II

The methodology of this section of the essay will be that of close reading for a particular theme.^[33] The opening scene of Lear raises the issue of obedience, proper and improper, almost immediately, but before turning to this aspect of the scene, a larger issue about the political orientation of the play must be addressed. If the spring of the entire tragic action, or at least of the Lear plot, is seen to be the division of the kingdom as such or Lear's abdication as such, then the entire play would seem to be oriented in a conservative direction, toward the ideology of order and degree—"The specialty of rule hath been neglected." The assumption that this is true, that the division and abdication are the great mistakes from which the tragic action flows, is one of the most well-entrenched assumptions in Shakespearean scholarship. It is regularly

[33] For how this procedure escapes my own indictment of critical "schemes," see Essay 3, n. 14 above.

taught to countless students under the guise of "scholarship" (and proper moralism), and it is a tribute to the power and persistence of the conservative view of Shakespeare. The "scholarly" assumptions that division of a kingdom and abdication would necessarily have been perceived as disastrous mistakes by an early seventeenth-century audience are among those "truths" that hardly need proving anymore—that hardly, in fact, need to be supported by evidence. Reference to Gorboduc and to the theory of hierarchy (as enunciated in Hooker or in the first paragraph of the homily on Good Order) seems to stand in for evidence.

Yet internally, Shakespeare's play (in both versions) is quite clear on the initial political situation, and contextually the actual social and political history of Europe in the sixteenth century does not support the normal view. The key to understanding—or rather, merely to seeing—what actually takes place in the opening scene is to distinguish between Lear's initial plan (call it Plan A) and his revised plan. As the opening lines of the play make clear, the actual plan had been very carefully worked out. The first words that we hear are about the proposed division and how impartial and careful the king has been in the process of determining and negotiating it ("in the division of the Kingdome, it appeares not which of the Dukes hee valewes most, for qualities are so weigh'd, that curiosity in neither, can make choise of eithers moity"). Lear's chief counselors, Gloucester and Kent, are familiar with the terms of the division and do not register any anxiety about it. They are very calmly discussing the situation, which has, presumably, been in process for a while.

There is no reason why they should feel any anxiety, since the plan, insofar as we can infer its details, was a sensible and politically astute one. From a truly historical point of view, we can see that an Elizabethan or Jacobean audience would have recognized Lear's situation, with regard to the inheritance of his kingdom, as a very unfortunate and perplexing one.^[34] He was in the situation of Henry VIII prior to the birth of Edward. Lear had only daughters. This was bad enough, but the elder two of lear's three are married to powerful and potentially antagonistic dukes. One is tempted to ask the critics who think of the division of the kingdom as inherently disastrous what they think Lear ought to have done. It is

[34] In The True Chronicle Historie of King Leir , there is explicit concern over the issue that God has not granted Leir, with his three daughters, "an heyre indubitate" (line 44). See Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), 7:338.

clear, however, that the facts of Lear's situation as we are given them are never considered before the Grand Scholarly Generalization clicks in.^[35] If we are seriously going to attempt imaginative historical realism, we have to recognize that the choices open to a monarch in Lear's situation were (1) to proceed by primogeniture, so that Goneril would inherit the kingdom; or (2) to devise some sort of arrangement—that is, a division. Fathers with exclusively female heirs often made such arrangements, and they were free to do so. Primogeniture did not apply to women.^[36] It is hard to see that naming Goneril sole heir was a desirable or politically workable solution given the power and known temperament of Regan's husband, the Duke of Cornwall. In order to prevent civil war Lear had to divide his kingdom, a motive that the Folio emphasizes ("that future strife / May be prevented now" [TLN 49–50]).^[37] And in order to give Cordelia anything, Lear had to divide the kingdom into three rather than two segments.

So far, none of this is truly speculative. The further details of "Plan A" might seem to be so, but they are also quite clearly implied by the text(s). The plan had further provisions for keeping the peace, though here we might seem to be speculating. The texts tell us both that the "moities" are of equal extent and that Cordelia's share will be "more opulent."^[38] Unless this is a simple contradiction (or Lear is just encouraging Cordelia), the answer to this puzzle would seem to reinforce a picture of the initial plan that would follow from the seats of the potentially warring dukes (Albany in the north, Cornwall in the south): Cordelia's equal but "more opulent" share would be in the middle of the kingdom. Lear would live there with Cordelia and her husband (almost certainly intended to have been Burgundy) in what would amount to a buffer state.^[39] This plan seems to have every advantage. It

[35] For reference to an immediate political context in which Shakespeare's audience would have been strongly for "the division of the kingdomes" (Q has the plural), see n. 47 below.

[36] See Joyce Youings, Sixteenth-Century England , The Pelican Social History of Britain (New York: Penguin, 1984), 113; and Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 , abridged ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 274, 290. Rosalie Colie sees the relevance of this in "Reason and Need: King Lear and the 'Crisis' of the Aristocracy," in Rosalie L. Colie and F. T. Flahiff, eds., Some Facets of "King Lear": Essays in Prismatic Criticism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), 196–98.

[37] This line does not appear in the Quarto (Q).

[38] The Quarto has "equalities are so weighed" where the Folio has "qualities."

[39] For Burgundy as the intended husband of Cordelia (he is given right of first refusal), and for some shrewd remarks on the intended division ("Plan A"), see Harry V. Jaffa, "The Limits of Politics: King Lear , Act I, scene i," in Allan Bloom and Harry V. Jaffa, Shakespeare's Politics (1964; rpt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 113–45. I should add that this essay also contains, I think, a number of egregiously forced assumptions about Lear's "perfection" as a king, about politics, and about the supposed moral or "Aristotelian" structure of Shakespearean tragedy.

would (as far as is humanly possible) guarantee political and military stability and it would also take special care (and advantage) of Cordelia. But what about the abdication issue? First ("internally"), it seems reasonable to think that the tripartite division plan would have had the best chance of success if it was begun while Lear was still alive and could supervise it. Second, historically, the most famous case of a reigning monarch in the sixteenth century abdicating his throne in order "To shake all Cares and Businesse from [his] Age" (TLN 44), was a spectacular success. Charles V, the most powerful ruler by far in sixteenth-century Europe, retired to a monastery and passed the kingship of Spain to his absent son (who was in the Netherlands at the time) with no problem whatever.

What we witness in the opening scene, then, is not a disastrous plan being made yet worse, but a set of spontaneous bad decisions on Lear's part supervening on a plan that might well have been a workable one—a true crisis.^[40] Reading the scene in this way helps us better understand Shakespeare's presentation of the behavior of both Cordelia and Kent. They are both to be seen as caught by surprise. Cordelia was not planning to disappoint Lear in public, nor was Kent planning to protest the arrangements Lear was making. Kent's concern for Lear's "safety" (TLN 168) is a response to the revised plan. What this means is that the love-test cannot have been part of the initial design, since, as we have seen, the shares to go to each of the sisters had already been carefully worked out. In the anonymous Leir , the love-test has a function, but in Shakespeare's play, it is a kind of game that Lear is playing ("Which of you shall we say doth love us most") while waiting for Gloucester to return with Cordelia's suitors. The real business of the scene was to make the division of the kingdom official through public proclamation and, the one actual piece of business, to declare which of Cordelia's suitors has succeeded (the rival princes "heere are to be answer'd" [TLN 53]). The love-test is purely ceremonial, and the suggestion that it is part of

[40] For the greater and more coherent dramatic effect of reading the scene in this way, see G. R. Elliott, "The Initial Contrast in Lear ," Journal of English and Germanic Philology 58 (1959): 251–63.

the division merely a flourish. As Stanley Cavell has argued, all three of the daughters understand perfectly what is being asked of them.^[41]

Goneril participates in the ceremony brilliantly. Realizing that Lear is calling more for word than matter, her inspired use of inexpressibility topoi allows her to fulfill her ceremonial role and free herself entirely from matter. Goneril has, in fact, performed so brilliantly and upped the rhetorical ante so high that Regan can only echo her and Cordelia can only commit herself to matter rather than to words. Cordelia's initial act is mere refusal, nonobedience ("Nothing my Lord"). She insists on distinguishing herself from her sisters and from the terms of the ceremony. When drawn into speech, she fills in the content of her present and future relations to her father, while the occasion calls only for form. She commits herself to a "plain" rhetoric of concrete enumeration, rather than to a ceremonial rhetoric of comparatives and superlatives. As is well known, the relation of a child to a parent was an essential part of the general nexus of hierarchical subordination in conservative Renaissance social and political discourse as well as a major source for political analogies.^[42] It is crucial to the value structure of King Lear that, from the point of view of conservative moral and political thinking, Goneril is entirely correct in saying to Cordelia, "you have obedience scanted" (TLN 304 ).^[43] Regan has just said: "Prescribe not us our dutie" (TLN 301). Goneril and Regan are the mouthpieces for "duty" and "obedience" straightforwardly conceived.^[44]

We recall that the Homily on Order reminded us that although we may not "in any wise" resist violently, we must believe undoubtedly that there are circumstances in which we "may not obey kings, magistrates, or any other, though they be our own fathers ." Yet we cannot help

[41] Stanley Cavell, "The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear ," in Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 62.

[42] For a powerful and (more or less) typical example, see William Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties , in The Workes of William Gouge , rev. ed. (London, 1627). For this type of discourse, see Gordon J. Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975).

[43] The assignment of this speech to Goneril is a Folio alteration. Randall McLeod is correct in noting that the Folio adds to Goneril's part, and that Goneril is "cooler" in the Folio, but I think that he very much mistakes the nature of cruelty in the play in seeing this coolness as making Goneril "milder" in the Folio;" Gon. No more, the text is foolish," in Division, 155–93.

[44] This helps explain why, as Edwin Muir elegantly puts it, Goneril and Regan "have a good conscience, even a touch of self-righteousness"; "The Politics of King Lear ," in Essays on Literature and Society , rev. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), 40.

wondering whether Cordelia's situation was truly one of these special circumstances (which the Homily against Disobedience disavows). Goneril's condemnation is not enough in itself, at this point in the play, to lead us to approve wholeheartedly of Cordelia's behavior. Perhaps some honorable form of compliance would have been possible.^[45] "Duty" and "obedience" are rendered problematic by the contrasting actions (that is, speeches) of Cordelia and her sisters, but disobedience is not fully valorized by Cordelia's behavior. For this, we must turn to Kent. It is in Kent's behavior in this scene that the theme of virtuous, morally mandated disobedience, even interference, is fully articulated.

Kent is normally thought of as a feudal retainer. This captures some central elements of his characterization, but obscures his identity as a Renaissance courtier. In scene 1, Kent attempts exactly what the revised "schoolmaster" courtier of Castiglione's fourth book is supposed to do: to speak truth to power, to use his personal skills and the relationship to the ruler that these skills have brought him to tell his prince unpalatable truth. One function of the opening prose interlude is to give us a sense of Kent's normal behavior as a courtier. Although critics are often confused about this, Shakespeare does not present Kent as naturally or habitually boorish or even plain-spoken. With regard to what we are to understand as Kent's normal behavior, the striking feature of the opening interlude is how exquisitely Kent handles the almost impossible social situation in which he is placed by Gloucester's crudely jocular introduction of Edmund-as-bastard. "I cannot wish the fault undone, the issue of it, being so proper" is truly magnificent, responding without stuffiness to Gloucester while managing to acknowledge and compliment Edmund. This is courtliness at its best, humanly and morally graceful without being in any way greasy.^[46] And Kent's initial addresses to Lear are both courtly. "Good my Liege," he begins, after the astounding curse on Cordelia (TLN 128). Lear immediately shuts him up with a threat and announces the new division and abdication plan. Kent tries the courtly mode again (though subtly echoing Cordelia's concrete enumeration): "Royall Lear , / Whom I have ever honor'd as

[45] Bradley states this view strongly. See A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (1904; rpt. New York: Meridian, 1955), 256.

[46] In his superb essay on "King Lear and its Language," Sheldon P. Zitner has noticed the morally alert courtliness of this initial exchange (in Colie and Flahiff, Some Facets of "King Lear," 6 ). In their pioneering essay on "'Service' in King Lear," Shakespeare Quarterly 9 (1958): 347–55, Jonas Barish and Marshall Waingrow note that Edmund shrewdly "takes Kent as his model in the forms of service" (350).

my King, / Lov'd as my Father . . . As my great Patron" (TLN 148–51). Only when Lear again cuts him off with a threat does Kent alter his style (his counterpart in Leir falls silent at this point). Shakespeare wants to present Kent as knowing exactly what he is doing—to the point of having Kent explicitly call attention to the relation between the extremity of the situation and his abandonment of verbal decorum. "Be Kent unmannerly , / When Lear is mad," he formally announces (TLN 154b–155a). Only after this announcement does Kent address Lear unceremoniously, that is, without a prologue, in the familiar form, and with a generic, nonhonorific description: "What wouldest thou do old man?" (TLN 155b).

Kent's rudeness is chosen, under pressure, as a moral stance. He is operating at a borderline where Castiglione merges into Ponet (Annabel Patterson has suggested that it is analogous to the world of Parliamentary privilege).^[47] Again "thouing" Lear, Kent explains that in interfering, he is acting out of faithfulness: "Think'st thou that dutie shall have dread to speake / When power to flattery bowes?" Kent's anticourtly style (like Cordelia's, he implies) is not an option but a moral obligation: "to plainnesse honour's bound / When Majesty falls to folly" (TLN 158–59). Kent is acting like Buchanan's "physician" in refusing to acknowledge as legitimate the wishes of the king-as-madman. He is attempting to recall Lear to reason ("in thy best consideration, checke / This hideous rashnesse") and to recollection ("Thy yongest Daughter do's not love thee least"). Yet he keeps speaking long after it is clear that Lear is only being incensed by his resistance; he ignores direct commands and interrupts Lear mid-oath. This final move produces, in the Folio only, a small act of resistance by Albany and, if Beth Goldring is right, Cordelia, in checking Lear from physical violence to Kent (TLN 175).^[48]

[47] See Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 71. Patterson argues for the political indeterminacy of the play, but if Lear can be seen as supporting parliamentary privilege, especially with regard to the king's highly unpopular plan for "Great Britain," then this provides a contemporary context in which the division of the kingdom(s) would have been positively rather than negatively conceived. Parliament wanted the kingdoms divided. On the parliamentary opposition to the union of the kingdoms, see Wallace Notestein, The House of Commons, 1604–1610 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971); for the history of the project of the Union, see Brian P. Levack, The Formation of the British State: England, Scotland, and the Union (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). Patterson seems to see Lear as more sympathetic to political radicalism in Shakespeare and the Popular Voice , 111–12.

[48] Beth Goldring, "Cor. 's Rescue of Kent," in Taylor and Warren, Division , 143–51.

Kent's attempt at schoolmaster courtiership receives precisely the "reward" (TLN 186) that More's Hythlodaeus or Castiglione's Calmeta would have predicted, banishment, and in the final speech before his fate is sealed, Kent combines Buchanan's analytical image with Ponet's prophetic stance, presenting himself more as bearing witness than as advising:

Kill thy Physition, and thy fee bestow
Upon the foule disease, revoke thy guift,
Or whil'st I can vent clamour from my throate,
Ile tell thee thou dost evill. (TLN 177–80)

The structure of values established in the first scene continues throughout the play. Plain speech and conscientious breaches of decorum remain touchstones of value and are richly developed as such. Kent, manifesting his characteristic awareness of style ("I other accents borrow"), reenters the play in 1.4 in the role of a non-gentle servant, a menial who is incapable of courtly speech (he can only "marre a curious tale in telling it" [TLN 363–66]).^[49] The introduction of Kent as Caius is immediately followed by a brief and haughty appearance by a gentlemanly servingman, Goneril's steward Oswald, and by a brief interjection by one of Lear's retainers. This retainer, raised from Servant to Knight in the Folio, takes it on himself to comment, directly to Lear, on the developing situation; he emphasizes that he is relying solely on his own judgment and conscience in making these remarks: "to my judgement, your Highnesse is not entertain'd with that ceremonious affection as you were wont" (TLN 587–88). The quality captured in this knight's wonderful phrase, "ceremonious affection," is the quality of normative or ideal courtliness, and it is entirely missing from the world of this play. Given its lack, unceremonious affection, loving plain-spokenness, is the only alternative.^[50] In the face of Lear's anger, the Knight explains his presumptuous and unmannerly behavior thus: "I beseech you pardon me my Lord, if I bee mistaken; for my duty cannot be silent, when I think your Highnesse wrong'd." Again, as in scene 1, in unusually negative

[49] For the distinction between menials and gentlemanly "serving-men," see I. M., A Health to the Gentlemanly Profession of Serving-Men , Shakespeare Association Facsimiles, no. 3 (London: Oxford University Press, 1931).

[50] See Kenneth J. E. Graham, The Performance of Conviction: Plainness and Rhetoric in the Early English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), chap. 6.

or perilous situations, "duty cannot be silent"—even at the risk of breaching decorum.

Oswald reenters at this point, dutifully following the instructions that (in the Folio) we have seen Goneril issuing to him in the previous scene ("Put on what weary negligence you please" [TLN 519]), and Kent intervenes. Shakespeare now introduces the last of the lovingly rude truth-speakers in the play, the Fool, whose first action is to identify with Kent (or Kent with himself). We can see what Shakespeare is doing in this scene. He is lining up the characters: Kent, the Fool, and the nameless Knight on the one hand, Oswald and Goneril on the other. As in the equivalent scene in Twelfth Night (1.5), willingness to tolerate the Fool is a way of making the crucial division.^[51] The Fool is a licensed plain-speaker who presents an utterly cynical, Hythlodaeus-like view of court life: "Truth's a dog must to kennell; hee must bee whipt out, when the Lady Brach may stand by th' fire and stinke" (TLN 641–43). A "brach" is a very high-class dog, and in the great dramatic moment of the scene, Lady Brach herself, Goneril, enters.^[52] Here, as usual, Goneril speaks for decorum.

Goneril begins her reproof of Lear with a comment on the Fool. His license is typical of the "rank and not to be endured riot" with which Lear's retinue threatens to "infect" the manners of her sober court (TLN 712–15, 752–55). She does not appreciate it when Lear adopts something like the Fool's "pranks" to make a point (TLN 746). The elaborately suspended and complexly subordinated syntax that Shakespeare gives to Goneril allows her to present her own desires as objective necessities: "The shame it selfe doth speake / For instant remedy" (TLN 755–56). Lear reacts to the personal threat behind the impersonal rhetoric, and at this point Albany enters. The question becomes where Albany stands. "Is it your will, speake Sir," Lear demands (TLN 770). Albany pleads ignorance, is horrified at the excess of Lear's curse, and then, after Lear rushes out, begins a weak protest. Goneril cuts him off,

[51] Goneril's initial complaint against Lear concerns Lear's defense of his Fool (1.3). In the Folio, where Goneril is addressing Oswald ("Steward") in this scene (1.3), it is unlikely that Oswald was the "gentleman" who struck the Fool. If it were Oswald (as is more likely in the Quarto, where "Gentleman" is interlocutor), the situation would exactly parallel that in Twelfth Night : Fool versus Steward. In any case, the general structure is identical. For a sustained meditation on "Fool in Lear ," see Empson's chapter by that title in The Structure of Complex Words (London: Chatto and Windus, 1964), 125–57.

[52] On the class implications of dog versus "brach," see Muir's note (quoting Duthie) on this line, the Arden Lear , 39–40.

appealing (in the Folio) to political prudence, and tasking him for foolishness or at least "want of wisedome" (TLN 867).^[53] Albany weakly accepts the possibility of Goneril's superior politic prudence, weakly recommends leaving well enough alone, and, when Goneril is about to counter, exits with, "Well, well, the'vent" (TLN 872). At this point, we are surely meant to see Albany as, in Buchanan's words, one of those who "albeit they are not ignorant what is lawful and just or right, yet prefer a quiet sloathfulness to honest hazards, and hesitating in their minds, do frame their consultation on the expectation of the Event."^[54]

Throughout the exchange with Albany, Goneril is constantly calling for Oswald (an effect that is intensified in the Folio). She relies on Oswald to be totally instrumental to her purposes; Oswald is not only to warn Regan about Lear's retinue but "thereto [to] adde such reasons of [his] owne, / As may compact it more" (TLN 862–63). Kent is sent off to Regan by Lear, and in 2.2 the inevitable confrontation occurs. In the structure of the play, Kent and Oswald are systematically contrasted.^[55] The sight of Oswald sends Kent into a Fool-like aria of virtuoso imprecation (TLN 1087–95). Contra Jonathan Dollimore, and despite the references to Oswald being "beggerly," and "three-suited," Kent is not insulting Oswald for being poor and in service.^[56] As I have already suggested, although Lear is set in the legendary past, its social world is that of Shakespeare's England. A figure like Oswald, a steward in a major noble household, was not at all poor, but actually quite grand. He would probably have had a steward himself.^[57] Unless Oswald is finely, even ostentatiously dressed in a very grand version of Goneril's livery, many of Kent's insults make no sense, nor does Lear's remark about Oswald's "borrowed pride" (TLN 1472). Oswald should certainly be

[53] TLN 842–57, from "This man hath had good counsel" to "When I have show'd th' unfitness" are a Folio addition.

[54] De Jure Regni apud Scotos , 61.

[55] See Barish and Waingrow, "'Service' in Lear ," 353.

[56] Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 201. The quotation from Dollimore in the next paragraph also appears on this page. On the sociology of Kent's insults, see Muir's notes (Arden Lear , 65).

[57] See, for instance, the biography of William ffarington, Esq., steward until 1594 to Lord Ferdinando Strange, Earl of Derby, in The Stanley Papers, Part 2: The Derby Household Books , ed. F. R. Raines (Manchester: Chetham Society, 1853), xviii–xcviii. See also Paul V. B. Jones, The Household of a Tudor Nobleman, Univ. of Illinois Studies in the Social Sciences 6 (1917); and Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 82–83.

much better dressed than Caius-Kent. Kent mixes phrases that suggest that Oswald is poor with ones that suggest that he is foppish. Kent is insulting Oswald by promiscuously alluding both to the kind of servant Oswald is ("proud . . . glasse-gazing . . . finicall") and to the kind of servant that Kent is pretending to be and that Oswald would disdain ("beggerly . . . filthy").

The major criticism of Oswald is, in fact, moral rather than social. If this be what Dollimore would call "humanism," so be it. Kent, in his own guise or as Caius, has not simply internalized the play's "dominant ideology of property and power." The dominant ideology of the play (and the of period) is much less successfully dominant and much less consistently conservative than Dollimore suggests. Dollimore downplays the role of critical ideology in the play (since only a "materialist" perspective can be positive in his scheme). Yet the central point of Kent's tirade is that Oswald is, as the Folio puts it, "superserviceable": "one that would'st be a Baud in way of good service" (TLN 1091, 1092–93).^[58] The essential picture is of a man who would do anything on command, "in way of good service." In explaining his anger at Oswald to Cornwall, Kent expounds on the point, now in high verse. He is incensed that "such a slave as this should weare a Sword," that is, should look like a gentleman and true courtier (sword bearing was a class privilege), and yet be among the "smiling rogues" who

                           smooth every passion
That in the natures of their Lords rebell,
Being oile to fire, snow to the colder moodes;
Revenge, affirme, and turn their Halcion beakes
With every gall, and varry of their Masters,
Knowing naught (like dogges) but following. (TLN 1148–53)

This is the figure Pietro da Napoli discerned in Federico Fregoso's "plyable" courtier; it is the smiling client in Juvenal's third Satire and in Jonson's Sejanus .^[59] This is Frank Whigham's "ordinary courtier" (as opposed to extraordinary principled types like Kent or Sir Philip Sid-

[58] One of the most telling pieces of evidence for the Folio's greater clarity about the themes that I have been tracing is its substitution of "super-serviceable" for the Quarto's "superfinicall" (Q E1r).

[59] See Sejanus, his Fall , 1.34–41, Ben Jonson , ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), 4:356; and see 9:598 for the Juvenalian source. The passage in Lear is closer to Jonson than to the original. Muir, Arden Lear, xxi, notes the connection.

ney).^[60] Such an "ordinary" figure encourages rather than, as Kent did in scene 1, stands against irrational passions in social superiors. Kent's characterization suggests that Shakespeare knew the dialectic of Luther and Buchanan in which the improperly obedient participate more truly in "the name and quality that is termed rebellion" than do the disobedient, since here the submissive servants are those who aid and abet a rebellion ("smooth every passion / That in the natures of their Lords rebell").^[61] The culminating dog image suggests an essential difference between brute and reasonable service, between those who are capable of loyal disobedience and those who, in Goodman's words, "suffer themselves like brute beastes rather than reasonable creatures, to be led and drawen where so ever their Princes commandements have called." The fundamental "antipathy" Kent posits between himself and Oswald (TLN 1160) is between two conceptions of obedience: one conscientious and limited, that "rightly obey[s]" power by knowing its proper bounds; the other "naught . . . but following."^[62]

In the scene between Kent and Oswald, Cornwall replaces Goneril as the voice of propriety. "Know you no reverence," he asks the railing Kent. "Yes Sir," Kent politely answers, but appeals, first, to the (non-social) "privilege" of righteous anger (TLN 1143)—a moral use of a key social term—and then to something like the Fool's licensed parrhesia : "Sir," he says, "'tis my occupation to be plaine."^[63] Cornwall's response to this is extremely interesting. He detects the element of wilfullness in Kent's behavior and offers a brilliant, Astrophil-like parody of affected

[60] For Oswald as an "ordinary courtier," see Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 20–21.

[61] For the quotation, see Luther, Warning to his Dear German People, 20. Jonson's treatment does not suggest this dialectic (nor does Juvenal's); their focus is on mimicry.

[62] For "That thou may'st rightly obey power, her bounds know" (line 100 of Donne's third Satire), see Essay 6, pp. 157–58ff. above. As the OED indicates, Shakespeare is an early user of "antipathy" in a metaphorical (nonphysical) sense.

[63] With regard to the political meaning of the defense of "folly" and plain-speaking in the play, it is worth recalling that Ponet, in the Shorte Treatise , presents himself as a kind of Fool. He speaks, he says, "not so finely as som others can, but boisteously after my rude maner" (Kiiv). Luther adopted the persona of a court fool in the Preface to the Appeal to the Ruling Class [of Germany], Luther: Selections , ed. Dillenberger, 404. For a powerful meditation on the function of this persona, see Robert Weimann, "History and the Issue of Authority in Representation: The Elizabethan Theater and the Reformation," NLH 17 (1986): 456. On parrhesia , freedom of speech in the Athenian assemblies, see Victor Eherenberg, From Solon to Socrates (London: Methuen, 1968), 181, 217, 271 (and comedy).

plainness: "He cannot flatter he, / An honest mind and plaine, he must speake truth; / And they will take it so; if not, hee's plaine" (TLN 1173–75). Parody then turns into moral critique. Cornwall recognizes the contrast between Kent and Oswald, but sees Kent as worse, as one of "These kinds of Knaves . . . [who], in this plainnesse / Harbour more craft, and more corrupter ends / Than twenty silly-ducking observants" (TLN 1176–78). The moral moorings of the play threaten to come loose here. Yet while it is generally true that, as Zitner puts it, "no verbal style is self-validating,"^[64] the ethic of Lear is so deeply anticourtly that there is in fact no plain knave in the play. For the figure Cornwall describes, we must look to Othello , not to Lear . We must look to Iago rather than to Kent (though it surely helps us understand Iago's power to recognize that he is pretending to be a figure like "Caius"). As is the case with the association of plainness with pride in the opening scene (Lear speaks of "pride," which Cordelia "cals plainnesse" [TLN 137]), the play does not support the critique. The plain style remains a locus of value. Significantly, Kent defends his "dialect" (TLN 1185) and his sincerity by asserting his willingness to disobey and alienate Cornwall on moral grounds: "he that beguild you in a plaine accent was a plaine Knave; which for my part I will not be, though I should win your displeasure to entreat me to't."

In the name of the particularly thin conception of propriety and decorum that Cornwall shares with Goneril and Regan, he commands the deeply indecorous step of putting "Caius," the King's messenger, in the stocks. At this point, the moral pressure shifts to Gloucester. He was offstage, fetching "the Lords of France and Burgundy," during the great explosion of scene 1, and therefore was not available for protest; the pressure was all on Kent there, as it was on Albany in 1.4. In acts 2 and 3 , the pressure, as Maynard Mack puts it, "to take some sort of stand," is on Gloucester.^[65] Gloucester's initial protest is polite but nonetheless real: "Let me beseech your Grace, not to do so" (TLN 1220).^[66] He disobeys a direct command (from Cornwall, in the Folio) in staying with

[64] "Lear and Its Language," in Colie and Flahiff, Some Facets of King Lear , 9.

[65] See Maynard Mack, "King Lear" in Our Time (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972), 90.

[66] The Folio perhaps weakens Gloucester's protest at this point by cutting the Q lines (E2v) about the social meaning of the "low correction" that Cornwall proposes (in the Arden conflation, the Q-only lines are approximately 2.1.137–41a). It should be noted, however, that Gloucester's conciliatory acknowledgment of Kent's "fault" is also cut in the Folio.

Kent, and he does not palliate or equivocate in his judgment: "The Duke's to blame in this" (TLN 1235 ).^[67] Yet when Lear enters the scene, Gloucester finds himself bearing messages back and forth between Lear and his daughter and son-in-law. As the purposeful quality of the behavior of Cornwall and Regan begins to dawn fully on Lear, Gloucester utters the great cry of the appeaser—"I would have all well betwixt you" (TLN 1396)—but the rest of the scene makes it clear that there is no middle position in this world. Gloucester says nothing during the successive interchanges between Lear and Cornwall, Lear and Regan, and finally, Lear and Goneril. Yet Gloucester follows Lear into the storm. The line that notes Gloucester's absence, however, also announces his return (TLN 1597). It is a brilliant stroke he is still temporizing. Despite his compassionate evocation of Lear's situation, despite his reservations about the actions of Cornwall and company, Gloucester seems prepared to obey the command he has received: "Shut up your doores my Lord" (TLN 1612).

To assess Gloucester's behavior in act 3, we must be aware of his social and political status vis-à-vis Cornwall and Regan. To Gloucester, Cornwall is "the Noble Duke my Master,/ My worthy Arch and Patron" (TLN 995–96); it is only through Cornwall's authority that Gloucester has access to state power and can issue his proclamation against Edgar ("The Duke must grant me that," Gloucester avers [TLN 1019]). Difficult as this is for us to perceive, there is a great distance in social and political status between Gloucester and Cornwall. Cornwall rules half of England (including the region in which Gloucester has his house); he is Gloucester's acknowledged sovereign, his "master" (recall "Let me beseech your Grace, not to do So").^[68] Yet in act 3, by the next time we see Gloucester, he has made his choice. Authority and humanity have definitively split apart, and Gloucester has lost the former in the name

[67] David Bevington has pointed out to me that Gloucester's not following Cornwall offstage could be played as "dithering" rather than as defiant noncompliance. In either case, however, Gloucester does not comply. Perhaps "dithering" too can be a form of resistance.

[68] Muir's assertion (Arden Lear , 63) that Cornwall is subordinate to Regan is based on a very dubious reading (and editing) of Regan's continuation of Cornwall's line to Gloucester at TLN 1061 ("You know why we came to visit you"). Muir punctuates this as an interruption by Regan (2. 1. 117; p. 63), but both Q and F punctuate Cornwall's line as a question, so that there is continuation but no interruption. Muir is (literally) making the text fit his theory here. Lear twice speaks of "the Duke of Cornwall and his wife" (2.4.94, 113), and it should also perhaps be noted (as Elliott, "Initial Contrast," 261, does) that in 1.1, after the disinheriting of Cordelia, Lear seems to see himself as dividing the kingdom between Cornwall and Albany, his "Beloved Sonnes" (TLN 146).

of the latter: "When I desired their leave that I might pity him, they tooke from me the use of mine owne house" (TLN 1752–53 ).^[69] Gloucester was "charged," in true regal idiom, "on paine of perpetuall displeasure," not to aid Lear. Charity has become a crime, but Gloucester now feels in the grip of a moral imperative: "If I die for it, (as no lesse is threatned me) the King, my old Master, must be relieved" (TLN 1768–69). It is important to read "old" here as "former" as well as "aged." Gloucester is insisting on a duty that does not depend on the immediate political situation. When he finds Lear on the heath, he reemphasizes the point, speaking the language of morally mandated disobedience to superior powers, the language of higher than immediate, narrowly political duty. "Go in with me," he says to Lear, "my duty cannot suffer / T'obey in all your daughters' hard commands" (TLN 1926–27). Gloucester means his duty to Lear, but he could also mean his duty to Cornwall and company, as we shall see. In any case, Gloucester flags his disobedience: "Though their Injunction be to barre my doores . . . Yet have I ventured" (TLN 1926–30). As in all the moments of moral courage in the play, duty and obedience are opposed.^[70]

It is important to be clear on Gloucester's political as well as his social situation. In sending Lear to Dover, Gloucester is aiding an invading enemy (and, perhaps, a popular rebellion).^[71] The letter that Edmund, in his major act of loyalty, passes on to Cornwall proves Gloucester "an intelligent partie to the advantages of France" (TLN 1981). Cornwall and company are not misusing language in speaking continually of "the traitor Gloucester."^[72] Gloucester cannot, ultimately, deny the charge when it is specifically put to him; "I am tyed to th' Stake," he says, "and I

[69] For a very similar discussion of the opposition between authority and humanity in the play, see Weimann, "History and the Issue of Authority," 473.

[70] A striking feature of the way in which moral obligations are conceived of in the play is that they are always put in terms of "duty," never in terms of "conscience." This perhaps reflects the play's stress on concrete human relations as the source of morality. It perhaps also reflects the thoroughgoing secularism of the play. "Conscience" appears both in Holinshed (Bullough, 7:317), and in Leir (line 880., Bullough, 7:359).

[71] Elimination of references to a French invasion is one of the most consistent departures of the Folio from the Quarto. Urkowitz has argued that in the Folio substitution of "a power already footed " (TLN 1764) for "a power already landed " (Q G1r) in 3.3, rebellion rather than invasion is suggested; Shakespeare's Revision of "King Lear," 73. Gary Taylor sees the Folio alterations to the latter part of the play as systematically emphasizing rebellion rather than invasion, and he notes that, with regard to Jacobean politics, this made the Folio more rather than less radical ("Monopolies, Show Trials, Disaster, and Invasion: King Lear and Censorship," Division , 80).

[72] This is emphasized in the Folio, in which Gloucester is called a "traitor" or "treacherous" twice more than in the Quarto.

must stand the Course" (TLN 2125–26). Yet though Gloucester is indeed a traitor, the scene of his mutilation is not presented as a judicial one. Shakespeare has Cornwall explicitly declare the extrajudicial, purely private nature of his actions: "Though well we may not passe upon his life / Without the forme of Iustice, yet our power / Shall do a curt'sie to our wrath" (TLN 2084–86). There is no legal or political point to torturing Gloucester.^[73] They already know what he knows. The presentation of a world "upside down" is made literal in the procedure Cornwall announces for the mutilation of Gloucester: "Upon these eyes of thine, Ile set my foote." Cornwall blinds Gloucester in one eye; Regan urges him on, appealing, characteristically, to decorum: "One side will mocke another: Th'other too" (TLN 2143). At this moment, one of the most remarkable and politically significant episodes in the play occurs. A character designated in both the Quarto and the Folio merely as Servant interrupts Cornwall with an imperious command, "Hold your hand, my Lord." Regan and Cornwall are astonished. Regan says, "How now, you dog"; Cornwall exclaims, "My villain," meaning "my menial," but the Servant appeals, as Kent had earlier, to the special social "privilege" of righteous anger, and fights with Cornwall. "Nay then come on, and take the chance of anger" (TLN 2153). Regan takes hold of a sword and, in the Quarto stage direction, stabs the servant in the back, exclaiming, with the full weight of outraged decorum in her words, "A pezant stand up thus!"^[74]

Regan is right. The menial's behavior is outrageous. It is unthinkable–but not, as we have seen and as we see here, literally so. Shakespeare

[73] For the theory of judicial torture, see John H, Langbein, Torture and the Law of Proof (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).

[74] Where F has merely "Killes him" (TLN 2155), Q has "Shee takes a sword and runs at him behind" (H2r). It is interesting to contemplate the Quarto stage direction in relation to the Dürer design to which Stephen Greenblatt has called attention, the monument to a "Victory over the Rebellious Peasants," which features at its apogee a peasant stabbed in the back with a sword. Shakespeare's scene here does not seem to involve the "genre problem" that Greenblatt emphasizes in Dürer's design. There is no comedy or ambivalence in this depiction, in Lear , of a "peasant" stabbed in the back. See Stephen Greenblatt, "Murdering Peasants: Status, Genre, and the Representation of Rebellion," Representations 1 (1983): 1–29; also in Learning to Curse : Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1990), 99–30. Greenblatt does not discuss the Lear scene in his essay, but he does discuss Shakespeare's depiction of the death of Jack Cade in2 Henry VI, where the "genre problem" is quite intense. Since 2 Henry VI is one of Shakespeare's very early plays, the different depiction of"murdering peasants" in Lear supports the suggestion that Shakespeare's politics change, become less conservative, in the course of his career. Annabel Patterson adopts this view in Shakespeare and the Popular Voice , 10 and passim. On Greenblatt's difficulties with allowing for the possibility of genuine radicalism in Shakespeare and in the period, see Essay 6, n. 1 above.

is presenting the most radical possible sociopolitical act in a way that can only be interpreted as calling for his audience's approval. This is Ehud killing Eglon in Ponet; this is Matathias. The servant is obviously not a "public person," and his action is one of militant interference; it transcends and does not even involve nonobedience, since it is not clear that he has been directly commanded to do anything (in performance, a director has to decide whether this servant is to be one of those holding the chair to which Gloucester is bound). The scene is that which Buchanan describes and endorses: "[when] from amongst the lowest of the people some very mean, and obscure" person is stirred up to revenge Tyrannical Pride. From the legal point of view, it should be noted, the servant, like Gloucester, is committing treason—though in the servant's case the treason is "petty." As Michael Dalton explains, "Pety treason is when wilfull murder is committed (in the estate Oeconomicall) upon any subject, by one that is in subsection, and oweth faith, duty, and obedience, to the party murdred."^[75] The punishment for Petit Treason was the same as for High.^[76] Recognizing the political radicalism of this scene, which is entirely a Shakespearean invention, perhaps helps solve a long-standing puzzle: Why did Shakespeare have the mutilation take place onstage? Dr. Johnson and most nineteenth-century critics and directors found this scene improper and excessive. Theatrical convention demands that this sort of thing happen offstage. The political helps explain the theatrical radicalism. Shakespeare perhaps felt that only through the extreme moral revulsion brought on by having to witness such a scene could he rely on his audience to approve rather than to recoil when they saw "A pezant stand up thus" and mortally wound a prince. To the question in the Homily against Disobedience—"But what if the prince be . . . evil indeed, and it [is] also evident to all men's eyes that he is so?"—Shakespeare offered an answer very different from that of the Homily.^[77]

The rationale the servant offers for his act is as remarkable as the act itself. After commanding the Duke of Cornwall to desist from what he

[75] See Michael Dalton, The Countrey Justice (1619; facsimile New York: Arno Press, 1972), 213. As far as I know, the first critic to point out that "as late as 1728, for a servant to kill his master or mistress was counted a specially heinous crime, far worse than ordinary murder," and to identify this "specially heinous crime" as Petit Treason, was Mary Hallowell Perkins in The Servant Problem in English Literature (Boston: R. G. Badger, 1928), 75.

[76] On the punishments for treason, see Dalton, Countrey Justice , 215, and Essay 8, p. 218 below.

[77] Compare Sidney Shanker, Shakespeare and the Uses of Ideology (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), 144: "Passivity could be no response desired for Lear ."

is doing, the servant characterizes his own behavior toward the duke as an instance of loyalty rather than of rebellion:

I have serv'd you ever since I was a Childe:
But better service have I never done you,
Then now to bid you hold. (TLN 2146–48)

This is the clearest articulation and most extreme case in the play of the paradox of service through resistance. Armed resistance is presented as good service. We recall Ponet's insistence that when Saul's "household wayters and familiar servauntes" refused to obey Saul's commandment to kill Ahimelech, they were "yet the kinges true servauntes and subjectes." In the Geneva Bible, Daniel, flouting a royal decree, assures Darius that "unto thee, O King, I have done no hurt" (6:26). The marginal gloss explains that since Daniel "did disobey the Kings wicked commaundement [in order] to obey God," he "did no injurie to the King."^[78] Buchanan would see the Servant as another political "physician." We can begin to appreciate how important this conception was to Shakespeare by reflecting that he could have gotten the same plot effect, but not the paradox, if he had made the militant servant one of Gloucester's rather than one of Cornwall's retinue. The scene takes place, after all, in Gloucester's house, as Gloucester keeps saying. Shakespeare wanted the servant to be Cornwall's in order to make the paradox possible, to emphasize the genuineness of the loyalty involved ("I have serv'd you ever since I was a Childe").^[79]

In a world where atrocities like the blinding of Gloucester occur, there is no room for temporizing. When we next see Albany, "never," as Oswald says, "[was] man so chang'd" (TLN 2270). In the encounter that the puzzled Oswald reports to Goneril, he and Albany found one another (morally) unintelligible: "he call'd me Sot, / And told me I had turn'd the wrong side out." As far as Oswald can see, "what most he

[78] The Geneva Bible, A facsimile of the 1560 edition, introduction by Lloyd E. Berry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 361a. According to Peter Heylin, King James found this translation extremely unsatisfactory and held that "the Notes upon the same in many places savour of Sedition" (quoted in Hudson, Ponet , 185). In the Authorized Version, the verse is translated "before thee , O king, I have done no hurt."

[79] In their extremely interesting essay, "The Language of Social Order: Individual, Society and Historical Process in King Lear ," David Aers and Gunther Kress see the servant here (like Cordelia in scene 1) taking "the traditional ideology" so literally that "it becomes a subversive force in itself"; David Aers, Bob Hodge, and Gunther Kress, eds., Literature, Language and Society in England 1580–1680 (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1981), 87). This is of a piece with taking Kent as a feudal retainer. Again, I feel the force of this suggestion but would point to more contemporary (Renaissance and Reformation) ideological formations.

[Albany] should dislike, seemes pleasant to him" (TLN 2277). In the Folio, which drastically cuts Albany's condemnation of Goneril, the condemnation remains strong but the focus of the scene is Albany's reaction to Gloucester's story rather than to Lear's—or rather, to a traditional Messenger's narrative of the scene that we have in fact just witnessed. The focus is precisely on the narration and on Albany's reactions, the kinds of reactions that Oswald, in his role as messenger, found so odd. This second messenger is another Oswald. He is entirely concerned with the business at hand (which is perhaps why, in the Folio, he is Messenger rather than Gentleman, a function rather than a social status). "Oh my good Lord," he begins, "the Duke of Cornwals dead, / Slaine by his Servant, going to put out / The other eye of Glouster" (TLN 2313–15). The news is the death of Cornwall; what he was doing at the time is almost irrelevant. The Messenger's casualness about the moral content of his message ("going to put out / The other eye") is dramatized by Albany's response: "Glousters eyes[!]" The Messenger takes no account of this response; he continues the story of how Cornwall was killed. Albany's response to the account of Cornwall's servant "bending his Sword / To his great Master" is to see the action as divinely sanctioned, perhaps even inspired.^[80] He does not worry about the servant's social status. He also does not lose track of the human situation: "But (O poore Glouster) / Lost he his other eye?"^[81] The Messenger clarifies the point and turns immediately to Goneril with his business: "Both, both, my Lord. / This Letter[,] Madam, craves a speedy answer." This messenger is another "good servant."^[82]

The major "good servant" in this sense, however, continues to be Oswald. He was largely absent in act 3, though present in Lear's reference to "servile ministers" and in "Tom o' Bedlam's" imagined past

[80] Albany's response is metaphysical and pagan—"This shows you are above, / You Justices" (F)—rather than Biblical. This serves to defuse or cushion somewhat the potential radicalism of his comment. For the systematic quality of the paganism of Lear , see William R. Elton, "King Lear" and the Gods (San Marino: The Huntington Library, 1968). It is also worth noting that the Messenger's account differs slightly from what we saw. The Messenger emphasizes the purely affective side of the Servant's intervention, seeing him as acting only out of a private feeling, "thrill'd with remorse," rather than out of the complex understanding of conscientiously limited duty, that, as we have seen, the Servant articulated.

[81] The way in which the play consistently calls attention to the immense difference between losing one and losing both eyes strongly supports the literalist rejection of the "sight pattern." See Essay 3, n. 23 above.

[82] In the Quarto, this Gentleman's narrative is clearly meant to contrast with that of the compassionate Gentleman in the following scene (4.3 in a conflated text), which the Folio cuts. In the Folio, the Messenger's account of Gloucester's blinding is the only extended narration in the play.

as a proud servingman (who "serv'd the Lust of my Mistris heart, and did the acte of darkenesse with her"), but he reemerges quite prominently in act 4.^[83] Kent's view of him proves true. Oswald is present when Goneril makes her adulterous and murderous plans with Edmund, and she assures Edmund that "This trustie Servant / Shall passe betweene us" (TLN 2286–87). Having become "a bawd in way of good service," Oswald remains a trusty servant to Goneril. He refuses to allow Regan to unseal Goneril's letter to Edmund. "I may not Madam," he says to Regan, "My Lady charg'd my dutie in this busines" (TLN 2403–4). For Bradley (as, more recently, for Marvin Rosenberg), this is a typically Shakespearean humanizing touch, showing that Oswald "is not wholly worthless"; Dr. Johnson was frankly puzzled: "I know not well," he wrote, "why Shakespeare gives to Oswald, who is a mere factor of wickedness, so much fidelity."^[84] Johnson's puzzlement is more helpful, I think, than Bradley's sentimentality and Rosenberg's "tough-mindedness." This is hardly a moment in which we are meant to admire Oswald. At the end of the scene, Regan, who has recognized the strategic folly of sparing the blinded Gloucester's life, reminds Oswald that "If you do chance to heare of that blinde Traitor, / Preferment fals on him, that cuts him off" (TLN 2426). "Would I could meet [him]," says Oswald chillingly, "I should shew / What party I do follow."^[85]

[83] Oswald does appear, in propria persona, in act 3. At the beginning of scene 7, he makes a brief appearance with some "intelligence," and then goes off with Goneril and Edmund, who also make brief appearances. Shakespeare seems to want all the wicked characters to appear in this scene. As to whether the imagined sexual "service" of "Tom" is meant to suggest that Oswald performs the same service for Goneril, I think that the texts leave this genuinely open, and I am myself agnostic on the question, It is certainly a possibility. It would fit into the view of Oswald as vain, ambitious, and "superserviceable," and it helps clarify Oswald's social status by reference to the fantasies of Malvolio, that other steward of a great lady's house. On the other hand, Goneril is a very grand figure and might not consider it suitable to her greatness to be "served" in this way. If a director chooses to hint at this possibility, it makes Goneril's lust for Edmund less surprising. Whether this latter result is desirable or not is itself a matter for interpretation.

[84] Shakespearean Tragedy , 238 (including the Johnson quote); Marvin Rosenberg, The Masks of King Lear (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972), 93.

[85] F's substitution of "party" for "Lady" in this line not only clears up an ambiguity (which "Lady" at this moment, when Oswald is speaking to Regan, does he mean?), but shows the Folio's typical predilection for more explicitly political terminology. I do not mean to suggest that "party" is used in the modem political sense here, but on the other hand, I do not think the modern sense completely irrelevant here. "Party" as "faction" was normal in the seventeenth century; see, for instance, the constant reference to a "malignant" or "ill-affected" party in The Grand Remonstrance, in Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution , 1625–1660, ed. S. R. Gardiner, 3d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), 203, 204, 127. The development of the term seems to me a happy circumstance for this line, and one harmonious with its historical meaning and general intent. This is a good case, I think, of the delicacy with which the notion of anachronism needs to be handled, since the normal heavy-handed prohibition of our "modern" meaning would shrink the line's meaning as well as its resonance.

The next scene gives Oswald his chance; it is the only moment in the play when we see Oswald on his own. We are confirmed in the view that there was more than class snobbery in Kent's rage "That such a slave as this should weare a Sword." For Oswald, the blind Gloucester is "a proclaim'd prize," a way to that greatest of all goals, "preferment." As Goneril's most intimate follower, he adopts the unctuous impersonality of her style: "the Sword is out / That must destroy thee," he tells Gloucester grandly (TLN 2679–80). Edgar, now playing "a most poor man" rather than Tom o' Bedlam, interposes. Oswald calls attention to the indecorousness, the illegality, and the imprudence of the (apparent) poor man's intervention: "Wherefore, bold Pezant / Dar'st thou support a publish'd Traitor? Hence, / Least that th'infection of his fortune take / Like hold on thee." Edgar suddenly breaks into dialect, and Zitner is certainly correct that "what releases Edgar's dialect manner is Oswald's courtly one, his succession of coldly turned phrases, his lofty epithets."^[86] Oswald is speaking as a great man here—"Let go Slave, or thou dy'st"— while Edgar's dialect is intended as a specifically lower-class version of the plain style: "Good Gentleman, goe your gate, and let poore volke passe. . . . Chill be plaine with you" (TLN 2690–95). They fight, and Edgar's peasant cudgel defeats Oswald's sword. This episode is clearly meant to recall the intervention of the other, actual "bold Pezant" of the blinding scene. The language—"Pezant . . . Slave . . . Dunghill" ("Out Dunghill," says Oswald)—is filled with echoes of the earlier scene (recall "throw this Slave / Upon the Dunghill"). The effect is to reinforce the image of this sort of "peasant rebellion" as a paradigm of moral action.

Edgar's epitaph for Oswald bears attention. With his dying breath, Oswald attempts to see his duty to Goneril fulfilled; Edgar comments:

I know thee well. A serviceable Villaine,
As duteous to the vices of thy Mistris
As badnesse would desire. (TLN 2704–6)

"Duteousness" in the play is not a virtue in itself. It is morally neutral. The question is duteous to whom or to what? Unlike Bradley, the play

[86] "Lear and Its Language," 10.

does not admire mere doglike fidelity. "Serviceableness," mere instrumentality, is always negative. It is part of Shakespeare's portrayal of what it means, in Johnson's great phrase, to be a "factor of wickedness" that Oswald has "so much fidelity." He cannot rightly obey power because he thinks that it has no bounds. As Arendt remarks, "total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content."^[87] The critique of doglike fidelity is precisely a critique of "good service" literally conceived. Shakespeare calls it "superserviceableness." Despite the fact that, as Barish and Waingrow note, Edmund's specialty is good service, he is not at the center of the play in this regard.^[88] Edmund manifests hypocrisy and opportunism, the Fool's targets, but not superserviceableness, Kent's target and, as Edgar recognizes, Oswald's specialty.

In the final act, we are given one more example of immoral "good service." We get to see how a dog's obeyed in office. After Lear and Cordelia are captured, Edmund enlists an unnamed "Captain" into his service. Edmund offers preferment, gives a lesson on "pliability"—"know thou this, that men / Are as the time is"—and then describes the essential feature of the service he is asking: "thy great imployment / Will not beare question: either say thou'lt do't, / Or thrive by other meanes" (TLN 2973–77). No thought about the content of the command is acceptable. The Captain must agree to "do't" before he knows what "it" is. The Folio version of this interchange omits the Captain's ironic claim to humanity ("I cannot draw a cart 'nor eate dride oats; / If it bee mans worke, Ile do't").^[89] The effect of this omission is to dramatize what it means for a human being to make himself into a mere instrument. This Captain allows himself to be, in the wonderful Elizabethan phrase, entirely Edmund's "creature." He has no independent consciousness. His only words are to say, respectfully, what Edmund tells him to: "either say thou'lt do't, / Or thrive by other means." "Ile do't[,] my

[87] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism , expanded ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1968), 324.

[88] "'Service' in Lear ," 350.

[89] Urkowitz seems to me mistaken in characterizing the Captain's exit lines in the Quarto (the lines on "not being able to "draw a cart") as rationalization or self-justification (Shakespeare's Revision of King Lear, 104). The lines are an expression of determination to duty. They are perhaps based on some lines in Leir , in which a very eager-to-serve Messenger tells Gonorill: "use me, trust me, commaund me: if I fayle in anything, tye me to a dung cart, and make a Scavenger's horse of me" (lines 1014–16, Bullough, 7:362). This figure from Leir lies somewhere behind the Captain and Oswald, but the Leir Messenger is a comic-melodramatic villain ("A purse of gold giv'n for a paltry stabbe!"), as Shakespeare's figures are not.

Lord" is his entire speaking part. He is not given an exit line. He goes off silently and obediently, like a proper dog, suffering himself like a brute beast rather than a reasonable creature to be led and drawn wheresoever his master commands.^[90] Through this moment we realize that the mad Lear's Fool-like or Hythlodaean view of his society is true only under certain conditions: a dog's obeyed in office only when its followers are also dogs.

As Barish and Waingrow observe, the final speech of the play "reiterates the note of service."^[91] Yet what is recommended is quite paradoxical:

The waight of this sad time we must obey.
Speake what we feele, not what we ought to say.

Here, in the final moment of the play, proper obedience is defined as breaching decorum.^[92] We "obey" the "waight" of Lear by not doing and saying what, in normal times, "we ought." Martines, who characterizes the Renaissance as a period in which "the thrust of political power [was] such that it afforded men few choices," notes that "personal integrity must have been doubly rare then."^[93] In King Lear, integrity is all.