The Fragile World of Lear Peter S. Anderson Drama is a form of ritual, and like its “savage” ancestor, it begins in a felt discontinuity—a certain fragility of the human series in the face of temporal and spatial change.1 Seeking to overcome this deficiency, it enters into dialogue or exchange with what is not human—either divinity or the natural series—to give to the sociomorphic “sacred” or “natural” form. Tragedy tends toward the former, comedy toward the latter. May Day, Mid summer Eve—the seasonal feasts—give Shakespeare, as C. L. Barber has pointed out, the social pattern of his “festive come dy.” Tragedy casts its eye through the more readily available natural series toward the unseen: divinity itself. The central form of tragedy is, thus, that ritual we call sacrifice, where the “real” is exchanged for the “unreal.” As Claude Lévi-Strauss demonstrates in his structural study of La Pensée Sauvage, a representative of the human series (in dramatic terms we would call him the tragos, the scapegoat) is sacralized and sacri ficed, so that the void caused by his removal (this the actualized discontinuity of the human series) will, hopefully, be filled by the divinity to whom he has been related. Drama thus voices our continuing concern over social structures threatened by dis continuity in time and space. It is this fragility, felt at the level of the human series but having its roots in our very perceptions, that I wish—by the somewhat circuitous route of Montaigne— to explore in Shakespeare’s Lear. In that famous chapter in the first book of the Essais, “That to Philosophie, Is to Learn How to Die” (which is certainly as large a part of Shakespeare’s debt to Montaigne as the “Apolo gie of Raymond Sebond”), Montaigne, after citing other men’s deaths “frequent and ordinary examples, hapning, and being still before our eies,”2 soon turns to nature as a proper teacher of how to die: 269 270 Comparative Drama Nature her selfe lends her hand, and gives us courage. If it be a short and violent death, wee have no leisure to feare it; if otherwise, I perceive that according as I engage my selfe in sicknesse, I doe naturally fall into some disdaine and contempt of life. I finde that I have more adoe to digest this resolution, that I shall die when I am in health, than I have when I am troubled with a fever: forsomuch as I have no more such fast hold on the commodities of life, whereof I begin to lose the use and pleasure, and view death in the face with a lesse undanted looke, which makes me hope, that the further I goe from that, and am the nearer I approch to this, so much more easily doe I enter in composition for their exchange. . . . Often somethings seeme greater, being farre from us, than if they bee neere at hand: I have found that being in perfect health, I have much more beene frighted with sicknesse, than when I have felt it. The jollitie wherein I live, the pleasure and the strength make the other seeme so disproportionable from that, that by imagin ation I amplifie these commodities by one moitie, and appre hended them much more heavie and burthensome, than I feele them when I have them upon my shoulders. The same I hope wille happen to me of death. Consider we by the ordinary mutations, and daily declinations which we suffer, how Nature deprives us of the [sight] of our losse and empairing: what hath an aged man left him of his youths vigor, and of his forepast life? (I.xix.57) Our confidence that Shakespeare was familiar with this par ticular passage in the Florio translation of 1603 is founded not only on the sense but also on the very language of Edgar’s an guish at the sight of blinded Gloucester: “My father, poorly led? World, world, O world!/ But that thy strange mutations make us hate thee,/ Life would not yield to age” (IV.i.10-11), and Gloucester’s answer, a few lines later, to the Old Man who...