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THE INFLUENCE OF EARLY MODERN THEORIES OF GOVERNANCE
“I would not see thy cruell nayles / Pluck out his poore old eyes." Although
the image of nails primarily connotes cruelty, Renaissance scientists regarded
this part of the body as the digestive system’s excrement.*”> Nevertheless,
before dying, Regan explicitly evokes the image of the belly when she attacks
her sister, saying, “Lady, I am not well; els I should answere / From a full
flowing stomack.”””°
In the organic conception of state, the financial officers take the position
of the organs of digestion, especially that of the stomach, which is also the
potential cradle of all illnesses: “financial officers and keepers may be compared
with the stomach and intestines, which, if they become congested through
excessive avidity, and retain too tenaciously their accumulations, generate
innumerable and incurable diseases, so that through their ailment the whole
body is threatened with destruction.”*”’
Correspondingly, in King Lear Regan and Gonorill behave as if they were
insatiable financial officers whose task would be to provide Lear with food
and shelter but whose greed and desire for power cause both Lear’s madness
and Gloster’s blindness, the physical maladies of the plot. In addition to the
allusions to digestion and the lower parts of the body, the text often applies
animal imagery, especially the attribute of a fiend, to descriptions of Gonorill
and Regan. However, these images seem to complement one another, as occurs
in the passage in which Lear cries out when he meets Gloster: “fichew nor the
soyled horse goes toot with a more riotous appetite, down fro the wast tha’re
centaures, though women all aboue, but to the girdle doe the gods inherit,
beneath is all the fiends, thers hell, thers darknesse, ther’s the sulphury pit,
burning, scalding, stench, consumption.”*
As regards their position in the social hierarchy, Gloster’s two sons, Edgar,
who appears mostly in the guise of an outcast, and Edmund the Bastard, are
positioned at the feet of the body politic. Rolls sees the two brothers’ career
in the play as “connected to their sympathetic relationship to the heads of
England’s body politic.”*”° (252-53) While the bastard Edmund can climb the
social ladder in Regan and Gonorill’s commonwealth, Edgar, like Cordelia,
becomes an outcast in their system yet regains his status following the demise
of the two sisters. Although in the brothers’ case the direct organic references
“4 Tbid., sig. Hlv.
“5 Michael Schoenfeldt: Fables of the Belly in Early Modern England, in David Hillman-Carla
Mazzio (eds.): The Body in Parts. Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, New York¬
London, Routledge, 1997, 245.
Shak-speare: His True Chronicle, sig. L1r.
John of Salisbury: The statesman’s book, 65. “Quaestores et commentarienses as uentris et
intestinorum refert imaginem. Quae, si immense aviditate congesserint at congesta tenacious
reservavaerint, innumerabiles et incurablies generant morbos, ut vitio eorum totius corporis
ruina immineat.” Saresberiensis: Policraticus, I. 283.
Shak-speare: His True Chronicle, sig. 13v.
129 Rolls: The Theory, 252-253.
a
426
42
a
428
s 109 ¬