[In the essay that follows, Greenblatt compares a nineteenth-century account of a father's "subduing" of his infant son with the love-test to which Lear subjects his daughters.]

I want to begin this essay far from the Renaissance, with a narrative of social practice first published in the American Baptist Magazine of 1831. Its author is the Reverend Francis Wayland, an early president of Brown University and a Baptist minister. The passage concerns his infant son, Heman Lincoln Wayland, who was himself to become a college president and Baptist minister:

My youngest child is an infant about 15 months old, with about the intelligence common to children of that age. It has for some months been evident, that he was more than usually self willed, but the several attempts to subdue him, had been thus far relinquished, from the fear that he did not fully understand what was said to him. It so happened, however, that I had never been brought into collision with him myself, until the incident occurred which I am about to relate. Still I had seen enough to convince me of the necessity of subduing his temper, and resolved to seize upon the first favorable opportunity which presented, for settling the question of authority between us.

On Friday last before breakfast, on my taking him from his nurse, he began to cry violently. I determined to hold him in my arms until he ceased. As he had a piece of bread in his hand, I took it away, intending to give it to him again after he became quiet. In a few minutes he ceased, but when I offered him the bread he threw it away, although he was very hungry. He had, in fact, taken no nourishment except a cup of milk since 5 o'clock on the preceding afternoon. I considered this a fit opportunity for attempting to subdue his temper, and resolved to embrace it. I thought it necessary to change his disposition, so that he would receive the bread from me, and also be so reconciled to me that he would voluntarily come to me. The task I found more difficult than I had expected.

I put him into a room by himself, and desired that no one should speak to him, or give him any food or drink whatever. This was about 8 o'clock in the morning. I visited him every hour or two during the day, and spoke to him in the kindest tones, offering him the bread and putting out my arms to take him. But throughout the whole day he remained inflexibly obstinate. He did not yield a hair's breadth. I put a cup of water to his mouth, and he drank it greedily, but would not touch it with his hands. If a crumb was dropped on the floor he would eat it, but if / offered him the piece of bread, he would push it away from him. When I told him to come to me, he would turn away and cry bitterly. He went to bed supperless. It was now twenty-four hours since he had eaten anything.

He woke the next morning in the same state. He would take nothing that I offered him, and shunned all my offers of kindness. He was now truly an object of pity. He had fasted thirty-six hours. His eyes were wan and sunken. His breath hot and feverish, and his voice feeble and wailing. Yet he remained obstinate. He continued thus, till 10 o'clock, A.M. when hunger overcame him, and he took from me a piece of bread, to which I added a cup of milk, and hoped that the labor was at last accomplished.

In this however I had not rightly judged. He ate his bread greedily, but when I offered to take him, he still refused as pertinaciously as ever. I therefore ceased feeding him, and recommenced my course of discipline.

He was again left alone in his crib, and I visited him as before, at intervals. About one o'clock, Saturday, I found that he began to view his condition in its true light. The tones of his voice in weeping were graver and less passionate, and had more the appearance of one bemoaning himself. Yet when I went to him he still remained obstinate. You could clearly see in him the abortive efforts of the will. Frequently he would raise his hands an inch or two, and then suddenly put them down again. He would look at me, and then hiding his face in the bedclothes weep most sorrowfully. During all this time I was addressing him, whenever I came into the room, with invariable kindness. But my kindness met with no suitable return. All I required of him was, that he should come to me. This he would not do, and he began now to see that it had become a serious business. Hence his distress increased. He would not submit, and he found that there was no help without it. It was truly surprising to behold how much agony so young a being could inflict upon himself.

About three o'clock I visited him again. He continued in the state I have described. I was going away, and had opened the door, when I thought that he looked somewhat softened, and returning, put out my hands, again requesting him to come to me. To my joy, and I hope gratitude, he rose up and put forth his hands immediately. The agony was over. He was completely subdued. He repeatedly kissed me, and would do so whenever I commanded. He would kiss any one when I directed him, so full of love was he to all the family. Indeed, so entirely and instantaneously were his feelings towards me changed, that he preferred me now to any of the family. As he had never done before, he moaned after me when he saw that I was going away.

Since this event several slight revivals of his former temper have occurred, but they have all been easily subdued. His disposition is, as it never has been before, mild and obedient. He is kind and affectionate, and evidently much happier than he was, when he was determined to have his own way. I hope and pray that it may prove that an effect has been produced upon him for life.

The indignation and disgust that this account immediately excited in the popular press of Jacksonian America, as it does in ourselves, seem to me appropriate but incomplete responses, for if we say that tyranny here masquerades as paternal kindness, we must also remember that, as Kafka once remarked of his father, "love often wears the face of violence." Wayland's behavior reflects the relentless effort of generations of evangelical fathers to break the child's will, but it would be a mistake to conceive of this effort as a rejection of affective familial bonds or as a primitive disciplinary pathology from which our own unfailing decency toward the young has freed itself. On the contrary, Wayland's struggle is a strategy of intense familial love, and it is the sophisticated product of a long historical process whose roots lie at least partly in early modern England, the England of Shakespeare's King Lear.

Wayland's twin demands—that his son take food directly from him and come to him voluntarily, as an act of love and not forced compliance—may in fact be seen, from the perspective of what French historians call the longue durée, as a domesticated, "realistic," and, as it were, bourgeoisified version of the love test with which Shakespeare's play opens. Lear too wishes to be the object—the preferred and even the sole recipient—of his child's love. He can endure a portion of that love being turned elsewhere, but only when he directs that it be so divided, just as Reverend Wayland was in the end pleased that the child "would kiss any one when I directed him." Such a kiss is not a turning elsewhere but an indirect expression of love for the father.

Goneril, to be sure, understands that the test she so successfully passes is focused on compliance: "you have obedience scanted," she tells Cordelia, "And well are worth the want that you have wanted" (I,i). But Lear's response to his youngest daughter's declaration that she does not love him all suggests that more than outward deference is at stake: "But goes thy heart with this?" From Cordelia at least he wants something more than formal obedience, something akin to the odd blend of submission to authority and almost erotic longing depicted at the close of Wayland's account: "He repeatedly kissed me, and would do so whenever I commanded.… As he had never done before, he moaned after me when he saw that I was going away."

To obtain such love, Wayland withholds his child's food, and it is tempting to say that Lear, in disinheriting Cordelia, does the same. But what is a technique for Wayland is for Lear a dire and irreversible punishment: the disinheriting and banishment of Cordelia is not a lesson, even for the elder sisters, let alone for Cordelia herself, but a permanent estrangement, sealed with the most solemn oaths. Wayland's familial strategy uses parental discipline to bring about a desired relationship rather than to punish when the relationship has failed. In his account, the taking away of the child's food initiates the love test, whereas in King Lear the father's angry cancellation of his daughter's dowry signals the abandonment of the love test and the formal disclaimer of all paternal care. In the contrast between this bitter finality and a more calculating discipline that punishes in order to fashion its object into a desired shape, we glimpse the first of the differences that help to account for the resounding success of Wayland's test and the grotesque and terrifying failure of Lear's.

A second crucial difference is that by the early nineteenth century the age of the child who is tested has been pushed back drastically; Wayland had noticed signs of self-will in his infant son for some months, but had not sought to subdue it until he was certain that the child could "fully understand what was said to him." That he expected to find such understanding in a fifteen-month-old reflects a transformation in cultural attitudes toward children, a transformation whose early signs may be glimpsed in Puritan child-rearing manuals and early seventeenth-century religious lyrics and that culminates in the educational philosophy of Rousseau and the poetry of Wordsworth.

King Lear, by contrast, locates the moment of testing, for Cordelia at least, precisely in what was for Shakespeare's England the age that demanded the greatest attention, instruction, and discipline, the years between sexual maturity at about fifteen and social maturity at about twenty-six. This was, in the words of a seventeenth-century clergyman quoted by Keith Thomas, "a slippery age, full of passion, rashness, wilfulness," upon which adults must impose restraints and exercise shaping power. The Elizabethan and Jacobean theater returned almost obsessively to the representation of this age group, which, not coincidentally, constituted a significant portion of the play-going population. Civic officials, lawyers, preachers, and moralists joined dramatists in worrying chiefly about what Lawrence Stone in The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 calls "potentially the most unruly element in any society, the floating mass of young unmarried males," and it was to curb their spirits, fashion their wills, and delay their full entry into the adult world that the educational system and the laws governing apprentice-ship addressed themselves. But girls were also the objects of a sustained cultural scrutiny that focused on the critical passage from the authority of the father or guardian to the authority of the husband. This transition was of the highest structural significance, entailing complex transactions of love, power, and material substance, all of which, we may note, are simultaneously at issue when Lear demands of his youngest daughter a declaration she is unwilling or unable to give.

Love, power, and material substance are likewise at issue in the struggle between Reverend Wayland and his toddler, but all reduced to the proportions of the nursery: a kiss, an infantile gesture of refusal, a piece of bread. In the nineteenth-century confrontation, punishment is justified as exemplary technique, and the temporal frame has shifted from adolescence to infancy. Equally significant, the spatial frame has shifted as well, from the public to the private. Lear is of course a king, for whom there would, in any case, be no privacy, but generally Renaissance writers do not assume that the family is set off from public life. On the contrary, public life is itself most frequently conceived in familial terms, as an interlocking, hierarchical system of patriarchal authorities, while conversely the family is conceived as a little commonwealth. Indeed the family is widely understood in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as both the historical source and the ideological justification of society: "for I admit," writes Bacon, "the law to be that if the son kill his father or mother it is petty treason, and that there remaineth in our laws so much of the ancient footsteps of potestas patria and natural obedience, which by the law of God is the very instance itself, and all other government and obedience is taken but by equity." In other words, the Fifth Commandment—"Honor thy father and mother"—is the original letter of the law which equity "enlarges," as the Elizabethan jurist Edmund Plowden puts it, to include all political authority.

This general understanding of the enlargement by which the state is derived from the family is given virtually emblematic form in representations of the ruling family; hence the supremely public nature of Lear's interrogations of his daughters' feelings toward him does not mark him off, as other elements in the play do, from the world of Shakespeare's audience, but rather registers a central ideological principle of middle- and upper-class families in the early modern period. Affairs of family shade into affairs of state, as Gloucester's anxious broodings on the late eclipses of the sun and moon make clear: "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" (I,ii). The very order of the phrases here, in their failure to move decisively from private to public, their reversion at the close to the familial bond, signals the interinvolvement of household and society. By the time of Jacksonian America, the family has moved indoors, separated from civil society, which in turn has been separated from the state. Reverend Wayland's account of his domestic crisis is also, of course, intended for public consumption, but it was published anonymously, as if to respect the protective boundaries of the family, and more important still, it makes public a private event in order to assist the private lives of others, that is, to strengthen the resolve of loving parents to subdue the temper of their own infants.

We will return later to the temporal and spatial problems touched upon here—the cultural evaluation of differing age groups and the status of privacy—but we should first note several of the significant continuities between Renaissance child-rearing techniques and those of nineteenth-century American evangelicals. The first, and ground of all the others, is the not-so-simple fact of observation: these parents pay attention to their children, testing the young to gauge the precise cast of their emotion and will. This is more obviously the case with Reverend Wayland, who when his child was scarcely a year old was already scrutinizing him for signs of self-will. The fathers in Shakespeare's play seem purblind by comparison: Lear apparently cannot perceive the difference between his eldest daughters' blatant hypocrisy and his youngest daughter's truth, while Gloucester evidently does not know what his eldest (and sole legitimate) son's handwriting—his "character"—looks like and is easily persuaded that this son (with whom he had talked for two hours the night before) wishes to kill him. This seeming obliviousness, however, signifies not indifference but error: Lear and Gloucester are hopelessly inept at reading their children's "characters," but the effort to do so is of the utmost importance in the play, which, after all, represents the fatal consequences of an incorrect "reading." We may say, with the Fool, that Lear was "a pretty fellow" when he had "no need to care" for his daughter's frowns (I, iv), but this indifference only exists outside the play itself, or perhaps in its initial moments; thereafter (and irreversibly) parents must scrutinize their children with what Lear, in a moment of uncharacteristic self-criticism, calls a "jealous curiosity" (I, iv). In initiating the plot against Edgar, Edmund gauges perfectly his father's blend of credulity and inquisitorial curiosity: "Edmund, how now! what news?.… Why so earnestly seek you to put up that letter?.… What paper were you reading?.… What needed then that terrible dispatch of it into your pocket?.… Let's see: come; if it be nothing, I shall not need spectacles" (I, ii). Children in the play, we might add, similarly scrutinize their fathers: "You see how full of changes his age is," Goneril remarks to Regan in their first moment alone together; "the observation we have made of it hath not been little" (I, i). The whole family comes to exist sub specie semioticae; everyone is intent on reading the signs in everyone else.

This mode of observation is common to Shakespeare's play and Wayland's account, but not because it is intrinsic to all family life: intense paternal observation of the young is by no means a universal practice. It is, rather, learned by certain social groups in particular cultures and ages. Thus there is virtually no evidence of the practice in late medieval England, while for the seventeenth century there is (given the general paucity of materials for intimate family history) quite impressive evidence, especially for the substantial segment of the population touched by Puritanism. For example, the Essex vicar Ralph Josselin (1617-83) has left in his diary a remarkably full record of his troubled relationship with his son, particularly during the latter's adolescence. "My soule yearned over John," notes one characteristic entry, "oh lord overcome his heart." The conflict between them reached a crisis in 1674, when, in a family discussion held in the presence of his wife and four daughters, Josselin put the following proposition before his twenty-three-year-old heir:

John set your selfe to fear God, & bee industrious in my business, refrain your evill courses, and I will passe by all past offences, setle all my estate on you after your mothers death, and leave you some stocke on the ground and within doores to the value of an £100 and desire of you, out of your marriage portion but £400 to provide for my daughters or otherwise to charge my land with so much for their porcions; but if you continue your ill courses I shall dispose my land otherwise, and make only a provision for your life to put bread in your hand.

The father's strategy was at least temporarily successful, as John prudently accepted the offer and "ownd his debauchery."

Josselin's insistence upon the economic consequences of disobedience provides an immediate link to King Lear, where the father's power to alter portions and to disinherit is of crucial importance. We should note that primogeniture was never so inflexibly established in England, even among the aristocracy, as to preclude the exercise of paternal discretion, the power to bribe, threaten, reward, and punish. Lear's division of the kingdom, his attempt both to set his daughters in competition with each other and to dispose of his property equitably among them, seems less a wanton violation of the normative practice than a daring attempt to use the paternal power always inherent in it. This power is exhibited in more conventional form in the subplot: "And of my land, / Loyal and natural boy," the deceived Gloucester tells his conniving bastard son, "I'll work the means / To make thee capable" (II, i). This economic pressure is not, of course, immediately apparent in Reverend Wayland's dealings with his infant, but Josselin's threat to "make only a provision … to put bread in your hand" curiously anticipates the symbolic object of contention in the Wayland nursery and suggests that there too the paternal power to withhold or manipulate the means of sustenance is at issue.

This power should not be regarded as exclusively disciplinary. It is instead an aspect of a general familial concern with planning for the future, a concern that extends from attempts to shape the careers of individual children to an overarching interest in the prosperity of the "house." Francis Wayland's struggle with his son is not a flaring-up of paternal anger but a calculated effort to fashion his child's future: "I hope and pray that it may prove that an effect has been produced upon him for life." Similarly, Lear's disastrous division of the kingdom is undertaken, he claims, so that "future strife / May be prevented now" (I, i), and the love test marks the formal entry into his planned retirement.

These efforts to shape the future of the family seem to reflect a conviction that there are certain critical moments upon which a whole train of subsequent events depends, moments whose enabling conditions may be irrecoverable and whose consequences may be irreversible. Such a conviction is formally expressed most often in relation to great public events, but its influence is more widespread, extending, for example, to rhetorical training, religious belief, and, I would suggest, child rearing. Parents must be careful to watch for what we may call, to adapt the rhetorical term, kairotic moments and to grasp the occasion for action. Hence Francis Wayland, wishing to alter his son's nature for life, "resolved to seize upon the first favorable opportunity which presented, for settling the question of authority between us." Had the father not done so, he would not only have diminished his own position but risked the destruction of his child's spiritual and physical being. Moreover, Wayland adds, had he received his stubborn child on any other terms than "the unconditional surrender of his will," he would have permitted the formation of a topsy-turvy world in which his entire family would have submitted to the caprices of an infant: "He must have been made the center of a whole system. A whole family under the control of a child 15 months old!" This carnivalesque reversal of roles would then have invited further insurrections, for "my other children and every member of my family would have been entitled to the same privilege." "Hence," Wayland concludes, "there would have been as many supreme authorities as there were individuals, and contention to the uttermost must have ensued."

King Lear depicts something very much like such a world turned upside down: Lear, as the Fool says, has made his daughters his mothers, and they employ on him, as in a nightmare, those disciplinary techniques deemed appropriate for "a slippery age, full of passion, rashness, wilfulness." "Old fools are babes again," says Goneril, "and must be us'd / With checks as flatteries, when they are seen abus'd" (I, iii). In the carnival tradition, tolerated—if uneasily—by the medieval church and state, such reversals of role, provided they were temporary, could be seen as restrorative, renewing the proper order of society by releasing pentup frustrations and potentially disruptive energies. As we know from a family account, even Francis Wayland could allow his children occasional bursts of festive inversion, always returning in the end to the supreme paternal authority that his early discipline had secured. But in Lear the role reversal is permanent, and its effect is the disintegration of the entire kingdom. Wayland similarly links permanent disorder in the family to chaos in the political, moral, and theological realms; indeed his loving struggle with his son offers, he suggests, a precise and resonant analogy to God's struggle with the sinner: it is infinitely kind in God to resist the sinner's will, "for if he were not resisted, he would destroy the happiness of the universe and himself together."

Here again, in Wayland's conviction that the fate of the universe may be linked to the power struggle in his nursery, we may hear an echo of Lear:

            O Heavens,
If you do love old men, if your sweet sway
Allow obedience, if you yourselves are old,
Make it your cause; send down and take my
 part.
                                     (II, iv)

Of course, as these very lines suggest, what is assumed in Wayland is deeply problematical in Lear: the fictive nature of the play, reinforced by its specifically pagan setting, seems to have licensed Shakespeare to anatomize the status and the underlying motives of virtually all of the elements that we have noted as common to the two texts. This difference is crucial, and it comes as no surprise that King Lear is more profound than Francis Wayland's account of his paternal authority: celebration of Shakespeare's profundity is an institutinalized rite of civility in our culture. We tend to assume, however, that Shakespearean self-consciousness and irony lead to a radical transcendence of the network of social conditions, paradigms, and practices in the plays. I would argue, by contrast, that Renaissance theatrical representation itself is fully implicated in this network and that Shakespeare's self-consciousness is in significant ways bound up with the institutions and the symbology of power it anatomizes.

But if its local ideological situation, its historical embeddedness, is so crucial to Shakespeare's play, what accounts for the similarities I have sketched between King Lear and Wayland's family narrative? The explanation lies first in the fact that nineteenth-century evangelical child-rearing techniques are the heirs of more widely diffused child-rearing techniques in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries—Wayland's practices may be seen almost fully articulated in a work like John Robinson's Of Children and Their Education, published in 1628 though written some years earlier—and second in the fact that the Renaissance English drama was one of the cultural institutions that expressed and fashioned just those qualities that we have identified as enabling the familial love test in the first place. That is, the mode of the drama, quite apart from any specific content, depended upon and fostered in its audience observation, the close reading of gesture and speech as manifestations of character and intention; planning, a sensitivity to the consequences of action (i.e., plot) and to kairotic moments (i.e., rhetoric); and a sense of resonance, the conviction, rooted in the drama's medieval inheritance, that cosmic meanings were bound up with local and particular circumstances.

I am not, of course, suggesting that the nineteenth-century American minister was fashioned by the Renaissance theater (a theater his seventeenth-century religious forebears detested and sought to close) nor that without the theater Renaissance child-rearing techniques would have been far different. But the theater was not merely the passive reflector of social forces that lay entirely outside of it; rather, like all forms of art, indeed like all utterances, the theater was itself a social event. Artistic expression is never perfectly self-contained and abstract, nor can it be derived satisfactorily from the subjective consciousness of an isolated creator. Collective actions, ritual gestures, paradigms of relationship, and shared images of authority penetrate the work of art and shape it from within, while conversely the socially overdetermined work of art, along with a multitude of other institutions and utterances, contributes to the formation, realignment, and transmission of social practices.

Works of art are, to be sure, marked off in our culture from ordinary utterances, but this demarcation is itself a communal event and signals not the effacement of the social but rather its successful absorption into the work by implication or articulation. This absorption—the presence within the work of its social being—makes it possible, as Bakhtin has argued, for art to survive the disappearance of its enabling social conditions, where ordinary utterance, more dependent upon the extraverbal pragmatic situation, drifts rapidly toward insignificance or incomprehensibility. Hence art's genius for survival, its delighted reception by audiences for whom it was never intended, does not signal its freedom from all other domains of life, nor does its inward articulation of the social confer upon it a formal coherence independent of the world outside its boundaries. On the contrary, artistic form itself both expresses and fashions social evaluations and practices.

Thus the Renaissance theater does not by virtue of the content of a particular play reach across a void to touch the Renaissance family; rather the theater is itself already saturated with social significance and hence with the family as the period's central social institution. Conversely, the theater contributes, in a small but by no means entirely negligible way, to the formal condensation and expression of patterns of observation, planning, and a sense of resonance. Hence it is fitting that when Cordelia resists Lear's paternal demand, she does so in an antitheatrical gesture, a refusal to perform: the theater and the family are simultaneously at stake.

To these shared patterns that link the quasi-mythical family of King Lear to the prosaic and amply documented family of Francis Wayland, we may now add four further interlocking features of Wayland's account that are more closely tied not to the mode of the theater as a whole but to the specific form and content of Shakespeare's tragedy: these are the absence or displacement of the mother, an affirmation of absolute paternal authority, an overriding interest in the will and hence in differentiating voluntary from merely forced compliance, and a belief in salutary anxiety.

Francis Wayland's wife was alive in 1831, but she is entirely, even eerily, missing from his account. Where was she during the long ordeal? In part her absence must depend upon her husband's understanding of the theological significance of the incident: in Francis Wayland's Christianity, there is no female intercessor, no Mother of Mankind to appeal to the stern Father for mercy upon a wayward child. Even if Mrs. Wayland did in fact try to temper (or reinforce) her husband's actions, he might well have regarded such intervention as irrelevant. Moreover, we may speculate that the timing of the incident—what we have called the perception of the kairotic moment—is designed precisely to avoid such irrelevant interventions. We do not know when any of the Wayland children were weaned, but fifteen months would seem about the earliest age at which the disciplinary withdrawal of food—the piece of bread and the cup of milk—could be undertaken without involving the mother or the nurse.

Thus the father is able entirely to displace the nurturing female body and with this displacement make manifest his "supreme authority" in the family, a micropolitics that, as we have seen, has its analogue both in the human world outside the home and in the divine realm. Between the law of the father and the law of God there is a perfect fit; between the father's authority and worldly authorities there is a more complicated relation, since Wayland, though an absolutist within his family, could not invoke in Jacksonian America a specific model of absolute power. The most he can do is to invoke, in effect, a generalized image of the social world and of the child as misfit: had his son been left unchecked, he "would soon have entered a world where other and more powerful beings than he would have opposed his will, and his disposition which I had cherished must have made him miserable as long as he lived."

This social vision does not mean that Wayland's primary interest is in outward compliance; on the contrary, a "forced yielding," as he terms it, is worthless. "Our voluntary service he requires," says Milton's Raphael of the Divine Father in Paradise Lost,

Not our necessitated, such with him
Finds no acceptance, nor can find, for how
Can hearts, not free, be tri'd whether they
 serve
Willing or no …
… freely we serve.
Because we freely love.

The proper goal is conversion, and to achieve this the father cannot rely on physical compulsion. He employs instead a technique of disciplinary kindness designed to show the child that his misery is entirely self-inflicted and can only be relieved by a similarly voluntary and inward surrender. In short, Wayland attempts to generate in his son a salutary anxiety that will lead to a transformation of the will.

With salutary anxiety we return powerfully to the mode and the content of King Lear. The very practice of tragedy depends upon a communal conviction that anxiety may be profitably and even pleasurably cultivated. That is, tragedy goes beyond the usual philosophical and religious consolations for affliction, and both exemplifies and perfects techniques for the creation or intensification of affliction. To justify such techniques, Renaissance artists could appeal to the theoretical account of tragedy that originated with Aristotle and was substantially elaborated in the sixteenth century, especially in Italy. But like most such theories, this one was inert until it intersected with a set of powerful social practices in the period.

From the perspective of Wayland's account, we may say that the most enduring of these practices is the Protestant cultivation of a sense of sin, the deliberate heightening of an anxiety that can only be relieved by a divine grace whose effect can only be felt by one who has experienced the anxiety. (I should emphasize that I am speaking here not simply of a set of theological propositions but of a program, prescribed in great detail and carried out by English Protestants from Tyndale onward.) To this religious practice, we may add the child-rearing techniques that also appear in Wayland's account, techniques that once again made a self-conscious and programmatic attempt to arouse anxiety for the child's ultimate good. But what is lost by early nineteenth-century America is the practice of salutary anxiety at the symbolic center of society, that is, in the characteristic operations of royal power. That power, concentrated and personalized, aroused anxiety not only as the negative limit but as the positive condition of its functioning. The monarchy, let us remind ourselves, did not conceive its purpose as the furthering of the subject's pursuit of happiness, nor was the political center of society a point at which all tensions and contradictions disappeared. On the contrary, Elizabethan and Jacobean charismatic absolutism battened on as well as suffered from the anxiety that arose from the instability of favor, the unresolved tensions in the religious settlement, the constantly proclaimed threats of subversion, invasion, and civil war, the spectacular public maimings and executions, and even the conspicuous gap between the monarch's ideological claim to perfect wisdom, beauty, and power and the all-too-visible limitations of the actual Elizabeth and James. The obedience required of the subject consisted not so much in preserving a genuine ignorance of this gap but in behaving as if the gap, though fully recognized, did not exist. The pressure of such a performance, demanded by the monarch's paradoxical yoking of the language of love and the language of coercion and registered in the subject's endless effusions of strained but not entirely hypocritical admiration, was itself an enhancement of royal power.

Throughout his career Shakespeare displays the deepest sensitivity to this production of salutary anxiety, a production he simultaneously questions and assimilates to his own authorial power. The fullest metatheatrical explorations of the phenomenon are in Measure for Measure and The Tempest, where both Dukes systematically awaken anxiety in others and become, for this reason, images of the dramatist himself. But Shakespeare's fullest embodiment of the practice is King Lear, and the vast critical literature that has grown up around the play, since the restoration of the text in the early nineteenth century, bears eloquent witness to the power of this anxiety to generate tireless expressions of love. King Lear characteristically incorporates several powerful and complex representations of salutary anxiety, the most notable of which, for our purposes, is the love test itself, a ritual whose intended function seems to have been to allay the retiring monarch's anxiety by arousing it in others. As the opening words of the play make clear, the division of the kingdom has in effect already taken place, with the shares carefully weighed. Lear's pretence that this prearranged legal agreement is a contest—"which of you shall we say doth love us most?"—infuses symbolic uncertainty into a situation where apparently no real uncertainty exists. This is confirmed by his persistence in the test even when its declared occasion has been rendered wholly absurd by the disposition of the first two-thirds of the kingdom, complete with declarations that possession is "perpetual," "hereditary ever." Lear wants his children to experience the anxiety of a competition for his bounty without having to endure any of the actual consequences of such a competition; he wants, that is, to produce in them something like the effect of a work of art, where emotions run high and practical effects seem negligible.

Why should Lear want his children, even his "joy" Cordelia, to experience such anxiety? Shakespeare's sources, going back to the distant folk tale with its salt motif, suggest that Lear wishes his full value to be recognized and that he stages the love test to enforce this recognition, which is crucially important to him because he is about to abdicate and hence lose the power to compel the deference of his children. Marks of deference such as kneeling for blessings, removing the hat, and sitting only when granted leave to do so, were of great significance in medieval and early modern families, though John Aubrey testifies that by the mid-seventeenth century they seemed strained and arbitrary. They figured as part of a complex, interlocking system of public signs of respect for wealth, caste, and, at virtually every level of society, age. The period had a deep gerontological bias. It told itself constantly that by the will of God and the natural order of things authority belonged to the old, and it contrived, through such practices as deferral of marriage, prolonged apprenticeships, and systematic exclusion of the young from office, to ensure that this proper arrangement of society be observed. At stake, it was thought, was not only a societal arrangement—the protection, in an economy of scarcity, of the material interests of geronto-logical hierarchy against the counterclaims of the young—but the structure and meaning of a world where the old in each generation formed a link with the old of the preceding generation and so, by contiguity, reached back to the ideal, sanctified order at the origin of time.

But paradoxically the late Middle Ages and the early modern period also kept telling itself that without the control of property and the means of production, age's claim to authority was pathetically vulnerable to the ruthless ambitions of the young. Sermons and, more generally, the writings of moralists over several centuries provide numerous monitory tales of parents who turn their wealth over to their children and are, in consequence, treated brutally. "Your father were a fool," Gremio, echoing the moral of these tales, tells Tranio in The Taming of the Shrew, "To give thee all, and in his waning age / Set foot under thy table" (II, i).

The story of King Lear in its numerous retellings from at least the twelfth century on seems to have served precisely as one of these admonitions, and Shakespeare's Edmund, in the forged letter he passes off as Edgar's, gives full voice to the fears of the old, that is, to their fantasy of what the young, beneath the superficial marks of deference, are really thinking:

This policy and reverence of age makes the world bitter to the best of our times; keeps our fortunes from us till our oldness cannot relish them. I begin to find an idle and fond bondage in the oppression of aged tyranny, who sways, not as it hath power, but as it is suffer'd. (I, ii)

This recurrent nightmare of the old seems to challenge not only the material well-being of fathers but the conception of the natural order of things to which the old appeal in justification of their prerogatives. "Fathers fear," writes Pascal, "that the natural love of their children can be erased. What kind of nature is this, that can thus be erased? Custom is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why isn't custom natural? I am very much afraid that this nature is only a first custom, as custom is a second nature." Shakespeare's King Lear is haunted by this fear, voiced not in the relative privacy of the Pensées but in the public agony of family and state relations: "… let them anatomize Regan, see what breeds about her heart. Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?" (III, vi).

But it would be misleading simply to associate Shakespeare's play with this uneasiness without specifying the practical measures that medieval and early modern fathers undertook to protect themselves when retirement, always frowned upon, could not be avoided. Such situations arose most frequently in Shakespeare's own class of origin, that is, among artisans and small landowners whose income depended upon continual personal productivity. Faced with a precipitous decline in such productivity, the old frequently did have to transfer a farm or workshop to the young, but for all the talk of the natural privileges and super-natural protection of the aged, there was, as we have seen, remarkably little confidence in either the inherent or customary rights of parents. On the contrary, as Alan Macfarlane has noted in The Origins of English Individualism, "contemporaries seem to have been well aware that without legal guarantees, parents had no rights whatsoever." There could even be a ritual acknowledgment of this fact, as testimony in a thirteenth-century lawsuit suggests: having agreed to give his daughter in marriage to Hugh, with half of his land, the widower Anseline and the married couple were to live together in one house. "And the same Anseline went out of the house and handed over to them the door by the hasp, and at once begged lodging out of charity."

Once a father had given up his land, he became, even in the house that had once been his own, what was called a "sojourner." The connotations of the word are suggested by its use in the Authorized Version of the Old Testament: "We are strangers before Thee, and sojourners, as were all our fathers. Our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding" (1 Chron. 29).

Threatened with such a drastic loss of their status and authority, parents facing retirement turned, not surprisingly, to the law, obtaining contracts or maintenance agreements by which, in return for the transfer of family property, children undertook to provide food, clothing, and shelter. The extent of parental anxiety may be gauged by the great specificity of many of these requirements—so many yards of woolen cloth, pounds of coal, or bushels of grain—and by the pervasive fear of being turned out of the house in the wake of a quarrel. The father, who has been, in Sir Edward Coke's phrase, "the guardian by nature" of his children, now has these children for his legal guardians. The maintenance agreement is essentially a medieval device, linked to feudal contractualism, to temper the power of this new guardianship by stipulating that the children are only "depositaries" of the paternal property, so that, in the words of William West's early seventeenth-century legal manual Simboleography, "the self same thing [may] be restored whensoeuer it shall please him that so leaueth it." Thus the maintenance agreement can "reserve" to the father some right or interest in the property that he has conveyed to his children.

We are, of course, very far from the social world of King Lear, which does not represent the milieu of yeomen and artisans, but I would argue that Shakespeare's play is powerfully situated in the midst of precisely the concerns of the makers of these maintenance agreements: the terror of being turned out of doors or of becoming a stranger even in one's own house; the fear of losing the food, clothing, and shelter necessary for survival, let alone dignity; the humiliating loss of parental authority; the dread, particularly powerful in a society that adhered to the principle of gerontological hierarchy, of being supplanted by the young. Lear's royal status does not cancel but rather intensifies these concerns: he will "invest" in Goneril and Regan, along with their husbands, his "power, / Preeminence, and all the large effects / That troop with majesty," but he wants to retain the hundred knights and "The name and all th'addition to a king" (I, i). He wishes, that is, to avoid at all costs the drastic loss of status that inevitably attended retirement in the early modern period, and his maddened rage, later in the play, is a response not only to his daughters' vicious ingratitude but to the horror of being reduced to the position of an Anseline:

          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."
                                             (II, iv)

His daughter, in response, unbendingly proposes that he "return and sojourn"—a word whose special force in this context we have now recovered—"with my sister."

Near the climax of this terrible scene in which Goneril and Regan, by relentlessly diminishing his retinue, in effect strip away his social identity, Lear speaks as if he had actually drawn up a maintenance agreement with his daughters:

Lear I gave you all—

Regan And in good time you gave it.

Lear Made you my guardians, my
  depositaries,
But kept a reservation to be follow'd
With such a number. (II, iv)

But there is no maintenance agreement between Lear and his daughters; there could be none, since as Lear makes clear in the first scene, he will not as absolute monarch allow anything "To come betwixt our sentence and our power" (I, i), and an autonomous system of laws would have constituted just such an intervention. For a contract in English law implied bargain consideration, that is, the reciprocity inherent in a set of shared obligations and limits, and this understanding that a gift could only be given with the expectation of receiving something in return is incompatible with Lear's sense of his royal prerogative, just as it is incompatible with the period's absolutist conception of paternal power and divine power.

Lear's power draws upon the network of rights and obligations that is sketched by the play's pervasive language of service, but as Kent's experience in the first scene makes clear, royal absolutism is at the same time at war with this feudal legacy. Shakespeare's play emphasizes Lear's claim to unbounded power, even at the moment of his abdication, since his "darker purpose" sets itself above all constraints upon the royal will and pleasure. What enables him to lay aside his claim to rule, the scene suggests, is the transformation of power into a demand for unbounded love, a love that then takes the place of the older contractual bond between parents and children. Goneril and Regan understand Lear's demand as an aspect of absolutist theater; hence in their flattering speeches they discursively perform the impossibility of ever adequately expressing their love: "Sir, I love you more than word can wield the matter / .… A love that makes breath poor and speech unable; / Beyond all manner of so much I love you" (I, i). This cunning representation of the impossibility of representation contaminates Cordelia's inability to speak by speaking it; that is, Goneril's words occupy the discursive space that Cordelia would have to claim for herself if she were truly to satisfy her father's demand. Consequently, any attempt to represent her silent love is already tainted: representation is theatricalization is hypocrisy and hence is misrepresentation. Even Cordelia's initial aside seems to long for the avoidance of language altogether and thus for an escape from the theater. Her words have an odd internal distance, as if they were spoken by another, and more precisely as if the author outside the play were asking himself what he should have his character say and deciding that she should say nothing: "What shall Cordelia speak? Love, and be silent" (I,i). But this attempt to remain silent—to surpass her sisters and satisfy her father by refusing to represent her love—is rejected, as is her subsequent attempt to say nothing, that is, literally to speak the word "nothing." Driven into discourse by her father's anger, Cordelia then appeals not like her sisters to an utter dependence upon paternal love but to a "bond" that is both reciprocal and limited. Against paternal and monarchical absolutism, Cordelia opposes in effect the ethos of the maintenance agreement, and this opposition has for Lear the quality of treason.

Lear, who has, as he thinks, given all to his children, demands all from them. In place of a contract, he has substituted the love test. He wants, that is, not only the formal marks of deference that publicly acknowledge his value, but also the inward and absolute tribute of the heart. It is in the spirit of this demand that he absorbs into himself the figure of the mother; there can be no division for Lear between authority and love. But as the play's tragic logic reveals, Lear cannot have both the public deference and the inward love of his children. The public deference is only as good as the legal constraints that Lear's absolute power paradoxically deprives him of, and the inward love cannot be adequately represented in social discourse, licensed by authority and performed in the public sphere, enacted as in a court or theater. Lear had thought to set his rest—the phrase means both to stake everything and to find repose—on Cordelia's "kind nursery," but only in his fantasy of perpetual imprisonment with his daughter does he glimpse, desperately and pathetically, what he sought. That is, only when he has been decisively separated from his public authority and locked away from the world, only when the direct link between family and state power has been broken, can Lear hope, in the dream of the prison as nursery, for his daughter's sustaining and boundless love.

With this image of the prison as nursery we return for the last time to Francis Wayland, who, to gain the love of his child, used the nursery as a prison. We return, then, to the crucial differences, as we sketched them, between the early seventeenth- and early nineteenth-century versions of salutary anxiety, differences between a culture in which the theater was a centrally significant and emblematic artistic practice, profoundly linked with family and power, and a culture in which the theater had shrivelled to marginal entertainment. The love test for Wayland takes place in the privacy of the nursery where he shuts up his fifteen-month-old infant. In consequence, what is sought by the father is not the representation of love in public discourse, but things prior to and separate from language: the embrace, the kiss, the taking of food, the inarticulate moaning after the father when he leaves the room. It is only here, before verbal representation, that the love test could be wholly successful, here that the conditional, reciprocal, social world of the maintenance agreement could be decisively replaced by the child's absolute and lifelong love. And, we might add, the father did not in this case have to renounce the public tribute entirely; he had only to wait until he ceased to exist. For upon the death of Francis Wayland, Heman Lincoln Wayland collaborated in writing a reverential two-volume biography of his father, a son's final monument to familial love. Lear, by contrast, dies still looking on his daughter's lips for the words that she never speaks.