Oldal 91 [91]
THE INFLUENCE OF EARLY MODERN THEORIES OF GOVERNANCE
to its parts or members. Having examined the Shakespeare oeuvre in order to
collect the leading motives of each play, Caroline Spurgeon concludes that the
dominant image in King Lear is “a human body in anguished movement” or “the
sense of bodily movement and strain.”**° David Hillman also remarked that the
play belongs to a group of Shakespeare’s tragedies that “are preoccupied with
an imagination of the visceral interior of the human body.”?#!
Although Shakespearean scholarship today tends to turn to the references
concerning Lear’s physical body, this chapter sides with critics like Mary
Axton, Albert Rolls, and Northrop Frye, who link King Lear with certain Early
Modern political concepts based on the analogy between the state and the
human body.?” In what follows, this chapter first summarizes the presence
of the corporeal images*** in contemporaneous governance theories and then
offers a reading of the 1608 Quarto of King Lear that examines these corporeal
images and considers the ways in which they could be said to call attention to
the notion of the “organic conception of the state.”
CORPOREAL IMAGES IN EARLY MODERN THEORIES OF GOVERNANCE
In the field of political science, the metaphor of the “body politic” has been
widely used in many alternations since Ancient times until the seventeenth
century to describe the hierarchical structure of society as if it were a human
body consisting of separate members with specific functions which serve the
needs of the whole organism. The application of such analogical patterns of
thinking, or as W. R. Elton calls them, “conceptual modes,”3** was a typical
feature of Early Modern ideas on kingship. As E. M. W. Tillyard noted,
Renaissance men regarded the world as an enormous web of correspondences
and believed that understanding the internal structure and the prevailing
Press, 1958; David Hillman: Visceral Knowledge, in David Hillman-Carla Mazzio (eds.): The
Body in Parts. Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, New York—London, Routledge,
1997, 81-106; John Erskine Hankins: Backgrounds of Shakespeare’s Thought, Hassocks, Sussex,
The Harvest Press, 1978.
Spurgeon: Shakespeare’s Imagery, 339.
Hillman: Visceral Knowledge, 81.
382 This is why, for instance, Kent’s reference to Edmund’s handsome body “I cannot wish the
fault vndone, the issue of it being so proper” (sig. Blr) becomes irrelevant to my perspective, as
the words “proper issue” refer to the character’s physical qualities. Similarly, Lear’s figurative
reference to the female genitalia as the “sulphury pit” (sig. I3v) is unrelated to the main
concern of this chapter.
333 I use the word “image,” as defined by Caroline Spurgeon, to cover “every kind of simile and
metaphor” that fits “the purpose of allegory” and connotes “any and every imaginative picture
or other experience” Spurgeon: Shakespeare’s Imagery, 5.
334 WW. R. Elton: Shakespeare and the Thought of his Age, in Stanley Wells (ed.): The Cambridge
Companion to Shakespearean Studies, Cambridge—New York, Cambridge University Press,
1986, 17.
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