Oldal 106 [106]
SHAKESPEARE’S ART OF POESY IN KING LEAR
in those days, because in the second half of the name he saw the anagram of
“ideal.”?” However, the explanation offered by Ted Hughes sounds even more
imaginative, as he divides the name into two parts, the first being Cordel,
which, like Ari-el (the “Light of God”), “makes her the heart of God, while
her full name Cordelia makes her simultaneously the heart of Lear,” or as
in a French-like spelling, “Coeur de Lear.”**° Regardless of their differences,
these explanations highlight that the trope of the heart not only describes
Cordelia’s nature and dramatic role, it also “functions as a silent pun,” relying
on the etymological root of her name.*”’ Placed in the context of the organic
conception of the state, Cordelia’s name becomes significant as it fits into the
system of corporeal images and positions her character as the heart of Lear’s
body politic. When she answers her father’s question by twice repeating the
word “nothing,” she makes a whole series of allusions to this political concept.
As Northrop Frye comments: “The word nothing we remember from Richard
II, where it was connected with the conception of the king’s two bodies. In
both plays nothing seems to have the meaning of being deprived of one’s social
function, and so of ones identity."
In the love contest scene, like Cordelia, Kent also identifies himself as an
organ to describe his relationship to Lear when he calls himself the "true
blanke” of the King’s eye. Tibor Fabiny argues that the eye in Shakespearean
drama stands “as a metaphor of proper moral judgment” and is also
connected to an ancient Christian tradition that applies seeing and vision to
the image of “religious understanding” and “the loss of sight” to “the loss of
ones contact with God." Thus, when Kent offers himself to Lear as a medium
of seeing, in a figurative sense, he not only reminds him that he is misjudging
Cordelia’s intentions but he is also in danger of losing his relationship with
God, whom he, as the King, should represent on earth. On the other hand,
from a societal point of view, the function of the eye, together with the ears and
tongue, is applied to provincial governors in the system of John of Salisbury,
who describes their position in the following manner:
A governor is one who presides over the administration of justice among the people
of a province. He therefore should have knowledge of the just and unjust, and should
have the means and the will to enforce justice. For although the common lot of death
w
95 Foakes: Introduction, 34.
3% Ted Hughes: Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, London, Faber & Faber, 1992, 273.
3°7 McAlindon: Tragedy, 87.
3°8 Northrop Frye: Northrop Frye on Shakespeare, ed. Robert Sandler, New Haven-London, Yale
University Press, 1986, 109.
399 Tibor Fabiny: The Eye as a Metaphor in Shakespearean Tragedy: Hamlet, Cordelia and Edgar:
Blinded Parents’ Seeing Children, in K. Kürtôsi — J. Pal (eds.): Celebrating Comparability,
Szeged, JATE University Press, 1994, 465.
400 Tbid., 466.
+ 104 +