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THE INFLUENCE OF EARLY MODERN THEORIES OF GOVERNANCE
each organ of a human body, is mutually dependent on the others, and the
body functions perfectly only if every part performs its duties for the benefit
of the whole. Thus, when Lear resigns from the government of the kingdom,
he upsets the delicate balance of the body politic and triggers the series of
events that leads to the decline of the metaphorical body of the state.*** First,
he dislocates himself, the head; shortly afterwards, he banishes Cordelia, the
symbolic heart, and also Kent, the eye. As the action of the play proceeds,
the audience witnesses the disintegration of the whole organism: Gonorill
and Regan, the organs of digestion, deprive Lear of his official companions,
the train of knights, and, later, even the Fool disappears without any reason.
Gloster, as a governor corresponding either to the ear or the eye of the body
politic, loses not only his physical sight, but also his property and social rank.
His legitimate son, Edgar, becomes socially marginalized for the major part
of the play. Even Lear’s daughters and Edmund, the Bastard, die at the end,
leaving the stage covered with the corpses of the royal family and creating a
vision of the complete destruction of Lear’s body politic. I find this emblematic
display of the dead bodies of the actual members of the body politic a very
good example of what Rosalie Colie described as Shakespeare’s fascinating
capacity for “unmetaphoring” the common usages of conventional expressions
or literary devices by relying on and exploiting their literal sense(s) in his
own poetic practice.** The text of the play presents the decline of the organic
system, the “body politic” in the figurative sense, with the help of an image
cluster that compares the state with an unhealthy and declining body in the
literal sense. Caroline Spurgeon points out that Shakespeare tends to present
the state facing disturbances as a human body covered with tumors or ulcers.
The image of “the kingdom [...] sick with civil blows”* first appears in his
history plays, and the context in which it appears implies that the members
are responsible for the sickness of the body. This imagery, frequently appearing
#3 Following the logic of analogical thinking, with this decision, Lear also disturbs the balance
of nature or, in other words, the macrocosm, since “as Providence is the emblem of order in
the universe [...] so, in the commonwealth, the emblem of order is the king.” Russel Fraser:
Anarchy and Order, in Russel Fraser: Shakespeare’s Poetics in Relation to King Lear, London,
Routledge-Kegan Paul, 1962, 72.
She uses the term “unmetaphoring” with reference to a poetic device of an author “who
treats a conventionalized figure of speech as if it were a description of actuality [and thus]
is unmetaphoring that figure.” Rosalie Colie: Shakespeare's Living Art, Princeton, Princeton
University Press, 1974, 11. Most recently, Hungarian scholar Attila Kiss has expanded on and
renamed this idea “demetaphorization’” in his study of the corporeal semiotics of Titus Andronicus,
a play in which Kiss examines instances of Shakespeare’s poetic practice “when the figurative
unexpectedly turns brutally literal and anatomical.” C.f. Attila Kiss: Demetaphorization on the
Early Modern Emblematic Stage, in Tóth Sára — Kókai Nagy Viktor — Marjai Éva — Mudriczki
Judit — Turi Zita — Arday-Janka Judit (eds.): Szólító Szavak / Ihe Power of Words: Tanulmányok
Fabiny Tibor hatvanadik születésnapjára / Papers in Honor of Tibor Fabiny's Sixtieth Birthday,
Budapest, Károli Gáspár Református Egyetem-LHarmattan Kiadó, 2015, 295—304.
135 Spurgeon: Shakespeares Imagery, 133.
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