[In the following essay, Frye examines the images of clothing in King Lear, noting the importance of clothing as an element of disguise in Shakespearean drama.]

Everyone feels that the moment when Lear begins to tear off his clothes on seeing Poor Tom is one of almost unlimited significance. The gesture is related to images of clothing that run throughout the play, so here action and poetry meet and reinforce one another. And they convey both emotion and idea in a way which makes the two inseparable. Here is one of the moments at which it is most clear, as clear as that Shakespeare is not a “dramatist of ideas,” that he is a dramatist of attitudes. In perfectly realistic fashion, passions in Shakespeare are regularly related, as cause or effect, to what Arthur Sewell calls “addresses to the world.”¹ Generally, abstract formulations that are the equivalents of these attitudes exist in the history of ideas and may provide, not the meaning or cause of the passion, but a background to the attitude and perhaps a vocabulary for its expression. Elizabethan drama characteristically such a drama of attitudes, which gives it some of the quality that is called “universality,” not only the universality of the passions imitated, but also their tendency to point beyond themselves. Lear's passionate personal gesture relates to a system of attitudes in the play, sometimes expressed as ideas. In such a drama, the step into abstract language is always an easy one, and heroes can express their emotions through generalization without their seeming, and without the play's becoming, particularly intellectual. Iterative imagery picks up associations with ideas as well as with feelings and so becomes a vehicle for the expression of both at once.

As Robert Heilman in particular has shown,² clothes are important in King Lear, as they are elsewhere in Shakespeare, who in fact makes constant use of them. One thinks first of all of disguise, which may blend metaphor and plot and has the great matter of appearance and reality always potential in it. Stage disguise—it is odd when you think of it—is far more often a stratagem of sympathetic characters than of villains. The disguises of the comic heroines as boys, of Portia as a judge, of the Duke in Measure for Measure as a friar, of Posthumus as a soldier, even of Feste as Sir Topas, are all for desirable ends. Villains use images of disguises to describe what they do: Iago will be only “trimmed in forms and visages of duty” (I. i. 50),³ and the Macbeths often talk about disguises and, especially, masks. But these characters do not actually dress up as anyone else. In King Lear, the villains force disguises upon characters of whom we approve, and these disguises are symptomatic of the disorder that has been let loose in the world.

In Elizabethan drama the ideal society is often pictured as one in which everybody wears the right costume, and the resolution of comedy means the end of all disguise, whether assumed for a good purpose like Florizel's or forced upon someone like Rosalind by evil circumstance, as well as the unmasking of impostors, actually disguised or not, and the relinquishing of inappropriate dress like Malvolio's cross-gartering. Perdita, Miranda, and Guiderius and Arviragus discover what dress properly belongs to them. Perhaps Isabella in Measure for Measure does too. The famous Elizabethan laws establishing relations between dress and rank point to the ease with which proper clothes may become a symbol for an ordered society, especially in the theater, where there is the reminder that an actor may become a king just by putting on the right costume. Such order as is restored at the end of King Lear naturally involves the return of Edgar to his proper clothes. “These weeds,” says Cordelia to Kent, “are memories of those worser hours: / I prithee, put them off” (IV. vii. 7-8).

The most extreme case in which the wrong clothes are a sign, even a cause, of social disruption is a special case, that of the robes and crown of a king. Caroline Spurgeon and Cleanth Brooks have called attention in Macbeth to the images of ill-fitting robes.⁴ Similarly, Falstaff's dagger and cushion are grotesque imitations of the scepter and crown, but his impersonation points to the danger that the genuine ones will be worth no more, and will really be his, when they come to Hal, who now dresses up in buckram for a joke. Claudius is a “king of shreds and patches” (III. iv. 102). But there are many other cases in which dress points at disorder. The antic disposition that Hamlet puts on, presumably indicated by his costume, is another disguise of sorts, and Antony's distance from the normal order of his world is never more striking than when we hear of his having changed clothes with Cleopatra. It is in this context that we think of the disruption that follows Lear's decision to divest himself of rule.

The hierarchical society in which everyone wears appropriate dress may be necessary to protect men from one another. “Blood hath been shed ere now,” says Macbeth, “i'the olden time, / Ere humane statute purged the gentle weal” (III. iv. 75-76). But Elizabethan clothes did more than help keep order, like a policeman's uniform. They were the costumes for a ceremonial society centered on rituals. C. S. Lewis, with his usual cogency, reminded us of how far we have come from such a world:

In an age when every one puts on his oldest clothes to be happy in, you must re-awake the simpler state of mind in which people put on gold and scarlet to be happy in. Above all, you must be rid of the hideous idea, fruit of a widespread inferiority complex, that pomp, on the proper occasions, has any connexion with vanity or self-conceit. A celebrant approaching the altar, a princess led out by a king to dance a minuet, a general officer on a ceremonial parade, a majordomo preceding the boar's head at a Christmas feast—all these wear unusual clothes and move with calculated dignity. This does not mean that they are vain, but that they are obedient; they are obeying the hoc age which presides over every solemnity. The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather it proves the offender's inability to forget himself in the rite, and his readiness to spoil for every one else the proper pleasure of ritual.⁵

The ritual, like all the pageants and progresses of Elizabethan life, is an artifice which is meant to give human life dignity and measure. At the same time, there is an innocence about it, in the sense of a lack of self-consciousness. So Lewis stresses the courtesy in Milton's Eden against the usual association of innocence with the simple and unsophisticated.⁶ When Lear unburdens himself he not only endangers political order but also puts the claims of his personal desires above those of his role in the social pageant, though he will retain the additions of a king and wear the robes as a fiction.

If his decision is folly, however, it is also perfectly comprehensible and in keeping with the feelings of other Shakespearean monarchs. The crown may be part of ones proper dress, but that makes it no less heavy. Clothes may provide an indispensable social role, and may at times be thought of as providing a total definition of the man who wears them, especially if he is a king, but there is also the recognition that the man and his clothing are not finally identical. One cannot live entirely within a ritual. The kings in Shakespeare, at least in moments of depression, frequently share with Lear the desire to divest themselves of what sets them apart, of the “intertissued robe of gold and pearl,” as Henry V says (IV. i. 279), of “thrice-gorgeous ceremony” (283). Henry IV finds no sleep under “the canopies of costly state” (Part II, III. i. 13). At such moments there is a tension between the public and private selves such as we recognize when Brutus changes from public toga to private gown. In another sort of case, Coriolanus is almost totally defined by his soldier's uniform and laurels, and when custom demands that he put on the “napless vesture of humility” (II. i. 250), it is all but impossible for him. The customary and appropriate dress of social order is not an adequate definition of the individual.

Still, Lear begins with a belief in the artifice that sublimates life as necessary to man. The additions that he retains, his train of knights, are meant to define him to some extent, and he is shocked at the attempt to do away with them. His need of them is real, he says, because men need more than simply to sustain life:

O! reason not the need; our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous:
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man's life is cheap as beast's.

(II. iv. 266-269)

There are, for instance, Goneril's clothes:

                                                                                Thou art a lady;
If only to go, warm were gorgeous,
Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear'st
Which scarcely keeps thee warm.

(269-272)

I doubt that Heilman is correct in calling this an “accusation that his daughter is out of harmony with nature.”⁷ There is a paradox which the audience may appreciate, but the main point for Lear is a serious defense of the artificial and, strictly speaking, unnecessary additions that men have made to their natural state.

The simplest art of covering is necessary for survival, but men have gone far beyond this necessity to create gorgeousness, which becomes more important than warmth. For Goneril to wear a blanket would be the loss of something, of an art. George Puttenham relates clothing and poetry:

And as we see in these great Madames of honour, be they for personage or otherwise neuer so comely and bewtifull, yet if they want their courtly habillements or at leastwise such other apparell as custome and ciuilitie haue ordained to couer their naked bodies, would be halfe ashamed or greatly out of countenaunce to be seen in that sort, … euen so cannot our vulgar Poesie shew it selfe either gallant or gorgious, if any lymme be left naked and bare and not clad in his kindly clothes and coulours, such as may conuey them somwhat out of sight, that is from the common course of ordinary speach and capacitie of the vulgar iudgement, and yet being artificially handled must needes yeld it much more bewtie and commendation.⁸

The tone may be playful here, but the point is seriously enough meant. The “kindly” clothes that custom ordains for Goneril are gorgeous, as a sign of her rank and her part in a ceremonial world.

Yet ceremony as such fails Lear. He begins the play with his ritual of professions of love, and discovers that such ceremonies are worthless and only provide disguises for evil. Now reality is breaking through, as Cordelia predicted: “Time shall unfold what plighted cunning hides; / Who covers faults, at last with shame derides” (I. i. 280-281). Lear is gradually approaching a state of mind in which he will reject artifice as itself evil.

It is not only that the artificial can be deceitful, like customary suits of solemn black. Clothes are, after all, one consequence of the Fall of Man, as is the whole social fabric of which they are a symbol. Looked at in one way, all clothes are disguise. Satiric attacks on gorgeous gallants and extremes of affectation may begin as attacks on impostors like Spenser's ape in Prosopopoia who, when he became a courtier,

                    was clad in strange accoustrements,
Fashion'd with queint devises never seene
In court before, yet there all fashions beene:
Yet he them in newfanglenesse did pas.

(672-675)

Such thrusts as Philip Stubbes' lengthy and detailed indictment of affected fashions⁹ may be partly aimed at newly created courtiers whose backgrounds made them impostors of sorts. “King Stephano” rewards his courtier Trinculo for a jest: “here's a garment for 't. Wit shall not go unrewarded while I am King of this country” (Temp, IV. i. 241-243). The two are diverted from their revolt by the “glistering apparel” that they come upon, though even Caliban knows “it is but trash” (224). So, in more serious cases, Osric is one who has “only got the tune of the time and outward habit of encounter” (Hamlet, V. ii. 198-199); Kent says to Oswald, “a tailor made thee” (II, ii. 55). But it is an easy step to rejection of the court, the center of structure and ceremony, in its entirety, a step that Iden has taken in Henry VI, Part II (IV. x. 18-25).

Montaigne would not agree with C. S. Lewis, and uses a comparison with clothing to make a different point about style from Puttenham's:

I have sometimes pleased my selfe in imitating that licenciousnesse or wanton humour of our youths, in wearing of their garments; as carelesly to let their cloaks hang downe over one shoulder; to weare their cloakes scarfe or bawdrikewise, and their stockings loose hanging about their legs. It represents a kind of disdainfull fiercenesse of these forraine embellishings, and neglect carelesnesse of art: But I commend it more being imployed in the course and forme of speech.¹⁰

Fine clothes and all that they imply may, indeed, come to seem unnatural whoever wears them, just as gorgeous vestments may appear to introduce worldliness into religion. The proper dress for all men, the nakedness of Eden having practical difficulties about it, may seem to be the most anonymous, like the “sad” clothes of the Puritans. The robes of office, even for those who wear them legally, are a temptation for one to confuse his real identity with his clothes, and, as Isabella says, “Dressed in a little brief authority,” make the angels weep with his apish tricks (M for M, II. ii. 117-122). “'Twas never merry world,” say Pompey in a comic version of this view, “since, of two usuries, the merriest was put down, and the worser allowed by order of law a furred gown to keep him warm” (III. ii. 6-9). Lear, of course, comes to feel this way: “The usurer hangs the cozener. / Thorough tatter'd clothes small vices do appear; / Robes and furr'd gowns hide all” (IV. vi. 165-167).

The positive vision that lies behind this line of satire is less often the ordered society of political orthodoxy than the pastoral freedom from society and its affectations and inequalities. The shepherd's dress, which was sometimes said to have been universal in the Golden Age, could be seen as the only really appropriate dress for all men. Description of the Golden Age in Shakespeare's time, generally deriving from Ovid, often added simplicity of dress to the elements which made up a picture of a naturally virtuous society before man's pride brought on all the troubles of the world. The connection with satiric themes is natural enough, since such descriptions frequently function satirically, setting up a standard to which, implicitly or explicitly, the present is compared. Joseph Hall makes the satiric point clearly:

They naked went: or clad in ruder hide,
Or home-spun Russet, voyd of forraine pride:
But thou canst maske in garish gauderie,
To suit a fooles far-fetched liuery.(11)

But it is just as clear in William Browne's later description:

Such as their sheep clad, such they wove and wore,
Russet or white, or those mix'd, and no more:
Except sometimes (to bravery inclin'd)
They dyed them yellow caps with alder rind.
The Grecian mantle, Tuscan robes of state,
Tissue, or cloth of gold of highest rate,
They never saw.(12)

Dyes frequently come in for attack, following Boethius' lament for the Golden Age, as in Drayton:

The purest fleece then covered purest skin,
          for pride as then with Lucifer remaynd:
Deformed fashions now were to begin,
          nor clothes were yet with poysned liquor staynd.(13)

Rich dress goes naturally with the other artificial innovations by which man, never able to let well enough alone, led himself away from natural virtue. Little distinction may be seen among clothing, cannons, and unnatural sexual practices, none of which the beasts have. They are all part of the artifice that brought an end to the Golden Age. Another version of the same ideal is found in one idea of the natives of the New World, such as the “Brasilian Women” who, according to Stubbes, “esteeme so litle of apparell … as they rather chose to go naked (their secret partes onely being couered) then they wold be thought to be proud, or desirouse of such vanities.”¹⁴ A more famous case is that of Montaigne's cannibals, whose great natural virtues are less important to Europeans than the fact that they “weare no kinde of breeches nor hosen.”¹⁵

The shepherd's dress is frequent enough in Elizabethan comedy, often as a disguise, and it is obvious that there is often more to such disguises than a sign of disorder. The clothes that Rosalind and Perdita wear for a time are not finally their own, but they have another sort of appropriateness for characters of natural directness who, at the end, will carry something of the pastoral freshness back into the everyday world and so revivify it. These clothes fit their inner natures, though not their proper social roles, just as Perdita's costume as Flora seems to waken something in her and in any case has its own appropriateness, however uncomfortable it may make her on the level of common sense. She and Rosalind, returning to social reality, will know just what value to place on their rightful clothes, because they seem to have innately the naturalness which, for instance, the men in Love's Labour's Lost must learn. Berowne and the others must give up, not only the unnatural oath by which they have attempted to sublimate life, but also rhetoric, the art which seeks to heighten the expression of its passions, and they replace these with something both natural and anonymous. “Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise,” and all such “spruce affectation,” are replaced by “russet yeas and honest kersey noes” (V. ii. 406-413), and come to seem a “particoated presence of loose love / Put on by us” (776-777), the dress of a fool.

Outside the world of comedy, however, the possibilities are not the same. In the Golden Age, says Hall, “The kings pauilion, was the grassy greene, / Vnder safe shelter of the shadie treene.”¹⁶ Henry VI, at one point, would like to exchange the “rich embroidered canopy” of his royal state for the shade which the hawthorne bush gives to the shepherd (Part III, II. v. 42-45), but the unromantic world of the histories and tragedies does not offer this alternative. The Golden Age is gone, and this is the Iron Age, when, as Golding translated Ovid,

                                                                                the wandering guest doth stand
In daunger of his host: the host in daunger of his guest:
And fathers of their sonne in laws: yea seldome time doth rest
Betweene borne brothers such accord and love as ought to bee,
The goodman seekes the goodwives death, and his againe seekes shee.
The stepdames fell their husbands sonnes with poyson do assayle.
To see their fathers live so long the children doe bewayle.(17)

Cordelia, whose place in the story is rather like Rosalind's or Perdita's is not associated with pastoral, and in King Lear there is no promise of the revivification on a social level such as is the vision of a return of the Golden Age through the pastoral virtues.

The evils of this world run deeper than mere affectation and cannot be changed as easily as the usurping Duke Frederick can assume a hermit's dress. When Lear divests himself of power, and then is divested of the additions of a king, he is left without protection and, rather than finding himself, he discovers the extent to which his identity has depended upon things which he bore but which were not himself. He is now, says the Fool, “nothing” (I. iv. 213), just as Richard II finds that on resigning the crown “I must nothing be” (IV. i. 201), “I have no name” (255). “Who is it that can tell me who I am?” asks Lear (I. iv. 238). Poor Tom, not the shepherd, is the symbol of natural man, without clothes, without position or protection, outside the law. At the same time, his picture of himself before his downfall, which might be a description of Oswald, depicts the artificial alternative in the usual satiric way: “A servingman, proud in heart and mind; that curl'd my hair, wore gloves in my cap” (III. iv. 85-86), one “who hath had three suits to his back, six shirts to his body” (139-140).

In this tragic world, the appeal to nature against mere artificial custom is not pastoral but villainous. As Louis Bredvold long ago pointed out, an important strain in the libertine tradition developed from “a reversal of the theory of the Golden Age”¹⁸ which pictured it as a time of freedom from all restraint, including moral law. The state of nature is thus imagined in a way closer to the tradition of Lucretius and Hobbes, but the normative force of “nature” is retained, so that the Stoic injunction to follow nature becomes a certification of license and all moral law becomes not truth but “opinion.” R. C. Bald and John F. Danby have both related Edmund to this libertine line,¹⁹ showing that his first soliloquy is in the tradition:

                                                                      Wherefore should I
Stand in the plague of custom, and permit
The curiosity of nations to deprive me,
For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines
Lag of a brother?

(I. ii. 2-6)

Neither legal creations of order, like primogeniture, nor moral laws are binding, because all are artificial.

Such a line of thought is one that naturally appeals to a long line of Renaissance villains and tempters from Armida to Comus. In Prosopopoia, the fox and the ape argue their right to steal from the traditional communism of “the golden age of Saturne old” (51). Philosophical attacks on chastity are generally in the same class. Tasso's chorus on the Golden Age in the Aminta stressed sexual freedom:

          But therefore only happy Dayes,
Because that vaine and ydle name,
That couz'ning Idoll of unrest,
Whom the madd vulgar first did raize,
And call'd it Honour, whence it came
To tyrannize or'e ev'ry brest,
          Was not then suffred to molest
Poore lovers hearts with new debate.(20)

A series of temptresses, to whom Juliet's nurse is a first cousin, are in the tradition of La Vielle of Jean de Meung's continuation of the Romance of the Rose, whom Bredvold cites as an early example of libertinism in literature,²¹ and of the Nutrix of Seneca's Phaedra. In the Arcadia, for instance, Cecropia's temptation of her niece is of this kind:

it is manifest inough, that all things follow but the course of their own nature, saving only Man, who while by the pregnancie of his imagination he strives to things supernaturall, meane-while he looseth his owne naturall felicitie.²²

So is the argument of the woman who tempts Daniel's Rosamund:

Then why should this respect of honor bound vs,
In th'imaginarie lists of Reputation?
Titles which cold seueritie hath found vs,
Breath of the vulgar, foe to recreation:
Melancholies opinion, Customes relation;
          Pleasures plague, beauties scourge, hell to the faire,
          To leaue the sweet for Castles in the aire.(23)

The emphasis here is upon what a courtly argument this is. Rosamund wishes she had never moved “From countrey safety, from the fields of rest” (541). Edmund's perversion of pastoral is a final step in courtly artificiality, the witty perversion of reason.

Edmund does not actually tempt anyone, even to the extent that Iago does. But in one way part of his function is the representation of a kind of temptation. His soliloquy lets his way of looking at nature and artifice loose into the play. It adds his to the attitudes which are recognized as possible, while identifying it as perverted by the actions for which it serves as a playful defense. This is not a matter of the truth of what he says; his view of the world of this play is accurate to a considerable extent. What is important is that it is related to what he does and is, and so defines for the play a dangerous and valueless view of life. At the time when he is undoubtedly mad, Lear comes to share this view. Raving desperately, he condones adultery by a perversion of the idea of the naturally sinless beasts:

Adultery?
Thou shalt not die: die for adultery? No:
The wren goes to't, and the small gilded fly
Does lecher in my sight.
Let copulation thrive; for Gloucester's bastard son
Was kinder to his father than my daughters
Got 'tween lawful sheets.

(IV. vi. 113-119)

The artifice of society is only a matter of power:

                                                                                Plate sin with gold,
And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks;
Arm it in rags, a pigmy's straw does pierce it.

(167-169)

In his anguish, he adopts a cynicism worthy of Goneril: “No, they cannot touch me for coining; I am the king himself. … Nature's above art in that respect” (83-84, 86). Goneril talks this way later: “the laws are mine, not thine: / Who can arraign me for't” (V. iii. 158-159). Lear's nadir occurs when he accepts Edmund's view—which is a semi-philosophical equivalent for the attitudes of all the villainous characters—though his acceptance is a self-destructive gesture of despair, not a principle on which to act.

Lear's first reaction to the sort of truth that he is learning is not cynical in this way. In Poor Tom he confronts “natural” man to whom nothing is added, neither the pastoral shepherd nor the licentious beast of the cynical view, but the unprotected victim. Edgar has taken “the basest and most poorest shape / That ever penury, in contempt of man, / Brought near to beast” (II. iii. 7-9), or rather below the beasts. The image of man which he presents to Lear gets a famous expression in Pliny, who says that nature, who covers all the other animals for their protection, is more like a harsh stepmother to man: hominem tantum nudum et in nuda humo natali die abicit ad vagitus statim et ploratum.²⁴ In Gelli's Circe, several of the animals whom Ulysses wants to turn back into men prefer to remain as they are because men receive so little from nature—neither warmth and protection without clothing nor food without agriculture.²⁵ To the latter complaint Ulysses replies that in the Golden Age the earth produced food spontaneously for men as well, but the Mole replies that that is only an idle story.²⁶

Such comparisons of man with the beasts are often primitivistic arguments for simplicity and the limitation of desires to the most fundamental, “natural” ones.²⁷ Here is yet another “version of pastoral.” But the comparison points also to the need for at least some artifice. Man alone cannot exist just as he is born, but must create. What matters to the moralist is the degree of artificiality that is necessary and so may be regarded as natural, but Lear here rejects all additions. His belief in ceremony and artifice was founded on the idea that they provided manifest symbols of natural truths—of the love and respect of children for parents, of his own regality. Finding that children can be “unkind” and that he is nothing without his retainers, he seeks to become the reality he finds beneath the deceit:

Thou ow'st the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Ha! here's three on's are sophisticated; thou art the thing itself; unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. Off, off, you lendings! Come; unbutton here.

(III. iv. 106-112)

He has thought just before of the need for charity towards “poor naked wretches” (28-36), a sharing of the products of artifice, but now, confronting such a wretch, he loses his faith even in this. The world is dark. If artifice is false, nature is anything but a pastoral idyll. “Wee call our bastards always our naturall issue,” said Donne in his Paradox, That Nature Is Our Worst Guide, “and we define a Foole by nothing so ordinary, as by the name of naturall.”²⁸ Lear has lost his innocence, but at least, he thinks, he will have the truth, and live it.

The play does not leave us with this perception of Lear's, however, or with the cynicism of his later madness. Cordelia returns; Lear regains his sanity and fresh garments are put upon him. It is a mistake to ask whether this is optimistic or pessimistic. A play like King Lear postulates a frightening world in order to seek for possible values within it. “Suppose,” it says, “that the world is as bad as in our worst dreams we fear that it may be. What, if anything, can relieve the nightmare?” The answer, of course, lies in the compassion and love which many characters exhibit and which are summed up in Cordelia's “No cause, no cause” (IV. vii. 75). They are defined, in part, by Edgar, in his disguise as

A most poor man, made tame to Fortune's blows;
Who, by the art of known and feeling sorrows,
Am pregnant to good pity.

(IV. vi. 222-224)

They are practised by the old man who brings his “best 'parel” to clothe Poor Tom (IV. i. 49). And it is here that the opposition of art and nature breaks down.

In the moral sphere, that opposition comes close to a distinction between will and instinct. To be moral by instinct is to be perfectly innocent. The shepherds of the Golden Age sometimes sound like such innocents, as do the natives of the New World. Several of the animals in the Circe argue the superior morality of the beasts because they are virtuous naturally. The Dog claims that, as one prefers a naturally fertile field, so, in the matter of souls, “you ought to give the preference to such as, without study or labor, can produce of themselves good and perfect operations.”²⁹ According to such a distinction, the good which operates in King Lear is what Edgar says it is, an “art of known and feeling sorrows.” It is man-made, not sent by the ambiguous gods. It is far different from ceremonial attempts to create something better than unaccommodated man. It is an art which draws on nature, like the art of the physician who is Cordelia's agent, which somehow taps the resources of natural order through music and the “bless'd secrets, / All you unpublish'd virtues of the earth,” which will spring with Cordelia's tears (IV. iv. 15-17). There is obviously a sense in which Goneril and Regan are unnatural daughters while she is natural. The natural Food shares with Cordelia the most important values of the play, as if there is a level of the soul at which virtue is instinctive. Yet these values are not on the whole a matter of instinct, but of choice. They are produced as additions to nature by the will, just as Cordelia practises arts of self-control, as when it “seem'd she was a queen / Over her passion; who, most rebel-like, / Sought to be king o'er her” (IV. iii. 14-16).

When Lear thinks about charity, he sees it in this way:

                                                                                Take physic, Pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the Heavens more just.

(III. iv. 33-36)

That by a choice men may justify the heavens, that he may create justice, is an idea which raises the artificial to a special level. “Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia,” says Lear, “The gods themselves throw incense” (V. iii. 20-21). Such moral artifice has a value that instinctive virtue does not, precisely the value of creativity. Discussing the men of the Silver Age, who still lived according to nature, Seneca denies that they were wise men:

Non enim dat natura virtutem; ars est bonum fieri. … Ignorantia rerum innocentes erant. Multum autem interest, utrum peccare aliquis nolit an nesciat.³⁰

The final reply of Ulysses to the animals in the Circe is along the same lines.³¹ The reason that “a dog, a horse, a rat, have life” but Cordelia at the end has no breath at all (V. iii. 306-307) lies in choices she has made. The creation of value in the Iron Age is dangerous, but it is the art that redeems nature.

Notes

1. Character and Society in Shakespeare (Oxford, 1951), pp. 1-37.

2. This Great Stage: Image and Structure in King Lear (Baton Rouge, 1948), pp. 67-87.

3. Quotations from Shakespeare, except those from King Lear, are from the Complete Works, ed. G. B. Harrison (New York, 1948). Quotations from Lear are from the new Arden edition, ed. Kenneth Muir (London, 1952).

4. Caroline F. E. Spurgeon, Shakespeare's Imagery and What It Tells Us (Cambridge, 1935), pp. 324-327; Cleanth Brooks, “The Naked Babe and the Cloak of Manliness,” The Well Wrought Urn (New York, 1947), pp. 21-46.

5. A Preface to Paradise Lost (Oxford, 1942), p. 16.

6. Ibid., pp. 112-117.

7. P. 86.

8. The Arte of English Poesie, quoted from Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith (Oxford, 1904), II, 142-143.

9. The Anatomy of Abuses, Part I, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall (London, The New Shakespeare Society, 1877-79), pp. 26-90.

10. Essayes, John Florio's translation (New York, The Modern Library, 1933), p. 134.

11. Virgidemiarum, Bk. III, Sat. I, 62-65, in Collected Poems, ed. A. Davenport (Liverpool, 1949).

12. Britannia's Pastorals, Bk. II, Song 3, 307-313, in Poems, ed. Gordon Goodman (London, The Muses' Library, n. d.).

13. Idea: The Shepheards Garland, eighth eclogue, 85-88, in Works, ed. J. William Hebel (Oxford, 1961).

14. Anatomy of Abuses, Part I, p. 82.

15. “Of the Caniballes,” Essayes, p. 171.

16. Virgidemiarum, III, I, 28-29.

17. Metamorphoses, I, 162-168, in Shakespeare's Ovid, ed. W. H. D. Rouse (London, 1961).

18. “The Naturalism of Donne in Relation to Some Renaissance Traditions,” JEGP, XXII (1923), 485.

19. R. C. Bald, “‘Thou, Nature, Art My Goddess’: Edmund and Renaissance Free-Thought,” Joseph Quincy Adams Memorial Studies, ed. James G. McManaway, Giles E. Dawson, Edwin E. Willoughby (Washington, 1948), pp. 337-349; John F. Danby, Shakespeare's Doctrine of Nature (London, 1949), pp. 31-43.

20. Henry Reynolds' translation, from English Pastoral Poetry, ed. Frank Kermode (London, 1952), p. 81.

21. 488-491.

22. Complete Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Albert Feuillerat (Cambridge, 1912), I, 406.

23. The Complaint of Rosamond, 267-273, in Complete Works, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (London, 1885).

24. Naturalis Historia, the Loeb Classical Library edition (Cambridge, Mass., 1942), II, 506.

25. Giovanni Battista Gelli, Circe, trans. Robert Adams (Ithaca, 1963), pp. 14-16, 22-23.

26. P. 22.

27. On this whole subject see George Boas, The Happy Beast in French Thought of the Seventeenth Century (Baltimore, 1933).

28. Paradoxes and Problems (Soho, The Nonesuch Press, 1923), p. 23.

29. P. 126.

30. Epistulae Morales, the Loeb Classical Library edition (London, 1930), II, 428.

31. Pp. 175-176.