Law and Love: The Trials of King Lear (review)

Paul W. Kahn, professor of law and the humanities at Yale, describes Law and Love as the fourth volume in a series of studies that have "sought to redirect the study of law away from problems of legal reform and toward the interpretation of legal culture" (171). According to Kahn, this series, and Law and Love as part of it, begins from the premise that in Western culture law is understood with reference to two competing but mutually dependent accounts. One, associated with Judaism, understands the law both as protection against the chaos and violence of unregulated existence and as an image of divine (Mosaic) law, the highest expression of human nature. The other conceives of law as imperfect, expressive of humankind's fallen state, a form of violence rather than a hedge against it; and it "imagines a community beyond law" (xi) based on love. Associating this latter account with Christianity, Kahn shows how law and love represent interpenetrating and often conflicting ways of seeing the world, and it is his argument that King Lear depicts the incommensurability between them. His aim, he says, is to "explore the element of tragedy within our beliefs about the rule of law" (xv). More precisely, the book claims to demonstrate how the play again and again proves the enormous costs exacted on love by the claims of political life, and, conversely, love's tragic indifference to, and powerlessness before, such claims.

Kahn reads Lear scene by scene, showing how the play illustrates complex and ever-shifting intersections of these themes by attending closely to character and language, always with an eye to mapping the domain of the political. As the book's subtitle suggests, Kahn sees Lear as a series of trials, which he says enact "the transition from private experience to public order" (7). It is in this abstract sense that the law figures in Kahn's argument; trials are ritualized negotiations of the place of the political in relation to love, rather than events of (say) procedural or evidentiary interest. Despite this schematic description, however, the argument is remarkably difficult to summarize. While Kahn's insights often begin from familiar observations—as, for example, the claim that "Lear's tragedy is rooted . . . in his effort to align his private and public selves, his identity as loving father and royal sovereign" (6)—they often lead in unexpected and rewarding directions. Kahn describes Goneril's and Regan's infatuation with Edmund, for example, as a reversal of their orientation at the opening of the play: "At Lear's initial trial of love, both Goneril and Regan acted as if love were only a subject of play in the theater of the state. Power has led them to reverse position. Now law has become a play in the theater of love" (150). Cordelia develops in the opposite direction, for at the end she has "lost the purity of her love. She is now giving her father that which he demanded at the beginning. She is giving him her whole love, not as an inward movement of the soul but as a public act. Love of the father, love of the sovereign, is a deeply politicized love" (151). Perhaps this is a good way to describe Cordelia upon her return to England; but not all readers will be persuaded that her initial expression of love possesses the purity Kahn suggests it does.

One welcome result of Kahn's determination to show the undecidability of the struggle between law and love in the play is an unusually sympathetic reading of Goneril and Regan. If this orientation produces a refusal to vilify Lear's elder daughters—in resisting Lear's demands, they are, after all, merely looking after the welfare of the state, for which they are now responsible—it can also blunt Kahn's appreciation for the play's misogyny...