Lear’s Redemption

In political office and masculinity, Lear suffers overlapping anxieties of impotence. As his daughters suggest: he has failed to know himself. This reference to nosce te ipsum points to classical philosophy as an antidote to the dangers of politics, like flattery, as described by Socrates to Timon’s Alcibiades in Plato and Plutarch. Lear’s self-recognition through the figure of Poor Tom—who he insistently identifies as an ascetic, Cynic philosopher—prompts a discarding of his ‘sophistication’, his unnatural complications. Lear’s madness therefore can be read as a descent into wisdom. This is not a “process of purification,” but of profanation—in which the allure of sanctity, the allure of purity, is dispelled through parodic misuse. In his unhinged meditations, Lear intuits his problem was not only flattery, nor sovereignty, but the underlying instrumentality of office: “thou, rascal beadle” (4.6.156). The hypocrisy permitted by angelic, instrumental office is a theme Shakespeare already explored in Measure for Measure. The recognition scene with Cordelia is also a self-recognition scene. Lear envisions a new life defined by sociability, rather than sanctity. The play’s tragic force derives from the foreclosure of this liberated dream of ‘the good life,’ through violence, executed by Edmund’s dutiful officer.