Angling in the lake of darkness: Possession, dispossession, and the politics of discovery in King Lear

ELH - English Literary History

Volumn 70, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 399-426

  Brayton, Dan ^a  

^a MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE   (United States)

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EID: 62449239113     PISSN: 00138304     EISSN: 10806547     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/elh.2003.0012     Document Type: Review

References (33)

1. In the first quarto of 1608 the line is shorter: "The map there." All passages from Shakespeare are quoted from the conflated text in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 1.1.38-39. Hereafter cited parenthetically by act, scene, and line number.
2. Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991), 221.
3. Lear's fetishization of property is precisely that which Thomas More condemns in book one of Utopia, where Hythlodaeus complains that according to the ideology of absolute kingship, "all property is in [the king,] not excepting the very persons of his subjects; and that no man has any other property, but that which the king out of his goodness thinks fit to leave him." "Utopia," in Famous Utopias of the Renaissance, ed. Frederic R. White (Putney, VT: Hendricks House, 1981), 31. Nearly a century later, in Jamesian England, we find this same formulation.
4. See Henry Turner, "King Lear Without: The Heath" in Renaissance Drama, ed. Jeffrey Masten and Wendy Wall, New Series 28 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1999), 171, 161-93.
5. Christopher Pye, The Regal Phantasm, (New York: Routledge, 1990), 102-3.
6. See James Berg, "'This Dear, Dear Land': 'Dearth' and the Fantasy of the Land-Grab in Richard II and Henry IV," English Literary Renaissance 29 (1999): 225-45, 226 ("the act"). Compare this with Halpern's claim, "Paradoxically, destroying the kingship is the truest demonstration that the office is the king's to do with as he pleases.... It is a piece of property - one that can be given away, like Lear's land, or simply consumed by royal fiat. By removing all sense of divine restraint, the play thus totalizes the absolutist conception of the kingship - and kingdom - as royal property" (229).
7. For a detailed and ingenious account of the several mapreading scenes in Shakespeare, including the tripartite division of state by the rebels in I Henry IV, see Garrett Sullivan, The Drama of Landscape (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1998), 92-123.
8. See also Francis Barker, The Culture of Violence (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993), 3-4.
9. Notably Sullivan and Barker. Richard Helgerson's seminal work on cartography, chorography, and "the [w]riting of England" has inspired numerous recent studies. See Forms of Nationhood: The Elisabethan Writing of England (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992).
10. For a broad-ranging account of cartography and its relationship to Shakespeare, see John Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994).
11. I say "feminized," and not "female," somatic space, because the monstrous other that Lear perceives to be thwarting his will threatens on at least one occasion from within the king's own body, in the form of the rising "mother." For a compelling account of this "mother," see Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Embodiment in Shakespeare's Tragedies (New York: Routledge, 1992).
12. My reading is in substantial agreement with Jonathan Dollimore's assessment that, "In Lear, as in Troilus, man is decentred not through misanthropy but in order to make visible social process and its forms of ideological misrecognition" (191). This making visible of social process is precisely what I have theorized in my introduction as a Utopian procedure. See Dollimore's Radical Tragedy (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984), 189-203.
13. William Dodd has recently argued that the antagonisms between Cordelia and Lear should be read as a fundamentally personal scenario: each character is the personification of Elizabethan and Jacobean political forces, and it is their interaction as persons that counts. Such claims as the following, then, are symptomatic of the long-standing tendency to emphasize the familial-psychological over the material-historical in Lear scholarship. "What actually triggers the disaster in Lear is neither the monarch's division of the kingdom nor his abdication nor his attempt to cling to symbolic authority while relinquishing the material basis of his power. It is the fact that he chooses to introduce a love-test into a ceremony concerned with succession." Yet, at stake in this love-test is - as Dodd acknowledges negatively - precisely the division of the kingdom and the attempt by Lear to "cling to symbolic authority" by establishing a ritual identity between filial duty and the divided kingdom. See "Impossible Worlds: What Happens in King Lear, Act I, Scene I?" Shakespeare Quarterly (1999): 488.
14. See Greenblatt, "Shakespeare and the Exorcists" in his Shakespearean Negotiations, (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988), 94-128.
15. John Turner points out that in the English tragedies, "Shakespeare has imagined worlds of kings and barons, without legal, ecclesiastical or parliamentary structures, without merchants, artisans, or labourers - without all those classes of people whom he imagined for the chronicle histories or the Venetian plays." "The Tragic Romances of Feudalism," in Shakespeare: The Play of History, ed. Graham Holderness (Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press, 1987), 171.
16. Katherine Eisaman Maus has argued this in her work on the early modern legal negotiation of inferiority and the legal hermeneutics of motives in cases of witchcraft and treason. See, "Proof or Consequences: Inwardness and its Exposure in the English Renaissance," in Materialist Shakespeare, ed. Ivo Kamps (New York: Verso, 1995), 157-80.
17. See Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (New York: Routledge, 1985), 185, 93 ("the demonization").
18. Timothy Murray, Drama Trauma: Specters of Race and Sexuality in Performance, Video, and Art (New York: Routledge, 1997), 41-42.
19. This refers to his "body natural," to use the discourse of the King's two bodies. The connections between the map in act 1 and the figure of the "O" in the rest of the play provide a spatial model for the theory of the king's two bodies that might be worth further study. The "king body natural" and the "king body politic" are mapped onto one another by the visual emblems that denote sovereignty, in particular the map of state that denotes the king's supreme power over territory and his daughters. This mapping is dissolved in act 1. See Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957).
20. The Fool's enigmatic mockery, "now thou art an "O" without a figure," can be understood as a direct reference to medieval cartography: medieval maps of the world were drawn in the form of an "O" containing a "T." The circular world was neatly divided into sections by the three continents that made up the "T": Europe, Asia, and Africa. These T and O maps were well known to Renaissance cartographers who, because of the discovery of two new continents and the possibility of discovering more, were busy devising new kinds of cartographic projection. According to the Fool, Lear is an empty territory, a world that has been evacuated. See Tom Conley on the T and O maps (The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France [Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1996]), and Gillies on the conventional association of the theater with the globe.
21. See Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), 58.
22. Heinrich Krames and James Sprenger, The Malleus Maleficarum, trans. Mantague Summers (New York: Dover, 1971).
23. Reginald Scot, The Discovery of Witchcraft (New York: Dover, 1972), 23.
24. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Scribner's 1971), 435-570.
25. See also Barbara Rosen, Witchcraft in England, 1558-1618 (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1991), 17-18.
26. Thus, in reference to Scot's skeptical mention of the "'little scroll ... espied to be hidden betweene [the] skin and [the] flesh' of the witch who would not burn," Pye notes a consistent "association between witchcraft and symbolic inscription." See Pye, "In the Looking-Glass a Certain Froth," in Repossessions, ed. T. Murray and Alan K. Smith (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1998), 176. Murray, 5.
27. Mary Fuller, "Ralegh's Fugitive Gold," in New World Encounters, ed. Greenblatt (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1995), 221.
28. see also Walter Cohen, Drama of A Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), 322-56.
29. Gloucester's demand, "Seek him!" is the same as that of another Shakespearean character who falsely discovers the treachery of a loved one. See Shakespeare's Othello, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Greenblatt (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1997).
30. Othello commands Iago, "Make me to see't" (3.3.369).
31. Gloucester demands the "ocular proof" that also ensnares Othello; like Othello, too, he is duped because of his willingness to fetishize the visual and impute the monstrous on a loved one. When Iago exclaims, "Ha! I like not that," apropos of Cassio's "suit" to Desdemona, Othello is caught in the same kind of rhetorical and ocular game as Gloucester. The Moor asks, "What does thou say?" Iago replies, "Nothing, my lord. Or if, I know not what" (3.3.34-35).
32. Pye's elegant summation of the cultural poetics of witchcraft as a function of overdetermination is worth citing here: "The confrontation between a patriarchal order and the transgressive woman, between a religious orthodoxy and the marginal charismatic practices of Puritans and Catholics variously, between nascent capitalism and a receding feudal order: if witchcraft seems an extravagantly overdetermined instance of social friction, that is because it represents antagonism as a function of the very fact of overdetermination itself - that fact that even the most hegemonic - the most 'real' - of social formations remains incapable of totalizing itself, and thus of constituting itself in objective form" (Pye, "In the Looking-Glass," 8).
33. Scott McMillin, "Shakespeare's Richard II: Eyes of Sorrow, Eyes of Desire" Shakespeare Quarterly (1984): 40-52, 51 ("gravitates").