Shakespeare's Philosophy by Colin McGinn

Author:Colin McGinn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

I have sketched these contrasting positions, noting the concepts that occur in them, to shed light on the philosophical substrate of King Lear, arguably the pinnacle of Shakespeare’s tragic vision. The play is set on a cosmic scale, in a craggy pre-Christian England, and deals in the extremes of human emotion. It does not have the claustrophobia of Shakespeare’s other great tragedies, but examines man in nature, and man at the limits of his being (and nonbeing). It is a play of sharp contrasts, of great forces arrayed against each other, of monstrosity, cruelty, of negations and reductions. The tragedy seems to echo through the universe itself, and not merely in the lives of the individual characters. It is not merely the characters that are tragic, but the stage on which they perform. The tragedy seeps into everything, leaving its stain. It is cosmic as well as human; or rather, the human becomes the cosmic, and the cosmic the human. The play thus possesses a kind of abstract grandeur, aided by the philosophical themes it exemplifies. In it, everything is out of joint; nothing happens in the way it should; inversions abound. Things turn into their opposites; evil springs from the unlikeliest of sources; nothing is as it appears. The very structure of the universe seems fractured and paradoxical. In short, it is the second, Humean conception of causation that seems to rule events.

Nothingness makes its resonant appearance early on in Lear. The king, wishing to retire, has decided to divide his kingdom into three parts, each part to be given to one of his three daughters. (There is no Queen Lear, nor is mention ever made of her: she is conspicuous by her absence, a giant nothingness at the heart of the play. We might even see the vacuum she creates as the source of all the nothingness that pervades the play.) With all the pomposity and presumption he deems proper to his regal position, Lear demands: “Tell me, my daughters, Which of you shall we say doth love us most, That we our largest bounty may extend/Where merit doth most challenge it?” Goneril and Regan acquit themselves well, turning in the obsequious performance Lear requires of them—dubiously sincere as it is. Cordelia, in an aside, expresses her misgivings: “What shall Cordelia do? Love and be silent”: that is, love her father and yet say nothing. When Lear turns to her, with his preposterous question, “What can you say to win a third more opulent than your sisters?” her reply is the laconic: “Nothing, my lord.” In other words, she can say nothing in order to gain something very substantial. Lear’s irritated retort is: “How? Nothing can come of nothing. Speak again.” All Cordelia can muster in response is: “Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave my heart into my mouth. I love your majesty/According to my bond, nor more nor less.” This lawyerly response leads to Lear disowning her, thus setting the wheels of the tragedy in motion; but my concern at present is with the career of the concept of nothingness as it patterns the play.

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