'Nothing Will Come of Nothing': Nature, Kingship, and the Unmaking of Order in Shakespeare's King Lear

Abstract

King Lear is the Shakespearean tragedy that has most divided its readers over the question of what, if anything, its suffering means. For two centuries after Nahum Tate's adaptation gave the play a happy ending, audiences could not bear the original; for much of the twentieth century critics read the play as a Christian allegory of redemption through suffering; since the 1960s it has increasingly been read as a play that withholds redemption altogether. This article argues that the division is built into the play, and that its source is the word "nature," which King Lear uses more often than any other Shakespearean text and in senses that cannot be reconciled. Drawing on the historical scholarship that has reconstructed the competing doctrines of nature available in Jacobean England, on the cultural materialist reading that has treated the play as a dismantling of providential ideology, on the feminist and psychoanalytic criticism that has examined the play's absent mothers and its terror of the female body, and on the philosophical reading that has found in Lear's story a study of the refusal of love, the article examines three sites at which the play's conception of nature is tested: the opening division of the kingdom, the storm and the encounter with Poor Tom, and the deaths of Cordelia and Lear. The paper contends that the play does not resolve the conflict between a benign and a malign nature but stages it to exhaustion, and that its refusal of consolation is not nihilism but the most rigorous honesty about suffering in the English dramatic tradition. The article is intended both as a contribution to the study of the play and as a model of theoretically informed close reading for undergraduate and postgraduate readers.