The Ghost behind the Masks: The Victorian Poets and Shakespeare

5.Thou, Nature, Art My Goddess

The ethics of Shakespeare’s Edmund in King Lear is the ethics of naturalism, embraced in the Victorian age by Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and Tennyson’s fool Dagonet in “The Last Tournament.” When Edmund invokes Nature as his goddess in his first soliloquy in King Lear, he is introducing a distinction between “natural right” and “man-made law” that harks back to the thought of the Greek sophists. Coming after the straight prose of Goneril and Regan, the perfect medium for two practical schemers, Edmund’s lift into lively blank verse lends force to his claim to be an imaginative villain who possesses natural capacities and innate talents lacking in his brother. 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, For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines Lag of a brother? Why bastard? Wherefore base, When my dimensions are as well compact, My mind as generous, and my shape as true, As honest madam’s issue? (King Lear 1.2.1–9) In the litany of Edmund’s grievances, “base” keeps sounding as an insistent groundswell or basso ostinato: “Why brand they us/With base? with baseness ? bastardy? base, base?” (1.2.9–10). He protests that the base behavior predicted of him by his father is both illogical and unloving. As it turns out, the law’s branding Edmund a bastard degrades an intelligent and resourceful son into a monster more unrestrained and aggressive than any “lusty stealth of nature” that begot him. In the end Edmund proves more heartless than his father in his worst nightmare could possibly imagine. 5 Thou, Nature, Art My Goddess The Garden and the Heath 84 shades of king lear Edmund the base Shall top th’ legitimate. I grow, I prosper. Now, gods, stand up for bastards. (King Lear 1.2.20–22) No prophecy in Shakespeare is more darkly fulfilled. Reviving the etymology gone dead in “legitimacy,” a word that traces its origin back to “lex” or man-made law, Edmund plays as flippantly with Edgar ’s claim to be “legitimate” as with his own base “bastardy.” Well, then Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land. Our father’s love is to the bastard Edmund As to th’ legitimate. Fine word, “legitimate.” Well, my legitimate . . . (1.2.15–19) The Nature Edmund invokes as his goddess is not the well-cultivated garden that Polixenes fashions out of nature in The Winter’s Tale. It is the brutalized world of Lear on the heath, a “nature red in tooth and claw.” Polixenes believes that, if art is man’s nature, nature itself is the art of God. Nothing could clash more jarringly with the Nature Edmund worships as his goddess. His Nature is not just a collective name for everything that is, but a name for everything that takes place without voluntary human agency. Edmund’s goddess sanctions a Hobbesian view of life: one that is poor and solitary, nasty, brutish, and short. No two speeches better illustrate the distance separating the heath from the garden than Edmund’s angry invocation to his goddess, Nature, and the gardener’s elegant speech on horticulture in Richard II. For the brusque, colloquial candor of the villain Edmund, the gardener substitutes a formal, highly conceited style that has less in common with Machiavelli’s The Prince than with a medieval allegory on flowers. Go, bind thou up yon dangling apricocks, Which, like unruly children, make their sire Stoop with oppression of their prodigal weight; Give some sustenance to the bending twigs. Go thou, and like an executioner, Cut off the heads of too fast growing sprays, That look too lofty in our commonwealth. (Richard II 3.4.29–35) Lopping off the heads of light and flexible sprays that grow too fast like rebellious subjects, a prudent gardener will prop up ponderous fruits that droop thou, nature, art my goddess 85 and dangle, weighed down by polysyllabic nouns like “oppression” or by adjectives like “prodigal.” One critic suggests that “the first thought of a modern audience is: what a ridiculous way for a gardener to talk. The first thought of an Elizabethan would have been: what is the symbolic meaning of those words, spoken by this king of the garden, and how does it bear on the play?” (Tillyard, 1957...