Abstract
As is well known, materialist criticism of King Lear has frequently held that the play allegorizes the passage from feudalism to capitalism. I discuss the materialist readings of the play’s “two moralities” toward the end of this chapter, but I would first like to interpret Lear in the context of the history of ethical theory, particularly in relation to the early modern genealogy of natural rights discourse. This starting point in intellectual history can then open out into a discussion of the play’s perceived materialism and its place in the transition to modernity. I argue that Lear reflects, among other things, the historically vexed relationship between duties and rights. Lear does not simply set out to define, as many critics have noted, the practical— historical parameters of duteous service. The play more fundamentally offers a metaethical inquiry on the mutually entailing relationship between basic liberties and prima facie duties, and it meditates on the origin of first principles of justice in the absence of any shaping religious framework.
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Notes
Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origins and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 53.
H.L.A. Hart, “Are There Any Natural Rights,” in Rights, ed. David Lyons (California: Wadsworth, 1979), 17.
Cited in J.L. Mackie, “Can There Be A Right-Based Moral Theory,” in Theories of Rights, ed. Jeremy Waldron (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 186.
All cites taken from William Shakespeare, King Lear. A Parallel Text Edition, ed. René Weis (London: Longman, 1993). For the sake of convenience, all passages will be cited from the First Folio text, The Tragedy of King Lear (1623), unless otherwise noted.
Richard Strier, Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 183.
Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 50.
Susan Schreiner, “Calvin’s Use of Natural Law,” in A Preserving Grace: Protestants, Catholics, and Natural Law, ed. Michael Cromartie (Grand Rapids: W.B. Eerdman’s, 1997), 57.
G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire: Interpretation of Shakespeare’s Tragedy (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1964), 188.
See John F. Danby, Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature: A Study of King Lear (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 116.
See Jeffrey Blustein, Parents and Children: The Ethics of the Family (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).
See A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (London: MacMillan and Company, 1904), 235.
Shakespeare’s Christian Dimension: An Anthology of Commentary, ed. Roy Battenhouse (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 444.
Cited in Sylvan Barnet, “A Christian Approach to Shakespeare,” A Journal of English Literary History 22 (1955): 90.
Cited in Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 194.
Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde in Generall (1604), ed. Thomas O. Sloan (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 149–294.
Judy Kronenfeld, “‘So Distribution Should Unto Excess, And Each Man May Have Enough’: Shakespeare’s King Lear-Anabaptist Egalitarianism, Anglican Charity, Both, Neither?” ELH 59 (1992): 756.
Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, in Sir Thomas Browne: The Major Works, ed. C.A. Patrides (Penguins Books, 1977), 35.
Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, ed. Phillip Harth (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1989), 268.
Hugo Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace, trans. A.C. Campbell (Westport: Hyperion Press, 1993), 86.
See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), chap. 3. For useful commentaries on Rawls’s theory of justice see Reading Rawls: Critical Studies on Rawls’ Theory of Justice, ed. and intro. Norman Daniels (New York: Basic Books,);
and Michael J. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
R.S. White, Natural Law in English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 202.
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 128.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1979), 299, cited in Agamben, Homo Sacer, 126.
On Agamben’s recent considerations on the relationship of potentiality to actuality, see Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), parts 3–4.
James I, Trew Lawe of Free Monarchies, in The Political Works of James I, ed. Charles Howard McIlwain (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1917), 62
cited in Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 221.
See Michael Hicks, Bastard Feudalism (London: Longman, 1995);
John Hudson, The Formation of The English Common Law: Law and Society in England from the Norman Conquest to Magna Carta (London: Longman, 1996);
H.E. Bell, An Introduction to the History and Records of the Court of Wards and Liveries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953).
Rosalie Colie, “Reason and Need: King Lear and the ‘Crisis’ of the Aristocracy,” in Some Facets of King Lear. Essays in Prismatic Criticism, ed. Rosalie L. Colic and ET. Flahiff (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), 193.
Cohen, Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 334–335.
Arnold Kettle, “From Hamlet to King Lear,” in Shakespeare in a Changing World, ed. Arnold Kettle (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1964), 171.
Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question”, in ed. The Collected Works Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975), 3: 162
cited in Steven Lukes, Marxism and Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 63.
Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, in Selected Works, 2 vols. (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962), 2: 24, cited in Lukes, Marxism and Morality, 57.
Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 118.
René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 13, cited in Shakespearean Tragedy, ed. John Drakakis (New York: Longman, 1992), 15.
Augusto Boal, Theater of the Oppressed, trans. Charles A. and Maria-Odilia Leal McBride (New York: Urizen Press, 1979), cited in Drakakis, Shakespearean Tragedy, 6.
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© 2004 Paul Cefalu
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Cefalu, P. (2004). The Early Modern Veil of Ignorance: Natural Rights Theory in King Lear . In: Revisionist Shakespeare: Transitional Ideologies in Texts and Contexts. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403973658_5
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