SOURCE: Davidson, Clifford. “The Iconography of Wisdom and Folly in King Lear.” In Shakespeare and the Emblem: Studies in Renaissance Iconography and Iconology, edited by Tibor Fabiny, pp. 189-214. Szeged, Hungary: Department of English, Attila Jozsef University, 1984.

[In the following excerpt, Davidson calls attention to the way symbolic associations underscore the motif of reversals and inversions of order in King Lear. He argues that although the first four acts may be read as a traditional Christian presentation of the operation of divine providence, the iconography of Act V appears to question the wisdom of relying on moral or religious certainties.]

Sometimes individual plays in the Shakespeare canon take on particularly strong significance in the light of events which we see taking place in the world around us. While it is unwise to see Shakespeare as a great sage, comparable perhaps to Socrates, the immediacy of some events in one or another of his stage plays will strike us particularly strongly from time to time. At this juncture in history, I am thus struck by the events of King Lear, which I find to challenge us in our complacent notions about the stability of the social order and the inherent goodness of men. In this sense the play perhaps will not teach so very much more than we could learn from surveying the dislocations and the terrible events of our own century. Nevertheless, Shakespeare's drama seems to have some further significance for us. It certainly places events within perspective, and it provides a grid against which we can examine the widom and folly of our own age.

If we may agree that Shakespeare thought of his theater as an emblem of the world,¹ then we can see the heart of the problem as one that can be translated into theatrical and visual terms. Life in a civilized society must be more than mere play-acting, going through the gestures and uttering the words demanded by the script before it is time to leave this earthly stage. Hypocrisy in the pursuit of a private and sinister kind of self-defined “wisdom”—a “wisdom” that must be hidden so as to seem to be something other than actual foolishness—provides therefore the paradox around which the visual tableaux and iconography of King Lear are organized. Such pretended wisdom, identifying life as shadow sans substance, will in the play persist in violating the meaning of life, in jeopardizing civilization itself. Thus Lear, after he has fallen to Fortune's lowest point which is also the kingdom's lowest point, recognizes in his madness that the world now appears to be nothing but a “great stage of fools” (IV.vi.183).

Goneril and Regan, the two sly daughters of the king, are actresses whose faces do not match what is in their hearts. To use Geoffrey Whitney's words from his Choice of Emblemes, their “flatteringe speeche” with their “sugred wordes” will have the purpose of deceiving trust: “And few there bee [who] can scape theise vipers vile.”² Such, then, is the wisdom of the deceptive Goneril and Regan, whose mastery of “that glib and oily art / To speak and purpose not” (I.i.224-25) persuades the old king of their love and loyalty. But as soon as they are able to confide in each other, these two daughters drop their actors' masks before the audience as they agree to “[hit] together” to deny any authority the king might wish to retain after his abdication (I.i.302-03). These daughters are, like Macbeth and Lady Macbeth welcoming King Duncan of Scotland to their castle at Inverness, hypocrites who turn to their monarch fair faces while their actual intentions remain hidden. They are, as we would say, “two faced”, like Cesare Ripa's Fraude as illustrated in his Iconologia.³ And they are acting out a role which conceals their malice, poisonous envy, perverse desires—qualities which only their self-love can translate into what will seem to them to be wise behavior. Goneril and Regan place self above all bonds of duty and all pretensions of love where love is due, and, as we see in the play's first scene, in order to gain their objectives they will engage in the most blatant flattery.

These two women, Lear's older daughters, may thus be said to represent the iconography of wicked femininity, which draws upon the original act of Eve in the Garden of Eden when in the Hebrew myth she succumbed to ambition and the lust for power. Shakespeare's play depicts this iconography with very great precision. When Goneril's letter is intercepted by Edgar, the good son exclaims, “O indistinguishable space of woman's will!” (IV.vi.271). She and her wicked sister, in spite of their pretensions to wisdom, are dominated by their wills as these faculties in turn are influenced by their passions and appetites without any real guidance from reason. Their wills are boundless, infinitely selfish. Hence Goneril finds the limits placed on her by the marriage bonds, which hold her to Albany's bed, like a jail. And, as we are reminded by Regan herself at I.i.69, she is “made of that self metal as my sister [italics mine].” Metal in this instance may be seen in terms of envy—a traditional association⁴—but it might also be compared to the important notion of which we are reminded in The Merchant of Venice I.iii.134, that metal is “barren” and hence cannot “breed” or reproduce itself. If all women were of the same “metal” as Goneril and Regan, nature would clearly be unredeemable, and Lear's mad and cynical words about them would be universally applicable:

Down from the waist they are Centaurs,
Though women all above;
But to the girdle do the gods inherit,
Beneath is all the fiends': there's hell, there's
                    darkness,
There is the sulphurous pit, burning, scalding,
Stench, corruption …

(IV. vi. 124-30)

Such double natures present us with a feminine character which is defined in terms of the magical but deadly mouth and cave of hell.

Fortunately, one of Lear's daughters is not thus controlled by her lower nature. The iconography of Cordelia stresses the contrast with her sisters, for she lacks their empty and flattering rhetoric as well as their essential “hollowness.” Despite the “Nothing” of her answer to her father, she does in fact love and respect him according to her “bond.” She has no wilful desire to reach beyond the limits set by nature for parent-child relationships; she will in all sincerity “Obey,” “love,” “and most honor” her father and king (I. i. 98). Her stance is on the side of that which makes possible the coherence holding the commonwealth together, while her sisters' individualism and selfishness tend only toward the terrible chaos that is at the iconographic center of the play. Thus Lear truly has “[one] daughter / Who redeems nature from the general curse / Which twain have brought her to” (IV. vi. 205-07). The implicit imagery which identifies the evil daughters with the Fall of Man is balanced by an explicit reference to the second Eve, the Blessed Virgin Mary, the mother of the Redeemer in Christian tradition.

The subjection of England to this cursed “twain,” Goneril and Regan, comes about, of course, through the choleric king's unfortunate decision to divide the kingdom and through his public preference for flattery over truth. In the first act, the king's “hideous rashness” (i. 151) seems impelled by a strange and mysterious force beyond the comprehension of rational philosophy. Blinded by his passion, Lear can only describe the intensity of his rage by the iconography of the line spoken to Kent: “The bow is bent and drawn, make from the shaft” (I. i. 143). The tension of the drawn bow ready to be released is appropriately analogous to the violence of the king's temperament. And it is sufficient to dislocate the precarious social balance achieved by civil society.

King Lear will be personally punished, of course, for his pride and anger. At the beginning, Lear is described in iconographic terms as being at the top of Fortune's wheel; when he steps down from his place at the top, he causes a great spinning of the wheel. The forces which are visually described as out of control become the means by which Edmund and the wicked daughters attempt to raise themselves to absolute power, while these same forces are turned against Lear and the other good characters in the play. Therefore “the rack of this tough world” (V. iii. 315) itself become a source of torture to the king. As Kent notes at the end, only someone who “hates” this formerly proud king would wish at last to see his life stretched out longer (V. iii. 316). The emblem is of a man whose body is tied or otherwise placed forcibly upon a globe or other circular instrument of torture. Thus will the proud be eternally treated, according to the account of the punishment of the seven deadly sins as told by Lazarus after his return from death in The Kalender of Shepherdes, translated by R. Copland (c. 1518): “I have seen in helle wheles ryght by sette on an hylle / the whiche was to loke on in maner lyke Milles incessauntly tournynge about by great Impytuosyte roaryinge and hurlynge as it were thonder.”⁵ The woodcut which accompanies the text shows the wheels in action. What we have here is Ixion's fiery wheel of punishment become a standard kind of punishment in hell. And it is a frightening vision. We are reminded of Lear's lines, spoken in the midst of the “rough” and hellish storm, in which he draws an analogy between “filial ingratitude” and “this mouth” tearing “this hand / For lifting food to't” (III. iv. 14-16).⁶

When King Lear in his insensitive rage had banished Cordelia, he had sworn by the icon of the sun's “sacred radiance”—not an inappropriate oath for an ancient Celtic king—but also by “The [mysteries] of Hecat and the Night,” that this daughter was henceforth no longer to be regarded as his daughter (I. i. 109-16). The goddess of the witches, dreaded Hecate who presides over the midnight rites of her devotees, and dark Night, who appears widely as a vivid personification in Renaissance literature,⁷ are heralds of the overwhelming tragedy that will carry the king through madness and then to the sorrowful death which he will encounter at the end of the drama. In words which comment directly on his foolishness at this point, he refuses to “See better” (I. i. 158), and hence eclipses the solar “radiance” that we might iconographically associate with a harmonius, ordered Apollonian existence. Indeed, “the night comes on,” as Gloucester emblematically notes after the king has been refused shelter by his daughters (II. iv. 300). Lear will shortly experience something analogous to being hurled into “utter darknes” where there is only “weping, and gnasshing of teeth” (Matthew 25.30, Geneva Version). Indeed, the hell into which the king descends must have not only its symbols of torture but also its demons, whose power over him seemingly will be broken when Cordelia returns to take him “out o' th' grave” (IV. vii. 44) in a symbolic gesture of redemption.

In the sub-plot, Edmund, like Goneril and Regan, represents a principle of inversion, for he too is an agent who wishes to insure that the wisdom of order and degree in family and state is turned upside-down. To achieve his demonic ends, he must fearlessly grasp the forelock of Opportunity as she is visualized in the emblem books, and he does in fact make the most of whatever chances fall in his way. Before he is toppled in Act V, he has raised himself from an unpropertied illegitimate son without status or power to be the Duke of Gloucester who is the “conductor” (IV. vii. 87-88) of the English forces. He is for a time very close to the English throne which, had he achieved it, would have completed the transformation of the lowest to the highest—at least in appearance.

Thus the iconography of the world-upside-down topos becomes a major factor in King Lear⁸ and illustrates emblematically what the ascendancy of Goneril, Regan, and Edmund means in the political sphere. Thus when the oily steward, Oswald, tells the “chang'd” Albany of “Gloucester's treachery, / And of the loyal service of his son [Edmund],” Goneril's husband reacts by telling him that he “had turn'd the wrong side out” (IV. ii. 6-9; italics mine). Unquestionably, the dramatist intends everyone to see that with Lear's evil daughters and Gloucester's bastard son in the ascendant, all positive values have been reversed: treachery is now “loyal service,” and service is “treachery”. In such a world, “Truth's a dog must to kennel, he must be whipt out, when the Lady Brach may stand by th' fire and stink” (I. ii. 111-13). Everything indeed is upside-down. As Ernst Curtius, who has identified this topos in ancient and medieval literature, observes, impossibilities are commonly strung together: “the ass plays the lute; oxen dance. … The Fathers … are to be bound in the alehouse, in court, or in the meat market. … Cato haunts the stews, Lucretia has turned whore. What is outlawed is now praised. Everything is out of joint.”⁹ This topos, which was understood by Shakespeare in terms of its visual effect, survived into the seventeenth century in two pamphlets by John Taylor in 1642, a time of unprecedented political chaos. One pamphlet is A Plea for Prerogative: or, give Caesar his due, Being the Wheele of Fortune turn'd round: or, The World turned topsie-turvie, which comments: “Thus vice is entred, virtue is thrust out, / And Fortunes Wheele is madly turn'd about.”¹⁰ The second little pamphlet, Mad Fashions, Od Fashions, All out of Fashions, contains on its title page a woodcut which depicts a scene “like this Kingdome”: the central figure wears a “doublet on his lower parts,” gloves on his feet, shoes on his hands, breeches over his arms. At the top, a church is turned upside-down, fish fly, and a candle burns downward; the bottom of the woodcut shows a cat being chased by a mouse and a dog by a hare. On each side is another detail: a man being pushed by a wheelbarrow on the right, and on the left a cart pulling a horse. The woodcut is understood as “the Emblem of the Times”: “All things are turn'd the Cleane contrary way.” Similarly, in the inverted order of the iconography of King Lear a bedlam beggar is called “this philosopher” and “this same learned Theban” (III. iv. 158, 161). At II. iv. 223-24, the dramatist indeed gives us precisely one of the details illustrated in the woodcut at the beginning of Mad Fashions, Od Fashions, All out of Fashions: “May not an ass know when a cart draws the horse?” In power and authority, the lesser seem to have exchanged places with the greater, with disastrous results, and Lear himself becomes “this child-changed father” (IV. vii. 16).

Having initially reversed the order of things in England, Lear is now surprised when his daughters Goneril and Regan expect him to be “an obedient father” (I. iv. 235). Edgar, legitimate and loyal, must disguise himself as a madman who possesses only a blanket to cover his nakedness, while Edmund proceeds to rise in power and glory, in influence and wealth. “Everything is out of joint.” Such chaos could only be successfully communicated in the drama visually and by means of the storm which Gloucester describes in terms of one of the traditional signs of Doomsday:¹¹ “The sea, with such a storm as [Lear's] bare head / In hell-black night endur'd, would have buoy'd up / And quench'd the stelled fires” (III. vii. 59-61). It is in the midst of this storm that Lear becomes transformed into the emblem of the poor, mad pilgrim, who will journey to Dover to be reconciled with his daughter Cordelia. The journey is a symbol of his alienation in a hostile world which is essentially upside-down.

In her return to England to rescue her suffering father, Cordelia is proven to be in inward substance no less than she had been in outward show at the beginning of the play when she had stood as an icon of truth against flattery. Described in terminology which implicitly links her to the “perle of great price” of the New Testament (Matthew 23.46), this youngest daughter is disinherited with only “truth” as her dowry (I. i. 108). Though she speaks only a little more than a hundred lines in the entire play, she is throughout a moving image of the true and the beautiful who is able to function iconographically in the play with all the power of a central symbol that has come to life. She must be seen as an emblem of the highest wisdom which paradoxically is also the greatest foolishness—a foolishness which is particularly underlined at the painful close of the play when her father comes on stage with her body and exclaims, “And my poor fool is hang'd” (V. iii. 306). Of course, the term fool with reference to Cordelia is meant in quite a different sense than when it appears on Goneril's lips with regard to Albany, whom she calls a “Fool [who] usurps my body” (IV. ii. 28). Cordelia's foolishness, however, places truth above expedience, love above glib words about love.

The opposition between Cordelia and her “dog-hearted” sisters, then, establishes the basic opposition upon which the entire play is structured. In contrast to Cordelia's selflessness and love for her father, Goneril and Regan express a strong preference for prudential behavior, which means unscrupulously advancing their own causes at all times. Sometimes such behavior, especially when set forth visually, must shock and horrify us, as when Regan exclaims: “It was great ignorance, Gloucester's eyes being out, / to let him live …” (IV. v. 9-10). All matters are to be judged without regard to higher standards of morality: neither sister wants to be thought of as a “moral fool” (IV. ii. 58).¹² Curiously it is the Fool who outlines the principles of this prudential behavior in terms of iconography: “Let go thy hold when a great wheel runs down a hill, lest it break thy neck with following; but the great one that goes upward, let him draw thee after” (II. iv. 71-74). Yet the Fool (like Cordelia the “fool”) does not himself follow the rising fortunes of Goneril and Regan: “The Fool will stay, / And let the wise man fly” (II. iv. 8283). Such “wisdom,” defined by the New Testament as “the wisedome of this worlde” (I Corinthians 3.19), will be ultimately doomed, if we are to believe St. Paul who insists that God “wil cast away the understanding of the prudent” (I Corinthians 1.19).

On the other hand, imprudent Cordelia must be understood iconographically in terms of her father's words at IV. vii. 45-46 which describe her as “a soul in bliss.” Though we should be careful not to romanticize her, she is in some sense a prefiguration of the Christian saint who later in history will imitate the way of the Christian Redeemer.¹³ However, her righteousness must, unlike the virtue of the person living in the Christian dispensation, find its total expression in works of goodness in the world rather than in an explicit Christian faith.¹⁴ Her truth, loyalty, and beauty¹⁵ are not only marks of Botticellian loveliness, but also, like the three Graces in the Primavera, point beyond this world to transcendental values.¹⁶ She thus stands in all the harmony of a divine presence which is associated with the heavenly wisdom of the truly “wise man”. In contrast, then, is demonic foolishness, which is represented by the emblem of the “codpiece” (III. ii. 4041). Since it is a world upside-down, however, Cordelia's sisters have no thoughts about goodness, while their minds are very much upon Edmund's physical attractiveness. And to them Cordelia's cause in returning to England seems infinitely foolish. If we may again borrow the language of the New Testament which was clearly in Shakespeare's mind when he wrote this play, Cordelia illustrates how Providence seems to choose “the foolish things of the worlde” in order “to confounde mightie things” (I Corinthians 1.27).

Cordelia thus goes about her “fathers busines” (Luke 2.49) as would any Christian saint:

O dear father!
It is thy business that I go about.

(IV. iv. 23-24)

Her own ambition is set aside (IV. iv. 27), and, motivated by love,¹⁷ she returns to her native land for the purpose of expressing her feelings in merciful acts. However, unlike her sisters, she is “queen / Over her passion” (IV. iii. 13-14), an iconographic example of rational goodness triumphing over all selfishness. Her will is in harmony with her reason. To those who lack the perspective of such regenerate reason, however, Cordelia's actions are destined to be thought merely self-destructive and absurd, for such “Wisdom and goodness to the vild seem vild” (IV. ii. 38). In an upside-down world which can neither trust nor hope, she is a seeming fool because she is saintly. Such a fool also was Milton's Abdiel in Paradise Lost, for he was the one among the angels who rebelled against his leader Lucifer's perverted plot to turn heaven upside-down (PL, Book V).

The central paradox of Cordelia is again derived from the New Testament, as the following quote from the Geneva Bible will make clear:

If anie man among you seme to be wise in this worlde, let him be a foole, that he may be wise. For the wisdome of this worlde is foolishnes with God: for it is written, He catcheth the wise in their owne craftines.

(I Corinthians 3.18-19)

Goneril, Regan, and Edmund are implicitly like crafty spiders who have caught themselves in their own webs.¹⁸ On the other hand, Cordelia seems on the level of iconography to be clearly a divine instrument, a fool for the sake of higher values. The wicked ones, in contrast, are surely “fools of time” who have “liv'd for crime” (Sonnet 124).

Sealed as she is within the sphere of a totally temporal perspective, Goneril in particular represents a royal irresponsibility diametrically opposed to Cordelia's sense of duty: she diabolically places herself above justice and insists to her husband Albany that “the laws are mine” (V. iii. 158-59). This “monstrous” statement is reminiscent of the lines spoken by “that old white-bearded Satan,” the fool and jester Falstaff, when he hears that Hal is now Henry V: “Let us take any man's horses, the laws of England are at my commandment” (Henry IV, Part I, V. iii. 135-37). In the end, however, Albany's assessment of his wife's arrogance and ambition (I. iv. 346) is proven correct: “Striving to better, oft we mar what's well.” Finally, the fabric of her reversed values and power crumbles even at the moment in which military victory has been achieved over the invading French army. Despairing, she ends her life with her own hand. It would seem superficially that Shakespeare is dramatizing a maxim found in the Elizabethan Homilies: “although God [may] suffer sometimes the wicked to have their pleasure in this world, yet the end of ungodly living is at length endless destruction.”¹⁹

As the above analysis shows, the first four acts and part of the fifth act of King Lear will bear interpretation as a conventional Christian drama, showing the hand of Providence working for good in the lives of individuals and the nation as well as countering the machinations of the wicked. But, especially in the light of iconographic study, portions of Act V are most disturbing; indeed, the whole dramatic thrust of this act seems in a different direction. Our emotional attachment to Cordelia is not diminished, and it is true that the wicked have their judgment here. For Edmund and the two wicked daughters, the wheel of Fortune has come round “full circle” (V. iii. 175). Yet the bitter, woefully tragic deaths of Cordelia and King Lear mean that somehow the neat iconographic pattern of Providence and its alleged redemptive action have gone all awry. Edgar, of course, looks down on the fallen Edmund and with justification proclaims: “The gods are just …” (V. iii. 171), but this statement comes before the disclosure which reveals the martyrdom of saintly Cordelia. When he learns of her death, Kent, speaking for all of us, asks, “Is this the promised end?” and Edgar, in words that surely qualify his defense of justice among the gods in V. iii. 171, adds, “Or image of that horror?” (V. iii. 264-65). The apocalyptic language is continued by Albany even as he signals the group of characters to be quiet: “Fall and cease” (V. iii. 265).

Lear, who has been brought back from the hellish chaos of his “untun'd and jarring senses” (IV. vii. 15) by the harmonious music of a consort of viols²⁰ and the redemptive presence of his saintly daughter—it is as if he is being extracted from hell—has been brutally sent to prison by the villain Edmund, the tough-minded and ambitious general of the English forces. This is the man who has told his subordinate officer that he must not question “Thy great employment” (V. iii. 32-33) as he is given written orders to do some terrible deed without a name. The officer, of course, stands in direct contrast to Cornwall's servant in III. vii. 72-75; he will do whatever he is told to do. Then we learn that, as we had suspected, Edmund's “commission,” signed also by Goneril, has been “To hang Cordelia in the prison, and / To lay the blame upon her own despair, / That she fordid herself” (V. ii. 254-56). Act IV does not, therefore, actually involve the release of Lear from hell through the divine instrument Cordelia, but appears only to be the ironic prelude to a most disturbing final act. Albany's prayer that “The gods defend her” (V. iii. 257) is not heard in heaven, for Cordelia has been killed.

In a drama that has focused to a large extent on the theme of wisdom versus foolishness, the iconography of its conclusion involves a serious probing of the veneer of civilization and its theological underpinning. Shakespeare, of course, does not overtly attack the religious beliefs of his time, and he has no intention of letting his unbelieving villains go free at the end. Like Iago, Macbeth, and Hamlet's uncle Claudius, the wicked sisters and the ambitious brother must receive the justice that is their due. Shakespeare also insists, as he almost always does, on some remedies to heal and sustain “the gor'd state” (V. iii. 321). But when he has Lear hold a feather before dead Cordelia's lips and say,

This feather stirs, she lives! If it be so,
It is a chance which does redeem all sorrows
That ever I have felt

(V. iii. 266-68)

the playwright seems through his iconography to be mocking all certainties. The possibility of being redeemed “from the general curse” seems to be insubstantial in the face of such words. There is no chance that Cordelia will live, and somehow the order of nature itself suddenly seems infinitely less benign. No one can deny that, on “this great stage of fools” which is the world we live in, the gods allow men and women to be tortured needlessly, though in the joyless and woeful moment of Lear's words at the end it also becomes impossible to believe that they do it in sport. But it may be worse: the gods may be indifferent. If human existence is never perfectly orderly, so also can it never be without its elements of chaos and pain. In the final tableau of King Lear, the pain overflows all measure.

When we last see Cordelia alive, her father is telling her:

                    Come, let's away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds i' th' cage;
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, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too—
Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out—
And take upon's the mystery of things
As if we were God's spies: and we'll wear out,
In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones,
That ebb and flow by th' moon.

(V. iii. 8-19)

There is irony here too, for the villain Edmund simply will not allow them together to “wear out … packs and sects of great ones.” No time will be given to them to sing like a pair of tamed birds in a cage, for they have been caught in the dangerous snare of the great fowler. This demonic figure appears with his limed line in the borders of one of the illuminations in the Book of Hours of Catherine of Cleves.²¹ The birds are being attracted to the line by a pair of caged birds who serve as decoys. In the symbolic language of the illuminator's art, the birds are, of course, souls jeopardized by the snares of Satan. The iconographic meaning becomes especially clear when the illumination itself is examined, for it shows an angel leading five souls out of the flames of hell-mouth into safety. Such an outcome is promised in Psalm 91, which tells men that God will deliver them from the snares of the fowler. But in King Lear, the gods are silent and acquiescent: no angel will come in this, the final act of the play to release Cordelia from the cage which is Edmund's prison. “She's gone forever,” Lear laments, as he carries her body onto the stage (V. iii. 260).

But there is a sense in which these two will be like “God's spies” even here, for the honesty of the fifth act of this drama may be said to reveal to us the world's most perplexing. paradoxes. The “mystery of things” is thus to be regarded as a much more complicated secret than the heart of Hamlet's “mystery” which will remain forever closed to the small-minded Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. The “mystery of things” must be the complex and contradictory reality which the world itself reveals to us. Surely it involves the ever-present temporal dialectic between wisdom and foolishness, between topsy-turvy and right-side-up.

Edgar in his final speech (V. iii. 324-27) speaks of “The weight of this sad time” and the necessity at this moment to be absolutely honest about the realities of the emotional life as it gazes upon the woeful Death (“Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say”). Then, in words that underline precisely the audience's feeling at this point, he notes: “The oldest hath borne most: we that are young / Shall never see so much, nor live so long.” But then, after we have returned home from the theater or closed the pages of Shakespeare's play, we may wonder with dread if we too might be asked to bear “so much.” Our divided world, like Lear's, is seemingly out of joint and in need of reconciliation, but having larger means to destroy and ravage, we have a very special reason to value Shakespeare's analysis of wisdom and foolishness.

Notes

1. See especially Frances A. Yates, Theatre of the World (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1969), passim.

2. Geoffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes (Leiden, 1586), p.

3. Cesare Ripa, Iconologia (Rome, 1603), p. 174; (Padua, 1630) pt. 1, p. 276, sig. R6^v.

4. See Henry VIII III.ii.239.

5. The Kalender of Shepherdes (London, [c. 1518]), sig. E5^v.

6. Caroline Spurgeon, in her Shakespeare's Imagery (1935; rpt. Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), p. 339, noted how pervasive in this play is the imagery “of a human body in anguished movement, tugged, wrenched, beaten, pierced, stung, scourged, dislocated, flayed, gashed, scalded, tortured and finally broken on the rack.”

7. See The Faerie Queene I.v. 20-45, for example.

8. See William R. Elton, King Lear and the Gods (San Marino, California: Huntington Library, 1966), p. 130.

9. Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask, Bollingen Ser., 36 (New York: Pantheon, 1953), p. 95.

10. Quoted in Samuel C. Chew, The Pilgrimage of Life (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1962), p. 44.

11. The first of the Fifteen Signs of Doomsday in The Golden Legend, trans. Granger Ryan and Helmut Ripperger (London: Longman, Green, 1941), I, 4, is as follows: “On the first day, the sea will rise fifty cubits higher than the mountains, and will rear up as a solid wall.” This event receives illustration in fifteenth-century glass in All Saints, North Street, York.

12. See also G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire, 5th ed. (New York: Meridian, 1957), p. 204.

13. See especially Elton, pp. 75-114.

14. Ibid., pp. 83-84.

15. These are the traditional attributes of Cordeilla (Cordelia). See J. S. P. Tatlock, The Legendary History of Britain (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1950), pp. 382-83.

16. See Edgar Wind, Pagan Myteries in the Renaissance, revised ed. (New York: Norton, 1968), pp. 117-26.

17. According to Geoffrey of Monmouth, she had lived while in France in Karitia, a city most appropriately named. See Tatlock, pp. 92-93.

18. See Edmund's speech at II. i. 15: “This weaves itself perforce into my business” (italics mine). With such a net he will catch his father and his brother, and he will make himself duke. Cornwall and Regan are likewise described in terms of thread put to no good use when they come to see Gloucester “out of season, threading dark-ey'd night” (II.i.119).

19. Homilies Appointed to be Read in Churches in the Time of Queen Elizabeth, 4th ed. (Oxford, 1816), p. 70.

20. On the usefulness of music as therapy for mental illness, see Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy (London: Nelson, 1964), pp. 46, 85, 267ff.

21. John Plummer, The Hours of Catherine of Cleves (New York: Braziller, n.d.), pp. 10-24, 347, Pl. 48.

References

Chew, S. C. 1962. The Pilgrimage of Life New York Yale UP

Curtius, E. R. 1953. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages Transl. W.R. Trask New York Pantheon

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