Abstract
The figure of the beggar and the poor man in Tudor-Stuart England was considered a threat to the social order. The solution proposed by the government, summarized in the old poor laws, was to project on him a replication of the social structures that defined, excluded, and at the same time aimed at containing him. The poor, as instanced by the beggar’s body, became a central site of semiotic conflict; the nature of representation itself came under interrogation.1 We analyzed Michel Foucault’s argument that he defined by “similitude,” for which the system of knowledge during this period (the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) was marked by the insurgency of a theory of representation following the Renaissance paradigm.2 In contrast to Foucault’s perspective, I argued that the literary works of this period are rather characterized by a break, a rupture, what I would like to call a combustion of representation: the system of knowledge we face is characterized by the insurgence of creation itself, which “burns”3 any representational system. Now we are going to see how this combustion is fully expressed in Shakespeare’s work. Together with a critique of the concept of money, as Marx noted,4 Shakespeare stages this rupture of representation as a rupture of meaning that is at once epistemological, social, and economic. I look to King Lear and Timon of Athens as examples of the staging of this rupture of representation. In the figures of Lear and Gloucester in King Lear we find an ironic5 critique of the concepts of value, of equivalence and equivocation, and of the power of coining.
And so I am, I am.
King Lear, 4.7.70
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Notes
See William Carroll, Fat King, Lean Beggar: Representations of Poverty in the Age of Shakespeare (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), here chapter 4.
See Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (New York: International Publishers, 1967), p. 165 fl.
See Geoffrey Ingham, The Nature of Money (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), p. 123. See Ingham, Nature of Money, p. 123 fl., and Chapter 4 of this book: Elizabeth’s stabilizing of coinages assigned a standard measure of money that lasted, quite uniquely, until the First World War.
See Agnes Heller, Renaissance Man (New York: Schocken Books, 1981)
and Antonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
How the present can be made by retrospective, alternative possibilities is expressed by Kiernan Ryan (see “‘King Lear’: The Subversive Imagination,” in William Shakespeare, King Lear: Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. Ryan [Macmillan, London, 1993], pp. 75–76)
and by Paola Pugliatti in Shakespeare, the Historian (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), where she writes: “History as retrospective possibilities—from a past crystallized in unchanging documents, it may turn out to be unstable and multiform” (pp. 53–54).
See Patricia Fumerton, “Unsettled Subjectivity: The Virtual ‘I’,” in Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 47–59.
For Buchanan’s possible influence on King Lear and Hamlet, see Lilian Winstanley, Macbeth, King Lear and Contemporary History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), which is a study of the relations of the play of Macbeth to the personal history of James I, the Darnley murder, and the St. Bartholomew Massacre, and also of King Lear as symbolic mythology.
See Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
See An Acte for the Relief of the Poore (39 Elizabeth, c. 3, 1597) and An Acte for the Punyshment of Rogues, Vagabondes and Sturdy Beggars (39 Elizabeth, c. 4, 1597) in Richard Henry Tawney and Eileen Edna Power, Tudor Economic Documents, vol. 2 (London: Longmans, 1924), pp. 346–62.
For the definition and recurrence of “subject” in Shakespeare, see J. Bartlett, Concordance to Shakespeare (New York: Macmillan, 1966), pp. 1484–85.
“The same resistance to regulation and containment in the prison-house of early modern discourse is manifest in the extemporized gibberish of Poor Tom […] Tom’s cryptic mutterings and the Fool’s impromptu riddles and quibbles, like Lear’s topsy-turvy ‘reason in madness’ (4.6.171), expose the limits of conventional language in the act of transgressing them. They warn us to take not a word of the play at face value, to bracket everything that is said between quotation marks” (Ryan, “King Lear,” in A Companion to Shakespeare, Volume 1: The Tragedies, ed. Richard Dutton and Jean Howard [Oxford: Blackwell, 2003], p. 387). This subversion, also of language, does not end in itself, but in trespassing the limits it constitutes a way of unhinging the given structure of language, power and being, to turn it into something else. The mutterings of Tom are the utterances of a mimic, the riddles of the Fool are the hidden puzzle of the play, and Lear’s reason in madness is the madness wherein lies the sharpest reason.
See Pugliatti, “Edgar in King Lear: Il travestimento come ricerca di identità,” Spicilegio Moderno 4 (1975): pp. 27–38. My contention is that Edgar’s disguise is the sign that there is no fixed location for the subject, apart from his force of being.
It seems to echo Seneca’s version of Sophocles’s Oedipus and also Montaigne’s “Apologie of Raymond Sebond” in book II of Essays (translated by Florio) and partly Thomas More’s Utopia. The different versions of Seneca’s plays available in Shakespeare’s time can be listed as thus: The Lamentable Tragedies of Oedipus Out of Seneca, by A. Neuyle (1563) (Oedipus, Troas, Medea, and Agamemnon); Hercules furens, Thyestes (1560); His tenne tragedies transl. into English London 1581: Herculens Furens, Thyestes, Troas by Heywood; Oedipus by Neville; Hyppolitus, Medea, Agamennon Hercules Oetaeus by Studley; Octavia by Nuce, Thebais by T. Newton; The worke of the excellent philosopher transl. by Golding, London 1578; The first booke concerning Benefyting. For works on the possible relation between Shakespeare and Seneca, see Adrian Poole, Tragedy, Shakespeare and the Greek Example (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), chap. 7, 209–39;
Emrys Jones, The Origins of Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977) has chapters on Shakespeare and Euripides and an appendix on Seneca (Lear, Timon); on Lear and Seneca’s Hercules Furens,
Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), pp. 143–74;
Miola, Shakespeare’s Reading (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
References to the classic tragedies and to Dante can also be found in William Francis C. Wigston, A New Study of Shakespeare (Charleston, SC: Nabu Press, 2011).
Thomas More, Utopia, trans. Ralph Robynson (New York: Heritage Press, 1935), Book I, p. 49, my italics.
The possible referent of the “good Athenian” as being Socrates has been suggested to me by Eugene Ostashevsky. I believe it could be a reference to Sophocles. For what concerns the “learned Theban” and the lines regarding the thing itself, I believe that Shakespeare refers to Oedipus and the riddle of the Sphinx. Other authors have studied this: see the already quoted Adrian Poole, Tragedy, Shakespeare and the Greek Tragedy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), pp. 209–39;
John P. Cutts, “Lear’s ‘Learned Theban,’” Shakespeare Quarterly 14, no. 1 (1963): pp. 477–81;
Norman T. Pratt, “From Oedipus to Lear,” The Classical Journal 61, no. 2 (November 1965): pp. 49–57.
Catherine A. Hebert in “Shakespeare’s King Lear, iii, iv, 161,” The Explicator 34, no. 9 (May 1976): p. 72, suggests that the “learned Theban” is “Oedipus solver of riddles”: “Shakespeare protagonist, groping Sphinx-like for an answer to the riddle of man’s essential nature, sees the bedlam ‘poor, bare, forked animal’ as providing him with valuable insights” […] he may well have known the Oedipus of Seneca […] a translation was done by Alexander Nevile in 1560 and Thomas Newton included this translation in Seneca, His Tenne tragedies, published in 1581.” Cutts writes as well: “Lear’s learned Theban, I suggest, is Oedipus, ‘this manly knight, / Passing prudent’ who ‘thoruh his hih prudence’ solved the riddle of the Spinx—‘What animal is it that in the morning goes on four feet, at noon on two, and in the evening upon three?’—by replying “Man, who in childhood creeps on hands and knees, in manhood walks erect, and in old age with the aid of a staff” (“Lear’s ‘Learned Theban,’” 478). Shakespeare would have been exposed to the riddle in Seneca’s version of Sophocles’s Oedipus.
For Shakespeare’s knowledge of Machiavelli, among the many works, see Franco Ferrucci, Il teatro della fortuna. Potere e destino in Machiavelli e Shakespeare (Roma: Fazi editore, 2004) (above all for Timon of Athens);
Hugh Grady, Shakespeare, Machiavelli and Montaigne. Power and Subjectivity from Richard II to Hamlet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002);
Giuseppina Restivo, “Shakespeare between Machiavelli and Montaigne: An Exploration through Lotman’s Codes,” Interlitteraria 1 (1996): pp. 41–62.
See also Youngwon Park, “Seneca and Machiavelli: Their Traces in Marlowe and Shakespeare,” Journal of Classic and Renaissance Drama 9 (2000): pp. 131–49. Machiavelli is also a central figure for Spinoza and Marx. This conceptual line is proposed by Antonio Negri in The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics (p. 219). For Marx’s knowledge of Machiavelli, see Ex libris Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels; for Spinoza’s knowledge of Machiavelli, see Tractatus Politicus and the presence of Machiavelli’s work in his library. 62. In terms of time, in Machiavelli’s case, we have to talk of a “seizure of time,” of “time as ontological horizon” (Negri, Insurgencies, 38, 9), of a seizure of the “now”: an “overdetermination of historical time and reorganization of it” (Negri, 42). “What we have here is an extremely profound rupture, taking place not so much within Machiavelli’s thought […] as inside the entire theoretical-political tradition of Western thought (Opere, 1:919)” (Negri, 42, my italics). “If the historical time of mutation is entirely emptied of meaning, at the same time it is made part of the intensity of anthropological time, and on this nexus the possibility of the constitutive hypothesis is posed. Here is the complex reason for which Machiavelli stops writing the Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius, the book of the ‘Republics,’ to work at the ‘pamphlet’ On Princedoms. The mutation of world politics, the dislocation of Italy’s destiny, his personal desperation and his metaphysical intuition of the radicalness of the foundation all spur him to look for the definition of strength” (Negri, 49, my italics). On the “anthropological time” see also Agnes Heller, Renaissance Man (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), chap. 6, pp. 170–97. “Time is therefore a matter of which social relations are constituted. Time is the substance of power. Time is the rhythm on which all the constitutive actions of power are selected and organized” (Negri, 39). “Machiavelli constructs a scientific function that wrenches mutation away from destiny and turns it into an element of history; he wrenches history away from the past and considers it as a temporal continuum; he snatches time away from continuity and constructs the possibility of overdetermining destiny […] Really, Machiavelli discovers for the first time the practice of princely power in its immediacy and restlessness […] How can the enigma of the making of power be disclosed? ‘I temporize, fixing my eyes upon each thing, and wait for my moment (Opere, 2:932).’ This is a first response: the secret lies in how Valentino valorizes his being in time, his political being” (Negri, Insurgencies, 40.1). An “innovation of time takes place: the old time is concluded, new plans for conquest are opened […] On the whole, the new presents itself as a synchronic affirmation that prefigures a new diachronic movement (Opere, 2:956)” (Negri, 41). Time is the leading figure of the decision of the political person: “Time is the protagonist in two ways: on the one hand, we have the ‘delay’ of Valentino’s enemies, which is to say, the lack of ‘virtue’; on the other, opposed to the enemies’ delay we have the ‘immediacy’ and ‘punctuality’ of Valentino’s action. Between these two poles takes shape the definition of ‘virtue’ and ‘fortune’ as different apparatuses for grasping time, as producers of subjectivity on a certain temporal rhythm. The political is configured as a grammar of time” (ibid.).
But it is not the Kantian time, which splits the “I” in two (Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 1984).
See Walter Benjamin, Origin of the German Tragic Drama (London: Verso, 1998), chap. 1. The importance of time as power in the baroque drama is highlighted by Benjamin throughout his book. Time is also extremely important for Benjamin’s theoretical figure of the allegory: it is the transposition of time into “quanta of space” that makes the baroque allegory a powerful transformative tool for the theory of knowledge. Ryan’s concept of “anachronism” could have a fruitful bearing on this.
Ryan brought my attention to the following quotes: “Let us, ciphers to this great account, / On your imaginary forces work” (Henry V, 1.0.15–18), and “This wooden O” (Henry V, 1.0.8–14). See on this Eugene Ostashevsky, “Crooked Figures: Zero and Hindu-Arabic Notation in Shakespeare’s Henry V,” in Arts of Calculation: Quantifying Thought in Early Modern Europe, ed. by D. Glimp and M. R. Warren (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 205–28.
On nothing and the thing itself see also: Z. A. Usmani, “King Lear—Nothing and the Thing Itself,” in Shakespeare and Other Essays (Meerut: Shalabh Publishing House, 1987), pp. 42–71;
Linda Mc.J. Micheli, “‘The Thing Itself’: Literal and Figurative Language in King Lear,” Philological Quarterly 60, no. 3 (Summer 1981): pp. 343–56.
See Ryan, “King Lear,” in A Companion to Shakespeare, Volume 1: The Tragedies, ed. Richard Dutton and Jean Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 375–92, mainly p. 380 fl.
See also Ryan’s introduction to King Lear (London: Penguin Books, 2005).
See James’s Basilikon Doron quoting Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Britanniae, in The True Law of Free Monarchies: And Basilikon Doron, ed. Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier (Toronto: Victoria University, Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 1996), p. 142. We know that Historia Britanniae was one of Shakespeare’s sources for King Lear. It is important to remember that Geoffrey of Monmouth was also the author of Vita Merlinii.
See Howard Dobin, Merlin’s Disciples: Prophecy, Poetry, and Power in Renaissance England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).
For the meaning of “crystal of time” in contemporary philosophy, see Deleuze, Le Bergsonisme (New York: Zone Books, 1988), pp. 59–60.
For the virtual as concept of the self, see Patricia Fumerton, Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
For the distinction between virtual and possible, see Deleuze, “L’actuel et le virtuel,” in Dialogues (Paris: Flammarion, 1996).
Ryan, “‘King Lear’: The Subversive Imagination,” in William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. K. Ryan (London: Macmillan, 1993).
Take me to the verge of eternity, take me to the brim of being. This is Job’s theme and it recalls the first words of Genesis, of the edge of creation. On how creation occurs on the brim of nothingness, see Negri, Kairos, alma venus, Multitudo, in Time for Revolution, trans. Matteo Mandarini (New York, Continuum, 2003).
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© 2013 Margherita Pascucci
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Pascucci, M. (2013). Four Ounces of Sterling Silver. In: Philosophical Readings of Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137324580_6
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