Creative Uncreation In King Lear

Abstract

THROUGHOUT HIS CAREER, FROM THE SAINTLY Henry VI sitting on his molehill during the battle of Towton to Prospero breaking his staff and drowning his book, Shakespeare was apparently fascinated with the concept of abdication and truancy. Prince Hal plays truant from his royal studies, Hamlet from his revengeful duties, and Antony from his Roman wars. The academicians in Love's Labor's Lost retreat from the world and women, King John tells the Bastard Faulconbridge Have thou the ordering of this present time, Richard II deposes himself with histrionic relish, Duke Vincentio retreats into dark corners, and Lear formally abdicates. Perhaps we may sense in these depictions of royal withdrawal an impulse on Shakespeare's part to abandon not necessarily London for the rusticity of Stratford, but his own responsibility as playwright exercising authority over his theatrical subjects. In any event, on at least one occasion, when he composes the choruses of Henry V, we find him explicitly renouncing his authority as sole creator and regarding the play as issuing from the cooperative imagination of his audience as well. What then of King Lear, where the formal abdication of the hero might suggest a similar abdication on the part of the playwright? Examining the play from this standpoint suggests, I think, that Shakespeare is engaged in a kind of creative uncreation. First, some qualifications. Obviously Shakespeare can never wholly abdicate from his role as creative authority. Since forms and meanings do not fall from the sky, not even from an intertextual sky, he remains responsible for his art and for what it does to us. We are inevitably his subjects in the Globe-subjects, not slaves, as Brecht would have it-obliged by our bond to honor his authority and by an act of poetic faith to endow his illusions with an air of reality. Hence when I say that Shakespeare uncreates King Lear I can hardly mean that, swept up by a passion for entropy, he abandons his play to disorder, and us to early sorrow. The patterns of imagery, the double plot, verbal echoes, and structural parallels, all the Biblical allusions, proverbs, aphorisms, sententiae, and other suggestions of communal wisdom testify to Shakespeare's ordering presence. Still, while remaining within the bounds of artistic form, Shakespeare manages, I suggest, both to unmake as well as to make King Lear.