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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 YorkLondon, 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
