[In the following essay, Hawkes focuses on verbal and non-verbal communication in King Lear, contending that the play reveals a significant change in Lear's character through his movement from understanding only “explicit verbal statement” at the play's beginning to his ability to note unspoken emotions and ideas in the play's final scene.]

That which is born out of Lear's experience takes us back to the play's beginning. Cordelia's refusal of his world of quantity and calculation had been met by the exasperated proposal that, ‘Nothing will come of nothing: speak again.’ But human beings never simply ‘speak’. Any utterance is always complicated, particularly in a pre-literate society, by the body. Its unignorable presence supplies a living and modifying context for the voice in all face-to-face communication. Drama is the art which is made out of that.

Lear's insistence upon explicit verbal statement, through words alone, thus confirms the reductive mode of his world-view—one which is utterly unable to cope with dimensions of experience lying beyond the reach of the straightforwardly expressible. In such a world, silence, or the use of non-verbal or ‘kinesic’ modes of communication as adjuncts to, or modifiers of, meaning, seems merely uncommunicative. Cordelia's sense that ‘my love's / More ponderous than my tongue’ (I. i. 77-8), that she cannot, accordingly, ‘heave / My heart into my mouth’ (I. i. 91-2), and her resolve to ‘Love, and be silent’ (I. i. 62) meet only blank incomprehension, and later fury, by comparison with her sisters' facile wordiness.

The play virtually insists on the point. Cordelia's silence is Shakespeare's own addition to the story. Part of its purpose is to demonstrate the limitations Lear imposes on language by his commitment to words as the sole carriers of meaning. Words, after all, can be slippery. To use the terms proposed by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, the nature of the linguistic sign, or the word, depends upon the relationship between the two aspects of ‘concept’ and ‘sound-image’, or ‘signified’ and ‘signifier’, which constitute it. The overall characteristic of this relationship is that it is arbitrary. There is no essential or necessary ‘fitness’ in the connection between the sound-image made by the word ‘tree’ (i.e. the signifier), the concept of a tree (i.e. the signified), and the actual material tree which grows up out of the earth. Thus the linguistic sign ‘tree’ has no natural, or ‘tree-like’ qualities by which its efficacy can be judged, and there is no appeal open to a ‘reality’ beyond the structure of the English language in order to justify our use of it.

The result is that the ‘meaning’ of any word is not automatically stable, guaranteed by nature, or by the ‘way things are’, in what we like to call the ‘real world’. That only appears to be the case. The truth is that in the ‘real world’ words do not always transmit the same meaning for everybody and that any agreed meaning—certainly for important words—is always a matter of social, moral, or political negotiation. Final agreement may never be possible. Our newspapers tell us every day that this is currently the case with words such as ‘woman’, ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’, ‘family’, ‘terrorist’, ‘patriot’. We have seen the same process in operation in King Lear in respect of the negotiations around the very crucial word ‘love’. Lear's simplistic reduction of that word's manifold dimensions finally drags him into the tragically reduced equation by whose light his own punishment will be finally calculated: ‘Nothing will come of nothing.’ But only a mind which persists in linking ‘something’ with explicit verbal protestation—dependent on words alone—could see that as an adequate response to the different realities with which his daughters confront him.

The pun on ‘love’ with which King Lear begins thus has a crucial function in the play which continues—sometimes evidently, sometimes by implication—to operate throughout the whole of the text. This is true to such a degree that it is salutary to remind ourselves at this stage that punning has only relatively recently come to be regarded as a not particularly demanding or portentous form of wit. That, needless to say, is the prejudice of a modern, literate culture. In a pre-literate community, dependent on the sound of the human voice and the physical presence of the body, the pun enjoys considerable status, because it depends precisely upon face-to-face inflection or gesture to indicate the homonym, something which language in its written form cannot allow for. This pushes the potential ‘slippage’ between signified and signifier—always open to exploitation in any human situation—very firmly into the foreground.

Because it utilizes that slippage, because it foregrounds the signifying processes at large, and because this enables it to press ‘beyond’ the limits of the simple word which generates it, the pun seems almost to embody language's capacity to overleap itself, to subvert—and in so doing to enlarge—the ordinary business of ‘meaning’. In this sense, the pun exemplifies the signifying use language often makes of things that appear, to rational thinking, to be merely unfortunate, scandalous, or catastrophic. Puns, that is to say, like jokes, digressions, nods, winks, gestures, are a serious business, and any reader of the poems and sermons of the early modern period can confirm that the gravity of important matters was frequently reinforced by such means.

King Lear is no exception. And in fact it is hardly a surprise to discover that—like ‘love’—the crucial word ‘nothing’ has a capacity for serious punning which the play exploits. Its homonym is the term ‘noting’. Since ‘noting’ refers (via the sense of intense observation, or even that of musical sound) precisely to a range and mode of perception to which the non-verbal, non-discursive sign—beyond the reach of words—appeals, these homonyms seem almost to enact, even to affirm, the committed pre-literate orality on which they depend, and to which they are addressed. In King Lear's case, what is clearly at stake in the ‘nothing/noting’ nexus is the range of meaning that lies beyond the reach of explicit, rational words. The play looks, as it were, into that silence which Cordelia insists is a valid expression of her love. Were Lear able to ‘note’ that, it seems to say, he would indeed be capable of following Kent's injunction to him to ‘See better, Lear’, (I. i. 158).

Cordelia's verbal withdrawal in the division scene is, therefore, not the wholesale rejection of communication that Lear takes it to be. The body, after all, talks. In fact, it is of the essence of drama itself, as well as of oral communication at large, that we take up the responsibility to ‘note’ the body's ‘kinesic’ contribution as an adjunct to and a moderation of whatever words say. This aspect of language had already perhaps received one of its clearest definitions in an earlier play of Shakespeare's whose very title embodies the pun. In Much Ado About Nothing, the capacity to ‘note’ the silent dimensions of communication turns out to be crucial to the story. In fact, the inability of Hero's accusers to ‘note’ beyond the level of mere words is the basis of the false accusations that lead almost to tragedy. Only the Friar, who has ‘noted’ her correctly, observing, for instance, the kinesic import of her blushing, can save Hero from disgrace and death. As he says,

                                        I have only silent been so long,
And given way unto this course of fortune,
By noting of the lady. I have mark'd
A thousand blushing apparitions
To start into her face, a thousand innocent shames
In angel whiteness beat away those blushes,
And in her eye there hath appear'd a fire
To burn the errors that these princes hold
Against her maiden truth.

(Much Ado About Nothing, IV. i. 156-64)

The parallel with Lear's accusation of Cordelia is not exact. But when we move to the end of the play, and see him enter, finally, with Cordelia dead in his arms, he has very obviously outrun the limits of verbal communication, and similarities start to accrue. Cordelia's death, though ordered, was almost accidental and might have been avoided. Although he has ‘kill'd the slave that was a-hanging thee’ (V. iii. 274), Lear was unable to prevent the deed. He has cut down her body, and now piteously stalks the stage with it. As he throws back his head and howls (the text's ‘Howl, howl, howl!’ (V. iii. 257) is presumably a printer's sign hinting at the actor's extended, non-verbalized cries), he stresses the absence of linguistic forms appropriate to such a situation:

Howl, howl, howl! O! you are men of stones:
Had I your tongues and eyes, I'd use them so
That heaven's vault should crack. She's gone for ever.

(V. iii. 257-9)

He looks beyond language now, for evidence of life: for breath, not words, to see if that will ‘mist or stain’ a glass, or stir a feather, and so communicate hope. In the event, Cordelia's inert body serves to stress her particular involvement with silence, her long-standing commitment to the sphere of the non-verbal, her intricate relationship with ‘nothing’ that has marked her—as, in the earlier play, it did Hero—from the beginning. Lear even seems to have begun to grasp that Cordelia's ‘nothing’—as always—might urgently communicate:

Cordelia, Cordelia! stay a little. Ha!
What is't thou say'st? Her voice was ever soft,
Gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman.

(V. iii. 271-3)

Lear's final words follow within seconds and their direction seems clear. It is away from ‘nothing’ and towards ‘noting’. Following him, we can begin by noting that his announcement—made of Cordelia—that ‘my poor fool is hang'd’ (V. iii. 305) conclusively links the two thematically related functions noted above, and perhaps confirms that the parts of his daughter and the Fool may have been ‘doubled’ by the same actor. The rest of the speech deliberately draws attention to the body in his arms. Beginning with the unanswerable question

                                                                                                    No, no, no life!
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,
And thou no breath at all?

(V. iii. 305-7)

it moves towards a famously pounding line of verse that projects itself well beyond the level of rational meaning:

                                        Thou'lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never!

(V. iii. 307-8)

Like the howls that precede it, this teeters on the edge of rational, verbal statement, virtually entering the non-discursive sphere of music (T. S. Eliot called the line ‘sounding’, meaning ‘musical’). And then, as music does, the speech apparently inconsequentially draws us into itself and into the necessary final act of ‘noting’:

Pray you, undo this button: thank you, Sir.
Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips,
Look there, look there!                    [Dies.]

(V. iii. 309-11)

The words are almost banal. Lear asks Edgar or Kent to undo a button on the actor's costume. Cordelia's head, perhaps because the button was restraining it, now lolls back, confirming her death and possibly also revealing the damage done to her larynx by the hanging noose. And then, as Lear directs our attention to her lips with increasing intensity, ‘Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips, / Look there, look there!’ (V. iii. 310-11), perhaps her mouth falls open.

As we stare at it, in response to Lear's clamorous urging, her lips, in their deathly rigor, may even seem about to form words. But what emerges from them is—nothing. In this situation, it is a silence that weighs far more heavily than any speech could. In death, as in life, Cordelia manages to speak without words, and proves capable of venturing beyond them. She says everything by saying—literally at last—nothing. And Lear dies, certainly noting the wordless eloquence in which her ‘nothing’ consists and perhaps even understanding the finally unutterable ‘love’ of which it may be the ultimate expression.

He invites us to do the same: to ‘note’ the vast non-discursive regions that lie beyond mere words, and beyond an instrumental reason which claims to master them. Such ‘noting’, the play implies, as the world lies in ruins about the bodies of Lear and Cordelia, might even become the basis for creating something out of nothing.