A longer version of this essay by Peter Holland was first printed in the programme for Nicholas Hytner's production of King Lear at the RSC in 1990 in which John Wood played Lear. Peter Holland is now McMeel Family Professor in Shakespeare Studies, Department of Film, Television and Theatre at Notre Dame University.




King Lear is rigidly hierarchical. Though Gloucester envisions a time when 'distribution should undo excess/ And each man have enough', though Lear himself attacks the corruptions of those who wear 'robes and furred gowns' and mocks 'the great image of authority' when 'a dog's obeyed in office', the play's concept of social organisation is not really democratic egalitarianism.


It manages instead to celebrate the virtues of service, the terrifying obligation put on the virtually powerless to accept their need sometimes to show their tiny fragments of power by refusing to obey the powerful. Kent simply cannot stay silent when Lear rejects Cordelia, even though he knows what his intervention may cost him: 'Think'st thou that duty shall have dread to speak/ When power to flattery bows?' Even when banished, he feels he must continue to serve 'thy master, whom thou lov'st', as he tells himself; as he tells Lear, 'you have that in your countenance which I would fain call master … Authority.' Cornwall's servant, watching his master blind Gloucester, is right both to find a voice and to express his opposition in terms of service: 'I have served you ever since I was a child,/ But better service have I never done you/ Than now to bid you hold.' Gloucester's tenant, a man even older than Lear, helps his master and sets off to fetch his best clothes for Edgar though, as Gloucester tells him, 'Thy comforts can do me no good at all;/ Thee they may hurt.'



Such actions, however futile they may prove to be in the play's world of unyielding brutality, are individuals' dignified responses to social forms, giving moral meaning and ethical force to the structures of social order. Intransigent and resistant to the immediate demands of those who, like Cornwall and Lear himself, demand reverence, these gestures are set against the work of those Kent dubs 'smiling rogues', who 'smooth every passion/ That in the nature of their lords rebel', or the 'servile ministers' Lear accuses the elements of being. Oswald gives such good service. Brecht worried about his paradox of service and the audience's response: why should an audience 'applaud when a servant gets beaten for carrying out his mistress's orders'? King Lear forces the audience to judge the characters' actions while making judgement painfully difficult.


But Kent's concept of service is also set against those who have only the most absolute powerlessness, the wretches and beggars whom the play recurrently conjures into our awareness, those who are heaped at the base of the social system and whom Edgar, the legitimate heir to the Duke of Gloucester, has to join. As Lear comes to realise directly, because as a king without power he now has to express his own needs, the 'poor naked wretches' have needs and their needs are a demand. As Michael Ignatieff defines it, in a fine essay on King Lear,

Kings in the fullness of their power do not have to speak the language of need. Theirs can be the pure and unjustified language of desire … What a man needs he does not earn or deserve. He does not have to justify his entitlement only the extent of his necessity. His entitlement inheres not in his person but in his humanity … What a person is due, on the other hand, is what they deserve … If basic need is what is necessary to a man as a natural being, these additional claims are due to him as a social being.
(The Needs of Strangers, 1984)

Lear strips himself and is stripped by others of his due and finds he therefore has to reason out the whole nature of need. Those who rise through the play succeed because they can manage to reject any notion of others' need, brutally refusing to acknowledge it.





At the start of the play, Gloucester describes his sense of acknowledging his bastard son, Edmund: 'I have so often blushed to acknowledge him that now I am brazed to't'. Gloucester has become shameless about Edmund, a son whom he will soon mistakenly call 'loyal and natural'. Throughout the play Lear and Gloucester repeatedly revise their judgement about which of their children are natural and which unnatural. Blood-kinship is, for them, not enough; natural children are the ones who behave, they believe, with the proper respect to 'how manifold and strong a bond/ The child was bound to th'father'. But the phrase is used by Edmund, whose self-interest is, for him, far more important than any obligations of family. His rise, carefully charted in the social gradations he crosses, manipulates others' loves so that by the end of the play he has become greater even than his father, Albany's equal since, as Regan says, 'In my rights/ By me invested, he compeers the best.'


Cordell Annesley described her love for her parents as 'dutiful'; yet her actions showed how far she was prepared to go in honouring this sense of duty and her father's will showed that he had understood and responded to it. Shakespeare's Cordelia uses the same language to describe her love for her father: 'You have begot me, bred me, loved me. / I return those duties back as are right fit.' But her father disinherits her for it. Clea - pop up box Cordell Annesley Sir Brian Annesley, an old servant of Queen Elizabeth, had three daughters, the youngest of whom was called Cordell. In October 1603 his eldest daughter, Lady Grace Wildgoose, attempted to have her father certified as incompetent so that she and her husband Sir John Wildgoose could take over the management of Sir Brian's affairs and his valuable estate in Kent. The part played by his second daughter, Christian, is unknown, but Cordell opposed the plan, apparently successfully, by appealing to Sir Robert Cecil. She argued that given his loyalty and long service, her father deserved better than to be judged lunatic in his old age. Sir Brian died in July 1604 and the Wildgooses contested his will, in which he left most of his property and possessions to Cordell. One of the executors of the will was Sir William Harvey, third husband of the dowager Countess of Southampton, whose son was Shakespeare's early patron. The will was upheld and after the Countess of Southampton's death in 1607, Harvey married Cordell Annesley.


Lear's division of his kingdom seems to make perfectly good sense, handing out his daughters' dowries in such a way that 'future strife/ May be prevented now'; neither the histories Shakespeare probably consulted nor his Kent and Gloucester see the division as a mistake. Brecht, again, worried that 'the spectators at the Globe theatre who saw King Lear give away his kingdom in pieces, pitied honest Cordelia, who didn't get one of the pieces, not the thousands of people who were thus given away'; the audience, like Lear, must learn about the needs of a king's subjects.


The love-test Lear imposes on his daughters is immediately visible as a cruel paradox. When Lear demands a public expression of love he creates a bizarre competition in which the prizes have already been awarded: the map has already been trisected so that Goneril can receive her third before the others have spoken. Lear has also already allocated to Cordelia the best third, 'a third more opulent than your sisters', for his intention for himself seems to have been straightforward: to live with Cordelia, thinking to 'set my rest/On her kind nursery.' The image turns her into his mother - in a play conspicuously lacking in mothers - but it is an inversion of orthodox family hierarchies that she will resist late in the play when he tries to kneel to her to ask forgiveness: 'O look upon me, sir,/ And hold your hands in benediction o'er me./ You must not kneel.'


The love-test demands love in a fashion that makes an expression of love impossible. Lear expresses his need to be loved all the more strongly by the artificiality of a ceremonial form that must make the truth of the rhetoric of love indecipherable. Cordelia's refusal to speak her love is the only way love can, in such circumstances, be spoken. When Edgar, in the play's last lines, advises us to 'speak what we feel, not what we ought to say', it is advice that Cordelia has fulfilled precisely by refusing to speak what she feels and by expressing the limits of dutiful love in rebutting her sisters' excess, the excess Lear demands to cover his fear of finding those limits.


Only one character from the Lear and Gloucester families survives the play: Edgar, the play's protean shape-changer. In King Lear so many characters are desperately concerned with finding the cause, the general reason of things: Lear characteristically wonders to Edgar as Poor Tom 'Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?' and, reunited with Cordelia, assumes that she does not love him just because 'You have some cause'. Cordelia does not tell him that she does love him, only that she has no reason not to: 'No cause, no cause'. In his disentangling of causes, Edgar has found a series of solutions, losing his identity and acting as his father's psycho-therapist, but he has also responded in two significantly distinct ways. Confronted by the sight of blinded father and mad king he can only accept its reality: 'I would not take this from report; it is,/ And my heart breaks at it.' But neither here nor at the end of the play does his heart break. Instead his acceptance of the true reality of the action he both undergoes and observes makes him find not cause but connection.


When Edgar says to the dying Edmund 'The dark and vicious place where thee he got/ Cost him his eyes' he is describing a link that has, incontestably, made of Gloucester's 'pleasant vices' an instrument to 'plague' him. At the end of King Lear, when, for the first time since the opening scene, Lear and his three daughters are together onstage again, the audience can do little more than observe the play's connections that have brought all four to this point. But Edgar's understanding of connection is also his reason to endure. He would understand the dispute Keats describes when he does what Dr Johnson resisted:

Adieu! For, once again, the fierce dispute

Betwixt damnation and impassioned clay

Must I burn through, once more humbly assay

The bitter-sweet of this Shakespearian fruit.

('On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again')