Succeeding King Lear: Literature, Exposure, and the Possibility of Politics

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. See Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1976); and Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead, 1998). Among recent books that consider Shakespeare’s relationship to philosophy, see Colin McGinn, Shakespeare’s Philosophy: Discovering the Meaning behind the Plays (New York: HarperCollins, 2006); and A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare the Thinker (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). For a recent treatment of Shakespeare’s literary political legacy, see Linda Charnes, Hamlet’s Heirs: Shakespeare and the Politics of a New Millennium (New York: Routledge, 2006). 2. Cf. Jacques Derrida, ‘‘La bête et le souverain,’’ in La démocratie à venir: Autour de Jacques Derrida, ed. M.-L. Mallet (Paris: Galilée, 2004), 433–76; Derrida, Voyous: Deux essais sur la raison (Paris: Galilée, 2003); Derrida, Without Alibi, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002); and Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 3. See Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, ed. and trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, –, ed. Michel Senellart and trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2007); and Foucault , The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, –, ed. Michel Senellart and trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2008). 4. See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 5. See James Chandler’s Wordsworth’s Second Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) for his account of a Wordsworthian shift from Rousseau to Burke. 6. Arendt’s phenomenological rethinking of politics and critique of the tradition of political philosophical is recently undergoing, more than thirty years after her death, a major critical revival. I have learned greatly from her work and cite her passim in the chapters to follow. 165 166 Notes . Sovereignty, Exposure, Theater: A Reading of King Lear 1. See R. A. Foakes’s ‘‘Introduction’’ to his Arden edition of King Lear (London : Thomson Learning, 1997), 12–3; and Frank Kermode’s ‘‘Introduction’’ to King Lear in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 1249–51. 2. Cf. Leah Marcus’s consideration of the timing of this performance in the context of James’s relationship to Parliament in Puzzling Shakespeare (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 148–60. 3. Tim Spiekerman offers a lucidly provocative account in Shakespeare’s Political Realism: The English History Plays (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001) of how Shakespeare explores the question of legitimacy in selected histories that engage in complex conversation with Machiavellian realism. 4. The question of the text’s instability is the center of Gary Taylor and Michael Warren’s edited collection of essays, The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare’s Two Versions of King Lear (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). I thank Margaret Maurer for showing me the tricky contours of the play’s textual history. 5. The poet and Shakespeare scholar John Berryman formulates the problem and its stakes this way: ‘‘It will be well if the reader can discard from the outset the notion that there is in existence a text of King Lear which we shall be discussing. There was once, certainly, such a text, but it is lost. All we have are two widely different texts, a quarto of 1608 and the folio of 1623, as witnesses to it. They report, with upward of 1,200 serious variations, an event—Shakespeare’s manuscript— which both of them have witnessed (at whatever remove) and we have not; what we have to do is to weigh their testimony, in order to reconstruct in its light the lost and important event of 1605–6.’’ ‘‘Textual Introduction,’’ in Berryman’s Shakespeare , ed. John Haffenden (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999), 179. I thank Bruce Smith for bringing to my attention Berryman’s Shakespeare scholarship. 6. All references to the text of King Lear in this essay will rely on the Arden version edited by R. A. Foakes that I cite above. 7. Quotation from ‘‘Notes on the Plays (1765, 1778),’’ in John Wain, ed., Johnson as Critic (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 217. 8. See ‘‘The Reception of King Lear’’ in Foakes’s Hamlet versus Lear: Cultural Politics and Shakespeare’s Art...