“Slender Knowledge”: Sovereignty, Madness, and the Self in Shakespeare's King Lear

Abstract

In King Lear, the English law of madness, especially the aspects of testamentary devises, royal accession, waste, and plunder, is thematized in such a way that the conflict between civil order and savage nature is brought to the foreground. This dynamic overshadows, and to some extent disguises what truly lies at the heart of ancient Britain's woes: a deficit of ontological self-inquiry on the part of the sovereign and his royal retainer, Gloucester, from which all of the other complications ensue.In the summer of 1453, while at a royal hunting lodge in Clarendon, what had for years been rumored of the English monarch Henry VI finally came to pass: a sudden terror befell the King, an attack that was immediately succeeded by a withdrawal from life so complete that he would not speak, move, wash, or even dress of his own accord. For five years this "darkness" held the monarch, during which time the war of the roses ripened. 1 The trouble of an incapacitated sovereign had presented itself not too many years earlier in France, in the case of Henry's grandfather. Charles VI, at the age of thirty-four, had his first fit of madness while on campaign in Brittany, turning upon and attacking his own soldiers. 2 During such times, an understandable anxiety gripped the respective courts. When the sovereign is not dead but incapable (as Henry was when acceding to the crowns of both England and France at the age of one year), how is the realm to be ruled? When the sovereign is the realm, and the realm has gone mad, the stuff of drama is made. This is so not only because such a quandary is fictively provocative, but also because it is philosophically riveting. For the