The Idea of Order in King LearBy Julianne Werlin
Lear: By Jupiter, I swear no!
Kent: By Juno, I swear ay.
In The Tragedy of King Lear, particularly in the first half of the play, Lear continually swears to the gods. He invokes them for mercies and begs them for destruction; he binds both his oaths and his curses with their names. The older characters—Lear and Gloucester—tend view their world as strictly within the moral framework of the pagan religion. As Lear expresses it, the central core of his religion lies in the idea of earthly justice. In II.4.14-15, Lear expresses his disbelief that Regan and Albany would have put the disguised Kent, his messenger, in stocks. He at first attempts to deny the rather obvious fact in front of him, objecting “No” twice before swearing it. By the time Lear invokes the king of the pagan gods, his refusal to believe has become willful and almost absurd. Kent replies, not without sarcasm, by affixing the name of the queen of the gods to a contradictory statement. The formula is turned into nonsense by its repetition. In contradicting Lear’s oath as well as the assertion with which it is coupled, Kent is subtly challenging Lear’s conception of the universe as controlled by just gods. He is also and perhaps more importantly, challenging Lear’s relationship with the gods. It is Kent who most lucidly and repeatedly opposes the ideas put forth by Lear; his actions as well as his statements undermine Lear’s hypotheses about divine order. Lear does not find his foil in youth but in middle age; not in the opposite excess of his own—Edmund’s calculation, say—but in Kent’s comparative moderation. Likewise the viable alternative to his relationship to divine justice is not shown by Edmund with his elevation of a nature oblivious to ideas of justice, but by the more flexible and very human system of Kent. We ought not to forget that it is Kent who, in the instance above, has objective reality on his side. It is important that the divine system with which Lear struggles is a pagan one, for its emphasis on earthly justice seems to form the crux of Lear’s conception of life. Lear’s oaths, particularly in the earlier parts of the play, are one of the most revealing instances first of his idea of natural and divine order, and later of his fight against the disintegration of that idea in the face of an oblivious nature.
Lear reveals that he sets great importance on the gods when he swears by “all the operation of the orbs/From whom we do exist and cease to be” (Lear, I.1.109-110). The very excessiveness of this oath is important; Lear not only swears but affirms a theological truth in swearing: he believes human life to be controlled by the motions of the planets. His divine reality is therefore also a natural one, of which man forms a part. Lear goes so far as to actually invoke nature when cursing Goneril, saying “Hear, Nature, hear dear goddess, here:/Suspend thy purpose if thou didst intend/To make this creature fruitful” (Lear, I.4.257-257). So far so good. The act of swearing, though, subtly alters this picture of the divine. To swear is not merely to speak but to act; it is performative. By implicating the gods in his actions, Lear insists not merely on a divine order that is an extension of natural and human order, but a divine order that is an extension of his conception of order. He does not, of course, conceptualize it this way: when he asks, for example, that “All the stored vengeances of heaven fall/On her ingrateful top” (Lear, II.4.152-153), he invokes an idea of an inalterable justice that extends downwards to and encompasses humanity rather than upwards from himself. But because he uses his own authority—because his invocations tend to take the form of commands—he is making a strong claim for his infallibility. Kent recognizes this and refers to “thy” gods. This idea is later reflected in his statement that humans can “show the heavens more just” (Lear, III.4.36), but it is a dark reflection in that it asserts that the heavens—and therefore humans—are not just already.
Lear’s first oath has the effect of disinheriting Cordelia. When Kent challenges him, he refers to his oath, saying “thou hast sought to make us break our vows,/Which we durst never yet, and with strained pride/To come betwixt our sentences and power” (Lear, I.1.166-168). Kent’s offense, according to Lear, is to try to come between his vows and his power to fulfill them. His kingly power, through the vehicle of the oath, is associated with divine power. Oaths, for Lear, are an essential expression of the continuity of the human and divine. By swearing he asserts both his power and the power of the gods; the two are in essential harmony because in Lear’s theology divine power is earthly or at least natural power both in its causes and its manifestations. Shortly thereafter, Kent opposes one of Lear’s swears by repeating its formula, as he does in II.4. Lear says “Now by Apollo—” (Lear, I.1.158) to which Kent replies “Now by Apollo, king, thou swear’st thy gods in vain” (Lear, I.1.159). By giving Lear ownership of the gods, Kent implies, of course, that they do not have objective existence, but he also emphasizes the nature of Lear’s relationship with the gods as one-sided. Lear, Kent implies, tends to extend his ideas about justice upwards from himself. By using Lear’s formula, Kent demonstrates that he can use oaths in the same way as Lear to contrary ends. This constitutes a denial of the intrinsic meaningfulness of divine invocation. For Kent, speech acts are acts like others: human and therefore revocable, malleable and motivated by a sense of one’s relationship to others rather than abstract concepts. Lear attempts to attach a permanence and significance by grafting a divine and fixed system onto them.
Lear’s relationship to the gods and the natural order shifts as the play proceeds. He begins, after his mistreatment at Goneril’s hands, to address the gods in terms of love and affection, with the idea that if the heavens “do love old men, if your sweet sway/Allow obedience, if you yourselves are old” (II.4.183-184) they will therefore be likely to take his part. He is still invoking an ethic of justice, but pleading for its enforcement on behalf of love. He returns to the idea of justice shortly thereafter, however, invoking “high-judging Jove” (II.4.220). When Lear rages in the storm in III.2, he appeals to the natural gods several times before finally returning to the idea of judgment (III.2.49-60). The multiplicity of approaches, here as in other places, undermines the principle behind all the approaches, that nature is in itself a divine extension of human order, that when we speak to the world, it listens. The storm is not, as Gloucester seems to think, and as the audience probably supposes, a sort of paysage moralise. It is just a storm.
By the time Lear, in his madness, encounters Edgar and Gloucester in IV.5, he has abandoned the idea of a stable justice that is at once human and divine. The idea of justice, for Lear and perhaps generally, presupposes a higher order and objective truth. But when “the rain came to wet me once, and the wind to make me chatter, when the thunder would not peace at my bidding, there I found ’em, there I smelt ’em out” (Lear, IV.5.102-103). His description of justice as “the strong lance of justice” (Lear, IV.5.164) which “hurtless breaks” (Lear, IV.5.165) on the robes of the king but easily pierces the rags of the peasant is more caricature than alternative. Still, the suggestion of a form of justice that is controlled by humanity and dependent on human characteristics such as wealth and poverty—even if it is ill-used—is definitely distinct from his earlier ideas about it.
This idea of the relationship between individuals as the grounds for actions is the vision of order that Kent offers throughout the play. It is shown not only through his relationship with Lear, but also through his interactions with other characters. When Kent is confronted by Regan and Cornwall for fighting with Oswald, he does not appeal to the justice of his actions, or even any reasonable cause, although he has one. He refers, instead, to the idea that “No contraries hold more antipathy/Than I and such a knave” (Lear, II.2.86). The relationships between humans serve here, as elsewhere, as the logic of his actions. In Kent’s response to Lear, “By Juno, I swear ay,” the importance lies in the act of swearing rather than in the divinity. He suggests that one god can easily be opposed to another based on the will of the person who is swearing and therefore the formality is worse than meaningless, it is actually harmful because of the ease with which it can be manipulated. Kent’s conception of order is founded in his relationship to Lear, “Whom I have ever honored as my king,/Loved as my father, as my master followed” (Lear, I.1.137-140). In Kent’s system, order consists in human relationships with each other rather than with the natural divine. Where Lear would call upon the gods, Kent invokes human relationships. Kent’s system has none of the rigidity of Lear’s. The relationship between Kent and Lear is not confined to a single affiliation, but is a complex and fluid web of bonds and associations. Kent locates Lear’s authority in his countenance (Lear, I.4.27-29) rather than in his position in relation to any external or overarching order; such orders, he implies, are fictional and as such extremely vulnerable. But Kent’s relationship to Lear viewed from Kent’s perspective is one of the few that is not demonstrated to be vulnerable within the play; it remains essentially unchanged throughout. The power of kingship, friendship, paternity, marriage and filial obligation are all undermined within the play, but Kent’s relationship to Lear is maintained to Kent’s last lines, the penultimate speech in the play, when he says “I have a journey, sir, shortly to go;/My master calls me, I must not say no” (Lear, V.3.299-300). This comparative stability is astounding given the way virtually every other relationship undergoes a radical change within the course of the action. It will be objected that the Kent-Lear relationship becomes the Caius-Lear relationship. But it is precisely this flexibility as regards the forms and appurtenances of relationships that allows Kent to preserve what is essential in them.
It would not do to forget that if some moral alternative is erected through the character of Kent, it is subtly done compared to the obvious brutality with which Lear’s system is torn down. Kent’s “By Juno, I swear ay,” is essentially negative in character. His ethos of adaptability takes chance or fortune into account insofar as it is possible to take it into account; it does not claim to control it. Lear says that he is “The natural fool of fortune” (Lear, IV.5.189), and Kent accords in this judgment, calling Lear one of two fortune “loved and hated” (Lear, V.3.257). Lear later describes his final happiness as hanging on “a chance” (Lear,V.3.43) that Cordelia is alive. Even Kent’s human systems cannot absolutely allow for fortune or chance, because there is always the possibility of it reaching, as it does in Lear’s case, unbearable extremes.
Lear no longer swears to the gods in the later acts of the play. Even in his momentary happiness with Cordelia he does not return to his old relationship with the divine, but instead pictures the two of them as “God’s spies” (Lear, V.3.17). This is the first time that Lear refers to God rather than a god or gods. In this metaphor, he and Cordelia are God’s employees and dependents rather than a necessary part of a natural order. He does not form his divine reference as an oath; he neither commands nor supplicates. It is a sweet vision and a sharp contrast to Lear’s earlier invocations of the gods. Were there some divine preceptor bent on teaching Lear an earthly lesson, he could safely say that it was learnt. But the play, of course, continues. What is important, finally, is not that Lear learns, but that we the audience learn. One of the most important aspects of this learning is anticipated by Kent, who first points out that any invocation of Jupiter can be countered by an opposite invocation of Juno to the same effect, which is to say none at all.
© Julianne Werlin |