‘ROBED MAN OF JUSTICE’: THE HERMENEUTICS OF TESTIMONY AND KING LEAR

Abstract

These are the final words of the tragedy: the words of the moral and of a testimony. They speak about Lear gone into the maelstrom of death, about the 'victorious' survivors, and about us 'that are young'. Yet they are weighty not merely in order to help the end-curtain fall or to frame the play with nice sentences, but because they utter what we already have in our hearts. Their elevation is due not only to the proximity of the unacceptable death brought on by the final showdown and collapse, but also to their being uttered by a witness, and we hear them in fact as witnesses: 'the oldest hath borne most.' Thus it is not a funerator* that is addressing us, or the minstrel of the theatre, the playmaster, but the witness. Why do I call Edgar, who says these words, a witness?1 Why do I call this emphatic moral, which closes the play, a testimony? And why do I resort to a legal concept? These are the questions I am trying to answer in the following pages. For this, I have found help in Paul Ricoeur's essay 'The Hermeneutics of Testimony'2, in which he examines the semantic, theologi cal and philosophical aspects of testimony. Ricoeur's basic thesis is that testimony itself interprets and also gives to interpretation a content to be interpreted. I do not intend to apply a new theory to Shakespeare, nor do I want to prove some philosophical theorem with King Lear, since that would be 'eisegesis', reading things into the text to be explained. On the contrary, the general and generalizable aspects of Ricoeur's hermeneutical statements