Chapter 1
The Vanishing Castle in King Lear

An empty space makes it possible for a new phenomenon to come to life

—Peter Brook, The Open Door (4).1

The small worlds of direct experience are fringed with much broader fields known indirectly through symbolic means

—Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place (88).2

In Forest Fire (c. 1505), a painting at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the Florentine Piero di Cosimo (1462–1521) depicts a forest fire, which scatters domestic and wild animals. The flames consume trees and bushes, and smoke reaches up to the clouds. Flocks of birds fly overhead or seek safe trees to perch upon. Animals flee in different directions; whereas others stand as in a daze or seem unaware of danger. A shepherd guides farm animals back to a cottage, where excited human figures gesticulate. In his analysis, Richard Turner writes: “A freak of nature, a forest fire, governs activity in this world.”3 He suggests that a copse of trees blocks the view and directs one’s eyes to the central area, where the fire “rages,” and “From here, the line of vision is forced to shoot off towards the horizon on two different tangents.”4 Turner writes of a “paradox that permeates much of Piero’s work,” combining the sinister threat posed by the fire, and the “disarmingly naïve” presence of a man moving “about the landscape as King of the animals but little better than an animal himself. This world of flame, soot, and death is presented in clear and forceful imagery, so that the least thought of the nostalgic or delicate is throttled within us.”5 The great visual impact of the painting depends on creating both a sense of order, represented by the cottage, and images of turmoil, represented by the fire, the scattering of the animals, and the admixture of both docile livestock and wild fauna.

Indeed, fire, tornado, hurricane, earthquake, flood, military action, and other man-made or natural disasters may damage or destroy human habitations and cause much suffering and upheaval. In usage dating to 1509, such dreadful calamities and disasters have become synonymous with tragedy.6 In everyday life, mortgages are foreclosed, and creditors repossess houses. In actual life, houses and castles also get damaged or destroyed, but they do not simply vanish into thin air. In folklore and literary creations, they do, as Andrew Marvell reminds us, “ … when th’ enchantment ends / The castle vanishes or rends.”7 In the story of the Grail, the Fisher King’s deserted castle vanishes when Perceval on horseback jumps over the rising drawbridge and gallops away toward the forest, having failed to seek an explanation for the mysterious sights and events of the night before.8 In Buchedd Collen Sant (c. 1536), Saint Collen is invited to visit the rich and marvelous castle of Gwyn, a mighty sovereign on a golden throne. All sorts of well-appointed courtiers, servitors, minstrels, musicians, and handsome youths riding priceless steeds give the saint a hearty welcome.9 Suspecting that the king and courtiers are evil spirits, Saint Collen refuses a tempting invitation to an elegant banquet. Collen “sprinkles holy water” all around, and “the castle vanishes, leaving nothing but the green tussocks.”10 According to Roger Loomis, Annwn, the palace of the deities of the ancient Welsh, was believed to appear and then disappear in a familiar landscape; and the dwellers of Annwn were always “noted for their hospitality; the place abounded in treasure, particularly in costly vessels for the service of the table.”11 In Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Britomart binds Busirane and frees Amoret. As she exits the house of Busirane, the rooms and the rich furnishings of the house vanish behind her: “those goodly roomes, which erst / She saw so rich and royally arayd, / Now vanisht vtterly, and cleane subuerst / She found, and all their glory quite decayd.”12

Likewise, in Shakespeare’s King Lear, I submit, Lear’s castle too vanishes, mysteriously and puzzlingly, to great dramatic and emotional consequences. I accept Linda Woodbridge’s statement that “Lear’s vanishing castle is more than a textual crux,” but not her explanation: “that [Lear] never considers, when his daughters close up their houses, simply going back to the castle where the opening scenes took place suggests the text’s commitment to homelessness as a theme.”13 I argue that Lear’s castle vanishes in a way similar to the disappearance of the abodes of the Fisher King, Gwyn, Annwn, or Busirane, without any association with homelessness. Therefore, I propose that the disappearance or erasure of Lear’s castle, home, and domestic sphere constitutes the central phenomenon around which the experience of dwelling revolves. I want to link the disappearing castle, a literary tour-de-force and the equivalent of a theatrical special effect, to a change in housing conditions, a crisis of patriarchal authority, and the disintegration of a way of life.

I am particularly interested in Lear’s domestic space and the extent to which Shakespeare connects perception to tragedy’s radical dislocation of habits of mind. When Lear divides his kingdom and casts out Cordelia, he also dismantles all the certainties that anchor his daily life. Lear presumably disposes of his abode, along with his throne, but in actuality the text remains silent on this issue. All that we know for certain is that Lear’s castle fades from the characters’ consciousness, seemingly vanishing into thin air. Christian Norberg Schuz writes that home, being a primary site of “meaningful events of our existence,” provides “points of departure from which we orient ourselves and take possession of the environment.”14 The disappearance of Lear’s castle from the characters’ consciousness signals a drastic disorienting effect that goes to the core of this tragedy: Shakespeare takes us to the shifting, unstable, idiosyncratic realm of perceptual space. Nothing can ever again be as it was.

In this play, a tragic nexus hinges on voids that the disappearance of Lear’s domestic space and the fragmentation of Lear’s affective domain create. To fill the voids, other places—the houses of Goneril, Gloucester, and Regan, and the hovel—become the focus of attention, revealing the sharp divide between inside and outside, indoors and outdoors. Awakened female sexual desire threatens to disrupt the household and subvert the integrity of the family. To a large extent, King Lear conforms to Jean Howard’s characterization of Jacobean tragedy in general: “By contrast, tragedies, particularly those of the first Jacobean decades, narrativize the decline and fall of once dominant groups rather than the emergence of new ones.”15 In this play, the shift from Lear’s castle to his daughters’ houses embodies and symbolizes a reshuffling of the social order.

Historical Contexts

Home can be a castle, a sumptuous palace or country house, an urban townhouse, a cabin in the Flint Hills of Kansas, a black tent in the Maghreb, a mud hut in the Congo, or a shack in a Rio de Janeiro favela. These architectural structures provide shelter and protection from the elements; serve as center of family life; and, according to a Kirgiz proverb, become a sanctuary: “A man’s tent is like a god’s temple.”16 At times, it might be instructive to strip all human abodes down to elemental functions, as it might also to historicize major changes in housing conditions and availability in the early modern period. My discussion of King Lear emphasizes both.

As Arthur Fairchild, Lena Cowen Orlin, and others have argued, the dissolution of the monasteries and other policies introduced under Henry VIII precipitated a major redistribution of lands and spurred a construction boom in England.17 According to Fairchild, the erection of new churches had practically ceased and of public buildings had barely begun, with the exception of the Royal Exchange.18 Architectural innovation, made possible by new wealth, reflected fundamental changes under way:

The feudal castle or castellated mansion, with its moat, its fortified entrance, its high walls, and its narrow windows, all designed for protection against an enemy, was no longer felt to be necessary; and it rapidly gave way to the Elizabethan manor house or hall, an E or H open type of structure, which was designed to be a home. The castle, frigid, formidable, and forbidding in its external features, was replaced by a house which was hospitable, inviting, and attractive—a fit setting for a gentleman and an implied compliment to its occupant and its invited guest.19

The Tudor period witnessed “the decay of the old architectural form of the feudal lord’s fortress,”20 so much so that “castle” would become a proverbial metaphor for the early modern house, which was no longer a military fortress but rather a human habitation: “A man’s house is his castle.”21 Social and economic changes, developments in warfare technology, and more effective defense strategies were making such medieval fortifications obsolete. “The new architecture was domestic. Mansions and great houses sprang up all over England.”22 Architectural innovations simultaneously derived from as well as ushered in new expectations and new degrees of comfort, privacy, individualism, and subjectivity.23 This “architectural revolution,” as Lena Orlin puts it, reflects “a higher standard of living, increased physical comfort, more individual privacy, and the segregation of laboring and domestic life, and more household spaces, each with specialized functions.”24 According to Mary Thomas Crane, the changes created “unstable boundaries,” and also elicited considerable “anxiety” about the potential of women as “producers”—“of income, goods, children”—and their roles as “caretakers” and “preservers of money, goods, and offspring produced by the husband.”25 The word “housewife,” adds Crane, epitomizes those unstable, contested boundaries, signifying simultaneously a woman “who manages her household with skill and thrift” and “a light, worthless, or pert woman or girl.”26

Two definitions of home help contextualize the changes. In The Elements of Architecture (1624), a compilation of European architectural writings, such as those of Leon Batista Alberti, Sir Henry Wotton describes what the house represents in a person’s life:

Every Mans proper Mansion House and Home, being the Theater of his Hospitality, the Seate of Selfe-fruition, the Comfortablest part of his own Life, the Noblest of his Sonnes Inheritance, a kinde of priuate Princedome; Nay, to the Possessors thereof, an Epitomie of the whole World: may well deserue by these Attributes, according to the degree of the Master, to be decently and delightfully adorned.27

In Wotton’s formulation, the house embodies family life and household, hospitality, self-realization and security, comfort, a financial investment and legacy, a “private princedom,” and a microcosm. Reflecting deeply-ingrained contemporary notions of privacy and domesticity, which had been evolving since the Renaissance, Gaston Bachelard, however, writes: “our house is our corner of the world,” and the house is “our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word.”28 The early modern house embodies both the death of the medieval castle and the birth of the modern home. In the Tudor and early Stuart periods, “England began to house itself.”29 In this context, Lear fails to negotiate the shift from the medieval castle to the early modern house, being unprepared to make the transition from an unflinchingly patriarchal household to an emerging wider diversity of households, which, though still functioning within patriarchal systems, might be headed by women, and new domestic arrangements in which husband and wife might—increasingly—share domestic responsibilities.

Lear’s Castle and Household

In Act I, Lear refers to his “court,” where both France and Burgundy have made their long amorous sojourn, although the seventeenth-century editions of the play do not specify the location of the scene. Modern editions locate the first scene in the throne or audience room in Lear’s palace. Kenneth Muir in his 1952 Arden edition of the play gives the location of the scene in a stage direction: “A State Room in King Lear’s Palace.”30 R.A. Foakes, in his 1997 new Arden Shakespeare edition, does not give a stage direction to identify location, but writes in a footnote: “Presumably a throne or chair of state was placed on stage to signal a ceremonial scene, and prepare for the entry of the King. … Although the play takes place nominally in the mythical reign of a king who ruled in antiquity, the characters may well have worn contemporary costume.”31 Stephen Orgel in the new Pelican Shakespeare gives the location in a footnote as “Lear’s Palace.” Quite logically, we should assume that the first scene of the play takes place where Lear dwells and holds his court, presumably his own castle or palace.

However, by the end of the first scene of the play, Lear’s dwelling place and seat of government mysteriously and inexplicably seem to vanish into thin air, not to be seen again. From that moment on, the action takes place in various other locations such as Gloucester’s house, Goneril and Albany’s castle, a hovel, and the outdoors. Presumably, Lear loses ownership of and by extension access to his properties, but my point is that Lear’s castle fades from the characters’ consciousness. Symbolically, Lear’s castle ceases to exist. As Peter Brook memorably puts it, “An empty space makes it possible for a new phenomenon to come to life.”32 He adds, “no fresh and new experience is possible if there isn’t a pure, virgin space ready to receive it.”33 I contend that Lear’s former abode becomes one such “empty space.”

Lear has ruled as an absolute monarch in his kingdom and managed his household as an all-powerful patriarch. In Moralia, Plutarch defines “character” as “habit long continued”; Lear’s abdication would therefore signal a fundamental break in the accustomed rhythms of life.34 King Lear explores a radical and fundamental change of routine and rhythm in the central character’s life. Lear intends to step down from the daily business of the state and from the active supervision and management of his castle, household, and estate.

In the first scene, Lear attempts to deal with personal, familial, and public affairs: division of property and distribution of his daughters’ inheritance, making provisions for his future living arrangements, negotiating Cordelia’s marriage contract and his separation from her, and settling the succession to the throne. Lear’s announcement and subsequent miscarried plans bring to an end what his subjects, friends, and family must have seen as a sense of continuity, if not stability, associated with the monarch’s extremely long life—“fourscore and upward” (4.7.63)—and very long reign. Later in the play, at Lear’s death, Kent remarks on how unusually old Lear was: “The wonder is he hath endured so long; / He but usurped his life” (5.3.323–4). Even as Edgar in the Folio text or Albany in the Quarto searches for words to “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say” (5.3.331), he cannot express anything more profound than amazement at what one can see and experience in a very long life: “The oldest hath borne most; we that are young / Shall never see so much, nor live so long” (332–3). Lear’s longevity also implies that things have remained the same for a long time, although nature is obviously running its unimpeded course.

Predictability, one infers, characterized the past experience of the characters. Kent offers an ever-fixèd mark of constancy and loyalty: “Royal Lear, / Whom I have ever honored as my king, / Loved as my father, as my master followed, / As my great patron thought on in my prayers—” (1.1.14043). Even when sent into exile, he says he will “shape his old course in a country new” (1.1.192). When Cornwall wants to teach him a lesson by putting him in the stocks, Kent remarks, “Sir, I am too old to learn” (2.2.125), suggesting long friendship as well as habits of mind grounded in the highest sense of virtue. As Frederick Kiefer points out, Shakespeare’s audience would have read Kent iconographically as an emblem of loyal friendship and as virtue under siege: “For in the moral interludes that precede Shakespeare’s play, as well as in sixteenth-century prints, representations of virtue are confined in stocks by their evil adversaries.”35 Even in his wrath, Lear confirms his constancy in keeping his “vows” (1.1.174); and Burgundy attests to the contract he thought Lear had agreed to: “I crave no more than hath your highness offered” (1.1.199), and “Give me that portion which yourself proposed” (1.1.247). Words such as “long,” “always,” and “ever” occur at key moments throughout the play to indicate duration of past events, unbroken continuity, and sameness. Throughout his long reign, Lear has fostered in his court what Plutarch, in Life of Dion, calls “habits of submission,” and was surrounded by those “accustomed to a life … of servility and intimidation.”36 In other words, the court knew where they stood with and what to expect from Lear, as long as they did not rock the boat, and always deferred to Lear’s judgment.

The need to find a husband for Cordelia, Lear’s advancing age, and the question of succession require urgent decisions. Lear states that the King of France and the Duke of Burgundy, rivals for Cordelia’s hand, “long in our court have made their amorous sojourn” (1.1.47; emphasis mine), but he does not explain why one of the two suitors has not yet been chosen. Shakespeare does not explain the reason for the long “sojourn” of Burgundy and France, or for Lear’s delay in finalizing Cordelia’s marriage contract. As the action progresses, however, it becomes clear that Lear grants Burgundy the right of first refusal of Cordelia’s hand, despite the expected order of precedence due to the King of France’s seniority as a reigning monarch. Perhaps whimsically, but more likely in an attempt to circumscribe the sphere of influence and balance the power of his three sons-in-law, Lear prefers a duke rather than a reigning monarch for his youngest daughter.

Burgundy’s right of first refusal may throw light on Lear’s original plan for the succession to the throne: the breakup of the kingdom into three more or less equal dominions or dukedoms, with Lear functioning as ceremonial head of state. Upon the death of the sovereign, the kingdom would cease to exist as a national entity, power having been devolved to regional states. Each daughter, married to a duke, would govern her dominion. As a duke himself, Burgundy seems perfectly contented to have his share of Lear’s kingdom, without the right to kingship. If he and Cordelia were required by contract to reside in Britain, at least during Lear’s lifetime, the aging sovereign could journey from one daughter’s house to the next, without having to travel abroad. Lear seems to have no contingency plan, however, should Cordelia marry the King of France and move to Paris, or should she marry Burgundy but move to his duchy in Europe. Lear intends for Cordelia to have a “more opulent” third of the kingdom. Again, what makes Cordelia’s share “more opulent”—richer, wealthier, more affluent—is unclear, unless it includes Lear’s own royal castle, seat of government, and principal place of residence. This opulence might serve as sufficient enticement for Cordelia and Burgundy to reside in Britain rather than in his estate in Burgundy. Lear could continue to live with Cordelia and Burgundy, but would feel free to travel to the houses of Albany and Cornwall, whenever he felt inclined to do so. His home base unchanged, he would turn over the daily running of his own house to Burgundy and Cordelia and only occasionally discharge his ceremonial role of monarch, as his age and state of health permitted. This arrangement would resemble the development, in late medieval and Tudor England, of an “abiding household,” a permanent residence, and a “riding household,” satellite hunting lodges or other country residences: “This arrangement of a greater house and satellites not only allowed the King to set up at one house and continue with short hunting trips to the lesser houses around, but enabled him to make day trips with somewhere to rest and eat.”37

This plausible, conjectural scenario suggests phased or gradual “retirement,” which in usage traced to Shakespeare’s Henry V (1599), means “withdrawing into seclusion or privacy,” and, to a letter written by Oliver Cromwell (c. 1648), in which it means, “Withdrawal from occupation, office, or business activity.”38 The OED also records a more modern sense of the verb “to retire” (1667): “to withdraw from office or an official position; to give up one’s business or occupation in order to enjoy more leisure or freedom (esp. after having made a competence or earned a pension).” According to the OED, the word “pension,” meaning “A regular payment made to a person of rank or a royal favourite to enable him or her to live to an expected standard,” can be dated to 1548. In fact, “pension,” “large allowance,” and “portion” are used interchangeably in referring to the financial support that King Leir, Shakespeare’s prototype king, receives in the anonymous True Chronicle Historie of King Leir.39 Shakespeare’s Lear, however, lacks Leir’s foresight and fails to stipulate such a pension. His large retinue not only adds a considerable burden to the daily expenses but also compounds the disruption and inconvenience caused by the presence of this retinue in his daughters’ households. This fact neither exonerates Goneril and Regan of their crimes nor excuses their heartlessness, cruelty, and lack of filial affection. It shows, however, that Lear has unrealistic expectations of his daughters’—or anyone’s—goodwill, love, and patience.

As the play begins, the king’s emotional state seems to be unstable, fluctuating, and unpredictable. Kent introduces the point: “I thought the king had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall” (1.1.1–2). In fact, throughout the play, Kent senses change and often remarks on things to come.40 Gloucester’s response explains the change: “It did always seem so to us; but now, in the division of the kingdom, it appears not which of the dukes he values most, for equalities are so weighed that curiosity in neither can make choice of either’s moiety” (1.1.3–6).41 Both agree that, as a matter of course, Lear favors one son-in-law over the other. Now, for this new Lear, the two sons-in-law have become each other’s true “moiety,” halves of each other, and therefore entitled to equal shares of the divided kingdom. Despite having played favorites before, he now treats his daughters and sons-in-law more equally, perhaps more justly, by more evenly apportioning his affection and favor. The king has turned over a new leaf in his relationship with his family.

In his abdication, Lear surrenders his “power, / Preeminence, and all the large effects / That troop with majesty” (1.1.131–3), although he retains the title and “all th’addition to a king” (137). He plans to reside alternately in his daughters’ houses: “Ourself, by monthly course, / With reservation of an hundred knights, / By you to be sustained, shall our abode / Make with you by due turn” (133–6). “All th’ addition” may include a royal crown, royal robes, and other appendages appropriate to the comfort, pomp, and privilege of a monarch, but it does not include a house of his own, nor does it include any source of income. Before long, his own Fool points out the obvious: “If I gave them [his daughters] all my living, I’d keep my coxcombs myself” (1.4.105–6). In other words, the Fool would keep the means by which he could earn income. Lear envisions his remaining life as a permanent royal progress, which David M. Bergeron defines as the sovereign’s “summer provincial tour” to “the private estates of noblemen,” where elaborate “progress pageants” or especially-designed, highly allegorical and emblematic theatrical entertainments would be performed for the visitor.42 One should add that the prestige and privilege of hosting such visitors and their retinues came at considerable expense and perhaps inconvenience to owners of country estates. In his plan, Lear gives no thought to the expenses involved, the difficulties that travel poses for an elderly person, and the ever-increasing likelihood of his failing health. Simply put, he counts on his daughters footing his bills.

Emotion clashes with reason; rage trumps common sense. Cordelia’s refusal to play along with the seemingly ceremonial expression of affection for her father arouses Lear’s uncontrollable wrath and rash nature, and leads to Kent’s banishment and her own disowning. Everything now is up for grabs.43 Lear compounds the problem when he divides Cordelia’s share between Regan and Goneril. By the end of the first scene, the kingdom has been turned upside down. As I will discuss, the text makes clear that Lear has not only thrown his family, court, and kingdom into turmoil, but his home has also vanished.

In the realm of perception and artistic license, the disappearance of Lear’s palace will leave an empty space. Empty spaces are certainly put to fascinating uses both in this play and in art. In his seminal Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History, Erwin Panofsky contrasts uses of empty spaces in the anonymous Christ Resurrecting the Youth of Nain (c. 1000), and in the later, more realistic Middelburg Altarpiece of the Three Magi, by Rogier Van der Weyden (1400–64) in order to teach the importance of historical context in iconographical description.44 The infant Jesus of the altarpiece floats in midair, seemingly suspended in “space with no means of support,” as a supernatural apparition to the three Magi, who are kneeling down in a worshipful posture. The miniature from the Ottonian period (c. 900–1050), known for its exquisite manuscript illuminations, depicts the resurrection of the youth of Nain (Luke 7:11–17), along with the city of Nain, where the miracle occurred, suspended in midair.45 Panofsky points out that the first image represents a supernatural apparition, whereas the second does not. Panofsky writes: “In the miniature of around 1000 ‘empty space’ does not count as a real three-dimensional medium, as it does in a more realistic period, but serves as an abstract, unreal background.”46 He adds:

The curious semicircular shape of what should be the base line of the towers bears witness to the fact that, in the more realistic prototype of our miniature, the town had been situated on a hilly terrain, but was taken over into a representation in which space has ceased to be thought of in terms of perspective realism.47

I suggest that, as in the Ottonian miniature, Shakespeare makes use of nonrealistic space in order to create and then imaginatively fill empty spaces.

In King Lear, if something vanishes, something else makes an appearance in its place. Take, for example, Cordelia’s departure for France at the end of Act I, scene 1; the appearance of the Fool in Act I, scene 4; his disappearance in Act III, scene 6, with his memorable last line, “And I’ll go to bed at noon” (83); Cordelia’s reappearance in Act IV, scene 4; and then the two of them are fused in Lear’s desperate lament: “And my poor fool is hanged: no, no, no life?” (5.3.312).48 Similarly, when Burgundy rejects the impoverished Cordelia, France decides to “take up what’s cast away,” commenting on the mysterious forces that have moved him: “‘Tis strange that from their cold’st neglect / My love should kindle to inflamed respect” (1.1.260–61). The “nothing” of Cordelia’s response and the “nothing” of Edmund’s forged letter leave voids that must be filled with such things as Lear’s wrath and madness or Gloucester’s anger and blindness, unfettered ambition, banishment, persecution, violence, and much else.

Space thus functions as an “abstract, unreal background” that can be filled, as the action requires. Strange though effective juxtapositions become a hallmark of this text. Other competing spaces loom large in place of Lear’s castle: Albany and Goneril’s house, Cornwall and Regan’s house, Gloucester’s house, a hovel, open country near Dover, battlefields, and the outdoors. As Yi-Fu Tuan argues in Space and Place, “Man-made space can refine human feeling and perception. … Architectural space—even a simple hut surrounded by cleared ground—can define such sensations and render them vivid. Another influence is this: the built environment clarifies social roles and relations.”49 As Lear’s palace vanishes, social relations and social rules are thrust into turmoil and chaos. In Goneril’s and Gloucester’s houses, the characters redefine and reconfigure their social relations and rules, discard old alliances, form new partnerships, and assert their newly-acquired power and authority. To render these phenomena, Shakespeare, accustomed to the Elizabethan theater’s continuous staging of place, envisions a dynamic interplay between unlocalized, nonillusionistic action and localized and illusionistic action, with linguistic markers, props, costumes, or other staging techniques to provide sufficient directional signposts.

Goneril’s House and the Space of Woman’s Will

Mazzola and Abate argue that in this play, “the household is attacked from within and from without,” and that “the reach of female interests and their fierce opposition to both the home and the state” seem “most horrifying, most inexplicable.”50 Woodbridge proposes that the absence of “domestic coziness … fits perfectly a play where ‘home’ is a myth to be exploded.”51 Heather Dubrow, focusing on domestic loss, contends that in the play “ … physical edifices variously facilitate and threaten social bonds.”52 I want to frame the issue in a different way. Goneril’s house emerges as the first rival architectural space to replace Lear’s vanishing palace, and within this architectural space, a fierce battle of wills over household management occurs. This does not, however, mean that women oppose home and state alike. In the play, home is no more of a myth to be exploded than it is in the self-destructive royal household of Sophocles’s Oedipus trilogy. Rather, Goneril and Regan, in their own different ways, try to modify, redefine, or bring to an end the tyrannical patriarchal regime associated with their father and centered in his now vanished castle. The troubles of Sir Francis Willoughby’s household at Wollaton Hall offer a historical parallel to Lear’s household, conditions from which Goneril and Regan seek an escape. These troubles continued even after Sir Francis’ death in 1596:

While the stated reasons for the difficulties between Sir Francis, his wife, and the members of their household varied from incident to incident, it is clear that the underlying cause was a frenzied cutthroat competition for his personal favor and, through him, for the rights to his property.53

Like Lear, Sir Francis apparently fostered this atmosphere of competition and in fact “fanned the flames of discord raging in his household even as he protested this behavior in others.”54

No wonder, then, that within their homes, both Goneril and Regan work towards an alternative worldview, which is dramatized as a fight over control of domestic space. Lear’s abdication becomes, for Goneril, “this last surrender of his will” (1.1.310), and she proposes immediate action: “We must do something, and i’ th’heat” (312). Lear’s palace empties out: Cordelia leaves for France; Goneril and Regan return with their husbands to their estates in Albany and Cornwall; Kent gets ready for his journey into exile; and Lear commences his journey to Goneril’s house, with whom he intends to live for a while. At the end of Act I, scene 1 remarking on the implications of the recent events at court, Goneril ominously predicts: “if our father carry authority with such disposition as he bear, this last surrender of his will but offend us” (302–4). Therefore, I contend that Goneril’s house, the first space that I will discuss, serves not only to “refine human feeling and perception” but also emerges as the pivotal feminine-gendered place of Goneril’s will in counterpoise to Lear’s masculine-gendered royal palace of the first scene.

Later, Edgar, after killing Oswald, discovers Goneril’s letters in her dead servant’s pockets in which she reminds Edmund of their “reciprocal vows,” and encourages her lover to kill Albany, and claim her hand. If Albany is allowed to “return the conqueror,” she adds, “Then am I the prisoner, and his bed my jail; from the loathed warmth whereof deliver me, and supply the place for your labor” (4.6.262–8). In astonishment at her brazenly adulterous, murderous plot, Edgar describes hers as the “indistinguished place of woman’s will” (270). According to Edgar, the “indefinable”55 place of a woman’s will escapes reason and the bounds of morality. His definition echoes Hamlet’s response to the ghost’s description of Gertrude’s impudence: “O most pernicious woman!” (1.5.105).

In “Untitled: The Housing of Gender,” Mark Wigley explores the “relationships between the role of gender in the discourse of space and the role of space in the discourse of gender.”56 He is particularly interested in the “familiar sense of the patriarchal construction of the place of woman as the house,” and the systems of patriarchal surveillance. Goneril offers a clear example of resistance to attempts at her domestication, whereby a woman internalizes “the very spatial order that confines her.”57 Wigley writes of Xenophon’s Socratic discourse Oeconomicus,58 Leon Battista Alberti’s fifteenth-century treatise, On the Art of Building in Ten Books [De re aedificatoria], published in 1485, and even the modern university as “a mechanism that sustains a system of spaces, an architecture, by masking the particular constructions of sexuality that make those spaces possible,” but he does not discuss King Lear; nonetheless, I think his ideas can prove most pertinent to the housing of gender in Shakespeare’s play.59 Goneril’s house, the place to which she retires after the partition of the kingdom and to which Lear first turns in his new status of king in name only, becomes a highly contested space.

Goneril vies with Lear, and to an extent with Albany, for control of this contested space. Lear’s stay with Goneril has quickly soured, and relations have palpably deteriorated. Goneril remarks that Lear “flashes into one gross crime or another / That set us all at odds,” and that she will “not endure it” (4–5). She is determined to confront him, when he returns from hunting. In the Quarto text she makes an even harsher assessment of her father:

Idle old man,

That still would manage those authorities

That he hath given away. Now, by my life,

Old fools are babes again, and must be used

With checks as flatteries, when they are seen abused. (16–20)

In this speech, she seems to be laying the groundwork for a legal case against her father, who seems to be usurping her and her husband’s rightful management of their own house. This speech also provides further context for her intentions and what she sees as her rightful authority. She must grab the bull by the horns, if Lear’s willful and outrageous nature, like that of a child, is to be broken and brought under control.

An overbearing, ebullient Lear returns from the hunt, amidst the blaring sounds of horns (1.4). Feeling re-invigorated and very sure of himself, Lear thinks that he can run the house and make whatever demands. In his treatise on hunting, Xenophon writes of the beneficial effects of hunting, although the activity is recommended for a much younger man than Lear: “With the practical side of hunting I have finished. But the advantages that those who have been attracted by this pursuit will gain are many. For it makes the body healthy, improves the sight and hearing, and keeps men from growing old; and it affords the best training for war.”60 In the commendatory verses to his 1576 The Noble Arte of Venerie or Hunting, George Gascoigne concurs that hunting helps exercise the minds of “Men of Noble kinde,” makes for better soldiers, and contributes to bodily and mental health: “Since by the same, mens bodies be, in health mainteyned well, / It exercyseth strength, it exerciseth wit, / And all the poars and sprites of Man, are exercised by it.”61 Xenophon, however, addresses common objections to hunting—“Some say that it is not right to love hunting, because it may lead to neglect of one’s domestic affairs”; “therefore,” he adds, “if keen sportsmen fit themselves to be useful to their country in matters of vital moment, neither will they be remiss in their private affairs: for the state is necessarily concerned both in the safety and in the ruin of the individual’s domestic fortunes.”62

When we first observe Lear at Goneril’s house, then, Lear is hungry from the hunt and energized by the chase. However, he comes across as imposing and overbearing when he orders an attendant, “Let me not stay a jot for dinner; go get it ready” (8). He loses his temper with Oswald, whom he calls a blockhead, and soon the alleged riotous knights in Lear’s retinue speak of Goneril’s insolent servants and the perceived “great abatement of kindness,” not only on the part of servants but—more alarmingly—on the part of Goneril and Albany. In his own cryptic way, the Fool tries to point out the obvious; namely: Lear should realize that he no longer has much leverage, now that he has “given away [his] land” (138), failed to take a “monopoly out” on some profitable enterprise (150), and showed lack of wisdom, having disposed of his throne. Lear confronts Goneril, when she enters at line 183, with complaints that she is “too much of late i’th’ frown” (185). He is still in the mood for sport; she is determined to put him in his place as a guest. If hunting has not made him remiss in his private affairs, he at least appears to be out of sync with and unaccustomed to the daily routines and rules of his daughter’s house. Various witnesses and the audience’s own observation suggest that there is little doubt, that he appears to be behaving abominably. Lear behaves as if he were master of the house; Goneril takes him for an insolent houseguest who is overstepping the acceptable boundaries of hospitality.

In this scene, Goneril carefully builds a case against Lear, first to Oswald and then to both Lear and Albany. Her argument centers on orderly household governance. To Oswald, she complains of Lear’s “all-licensed fool,” and the “insolent retinue” of knights who “hourly carp and quarrel, breaking forth / In rank and not-to-be-endured riots” (1.4.195–8). In what she calls his “new pranks,” she says that Lear condones insubordination; therefore, she warns him: “As you are old and reverend, [you] should be wise” (1.4.232, 234). To provoke him further, she blames him for corrupting her house, interfering with household management, and setting an altogether bad example:

Here do you keep a hundred knights and squires,

Men so disordered, so debauched and bold

That this our court, infected with their manners,

Shows like a riotous inn. Epicurism and lust

Makes it more like a tavern or a brothel

Than a graced palace. The shame itself doth speak

For constant remedy. (1.4.235–41).

She accuses him of striking her “people” and his “disordered rabble” of making “servants of their betters” (250–51). Goneril thus clearly draws the line in the sand and roundly puts Lear in his place, as a guest not master of the house.

When Albany appears, he finds Lear in a rage; and for the rest of the scene, Goneril wants her husband to observe and judge Lear’s outrageous behavior. Affronted by Goneril’s remarks, Lear retaliates by attacking her womanhood, and cursing her womb with sterility. He invokes Nature’s curse to “Dry up in her the organs of increase” and “Turn all her mother’s pains and benefits / To laughter and contempt” (1.4.282–3). So strongly offensive are these words, that mild-mannered Albany wonders: “Now, gods that we adore, whereof comes this?” (286). Goneril retorts: “Never afflict yourself to know more of it, / But let his disposition have that scope / As dotage gives it” (287–9). In other words, given scope to show his prevailing tendency, compounded by an age-induced state of feeblemindedness, Lear will show his true rash and enraged nature and be deemed unfit to manage his affairs. In his Life of Lysander, Plutarch writes that “Moral habits, induced by public practices, are far quicker in making their way into men’s private lives, than the failings and faults of individuals are in infecting the city at large.”63 Ironically, Goneril seems to agree with Plutarch’s philosophy of life, the foundation of which consists of good habits coupled with obedience to virtue; hence her seeming condemnation of luxuriousness, loss of self-discipline, and habits contrary to a life of virtue.

When Lear exits, Goneril turns to Albany, expecting agreement: “Do you mark that?” (307). She insists that Lear’s knights may pose a threat to her and Albany’s safety: “He may enguard his dotage with their pow’rs / And hold our lives in mercy” (1.4.323–4). When Albany insinuates that she may be overreacting (“Well, you may fear too far,” I.4.325), Goneril retorts, “Safer than trust too far,” and she claims she knows Lear’s heart and has proven his “unfitness.” When she realizes that Albany remains skeptical, she refers to his “milky gentleness,” and the conversation ends in an impasse:

ALBANY.	How far your eyes may pierce I cannot tell;
	Striving to better, oft we mar what’s well.
GONERIL.	Nay then—
ALBANY.	Well, well; th’ event. (1.4.342–6)

Albany obviously does not agree with Goneril. The exchange reveals their emerging political, let alone conjugal conflict and marks the beginning of events that will lead to the breakup of their marriage. At this point, Goneril still pays lip service to Albany’s role as her husband and master of the house, perhaps mindful of prevailing notions of the duties of a wife and good household governance, such as the ones presented in Leon Battista Alberti’s Della Famiglia: “The woman, as she remains locked up at home, should watch over things by staying at her post, by diligent care and watchfulness. The man should guard the woman, the house, and his family and country, but not by sitting still.”64 Mark Wigley suggests that Alberti opposes “male mobility in the exterior to female stasis in the interior,” a belief in consonance with Xenophon’s ideas in Oeconomicus. According to the ancient writer, architecture shapes and maintains established gender roles.65 As housewife, Goneril relies on expected roles to assert her authority, first in the management of her house; in the process, however, she extrapolates that role as she rebels against her father and then her husband. Familial relationships fall apart and, as Diane Elizabeth Dreher writes, these failed relationships demonstrate “the savagery to which human life would descend without essential bonds of love and respect.”66

Regan’s House

No scenes in King Lear are set in or near Regan and Cornwall’s castle. The action in Act II and parts of Act III moves away from Goneril’s to Gloucester’s house and to other spaces, such as the outdoors and the hovel. Before I discuss Gloucester’s house, however, I would like to focus on Regan’s house, which although not represented, serves an important symbolic function in the play. Lear’s intention to go to Regan and Cornwall’s house and Edgar’s apparent plot against his father bring about a double crisis. Therefore, most of the characters convene under Gloucester’s roof. The house of Gloucester and the castle of Regan and Cornwall are symbolically, politically, and after a while even sexually connected, when the widowed Regan decides to marry her lover Edmund; it is, therefore, difficult to talk about one without mentioning the other. Gloucester makes clear the nature of his alliance to the Duke of Cornwall, when he announces the visit of his “worthy arch and patron” (2.1.59) and indicates that he will launch a search for Edgar by his patron’s ducal authority. Cornwall refers to Gloucester as his “noble friend” (86), suggesting some degree of intimacy. Likewise, Regan speaks of Gloucester as an intimate in her father’s house, with Lear serving as Edgar’s godfather (91–2). Their arrival follows shortly at the heels of Edgar’s apparent conspiracy and sudden escape; as friends, Cornwall and Regan can give the support that Gloucester needs.

Cornwall and Regan’s journey from their house to Gloucester’s comes out of the blue. It also acquires important meaning. At the beginning of Act II, scene 1, Edmund learns from Curan of the imminent visit and possible war between Cornwall and Albany. To Edgar, Edmund suggests that Cornwall and Regan may suspect Edgar of conspiring with Albany; hence the sudden visit. Cornwall and Regan leave behind a locked empty house, an image with which they become increasingly associated. After Lear’s, theirs is the second house that is emptied out and kept out of sight. Regan suggests that, having heard of Goneril’s troubles with Lear, she and Cornwall decided to abandon their house, so that if Lear and his retinue “come to sojourn at my house, / I’ll not be there” (2.1.103–4). To Gloucester, she explains that they have decided to visit him, “Thus out of season, threading dark-eyed night,” with a double purpose—to comfort Gloucester in his hour of need and to seek his advice on her father’s troublesome behavior: “Our good old friend, / Lay comforts to your bosom, and bestow / Your needful counsel to our businesses, / Which craves the instant use” (2.1.126–9).

Two other accounts reconstruct unrepresented events at Regan and Cornwall’s house. Lear remarks, “‘tis strange that they [Regan and Cornwall] should so depart from home, / And not send back my messenger” (2.4.1–2); to which the Gentleman adds that the night before there was no indication that the duke and the duchess intended to travel. Kent, disguised as Caius, tells Lear that something even stranger occurred when he, arriving at their “home,” delivered Lear’s letters to Regan, only to be rudely interrupted by Oswald bearing letters from Goneril. Cornwall and Regan, he adds, promptly read these letters, and “on whose contents / They summoned up their meiny, straight took horse” (2.4.33–4), and left Kent waiting for an answer. The OED defines the archaic “meinie” (OF. Meyné, mesnie, from L. mansionata, mansionem [whence French maison]) as follows: a family; household; a body of retainers and dependents; a retinue; a multitude of persons; a herd, drove, or flock of animals. Like the herd of animals displaced by a forest fire in Piero di Cosimo’s painting that I discussed earlier, the entire household has picked up and left, clearing the whole estate. After the initial discussion of Regan’s abode and the evasive action that Regan and Cornwall took to avoid receiving Lear, the castle or house in Cornwall, like Lear’s dwelling place, fades from the characters’ consciousness. Thus, Regan’s confrontation with Lear and the conflict between Kent and Oswald over the insolent interruption remains to be resolved somewhere else; namely in Gloucester’s house, which becomes the site of decisive events in the play. In the meantime, like Lear’s castle, Regan’s house has been abandoned—at least temporarily—by its occupants. Once again, disrupted and uprooted, another group has to abandon their house and seek refuge somewhere else.

Gloucester’s House

As a symbolic substitute for Lear’s, Gloucester’s house is the stage upon which various conflicts play out. Architecture mingles with familial and political conflicts. The house becomes a symbol for the radical reshuffling of the social order in the play. Gaston Bachelard writes, “A house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability. We are constantly re-imagining its reality.”67 In Gloucester’s house, various characters re-imagine fundamental social and cultural relations; it is the location, where “Outside and inside form a dialectic of division.”68 In this dialectic, as in King Lear, the door plays an important role in the symbolic realm that envelops our sense of physical space, or in Bachelard’s formulation, one of the primal images: “If one were to give an account of all the doors one has closed and opened, of all the doors one would like to re-open, one would have to tell the story of one’s entire life.”69

Here, other characters discard their former selves and reinvent themselves in a new world order based on notions of an upside-down world, which reverses customary relations. As I have written elsewhere of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “Symbolic inversion projects alternatives to the patriarchal order. Through images of inversion, Shakespeare depicts a world that seems uncertain about is boundaries.”70 In Lear’s dominion, as in Theseus’s, the focus of cultural, political, and gender relations oscillates between the cultural center, represented by Lear’s patriarchal authority, and a marginal world, embodied by upside-down images and situations.71 Again, as I have discussed elsewhere, Balthasar Gracian of the Society of Jesus argues in El Criticon (1651): “the things of this world can be truly perceived only by looking at them backwards.”72 Sixteenth-century woodcuts, such as the Venetian Il Mondo Alla Riversa (c. 1560s) and a Dutch one by Ewout Muller, depict images of a cart going before a horse, women going to war while the men stay home and spin, ships traveling on land, and a client telling the fortune of a gypsy fortune-teller.73 Consequently, “Images of the world turned upside down, where nothing is as it seems, present an oppositional view of culture, invert and subvert power relations, and permit the artist to reconfigure the imaginary cultural map.”74 Barbara A. Babcock defines “symbolic inversion” as “any act of expressive behavior which inverts, contradicts, abrogates, or in some fashion presents an alternative to commonly held cultural codes, values, and norms, be they linguistic, literary or artistic, religious, or social and political.”75 I suggest that symbolic inversion, at first centered in Gloucester’s house, spreads and scatters outward to other areas of experience. In Gloucester’s house, the legitimate and illegitimate sons trade positions; and hospitable practices stand on their head when Regan and Albany arrive as Gloucester’s guest, but take over the house.

An outsider in his own father’s house, Edmund re-imagines the reality of this house; and he sets out to displace Edgar and thereby take possession of the lands and of Gloucester’s love:

Well, then,

Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land,

Our father’s love is to the bastard Edmund

As to th’ legitimate. Fine word, “legitimate,”

Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed,

And my intention thrive, Edmund the base

Shall top th’ legitimate. I grow, I prosper,

Now, gods, stand up for bastards. (1.2.15–22)

Edmund finds an opening brought about by an apparent change in Gloucester’s affective domain. To Kent, Gloucester admits: “I have so often blushed to acknowledge him that now I am brazed to’t” (1.1.9–10), although he has of course sent Edmund away for nine years. The change may be rooted in a new sense of equality that the two sons seem to have achieved in Gloucester’s heart:

But I have a son, sir, by order of law, some year elder than this who yet is no dearer in my account: though this knave came something saucily to the world before he was sent for, yet was his mother fair, there was good sport at his making, and the whoreson must be acknowledged. (18–23)

Despite the intention to acknowledge his illegitimate son and the expression of equality in love, Gloucester seems still of two minds, referring to Edmund as “whoreson” and suggesting that Edmund must soon depart again. Edmund speaks of his “lodging” (1.2.168) rather than perhaps more permanent quarters at or near his father’s house.

As an outsider and social outcast, he seeks to undo “the plague of custom” that defines legitimate and illegitimate, noble and base, although “in the lusty stealth of nature,” both legitimate and illegitimate children are equally conceived “within a dull, stale, tired bed” (12; 13).

In his closet, the private chambers, Edmund explains to his gullible father that Edgar has rebelled against “the oppression of aged tyranny” and seeks to undermine the “policy and reverence of age”: “But I have heard him oft maintain it to be fit that, sons at perfect age, and fathers declined, the father should be as ward to the son, and the son manage his revenue” (73–7). Liberated from moral constraints, Edmund reveals a new approach to life: “Let me, if not by birth, have lands by wit; / All with me’s meet that I can fashion fit” (181–2). Thus, he seeks to reverse the roles of insider and outsider with Edgar. He opens a door for himself to Gloucester’s house, and closes another to Edgar. He succeeds so thoroughly that Gloucester, incensed at Edgar’s presumed betrayal, says, “All ports I’ll bar” (2.1.80) to his legitimate son; in other words, he will shut seaports and town gates, so that Edgar cannot escape and will be brought to justice. When Edgar reemerges disguised as a homeless madman in II.3, he confronts a new reality of overwhelming patriarchal surveillance: “No port is free, no place / That guard and most unusual vigilance / Does not attend my taking” (3–5). To escape, he must become “nothing,” the markers of his identity having been utterly removed, freeing himself from the architecture of his father’s house. Gloucester’s house becomes a veritable upside-down world, which also reverses the roles of outsider and insider in other ways. Regan and Cornwall enter the house as friends, patrons, and guests of Gloucester; however, they take over the house, reshaping its function and reconfiguring familial and social relations.

William Vaughn, in The Golden-grove, moralized in three books (1600), defines hospitality as “the chiefest point of humanity, which an household can show, not only unto his friends, but also unto strangers & wayfaring men.”76 Later in the seventeenth century, George Wheler, in The Protestant Monastery (1698), refers to hospitality as “a liberal entertainment of all sorts of men, at one’s house, whether neighbors or strangers, with kindness, especially with meat, drink, and lodgings.”77 In Hospitable Performances, Daryl Palmer explains the profound and intricate relations centered on hospitable practices in the early modern period: “hospitality existed as a code of exchange between competing, often conflicting, orders of society: between the poor and the rich, noble and plebeian, noble and noble, male and female, patriarch and family, family and society, English and non-English, Anglican and Puritan.”78 In this context then, Shakespeare dramatizes the breakdown of hospitality in Gloucester’s house as a measure of the large array of inversion that the characters in this tragedy experience.

Regan and Cornwall arrive at Gloucester’s house as guests, friends, and patrons; before long, however, they take over the management of the house and become Gloucester’s hosts, enemies, jailors, and torturers. As Woodbridge writes, “Hospitality violations abound. The Cornwalls are both poor guests and poor hosts.”79 Their transformation from guest to host and from host to guest occurs quickly and decisively in three events: the punishment of Kent, the barring of the door to Lear, and the blinding of Gloucester and barring the door of Gloucester’s house to Gloucester himself. All three episodes center on the reversal of the function of the house.

Oswald’s arrival at Gloucester’s house in 2.2 and the exchange between Oswald and Kent start out as customary hospitable practices only to deteriorate quickly into insults and a row:

OSWALD. Good dawning to thee, friend. Art of this house?

KENT. Ay.

OSWALD. Where may we set out horses?

KENT. I’ th’ mire.

OSWALD. Pritee, if thou lov’st me, tell me.

KENT. I love thee not.

OSWALD. Why then, I care not for thee. (1–7)

Having traveled all night to deliver Goneril’s letters, Oswald seeks accommodation for himself and his horses. Oswald’s question, “Art of this house?” underscores the extent to which Gloucester’s house defines the boundaries of who belongs and who doesn’t. Kent assumes that he is of this house and that those in the house will endorse his verbal and physical assault on the villainous Oswald. The brawl between Kent and Oswald rouses the house. Edmund parts the combatants (2.2.41); and Gloucester tries to take charge: “Weapons? Arms? What’s the matter here?” (44). Instead, Cornwall, as the highest-ranking member of the nobility present, orders: “Keep peace, upon your lives. He dies that strikes again” (2.2.45–6). As Oswald indicates, Kent’s earlier assault on him “got praises of the king” (118). Cornwall orders punishment for Kent: “Fetch forth the stocks! / You stubborn ancient knave, you reverent braggart, / We’ll teach you” (2.2.123–5). Gloucester finds the punishment unbecoming for a follower of the king, since it is a form of “low correction” for “the most common trespasses” committed by the “basest and contemnèd’st wretches” (2.2.139–47). Regan brushes aside his concerns, and Gloucester himself looks to appease Cornwall with entreaties on Kent’s behalf. In his humiliating punishment, Kent hopes that Lear may never see this “shameful lodging” (172).

Later on, inside Gloucester’s house, Cornwall nurses his “fiery quality,” unmoved and fixed in his course. He and Regan refuse to come out. Outside the house, Lear notes with dismay and anger the shameful punishment of his servant and threatens to disturb the peace: “Bid them come forth and hear me, / Or at their chamber door I’ll beat the drum / Till it cry sleep to death” (2.4.116–17). When Regan and Cornwall do come out from inside Gloucester’s house and Goneril arrives, the two sisters present a united front against Lear. For the first time, Lear seems to grasp his dire situation. Addressing Regan, he begs for the bare necessities of life: “On my knees I beg / That you’ll vouchsafe me raiment, bed, and food” (153–4). Regan, however, promptly dismisses his gesture as “unsightly tricks” (155). Regan points out that, being away from her own home, she is “out of that provision / Which shall be needful for your entertainment” (204–5), and encourages him to seek help from Goneril. Lear objects (206–8). In turn, Regan sides with Goneril, warning that a household cannot properly function under “two commands” (241). Cornwall and Regan agree to go back into the house, leaving Lear to meet his fate outdoors (2.4.288–9). Regan orders the doors closed (307–9) to her father and throws him into the storm. Once again, the barring of the door to Lear epitomizes the struggle for control over and access to a house.

In Act III, Gloucester tries to provide a bridge between insider and outsider. In scene 3, he laments the “unnatural dealing” of Cornwall and Regan, as he explains to Edmund: “When I desired their leave that I might pity him [Lear], they took from me the use of mine own house, charged me on pain of perpetual displeasure neither to speak to him, entreat for him, or any way sustain him” (3.3.1–6). Edmund characterizes the behavior of the usurpers of the house as “most savage and unnatural” (7), only to confess his true belief as soon as Gloucester exits: “The younger rises when the old doth fall” (24). In the next scene, against the express command of Cornwall and Regan, Gloucester seeks Lear out and entreats Lear to “go in with me” (146). He knows that he is risking his life, in helping Lear both by being in communication with Cordelia and by offering to assist Lear:

My duty cannot suffer

I obey in all your daughters’ hard commands.

Though their injunction be to bar my doors

And let this tyrannous night take hold upon you,

Yet have I ventured to come seek you out

And bring you where both fire and food is ready. (3.4.146–51).

If not in Gloucester’s house, then perhaps they can find shelter in a hovel and weather the storm. The battle lines harden; they center on control of Gloucester’s house, with Cornwall vouching revenge on Gloucester ere he departs from this house (3.5.1–2). In fact, the revenge will come in scene 7, when Regan and Cornwall arrest, interrogate, torture, and mutilate their host. Gloucester reminds them of their special status in his house: “Good my friends, consider / You are my guests” (30–31). Not without irony, Gloucester learns, a bit too late, that Edmund has betrayed him: “O my follies! Then Edgar was abused” (92). Regan and Cornwall thrust Gloucester out of his own house, and bar the door to him, as they had done to Lear. Thus Kent, Cordelia, Edgar, Lear, and finally Gloucester—one by one—experience the loss of their house, face exile or abandonment, and must seek refuge wherever they can find it. The repeated barring of doors becomes a powerful symbol for the fierce battle for control of domestic space.

In her review of Richard Eyre’s 1998 film adaptation of the play, starring Ian Holm in the title role, Ariel Swartley writes: “Indeed, to think of Lear is, almost universally, to think of a man outdoors and dwarfed by nature.”80 But the play juxtaposes indoors and outdoors, inside and outside, house and homelessness. For the Elizabethans, the household was a prototype for and should function as a perfect commonwealth. In A Preparative to Marriage (1591), Henry Smith advises his readers: “As a kingdom cannot stand if it be divided, so a house cannot stand if it be divided, for strife is like fire which leaves nothing but dust and smoke and ashes behind it.”81 As Catherine Richardson remarks, writers of the period often use images of the house to embody and describe human relationships, and bodily images to describe the house, “merging the categories of ‘body’ and ‘house’ in peculiar ways.”82 The collapse of the old order associated with Lear’s or Gloucester’s house makes room for new visions of the house and household relations, especially as conceived by Goneril and Regan; it also lays bare the vast expanses of Lear’s kingdom.

“Let copulation thrive”: Women and the Management of the House

The scenes in Goneril’s and later in Gloucester’s house suggest that both Goneril and Regan feel empowered by their father’s abdication of his authority, distribution of his wealth, and erratic behavior. Each, however, follows a different path in her marriage. As we have seen, Goneril makes at first tactful but eventually forceful attempts to control her husband and to assert her own authority over her house and household. Regan forges a partnership with her husband first against her father and eventually against Gloucester. Like Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, Regan and Cornwall have a cruel, criminal mind, and act together in several ways: they abandon their house, travel to Gloucester’s, put Kent in the stocks, take over Gloucester’s house, band together against Gloucester, and support and advance Edmund and his cause. They join forces to gouge out Gloucester’s eyes and throw their old ally out into the cold. Unlike Goneril and Albany, Regan and Cornwall work together, not at cross purposes. Cornwall, gouging Gloucester’s second eye, receives a fatal wound from a servant. His death creates a rift between Goneril and Regan. Empowered by her new widowed state, Regan quickly moves to claim Edmund for herself. Goneril, however, has already given up on her mild-tempered, “milk-livered” husband, and expects to develop an adulterous relationship with Edmund. The two sisters vie for Edmund’s love and become deadly enemies. They embody quite different approaches to household management, marital relations, and sexual freedom.

In the anonymous King Leir, Gonorill and Ragan never emerge as sexual beings. Upon their military defeat at the end of the play, they retreat to their home territories with their husbands, Cambria and Cornwall, respectively, as Cornwall summarizes the situation: “The day is lost, our friends do all revolt, / And joyne against us with the adverse part: / There is no meanes of safety but by flight, / And therefore ile to Cornwall with my Queene” (Sc. 31). Likewise, Cambria, Gonorill’s husband, concludes, referring to Mumford: “I thinke, there is a devil in the Campe hath haunted me to day: he hath so tyred me, that in a maner I can fight no more,” and takes to flight.83 In Shakespeare’s play, however, Edmund’s presence poisons not only the relationship between the two sisters, Regan and Goneril, but also Goneril and Albany’s marriage. Further, Shakespeare depicts the awakening of Regan and Goneril as sexual beings. A specific moment encapsulates the two daughters’ blossoming sexual desire. In Act V, scene 1, Regan sounds Edmund on his feelings for Goneril: “Do you love my sister?” (9). When he prevaricates in his answer—“In honored love”—Regan cuts to the chase and asks point blank: “But have you never found my brother’s way / To the forfended place?” (10–11). “Forfended place,” like the word “nothing” in its slang usage in Shakespeare’s time, becomes a euphemism for female genitalia and in King Lear for the force that fills the void left by the dismantling of Lear’s patriarchal hold on his family and on his country. Female sexuality becomes a strong distinctive force rivaling patriarchal power.

Goneril’s sexual desire awakens relatively early. Goneril takes a dislike to her “mild husband” and disdains “the cowish terror of his spirit,” and also develops an admiration for Edmund’s daring conduct. At home, she knows that she must defer to the master of the house: “I must change names at home, and give the distaff / Into my husband’s hands” (4.2.17–18). She notes “the difference of man and man”; to Edmund, she pledges her “woman’s service,” while Albany, “my fool usurps my body” (4.2.26–8).

The Quarto text contains the announcement of the death of the Duke of Cornwall: “[he was] slain by his servant, going to put out / The other eye of Gloucester” (4.2.71–3). As a widow, now Regan can marry Edmund, which adds to the rivalry between Goneril and Regan. Goneril goes so far as to write a letter to Edmund, encouraging him to kill Albany, because if Albany returns home alive: “Then am I the prisoner, and his bed my jail; from the loathed warmth whereof deliver me, and supply the place for your labor” (4.6.265–7). Having sworn his love to Goneril and Regan, Edmund faces a dilemma as to whether he should have only one of the sisters or enjoy both (5.1.56–70). Finally, each sister claims Edmund for herself. As a widow, Regan asserts her sovereignty over her destiny: “In my rights / By me invested, he compeers the best” (5.3.70–71), and attempts to create him her “lord and master” (79). When confronted with evidence of treason and murder conspiracy, Goneril defies her husband and the law: “the laws are mine, not thine, / Who can arraign me for’t” (5.3.160–61). This suggests that with her poisoning of Regan and the defeat of the forces of Cordelia and Lear, she is hoping to gain control not only as master of her own house but also to claim sovereignty as queen in her own right.

Thus the dismantling of Lear’s home, Edmund’s ascendancy, and a collapse of patriarchal control create a power vacuum, which Goneril and Regan try to fill. As Gloucester feels his way to Dover and Lear crosses over to a state of homelessness and insanity, the two sisters discover a new sense of sexual liberation and of freedom from patriarchal mores. Lear will never again see the inside of a house, wandering through the heath, seeking refuge in a hovel, recovering in a tent on the battlefield, and finally, defeated on the battlefield, being sent to jail. Away from the castles, palaces, and country houses, he journeys into the realm of poverty. Homelessness looms large in the consciousness of the characters, as they struggle for survival. Shakespeare takes the loss of the house to its logical consequence: a state of “houseless poverty” and a struggle for survival, which become central concerns in Act II and parts of IV, before war breaks out and differences are to be settled on the battlefield.

The Hovel and Survival Situations

In survival situations, contemporary survival guides instruct, one should look for shelter or build a makeshift shelter at least two hours before sunset. In a harsh, hostile environment, warns one of such guides, “your need for shelter may take precedence over your need for food, possibly even your need for water.”84 Prolonged exposure to cold temperatures leads to fatigue, exhaustion, and a passive attitude. The guide adds:

A shelter can protect you from the sun, insects, wind, rain, snow, hot or cold temperatures, and enemy observation. It can give you a feeling of well being; it can help you maintain your will to survive.85

Types of improvised shelters include a poncho tent; parachute tepee; a “lean-to” built out of branches, palm leaves, and rope or vine; a so-called swamp bed; a hammock; a tree-pit or beach-shade; and a cave.86 The SAS Survival Handbook adds an encouraging note, if the survival situation derives from the destruction of one’s house: “In a domestic situation there is likely to be shelter, unless it has been totally destroyed, or the area has become a danger zone and evacuation is imperative.”87 Such guides provide an analogy for the survival conditions that the characters in King Lear face, as they, wandering in the wilds, seek shelter in a hovel or wherever they find it.

The word “hovel” occurs four times as a noun and once as a verb in Shakespeare, all in King Lear. A “hovel” means, of course, an open shed used as a storage place for grain or tools or as a shed for cattle (OED). It also means a miserable dwelling-place or a shed used as a human habitation (OED). In the Quarto text, Cordelia employs it as a verb to express her dismay at Lear’s makeshift accommodation in the stormy night: “was thou fain, poor father, / To hovel thee with swine and rogues forlorn / In short and musty straw?” (4.7.39–41). The distinctively Brazilian Portuguese word tapera, somewhat synonymous with hovel but without the connotation of shed, derives from Tupi-Guarani ta ‘pera (tawa, “pueblo”; pwera, “that which has been”).88 The Portuguese word refers to the ruins of an abandoned abode, previously used exclusively for human habitation but now reclaimed by vegetation and wildlife. Tapera bears the intense spectral markers of its mysterious late occupants and the ubi sunt of their disappearance. It embodies a human narrative; it tells a human story. In King Lear, the hovel will serve as a temporary, intermediary habitation before Lear and others are thrust into the vast empty countryside; but it is also pwera, an emblem of that which is no more.

In Act II, scene 4, blinded by rage, Lear storms out of Gloucester’s house into the desolate countryside in the dark, stormy night. Cornwall seconds Regan’s order to Gloucester that the doors to the house be shut close: “Shut up your doors, my lord; ’tis a wild night. / My Regan counsels well. Come out o’ th’ storm” (308–9). Act III juxtaposes and contrasts Gloucester’s sturdy, comfortable house and the precarious, fragile, miserable hovel where Kent, the Fool, Lear, and Edgar seek refuge from the storm. Bachelard underscores the extent to which we depend on the house for our sense of security, safety, and protection: “The house does not tremble, however, when thunder rolls … In our houses set close one up against the other, we are less afraid.”89 Even a hut still embodies “the house’s powers of protection against the forces that besiege it.”90 But in Act III, house and hovel trade and invert functions. The house, transformed by the cruel and harsh guests who take it over, becomes, in Kent’s description, the “hard house,” in fact “harder than the stones whereof ’tis raised” (3.1.63–4). Displaying “scanted,” deficient courtesy, the house has denied Kent entrance (66–7). The hovel enters the characters’ consciousness when Kent promises bareheaded Lear, nursing “heart-struck injuries” (3.1.17): “Gracious my lord, hard by here is a hovel; / Some friendship will it lend you gainst the tempest” (3.2.61–2). The house, despite its stone walls and heavy doors and gates, offers no security; whereas the hovel, lacking proper doors and walls, feels safe and welcoming. One represents the dangers of human cruelty; the other, warmth, safety, and protection from the “the tyranny of the open night” (3.4.2).

The refugees from the house are in a survival situation. Shakespeare carefully establishes the unusually inclement spell of weather. The storm resembles the hurricanes or tropical storms that form off the coast of Africa, course toward the Caribbean, develop a rotation pattern, wreak havoc in North America or in Bermuda, and then, moving in a northeasterly-easterly direction and being recharged by the warm waters of the Gulf Stream, still retain gale force winds when they make landfall in England. The first sounds of the storm appear in a stage direction, “Storm and tempest” (2.4.283), just before Lear, the Fool, Kent, and Gloucester go off into the darkness of the night. Cornwall calls attention to the storm, “Let us withdraw; ’twill be a storm,” and Regan rationalizes her own cruelty, “This house is little: the old man and’s people / Cannot be well bestowed” (187–9). In III.1, Kent and the Gentleman connect “foul weather” to Lear’s mind—“One minded like the weather, most unquietly”(1–2); they also speculate about “division,” still covered by “mutual cunning” and not yet open warfare, between Albany and Cornwall.

An urgent survival situation becomes apparent in Act III, scene 2. Fuming with rage, Lear wanders about with the Fool and, like a mad conjurer or magician,91 commands the storm to rip the world apart: “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow! / You cataracts and harricanoes, spout / Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks” (1–3). The rest of the speech refers to “sulph’rous and thought-executing fires,” “oak-cleaving thunderbolts,” “all-shaking thunder”—all strong enough to “crack nature’s molds,” and spill “all germens,” all seeds, that generate “ingrateful man.” Shakespeare describes thunder and lightning as “heaven’s artillery” (Shrew, 1.2.205), reflecting contemporary meteorological theories and punning on the usual method, which used canon balls, gunpowder, and fireworks to produce special theatrical effects in the “heavens” of the public playhouses.92 The title page of Looke Up and See Wonders (1628) depicts heavenly artillery and drums and armies battling in the sky.93 Meteorologists and laypersons were, of course, familiar with various theories of the origins of these meteorological phenomena and the destructive power of lightning, which burnt the steeples of St Paul’s Cathedral in 1561 and 1563.94 Pierre de La Primaudaye, in The French Academie (1601), describes the effects of lightning on the human body and on the bodies of animals: “Those which are stroken therewith, be they men or beasts, remain all consumed within, as if their flesh, sinewes, and bones were altogither molten within their skin, if remayning sound & whole, as if they had no harme.”95 In ancient Greece, Zeus was believed to use, as instruments of his wrath, thunderbolts and lightning, which the Cyclops manufactured in Vulcan’s underground forges.96 In King Lear, the storm, acquiring an anthropomorphic dimension, blends the tumultuous elements and Lear’s wrath. The storm in the mind and the meteorological phenomenon resonate in each other’s domains—rumbling, spitting, and spouting their “horrible pleasure” (19).

In such a night, the need for shelter takes precedence, despite Lear’s earlier furious resolution, “No, rather I abjure all roofs, and choose / To wage against the enmity o’ th’ air” (2.4.207–8). The Gentleman intuits that the cub-drawn bear chooses to “couch,” go hungry, and the lion and the “belly-pinchèd wolf” to keep their furs dry rather than venture forth in the cold rain (3.1.12–14). Kent, later, comments that “Things that love night, / Love not such nights as these. The wrathful skies / Gallow the very wanderers of the dark / And make them keep their caves” (3.2.42–3). As even Lear seems aware, “this contentious storm / Invades us to the skin” (3.4.8–9). Chilled to the bone, Kent, Lear, the Fool, and Gloucester stand at the entrance of the hovel, where Tom o’Bedlam has already taken refuge, and try to figure out what to do next. Gloucester grumbles about his guests having taken “the use” of his own house (3.3.3).

Later, returning from his house, where he had gone to fetch fire, Gloucester approaches the hovel. The Fool takes him from a distance as “a little fire in a wild field,” as if he were “a walking fire,” a terrifying apparition (3.4.111–13). He still hopes to persuade Lear to return to the house, “where both fire and food is ready” (151). The word “enter,” used several times in this scene, suggests their trepidation in entering such a miserable abode. Only when Edgar as Tom o’Bedlam complains, “Tom’s acold,” does Gloucester respond—“In fellow, there, into th’hovel; keep thee warm” (3.4.174). The hovel is good enough for a beggar but of course not for a king. Lear, however, sensibly orders: “Come, let’s in all” (175). The English mineralogist, John Mawe (1766–1829), in poor health, while traveling on horseback to the Diamond District in the Brazilian highlands in the early nineteenth-century, stayed in many a makeshift shelter and taperas. Upon arrival at a particularly dismal abode, and after an arduous day’s journey, he concludes: “These were miserable accommodations; but sleep knows little distinction between the hovel and the palace, and a man thoroughly disposed may enjoy it as soundly in one as in the other.”97 Lear, momentarily practical-minded, would concur: “The art of our necessities is strange, / And can make vile things precious” (3.3.71–2). In Scene 6, inside the hovel, Gloucester also agrees that “here it is better than the open air,” and promises to smuggle out of his usurped house whatever additional “comfort[s]” he can (1–2).

Scenes 6 and 7 juxtapose and compare inside the hovel and inside Gloucester’s house. In the hovel, Edgar imagines Nero angling in the lake of darkness. Lear sees red burning spits and hears hissing. At one time, he sees and hears his three little dogs, Tray, Blanch, and Sweetheart, bark. At another, Edgar imagines packs of chasing, barking, biting mastiffs, greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, and hounds. In his house, not far away, Gloucester confronts Regan and Cornwall, and imagines Regan and Goneril, as hellhounds, using their “cruel nails” to pluck out Lear’s eyes and their “boarish fangs” to bite into their father’s flesh (3.7.57–9). He seems to anticipate, perhaps he even unwittingly inspires, the torture, mutilation, and cruelty his guests intend for him; for Cornwall and Regan blind Gloucester, leaving him “all dark and comfortless” (86), and eject him from his own house, so that, like a dog, he has to “smell / His way to Dover” (3.7.94–5). In the Folio text, the scene ends when Cornwall asks Regan to “turn out that eyeless villain” and wants her help for he has received “a hurt,” in fact a mortal wound, from an anonymous First Servant who fought and sacrificed his own life to save Gloucester’s eye. Gloucester receives no comfort. In the Quarto text, however, two anonymous servants apply flax and whites of eggs to Gloucester’s wounds, the prescribed medical treatment for injuries to the eye,98 and will seek a Bedlam beggar to guide the old earl about. In contrast, the hovel affords Lear enough comfort in an imaginary bed: “Make no noise, make no noise; draw the curtains. / So, so. We’ll go to supper i’ th’ morning” (3.6.82–3). Also, in the quarto text, Edgar takes comfort that his misery has found company: “Who alone suffers suffers most i’ th’ mind” (3.6.103). He does not know, of course, that his father, in the Folio text, suffers utterly alone in body and mind.

Linda Woodbridge aptly underscores that the scenes set near or in the hovel draw attention to the plight of the poor, homelessness and questions of social justice.99 In the process, the play sheds light on endemic poverty, abject homelessness, and pervasive neglect in Lear’s kingdom. I want, however, to place these issues in the context of survival situations. What had begun in Lear’s palace continues under Gloucester’s roof. In this house, extraordinary upheaval, dislocation, and uprooting occur and take shape, as one by one Kent, Cordelia, the Fool, Lear, Edgar, and Gloucester leave their houses and, with the exception of Cordelia, have no place to go. Animals instinctively seek shelter; human beings need a roof over their heads, whether in a hovel, a hut, a cave, a lean-to, or a tree-pit. They need shelter from the “extremity of the skies,” as Lear states at the sight of the “uncovered,” begrimed, mortified body of Tom o’Bedlam:

Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou ow’st the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Ha! Here’s three on’s are sophisticated. Thou art the thing itself: unaccommodated man is no more but a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. (3.4.103–8)

The Gospel writer refers to the great divide Christians face: “And beside all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed: so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that would come from thence” (Luke 16:26).100 In the pre-Christian world of this play, where Christian imagery crops up with startling frequency, the dismantling of Lear’s patriarchal hegemony lays bare the great gulf between potens and pauper, rich and poor, powerful and powerless, young and old, male and female. The presence of the house as a symbol of shelter, security, stability, and continuity recedes from view; in its place, the play offers vast expanses of landscape, often without houses, and a struggle for survival.

Shakespeare explores the centrality of the house to how the characters define and see themselves; naturally, this also reveals the extent to which pervasive poverty and homelessness intertwine with the lives of the more privileged. In his book, Poverty: A History, Bronislaw Geremek traces coexisting different value systems that shaped attitudes toward poverty in Western Europe: the Gospels and early patristic literature exalt poverty as a virtue and “as a spiritual value, accessible to rich and poor alike” (19). In early theological history, poverty represented “the Christian model of the ideal life,” and therefore many gave away their possessions and chose a life of poverty as a Christian ideal. Actual poverty, brought on by disadvantages of birth or by the circumstances of life, gave the economically better-off Christians an opportunity to perform charity to the genuinely poor. In practice, the Christian ethic regarding poverty depended on economic status and social setting. For the elites, if they chose to renounce their material possessions, poverty was a privilege; but “For the working masses [poverty] meant accepting one’s lot with humility; for them, abandoning their social role by renouncing work would be an act not of humility but of pride” (201). Therefore, “The Christian doctrine of poverty had little to do with social reality; [poverty] was treated as a purely spiritual value” (201).

A new ethos of poverty emerges in the late middle ages and early modern period, with the appearance of charitable institutions and a new emphasis on institutionalized charitable activity and centralized aid to the poor.101 Geremek suggests that begging becomes a recognizable profession, whereby real beggars were to be set apart from impostors. Beggars, therefore, had to conform to specific cultural expectations of what a beggar was supposed to look like and how he was supposed to behave. Poverty developed its own iconography, as for example the representations of St Martin and the work of Hieronymus Bosch, to depict human affliction:

A beggar’s external appearance was not only a reflection of his genuine need but a part of his professional technique. Clothes were the main thing. Medieval iconography portrays beggars barefoot and in rags; often, in many images of St Martin offering his clothes to a beggar, they are also naked … The common accessories of the wandering beggars, such as the staff and the sack, were both functional and symbolic … Equally important in the beggar’s appearance is his body: it, too, crippled and racked with illness, old age or poverty, is part of his professional technique, and must be exposed to public view in the right way. … Singing belongs to what one might call the ‘artistic production’ side of the beggar’s craft.102

Begging becomes a spectacle, and a public performance of “ostentatious misery,” so that it was often difficult to discern the genuinely poor from impostors.103 Shakespeare’s Edgar, for example, although he becomes unexpectedly and suddenly dispossessed of his properties, family, and station in society, knows exactly how to impersonate a Bedlam beggar. Lear neglected the poor all his life, and now must share their plight.

In King Lear, Shakespeare offers representations of poverty, both voluntary and forced, exploring such topics as the house as the material foundation of his characters’ lives, the stripping away of material possessions, need and the necessities of life, and the equitable redistribution of material possessions. Lear, Edgar, and Gloucester, stripped of clothes, house, and material possessions, embody what Lear himself terms “houseless poverty,” but in the hovel or the heath, or on the way to the White Cliffs of Dover, they discover a new sense of communion with others and with the world.104

Ironically, perhaps unwittingly, Lear, like Timon of Athens, chooses poverty, when he announces his abdication and redistribution of his wealth and power. In the process, he also strips Cordelia of her material possessions—her dowry—as well as of paternal care, “propinquity, and property of blood.” In his anger, he mocks her about what she now “owes”—“infirmities” (207), since she is now without friends, hated, dowerless, estranged with a curse, deprived of “grace and favor,” and cast away, were it not for France’s charity. By scene 4, Lear tells the disguised banished Kent that “If thou be’st as poor for a subject as he’s for a king, thou art poor enough” (1.4.21–2), and later he reminds Regan and Goneril that he chose poverty: “I gave you all” (2.4.250). Questions of survival loom large, as the play focuses on the essential necessities of life—food, clothing, shelter (2.4.153–4), asking, in Lear’s words, if the bare necessities suffice (2.4.264–70).

Lear offers a distinction between “houseless poverty,” which affects those who are born poor or become poor and those, like himself, who renounce their riches in pursuit of a spiritual ideal:

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,

That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,

How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,

Your hoped and windowed raggedness, defend you

From seasons such as these? (3.4.30–8).

Although the houseless poor seem invisible, Lear senses their presence, and recognizes that his own government bears the responsibility for doing too little to alleviate their suffering: “O, I have ta’en / Too little care of this!” Ironically, he has discovered that no one can truly experience the suffering of the abject poor, unless one gives up voluntarily all one possesses; only then can one truly commune with the less fortunate and “show the heavens more just” (3.4.5–8).

As Edgar’s plight proves, the poor fall through the cracks of the social fabric, have no identity, and are anonymous, helpless, and invisible. As his brother Edmund makes his move to force Gloucester to disown Edgar and reapportion the family wealth and favor, we catch a glimpse of a world turned upside down. Without the support of family, love, and charity, this social experiment turns into the “image and horror.” Edgar must seek refuge in the interstices of the social fabric, embodying the opposite of a life of privilege and power. To escape, he tells us, he must assume “the basest and most poorest shape” of penury—a word whose roots derive from Latin penuria, need, and Greek pema, “suffering, capable of enduring, patient” (OED). He grimes his face with “filth,” wraps a “blanket” around his loins, and creates what he calls a “presented nakedness”—a representation, an iconography of a beggar. This involves a recognizable performance (2.3.1–21) and ironically becomes “nothing.” The language of the passage suggests that “nothing” signifies suffering, endurance, and pain. A beggar must get used to being pelted with a succession of blows or having objects hurled at him; to hearing “bans”—malediction, curses—and facing hostile laws and ordinances; and to seeing his wounds become “mortified”—necrotic and gangrenous. The OED suggests that “nothing,” in usage dating from late Middle English, signifies “a thing (or person) not worth reckoning, considering, or mentioning,” “insignificant, worthless.” Indeed, as the Fool comments, “Fortune, that arrant whore, / Ne’er turns the key to th’ poor” (2.4.51–2); in other words, the rich and powerful never open the door to the poor. After his eyes have been gouged out, stumbling in utter darkness, Gloucester journeys to Dover as if to Damascus, now imbued with new vision: “So distribution should undo excess / And each man have enough” (4.1.73–4). Like Gloucester, Lear must discard his habitual indifference to suffering and suffer himself; like Phillip of Macedonia, he must be reminded of his mortality.

In “Of Repentance,” Montaigne speaks of the difficulty in overcoming certain long-ingrained habits: “One may disown and retract the vices that surprise us, and to which we are hurried by passions; but those which by a long habit are rooted in a strong and vigorous will are not subject to contradiction.”105 Shakespeare suggests, however, that the tragic journey requires that Lear and Gloucester learn to modulate their wrong-headed wills, mollify their hardened hearts, and venture forth into the voids of Lear’s kingdom.

Spectral Places

After Act III, references to permanent dwellings are few and far between. Unlocalized scenes predominate. The exceptions are Act IV, scene 2, and Act IV, scene 5, which editors generally identify as being set before Albany’s castle and in Gloucester’s house, respectively. The other scenes are in the “open country” or somewhere “near Dover,” or in the British or French army camps.106 Signposts of precise location become rare, except for a general convergence of all the characters toward the battlefields near and around Dover. Goneril and Edmund, for example, exit in 3.7.22, just before the blinding of Gloucester, and arrive together presumably at Albany’s castle in 4.2. Goneril wonders why her “mild husband” has not come out to greet them, as Oswald has obviously done. She asks her steward, “Now, where’s your master?” (1); and he replies: “Madam, within” (2). We have not seen Albany since 1.4, and the only other reference to him is in 3.7, when Cornwall writes him a letter, informing him that “the army of France is landed” (2–3). According to Oswald, Albany has radically changed, obviously quite distressed about Gloucester’s supposed treachery and Edmund’s ascendancy. As Albany enters (4.2.29), he hurls insults at his wife, both in the Quarto and in the Folio texts: “O Goneril, / You are not worth the dust which the rude wind / Blows in your face” (31–3), although the Quarto text expands the fight in additional lines. He learns of Cornwall’s death and the shocking news of the blinding of Gloucester. His last words in this scene contain his pledge to “revenge” Gloucester’s eyes.

Fig. 1.1 “King Philip of Macedon in His Bedchamber.” M. de La Serre, The mirrour which flatters not, trans. T. Cary (London, 1639). STC 20490. By courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Act IV, scene 5, presumably set in Gloucester’s house, revolves around Regan and involves her discovery that Goneril has written a letter to Edmund, which Oswald has come to deliver but discovers that Edmund has departed in search of Gloucester in order to dispatch his “nighted life” (15). It has no markers of location, except that the text contains no information to suggest that she has gone anywhere since we saw her last in Gloucester’s house in Act III, scene 7. Regan also reveals that she and Edmund have talked, presumably since we last saw him with Goneril, and have decided that he is “more convenient” for her than for her sister. Regan announces that “Our troops set forth tomorrow” (18). These two scenes, which in actuality could be set anywhere, serve as transitional, intermediary stations in the general movement of all the characters towards the vicinity of Dover.

In a sense, Gloucester, guided by Tom o’Bedlam, and Lear serve as the audience’s guides, as the action dislocates to the battlefields around Dover. The audience ironically depends on the blind and the madmen to get its bearings. The landscape becomes more diffuse, locations less precise, although the characters and the audience know the general direction in which the action is moving. At the beginning of Act IV, Gloucester enters, led by an elderly man, who identifies himself as a tenant in Gloucester’s estate for some “fourscore years” (4.1.14). Gloucester himself feels totally disoriented. He reveals that he does not need eyes to see because he has “no way” (18), no particular place to go. In fact, he concludes that his eyes had been worthless, “I stumbled when I saw” (19). Recognizing the voice of Tom o’Bedlam, however, he asks for directions to the Cliffs of Dover, “Know’st thou the way to Dover?” (15), which will become his final resting place: “From that place / I shall no leading need” (79–80).

Edgar, still disguised as a Bedlam beggar, leads Gloucester in Act IV, scene 6. Gloucester assumes they are headed for Dover, but he cannot rely on his senses to tell him if they have reached the top of the cliff, or even if they are actually climbing a hill, for the “ground is even.” He cannot even hear the sea, but Edgar explains: “Why, then, your other senses grow imperfect / By your eyes’ anguish” (5–6). Ambroise Paré (1510–90) first recorded and studied “phantom limbs,” the illusions or sensations of pain that come from an amputated limb. Unlike such phantom sensations, dependent on the sense of touch, “damage or loss of other senses results in the absence of experiences formerly associated with their function,” such as in the case of blindness and deafness.107 As Wade points out, we generally grasp the material, visible world globally through the “principles of perception grouping,” which were first described by Gestalt psychology (1923).108 Vision serves “to determine the location of objects”109; in the absence of vision, as is the case of Gloucester, one has to depend on touch and hearing, to get one’s bearings and to interact with the outside world. Likewise, at night or in dim lighting conditions, the red-orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo-violet spectrum of visible light narrows to blue-green, “the range of wavelengths to which the human eye is best adapted at night.”110

Edgar further confuses Gloucester when he announces, “Here’s the place” (11) and creates through language the illusion of dizzying heights where they presumably stand. This may be an odd dramatization of medieval concepts of tragedy, associated with the wheel of fortune. One rises to the top of the wheel, and then comes tumbling down from the dizzying heights. According to Edgar, “crows and choughs,” like the Andean condors and the American eagles, glide in the air, riding on the rising warm air. Perched on the white cliffs, someone harvests samphire, a coastal plant with culinary uses; fishermen walk on the beach; and a boat lies anchored off shore. He also explains the absence of the “murmuring surge” on account of the great height where they stand. The scene, however puzzling it might seem to us or to Shakespeare’s original audience, advances Edgar’s plan to dislodge Gloucester’s suicidal feelings, and to give him a new purpose in life. When Gloucester, having fallen forward in a swoon, wakes up, Edgar tell him: “Thy life’s a miracle.” Edgar adds: “Think that the clearest gods, who make them honor / Of men’s impossibilities, have preservèd thee” (4.6.73–4). This scene resembles wondrous moments of rebirth in Shakespeare’s romances, such as Hermione’s restoration in The Winter’s Tale, or Cymbeline’s reunion with his long-lost sons, Guiderius and Arviragus, and his daughter Imogen, which by their very miraculous nature defy human understanding. Gloucester and Lear come together one more time; yet there is no sense of location. Bedecked with flowers, Lear raves mad, lost in a fiendish world, where “copulation thrives,” his daughters are centaurs from the waist down, and a “farmer’s dog” barks at a beggar. Yet, he has moments of lucidity to tell Gloucester that “a man may see how this world goes with no eyes” (150–51); to know that “We came crying hither” (178); and momentarily to be on the verge of recognizing Gloucester. After Lear exits, Edgar promises to lead his father to “some biding” (224), some unknown dwelling. Later, he reveals that he had to leave Gloucester in “the shadow of this tree” (5.2.1), where Gloucester peacefully passed away.

Likewise, Lear, carried in a chair, wakes up in Act IV, scene 7. He is now under the care of Cordelia, but, like Gloucester, he too is disoriented. He does not know where he is, “Where have I been? Where am I?” (53). He adds, “Nor I know not / Where I did lodge last night” (690–70), but Cordelia assures him that he is in his own kingdom (121). The audience also does not know where Lear and Cordelia are, although we assume that they must be in a field tent, preparing for the battle. The play has two other references to tents. In the Quarto text, Edmund refers to Albany’s tent (5.1.34); and later, when Regan, having been poisoned by Goneril, says that she is sick, Albany orders an attendant: “She is not well. Convey her to my tent” (107). Defeated in battle, Cordelia and Lear become Edmund’s prisoners, and Lear attempts to console Cordelia in saying that they will be like birds in a cage. However, the prison must be in some nearby castle, for Edmund refers to “a castle” (250). The proximity of the castle becomes apparent when Lear enters carrying in his arms the dead body of Cordelia, who was hanged, presumably in her prison cell.

King Lear is the most rural of the tragedies. In Act IV, scene 3, a scene that occurs only in the Quarto text, Kent tells the Gentleman that “the poor distressèd Lear’s i’ th’ town” (39), but there are no other references to any towns or to the great cities of England, such as London and York. In his prophecy, a speech that occurs only in the Folio text, the Fool indicates that the realm of Albion is yet to come to great confusion, when everything will become upside down, even where, as in Spenser’s Giant of the Scales’ vision, “every case in law is right” (3.3.86). Lear’s kingdom consists of a barren landscape and sparsely populated countryside, punctuated with occasional dwelling places, such as Lear’s castle, the abodes of Gloucester, Regan, and Goneril, the hovel, a tree under which Gloucester dies, Albany’s tent, and an unidentified castle, where Lear and Cordelia are held in prison. These locations materialize momentarily, but then recede into the vast, dark expanses of Lear’s kingdom. Ironically, references to Dover help us at least visualize the general direction of the characters’ journey. Precise locations become less distinct. King Lear truly illustrates Yi-Fu Tuan’s point about our perception of place: “The small worlds of direct experience are fringed with much broader fields known indirectly through symbolic means.”111

In the play, Shakespeare gives us the “life” of a king who, by discarding kingly trappings, discovers a perceptual gap. Lear must see the everydayness of his and other characters’ lives. But the tragedy suggests that house and kingdom are intimately interconnected, and that the house intertwines with who the characters are and how they see themselves. At the very end of the play, the three survivors—Kent, Albany, and Edgar—are each associated with one of the three houses represented in the play: Lear’s, Albany and Goneril’s, and Gloucester’s. Kent, closest in age to Lear, represents the old generation; Edgar represents the young generation, victimized by the older generation; and Albany offers a bridge between the two generations. Unmarried or widowed and childless, they face the bleak prospects that the future holds for them. Kent has no place to go. Empty, lonely houses await Edgar and Albany.

In King Lear, the house, as an imagined place, takes center stage through direct experience and through symbolic means. The play explores different types of dwelling—a castle, cave, someone else’s house, a hovel. It also explores different modes and concepts of dwelling, and unsettles notions of “inside”—entering, belonging, being accepted—and “outside”—leaving, closing of doors, exile, not belonging. When disaster occurs, the SAS Survival Handbook cautions, we may be left to manage for ourselves, completely cut off from “the usual services and food supplies.”112 In such a situation, we might be contented with any shelter we can find, as Kent wishes for banished Cordelia: “The gods to their dear shelter take thee, maid” (1.1.187). But when the castle vanishes or rends, however, it leaves behind an open space and emptiness. There is no turning back. With the technological resources of the modern theater, stage producers could make Lear’s castle vanish before our eyes through spectacular special effects. The vanishing castle represents not only a perceptual phenomenon; it also helps localize and dramatize pivotal historical changes in housing conditions, family expectations, and gender roles in the early modern period.

1 Brook, The Open Door, 4.

2 Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place, 88.

3 Richard Turner, The Vision of Landscape in Renaissance Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966) 43. Throughout this paragraph, I am indebted to Turner’s analysis of the painting.

4 Turner 44.

5 Turner 44. He explores Piero di Cosimo’s connection to Paolo Uccello, as well.

6 This first recorded usage in the OED is from Stephen Hawes, The historie of graunde Amoure and la bell Pucel, called the Pastime of plesure (London, 1509/1554). STC 12950. Fynes Moryson, in his Itinerary (1617) writes of war as initiator of “tragedy”: “The warre of Hungarie made all those parts full of tragedies and miserie” (OED).

7 Marvell, 1.1711.

8 See Chrétien de Troyes, The Complete Romances of Chrétien de Troyes, trans. David Staines (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990) 278–84.

9 This summary is based on Roger Sherman Loomis, “The Spoils of Annwn: An Early Arthurian Poem,” PMLA 56.4 (1941): 893–4. See The Mabinogion, Mediaeval Welsh Romances, Third Edition, trans. Charlotte Guest (London: D. Nutt, 1910). In The Grail: From Celtic Myth to Christian Symbol (Cardiff: University of Wales Press; New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), Loomis writes: “ … we find in Celtic literature and Arthurian romance an atmosphere of wonder and supernatural paraphernalia such as are characteristic of mythology—revolving castles, sword-like bridges, springs haunted by fays, isles inhabited only by women, enchantresses who take the form of birds, hags changed by a kiss into damsels of peerless beauty, vessels of inexhaustible plenty, vessels moved by no visible agency, banqueters who preserve a youthful appearance in spite of their many years” (22).

10 Loomis, “Spoils of Annwn,” 893–4; and Loomis, The Grail, 21–2.

11 Loomis, “Spoils of Annwn,” 895. Philip Ariès refers to fantastical events recorded in the autobiography of Burkard Zink of Augusburg, who having followed two unknown horsemen into a Hungarian forest, finds himself pursued by wild boars before a gloomy castle. When Burkard prays to God for help, the castle suddenly vanishes. See Philip Ariès and Georges Duby, (eds), A History of Private Life: Revelations of the Medieval World, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1988), 2: 629. Burkard’s account appears in Chronik des Burkard Zink, in Die Chroniken der deutschen Städte vom 14. bis ins 16. Jahrhundert, 5. Band (Leipzig 1866).

12 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, (ed.) Thomas P. Roche (London: Penguin, 1987), III.12.42. All quotations from Spenser, unless otherwise indicated, will be from this edition.

13 Linda Woodbridge, Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001) 218. Woodbridge offers a brilliant analysis of the play; but, although she decries Universalist readings, she admits to one: “It is, then, with some chagrin that I now argue that on the issue of poverty and homelessness Shakespeare, in King Lear at least, stood head and shoulders above his culture and was centuries ahead of his time—and perhaps ahead of ours” (206). I am making no such claim. See also William C. Carroll, Fat King, Lean Beggar: Representations of Poverty in the Age of Shakespeare (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). To further contextualize and historicize assistance to the poor in England, consult Bronislaw Geremek, Poverty: A History, trans. Agnieszka Kolakowska (Oxford, UK and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997). Geremek argues that “In England new policies were implemented in stages, and even though reform sometimes seemed slow in comparison with the continent, by the end of the sixteenth century it had more than caught up, and seemed more successful than in France” (167). Particularly well developed were the administrative structures in place for distribution of assistance, although in the 1570s, English authorities came under “growing pressure root out public begging” (168). See also Paola Pugliati, Beggary and Theatre in Early Modern England (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, 2003); John Pound, Poverty and Vagrancy in Tudor England, Second Edition. (London and New York: Longman, 1986); and J.F. Pound, “An Elizabethan Census of the Poor,” Historical Journal 8 (1962): 135–61.

14 Christian Norberg-Schulz, Meaning in Western Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1980) 224.

15 Jean E. Howard, “Shakespeare, Geography, and the Work of Genre on the Early Modern Stage,” Modern Language Quarterly 64.3 (2003): 314. By contrast, in Dangerous Familiars: Representation of Domestic Crime in England, 1550–1700 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), Frances Dolan defines the home “as a locus of conflict, an arena in which the most fundamental ideas about social order, identity, and intimacy were contested” (1).

16 Quoted in Torvald Faegre, Tents: Architecture of the Nomads (New York: Anchor Books, 1979) 1.

17 Arthur H.R. Fairchild, Shakespeare and the Arts of Design, University of Missouri Studies (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri, 1937); Lena Cowen Orlin, “Man’s House as His Castle in Arden of Feversham,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 2 (1985): 57–89; and Orlin, Private Matters.

18 Fairchild 1.

19 Fairchild 1.

20 Private Matters and Public Cultures in Post-Reformation England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 2. In The Custom of the Castle From Malory to Macbeth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), Charles Ross traces the representation of the castle as a symbol for “a flexible mode of thinking about tradition and convention” from Arthurian romance to the Renaissance, and contends that “As castles give way to rural estates, new images arise for the containment of social behavior” (140).

21 Orlin argues that this statement had become proverbial in the Elizabethan period (2). See Orlin’s discussion of this matter in her introduction (1–13). Throughout her book, Orlin is interested in locating “the private in property, both real and movable,” domesticity, and household roles and relationships in domestic tragedy. Of interest here is also her article, “Man’s House as His Castle,” especially her summary of the major historical changes. See also, Crane, Shakespeare’s Brain, 43.

22 Fairchild 1.

23 Fairchild 1. See the most helpful survey of the changes, including interior and exterior characteristics, of both the English country houses and of “houses of varied size, material and form,” in H. Avray Tipping, English Homes: Late Tudor and Early Stuart 1558–1649 (London: Offices of Country Life and George Newnes; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922); and Olive Cook, The English House Through Seven Centuries (New York: Overlook Press, 1983), esp. Chapter 5, “Tudor Renaissance,” and Chapter 6, “Elizabethan Baroque.” For purposes of comparison, see Marta Ajmar-Wollheim and Flora Dennis, (eds), At Home in Renaissance Italy (London: V & A Publications; New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2006). Georges Duby argues that the castle was “an ambivalent symbol: it was both the seat of justice and the base of a potentially oppressive power, as sign of the lord’s duty to protect his people and also of his right to command and, if necessary, punish them.” See Georges Duby, France in the Middle Ages (1987; Oxford: Blackwell, 1991) 56, quoted in Ross, Custom of the Castle, 130. Ross discusses Lear only in passing (Appendix One, 141–2), but I agree with his concluding remark, which I think reinforces mine; namely, that Shakespeare sets the play in the distant past and therefore creates the illusion “that the social world of Lear is long established” (142).

24 Lena Cowin Orlin, (ed.), Elizabethan Households: An Anthology (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1995) 3. Like Orlin, Natasha Korda, in Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies, also focuses on a history of property and privacy, but seeks “to elucidate the matrices or interconnections between symbolic and material economies” (15).

25 Mary Thomas Crane, “‘Players in your huswifery, and huswives in your beds’: Conflicting Identities of Early Modern English Women,” Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period,” (eds) by Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh (Burlington: Ashgate, 2000) 212.

26 Crane, “‘Players in your huswifery’,” 212.

27 Henry Wotton, The Elements of Architecture, Collected by Henry Wotton Knight, from the best Authors and Examples (London, 1624), sig. L^v. See the Folger Shakespeare Library facsimile reprint, (ed.) Frederick Hard (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1968) 82. A very handy anthology, which contains excerpts from Wotton and other writers on architecture, the house, household, rooms, goods, and social order is Lena Cowen Orlin, Elizabethan Households: An Anthology (Washington, DC: The Folger Shakespeare Library, 1995). Orlin reprints the passage from Wotton on p. 15.

28 Bachelard 4.

29 Fairchild 1.

30 King Lear, (ed.) Kenneth Muir, Arden Shakespeare (New York: Random House, 1952) 3.

31 King Lear, (ed.) R.A. Foakes, Arden Shakespeare, Third Series (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1997) 157.

32 Brook, The Open Door, 4.

33 Brook, The Open Door, 4.

34 See OED, “ethos”, Gr. ήθος (“character”)—“a person’s nature or disposition”—and “ethic.” “Aristotle’s statement that Polygnotus excelled all other painters in the representation of ‘ethos’ app. meant simply that his pictures expressed ‘character’; but as Aristotle elsewhere says that this painter portrayed men as nobler than they really are, some mod. writers have taken ethos to mean ‘ideal excellence.’ The opposition of ethos and pathos (‘character’ and ‘emotion’), often wrongly ascribed to Aristotle’s theory of art as expounded in the Poetics, really belongs only to Greek rhetoric” (OED).

35 Frederick Kiefer, Shakespeare’s Visual Theatre: Staging the Personified Characters (Cambridge, UK; Cambridge University Press, 2003) 12.

36 Plutarch, “Life of Dion,” http://classics.mit.edu/Plutarch/dion.html, August 23, 2009. See also The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, trans. Thomas North (1579; New York: The Heritage Press, 1941), 2: 1778. North translates this passage as follows: “For Dion having from a child been brought up with humble conditions under a tyrant, and acquainted with a servile, timorous life, with a proud and insolent reign, with all vanity and curiosity, as placing felicity in covetousness; nevertheless, after he had felt the sweet reasons of philosophy, teaching the broad way to virtue, his heart was inflamed straight with earnest desire to follow the same” (1778).

37 Simon Thurley, The Royal Palaces of Tudor England: Architecture and Court Life 1460–1547 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993) 69. See Thurley’s discussion of the logistics involved in royal perambulations and of an itinerant court (67–84).

38 OED.

39 Geoffrey Bullough, (ed.), Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; New York: Columbia University Press, 1973) 7:337–402, lines 763, 799, and 807.

40 Some examples of this include: his exile parallels and anticipates Cordelia’s, as does his return to serve Lear; the mistreatment he receives from Regan and Cornwall anticipates their rejection of Lear and the blinding of Gloucester. See, for example, Act III, scene 1, where Kent refers to the imminent civil war between the houses of Cornwall and Albany. In a powerful, yet ironic reversal of this pattern, Kent enters in Act 5, scene 3, “To bid my king and master aye good night” (240), arriving just in time for Lear’s entrance with the dead Cordelia in his arms and then for Lear’s own death.

41 The OED dates the first usage of “moiety” to 1444: “a half; esp. in legal or quasi-legal use”; another meaning, which emerged in 1596 also pertains to the passage from Lear: “One or two [or more] parts into which something is divided; one’s share” (1596).

42 David M. Bergeron, English Civic Pageantry, 1558–1642, Second edition (Tempe: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Arizona State University, 2003) 2. Bergeron writes that these royal visits and the accompanying entertainment for these progresses “typically spread out over several days and different locations. Demands of hospitality often governed how the noblemen shaped these estate entertainments. Regularly pageants of various kinds made use of the materials at hand, making place serve dramatic purpose. Or, as in the case of the Earl of Hertford at Elvetham in 1591, one might create a new place: here, a specially constructed crescent-shaped pond for the battle between the wood gods and sea gods. In these places audiences gathered, made up of multiple social and economic classes” (4). See also Bergeron’s “Symbolic Landscape in English Civic Pageantry,” Renaissance Quarterly 22. 1 (1969): 32–7.

43 This development parallels Gloucester’s own attempt to weigh Edgar, his legitimate son, and Edmund, his illegitimate son who has been away for nine years. Although Gloucester confesses that he has “so often blushed to acknowledge” Edmund, he now is “brazed” to do so: “But I have a son, sir, by order of law, some year elder than this who yet is no dearer in my account: though this knave came something saucily to the world, before he was sent for, yet was his mother fair, there was good sport at his making, and the whoreson must be acknowledged” (1.1.18–23).

44 Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1955) 33–4. See Rogier van der Weyden, Middelburg Altarpiece, Three Magi, detail, ca.1445–1448, oil on panel, Gemaldegalerie, Berlin.

45 See John Beckwith, Early Medieval Art (New York: Praeger, 1964), and V.D. van Aalst and Krijna Nelly Ciggaar, Byzantium and the Low Countries in the Tenth Century: Aspects of Art and History in the Ottonian Era (Hernen: A. A. Brediusstichting, 1985), and especially the following catalogue of an exhibition on Bernward, bishop of Hildesheim (ca. 960–1022) and manuscript and book illumination: Michael Brandt and Arne Eggebrecht, Bernward von Hildesheim und das Zeitalter der Ottonen: Katalog der Ausstellung, Hildesheim 1993, 2 vol. (Hildesheim: Bernward Verlag; Mainz am Rhein: von Zabern, 1993).

46 Panofsky 34.

47 Panofsky 34.

48 Scholars believe that this is evidence of doubling of the roles.

49 Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977) 101.

50 Mazzola and Abate, Introduction to Privacy, Domesticity, and Women, 1.

51 Woodbridge 206.

52 Dubrow, Shakespeare and Domestic Loss, 116.

53 Alice T. Friedman, House and Household in Elizabethan England: Wollaton Hall and the Willoughby Family (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989) 53.

54 Frideman, House and Household, 53.

55 C.T. Onions and Robert D. Eagleson, A Shakespeare Glossary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986) 298.

56 Mark Wigley, “Untitled: The Housing of Gender,” in Sexuality & Space, (ed.) Beatriz Colomina (Princeton: Princeton Papers on Architecture, 1992) 325.

57 Wigley 340.

58 The first English translation of Oeconomicus, by G. Hervet, appeared in 1532 as Xenophons treatise of householde (STC 26073). See Leo Strauss, Xenophon’s Socratic Discourse: An Interpretation of the Oeconomicus, with translation of Oeconomicus by Carnes Lord (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970; South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2004).

59 Wigley 328.

60 Xenophon, “On Hunting,” in Xenophon in Seven Volumes, 7 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, Ltd., 1984), translated by Sir John Sandys; revisions by T.K. Hubbard, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?lookup=Xen.+Hunt.+12.1, August 23, 2009. The most authoritative and popular English treatise on the subject in the period is George Gascoigne’s Noble Arte of Venerie or Hunting (London, 1576), STC 24328, which was reissued in 1611 (STC 24329).

61 Gascoigne, Noble Arte of Venerie, sig. A3v.

62 Xenophon, “On Hunting.”

63 Plutarch, http://classics.mit.edu/Plutarch/lysander.html, August 23, 2009. See Thomas North’s translation of this passage in Vol. I, p. 709: “But we are rather to think that private men’s manners are conformed according to the common uses and customs of cities, than that the faults and vices of private men do fill cities and commonweals with ill qualities.”

64 Leon Battista Alberti, Della Famiglia, trans. Renée Neu Watkins, The Family in Renaissance Florence (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1969), 3.207; quoted in Wigley 334.

65 Wigley 334. In his A Priest to the Temple or, The Country Parson His Character, &c. (1632), George Herbert prescribes fixed roles in a religious household of a generation later. He argues that a parson must be “very exact in the governing of his house, making it a copy and model for his Parish,” whose wife must be religious and she has clear responsibilities in the religious education of the children, in being a nurse capable of “curing, and healing of all wounds and sores with her own hands,” and finally, in “providing for her family in such sort, as that neither they want a competent sustentation, nor her husband is brought in debt” (p. 238). See The Works of George Herbert, (ed.) F.E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959) 238.

66 Diane Elizabeth Dreher, Domination & Defiance: Fathers and Daughters in Shakespeare (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986) 104.

67 Bachelard 17.

68 Bachelard 211.

69 Bachelard 224.

70 Sousa, Cross-cultural Encounters, 21.

71 This sentence is recast almost verbatim from Sousa, Cross-cultural Encounters, 21.

72 See Sousa, Cross-cultural Encounters, 11.

73 See Sousa, Cross-cultural Encounters, 11.

74 Sousa, Cross-cultural Encounters, 11.

75 Barbara A. Babcock, (ed.), The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 13. Of interest here also is Peter Stallybrass, “The World Turned Upside Down: Inversion, Gender and the State,” in Valerie Wayne edition, The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991) 201–20.

76 William Vaughn, in The Golden-grove, moralized in three books (London, 1600), sig. P6r, quoted in Daryl W. Palmer, Hospitable Performances: Dramatic Genre and Cultural Practices in Early Modern England (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1992) 1.

77 George Wheler, in The Protestant Monastery (1698) 173, quoted in Palmer 1.

78 Palmer 4.

79 Woodbridge, Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature, 207.

80 Ariel Swartley, “Shakespeare, and the Wilds Found Indoors,” The New York Times, 4 October, 1998, 45.

81 Henry Smith, A Preparative to Marriage (London, 1590); rpt. in Orlin, Elizabethan Households, 40. See also discussion of this matter in Comensoli 16–24.

82 Richardson 45.

83 Bullough 7: 401.

84 United States Department of the Army, U. S. Army Survival Manual (New York: Dorset Press, 1991) 8–1.

85 U.S. Army Survival Manual 8–1.

86 For an explanation of these terms and precise instructions on how to construct these improvised shelters, see U.S. Army Survival Manual 8–1. For most of these, instructions assume that you have at least a good knife with you.

87 SAS Survival Handbook 560.

88 Antônio Houaiss, Mauro de Salles Villar, and Francisco Manoel de Mello Franco, Dicionário Houaiss da Língua Portuguesa (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Objetiva Ltda., 2001).

89 Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 27.

90 Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 37.

91 Philip Butterworth, Magic on the Early English Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), offers a fascinating study of magic tricks on the early stage.

92 See Philip Butterworth, Theatre of Fire: Special Effects in Early English and Scottish Theatre (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1998).

93 S.K. Heninger, Jr. A Handbook of Renaissance Meteorology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1960; rpt. New York: Greenwood Press, 1968) 77.

94 Heninger, 81n.

95 Qtd. in Heninger, 79.

96 Heninger, 86.

97 John Mawe, Travels in the Interior of Brazil; particularly in The Gold and Diamond Districts of That Country (London, 1816) 165. See also H.S. Torrens, ‘Mawe, John (1766–1829)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

98 David M. Bergeron, “King Lear and John Hall’s Casebook,” Shakespeare Quarterly 23 (1972): 206–7.

99 Woodbridge, Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature, 212–27.

100 I am quoting from The Authorized King James Version (Iowa Falls: World Bible Publishers, n.d.). The Geneva Bible (1560) reads: “Besides all this, between you and us there is a great gulf set, so that they which would go from hence to you, can not; neither can they come from thence to us.”

101 Geremek summarizes the situation in England: “the historian E.M. Leonard distinguishes three stages in the development of social aid in England in the sixteenth century: the years from 1514 to 1568, when reforms were initiated mainly by individual cities; those from 1569 to 1597, when legislation began to play a larger role; and finally, the period after 1597, when the problem was dealt with by the Privy Council, whose decisions were handed down to local courts. … Most of these took the form of laws against vagrancy, involving punishments much more cruel and severe than those on the continent” (163–4). In Portugal, for example, lay brotherhoods (Misericórdias) were especially set up to provide aid to the poor. For a study of these brotherhoods and specific situation in Braga, Portugal, see Maria Marta Lobo de Araújo, “The Archbishops of Braga and their Assistance to the Poor in Early Modern Portugal,” Mediterranean Studies: Journal of the Mediterranean Studies Association 17 (2008): 97–117. For purposes of comparison to these administrative structures in Portugal, see Brian S. Pullan’s study of the Catholic institutions in Venice: Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice: The Social Institutions of a Catholic State, to 1620 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971).

102 Geremek 48–50.

103 Geremek 51.

104 In The Making of Jacobean Culture: James I and the Renegotiation of Elizabethan Literary Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), Curtis Perry argues that King Lear and Macbeth “take up the newly topical rhetoric of royal bounty” and deploy “gendered language” to symbolically “deconstruct” concepts of “patriarchal kingship” (148).

105 Michel de Montaigne, “Of Repentance,” in Essays, trans. Charles Cotton, http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/montaigne/montaigne-essays--2.html, August 23, 2009.

106 See, for example, Stephen Orgel’s New Pelican edition of King Lear (New York and London: Penguin, 1999).

107 Nicholas J. Wade, Perception and Illusion: Historical Perspective (New York: Springer Science+Business Media, Inc., 2005) 40.

108 Wade 7.

109 Wade 3.

110 C. Claiborne Ray, “Little Blue Lights,” New York Times, August 7, 2007, D2.

111 Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977) 88.

112 John ‘Lofty’ Wiseman, The SAS Survival Handbook: How to Survive in the Wild, in any Climate, on Land or at Sea (London: Harper Collins, 1999) 557.