King Lear, the title character of Shakespeare’s great tragedy, is, by critical consensus, a “philosopher king,”1 whose history (in the words of Harold Bloom) “transcends the limit of literature” in its approach to “the beginning and the end of human nature and destiny.”2 For both René Girard (1923-) and Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995), Shakespeare is one of the great authors whose plays convey not mythology, not intoxicating lies, but rather the riveting truth of things in an imaginative form. Levinas half playfully declares “the whole of philosophy” to be “only a meditation of Shakespeare,” whose tragedies “assume death” (TO 72). Girard has written a book about Shakespeare’s “theater of envy,”3 discovering in it the central insights of his own mimetic theory. That study of Girard’s includes no chapter on King Lear, however. Similarly, Levinas mentions King Lear on more than one occasion—without, however, ever discussing that play in any detail.4
What in particular would Girard notice, what would Levinas see, in Shakespeare’s tragedy? Reflecting on Girard and Levinas as readers of King Lear requires me to play to some degree a prophet’s part, extending the lines of their articulated thought and its recurrent themes and bringing them to bear upon what is perhaps the most Biblical of Shakespeare’s plays, despite its lack of overt allusion to the God of the Bible. Raphael Holinshed, whose Chronicles of England (1587) is Shakespeare’s chief source for the tale, dates the reign in Britain of “Leir the sonne of Baldud” to the time when “Joas reigned in Juda” (Cf. 2 Chron. 23-24)5—a Biblical and Levinasian “time of the Other,”6 of gentile and Jew, that mysteriously affects our reception of Shakespeare’s play, altering its past, present, and future.
Shakespeare seems to have entitled King Lear a “history,” not a “tragedy,” although the play is manifestly both, even as it subsumes additional genres: riddles, songs, apocalyptic oracles, the proverbial sentences of sages and of the law courts. Building upon previous scholarship, Guy Story Brown finds echoes in King Lear of thirty-one different books of the Bible—from Genesis to Revelation.7 Considering the significance of this kind of intertextuality, Nicholas Boyle has called our attention to a public disagreement in 1976 between Paul Ricœur and Levinas concerning the different literary genres of the Bible and their relationship to literature in general.8 To Ricœur’s suggestion that every Biblical text has a metaphoric quality, pointing beyond itself to a God beyond all naming and understanding,9 Levinas in his essay “Revelation in the Jewish Tradition” replies that law, not metaphor and not narrative, is fundamental to the Biblical writings, all of which can be reduced, drawn back, to commandment:10 “Prescriptive lessons … occupy a privileged place within Jewish consciousness” (LR 193).11 Significantly, Levinas’s own practice of literary criticism is most evident in his Talmudic commentaries, where he interprets the stories and sayings of the rabbis concerning the law.12 For Levinas, law is the literary kind that distinguishes the sacred scriptures from secular texts, even as it provides a criterion for identifying those great works of literature that may be understood as “secular scriptures,”13 because they somehow comment on the Bible and the Oral Law, illustrating its teaching and enforcing its commands through example.
Girard may be said to have reached the same conclusion. In Girard’s anthropology, as in his literary criticism, “the function of the law,” of “prohibition,” is to ward off the dangers connected with mimetic behavior.14 “Shakespeare and Cervantes … place acquisitive mimesis in the foreground,” writes Girard, teaching us through their fictions, which repeatedly show “tragic conflicts [arising] out of [seemingly] trivial events,” that “there is no prohibition that cannot be related to mimetic conflict.”15 For Girard, the mimetic quality of art and its instructive value are inseparable from the law, divine and human, and its demands and judgments. For this reason, according to Girard, Plato’s Republic envisions the restriction of the poets and playwrights by law, the philosopher rightly seeing in mimesis “both a force of cohesion and a force of dissolution.”16
In the opening scene of King Lear, then, Cordelia’s famous answer to her father that she loves him “according to [her] bond” (1.1.93) invokes a common keyword in the vocabularies of Girard and Levinas,17 albeit a keyword heard with different accents. To the ear of Levinas, the “bond” of a daughter’s love resonates with commandment, with obligation, with bondage, with each one’s inescapable and infinite responsibility for the Other. In the hearing of Girard, the word “bond” also names commandment and the irreducible relationality of humans as mimetic beings, created in the image and likeness of God (Cf. Gen. 1:26). Whereas Levinas focuses on the command “Thou shalt not kill” (Ex. 20:13), however, finding it written on every human face (EI 87), Girard more characteristically highlights the prohibitions against coveting “anything that is your neighbor’s” (Ex. 20:17). According to Girard, “The commandment that prohibits desiring the goods of one’s neighbor attempts to solve the number one problem of every human community: internal violence.”18 The “bond” of the law forestalls the inter-personal tragedies that predictably result, in Girard’s view, from being “‘to double-business bound,’”19 enslaved to the mimetic desire of another.
In my hypothetical construction of their respective readings of King Lear, these different emphases lead Girard and Levinas to complementary critical axiologies. Girard, on the one hand, would place into the foreground the horizontal axis, the strife between the siblings in the play, whose mimetic desire turns them into doubles of one another—a lack of differentiation that precipitates the drama’s escalating violence. Levinas, on the other hand, predictably foregrounds in his reading of King Lear the vertical axis of the Other’s transcendence, the bonds of filial and fatherly piety that characterize especially the relationships between Lear and Cordelia, Lear and Kent, Lear and Lear’s Fool, and Gloucester and Edgar. These horizontal and vertical axes converge, I argue, at the center of the play, where Girard’s scapegoated outcast meets Levinas’s needy orphan in the nakedness of those exposed to the storm on the heath. This convergence fashions an apocalypticism in Edgar, disguised first as a beggar and then as a helmeted warrior in a legally sanctioned trial by ordeal with his brother. At the play’s conclusion, commandment itself stands revealed as a two-edged sword (Heb. 4:12). Whereas Levinas’s ethics seeks to ground a politics,20 Girard’s politics works to prove the necessity of such an ethics.
The Genesis of Time and Tragedy
The brief, opening conversation between Kent, Gloucester, and Gloucester’s illegitimate son Edmund informs us of King Lear’s intended “division of the kingdom” and of the “equalities” of the sons-in-law, Albany and Cornwall, who, together with their respective wives, Goneril and Regan, vie for the king’s regard (1.1.4-5). This exchange also introduces us to Edmund, who, as Gloucester’s younger, bastard son, is the brother of Edgar, “a son by order of law, some year elder than [Edmund], who yet is no dearer” to his father (1.1.18-19). The double plot of the play, which interweaves the familial strife in the house of Gloucester with that in the house of Lear, is thus economically intimated.
While his legitimate birth and his age secure Edgar’s legal right of inheritance and initially preserve him from any cause for rivalry, Edmund’s lesser status provokes him to an acquisitive desire for what his brother is bound to possess: “Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land” (1.2.16). “Acquisitive mimesis is contagious,” according to Girard.21 In order to achieve his innocent brother’s banishment, Edmund composes a letter, in which Edgar supposedly invites him to join him in a plot to kill their father and share the inheritance: “If our father would sleep till I waked him, you should enjoy half his revenue for ever and live the beloved of your brother” (1.2.51-53). Edmund discloses this fabricated letter to Gloucester, “a credulous father” (1.2.172), whom he persuades to believe in Edgar’s guilt. Edmund then temporarily allies himself with his father against his brother, who flees into hiding, disinherited, a death-warrant upon his head.
Girard’s reading of King Lear would focus on this fraternal strife, which first manifests itself in an acquisitive desire for land—an envy that adumbrates a deeper metaphysical desire on Edmund’s part for the very substance of his brother’s life, which is held to be “noble” by law and convention (1.2.172), while his own is denigrated as “bastard” and “base” (1.2.6). As Edmund explains in soliloquy, his resentment is fueled by his sense that Edgar’s legal and social preferment is completely arbitrary, because he is equal to his brother in the natural endowments of mind and body. “In a universe of peers,” Girard observes, “the feeble are prey to metaphysical desire.”22 As the veritable double of Edgar, Edmund endeavors to substitute for him as his father’s heir and successor, overriding the law of primogeniture that, in Girard’s analysis, has its purpose precisely in prohibiting mimetic desire and its attendant violence.
In the play’s parallel plot, the initiative to trouble the first-born child’s right of succession comes not directly from the younger siblings, but from the father who, as king, decides to divide his kingdom into three portions, one for each of his daughters, whom he would endow with their inheritance while he still lives. Paul W. Kahn summarizes the legal and ethical violations that are involved: “The kingdom is denied the unitary king that it needs if it is to avoid civil war. The eldest child is not getting the whole that she deserves by law. Finally, Lear is being unjust to himself as king. By denying himself the power to rule, he undermines the kingship.”23
Desiring the desire of his children and craving their love in return, Lear foolishly promotes their mimetic rivalry with each other through a ritualized trial, in which each is asked to respond to the same question: “Tell me, my daughters, / … / Which of you shall we say doth love us most” (1.1.48, 51). Predictably, Goneril, the eldest, declares her love in superlatives. Regan, the second oldest, insists that she is “made / Of that self-same mettle as [her] sister” (1.1.69). As Kahn observes, Lear himself is assimilated to these two daughters, later calling himself “Goneril with a white beard” (4.6.96): “Goneril and Lear were a matched pair: she would say what he would hear.”24 Lear ruefully recalls, “They flattered me like a dog,.… to say ‘ay’ and ‘no’ to everything I said!” (4.6.98-99).
In a Girardian reading, this mimeticism, which dissolves the distinction between father and daughter, king and subject, ruler and ruled, veils a violent potential that suddenly realizes itself in a scapegoating when Cordelia, the youngest daughter, withdraws from the game that Lear has devised. Maintaining her difference from her sisters and her filial distance from the father she honors and loves, she answers “Nothing, my lord,” to his question: “What can you say to draw / A third more opulent than your sisters?” (1.1.85-87). Standing one against the all, Cordelia resists the idea that an inheritance can be won, that a father’s gift be earned in a rhetorical contest among siblings, that a kingdom be divided. The favored object of her father’s special affection, Cordelia has been the envy of her sisters: “He always loved our sister most” (1.1.289-290). Now, in a burst of anger that he lives to regret, Lear disowns the true-hearted Cordelia, parts her inheritance between her older sisters, and banishes both her and Kent, who dares to protest the king’s decision as “evil” (1.1.165).
Complementing Girard’s interest in the echoic answers of Goneril and Regan to their father’s question, Levinas would focus on Cordelia’s plain-spoken reply and its keyword, “nothing.” “Nothing can come of nothing,” Lear rebukes her, urging her to “speak again” (1.1.89). Later, Lear spurns the Fool’s proverbial wisdom, calling it “nothing” (1.4.122). The Fool, who has spoken the wise sentences of “an unfee’d lawyer” (1.4.123), asks Lear, “Can you make no use of nothing, nuncle?” (1.4.124-125). Again Lear replies, as he did earlier to Cordelia, “Nothing can be made of nothing” (1.4.126). Shortly thereafter, the Fool tells the disempowered Lear, “Now thou art an 0 without a figure.… Thou art nothing” (1.4.183-185). Edgar will say of himself, “Edgar I nothing am” (2.3.21).
Contra Harold Bloom, who discovers in these words a pagan nihilism that mocks “the Christian doctrine of creation out of nothing,”25 Levinas would understand King Lear’s reminiscence of Genesis, chapter 1, in a positive, Judaic sense. In Totality and Infinity, he writes: “The absolute gap of separation which transcendence implies could not be better expressed than by the term creation, in which the kinship of beings among themselves is affirmed, but at the same time their radical heterogeneity also, their reciprocal exteriority coming from nothingness” (TI 293). For Levinas, the concept of God as the Good beyond Being makes possible the ethical appropriation of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo and thus also, as Clair Katz has shown, its reconciliation with rabbinic commentaries on Genesis 1.26 “Creation ex nihilo expresses a multiplicity not united into a totality … Creation ex nihilo breaks with system,” writes Levinas, adding, “Accomplished as psychism, it precisely opens upon the idea of Infinity,” which “comes to us from separation and from the consideration of the Other” (TI 104-105).
Levinas would note that the characters in Shakespeare’s play who recognize their own nothingness, their status as creatures, are precisely the ones who possess a positive power of love that is not based on personal need, craving, or lack. Cordelia loves simply as a daughter, without seeking a reward; the Fool loves; Edgar loves; Kent loves; Lear and Gloucester in their wretchedness come to love more wisely. Loving her father and her king “according to [her] bond” (1.1.93), Cordelia is a Levinasian heroine who understands her existence to be an a priori, passive relatedness to an Other, radically exterior to herself, to whom she is already obligated, for whom she is already responsible. Cordelia’s inability to express her love in words—“I cannot heave / My heart into my mouth” (1.1.91-92)—marks her, in Levinas’s terms, as a subject upon whom “the ascendancy of the other is exercised … to the point of interrupting it, leaving it speechless” (OB 101). Levinas dares to call this ethically demanding ascendancy a “persecution” (OB 101). Girard would add that Cordelia, unable to defend herself in Lear’s court, is literally persecuted, outcast by her father, who, at the start of the tragedy, is the opposite of a Levinasian hero. Lear abnegates his responsibilities as ruler. Rather than living out his fatherhood and its demands, Lear willfully breaks his bond of relatedness and proximity (were that possible) to his youngest daughter: “Here I disclaim all my paternal care, / Propinquity and property of blood, / And as a stranger to my heart and me / Hold thee from this forever” (1.1.113-116).
The Exodus into the Heath
The expulsions of Cordelia, of Kent, and of Edgar as accused traitors are all, in Girardian terms, instances of “Satan casting out Satan” (Cf. Mark 3:23-26) in order to preserve temporarily the existence of communities whose members will soon fall again into division: “The violent outcome of scandal, the violent expulsion of scapegoats, works for a while.”27 Reading King Lear, Girard would note the temporary character of the alliances forged in the first Act—alliances based on an opposition to a single figure, misrecognized as a monstrous enemy. In the first wave of expulsions, King Lear stands with his two eldest daughters, Gloucester with Edmund. These father figures soon become, in turn, the victims of scapegoating.
Lear, who has dispossessed himself of royal power, retaining only the title of a king and the company of a hundred soldiers, plans to alternate his place of residency monthly, staying first with Goneril and Albany, then with Regan and Cornwall. Finding the maintenance of the hundred to be burdensome, Goneril demands a reduction of that force to fifty, whereupon Lear, offended, betakes himself to his second daughter, who similarly refuses to accommodate him. Whereas the two sisters matched each other earlier in declarations of love for Lear, now they unite with each other against him and his desires. As Goneril puts it, “[Regan’s] mind and mine … in that are one, / Not to be overruled” (1.3.15-16). Once honored as a father and king, Lear is now treated by them as a child: “Old men are babes again, and must be used / With checks as flatteries, when they are seen abused” (1.3.19-20).
The sisters’ mimetic desire to be rid of nuisance leads them to imitate each other in humiliating Lear. As Goneril has demanded a reduction of the king’s men to fifty, Regan would cut even that number in half (2.4.243). As Lear’s protests grow, the sisters reach an agreement that neither will allow the king any men at all. When he flees, angry, into the storm, Regan commands Gloucester, at whose house this scene has played out, “Shut up your doors” (2.4.299).
Once an unwise Solomon, who divided his kingdom and his children (cf. 1 Kgs. 3:16-28), now Lear appears on stage as another Job, nakedly exposed to the elements, bereft of all that he has too foolishly given away to his ungrateful daughters. Critics commonly compare Lear to Job,28 because the king tries to steady himself with exhortations to patience, the virtue most associated—somewhat strange to say—with Job in his suffering. Lear cries out, “You heavens, give me that patience, patience I need” (2.4.266). Sitting on the ground in the violent downpour of rain, Lear tells himself, “I will be the pattern of all patience. I will say nothing” (3.2.37-38). In the hut, he rails against Goneril, only to be calmed by Kent in his disguise: “Sir, where is the patience now, / That you so oft have boasted to retain?” (3.6.57-58). Later, recognizing the blinded Gloucester, Lear echoes the Book of Wisdom 7:1-6: “Thou must be patient. We came crying hither; / Thou know’st, the first time that we smell the air / We wawl and cry. I will preach to thee” (4.6.175-177).
What Girard in his book, Job, The Victim of His People, adds to the commonplace critical recognition of a Joban Lear is that the Biblical figure is himself Lear-like, the victim not just of natural catastrophes, permitted by God, but also of human scapegoating aroused by envy.29 In Girard’s reading of Job, Job is a king, a deposed ruler, set aside and afflicted, blamed as guilty because he has been punished by the crowd.30 Even as the Biblical Job insists upon his innocence, Shakespeare’s Lear declares, “I am a man / More sinned against than sinning” (3.2.59-60). As Gloucester reports to Kent, the same daughters who have ungratefully cast out the king, their father, are actively plotting Lear’s death (3.6.88).
Caught at night in the terrible storm on the heath, Lear starts his descent into madness, running “unbonneted” in the wind and rain (3.1.14). “Bare-headed” (3.2.60), Lear’s “wits,” by his own acknowledgement and Kent’s witness, “begin to turn” (3.2.68) and to “unsettle” (3.4.153). Burdened with an “unnatural and bemadding sorrow” (3.1.38), Lear competes with his Fool in speaking nonsense. Thinking of his ungrateful daughters, who have turned him out, Lear tries to suppress his thoughts: “O, that way madness lies” (3.4.21). His very self determined by his past folly, his future, in the extended form of his children, cut off through their cruelty and his curse, Lear is thrown back upon himself, with literally nowhere to go. What remains is only the “shadow” of himself (1.4.221). “Lethargized,” Lear stumbles, in a state between sleep and waking, unable to recognize himself: “Does any here know me? … Who is it that can tell me who I am?” (1.4.219, 216, 220).
Levinas would surely see in Lear’s drama an experience of the il y a, the “there is,” that chains each one to his or her past and to one’s very self: “I always carry along my past whose every instant is definitive … I am forever stuck with myself”(EE 85). What Levinas says about the “theatre of Racine” applies to that of Shakespeare: “The hero is overwhelmed by himself. Therein lies what is tragic in him: a subject is on the basis of himself, and is already with or against himself” (EE 89). Writing poetically in Existence and Existents, Levinas imagines the “there is”—the sheer fact of the generalized existence in which one participates—as a night, a silence, a horror, “full of the nothingness of everything,” in which “nothing approaches, nothing comes, nothing threatens”(EE 53). Referring specifically to Shakespeare’s Macbeth and to his Hamlet, Levinas finds “the final depths of Shakespearean tragedy” not in the “danger of death,” but in “the return of presence in absence” (EE 56-57), the perceived inability to escape one’s self, even after one has somehow died.
For Levinas, hope is not properly to be found in one’s self, but in the Other who summons one in the present moment to service: “The self is a sub-jectum; it is under the weight of the universe, responsible for everything” (OB 116). The self is precisely the one who is subjected to the Other, who responds with a “Here I am” to the Other’s need for food, shelter, clothing (OB 145-146). Portraying King Lear in his affliction, Shakespeare effectively captures this paradoxical combination of royalty and neediness: “The transcendence of the Other, which is his eminence, his height, his lordship, in its concrete meaning includes his destitution, his exile [dépaysement], and his rights as a stranger” (TI 76-77). The sight of Lear in this condition commands Gloucester’s decision to side with the king against Regan and Cornwall.
In the great third Act of King Lear, this same afflicted king is himself summoned to responsibility through his encounter with the fugitive Edgar, a veritable orphan, shivering in the cold in his disguise as Poor Tom, a Bedlam beggar. Feeling “what wretches feel” as a “physic” for pride, the king regrets his former indifference to the “poor naked wretches” who “bide the pelting of this pitiless storm” (3.4.33-34, 28-29). He imagines that Poor Tom must have suffered something akin to his own sorrow. Face to face with the beggar, Lear, “a poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man” (3.2.20), returns to the awareness of his own humanity: “Thou art the thing itself; unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art” (3.4.101-102). As Lear in his madness starts to strip himself naked, he enacts what Paul Kahn calls a “recovery of Eden,” a witness to the common suffering of human beings and to the universal need for forgiveness.31 Edgar, in turn, pities Lear, who reminds him of his own father, and identifies with Lear in his loss, albeit through a Levinasian alterity: “He childed as I fathered” (3.6.108). “He has had a child (or children), as I have had a father”—Shakespeare’s most eloquent expression of Levinas’s heteronomous ethics.
Edgar in hiding, like Cordelia in her exile, is a scapegoat. Just as Lear succeeds his innocent daughter in the place of the victim, so too, in a Girardian escalation of violence, Gloucester follows Edgar. Taking the side of the victim-king, Gloucester becomes the victim, in turn, of Lear’s enemies, Regan and Cornwall, and of his own son Edmund, who betrays him in order to supplant him.
The cruel blinding of the old man Gloucester in his own house, by his guests, is one of the most horrific scenes in English drama. It leaves a servant dead on the stage, Cornwall mortally wounded, and Gloucester “all dark and comfortless” (3.7.85), aware of Edmund’s treachery and of his own misguided abuse of the falsely accused Edgar. An emblem of his blindness in misjudging Edgar, Gloucester’s bleeding eye-sockets double for those of Lear, whose “poor old eyes” Regan had threatened to “pluck out” (3.7.57). Lear too, of course, has been blind, lacking in self-knowledge and foresight, errant in his exiling of Cordelia and Kent. Already in the first scene, Kent pleads with the king: “See better, Lear, and let me remain / The true blank of thine eyes” (1.1.158-159). Later, Lear himself wonders about Lear, “Where are his eyes?” (1.4.217).
Even in his madness, Lear can recognize the blinded Gloucester, his true servant, and the mirror of his own misery: “If thou wilt weep my fortune, take my eyes. / I know thee well enough: thy name is Gloucester” (4.6.173-174). Earlier, Lear recognizes the disguised Kent’s worth as a servant, even if he fails consciously to see him as Kent, the friend he has banished. For his part, Gloucester thinks of his son Edgar, without knowing why, when he sees him in disguise as Poor Tom in the hut on the heath: “In last night’s storm I such a fellow saw, / Which made me think a man a worm. My son / Came then into my mind, and yet my mind / Was then scarce friends with him” (4.1.32-35; cf. 3.4.157-160). Later, newly cognizant of Edgar’s innocence, Gloucester longs for contact with his “dear son Edgar,” whom he addresses in an apostrophe within Edgar’s actual hearing: “Might I but live to see thee in my touch / I’d say I had eyes again” (4.1.21-23). Taking the hand of the disguised Edgar, who is to be his guide to Dover, Gloucester orders the beggar to be clothed—an action whereby he restores Edgar symbolically to his sonship as rightful heir. Even in his confusion and eyeless despair, Gloucester half-recognizes the disguised Edgar for who he is. His last word before he falls forward, off the imagined cliff, is a prayer of blessing for Edgar: “If Edgar live, O bless him!” (4.6.40).
Girard would see in these positive misrecognitions of friends a gradual righting of the méconnaissance that distorted Lear’s view of Cordelia, scapegoated in the opening scene of the play, and that led a credulous Gloucester too suddenly to charge the innocent Edgar with a murderous intent.32 Half-recognized in their disguise, Kent and Edgar can be welcomed back from their banishment, restored to their former status. As Paul Kahn puts it, “A well-dressed Tom is not Tom at all,” but Edgar, restored to his father’s favor, brought “back into the political life of the state.”33
Neither Kent nor Edgar are fully recognized, however, until the end of the play, their “delay of revelation” corresponding to a “parallel delay of recognition” by Lear and Gloucester,34 whose physical blindness, inflicted upon him by Cornwall, is the very image of a Girardian méconnaissance. A critical consensus regards Lear and Gloucester alike as versions of the legendary Oedipus, who blinded himself after having unwittingly killed his father, married his mother, and brought the plague to Thebes. Reading Oedipus through the lens of Shakespeare’s King Lear, Girard has repeatedly called into question Oedipus’s actual guilt, portraying him instead as a likely scapegoat, a club-footed victim singled out by the community for blame and expulsion at a time of crisis.35 Following Girard’s lead, Sandor Goodhart has argued that Sophocles in Oedipus Rex leaves open the significant possibility of Oedipus’s innocence.36 In the world of King Lear, the victims are not completely blameless—even Cordelia and Edgar become contaminated in the end by the strife that engulfs them—but they are undeserving of the punishments meted out to them.
Indeed, the language of monstrosity is so recurrent in the play, attaching itself to virtually every character in turn, that the contagious mounting of violence seems inevitable. Measured by Lear’s sudden rage in the first scene against his most beloved daughter, Cordelia’s “offence / Must be of such unnatural degree,” France conjectures, “That monsters it” (1.1.218-220)—a thing he finds impossible to believe. Gloucester objects that Edgar “cannot be such a monster” (1.2.92), but he gives credence to Edmund’s charges, calling Edgar an “unnatural, detested, brutish villain” (1.2.75-76). Albany calls Lear’s two eldest “Tigers, not daughters” (4.2.40) and likens them to the fiend, exhorting his wife, “Bemonster not thy feature” (4.2.63). To Kent, who insults him, Oswald replies, “What a monstrous fellow art thou” (2.2.23). In Girardian terms, “the proliferation of monsters” marks “the collective experience of the monstrous double”—an experience that leads “to the polarization of violence onto a single victim who substitutes for all the others.”37
In the last two Acts of the play, mimetic desire works to turn even the two sisters, Goneril and Regan, against each other in their acquisitive desire for Edmund, now earl of Gloucester. “To both these sisters have I sworn my love; / Each jealous of the other, as the stung / Are of the adder,” confesses Edmund in soliloquy (5.1.55-56). This last lovers’ triangle within the series of interlocking triangles discerned by a Girardian reading of the play is inseparable from the political violence that overwhelms the kingdom as a whole. The temporary unity of the native forces led by Albany and Edmund against Cordelia’s invading army cannot long survive its victory over France, because that very unity is already contaminated by the seeds of an internal strife. Edmund will die in his duel with Edgar, who also represents Albany’s interests. What began in the elder sisters’ envy of Cordelia ends in their jealousy of one another, and in the deaths of all three. Regan dies by Goneril’s poison, Goneril at her own hand, Cordelia at Edmund’s order.
Cordelia’s Passion, Lear’s Akedah, Edgar’s Apocalypse
Located dramatically within a pagan world, Shakespeare’s Cordelia nevertheless appears before a Christian audience as a Christ-figure, similar to Jesus in her Father-centered piety, in her love and forgiveness of Lear, in her healing of him in his mental derangement, and in her explicitly stated intention to be “about [her] father’s business” (4.4.23-24; cf. Lk. 2:49), an intention that prompts her Messianic return to England at the head of the French army. Cordelia resembles Christ, too, as an innocent, falsely accused of treason, and killed. In the Shakespearean tableau of the grieving father holding his daughter’s dead body, more than one critic has seen a version of the pietà, the familiar depiction in sculpture, painting, and drama of Mary in her maternal grief, supporting on her lap the body of her crucified son.38
When Lear carries her dead body on stage in the final scene—a stage already bearing the corpses of his other two daughters, Goneril and Regan—the old father, broken-hearted and soon to die himself, is frantic to see some sign that Cordelia still breathes, still lives, or lives again: “Lend me a looking-glass. / If that her breath will mist or stain the stone … This feather stirs. She lives! If this be so.…” (5.3.262-263, 266). In this death-defying faith, Lear has been compared to Abraham in his offering of Isaac in Genesis 22.39 In the face of her certain death (“She’s dead as earth” (5.3.262), Lear yet seems both to hear (“What is’t thou say’st?—Her voice was ever soft” (5.3.272)) and to see (“Look her lips, / Look there, look there” (5.3.311-312)) a Cordelia brought back to life, perhaps in another realm: “Cordelia, Cordelia, stay a little” (5.3.272).
Cordelia does not, however, breathe. Or does she? Levinas would invoke the classical proverb “Spiro / Spero,” “I breathe, I hope” (TO 73),40 to show that more than one person’s hope rests upon an Other’s breath, the breathing of a child, the very alterity of a parent’s existence. Ambiguous are Lear’s last words and gestures: his request, for example, that someone help him to “undo this button” (5.3.310), whether his own or Cordelia’s, and his apostrophe to a “heart” (5.3.313), addressed at once literally to his own breaking heart and to his heart’s beloved, Cordelia. This ambiguity affirms Levinas’s insight, citing Shakespeare’s Macbeth, that hope is coterminous with life itself: “Prior to death there is always a last chance … In the present, there is hope,” a hope that “is in the very margin that is given, at the moment of death, to the subject who is going to die” (TO 73). Because Lear’s love for Cordelia is “strong as death,”41 identical with the responsibility that constitutes his very self as relational, Lear’s hope for her remains alive in him, as long as he himself lives.
Christian tradition names Abraham’s offering of Isaac and Christ’s self-offering “sacrifices,” but it characterizes them both as profoundly anti-sacrificial—Abraham’s raised knife put down in response to an angel’s call (Gen. 22:11), Christ’s death as the “Lamb of God” (Jn. 2:35) ending in a Passover of resurrection announced by angels (Mt. 28:5; Mk. 16:5, Lk. 24:4, 23). Girard reads both the Passion accounts of the Gospels and Genesis 22 (the latter admittedly in a more complicated way) as anti-sacrificial in their prophetic concern for the innocent victim, in their affirmation of the value of human life, in their revelation of the scapegoat mechanism.42 In King Lear, Shakespeare uses the word “sacrifices” only once, placing them upon the lips of Lear, just before he and Cordelia are led off to the prison where, according to Edmund’s secret orders, they are to be executed (5.3.27-37). Arrested as “God’s spies” (5.3.17), the old king and his youngest daughter can expect no better fate from a violent world united against them. “Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia,” Lear declares, “the gods themselves throw incense” (5.3.20-21).
Setting the word “God’s” (singular, capitalized, possessive in case) against the word “gods” (plural, lower-case, nominative), Shakespeare introduces a monotheism into the play that distinguishes between the anti-sacrificial, anti-idolatrous religiosity of Lear and Cordelia, on the one hand, and the sacrificial cult of their enemies, swept up in a current of mimetic contagion. Consoling Cordelia, Lear imagines their living together, even in prison, in a kingdom of mutual love, forgiveness, blessing, and prayer; singing “like birds i’th’cage” (5.3.9) of the eternal things that outlast the mutable “packs and sects of great ones / That ebb and flow by th’ moon” (5.3.18-19).
Neither Lear nor Cordelia completely escape the contagious effect of mimesis, however. Initially very susceptible to its influence, Lear at the end of the play has become relatively immunized against its effects, but only at the cost of a mad withdrawal from the world, a madness from which the compassionate Cordelia alone can recall him. Lear kills the man who hangs her. Cordelia, for her part, wages a reluctant war against her sisters for her father’s sake, risking the scandal involved in a foreign invasion—she who at the start of the play refuses even to compete with them in a contest of words. As she tells Lear, “For thee, oppressed king, I am cast down” (5.3.5). In her last speech on stage, expecting the worst, Cordelia urges a confrontation with Goneril and Regan: “Shall we not see these daughters and these sisters?” (5.3.7).
Edgar is arguably the guiltiest, the most contaminated, of the innocents. Disguised as Poor Tom, Edgar feigns a madness to match Lear’s genuine insanity, withholding his true identity from the king and from his father, even after Gloucester has become convinced of his innocence. In this disguise, Edgar purposely deceives the blinded Gloucester, whom “Poor Tom” aids in his attempted suicide, leading him (as Gloucester supposes) to the cliffs of Dover. Edgar kills Oswald, who tries to murder Gloucester. He then repeats the action of Edmund, early in the play, in disclosing to Albany a treasonous letter, this one sent from Goneril to Edmund. When Edgar does reveal himself to his father, Gloucester dies “smilingly” at that revelation (5.3.200). Finally, disguised in armor, Edgar mortally wounds his brother Edmund in an ordeal by combat, thus proving against him a monstrous charge: “Thou art a traitor, / False to thy gods, thy brother, and thy father, / Conspirant ‘gainst this high illustrious prince” [Albany] (5.3.134-136).
When Edgar tells a dying Edmund, “I am no less in blood than thou art” (3.3.168), the words have a double meaning that refers both to their equal rank and to their common share in blood-guilt and need for forgiveness: “Let’s exchange charity” (5.3.167). Critics stumble over the ethical questions that surround and motivate Edgar’s actions—all the more so because those actions bear gracious fruit.43 Gloucester’s suicide-wish is purged, his will to patient endurance restored, after he survives his imagined fall from the cliff. The once envious Edmund forgives his brother and performs a final “good” (3.3.244), after hearing Edgar speak of their father’s sufferings. The kingdom is restored to unity, moreover, under Edgar’s rule—a rule he assumes, at Lear’s death and at the expressed wishes of Albany and Kent, as a burden of responsibility, not as something he had ever desired. Indeed, the self-revelation of Edgar marks the end of the apocalyptic disturbances foretold by Gloucester and evident throughout the tragedy: “Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide; in cities mutinies, in countries discords, palaces treason, the bond cracked between father and son” (1.2.104-107).
Reading King Lear in the company of both Girard and Levinas, one recognizes in Edgar, both at the heath and at the cliffs of Dover, a figure in whom the horizontal axis of mimetic contagion meets the vertical axis of an ethical transcendence. In the hut in the heath, the fugitive Edgar is an outcast like Lear, but Edgar’s is no true madness, nor is the beggar’s part appropriately his. As a result, Edgar in disguise as Poor Tom can command the pity of the king and of his father, even as he must place himself, ethically, into their service in the face of their genuine need. In the heath, Poor Tom ministers to the mad Lear, as much as the king, in turn, pities his comrade in misery. On the way to Dover, Edgar leads his blind father by the hand, supposedly to the very cliff from which he would throw himself down to end his life.
As an apparent abettor to his father’s suicide, Edgar plays the part, as he acknowledges, of a fiend, talking crazily of fiends. When Edgar tells the still-living Gloucester that “It was some fiend” (4.6.72) who had led him to his almost certain destruction, his father replies, “That thing you speak of, / I took it for a man” (4.6.77-78). The confusion of human and devil recalls the Girardian Satan, that accuser in thought and word, who, having infected a mob with his lies, destroys one victim after another: “Satan is the name for the mimetic process as a whole.”44
At the same time, however, Edgar is, in reality, an angel to Gloucester of a divine providence and protection. Staging Gloucester’s survival from his fall, Edgar teaches his father: “Thy life’s a miracle” (5.6.55). Leading Gloucester not to the edge of a cliff (as he has requested) but to a level spot, described as a dizzying height, Edgar allows his father’s short, blind fall in order to save him from a greater one. In an aside to the audience Edgar reveals his motive: “Why I do trifle thus with his despair / Is done to cure it” (4.6.33-34). The risk Edgar runs is great, however, as he admits, because Gloucester’s death-wish may work by its own suggestion to effect the end it desires: “I know not how conceit may rob / The treasury of life” (4.6.42-43). The would-be angel may fall with Gloucester to become a fiend indeed, should his father die.
In Levinasian terms, the cliff of Dover and Edgar’s saving action there on behalf of his father symbolize the greatest height and depth of ethical transcendence. Knowing himself to be “the most guilty of all” (a phrase from Dostoyevski that Levinas loves to quote (TO 108)), Edgar, the just man, the most obligated, bears a responsibility for his beloved father that goes so far as to be responsible for his father’s death, not only for his life. “The face as the very mortality of the other person,” writes Levinas, implicates the Ego “without his intentional guilt” (TO 107). As the one-time victim of Gloucester’s banishment, Edgar is now an inadvertent cause of Gloucester’s self-accusation and death-wish. “Called to answer for this death”—the death of a “unique one,” a “loved one”—Edgar rescues his despairing father (TO 107-108), whose face still bleeds, by taking upon himself a share in the guilt of an attempted suicide.
As the great figure in disguise until the very end, and thus the self-referential sign of the theatre itself, Edgar possesses an apocalyptic quality in King Lear that makes him the agent of purgation and cure, of life and death, of pity and fear, of endings and beginnings. Edgar is, in Girardian terms, a pharmakos, albeit one conscious of his own healing agency as such, having survived his own banishment and returned alive from it.45 For Levinas, too, Edgar is an apocalypse, a revelation. This is so, however, not because Edgar sheds his disguises to disclose his hidden identity and to describe what has occurred off-stage. Rather, Edgar stands as a revelation of God, of the Infinite, through his very status as a witness, at once guilty and responsible: “The subject who says ‘Here I am!’ testifies to the Infinite” (EI 106). Echoing the words of the Biblical patriarchs and prophets, Edgar’s double, Edmund, acknowledges his liability to punishment, saying, “The wheel has come full circled. I am here” (5.3.175). Forgiving his still-helmeted killer, Edmund invites his brother’s self-disclosure: “My name is Edgar, and thy father’s son” (5.3.170).
Conclusion
Edgar’s closing speech, “The weight of this sad time we must obey” (5.3.324), returns us to the theme of commandment with which we began. For Girard, the kingdom reestablished at the end of King Lear is, like every earthly city after Cain (cf. Gen. 4:17), founded upon a fratricide, the strife of siblings divided by mimetic desire. Its survival depends upon the keeping of laws aimed at controlling the propensity toward covetousness that first sparks such division. Levinas, for his part, urges the possibility of a politics that takes as its starting point an ethical demand ordered toward an Other, a neighbor, in his or her transcendence: “Thou shalt not kill” (Ex. 20:13). Closely related to these revealed prohibitions against envy and murder, Shakespeare himself might propose yet other commandments: the prohibition against adultery (Ex. 20:14), for example, that seeks to avoid a competition between legitimate and illegitimate offspring and strife between spouses. Sovereign, too, over all the relationships of the play is the bond that initially restrained Cordelia’s tongue, even in opposition to her father’s unwise wish that she speak: “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land which the Lord your God gives you” (Ex. 20:12). “What shall Cordelia speak?” she asks herself, answering, “Love and be silent” (1.1.63).
An effort to keep the first and greatest of the commandments, the law of anti-idolatry (Ex. 20:1-4), led an anxious Protestant parliament in England, shortly before the first performance of King Lear on December 26, 1606, to ban the word “God” as blasphemy from theatrical productions, but to permit the word “gods” as what Alfred Harbage terms “mere classical allusion.”46 In the ostensible absence of Judaism and Christianity alike, the stark world of King Lear, infused with Biblical echoes, nonetheless teaches what is for Girard and Levinas alike revealed truth, the truth of commandment, the “ethical kerygma” to which all are held accountable” (LR 207).47
Notes
1 Guy Story Brown, Shakespeare’s Philosopher King: Reading “The Tragedy of King Lear” (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 2010).
2 Harold Bloom, Shakespeare’s King Lear (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005), 3.
3 René Girard, A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
4 In an interview with Philippe Nemo, for example, Levinas recommends reading “between the Bible and the philosophers, the Russian classics … and also the great writers of Western Europe, notably Shakespeare, much admired in Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear.” See Emmanuel Levinas, EI, translated by Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 22. Speaking similarly to Françoise Armengaud, Levinas lists King Lear among the great “dramas of the human condition,” concerned with “the meaning of life, … perhaps, with the meaning of being.” See Emmanuel Levinas, In the Time of the Nations, translated by Michael B. Smith (New York: Continuum, 2007), 152.
5 For the complete text of the Chronicles, see http://www.english.ox.ac.uk/holinshed.
6 I play here with the titles of two of Levinas’s books, Time and the Other and In the Time of the Nations, cited in notes 3 and 5 above.
7 Brown, Shakespeare’s Philosopher King, 373.
8 Nicholas Boyle, Sacred and Secular Scriptures: A Catholic Approach to Literature (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 77-78.
9 Ibid., 114-115, 80.
10 Ibid., 78.
11 Emmanuel Levinas, “Revelation in the Jewish Tradition,” translated by Sarah Richmond, in LR, edited by Seán Hand (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989, repr. 2002), 190-210, at 193.
12 See Emmanuel Levinas, NT, translated by Annette Aronowicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Ann W. Astell and J. A. Jackson, eds., Levinas and Medieval Literature: The “Difficult Reading” of English and Rabbinic Texts (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2009).
13 Before the publication of Nicholas Boyle’s Sacred and Secular Scriptures, Northrop Frye’s influential studies, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1978) and The Great Code: The Bible and Literature, edited by Alvin A. Lee (1981; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006) had appeared in print.
14 René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World [1978, Des Choses caches despuis la foundation du monde], translated by Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 10.
15 Ibid., 16.
16 Ibid., 17.
17 William Shakespeare, King Lear, in The Complete Works, edited by Alfred Harbage (New York: The Viking Press, 1969, repr. 1977). Unless otherwise indicated, I use this edition throughout, citing parenthetically by Act, scene, and line numbers.
18 René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, translated by James G. Williams (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis, 2001), 9.
19 The phrase is a quote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet (III.iii.41), used by King Claudius in the soliloquy, overheard by Hamlet, in which he admits having killed his brother, Hamlet’s father. To play with the words bond/bound, I recall the title of a book by René Girard, “To Double Business Bound”: Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). The notion of the “double bind” also appears in Gregory Bateson’s theory of schizophrenia. Girard argues that “the principle of the double bind” can be applied “to the whole process of mimetic appropriation.” See Girard, Things Hidden, 294.
20 In “Revelation in the Jewish Tradition,” Levinas points to the hope alive in the State of Israel “of founding its political life on truths and rights drawn from the Bible” (Levinas Reader, 191).
21 Girard, Things Hidden, 26.
22 René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure [Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque, 1961], translated by Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965, repr. 1984), 65.
23 Paul W.Kahn, Law and Love: The Trials of King Lear (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 5.
24 Ibid., 128.
25 Bloom, Shakespeare’s King Lear, 26.
26 Claire Elise Katz, Levinas, Judaism, and the Feminine: The Silent Footsteps of Rebecca (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 22-34.
27 Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 34.
28 See, for example, Ruth Nero, Tragic Form in Shakespeare (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 260-261.
29 René Girard, Job: The Victim of His People, translated by Yvonne Freccero (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987).
30 For a recent assessment of Girard’s reading of Job, see Chris Allen Carter, “Mimesis, Sacrifice, and the Wisdom of Job,” in Sacrifice, Scripture, and Substitution: Readings in Ancient Judaism and Christianity, edited by Ann W. Astell and Sandor Goodhart (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), 294-310.
31 Kahn, Law and Love, 87.
32 On this key Girardian notion of méconnaissance, see René Girard with Pierpaolo Antonello and João Cezar de Castro Rocha, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture (New York: T. & T. Clark, 2008), 83-87.
33 Kahn, Law and Love, 111.
34 Ibid.
35 Girard, Things Hidden, 116-117, 152; René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, translated by Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1977, repr. 1979), 68-88.
36 See Sandor Goodhart, Sacrificing Commentary: Reading the End of Literature (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 13-41.
37 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 160-161.
38 See especially Katherine Goodland, Female Mourning and Tragedy in Medieval and Renaissance English Drama: From the Raising of Lazarus to King Lear (New York: Ashgate, 2006), 201-220.
39 See, for example, Kahn, Love and Law, 156-157.
40 Levinas quotes this proverb in TO, 73.
41 Song of Soloman 8:6.
42 The application of Girard’s mimetic theory to the Akedah is complicated. See Matthew Pattillo, “Creation and Akedah: Blessing and Sacrifice in the Hebrew Scripture,” in Sacrifice, Scripture, and Substitution, 240-260. See also Bruce Chilton, Abraham’s Curse: Child Sacrifice in the Legacies of the West (New York: Doubleday, 2008).
43 Stanley Cavell, for example. Edgar’s avoidance of his father’s recognition is a symbol of the son’s unacknowledged guilt and of his resentment: “He cannot bear the fact that his father is incapable, impotent, maimed. He wants his father still to be a father, powerful, so that he can remain a child.”See Stanley Cavell, “The Avoidance of Love,” in Twentieth-Century Interpretations of King Lear: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Janet Adelman (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978), 70-87, at 80.
44 Girard, Things Hidden, 162. See also Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 32-46; Things Hidden, 418-419.
45 See Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 9, 94-98, 288, 296-297.
46 Alfred Harbage, “Introduction,” in William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, 1060-1064, at 1061.
47 Levinas, “Revelation in the Jewish Tradition,” in LR, 207.