“Without the form of justice”: Plainness and the Performance of Love in King Lear

Abstract

USTICE, THOMAS ELYOT WROTE, a wille perpetuall and constaunt, whiche gyueth to euery man his right. In that it is named constaunt, it importeth fortitude: in discernynge what is right or wronge, prudence is required: And to proporcion the sentence or iugement, in an equalitie, it belongeth to temperaunce.' This is a handy definition, disposing of a difficult concept neatly in terms of the traditional scheme of the cardinal virtues (themselves difficult concepts), and doing so in nicely balanced prose. Such neatness and balance could hardly be further away from the world of King Lear. Here justice is anything constant, and fortitude, prudence, and temperance are called into question. In Lear, justice is inseparable from conflicts of will and power, the forms and structures of law are subservient to individual desires, and the vagaries of human justice eventually raise doubts even about divine justice. The inability to judge justly in matters of the highest importance might justly be judged the play's tragedy. It is therefore unsurprising that over the last thirty years critics have found one of the play's chief themes to be the inadequacy of human judgment-and especially of traditional formulations like Elyot's-to the task of interpreting human experience. The play's many sententiae and commonplaces, once culled confidently as evidence that the play affirmed universal human truths, are now most often seen as faulty generalizations exposed as such by the process of the play. For example, Nicholas Brooke, one of the most influential of new Lear critics, writes that fatalistic and Christian ideas can be found in the play, but stronger than either is the sense of nature, internal and external, as immediate experience on which any superstructure of interpretation may be mere delusion.2 In recent years New Critical readings like Brooke's have been supplemented by