Tracing a Theory of Human Dignity in Shakespeare’s King Lear

Abstract

Shakespeare’s King Lear prefigures the shape of “dignity” as first imagined by Immanuel Kant, who would argue in 1785 that rational beings are ends in themselves, “something that may not be used merely as means” (46). I do not suggest that Shakespeare secretly used the word “dignity” as it is used today, or even that he himself was any kind of proto-Kantian. Scholars such as Robin Headlam Wells have made the case that his plays are deeply rooted in a Renaissance culture of humanism, which would of course give rise to the discourse of social contracts and universal rights that infused Enlightenment thought—but this does not mean that he was already imagining the kind of rights-bearing human subject that would take shape in the philosophies of Kant, Locke, and Rousseau in the eighteenth century. I do suggest, however, that moments in King Lear hint at an economy in which human value is divorced from wealth, position, or performance: even as Lear sinks lower into disenfranchisement and incapacity, the play insists that his worth does not diminish. If King Lear makes the case for dignity as a quotient of human worth that falls out of the hierarchies of value that first produce and measure worth, the economy it envisions hinges on individuals who can suspend those hierarchies and operate within a space where others command respect simply by being. This economy becomes an aneconomy as it demands respect and dignity in a way traditional exchange economies fail to do; it both asks and enables its participants to be gracious, to let go of the transactional logic by which Lear would have everyone live. Though the image of this world in King Lear is fractured, glimpsed between scenes of great cruelty, malice, and misery, it is nonetheless the climax of Shakespeare’s moral vision for his characters. The narrative enables its viewers to contemplate, if only in fragments, the possibility of absolute human worth.