Shupack NaturalJusticeKing 1997

Natural Justice and King Lear
Author(s): Paul M. Shupack

Source: Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature , Spring - Summer, 1997, Vol. 9, No. 1,
Boalt Hall: Law and Literature Symposium. Part 2 (Spring - Summer, 1997), pp. 67-105
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of Cardozo School of Law
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Natural Justice and King Lear
Paul M. Shupack
The debate between the natural law tradition - asserting a necessary

relationship between law and morals - and positivism - asserting that
law is simply whatever the sovereign commands - is as old as Western
Civilization.' This debate asks whether law has a necessary moral core. If
justice means reaching results in accord with proper application of the
law, justice can be confined as a conclusion both within and about law.
That, in caricature, is the core of positivism. Natural law insists that judg-
ments about results reached under the law are the subject of judgments
based on some other standard. These principles, upon which results
reached under the law can be judged, themselves are universal in applica-
tion, hence "natural."
I suggest in this paper that the conflict between natural law and pos-
itivism appears as one of the themes within King Lear.2 In the swirl of
controversies about law and legitimacy that followed from both the
Renaissance and the Reformation, these ideas were organized around the
categories of traditional rights and royal absolutism emerging in its divine
right moment. So long as people could persuade themselves that tradition
defined what was natural and just, and so long as kings saw their role was
to enforce traditional rights, the tension between law and morals
remained hidden. One consequence of the ferment created by both the
Renaissance and the Reformation was the destruction of the idea that the
actual and the ideal state could be one. Natural law and positivism,
though anachronistic terms, nonetheless serve as convenient short hand
for ideas that already were very much in the air.
I make no claim concerning the meaning of King Lear. All I want to
do is point to yet another strand of meaning. I join those who argue that
"Any Elizabethan use of the Lear 'matter' could hardly avoid key contem-
porary issues of politics: the succession to the throne, the division of sov-
ereignty, foreign invasion, and domestic loyalty."3 King Lear was written
in 1605, and an examination of the circumstances in England at the time
it was written suggests that what we today would call the debate between
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natural law and positivism was an issue in then-contemporary politics.
While a part of this paper establishes the plausibility of this conclusion,
that exploration of 17th century thought is not my main point. I want to
understand why the 18th century could not tolerate the play as written,
preferring instead Nahum Tate's version that ends with Cordelia living
and marrying Edgar.4 The answer lies, at least in part, in recognition of
this jurisprudential theme. Finally, recognition of the theme helps to
explain why Cordelia's death is a necessary part of the Shakespearean
tragedy. It is her death, rather than Lear's, that closes off this theme.
I. Lear in the 18th century
Stephen Jay Gould described a species of wasp that lays its eggs inside
the body of a living beetle.' The hatched larvae slowly consume the living
beetle from within, causing it a slow, agonizing death. Gould discusses how
the discovery of this wasp towards the end of the century destroyed the
peculiarly English 18th century view of a fundamentally just nature.
Anglican divines were unable to reconcile this visible cruelty with their
image of a God whose creation reflected a just moral order.
The horror of Cordelia's death struck 18th century sensibilities as a
violation of the naturally just moral order, much as the gratuitous pain
the wasps caused violated that principle. Her death goes beyond tragedy
because it is gratuitous. It denies the necessity of a just natural order. We
know that Samuel Johnson, speaking for most others (though not for all)
in his century, thought that because it contained so unjust a result,
Shakespeare's Lear was immoral. Writing in 1765, he compared the sub-
plots with the main plot. He saw the subplots of the play developed in a
way so as "to impress this important moral, that villainy is never at a stop,
that crimes lead to crimes and at last terminate in ruin."6
The main plot, however, was a different matter.
But though this moral [of the subplots] be incidentally

enforced, Shakespeare has suffered the virtue of Cordelia
to perish in a just cause, contrary to the natural ideas of
justice, to the hope of the reader, and, what is yet more
strange, to the faith of chronicles.... A play in which the
wicked prosper and the virtuous miscarry may doubtless
be good, because it is a just representation of the common
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events of human life; but since all reasonable beings natu-
rally love justice, I cannot easily be persuaded that the
observation of justice makes a play worse; or that, if other
excellencies are equal, the audience will not always rise
better pleased from the final triumph of persecuted virtue.
In the present case the public has decided. Cordelia, from

the time of Tate, has always retired with victory and felic-
ity. And, if my sensations could add anything to the gen-
eral suffrage, I might relate, I was many years ago so
shocked by Cordelia's death that I know not whether I
ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till
I undertook to revise them as an editor.7
Two facts suggest that the special 18th century sensibility depended
in part on the debate between natural law and positivism. The same
decade that saw Lear restored to its original ending also heard John
Austin's Lectures on Jurisprudence, which mark the revival of legal posi-
tivism in England.8 The restoration of Shakespeare's Lear meant aban-
doning Nahum Tate's version. While the most memorable feature of Tate's
version was his happy ending - Edgar and Cordelia marry and take over
the kingdom - an examination of his text shows that he struck most of
the lines that this paper offers as evidence of the theme of the debate
between natural law and positivism.
II. Kingship and the Question offustice in Shakespeare.
Before looking at the more nearly legal materials in Lear, it would be

helpful to examine the idea of kingship in Shakespeare. Legal positivism's
idea of law as the will of the sovereign takes on differing content if the
idea of the sovereign differs. During late Elizabethan and early Jacobean
times, two descriptions of kingship were part of the political discourse.
One concept looked back to what we might call a constitutional king,
who, though ruling by reason of God's grace, nonetheless ruled consistent
with established custom.9 The other view led to what would emerge as
absolutism, taking the form of divine right of kings. These two separate
strands the Elizabethans wove together in the image of the king's two bod-
ies. In one sense the king embodied a perpetual corporation. The other
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sense saw the king as a human being, serving as king by the grace of God,
but still a frail human being."' Seeing the king as a human who, though
appointed by God, was fallible, could allow justifications for rebellion.
Those failings could, for example, provide a basis to believe that God had
removed His grace. The king's human failures could, at the extreme, per-
mit the conclusion that the king's right to rule depended upon his quali-
ty of rulership. Seeing the king as embodying the immortal state made
easier the conclusion that under no circumstances is rebellion justified
against a lawful monarch. Yet neither conclusion follows with any
necessary force.
Nor does either of these ideas have any necessary connection to the
terms in which the political discourse concerning succession took place
during Elizabeth's reign. Ideas about the nature of kingship, already com-
plex and blurred, took on a baroque complexity during her reign. The
arguments first advanced by the Catholic party on behalf of the right of
Mary, Queen of Scots, to succeed Elizabeth were put in terms of indefea-
sible right of succession - a view that connects easily, though not neces-
sarily, to absolutism. These people used this argument with special force
to counter any rights of succession created by the will of Henry VIII,
which cut off Mary's claim. After her death these same arguments were
taken over by the Protestant party to support James's right to the throne,
while the Catholic party took over the arguments that had previously
belonged to the Protestant party. Those arguments insisted upon kingship
depending upon the quality of the king and his acts, arguments that con-
nected more easily with the king as a human being."
This framing of the debate made possible conflating two logically
separate questions: who is the rightful ruler, and what may a rightful ruler
do.12 A political theory of kingship that included within it something of
the king as human could accommodate the idea that the king's acts could
deny him the right to be king. The conclusion could be justified in terms
of the facts evidencing a withdrawal of God's favor, a view that provided
one means to reconcile the idea that kings rule by the grace of God with
the fact of some truly dreadful kings. Theories of kingship that saw the
king as the embodiment of the body politic more easily slid towards the
emerging absolutism.
In his book, Shakespearean Politics: Government and Misgovernment in
the Great Histories, Calvin Thayer examines the "arguments" of Richard
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II, I and 2 Henry IV, and Henry Vin terms of these competing concepts
of kingship.13 In Thayer's view, Henry V "is designed to provide serious
answers to questions that... lie in its immediate background. [T]he ques-
tions behind the play are... what kind of ruler do we Englishmen want,
right now, in 1599, what sort of government, what kind of monarchy,
what kind of civil polity, what sort of world? And I believe that
Shakespeare raises, and answers, these questions with James VI [of
Scotland] in mind."'4
Thayer's conclusions deserve quotation at length, since they throw an
important light on Lear, a play that was written shortly after James's acces-
sion to the throne.
...I have argued that Shakespeare had little use for

notions of divine right and divine kingship. Even though
all sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theories of divine
right specifically include indefeasible hereditary right,
Shakespeare neatly split them apart, having seen, one
supposes, no necessary connection between them; the
theoretical connection was that indefeasible hereditary
right rules out the possibility of purely human interven-
tion, and Shakespeare remained discreetly skeptical of
that kind of theory. Instead, and by implication, he
argued for man-centered kingship.
The mirror of all Christian kings is a paragon of
man-centered kingship, and 1599 was a good year to
write about him because, in addition to the reasons given
earlier, in 1599 the likeliest successor to the crown had
published the age's most uncompromising statement on
the doctrine of divine right, The Trew Law of Free
Monarchies.... James espoused an idea of kingship
already completely familiar in Tudor England.... I do not
suggest that, in 1595, Shakespeare was "showing" James
Stuart the fractured face of divine kingship - although
he was certainly showing it to someone, but in 1599, after
the publication of The Trew Law and at a time when
James's candidacy had been considerably strengthened,
Shakespeare was representing on the stage the virtues of
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man-centered kingship with some reference to the
monarch that most Englishmen expected would succeed
to the throne and whose candidacy was being quietly but
aggressively pushed by both Cecil and Essex and was very
likely accepted by the Queen herself. The "message" was
as follows": James VI of Scotland has an indefeasible
hereditary right to the crown of England, and he is a
desirable candidate on other grounds as well... but he
does hold some regrettable notions of kingship, and most
specifically he believes in the discreditable doctrine of the
divine right of kings on which he is a notable authority.
"Our bending author" therefore proposes that he recon-
sider, that he give some thought to the virtues of man-
centered kingship.15
Thayer, then, sees Shakespeare arguing for the necessity of a concept

of a king who not only is a king by right, but also a king by reason of his
personal qualities. If we may conclude that, by 1599, Shakespeare was
willing to preach the virtues of man-centered kingship, the question of
the source of law's authority would follow naturally. In light of events at
the beginning of James's reign, the question of the source of the law's
binding force was prominent in the thoughts of politically active people.
If law is the will of the sovereign, as positivism maintains, then all law and
all legal rights flow from the sovereign. As the king was the source of all
law, as James had already argued in print, James was free to impose on
England any law he might choose. Those who opposed James, notably the
common lawyers and especially Coke, succeeded in transforming a con-
frontation between absolutism and tradition into one in which they iden-
tified traditional law with justice. Tradition and law's artificial reason jus-
tified its authority, and not the will of the king. The question of whether
law requires an inner morality was asked in terms of the times. Those
times still spoke in terms of a congruence between the natural and the
conventional. The radical thought of the king was at discord with this
alliance of the conventional and the natural.
Thayer hears Shakespeare's own voice in an exchange early in Henry
V, in which Exeter compares the body politic to music, divided into parts,
and agreeing "in one consent... in a full and natural close." Canterbury's
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reply, elaborating on the figure, compares the community of man to hon-
eybees, who teach man "that by a rule in nature... /The act of order to a
peopled kingdom."'6 Thayer asserts that Shakespeare's contemporaries
would have found nothing startling in either the imagery or the ideas.
As a principle of Justice, obedience means obeying laws

- e.g., laws against conspiring to murder the king, laws
against theft, from churches or wherever. It means sub-
mission to rule or authority, and no society has ever been
able to forego submission to some form of legitimate
authority and survive. If the source and center of author-
ity is itself corrupt, then of course Justice becomes an
obscenity - endless instances come to mind. But for
Shakespeare, at least, there seems to be some sense that
Justice should be rational and not capricious, that it
ought to be just by standards that almost anyone can
comprehend....17
In Lear, Shakespeare shows us repeated instances of what happens

when the center of authority is corrupt, and "Justice becomes an obscen-
ity." As A. C. Bradley observed:
I might almost say that the "moral" of King Lear is pre-

sented in the irony of this collocation:
Albany. The gods defend her!

(Enter Lear with Cordelia dead in his arms.)
The "gods," it seems, do not show their approval by

"defending" their own from adversity or death, or by giv-
ing them power and prosperity."
III. King James - His Ideas and his Politics

A. His Ideas
If Thayer is right that by 1599 Shakespeare knew of and was reacting

with some hostility to the ideas in James's The Trew Law ofFree Monarchy
Revealed, then it is worth examining that work in some greater detail.
James wrote:
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Obedience ought to be to him [the King], as to God's
Lieutenant in earth, obeying his commands in all things,
except directly against God, as the commands of God's
minister, acknowledging him a judge set by God over
them, having power to judge them, but to be judged only
by God, whom to only he must give account of his judg-
ment; fearing him as their judge; loving him as their
father; praying for him as their protector; for his contin-
uance if he be good; for his amendment if he be wicked;
followying and obeying his lawful commands, eschewing
and flying his fury in his unlawful, without resistance,
but by sobs and tears to God.'9
James's view of the relation of the king, his people and God evidenced
the collapse of a medieval world view, in which the king, though God's
anointed, was not altogether the representative of God on earth. In this
medieval view of kingship, a king's power might be absolute, but it was
absolute only within a sphere of activity. That sphere did not empower
the king to change immemorial rights. The late medieval view, stated well
by Dante in De Monarchia, argued that the spiritual realm was under the
command of the Church, while the temporal was under the command of
the Emperor.20 The last echoes of this view appear in James's one qualifi-
cation upon the duty of a subject to his king - the duty owed to God.
Note, however, James does not describe a king who would permit consci-
entious objection to his orders. James allowed his subjects only one rem-
edy if governed by a wicked king - to fly his fury without resistance,
"but by sobs and tears to God." A subject who rebelled risked God's wrath
as well as the king's.2'
If we are to read Shakespeare as Thayer would have us read him, then
included in the text of Lear may well be lessons for a king who has writ-
ten a book.22 James, though an absolutist, did not insist that any order of
the king was lawful. The Trew Law of Free Monarchy Revealed shows that
James understood that subjects could make judgments about the content
of king-made law: the king's could offend heaven. What became impos-
sible, in James's view, was any remedy on earth for a king's wrongful acts.
Both monarch and subject remained accountable only to a heavenly reck-
oning. In this way, James's absolutism did not elide the lawful with the
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will of the sovereign. That elision would have to await another generation
until Hobbes wrote his Leviathan. Seen from the position of the subject,
the difference between James's absolute monarch and Hobbes's sovereign
is not that great. While James's subjects retained the capacity to make
moral judgments about the content of laws, they were precluded, by his
philosophy, from doing anything about perceived injustices. In King Lear,
some of the risks of the near identity of law with the will of the sovereign
are made explicit. Remember the scene where Albany confronts his wife
Goneril, the Queen, with a letter evidencing her adultery:
Albany. ...No tearing, lady; I perceive you know it.

Goneril. Say, if I do, the laws are mine, not thine: Who
can arraign me for't ?23
To this statement Albany can say only, "Most monstrous O!"24 These
lines capture the way in which the late medieval notion of kingship and
the absolute monarchy of the early modern period speak the same words,
but mean differing things. If a late medieval monarch said the laws were
his, he would also be bound by tradition, and that same tradition pro-
vided a source of his authority. The absolute monarch did take the posi-
tion that, as God's anointed, he could commit no crime except against
God's law. "The king can do no wrong" shifted from an ethical statement
to a legal conclusion. For some substantial part of medieval thinking
about kingship, if the individual who had been annointed as king acted
wrongfully, those wrongful acts would provide reasons to believe that the
individual forfeited his claim to be king. For the later absolutists, no act
of the king could be wrong, judged by earthly standards. Included with-
in King Lear is just this tension between the late medieval concept of the
sovereign monarch and the more modern absolutist version.
B. King James and the Common Law
The confrontation between James and Coke is the stuff legends are
made of. In fact, at least some of the details of conflict are, in all proba-
bility, legend. Nonetheless, the story of Coke, as the defender of the
Common Law against a king who thought his reason was equal or supe-
rior to any lawyer's remains as a central part of the history of the first years
of James's reign. Although its moments of high drama occurred in 1610,
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the issue was present at the outset of King James's reign. During James's
progress from Scotland to England to claim his throne,
There was one disquieting incident; news of it went

quickly through the counties. At Newark-on-Trent a
thief was caught and confessed he had followed the King
all the way from Berwick, cutting purses. Without trial,
without a hearing, James had him hanged. Was this,
then, the law in Scotland, and did James look to bring it
across the border? Roman law which followed the
prince's pleasure: Quod principi placuit legis habet vig-

orem : What pleases the prince has the force of law. "I
heare," wrote Elizabeth's good-natured godson, Sir John
Harrington, "oure new King hath hanged one man
before he was tried; 'tis strangely done: now if the
winde bloweth thus, why may not a man be tried before
he hath offended?"25
James himself acknowledged that his accession had created doubts

concerning the status of law in England. In a speech to Parliament
1610, he said,
I am not ignorant... that I have been thought to be

enemy to all prohibitions and an utter stayer of them.26
Anent the common law, some had a conceit I disliked it,
and that I would have wished the civil law to have been
put in place of the common law for government of this

people.27
The basis for that belief was, in large part, James's own statements to
Parliament. One of James's first acts as king was to proclaim the union of
England and Scotland.
When he addressed his first Parliament on 22 March
1603/4 he expected immediate ratification of his procla-
mation.... He proposed the union of his kingdoms
under the ancient name of Great Britain, in a speech
whose metaphors spring from the old and fertile notion
of the king's two bodies. In James's argument king and
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realm are indistinguishable; as there was one king there
should be one not two kingdoms and one law for
Scotland and England.... James completely misjudged
the feelings of his subjects. While the plan for Union
received enthusiastic support from his judges and most of
the House of Lords, the Commons baulked.... Between
1604 and 1608 the House argued the vexed questions of
England's supremacy over Scotland, of subjects born out
of the allegiance of the English King, and most momen-
tous of all: was the object of allegiance King or soil.28
Thus, in less than a year after his ascension to the throne, James's bat-
tle with Parliament was well under way:
In July of 1604, King and Parliament had parted in

mutual anger and suspicion after a stubborn battle con-
cerning privileges, religion, matters of revenue and the
royal plan of union with Scotland. ("By what laws,"
Bacon demanded, "shall this 'Britain' be governed?")29
As 1605 is the year in which Lear was written,30 there can be no ques-
tion that these political events constituted the background against which
the audience would hear its lines. Its performance followed the tumul-
tuous first three years of James's reign, and it was written to be performed
before the King as well as the public.31 If Thayer is right that Shakespeare
did not share with enthusiasm James's pretensions to the power of an
earthly God, it is not altogether surprising that a question that was in the
air - the problem of what law should govern Britain - would appear in
King Lear, but do so obliquely.
What is confusing is that in England, starting in the 16th century, law
was itself the subject of intense intellectual scrutiny. The impulse to sys-
tematize law in a rational way led to the great codification movements on
the Continent in the 16th and 17th centuries. That examination of the
laws as system of ideas did make more difficult to assert the identity of
traditional law with just results. On the continent, there was a tendency
for the systematizers of the law to identify with the emerging absolutists.
In England, matters were different. In the person of Sir Edward Coke, a
rationalizing moment in the history of English law was clothed in claims
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of ancient precedent. Coke was able to insist that his systematization of
the law was no more than what the law "always" had been.32 As the com-
mon law was transformed, those who articulated its principles insisted on
the independence of law from influences external to itself:
The mythology of the common law contended that it

had always existed as a self-contained system, uncontam-
inated by any other legal code, rugged and immemorial,
resisting foreign intrusions. This myth had some founda-
tion, but needs to be importantly qualified. From the ear-
liest times, the system known as the common law
embraced a delicate interplay of English custom and
Roman law principle in which, though the first predom-
inated, the second was never extinguished.... This eclec-
tic quality of the common law preserved a role for
Roman law concepts within it, and the tactical need to
find arguments to limit the unified King-in-Parliament
who was created in the 1530's and who more securely
ruled after 1660 kept an Anglican version of natural law
near the political center of attention.33
With this moment of analytic obscurity, common lawyers could

argue simultaneously for tradition and natural justice. Defending com-
mon law from the king's prerogative defended basic morality. In this con-
text, the king's reason, even though backed by claims of divine right, rep-
resented an amoral law. Simultaneously, the common law, by represent-
ing tradition as against the rationalizing force of kings stood against the
emerging view of nature as fundamental order. Shakespeare worked at the
beginning of this transformative time for the common law.
IV. Law and Nature
The systematic examination of law was part of the larger intellectual

currents of the Renaissance, including the beginnings of modern science.
The transformation of poetic imagery in light of the new science occurred
in the works of those who wrote in the generations after Shakespeare. This
proposition has been amply demonstrated by Marjorie Hope
Nicolson.34 While she sees Shakespeare's imagery untouched by the new
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learning, there is nonetheless in Shakespeare a tension between two con-
cepts of nature. While the ambiguity towards the concept of nature in
Lear has been much written about, it is enough for my purposes to see
that the natural can mean, in the context of the play, one of two opposed
ideas. Natural can be simply what is, so that there is no particular natur-
al order. Falling objects fall at different speeds, as any idiot can see. Nature
can also be the order underlying the apparent disorder. There is, in nature,
the law of gravity. In this sense of natural as underlying order, nature is in
opposition to the conventional. The sense of nature as disorder is cap-
tured in the perhaps apocryphal story from near the end of the 17th cen-
tury. Charles II is supposed to have said as he first entered the newly
rebuilt Saint Paul's Cathedral, "How awful, how artificial" and he knight-
ed Wren on the spot. "Awful" meaning inspiring of awe. "Artificial"
meaning artificed, the very opposite of nature. We hear an echo of
Hobbes's state of nature and its war of every man against every man.
Emerging science carried with it exactly the opposite idea of nature. It
claimed to discover in nature invariant regularities.
The difference between the idea of nature at the beginning of the
17th century and the 18th century's concept of nature and yet another
concept of nature in the 19th cetury helps to explain the radically differ-
ent ways in which each century saw the play. For the 18th century, nature
was a source of fundamental political order. By the time Lear returned to
its original ending, nature had become part of the intellectual attack on
that order. These changes in the relationship between concepts of law and
nature parallel changes in politics in England during these times:
Under the impact of a strengthening doctrine of unitary

sovereignty, and of the omnicompetence of that unitary
sovereign, the fundamental law which was often held to
underpin the English constitution came after 1688 to be
identified more with natural law than with the ancient
constitution as immemorial and inviolable custom. The
natural law tradition then steadily abolished itself in
eighteenth-century England by its very success in pro-
ducing an identity of religion between nation and
monarch, so opening the way for the common law to
modernise itself in the unhistorical idiom of
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Benthamite utilitarianism. The ancient constitution was
increasingly unnecessary to those who took their stand

on the principles of 1688 and 1714, and largely irrelevant
after 1832.35
The revival of Lear with its original ending coincided with the high
tide of Romanticism. The disordered, possibly amoral nature the roman-
tics described permitted them to see a play which, because of the death of
Cordelia, the previous century had found impossible to view. The increas-
ing control over nature as a consequence of scientific discovery of the
underlying natural order did not require, in the context of the 19th cen-
tury, an insistence that the moral order also contain the same fundamen-
tal regularity. The 19th century revival of positivism as a way of seeing law
also evidences a willingness to see law as fundamentally a human creation,
one whose regularities do not require an appeal to a necessary nature for
their explanation.
V. Natural Justice
In King Lear, what we see as two irreconciliable views of nature -

nature as disorder to be tamed by human activity and nature as the invari-
ant regularity underlying daily life - emerges most clearly in the
Gloucester subplot.
The theme starts in Act I scene 2 with Edmund's soliloquy starting,
Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law

My services are bound. Wherefore should I
Stand in the plague of custom and permit
The curiosity of nations to deprive me...
Why bastard? Wherefore base?36
For Edmund, nature opposes custom, but he is prepared to take

advantage of others for whom custom is a fact. As he says later in this
same speech, "Fine word, 'legitimate'!"37 There is sarcasm here, but there
is also a recognition of the benefits of a social status having nothing to do
with nature. Edmund wants his legitimate brother's advantages - his
lands. For Edmund having his brother's land will make him as if legiti-
mate. In the name of nature he wants to pick and choose among the social
conventions. Precisely this play between nature as that which happens
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and nature as order in opposition to custom is used by Gloucester, later
in that same scene, when he says to Edmund, "Loyal and natural boy, I'll
work the means /To make thee capable."38 Gloucester promises Edmund
to make him capable - to change the social reality to allow him the ben-
efit within society that Edmund asked of nature to accomplish for him.
This line can easily be read as conflating both concepts of nature. For
Gloucester, nature and custom can be brought into alliance. For his nat-
ural son, the alliance between nature and custom does not exist, but
because others believe the alliance exists, he is free to manipulate the oth-
ers. His nature shall prevail against their custom.
Tate uses Edmund's soliloquy to open his version of King Lear, but he
edits it severely. In Tate's version, the opening few lines read:
Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law

My services are bound. Why am I then
Deprived of a son's right because I came not
In the dull road that custom has prescribed?39
The Nature to whom Tate's Edmund binds himself is not a force

independent of and in contrast to custom. While Shakespeare's Edmund
says, "Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land,"40 Tate's says,
...legimitate Edgar, to thy right /

of law I will oppose a bastard's cunning.4'
Where Shakespeare's Edmund appeals to Nature to seize land,

Edmund's Nature acts as a corrupt Equity Judge. By modifying this solil-
oquy, Tate has made bloodless both nature and custom. His custom is no
longer a "plague," but is instead a "dull road." Tate has, at the very outset
of his play, reduced the tension between nature and custom.
Tate eliminates lines that in Shakespeare's version underscore two
views of Nature embodied in speeches by Gloucester and
Edmund. Gloucester, in referring to the "late eclipses" says they
portend no good to us: though the wisdom of Nature can

reason it thus and thus, yet Nature finds itself scourg'd by
the sequent effects. Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers
divide: in cities mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces,
treason; and the bond crack'd 'twixt son and father.42
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Gloucester speaks here in terms of what we might call forces of nature
as a macrocosm of as well as a cause of discord at all levels of personal and
civil relationships. Reason is present here - reason by analogy, by paral-
lel structures in the world we would call nature and the world we would
call humanly constructed.43 Tate changes this speech to
These late eclipses of the sun and moon

Can bode no less: Love cools and friendship fails,
In cities mutiny[.]44
In this revision, Tate takes out all references to nature and reason. He
does so while also eliminating altogether Edmund's speech, which imme-
diately follows his father's exit:
This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we

are sick in fortune, often the surfeits of our own behav-
ior, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon,
and stars; as if we were villains on necessity... and all that
we are evil in, by a divine trusting on. An admirable eva-
sion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to
the charge of a star!45
With this speech, Edmund denies the nature his father appeals to.
The stars do not cause or mimic earthly events, nor is there a grand par-
allel between nature and human acts. Edmund here stakes out a position
of a person governed by reason; free will constitutes nature.
By Act IV, Gloucester no longer asserts the existence of order in
nature as it affects human affairs. He no longer claims, as he did in Act I,
that people's affairs are a microcosm of the larger natural order. Nor does
he see a structure to the world. Instead he says:
As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods;

They kill us for their sport.46
In this speech we hear a denial of the possibility of any order in

human affairs.
Tate, by giving Edmund's soliloquy the prominence of being the first

words spoken in the play, sets in motion a nature theme which culminates
in Edmund's death. In Shakespeare's version, there is closure at that
moment. Edgar says to the dying Edmund, "The Gods are just, and of
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our pleasant vices / Make instruments to plague us."47 Shakespeare here
lets Edgar speak in terms that the 18th century would see as natural jus-
tice. Tate, having moved the nature theme to special prominence, cuts
these lines that in Shakespeare's text close off this point. We can see that
the lines are superfluous in Tate's version because he has the entire play
turn on natural justice. In both Tate's and Shakespeare's Lear there is a
double parallel plot. In both the Lear and Gloucester families, a parent
makes a tragic misjudgment about the intentions of a child. The differ-
ence in the plots is that Edgar lives and in Shakespeare's version Cordelia
dies. In Tate's version the Gloucester sub-plot has no independent func-
tion. For Shakespeare, it does. It allows us the sense of natural justice, but
the main plot, culminating in Cordelia's death, appears almost by design
to remove from us that comfort.
VI. Law andAuthority
Anyone familiar with King Lear knows that the theme of authority
runs through the play. This theme ties together three of the main plots of
King Lear - the chronicle play (the history of Britain), the story of Lear's
family, and the story of Gloucester's family.48 My concern in this article is
with two strands within this large idea. The first concerns the king's
capacity to do what Lear did in fact do in Act I, scene i . Can a king give
away pieces of a kingdom as dowry? One of the most prominent lawyers
during Elizabeth's regime, Edmund Plowden emphatically said no.
A king could not legally divide his realm whereas a sub-

ject might divide his lands. Plowden compares a monarch
and a subject who have daughters and no son; his argu-
ments are crucial for Gorboduc and the Lear plays. An
ordinary man's inheritance would be shared equally by
his daughters. However, a king's daughters could not
receive a divided crown or crown lands: 'the crowne shall
discende only to the eldeste & thother shall haue no
parte of thinritance [sic] thereof'."4
Plowden made this argument early on to support Mary, Queen of

Scots's claim to the throne, as against any who claimed under the will of
Henry VIII. These arguments then became the rationale of those who
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supported James's claim to the throne. As James watched the performance
of Lear, did he see in the play Plowden's point and let it rest at that? Or
did he see as well, that in Lear the monstrous Goneril would, under
Plowden's understanding of the law, be the lawful queen? Did he see that
if he delighted in the destruction of King Lear, a man who acted contrary
to the claim of right that justified James's claim to his own throne, he was
accepting limits upon the absolute powers he had claimed for the king in
The Trew Law of Free Monarchy Revealed? I join here with Marie Axton's
description of the play, "[u]sing a freedom which the lawyers had been
first to develop and a currency of political imagery which had once
affirmed the supremacy of the state, Shakespeare wrote his deeply specu-
lative tragedy."'0
Another strand within the theme of authority has been little noted -
the question of the authority of law itself. The law-related subtheme of
the authority theme is introduced in Act I, scene i, when King Lear sep-
arates the king's name from all the sources of the king's force.51 Within
thirty lines, Lear banishes Kent. Having just resigned the "sway" of a king,
a legalistic turn of mind wonders where the source of Lear's power to ban-
ish anyone comes from. If Lear has just resigned his office, he can no
more banish Kent than a President can pardon a criminal five minutes
after the end of his term. The inconsistency between Lear's renunciation
and his acts is noted in a colloquy between Goneril and Regan at the end
of Act I, scene i. Regan identifies Kent's banishment as an
"unconstant start," and it is Goneril who notes the logical and political
difficulty of having a king who has only the name of king: "...if our father
carry authority with such disposition as he bears, this last surrender of his
will but offend us."52 Goneril uses the word "authority" ambiguously. In
this context the word could refer either to Lear's personal authority result-
ing from his habit of command connected to his subject's habit of obedi-
ence, or to Lear's retaking the authority of kingship - the "sway" he had
so recently given up.
By Act I, scene iii, Goneril makes clear Lear's untenable position:
By day and night, he wrongs me; every hour

He flashes into one gross crime or other,
That sets all at odds: I'll not endure it.53
Although the lines are ambiguous, the thought here is extraordinari-
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ly tight. Either Lear has committed crimes, and by doing so he wrongs
Goneril, who takes on the persona of the State, or Lear's actions, by
wronging Goneril, are crimes. Here begins an ambiguity in Goneril's sta-
tus that runs through the play. Although in Act I, scene i, Lear makes clear
that he has divided the "sway, Revenue, execution of the rest" between
Albany and Cornwall, Goneril here, and continuously through the play,
ignores her husband's supervening rights to her dowry.
Lear sees nothing unusual in the behavior of his retinue, so it is incon-
ceivable to Lear that his actions could be crimes. Goneril states directly a
central question raised by the natural law tradition. Is the category crim-
inal that which has natural characteristics, or is the category criminal that
which offends the monarch? The mediating answer - that which offends
conventions previously established - won't work here. Lear's train does
nothing out of the ordinary.
The ambiguity concerning "crime" builds on the ambiguity of
"authority" in Act I, scene i. There the ambiguity was between the
monarch's personal attributes and his or her lawful role. Here the ambi-
guity is between the Queen's identification of the law with herself and the
identification of law as external to the monarch. Goneril's accusing Lear
of crimes occurs in a speech instructing Oswald to be negligent towards
Lear. Twelve lines later, in a continuation of that speech, she says:
...Idle old man,

That still would manage those authorities
That he hath given away!54
The crime is now clear, as is the question of authority. Lear continues

to "manage those authorities" that he has given away, that is, he contin-
ues to act as if king. By acting as king after having resigned as king, his
offense is against Goneril (although strictly speaking, the offense is
against Albany) in her capacity as ruler. Because the state is the monarch,
Goneril can reasonably conceive of her father's acts as a species of treason.
The very next scene gives the opposite spin to the concept of author-
ity. In that scene, Kent, in disguise, offers his services to Lear:
Lear. What are thou?
Kent. A very honest- hearted fellow, and as poor as the

King.
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Lear. If thou be'st as poor for a subject as he is for a King,
thou art poor enough. What would'st thou?
Kent. Service.
Lear. Who would'st thou serve?
Kent. You.
Lear. Dost thou know me, fellow?
Kent. No, Sir; but you have that in your countenance
which I would fain call master.
Lear. What's that?
Kent. Authority.55
Tate cuts off this dialogue at line 23 after the words "thou art poor
enough."''6 By his deletions here and in the previous scene, Tate fairly well
removes any richness in the theme of authority from Act I. This exchange
is followed immediately by Oswald's studied insolence to Lear, who we
have just been told has authority on his countenance. When asked by
Lear, "Who am I, Sir?", Oswald answers, "My lady's father." Oswald here
accurately describes the king. He has become no more than the father of
the Queen. Whatever authority he might have can be seen only by those
looking for it. Strictly speaking, authority is no longer in him; it is an
attribute that others bring to him.
Lear's last speech in this scene brings together the two strands of
authority. Speaking in personal terms Lear says to Goneril, "I am
asham'd / That thou hast power to shake my manhood thus."''57 Tate
removes this line. Tate does, however, keep Lear's last threat to Goneril.
"[T]hou shalt find I That I'll resume the shape which thou dost think / I
have cast off for ever." By keeping only this last threat, Tate pares the
theme of authority back to its official sense. Shakespeare, by keeping both
ideas in the same speech, makes clear that authority has both personal and
official aspects, here echoing the idea of the king's two bodies. The idea
of authority in its governmental sense returns with a new flavor in the Act
IV, scene vi, exchange between the blinded Gloucester and a mad Lear.
Lear. ...Thou hast seen a farmer's dog bark at a beggar?

Gloucester. Ay, Sir.
Lear. And the creature run from the cur? There thou
might'st behold
The great image of Authority:
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A dog's obey'd in office.58
Here authority returns to its governmental meaning but is bereft of

anything beyond naked power. Authority exists because the dog barks.
There is nothing in the countenance of the dog that one "would fain call
master." Authority has taken on the same bleakness and amorality as
Gloucester's gods, who, like boys with flies, kill us for their wanton sport.
Authority belongs to the office and ceases to be a trait of the officer. This
view of authority is confirmed later in that same scene, when a
Gentleman sent by Cordelia, comes to help Lear. Lear is made palpably
mad: "Let me have surgeons; I am cut to th'brains."59 Yet this Gentleman
says, "You are a royal one, and we obey you."60 Only in a world where a
"dog's obey'd in office"''1 does the Gentleman's statement make sense.
No matter how foolish the idea of obeying a dog in office,
Albany succeeds in achieving an even more foolish posture at the end of
the last scene in the play. Cordelia is dead, and Lear is at least half-mad.
Kent reveals his identity and attempts to tell Lear the fate of his other
daughters, to which Lear replies, "Ay , so I think." Albany sensibly says,
"He knows not what he says, and vain is it / That we present us to him."
Four lines later, Albany says, "we will resign, / During the life of this old
Majesty, / To him our absolute power.'"62 Despite all we have seen, and
Albany has experienced, Albany sees authority inhere in the office and not
the man. Albany restores to an abstract idea of kingship the powers of a
palpable king. Albany's actions are, of course, consistent with the idea of
the king's two bodies. There mere insanity of the physical king left
untouched the king's metaphysical body politic.
Despite his being mad, Lear understands more about the connection
between power and authority than does Albany. Lear displays throughout
the play a growing awareness that force - the barking cur - creates its
own authority, while authority without force is no more than personal loy-
alty. This theme starts with the first dialogue between the Fool and Lear.
Fool ...Can you make no use of nothing, Nuncle?

Lear. Why, no, boy; nothing can be made out of noth-
ing.
Fool [to Kent]. Prithee, tell him, so much the rent of his
land comes to: he will not believe a fool.63
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The Fool leads Lear to give the same reply Lear had given to Cordelia
- nothing will come of nothing. Now, however, the meaning has shift-
ed. As Lear has nothing to offer, he should learn to expect nothing from
others. Having failed to retain the sway revenue and execution, Lear
should not expect that the name of "king" should give him authority. This
moral is driven home by the Fool a few lines later, with the Fool's offer:
Fool. Nuncle, give me an egg, and I'll give thee two

crowns.
Lear. What two crowns shall they be?

Fool. Why, after I have cut the egg i' th' middle
up the meat, the two crowns of the egg. When
clovest thy crown i' th' middle, and gav'st away
parts, thou bor'st thine ass on thy back o'er
dirt....64
As this scene progresses further, the Fool teaches Lea

ty, after Lear asks a rhetorical question, "Who is it that
am?" The fool answers, "Lear's shadow," to which Lear
learn that."''65
Lear's speech following this line bears close analysis.

that he is Lear's shadow. Until he learns that he is a sh
"false persuaded" he had daughters. But even as he ackn
sibility of his shadow state, Lear claims the "marks of so
edge, and reason." Why sovereignty? Hadn't Lear given
when he surrendered all but the "name and all th' addit
does Lear regard sovereignty to be included in the nam
of a king? If Lear has thought that he has retained sover
yet learned the lesson the Fool had attempted to teach h
If not sovereign, Lear must be ruled, as Regan sa
should be rul'd and led / By some discretion that disce
Better than you yourself."'66 The pun on the word "stat
ration. But again, think on these lines in terms of jurisp
of traditional natural law, the ruler's job is precisely to
and be ruled by a higher law. Because these lines are sp
who proposes to be Lear's higher law and who at all
higher law governing her behavior, they contain an iro
Lear's personal disassociation of authority and powe
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stripping from Lear of all his train of knights. Although the train could
easily be seen as a symbol of kingship, Lear's famous speech, "0! Reason
not the need," speaks entirely of his personal tragedy, and there is no
mention of kingship.67 Only as Lear comes out of his madness does he see
one fundamental point, "For I lack soldiers.'"68
Yet Lear is no positivist. In the trial scene on the heath,69 which Tate
entirely omits, Lear places his daughters on trial under the law. The pos-
itivists in Lear are Goneril and Regan. For them law is simply what they
will. The play gives the speech with the strongest positivist statement to
Goneril. When confronted by her husband Albany with letters proving
her adultery, she says, "the laws are mine, not thine. / Who can arraign
me for't ?" We, along with Albany and Goneril, have forgotten that her
interest in the kingdom is as a dowry, and that the kingdom does belong
to Albany. Alone, the lines could mean that, as a practical matter a ruler
cannot be held to the laws that are administered by the ruler. "Who shall
guard the guardians?" is a question as old as Plato. In Shakespeare's time,
these lines would also carry with them some resonance of James's own
thought. In the larger context of Lear, the lines have a deeper resonance.
If the laws are Goneril's, then their content is hers as well. She can, at will,
redefine crime to eliminate the possibility of indictable offense. The idea
that Coke was to defend against James, that the King was subject to the
law, has no echo here.70
VII. Simple Justice
All of us desire to see what we perceive as wickedness punished as

much as we long to see what we perceive as persecuted virtue triumph.
We also recognize, along with Johnson, that in the common experience of
humanity, that is not so. Throughout Lear, a number of characters voice
this desire, but it is never given as a simple message.7" There is also always
(with one telling exception) a complexity arising out of the context in
which the lines are spoken, or the identity of the speakers.
The apparently simplest and most direct statement of this view is by
Cornwall's servants who attend Gloucester immediately after his blind-
ing.72 But even these simple words acquire some texture in context. At the
beginning of that same scene, Goneril, Regan and Cornwall react to the
news of what they see as Gloucester's treachery. Regan says, "Hang him
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instantly." Goneril says, "Pluck out his eyes." In response, Cornwall says,
"Leave him to my displeasure."73 Within 20 lines, he continues his
thoughts:
Though well we may not pass upon his life

Without the forms of justice, yet our power
Shall do a court'sy to our wrath, which men
May blame but not control.74
Cornwall recognizes here the need to preserve "the forms of justice."

To preserve propriety, he chooses not to kill Gloucester. Instead he blinds
him brutally without observing any of the forms of justice. His power -
that which he has through his spouse - yields to his wrath. The servant's
reaction to this act is precisely the reason for observing the forms of
power.
If one chooses, one could read into this scene a message to James. In
The Trew Law ofFree Monarchy Revealed, James had described a king who
ruled through divine right. Any king, however, would find prudence to
suggest that he choose to follow the forms of life, the conventions his sub-
jects understood as stemming from time immemorial, in order not to stir
up opposition. A simple proposition that this scene illustrates is that for
rulers, prudence suggests the necessity of the appearance of justice by
means of following the forms of justice. If this scene contains any "mes-
sage" to King James, it would be to remind him that even for an absolute
king having power does not mean exercising it.
The strongest statement of this simple moral view is stated by Edgar
in the exchange with Edmund immediately after Edgar has mortally
wounded Edmund.
Edgar. The Gods are just, and of our pleasant vices

Make instruments to plague us;
The dark and vicious places where thee he got
Cost him his eyes.
Edmund. Th' hast spoken right, 'tis true.
The wheel is come full circle; I am here.75
This passage speaks directly for natural justice. No complexity of

character or circumstance dilutes its strength. That strength is appropri-
ate because here is the climax of the domestic story of the Gloucester
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household. Within the family simple morality prevails. Within the state,
it does not.
At the level of state, the principal voice for conventional morality is
hapless Albany, whose weakness of character and mind undercuts the per-
suasive force of the ideas he holds.76 On hearing that his brother-in-law
Cornwall died as a result of blinding Gloucester, Albany says: "This shows
you are above, I You justicers, that these our nether crimes / So speedily
can venge!"77 For Albany, the gods' accounting takes place on earth, and
if events appear to be just, they show the working out of a divine account-
ing. His statements here are consistent with the sentiments he expresses a
few moments earlier when confronting his wife, Goneril:
Most barbarous, most degenerate! have you madded?

Could my good brother suffer you to do it?
A man, a prince, by him so benefited!
If that the heavens do not their visible spirits
Send quickly down to tame these vile offences,
It will come,
Humanity must perforce prey on itself,
Like monsters of the deep.78
For Albany, correcting these most unnatural acts will need the inter-
vention of the heavens themselves. In Shakespeare's play, the sisters do
prey on each other like monsters until Goneril dies by her own hand, hav-
ing already poisoned Regan. To this extent, Shakespeare's Lear conforms
to Albany's moral structure. Shakespeare does not, however, adopt
Albany's moral view.79 Cordelia dies. For Samuel Johnson that death
negated the possibility that heaven's justicers were at work.
With his nearly perfect ear for eliminating matters touching on
jurisprudential themes, Nahum Tate eliminated the passages discussed in
this part. For that reason he had to provide a voice to speak for the sim-
ple moral view. Cordelia is that voice, and Tate gave her a new speech with
which to close Act IV, on the eve of the battle with her sisters. She prays:
...You never-erring gods

Fight on his side, and thunder on his foes
Such tempest as his poor aged Head sustained;
Your image suffers when a monarch bleeds.
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'Tis your own cause, for that your succors bring,
Revenge yourselves, and right an injured king.80
In Tate's version, since Cordelia wins the battle with her sisters, there
is no irony in these lines.
VIII. The Necessity of the Death of Cordelia
As Edmund is dying, as the suspense builds up because the audience

knows that a soldier has been sent out to the prison holding Lear and
Cordelia to do "a great employment" requiring him not to be tender-
minded, Edmund reveals the nature of the errand:
I pant for life; some good I mean to do

Despite of mine own nature. Quickly send,
Be brief in it, to th' castle; for my writ
Is on the life of Lear and on Cordelia.
Nay, send in time.81
A few lines later, Edmund changes his account and says of the soldier,
"He hath commission from thy wife and me[.]"82 With this line we learn
that Cordelia dies as the result of an order, lawful in form, given by
Goneril, who has, throughout the play, acted as the lawful ruler of
England. The action that Johnson found to be contrary to natural justice
results from an order that positivists would find acceptable. Within
James's theory of kingship, no relief from this order is available on this
earth. If we read King Lear as including as one of its strands a commen-
tary on The Trew Law ofFree Monarchy Revealed, then we find that James's
position requires us to accept Cordelia's death, not only as tragic, but irre-
sistible. If we do not accept Cordelia's death, we are committed to a posi-
tion that justice constitutes a thing apart from either nature or the will of
kings. Within James's political theory, Cordelia's death cannot be chal-
lenged on earth.
IX. Conclusion
How do we differ from the 18th century so that we can read and see
Lear as it was written? Our view of nature, and our belief that law, as a
human institution, is malleable, begins to account for that difference.
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Nothing is inherent in law to prevent lawful acts from being morally
repugnant. That truth about law, which was too painful for the 18th cen-
tury to behold, we can recognize.
The ordeal [of King Lear] has been unique in its protrac-
tion of torment, and the note [in Edgar's closing speech:
"we that are young I Shall never see so much nor live so
long"] is surely one of refusal to hide that from oneself,
refusal to allow the terrible potentialities of life which the
action has revealed to be concealed once more behind the
veil of orthodoxy and the order of Nature. If there is such
an order, it is an order which can accommodate seem-
ingly limitless chaos and evil.81
If the gods did support the right, and if justice were accomplished by
small miracles done daily, then Tate's version of Lear would still appeal to
us. The tragedy that Shakespeare wrote casts substantial doubt on that
simple view that divine intervention is likely to bring about not only a
just order, but also a series of just outcomes. The relationship between
man and justice does not, for Shakespeare's Lear, permit so simple a set of
assumptions. Here I take partial exception to C.J. Sisson, who argued:
If there is a truly theological basis for this play, it is that

evil is to be known and feared because it is the absence of
good, that hatred is dreadful because it arises out of the
absence of love. The end of the play is surely the triumph
of love, of positive goodness.84
I join with the 18th century and doubt that the end of the play can
sustain the pleasant thought that it represents "the triumph of love, of
positive goodness." Cordelia's corpse prevents that conclusion. Either the
corpse or the pleasant conclusion must disappear. Since the 1820's we
have chosen to know there is a corpse. That knowledge keeps us from feel-
ing the force of the triumph of positive goodness.
If Thayer is right that the histories "teach" us the value of a man-cen-
tered king, then King Lear has the capacity to teach us the same lesson
concerning law. Those who look to justice to come out of the sky, either
as part of the natural order or as the will of princes, all end the play fac-
ing the corpse of Cordelia. Johnson is right to see this death as morally
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monstrous. From the perspective of our century, Cordelia's death occurs
because, as Father Boenhoffer put it, "For evil to triumph, it is sufficient
for good men to do nothing." Nothing inherent in law keeps evil from
triumphing. It is a lawful order that kills Cordelia. No law is just in itself.
Rather a man-centered jurisprudence is required, parallel to and as an
adjunct to the man-centered king of the history plays. Whether or not
Shakespeare intended to teach this lesson, we shall never know.
1 See David A.J. Richards, The Moral Criticism of the Law (Belmont: Wadsworth
Publishing Company, 1977), pp. 8, 11:
The natural law tradition identifies a tradition of thought about the rela-
tion of law and morals, among whom prominent representatives are
Cicero, St. Thomas Aquinas, Franciscus Victoria, Francisco Suarez, John
Locke and Immanuel Kant. These thinkers do not share a common
metaphysics or epistemology.... They do, however, share two beliefs

which together characterize the natural law tradition: (1) a view of the
kind of moral principles which govern the law and (2) a view of the log-
ical relation of the concepts of law and morality.... The great traditional
opponent of this view, which arose in antagonism to its claims, is legal
positivism.... In its systematic modern development, legal positivism
identifies a tradition of thought about the relation of law and morals
whose prominent representatives are Thomas Hobbes, Jeremy Bentham,
John Austin, Hans Kelsen , Alf Ross, and H.L.A. Hart.... They agree on
one thing, that the concepts of law and morals have no necessary logical
relationship.
My use of the term positivism is in its classical 19th through mid-20th century sense.
The literature in the past two decades has added meanings to the term that go beyond
its use in this paper. See Anthony Sebok, "Misunderstanding Positivism," 93 Michigan
Law Review 2054 (1995).
2 I make no claim to novelty in seeing legal issues in Lear.
Deep within the very core of this activity [constituting Lear's role] lies the
problem of justice, that justice which in the catastrophe of the play
appears to be contemned and almost irrelevant.
C.J. Sisson, "Justice in King Lear," reprinted in Frank Kermode, ed., Shakespeare: King
Lear (Nashville: Andrea Publishers, Inc., 1970), p. 236.
My paper advances the discourse by specifying a specific problem of justice within King
Lear and how that problem connects both to the inner logic of the play and to its histo-
ry as a cultural artifact.
3 John Murphy, Darkness and Devils: Exorcism and King Lear (Athens: Ohio University
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Press, 1984), p. 131. See also Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display: The Politics of
Shakespeare's Genres (New York: Menthuen, 1986), p. 6: "My goal, then, is to argue for a
Shakespeare whose dramatic forms participated in the political life of Renaissance
England."
4 The flavor of Tate's work can be gathered from his letter "To My Esteemed Friend
Thomas Boteller, Esq.", which prefaces the play:
I found [King Lear] a Heap of Jewels, unstrung, and unpolisht ; yet so
dazling [sic] in their Disorder, that I soon perceiv'd I had seiz'd a Treasure.
'Twas my good Fortune to light on one Expedient to rectify what was
wanting in the Regularity and Probability of the Tale, which was to run
through the whole, as Love betwixt Edgar and Cordelia; that never
chang'd a Word with each other in the Original. This renders Cordelia's
Indifference, and her Father's Passion in the first Scene, probable. It like-
wise gives Countenance to Edgar's Disguise, making that a generous
Design that was before a poor Shift to save his Life. The Distress of the
Story is evidently heightened by it; and it particularly gives Occasion of
a New Scene or Two, of more Success (perhaps) than Merit. This method
necessarily threw me on making the Tale conclude in a Success to the
innocent distrest Persons: Otherwise I must have incumbred the Stage
with dead Bodies, which Conduct makes many Tragedies conclude with
unseasonable Jests.
Nahum Tate, The History ofKing Lear, James Black, ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1975), lines 20-39, pp. 1-2.
5 See Stephen Jay Gould, "This View of Life," 91.2 Natural History 19 (1982).
6 See Samuel Johnson, Preface and Notes of the 1765 edition, as reprinted in Kermode,
supra note 2 at 28.
7 Id., at 28-29. In the part omitted from the paragraph quoted in the text, Johnson shows
that some did disagree with him. It reads as follows:
Yet this conduct is justified by the Spectator, who blames Tate for giving
Cordelia success and happiness in his alteration and declares that, in his
opinion, the tragedy has lost half its beauty. Dennis has remarked, whether
justly or not, that to secure the favorable reception of Cato, the town was
poisoned with much false and abominable criticism, and that endeavors had
been used to discredit and decry poetical justice.
8 It is true that Jeremy Bentham's writings preceded Austin's Lectures by a generation, but
it is also true that these writings were not published in English until after Austin's
Lectures had been given.
9 J.W. Allen, A History of Politcal Thought in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Barnes and
Nobles, 1960), p. 367.
10 By the beginning of Elizabeth's reign common lawyers had developed a theory about the
monarch and state that is best understood as the secularization of a religious concept.
The lawyers were formulating an idea of the state as a perpetual corpora-
tion, yet they were unable or unwilling to separate state and monarch.
Their concept of the king's two bodies was an attempt to deal with a
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paradox: men died and the land endured; kings died, the crown survived;
individual subjects died but subjects always remained to be governed.
Perhaps the lawyers were unwilling to envisage England itself as a per-
petual corporation because the law had always vested land in a person.
Anyway, for the purposes of law it was found necessary by 1561 to endow
the Queen with two bodies: a body natural and a body politic. (This body
politic should not be confused with the old metaphor of the realm as a
great body composed of many men with the king as head. The ideas are
related but distinct.) The body politic was supposed to be contained with-
in the natural body ofthe Queen. When lawyers spoke of this body politic
they referred to a specific quality: the essence of corporate perpetuity. The
Queen's natural body was subject to infancy, infirmity, error and old age;
her body politic, created out of a combination of faith, ingenuity and
practical expediency, was held to be unerring and immortal.
Marie Axton, The Queen's Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London:
Royal Historical Society, 1977), p. 12. Axton, of course, builds her argument on the
foundation laid by Ernst Kantorowicz in his The Kings Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval
Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957).
11 Doleman's view [Doleman was a principal apologist for Catholic position

writing in the 1590's ] is clarified by his certainty about the social con-
tract: claim by blood royal is only a marital pre-contract. Only corona-
tion can confirm the legality of a succession claim; at the coronation the
heir is elected by the people and this ceremony is the proper marriage de
praesenti ( Pt I, pp. 132-3). By metaphor Doleman persuades the reader
to accept the social and marital contracts as identical.
Axton, supra, note 10.
12 Though characters in Elizabethan history plays and 'romantic' histories

sometimes advance a theory of contractual kingship they are almost
always contradicted, defeated or discredited. In the kingship controversy
of the 1590's the anonymous author of Woodstock therefore stands out,
unconventional and audacious. He bases his play on the proposition that
a king must protect his realm or lose his right to govern; he posed situa-
tions which questioned axioms of the theory of the king's two bodies:
that the king's body politic protects the realm, never errs, is never under-
age, is never senile, transforms to English a foreign wife, or a foreign-born
heir.... Both Woodstock (the anonymous play) and Shakespeare's tragedy
Richard II ask covertly, 'What did Richard have to do with the death of
Woodstock?' Both plays raise basic issues about the nature of kingship. A
theory of the king's two bodies would absolve Richard of guilt. Doleman's
contractual theory, on the contrary, suggested that by destroying
Woodstock, Richard destroyed his only sound claim to the throne; his
deposition would thus be justified.
Id., at 97-98.
13 C.G. Thayer, Shakespearean Politics: Government and Misgoverment in the Great

Histories (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1983). Thayer starts his book with an exami-
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nation of John of Gaunt's speech in Act I, scene ii of Richard II, in which, to use Thayer's
words, it is
Gaunt's view that he can never lift an angry arm against God's minister
the King and that the only source of redress for the widow is "God, the
widow's champion and defence[.]" It follows from what Gaunt tells his
sister-in-law that there is no conceivable crime of which a king might be
guilty, no possible royal criminality, not even murder, that would justify
his punishment at the hands of his subject.
Id., at 2-3. The book examines the idea of kingship as it evolves through the tetralogy,
and Thayer argues that, if for Shakespeare Henry V
...is the antithesis of his King Richard, what has happened to the four
cardinal principles of the doctrine of the divine right of kings? If monar-
chy is ordained by God, here is a king who seems to have been born for
just that sort of ordination; if hereditary right is indefeasible, here is a
king who rules by hereditary right (a point vigorously made in 2 Henry
IV); if the king is accountable to God alone, here is a king who says that
the success of his ventures lies in God's hands and who thanks God when
his ventures succeed; if passive obedience is enjoined by God, here is a
king who enjoys the loyal obedience of the overwhelming majority of his
subjects, including those who must follow him into battle. In fact, here
is a king who seems to enjoy all the advantages of divine right without
making any of its claims and without having anyone else make them for
him.... Richard invoked divine right and divine kingship to buck him-
self up; Harry doesn't need to and wouldn't care to... a king who falls
into the habit of thinking of himself as the deputy elected by the Lord is
likely, when challenged and in real danger, to think of himself as the Lord
betrayed, as a spiritual figure and not a temporal, political figure at all....
Henry V is a Christian king whose religion is genuine, humble, and
orthodox; but he is also a strictly temporal ruler whose work is exclusive-
ly in and of the temporal world.... The mirror of all Christian kings has
nothing whatever to do with mystical doctrines of kingship.
Id., at 143-144.
14 Id., at 151.
15 Id., at 162-163 [footnote omitted].
16 Henry V, Act I. scene ii, 181-189 (New York: Bigelow, Smith & Company, 1909), pp.
22-23.
17 See Thayer, supra note 13 at 165-166.

18 A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, as quoted in Janet Adelman, ed., Twentieth Century
Interpretations of King Lear (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1978), p. 33.
19 James I, The Trew Law of Free Monarchy Revealed, as reprinted in The Political Works of
James I (New York: Russell & Russell, Inc., 1965), p. 61. WS. Holdsworth describes
James's views this way:
[T]he king was the supreme ruler and the supreme judge; that he was
above the law, which he could make, mitigate, or suspend; and that he
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was answerable for his acts to God alone.... James's theory was a direct
challenge both to Parliament and to the courts.
W.S. Holdsworth, A History ofEnglish Law, vol. 6 (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1927),
pp. 20-21.
20 Dante's De Monarchia dates from the early part of the 14th century. In it he does not rely
on the traditional medieval way of arguing for this conclusion - the imagery of the two
swords - but instead develops the point from first principles.
21 James developed fully ideas that were in the air. For the previous generation, the recon-
ciliation of the power of the monarch with the idea of justice had been best done by
Richard Hooker.
Hooker had to try to deal with the nature of law and of legislation. His
way of approaching the problem is both complicated and facilitated by
the fact that the English word "law" covers not only what the
Continental lawyer meant when he spoke of lex or loi, but also what was
designated by the term jus or droit. However, even in Hooker, right is rec-
ognized alongside law, but of course right carries non-legal, ethical, and
moral implications. This dual nature of law explains much in the argu-
mentation of Richard Hooker. He could not derive the obligation of the
law only from the right to rule of him who is responsible for positive leg-
islation. Nor could he explain it by the reference to truth and reason
which natural law contains. It was Hooker's genius to try to combine
these two elements and to infuse all with a profoundly reasonable spirit
of moderation.
Carl Joachim Friedrich, Philosophy of Law in Historical Perspective (Chicago: Chicago

University Press, 1963), p. 70. James's genius drove him to break down this synthesis
and, along with it, the profound moderation derived from it. Hear James addressing
Parliament in 1610:
The state of monarchy is the supremest thing upon earth. For Kings are
not only God's lieutenants upon earth and sit upon God's throne, but
even by God himself they are called God's... for that they exercise a man-
ner or resemblance of divine power upon earth. For if you will consider
the attributes to God, you shall see how they agree in the person of a
King. God hath power to create or destroy, make or unmake at his plea-
sure, to give life or send death, to judge all and to be judged not account-
able to none. Kings make and unmake their subjects; they have power of
raising and casting down; of life and of death... and make of their sub-
jects like men at the chess; a pawn to take a Bishop or a Knight, and to
cry up or down any of their subjects as they do their money.
James I, as quoted in Catherine Drinker Bowen, The Lion and the Throne (Boston: Little,
Brown & Co., 1957), pp. 312-313.
22 As my colleague Arthur Jacobson has pointed out, "'Lear,' in Scots, means instruction or
lesson." See Arthur Jacobson, "Transitional Constitutions," 14 Cardozo Law Review 947,
952 (1993).
23 Act V, scene iii, lines 157-160 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959). [These lines
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are in Tate's version, supra note 4 at V.v.65-67.]
24 V.iii.159. [See Tate, supra note 4 at V.v.68.]

25 Bowen, supra note 21 at 178.
26 James here refers to the writs of prohibitions by which the common law courts had pro-
tected themselves from the prerogative courts, including the Court of the Star Chamber.
The dispute over prohibitions lay at the heart of the battle of king against the courts.
After 1585, when the commission for causes ecclesiastical was passing
more and more under episcopal control and developing into a regular
court of ecclesiastical law, the common law judges began frequently to
interfere with its actions by writs of prohibition. So commenced that
process which was to bring about that strangest of alliances, the alliance
between the Puritan parties and the common lawyers.
Allen, supra note 9 at 170-71.

27 James I, in Bowen, supra note 21 at 312.
28 Axton, supra note 10 at 133-134.
29 Bowen, supra note 21 at 251.
30 See Russell Fraser, Shakespeare: The Later Years (New York: Columbia University Press,
1992), p. 163.
31 During the Christmas recess of Parliament in 1606, on St. Stephen's
Night, Shakespeare's King Lear was performed before King James at
Whitehall by "his Majesty's servants playing usually at the Globe on the
Banksyde." James and his court saw the tragedy against the backcloth of
a struggle for Union.... Shakespeare's tragedy of age and filial ingratitude
is timeless in its appeal. But the crown, the heavens, stars, thunder, gods,
even the double plot have a meaning within a political tradition current
in the decade of the play's first performances. That meaning is worth
pondering.
Axton, supra note 10 at 135-136.
32 Sir Edward Coke[, b]orn in 1552, the same year as Spenser, provide[s] in
his Reports (1600-1615), his Book of Entries (1614), and his Institutes
(1628-44) something of a Corpus Juris for England. To identify Coke as
the chief "Romanizer" of English common law may, however, seem little
short of absurd. No less likely candidate for such a distinction seems
imaginable than this man whose mind, in the memorable phrase of
J.G.A. Pocock, "was as nearly insular as a human being's could be." Yet
I would contend that Coke's very insularity, his myopic insistence on the
uninterrupted Englishness of English law, was the product of a constant
sense of legal and national difference, a persistent awareness of a rival sys-
tem of law against which English law had to defend and define itself.
Coke was insular not by ignorance but by ideological necessity. His insu-
larity was part of a self-presentional strategy. Furthermore, neither that
insularity nor the cosmopolitan awareness that underlay and enabled it
were his alone, though in him both reached extraordinary proportions
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and led to no less extraordinary results. Both were shared by his genera-
tion, the generation of lawyers and legal scholars born between the mid-
century and the mid -1560's. Coke's massive legal writings were just one
manifestation of a common, age-based project, a project that began to
emerge in the last years of Elizabeth, was powerfully shaped by the con-
flicts of James's reign, and produced its most enduring monument,
Coke's own Institutes, only after Charles had become king.
Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago:

Chicago University Press, 1992), pp. 70-71 [footnotes omitted].
33 J.C.D. Clark, The Language ofLiberty 1660-1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics
in the Anglo-American World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 3-4.
34 As Nicolson observes, Shakespeare did not use the new science as part of his imagery.
If Shakespeare ever expressed himself on the new cosmology, he should
have done so in King Lear, written while men's minds were dwelling on
the significance of the new star of 1604. He might have used the star of
1604 as the most spectacular of all those "dire portents" in Lear, the only
play in which he paid much attention to cosmology. Dire portents, trou-
bled heavens, the influence of planets and stars on "order" in the little
world - all these analogies sprang to his mind, in connection with "late
eclipses" in the sun and moon. The eclipses were real enough: a nearly
total eclipse of the sun on October 2, 1605, a partial eclipse of the moon
on September 27 of the same year. Yet both Shakespeare and his audience
must have been aware that more ominous than those had been the
appearance of a new star in a heavenly constellation. Perhaps he felt that
it would be too obvious an anachronism to read back into the period of
Lear a phenomenon associated by his audience with the immediate pre-
sent. Perhaps his failure to refer to the nova arose from the fact that he
was never so interested in topical references as was his contemporary Ben
Jonson, who was one of the earliest English dramatists to refer to Galileo's
telescopic discoveries.
Marjorie Hope Nicolson , Science and the Imagination (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1956), pp. 43-44.
35 See Clark, supra note 33 at 18 [footnote omitted].
36 I.ii.1-5,6. [These lines are in Tate, supra note 4 at I.i.1-5,7.]
37 I.ii. 18. [This line is not in Tate.]
38 I.i.84. [This line is in Tate, supra note 4 at II.i.31-32.]
39 See Tate, supra note 4 at I.i. 1-4.
40 I.ii. 16.
41 See Tate, supra note 4 at I.iv. 11-12.

42 I.ii. 107-114.
43 Kent also shares this sentiment:
It is the stars,
The stars above us, govern our conditions;
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Else one self mate and make could not beget
Such different issues.
IV.iii.33-36. [These lines are not in Tate.]
Kent here echoes Gloucester's imagery in Act I. The fundamental nature of man and of
his actions is beyond his control. He here, however, asserts the existence of a fundamen-
tal order to the universe even as he denies human agency. In doing so, he echoes the late
medieval view of kingship, in which the king was bound to a fundamental order
although how he was to be bound remained unclear.
44 See Tate, supra 4 at I.i.286-288.
45 I.ii.124-134. [These lines are not in Tate.]
46 IV.i.36-37. [These lines are not in Tate.]
47 V.iii.170-171.
48 The more specific historic references also tie together the Lear and Gloucester plots.
It would, I think, be of interest to look closely at the Shakespeare Henry
VItrilogy with a mind alert to the parallels of Tudor succession polemics
to that Queen of England, Queen of France, and that particular Duke of
Suffolk.... The opening lines of King Lear seem to me to catch exactly the
mood of the middle-to-late Tudor years in considering the Scottish and
the Suffolk claims to be heir-apparent to the throne of England.... One
must never forget that Bishop Leslie and his Roman Catholic English
advisers in the Inns of Court were aiming at the grandest prize of all: the
declaration by Queen Elizabeth and her Council that Mary of Scotland
was the rightful and sole heir-apparent to the Crown of England.... [John
of Gaunt's "sceptered isle" speech in Richard II] is, of course, an embodi-
ment of the Plowden claims of the Stuart succession; the difficulty is that
the play is also a passionate exposition of Fr. Person's medieval and the
Puritan "modern" theory of the right to depose an anointed king. It is
true, a Stuart monarch was not sitting on the English throne in 1598.
Above all, this complex legal historical perspective flawlessly unites the
double plot of King Lear into one. The Lear-Daughters-Albany and
Cornwall plot turns on Tudor history wracked by the king's body politic
subverted by the will of the king's body natural. The Gloucester plot dra-
matizes the domestic disorder in the king's body natural.
Murphy, supra note 3 at 166-169.

49 Axton, supra note 10 at 31.
50 Id., at 136.
51 Only we shall retain
The name and all th' addition to a king; the sway,
Revenue, execution of the rest,
Beloved sons, be yours.... (I.i.135-138)
Compare to Tate's version:
The Name alone of King remain with me
Yours be Execution and Revenues
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This is our final Will.... (I.i.144-146)
Tate strips the king down to his name. Shakespeare left him with "Th' addition."
52 I.i.300,304-306. [Not in Tate's version.]
53 I.ii.4-6. Nahum Tate modifies this speech, changing its first line to, "By day and Night
this is insufferable[.]" SeeTate, supra note 4 at line 31. By removing the words "he wrongs
me," Tate takes out the tension between Goneril as Queen and Goneril as aggrieved
daughter.
54 I.iii. 17-19. [These lines are not in Tate.]
55 I.iv. 19-32.
56 See Tate, supra note 4 at I.ii. 11-13.

57 I.iv.304-306.
58 IV.vi. 156-161. Tate alters this text, but he leaves the sense of it. See Tate, supra note 4 at
IV.iv. 133-138.
59 IV.vi. 193-194.
60 IV.vi.202. [This line is in Tate's version, supra note 4 at IV.iv. 169.]

61 IV.vi. 161.
62 V.iii.292-300. In Tate's version, Albany keeps his half of Lear's kingdom, turning back
Lear only that which he had given Regan. See Tate, supra note 4 at V.vi.93-95.
In an echo of Kent's banishment in Act I, scene i, immediately after Albany states he will
resign his absolute power, he awards Kent and Edgar "rights" and "boot and such addi
tion as your honours / Have more than merited." (V.iii.300-302) Unlike Act I, scene i,
where King Lear divided a coronet between Albany and Cornwall, symbolizing the com-
pletion of his resignation before he banished Kent, Albany could be understood a
expressing an intention to resign in the immediate future rather than having resigne
before he distributed honors.
63 I.iv. 136-141. [These lines are not in Tate.]

64 I.iv. 162-169. [These lines are not in Tate.]
65 I.iv.238-240. [These lines are not in Tate.]
66 II.iv.149-151. These lines are in Tate, supra note 4 at II.v.81-83. By keeping these lines
and eliminating the other lines of this scene relating to sovereignty and ruling, Tate
removed the double meanings by making impossible understanding Regan to be refer
ring to issues of statecraft and reducing the question of rule to one of domestic concerns
only.
67 The full speech reads:

O! reason not the need; our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous:
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man's life is cheap as beast's. Thou art a lady;
If only to go warm were gorgeous,
Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear'st
Which scarcely keeps thee warm. But, for true need -
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You Heavens, give me that patience, patience I need! -
You see me here, you Gods, a poor old man,
As full of grief as age; wretched in both!
If it be you that stirs these daughters' hearts
Against their father, fool me not so much
To bear it tamely; touch me with noble anger,
And let not women's weapons, water-drops,
Stain my man's cheeks! No, you unnatural hags,
I will have such revenges on you both
That all the world shall - I will do such things,
What they are, yet I know not, but they shall be
The terrors of the earth.
II.iv.266-284. Tate removes this entire speech up to the words, "No, you unnatural
hags." See Tate, supra note 4 at II.v. 181-184.
68 IV.vi. 120.
69 III.vi.
70 See Richard Helgerson, Forms ofNationhood (Chicago: Chicago University Press,

pp. 98-99. Helgerson discusses Coke's view of the law, he quotes Coke as saying
"Reason is the life of the law; nay, the common law is itself nothing else
but reason." But this reason neither is nor should be immediately acces-
sible to all. For this is not "everyman's natural reason." It is rather "an arti-
ficial perfection of reason, gotten by long study, observation, and experi-
ence," a quality proper to the law and to those who have immersed them-
selves in it. "If all the reason that is dispersed into so many several heads
were united into one, yet could he not make such a law as the law of
England is, because by many successions of ages it hath been fined and
refined by an infinite number of grave and learned men, and by long
experience grown to such a perfection for the government of this realm
as the old rule may be justly verified of it, Neminem opportet esse sapien-
tiorem legibus : No man (out of his own private reason) ought to be wiser
than the law, which is the perfection of reason" ( 1.97b ).
Coke's "no man" had, as Thomas Hobbes noticed, one particular man in
sight: the king. Kings did not make the law - Cokes "grave and learned
men" are obviously lawyers and judges - nor are kings fit to interpret or
apply it. This according to his own report, is what Coke told King James
to his face. Sometime early in his reign (the precise date is unclear), in
support of a claim that he might decide cases in person, James is sup-
posed to have said that "he thought the law was founded on reason, and
that he and others had reason as well as the judges." Coke's answer, an
answer that he may or may not actually have given but that he certainly
wanted to be thought to have given, closely resembles what he was later
to write in his Institutes. "True it was," he claimed to have said, "that God
had endowed his majesty with excellent science and great endowments of
nature. But his majesty was not learned in the laws of his realm of
England, and causes which concern the life or inheritance, or goods, or
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fortunes of his subjects. They are not to be decided by natural reason, but
by the artificial reason and judgment of law, which law is an act which
requires long study and experience before that a man can attain to the
cognisance of it; and that law was the golden metewand and measure to
try the causes of the subjects; and which protected his majesty in safety
and peace." At this reply, the king was "greatly offended" and said "that
then he should be under the law, which was treason to affirm." To which
Coke quoted Bracton: "The king must not be under any man but only
under God and the law."
[Footnotes omitted.]
71 [Lear] has but little to say upon divine justice in direct intervention or
indirect, though this was so familiar and accepted a feature of the
Elizabethan moral landscape. And what it says is all incidental, and con-
tradictory. The gods are just, and use our vices to plague us, says Edgar,
yet Gloucester accuses these gods whom elsewhere he calls "kind," and
"ever-gentle," of slaying men for their wanton sport.
Sisson, in Kermode, supra note 2 at 243.

72 Second Servant I'll never care what wickedness I do
If this man [Cornwall] come to good.
III.vii.98-99. [These lines are not in Tate.]
73 III.vii.4-6.
[The trial scene on the heath in Act III] is followed hot-foot by

Cornwall's brief trial of Gloucester. He has scruples not concerning jus-
tice, but concerning the forms of justice, which forbid the execution of
Gloucester. Yet he diverts justice to the vengeance of wrath served by
mere power beyond men's control, in the execution of Gloucester's eyes.
And in this doing of injustice the false justicer himself meets his death-
wound at the hands of one of his servants, of one of those whose control
he mocks. Such is the exercise of power, the master of justice.
Sisson, in Kermode, supra note 2 at 239-240.

74 III.vii.24-27. [These lines are not in Tate.]
75 V.iii.170-174. [These lines are not in Tate.]
76 For the most egregious example of Albany's weakness of mind, see the exchange in A
V, scene iii, lines 248-251. The dying Edmund has just informed the assembly that there
is a death warrant outstanding against Lear and Cordelia. Albany's reaction is to say
"Run, run! 0, run!" To this, Edgar sensibly asks, "To who, my Lord? Who has the office
send / Thy token of reprieve." Then it is the dying Edmund who has the wit, in bot
senses, to say, "Well thought on: take my sword, / Give it to the captain." Tate cuts thes
lines in their entirety.
Russell Fraser, supra note 30 at 164, describes Albany as an "all's-right-with-world kind

of man" as Shakespeare's "special target."
77 IV.ii.78-80. [Tate cuts these lines from his version.]
78 IV.ii.43-50. [Tate eliminates these lines.]
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79 There is in fact poetic justice enough in King Lear. Goneril, Regan,
Cornwall and Edmund, all perish in their sins. Evil is destroyed. Towards
the end of the play Albany proclaims the restoration of the old King to
his absolute power, and of Edgar and Kent to their just rights:
All friends shall taste
The wages of virtue, and all foes
The cup of their deservings.
But poetic justice seems to be of little moment. When Edmund's death

is reported to Albany, he truly comments, "that's but a trifle here," as
indeed it is. When the news of the desperate deaths of Goneril and Regan
comes to Lear, he puts it aside carelessly as an irrelevance, "Ay , so I
think." And hard upon Albany's proclamation, to which the old king
pays no attention, it is cancelled by Lear's death. As for Kent, restored to
his rights, and more, he has a journey shortly to go, to join his master.
Albany's justice beats the air.
Sisson, in Kermode, supra note 2 at 235.

80 See Tate, supra note 4 at IV.v.67-72.
81 V.iii.243-247. [These lines are not in Tate.]
82 V.iii.252.
83 John Holloway, "King Lear," in Kermode, supra note 2 at 221.

84 See Sisson, in Kermode, supra note 2 at 242.
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Natural Justice and King Lear

Author(s): Paul M. Shupack

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/743407

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The debate between the natural law tradition - asserting a necessary

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I. Lear in the 18th century

But though this moral [of the subplots] be incidentally

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In the present case the public has decided. Cordelia, from

II. Kingship and the Question offustice in Shakespeare.

Before looking at the more nearly legal materials in Lear, it would be

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...I have argued that Shakespeare had little use for

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Thayer, then, sees Shakespeare arguing for the necessity of a concept

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As a principle of Justice, obedience means obeying laws

In Lear, Shakespeare shows us repeated instances of what happens

I might almost say that the "moral" of King Lear is pre-

Albany. The gods defend her!

The "gods," it seems, do not show their approval by

III. King James - His Ideas and his Politics

If Thayer is right that by 1599 Shakespeare knew of and was reacting

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Albany. ...No tearing, lady; I perceive you know it.

B. King James and the Common Law

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There was one disquieting incident; news of it went

prince's pleasure: Quod principi placuit legis habet vig-

James himself acknowledged that his accession had created doubts

I am not ignorant... that I have been thought to be

put in place of the common law for government of this

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In July of 1604, King and Parliament had parted in

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The mythology of the common law contended that it

With this moment of analytic obscurity, common lawyers could

IV. Law and Nature

The systematic examination of law was part of the larger intellectual

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Under the impact of a strengthening doctrine of unitary

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increasingly unnecessary to those who took their stand

In King Lear, what we see as two irreconciliable views of nature -

Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law

For Edmund, nature opposes custom, but he is prepared to take

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Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law

The Nature to whom Tate's Edmund binds himself is not a force

...legimitate Edgar, to thy right /

Where Shakespeare's Edmund appeals to Nature to seize land,

portend no good to us: though the wisdom of Nature can

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These late eclipses of the sun and moon

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we