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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
