Oldal 105 [105]
THE INFLUENCE OF EARLY MODERN THEORIES OF GOVERNANCE
The Presence of the Body Politic in the 1608 King Lear Quarto
When exploring King Lear in relation to the early Jacobean intellectual milieu,
Mary Axton describes the play as “a sensitive study of the disintegration
of an inhuman political idea.”**? In her reading, Lear’s tragic error is the
misinterpretation of his own role: he tries to behave as if he had only a body
natural and disregards his responsibility as a monarch. With respect to the
principle of royal inheritance, he cannot assign his property as his body natural
wishes, yet he disregards this restriction at the beginning of the play. Lear’s
error lies in treating the question of inheritance as a family matter. In this
respect, Lear is in sharp contrast with Gloster, who, having a body natural only,
also commits the mistake of “misjudging his children,” yet the consequences of
his error remain within the scope of the family, whereas Lear’s act precipitates
a series of events that have political significance. Although in the end, Lear
is able to restore his relationship with Cordelia, “there is no remedy for his
offence against his body politic.”*°? Mary Axton argues that Shakespeare makes
the audience focus on Lear, the man, especially after the storm scene, and
from this point of view, the play presents him as a man for whom “fatherhood
means more than kingly power.”?”* She also suggests that the performance
of King Lear before King James I at Whitehall on Saint Stephen’s night in
1606 might have been understood by the audience as a warning against the
non-human side of the concept of the King’s two bodies. Although Axton’s
argumentation undoubtedly sounds convincing, the main shortcoming of her
study is that she fails to notice that by the time of King James’ reign, and also
by the assumed 1608 inception of King Lear, the notion of the body politic
appears in a discourse slightly different from the one in which Plowden and
his contemporaries participated in the Elizabethan period.
In contrast with Axton, I argue that this corporeal symbolism—with
the help of rhetorical devices—demonstrates the relevance of the organic
concept of state to an understanding of the subtle relationship between the
characters and the king. From the beginning, the imagery of the play links
expressions referring to various bodily organs to certain characters in the
play. To take the most striking example briefly mentioned in the previous
chapter, the tropes of the heart are connected to the figure of Cordelia whose
name stems from the Latin word “cor,” which means “heart.” Scholars have
presented highly original and fascinating etymologies for this name, a few of
which are worth citing, even if they seem far-fetched. Reginald Armstrong
Foakes, mentioned in my introduction, argues that Shakespeare might have
preferred Cordelia to “Cordeilla” and “Cordella,” which were also widely used
392 Tbid., 137.
393 Tbid., 139.
394 Tbid., 141.
s 103 ¬