In Shakespeare’s History of King Lear, an aged sovereign assembles his three daughters, to divide his kingdom among them in exchange for their profuse flattery. When his youngest, and most favored, daughter demurs, the king erupts and sets in motion his descent into madness and the dissolution of his kingdom into civil war. Drawn from historical chronicles, King Lear portrays a profound unraveling of the sovereign’s mental state paralleled by the chaotic forces unleashed by fragmented sovereignty. First performed in 1606 for the recently ascendant King James I, the play is often framed today in personal and psychological terms, as a meditation on madness and senescence, the fragile ego of patriarchal privilege, and the nature of authentic familial love. But as King James’s presence suggests, the play was conceived in a time of political instability when royal legitimacy was subject to contentious claims and competing theories of sovereignty. As vivid and heart-rending as Lear’s psychological crisis is, the play also has much to teach us politically: about the blindness of old regimes, the cynical opportunism that can take advantage of that blindness, and the communitarian politics that can and perhaps must be built amidst political dissolution. How can we understand the political and social context in which Shakespeare wrote? What are the ideas—about god, nature, kings, and kingdoms—that inform his play? And how, if at all, can King Lear help us think about the political fracture that prevail today?
In this class, we will complement a close reading of Shakespeare’s superlative blank verse and intricate image clusters with a contextual reading of philosophical influences on the play as well as the politics and theatrical culture of early seventeenth-century Britain. Foremost among these influences were the essays of Montaigne, particularly on secular nature and embodied experience, and Machiavelli’s political theories concerning power and interest, articulated and realized in the play by Edmund, one of Shakespeare’s great villains. We will also consider important theories of monarchy that Shakespeare represented, including King James’s own “divine right of kings,” the King’s Two Bodies and the Great Chain of Being, as well as the debate around Poor Laws in England. As the formerly stable hierarchy of Lear’s reign falls into nature, figured by the storm at the heart of the play, how do the various political actors navigate the contingencies and betrayals that uncertainty sets loose? In particular, how are virtue and community refashioned out of penury and dispossession by Edmund’s rival brother Edgar and others in the face of his Machiavellian treachery? Where does Shakespeare leave us at the end of the play and what does his specific adaptations of the historical record suggest about his political argument addressed to the debates of his time? In turn, how has the play been interpreted and staged over the centuries, particularly amidst the political upheaval of the 20th century and beyond?
