Playing Nothing for Someone: Lear, Bottom, and Kenotic Integrity

Abstract

Tragedy depicts harm to integrity—personal, moral, bodily, even the integrity of nature—and so offers occasions for rethinking the idea of integrity. These occasions may prompt us to set aside notions of pristine wholeness, moral perfection, and solitary authenticity for a more relational integrity, informed by the paradigms of performance and kenosis. This essay first juxtaposes King Lear with a film by Kristian Levring, The King Is Alive, and then moves to Shakespeare's earher A Midsummer Night's Dream. All three works are metatheatrical, and depict people playing-as-others in solicitude for others. Each in its way broaches the ethical and theological possibility of 'kenotic integrity'. To take the basest and most poorest shape That ever penury in contempt of man Brought near to beast. My face I'll grime with filth, Blanket my loins, elf all my hair in knots And with presented nakedness outface The winds and persecutions of the sky. Poor Turlygod, poor Tom That's something yet: Edgar I nothing am. —Edgar, in King Lear, II.2.182-85, I94--951 They began to say words. Words made them forget. For a while they went around and said words without talking to each other. Henry listened. —Kanana, in The King Is Alive2 Quince. Bless thee, Bottom, bless thee! Thou art translated. (III. 1.113) Bottom. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. (IV. 1.203) Theseus. Out of this silence yet I pick'd a welcome... (V.1.100) —A Midsummer Night's Dream Literature & Theology, Vol. 19. No. 2 © The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press 2005; all rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: joumals.permissions@oupjoumals.org This content downloaded from 157.55.39.153 on Mon, 19 Sep 2016 04:38:33 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 16o LEAR, BOTTOM, AND KENOTIC INTEGRITY To the question, what may be done for someone losing the physical or spiritual anchors of integral selfhood, King Lear offers a surprising answer. Cordelia, Kent, the Fool, and Edgar respond to Gloucester's and Lear's suffering by playing others. They assume parts of diminished status and hence become 'nothing' in an effort to resist their betters' descents into oblivion. As often happens in tragedy, they fail. Yet their pretending is remarkable in light of Shakespeare's ambivalent tropes on playacting. Hamlet, for instance, is anxious about 'seeming' and 'the trappings... of woe'. But he is delighted by the arrival of'tragedians' (players) at Elsinore, just as he revelled in the gambols ofYorick. On one hand, to play at something is almost nothing; in addition to using theatre to trope false social pretence, Shakespeare often reflects how stage players exist at the margins of society. On the other hand, he suggests that playing in life or onstage can resist tragic harm. It is this paradox, that playing can be both a distraction from and a response to tragic accountability and suffering, that I wish to explore. That playing can count for nothing and for something is also a clue to 'kenotic integrity', a different sort of integrity than Polonius's, 'to thine own self be true'. For this exploration I will juxtapose King Lear with a film by Kristian Levring, The King Is Alive, then 'return' to Shakespeare's earlier play, A Midsummer Night's Dream. All three works are metatheatrical: they depict others playing others, in solicitude for others.4 Levring's film, however, hesitates to affirm that theatrical play might move us out of the umbra of naturalistic tragedy, which leaves selves in static roles or 'authentic' isolation. The possibility of release from such traps entails an emptying of the self, creating space where fragmented lives can be held in suffering or enjoyed in play. Though earlier in time, there is a sense in which both Dream and Lear reply to Levring.