20
Seung Hwa Kim
English 378, Shakespeare on stage
Dr. Ron Strickland
Final paper, Summer, 2003
King Lear
Modernist, Edmund: His Agony and Redemption
Ⅰ
Grady says one of the most frequently cited words for the writings of Shakespeare for the last 400 years is ‘modernity’ (Grady 2000, 1). Aers contends that the matter of ‘human subject’ or ‘liberal human subject’, which belongs to interiority and the subjectivity as a reification of modernity, emerged in Western culture with the time of Shakespeare (Aers, 177). Shakespeare lived most of his life during the reign of Queen Elizabeth and James 1, when England went through rapid economical, historical, political, social, cultural, and spiritual changes on the cusp of modern era. In the 16th century, England, most of all, went through the transition from the medieval feudalism to modernity. It was a period from the pre-modern era to the modern era. People observed and faced fast and drastic changes in economy, religion, education, and politics. Their family life and everyday life too changed rapidly and their spiritual life was continuously challenged and forced to choose between staying in the old order and moving out to the new ideology.
The binary frame of the world around individuals continuously forced them to adopt and adapt the drastic changes in their spiritual and material world, which consequently created conflicts between individuals and within an individual. Tragedy caused by the conflicts was watched and experienced by any individuals and tragic dramas as ‘a conflict of the spirit’ reflected it. “Tragedy may here be defined as an attempt to reclaim the distance that exists between man and things, and give it a new kind of value, so that in effect it becomes an ordeal where victory consists in being vanquished (Robbe-Grillet; Drakakis, 14).” Drakakis says that the idea of a union between man and the world, and thus by implication the idea of immanence has always figured prominently in Shakespeare and the unity of man and world has been identified as an ideology. The ideology reflects the primary political means through which human beings live their social relations (Drakakis, 13). The immanence has come under scrutiny in the tragedies of Shakespeare. Radical discontinuities between ideology and social praxi involved a radical conflict of the society within which Shakespeare’ tragedies were produced. Edmund in Shakespeare’s tragedy, “King Lear” is a reification of this conflict and disparity and immanence.
Ⅱ
Characters in Shakespeare’s plays reflect human beings’ new images of the Renaissance. The new ideology of the Elizabethan era influenced by the Renaissance and the scientific revolution of the times stressed the flexibility of the human society which expanded the spiritual and material position of human beings in the relations with nature. It was completely in contrast to the medieval view of nature which was based on the fixed perceptions of social order and hierarchy. The creation of these expanded images of human beings was a reflex of the age. The images are a dialectic combining of the social characteristics of the Middle Ages and the new ideologies of the Renaissance. Tragedy comes from the unbalanced, distorted, and flawed combination of these two traits inside an individual and among individuals.
Shakespeare adopts the new trend of human thoughts while keeping the medieval ideology and the tradition of the tragedy. He combines these opposite ideological trends and applies them to his drama and makes it a principle for creating a tragedy. “King Lear” effectively shows this process through various characters in the double-plot story of King Lear and Gloucester. The characters fight and struggle for their own values against the world with different value systems. They also go through immanent conflict in the middle of getting to their own subjectivity. Conflict can be one between good and good, between good and evil, and between evil and evil among individuals and within an individual. And what they pursuit, whether good or evil, is spiritual value rather than moral goodness. So Edmund appears as a most attractive subject of modernity in the play. He raises an issue of human subjectivity in the struggles with the social restriction, injustice, and unfairness of the 16th century such as primogeniture, legitimacy, and conventional hierarchical order. He reveals himself as a prescient modernist in the agony of doubt and in the separation of thoughts and feelings. Although his modern spirit is still as immature as his times and thus he is destined to end up with a failure in the battle with the social and institutional unfairness and injustice, he “evacuates unfair social divine order of meaning and value and makes it an object to be subordinated to human rationality, will, and desire (Cohen, 21).” In this paper I will focus on Edmund of “King Lear” because he is a center figure of modernity in that his disparity between his liberal world of consciousness and the world outside is “the moment when we find a version of the human being with interiority, a being who is now defined through consciousness (Aers, 190).” I will illuminate the procedure of his intense life as a protagonist who is actively transforming himself from a pre-modernist to a modernist under the invincibly systemized restrictions of social hierarchy.
Ⅲ
Bradley sees tragedy as ‘a conflict of the spirit’ (Bradley, 7; Drakakis, 9). What is genuine and striking about his definition of tragedy is that “the tragic conflict is one not merely of good with evil, but also, and more essentially, of good with good”. And he adds that we have to be very careful, in saying so, to recognize “that ‘good’ here means anything that has spiritual value, not moral goodness alone, and that ‘evil’ has a similar wide sense (Bradley, 87; Drakakis, 9).” Based on this definition of the tragedy we can rewrite a villain, Edmund as a modernist warrior who is willing to fight against evil inside as well as outside of him for the spiritual value.
In the 16th century, while the established party’s conservative attempt to protect the existing social order was serious, social mobility and vacillation in the social hierarchical order was already an irresistible wave of the age. In the process of the social changes man became a spiritual individual, and recognized himself as such (Burkhardt, 1965; Cohen, 20). An emerging ideology of modern subjectivity started to take root in individuals naturally. “Traditional social and economic roles were sloughed off by the interiorization of individuality (Cohen, 22).”
However, the social structure and value system was still very medieval. Social status of the people dominates their daily life and even intervene with their world of consciousness, whether in higher or in lower class. People were still divided into four sorts of social status: gentlemen, citizens, yeomen artificers, and labors. More exactly, there were only two groups of people. “At the forefront of the class of gentlemen was the monarch, followed by a very small group of nobles--dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts, and barons--who either inherited their exalted titles, as the eldest male heirs of their families, or were granted by the monarch. …the younger sons of the nobility were only entitled to called “esquires,” … the English tended to divide the population not into four distinct classes but two: a very small empowered group-the “richer” or “wiser” or “better” sort and all the rest who were without much social standing or power, the “poorer” or “ruder” or “meaner” sort.… (Greeblatt, 6)” The great mass of these ordinary people had neither voice nor authority in the commonwealth. They were only to be ruled. In fact, the structure of society was simple: haves and have-nots. “There were, to be simple about it, but no more simple than the views of the time warrant, two kinds of people in Renaissance England: those that mattered and those that did not. The latter were “the multitude, wherein be contained the base and vulgar inhabitants not advanced to any honor or dignity,” …The group that mattered is fairly easy to define. They were those who lived in the unearned income from inherited land. (Cunningham, xviii).” The society was maintained by the conventional divine order or the inherited hierarchical order. “…the means of order were, in the Queen’s view, the reverence attached to “the anointed sovereignty of crowns” and the hierarchical stepping down by degrees of power and respect, inviting and compelling awe from inferior to superior. It was a congenial way of thinking, for the universe itself was so ordered, from the lowest element to the highest sphere, as was that celestial society that rose by degrees through all the orders of angels to God (Cunningham, xx).”
To notice that in literature, class distinctions are literary distinctions is helpful to understand the modernist, Edmund in “King Lear”. Tragedy is only a matter of the governing class, and usually with heads of states such as “Lear, Claudius, Hamlet, and Julius Caesar” (Cunningham, xxiii). What was more conspicuous is class distinction in matters of sex and of love. “Whoring and lust may be expected in the lower class. It is whoring and lust in the upper class, or between nobility and the citizen’s wife, that is particularly the object of satiric vehemence… The worst is the corruption of the best. So it is “my lord” Stallion and his “court-bred filly,” “stretched upon the rack of lust,” who are the special objects of invective. And, conversely, the whole area of what we call romantic love is the prerogative only of the upper class. (Cunningham, xxiv)” This statement is important to understand how Edmund becomes a protagonist and a antagonist of the play, too.
Edmund is an illegitimate whoreson of the Earl of Gloucester and his “court-bred filly”. The story of his birth is the object of satiric vehemence and the special object of invective and humiliation. While he belongs to the upper, unearned-income-from-the- inherited-land class, he is one of the ruled, have-nots, and the base. Even though he is called a “lord” from the birth, he is an illegitimate son due to his legitimate father’s illegitimate affair. By the convention of primogeniture the other children except the first legitimate son, both daughters and younger sons, were not entitled to have any share of their father’s property and social status. Under such a system, the younger children inherited neither title nor estate, unless one of them happened to be heir to his mother’s property or unless the elder son died childless and he replaced the dead brother as a ‘walking sperm-bank’ (Stone, 71). Edmund, a bastard, belongs to the base.
Ⅳ
Edmund becomes marginalized in either class. He always feels the fragmentation and emptiness while looking at what is happening around him. Gloucester confesses his illegitimate and unconscientious affair to the Earl of Kent:
Kent. Is not this your son, my lord?
Glou. His breeding, sir, hath been at my charge.
I have so often blush’d to acknowledge him, that now
I am braz’d to’t.
Kent. I cannot conceive you.
Glou. Sir, this young fellow’s mother could;
Whereupon she grew round-womb’d, and had indeed,
sir, a son for her cradle ere she had a husband for her
bed. Do you smell a fault?
Edmund has heard this open secret of his birth in a humiliating way so many times that he too is brazed about that. However, this humiliation is reified as a full awareness of unfair and unjust social and institutional order and restriction. He rejects the unfair reality of divine order and divine nature, which only deprives the ruled and have-nots of all the human dignity and human rights. He decides to reinvent his own fate by himself in order to be in the center of life. His own nature that he believes in and wants to follow is not the unfair divine nature. He starts to write his own history “as a process leading toward rationality and freedom (Grady 2000, 11)”, which would achieve human subjectivity for him.
Edmund: Thou, Nature, art my goodness, to thy law
Amy services are bound. Wherefore should I
Stand in the plague of custom, and permit
The curiosity of nations to deprives me,
For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines
Lag of a brother? Why bastard? Wherefore base?
When my dimensions are as well compact,
My mind as generous, and my shape as true,
As honest madam’s issue? Why brand they us
With base? with baseness? bastard? base, base?
Who, in the lusty stealth of nature, take
More composition, and fierce quality,
Than doth within a dull, stale, tired bed
Go to th’ creating a whole tribe of fops,
Got ‘tween asleep and wake? Well then,
Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land.
Our father’s love is to the bastard Edmund
As to th’ legitimate, if this letter speed
And my intention thrive, Edmund the base
Shall <top> th’ legitimate. I grow, I prosper:
Now, gods, stand up for bastards! (2.1.1-22)
Edmund “is the product of Nature—of a natural appetite asserting itself against the social order; and he has no recognized place within this order. So he devotes himself to Nature, whose law is that of the stronger, and who does not recognize those moral obligations which exist only by convention,--by ‘custom’ or ‘the curiosity of nations (Bradley, 302).” However, it may be a satiric confession of both his indignation about his unfair fate and his determination about the ambitious future plan to achieve freedom, rationality, and modernity.
A conflict of the spirit is not necessarily moral goodness. What we are interested in is spiritual value. In fact, in the soliloquy above, we cannot say who is good and who is evil. Who is a protagonist? Who is an antagonist? We cannot say that Edgar is a protagonist and Edmund is an antagonist. We cannot judge the opposite is true, either. What we only can see is that Edmund continuously divides himself and separates his thoughts and feelings. The separation of his thoughts and feelings is continuously happening. His subjectivity becomes more mature in the mental conflict, in the division of self-consciousness, and in the separation of thoughts and feelings. His confession continues in the disguise of irony.