SOURCE: “Love's Trials,” in Law and Love: The Trials of King Lear, Yale University Press, 2000, pp. 1-28.

[In the following essay, Kahn posits that at the center of King Lear is a treatise on the exclusivity of love and political power.]

Love and political power are central themes of King Lear. In the course of the play, Lear moves from power to love and back to power. The tragic action of the play is brought on by efforts to breach the separation between love and power, to mold power by love, or to infuse love with power. But what is appropriate for love is inappropriate for power, and what is appropriate for power is inappropriate for love. Man must die to power if he is to love purely. Or he must restrain love if he is to rule effectively. This, in the most abstract and summary form, is the philosophical and moral vision that the play explores.¹

Lear's plan as the play opens reflects an ambition to unite love and power. He will accomplish this union by means of a public trial of his daughters' love. Each daughter must stand before the whole of the court and give a public proclamation of the extent of her love for her father. If she proves her love, she will be rewarded with a part of the state. The two older daughters succeed and receive their allotted portions. Cordelia, whom Lear loves most and for whom he has planned the finest share of the kingdom, fails. She wants to love silently, to say “nothing” at her trial. When Lear forces her to speak, she speaks poorly by the king's measure. She tells him that she loves “according to her bond” and that he cannot be the sole object of her love. This is not enough for the king. He banishes her and distributes her third to his other daughters. The king of France, who finds himself enthralled by Cordelia, saves her from Lear's effort to render her nothing.

The opening scene of the play, which has given rise to so many puzzles of interpretation, is not fully understood if it is described only as a “test” of the daughters. Such a test seems not only inappropriate but offensive. Why would Lear do it? This question, however, is usually asked from a perspective that sees Lear only as a father, not as a king. Every father may want to have his daughters proclaim the fullness of their love, but most are insightful enough to see this ambition as psychologically immature and potentially destructive. If, however, we keep in mind that Lear is not just a father but also a king, we see that the opening scene represents the paradigmatic legal act: a trial. Understanding this scene as a trial may not make Lear's actions seem more appropriate—it is not an excuse for his behavior—but it opens up a complex set of problems around which the play is organized.

ACCOUNTING FOR THE WHORESON

The question of love's relationship to law is foreshadowed in the brief banter between Kent and Gloucester that opens the play. Kent is Lear's most faithful and loving subject. He more than anyone should know the measure of the king's love. His opening line speaks of the appearance of Lear's love: “I thought the King had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall.” But if kings love, they nevertheless should not let the scale of love's affection affect their deployment of power. And Lear has not. Gloucester answers Kent that while this might be true of Lear's love—“It did always seem so to us”—that fact did not enter into Lear's proposed division of the kingdom. Under this division, “it appears not which of the dukes he values most.” For a wise king, equality at law trumps affection.² Already we see that love cannot be directly translated into law. Lear may love Albany more than Cornwall, but to express that inequality in law would be to ignore law's own necessities.

Gloucester and Kent turn from a consideration of Lear's children's inheritance to that of Gloucester's own children. Gloucester too is trying to bridge the gulf between law and love. His bastard son, Edmund, is by his side; Edgar, his absent son, is nevertheless present through law: “I have a son, Sir, by order of law, some year elder than this” (I, i, 18-19). Gloucester says he loves his two sons equally: Neither is “any dearer in my account.” Law's order, however, grants Edgar the exclusive right to inherit within the House of Gloucester. Which—law or love—is the basis upon which an account is to be made?

Gloucester concludes that “the whoreson must be acknowledged.” But what kind of a “must” is this? Gloucester, the loyal subject, has no power to make new law. He says that he has previously overcome shame to “acknowledge” Edmund as his son. He has done this so often that he is now “brazed” to it. This is the public display of a father's private affection. Yet, we suspect that this acknowledgment has been less than Gloucester claims, for Edmund has not been present: “He hath been out nine years, and away he shall again” (31-32). Gloucester must acknowledge his legal son, Edgar, even in his absence. Does he similarly acknowledge Edmund in his absence? Would Gloucester even speak of equal entitlements were Edgar present? Given what we are about to learn of Edmund's hatred for his father, we imagine that banishment—much more than acknowledgment—has been Edmund's fate.

Law can make present those who are absent. Law's presence is inscribed in property, which can be seen by all even in the absence of the owner.³ Indeed, law's power over property extends beyond death. Thus, both Lear and Gloucester are contemplating a use of law to order relations among their children after their deaths. Love has substantially less power to make the absent beloved visible. Love is not inscribed in property. Sacrifice, not ownership, makes love visible.⁴ Gloucester may be unwilling to sacrifice much for Edmund. When Edmund is absent, he may lack presence both in law and in his father's affection.

Gloucester does not know how to solve the problem created by the “whoreson.” He can acknowledge Edmund's presence by affirming his affection for him, but he has no means of acknowledging him at law. Edmund is deeply aware of the conflict within which his father labors. Hence his chilling response to Kent's polite profession of love: “I shall study deserving” (30). Indeed, he will. He “knows” that he deserves no less from his father than Edgar deserves. He must reorder the public scale—law's valuation of the whoreson—to make it match the order of affection. Father and son seem to agree on this need for reevaluation. Nevertheless, Gloucester would send him away again, out of the public realm. This is exactly expressed by Gloucester: “Away he shall again. The King is coming” (31-32). When Lear enters, Edmund must exit. He can have no presence before the legitimate source of law: Lear. When he is next in Lear's presence, it will be to order the King's murder. (See V, iii.)

KING OR FATHER?

Lear, no less than Gloucester, wants to reorder the public scale of deserving. He too seeks to bridge law and love. That Lear may have a king's power to work toward accomplishing this end does not make it any less problematic. Thus, on entering the stage, Lear immediately announces his “darker purpose.” It is darker not because it has been hidden. Indeed, it was immediately visible to Gloucester and Kent at the play's opening. What he intended to do, including the exact divisions he planned, was public knowledge. It is “darker” because it violates the principles of public order. In it we “smell a fault,” to use Gloucester's vivid expression about his own relationship to Edmund (I, i, 15).

Lear, we must not forget—although he seems to—is the king. In his person he embodies the whole of the state. His body is the mystical corpus of the state.⁵ Because he is one and indivisible, so too is the state. Yet, immediately after speaking of his “darker purpose,” Lear asks for the map and pronounces: “Know that we have divided / In three our kingdom” (36-37). Not only would he divide the kingdom geographically among his daughters, he would also divide the office of the king with his sons-in-law.

If kings embody the geographic, temporal, and political unity of the state, then Lear is a problematic king from the very beginning of the play. The map is a divisible representation of the kingdom in a way that the king's body is not.⁶ Projecting the kingdom onto the map, Lear attempts to depoliticize his own body. No longer the mystical political body of a unitary king but the singular body of a beloved father is to hold together the divided kingdom.

Love forms a unity out of a plurality within a family. A father can love and be loved by all of his children. Lear would project this unity of familial love onto the geography of his kingdom. Loving him, each daughter is to be satisfied with her allotted portion of the realm. But if love for the father is to keep the political divisions of the kingdom from falling into conflict, what will sustain the unity of the state once Lear dies?⁷ We have already seen that love without physical presence is a very weak political force.

Yet, in the end Lear does not entirely depoliticize himself. He does not abdicate; he retains the title of king.⁸ He cannot wholly shed his position as king and be just a father. By holding onto his title, Lear establishes a competition between two very different representations of the kingdom: the king's body and the map. The conflict is present in the very sentence he utters: “We have divided … the kingdom.” The unity of the royal “we” purports to divide the whole, which is itself. After Lear's death, the divided whole will be held together only by the unity of the map. A map, however, can always be redrawn.

To seek to divide the kingdom is indeed to pursue a “darker purpose.” It threatens multiple injustices. The kingdom is denied the unitary king that it needs if it is to avoid civil war. The eldest child is not getting the whole that she deserves by law. Finally, Lear is being unjust to himself as king.⁹ By denying himself the power to rule, he undermines the kingship. All of these injustices stem from a common source: Lear's love of his daughters. Determined to do what Gloucester could not do—acknowledge at law his feelings of paternal love—he creates confusion over who and what he is. Is he a loving father or a ruling king? He wants to be both at once, but instead he quickly ends up a king in name but without rule, and a father in name but without love.

Lear's plan of succession and division is hatched out of anticipation of his own death. Even a king must die. But how does a king die? In part, he dies like anyone else, leaving behind his children. Like all parents, Lear seeks in his children both the peace of old age and the continuation of himself. Seeing that he must soon die, he sees himself a mere man. He would “crawl toward death,” having stripped himself of “all cares and business” (38-40). He hopes to find a father's solace in his most loved and loving daughter's “kind nursery.” Lear's capacity to imagine his own death disrupts his idea of himself as the deathless monarch.

Yet kings cannot simply crawl toward death, shedding power as nature renders them helpless. If death is natural, then kings lead unnatural deaths, just as they live unnatural lives. The mystical corpus that is simultaneously the king and the state never dies. Lear is not yet dead in his person, but already he is dividing the kingdom as if the deathless king had died. If love and death form a pair, then so do law and deathlessness. As the timeless corpus of the state, the king cannot love. Lear loves too much.¹⁰

If men dream of being kings, perhaps kings dream of being men. Lear would reorder the public scale—law's valuation of the eldest child's claim—to make it match the love he feels toward each of his daughters. A father's heart, however, is not the stuff out of which to create the public order of law. Just as Gloucester's family disturbance comes from loving the whoreson and the legal son equally, Lear's comes from loving the youngest even more than the eldest.¹¹

Lear's ambition makes sense only if law and love can form a unity. Is a law founded on love any more possible than a love founded on law? We have reason to doubt this, even before the play explores the question in any depth.¹² Law cannot command love. Lear can marry his daughters to dukes and kings, but he cannot command them to love them. It is just our worry about this incompatibility of law and love that makes us uneasy with Lear's public trial of his daughter's love. We feel the public command directed at love is self-contradictory: it destroys its own object. Conversely, can love command law? A law infused with love would, we suspect, not be law at all. Law, for example, can allow mercy to extend only so far before the legal order is wholly undermined.

Lear can be king or he can be loving father. He cannot be both at once. To those wholly within the grip of law, a loving king looks mad. To a loving king, law looks mad.¹³ By the end, we will experience Lear's madness from both of these perspectives. Nevertheless, Lear is not mad at first. He would occupy this position between law and love willfully—that is, as king. He is driven mad by the necessities of a situation that he brings upon himself.

Lear's tragedy is rooted, then, in his effort to align his private and public selves, his identity as loving father and royal sovereign. He wants to make the public order of the realm reflect his private order of love. Lear is not just a troubled father; he is always “every inch a king” (IV, vi, 107). What is at stake is not psychology but political psychology: the soul of man in its political necessities.¹⁴

THE TRIALS

The transition from private experience to the public order is always dangerous. The transition is often protected by ritual—for example, the traditional coronation ceremony, through which the private body becomes the corpus of the state.¹⁵ More commonly, the place and manner of transition is the trial. Every trial is a process/ritual through which a private event, act, or person is made to show itself publicly so that it may be subject to law's order. The trial gives a public meaning of law to what appeared at first to be merely private. Trials extend the domain of law within the kingdom, just as war extends the external borders of the kingdom.

The transitional function of the trial accounts for the multiple trials that occur throughout the play.¹⁶ In the opening scene, Lear commands his daughters' participation in a public trial. The power of the state puts on trial their love of their father. Gloucester will shortly sit as judge in a trial of Edgar's love. A mad Lear will later retry Goneril and Regan. Gloucester will suffer a trial at the hands of Regan and Cornwall. The ambition of each trial is to reorder the public domain—literally to reconfigure public space—by taking up into itself a “prepolitical” nature that is revealed in the course of the proceedings. The play ends with a trial by combat in which the “true” natures of Edmund and Edgar are revealed and brought within the reconstituted order of the state.

We might think of these trials today as various forms of “show trials.” They do not satisfy our belief that the aim of a trial must be the discovery of truth through the application of neutral rules of evidence. Nevertheless, the show trial makes vivid the transitional function of every trial. When we derogate its quality as merely “show,” we mean that the political ideology on display is not our ideal of law's rule and that the trial performance is different from that which operates in our own trials. Yet we, too, want our trials to show forth the character of our political space. We, too, expect, at the end of a trial, a reevaluation of private interests and private actors in light of our political values.¹⁷

In King Lear, love initially appears to be natural. It arises before law and independently of it. A trial is to reveal the truth of nature to the power of the state and so allow the alignment of love and law. Lear expresses this ambition quite precisely:

                                                  Tell me my daughters
.....Which of you shall we say doth love us most?
That we our largest bounty may extend
Where nature doth with merit challenge.

(I, i, 47-52)

Lear poses the issue as one of public speech. His speech as king must be made to match the daughters' natural love, and thus depends upon the making public of the daughters' private natures. This speech will be both the conclusion and the consequence of the trial. It will transform the nature revealed at trial into a permanent, public display of law's order, objectified in the distribution of property—literally the kingdom itself.¹⁸

Lear would create a public law that is the visible expression of his love for his daughters and of their love for him. But before law can express love, love must express itself to law. This is the point of the trial: to force a public appearance of love's order, which is the order of the soul. Lear does not look to his own soul to accomplish law's end. He looks to the public display of a trial. He is still the king, not merely a father. As king, he is bound to the trial, even as he watches it fail his ambition as loving father. The tools of state—in particular, the trial—are not capable of mapping love onto the public order of law.

A trial is never a spontaneous act of speech. It is always speech directed by, and infused with, political power. The trial assumes that there is a fact of the matter, which will be revealed in the course of the proceedings. It is intended to be a showing-forth of that which has been hidden from public perception. Its hope is to reveal nature to power, if we understand nature to be that which exists before the application of the public order of law. But just by virtue of the fact that the trial is always power reaching out to cross the divide between itself and nature, it can never see nature pure. What it sees already reflects the power of law itself.

A trial, therefore, can mislead just as much as it can reveal. Indeed, the trial creates an opportunity for false representations to have a political impact. Despite the fact that we are aware of this—an awareness brought home to Lear by Kent—law is bound to the appearance. It has no independent way of measuring what is said. Lear cannot stage yet another trial to measure the truth of the appearances brought forth in the first trial. A trial ordinarily does not begin until after a commitment has been made to abide by its conclusion. Once it is set in motion, there is no way to reject its outcome without undermining the public order.¹⁹

Cordelia and her sisters may create false appearances of love within the circumscribed space of the trial. Yet Lear as king cannot penetrate the boundaries of the trial. Law would see nature, but in the end it cannot see further than the appearance of nature it commands: that is, the testimony at trial.

Having staged the trial, Lear is bound to its results. He can encourage Cordelia to “mend [her] speech a little,” but he cannot turn away from public speech to what he already knows as a loving father.²⁰ Lear is passing sentence on the characters that appear in the trial. He is not rewarding the children for a lifetime of devotion to their father. He can warn Cordelia: “Nothing will come of nothing: speak again” (89). But he cannot save her from the judgment of law. From the king's point of view, Cordelia failed at trial. She must endure law's response. And so must he.

The trials begin with Goneril announcing the tension between public speech and love: “Sir, I love you more than word can wield the matter” (54). She understands that speech is a poor substitute for love. But this creates an opportunity, as well as a problem. The love—or its absence—is hidden. Goneril is playing the part that Lear has cast for her. In the drama that is the trial, she is asked by Lear to hold up an appearance of love. She does so. Hearing what he wants to hear, Lear need go no further in order to make a disposition.

To ask whether Goneril's words represent the truth of her love is to make a category mistake. Since these are the first words spoken by Goneril in the play, we cannot really know whether they are true or false. Indeed, this distinction may not even be apparent to the trial participant. For this reason, we should not think that Lear's trials somehow fail their purpose because they lack an opportunity for cross-examination. At every point in a trial, the problem of speaking to power re-creates itself. No procedural innovation can assure a coincidence of language and nature. Asking more of Goneril would not get us closer to the truth. Would Lear have been happier with a more “truthful” report that denied love and thus undermined his plan for the division of the kingdom? The king must hear what the king would hear.

Just as the audience knows about these characters only what the play reveals, so Lear's vision is limited by the appearances of the trial. Neither he nor the audience can go behind it. A trial is a play staged by the politically powerful, in which the judge's sentence at the end bridges the little drama of the trial and the larger drama of the state.²¹ Indeed, Lear's power as judge becomes more ferocious the less he sees. To see again, he will have to overcome law through his own experience of love outside of law.²²

Kings must speak in order to rule. Speaking, they can only react to what has already been said. This creates the risk inherent in every trial. The more powerful the authority, the less it will open a space for risk. The show trial and the plea bargain both minimize risk. But if power is to be extended, not all risk can be eliminated. A trial is a speaking by others in order to determine what the king should say. The king, however, can never know whether he is acting on true or on false speech. Because the players in the trial are themselves autonomous subjects, they can turn the trial process to their own ends. For this reason, power's display at trial is always a moment of vulnerability.²³ Lear would use his daughters, but perhaps his older daughters are using him. They seize the opportunity that the trial creates.

Accordingly, the stability of political rule cannot be rooted in its correspondence with a nature beyond the domain of law. That nature cannot appear directly to law. Law can only construct for itself an image of nature. Law's stability, if it is to exist at all, must be built from within the domain of political power. By juxtaposing law and love, the play throws into question any assumptions we may have had about a natural order of politics. What is natural to the state is not a prepolitical nature, but the demands of political necessity.

Goneril's words are false as a representation of herself but not of love. They, in fact, provide a fair representation of Cordelia. Words are detachable from their referent in just this manner. This is the point that Regan makes immediately after hearing Goneril's speech. She states: “In my true heart / I find she names my very deed of love” (69-70). Whatever we may think of her “true heart,” she is pointing out that the relationship between names and the objects named is never carried on the surface of the words themselves. Just as Goneril told us that love is beyond speech, Regan tells us that the words of speech have an indeterminate relationship to the object named. If law is dependent upon the spoken word, then it is incapable of really seeing the “true heart.”

“Sir, I love you more than word can wield the matter.” Goneril says this; Regan claims it. It is, however, precisely Cordelia's problem. Cordelia sees this immediately and follows Goneril's speech with an aside: “What shall Cordelia speak? Love, and be silent” (61). Cordelia's voiced silence announces that she will not take the first step from love into law's ordering. When Cordelia does finally speak, she offers only an empty image of what law seeks to discover. She says “I cannot heave / My heart into my mouth: I love your Majesty / According to my bond; no more nor less” (90-92). But exactly how much is this? Her speech reveals nothing; it provides no prepolitical nature for law to judge.

Goneril continues her speech with a description that appears in retrospect to set out a fair approximation of what lies ahead for Cordelia:

Dearer than eye-sight, space and liberty;
Beyond what can be valued rich or rare;
No less than life, with grace, health, beauty, honour;
As much as child e'er lov'd, or father found;
A love that makes breath poor and speech unable.

(55-59)

Cordelia will be exiled from this space, she will be disinherited; and in the end, she will lose her life. Her love for her father is “dearer” than all of this. It endures despite these losses. Of course, to read Goneril's speech in this way is to approach it with hindsight. We know none of this yet. But this is just the point. From the words themselves, we cannot tell anything about their truth as representations.

Understood as a trial, the opening scene introduces a familiar problem. We may know what words are required at trial—what should be said—without knowing whether they are said by or about the right person or action. A trial can dissolve into a “swearing match” in which the parties agree on the description that is a predicate to a legal right, while each makes opposing claims to be the bearer of that description. The trial becomes a set piece—a predictable discourse—that may be impenetrable to the truth. This is not just the problem of trials, but the problem of power generally. How does a king know whom to trust? How can he tell who is just mouthing the words of loyalty and who is really loyal? Knowing what they are expected to say, all who approach the king appear equal. They say the same things. Some, however, are only flatterers and sycophants; some would sacrifice everything for the king.²⁴ With Kent's introjection, this problem is introduced into the very midst of the trial.

THE KING’S SPEECH, THE KING’S POWER

Kent's description of himself tracks almost exactly Cordelia's description of her love for her father.²⁵ Kent says:

Royal Lear,
Whom I have ever honour'd as my King,
Lov'd as my father, as my master follow'd,
As my great patron thought on in my prayers.

(I, i, 138-41)

Cordelia had just said of her own relationship to her father: “Obey you, love you and most honour you.” Obedience, love, and honor link them both to Lear: one as child, the other as subject. The subject is like a child to his ruler; the king is father to his subjects. Nature and law are parallel and reinforcing. Of course, just as there are good and bad children, there are good and bad subjects. Not surprisingly, Lear has the same problem identifying the good subject that he has in seeing the good daughter.

Despite their common love for Lear, there is a fundamental difference between Kent and Cordelia. The private love of a daughter is not the public love of a subject. Indeed, one seems incapable of a public performance, while the other seems without a private life. Kent is the only person in the play who is wholly and completely a public person. He has no competing private domain of family. When he takes up a secret life, disguised as Caius, the life he pursues is the same public service to Lear that he has always pursued. Banished by Lear, he cannot leave him. He must remain attached to Lear, even if it means his death: “My life I never held but as a pawn / To wage against thine enemies” (154-55).

Kent is the model of the trustworthy subject. Loving only Lear, he is incapable of malevolent deceptions. At the very end of the play, when Lear dies, Kent says he must follow. He has no life apart from Lear. Kent's presence and the parallel between him and Cordelia make an important point: Love is possible within the public domain. Lear's ambition to bring love into the public order is not simply a mistake of confusing what should be private with what must be public. Indeed, at the end of the play we will see that love of the father has a critical role to play in providing support for a stable political order. Nevertheless, the tools of law—trial and judgment—are not themselves capable of discovering, creating, or managing love.

The opposition of love and power is not quite so sharp as we might expect, then, if we saw only Cordelia and Lear. It may be possible to live with love, and therefore to live wholly and completely, within the state. Kent's love for Lear fills his life. It gives all of his actions their meaning. A state constituted wholly by Kents would be entirely secure against internal revolt. It would, nevertheless, be short-lived. It would not reproduce itself.²⁶ Kent has no family. Were he to have one, his complete love for Lear would no longer be possible.

Kent speaks spontaneously and directly out of his love. This is not speech directed by power, but speech directed at power. Nevertheless, Lear perceives it not as a warning and disclosure of his own error, but as an insult to power. Kent says “Think'st thou that duty shall have dread to speak / When power to flattery bows?” (146-47). Again, the problem is not quite so easy as it appears to Kent, who believes he knows the truth and can speak plainly.

How is Lear to tell the difference between flattery and duty, between the deceptive appearance of love and love itself? Having staged the trial, Lear is no longer free to label the public proclamations of love by Goneril and Regan mere flattery and Cordelia's silence true love. Just as he cannot distinguish flattery from love, he cannot distinguish arrogance from honesty. Is Kent honest or merely arrogant? Flattery is endemic to the circumstances of those who wield power, just because false speech does not announce itself as such. Does arrogant speech similarly disguise itself as honesty?²⁷

To speak honestly to a king, one must be a “fool.” This is, indeed, the Fool's role. But if the Fool would speak honestly, he cannot speak “plainly.” Kent speaks plainly, and thus foolishly, to Lear. The result is that he is banished.

Lear cannot see Kent plainly because plain seeing is not in the nature of a king. He sees only what he can and must see. Kent pleads, “See better, Lear; and let me still remain / The true blank of thine eye” (157-58). But if Lear were to see only as Kent sees, he would no longer be king. The king holds forth a different world in which he creates what can and cannot be seen. Thus Lear says to Kent, “Out of my sight.” The king's sight is a product of his power, not the source of it. He does not simply see what is. He sees only what he allows within his domain. This is the world built by power and maintained by law.²⁸

The Fool alone is allowed to exist at the border of that realm and remind the king that there is a world on the other side. The Fool's position, however, remains a privilege granted by the king. If the Fool's spoken truths appear as mere arrogance, the privilege will be withdrawn.²⁹

Kent would be Lear's physician: “Kill thy physician, and the fee bestow / Upon the foul disease” (162-63). But is Lear ill? He is in one sense, because he is trying to use power in a way that power cannot be used. His illness is, in other words, political. This, however, is just the kind of error for which we have no physicians. There is no expert in the care of the state, as there may be in the care of the body. There cannot be, because there is no way to measure, before the fact, the difference between flattery and love, arrogance and honesty, or false appearance and truth. Watching this opening display for the first time, we cannot know who loves and who does not, who is honest and who is not. We cannot know because political power can create its own truths. Politically, the flatterer may serve the king as well as the lover does.

Lear, therefore, rejects the would-be physician, identifying precisely the problem with Kent's pretension. It is, he says, “pride” on the part of Kent to try to “come betwixt our sentence and our power” (169). For a king pronouncing judgment after a trial, what is important is that words match power, not that power match some prepolitical truth.

Indeed, truth appears to be “nothing” at all. Lear says to the recalcitrant Cordelia, “thy truth then be thy dower” (107). This statement follows upon his pronouncement that “Nothing will come of nothing.” Truth is not the coin of this realm.³⁰

In itself, truth is as nothing in the domain of power. A king cannot announce that he has not been serious about the process of law whenever he does not like the outcome.³¹ The king's truth is only that which is sustained by the power of his law. Before Lear can deal in a prepolitical truth, he must be stripped of his power. The heath, not the castle, is the domain of truth. Sight will replace speech on the heath. Lear will see more and more, until at last the power of his speech is reduced to the expression of forgiveness.

Both Cordelia and Kent appear to Lear to be acting from pride when they resist his commands. Love cannot appear other than prideful to Lear, because it claims its own completeness. Having no need of power, it can speak—or remain silent—at its own direction. To see this refusal to speak as independently valuable, rather than as an offense to power, requires seeing outside of the political. This is true even for the one who is the object of this love.

It is the arrogance of love to take no offense from the abuses of power. Love and law are complete opposites here. A king must measure the subject's words and actions. Love, as even Goneril knew, is beyond speech and indifferent to action. Thus, Cordelia and Kent are both indifferent to their mistreatment by Lear. Their love endures because it is already complete. This cannot but appear as a sin of pride to those in the grip of power.³² Accordingly, Goneril, the oldest sister, lectures Cordelia: “You have obedience scanted.” And Regan tells Cordelia “Prescribe not us our duty.” Both of them purport to know their duty. They tell Cordelia: “Let your study / Be to content your lord” (275-77). Cordelia, who has just said that when she marries, “That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry / Half my love with him, half my care and duty” (100-101), is being told that she does not know how to act as a wife—or, for that matter, as a daughter. She knows love, but not duty.³³

Goneril and Regan, the successful participants in the trial of love, view Cordelia as Lear views Kent. They believe that Cordelia has failed in a duty prescribed by political power. Both Cordelia and Kent failed to speak as power demanded. The conflict here is not between good and evil but between love and power. Love can be foolish: Gloucester's love for Edmund, for example, or, later, the sisters' competitive love for Edmund. Power can be good: Lear's reign before this trial produced a kingdom represented as a virtual Eden. (See 63-64.) The antinomies in the play are never simple, because, fundamentally, a person spans both worlds. We can abandon neither law nor love. But can we put the two together and live a single life, whole and complete? Can love inform law? The trial's effort to reach such an end fails. At its conclusion, love is banished from the kingdom.

Lear's power—the power of a king—is a power to name. At the end of a trial, the king names the guilty and the innocent. This is a power to call things not as they are in themselves, but as they will be seen within the state. Lear claims this power for himself: “Only we shall retain / The name, and all th'addition to a king” (134-35). Holding on to the name of king is a metonym for holding on to this power to name. This is what Lear refers to when he links, just a little later, “our sentence and our power.” The king's power makes real within the political order that which he names. But love is beyond the king's power to name. What cannot be named, cannot be controlled by law.

With the introduction of Cordelia's suitors—France and Burgundy—we see the full fury of this battle between a silent love and a naming power. Lear, who cannot force love to speak, claims the power of law to destroy. He tells Burgundy of Cordelia's new state: “by the power that made me, / I tell you all her wealth.” He then goes on to describe Cordelia as “a wretch whom Nature is asham'd / Almost t'acknowledge hers” (206-12). By naming her “as a stranger,” he claims the power to make nature itself ashamed of her. No longer his daughter by law, she is not to appear as his natural daughter either.

The extent of Lear's power to name and thus to make real is immediately exposed in the contrasting reactions of France and Burgundy to Cordelia's new state of “nothing.” Burgundy and France represent two kinds of love, both of which have already made an appearance in the play. For Burgundy, love is only an element within the construction of political power. He has come to Lear's court not as a private suitor but as himself a king. He has relied on Lear's representations that he will dower his daughter. Burgundy wants no more but no less “than hath your Highness offered.” This, he believes, is rightful: “Nor will you [Lear] tender less” (193-94). This is a “love” well within the power of a king to name and unname. Lear's words are the truth for him. He sees Cordelia only as Lear names her. Without dowry, she is without interest.

Lear was, of course, aware of Burgundy's intent. He introduced the trial scene with the comment that Burgundy and France, “Long in our court have made their amorous sojourn, / And here are to be answer'd” (46-47). This “amorous sojourn” is an affair of state. Marriage, from this perspective, is a linking of kingdoms that has little, or nothing, to do with the love of individuals for each other. This is love under the aegis of power: love as political duty. Offending Burgundy's expectations, Lear exposes himself politically. He, therefore, substitutes himself for Cordelia: “I would not from your love make such a stray / To match you where I hate” (208-09).

The product of such a political marriage is duty under law. This, we suspect, is the sort of marriage into which both Goneril and Regan have already entered. They see Cordelia's behavior from this perspective when they say, “You have obedience scanted.” But Cordelia seems not to understand this form of marriage as an arrangement of law and a disposition of political power. She tells her father in her speech on love that she would extend “half” her love to her husband (101). “What has love to do with marriage?” is effectively Lear's response.

Lear cannot face the fact of divided love. We can interpret this two different ways, corresponding to Lear's double nature as king and father. Cordelia's declaration creates a serious political problem for Lear as king. What will hold the kingdom together if Cordelia loves a foreign prince? Love for the father—Lear—was the principle that would bind each of the daughters—with their individual allocations—to a single unified kingdom. Cordelia's promise of love for her husband threatens to become support for a foreign contender for the throne. The marriage cannot go forward under such conditions. Again, we see here that Lear's political judgment is not clearly worse—and may be better—than Kent's.

Of course, this political reading misses the power of the psychological drama that is simultaneously presented. Lear exacts a familiar fee for approving of his daughters' marriages: They must speak only of their undivided love for him. Cordelia refuses to do this. Her insistence on stating that she will love her husband as much as her father drives Lear's rage. On this condition, he is not willing to give her away at all. By revoking the dowry, he hopes to prevent her marriage. If Lear is attempting to use love as a principle for the operation of political power, he is also attempting to use power as a way of negotiating this inevitable frustration of a father's love.

To be displaced by a husband may be a father's inevitable fate, but Lear wants it on his own terms. Marriage will be a loveless, public affair that does not reach the love of daughter for father. Cordelia sees that this is just what Goneril and Regan have declared: “Why have my sisters husbands, if they say / They love you all?” (98-99). She does not see that they have husbands in order to unite the kingdom. In their speeches on filial love, there has been no mention of their husbands, nor even of the possibility of children of their own. To Cordelia, this will not do: “Sure I shall never marry like my sisters, / To love my father all” (102-03). If so, responds Lear, you shall not marry at all. His dispossession of her is intended to have just the effect it has on Burgundy: “I am sorry, then, you have so lost a father / That you must lose a husband” (245-46). The surprise is that it does not have this same effect on France.

France is transfixed by an experience of love pure, unmixed with politics. This love finds its fulfillment in a silent Cordelia. What Cordelia is by nature—beyond Lear's power to name—France appears to become in a moment of transcendence. Like Burgundy, he too had been a king pursuing a political relationship with England. Yet he suddenly becomes wholly and completely a lover. He does not quite understand what is happening: “Gods, gods! 'tis strange that from their cold'st neglect / My love should kindle to inflam'd respect” (253-54). France is experiencing an epiphany of grace.

Grace always comes unexpectedly and literally from nowhere. It is beyond words, including those of a king. France thus finds himself using the most Christian language—the language of paradox—to describe his reaction to Cordelia, who has been stripped of all the possessions that power could bestow:

Fairest Cordelia, that art most rich, being poor;
Most choice, forsaken; and most lov'd despis'd!
Thee and thy virtues here I seize upon.

(249-51)³⁴

France experiences the conversion to a purity of love in the presence of Cordelia. His relationship to Cordelia comes as unexpectedly as that of Paul to Christ. Cordelia will be “Queen of us, of ours, and our fair France” (256). Yet, already we must wonder whether political power in France is more easily reconciled with love than has been the case in Lear's England.

Lear's anger at France's frustration of his plan is extraordinary:

Thou hast her, France; let her be thine, for we
Have no such daughter, nor shall ever see
That face of hers again; therefore be gone
Without our grace, our love, our benison.

(261-64)

With this, France really is gone. He takes Cordelia away from Lear's power to name her identity, and thus establish her value.

Lear's anger registers a twofold failure. He fails as king, because he has allowed an alliance with a foreign power that is beyond his control. He can exile Cordelia and send France away, but he cannot prevent their return at the head of an invading army. He fails as father, because the marriage of love goes forward without him. Love is simply beyond his power to control.

Remarkably, while Cordelia is unique to France, he is not unique to her. Cordelia has already announced that she will love her husband, but she seems quite indifferent to who her husband will be: Burgundy or France. She has no ill feelings toward Burgundy, whom she blesses even after he rejects her: “Peace be with Burgundy!” (246). Even her sisters, whom she has good reason to suspect, she leaves with a blessing: “Well may you prosper!” (281). Cordelia's love is ecumenical. She loves each as she should, which, in part, means that she loves all. She is daughter, sister, spouse; she loves within each relationship. She says as much to Lear. She loves “according to [her] bond, no more nor less.” Cordelia is not some natural force standing wholly outside of convention. But the source and power of her love do not come from those conventions.³⁵

Cordelia's love resists the direction that power would impart to it. Yet this resistance is not that of a revolutionary. Cordelia does not stand on her love to overthrow political power. Neither, however, is she subservient to that power. She can quietly suffer the effects of power, because she is already complete within herself. She loves not in order to fill a need but as an expression of her own fullness. When she later returns to contest the power of the state, she is no longer full and complete in her love. Participation in political power corrupts her love. By the time of her return, Lear will be the better lover. He will have completely abandoned the state and its law.

To say that the play is largely organized around the themes of love and power is not to say that love and power are viewed as essentially and necessarily in conflict. They come into conflict when the king insists on naming love. Nevertheless, the play rejects rigid dichotomies. Love, nature, truth, and the private family are loosely aligned at the play's opening, just as power, law, false appearances, and public order are loosely aligned. But from the very beginning family is also a structure of law, nature can produce deceptive appearances, and love can inhabit the public order. By the end of scene one, we have already lost the ordinary markers of conceptual order and stability.

Nature first appears in the form of Edmund—the “whoreson”—as opposed to Edgar, the son “by law.”³⁶ Gloucester poses the problem of extending law's recognition to his natural son. Lear's trial elaborates this same theme of natural equality among children. Law must recognize the natural, familial order of love. Nature is simultaneously the object and the measure of law. But, in the course of the trial, we see a reversal of this relationship. Lear's rage, as he disowns Cordelia, makes law the measure of nature.

Nature stands on the other side of law. Yet, the concept is so unstable that we do not learn whether it precedes law or follows upon it.³⁷ We cannot know whether conventional relationships and expectations are natural or unnatural. Lear's family, for example, seems the domain of a private, already-complete love. This family is to be the nurse to Lear in his old age. Yet, the family is also a political device, a line of political power and rule that is perpetual. Lear makes his grants not just to his daughters, but also to his sons-in-law and to their “issues” for all time. (See 65, 78.) Is family then natural or conventional? Is it a structure of love by nature, or a deployment of political power? Can the House of Lear encompass in a single unity both love and power, or must they always split apart?

“NATURE ART MY GODDESS”

This confusion brought about by the effort to bridge the double loci of love and law is again the theme of scene two. There, we find the House of Gloucester facing the same problems as the House of Lear. Again, a trial of a child's love for the father is planned: Edgar must be made to testify to his love for Gloucester. Now, however, the force behind the trial is not a loving Lear, but a hating Edmund. As Edmund tells us, though in the false voice of Edgar, fathers rule their children not by virtue of their own power, but because the children willingly suffer that rule. Edmund will suffer no longer. He reminds us of what we already suspect of Lear's older daughters: In their public performances at trial, they may be using Lear as much as he is using them.

Edmund left scene one promising “to study deserving.” He enters scene two reflecting on the relationship of age and legitimacy to legal inheritance. In both respects, he concludes, law is not in accord with nature: “Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law / My services are bound” (I, ii, 1-2). He is equally deserving of an inheritance from his father, because the “father's love is to the bastard Edmund / As to th'legitimate” (17-18). Gloucester acknowledged this equal love in scene one but was not about to disturb the order of law. Edmund will. Indeed, he seeks not the equality of love's natural order—as Lear proposed—but the inversion of the conventional order of law: “Now, gods, stand up for bastards!” (22).³⁸ If he would inherit nothing under the existing law, then Edgar, the son by law, shall inherit nothing under the new-made order.

Edmund's appeal to nature's law over what he calls “the plague of custom” reminds us of Lear's effort to reorder law to match his idea of the natural family. But just as law and nature were rendered ambiguous in scene one, so they are in scene two. Edmund's opening soliloquy is balanced by an ending soliloquy, in which we see an inversion of his original alignment of himself with nature. Now it is Edgar who is described as somehow natural: “a brother noble, / Whose nature is so far from doing harms / That he suspects none” (176-78). Edgar has his lands “by birth,” while Edmund must earn his by “wit.” Thus, Edgar, not Edmund, stands on a correlation of nature, birth, virtue, and property. Edmund would reorder this natural order: “All with me's meet that I can fashion fit” (181). There are, in short, no natural limits to his scheme. He stands on a correlation of wit, willfulness, and power. We cannot tell who is natural: the self-interested Edmund or the innocent Edgar.³⁹

The legal order, just like Edmund's will to power, can be seen as either natural or unnatural. By the end of the play, whatever Edgar had by nature at the beginning, he must win again by wit. Similarly, by the end of the play, Edmund comes to believe that what he took to be natural self-interest was wholly unnatural. Yet a third soliloquy of Edmund's, in between the other two of this scene, gets this just about right:

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeits of our own behaviour, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars; as if we were villains on necessity.

(115-19)

Just as we claim our fortunes to be natural—and so legitimate—we blame our misfortunes on nature. Edmund takes responsibility for himself. Whether he calls this self-creation “natural” or calls upon the gods to stand with him, there is only Edmund making himself. “I should have been that I am had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing” (128-30). Nature has nothing to do with who he is.

Edmund, therefore, cannot blame nature for what follows, anymore than Edgar can claim his inheritance by nature. Nature is not a set condition, but rather a range of possibilities. The same can be said of law. No one can simply rely on law—not a king and certainly not an eldest child. Edmund, no less than Lear, has set out to change the order of law. No one is what he or she is merely by law, even if law would make birth itself legitimate or illegitimate. Law is as changeable as nature. If law is to continue, it must be upheld through acts of will.

As the play progresses, we see that those most constant in their character—even if not in their appearance—are Cordelia and Kent. Everyone else in the play is changing.⁴⁰ Lear moves from king to a “foolish old man.” Gloucester is blinded and stripped of his position and his possessions. Edgar loses his innocence through becoming the innocent, Poor Tom. Edmund would make himself the son-by-law—the child of Cornwall—and the son-in-law—the husband of Lear's two eldest daughters. Goneril and Regan move from dutiful daughters to rulers. Albany becomes a more virtuous figure, while Cornwall becomes more vicious.

What marks Cordelia and Kent as different from the others? Each knows him or herself in and through love. Each can be true to a self that is constituted by this love. Love is indifferent to what is nature and what law. Kent had already suggested, in scene one, that we are what we love—he had identified wholly with Lear—but the larger theme may be that we are only when we love. Identity apart from love is uncertain and changeable. Neither law nor nature can overcome this instability; rather, they are the terms within which this instability appears.

Love's antithesis on the political level is power, but on the psychological level it is will. This connection of political power and psychological will links Lear to Edmund. Both stage trials; both would use trials to reorder the political domain. And, of course, Edmund will advance in political power as Lear declines.

Edmund, who is without love as the play begins, embodies pure will. Both power and will pursue self-creation: the former through the creation of law; the latter through the creation of what we might call individual character. All efforts at self-creation are bound to nature and convention. The individual will, like political power, can take as its measure either nature or convention. It can imagine some ideal of the natural self against which to measure “the plague of custom.” Conversely, it can imagine an ideal convention—law—against which to measure the natural self. Indeed, these turn out to be reversible terms, as we see in their uncertain application to Edmund and Edgar. Love locates a self beyond the possibilities of will—beyond, therefore, either nature or law.

Edmund, in scene two, shows us that he has not only studied the nature of deserving; he has studied well the manner in which deserving is displayed. In an ironic miming of the performance commanded by Lear, Edmund has created a false appearance of Edgar by drafting a letter that looks as if it were written by Edgar. Is there really much distance between words spoken on the law's command—a set speech—and words written in a letter ascribed to another? In neither case are the words “really” those of the speaker. Edmund's letter replicates the problem of false naming that we saw with respect to Goneril's and Regan's declarations. The letter is false because it purports to describe the sentiments of Edgar, when they are really those of Edmund. Gloucester, like Lear, sees only what the words show him.

What the letter shows is not just an accurate description of Edmund; it is also a subtle reference to Lear himself. Edmund has Edgar writing: “This policy and reverence of age makes the world bitter to the best of our times; keeps our fortunes from us till our oldness cannot relish them” (45-47). Or, as Edmund puts it a little later, falsely describing his brother's views: “Sons at perfect age, and fathers declin'd, the father should be as ward to the son, and the son manage his revenue” (69-71). This was just Lear's thought, when he attempted to distribute his kingdom to his children. He would not hold on to power into his old age, but would “creep toward death,” an old man who has seen his own dependence upon the young. Indeed, Edmund's line reminds us of Lear's injunction to Cornwall and Albany: “the sway, / Revenue, execution of the rest, / Beloved sons, be yours” (I, i, 135-37).

This is hardly a shocking sentiment, yet it is too much for Gloucester. He immediately turns against Edgar. No wonder Gloucester had entered on the scene stunned that the king had “prescribed his pow'r” and confined himself “to exhibition.” When he hears these views ascribed to Edgar, he breaks out: “O Villain! … Abhorred villain! Unnatural, detested, brutish villain!” (I, ii, 72-74). What or who, exactly, is “unnatural” here?

This is a complex question that arises just a few moments into the play. On the one hand, Gloucester is saying that Lear and Edgar have acted in a most unnatural manner. He compares their actions with “eclipses in the sun and moon,” and warns of continuing disturbances (100). On the other hand, can Gloucester claim his own actions are based on a natural order? He began the play by affirming his equal love for his two sons, yet he is incapable of acting on that natural love in the face of a contrary convention. What appears natural to him—and so also what appears unnatural—is really only convention. Gloucester's perception of the king's unnaturalness is only his view of Lear's violation of the existing legal order.

Edmund knows his father well. He paints for him a picture of Edgar's “unnaturalness” by showing him a violation of convention. The whole thrust of this scene is to question what is natural. Edmund ascribes what he takes to be natural inclinations to Edgar—indeed they are his own inclinations and Nature is his goddess—knowing that his father will view the expression of such views as wholly unnatural.

The perverse image of scene one that Edmund creates is continued in his suggestion to his father of how to resolve the question of what Edgar really is. Edmund tells Gloucester that he must “suspend [his] indignation” until he can “derive from him [Edgar] better testimony of his intent” (77-79). Just as Lear sought oral testimony as proof of his children's love, so will Gloucester. Edmund makes this connection explicit when he refers to his father as a judge: “If your honour judge it meet, I will place you where you shall hear us confer of this” (87-88). Gloucester, who comes into the scene amazed at what Lear has done in the trial of his daughters' love, is manipulated into conducting a trial of his own son.⁴¹ Gloucester, like Lear, must have “auricular assurance” of his child's love. He too will be unable to distinguish true from false appearances at a trial. At both trials, the speech perceived reflects not a prepolitical nature—love—but only the power that can demand the speech.

Edmund manipulates his father into a trial by appealing to Gloucester's sense that honor must control emotion: “If you violently proceed against him, mistaking his purpose, it would make a great gap in your own honour, and shake in pieces the heart of his obedience” (79-83). Edmund is reminding Gloucester not of his private love for Edgar, but of his public position. Honor is the sentiment of conventionality; it supports the structure of law. Accepting Edmund's plan, Gloucester can now describe himself as Edgar's “father, that so tenderly and entirely loves him” (93-94). Having just seen Gloucester's easy rage, we have reason to doubt this. He follows with, “I would unstate myself to be in a due resolution”—an entirely false statement. When he thought he was threatened with being unstated, he was ready to act violently toward Edgar. Only now that he has been cast in the reassuring and entirely conventional role of judge can he give expression to his love.

This is the same Gloucester that we saw in the play's opening. There, he affirmed his love for Edmund, while simultaneously following the convention of sending him away. We are reminded of France's prophetic statement to Burgundy: “Love's not love / When it is mingled with regards that stand / Aloof from th' entire point” (I, i, 237-39). There is something shallow in Gloucester's love for his two sons. He says he loves Edmund, but he will not overcome conventional disapproval of him. He says he loves Edgar, but he is quick to turn on him.

Gloucester's love for both his sons is bound by convention. The unsettled relationship between law and nature makes him insecure in his position. Because he knows that there is something true about the views ascribed to Edgar in the counterfeit letter—and secretly acted on by Edmund—he fears his position is insecure even with respect to the son who stands to inherit under law. And because he knows he has failed the “natural” son, Edmund, he knows he is vulnerable there as well.

Again we see here a confusion of nature and law. Is it natural, or merely conventional, that fathers rule until their death? Gloucester thinks that what Lear has done is most unnatural. But Edmund's letter speaks instead of the very unnaturalness of this rule by the aged. Such a regime is not natural, but rather an “idle and fond bondage” sustained only by a willingness to suffer. Rule by the aged, then, is only a matter of law, not nature. Does law sustain the natural authority of age or undermine the natural power of the stronger?

To overthrow Edgar, Edmund will have to overthrow Gloucester as well, because Gloucester's power reflects the same mix of convention and nature as Edgar's privilege. If it is natural for the eldest son to inherit, it is natural for the father to rule. If it is only a convention that the eldest and the legitimate inherit, then it is only a convention that the father rules. Edmund intends to rewrite the familial relationship as a structure of law, by bringing to it a different—but no less unstable—sense of what is natural. Rule by the weak and old will now appear unnatural.

How does Edgar appear in all of this? He is a mere innocent, who will nevertheless inherit his father's position. He is well-meaning but not particularly deserving. Edmund describes Edgar's initial entrance as “like the catastrophe of the old comedy” (I, ii, 131-32). Edgar falls right into the role required in the play/trial that Edmund is directing. Edmund, always a fine judge of human character, aptly describes his brother as one “on whose foolish honesty / My practices ride easy!” (178-79).

Law and nature are bound together in Edmund and Edgar. The play opens with Edgar standing within law and Edmund within nature, but they quickly change places. Exiled, Edgar will have nothing but nature on which to rely. As Tom, he will appear virtually naked. He will reconstruct himself by passing through a complete absence of any value at law. Edmund will step into the place of Edgar—and even of Gloucester—in the new order of law that emerges under the reign of Goneril and Regan.

The two Eds can switch places, but neither is any more deserving in himself than the other. Law and nature are competitive standards for judgment. Each brother appeals to these standards to judge the other. We have no easy way of judging between them. Theirs is a fight that has no proper answer. They can circle around each other until the end of time. The gods will always “stand up for bastards,” but then again they will not. Neither can rely on half of the equation alone—nature or law. What is natural for one is merely conventional for the other and vice versa.

If we ask what we are to feel toward these characters at this point, Gloucester may appear the lowest in our estimation. Edmund, after all, is responding to law's injustice by appealing to a natural order. He wants what has so far been unfairly given only to Edgar. Gloucester merely speaks of love without the ability to act on it. He would not legally disable Edgar for the sake of Edmund; he turns too quickly on Edgar. Gloucester is the most conventional, and thus unnatural, of men. He has had to acknowledge Edmund: “I have so often blush'd to acknowledge him, that now I am braz'd to't” (I, i, 8-10). At heart, however, he remains caught by the question he asks Kent in the opening scene: “Do you smell a fault?” Gloucester smells that fault about himself and is ashamed.

Gloucester is concerned only with appearances. This is why he focuses from the beginning on shame, an emotion determined by our sense of how we appear to others. To overcome appearances, he will have to be blinded. Lear is not concerned with ordinary conventions. He is already at battle with those conventions when he announces his ambition to reconstruct the legal order. He believes he has a rational plan to reorder law in a way that simultaneously secures political stability and familial love. He reasons about the need to avoid future strife, the need to transfer power to the young, and the need to tend to his own approaching death. If Gloucester must go blind, then Lear must go blind, then Lear must go mad.

Notes

1. On the tension between love and power in Renaissance ideas of king and father see the discussion of “nursing fathers” in Debora K. Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 218-49.

2. Lear himself proposes a different resolution of this conflict in the scales of love and law. He says he will divide the kingdom equally among the daughters, but still would give the most “opulent” third to his favorite, Cordelia. Difference within equality is a mystery of love well known within the family.

3. Property, in the context of the play, includes Gloucester's title of duke. Edmund will later obtain that title over both his father and brother. See III, v, 16.

4. Sacrifice is discussed in detail in chapter 8.

5. The classic work on this conception of the sovereign is Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957).

6. See Francis Barker, The Culture of Violence: Essays on Tragedy and History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993), 3-7 (discussing the play's representation of land and the map).

7. Harry Jaffa argues that conflict itself is to provide the principle of unity, in a sort of medieval anticipation of the modern balance of powers doctrine. Harry V. Jaffa, “The Limits of Politics: King Lear, Act I, Scene i,” in Allan Bloom, Shakespeare's Politics (New York: Basic, 1964), 113, 121-27. Given the failures of the division—unleashing civil war and invasion—this claim seems rather anachronistic.

8. We do not know if this was an original part of his plan or an abrupt change brought about by Cordelia's failure at the trial of love.

9. See Stephen S. Booth, King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition, and Tragedy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 48-49 (Booth labels the audience's expectations of consequences of division as “the domino theory of Elizabethan politics”); and Irving Ribner, “The Gods are Just: A Reading of King Lear,” Tulane Drama Review 2 (1958): 34, 36 (“Lear's division of his kingdom and resignation of his throne would have been regarded by a Jacobean audience with a horror. … for these acts constituted a violation of the king's responsibility to God”). On primogeniture generally in seventeenth-century England see Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Political Works, ed. Peter Laslet (New York: Garland, 1984), 21-27; Ralph Houlbrooke, The English Family, 1450-1700 (New York: Longman, 1984), 234-38.

10. Lear has no spouse. His love is directed wholly toward his children and thus wholly within the temporal, intergenerational dimension of the family. In The True Chronicle History of King Leir and His Three Daughters (c. 1594), Shakespeare's main source for the story, Lear's “wife has died just before the play begins, and he is thinking about resigning his kingdom to his daughters so that he can prepare his own soul for death.” Edgar Schell, Strangers and Pilgrims: From The Castle of Perseverance to King Lear (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 151.

11. On the conflict between the legal rights of the eldest child and the father's love of younger sons generally see Houlbrooke, The English Family, 180.

12. See Stephen Greenblatt, “The Cultivation of Anxiety: King Lear and His Heirs,” Raritan 2, no. 1 (1982): 92, 113. (“There can be no division for Lear between authority and love. But as the play's tragic logic reveals, Lear cannot have both the public deference and the inward love of his children.”)

13. The Fool can see the first form of madness, but not the second. When Lear moves to the second form of madness on the fields of Dover, he will be all alone—no longer accompanied by even the Fool.

14. I disagree with Stanley Cavell's reading of Lear's opening scene in his essay, “The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear,” in Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 267-353. Cavell believes the play to be about shame and the impossibility Lear feels of showing his love. This is to make of Lear merely a man. It is to pursue psychology. To understand a king, we must turn from psychology to political psychology—a move Cavell specifically declines to take. See ibid., 295. The play's opening scene is better understood to be about what law can hear, and, having heard, what it can do. Lear begins by wanting to hear more than he can as king. When the trial fails, he must choose between himself as king and himself as loving father. A similar psychological interpretation of the opening is offered in S. L. Goldberg, An Essay on King Lear (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 7-33. He too sees Lear and Cordelia as struggling with a problem of acknowledging their own relationship to their natural love.

15. See Fritz Kern, Kingship and Law in the Middle Ages, trans. S. B. Chrimes (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1939).

16. The centrality of trials in the play was noted forty years ago in a short essay by Dorothy Hockey, “The Trial Pattern in King Lear,” Shakespeare Quarterly 10, no. 3 (Summer 1959): 389. (“The action pattern [of the play] is that of a trial, suggesting justice, and the quality being weighed is love.”) Despite her suggestion, the connection of law and love in the play has not been the focus of subsequent study. Moelwyn Merchant, in an interesting essay on “the Jacobean dramatist's preoccupation with legal matters,” notes that “the structure of the third and fourth acts [of King Lear] depend[s], to a degree insufficiently recognized, on the formal pattern of trial in a court of justice.” “Lawyer and Actor: Process of Law in Elizabethan Drama,” in English Studies Today: Third Series; Lectures and Papers Read at the Fifth Conference of the International Association of Professors of English Held at Edinburgh and Glasgow August 1962, ed. G. I. Duthie (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1962), 107, 121.

17. See Owen Fiss, “The Supreme Court, 1978 Term—Foreword: The Forms of Justice,” Harvard Law Review 93 (1979): 1.

18. On the “material power” of a king's speech see Terry Eagleton, William Shakespeare (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 8-9.

19. Of course, it is not literally impossible for Lear to reject the trial process in midstream. That claim would be nonsense in the context of a work of fiction. Rather, we can understand how a public figure can find himself “bound” in Lear's situation.

20. That he knew this prelegal truth is given visible representation in the map, upon which he had already marked the divisions of the kingdom before the trial began.

21. For a modern inquiry into this theme see Milner S. Ball, The Promise of American Law: A Theological, Humanistic View of Legal Process (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981), 42-68.

22. There is here an intimation of one of the most vivid metaphors from late in the play, when Lear and Cordelia have lost everything but love. Lear proclaims then that they will be “God's spies” in their prison cell. This is a vision beyond eyesight, no longer bound to the appearances that power commands. The image of the self as God's spy stands in direct contrast to Lear's mad proclamation to Gloucester that all life is performance on a stage. To become only audience and not an actor requires abandoning all action and reaching a pure love in which all is simultaneously seen and forgiven.

23. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979), 59-65.

24. See Jaffa, “Limits of Politics,” 131.

25. What was inadequate as a description of a daughter's love is more than adequate as a description of the subject's love. The issue at trial was Cordeli's “natural” love for Lear. Kent's love, on the other hand, is wholly within the political space. To say “I love you as a father” is one thing for a daughter and quite another for a subject.

26. Kent is as close a dramatic figure as we can imagine to Plato's guardian class. See The Republic, Books 2-3. Guardians are completely denied a private life, but are infused with a public love of the state. Plato's state falls apart when the guardians are allowed to have families.

27. See Cornwall's reproach of Kent: II, ii, 92-101.

28. See Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, 2d ed. (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), 197. (“King Lear is, above all, a play about power, property and inheritance. … Human values are not antecedent to these material realities but are, on the contrary, informed by them.”)

29. Goneril will banish the Fool along with Lear, describing him as “more knave than fool” (I, iv, 313).

30. See IV, iv, on king's coinage, discussed in chapter 8.

31. In Sophocles' Oedipus the King, having announced his judgment on the unknown killer of King Laius, Oedipus is bound to the judgment, even when it turns out that he is himself the object of punishment.

32. Consider the appearance of Christian martyrs who would not yield to Roman power. See Elaine H. Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House, 1979), 78-89; Peter Robert Lamont Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).

33. Cordelia and Edmund are reverse images of each other here. Edmund's last line had been, “I shall study deserving.” Both have been placed outside of law's domain by their identification with the natural family. Both have confused love and desert: Cordelia as lover, Edmund as the object of love. Both need to study deserving “by order of law.” Neither is a rightful heir by law. The problems begin in each case with their father' desire to violate that order by making them equal heirs.

34. His next line shows him still within the domain of law to some degree: “Be it lawful I take up what's cast away” (I, i, 252). The Arden edition cites Richard Noble, Shakespeare's Biblical Knowledge and Use of the Book of Common Prayer (New York: Octagon, 1970), comparing these lines to 2 Corinthians 6:10. See also Rosalie L. Colie, “The Energies of Endurance: Biblical Echo in King Lear,” in Some Facets of King Lear: Essays in Prismatic Criticism, ed. Rosalie L. Colie and F. T. Flahiff (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), 117, 125.

35. As many have noted, there is a Christlike character to this love. See Robert G. Hunter, Shakespeare and the Mystery of God's Judgments (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1976), 185; John Cunningham, “King Lear, the Storm, and the Liturgy” (1984), in Shakespeare's Christian Dimension: An Anthology of Commentary, ed. Roy Battenhouse (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 463-69; Harry Morris, Last Things in Shakespeare (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1985), 147-62. See also John D. Cox, Shakespeare and the Dramaturgy of Power (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), on Christian realism in the plays. On Cordelia's character combining love and duty see John F. Danby, Shakespeare's Doctrine of Nature: A Study of King Lear (London: Faber and Faber, 1949), 126-33.

36. See Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, 200 (“nature is represented as socially disruptive, yet … as the source of social stability”); Robert Speaight, Nature in Shakespearian Tragedy (London: Hollis & Carter, 1955), 95-97; Danby, Shakespeare's Doctrine of Nature, 44-46; Robert B. Heilman, “The Two Natures in King Lear,” Accent (Autumn 1947): 51.

37. See Eagleton, William Shakespeare, 90 (“Shakespeare deconstructs this binary opposition [of nature and culture], showing how each term inheres in the others”).

38. Compare Lear's later invocation of the gods, “If you do love old men” (II, iv, 188).

39. The classic analysis of nature in King Lear is that Danby, Shakespeare's Doctrine of Nature, arguing that the play juxtaposes a newly emerging conception of a mechanical nature against the classical and medieval conception of nature as a normative order that includes man. No doubt these conceptions are at work in the play, but I view nature as a far more fluid and ambiguous concept than is represented in Danby's somewhat rigid structure.

40. Too often the characters of the play are seen as mere markers of character types, e.g., good or evil children. See, e.g., Maynard Mack, King Lear in Our Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), 70. (“The characters are pure states of being, unmixedly good and bad.”) It is true that the play focuses little attention on the internal sources of character development, compared, for example, with the soul's struggle in Hamlet. See ibid., 91-93. Change in King Lear comes about from the effects of the circumstances of power upon the individual.

41. The parody here is almost comic; it is surely pathetic. See G. Wilson Knight, “King Lear and the Comedy of the Grotesque,” in The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearian Tragedy with Three New Essays (London: Methuen, 1949), 160-76.