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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 selfperception 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 contextdependent 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°
