portrayed mundane, commonplace, every day life’ that governs the academic intellectual's automatic repudiation of the connection I seek to establish.⁸ Nietzsche has taught us to seek for the ‘secure and sacred primal site’ of the tragic in the mythic, the visionary, and the metaphysical, not in puerilities of domestic life.⁹ It is the force of this general critical sentiment rather than the possible bearing of any particular novel or novelist that I am most anxious to meet head-on. The best illustration of this entrenched objection I can offer comes, significantly enough, from the author of The Characters of Love, who, needless to say, shows no hesitation about shuttling back and forth between fiction and poetic drama. Here is a key passage from John Bayley's lengthy discussion of the nature of the tragic as he finds it in King Lear:

All we can conclude is that the core of the tragic material—a family situation—made a deep, a very deep, appeal to Shakespeare's temper and convictions. So much so that it unconsciously began to form areas and depths of effect, independent of the tragical events contrived and enacted.

A family situation, the fate of ‘whatever is begotten, born and dies’, is in one sense all the tragedy human beings know or need. But that doesn't get us far. A tragedy addressed solely to this fact would be merely pretentious, or at best starkly reductive, as so many modern plays have been. The clue may be the unadmitted an undefined contrast in King Lear between the necessities of family behaviour and the aesthetics of play behaviour. … Families may play at being fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, and this may be beneficial, but it never goes very far. Family life reveals the natures and drives of the participants in a manner so predictable as to be usually merely boring. And in a way Cordelia and her sisters are boring: their natures as they are, and as the family situation reveals them, would make no sort of play without external help.¹⁰

I never cease to be amazed by the gall and the effrontery of successful academics. How do they do it? To be so knowing as to detect Shakespeare's ‘unconsciousness’, and then to rescue Shakespeare from himself by handing us the ‘aesthetics of play behaviour’ so as not to bore us all to tears. What a formula for tragedy! And what thin beer Nietzsche turns into when cold-filtered through the nervous system of received opinion!

I close this preamble to a detailed reading of the first scene of King Lear by appealing to Stanley Cavell, whose stature as a philosopher and critic will, I hope, lend a corroborating weight to my common reader's diagnosis of an endemic critical bias. Where literature in general and Shakespearian tragedy in particular is concerned, Cavell articulates the possibility of holding together (if only in a trembling balance) the strange and the sublime, and the ‘mundane, commonplace, every day life’ to which Shakespeare gave voice. I quote not from ‘The Avoidance of Love’, his still-essential essay for anyone really open to the power of King Lear to move us to wonder, but from the introduction to his more recent collected Shakespeare essays, Disowning Knowledge:

In recent years I have identified what philosophy thus calls the ordinary or everyday with what in literature is thematized as the domestic, or marriage; and hence I look for the cloaking of scepticism in literature as what attacks the domestic, namely in what forms tragedy and melodrama.¹¹

.....

My opening remarks on King Lear itself are intended to be cleansed of even the slightest hint of the controversial. I want to try to mole my way in by remarking on a distinctive feature of the language which I feel draws the audience into recognizing the design of the action. Before the family contest begins, before Lear even sets foot on the stage, Shakespeare sets up a pattern of grammatical constructions so elementary to all language acts that Yvor Winters could have used it to enforce his dogmatic championing of ‘rational form’. Both the conversations between Kent and Gloucester turn upon the words we call comparatives or superlatives: ‘more affected’, ‘values most’, and then ‘who yet is no dearer in my account’. The challenge to discrimination might be intimated by the question of true and ‘false compare’, to take a tip from the conclusion of that too well-known but rarely carefully read Sonnet 130. How dear is his good son Edgar if, as Gloucester states, he is no dearer ‘than this’, the bastard whom the father has kept away from home, and who he is about to pack off again, and whose very existence he can only acknowledge as a lame joke? The syllogistic spine of the dialogue enables one to anticipate the father's readiness to believe the worst of Edgar when the other son presents him in the ‘character’ of a patricide in Act One, Scene Two.

The answer to how well Shakespeare loves his mistress when he tells us, ‘I think my love as rare / As any she belied with false compare’ rather depends upon whether you have taken in the bearing of the shifting and mutually incompatible terms found elsewhere in the sonnet upon which you are required to render your verdict: ‘nothing like’, ‘far more’, ‘no such’, ‘in some’, or the final ‘as rare as’. The overall effect leaves you reeling under the onslaught of conflicting meaning much as the final lines of Blake's ‘The Fly’ hurl you back through the philosophic inquisition you only thought you had emerged from with your reasoning powers intact.

The oh-so-terribly-familiar sense of our individual portion in life, whether in the public or private domain, never feeling adequate to our deserving, is locked in by Shakespeare's hooking Regan's declaration, ‘I find she names my very deed of love; / Only she comes too short’ (I. i. 97-8) back into Albany and Gloucester's worrying away at how to cope with the baffling appearance of ‘equalities’ and ‘moiety’ when they just know there has to be an advantage somewhere. Even when, or perhaps especially when, things seem evenly divided, ressentiment is sure to follow. The grammar and syntax of these less challenging sets of ‘mores’ and ‘equals’ point the reader to the most disturbing usage in the pattern, Lear's ‘darker purpose’. Darker than what, we must timorously wonder? And how much more do we recognize in that darkness than does the strange being who utters himself in this purposefulness? But to ask the question that way is to squeeze the ‘darker’ into the simplification, darkness. I feel sure that it is precisely here in this bit of ordinary language that this particular expression of the tragic originates. Even after innumerable readings this questionable shaping holds answers in abeyance.

I have often seen Cordelia's ‘no more nor less’ (I. i. 93) phrasing of her love for Lear canvassed as evidence of an angry retort or a want of warmth or tact, but I have never noticed a single reference to the ‘most’ in the equally vital declaration, ‘Obey you, love, and most honour you’ (I. i. 98). I couldn't see it for looking at it. And has anyone pondered the implications of the word ‘better’ Cordelia and France each speaks on their departure: his ‘Thou losest here, a better where to find’ (I. i. 261) tensely poised against her ‘I would prefer him to a better place’ (I. i. 274)? Dwelling on the way such unexceptional words reach out to one another, often with contradictory impulsions, may not conform to traditional notions of dancing attendance on Shakespeare's poetry, but only by dwelling in them can we even identify the problems Shakespeare poses.

The second mode of entry the first scene solicits may be traced all the way back to Aristotle's distinction between simple and compound actions. I am not referring here to the standard sub-plot vs main-plot view of King Lear but to the simultaneity of Lear's abdication of kingship, the announcing of his daughters' respective dowries, and the marriage of Cordelia to one of her two suitors. Lear's ‘darker purpose’ speech lines them up more or less in that order, leaving us to work out the possible relations between them. In capping Lear's several public declarations with his desire to stage a bizarre contest—‘Which of you shall we say doth love us most?’ (I. i. 51)—Shakespeare ensured our awareness of their relative importance as well as the explosive conflict between the various actions. We may recognize a source of grievance when it dawns on us that Goneril and Regan, who have been married for some indeterminate length of time, must await their favoured youngest sister's marriage before receiving their dowries. Lear could give all three daughters the most generous of dowries without having to shake off the cares of kingship; but I assume Shakespeare expects us to see Cordelia's imminent marriage as the cause of Lear's feeling so old and frail as to present himself as ready to ‘Unburthen'd crawl toward death’ (I. i. 41). As we work through the causal relations and the dramatic priorities in this scene, we are lead to the inevitable conclusion that it is the bond of love between Lear and Cordelia that informs the whole. This I assume to be a minimal inference we can all assent to.

The transition from history play to tragedy owes more to the shift from kingship and the troubled relation between father and son (in the Henry plays, say) to the love of parent and child of the opposite sex (as in Hamlet and King Lear) than any other factor. One of the profoundest shocks for the audience is experienced when we realize how Hamlet's revulsion from his mother's marriage cuts deeper into his soul than even the knowledge of his father's having been murdered by his uncle. This precedent has a vital bearing on the way we imagine Lear's and Cordelia's love.

To put the case as bluntly, not to say reductively, as Kent might had it presented itself to him, there are two alternate ways of responding to what transpires in the first scene. The predominant reading sees the tragedy as motivated by Lear's disclaiming his ‘paternal care’ (I. i. 113), insisting against nature ‘we / Have no daughter, nor shall ever see / That face of hers again’ (I. i. 262-4), and thereby banishing the meaning of his life. This reading of the play presents the central relationship as a denial of love similar in kind to Dickens' Dombey repudiating his daughter's unselfish yearning for affection. The minority reading—the one I favour—considers Lear and Cordelia's relation as bordering on the incestuous. (Once again Hamlet is a relevant text.) The savagery with which Lear casts Cordelia off has effectively masked the deeply disquieting nature of the bond between them, which persists despite the apparent breach. Shakespeare's art compounds the two horrifying realities; the more familiar response to Cordelia's banishment acts as a cover story, blinding us to a far more harrowing truth.

Lear deliberately begins his contest before Gloucester can return with France and Burgundy, whom Lear summons in the first words he utters in the play. ‘Meantime’, Lear says, ‘we shall express our darker purpose’. No one who has ever read or seen the play has the slightest doubt as to how Lear's ‘Which of you shall we say doth love us most?’ is to be answered. At the very least I assume we are to imagine an old man reluctant to give his daughter away in marriage who wants to enjoy a last opportunity to express his love for her as his daughter, and not as someone's wife. The thought that ‘Great rivals in our youngest daughter's love, / Long in our court have made their amorous sojourn, / And here are to be answered’ (I. i. 46-8) weighs heavily on his mind, and the contest is his way of saying, ‘but not yet, not until I am confirmed in her love for me.’ Even someone who finds the thesis I am developing offensive and perverse has to admit that Lear does everything he can to get rid of her suitors in the second half of the scene. He cannot endure the thought of Cordelia's marriage, even when he has banished her from his life.

My major misreading of the scene, a piece of sentimentality I persisted in for years, was to want Cordelia's response, ‘You have begot me, bred me, lov'd me’ (I. i. 96) to stand as a normative check on the ‘barbarous Scythian’ Lear talks of, compelled to ‘gorge his appetite’ on the child he loves with such unappeasable passion. The two fragments from Cavell's interpretation of this speech—‘the heart which is shuddering with confusion’, and ‘this speech, said in suppression, confusion, abandonment’¹²—convey more truth about her state of mind than all the moralistic measuring out of her responsibility for the ensuing disaster which has too often dominated critical debate.

The dramatic inflection Cavell gives the crisis has more to do with private intimacies being forced into the public gaze than the way ‘suppression, confusion, abandonment’ in Cordelia's voice strikes my ear. She tries to shrink from Lear's demand by rounding on her sisters, as a child so often does when pressed by a parent. The second half of her speech is tossed in their direction, but what she says inadvertently touches the raw nerve in her father. The very last thing Lear can endure to be reminded of is the consequences for him of his favourite daughter's imminent marriage. The portion Cordelia fixes on in Regan's blatantly false performance I now find myself reading in horrified surprize as reflecting back on Cordelia's own condition. Regan had just claimed (I. i. 70-76):

In my true heart
I find she [Goneril] names my very deed of love;
                                                  … 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.

The contrast is not, as the good servant Kent and his critical followers believe, a simple opposition between flattery (how can you flatter someone, after all, who isn't listening?) and sincerity. Instead Shakespeare administers a lethal jolt we may learn later in the play to identify as the operation of Lear's ‘handy-dandy’ place changing (IV. vi. 155). No wonder Cordelia's first impulse is to say nothing. (I am not proposing to dwell on the sexual puns associated with the word ‘nothing’ as so many of the modern radical breed of Shakespearean commentators are wont to do.) You have only to make a cursory comparison of Cordelia's speech to the decisive answer Desdemona makes to her father (Othello, I. iii. 181-8)—

I do perceive here a divided duty:
To you I am bound for life and education,
My life and education both do learn me
How to respect you, you are the lord of all my duty,
I am hitherto your daughter: but here's my husband:
And so much duty as my mother show'd
To you, preferring you before her father,
So much I challenge, that I may profess,
Due to the Moor my lord.

—to see how inept my previous reading was. ‘Happily, when I shall wed’ (I. i. 100) is spoken as if Cordelia had no awareness at all of the ‘when’ being upon her. Her uttering a disordered version of the marriage vow (see my earlier reference to the ‘most’ modifying ‘honour’) to her father as evidence of returning the duties of child to parent as ‘are right fit’ is the purest moment in the play of the uncanny sensation of everything being hidden and yet wholly exposed to our view. The only thing close to Cordelia's declaration of love for her father that I can think of is Maggie Verver's reunion with her beloved father in The Golden Bowl. Here is the queer way Maggie registers the emotional consequence of her marrying the Prince in conversation with her father in Chapter 9:

She thought a minute, as if it were difficult to say, yet as if she more and more saw it. ‘Well, whatever it was that, before, kept us from thinking, and kept you, really, as you might say, in the market. It was as if you couldn't be in the market when you were married to me. Or rather as if I kept people off, innocently, by being married to you. Now that I'm married to someone else you're, as in consequence, married to nobody.’

It goes on like this for several more lines without Iago to ask the obligatory question, ‘Are you fast married?’ (Othello, I. ii. 12)—and I must confess I can't tell, even after four hundred odd further pages of ‘indirectness and tortuosities of application and effect’ James considered appropriate to the treatment of love.¹³

Lear's violent recoil answers in kind. It is as if you are overhearing people you know to be wide awake speaking as if in a dream state. Two of Lear's responses, ‘But goes thy heart with this?’ (I. i. 104) and ‘Here I disclaim all my paternal care’ (I. i. 113), constitute an unconscious (I wish there was a better word) enactment of the father's proper place in the marriage ceremony. The exchange I contend amounts to nothing less than a strange disturbing shadow ritual we think of in our common language as marriage. What else does the coronet stand for but daughter-wife and Queen?

I pause for breath here before plunging ahead to trace out the ramifications of imagining the disturbing nature of the love revealed in the rupturing of the father's and daughter's relations in this strange fashion to remind myself how insidiously our arguments fasten themselves on us and we on them. The sting of my insistent misreading of this matter reminds me to go warily in urging others to share my conviction. Many will no doubt have already turned away, feeling ‘There are some follies which baffle argument; which go beyond ridicule; and which excite no feeling in us but disgust’,¹⁴ but against the run of Burke's admonitory prose I pursue thoughts I would rather not harbour.

Stanley Cavell speaks movingly of the ‘rush of gratitude toward France, one's almost wild relief as he speaks his beautiful trust’ (Cavell, 293). I, too, have felt the urge to welcome this appealing generosity of spirit, but then I assumed France's passionate speech (I. i. 250-61) to be the worthy answer to what I wrongly wanted to hear as Cordelia's readiness to receive a loving husband—‘Happily, when I shall wed’. I still find myself disarmed in listening to the string of superlatives—‘most rich’, ‘most choice’, and finally, ‘most lov'd’—that accent this moving declaration, by the realization that such a voice will never be heard again in the play. But then that was precisely Shakespeare's way of situating father and daughter's tragic bond. ‘Be it lawful’, indeed! As in Cordelia's earlier wedding vow addressed to her father, the meaning of the key speeches depends upon the reader's capacity to re-assign them: that is to see their implications for someone other than the speaker has in mind. Cordelia remains silent. She doesn't even have an aside this time. She makes no reply to France's proposal (I. i. 250-61):

Fairest Cordelia, thou art most rich, being poor;
Most choice, forsaken; most 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.
Thy dowerless daughter, King, thrown to my chance,
Is Queen of us, of ours, and our fair France:
Not all the dukes of wat'rish Burgundy
Can buy this unpriz'd precious maid of me.
Bid them farewell, Cordelia, though unkind:
Thou losest here, a better where to find.

Her unresponsiveness is as revealing as Othello's shrinking from Desdemona's marvellously passionate giving of herself in the public proclaming of her devotion (Othello, I. iii. 248-54):

That I do love the Moor, to live with him,
My downright violence, and scorn of fortunes,
May trumpet to the world: my heart's subdued
Even to the utmost pleasure of my lord:
I saw Othello's visage in his mind,
And to his honours, and his valiant parts
Did I my soul and fortunes consecrate.

What Desdemona did not see in her unqualified commitment to that visage is evident in her bewildered silence later at what must seem to her an incomprehensible invitation (Othello, II. iii. 8-10):

                                                  Come, my dear love,
The purchase made, the fruits are to ensue,
The profit's yet to come ’twixt me and you.

Cordelia cannot, as even Cavell insists, be described as ‘protected in France's love’ (Cavell, 292), however much one yearns to think so. Her being is so utterly rooted in and derived from the bond with her father that she cannot acknowledge France or his love. The aptness of France's diagnosis of the family predicament, his other major speech, must also be denied (I. i. 213-24):

                                                  This is most strange,
That she, whom even but now was your best object,
The argument of your praise, balm of your age,
The best, the dearest, should in this trice of time
Commit a thing so monstrous, to dismantle
So many folds of favour. Sure, her offence
Must be of such unnatural degree
That monsters it, or your fore-vouch'd affection
Fall into taint; which to believe of her,
Must be a faith that reason without miracle
Should never plant in me.

Of course I did the same. In my misplaced sympathy for France I adopted his false alternative. I accepted the either/or construction, assenting to part of the logic of his propositions because it corroborates my earliest and my present judgement that Lear's ‘fore-vouch'd affection’ does indeed ‘fall into taint’ (I. i. 220-1), while denying completely the possibility of Cordelia's participation in anything ‘monstrous’ or ‘of such unnatural degree’. It took a prospective bridegroom to intuit such a frightening possibility and simultaneously to deny its psychological corollary. The taint in Lear's love is pointedly attached to affection for the child of his blood that preceded his ostensible repudiation of her. Naturally France's love for Cordelia blinds him to her pre-eminent concern with her father's ‘grace and favour’ (I. i. 229). Even here the ‘better place’ for her remains her father's arms, not those of an ardent suitor. In his last major speech in the play France strives to appropriate the crucial rhetoric of superlatives, but the antithesis he would construct between his ‘fairest Cordelia’, ‘most loved’, and a Cordelia ‘despised’ and called ‘unkind’ won't hold. The phrase ‘most loved, despised’ runs the two worlds together, so that we hardly know which is which—and when we come to the syntactically shaky final couplet the parenthetical qualifier ‘though unkind’ should remind us of Hamlet's sardonic play on kin and kind. France cannot possibly realize (but we must) how his proposal threatens to ‘un-kin’ Cordelia from the father who she loves, ‘most honours’, and obeys.

I used the word ‘natural’ a moment ago, conscious that all the interminable intellectual debate concerning the large philosophic questions of what constitutes nature, civilization, the monstrous and the humane, float round the specific horror Shakespeare dares us to wrestle with. In this emotional force field it is France's proposal ‘here I seize upon: / Be it lawful’ that feels like the violation of the normative, the sane and the healthy, and as this wording suggests he may have half sensed the frightening truth of the inversion. How are we to find out the ‘better’? It is the knowledge of the way Cordelia and Lear's relation is revealed to us through France's desire that we come to suffer what Bradshaw spoke of as impalement.

.....

If these scattered remarks about King Lear pass the Johnsonian standard for literary-critical argument, that they convey something preponderantly true, then certain consequences follow for the balance of the play. I will try sketch these in as economically as possible. Even those who declare their belief in Lear's and Cordelia's relation standing at the dramatic centre of the play are hard pressed to keep their conviction in operation throughout Acts Two and Three, where Cordelia is literally absent. I think we should read the twin clashes with Goneril and Regan in Act One, Scene Four, and Act Two, Scene Four, as Lear irrationally demanding of these two daughters satisfaction of needs only Cordelia could gratify. The violent clashes are a direct prolonging of the family life we have been given in the first scene. The daughters are inured to his exclusive love for Cordelia and his refusal to admit their existence, and thus Lear's demands that they act Cordelia's part add insult to injury. They pay him in kind. He wanders inconsolably back and forth in the void between them seeking the absent daughter: ‘I should be false / Persuaded I had daughters’ (I. iv. 241-2) and ‘Yet have I left a daughter’ (I. iv. 263).

To follow Lear's anguished progress through this nightmarish suffering as if Shakespeare was following a Socratic or Sophoclean trajectory is to make the miserable mistake Nietzsche railed against throughout The Birth of Tragedy or, in effect, to know Lear's life through the eyes of Goneril and Regan. The old man ‘hath ever but / Slenderly known himself’ (I. i. 293-4) they inform us at the outset. They also repeatedly recommend wisdom as something he should learn through the suffering he deserves. I have made lectures out of sliding along in such brutal grooves. Perhaps we take revenge on Lear by insisting he know fully what Shakespeare has revealed to us.

The most disturbing embodiment of Lear's anguished crawl towards death is surely his ferocious outbreaks of sexual revulsion. The Cambridge critics, A. L. French, Harold Mason, and (I am sorry and surprized to report) J. C. F. Littlewood, are torn between dismissing these rages as oddly intense but finally irrelevant and/or construing them as symptoms of some obscure psycho-sexual disablement in Shakespeare himself.¹⁵ Trying to attach Lear's obsessive screams of sexual revulsion to Goneril and Regan competing for Edmund's favour—a man who incidentally shows little or no inclination for sexual lust—is to make moral nonsense of the play. I assume Lear's diseased imagination expresses his own pathological recoil from the hideous prospect of imagining the detested bride-groom, ‘the hot-blooded France’ (II. iv. 213), enjoying his beloved daughter. Such unendurable thoughts may also carry him to the brink of becoming conscious of the forbidden sexuality of his own need to possess Cordelia's person. To shrink from these realizations is an essential part of leaving oneself open to Shakespeare's power to move us to pity and fear. Lear virtually tells us how to read him. The ‘close pent-up guilts’ (III. ii. 57) and the ‘undivulged crimes’ (III. ii. 52): these are the real sources of the frantic rant against sexual sins. That it is ‘thou simular of virtue / That art incestuous’ (III. ii. 54-5) is as close as Lear can come to confessing. Who would wish more knowledge upon him?

The closer I get to Cordelia's re-appearance, and especially her touching reunion with the ‘foolish fond old man’ (IV. vii. 60), the more painful it becomes to insist on the way the first scene continuously shapes the action. Hard as the struggle to redeem my understanding of the play has been, I want to do my utmost to avoid the ever-present temptation to find fault with Shakespeare's art (à la Harold Mason) wherever maintenance of my thesis is threatened. Like most critics, I consider Shakespeare's packing Cordelia's husband off with the set up line, ‘Why the King of France is so suddenly gone back know you no reason?’ (IV. iii. 1-2) a clumsy piece of stage business. What really concerns me is the veil Shakespeare casts over Cordelia's marriage. It may be the inveterate novel reader in me that leads me astray, but then I admit to also feeling justified in wanting more access to Gertrude's inner life subsequent to Hamlet forcing her to see her marriage with his extreme revulsion. Instead of exploring the impact on her of this extraordinarily distressing encounter between mother and son, Shakespeare frustrates my desire by keeping the focus on the far less compelling matter of Claudius' manipulation of Laertes. Am I wrong to object?

If comparing the first scene of the play to Act Four, Scene Seven were merely a question of contrasting curse, rage, estrangement, and hatred to blessing, acceptance, forgiveness, and unselfish love, and were that all Shakespeare demands of us, then all my fussing would be beside the point. But in the other plays of this period—Hamlet, Measure for Measure, and Othello—true and false compare is anything but a stark contrast. Shakespeare incessantly structures the crucial sequences in his dramas so as to make the identical seem antithetical, and complementarity look like opposition. There is one tantalizing moment in the lead into Shakespeare's restoring of the father and daughter to one another where we can just about catch a glimpse of what her lines ‘when I shall wed, / That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry / Half my love with him, half my care and duty’ (I. i. 100-2) have come to mean. I refer of course to this exclamation (IV. iv. 23-9):

                                                  O dear father!
It is thy business that I go about;
Therefore great France
My mourning and importun'd tears hath pitied.
No blown ambition doth our arms incite,
But love, dear love, and our ag'd father's right.
Soon may I hear and see him!

You don't have to be overly ingenious in suggesting the presence of a syntactical wriggle of ambiguity about these tears. Are they shed for father or husband or both? Can the ‘love, dear love’ be stretched to include France, or must we pity and mourn his exclusion? I certainly cannot detect the law of life Fanny Assingham rests her faith on in the twenty-fourth chapter of The Golden Bowl:

‘I quite hold’, Fanny with characteristic amplitude parenthesised, ‘that a person can mostly feel but one passion—one tender passion, that is—at a time. Only, that doesn't hold good for our primary and instinctive attachments, the ‘voice of blood’, such as one's feeling for a parent or a brother. Those may be intense and yet not prevent other intensities—as you will recognise, my dear, when you remember how I continued, tout bêtement, to adore my mother, whom you didn't adore, for years after I had begun to adore you.’

Perhaps the difference is that the ‘voice of blood’ speaks in the love of daughter for mother and not father. In a novel in which James tosses the word ‘perverse’ about with gay abandon we can never be sure, however, about Maggie Verver's balancing the claims of husband and father. In this work it is the father's consciousness we are shut out from, not the daughter's. But I cannot postpone facing the scene so many hard-hearted academics have proclaimed the most moving in Shakespeare a minute longer.

Shakespeare gives primacy to Lear's agony, representing his journey with the full dramatic continuity not afforded Cordelia. Discussions of their mutual recognition often pay too little regard to Shakespeare's preparing the way by showing us Lear's running away in panic and shame at the bare mention of his ‘most dear daughter’ (IV. vi. 191) As far as I know, Cavell is the only critic who isn't hampered by a will to display his tenderness and who shows the requisite courage to insist that it is Lear's shame at ‘the nature of his love for Cordelia’ that makes him so frantic (Cavell, 299). To give way to what he longs for is in his blurted words ‘No rescue? What! a prisoner?’ (IV. vi. 192.) In the extremity of his conflict Lear envisages himself dying ‘bravely, like a smug bridegroom’ (IV. vi. 199-200). Cavell is surely right again when he identifies the last two words of the line ‘Methinks I should know you and know this man’ (IV. vii. 64) as a case of Lear mistaking the disguised Kent or the doctor for France (Cavell, 299). The distance travelled between this ‘should know’ and the ‘shall we say’ of ‘Which of you shall we say doth love us most?’ (I. i. 51) is as nothing and everything—the play itself. The unendurable pain comes in the final lines of this speech (IV. vii. 68-70):

                                                  Do not laugh at me;
For, as I am a man, I think this lady
To be my child Cordelia.

Though I am drawn to both S. L. Goldberg's and J. C. F. Littlewood's generous accounts of the father's acknowledgment of Cordelia's existence as more than an answer to his need,¹⁶ I think in his extremity Lear strives even more agonizingly against his nature to accept ‘this lady’ as the Queen of France. The exchange immediately following this speech is an astonishing compound of all-pervading denial and naked meeting of two people who love one another utterly. I dread sounding like Dickens' Mrs. Clennam in her life-denying insistence that the past can never be forgotten, but Shakespeare will not let us rest easy in Cordelia's ‘No cause, no cause’ (IV. vii. 75). This isn't to imply that she should react to her father's view of his conduct as Hamlet does to his mother. (I for one don't know how to receive his ‘Forgive me this my virtue’; Hamlet, III. iv. 154.) I feel rent in two by the demand their love makes upon me to ‘see as’ and ‘see in’ simultaneously. Here is Goldberg's exposition of the vital distinction:

we speak of ‘seeing in’, not ‘seeing as’; and we do so because we know that although love sometimes is ‘blind’ in the sense that it is only the cause or the effect of a delusion, it sometimes is ‘blind’ in another sense: that it involves a trust, a faith, not just in the existence and value and strength of certain potentialities in the other person, but also in one's own need, capacity and commitment to appreciate those potentialities and thereby perhaps help them realize themselves. This is why the blindness of love sometimes sees a person, and the course of time, far more deeply than the wisest spectator.

(Goldberg, 97)

Shakespeare takes no pity on us; he burdens us with knowledge that dooms us to spectatorship even as he compels our emphatic participation. Who dares to judge?

Lear cannot maintain the effort, and he slips back in the final scene. The word fantasy is often applied to his desire to live alone with Cordelia. The prison he feared is now a paradise. But Lear isn't the play. Shakespeare drives on unrelentingly. Lear's ‘Have I caught thee?’ (V. iii. 21) cruelly recalls the memory of France's ‘Thee and thy virtues here I seize upon’ (I. i. 252). There is no escape. Even in Edmund's summary of his actions we find ‘the old and miserable King’ (V. ii. 47) paired with ‘With him I sent the Queen’ (V. iii. 52), as if they were married royalty, not, as the last two lines of the speech remind us—‘The question of Cordelia and her father / Requires a fitter place’ (V. iii. 58-9)—parent and child.

I have seen too many fine critics pace round and round the final scene in King Lear, reminding me of a neurotic polar bear I once saw pacing his cell in the Winnipeg zoo, to want to sum up the play myself. Anthony Eden's verdict on the Katyn massacre—‘Let us think of these things always. Let us speak of them never’—probably is cowardice,¹⁷ but who at Cordelia's death feels up to answering Zarathustra's command:

Let us speak of this, you wisest men, even if it is a bad thing. To be silent is worse; all suppressed truths become poisonous.

And let everything that can break upon our truths—break!¹⁸

Having misread the play when I was so sure I had it right ought to ensure my sympathy with Tate or Bradley in their impulse to revise the ending, but it doesn't. What could they imagine as Cordelia and Lear living together happily ever after? ‘If there be more, more woeful, hold it in’ (V. iii. 202), I say with Albany, for how could anyone imagine marrying Cordelia to that lethal moralizer Edgar? That surely is revenge disguised as tenderness, and it is monstrous and beyond forgiveness to answer Lear's anguished cry of love by providing him with any son-in-law, let alone that one. It is to find yourself immured in an affirmative answer to the nightmarish question: ‘Could there be people who could never achieve the spirit in which words about another (mind) are meant?¹⁹

As for Shakespeare's bequest to the novel, Dickens found the ‘darker purpose’ in the shadow of the Marshalsea. He grappled with it by creating Arthur Clennam, whose dearest wish is to be a father to Little Dorrit. In Book One, Chapter 35, Clennam rescues her from the prison: and Dickens portrays his carrying her out into the world beyond so:

As he kissed her, she turned her head towards his shoulder, and raised her arm towards his neck; cried out ‘Father! Father! Father!’ and swooned away.

After the father of the Marshalsea dies, Clennam is permitted to replace him, but he can only do so by being locked in the same cell. ‘Dozing and dreaming’ as he sits in her father's chair, the nearly broken Clennam is rescued by his Cordelia: Little Dorrit returns to nurse him just as she had nursed her father.

‘Who [indeed] can tell what disquieting moral capacities or incapacities might reveal themselves’ when we answer Shakespeare's call? (Goldberg, 252.) And even those who would never dream of judging Shakespeare ‘in relation to [their] deepest sense of human possibilities’ cannot escape, for Emerson was right:

Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine that they communicate their virtue and vice only by overt action, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.²⁰

We emit that breath in everything we say and everything we write about Shakespeare.

Notes

1. Stanley Cavell, Themes out of School (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 192.

2. H. A. Mason, Shakespeare's Tragedies of Love: An Examination of the Possibility of Common Readings of ‘Romeo and Juliet’, ‘Othello’, ‘King Lear’, and ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ (London: Chatto and Windus, 1970), vii; referred to below as Mason.

3. Graham Bradshaw, Shakespeare's Scepticism (Brighton: Harvester, 1987), 63; referred to below as Bradshaw.

4. S. L. Goldberg, Agents and Lives: Moral Thinking in Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 252; referred to below as Goldberg.

5. King Lear, I. i. 36; all quotations are from the Arden edn., ed. Kenneth Muir (London: Methuen, 1961).

6. F. R. and Q. D. Leavis, Dickens the Novelist (London: Chatto and Windus, 1970), 29; referred to below as Dickens the Novelist.

7. F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (New York: New York University Press, 1964), 9.

8. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1993), 101, 56.

9. Ibid. 110.

10. John Bayley, Shakespeare and Tragedy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 63.

11. Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 29.

12. Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 292; referred to below as Cavell.

13. I have quoted this passage from a letter James sent to H. G. Wells, quoted in Dorothea Krook, The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 290.

14. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: Penguin, 1986), 369.

15. A. L. French, Shakespeare and the Critics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 180-3, 194-5, 201; Mason, Shakespeare's Tragedies of Love, 203-4, 214; and J.C.F. Littlewood, ‘Thoughts on King Lear’, The Gadfly, 7: 4 (Aug. 1984), 23-4.

16. S.L. Goldberg, An Essay on ‘King Lear’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 27-30, 83-6; Littlewood, ‘Thoughts on King Lear’, 16-18.

17. I quote Eden's remark from Cavell, Themes out of School, 118.

18. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 139.

19. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 379

20. I quote this passage of Emerson's from Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 25.