SOURCE: “Entitled to be King: The Subversion of the Subject in King Lear,” in Literature and Psychology, Vol. 42, Nos. 1-2, 1996, pp. 100-12.

[In the essay below, originally published in 1994, Van Pelt applies the theories of Jacques Lacan to King Lear.]

Lacan, like Freud before him, continually finds in Shakespeare those revelations which invigorate theory. In this spirit, then, the following study explores not only what the Lacanian idea of the dynamics of desire can tell us about Shakespeare's King Lear, but also what Shakespeare can tell us about the theory of signification. King Lear invites the theoretical reading of kingship as signification because Lear's dynamics of mad desire and prodigious suffering derive from the discovery that his own kingly signifier signifies nothing. As a drama of signification, Lear implicates all its characters in the construction of the madness that the foolish, fond old king enacts.

No one, not even the fool, is innocent of language; no one, not even the king, escapes the effects of language in the construction of desire. ‘Desire’ states Freud's idea of the ‘wish’ more forcefully, for the German Wunsch like the English ‘wish’ connotes “individual, isolated acts of wishing” (Sheridan viii). Lacan's term désir “has the much stronger implication of a continuous force. It is this implication that Lacan has elaborated and placed at the centre of his psychoanalytic theory” (viii). Thus, though biological needs come and go, amenable to satisfaction, desire—because it is constructed by language—is implacable, “excentric and insatiable” (viii).

Lear's impossible, insatiable desire to “retain / the name, and all th' addition to a king” while dividing “the sway, revenue, execution of the rest” between Albany and Cornwall (1.1.135-7) separates the name of King from the power of kingship, separates the signifying “addition,” glossed as “honors and prerogatives” (1257), from the imposition of the law and separates the nom (the signifier which encodes the law) from the non (the phallic prohibition which enforces the law). To the horror of his court, Lear performs linguistic self-castration. When Lear gives up the phallus, he reveals to everyone the gap between the chain of signification and the chain of drive on which castration locates itself in the unconscious. This gap, once sutured by Lear's kingship, now yawns wide with the loss of the king as a phallic referent.

Lear's division between the name and the source of its power is, like Lear's parting of his coronet, metaphorically innocuous but literally destructive. To make of the circular crown two pieces is to make a nothing into nothing—the very blunder against which Lear has counseled Cordelia:

Lear.
What can you say to draw
A third more opulent than your sisters'? Speak.
Cor.
Nothing, my lord.
Lear.
Nothing?
Cor.
Nothing.
Lear.
Nothing will come of nothing, speak again.

(1.1.85-90)

Though both Lear and Cordelia err in their understanding of the power of language, they err in opposite directions—he by attributing to the signifier a power it does not have, she by resisting the very real power of making words. “From her voiced ‘Nothing’ to her mute voice as ‘an excellent thing,’ Cordelia's discourse traces a circle of absent presence. She is the queen of silence, reciprocating Lear's tragic stature as the king—‘every inch’—of nothing” (Willbern 247). Consequently, as daughter/subject of a king, Cordelia is as much the incarnation of Absence as Lear is of Presence. Throughout the play, these absolutes persist, signifying the nothing and the king, the castration and the phallus. Lear's demand to signify confronts Cordelia's reciprocal demand for truth as reference. Their mutually negating desires clash powerfully, violently, lacerating the familial bond between them and constructing Lear's madness as a profound resistance to the discovery that he is empty of significance.

THE LINGUISTIC PARADOX OF KINGSHIP

Though Lacan speaks of Hamlet's tragedy, he might equally well be speaking of Lear's when he indicates that “there is a level in the subject on which it can be said that his fate is expressed in terms of a pure signifier, a level at which he is merely the reverse-side of a message that is not even his own” (“Desire” 12). “They told me I was / everything” (4.6.104-5) Lear will rage when he confronts the tragic realization that he does not—can not—construct his own kingship, but the opening scenes of the play, by contrast, explicitly demonstrate that Lear does not know this. When Lear says “by the marks of sovereignty, / Knowledge, and reason, I should be false persuaded / I had daughters (1.4.231-34), he indicates that the marks of sovereignty even before knowledge or reason have the power to signify, to persuade.

Kingship is, indeed, on the order of common sense for Lear. From Lear's position, his kingship, provides the illusion of perfect presence, and self-presence constitutes Lear's méconnaissance, his “failure to recognize, [his] misconstruction.”¹ Lear's presence, his misconstruction, springs from a crucial inversion: the permanence of Lear's desire for honor transfers itself to his intermittent ego; thus, the illusory kingly ego, rather than the desire, appears permanent. Conversely, desire now seems intermittent, the mirroring reversal of the ineffable kingship. Since Lear's desire rather than his self-designation appears to come and go, the king gains and loses according to external acknowledgments or frustrations of his majesty; insulted by Cordelia, he will turn for satisfaction to Goneril and Regan.

Moreover, Lear's ‘addition’—his honor and prerogative—is a desire acceptable to both him and his loyal subjects. As Juliet Flower MacCannell writes of monarchy, “a real hierarchy at least allows universal participation for all those whose lives it organizes, and also … allows for the potential of any of its participants to rise or fall within it” (921). Consequently, the cast of characters surrounding Lear enact the fiction of kingship as reference because this referential kingship conceals desire's true nature as a gap in each of them, a yawning chasm of impossibility. Lear, his friends, his family, his foes—all believe themselves sufficiently complete and capable of getting from others what they demand. Hence, the countless specific satisfactions that kingship supports as attainable.

Lear alone, however, comes by his méconnaissance legitimately. He alone experiences the unity of the phallic signifier ‘king’ with his person. Through the linguistic paradox of kingship, Lear knows no difference; the king is subject only to himself—fusing the registers into a whole where symbolic, imaginary, and real seem one. This unity provides a referential world of power for Lear and truth for Cordelia; hence, it is a world which both resist losing.

Tragically, the ultimate unity of subjectivity with law that kingship designates robs King Lear of himself even as it names him. Even the king cannot be the phallus, and the phallus is, as Lacan points out, “our term for the signifier of his alienation in signification” (“Desire” 28). Accordingly, Lear's relationship to his own kingship alienates him from his life, and it is to get back a sense of liveliness, a jouissance, that he attempts to unbind himself from rule—from the exercise of the phallus. But the alienating phallus—the phallus which distances him from the daughter he most loves (but cannot have) cannot be got rid of while Lear still bears the signifier ‘king.’ The alienation he attempts to bridge through self-castration drives Lear to make special demands on the others who become renewed objects of desire—his daughters. Lear's error is not that he goes too far in abandoning the phallus, but that he does not go far enough in abdicating his demand to signify.

The paradox of kingship's signification and its particular meaning for Lear also arises from the relationship of desire to the Law. Relevant here is Lacan's translation of Freud's family drama into the venue of language and the crucial re-situation of roles and terms this translation provides. A Legislator—a subject who claims to lay down the law in order to close the gap opened by desire—must be an impostor even though, “there is nothing false about the Law itself, or about him who assumes its authority” (“Subversion” 311). Though the cultural codes deployed from a vast variety of impostor positions and those ‘legislators’ who would deploy them are fictional constructs, they still define positions of agency from which very real authority may be exercised. So it is in Lear—with one exception. In the monarch, as in no other, the legislator and the Law merge in a vision of perfect referentiality.

Kingship in Lear's case is even more complex because the king is also a father, because the role of authority belongs to the Father, and because the Father's authority is sustained by a “privileged mode of presence” (“Subversion” 311) beyond the subject. Hence, King Lear, so long as he is king, provides—in addition to perfect reference—absolute presence. Is it any wonder, then, that Lear's sense of omnipotence is infantile and unbounded? Is it any wonder, as well, that Cordelia sees in perfect reference and absolute presence a place for absolute, unproblematic truth?

CORDELIA'S DEMAND

Cordelia's nothing, her refusal to speak anything that is not truth, betrays her naive insistence on a reference that cannot be and on a discourse which does not fictionalize. Language itself denies the merger of heart and speech which she cannot generate any more than can her sisters. Any speech that presents itself as truth is doubly distant—nothing and nothing—Lacan points out, for it arises out of pretense (the theater of life) dislocated via the other (the witness or audience). To be capable of truth one must be capable of lying, thus “it is from somewhere other than the Reality that it concerns that Truth derives its guarantee: it is from Speech” (“Subversion” 305-6). To resist speech in lieu of some idealized whole of heart and mouth is thus to make a nothing of Truth. Cordelia's nothing is the vehicle through which she demands to limit speech's power, and to deny Truth's construction.

Signification and action—speech and law—will separate for Cordelia no more easily nor harmlessly than for Lear. She demands that Lear operate in the theater of action, in the space of the law he most wants to abdicate. Consequently, Cordelia's speechlessness forces Lear into the realm of action, into law and banishment. Lear's command is the familial Other by which Cordelia is empowered as daughter and subject: “In the normal form … of the Oedipal situation … the Father … is the expected source of the sanction from the locus of the Other, the truth about truth” (“Desire” 44). So long as Lear continues to rule, he supports Cordelia in a referentially unified world in which word and deed mesh unproblematically—a world in which truth is, quite simply, truth. Cordelia commits what Lacan sees as the essentialist error implied by “the deceptive accentuation of the transparency of the I in action at the expense of the opacity of the signifier that determines the I” (“Subversion” 307). She locates truth in action in resistance to the power of speech.

The issue of Cordelia's speech—of Cordelia's nothing—is made even more complicated by the fact that she waxes thoroughly articulate in her own defense. Here, Cordelia explicitly situates the family disagreement at the level of action, making it clear that she has not transgressed the paternal non in any way. Thus, she begs Lear to affirm that she has not actually done anything to lose his favor:

It is no vicious blot, murther, or foulness,
No unchaste action, or dishonored step,
That hath deprived me of your grace and favor,
But even for want of that for which I am richer—
A still-soliciting eye, and such a tongue
That I am glad I have not, though not to have it
Hath lost me in your liking.

(1.1. 227-33)

For Cordelia, actions speak louder than words. Speech, conversely, is just an object, something people have. What Cordelia does not understand is that, “the Father must be the author of the law, yet he cannot vouch for it any more than anyone else can, because he, too, must submit to the bar, which makes him, insofar as he is the real father, a castrated father” (“Desire” 44). Lear can not give to Cordelia the untroubled referential world of perfect truth any more than she can heave her heart into her mouth. His action is no less problematic than her speech. And so he really fails her—as he must—because the Father is, after all, only a father and the King only a king, truths Lear's madness will unveil.

Signification resisted and desire denied, nothing comes of nothing with inexorable destruction. This deeper, violent, castrating nothing in Cordelia's defense—the nothing to which Lear seems so pathetically vulnerable—also has a place in Cordelia's deepest reality. It is absence, the deferral, the delayed arrival of the wished for unions—familial and marital and symbolic—that Cordelia's imagery so well depicts. David Willbern concludes that, “through its imagery of licentiousness denied and organs deprived, the language of Cordelia's defense alludes to the hidden genital significance of her ‘Nothing’” (246). As a symbol of Lear's own castration, Cordelia signifies, at the level of desire, Lear's self-castrating self-division. Therefore she must be repressed. If her legal penalty is the loss of her dowry and banishment from Lear's kingdom, her linguistic penalty is that she loses the name of daughter, for as Lear royally notes, “We / have no such daughter, nor shall ever see / That face of hers again” (1.1.263-4). Absent from both the symbolic and imaginary realms of Lear's construction, she must absent herself from the real as well, must “be gone” in every register—Lear's repression of Cordelia's nothing is total.

King Lear's “nothing will come of nothing” negates Cordelia's negation, delaying the recognition of his own self-castration through his erasure of Cordelia from his kingdom of signification. To concentrate his anger against Cordelia's nothing is to locate that nothing within her and to prolong the linguistic name game of his kingship. Consequently, Lear's repression signified by Cordelia's banishment is mirrored by Cordelia's inability to recover what Lear lacks—the nothing cuts both ways. The cruelty of this mutual mutilation will not become completely clear until the play's opening is mirrored in its conclusion—until Lear and Cordelia are restored to each other in their final double gesture of mutual destruction.

THE STAND-IN

The drama unfolds itself as a series of confrontations between the man who would be King Lear and those who either affirm or deny his titular significance. More deeply, the subject Lear attempts to affirm a phallic potency against the onslaught of the nothing shown in those mirroring others who replace the absent Cordelia. Foremost among those others is the Fool, the stand-in for the repressed Cordelia whose nothing he takes up in all its forms. Thus it is with the Fool that Lear replays the nothing of nothing speech:

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

(1.4.131-3)

As the Fool continues to enunciate Cordelia's nothing, he makes its bloody, bawdy latent meanings clear, meanings that constantly point to the nothing his ‘nuncle’ now signifies for the Fool.

Inexorably, the Fool's nothing undercuts Lear's speaking game, reaching beneath the level of the chain of signification to the chain of desire itself, where—as the voice of the repressed—it decrees a gap in the real, pointing out that nothing is “really” there. The lack is not merely symbolic, for as Willbern notes, “Shakespeare's overdetermined language typically includes bawdy meanings, and there is a specific, though latent, bodily sense of Cordelia's ‘nothing’—as no thing” (245); this is the sense the Fool so blatantly invokes. Over and over, the Fool enunciates Lear's castrated status.“Thou hast par'd thy wit o' both sides, and left / nothing i' th' middle” (1.4.187-8), he observes, and follows almost immediately with “now thou art an O / without a figure” and, yet again, “thou art nothing” (1.192-3;1.194). Ironically, all the nothings that the Fool and Lear exchange, amount to nothing. Lear succeeds in enforcing the theory he deploys—nothing is made of nothing, and even though Lear rants to Goneril, the detested kite, of her power to shake his manhood, he is unable to hear himself name the site of the damage.

Why doesn't the Fool's persistent nothing have some therapeutic value for the tormented king? The Lacanian dynamics of Lear's position seem convincing. If the unconscious is the discourse of the Other, and the discourse of the Other is nothing, then the cruel hoax the other's discourse perpetuates is the illusion of presence—the negation (nothing) of nothing (the unconscious awareness of the castration). Consequently, the Fool as Cordelia's stand-in who delights to remind the King of his nothing unwittingly draws out Lear's double-blind impotence by reinstating Lear's status as a referent.

As the ensuing acts display the castration Lear's nominal kingship so imperfectly conceals, Lear fights back the realization of his feminization. Though he can generalize regally, “we are not ourselves” (2.4.107), Lear exclaims “O me, my heart! my rising heart! But down!” (1.121) to the unwanted feminizing forces within him. The feminine so persistently threatening to Lear is immediately masculinized by the Fool's phallic jibes and cries of “Down, wanton, down!” (ll. 123-5) which translate Lear's heart into a bawdier organ. Preferring madness to feminization with its attendant acknowledgment of castration, Lear disintegrates himself as referent.

Fantasies irrupt into Lear's speech—fantasies “hooked up on the circuit of [Lear's] unconscious” (“Desire 14) which is not the same as the circuit commanded by the signifier ‘king’; the latter is the locus of demand, the former of perverse wishes. It is just such perverse images that haunt Lear's mad scenes, scenes in which demand becomes an infantile, omnipotent command of the very elements of nature. Once his imagistic, orgiastic rant filled with the pounding masculine magnificence of “oak-cleaving thunderbolts” (3.2.5) is spent, Lear becomes, before the wet, raging storm, a “slave, / a poor, infirm, weak, and despis'd old man” (ll. 19-20). In an apostrophe, Lear diagnoses his psychological condition: “Tremble thou wretch / that hast within thee undivulged crimes / unwhipt of Justice!” (ll. 51-3) and follows immediately with specific images of castration: “Hide thee, thou bloody hand; / thou perjur'd, and thou simular of virtue / that art incestuous!” (ll. 53-4).² Still, Lear cannot own his condition: “I am a man / More sinn'd against than sinning” (ll. 59-60) he concludes.

At the peak of his madness, aswim in a chaos of images and shattered elements of his former rule, Lear comes to the secret of the Other: “They are not men o' their words” (4.6.104)—but neither is he the man of their words: “they told me I was / every thing” (l. 105) he mourns. This realization unleashes the contents his unconscious; images of the vile, repugnant thing named woman erupt from Lear in a torrent of accusation culminating in a disgust so deep it can only be expressed in sounds. Thus Lear, every inch a king, finally descends into the very memory of birth, of coming crying hither, of coming to the world made false by the necessity to act one's part with borrowed lines. Enraged, his response is archetypal and murderous “kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill!” (l. 187). His rage thus depleted, Lear can die restored, can end it “bravely, like a smug bridegroom” (l. 198) knowing that, though subjectively decentered and no longer the absolute referent, he is yet a king (l. 199). It is in this state that Cordelia and the doctor find him.

THE REPRESSED RETURNS—WITH A VENGEANCE

The stage directions suggest that Cordelia's return is appropriately military; she enters “with drum and colors.” She has already seen the mad Lear, crowned with flowers, but trusts in the doctor's assurances that herbal “simples” (4.4.15) and rest, the “foster-nurse of nature” (l.12) will restore him.

In an apostrophe to the clearly symbolic Father, she announces her intentions:

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.

(4.4.23-28)

Bent upon restoring her father's dignity, not simply his sanity, Cordelia frames restoration in terms of arms wielded in the defense of Lear's right. Thus the vengeance Lacan observes in the action of Hamlet plays—through Cordelia—a similar function in Lear: “lead[ing] us to ask questions about retribution and punishment, i.e., about what is involved in the signifier phallus in castration” (“Desire” 44). Thus guilt must be assigned, and punishment meted out—damages must be paid, and restoration compensate lack.

The restoration of Cordelia to Lear in the final scene of the fourth act is the moment when interpretations stressing Lear's fantasy of the care of Cordelia's kind nursery seem fully realized. However, Cordelia's language clearly expresses her attachment to the Law embodied in Lear, and the kiss she gives him is to repair the “violent harms” that her sisters have made in Lear's “reverence.” Cordelia's military metaphors stress that she remains as bent upon action as ever:

Was this a face
To be oppos'd against the [warring] winds?
[To stand against the deep dread-bolted thunder?
In the most terrible and nimble stroke
Of quick cross lightening? to watch—poor perdu!—
With this thin helm?]

(4.7.30-36)

Cordelia turns Lear's impotent confrontation with the elements—the moment in which he comes to realize his own powerlessness—into a battle scenario; utterly helpless, Lear still seems armed by her discourse.

Once Lear is able to affirm his manhood, “(as I am a man) I think this lady / to be my child Cordelia” (4.7.68-9), Cordelia adopts her role as daughter “And so I am” (l.69) and at this moment (each agreeing to be the linguistic construction of the other's desires) both seal their fates. Both insure the double negations to follow—for Lear can no more be the king of action, leading the forces Cordelia has provided, than Cordelia can be his mother. Only the Doctor, from his therapeutic distance, recognizes in the enormous tenuousness of the moment that “it is danger / To make him even o'er the time he has lost” (4.7.78-79).

Thus, the real tragedy in Lear may well be that at the moment of intervention, nothing happens. In response to the doctor's admonitions, those who enable Lear are unable to support the dismantling that has taken place through his privation and his madness. Resistant to the instability of the moment, they rush to put back in place the original condition—making the final act an inversion of the first, acting out their speech in the cut, the void, the wound of Lear's original demand.

What we see of the actual battle is (appropriately, since it manifests Cordelia's trust in the truth of action over speech) a dumb show. The stage directions suggest, “Enter, with Drum and Colors, [the Powers of France] over the stage, Cordelia [with her Father in her hand,] and exeunt” (5.2.sd).³ Cordelia's brief reconstitution of her father's martial agency has tragic consequences: “King Lear hath lost, he and his daughter ta'en,” (5.2.6) Edgar reports to the blind Gloucester as the troops retreat.

Following a brief penultimate scene depicting the failure of Cordelia's desire to place Lear in the theater of action, the consequences rapidly emerge. Together again, father and daughter reinstate the original paradox of kingship—the fusion of law as regulation of desire with desire that is complex and double: kin(g)ship. This linguistic duplicity contaminates the regressive stop time fantasy of Lear and Cordelia “two alone” singing and telling tales, blessing and forgiving, in womb-like resistance to an outside world where mutability rules with its winners and losers, its ins and outs, its ebbs and flows. “Have I caught thee?” (5.3.21) Lear asks ingenuously and to her tears of response he offers a last, clearly infantile fantasy of protection: only the gods can part them in their fusion. Yet almost immediately Cordelia's murder parts them forever, her death by strangulation a repetition of her first act choking off of speech. Even in her death, she makes of Lear once more a man—the man who “kill'd the slave that was a-hanging thee” (l. 274). But gone are the day's when Lear's falchion sword made his enemies skip, and gone is Cordelia's demand for truth as reference.

Others, however, rush in to voice their demands. Having acknowledged that Lear, holding the dead Cordelia, “knows not what he says” (5.3.293), Albany nevertheless restores to Lear his power, “For us, we will resign, / during the life of this old majesty, / to him our absolute power” (5.3.299-301). This pathetic human fable, this attempt to restore what military defeat has taken away, seems less an elevation to former glory than a demonstration of the cruel insufficiency of Lear's castrated state. Lear will make no more daughters; he will die without issue. And for the first time in the play, he will make a request where before he issued commands: “Pray you undo this button” (l. 310). Lear wants to breathe, for he is, as Janet Adelman writes, suffocating, returning to the first moment where breath and the cry are the only stuff of existence—the moment of merger of action and speech. And thus he dies.

The problem of King Lear's drama of signification is laid bare in Kent's forthright assessment of Lear's tragedy: “He but usurp'd his life” (5.3.318). The play that begins with the division of the kingdom, ends with the same, and in the most disheartening moment of the play's politics of signification, Albany—who minutes before unified absolute power in Lear—divides the kingdom between Kent and Edgar. Kent declines, it is true, but the repetition of Lear's error so hard upon his death suggests that nothing has been learned from his tragedy. The double negation of phallic signification needs only the return to Law over speech to complete itself. Thus the enormous—potentially infinite—regress suggested by Edgar's horrifyingly simplistic conclusion as it repeats Cordelia's original error:

The weight of this ad time we must obey,
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say

(5.3.324-5)

Notes

1. Sheridan points out that Lacan's concept of méconnaissance is “central … since, for him, knowledge (connaissance) is inextricably bound up with méconnaissance, xi.

2. For a reading of the phallic associations of the various body parts that persistently litter Shakespeare's stage, see Frankie Rubenstein, “Persistent Sexual Symbolism: Shakespeare and Freud.” The eyes and hands as phallic images persist in King Lear; Rubenstein, having already noted that the hand is frequently a phallic symbol “linked to masturbatory and copulatory images,” 7, uses Edgar's advice to the mad Lear as an example: “‘keep thy foot out of brothels, thy hand out of plackets['] (hole or slit in a petticoat, hence the pudendum,” 22. In fact, the bloody hand is a persistent castration image throughout Lear's central three acts.

3. Both Quartos one and two have a similar stage direction at 5.7: “Lear, Cordelia, and Souldiers, over the Stage.” The military victory, too, is emphasized by Scene III stage directions “Enter in conquest, with Drum and Colors, Edmund, Lear and Cordelia as prisoners, Soldiers, Captain,” 1291.

Reprinted with permission of BELL, Belgian Essays on Language and Literature, English Department, University of Liége, Belgium (1994): 126-134. Citations of King Lear are from The Riverside Shakespeare, Ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

Works Cited

Adelman, Janet. Suffocating Mothers. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Casey, Edward S. and J. Melvin Woody. “Hegel, Heidegger, Lacan: the Dialectic of Desire.” Interpreting Lacan. Eds. Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan. New Haven: Yale U P, 1983. 75-112.

Lacan, Jacques. “Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet.” Trans. James Hulbert. Literature and Psychoanalysis. Ed. Shoshana Felman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1989. 11-52.

———. “The Signification of the Phallus.” Trans. Alan Sheridan. Écrits. New York: Norton, 1977. 281-291.

———. “The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious.” Trans. Alan Sheridan. Écrits. New York: Norton, 1977. 292-325.

———. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I, Freud's Papers on Techniques, 1953-1954. Trans. John Forrester. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. New York: Norton, 1991.

MacCannell, Juliet Flower. “Oedipus Wrecks: Lacan, Stendhal, and the Narrative Form of the Real.” Lacan and Narration: The Psychoanalytic Difference in Narrative Theory. Ed. Robert Con Davis. MLN 985 (1983): 910-40.

Rubenstein, Frankie. “Persistent Sexual Symbolism: Shakespeare and Freud.” Literature and Psychology 34 (1988): 1-26.

Shakespeare, William. King Lear. The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974.

Sheridan, Alan. “Translator's Note.” Écrits. New York: Norton, 1977. vii-xii.

Willbern, David. “Shakespeare's Nothing.” Representing Shakespeare. Eds. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppelia Kahn. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1982. 244-263.