Learning to Curse by Greenblatt Stephen

Author:Greenblatt, Stephen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

Regan

And in good time you gave it.

Lear

Made you my guardians, my depositaries, But kept a reservation to be follow'd

With such a number. (II, iv)

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

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

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