CHAPTER 2King Lear and the Avoidance of CharityThe Spirit of Truth in Love

Love, and Be Silent: The Banishment and Silencing of Love

King Lear begins with a number of speech acts whose effects resonate throughout the play: They are speech acts of bequeathment, disclaiming, disowning, banishment, cursing, and exile. Lear wishes to speak as if there is no gap between his sentences and his power (1.1.171). From that fantasy stems his undoing of reality in speaking, for he speaks as if no others can have a say that he himself has not scripted.

Lear begins, for example, expressing his “darker purpose” with a set of imperatives: “Know we have divided. . . . Tell me, my daughters” (1.1.35–36; 1.1.48). We might pause over these speech acts. Can you tell someone to “know something?” You can say, “Let it be known,” but not “I order you to know.” You can tell your subjects that you have divided your kingdom, but you cannot tell them what they will know about this division. The gap between his sentence and his power is already there, but it is not a gap Lear knows. He is blind to further necessary implications of speech. By redrawing the spatial boundaries of the kingdom, he is by fiat obliterating the usual path and past of inheritance, which properly depends on his death, and ignoring all future contingencies, ignoring, one might say, the very fact of contingency.¹⁸ He understands his fiat in spatial but not in temporal terms. If spatial and not temporal, his speech act can occlude time's unfolding, and the “impropriety of action,” the idea, that is, that his action is not his property.¹⁹ The drawing on the map is an illusion of his will and sovereignty, his autonomy and self-sufficiency, his misrecognition of his needs. It is a picture of sovereign agency: one that imagines the care of others only in relation to their care of him.²⁰ The idea that he can retain the name and the addition of a king without the trappings of kingship, without those conventions of ceremony, crown, land, property, and relations of obeisance, fealty, and allegiance owed to the office of king, is a fatal confusion of his person and his role, although, of course, his place in a ceremonious world of obeisance and allegiance might lead him to misunderstand that difference. Giving away the kingdom without its trappings is a misunderstanding of his position, a confusion of office and person, and therefore of his responsibilities. His speech enacts fantasies of power, ones that nevertheless are momentarily underwritten by the mirroring, yea-saying, and “obedience” of those around him who sustain the fantasy of a sovereign will. Kenneth Graham suggests that “for the Lear who presides so majestically over his court, formality is reality,” and although it might be his last royal act, his word for now still goes as law.²¹ Shakespeare thus economically stages how the gap between Lear's sentence and his power widen to an impossible breach. It is all will, divorced from the responsibilities entailed by speech as action.

Lear orders his daughters to tell him who loves him most, but he does so in the form of a question. By asking “Which of you shall we say doth love us most?” (1.1.51) he reserves for himself the sole right to determine (“shall we say”) who loves him most. It is an invitation to winning and losing, to a rivalrous competition that obliterates the love for which he appears to have asked. Can we say he does not know what he is doing? Cavell says he is avoiding love and requesting flattery. That is what his speech acts amount to because under these circumstances he cannot be requesting love.²² Under these conditions, as Cordelia so rightly sees, love cannot be spoken without becoming something else—flattery, emotional extortion, competition, rivalry, deceit, or bribery. To say how much she loves him on this occasion would be to rival her sisters, to flatter her father, to take part in a cynical show of obedience in exchange for land and status, converting her words into play acts and rendering them hollow. What Cordelia tells us in her first aside—a form of words both overheard and underheard, as Cavell points out—is that she does love her father, but that her love cannot be voiced, she cannot speak it. Her resounding “Nothing, my Lord” (1.1.87) reveals the problem with his command/request and shows its incoherences. Her stark “nothing,” in its unadorned bluntness and granite simplicity, shows fidelity to the value of words.²³ Her words also expose Lear's request, in Cavell's argument, as an avoidance of love's knowledge and love's exposure, for love is mutual where flattery is not. Neither party to the address is revealed in flattery; for this reason, it is a mutually serviceable lie.²⁴ The flattered is not so much revealed as concealed in flattery, and the flatterer too also does not reveal herself in the proclaimed “love.” As Simone Weil says, one distinction between love and flattery is that love “needs reality,” whereas flattery is careless of it.²⁵ The play will explore the devastating consequences of the silencing of love, and the concomitant mistaking of reality. Lear may not have known what he was doing, but he will come to know what he has done. The play will remorselessly track down the consequences of speech acts. Anthony Cascardi has usefully said: “The power of Shakespeare's work rests on his ability to envision characters who live out the fate of their words relentlessly, without compromise or escape, or who suffer disastrously from their failure to do so.”²⁶ It is part of its great innovation to have so pressingly investigated the nonsovereign nature of human action in speech and thus to explore the ethics of address in the exchange of words, in acts of speech.

Lear seeks to overcome the conditions of the bequeathal of a kingdom (his death) and the separate contingencies of the freedom of response of others. Both constitute denials of finitude and the separateness of others. In imagining that he is the source of all that can be given—he asserts, “I gave you all” (2.2.439)—he fantasizes an overcoming of his own given-ness, and what must be in place before he can so much as speak or love. In imagining that he can ask for flattery and call it love, that he can shake off all cares and still be cared for, he negates the very relations that sustain him.

Lear's universe at the beginning of the play is thus defined by his imagination that language is a mere extension of his will. He does not see that language bears its own necessity, the necessity of sense, because he occludes the response of others.²⁷ Until the advent of grace in the figure of his daughter, he will harp on ingratitude. Lear's ceremony of flattery is a denial that there are others in the world. When he banishes love along with the truthful figures Kent and Cordelia, so too he banishes truth and his grip on reality, for love, as Iris Murdoch has told us, is disclosive of reality.²⁸ Love is not so much an experience or psychological feeling in this regard as it is a concept, honed in the use of words. Lear learns what it is as a matter of painful biography. Because it is a matter of such biography—that which must be lived through and felt—and not externally taught, it is not moralizable.

To draw out the full implications of what Cavell means by an act of speech, it is necessary to differentiate his inheritance of J. L. Austin from the way he is conventionally received in literary studies. Only then can the full ethical force of speech as action, and Shakespeare's radicalization of the idea of action in tragedy, emerge.

In his title essay in Must We Mean What We Say?, Cavell argues that a usage of a particular term entitles us to draw certain inferences. This is a question of the normativity of language, an implication that is obscured when rules are understood as imperatives or commands.²⁹ This is what the learning of language comes to: We are responsible for the implications of our speech. We are responsible for those implications even when we may not know what we are saying and doing. We may not, often we cannot, sometimes we do not, foresee how our words will go out into the world. What Hannah Arendt says of human action, that it is boundless, unpredictable, and irreversible—what is done not being capable of being undone—is true of speech acts.³⁰ Like other forms of action, the effects of our speech are irreversible—we can recant, abjure, revoke, and retract, but we cannot unsay what we have said. They are unpredictable because, for example, we know that the judge's verdict will result in a prison sentence but not how that verdict will resound in the defendant's life or those of his loved ones. They are boundless in their effects, for one speech act can begin a proliferating chain reaction which cannot be limited or defined in advance. We can begin to see some of the implications of implication: inference, imputation, indication, or suggestion; implication as involvement, connection, and entanglement in bonds “too intrince t’ unloose” as Kent puts it (2.2.73) and, last, implication in the quasi-legal sense as bearing guilt, and hence responsibility.³¹

Cavell's inheritance of Austin is brilliantly distinctive. It follows a different path from the way it came to be developed in the field known as performance studies. Austin has been taken up by many critics, but in a sense that is often opposed to the spirit of his writings. For Austin did not think that some language was performative. He thought rather that we do not understand an utterance unless we understand the point of what someone is saying: what they are doing in and with their words. The semantic words will not register a meaning absent the point of saying these words in these particular situations, which explains the kinship between theater and ordinary language philosophy. For Cavell, one might say, theater is a form of ordinary language philosophy. It requires us to ask: Why do Edgar, Goneril, or Coriolanus say just this just now, in response to what, and inciting what response? On what do they stake their authority for saying what they say? Is that authority contested, interrupted, countermanded, or exposed as fraudulent and ill-founded? Is it assumed, insisted upon, arrogated, or risked? In pursuing these questions we will not only be doing what good criticism requires—making the work available to just response—but also imagining precisely, concretely, the simple yet difficult fact that words are said and meant by particular people in particular situations.³² Theater can thus aid in the consequential flight from particularity, from the world-denying and self-forgetful elimination of the contexts in which words have a use.

Austin helps us to see that if we pay attention to what we do by virtue of our words, we are always talking in relation to the positions we are prepared to assume in relation to each other. You tell me at great length about the rules of baseball, but as I was the local sports reporter for at least ten years and know the team well, I may find you patronizing. Your mother tells you not to drink, but this morning she had a terrible hangover. Even so simple an act as telling someone something is bound up in all kinds of complex ways with our authority in relation to each other. In each of these exchanges, our position in relation to each other shifts—shifts with my waning sense of your authority as I spot your well-meaning hypocrisy, or my simple boredom, or my discomfort with your unyielding condescension. In his essay “Three Ways of Spilling Ink,” whose manuscript title was “responsibility”, Austin says: “Questions of whether a person was responsible for this or that are prior to questions of freedom.”³³ Austin's work opens us up to the responsibilities of our responsiveness to each other and the contexts we find ourselves in, and so to an inevitable ethics of speech.

Austin's method for investigating a concept, for doing what he calls “linguistic phenomenology” is to ask, “What should we say when?” (to ask on what occasions do we use certain words and not others) and to parse out the differences and distinctions made in the history of our language.³⁴ Cavell explains that when we ask that Austinian question (What should we say when?), it is a question about the first-person plural. Sometimes I might be just plain wrong, and it might be indeed a question of evidence at stake. If I am mistaken about what we do, however, that is “liable, where it is not comic, to be tragic.”³⁵ We, as native speakers, are the authority for what we say. These systematic agreements in judgments display accord in our practices and apprenticeship in learning word and world both together and inseparably. To be wrong about what we say and do is to mistake the very conditions and consequences of speech; it is to exile ourselves from the shared and necessary conditions of our existence. To be wrong is not to be put right “with a more favorable position of observation or a fuller mastery of the recognition of objects: it requires a new look at oneself and a fuller realization of what one is doing or feeling.”³⁶

Cavell argues that conceiving our words as speech acts opens them up to all the problems to which human action is heir—what he calls the pathos of the necessity of action. We might talk about speech acts: what we do in and by virtue of speaking. But Cavell also says that speech acts are heir to the pathos of the necessity of sense (hence Cordelia cannot, not will not, voice her love in the opening scene), and this entails that his work will be a brilliant extension and reworking of Aristotle's idea of tragedy as an imitation of action.³⁷

Cordelia says that she loves her father according to her bond—no more, no less. But this does not entail a diminishment, shackle, or constraint. It is a recognition of a relation she is already in, deeper than a covenant or agreement, for the child does not covenant with her father. Her birth is accident or gift; in any case not willed. The bond with her father is there: It may be accepted or denied, acknowledged or disowned. When Lear attempts to dissolve that bond, the bond of father to child, “disclaiming all (his) paternal care” (1.1.114), disowning the claims to pity and relief of even a neighbor (1.1.120), making her his “sometime” daughter, he denies bonds that precede formal allegiance and agreement (1.1.121). When Austin explores what our words do (what we mean by them), he is indicating the exorbitance of the idea that our word is our bond and that our bonds are not disclosed in particular acts of speech alone but in all we do and say. Niklas Forsberg puts it this way: “The responsibility to mean, to learn, to know, and to love and be loved is a kind of responsibility that never exceeds or surpasses the fact that our word is our bond.”³⁸ This is an ethics in and of speech.

It is not then, I am suggesting, that Cordelia will not express her love because she is stubborn, willful, or clumsy. It is that it is love that she yearns to give Lear, and she cannot speak it under these conditions. For under these conditions, it could emerge only as oily and glib flattery of her father, as competitive rivalry of her more seemingly compliant and clever sisters. We already see emerging from Cavell's analysis of this first scene of the tragedy the conditions of felicity to the speaking of love. Not just anything will count as the voicing of love. Even when the word love is used, the concept may be lost when people do not mean what they say.

It is part of Shakespeare's astonishing insight in this opening scene to perceive that when love is cast out in this way, then so too is truth: “Thy youngest daughter does not love thee least” (1.1.153). We will return to the idea that love is disclosive of reality.

Love and Charity

Biron's magnificent comic speech at the end of the eaves-dropping scene in Love's Labor's Lost ends on a high note of self-delight and self-justification:

It is religion to be thus forsworn;

For charity itself fulfils the law,

And who can sever love from charity?

(4.3.337-339)

Mashing together some allusions to Romans 13.8 and Romans 13.10, Biron wittily vindicates the courtiers forswearing of their noble, ascetic aspirations.³⁹ He shows them how to lose their oaths to find themselves. Biron's delicious equivocation, all in the aid of releasing his companions from their unself-knowing oaths to abjure women, justifies their love as charity. His rationalizing quibble turns on a distinction that had some cultural weight. In Sir Thomas More's compendious debate with William Tyndale, Dialogue Against Heresies, continued in the even more expansive A Confutation of Tyndale's Answer, More is infuriated by Tyndale's consistent translation of the Vulgate's caritas as love.⁴⁰ Where the Vulgate had translated agape as charity, Tyndale preferred to translate it as love. What is at stake in this difference? To More's ear, the idea of charity is fundamentally bound up with the pax, the peace of the mass. Charity is not something given as a donation dispensed in one action, as in Blake's devastating poem “The Human Abstract.”⁴¹ Charity is rather something you are in. The two different prepositions—giving charity to someone and being in charity with someone—entail different understandings between those involved in such charitable relations. To be in charity is to be implicated in mutual relations. The preposition “to” exposes the separation and one-way traffic of charity. “In” implies relation and mutual participation.⁴² It implies bonds that are not subject to negotiation.⁴³ These relations are fundamentally expressed in the medieval mass and later in Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer. ⁴⁴ You must not come to the table out of charity with your neighbor, for that would be to take the eucharist to your damnation.⁴⁵ Those out of charity are to seek out the parish priest to be reconciled with their neighbor. “Therefore, I pray thee prince of pees / That thou wilt make, as thou may best / My hert to be in peece and rest / And redy to love all maner of men,” as The Lay Folk's Mass Book says.⁴⁶ Charity, for More, bears on the relation not alone between a human soul and God, but between neighbor and neighbor, self and soul, and self and God as an indissoluble aspect of each other. If you leave out the neighbor, then love is between soul and God alone. It is a private and not a social love. For the soul that seeks its direction alone from God absent the neighbor has ceased to encompass mutual imbrication and mutual dependence and also has ceased to find it obvious that there can be no such thing as a private relation with God. More's argument with Tyndale rests on how the word charity is commonly used: “charyte signyfyeth in engleysh mennys eres / not every common lore / but a good vertuous and well-ordred love.”⁴⁷ To his ears, Tyndale's “love” is innovative. It severs the long scriptural tradition whereby agape was rendered as caritas; it severs the communal bond of love and peace associated with the church as the body of Christ; and finally it utterly obscures the association of love with the trinity of theological virtues. Faith was prior to love, but it was incomprehensible without both hope and love.⁴⁸ Tyndale, claimed More, “put the indifferent word love in the place of the undowted good worde cheryte.”⁴⁹ Like Thomas Lupset, More thinks that “though charyte be always loue, yet is not ye wote well love always charyte.”⁵⁰ Why put the “indifferent word love in the place of the undowted good word cheryte”?⁵¹ Charity carries the Augustinian associations of rightly ordered love: It is, in short, good love.⁵²

I have argued, following Stanley Cavell, that love is banished in the first scene with devastating consequences, and I have insisted that this is a grammatical and not a psychological point. For love is disclosive of reality, as Iris Murdoch has claimed.⁵³ A world in which the honest expression of love is impossible is a world of predation, calculation, and appetite. If love discloses the reality of someone, if it is bound up in and with acknowledgment, then the play extends the grammar of acknowledgment into every imagined social relation and traces out the avoidance of charity as well as the avoidance of love.

The exploration of the avoidance of charity is most evident in the figure of Poor Tom, but it emerges forcefully and pervasively throughout the Gloucester subplot. For the dispossession of Lear and the exile of charity is from the beginning bound up with the terrifying extension of the Cornwalls’ jurisdiction. The coming of the Cornwalls to Gloucester's household, where fully fourteen of the play's twenty-six scenes of the play take place, and their assumption of complete power over Gloucester's home, is a gradual, remorseless evacuation of all and any form of charitable love.

The outcasting of the play begins in Lear's banishment of Kent and Cordelia but continues in earnest in Gloucester's household. Before Lear is barred from Gloucester's household—for his own good, so he can taste his folly—before charity is prohibited by the Duke of Cornwall and his wife, their jurisdiction and its terrifying implications are established. Kent is stocked, a punishment reserved for rogues and vagabonds, and the doors are barred to Lear following the pitiful and painful negotiation to keep at least some of his followers. Finally, the home is turned into a torture chamber, where the Cornwalls reveal their lust for domination and where power is nakedly exercised because it can be: “Though well we may not pass upon his life / Without the form of justice, yet our power / Shall do a courtesy to our wrath, which men / May blame but not control” (3.7.24–28).

“When I desired their leave that I might pity him,” says Gloucester, “they took from me the use of mine own house; charged me on pain of perpetual displeasure neither to speak of him, entreat for him, or any way sustain him” (3.3.1–5). A world in which leave must be asked for the natural and necessary expression of pity is a world in which some bodies may be whimsically instrumentalized for others; it is a world of domination and violence, a world that leads to torture more terrible than death.

The vocabulary of love extends to charity in the Gloucester subplot, as love's exile is acted out.⁵⁴ After Regan's cruel housekeeping—“This house is little; the old man and's people / Cannot be well bestowed” (2.2.474–75)—charity must hide. Gloucester fatally asks his son to cover for him with the duke when he decides to help the king, “that my charity be not of him perceived” (3.3.15). He appears to have been transformed out of listlessness and moral stupidity by the depravity of the Cornwalls’ unceremonious takeover of his house. He seeks out Lear against the injunction of the Cornwalls. To Edmund, Gloucester's charity is merely evidence of a putative betrayal that serves his purposes, grist to the mill of his desire, at any cost, to top “Legitimate Edgar” (1.2.16), to become the Earl of Gloucester in his father and his brother's place.

Lear is cast out, debarred from the home.

The Outcast: Charity and Poverty

So we arrive at the strange society of outcasts on the heath: a madman, a fool, and a beggar. Those daring to help them—Kent and Gloucester—are or will be outcast, too. Cavell spells out the centrality of the question of acknowledgment to the figure and idea of the outcast: “So far as we think that the human being is naturally a political being, we cannot think that some human beings are naturally outcasts. So if there are outcasts, we must have, or harbour, sub specie civilitatis, some explanation of their condition.”⁵⁵

The condition of the outcast is one that fundamentally entails the idea of recognition at its heart. A relationship exists between the outcaster and the outcast, but this is disavowed. The kinds of explanations called for by the outcast may encompass the following ideas, all rehearsed in King Lear. The condition of the outcast is deserved. This is Goneril and Regan's position: “The injuries that they themselves procure / Must be their schoolmasters” (2.2.494–5). Or perhaps the outcast is simply unfortunate—his situation lies at the gates of chance. Each of these positions is a denial of the responsibility of the one who casts out. A further fantasy is rehearsed about the outcast. The outcasts are mysteriously in league with each other, a secret confederacy known to each other but opaque to the rest of the world, and in need of decipherment.

Poor Tom is the most obvious instance of the play's complex and comprehensive extension of love to charity and thus with the techniques by which charity as well as love are evaded and avoided. Edgar chooses the disguise of an outcast that complexly exemplifies a theatricalization of charity. The country he says, “gives me proof and precedent / Of Bedlam beggars” (2.2.184–85) who “sometime with lunatic bans, sometimes with prayers / Enforce their charity” (2.2.190–91). His disguise as Poor Tom bets on the double invisibility of “the basest and most poorest shape” (2.2.178). He will not be recognized as the Earl of Gloucester's erstwhile son because he will disguise himself as a bedlam beggar, but to be a beggar is precisely to be unseen, avoided, and unrecognized as a fellow man. Edgar relies on his culture's fear of beggars. In her book The Fear of Beggars, Kelly Johnson says: “Although abstractly most people recognize that all of us are in some respects dependent upon each other, the sight of a stranger asking for help outside the public order of rights and the private affection of the family shakes us up.”⁵⁶ The figure of the Bedlam beggar adopted by Edgar is, I argue, a theatricalization of charity.

If we assume that poverty is merely an assumed role, we will not feel obliged to respond to it. This attitude is nurtured and conjured, fed by the proliferation of literature about the vagrant. It merges straight out of an inventive, long-lived literature of cony-catching, a literature that began with the epistemological drive to distinguish the deserving from the undeserving poor. The literature that spawns the bedlam beggar and the Abraham man is a literature of discovery and exposure. It translates the so-called canting underworld with its dense confederacies and imagined opaque conspiracies and lays it bare to the judicial eye. Such confederacies are to be taxonomized, discovered, and revealed in their cozenage; their language is translated so that it is now transparent to the ruling classes. The poor are pretending, and their pretense must be displayed to avoid being the cony whose charity is enforced. For example, Harman, in A Caveat for Common Cursitors, exposes the ruse of a “dummerer,” one who acts dumb so as to be more pitiful: “The most part of these will never speak, unless they have extreme punishment, but will gape, and with a marvellous force will hold down their tongues doubled, groaning for your charity, and holding up their hands full piteously, so that with their deep dissimulation they will get much.”⁵⁷

Harman's tract builds on other cony-catching pamphlets, and his purpose it to detect the counterfeit more easily: “I have repaired and rigged the ship of knowledge, and have hoist up the sails of good fortune, that she may safely pass through about and through all parts of this noble realm.”⁵⁸ Harman reveals then that the project of this literature is epistemological: It displaces acknowledgment for knowledge. The relation to the poor man is one in which knowing precisely blocks the natural response of pity. Indeed, what you learn about him in these helpful materials, obviates the need for any other response apart from avoidance and self-protection. In Poor Tom's disguise in the Gloucester subplot then, the avoidance of love, of charity, is not merely a personal oversight on the part of the man who was king—“O, I have ta-en / Too little care of this” (3.4.32–33)—but rather a systematic and rigorous display of the conditions of the avoidance of charity as an aspect of love. The “Abram man” is a figure straight out of this literature. The marks on their flesh are self-made “with a sharp awl pricking or razing the skin to such a figure or print as they best fancy.” Thomas Dekker's O per se O (1612) compounds this tradition: “All that they beg being either lure or bouse [money or drink].” His gestures are “antic,” ridiculous,” “counterfeit,” a “puppet play” culminating in “Good dame, give poor tom one cup of the best drink-well and wisely.”⁵⁹ Beggars are charlatans or under suspicion of being so. Linda Woodbridge has shown decisively that the pictures of penury and beggary derived from this “underworld” or “canting” literature feeds the legislation that compounds poverty and vagrancy.⁶⁰

When Lear responds to his daughters’ cold calculation of his needs for maintenance, with this outburst: “O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars / Are in the poorest thing superfluous” (2.2.453–54), he is in a long lineage of inquiry about the question of need. It is a spontaneous outburst showing his acknowledgment that need cannot be calculated, as the horrors of now being spoken for by these daughters dawns on him. In examining Langland's complex exploration of the figure of Need in his great allegorical poem Piers Plowman, for example, Kate Crassons has shown the costs and longevity of a mode of depiction that renders the question of need a problem of knowledge rather than a problem of response. Poverty, she suggests, and Langland shows, requires recognition. It privileges the category of human response. Langland is responding to the complexity of poverty in his culture, which was innovative for establishing an ambitious system for documenting and identifying the poor in the legislation of 1376 and 1388. The Commons Petition Against Vagrants (1376) and the subsequent Cambridge Statute of Labourers (1388) established a scheme for documenting and identifying mobile workers. It combined—as later poor laws were to do for a considerable period of time—both a regulation of work and a regulation of poverty, attempting to make possible the discrimination of the deserving and the undeserving poor. Crassons insightfully says that “the single feat of asking someone for some identification was meant to replace other more challenging forms of human response that required people to exercise moral judgment by acknowledging need, dismissing its real presence, or refusing to scrutinize what they thought ultimately unknowable.”⁶¹ Langland brilliantly insists, as does Lear, on the opacity of need: It cannot be reasoned in the way such legislation presumes. Indeed, Paul Slack, one of the leading historians of Elizabethan and Jacobean poverty legislation has said that the system “made paupers and delinquents by labelling them.”⁶²

When Shakespeare wrote King Lear, the mobile workers of the land lacked political recognition. In a land where laws dealing with poverty and laws mandating labor had for two centuries worked hand in glove, the poor lived out the bitter ironies of a culture that had often—through poor harvests, marginal existence, and enclosure—driven them off the land. Poor law legislation attempted to discriminate between the deserving poor—too old or impotent to work—and those mobile laborers who were deemed to be vagrant or roguish. They were whipped and sent back to their parish to work. The unsettled poor lacked recognition for they inhabited a society in which identity was still defined by place. The unsettled were sent back to their parishes, and the mobile poor were consciously separated from vagrants as a punishable offence only in 1662 with the Settlement Acts, when a provision was made for the return, without punishment, of migrants likely to be chargeable to the parish. The poverty and vagrancy laws made poverty an epistemological issue. Donors were obliged and encouraged to discern the difference between the deserving and undeserving poor, with the confidence that such an act was so much as possible. It was, in fact, proscribed to give to the undeserving, and so telling them from the real poor was essential, if impossible. The difficulties of acknowledgment are covered over with the technologies of knowledge, and charity's links to gratuity and generosity, to fellowship and neighborliness, are severed. Edgar talks of “enforcing charity”(2.2.191) as if charity must be coerced and acquired by threat, thus again vitiating it.

In the Sam Mendes's 2014 National Theater production of King Lear, the stage was populated by eight or nine actors playing a community of vagrants. They are cleared out of the way for the ceremonial entrance of the king, a striking gesture of ridding the king and court of their presence. Yet in Lear's great address—“Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are” (3.4.28)—he envisages not the labeling and taxonomy of poverty but an imaginative sense that we ourselves might be such naked wretches. Homeless (houseless?) as he now is, he calls on “poor naked wretches” wherever they are, looped and ragged, their very bodies utterly open, houseless to the world: “How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, / Your looped and windowless raggedness, defend you / From such seasons as these?” (3.4.30–31). The awareness of exposure and defenseless vulnerability is now linked to his own lack of care. If he persists in seeing Poor Tom, who enters as if on cue as a very instance of the “naked wretch,” as an image of himself, “Didst thou given all to thy two daughters?” (3.4.48), and as the very philosophical picture of an unaccommodated man, and if he wishes in his failing senses to show himself as “unaccommodated” as Poor Tom, he nevertheless takes shelter in his company. It is the beginning of care, and it stirs in him an idea of profound injustice in which he has played a part. This implicates him with the claims of others even in his incipient madness.

“How have you known the miseries of your father?” Albany asks Edgar (5.3.179). “By nursing them, my Lord,” Edgar replies (5.3.180). This is not quite true, for we may say, as Edgar shortly says of himself, that he has known but not acknowledged the miseries of his father. He has sought to cure them and “Never—O fault revealed myself unto him? / Until some half-hour past, when I was armed” (5.3.191–92). For to acknowledge his father's miseries would have been to reveal himself not as a hero, not as the fair unknown of romance who will perfectly reconcile gentility with true gentleness, but as the one disowned, abandoned, and dispossessed.

It is Cordelia who knows the miseries of her father by nursing them. Before we can arrive at that scene of care and love, we need to continue to understand the play's relentless and searing investigation of love's banishment in Cornwall's jurisdiction.

Jean Améry, in his astonishing exploration of his torture at the hands of the Gestapo said: “Whoever has succumbed to torture can no longer feel at home in the world.”⁶³ What links the outcasts on the heath with the terrible scene of Gloucester's blinding is the connection of careless love to transcendental shelterlessness. These men are not “houseless” (3.4.30) but homeless. When Améry says he cannot find a home again, he does not mean he will not once again find shelter. He means that his fundamental trust in the world is a condition from which he is forever exiled; he is transcendentally, not empirically, lost.

Torture, Devastation

Simone Weil may have had King Lear in mind when she posed the following question in her essay “Human Personality”: “What is it, exactly, that prevents me from putting that man's eyes out, if I am allowed to do so and it takes my fancy?” We might think immediately of Cornwall's power doing “courtesy” to his wrath. She answers: “What would stay it is the knowledge that if someone were to put out his eyes, his soul would be lacerated by the thought that harm was being done to him.” For at the bottom of every human being from earliest infancy until the tomb, she claims, “there is something that goes on indomitably expecting in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done to him.”⁶⁴ Cora Diamond has linked Weil's exploration to the grammar of love by saying that “the awareness of the other being that impedes doing injustice is a kind of love, or loving attention.”⁶⁵ This, I suspect, is the reason that Shakespeare confronted us with the most terrible scene in British theater: act 3, scene 7, the unprecedentedly harrowing scene of torture.⁶⁶ In this scene, as Cavell points out, it is Gloucester's calling out of his hope that “I shall see / The winged vengeance overtake such children” (3.7.64–5) that precisely prompts Cornwall's act of blinding. What he wishes to eradicate is thus not just Gloucester's poor eyes, but the very idea that justice will be, will ever be, seen to be done. Weil's essay is an argument with a moral theory based on rights, which separates justice from “love, pity, and tenderness,” from the naturalness of our responses.⁶⁷

“Bind fast his corky arms” (3.7.28). On the Duke of Cornwall's orders, Gloucester is first made helpless. Gloucester's bound impotence is an essential prologue to torture. For it is our natural expectation that if we suffer, we will be succored. It is against this background of the thought that aid will come to us that we grasp the connection between pain and help, between suffering and succor. Gloucester cries out in his pain, and that pain is incorrigibly plain and present to us but chillingly absent as a reason for action.⁶⁸ The binding of Gloucester's “corky arms” prepares him for the severing of suffering from the expectation of aid. This is a radical dispossession. Gloucester began by reminding the Duke of Cornwall and Regan that they are his guests, but the rules of hospitality, whereby even a stranger might be welcomed, do not apply here. Gloucester is unneighbored and deprived of every consolation. The son he calls on to avenge this “horrid act,” he is told, is the one who betrayed him (3.7.86). Stripped of his very agency, he is also stripped, radically, of his trust in the world, that primordial trust linked to the expectation of good.

In the weave of our lives with love, trust is primordial and primary, woven into our earliest dependence and care, and allowing us to inhabit our dependence and vulnerability, without having to face the full extent of our helplessness. It is these relations in Améry's and Jay Bernstein's accounts that show how systematic the destruction of trust is in torture and how radical the dispossession. For what Gloucester is left with—what drives him to despair and suicide—is that he counts for no one and that the undoing of his person, not the pursuit of information, “Be simple answered for we know the truth” (3.7.43), is Cornwall's point and obscene passion. In destroying his trust in the world, Cornwall has severed the natural and normative relation between love and trust as well as the deepest bond between self and other.

If this analysis rings true for this devastating and prescient scene of harm, Shakespeare has staged the undoing of personhood not just in the dispossession of Poor Tom or the dispossession of Lear's wits in his confusion and madness but also in the devastation of Gloucester's person through the undoing of who he has taken himself to be, through his forced disowning of his self.⁶⁹ Only through a sense of the normativity of trust can the links between love and justice be parsed out, as in this scene of devastation.

Love, Grace, and Forgiveness: The Responsibility of Response

Lear's encounter with Cordelia in act 4, scene 7 is an exquisite extension of the grammar of love in this play. Through the minute responses of Cordelia and her father, love's reach becomes intimately exposed and extended in its claims and responsibilities. This is as true for Cordelia as it is for her father. The great scene of recognition (4.7) is also a real-ization, an awakening to reality and to the intimacy of love with truth. The lover has to be in his or her words to express love. She has to mean what she says for her love to be loving. This expression of love simultaneously involves a kind of presence to the self and to the other.

In this famous encounter between Lear and his banished daughter, the question of acknowledgment is first flagged between Kent and Cordelia by way of prologue. Cordelia greets Kent in gratitude of his care and goodness: “O thou good Kent, how shall I live and work / To match thy goodness?” (4.7.1–2) Kent's answer is that “to be acknowledged” is “o’erpaid” (4.7.4) As if in response to this question, Cordelia requests that he discard his disguise and resume his appearance as the Earl of Kent, that he be present as himself, but in return Kent asks her not to “know” him until “time and I think meet” (4.7.10–11). The great sadness is there is no meet or suitable time in this play for Kent to be acknowledged, at least by Lear, although much depends on Lear's greeting: “You’re welcome hither” (5.3.287), which he says to Kent in the play's harrowing last scene after he has revealed that he was “your servant Kent” (5.3.281). Although Cordelia can privately acknowledge Kent, it appears that Kent does not want to be recognized by anyone else, perhaps on the understanding that his services to Lear are for now better served in disguise. So the acknowledgements between Kent and Cordelia remain private, and are not extended into a wider world. They remain hidden and to that extent, still in retreat. The relief in the meeting of these two, faithful lovers all, is a large relief for them and for us, too: “To be “acknowledg’d is “o’erpaid” (4.7.4).

As the Doctor and the Gentleman enter, Cordelia's first question is to ask how “the King” does (4.7.12). Told that he is still sleeping, she first addresses the gods in a prayer for his cure. The prayer acknowledges his damaged and bereft state—he is a “child-changed” father—changed by his children or changed into a state of childishness. Her prayer also expresses a faith in harmony that precedes chaos, for she pays witness in her prayer to his “untuned” senses, as if the natural state is accord, attunement (4.7.16). Before he is fully awake, she kisses him, a kiss we might remember when he asks us to look, look there at her lips in the play's devastating end, for it is a kiss of repair and reverence. The shocking confrontation with his face—“Was this a face / To be exposed against the warring winds?” (4.7.31–2)—and with his lostness—“poor perdu” (4.7.35)—registers his worthiness for care and her astonishment at her sisters’ carelessness. Her words bear a full understanding of the extremes of his exposure, and perhaps in the face of this, there is a momentary balking, a hesitation before the encounter, and she asks the Doctor to speak with him. He replies that it is fittest for her to do so. It is fittest because the breach between these two, between father and daughter must be addressed. The delicate but utterly precise propriety of the scene calls out for this meeting. It must be risked, gone through, if these two are to be in relation.

Every fact about their meeting is risky: that they are there now at all, marked out for capture, with enemy encamped around; that Lear may not be intelligible; that he may not share the same world as Cordelia; and that she might once again be turned away because of his deep shame, the old and the newly found. The results of this fitting encounter cannot be foreknown or guaranteed; their bond will have to be felt out word by word. She at last addresses him as her “royal lord” and “majesty,” granting him the reverence and dignity due to a king but—surely—due to an old man, too (4.7.44). Is this an address? For he is still asleep. They allow him the time to get his bearings, they wait on him, and they attend to him: “He's scarce awake. Let him alone awhile” (4.7.52).

Cordelia's response to his casting out is this striking phrase: “Mine enemy's dog / Though he had bit me, should have stood that night / Against my fire” (4.7.36–38).⁷⁰ It is striking given the state of charity in Britain that Edgar's guise and disguise has shown. Cordelia would have sheltered even the vicious dog of one who wished her harm. Cordelia's love is not confined to any single object; her love of her father extends to the creatures in the world, even to their noncomprehending harm of her. Her exclamation shows that love of the world accompanies the open-hearted love of others, extending its gratuitous good from the single objects of its care and attention. Her response to Lear seeks no justification or reasons; it is purely instinctive and responsive.

Lear does not know where he is—in heaven, hell, or, if on earth, in France or England. Nor does he know how he comes to be clothed in the garments he is wearing, or where he spent the previous night. He worries whether he is in possession of his wits. All this comes a bit later. For now, slowly awakening, he will say words that indicate that he thinks he might be dead. If he is dead, she seems to him like one from heaven, a soul in bliss, as he is in hell bound on a wheel of fire. The quarto gives Cordelia's next line as “Sir, know me.” Is this a plea, an entreaty, or a request? It cannot be an order or a command for she has already shown, by addressing him as majesty, that the obeisance is owed to him and not to her. The folio changes this to the more fitting: “Sir, do you know me?” (4.7.48). This is a question to which the answer is not yet clear, and yet it is the most important question of the play. The scene will delicately and beautifully illuminate what it means to know someone, to acknowledge someone, and it will insist that such acknowledgments are always mutual. Lear will hesitatingly and slowly find his way toward his daughter only by acknowledging that he is fond and old. Earlier in the play, Regan had invited just such a confession: “Sir, you are old: / Nature in you stands on the very verge / Of her confine” (2.2.335–36), a cruel accusation to which Lear bitterly responds: “Dear daughter, I confess that I am old; / Age is unnecessary” (2.2.342). To another daughter, feeling his way into speech, Lear belatedly responds to her question “Sir, do you know me” with “I know not what to say” (4.7.54). He cannot swear that even his hands are part of a composite body. He is “not assured” of his condition, alive or dead, a spirit or a human (4.7.56). He pricks himself with a pin to see if he is flesh and blood: Any true response to Cordelia's question must come from the acknowledgment of his flesh and blood, his folly, his vanity as part of the history of actions that are not and were not his alone to define or own. Cordelia kneels and asks his blessing. She seeks his benediction, his good speech, over her. He, too, will seek to kneel as if to seek the same, the good in speaking. The rest is all benediction, all blessing, and they share each other's lines: “Cordelia: You must not kneel. Lear: Pray do not mock” (4.7.58).⁷¹ It is as if all the lines are still an attempt to answer her question: “Sir, do you know me?” These are everyday, ordinary words. To acknowledge her as his daughter is to acknowledge his disowning, his banishment, of her.

Then he risks the expression of what he thinks he does know: “I know you do not love me” (4.7.73). It is all he can venture for he cannot yet envisage a love whose fidelity would survive such a cruel banishment. She has cause not to love him. He is expecting and he is owed a love according to his deserts. Her answer to this is profound: “No cause, no cause” (4.7.75). What is she doing here? She is not so much forgiving him as suggesting that she is not operating in an economy of guilt or punishment in any world of desert or deservings. Cause has the sense of reason and the legal understanding of cause as a matter you are entitled to take to law. (We have of course seen all legal structure utterly collapse in this play: Who can arraign me? is Goneril's challenge (5.3.157). Lear can arraign only a joint stool in his heartbreaking search for justice.) Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts? This has been Lear's devastating, unanswerable question. To his reply that Cordelia has a reason not to love him, her answer is that reasons and causes do not come into it. To his desire for punishment at her hands—“If you have poison for me, I will drink it” (4.7.72)—she offers a different ground, a groundless ground. “No cause” is the ground of grace. Tony Tanner has beautifully said of this scene: “Hearts are causes. . . . Is there any cause in nature that makes these gentle hearts?”⁷² Emilia's response, as he reminds us, is the best: “They are not ever gentle for the cause, but gentle for they’re gentle.”⁷³ Cordelia also reveals that love is not funded by causes; they come after the fact of loving, to justify and enhance the unanticipated, unsummoned gift of love.

In the first scene of the play, in the plea to her father before France, she had asked that her father make it clear that what deprived her of her father's grace and favor was a want of the glib and oily art that separates the speaker from her true purpose in speaking. “What I well intend,” she says, “I’ll do’t before I speak” (1.1.227–28). She understands that empty words of love evacuate the concept of love, and betray both her father and herself. In this scene, she does not speak of love at all. But she reveals it in her every care for his dignity and attention to his frailty and awareness of his shame, although such shame does not diminish her love for him. Perhaps her own love has extended beyond the bond of childhood, the bond of marriage, to an exorbitant love that cannot know what claims might be made on it, and whose words are the more delicate for that harrowing experience of suffering another's devastation. Love encompasses but spreads far beyond duty returned, obedience owed, and honor due.

In Mendes's rendering of this scene in the 2014 production, Simon Russell Beale as Lear gave a long pause between forget and forgive. Cordelia: “Will’t please your highness walk?” Lear: “You must bear with me. / Pray you now forget and forgive, I am old and foolish” (4.7.82–84).⁷⁴ Bearing with each other is the only thing this play offers in the end. It may not seem to be much, but it is everything.⁷⁵ The long pause between forget and forgive—the first time I ever heard these lines spoken in this way, offer a complete reversal of the way I usually read and heard them. Forget and forgive deliberately reverses the more conventional forgive and forget, forgetting, coming conventionally after forgiving. Now, however, forgive is the slowly realized afterthought, painfully added on, coming after the desire for oblivion and serving as an antidote.

Grace is groundless and gratuitous. It is unprecedented and given, and it is not generated by the structures of the will. The Reformation, with its deep encounter with the thought of Augustine and Saint Paul, sees that the recognition of sin is retrospective and so deepened the Christian appreciation of grace. We can only bear the recognition of our sinfulness in the light of the grace of God (simul justus et peccator). Grace does not come after a recognition of sinfulness but rather is that recognition in the light of the good it has absented from view.⁷⁶ If Cordelia's love is divine, like Christ's love, it is because it is known only in the acknowledgment of it.⁷⁷

We know Cordelia dies, that her death is unbearable for Lear, that he dies perhaps imagining that she is not yet dead, and that even that consolation—if that is what it is—is an illusion. The work of grace in this play is neither a theodicy nor a justification of the ways of God to man, but rather a pattern of response to bear with. What happens in this scene can be described as the advent of grace as love and forgiveness, and now, Shakespearean tragedy seems unimaginable outside this glimpse of graced awareness. Lear's dawning awareness of Cordelia is not generated by his will and is no longer confined by his deserts. Lear is faithful, for the rest of his life and the rest of the play, to the space held open by Cordelia's loving loyalty and by his awakened ability to attend and see it for love.

The kind of love Cordelia offers brings truth not consolation. That is why we can talk about realization—in which case realization is a recognition of a reality, and a making something real.

In registering the weight of her love, Cordelia said that it was more ponderous than her tongue and that she could not heave her heart into her mouth because of it. It is as if she understands the gravity and the grace of words as bonds. It was Augustine who beautifully said, “My weight is my love.”⁷⁸ This is Lear's cue when he comes in bearing Cordelia in his arms. Nicholas Rowe was the first editor to add the word dead to the stage direction: “Enter Lear with Cordelia dead in his arms.”⁷⁹ It is a demand of physical stamina that every older actor has to undertake; and it is an existential task for the character, Lear, to bear the weight of her shortened life and the desperate hope of deferring her death. This is the burden of a finite love, to have its preciousness so singularly and distinctly embodied. With Lear we all want to say: “Stay a little” (5.3.269).

In his invitation to bring our words home, as if we have been exiled from our flight from what we mean by them, Ludwig Wittgenstein enjoined us to “look and see.”⁸⁰ King Lear ends with the old, frail king, now incapable of distraction, looking at Cordelia, in particular at her lips, “Look on her: Look, her lips, / Look there, Look there!” (5.3.309–10). In some stage versions of King Lear, Lear gazes at the air around him as if Cordelia's soul has departed with her last breath, as if he is seeing it. In others, Lear is caught in the illusion that she is alive, as if the old romance form from which Shakespeare had so carefully excavated and inverted the Lear story is back as a romance: She is alive! Paul Fiddes, however, has suggested that Lear is doing what he says, asking us to look at Cordelia and see her for her wonder, her life, her very being.⁸¹ For what we know from Lear is that love (and trust and pity) are forms of recognition and that we are sustained only through love's relation to care. For creatures revealed and exposed in our dependencies, for creatures so intrinsically, so intrinsicately, bonded to each other, the loss and the preciousness cannot be separated.

The play restores us to love's hard realities and the forms of our lives with love. Why do I talk about the banishment of love when there seems to be a plenitude of it among the characters Goneril, Regan, and Edmund, and in other relationships of allegiance? And why “restoration”? The same word is, after all, used by the play's evil lovers. At the end of the play, Edmund can say, extraordinarily, “Yet Edmund was beloved” (5.3.237), when he realizes that, “The one the other poisoned for my sake, / And after slew herself” (5.3.238–39). This late understanding of being beloved might even sponsor the good he means to do immediately afterward: “Do you want to discern the character of a person's love?” asks Augustine: “Notice where it leads.”⁸² The love between Goneril, Regan, and Edmund is rivalrous, however, and continues the competition in love introduced in the first scene and the illusion of its quantification. Edmund imagines that to be loved by more than one woman is to be loved more; the love of Goneril and Regan is mutually death-dealing. Absent a vision of a sharing that precedes it, absent an understanding of the priority of being in relations of primordial love, Goneril and Edmund's unhandsome and predatory grasping, their compelled appetite, and their instrumental use of others show the word to be reliant on its prior use. But this use distorts the concept, for example, severing the links with truth, charity, and justice and with the “loved” one's separate gratuitous worth. It has ceased to mean anything like a bond in which rivalry is suspended or inapplicable, or as John Burnaby puts it, not “monopolizable.”⁸³ The exploration of love's grammar is then in order precisely because the lovers in the play are stretching the concept, subordinating it to the isolated, choosing will, while also using the same word. In subtle ways, the kinds of loss involved in such a narrowing down of the concept of love might be hard to see.

When representation is the chief focus of criticism, and adequation to reality is seen solely in terms of reference, then other (moral and ethical) ways of thinking about reality drop out. Then we will ignore what Diamond calls the “difficulty of reality” as a moral question and the difficult task of seeing, say, the reality of another person.⁸⁴ In the vision of language of ordinary language philosophy, we do not lose contact with reality, and with ourselves and others, when we represent something that does not exist. Rather, we lose contact with reality when we lose our grip on sense, because language and reality are internally connected.⁸⁵ When we cannot make sense or cannot understand the sense others are making, when we cannot see the point of what they are saying, then we lose our grip on our reality and the reality of others.⁸⁶

Peter Winch has expressed this idea when he says: “Reality is not what gives language sense. What is real and what is unreal shows itself in the sense that language has.”⁸⁷ Becoming real, seeing what is real (which may have all along been right in front of us), appreciating the reality of others in our lives is a moral and ethical task. Our everyday language reflects precisely this understanding of reality, not only its fragility and evanescence but also the relief that comes from clarity and insight, the way we come into focus for each other when we see the point of our words on any particular occasion. It is the sense of reality evoked in such phrases as “I barely existed for him” or “When I actually met with her, I realized that my version of her was fundamentally distorted by my sense of resentment and envy, and I was able to appreciate different things about her,” that create a sense of the difficulty of reality for us as it emerges in everyday ways in our relationships with each other. The ways in which reality is caught up in our speech acts is thus never general and is never secured by anything outside our relations with each other. Forsberg puts the point very well when he says: “If words are not merely the names of things—though they can be that too—but more importantly interconnected to how a particular life is led, then, the matter of ‘meaning’ means listening to the sense of our words and to one's other. To lead by listening is to know and understand how a word and the speaking person belong to a particular context of use or form of life.”⁸⁸

Perhaps current criticism focuses on a too-narrowly circumscribed region of language—representation—and mistakes it for the whole of language. Perhaps it ignores how we are implicated in our speech acts other than by being represented. King Lear, with its extension of tragic action to the actions of our words, might bring this perspicuously into view, showing us the very shapes of love and how its intrinsic connections with hope, faith, patience, trust, and truth unravel to such devastating effect.