Physis and Nomos in *King Lear*

4 ‘All’s with me Meet that I can Fashion Fit’1: Physis and Nomos in King Lear Nic Panagopoulos Given the pervasive inluence of classical humanism in Shakespeare’s age, it would be a strange thing indeed if one could not identify a plethora of Greek references, if not an overarching theme, in a great tragedy like King Lear. Nevertheless, there is a curious dearth of studies on the play’s relationship to Greek drama and its typical preoccupations. One reason for this is Shakespeare’s compositional strategy which was to adapt his sources to his audience’s concerns, as well as fuse diferent sources together so that, as R. A. Foakes points out, the various ‘philosophical, religious, social and political issues interwoven in the dialogue of his plays can rarely be traced to a particular source’.2 Moreover, we don’t know to what extent Shakespeare could read a text in the original Latin or Greek3 or needed to rely on the available translations which would have limited his access to non-vernacular works. The diiculties of tracing 9781474244251_txt_print.indd 115 11/08/2016 14:27 116 SHAKESPEARE AND GREECE Shakespeare’s sources are compounded by our reliance on the textual evidence of the works themselves, as well as by the fact that many ideas must have come down to him at second or even third hand. A cursory glance at the vast bibliography pertaining to King Lear informs us that Shakespeare’s sources include such works as the New Testament, Erasmus’s Praise of Folly (1549, 1577), Sidney’s Arcadia (1590), Montaigne’s Essays (1603), Samuel Harsnett’s A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (1603) and the anonymous King Leir (1605).4 However, in contrast to these clearly identiiable sources, the broader inluence of the Greek literary tradition is much more diicult to pinpoint. This is because the basic ideas and themes of this tradition appear relected and refracted in so many diferent texts from the classical period onwards that they lose much of their originary quality in the long continuum traced by Western civilization, becoming a common intellectual heritage. As Stephen Greenblatt notes, ‘history cannot simply be set against literary texts as either stable antithesis or stable background, and the protective isolation of these texts gives way to a sense of their interaction with other texts and hence of the permeability of their boundaries’.5 A good example of this kind of intertextuality in King Lear relates to the idea of the body politic which ostensibly derives from St Paul’s metaphor of the Church as the spiritual body of Christ with limbs in the form of the faithful.6 However, an older version of this crucial political paradigm can be found in Book IV of the Republic, where Plato imagines the three classes that make up his ideal state (guardians, auxiliaries and producers) as corresponding to the three parts of the individual body (head, heart and belly), which, in turn, represent the three parts of the human soul (reason, spirit and appetite).7 King Lear – which has aptly been termed ‘a Christian play about a pagan world’8 – imperceptibly fuses both versions of this organicist metaphor, virtually collapsing the diferences between classical, biblical and Renaissance culture. Thus, Lear conceives of the signiicance of his mismanagement of the corpus mysticum in Platonic terms when he says of Poor Tom, who represents the 9781474244251_txt_print.indd 116 11/08/2016 14:27 ‘ALL’S WITH ME MEET THAT I CAN FASHION FIT’ 117 lower social strata/parts of the body, ‘O, I have ta’en / Too little care of this’ (3.4.32–3). Also, the tearful, but digniied Cordelia is described by the Gentleman in Act 4 as ‘queen / Over her passion, who, most rebel-like, / Sought to be king o’er her’ (4.3.12–14): an image which airms Plato’s privileging of reason over passion in government, while simultaneously inverting conventional gender associations and hierarchies. The abuse of patriarchal power is another important theme in King Lear that has been traced to the King Leir play, as well as to Sidney’s Arcadia. However, the same gender politics inform Sophocles’ archetypal tragedy, Antigone (c. 440 bc). Although no English translation of Antigone was available during Shakespeare’s lifetime, he may have come across the story in one of the numerous Latin translations of Sophocles’ work that began to appear on the continent from the 1540s onwards9 or Thomas Watson’s derivative Sophoclis Antigone, Interprete Thoma Watsono I. V., printed in London by John Wolfe in 1581 and also performed at the Inns of Court.10 It is interesting to note that Creon’s chauvinistic attitude towards the eponymous heroine when the latter disobeys his edict denying her brother, Polyneices, burial (‘While I’m alive / No woman is going to lord it over me!’11) is echoed in Lear’s line to Goneril, ‘I am ashamed / That thou hast power to shake my manhood thus’ (1.4.288–9). Furthermore, just as Creon disdains the subversive Antigone’s engagement with Haemon (‘A worthless woman for my son: It repels me’12), so Lear considers the insolent Cordelia unit to marry Burgundy: ‘beseech you / T’avert your liking a more worthier way’ (1.1.211–12). Both kings live to regret their early arrogance, ultimately losing the child they most love. The domestic theme in King Lear, with the family conceived as a microcosm of the state, is present in the earliest known source of the legend, Geofrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regium Britanniae (c. 1135), which was subsequently recorded in Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587) and then developed further in John Higgins’ The Mirror for Magistrates (1574), among other works.13 We cannot ascertain, of course, which of these 9781474244251_txt_print.indd 117 11/08/2016 14:27 118 SHAKESPEARE AND GREECE sources if any is the primary one for Shakespeare. The Leir play emphasizes the conlict/conlation between state and family in the igure of Lear as both king and father, thereby raising crucial political-ethical issues that are also central to King Lear. However, these can also be said to relect the archetypal importance of the family (oikos) in Greek tragedy, as well as the Aristotelian distinction between the life given to us by our parents (zēn) and the life conferred to us as citizens (eu zēn).14 The political bias of Aristotle’s work means that he privileges the latter of these two concepts (eu zēn means ‘good life’ as opposed to zēn, mere life), but in the case of tragedy – a genre which traditionally thrives on contradiction and conlict – no axiomatic prioritization or resolution is to be expected between familial and civic values nor does Sophocles ofer his protagonists a simple choice between right and wrong. Antigone’s decision to bury her brother Polyneices in compliance with what she regards as the higher law does not merely result in a public act of disobedience with genderpolitical ramiications, as in Cordelia’s case, but is expressive of the same tragic dilemma that we ind in the love test in King Lear. For Cordelia to declare her feelings for Lear in high-lown courtly language would paradoxically constitute an unloving act as it would be both indiscreet and forced. It would represent that amoral aspect of the theatre which Greenblatt has called ‘the external and trivializing staging of what should be deeply inward’.15 So, Cordelia chooses to disobey the demands of fealty rather than those of ilial love. As for Lear, the fact that he is both object of his daughter’s natural afections, while also embodying the law of the state does not absolve him of his dual responsibilities as father – monarch or place him above either ethical norm. The Theban king, too, is crushed between his public and his private personas and, recalling Lear’s tragic question, ‘Who is it who can tell me who I am?’ (1.4.221), Creon inally admits that, ‘I don’t even exist – I’m no one. Nothing’.16 The thematic parallels between King Lear and Antigone are many and extend to the basic tragic conlict dramatized 9781474244251_txt_print.indd 118 11/08/2016 14:27 ‘ALL’S WITH ME MEET THAT I CAN FASHION FIT’ 119 in both between nature and law/convention – or physis and nomos to use the Greek terms. This is the central binary that seems to connect King Lear to Erasmus’ Praise of Folly as well as Montaigne’s Essays.17 So, where do the inluences begin and end? And how deep do we trace them? A possible answer to these questions is ofered in the storm scene, when Lear sees in the disguised Edgar a ‘philosopher’ and ‘learned Theban’ (not a particularly good omen, considering the fate of the House of Cadmus) and inquires of him, ‘What is the cause of thunder?’ (3.4.150–2).18 Of course, in ancient Greece, thunder was the prerogative of Zeus, signifying divine justice and the irresistible might of the Olympian pantheon; but when the power of the gods begins to wane – and with it the authority of divine-right monarchs like Lear – where then does thunder come from? Lear’s question implies not only the passage from a religious to a secular culture, but also the attendant transition from a mythic to a scientiic world view. Even if Edgar as Tom O’Bedlam can only respond in a manner expressive of metaphysical dread, the pre-Socratic philosopher whom Lear imagines as his interlocutor must reply deus sive natura, there is a physical explanation for all natural phenomena: thunder is caused by clouds. Lear’s question is a central concern in Aristophanes’ The Clouds, which was irst performed in the Great Dionysia of 423 bc and was named after the deities which preside over the so-called ‘New Learning’ in ifth-century bc Athens. The plot of Aristophanes’ comedy revolves around a cunning elderly farmer, Strepsiades (‘Twister’) and his fashionable son, Pheidippides, who has run up debts in town and is enrolled in Socrates’ Phrontisterion, or ‘Thinking Shop’, in order to learn the art of sophistical reasoning and confound his father’s creditors in court. Although the plan succeeds and the ‘Unjust Plea’ triumphs over the ‘Just Plea’, releasing Strepsiades from his debts, the tables are turned at the end of the play when Pheidippides proceeds to beat his father and justiies his actions on the basis of the ‘New Learning’.19 In an attendant volte-face, the clouds which were originally presented as the real deities 9781474244251_txt_print.indd 119 11/08/2016 14:27 120 SHAKESPEARE AND GREECE that produced thunder and rain – as opposed to Zeus – turn out to serve the old gods after all, and the intellectual establishment of Athens is made to appear essentially no diferent from any other religious institution of Aristophanes’ day.20 The Clouds has a clear binary structure, based on the opposition between the old ethos and the new (tradition/novelty, country/ city, peasantry/aristocracy, religion/science, justice/sophistry), which is ultimately deconstructed when the personiied clouds mutate from new divinities to conventional moralizers. Thus, those who read Aristophanes as a traditionalist, opposed to any innovations in ifth-century bc Athens, are hard pressed to explain why the Just Plea is ultimately presented as no more attractive than the Unjust, and Strepsiades no more virtuous than his son. Although The Clouds is best-known for its satirical portrait of Socrates, it is actually a highly sophisticated representation of the profound social changes taking place in Athens after the seemingly miraculous defeat of the Persian expeditionary force of 480/479, when the city-state was transformed over the next ifty years into ‘the political, economic and cultural powerhouse of Greece’, as well as the world’s irst participatory democracy.21 In a somewhat shorter, albeit no less momentous, ‘Enlightenment’ than that which took place in Europe over two millennia later, ifth-century bc Greek thinkers built on the work of the Ionian physical scientists to produce not only the disciplines of ethics, sociology, anthropology, and linguistics, but also philosophy itself.22 As in the case of Antigone, the irst English translation of The Clouds, which appeared in the second editon of Thomas Stanley’s History of Philosophy (1655),23 came too late for King Lear. But Shakespeare may have had access to a celebrated 1586 Latin translation by Frankfurt humanist Nicodemus Frischlin, which, as John Nassichuck tells us, was a luid ad sensum rendering that won ‘much contemporary approval based on the renowned elegance of its Latinity’.24 Besides the thematic echo of Lear’s question to Edgar, The Clouds also relects many of the cultural conlicts of Shakespeare’s own age, products of equally profound transformations in social 9781474244251_txt_print.indd 120 11/08/2016 14:27 ‘ALL’S WITH ME MEET THAT I CAN FASHION FIT’ 121 and individual ethics in early modern England. Most obvious, perhaps, is the conlict between the generations, which in turn relect the loosening of traditional social bonds as a result of the new zeitgeist. As John Donne writes in the Anatomy of the World (1611), the ‘new Philosophy calls all in doubt, / […] ‘Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone, / All just supply, and all relation; / Prince, subject, father, son, are things forgot’.25 Just as Pheidippides ‘scorns the established nomoi’ (l. 1400) and argues that it is quite acceptable to beat one’s parents, Edmund, Goneril and Regan shamelessly plot against their fathers’ lives and come into their inheritance by hook or by crook. Ekbert Faas has observed that the revolution which the sophistically inluenced Euripides brought to the Greek stage in the ifth century with his iconoclastic ‘anti-tragedies’ is ‘precisely what happened during the Renaissance, when once again established beliefs were questioned by men like Montaigne and Francis Bacon’.26 Religious belief was far from lost, yet prominent intellectuals in both eras began to publicly challenge or revise received metaphysical principles and the old societal orders which these served to underpin. In Shakespeare’s age, Machiavelli’s neo-pagan ‘efectual truth’ deeply inluenced both Bacon and Raleigh,27 while in humanistic ifth-century Athens, Protagoras of Abdera claimed: ‘I am not in a position to know either that [the gods] exist, or that they do not exist; for there are many obstacles in the way of such knowledge, notably the intrinsic obscurity of the subject and the shortness of human life.’28 Similarly, Aristotle excluded any discussion of the religious element in his analysis of tragic poetry, Thucydides ignored the gods in his histories and even the great Pericles seemed to have subscribed to agnosticism.29 In The Clouds, the gods – who are little more than civic conventions, anyway – have been replaced by deiied natural forces, while in King Lear they are presented as self-justifying human projections, at best, or deliberate social ictions, at worst.30 The irate Lear of the irst scene assumes he can enlist any pagan deity or natural force to lend weight to his decision to disown Cordelia 9781474244251_txt_print.indd 121 11/08/2016 14:27 122 SHAKESPEARE AND GREECE (1.1.110–13), but, by Act 2, Scene 2, the beleaguered king seems far less certain of the support, or even of the nature of the gods he was wont to apostrophize in times of need (2.2.378–81). Religious fanaticism is mocked in Poor Tom’s demonological tirade, as is Renaissance astrology and the music of the spheres in Edmund’s sardonic, ‘O, these eclipses do portend these divisions. Fa, sol, la, mi’ (1.2.135–36). Most expressive of the period’s religious skepticism in King Lear is the Dover Clif scene where Edgar’s diegetic impersonation of one of Harsnett’s devils results in a crescendo of absurdist meta- theatricality, while his role as Tom O’Bedlam is strained to breaking point, as he confesses that he ‘cannot daub it further’ (4.1.52).31 The dominant trend in both societies was towards selfdetermination, civic virtue and efective government: goals which depended on a new kind of secular education that emphasized facility in logic and rhetoric. In Shakespeare’s time, rhetorical training in the universities and the Inns of Court became the primary aim of a gentleman’s education and the main means of social advancement. Similarly, as a result of the educational changes which took place in ifth-century bc Athens due to the marriage between natural philosophy and the sophistic revolution, anyone who could aford the services of an itinerant teacher of rhetoric could learn how to cut a ine igure in town, sway the demos, or hold their own in a private law suit, as The Clouds aptly demonstrates. There was a class dimension to this phenomenon, too, since rhetorical sophistication was associated in both societies with the ‘new aristocracy’32 which had risen from the ranks, prospered in the new economic climate, and was keen to prove that virtue (aretē) and by extension social status could be won by merit as well as by birth. We see this class relected in Strepsiades’ fashionable wife and son, as well as in the decadent Oswald and his mistress. Although the physis–nomos dichotomy emerges less directly in The Clouds, than it does in Antigone, Aristophanes’ archetypal drama of ideas gives us the opportunity of approaching 9781474244251_txt_print.indd 122 11/08/2016 14:27 ‘ALL’S WITH ME MEET THAT I CAN FASHION FIT’ 123 it from a more philosophical perspective, vis-à-vis the sophists who taught that many of the things we view as natural are in fact conventional; that is, linguistically or culturally constructed. An extreme example of such an idea, expressed in Critias’ play Sisyphus, is that the gods are the invention of a cunning despot, designed to control people by making them imagine they are being watched when no one is present.33 We hear an echo of this kind of moral pragmatism in King Lear when Goneril says to Albany: ‘Fools do those villains pity who are punished / Ere they have done their mischief’ (4.2.55–6). Like Antigone, the sophists privileged physis over nomos, so that when a conlict emerged between the claims of law and those of nature, they believed the latter should prevail. As Antiphon writes, ‘the demands of the laws are adventitious, but the demands of nature are necessary; and the demands of the law are based on agreement, not nature’.34 Although there is some debate regarding the identity of Antiphon the sophist, it is generally agreed that the author of the Tetralogies and of certain forensic speeches who helped establish the regime of the Four Hundred in 411 bc and Antiphon of Rhamnus who wrote the inluential discourses On Truth and On Concord were one and the same man.35 It is unlikely that Shakespeare knew Antiphon’s work irst hand given that the relevant papyri were discovered in the late nineteenth century and irst published in 1915 and 1922,36 with a inal fragment coming to light as late as 1984. Nevertheless, Antiphon is a central igure in the sophistic movement, because, as David J Riesbeck observes, ‘the Papyrus fragments of Antiphon’ s Truth collectively referred to as fragment 44 contains the longest extant ifth-century discussion of the opposition between nomos and physis’.37 Whether Shakespeare got the idea of Edmund’s ‘Thou, Nature art my goddess’ (1.2.1) soliloquy from Antiphon or not, it could easily serve as a model sophistic set speech on the superiority of biological over legal categories and clearly belongs to the same philosophical tradition. Edmund’s radical questioning of legitimacy in this soliloquy (‘Wherefore base? 9781474244251_txt_print.indd 123 11/08/2016 14:27 124 SHAKESPEARE AND GREECE / When my dimensions are as well compact, / My mind as generous and my shape as true’ (1.2.6–8)) assumes an egalitarian position which strongly recalls Antiphon’s argument on the essential ainity between barbarian and Greek in On Truth: We have only to think of things which are natural and necessary to all mankind; these are available to all in the same way, and in all these there is no distinction between barbarian and Greek. For we all breathe out into the air by the mouth and the nostrils, and we laugh when we are pleased in our mind or we weep when we are grieved, and we receive sounds with our hearing, and see by the light of our vision, and we walk with our feet.38 Eric MacPhail has proposed that Antiphon’s argument about the distinction between barbarian and Greek is echoed in Montaigne’s Of Cannibals39 which, given Shakespeare’s proven knowledge of the French philosopher’s work, could be a possible source for this egalitarian idea.40 Antiphon employs vitalism in the above passage to question one of his culture’s most prized beliefs, just as the ‘natural’ Edmund expresses contempt for what is arguably the founding legal principle in his society, the law of primogeniture. Thus, the two passages can be said to express a comparable challenge to legality and convention based on the physis–nomos dichotomy, relecting the profound cultural changes taking place in their authors’ respective eras. The archetypal conlict between physis and nomos that permeates European letters was not the invention of the sophists; we can ind traces of it in Pindar’s idea of the law of God or Nature as being antecedent and antithetical to human law,41 as well as in the skepticism of Parmenides’ Eliatic school.42 However, the sophists developed this concept to its highest degree. Ironically, the same philosopher who is depicted as the sophists’ arch-enemy in Plato’s dialogues personiies the entire sophistic movement in The Clouds, 9781474244251_txt_print.indd 124 11/08/2016 14:27 ‘ALL’S WITH ME MEET THAT I CAN FASHION FIT’ 125 regardless of the fact that Aristophanes knew the real-life Socrates well enough to be able to diferentiate him from the travelling teachers of virtue (aretē) who were given the deprecating name of ‘sophistês’ by philosophical opponents and anti- intellectual laymen alike. Thus, Plato – whose historically dominant deinition of ‘philosopher’ is largely constructed on the opposition between professional logician and genuine lover of wisdom – claimed that the sophists understood only appearances rather than realities and preferred to pander to the masses rather than serve the highest good.43 Aristotle too, echoing the popular stereotype of the sophists as clever but unscrupulous orators, says of Protagoras, their champion, that he taught his students how to ‘make the lesser argument the stronger […] wherefore men were justly disgusted’.44 The sophistic power of language to question norms, convince an audience and argue both sides of a case is particularly marked in the trial scenes of King Lear: the love test in Act I, the mock trial in Act III of the Quarto, Gloucester’s interrogation (3.7), and Lear’s own interrogation of justice in his madness (4.6.153–62). These trials with their attendant disputations relect the way the Elizabethan poet, ‘the nearest borderer upon the Orator’, according to Bacon, is ‘continuously reasoning, persuading, demonstrating analogies and logical connections; even his imagery and his rhythm are marshaled into argument’.45 However, while revealing the protean quality of logos in King Lear, Shakespeare also wants to emphasize its morally distorting potential which can allow the Unjust Plea to defeat the Just by sheer force of argument. Thus, Goneril and Regan’s lorid protestations during the love test make ‘power to lattery bow’ (1.1.149), while rendering the vain king unable to distinguish friend from foe. This seems to have been the case with James I, whose court favourites, Robert Carr and George Villiers, lattered him publicly at every opportunity, ultimately estranging the monarch from parliament and people.46 Edmund, too, is able to turn night into day and good into evil by the power of speech alone, showing that rhetorical skill, regarded as the summum bonum 9781474244251_txt_print.indd 125 11/08/2016 14:27 126 SHAKESPEARE AND GREECE by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, could be used to devastating efect by a cunning practitioner. Thus, while ofering to deliver up his father to Cornwall, Edmund claims he will ‘presever in [his] course of loyalty, though the conlict be sore between that and [his] blood’ (3.5.21–3). In his artful sophistry, Edmund its Protagoras’ deinition of the wise man as someone who ‘when bad things appear to be and are for one of us, could change things around to make them appear to be and be good’.47 Like Strepsiades in The Clouds, Gloucester has paid good money to educate his illegitimate son in the ine arts of moral reversal and ilial ingratitude: a fact which seems to indict the always dangerous conjunction of rhetoric and gold (‘the common whore of mankind’ [4.3.43]),48 but also those who naively assume that the knife of logos cuts only one way. Even the honest Edgar can be said to practise duplicity with his Poor Tom disguise convincing his blind father that his deliverer was a iend with ‘a thousand noses, / Horns whelked and waved like the enraged sea’ (4.6.70–1): an image that aptly encapsulates the potential of language to construct both good and evil in the play. Emphasis on and exploitation of the power of logos in its various manifestations (speech, language, argument, reason) constitutes the common ground between thinkers that went by the name of ‘sophist’, and especially so in the art of public speaking which, as we have seen, was a fundamental skill in democratic Athens for anyone wishing to sway the citizenry. Thus, contrary to aristocratic ethics, aretē was viewed by the sophists not only as something which could be taught, like any other useful tēchne, but also as ultimately synonymous with rhetorical acumen itself. Gorgias of Leontini, for example, deines virtue as ‘to be adequate in civic afairs’ and Socrates describes him in the Meno as making fun of anyone who promises to teach moral excellence, as opposed to ‘skill at speaking’.49 In the Philebus too, the art of persuasion is said to greatly exceed all others, ‘For it brings all things under its dominion, willingly and not by force, and it is by far the best of all the arts’,50 while in the Gorgias, the eponymous sophist 9781474244251_txt_print.indd 126 11/08/2016 14:28 ‘ALL’S WITH ME MEET THAT I CAN FASHION FIT’ 127 exclaims, ‘Possessed of such power you will make the doctor and the trainer your slaves; your businessman will prove to be making money not for himself but for another, for you who can speak and persuade multitudes’.51 Given such promises by the sophists, it is not surprising that the top names could charge the wealthiest youths in Greece anything up to 100 minae (the equivalent of £100,000–£160,000 in today’s money) for a full course of tuition.52 The seminal debate between Plato and the sophists is relected in King Lear as the conlict between plain speaking and courtly duplicity. However, as Foakes argues, ‘the temptation to align plain speaking with goodness and rhetoric with lattery or hypocrisy’ in the play ‘should be resisted’.53 The fact that the ‘virtuous’ characters are unwilling or unable to compete with the ‘wicked’ in rhetorical debate ultimately leads to more harm than good and not a little self- righteousness. Thus, Cordelia who wants ‘the glib and oily art’ (1.1.226) of persuasion, while intending the best, incurs the worst for herself and the kingdom, and Kent is so eristic in his treatment of the ‘tailor-made’ Oswald in Act 2, that he falls into self-contradiction. Lear’s banished counsellor justiies his verbal abuse of Goneril’s foppish servant by claiming ‘’tis my occupation to be plain’ (2.2.90); but every occupation presupposes a social convention, so the ‘plainness’ which Kent professes is no less a public performance than Oswald’s afected courtly manners. Convincing no one on stage but himself that ‘No contraries hold more antipathy’ (2.2.85) than he and the ‘super-serviceable’ (2.2.17) Oswald, Kent is inally placed in the stocks for disturbing the peace. This incident illustrates Protagoras’ principle ‘that there are two possible positions on every question, opposed to each other’,54 so what is important in any given argument is not who is right, but who has the ability to convince others. My main intention in this study is not to prove direct borrowing by Shakespeare of sophistic thought, but to link the plays and the philosophical texts through a common intellectual tradition. A. D. Nuttall has also argued that 9781474244251_txt_print.indd 127 11/08/2016 14:28 128 SHAKESPEARE AND GREECE Shakespeare’s response to the Greeks is ‘an area in which the faint occasional echoes mean much less than the circumambient silence’ and that ‘Shakespeare never looks steadily at the Greeks, but he does, on occasion, look with Greek eyes’.55 Be this as it may, Shakespeare could have learned about Protagoras’ ideas from a variety of sources. As Paula Blank notes, ‘The Renaissance gained a wider knowledge of Protagoras’ philosophy through Marsilio Ficino’s translations of Plato’s Protagoras and Theaetatus (1466–8) and the rediscovery of works by the third-century ad philosopher Sextus Empiricus’,56 all of which reproduce and debate various sophistical theories. Protagoras’ most inluential idea, that ‘man is the measure of all things’ – which has been interpreted as meaning that each individual experiences the world in his/ her own way but also that humanity creates its own standards – has been identiied as one of the progenitors of Renaissance humanism.57 Besides being quoted in the Theaetatus58 and in Sextus Empiricus,59 the so-called homo mensura could also have made its inluence felt in England via the work of the ifteenth-century philosopher Nicholas de Cusa (‘Cusanus’) who, as Blank notes, analyses in greatest depth ‘what it means for man to measure man’.60 Nevertheless, most critics agree that Shakespeare’s most likely source for Protagoras’ theories in general and the homo mensura in particular was Montaigne’s Essays.61 The moral relativism implied in Protagoras’ famous dictum inds many applications in King Lear, a particularly slippery text, resistant to ethical exegesis. Hegel, for example, railed against King Lear for indulging in ‘the humour of the abominable thing’,62 while A. C. Bradley detected something corrosively amoral about the play compared to the other great tragedies, since ‘requital, redemption, amends, equity, explanation, pity and mercy are words without meaning here’.63 Many commentators have followed suit and noted the play’s lack of any coherent and recognizable moral order64 for, not only are the two opposing camps at odds as regards the socio-political norms which they represent, but each character 9781474244251_txt_print.indd 128 11/08/2016 14:28 ‘ALL’S WITH ME MEET THAT I CAN FASHION FIT’ 129 seems to be a moral world unto him/herself. Thus, Kent, commenting on Cordelia’s nobility of character, expresses amazement that Lear’s three daughters came from the same stock (4.3.35–6), while Goneril, comparing her scrupulous husband to the unprincipled yet virile Edmund, proclaims, ‘O, the diference of man to man!’ (4.2.26). Goneril’s disgust at Albany’s apparent inability to know or pursue his own interest (‘hast not in thy brows an eye discerning / Thine honour from thy sufering’ [4.2.53–4]) – principles which she takes for granted – relects Thrasymachus’ sophistic argument in the Republic that the just man ‘will sufer from neglecting his private afairs; […] and his friends and relatives will detest him because his principles will not allow him to do them a service if it’s not right’.65 Given that moral relativism presupposes ontological relativism, and vice versa, Protagoras argued – to Plato’s chagrin – that neither truth nor falsehood existed. As Protagoras is quoted in Sextus Empiricus: the madman is a reliable criterion of the appearances which occur in madness, and the sleeper of those in sleep, and the infant of those in infancy, and the elderly of those in old age […] no impression is received independent of circumstances, each man must be trusted in respect of those he received in his own circumstances.66 This observation seems most pertinent to King Lear, a play in which the philosopher’s homo mensura converges with the poet’s theatrum mundi to produce a world that contains various states of mind, roles and performances, but no objective ground of being or absolute truth. The mad king’s debate with Poor Tom, Kent and the Fool about daughters being the cause of Tom O’Bedlam’s wretchedness on the heath, (3.4.62–70) is a case in point. In the storm scene, Lear’s madness can be seen as a metaphor for both psychological projection and subjectivity of perception, but Edgar, too, as the raving Bedlam beggar, constitutes a symbol of moral 9781474244251_txt_print.indd 129 11/08/2016 14:28 130 SHAKESPEARE AND GREECE and linguistic solipsism, while the Fool continues to produce sophomoric insights that only the more alert members of the audience, at best, would be expected to gain much beneit from. Each member of this alternative court is morally if not physically isolated and barely able to communicate, let alone agree with any other. Shakespeare does not conine himself to the ethical or ontological ramiications of Protagoras’ views, but also explores their political implications in King Lear. Of particular note is Protagoras’ so-called Great Discourse,67 which appears in the homonymous Platonic dialogue and revolves around the question of whether virtue can be taught. As we have seen, this was a crucial issue for Plato and the sophists because, besides relating to the proper function of logos, it went to the heart of the political debate concerning democratic government. In support of his argument that virtue can be taught, Protagoras gives his own version of the creation myth which describes the origins of civilization and the establishment of the citystate. At irst, says Protagoras, all the animals were equipped with the means of survival (strength, speed, fur, hooves, claws, etc.), except for man who was naked and defenseless. Although Prometheus remedied this by stealing the arts of Athena and Hephaestus (technical wisdom) and ire from the gods, the human race was still threatened with extinction for, although they built cities to protect themselves from the elements and the wild beasts, lacking political wisdom, they began destroying one another. To preserve the race of men, Zeus ordered Hermes to give them all a share of justice and shame, and simultaneously issued a death sentence on any found lacking in these essential virtues, as a miasma and a plague on the city. Since all men, in order to be deemed it for human society, must therefore profess to be just and reverent, and also learn to be so, Protagoras concludes that aretē is not just the preserve of the elite, but teachable by all to all. Various ideas from this myth are rehearsed in King Lear. When Lear identiies in the shape of Poor Tom ‘the thing itself. / Unaccommodated man’ who ‘is no more but such a poor, 9781474244251_txt_print.indd 130 11/08/2016 14:28 ‘ALL’S WITH ME MEET THAT I CAN FASHION FIT’ 131 bare, forked animal’ (3.4.105–6), he is not merely coming to terms with the essential in the human condition which, as monarch, he had been alienated from; he is learning the importance of political virtue for the preservation of human life. Just as Protagoras argues in his Great Discourse that aretē can be taught and learnt by all citizens, regardless of rank, so the king learns from the beggar in King Lear that, even if man has all the advantages of material culture (the arts of Athena and Hephaestus, ire, or a hundred knights), he can still perish quite easily in the Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes which prevails in society. In Protagoras’ version of the creation myth, all that stops human beings from devouring one another like beasts is the sense of justice and shame granted them by Zeus, an idea relected in Albany’s exclamation that If that the heavens do not their visible spirits Send down to tame thee vile ofences, It will come: Humanity must perforce prey on itself, Like monsters of the deep. (4.2.47–51) Another parallel between King Lear and Protagoras’ Great Discourse relates to justice which, in the sophistic myth, all citizens were enjoined to profess at all times – but not necessarily in deed as opposed to word. The sophists, as we have seen, did not distinguish between the appearance of justice and justice itself, since for them morality was merely another social convention established by consent that could be trumped at any moment by the demands of nature. Thus, Protagoras’ Great Discourse can be said to lend support to the functional ethics of the machiavellian characters in Shakespeare’s play, such as Cornwall, who refrains from killing Gloucester for reasons of expediency (‘we may not pass upon his life/ Without the form of justice’ [3.7.24–5]), and Edmund who constantly hides his selish motives behind a mask of virtue (‘How malicious is my fortune, that I must repent to be just?’ [3.5.9–10]). 9781474244251_txt_print.indd 131 11/08/2016 14:28 132 SHAKESPEARE AND GREECE Since poetry predates philosophy as a truth-seeking and didactic activity, Platonic dialogues like the Protagoras not only show the participants employing myths in support of their arguments, but also relying extensively on poetic devices such as metaphors, analogies, and allegories, many of which are shared with the art of rhetoric. On the other hand, a Shakespearean play in which classical humanism is said to ‘triumph in the actor’s rhetoric’,68 is a deeply discursive form, endlessly practicing antilogies and disputing contrary positions, often for the sake of intellectual stimulation – very much like the set speeches which Protagoras and his colleagues taught the well- to-do youth of ifth-century bc Athens. Thus, we should not view the physis–nomos dichotomy found in ancient Greek drama and sophistic sources as resolving the many issues, ethical, political and philosophical raised by King Lear, so much as providing material for debate since, as Emma Smith observes, ‘Shakespeare’s play challenges any easy equivalence of tragedy, justice, and morality’.69 Nevertheless, the case of King Lear amply demonstrates that Greek intertexts were crucial in constructing Shakespeare’s dramatic praxis, characterized by ‘the prompting of questions, rather than the supplying of answers’.70 Notes 1 William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. R. A. Foakes. The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), (1.2.182). All quotations from the play are from to this edition. 2 Introduction to Shakespeare, in Foakes, ed., King Lear, 93. 3 Jonson’s proverbial ‘small Latin and less Greek’ hardly constitutes a reliable marker of the Bard’s facility in these languages, especially considering the depth and range of classical allusions that we ind in the works. 4 For a review of the sources, see Foakes ed., King Lear, 92–110. 5 Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The 9781474244251_txt_print.indd 132 11/08/2016 14:28 ‘ALL’S WITH ME MEET THAT I CAN FASHION FIT’ 133 Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), 95. I am indebted to Alison Findlay for directing me to this source. 6 Corinthians 12.12. 7 The irst well-known translation of Plato into English from the Greek was that of Thomas Taylor and Floyer Sydenham, published in London in 1804. Shakespeare could have come across the Republic, as well as other works by Plato from the irst authoritative translation of the complete works, Henri Estienne’s (‘Stephanus’) masterly three-volume edition, published in Geneva 1578 which contained the Greek and Latin versions side by side, the scholar–translator claiming to have established the original Platonic text. See Simon Blackburn, Plato’s Republic: A Biography (London: Atlantic Books, 2007), ix. 8 J. C. Maxwell, ‘The Technique of Invocation in ‘King Lear,’’ MLR 45 (1950): 142–7. 9 These include the translations of J. B. Gabia of Verona (1543) and G. Ratallerus of Louvain (1548, 1576, 1584). See E. Littell and C. & G. Carvill, The Museum of Foreign Literature and Science, Volume 10, New Series Vol. III (Philadelphia, PA: Clark and Raser, 1827), 542–3. 10 Thomas Watson, et. al., Antigone, Renaissance Latin Drama in England, Second Series, IV (New York: G. Olms, 1987). 11 Sophocles: The Three Theban Plays: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, trans. Robert Fagles; introduction and notes by Robert Knox (London: Penguin, 1984), 86. 12 Ibid., 89. 13 See Foakes ed., King Lear, 94–8. 14 Aristotle: Politics, trans. T. Sinclair, rev. Trevor J. Saunders (London, Penguin, 1992), 1252b–29. Although most of Aristotle’s works irst came to Europe through Arabic translations from the Greek, and then translated into Latin, the Politics was irst translated into English from Le Roy’s French version in 1598 and so would have been accessible to Shakespeare in the vernacular. See Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 9781474244251_txt_print.indd 133 11/08/2016 14:28 134 SHAKESPEARE AND GREECE 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 112. 15 Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 113. 16 Sophocles, Three Theban Plays, 126. 17 For Erasmus links, see Walter Kaiser, Praisers of Folly: Erasmus, Rabelais, Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963); for Montaigne comparisons, see Peter S. Anderson, ‘The Fragile World of Lear’, in Drama in the Renaissance: Comparative and Critical Essays, eds Cliford Davidson, C. J. Giannakaris and John H. Stroupe (New York: AMS Press, 1986), 179–91. 18 This question has been explored at some length by critics, none more so perhaps than John Danby who argues that the thunder encapsulates all the complex theological questions raised in King Lear since it evolves from being the king’s ally in his ‘noble anger’, to a fearful antagonist, and inally bespeaks of a vague disturbance in the cosmos, without metaphysical signiicance. See John F. Danby, Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature: A Study of King Lear (London: Faber, 1961), 191–5. 19 Paul Harvey, The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 161. 20 Aristophanes: Clouds, introduced by Ian C. Storey; trans. Peter Meineck (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2000), xxxvi. 21 The Greek Sophists, trans. John Dillon & Tania Gergel (London: Penguin, 2003), ix. 22 Clouds, ‘Introduction’, xxxvi. 23 Patrick Cheney and Philip Hardy, The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, Vol. 2: 1558–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 411. 24 John Nassichuk, ‘Strepsiades’ Latin Voice: Two Renaissance Translations of Aristophanes’ Clouds’, in Ancient Comedy and Reception: Essays in Honour of Jefrey Henderson, ed. S. Douglas Olson (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2014), 427–46, 427. 25 John Donne, ‘Anatomy of the World’ (1611), cited and discussed by Jennifer Waldron, ‘Reading the Body’, in The New Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, vol. 9781474244251_txt_print.indd 134 11/08/2016 14:28 ‘ALL’S WITH ME MEET THAT I CAN FASHION FIT’ 135 1, ed. Michael Hattaway (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2010), 557–81, 564. 26 Ekbert Faas, Tragedy and After: Euripides, Shakespeare, Goethe (Kingston & Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1981), 74. 27 R. G. Salingar, ‘The Social Setting’, in The Age of Shakespeare, Vol. 2, The New Pelican Guide to English Literature, ed. Boris Ford (London: Penguin, 1993), 15–50, 21. 28 The Greek Sophists, 3. 29 Robert W. Wallace, ‘Plato’s Sophists, Intellectual History after 450, and Sokrates’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Pericles, ed. Loren J. Samons II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 215–37, 219. 30 The classic study on this subject remains William R. Elton’s King Lear and the Gods (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1968). 31 For a cultural historicist analysis of the Harsnett material in King Lear and its relation to the theatre of the day, see Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Shakespeare and the Exorcists’, in Shakespearean Negotiations, 94–128. 32 Protagoras, the most famous of the sophists, began life as a porter before turning to rhetoric and becoming a friend of Pericles. See The Greek Sophists, 9. 33 Sarah Brodie, ‘The Sophists and Socrates’, in The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Philosophy, ed. David Sedley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2004), 73–97, 87. Guido Avezzu has argued that the extant fragment from Critias’ Sisyphus was well-known in the late sixteenth century, as evidenced by Robert Greene’s use of the idea of the invention of the gods in First Part of the Most Tyrannicall Tragedie and Riagne of Selimus (1594), but also in the ‘hellish verses’ attributed to Walter Raleigh. See Guido Avezzu, ‘Classical Paradigms of Tragic Choice in Civic Stories’ in Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet and Civic Life: The Boundaries of Civic Space, eds Silvia Bigliazzi and Lisanna Calvi (New York & London: Routledge, 2016), 45–65, 47. I would like to thank Vassiliki Markidou for pointing me in the direction of this source. 9781474244251_txt_print.indd 135 11/08/2016 14:28 136 SHAKESPEARE AND GREECE 34 Antiphon: Fragment B, Papyrus Oxyrhynchus, XI 1364, in The Greek Sophists, 150. 35 See The Greek Sophists, 133. 36 See Jonathan Barnes, The Presocratic Philosophers (London and New York: Routledge 1982), 403. 37 David J. Riesbeck, ‘Nature, Normativity, and Nomos in Antiphon Fr. 44’, Phoenix 65 (3–4) (2011): 268–87. 38 Antiphon: Fragment A, in The Greek Sophists, 150. 39 See Eric MacPhail, ‘Neighbours: Ethnocentrism in Antiphon and Montaigne’, Acta Antiqua Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 53 (4). Published online 12 January 2015: http:// www.akademiai.com/doi/abs/10.1556/AAnt.53.2013.4.6. I am indebted to Vassiliki Markidou for this invaluable source. 40 Alison Findlay has rightly pointed out to me that Antiphon’s argument in this speech is even more closely echoed in Shylock’s famous ‘Hath not a Jew eyes’ speech in Merchant of Venice, ed. John Drakakis, Arden Shakespeare, Third Series (London: Bloomsbury, 2010 ) 1.3.52–3. 41 The Greek Sophists, xv. 42 Wallace, ‘Plato’s Sophists’, 221. 43 Ibid., 216. 44 There is considerable debate concerning the objectivity of Plato’s and Aristotle’s portrait of the sophists. Wallace, for example, writes that ‘no one is known to have advertised that he could make the worse cause seem the better. The liberal historian George Grote long ago observed that no great teacher has ever made such a proclamation. Those allegations were a parody, mocking contemporary interest in exploring both sides of complex questions’ (‘Plato’s Sophists’, 220). Also, Karl Popper, in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), argued that ‘the poor overall reputation of the sophists was politically inspired, due to Plato’s aristocratic abhorrence of the moral universalism and democratic sympathies of many sophists’, in Thomas Mausner, The Pelican Dictionary of Philosophy, 2nd edn. (London: Penguin, 2005), 582. 45 ‘The Social Setting’, 90. 46 Robert Bucholz and Newton Key, Early Modern England 9781474244251_txt_print.indd 136 11/08/2016 14:28 ‘ALL’S WITH ME MEET THAT I CAN FASHION FIT’ 137 1485–1714: A Narrative History, 2nd edn. (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2009), 219. 47 Plato: Theaetetus, 166d–167b, in The Greek Sophists, 12. 48 Shakespeare: Timon of Athens, eds Anthony B. Dawson and Gretchen E. Minton, The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series (London: Bloomsbury, 2008), 275. Foakes notes that Timon of Athens was ‘a play probably close in date of composition to King Lear’ (King Lear, 28) which may explain in part the prominence of Greek philosophical thought in the latter. 49 The Greek Sophists, 61. 50 Ibid., 63. 51 Plato: Gorgias, 452d–e, in Wallace, ‘Plato’s Sophists’, 215. 52 The Greek Sophists, vii. 53 Foakes, ed., King Lear, 9. 54 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, IX 50, in The Greek Sophists, 3. 55 See A. D. Nuttall, ‘Action at a distance: Shakespeare and the Greeks’, in Shakespeare and the Classics, eds Charles Martindale and A. B. Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 209–22, 210, 219–20. 56 Paula Blank, Shakespeare and the Mismeasurement of Renaissance Man (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006), 22. 57 See Charles Trinkaus, ‘Protagoras in the Renaissance: An Exploration’, in Philosophy and Humanism: Renaissance Essays in Honor of Paul Oskar Kristeller, ed. Edward P. Mahoney (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976): 190-213. 58 Plato: Theaetetus, 151E, in The Greek Sophists, 10. 59 Sextus Empiricus, Against the Mathematicians VII 60–61, in The Greek Sophists, 14. For the publication and transmission of the works of Sextus Empiricus in the late sixteenth century, see Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979). 60 Blank, Shakespeare and the Mismeasurement of Renaissance Man, 20. 9781474244251_txt_print.indd 137 11/08/2016 14:28 138 SHAKESPEARE AND GREECE 61 As Ekbert Faas has argued, ‘Some of the Greek philosophers who helped Euripides evolve his anti-tragic denials, may, via Montaigne, have had a similar impact on Shakespeare’, Tragedy and After, 74. Paula Blank concurs, claiming that ‘Michel de Montaigne’s discussion of the limits of human knowledge in his Essays (1575) […] probably represents the most immediate source of Shakespeare’s own discourse of measurement’, Shakespeare and the Mismeasurement of Renaissance Man, 24. 62 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel on Tragedy, eds Ann and Henry Paolucci (Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1975), 135. 63 A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth (London: Macmillan & Co. 1909), 278. 64 This extends to the vast range of critical positions that the play has spawned. For an entertaining review, see Kiernan Ryan, ‘King Lear: A Retrospect, 1980–2000’, Shakespeare Survey 55 (2002): 1–11. 65 Plato: The Republic, introduction by and trans. Desmond Lee (London: Penguin, 1987), 27. 66 Against the Mathematicians, VII 61, in The Greek Sophists, 14. 67 Plato: Protagoras, 320c–328d, in The Greek Sophists, 22–32. 68 ‘The Social Setting’, 68. 69 Emma Smith, The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 131. 70 Ibid., 131. 9781474244251_txt_print.indd 138 11/08/2016 14:28