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SHAKESPEARE’S ART OF POESY IN KING LEAR
are missing, there are many instances that seem to allude to this lower social
position. For instance, in his soliloquy at the beginning of the play, the Bastard
openly articulates his rejection of “customs” representing social order and
obedience as a subject, and instead he swears loyalty to “nature.” Without
defining what he means exactly by “nature,” it is worth noticing that his self¬
perception is strongly connected to the image of “baseness,” denoting not
only a moral quality but also a social position. What drives his deeds is not
hatred for the others, but his selfish need for land: “well the legitimate Edgar,
I must haue your land, our Fathers loue is to the bastard Edmund, as to the
legitimate [...] Edmund the base shall tooth’legitimate.”° His words reveal
here that, although he rejects custom, he imagines his own prosperity as
vertical movement up the social ladder. Based on one of Gonorill’s statements,
“My foote usurps my body” in the Quarto, Peter Stallybrass also contends that
Edmund’s character could be understood as representing the foot of the body
politic.**! In this role, he even recalls the image of the foot in Saint Paul’s letter
to the Corinthians cited above: when the question is raised whether the foot,
as a foot, is “not of the body”, the answer is the unambiguous affirmation that
it belongs to the body. (1Cor 12:15)
Obviously, the anthropomorphic mapping of characters described above
does not explain all the aspects of the semantic complexity of the body-related
images of the 1608 King Lear Quarto. Neither should it be regarded as a
perfectly balanced systematic correspondence between the Early Modern
social hierarchy and the characters of the play. Yet it may enrich readings
of the text by pointing out that some of its corporeal images are context¬
dependent and thus poetically motivated by the sociopolitical discourses of
the Early Modern period.
The Disintegration of King Lear’s Body Politic
If the reader considers the hierarchical social order in terms of the organic
analogy that the text of the play evokes, Lear’s decision to retire, or, to recall
his words, “to shake all cares and busines of our state; / Confirming them on
yonger years,“ appears in a different interpretive light. According to the
organic conception of the state, every member of the commonwealth, like
430 Shak-speare: His True Chronicle, sig. Clr.
#1 “Just before Q1’s “My foote usurps my body,” Goneril gives a chain to Edmund, the Bastard [...]
Edmund, the base, stoops his head to be kissed by his mistress; a woman’s kiss, a monarch’s
kiss, that can stretch the spirits of the base, the feet of society “up.” [...] Goneril (as woman,
foot; as monarch, head) raises Edmund (as bastard, foot; as man, head) by enchaining his
head.” Peter Stallybrass: Footnotes, in David Hillman-Carla Mazzio (eds.): The Body in Parts.
Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, New York-London, Routledge, 1997, 318-319.
#32 Shak-speare: His True Chronicle, sig. Blv.
+ 110°