[In the excerpt below, Colie suggests that in King Lear Shakespeare dramatized the deterioration of an aristocratic, hierarchical social order as well as the decline in parental authority during the English Renaissance.]

No; he's a yeoman that has a gentleman to his son; for he's a mad yeoman that sees his son a gentleman before him. (3.6.12-14)

When every case in law is right;
No squire in debt, nor no poor knight … (3.2.85-
6)

Prithee, tell him, so much the rent of his land comes to … (1.4.140-1)

Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide: in cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond crack'd 'twixt son and father. (1.2.110-14)

… unnaturalness between the child and the parent; death, dearth, dissolutions of ancient amities; divisions in state; menaces and maledictions against King and nobles; needless diffidences, banishment of friends, dissipation of cohorts, nuptial breaches, and I know not what. (1.2.151-6)

These comments from King Lear show some of the topsy-turvyness in the social order that informs the play, which has often been criticized as if its tragedy sprang from the simple disruption of an hieratic, orderly, customary society in which each man knew his place and responsibilities and kept to them both, in which duty and deference were expected and exacted in proportion to a man's known social and political status. According to one interpretation of Lear (as of many Shakespearean and other Renaissance dramas) the plot itself, with its manifold difficulties and sufferings, results from the deliberate abrogation of responsibility by the ruler. This Lovejovian or Tillyardian view has ruled for some time in criticism of the English Renaissance, and only recently has it begun to be criticized, both by literary students who find in the abrogations of degree, priority, and place a less than necessary cause for tragic, or even significant action; and by historians who have consistently found the English Renaissance (like any other historical 'period') full of inconsistency, anomaly, disorder, and disruption. Without quarrelling deeply with the Tillyardian notion of the Elizabethan world-picture, I want to pillage from quite a different historical scheme to illustrate some aspects of the social tensions involved in King Lear; that is, from Lawrence Stone's Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641, a rich, suggestive analysis of a major social class over a long period of time.

Mr Stone's 'crisis' was a prolonged affair, during which the aristocracy, although it never lost its favourable position in English society, lost its relative importance and was forced to alter its own self-image from that of an entrenched chivalric and 'feudal' group, with particular military obligations of service and general obligations of largesse, to that of a group involved in private lives and obligations precariously facing the problems of an expanding economy and a society increasingly articulate. Although the Tudors elevated themselves above their erstwhile peers, they came out of the aristocratic class and shared, as a family, some of the social and personal problems of that class.

Yet they sought to identify themselves with their state and its administration. Thus public policy underlined their differences from the nobility rather than their likenesses, and the English nobility found itself, like its European cousins, increasingly threatened by the centralizing efforts of the state. Chiefly, the court set out to gentle the armigerous aristocracy, to disarm them in all kinds of ways—by charming the nobles to live at court and to involve themselves in a growing bureaucracy; by cutting the number of armed servants and thus the private military power long enjoyed by local noblemen; by educating the nobility to the gentle pursuits of humanistic learning and artistic patronage; by allowing and even encouraging the greater participation of women in social life—especially at its centre, the court itself. In many ways, central governments sought to domesticate the aristocracy; the aristocracy, too, found some pleasure and satisfaction in domesticating itself—in building houses according to new patterns; in making collections of paintings, sculpture, furniture, and books.

Withal, the aristocracy was faced with the particular problem of self-definition. Those who had given up the sword for the chamberer's graces found their relation to the sovereign somewhat altered: under Elizabeth and James, noble courtiers accustomed to deference themselves had to learn the importance of deferring to a monarch. The greater the family from which a courtier came, the greater the deference the monarch seemed to require. The more opulent a subject's house, the more he was expected to put it at his sovereign's service. In various rather touching ways, noblemen attempted to show their difference from other men. The great 'prodigy houses,' most of them built by Lords Treasurer, of whom Stone so amusingly speaks, were for a while a major proof of class grandeur. With their ancient outlet in militarism gradually being closed off, noblemen and gentlemen tended to substitute the code of honour for the chivalric values. The older system of armigerous behaviour was superseded not only by modern technology and ordnance, but also by modern social arrangements: there was less and less place for the serious tournament or the trial-by-combat, as judicial settlements were otherwise reached. So a nobleman's word came to be defended and upheld by a complicated system of swordsmanship, based on the peculiar anomaly of the long, showy, dangerous rapier, which belonged neither to the old world of weaponry nor to the new. The rapier duel was an invention of a group of men trying to set themselves off socially from the 'others'; the weapon itself, carrying on a social tradition of archaism, was brilliantly and obviously nonfunctional as a practical weapon in an ordnance world.

Another method by which noblemen set themselves off was dress. As Stone puts it, the acid test of living nobly was to have the money to spend liberally, to dress elegantly, and to entertain lavishly. The portraits of the royal favourites, Leicester, Essex, Ralegh, and Buckingham, give some proof of the expense involved in looking the peacock courtier or the 'compleat' Queen. Against such expenditure, even the conservative authors of the homilies sounded their injunctions: preachers never ceased to bewail the ruinous and frivolous preoccupation of the rich with their apparel.

           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 (2.4.269-72)

Lear says to Goneril, whose costume we can imagine from the opulent ladies portrayed in Renaissance pictures; and Kent's rage at Oswald—'a tailor made thee!'—records his anger at the upstarts who imitated their social betters.

Conspicuous expenditure and consumption were frequent causes of ruin for aristocratic families: 'Put not your finger in mortar,' Coke wrote, having observed the financial difficulties incurred by many great builders. Critics of gorgeous apparel noted that men 'weare their lands upon their backes.' Yet these particular modes of setting themselves off from other men did not protect the aristocracy from imitation by social inferiors: noble ladies were offended by the liquefaction of merchant capital that could be heard in the rustle of city wives' skirts. Satirical literature of the period is full of upstarts, crow and popinjay, 'nobodies' who deck themselves in the costumes and manners of their betters. Ralegh himself, though an intermittent profiteer from the arbitrary system of favourites, was in effect such a 'nobody': he rose by his wits, his imagination, and his sprezzatura, and he fell for the same qualities. Ralegh had exceptional talent and exceptional personality; the Osrics, Oswalds, and Parolleses of Shakespeare's world are permitted no such virtues. Their showiness is just that: they are the froth thrown up by a roiled social system. Clearly, then, garb and retinue were insufficient protections from social intrusion, and dressed-up nobodies offered a real critique of the methods by which noblemen defended themselves against encroachments upon their rank and exclusive privileges. One can recognize at once the superficiality of distinctions as separate from function, while acknowledging that as function declined, such distinctions seemed ever more necessary. Barred from the automatic recognition conferred by its old sumptuary monopolies, the aristocracy had to find in just such attitudes, attributes, and costumes a substitute means of self-definition, even of self-identification. The sociological importance of the nobility's self-concentration is obvious—and it carried economic implications as well, as shoals of craftsmen, jewellers, tailors, silkworkers, cabinetmakers, stonecarvers, architects, and so on, were called upon to support the aristocratic self-image in England. The lavish expenditure characteristic of the medieval noble way of life was simple, as many commentators remarked, compared to the new ways a nobleman might spend his money—the new commerce, the New World, and the aristocratic need for show accounted for remarkable outlays of income.

Although these signs of aristocracy were important and obvious at the time, they were by no means the only problems an aristocrat faced. Over the long span of time from the accession of Henry VII to the out-break of the Civil War, there was obviously a slackening in the deference automatically due to a lord: the war itself is one gross measure of the change in aristocratic weight in the nation's social world. Other changes took place as well: for one thing, as Stone stresses, even among the aristocracy there was a considerable decline in paternal authority. Very few children adopted the social views Edmund attributed to Edgar, that 'sons at perfect age, and fathers declin'd, the father should be as ward to the son, and the son manage his revenue' (1.2.72-4), but the case of poor Sir Brian Annesley, whose daughters sued to declare him insane that they might get his estate, is relevant to the general problem and perhaps even to the play of King Lear. In spite of marked deference shown parents by their children in England, it is clear that over the century and a half of the Renaissance, fathers lost their unquestioned authority in the disposition of their children's lives and fortunes. Legal requirements came to protect, particularly, daughters. In other cases, fathers took a more active interest in their children's individual personalities and welfare, in particular permitting them to marry with greater attention to need and temperament; often, too, fathers provided so generously for daughters and younger sons (in some cases, for bastards as well) that support for entailed estates was severely jeopardized. As general respect for the individual came to be recognized, paternal authority counted for less; as ideals of social egalitarianism grew more widespread, aristocratic authority counted for less too. All the same, the class was, and remained, particularly privileged. Their crisis, such as it was, was as nothing to the difficulties suffered by the rural and urban poor, some of whom were not even privileged to recognize a 'crisis' in their affairs: life was certainly problematical for many segments of what is now called the middle class. But the nobility did face changes that unsettled many individuals within the class, if not the class itself. Against this particular set of problems, especially in their psychological manifestations, I want to look at King Lear. It is a play deeply rooted in its own period, a play which draws some of its power from the playwright's insight into the peculiar aristocratic situation of the time in which it was written, the situation Lawrence Stone has been at such pains to delineate.

Before beginning on that task itself, I must assert something else, obvious enough. This play will not provide a proof-text for the aristocratic crisis (if that is what it was). Indeed, the adjustments described in Stone's book are too drawn out to have been compressed into one literary work—although, for a critic dissatisfied with a 'crisis' lasting for nearly a century, perhaps the concentration of the play more nearly justifies the use of that term. There is, of course, much in the general aristocratic social situation that is not in King Lear: for one thing, the play does not dwell topically on a major problem occupying the nobility and their advisers, namely, education; for another, though it exploits the question in its metaphors, it does not overtly deal with economics. In the play, actual economics are vague: the curious anachronisms of this play are uncompromised by discussions of pounds, shillings, pence, guineas, rose-nobles, and so on: but it is difficult not to read from this play a profound critique of habits of quantification induced by a commercial revolution. Though certainly questions of deference, of privatism, of personal and class ethos are of the utmost significance, King Lear is something very much greater, very much more complex, than a mere sketch in play-form of the psycho-social problems of new-style sovereigns and magnates. As these essays exist to proclaim, King Lear is made up of so much that to isolate one strand of its meaning is dangerously to oversimplify its multifoliate richness. The play is only in the highest sense an historical 'source,' testifying but fitfully to the problems historians must face head on. Indeed King Lear handles what might be called sociological materials very unevenly; at some points, the text is amazingly allusive, vague, and generalized; at others, remarkably direct and precise. The problem of being 'noble' is no less complicated than many of the purely literary problems this book deals with: the poet is sometimes astonishingly exact in what is here taken as data, and at other times hazy. But the playwright is nonetheless remarkable for what he saw in his society—and furthermore in a segment of society not naturally 'his'—and in his efficient translation into literary structures of the social structure of these problems. Indeed, he used many social paradigms in the terms of his given literary schemes and paradigms: he was able to treat his society, then, as he treated many other non-literary materials, as something to be rendered in the terms of his craft. What is remarkable, too, is that the playwright dealt analytically, evenhandedly, and problematically with social problems, even as he consistently did with literary problems, and, thus, with the same striking insight and originality. If one may turn things about somewhat, the hypothesis might be offered that the play gives us, in its own laying out of social problems untouched by the benefits of modern analytical techniques, one bulwark to Lawrence Stone's massive analytic reconstruction of aristocratic society.

Within the play, historical structures are oddly treated. First of all, English 'history' is telescoped. According to chronicle-myth, the troubles of the Lear family did not end with the king's death; his daughters quarrelled fatally, and Cordelia's sons (imagine Cordelia with her sons!) did too. A train of Celtic king-figures had to reign before the historical Edgar could join the kingdom under a single strong rule. The very names of the major figures in this play serve to fuse the layers of the English past—Lear and his daughters come from the catalogue of British royalty; Edgar and his wicked brother bear Anglo-Saxon names, one of them of the greatest significance in the roster of English kings; Gloucester was a Plantagenet royal title until the fifteenth century and would again become a royal title; the earls of Kent were local noblemen who had died out early in the sixteenth century; the title revived under Elizabeth in 1572. Albany and Cornwall were imaginable titles in the English Renaissance; the earls of Cornwall had been both Plantagenets and Piers Gaveston; the kings of Scotland descended from a darkling Duke of Cornwall, and Albany was one of James I's titles as well. The names 'Albany' and 'Cornwall' are realistic enough, then, but they recall something as well of Arthurian intermarriage. These names reverberate symbolically with English historical meaning; they do for the vertical range of time past what Edgar and Kent between them do for the horizontal range, across the social estates, of English speech, as those figures shift their dialects to offer a schematic section of the local and class languages of the nation. But Shakespeare was careful, too, in his use of title: he observed the rules of precedence, so that the blood royal takes precedence over all others, dukes take precedence over earls, and earls over the rest of the play's population.

By such simple means, then, great implications are suggested. For all its moments of exact social observation and commentary, King Lear is surrounded by questions neither directly met nor directly answered. The action is mysteriously sited both in time and in place. The great rituals of the first scene echo with reverberations of something far deeper than specific reason or policy. We never know the practical details about the kingdom Lear rules and divides. Where does Lear hold court? Where was his palace before he went to lodge with his daughters in turn? That palace vanishes like Prospero's: indeed, except for Dover, we never know where anything takes place. In 1 Henry IV, the rebels divide the kingdom precisely, even arguing about its boundaries—Lear simply draws on a great map we never see. Obviously Gloucester's 'little' house (apparently a small castle of the old nobility rather than a great house of the new, but even so, peculiarly situated: 'for many miles about / There's scarce a bush' [2.4.303-4]) lies within the district allotted to Regan, for Cornwall becomes, Gloucester says, his 'patron.' Where Regan's house is in relation to it, or Goneril's in relation to either, we do not discover: simply, Lear's palace dissolves with his power, and the 'court' is concentrated on where power subsequently is rather than in a specific town or at a specific seat.

Other things are odd, too. Letters pass at an amazing rate from hand to hand—but there is no hint of how they do so. Nor do we know why the Gentleman (evidently the messenger between Cordelia and Kent) so readily trusts Kent on the heath; simply, we must accept that two good-hearted people, devoted to the king and Cordelia, trust one another on sight and do each other's offices willingly for that trust. All we know is that letters and people pass from here and there to Dover; even a beggar can lead a blind man to that critical port.

As with geography, so with other things: much is left unclear. Did Oswald do the act of darkness with Goneril, and if he did, why was he so willing to act as go-between for his mistress and Edmund? What happens to the Fool in fact and (more critical even) what kind of 'journey' must Kent go on, at the end of the play? Albany is left sole ruler of the kingdom, a position to which, judging from the first speech of the play, he had aspired; but without explanation or anything like the ritual fuss of the first act he resigns his rule first to Lear, then to Edgar. Most important of all, does Lear die thinking Cordelia dead or alive—can we tell, or should we try to tell? Within these areas of non-definition, of vagueness and mystery, the lives of King Lear and his three daughters, of the Earl of Gloucester and his two sons, of Kent, the Fool, and the rest are nonetheless lived to an extraordinary degree within the terms of sixteenth-century English society. Maynard Mack has pointed to one thematic and poetic gamut operating in this play, that from morality abstraction to naturalistic imitation of actions; the play moves along another gamut, from ritual and myth to an extremely practical and accurate grasp of local affairs. There are things in this huge, difficult, and shocking play that become a little clearer when we apply to it some of the categories laid out by Stone's paradigm of the English aristocracy in the Renaissance.

Indeed, the more we look at the play, the more clearly we can see in it Stone's schema for the problems of the aristocracy. As he put it, 'the aristocratic ethic [sic] is one of voluntary service to the State, generous hospitality, clear class distinctions, social stability, tolerant indifference to the sins of the flesh, inequality of opportunity based on the accident of inheritance, arrogant self-confidence, a paternalist and patronizing attitude towards economic dependents and inferiors, and an acceptance of the grinding poverty of the lower classes as part of the natural order of things.' These values are striking illuminations of the value-system of the play. For one thing, Kent's extraordinary loyalty to the king is a mark of his commitment to the aristocratic ethos. His behaviour within the play, evidently, is no less consistently loyal than his behaviour before the play began:

My life I never held but as a pawn
To wage against thine enemies.
                                       (1.1.155-6)

As a private person Lear assumes the hospitality and generosity of his daughters; and Gloucester's touching confidence that Cornwall cannot mean either his extreme rudeness to the old king or his cruelty to Gloucester's own person is based on his view of the unchangeable relation between host and guest—'You are my guests,' he says (3.7.31) and 'I am your host' (3.7.39). The class distinctions of the play are clear enough, although the play's action in part consists in showing how tenuous they are when faith is bad. Gloucester's tenant comes on stage, it seems, solely to demonstrate how greatly Gloucester's landlordism attached the loyalty of his dependents; Lear shows gentleness, even on the heath, to his dependent, the Fool. Gloucester's repetitious sententiae about the breaking of social bonds are one measure of the limitations of his imagination—he recognizes that social bonds are being broken around him, but not why that is so. For him, as for the composers of the homilies, the social order 'ought' to remain constant, even when he sees it fall into disruption. Hence Gloucester's defencelessness against the deceptions of his son and the brutality of his lieges. Both Gloucester and Kent, adherents of the old aristocratic mores, are tolerant of the sins of the flesh, as we learn in the play's opening interlude; the Fool conforms to the manners of his social betters when, at the end of act 1, he suggests his love-play with the castle maids.

The problems raised by the inequality of inheritance are twice dramatized and very differently stressed. Lear takes a 'modern' solution to his predicament, the absence of a male heir: he divides his kingdom justly among his co-heiresses, attempting to prevent strife later. Gloucester, on the other hand, acts as the old aristocrat would, not noticing, until he thinks himself betrayed by Edgar, the injustice of what Stone calls 'the winner-take-all doctrine of primogeniture'; Edmund's bastardy-speech is, in fact, not a paradox only: it bespeaks a new and fairer view of individual worth in rejecting the automatic second-classness of bastards. These aristocrats are all arrogant, in different personal idioms; Kent never entirely forgets who he is, even when he is stocked for his apparent presumption to Cornwall. Cornwall is wantonly confident of his own power and safety among his servants, as he mutilates his elderly, aristocratic host. Goneril and Regan are high-handed with all others; both Lear and Cordelia are extravagantly high-minded and proud. As Sigurd Burckhardt has beautifully pointed out [in Shakespearean Meanings, (1968)], Lear's absolute trust in his own and other people's 'word' is an outmoded social habit, but one entirely appropriate to his rank and style. Of the noblemen, only Edgar demonstrates his independent awareness of the plight of the kingdom's poor—and yet this same Edgar, companion of poverty, becomes the champion of the whole kingdom, on whose swords-manship the national virtue must be risked. He ranges along the whole social scale, from beggar and Bedlamite, doubly outcast, to the rituals of high-born conflict.

As against the 'paternalistic and patronizing attitude toward economic dependents and acceptance of the grinding poverty of the lower classes as part of the natural order of things,' one must note that Stone's aristocrats were also astonishingly open-handed. Their testamentary charities may not have reached the standards set by the middle class in this period, but their daily and weekly support of the poor and of other odd folk was both steady and generous. In his dealings with the Fool and with Tom, Lear shows some of that characteristic paternalism—in his case, the more poignant because of his personal problems as a father. From his behaviour to the Fool, we can realize both Lear's automatic aristocratic kindness and his personal gentleness:

          My wits begin to turn.
Come on, my boy. How dost, my boy? Art
 cold?
I am cold myself. Where is this straw, my
 fellow?
The art of our necessities is strange,
And can make vile things precious. Come,
 your hovel.
Poor Fool and knave, I have one part in my
 heart
That's sorry yet for thee. (3.2.67-73)

Finally, in the king's awareness of the plight of the truly poor in his kingdom, lies his achievement of a responsibility which, without his tribulations, he might never have won. There is nothing in the past life of King Lear—indeed, nothing in the play itself—to suggest that 'the people' were important in either the private or the public economy of the nation or of its rulers. Of all Shakespeare's political plays (in which I include all his late tragedies), this one most overtly closes off considerations of subjects, populace, and the non-noble life. In the history plays, in the other tragedies, there is much reference made to the people, English, Scottish, Danish, Roman, even Cypriot; in both Hamlet and Macbeth we are ever aware of potential rebellion against the centres of power. In King Lear, though, the great ones fight out their battles within their own class, and such realization as the audience has of other groups is skimpy and schematic. The more remarkable, then, that from this background and in this setting, King Lear, having renounced his kingdom, comes to realize, at the stretch of his extremity, what it means to be really poor. In his 'houseless poverty' speech ring the echoes of a common configuration of ideas of poverty, charity, clothing, and food:

Poor naked wretches, whereso'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed
 sides,
Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend
 you
From seasons such as these? O! I have ta'en
Too little care of this. Take physic, Pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the Heavens more just.
                                  (3.4.28-36)

As in so much else, Gloucester echoes both the king's predicament and his insight; in his blindness, exposed to the miseries the Bedlam beggar illustrates for him, he says, too:

                    Heavens, deal so
 still!
Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man,
That slaves your ordinance, that will not see
Because he does not feel, feel your power
 quickly;
So distribution should undo excess,
And each man have enough.
                            (4.1.66-71)

Both old men began the play securely enclosed in their own convictions of Tightness and security; both under go indescribable psychological torment, Gloucester paying with his eyes for not having 'seen' aright, Lear with his reason for not having understood how to be a proper parent. Both emerge from their class-bound view to 'see feelingly,' as kings and aristocrats were generally spared from seeing and feeling, what it meant to be a plain poor man in the kingdoms of this world. Both men are remarkably modernized by their sufferings, enlarged from the conscriptions of their social status. It comes with some irony that these undefended old men reach their new insights, their astonishing sympathies, under the guidance and by means of the emblematic beggar who seems to them 'the thing itself; unaccommodated man,' but whose unaccommodated state is simply a disguise.

To say that Lear and Gloucester achieve some of their greatness because they break out of the limitations of high-born assumptions does scant justice to the richness of their experience. Yet no more than in real life can this play be presented by some abstraction or social paradigm. In different ways, Lear, Gloucester, and Kent are old-fashioned aristocrats, theirs the noble ethos in the process of erosion during the Renaissance; equally, Albany, Cornwall, Goneril, Regan, and Edmund are domesticated in a 'new' world of power and might, which they intend to keep well within their own control. But just because we prefer Lear, Kent, and Gloucester to the scheming members of the next generation, we cannot explain the play by the glib assumption that Shakespeare asserted his characteristic conservatism by the play's means, praising an old if outmoded way of life for its moral symmetry and beauty; nor can we claim that human virtues are assigned to the old way, vices consigned to the new. Like Shakespeare's other great plays, King Lear deals in problems and problematics: neither way of life is sanctified, neither is regarded as an unqualified success.

This play begins with the situation feared by all men, kings and noblemen alike, with an inheritance to leave behind them, the absence of a male—that is, an obvious—heir. The number of noble families that died out in the period between Elizabeth's accession and the outbreak of the Civil War was frighteningly large. Of royal families, the Tudors themselves died out, and in spite of Henry II's quiverful of sons, the Valois died out too. For a time Philip II feared to die without a male heir; the Stuarts survived by the puny breath of James VI; the nearly-royal Oranges twice just escaped heirlessness, both times at a period critical to the Netherlands' turbulent history. Great families had to worry about male issue, and kings more than others. Shakespeare followed his sources in providing King Lear with no male heir, but he stressed that critical fact not at all, though his sources, including the earlier play, make much of it. We see, then, the king coping with his problem and deciding to deal with his three daughters as co-heiresses. This is not an English or French royal habit—or, at least, not a modern habit, though Charlemagne had split his kingdom three ways long before Lear treats his girls in a thoroughly modern manner, as noblemen and commercial grandees without sons had begun to treat their daughters. Shakespeare followed these same sources in making the king relinquish sovereignty before his own death, and Lear's reason for doing so makes political sense in either a primitive or an early modern kingdom. Lear wanted to be sure, before he died, that his division of the kingdom was acceptable both to his beneficiaries and to the subjects over whom, after all, the girls with their husbands would rule. The division was proclaimed in public, before the lords and with the acquiescence of daughters and sons-in-law, 'that future strife / May be prevented now' (1.1.44-5). As a generation of students has written in criticism of this play, Lear's unwisdom is 'proved' by just this gesture—no king 'ought' to relinquish rule before it has formally ended with his mortal death. Historical rulers were not so obedient to this regulation as critical orthodoxy would suggest—against the rule there are several counter-cases. Not only was there no rule against abdication—Charles V, after all, voluntarily gave up his great Empire; Mary Stuart had perforce abdicated; though Shakespeare's Richard II may have been an anointed king, the playwright does not conceal his unfitness to rule, all the same—but also Lear was unlucky. In cases where a male heir lacked, was young, or was weak, political disruption could be expected, as Machiavelli taught; it could be argued that in trying to secure assent to the division of his kingdom, Lear showed foresight of an unexpected sort.

Although Lear never complains of having only daughters, his assumption that continuance is crucial emerges clearly from his speeches to his daughters: he says to Goneril, 'to thine and Albany's issues / Be this perpetual' (1.1.66-7), and to Regan, 'To thee and thine, hereditary ever, / Remain this ample third of our fair kingdom' (1.1.79-80). The significance of his later cursing Goneril with sterility becomes even more profound when we consider his preoccupation with issue. Apparently, too, Lear was less satisfied with one son-in-law than with the other. In the first words of the play, Kent says, 'I thought the King had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall' (a preference which does the king credit, after all); later we hear of 'inevitable' dissent between the sons-in-law. But, as Gloucester says, Lear had resolved for strict justice between the dukes—

It did always seem so to us; but now, in the division of the kingdom, it appears not which of the Dukes he values most; for equalities are so weigh'd that curiosity in neither can make choice of either's moiety. (1.1.3-7)

In the first scene, the emotional weight of Lear's imposition of the competitive declarations of love for him tends to overbear the fact that, in spite of his psychological inequity, his division of the kingdom was 'just.' He divided the land into three rich parts, intending for his favourite child a third evidently not larger, but 'more opulent,' than those assigned her sisters. There is in the ritual charting of the new rule more than the suggestion that, before he allowed his psychological needs expression in the competition, Lear had taken thought for the political needs of the nation: he was not, in fact, dividing his kingdom solely in response to his daughters' declarations of devotion.

Looked at in the context of contemporary behaviour, Lear's solution for his kingdom was in line with modern aristocratic treatment of daughters, by which the strongly paternalist father strove to provide generously for their futures. The difficulty with Lear's situation is that it did not allow for the roles both of ruler and of father; he did not recognize his situation as unique—though Charlemagne, another dimly historical ruler in Elizabethan imaginations, divided his kingdom into three, British and English rulers customarily did not. But there is an interesting record of aristocratic division of wealth: consideration of daughters' material prosperity often contributed to the financial difficulty of noble families, some of which collapsed at the centre because of generosity in dowries and jointure-arrangements. By treating his kingdom as if it were simply 'his land,' an estate, Lear threatened his land, his 'country,' at its centre, too. It might be said that Lear's kingdom figuratively came to grief just because of his generous division of it among his heiresses. To say this, though, is to offer material substitutes for eventuations in the play sufficiently grounded in character and psychology, to say nothing of the ritual folklore of the deed itself. We do not need to know that, as a matter of economic and social fact, great holdings were often dissolved by division among children, especially female children, to realize that there is something fatal in Lear's act of division; but the modern relevance of that problematic gesture deepens the play's reference to a felt reality. One simplistic observation might be that in making Lear regard his kingdom as his property, Shakespeare made his profoundest comment on kingly misapprehension of rule and on ancient modes of governing.

Just the same, in at least two ways, Lear's disposition of the kingdom did observe modern rules of prudence and justice. In many ways doubtless more important, Lear must be ranged with the conservative noblemen of the play as an adherent, even a blinkered adherent, of the old ethos, dependent upon its values and profoundly endangered by their abrogation. His notion of himself, if not of his daughters and his kingdom, is entirely in terms of the old modes: though divesting himself of 'the sway Revenue, execution' of kingship, Lear chooses to retain 'only,' as he says, 'The name and all th'addition to a king' (1.1.136). In practice, what this means is that Lear wants to spend his latter days surrounded by his familiar household and the signs of his former greatness (in this case, a retinue of a hundred armed knights, a clever Fool, and whatever servants he may require for his personal needs), domiciled with his daughters by turn, on a perpetual royal progress. Under normal circumstances, this arrangement could very well have been made for an old patriarch and even for a self-retired king, at his life's end turning in legitimately upon private and familial pleasures. Furthermore, a great social figure would have had a household—witness Catherine of Aragon after her repudiation, or Mary Stuart in her detention—distinguished by a train of retainers. Retainers were not only a sign of an aristocrat's prestige but a defence of his prerogatives. The sovereign often attempted to cut down on retaining because of its potential danger, but no ex-king could imagine himself entirely without retainers, simply to show his rank. One deep theme of this play is the meaning of deference to those who expected it as their due. The significance of King Lear would be greatly lessened if we could not understand what it meant to the king, to his children, to his nobles and servants, that men were deferred to according to their rank in society. From the vantage-point of the aristocratic ethos, there was nothing odd about Lear's wanting to maintain the 'exhibition' of his former greatness, even after he had delegated its great function to others. From the point of view of the new functionalism, equally, there was nothing peculiar about Goneril's and Regan's attempts to cut down their father's retinue: Elizebeth never allowed Mary Stuart a quota of armed servants.

Since so much of the struggle between early modern rulers and their nobility was over the monopoly on violence, it is obvious that retainers were looked at darkly by the sovereign. The physical inconvenience and danger surrounding a retinue was one thing, the psychological importance of such a train was another. Rulers intent on their own security were unlikely to tolerate a mighty subject surrounded by proofs of his power; a retinue was, as Lear called it in that quantitative language so characteristic of his utterance before the storm, the 'addition' by which a grandee could reckon his importance.

Thus when Goneril says, 'His knights grow riotous,' Elizabethans would scarcely have found her remark incredible—if they knew of Sir Richard Cholmley's liveried retainers, who sneaked into the kitchen and speared the meat out of the pot with their daggers, they might well have sympathized with her. On the face of it, her complaint carried weight; her insistence on the retainers' 'rank and not-to-be-endured riots' was hardly different from Henry's or Elizabeth's. Goneril was, by her father's donation, sovereign in her portion of the country, and certainly in her house. As sovereign, she simply acted the efficient ruler striving for order in her palace and, by extension, her kingdom:

           A hundred knights!
Tis politic and safe to let him keep
At point a hundred knights; yes, that on every
  dream,
Each buzz, each fancy, each complaint,
  dislike,
He may enguard his dotage with their powers,
And hold our lives in mercy.
                                  (1.4.332-7)

Later, as the size of Lear's retinue is ruthlessly cut down (only thirty-five or thirty-six of his knights join the king's forces at Dover), Regan states the general argument against a mobile retinue in a speech far more neutral and sensible, in social terms, than it is usually considered:

            what! fifty followers
Is it not well? What should you need of
  more?
Yea, or so many, sith that both charge and
  danger
Speak 'gainst so great a number? How, in one
  house,
Should many people, under two commands,
Hold amity? 'Tis hard; almost impossible.
                            (2.4.239-44; italics mine)

The objections the daughters raised against the knights were those of a practical, modern, civilizing, rationalizing social orderliness; their objections were, in fact, received opinion. Further, from Goneril's remarks about Lear's servitors, we realize what sort of household she kept:

          Hear me, my Lord.
What need you five-and-twenty, ten, or five,
To follow in a house where twice so many
Have a command to tend you?
                     (2.4.262-5; italics mine)

From this hint, we may assume that Goneril's house was—in contrast to Gloucester's isolated little house, typical of the parochial older nobility—a truly 'great' house, a palace, a prodigy house; she had a staff of at least fifty servants, from whom a sufficient number could always be spared to tend to her father's needs. With this glimpse into Goneril's milieu, we suddenly see the degree of pride, of self-indulgence, involved in the lives lived by 'these daughters and these sisters.'

They have their modern ways of conspicuous consumption no less grandiose than their father's old-fashioned train—and far more centred on themselves, on their own comforts and the projected image of their own greatness. Coupled with the fact that Shakespeare makes us witnesses to Goneril's complotting with Oswald to offend the king ('Put on what weary negligence you please' [1.3.13]), this glimpse into her values and manner of living makes us realize that her objections to Lear's knights are not simply those of a sovereign lady intent on maintaining civil peace. Indeed, just as with Edmund, at first sympathetically presented and only later revealed as the cheat he is, the playwright is careful to deny Goneril her claims to justification in this respect. So also with Cornwall, commanding that Kent and Oswald put up their swords—'Keep peace, upon your lives: / He dies that strikes again' (2.2.48-9)—his words are those of any sensible ruler concerned for civil order. We might take them at face value if we were not in the next act to see how Cornwall behaves when he thinks the monopoly on violence securely his. Shakespeare never leaves us long in doubt about these 'new' statesmen.

That Lear's knights were troublesome, we have only Goneril's authority; when we hear Regan linking Edgar and the knights, an association clearly false, we must wonder about the knights' behaviour altogether. Of Lear's 'riotous' train, only a single gentle figure says anything at all, and what he says is, it seems, a remarkable understatement of the actual situation:

My Lord, I know not what the matter is; but, to my judgment, your Highness is not entertain'd with that ceremonious affection as you were wont; there's a great abatement of kindness appears as well in the general dependants as in the Duke himself also and you daughter. (1.4.60-5)

'Ceremonious affection' is entirely absent from this house, as we know from Goneril's planning with Oswald to withhold deference from her father. Gradually we realize the symbolic importance of with-holding the ceremony normally due a father and a king: Goneril seeks to destroy the old man's sense of himself long before king-killing becomes part of the action.

Goneril and Regan were, of course, afraid of something other than mere inconvenience; they were afraid that their father, invested with his military power, might discover their aims and seek to stop them by turning that power against them. Their eagerness to strip Lear of his symbols of personal greatness is one thing; but it was quite another matter, a matter of pure power, to want out of the way those hundred knights who might have made up a Lear faction. Since the remnant of the retinue did join Cordelia at Dover, if Oswald's words are accurate, we may assume that at least those knights knew the proper duty of their allegiance and followed it.

One problem of the Tudor monarchs was that, like King Lear, they lacked soldiers. In times of crisis, Elizabeth had to depend upon a very mixed army, composed of trained bands, pressmen (some little better than the crew gathered by Falstaff), and the cohorts of her great lords contributed as private trains, in the old-fashioned way, to the sovereign's cause. During the period studied by Stone, loyalty was never entirely diverted from the great lords to the Crown, for all of Henry VIII's statutes and propaganda of the 'Faerie Queene'; the dutiful behaviour of Lear's knights was still quite understandable to a Jacobean audience. As far as the play itself is concerned, though, the knights barely appear; they are a shadow-retinue, whose importance depends entirely upon the director's, not upon the playwright's, injunctions. Their behaviour is undefined, largely attributed them by the daughters' unreliable words. Lear is effectively stripped of his strong bodyguard, left destitute and alone save for his Fool and a disguised servant. He has not forgotten the orthodox meaning of his retinue, however, as on the heath he recruits the Bedlam beggar as its replace-ment—'You, sir, I entertain for one of my hundred' (3.6.80). That his retinue wore his colours is evident from his next remark to Tom, famous for its beautifully learned associations: 'only I do not like the fashion of your garments: you will say they are Persian; but let them be chang'd' (3.6.80-3). It is important to notice throughout these scenes, the great gentleness of the king. While he has control of his retainers, he never thinks to call them in his own defence against the extraordinary behaviour of his daughters, never thinks of himself as the leader of a band of armed men. For all his childishness, his irascibility, his arrogance, Lear is a civilized man, thinking himself in a civilized country. He lets his defenders slip away from him as if their 'real' function had never crossed his mind. indeed, for him, the knights were simply a means of signalling his dignity to himself and others, never defences against his nearest kin.

The astonishing breaches in decorum in this play are not so immediately obvious to us as to an audience trained in the deference society. When Oswald refuses to stop at the king's command, when he identifies the king as 'My Lady's father,' the shock was almost as severe to the audience as to the defenceless and unprepared Lear. That Oswald 'would not' do the king's bidding utterly shatters Lear; when he finds his servant stocked, he says,

             They durst not do't,
They could not, would not do't; 'tis worse
 than murther,
To do upon respect such violent outrage.
                       (2.4.22-4; italics mine)

Lear's awareness of criminal degree is imperfect, one might say; because, as Kent sits outside the house in which Gloucester's mutilation is soon to take place, we shortly realize how insignificant, beside that crime, the stocking of the king's servant is. But at the time, that punishment is part of the ruthless imposition of their will and rule on Lear and his kingdom that the daughters' party puts into effect. Lear must learn that he is no longer sovereign in Britain; his daughters undertake to teach him.

Of course Lear was arbitrary. Sovereigns were—and could count on absolute deference, even in their tantrums. Hence Lear's fury at Kent's gain-saying him, his attack on Kent in terms of the feudal bond—'Hear me, recreant! / On thine allegiance, hear me!' It is one measure of Shakespeare's art that we come to see Lear's autocratic demands for his dinner naturalistically, as the signs of the childish greed in an old man, rather than as one automatic prerogative of royal position. Goneril has, after all, commanded that dinner be made ready; why should not the king, hungry from hunting, have it when he likes? That Goneril orders her servants to slight the king shows how far she was willing to go, disgracing him, her kin, her father, before outsiders; Regan, literally, went further to show Lear incivility. When he rushes from Goneril's house to hers, Lear could expect (as any sovereign could) to be received. But Regan did what only a few landowners dared to do to Elizabeth; she left her house empty, so that the king was unable to rest on his progress. That she could do such a thing, unthinkable either to a father or to a sovereign, makes it less incredible that Regan could take such an active part in the blinding of her host shortly after.

In terms of the deference society, Kent's behaviour is interesting. He is round with the king, but obviously loyal and dutiful. With Oswald he is violent, outraged that a 'clotpoll' should so treat a king, outraged that his clotpoll should so flout him, even when he is in disguise. When Cornwall makes to stock him, Kent cannot believe that such a punishment, from which noblemen were securely exempt, could possibly be meted out to him; both he and Gloucester remonstrate with Cornwall in vain, urging him not to punish the king's servant. Kent's reaction, like his over-reaction to Oswald, is a remnant of his own aristocratic experience. Such things simply cannot be done to a man like him. That they are somehow prepares us for the outrage done Gloucester within doors.

Indeed, in spite of the control he achieves at stress-points, Kent's reactions are not always under his own control. His outburst against Oswald is that of the old aristocrat, against the falsity of a cowardly, braggart 'new' man, a nobody, a butterfly made by a tailor—'That such a slave as this should wear a sword!' Kent too lacks deference, lacks 'reverence' for those apparently his superiors; his gorgeous rudeness to Cornwall may endear him to the audience, but it brings him to suffer punishments expressly forbidden to be applied to aristocrats. Still, no servingman Caius could speak as Kent spoke to the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall. For all his willing self-degradation in the service of his degraded king, Kent has difficulty in maintaining his servant role, although the violent language he uses to Oswald is certainly matched by other historical noblemen and gentlemen. That difficulty shows in one very interesting context: Kent evidently did not share his master's fellow-feeling for the Bedlam beggar, who later says of him that he, 'having seen me in my worst estate, / Shunn'd my abhorr'd society' (5.3.209-10). When he comes to recognize in the beggar his old friend's son, Kent is joyously reconciled to Edgar—but a remnant of his fastidiousness remained during their time of common disguise.

The question of rank is relevant also to the 'punishment' of Gloucester. Though noblemen could be, and were, put under attainder and executed for treason, they could not be hanged, as Regan suggested, and certainly could not be blinded. Neither were they properly subject to the summary 'justice' meted out by Cornwall (who was himself uneasy about it [3.7.24-7]). The blinding of Gloucester is shocking dramatically, humanly, and socially: the First Servant's reaction to the deed sprang from his outraged sense of decorum as well as from his shock at the cruelty of the deed. The Servant is interesting: he dares give an order to his lord—

     Hold your hand, my Lord.
I have serv 'd you ever since I was a child,
But better service have I never done you
Then now to bid you hold.
          (3.7.71-4; italics mine; cf. 4.2.73-8)

'Ever since I was a child': the Servant's devotion to Cornwall, which should have been automatic, could only be broken by the horror of what he was forced to witness, this wanton brutality against an old man, a peer, and his master's host. To Regan the Servant speaks as boldly,

If you did wear a beard upon your chin
I'd shake it on this quarrel.
                                        (3.7.75-6)

which causes Cornwall, in turn stunned by the disruption of received decorum in his train, to cry, 'My villain!' Unthinkable—'My villain!' Obviously Cornwall and Regan, recognizing their youth, power, and strength, think themselves immune from opposition and above social regulations; but that they too live within the conventions of deference is shown by their shock that a 'peasant' should 'stand up thus!' Regan is never more herself than when she stabs the man, and from behind. For Regan, as she makes plain later, is sovereign and intends to make the most of her independence. She and her husband simply take over Gloucester's house; later, in the rivalry for Edmund, she plays her advantageous widowhood against Goneril. Her 'rights' are in her own gift, and she can 'invest' Edmund with them so that he then 'compeers the best' (5.3.69-70). Regan knows her power and uses her precedence for her own ends.

The rise of Edmund, the bastard, the nobody, the new man, is indeed spectacular. He appears at the beginning, acknowledged but unprovided, a victim of his father's callousness to his predicament. Gloucester says of him, quite calmly, 'He hath been out nine years, and away he shall again,' never thinking that a nice-looking young man (who also happened to be his son) might prefer to stay 'in,' at court. To Cordelia's and Edgar's disinheritance Edmund stands as emblem: we see in Gloucester's carelessness toward this child of his flesh (whose mother he does not even name) a failure of paternity which slightly prepares us for the king's abrupt rejection of his child and for Gloucester's speedy rejection of Edgar later. Cordelia is, of course, incapable of policy altogether, and Edgar's dissimulations trouble him; Edmund's nature, on the contrary, mates with his condition to make of him a natural machiavel, a new man, outside the customary values, as careless of privileged lives as his father had been of Edmund's unprivileged existence. Edmund follows his version of 'nature,' an impartial naturalistic goddess who, with other gods unnamed, stands up for bastards. At first, it seems to be only 'land,' or position, that he wants—and Edgar's, not his father's. That is, as a bastard he wishes simply to stand in his brother's legitimate place, content at the time simply to be his father's heir. That Gloucester took it for granted that an heir he must have, is evident from his remarks to Edmund at Edgar's supposed treachery. Like King Lear and like Henry VIII (who, despairing of a legitimate son, for a while considered legitimating the Duke of Richmond), Gloucester knew the importance of male issue. Thus he can say, almost without thinking,' of my land, … I'll work the means / To make thee capable' (2.1.83-5), acknowledging both the need for an heir and the legal difficulties involved in such a transfer of rights. It turns out that Edmund need not—perhaps could not—wait out his father's natural life; perceiving the means, he betrays Gloucester, and Cornwall takes over the punishment of the old man's 'treason,' sequestering his estates and awarding them to Edmund, who by his father's attainder becomes Goneril's 'most dear Gloucester.' The young simply cancel out the older generation; later, we can read Albany's re-alliance from his refusal to accept Edmund's new title and his references to the old Earl as 'Gloucester.' Once an earl, why not more? So Edmund makes his loves to the two queens, evidently indifferent to their relative charms. As the example of the Earl of Essex attests, if one is granted private privileges by a ruler, it is an easy temptation to fancy one's self as ruler. When Edmund sees the two women dead before him, he says with a pardonable pride but an unpardonable self-centredness, 'Yet Edmund was belov'd'—with never a word to spare for them.

Edmund brutally illustrates the ambitious ethos of the new man (in this respect he is unlike Essex and his aristocratic crew, rather men failed in their ranks than new men aspiring to greater noble position); Edmund is the natural talent unsupported by background who makes his way into the chancy world of Renaissance opportunity. Without respect for the privileged, he nonetheless covets their privileges; his parallel at a lower rank is the opportunist Oswald, a clothes rack, a mock-man, a braggart soldier, a go-between. Whatever can be done for his advancement, Oswald does, in ways that have their real analogue in the dis-oriented men of Essex's train. Oswald's view of the world as made for him emerges from his horrible remarks just before he blunders upon his own death. Seeing the blind Gloucester, on whose head a price has been set, he cries:

           A proclaim'd prize! Most
 happy!
That eyeless head of thine was first fram'd
 flesh
To raise my fortunes.
                                   (4.6.227-9)

'To raise my fortunes'! After this, the audience can see him dispatched without the least qualm. 'Advancement' and 'fortune' are associated with this whole party: Goneril promises Oswald advancement; Edmund purchases the murder of Lear and Cordelia. To his tool, the Captain, he says,

One step I have advanc'd thee; if thou
  dost
As this instructs thee, thou dost make thy
  way
To noble fortunes; know thou this, that
  men
Are as the time is; to be tender-minded
  Does not become a sword; thy great
employment
  Will not bear question; either say thou'lt
do't,
  Or thrive by other means.
                                             (5.3.29-35)

Actually, the 'other means' of thriving is illustrated in the play. When he asks Tom to direct him to Dover, Gloucester gives him a purse, at that point speaking of aristocratic charity not as an automatic duty, but in terms of social justice (4.1.70-1); when he believes himself on the point of dying, he gives Tom another purse, 'in it a jewel / Well worth a poor man's taking' (4.6.28-9). At the end of his 'every inch a king' speech, Lear in turn gives money to the blinded Gloucester, whose condition he recognizes—'No eyes in your head, nor no money in your purse?' (4.6.146-7)—before he admits to recognizing the man himself: 'I know thee well enough; thy name is Gloucester' (4.6.179). The almsgiving of both Lear and Gloucester has become something more meaningful than that largesse traditional to aristocrats: Gloucester at least begins to speak in full awareness of what destitution means, and to realize in personal terms what money can do for a beggar (4.1.76-7), and Lear has made his astonishing remarks about his poor subjects, about those denied justice by their poverty, and about 'the thing itself.'

For the old men, the realization that some men are poor comes as an immense revelation. Unlike them, and in spite of his naïveté about his brother's motives, Edgar possesses remarkable social experience for a young aristocrat. His description of Bedlam beggars may argue a mere sightseeing visit to a madhouse, but his knowing how beggars 'Enforce their charity' (2.3.9-20) and are 'whipp'd from tithing to tithing, and stockpunish'd, and imprison'd' (3.4.137-9) suggests that he has already paid considerable attention to contemporary customs outside the normal purview of the heir to an earldom. This sort of knowledge, got we know not how, argues for Edgar's ultimate fitness to rule the kingdom: he will not, one assumes, take 'Too little care of this.' As king he will be, it is implied, a just judge, a 'justicer' in reality for whom 'Robes and furr'd gowns' shall not 'hide all,' fulfilling the ancient duties ascribed to an earl, or 'Iudex.'

Edgar may seem surprisingly democratic in this respect, but he is impeccably trained in the old aristocratic ethos—his training offers one explanation, indeed, of how he was so easily duped by his half-brother, from whom he could not imagine treachery; and why he was unable to do his father hurt, sorely though that father had hurt him. Edgar's nature makes him the ideal preux chevalier to challenge Edmund; in that short episode of trial-by-combat, when Edmund receives his mortal wound, much is involved. First, Edmund is arrested for 'capital treason' on a charge familiar enough in sixteenth-century England, adultery with the Queen. Second, he is to prove himself by an old-fashioned and quintessentially aristocratic method, the formal trial-at-arms outmoded in the late sixteenth century as a customary proof. The modern equivalent of this sort of combat was the duel, a far more private affair than Edgar's challenge to Edmund; treason trials were judicial, carried on in camera. The anachronism stresses the play's archaism; further, it sets the struggle between factions into a simple morality-context, where virtue must be victorious. With this episode we are back in the world of chivalry of which we have heard nothing in the play and to which, under normal circumstances, Edmund the bastard could never have aspired. The new man, intent only on the main chance, ought to have looked on such an outmoded, hazardous process with contempt—but Edmund found himself subtly flattered by being party to such a procedure, the signature, after all, of the aristocratic life which he had usurped. From his answer to Edgar's formal challenge we can hear how attracted Edmund was to the idea of himself as a 'real' aristocrat, the true inheritor of this beautiful, dangerous, elaborate ritual:

       In wisdom I should ask thy name;
But since thy outside looks so fair and war-
 like,
And that thy tongue some say of breeding
 breathes,
What safe and nicely I might well delay
By rule of knighthood, I disdain and
 spurn …
                                   (5.3.141-5)

Edmund adapts his language to the archaic formalities of chivalric address; his behaviour assimilates to that of the nobleman born. In this hour of his greatest danger, Edmund is at least offered a chance to act with the full dignity of the high-born, to take up the class-legacy his father did not leave him. Evidently, too, there is something purgative about this gesture; though he speaks to Edgar with a condescension dis-allowed by the real facts ('If thou'rt noble, / I do forgive thee' [5.3.165-7]) he admits his guilt and acknowledges the ironic justice of fortune's wheel, to which he was bound from the beginning (5.3.173-4). He resolves to do 'some good' by sending to stop the execution of Lear and Cordelia, and is borne off to die with some dignity before that terrible pietá of parent and child takes place.

Beside the bodies of Goneril and Regan, the bodies of Cordelia and Lear come to lie. Before our eyes, the greatest family in England is brought to its end. What every patriarch feared—even Lear, who could invoke sterility upon Goneril—has come to pass. From 'the promis'd end,' or 'image of that horror' the survivors must build back to some restoration of order, of justice. Kent refuses the commission of the kingdom, resigning his share to Edgar; Albany, who has begun the play ambitious for rule, is glad to relinquish its responsibility; Edgar, who never wished any such thing, lives to rule, his father's surviving son and godson to the dead king. A dynasty has ended, and a different rule is about to begin.

We do not know what the reign will be like: we can only assume that Edgar, having profited from knowing 'The worst' in his own experience, his father's, and his godfather's, having travelled the long road from the heath to the combat at Dover, from destitution to sovereignty, will rule as a Lear 'improv'd.' Just as at the play's beginning we are given no hint of what went before the day of division, at the play's end we are given no warranty of the future, but are simply asked to commit ourselves to Edgar's experience, sense of justice, and human-kindness. As the play began, in medias res, without explanation or motivation offered, to present us with the agonizing exemplum of the complexity of human life and human intents, inexplicable often even to the actors themselves, so it ends without explanation, prophecy, or promise.

That contemporary social problems were analysed and exploited to make up much of the substance of this play may strike us as astonishing, although readers of Shakespeare's history plays will not be surprised at this further link between them and King Lear. Some of the elements of the aristocratic 'crisis'—for example, primogeniture, retinue and service, exhibition of power, and actual power—are obvious enough in plot and theme; but other aspects of the problem, on their face less apparent in society, as well as less prominent in the play, turn out to be crucial. I have spoken of the importance of deference to both old and new aristocrats; Stone regards the decline of respect to the nobility as one of the major social changes that class had to face, and, obviously, monarchs had to come to terms, after 1647, with the regicidal ideas subjects could afford to entertain. Stone gives many reasons for the decline of automatic deference to aristocrats—the passing of aristocratic military power, the relative rise of the gentry and the commercial classes with respect to the nobility, the creation of a 'rival' ethos involving prudence and frugality rather than openhandedness and magnificence, the venality of some noblemen and the wickedness of others, together with a communications system that permitted open criticism of such foibles and faults. Shakespeare, of course, concentrates, translates, and transvalues this process of devaluation in dramatic and symbolic rather than realistic or reportorial terms. For example, the terrible poignancy of the play's situation is heightened by the fact that it is Lear's daughters who, instead of jealously guarding the prerogatives of their rank and family (as would have been the normal 'real' behaviour of even unloving daughters), so calculatingly rob Lear of the deference due him. But 'rule' enforces high stakes: in his private capacity, Lear might expect family solidarity, but as ruler he risked great dangers particularly from members of his family.

A rather silly way of speaking of this play is to suggest that it dramatizes, as no other piece of literature in the period does, the actual decline of paternal authority that Stone has tried to measure in the English Renaissance. Some of the power noble fathers exercised over their children, as we have seen, they themselves relinquished, and did so gladly for the children's sake. Some of the decline in parental authority is related to the gradual softening of behaviour between the generations, as noblemen allowed themselves a greater preoccupation with private pleasures and satisfactions. This tendency toward privatism—symbolically crucial in the play, and ironically expressed in Lear's joy at the prospect of sharing his prison with Cordelia—is apparent also in his early speeches, when he clearly looked forward to retirement in his daughters' houses, especially Cordelia's: 'I lov'd her most, and thought to set my rest / On her kind nursery' (1.1.123-4). Unlike Richard II, whose preference for private pleasure brought an end to his rule, King Lear had evidently fulfilled his public obligations during his reign; but that he could take such pleasure in withdrawing from public power is one mark of the period in which this play was written, rather than the primitive period in which it is supposed to have taken place. Obviously, Lear thinks that he has come to deserve the delights of retirement on his own terms.

In England, a mark of respect paid parents by their children was kneeling for their blessing: in a sermon of 1629, far later than this play, Donne wrote, 'Children kneele to aske blessing of Parents in England, but where else?' Still later, Evelyn commented on the childish dutifulness of grown children before their parents. Against such a background, Lear's cursing his daughters (Cordelia, 1.1.108-20; Goneril, 1.4.284-98; 2.4.147, 163-9), and his denial of benison to Cordelia (1.1.264-5) gain great force, and bring the play out of its Celtic pre-christianity into the sixteenth century; so also does his bitter mockery of the forgiveness Regan counsels him to ask of Goneril:

      Ask her forgiveness?
Do you but mark how this becomes the house:
'Dear daughter, I confess that I am old;
Age is unnecessary: on my knees I beg
That you'll vouchsafe me raiment, bed, and
  food.'
                             (2.4.153-7; italics mine)

The king's gesture of kneeling to his children is not just a momentary criticism of the children's behaviour to him, but also a confirmation of the Fool's sharp words, that he has made '[his] daughters [his] mothers,' and must kneel to them to supplicate the elemental support that fathers without question provide for their children and can in turn expect from them. From Cordelia, much later, he does receive raiment, bed, and food: she becomes his real mother, on whose kind nursery he can set his brief rest. Not only that, Cordelia asserts her daughterhood the while, by asking the blessing he had withheld from her when they parted—

      O! look upon me, Sir,
And hold your hand in benediction o'er me,
                                   (4.7.57-8)

she says, cancelling out the harshness of that last exchange. And Lear, as befits the moral and social dependent, kneels to her, a gesture which her dutiful daughterhood cannot permit: 'No, Sir, you must not kneel' (4.7.59). He is still her father and, for her, still king as well (4.7.44). The significance of these gestures of reconciliation sticks in Lear's mind, so that when Edmund's guard carries him and Cordelia off to prison, he welcomes the respite from warlike life and plans, in the safety of the birdcage endlessly to recapitulate his reunion with Cordelia:

When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel
 down,
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and
 laugh
At gilded butterflies …
                                    (5.3.10-13)

The old man's union with his child is, in fact, their fusion: each as parent blesses the other, who asks blessing as a child. The paternal and filial functions, so long misused, skewed, and uncommunicated in the play, finally interchange to become one. When it is too late to do more than assert their value, the old bonds are confirmed and made stronger than ever.

Lear becomes reconciled to his child, and to his own paternity. Stable values are corroborated as he comes to rest, for a tragically brief moment, confident of the security of Cordelia's 'bond.' In other ways, Lear shows traces of 'modern' attitudes toward sexuality and paternity, some pleasant and some unpleasant. Although the play's skilful arrangements with its secondary plot both corroborate and counterpoint the main plot, in one social respect Lear and Gloucester, so often alike, differ markedly. Betrayed as he is by the fruit of his adultery, Gloucester might have been expected to denounce aristocratic licence. Not so, however; the harshest comments on sexuality come from Edgar, puritanical in his view of his father's behaviour, and from Lear, who suffers an extraordinary revulsion from sexuality altogether. Although, presumably, aristocratic tolerance of sexual laxity remained greater than that of other social classes, it too underwent some stiffening over the period of the Renaissance, in part because marriages had more to do with love than hitherto, in part because women emerged as a stronger social force within the class, and in part because real pressure was exerted on the nobility by chaplains, ministers, and disapproving puritan commentators on sexual habits. Lear's attacks on Goneril's sexuality, his comments on the 'rascal beadle' standing in for lustful humanity at large, and his backhanded encomium of adultery and luxury all testify to his obsession with his own begetting, but also represent the greater preoccupation of noblemen with the question of sexual standards, earlier rarely considered at all. As a whole, the play condemns sexual license and casts doubt on the values of sexuality: Gloucester suffers extremely for his early adultery, and their sexuality is one mark of the monstrousness and inhumanity of Goneril, Regan, and Edmund.

In quite a different range of language, another major theme of King Lear is tied to the problems of an aristocracy caught between an old ethos of unreckoned generosity, magnificence, and carelessness, and new values stressing greater providence, frugality, and even calculation. The economic alterations characteristic of the period struck the aristocracy, as everyone else; noblemen made various kinds of compromise with new economic exigencies—dowries and jointures, for example, were initiated as prudential arrangements; some noblemen were faced with choosing between imposing higher rents and receiving still the unqualified reverence of grateful tenants. Old-fashioned aristocrats tended to maintain old ways, with their concomitant bonds of service, in the teeth of economic difficulty; newfangled lords often put their relations with their dependents upon a businesslike basis unknown earlier.

We might well expect Goneril, Regan, and Edmund to think quantitatively—to fractionate and even annihilate Lear's retinue, to set prices on Gloucester's head and Lear's and Cordelia's lives; we might expect, too, that Oswald and the Captain should seek their material advancement by the deaths of these great ones. Such people represent and act out their lives in terms of the material values of both power and accounting. They can always go one arithmetical step farther—'What need one?' 'Till noon! till night, my Lord; and all night'; 'Hang him instantly.'—'Pluck out his eyes.' They know the minimum and the maximum—Goneril calculates to the last, assuring her mortally wounded lover that he had not had to answer the challenge of 'An unknown opposite.' Their naked calculation reduces all human values to quantitative measurement and thus easily loses sight of the 'need' underlying such values, to slip easily over into the utmost barbarity. But the fractionating by Goneril and Regan of their father's train, after all, echoes the same habit of mind and spirit exercised by the king himself, who set a price on his daughters' love and divided his kingdom in relation to their assertions of quantitative devotion. Again and again, characters take account, reckon their own and others' emotions: even the saintly Cordelia (perhaps pedagogically) speaks to her father of bonds and fractions—half her love for her husband, half left with her father. Gloucester tells Kent that Edgar is 'no dearer in [his] account' than Edmund; Kent speaks metaphorically of fee, as does the Fool later. For Lear, bestowing his disinherited daughter as a bad investment, Cordelia's 'price is fallen'; for France, brought up to admire magnanimity, 'She is herself a dowry.' Later, when Goneril's husband tells her she is not 'worth the dust which the rude wind / Blows in your face' (4.2.30-1), we realize how much he has begun to learn of calculation's values. Finally, the language of number is dissolved into paradoxes of 'all' and 'nothing,' thereby running out into areas of meaninglessness and incalculability. Need cannot be reasoned, or measured—nor can love, fidelity, or truth. It takes Lear a long time to come to that lesson: on his way to it, he can still say to Goneril,

Thy fifty yet doth double five-and-twenty,
And thou art twice her love,
                                         (2.4.261-2)

only to hear Regan ask a moment after, 'What need one?' Reduced to nothing, he has reached the point of non-support implied when the Fool asked Kent, 'Prithee, tell him, so much the rent of his land comes to' (1.4.140-1)—that is, to nothing. Lear, like Gloucester, passes through a stage of thought involving 'distribution' and 'superflux,' the language of justice in which he arraigns his daughters and criticizes the exercise of authority. He must evidently pass through that stage, which is after all simply another kind of reasoning of need (exposed in Goneril's hard statement of power, 'Who can arraign me for't?') to realize that there are senses, good and bad, in which 'None does offend, none, I say, none' (4.6.170)—and in which even those with cause to harm or punish reject the bargaining code implied by the concept of 'cause': 'No cause, no cause.'

In all kinds of ways, in many ranges of expression and of art, this play passes through ordinary human experience to insist upon the greatness and the abyss of human life. From the simplest, and often the silliest, aspects of human behaviour, its morality is made to open upon an almost metaphysical amplitude. The play forces upon us a realization of the limitations of being human, as well as of humanity's potentiality for transcending and even transvaluing itself. In one particular literary type, the figure of the Fool, we have an example of this transfiguration from naturalistic representation to reverberating symbol. Fools, as the books assure us, were typical appendages of both medieval and Renaissance courts. Interestingly enough, in England James I (famous for his fools and his foolishness, though perhaps not yet for the latter when this play was first put on) was the last English monarch to patronize professional fools; they too went out in the peculiar, muted modernization of life resulting from the War and the Interregnum. Of the figures in the play, the Fool most of all moves along the gamut from morality to naturalism: the Fool speaks both in propria persona and in the stylized persona of the official fool, sometimes 'all-licens'd' and satirical, sometimes sad and despondent, sometimes mixing modes of actuality and metaphor. His 'prophecy' is one such mixture (3.2.81-95); at first he seems to project a Utopian world 'When priests are more in word than matter,' at other times a world upside down in unpleasantness—'When brewers mar their malt with water.' From that point on, the prophecy jumbles ideal with deformed elements, and we are never sure what the measuring-rod is. Why should it be better, or worse, if 'No heretics' are 'burn'd, but wenches' suitors'? Though it would indeed be Utopian if 'No squire' were 'in debt, nor no poor knight,' and if usurers could 'tell their gold i' th' field' secure from theft, still it is an imperfect England that harbours usurers at all; there is, too, no particular virtue in bawds' and whores' building churches. The world of the Fool's prophecy is no schematic world of handy-dandy, where evil systematically replaces good or good evil: the Fool recognizes, even in this utterance, that the world in which he lives is deeply confused. His words to Kent in the stocks, too, both the prose comment on fortune and favour and the little poem reiterating the theme, seem to say that wise men ought not to follow declining patrons; yet he calls those who fly such patrons 'knaves' and insists with pride upon his own 'foolish' loyalty to his powerless lord. The Fool knows the ways of Goneril and Regan—and rejects them. Perhaps it is not so grotesque, after all, that he is one of the justicers of the crazy King's Bench which arraigns Goneril, the joint-stool in a symbolic gesture whose meaning the real woman could never recognize. Like Erasmus' Folly, Lear's Fool knows truth from fiction, and knows their complicated inter-dependence as well.

The Fool disappears—from the play as from English courts, and for just the reason Lear's Fool gives: 'Lords and great ones' usurp his monopoly. The Fool's comment is extremely shrewd. For a time folly was the monopoly, granted by monarchs, as the exclusive privilege of fools, but as the social distinctions upon which such regulated mockery depended fell away, so everyone 'snatched' at all privilege, even the dubious one of folly. Along with the gentleman and yeoman of the riddle, even a king can be a fool. When that happens, deference offers no defence against folly, and professional fools must be got rid of.

Lear becomes, by his own admission, a fool—an old king, caught in the conflict of one ethos with another, trying to be fair by the new standards and yet relying on the privileges granted by the old, becomes a child again, with all the nonsense and the clarity of a child. He fails in the impossible task of doing right by a double standard he cannot even define, but after he has failed, he comes to understand, reject, and transcend those standards to assert a vision even truer than the normal ones, a reason purer than the customary assessments of either need or logic, and a charity greater than even royal munificence could show. One way we can perceive Lear's poignant predicament and accomplishment is to reckon it by the real problems that faced his peers, as Stone's book enables us to do. Shakespeare has not let Lear off easily; as so often, the playwright, for all that his heart lay with the old mores of abundance, kindness, and carelessness, scrupulously shows the problems and limits of such a code. Magnanimous noblemen were careless of costs, wasted human potential in their easy acceptance of the old customs. Ambitious 'new' noblemen may have corrected some of the errors of their conservative elders—but the cost of their correction, as this play demonstrates, is prohibitive. We are forced to acknowledge that there is a crisis of values in this play, and that neither ethos will do—and, though there is no doubt which side the playwright preferred, he was too scrupulous to present the problem simply as a morality, or simply as a conservative argument for 'order' and 'degree.' He saw both the practical Tightness of the position Goneril, Regan, and Edmund abused, and the social grace of the position Lear and Gloucester exploited. But however we come to love and pity the old aristocrats, we know that their unconsidered acceptance of their own values was too expensive, in terms of their own families. Those lapsing fathers counted on unexamined social custom for protection against everything, even against the mysteries of hard hearts and calculating brains. The moral weight of the play comes down decisively with the advocates of old values, but not without having hesitated long enough to show how crucially those values fell short.