Making Use of Nothing: The Sovereignties of King Lear

Abstract

Shakespeare's King Lear obsesses over iterations of "nothing," especially in relation to the play's monarch. Beyond the usual existential and materialist associations of this word, however, what does it convey politically? This article traces a deep-seated fascination with nothingness in English political writing extending back to Sir John Fortescue. In particular, the proto-republican tradition developed by thinkers such as John Ponet and George Buchanan struggled to theorize a sovereignty absent of ontology—where the monarch is merely a cipher of public will. The political climate in which King Lear was performed was thus one in which two conceptions of nothingness found themselves at odds, one (from the absolutist perspective) that would merely negate sovereign identity, and another (from the proto-republican perspective) that would paradoxically rehabilitate it by finding the political potential within absence itself. Within this context, Shakespeare's drama becomes neither politically nostalgic nor reactionary; rather, it dramatizes the tragic impossibility of reconciling two ideological preconceptions that differently signify "nothing." Even if "nothing comes of nothing" in the end, by no means has this been inevitable.