Shakespeare's The History of King Lear
[In the following excerpt, White interprets King Lear as Shakespeare 's most powerful demonstration of the struggle between Natural and worldly law.]
In [many of] the plays by Shakespeare . . . a running debate is sustained between the rival claims of Natural Law and positive law in effecting 'poetic justice'.1 So insistent is this debate that it is virtually a Shakespearian signature, and in King Lear we find no exception. In this play, moreover, Shakespeare sets in opposition particularly naked forms of the two legal systems, searches more profoundly the nature of their differences, and reveals in the ending an unsettling ambivalence which is a source of tragedy for the protagonists. The play is one of struggle and dialectic, dramatising, amongst other polarities, an archetypal clash between Natural Law and positive law, trust and mistrust in human beings, Aquinas' idealism about people and the scepticism of Calvin and Hobbes. That the struggle is inconclusive, as it is in Love's Labour's Lost and Measure for Measure does not diminish the play's power, and gives evidence of Shakespeare's preference for incomplete closure, leaving the audience scope for exercising judgment.
In one sense, as many critics have observed, King Lear gives us a very simple view of good and evil. In the terms of Natural Law, good is humanitarian, communitarian, and is driven by compassion, reason, and conscience. This rough generalisation applies not only to Kent, Cordelia, Albany, the King of France, and Edgar, but also to a host of 'Little people', and it is a lesson eventually learned and acknowledged by the old men, Lear and Gloucester, through the recognition of their own violations of these principles. Evil is represented as an equation between power and positive law, without reference to conscience or any 'Higher' morality, and it is fundamentally individualistic, corrupt, and self-seeking: a rerun of Angelo, and a forecast of Hobbes. Cornwall, Gonoril, Regan, and Edmund stand on this darker side of the division. Both Cordelia and Kent promise exemplary poetic justice along the lines of Natural Law, enabling us to admire and follow virtue, murmur at vice:
CORDELIA Time shall unfold what pleated cunning hides.
Who covers faults, at last shame them derides.
And so it does. But so it does not, at the same time, for although evil is unmasked, good cannot be said to triumph.
Where the play becomes problematical is in the failure of Natural Law to prevail in any but a moral sense. Cordelia, the agent most closely equated with Aquinas' maxim that one should follow reason and conscience, lies dead at the end. So, for that matter, do those who conspicuously and unrepentantly (unless we exempt Edmund's final 'good' deed done 'Despite of [his] own nature') violate Natural Law, but somehow the morally satisfying appropriateness of their demise pales into insignificance beside the failure of Natural Law to prevail. The deaths of Cornwall, Gonoril and Regan, and Edmund, have 'poetic justice', but the death of Cordelia makes victory to the virtuous less than Pyrrhic. Meanwhile, even the natural world is deeply ambivalent, at times presented as the pitiless storm which assaults the fragile human community, at others aligned with the healing herbs that gently bring new life and nurture the human world. At the heart of King Lear lies a dialectic that underpins More's Utopia. Natural Law, based on the dictates of reason and conscience, is entirely vindicated and upheld in a moral sense, but its worldly failure raises disturbing questions about whether those who wield power in the state will ever allow it to be enacted in the world as it is.
The most significant, recent development in the study of King Lear is a reassessment of the relationship between the two printed versions. This appears at first sight to be of interest only to textual scholars, but the ramifications are very important for all branches of Lear criticism. The editors of The Oxford Shakespeare Complete Works, Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor,2 succinctly state the basis of the 'Revision theory', as a prelude to printing not one but two texts, The History of King Lear and The Tragedy of King Lear:
King Lear first appeared in print in a quarto of 1608. A substantially different text appeared in the 1623 Folio. Until now, editors, assuming that each of these early texts imperfectly represented a single play, have conflated them. But research conducted mainly during the 1970s and 1980s confirms an earlier view that the 1608 quarto represents the play as Shakespeare originally wrote it, and the 1623 Folio as he substantially revised it.
Some of the evidence for this view, together with consideration of the implications for criticism and stage history, are collected in essays in The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare's Two Versions of 'King Lear',3 where the date of revision is proposed as 1608, contemporary with the writing of Cymbeline, whereas the Quarto was evidently written in 1605, and performed in 1606. Another, even more persuasive view put by Christopher Wortham, is that the Folio represents the play as Shakespeare originally wrote it (in line with the editors' stated principles), and the Quarto is as he substantially revised it for performance before the king, as the title-page announces.4
The differences between the texts for the purposes of the present book can be summarised in this way. Both Quarto and Folio texts constitute plays with significant Natural Law content, and this subject can be seen as an identifiable and central 'Theme' of each. But there is an important difference in that where the Quarto presents explicitly issues of Natural Law, the Folio does so largely implicitly, so that in reading the latter we can either presuppose supportive knowledge acquired from the former, or presuppose a more hard-working reader or audience. Whichever tack we take, many of the episodes and characters who appear in the Quarto carrying the Natural Law refrain do not even appear in the Folio, and yet the action in the Folio still invites a Natural Law interpretation. This study is primarily based on the Quarto—what the Oxford editors call The History of King Lear—quoting many passages which simply do not appear in the Folio, and accordingly I supply references from the Quarto's Scenes (Acts are not used).
Trials and justice
There are many trials and quasi-trials in King Lear, and these reveal different forms in which justice and law are defined and executed in the play. In the tumultuous middle of the play, two scenes (in conflated texts, Act III, Scenes 6 and 7; Scenes 13 and 14 in the Oxford text of the History), are starkly juxtaposed on the issue of law itself, both scenes are set indoors, but in very different rooms—13 (III. 6) in the hovel standing against the wind and the rain on the open heath, 14 (III. 7) in Gloucester's castle. The one is a fantasy while the other is grimly 'Real', but both in different senses parody the machinery of justice. In the former, Lear in his madness orchestrates an imagined, even hallucinatory trial of Gonoril and Regan. Fictional and fantastic as the situation is played out only in Lear's fevered consciousness, Lear follows strict legal procedure, anachronistically since he imports Elizabethan practice into Celtic England. He declares 'I will arraign them straight' (13. 16, III. 6. 20). Arraign means 'To call a prisoner to the bar of the court by name, to read to him the substance of the indictment, and to ask him whether he pleads guilty or not guilty'.5 He nominates Edgar, impersonating Poor Tom, as the judge: 'Come, sit thou here, most learned justicer' (line 17). 'Thou robed man of justice, take thy place' (line 32). The Fool represents primarily the Elizabethan system of equity and secondarily the driving spirit of simple fairness behind law in general: 'And thou, his yoke-fellow of equity, Bench by his side.' That a fool should represent fairness is a comment on the explosive first scene which precipitated the action of the play. The presence of Lear, still thinking of himself as king, establishes that the court of equity, the king's court, is one presiding jurisdiction, while the 'Robed man of justice' evokes a common-law setting. It was only under unusual circumstances that common law and equity sat down together in a 'commission', as, for example, in the trial of Mary Queen of Scots which continued to be controversial many years later, as we have seen in Spenser's case. Kent, disguised as servant to Lear, is also declared 'O'The commission' (line 39). Edgar intones 'Let us deal justly' before breaking off into apparent irrelevance. Addressing a joint-stool, Lear states the charge: 'Arraign her first. 'Tis Gonoril. I here take my oath before this honourable assembly she kicked the poor King her father' (lines 41-2). This is the formal indictment, basically a charge of cruelty and a metaphor for the ill-treatment Lear believes he has received from his daughters, which in his obsessive mind appears to be treasonous. There is no time to read the charge against the other defendant, presumably Regan, since she 'escapes' much to Lear's annoyance: 'False justicer, why hast thou let her scape?' (line 51). Both Kent and Edgar, for a moment moved by their feelings of pity for the mad king, step out of their 'counterfeitings', dismayed by Lear's state.
Lear now asks a very central question, and it is one that, in some form or another, the play keeps returning to: 'Then let them anatomize Regan, see what breeds about her heart. Is there any cause in nature that makes this hardness?' (lines 75-6). In the Folio the last phrase is 'These hard-hearts' which is perhaps more useful for our analysis of Natural Law content.6 Anatomy was a favoured study in the early seventeenth century regarded as if it could reveal nature's secrets about human beings, and even generating its own literary form, the 'Anatomy'. Are the 'Hard-hearts' in the play, Gonoril and Regan, Cornwall and Edmund, obeying some law of their own natures, or even nature in general, or are they violating their links with humanity in general? The unnervingly fundamental question radiates out into others. Are there any equally 'natural' impulses for good? Is a person's nature actively opposed to Natural Law (as an extreme Calvinist might argue), or can evil, indeed, be a product of nature at all? Are the hard-hearts after the Fall closed to reason and conscience, or are they wilfully denying the innate impulses 'natural' to people, and thus betraying their own place in nature? In the event, the 'Trial' does not proceed, although, as a legal writer argues,7 the scene achieves a double effect of providing 'A mocking of the forms of normal human justice' and also a cathartic process for Lear of dealing formal justice, after which he can sleep. But the question about human nature's capacity for knowing and obeying Natural Law remains, and it is one that the whole play interrogates.
Just as the play as a whole oscillates between hope and despair, good and evil, the scene in a quieter way unfolds another image of action which is of something equally basic, the exercise of compassion and fellow-feeling, for Edgar, Kent, and the Fool (by his continued presence, if not by his words) exhibit loyalty, sympathy, and the desire to protect Lear. It is one of many answers offered to the overriding question: in this case human beings are capable of knowing and implementing Natural Law, and 'Hard' hearts are therefore not natural. It is a vision of community huddling in mutual protection against the elements. Gloucester adds one to the company when he enters and, having heard of an assassination plot, arranges for Lear, by now sleeping, to be conveyed to Dover to meet the French army with Cordelia. Edgar ends the scene by extolling the values of community and support to one who suffers. The mind, he says, can avoid much sufferance 'When grief hath mates, and bearing fellowship' (line 105), reflecting a favouring of community values over individualism. It appears that the machinery of poetic justice, the proof of Natural Law within the play's universe, is being wheeled onto the stage in preparation for the ending.
An immediate and brutal challenge to this expectation comes after the 'Mad' cameo of justice. The following scene, III. 7 (line 14), may show a trial, and even some perverse version of fellowship among mates, but these are of a very different order, a dark parody of the hovel, where human nature itself is seen as 'Hard'. Cornwall, Gonoril, and Regan have arrived at Gloucester's castle, full of fury that he has intervened to allow Lear to escape. Cornwall, who has now emerged as the decisive ruler and has taken prime authority upon himself, sends Edmund away, since the interrogation and punishment of Gloucester, he says, is not fit for the 'beholding' of a son's eyes, a somewhat uncharacteristic gesture towards the law of filial kind, in the light of these characters' treatment of Lear. He instructs Edmund to accompany Gonoril, so she also is absent from the rest of the scene. Cornwall and Regan, a married couple surpassing even the Macbeths in ruthlessness, now conduct an interrogation and 'Arraignment' of Gloucester which is just as fanciful as Lear's, but far more nightmarish, in that these two as monarchs wield full, legal authority to carry out their sadistic and vindictive wishes. Cornwall is quite precise on this point, saying that although they must observe some due procedure of law, yet, even if the form is questioned, opponents will be silenced by their naked power:
Though we may not pass upon his life
Without the form of justice, yet our power
Shall do a curtsy [courtesy?] to our wrath, which men
May blame but not control.
(lines 23-6)
Here is one for whom Natural Law either does not exist, or cannot be known by mankind, or simply does not matter. 'The form of justice', positive laws made by worldly authorities, are the only ones that operate. This is legal positivism with a vengeance. Cornwall and Regan bind Gloucester, and, against his repeated appeals to the same conventions of hospitality that haunted Macbeth before the murder of Duncan ('You are my guests', 'I am your host'), proceed to charge him formally with treason and interrogate him about letters he has received from France and about why he has arranged to convey Lear to Dover. Gloucester is as stubborn as Cordelia and Kent had been formerly, in refusing to compromise conscience simply because authority demands—another competing sign of human comprehension of Natural Law—and Cornwall and Regan proceed to their 'punishment', the horrifying act of blinding Gloucester. The narrow legalism of the procedure may accord with Cornwall's 'Form of justice', but its sickening inhumanity is thrown into sudden relief by the impetuous act of Cornwall's servant, who relinquishes one duty of 'service' in favour of a duty of conscience:
Hold your hand, my lord!
I have served you ever since I was a child;
But better service have I never done you
Than now to bid you hold.
(lines 70-4)
In his 'Anger' (line 77), a further sign that moral virtue is based on instinctive knowledge and impulsive acts, he wounds Cornwall, mortally as it transpires, only to be stabbed in the back by Regan and later thrown upon the dunghill. His dying words beg Gloucester to witness the murder with his remaining eye, which provokes Cornwall to remove Gloucester's other eye. In extremity Gloucester calls upon his absent son to 'enkindle all the sparks of nature To quite [requite] this horrid act' (lines 84-5), but, as Regan gloatingly points out, his son Edmund in hatred had been the informant against his father. Immediately Gloucester in remorse realises 'Then Edgar was abused' (line 89), and prays for his own 'Forgiveness' and his son's 'protection'. In this sense alone, the 'Trial' has succeeded in repeating Lear's anguished question about 'nature', providing contrary and equally poised answers. The scene of legally sanctioned cruelty is ended with discussion between two more servants, like a jury passing a judgment which must by now be shared by the audience in either version of King Lear, even though the Folio does not have the words:
SECOND SERVANT I'Ll never care what wickedness I do
If this man [Cornwall] come to good.
THIRD SERVANT If she [Regan] live long.
And in the end meet the old cause of death,
Women will all turn monsters.
THIRD SERVANT Go thou. I'Ll fetch some flax and whites of eggs
To apply to his bleeding face. Now heaven help him!(97-105 passim)
In these two scenes, the one painful for its pathos and the other for its cruelty, we see enacted several 'Formal' trials and judgments: the first imaginary and inconclusive, ending with a question rather than a sentence, the second relentlessly moving through to sentence and punishment, a third the Servant's judgment on his master, a fourth the adjudication by Gloucester between his two sons, a fifth the commonsense judgment passed by the two Servants on Cornwall and Regan, and so on, reaching out to the audience's judgment about what has happened. Neither of the former sequences is any less 'Mad' than the other in a play which questions the boundaries between imagined and real in, for example and in particular, the 'Dover Cliff scene. The point is that law and authority, their officers alienated to roles, can themselves act with insane cruelty, but that human beings acting impulsively and from their own 'natures' can be kind and virtuous, ineffectual in the immediate situation but, if the Servant's case is taken into account, finally effective, since the Servant does kill Cornwall. To the question 'Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard-hearts?' we are directed, at least provisionally, to answer 'no' by witnessing the overwhelming evidence of other 'natural' and spontaneous responses to evil, such as anger, indignation, horror, self-sacrifice, fellowship, protection, and simple kindness. As in Aristotle's conception of justice, the audience's assessment may be based on the emotional grounds of pathos, but it carries weight.
One possible argument is that the 'cause' of evil lies not in nature or the human heart, but potentially in 'Office' or institutional authority. Not nature, but vested power, creates these hard hearts. Like Angelo, once a person acquires power, he or she may change. Lear only fitfully realises that his own history, as one who ignored virtue and became hardened when in office, softened only when out of office, darkly exemplifies this conclusion. In allowing this judgment to surface, Shakespeare has placed the audience in the position of a jury, and has arranged the action along the lines of Thomas Wilson's advocate who, we recall, stirs the hearts of judges or a jury to pity the plight of the victims and arouse indignation against their oppressors, in order to find justice: 'In moving the affections, and stirring the judges to be grieved, the weight of the matter must be so set forth, as though they saw it plain before their eyes.' The Servants act as moral guides in our assessment of justice in the Quarto, but their absence from the Folio does not exclude the same conclusion, since the action itself ipso facto, stirs the 'Affections' against those who blind Gloucester. However, the sardonic conclusion of the play, as of More's Utopia, is that on earth the positivists and the sceptics have one trump card, power itself, and this renders those who seek to live by Natural Law deeply vulnerable. The rest of this [essay] will trace the challenges they face, to the dismaying conclusion where poetic justice itself is swept aside in the sight of the limp, dead body of Cordelia in her father's arms. In the terms of this book, King Lear affirms the existence of Natural Law located in the human heart, and the hope that it can be implemented through poetic justice, but equally fundamentally questions the likelihood that it can survive more 'unnatural', institutionalised uses (or misuses) of positive law. Shakespeare, while agreeing with Hobbes about the jungle-like savagery of human struggles for power, opposes the Hobbesian assumption that only the state can deliver justice. Indeed, he tends to locate the true source of injustice in the state itself, and the only resistance to injustice lies within human reason and conscience.
The 'Trials' in scenes 13 and 14 may be cruel parodies of justice, but they clearly tell us much about the relationship between positive law and Natural Law in the play. They are also perverse images for the most important trial of all, the one which opens the play when Lear tests his daughters' fitness to rule in his stead. The first scene presents a series of trials within trials. Each of them carries both senses of 'Trial', as 'Test' and also as quasi-judicial proceeding. First, King Lear puts his daughters on trial. If, in this absolute monarchy, his will is law, then he is making positive law in proposing to divide the kingdom into three parts, and to distribute them on 'Merit'. His particular procedure is to promise disposal of the largest bounty 'Where nature doth with merit challenge' (I. i. 53), on the face of it an appropriate task for the machinery of justice. He puts to each of his three daughters in turn a question designed to test 'Merit' by simultaneously testing 'nature' according to a version of the law of kind which is expected to operate in Renaissance family relations: 'Which of you shall we say doth'Love us most' (line 51). It is clear, however, that this is a 'show-trial' since his decision has already been made, and as each sister answers he will offer a predetermined moiety. His decision has been kept from his courtiers, Gloucester and Kent, since at the beginning they were discussing which of Albany (Gonoril's husband) and Cornwall (Regan's) is to gain the larger portion (emphasising in passing that although the women are tested the men are the ones who will financially benefit) but Lear has already made his decision and the public occasion is a ritual affirmation. He has reserved 'A third more opulent' than her sisters' for Cordelia. Gonoril and Regan, playing their part in the royal ceremony, treat Lear's question as a positive law and royal command. They trot out speeches that sound just as pre-scripted as Lear's, and they successfully meet the test. The asides heard by the audience from Cordelia generate the fundamental clash of legal and moral values which will throw the state into civil war and send Lear mad: 'What shall Cordelia speak? Love, and be silent' (line 62).
Then poor Cordelia!
And yet not so, since I am sure my love's
More ponderous than my tongue.
(76-8)
Appropriately enough for one whose name incorporates the word 'Heart' (cor) she is speaking from the heart rather than from political expediency, from felt duty to conscience rather than hollow 'Obedience' (line 278). None the less, when she speaks, her words have legal substance. To the question put by Lear she merely says 'nothing'—equivalent to a refusal to enter a plea of guilty or not guilty, and she redefines the nature of the trial. If, she says, Lear is proposing a contractual bargain (words in return for riches) then she cautions him in language of pure reason and law that such a contract is compromising other contracts:
Good my lord,
You have begot me, bred me, loved me.
I return those duties back as are right fit,
Obey you, love you, and most honour you.
Why have my sisters husbands, if they say
They love you all? Haply when I shall wed,
That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry
Half my love with him, half my care and duty.
Sure I shall never marry like my sisters,
Love my father all.
LEAR But goes thy heart with this?
CORDELIA Ay, my good lord.(Scene 1, 87-98)
Cordelia is invoking the terms of Natural Law. Her 'Heart' (conscience) informs an argument which is more soundly based on reason, conscience, and the law of kind than Lear's own command. She points out with legalistic precision that it is impossible for her sisters to claim to love a father 'All' when each is married and 'Owes' love to her husband. Cordelia is not married, but she has been told by Lear that her future husband will be either the King of France or the Duke of Burgundy. At this stage, in a new sense, Lear himself is on trial, for his decree based on authority stands unexpectedly questioned in an impromptu court of Natural Law. Characteristically, he refuses to move his position, and equally true to character Cordelia remains consistent, so that there can be no meeting of minds. By disinheriting Cordelia, Lear is using his royal power in the fashion of Cornwall, to make another decree, directly opposing Natural Law with his authority to make positive law, and ironically displaying the 'Hardness' of heart which he later recriminates. His own barely perceived recognition of the fragile basis of his judgment is, no doubt, one of the contributory causes, together with a sense of personal rejection, of his near-hysteria: reason and conscience may be working, but Lear suppresses them, and covers up any doubts he may hold.
The set of trials-within-trials is immediately followed by two others, where the same opposition between Natural Law and positive law is in issue. Kent accuses Lear of madness, folly, and bad judgment in giving his trust and power to the two eldest daughters over his youngest, and by doing so he aligns himself with Cordelia's Natural Law of reason and feelings, claiming to be Lear's 'physician' (line 153). Once again, Lear bases his judgment (if that is not too cool a word for his rage) on the felony of disobedience in trying to make a king break his vow (line 158), of attempting 'To come betwixt [his] sentence and [his] power' (line 160), and he banishes Kent. When he stands on his 'nature' and his 'place' (line 161) he is in reality simply asserting his power over a subject in the manner of positive law. The next trial is between France and Burgundy, over who will choose Cordelia. Burgundy takes his lead from Lear, equating Cordelia with material wealth and since 'Her price is fallen' (line 187) he does not feel contractually bound. France, preferring to follow the reasoning of Cordelia and Kent in declaring that 'Love's not love When it is mingled with regards that stands Aloof from the entire point' and that 'She is herself a dowry' (lines 233ff), takes her in marriage. France takes her 'virtues' as the dowry and discovers that his love has kindled to 'Inflamed respect' (line 255). We might add that after this succession of trials in the first scene, another immediately follows in the second, when Gloucester's claim to love equally his sons Edmund and Edgar is tested. Admittedly, this is precipitated by Edmund's trickery but Gloucester, who prefers astrology, superstition and the state's laws of 'Legitimacy' to either reason or the feelings he claims to find within him, is an easy dupe. Effectively he is no better than Lear who arbitrarily disinherited his best loved daughter, since Gloucester first accepts society's prohibition against any rights for bastards, irrespective of his own 'natural' affections, and secondly he does not question allegations of Edgar's disloyalty. The results are just as calamitous for the Gloucester family as those stemming from Lear's mistake for his family, since both families are by the end of the play literally destroyed, except for the one survivor, Edgar.
Positive law, at least in this play, is simply the extension of the will of a sovereign ruler, while Natural Law has its source in the human mind and heart working independently of worldly authority. Lear has set up the situation where these systems are in direct conflict, and the titanic struggles which follow are as much in his own mind as in the state, and they are certainly his responsibility. His madness and his mental breakdown reflect the fundamentalist nature of the clash, and the play relentlessly follows the course of the dispute.
Positive law, authority, and evil
Cordelia, Kent, to some extent Edgar and the Fool, together with a procession of kindly servants, gentlemen (at least in the Quarto) and a doctor, all stand out against positive law on behalf of the Law of Nature in acts which the legal theorist John Rawls8 would call conscientious resistance. Positive law, vested in worldly authority, however, is seen as immensely effective and destructive, even over Natural Law itself, and to understand its power we must examine its claims to legitimacy. Set against the essentially equitable and Natural Law appeal to feelings that lie behind conscience, charity and reason (in the sense of reasonableness rather than strict logic), lies Cornwall's appeal to authoritarian 'Form of justice' as the basis for law. His argument is harder to parry in theory than in practice, for there is behind Cornwall's words a firm, if debatable, understanding of law itself Law for him is positive law, without appeal beyond itself, and positive law is whatever a properly constituted authority deems it to be. Gonoril later makes the same point to Albany: 'The laws are mine, not thine, Who can arraign me for'T?' (Scene 24, lines 154-5), and Lear, although now he lacks authority himself, knows that a king cannot be taken for coining since he is the king himself, owning or even 'being' both currency and law. In the general context of jurisprudence Roger Cotterell makes the point by quoting Emil Brunner:
The Protestant theologian Emil Brunner wrote: 'The totalitarian state is simply and solely legal positivism in political practice . . . the inevitable result of the slow disintegration of the idea of justice'. And he adds: 'If there is no justice transcending the state, then the state can declare anything it likes to be law; there is no limit set to its arbitrariness save its actual power to give force to its will'.9
As many divine-right theorists argued, the monarch is the law, and is at the same time above the law, and one whom only God may judge. Whether or not Natural Law exists is virtually an unnecessary question in this formulation of authority, since not even the monarch needs to be credited with any understanding of it. The situation in the play's kingdom may be messy, with four rather than one in the position of monarchs, but the theory still remains. The only qualification is that authority must be backed up not by morality but by the brute power to enforce law, and it is clear that effectively power now lies with Cornwall, Gonoril, and Regan, Albany being marginalised. Within such an understanding, there is no room for appeals to Natural Law, nor are there legal checks against tyranny, arbitrariness, or corruption. Such sanctions as may exist are political (or military), the counter assertion of superior 'power'. The latter half of the twentieth century must be haunted by Hitler's apparent declaration after a massacre of his party members in 1934, ratified by ex post facto legislation: 'The supreme court of the German people consisted of myself.10 At every level in the system of authority which applies, justice is no more nor less than the will of the person wielding power, and such a will may be implicated in the very corruption which it seeks to judge:
An the creature run from the cur, there thou
might'st behold the great image of
authority. A dog's obeyed in office.
Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand.
Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thine own back.
Thy blood as hotly lusts to use her in that kind
For which thou whip'st her. The usurer hangs the cozener.
Through tattered rags small vices do appear;
Robes and furred gowns hides all.
(Scene 20, lines 151-9)
Shakespeare is returning to the terrain oí Measure for Measure, the corrupting potential of power, its hypocrisy, and its self-referential ability to enforce unreasonable laws. It is ironic that Lear should be the one who comments thus, since it was he who initiated the new, tyrannical regime by royal fiat, more or less as Sidney's Duke Basilius did in the Arcadia (a work which the play draws upon), or like Shakespeare's Duke Vincendo, who delegates rather than transfers authority but still effectively abdicates. Gonoril diagnoses Lear's own confusion: 'Idle old man, That still would manage those authorities That he hath given away' (Scene 3, lines 16-17), but it is perhaps a person who has once held, and then relinquished ultimate authority, who can best perceive the misuses and abuses of power exercised by others, and in recollection of himself in his former station, though he may not so readily admit the latter. Cornwall, Gonoril, and Regan think and act as if authority gives the holder free licence unconstrained by moral considerations or any notion beyond their own wills. The legal maxim, posed as a question, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? is consistently and bleakly answered in this play by 'superior force'. Righteousness alone, however true it may be to reason and conscience, is impotent when rulers are not constrained by moral considerations. On the other hand, as we shall see in examining the virtuous side of the question, the final agents of what we might call rectificatory justice do not work directly, or even fully consciously, but they do oppose force: the Servant, Albany's conscience, even the apparently 'natural' tendency of evil characters to quarrel and destroy one another, are all ultimately effective in some way. Natural Law, like God, may act in mysterious and indirect ways, and apparent defeat can lead to ultimate victory. Milton was to place his trust in such a creed, and as we shall see in the next chapter, on issues such as the accountability of rulers and divorce, three hundred years passed before he was vindicated. For the virtuous forces in King Lear, to invoke a phrase in Love's Labour's Lost, 'That's too long for a play.'
In the context of a play, the positivist logic can be exposed as dangerous if not quite provably fallacious, but it is sobering to remember that the arguments of Hobbes and legal positivists alike, and the modern system of rule by law itself are, in essence, based on just such a logic. If this were not so, where would a properly elected government gain the authority to reverse law made by its predecessor, and why should common law generate new precedents that so qualify earlier ones that they appear to overturn them? Such checks as we have, lie respectively in the political process for passing statutes and in what the prevailing climate of opinion finds acceptable, not in the substance or procedures of law itself. King Lear may show positive law in the ascendancy and at its worst, but the train of events also presents at least 'pathetically' to the feelings of the judging audience in Wilson's sense, why some kind of Natural Law is necessary in a world where positive law rules. Authoritarian, positivist versions of law prevail, but audiences and readers are made aware of a coexisting, more benign and morallybased, form of judgment. That such legitimated injustice prevails over Natural Law in the political world of King Lear does not mean that the latter does not exist and operate in the play's moral scheme.
Edmund's law of nature
Before turning more fully to Natural Law in King Lear, we must address a different use of the word 'nature'. This second form of 'Law of nature' (what in this book has been named natural philosophy as it links all the natural world) is the one under which Edmund at least claims to operate, and it is the driving force behind the other 'evil' characters as well. They obey what is popularly called by neo-Darwinians 'The law of the jungle' (incidentally slighting the peaceable kingdom of animals and plants, where in truth 'necessity' rather than competition is the basic driving force, and also misrepresenting Darwin). Without exception, all critics have interpreted Edmund's famous speech on 'Nature' at face value,11 but it must be clear on close reading that he is not in fact invoking any recognisable version of 'nature'. Rather, he is perversely making himself the slave of the very social 'custom' that he reviles:
Thou, nature, art my goddess. To thy law
My services are bound. Wherefore should I
Stand in the plague of custom and permit
The curiosity of nations to deprive me,
For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines
Lag of a brother? Why 'bastard'? Wherefore 'base',
When my dimensions are as well-compact,
My mind as generous, and my shape as true
As honest madam's issue?
Why brand they us with 'base'? with 'base, base bastardy'?
Who in the lusty stealth of nature take
More composition and fierce quality
Than doth within a stale, dull-eyed bed go
To the creating a whole tribe of fops
Got 'Tween a sleep and wake? Well then,
Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land.
Our father's love is to the bastard Edmund
As to the legitimate. Well, my legitimate, if
This letter speed and my invention thrive,
Edmund the base shall to th' legitimate.
1 grow, I prosper. Now gods, stand up for bastards!
(Scene 2, lines 1-21)
The sense in which Edmund is appropriating 'nature' is semantic rather than substantive, deriving from the term 'natural child' for a bastard who is conceived, as he sees it, outside wedlock in animal passion, rather than within the dull habit of marriage. He also uses nature as antagonistic to society, in the same sense that during the storm scene several characters see the elements of nature as opposing mankind. Like Shylock, Edgar has a point, in so far as legitimate and illegitimate alike are 'natural' in the biological sense and there should be no basis for inequality. However, in his argument he is not appealing to anything beyond human institutions, and in so far as he is relying on a moral order it is merely as a challenge to positive law. He is showing up and railing against the contradictions in laws of inheritance. Renaissance law, for example, based rights to inheritance law on the issue of marriage, and Edmund's complaint is that 'Legitimacy' is defined simply through this artificial construction, rather than parentage or even affection. A daughter born before a male heir, even 'Legitimately', would have the same grievance. He is not appealing to a transcendent scheme of natural justice, but rather is condemning an existing, hypocritical system and asking for his proper inheritance rights as a 'natural' son, within society's own rules. In his spirit of acquisitiveness he wants not equality and morality as human values in themselves, nor even some form of fair, distributive justice, but rather property and money all to himself. He is no Raphael Hythlodaeus, challenging the basis of property from a 'Natural' point of view. Just as Gonoril and Regan feigned filial love to gain inheritance, so Edmund's plot to turn his father against the 'Legitimate' Edgar is a stratagem to get land, not an action based on any kind of law observable in the world of nature. Like Cornwall's group, he basically wants power. Edmund's spurious reference to nature as a goddess is no more than a rationalisation of human greed. It carries no more weight than Lear's description of Cordelia as 'A wretch whom nature is ashamed Almost to acknowledge hers' (Scene 1, lines 202-3).
Obviously, later thinkers such as Hobbes and some followers of Darwin have elevated greed into a 'natural' law by calling it 'Human nature', but such a conclusion is not necessitated by Shakespeare's words, nor is it for that matter necessitated by a reading of human history. We may be attracted to the energy and charisma of an actor who plays Edmund, but there are few signs in the text that such admiration should extend to his morality or his actions. They are certainly implacably opposed to the tenets of Aquinas and classical Natural Law.
For every power-hungry tyrant there have been thousands at least silently opposing him; for every greedy person there are many generous ones; for every militarist there have been many who prefer peace, and so on, and all these contrasting types are depicted in Shakespeare's play. Edmund's 'nature' in King Lear is something of a red herring, and our reading of More's Utopia might invite us simply to replace his 'nature' with 'private property'. This is not to argue that Edmund does not have a just complaint against a society which allows his father to boast about the lust in which his son was conceived, while depriving that son of a share of the father's inheritance. Such a society is neither just nor fair in our terms. As a concession, Shakespeare mollifies the 'poetic justice' which kills Edmund at the end by giving him one last repentance, perhaps even a conscience, when in his dying moments he sends the order to reprieve Lear and Cordelia, an order that comes too late for Cordelia.
Where Edmund departs radically from classical Natural Law is in defining nature as a vindictive force and directly opposed to human society. He is merely employing the forms of social injustice and power-manipulations that he has learned from others, and the kind of positive law implementation that we have observed in Cornwall. The ruthless sexual acquisitiveness with which he throws Gonoril and Regan into competition against each other is evidence that even in intimate situations he follows these rules of power. Natural Law requires quite the reverse, centralising charity and the placing of social good above personal ends, co-operation above competition, drawing on the physical universe, if at all, only as a metaphor for 'Laws' which are regular and consistent. Kent's 'The tyranny of the open night's too rough For nature to endure' (Scene 11, line 2) makes clear the reading of 'nature' as human and communitarian in essence, pitted metaphorically against the 'Tyranny' of outward storms. The clearest contrast in the play lies between Edmund and Cordelia. Where his actions are motivated by the desire for individual power and status, and where his thoughts reveal little concern for conscience until his final gesture, Cordelia is willing to forfeit power and status when they are offered, before she will compromise on conscience. What we may be witnessing in the creation of Edmund is the birth of a modern myth of nature as red in tooth and claw, and an equally post-Hobbesian, Darwinian, assumption that human nature is the same.
Gonoril and Regan, and later Cornwall, also follow no 'natural' imperative. They simply want power, wealth and property, and given their chance the first two use unashamed flattery and unfelt sycophancy to achieve their ends. Once they have power, as we have seen, they equate law with their own wills, without reference even to the 'gods' that many others call upon, let alone to a system of morality or social justice. Gonoril and Regan, significantly, kill each other: dog may not eat dog in the world of nature (although it may eat, for example, rabbit for necessary food), but human may kill human when they enter the lists of power-play and competition, abandoning the Law of Nature written in their hearts. Cornwall is killed by what can be interpreted as a rival moral system, more literally by a servant acting on behalf of an altruistic set of values, even if the Servant is himself slain. When we wish to answer 'no' to Lear's question 'Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard-hearts?' we need not be sidetracked by Edmund's call to 'Nature' as his goddess.
Necessity, charity, and Natural Law
In our analysis of King Lear we may now move to a consideration of most of the major issues raised in this book. The play gives a representation of an absolutist political system where rulers seem rarely if ever constrained by moral considerations (the 'Moral' man, Albany, loses power because he has qualms, and even when offered power at the end he refuses it) or by anything beyond military power itself. Might is considered, at least by the mighty, to be right, in a treatment by Shakespeare which could be read as a merciless satire on perversions of power. Despite many characters' calls upon gods, there are no dei ex machina and no evidence of manipulative gods.12 The most virtuous character, Cordelia, ends up not only unrewarded but dead, and the two who might, as suffering indexes of good and evil, be said to have learned something, Lear and Gloucester, both also die. We should recall that Shakespeare has gone out of his way to create such an unrelieved and negative picture of the consequences of tyranny, since he has decisively altered most of his sources in giving us these deaths. If, as I have argued, Renaissance literature is, according to rhetorical theory, supposed to be morally educative, Rymer's question of Othello could be directed to King Lear: 'What learn you by that?', when all vestiges of poetic justice are violated, at least by Cordelia's death.
At the same time, this play above all others has been seen, especially in the twentieth century, as the most morally educative of all those by Shakespeare or any other writer. The contradiction—absence of an effective, implemented moral code within the play-world may paradoxically lead to the construction of a supremely moral experience for the audience—is resolved by the omnipresence of Natural Law in all its facets, and by the crucial 'participation' in Aquinas' sense, of readers and audiences in completing the circle. The resonant line 'Thou, Nature, art my goddess' could be appropriated from the reprehensible Edmund and redistributed in a different sense, certainly to Cordelia and also to each reader and each member of an audience. It is unseen Nature working its Laws of reason and conscience through virtuous characters, which dictates our capacity to make moral judgments on the action, and to distinguish between good and evil even where evil prevails in the worldly sense. The play is far from Utopian, and indeed is despairing of social improvement until power itself is eradicated, but it does consistently endorse a code of values based on Natural Law which leads virtuous characters to oppose authority's version of positive law. In turn, Cordelia, Kent, and others are driven by conscience and reason into positions of civil disobedience based on their beliefs in communitarianism, loyalty, and human sympathy. In a play which is backgrounded with the English adversities of common life, 'Poor pelting villages, sheep-cotes, and mills' (Scene 7, line 184), where the mere sight of beggars enforces 'charity' (line 186), a set of local communities with 'Wakes and fairs and market towns' (Scene 13, lines 68-9), ranging in its dramatis personae from monarchs to a naked Bedlam beggar, it is significantly those who do not hold power who emerge as the most virtuous. They are driven by simple 'need', by 'necessity', and they are solicitous of others in need, only because they know what it is to suffer. In his unregenerate state, threatened with the disbanding of his personal followers, Lear had fulminated 'O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars Are in the poorest thing superfluous': 'Allow not nature more than nature needs, Man's life is cheap as beast's' (Scene 7, lines 423-6), but he speaks without the experience of true need. He is rationalising 'superfluities'. In the next scene but one, cold in the storm and seeking shelter, he recants, musing 'The art of our necessities is strange, that can make vile things precious' (Scene 9, lines 71-2). As the Fool reminds him, and as he altruistically realises, in a storm rain is wet, shelter is welcome. Lear finds that need does exist amongst humans, and furthermore that there is human responsiveness, and the impulse to help others. He has entered a new ethical arena, where 'need' must be 'Reasoned', and where it is the imperative to charity, Luther's prime nutrient of Natural Law. The lesson is one that can be learned by Lear only in extreme adversity, divested of his pomp and ceremony. It is one of the play's starkest ironies that tenants, paupers, and beggars, all of whom have little means and many basic needs, are able to understand the basis of mutual aid in hardship, while kings, with all the resources at their disposal to eliminate poverty, cannot; that only need can recognise need, and, spurred by reason and conscience, try to meet it.
We have already noted the actions and words of servants who are more moral than their masters and mistresses, and to them we could add other characters who appear at least in the Quarto, such as Gloucester's tenant, the Old Man who offers to help him, the messenger who describes so eloquently Cordelia's grief (Scene 17, lines 17-24), the patient, understanding Doctor who helps Lear, and others. It seems no accident that the dramatic design puts Cordelia in the position of a disinherited child, Edgar into the disguise of a beggar, and Kent that of a Servant, and makes a Fool the trusted companion and political adviser to the fallen king, for it appears that virtuous action is the exclusive prerogative of the marginalised, the powerless, and the insignificant. While the great and lofty in power (including Lear as king) pursue self-interested motives, Machiavellian tactics for holding power, and a Hobbesian sense that human life is expendable, those at the other end of the social spectrum (including Lear himself when he is no longer king), demonstrate sympathetic charity. The 'Intense imagining' of Edgar in his construction of the dizzying heights of Dover Cliff has not only a poetic and rhetorical but also a moral basis, and it is significant that his stage-managing of his father's 'Fall' is, at least in Edgar's eyes, justified: 'Why I do trifle thus with his despair Is done to cure it' (Scene 20, lines 32-3). Cordelia's responses are consistently based on reason as the moral faculty and conscience as the stimulus to action. Her 'Nothing', simultaneously so disastrous in its results and so glorious in its courage, is based not on obstinacy, but a moral principle, in the face of a statement couched as a request but in reality a command:
LEAR But now, our joy,
Although the last, no least to our dear love:
What can you say to win a third more opulent
Than your sisters?
CORDELIA Nothing, my lord.
LEAR Nothing?
CORDELIA Nothing.(Scene 1, lines 77-83)
Her earlier asides confirm her love for her father and her refusal to be drawn into a public declaration of it for personal gain. Love is silent in a context of power, her 'Love's more richer than [her] tongue', to be proved by actions and not by words. Her reasoned response to Lear's demand is to assert some tenets of Natural Law: one loves according to some 'bond' of nature and inclination rather than to prescribed forms of words. Forced to 'Heave' her heart into her mouth and use words when she would prefer to be silent, Cordelia must couch her response in terms that sound at first like positive" law based on contractual obligations, but this implication is a coercion of Lear in setting up the situation. She is forced to answer authority with law. When we recall that axiomatically positive law is supposed to be in line with Natural Law, we can recognise that Cordelia is not standing upon a positive law—indeed, she is refuting Lear's positive 'Law'—but instead explaining rationally the moral basis for the 'Law of love' in the very terms introduced by Lear. 'Nothing', her answer to Lear's indecorous question supplemented by her explanations, carries the full weight of reason and conscience. When reluctantly talking, she cannot avoid altogether Lear's linguistic circuit, and, as he asserts an authoritarian version of law (rewards will be distributed according to royal whim), so she asserts a Natural Law (rewards and punishments are irrelevant beside the overwhelming compulsion of reason and conscience). Like most examples of conscientious resistance and refusal to obey authority's demands, Cordelia's gesture precipitates as much if not more anger and destruction than would outright opposition, for she is refusing to accept the basis for authority at all when it conflicts with conscience. The events of the play, dismaying as they are, unravel from this exchange. Responsibility, however, lies not with Cordelia but with Lear who, again like Basilius, attempts to assert positive law over Natural Law.
Kent's outburst, claiming the privilege of spontaneous and 'natural' anger at witnessing an injustice, is a different kind of political action. He implicitly accepts the absolute authority of Lear, but directly opposes his judgment and justice in the immediate case of appointing royal successors. Like Cordelia, Kent takes inspiration from the 'Region' of his heart, but, in accusing Lear of madness, of folly, 'Hideous rashness' and of bowing to flattery in misjudging his daughters, he is not questioning Lear's authority. He begs the king to reserve his state and apply 'best consideration' by reversing the decision, thus bringing positive law into line with manifest justice based on true deserts. He claims the position of a physician trying to cure a disease (lines 154-5), a metaphor which points to the 'naturalness' of his advice. Lear, speaking in Angelo's terms of alienated authority based on 'Our sentence and our power' (an anticipation of Cornwall) asserts that neither his 'nature' nor his 'place' nor (more to the point) his 'potency' can accept such opposition, and he banishes Kent. Thereafter, Kent is completely and loyally consistent to his own self-defined 'bond', for, disguised as Caius, servant to Lear, he acts in willing servitude to his master. He refuses to accept the legitimacy of the new regime of rulers since, in his view, it is not based on a judgment consistent with reason and conscience. While Cordelia tacitly repudiates Lear's authority to act as he does, Kent accepts his authority but opposes his judgment (in both senses of the word, judicial and psychological), but they both agree that Natural Law is here opposed to positive law. Kent's touching farewell to Cordelia says as much:
The gods to their protection take thee, maid,
That rightly think'st, and hast most justly said.
(Scene 1, lines 172-3)
In the 'Mini-trial' that follows, Burgundy refuses Cordelia in marriage, revealing that he sees her simply as property, as a dower, whereas France bases his decision to marry her on the basis of love and 'Inflamed respect' ('She is herself a dowry'), and on 'Reason without miracle' (Scene 1, line 213). Burgundy is establishing himself incidentally as a legal positivist in looking no further than immediate contractual circumstances of a dowry, France as a Natural Lawyer, looking beyond present authority to more ultimate values.
As the action unfolds, Cordelia becomes more and more equated with benevolent and healing natural forces. To her all natural things in distress are equally deserving of pity:
Mine injurer's mean'st dog,
Though he had bit me, should have stood that night
Against my fire. And wast thou fain, poor father,
To hovel thee with swine and rogues forlorn,
In short and musty straw? Alack, alack!
(Scene 21, lines 34-8)
Tears of sympathy and grief are her emblem, and virtually a whole scene (17) is devoted to them:
GENTLEMAN . . .
And now and then an ample tear trilled down
Her delicate cheek . . .
KENT O, then it moved her?
GENTLEMAN
Not to a rage. Patience and sorrow strove
Who should express her goodliest. You have seen
Sunshine and rain at once; her smiles and tears
Were like, a better way . . .(Scene 17, lines 13-20 passim)
'What, i'Th' storm? i'Th' night?
Let piety not be believed!' There she shook
The holy water from her heavenly eyes,
And clamour mastered, then away she started
To deal with grief alone.
(Scene 17, lines 29-33)
Kent's comment in response that 'The stars above us govern our conditions' strikes us as glib in the manner of the superstitious Gloucester, when seen in the light of the constant equation drawn in the latter stage of the play between Cordelia and natural forces. It is she who brings the description of Lear,
As mad as the racked sea, singing aloud,
Crowned with rank fumitor and furrow-weeds,
With burdocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckooflowers,
Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow
In our sustaining corn.
(Scene 18, lines 2-5)
She collaborates with the doctor who uses not drugs but nature and its 'simples operative', perhaps the 'Idle weeds' some of which had curative functions, as Culpepper testifies, to induce sleep, and even, in the case of 'sweet marjoram' later mentioned by Lear, to allay madness:
Our foster-nurse of nature is repose,
The which he lacks. That to provoke in him
Are many simples operative, whose power
Will close the eye of anguish.
(Scene 18, lines 13-16)
Cordelia calls on nature itself to heal:
All blest secrets,
All you unpublished virtues of the earth,
Spring with my tears, be aidant and remediate
In the good man's distress!
(Scene 18, lines 16-19)
Cordelia's earlier, stubborn insistence on conscience is now linked with nature itself, as benevolent and as a moral force, to construct an emblem of Natural Law, brought into consistency with natural philosophy. Her nature is poles apart from Edmund's, which is closer to Hobbes's model of acquisitive 'Human nature'. The victimisation and execution of her define more clearly than anything else could, that her enemies are also the enemies of both nature and Natural Law. The unutterable pathos (in Thomas Wilson's sense) of her death is generated from the echo of her natural imagery in Lear's anguished 'Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, And thou no breath at all?' (Scene 24, lines 301-4). Nature's companion has now become no more precious and unique than any of nature's beings. The image of her lifeless body makes a mockery of Albany's obtusely simple minded distribution of poetic justice:
All friends shall taste
The wages of their virtue, and all foes
The cup of their deservings.
(Scene 24, lines 297-9)
If this 'Friend' is dead, then there is a sense in which virtue itself, far from being rewarded, has ceased to be.
If the audience and readers are in the position of a jury, then the ending of this play requires us to give our verdict by referring to our reasoning powers and activating our consciences, and in this case to feel outrage at the deeds of those who opposed Natural Law, while acknowledging the worldly destructiveness of evil. The educative function of the play, then, lies not in apportionment of rewards and punishments as Nahum Tate's eighteenth-century rewriting attempted to represent, but in making us 'Feelingly', through witnessing victimisation, extend and implement the lessons of Natural Law, charity, and sympathy. An unfortunate inference is that outside Thomas More's state of Utopia, no such ideal world is available as a refuge, just as in Utopia itself the world of Europe remains incorrigible. Even Lear's comforting vision of prison as a place of observing gilded butterflies and acquiring the mystery of things is a whistle in the darkness.
The ambiguity discovered by critics in the line 'And my poor fool is hanged' (Scene 24, line 300), whether intended by the dramatist or not, points us towards another equation, that between Cordelia and the Fool.13 The Fool also speaks from a basis in Natural Law, although he is more retributory and reproachful than Cordelia, losing no opportunity to bait Lear with the king's folly and injustice. He is the truly anti-authoritarian man, professionally licensed to challenge and undermine the power of those above him in the social hierarchy, and particularly the monarch at the top, and to disrupt even linguistic and conversational expectations. He taunts Lear, sometimes harshly, for dividing the kingdom so inequitably and for banishing his youngest daughter, but any cruelty in his attacks stems from loyalty towards Lear, love of Cordelia, and respect for a sense of collective good. He is more angrily subversive towards Gonoril when she holds power: 'I am a fool, thou art nothing' (I. iv. 192). In calculated puns, misdirections, underminings, he is directly threatening not only the authority of speakers, but that of language itself, at least in its assumed status as a stable signifier of 'Meaning'. Unlike Kent and Cordelia, the Fool has no capacity to influence events. He even 'pines away' after Cordelia goes to France, and eventually out of the play altogether. His role is largely that of gnomic commentator on folly, injustice and breaches of Natural Law. His is the one lonely voice that refers, however-sceptically and strangely, to a utopia of justice, equality, and freedom from exploitation, and his mysterious 'prophecy' dwells on how natural these states are—as easy walking, in fact—and yet how unlikely they seem to be for mankind to achieve, at least in the 'confusion' prevalent in this play's Albion:
When every case in law is right;
No squire in debt, nor no poor knight;
When slanders do not live in tongues,
Nor cutpurses come not to throngs;
When usurers tell their gold i'Th'Field,
And bawds and whores do churches build,
Then comes the time, who lives to see'T,
That going shall be us'd with feet.
(Folio only, Tragedy 3.2.87-94)
In other words, when the world is honest, then living will be as easily natural as walking. The weird comment that follows, sounding more the note of postmodern novels than a Jacobean play, 'This prophecy Merlin shall make; for I live before his time', throws the time of utopia outside the play and outside history itself, defining it as the kind of timeless state of Natural Law which is eternally present as a moral touchstone, but which the Fool, in his pessimism, sees as absent from the dealings of people in his world.
Lear himself is disingenuous in claiming to be 'More sinned against than sinning' (Scene 9, line 60) for it was he who precipitated all the disasters depicted as a consequence of the 'division of the kingdoms.'1 4 The play can be rather reductively read as a punishment of Lear and the kingdom as a whole for his violation of Natural Law at the beginning of the play, not only a breach of the 'Law of kind' in rejecting his best loved daughter, but also an injustice in rewarding the unworthy daughters and punishing the virtuous one. The consequences of these 'sins' are to drive Lear into a direct confrontation with the very forces of nature which he has opposed. The storm scene can be read as allegorical in Spenser's sense, as the forces that Lear has gone against now humble and educate him. From this archetypal encounter Lear may learn some things, but too late for remedy. One thing he does learn about is 'The art of our necessities' (Scene 9, line 71), a concept legally and emotionally defined, which we have seen to be important in Love's Labour's Lost. 'Necessities' or needs are infinitely various, and depending on the situation 'can make vile things precious' (ibid.). But in this context they take us back to the notion of a minimal content of Natural' Law. In order to survive in a violent storm when threatened with assassination, the text reveals, necessities are shelter and protection, literal and psychological, both of which require a form of human bonding which must be 'natural' in all senses, instinctive, and fulled by reason and conscience. Mutual aid and charity in its fullest sense take the place of self-defence in the struggle for survival, when the antagonist is the natural world of wind and rain rather than a human adversary.
The play gives an array of circumstances in which discrimination between what is a true need and what is not is raised as a problem. It is his daughters' dismissal of his 100 men that drives Lear to contemplate the issue. Gonoril and Regan clearly act politically rather than from their avowed distaste for the retinue's lack of house-training. To tolerate the existence of what amounts to a standing army loyal to the former king would, to these political pragmatists who believe that might is right, be courting the possibility of a reactionary coup. Regan questions Lear's 'need' of even one man in attendance, which unleashes his rather confused but enraged response:
O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous.
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man's life is cheap as beast's. Thou art a lady;
If only to go warm were gorgeous,
Why, nature needs not what thou, gorgeous, wearest,
Which scarcely keeps thee warm. But for true need—
You heavens, give me that patience, patience I need!
(Scene 7, lines 423-30)
Unregenerate as yet, Lear is simultaneously glimpsing and resisting the idea of 'need' as something that applies only in a world of deprivation, and not in that of a privileged 'Lady' or a king. Even the poorest beggar wears what is superfluous to his needs, and once we 'Reason' about whether something is needed, then we reduce man's life to the level of a beast's and strip it of all dignity. Ironically, a minute or so before, he had been speaking of 'Necessity's sharp pinch', and it is this he is about to encounter in the storm on the heath. Within a scene or two, Lear is to reassess his views, when he meets a 'philosopher' who wears virtually no clothes in a storm.
Lear is forced to test his analysis of 'need' by experiencing a situation offering little more than an animal's comfort in the wild (an analogy drawn by Cordelia), unprotected, 'bare-headed' (Scene 9, line 61) in the storm, 'Minded like the weather, most unquietly' (Scene 8, line 2). Here, as he 'Strives in his little world of man to out-storm The to-and-fro conflicting wind and rain' (Scene 8, line 10) on a night when even the bear, lion, and wolf keep their fur dry, Lear learns a fundamental law that 'True need' provides a model for existing within nature and its laws. Increasingly, his perceptions embrace the lesson that previously, kept ignorant in the mantles of authority, he could not have understood. He sees the storm as a judicial scourge, finding out 'undivulged crimes Unwhipped of justice' (Scene 9, lines 52-3) crimes committed by the very people who claim to hold authority in the human world. Reduced to 'necessity' he sees that the true need for humanity is not a troop of men or gorgeous robes, but simple justice. Leaf learns that in a storm his companion the Fool 'needs' shelter, the glimmerings of a moral sense which previously had been denied him. Extended to the social and political sphere, the logic leads towards Utopia's:
Poor naked wretches, whereso'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless night,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed 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.
(Scene 11, lines 25-33)
This marks a reversal of his outburst to Regan. Instead of saying even a beggar has more than he 'needs' to survive, and thus more than animals, he is saying that , the beggar has less than is necessary, and he perceives that the injustice is directly caused by the superfluity appropriated by the rich and powerful. Gloucester, later reduced to similar need, discovers an equally communalistic, utopian-like basis of social justice, when in severe need himself he finds the compassion to give his purse to a presumed beggar:
Heavens deal so still.
Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man
That stands 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.
(Scene 15, lines 64-9)
'Enough' for all is the maxim of Natural Law, 'distribution' is its basis for material justice, and the logic of 'Feeling' is awakened by the Aristotelian advocate deploying the rhetoric of pathos. The sardonic point silently made by the play is that it seems impossible for anybody in authority to learn this lesson and improve things, simply because they are blinkered by the very fact of holding authority. They have too much to lose personally by instituting such a state of Natural Law.
Lear even finds his natural 'noble philosopher' (Scene 11, lines 141 and 159), his 'Learned Thebaic'(line 144) of Natural Law, in Poor Tom who literally has 'nothing', and who is 'The thing itself! Unaccommodated man', a 'poor, bare, forked animal', and he removes his clothes in fellow-feeling (lines 98-9). Edgar's gibberish in his role as Poor Tom associates him with unpleasant facets of nature, eating cowdung, old rats, and ditch-dogs, like the beggars described by Raphael Hythlodaeus who are 'Whipped from tithing to tithing, and stock-punished, and imprisoned' (lines 122-3) simply for existing.15 He becomes for Lear the walking evidence of man's inhumanity to man, breaches of Natural Law, of injustice, and of the 'need' for conscience in making a human society. As well as being, with the Fool, the focus for Lear's new-found compassion, Edgar's condition also becomes in Lear's eyes the model of an ecologically non-exploitative existence, owing nothing to the silkworm for silk, to cattle for leather, to sheep for wool, and to cats for perfume. In the role of Poor Tom, one of his many quick changes, Edgar is less a 'character' than a functional catalyst, an agency for change and moral awakening.
Lear's sentiments in this part of the play are as communitarian, anti-individualistic, and anti-authoritarian as More's in his fictional version of Utopia. Once again, consistent with the Fool's despairing prophecy, neither Lear nor the play survives to see a state of justice according to Natural Law implemented in human society. Nor are there many signs that such a state will exist, without fundamental change in the world. It is for audiences and readers, as the judge and jury presiding over an 'As-if scenario, to pass judgment and take the lessons into their own societies.
That, as in Love 's Labour 's Lost, is too long for a play and can occur only afterwards.
The parallel, interlocking plot of the Gloucester family, follows the course of Lear's. A father commits an injustice against his progeny, a sin against/FÍatural Law, and not only does he suffer from his choice to follow vice and shun virtue, but so in different ways do the sons. In this case responsibility is shared (as it is between Lear, Gonoril and Regan and Cornwall) because the plot is hatched and perpetrated by Edmund for his own, self-seeking reasons. At the same time, as I have suggested, it was Gloucester (like Lear or, again, like Basilius) who set in motion the train of events by his ambiguous attitude to Edmund, at once admiring him as a reflection of the father's amoral virility and yet disinheriting him according to society's laws on bastardy. In strictly narrative terms we might exonerate Gloucester by saying he is duped, but that would mean we could exonerate Lear also, on the grounds that he was deceived by Gonoril's and Regan's speeches in the first Act. Like Lear, Gloucester acts impetuously, without consulting the evidence of his own eyes and his experience about Edgar's filial affection. He superstitiously blames the 'stars' in the astrological sense instead of his own actions which were indifferent to human reason and conscience. As Lear begins sumptuously dressed, surrounded by troops, and learns by being naked and alone, so Gloucester begins metaphorically with sight which he neglects to use, and learns through blindness. When he is led to 'see' the scene of Dover Cliff through Edgar's poetic construction, he is doing no more and no less than when he had 'seen' Edgar distorted through Edmund's eyes. He too has allowed positive law, the rules concerning 'Legitimacy', to blind him to more important, human values. In this sense Edmund does have a grievance, and, although the play does not condone his actions, it does explain them, and in doing so places primary responsibility for the family fortunes squarely with Gloucester himself.
Power and injustice
Right through his writing career, from the debates on the use and misuse of power centring on Henry VI and Richard III to Gonzalo's vision of a political utopia in The Tempest, Shakespeare worried away at problems concerning the nature of justice and authority in political worlds. He encompassed a dizzying kaleidoscope of models of justice, but the central distinction from which his plays derive much of their dramatic, moral, and intellectual energy is between man-made decrees, and something more 'natural' and eternal in its origin, beyond a world where people make mistakes of family justice and where humanity must perforce prey on itself. This is precisely the distinction between positive law and Natural Law. And if the dialectic pervades all Shakespeare's plays, nowhere is it more central, more problematic, and more pressing than in King Lear. This is somewhat ironic, since it is a play, like Love's Labour's Lost, which itself flouts all conventions of the form of 'poetic justice' as classically defined. Virtue, far from being rewarded, lies dead. Expectations are unfulfilled at every turn. To suggest that Shakespeare is systematically requiring audiences and readers to act as jury in a case raising Natural Law issues of reason and conscience is, as the evidence of this book testifies, not anachronistic in the Renaissance, but fairly standard practice. Milton's Areopagitica is the greatest theoretical exposition of the obligation upon readers to form their own moral judgments, and his Paradise Lost is no less insistent a practice of this theory than is King Lear. We have constantly discovered through our exploration of Natural Law that, at least in its classical version, its main assumption is that people do not need to be told the difference between right and wrong, but that within each individual is the innate capacity to discriminate through the faculties of reason and conscience. Even one like Spenser showing Calvinist influence can, in the medium of poetry, draw upon such a belief. Furthermore, according to the model, a person in tune with Natural Law by a kind of instinct inclines towards virtue and away from vice. In this sense King Lear becomes a clear example of a work in which the dramatist appeals to audiences to activate exactly these faculties. The plays of the period themselves bear witness to the fact that audiences were more imaginatively and morally active than those witnessing our post-Victorian stage practices. Brecht was one of the few who sought to tap the same active, judgment-forming faculties in his audiences, but it is arguable that entrenched, modern conventions were against him. Edward Bond follows in his footsteps, and it may be no accident that his most powerful plays are the adaptation called Lear and the play in which he represents Shakespeare writing King Lear, Bingo. Bond, like Shakespeare, gives no pat or easy solutions based on simple poetic justice, but rather he requires each member of his audience to search and construct a set of personal moral values out of the experience of the plays.
The most conspicuous point of both Shakespeare's versions of King Lear is the absence of a schematic 'poetic justice' which could easily have been applied by simply following sources, allowing Cordelia to live on, and take up the throne, or even to have allowed Lear to live on with his beloved daughter in autumnal reconciliation, as in Tate's version. Shakespeare has gone out of his way to reject his sources (whether legendary or historical), by killing off Cordelia and leaving a hiatus in the ruling of Britain. No self-respecting dramatist would expect his audience to accept this state of affairs as morally right, no matter what we think of the play's aesthetic qualities. The alternative 'Happy ending' such as Tate's simply leaves the reader and audience in a state of cosy complacency, omitting the 'supplement' of manifest injustice chosen by Shakespeare.
An important but sadly overlooked book published in 1949 by Edmond N. Cahn, The Sense of Injustice,16 posits that human beings may well be more 'naturally' able to recognise injustice than justice, as a prelude to the awakening of a desire for justice itself. Aristotle's emphasis on pathos in adjudicating a trial at law could be said to work on the same principle. The moral 'Work' required of an audience by such a scheme clearly continues after the play is over, with an invitation to the reader and audience to transfer a largely tacit and emotionally pitched analysis and exemplification of good and evil into their own lives, as, in a very real sense, the capacity to judge came initially from their own experiences. It is in the nature of rhetoric, after all, to convince us 'Feelingly' of injustice, without needing to spell out what justice itself compels. Once again, in lighter mode, Love's Labour's Lost emerges as the work, in terms of moral structure, oddly closest to King Lear, like a playful 'First run' for the immense tragic passion of the Lear plays. The crucial difference is that the courtiers in the earlier comedy 'deserve' the deferment and uncertainty of marriage they face at the close of the play, since they have overridden Natural Law by agreeing to obey a misguided edict, whereas Cordelia does not deserve death because she has, if anything, embodied Natural Law by instinctively following reason and conscience and by inclining to virtue. Here we might locate a more general 'Law' of Shakespearian drama which has been overlooked in all the hundreds of accounts of 'The nature of comedy' and 'The nature of tragedy'. Shakespeare's comedies, at their heart, become a contemplation of the effecting of justice according to their own internal Natural Law of sexual attraction, while his tragedies become a contemplation of injustice, violations of Natural Law precepts. This is so even in plays with a more 'villainous' titular hero than Lear himself: nobody at the end of Macbeth can bring back Lady Macduff and her children, the innocent victims of tyranny, and at the end of Coriolanus there is no force that can resurrect all those civilians killed in war by the military machine. The main offenders may be dead, and to this extent some version of poetic justice applies, but the profound injustices perpetrated by them cannot be rectified, and must instead remain as permanent witnesses to injustice. The lesson may be starker in Lear since the good and the evil alike are destroyed in a travesty of poetic justice, emphasising that injustice itself is intransigent when there are those around who do not follow innately the tenets of Natural Law.
Here lies an answer to the problems raised by the existence of 'Two versions' of Lear. Whçreas it is becoming common to describe the Quarto as compassionate and the Folio as harsh, we can equally argue that there is no fundamental moral difference between the two, and that if anything the Folio is more rigorously consistent to the underlying moral schema present in both. The Quarto gives more spoken guidance by offering choric voices and examples of human charity and Natural Law in operation which we may hang onto and identify with. The Folio, by shaving these away, leaves us more morally isolated, so that we must make up our own minds about good and evil without prompting, more or less like Milton's Adam and Eve at the end of Paradise Lost. It tests the reader and audience more starkly by requiring us to choose by reference to faculties which come from Within us rather than being asserted by the play. This parallels exactly the morally active practicum of reading and interpreting advocated by Sidney, Milton in Areopagitica, and the Aristotelian theory of rhetoric described by Wilson. Cordelia, in this sense, has acted in lonely integrity, and the audience and reader are encouraged to do likewise.
The actual conclusions drawn by an audience from the Folio cannot be different in kind from those generated by the Quarto. For example, it would be considered frankly impossible for any audience not to be repulsed by the blinding of Gloucester, whether or not we have two Gentlemen moralising directly about it at the end of the scene. Their presence in the Quarto 'History' version may focus the humanist response by introducing voices of pity within the action, yet, although in the Folio 'Tragedy' the tone is different, there is no reason why the reader/audience does not feel directly the same pity and outrage, perhaps even more keenly because the stage spectators are ignoring callously some obvious moral assumptions. The Folio is, then, simply carrying a stage further, the Quarto's insistence that Natural Law is a 'need' from within which can be obscured by the existence of questionable positive laws enacted by worldly tyrants, but which can be retrieved by the exercise of human reason and conscience. While the Folio may give us the same number of violations of Natural Law as the Quarto, and fewer affirmations of it, this does not mean that Natural Law is excluded from its orbit. At the same time, Nahum Tate's Lear is different from Shakespeare's two versions. Tate eliminated all the doubts, uncertainties, ambivalences, and, in the currently voguish word, 'Anxieties' of Shakespeare.
The little group of characters left huddling, exhausted, at the end of both versions of King Lear are like the audience in the position of Adam and Eve at the end of Milton's epic. They have witnessed something akin to the tragedy of the Fall of mankind in the evil perpetrated, and they have no refuge in the kind of platitudes and superstition which, for example, Gloucester had fallen back on. 'Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say', whoever says it (Albany in the Quarto, Edgar in the Folio), is a reproof to any glib or easy answer to the violations of Natural Law which we have witnessed: Lear's initial rejection of his loving daughter, Gloucester's failure to trust his son, the blinding of Gloucester, the hanging of Cordelia, and so on. Evil may be dead, but so is good. At the same time, like Adam and Eve, they know these sobered witnesses have the equipment for enlightened moral judgment, and realise also that they will be individually tested in their lonely attempts to follow virtue and shun vice. If they forget the lessons of Natural Law demonstrated by the actions they have witnessed and participated in, they may inadvertently fall themselves, or watch others fall into the blind and tyrannical ways of authority. They have reached a real but fragile point of moral awareness.
Readers and audiences occupy the same position, as, even more pertinently, do critics claiming any 'Authority' over such a play. The logic of King Lear, with its decisive celebration of virtue over vice and its equally decisive extinction of virtue, folds back to catch in its snare those who would impose any kind of positive law, literary or legal, over Natural Law. As in Utopia, no matter how splendid is the prospect of a world based on reason and conscience, that world may not be achievable, because human greed and power-seeking are too deeply entrenched in the existing structures of authority and power: but the effort of trying should still go on. In answer to those who debate whether King Lear is an optimistic or a pessimistic play, we might conclude that it is optimistic in so far as Shakespeare believes in the existence, innate in the hearts of human beings, and the supreme importance of, Natural Law; pessimistic in so far as he does not give indications that we may foresee its imminent implementation in the political and legal processes of human society, because those who have power to change the political world for the better, are the 'Hard-hearts' sealed against the promptings of Natural Law. If Shakespeare indeed has the transportability between cultures and times that have invited the term 'universality', the source lies not in his presentation of presumed verities, but his unsettling ambivalence about the possibility of ever arriving at such verities. His unerring focus on the central human activities of doing justice and injustice, and the problems each raises, is the central dynamic of all his plays and the reason they are applicable in some way to such diverse cultures. In this focus, the dialectic between Natural Law and positive law is fundamental, and King Lear is its powerful exposition.
Notes
1 This chapter draws freely from my previous publications, Innocent Victims: Poetic Injustice in Shakespearean Tragedy (second edition, Athlone Press, London, 1985), chapter 8, and 'King Lear and Philosophical Anarchism', English, 37 (1988), 181-200. I am not sure whether it is encouraging or dismaying that we go on discovering much later what we were trying to say on earlier occasions. In this case, research into Natural Law has clarified and simplified my thoughts on the play, and in no way reverses them. I also owe debts to John Danby, William Hazlitt, A. C. Bradley, G. Wilson Knight, and William Elton.
2 William Shakespeare, The Complete Works (Oxford, 1986) p. 1025. Quotations taken from this edition.
3 Edited by Gary Taylor and Michael Warren, Oxford Shakespeare Studies (Oxford, 1983).
4 Christopher Wortham, 'Ghostly Presences: Dr Faustus meets King Lear', Meridian, 14 (1995), 65-74.
5A Concise Law Dictionary, ed. P. G. Osborn (London, 1964).
6 John Donne's imagery is full of 'Anatomy', and it was, after all, the age of William Harvey's discovery of the circulation of blood. See Devon L. Hodges' fascinating little book, Renaissance Fictions of Anatomy (Amherst, 1985).
7 John D. Euce, 'Shakespeare and the Legal Process: four Essays', Virginia Law Review, 61 (1975), 390-433.
8 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford, 1971). Rawls' book, while not dealing directly with Natural Law, has been a continuing influence behind this book.
9 Cotterell, The Politics of Jurisprudence, p. 143.1 should point out, in defence of quoting at third hand, that Cotterell's book is an excellent 'Critical Introduction' which works largely through quotations, many of which are useful here.
10 Cotterell, The Politics of Jurisprudence, p. 131, quoting Fuller.
11 My analysis differs markedly from John Danby's in Shakespeare 's Doctrine of Nature. A Study of King Lear' (London, 1949), although I readily admit my general indebtedness to this book. Although he does not ignore Natural Law, his main analysis deals with what I have called 'natural philosophy'.
12 Among the many accounts of this contentious issue, see J. C. Maxwell, 'The Technique of Invocation in King Lear', Modern Language Review, 45 (1950), 142-7; Barbara Everett, 'The New King Lear' in Critical Quarterly, 2 (1960), 325-9; and compare William Elton, King Lear and the Gods (San Marino, California, 1966).
13 It has sometimes been argued that one actor doubled for Cordelia and the Fool. I find it very implausible that these two characters were played by the same actor, since both roles are identified with specialist actors, a professional comedian and a boy actor respectively.
14 For the topicality of this issue in James I's reign, see Leah Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare (above, chapter 7, note 18).
15 See Michael Goldman, Shakespeare and the Energies of Drama (Princeton, New Jersey, 1972), pp. 94ff., for a graphic description of the kind of beggar's persona Edgar asumes.
16 Edmond N. Cahn, The Sense of Injustice: An Anthropocentric View of Law (New York and London, 1949).
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