Poor Tom: Living “King Lear” by Simon Palfrey (review)

Over the last thirty years, the Lear we once knew has been taken apart, and what it is becoming we are not yet in a position to judge. Theories of emergence, assemblage, and network are in ascendance, but at the same time we are still “historical”: the best arguments for a new, more fragmented Lear have come from editors and critics steeped in the history of the book. In 2007, Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern argued that Shakespeare did not write complete plays imagined to stand as coherent formal wholes (a fantasy that the history of the book, too, had dispatched according to its own methods). Instead, playwrights composed individual actors’ parts, which were then learned alone, recombined in performance, and revised independently of one another. These slips of paper, fragments of dialogue, and speeches unfurling between the cue words of another actor’s part were among the most ephemeral materials of the Renaissance stage, Palfrey and Stern argued, and yet they were the most important compositional and interpretive units of Shakespeare’s art.

In his Poor Tom, Palfrey now takes this insight as far as possible: “The part is at once the distillation and explosion of Shakespearean form: its opacity and plenitude, fathomless reaches, tentacular networks of implication.” In the process, and closing a methodological circle that had been broken by New Historicism, Palfrey returns to Bradley, Empson, Mack, and other twentieth-century critics and enlists them in a distinctly twenty-first-century project: they appear alongside Agamben, Artaud, and Whitehead, between Hegel and Levinas, El Greco and radical ecology. The book itself is conspicuously fragmentary, written in twelve “scenes” and twelve “interludes.” The former read the play intensely but never single-mindedly; the latter are experiments in Palfrey’s own creative thought: a detour through the Book of Job, a list of thirty-four things that “Tom is . . . ,” reflections on a famous source text (Harsnett), a dialogue between a humanist and a posthumanist. Taken as a whole (for all its restlessness, the book nevertheless presents itself as moved by a unifying sensibility), Poor Tom illuminates many classic problems: violence, bereavement, and suffering, legitimacy and sexuality, sovereignty and the nature of life in exile, subjectivity and law, allegory, and the almost infinite capacity of the play’s figurative language. But Palfrey torques them into new shapes and stretches their horizons. What is the “ontology” of theatrical character, and especially of Edgar/Poor Tom, this doubled creature of stage performance, hovering at the edge of being and nonbeing? How does theater assemble an artificial, posthuman species of life? What is the value and purpose of this life, especially in tragedy? For all the play’s transformations under the hands of critics over the years, it remains one of the most enigmatic, moving, and radical works ever written in English, by Shakespeare or by any other playwright. Those who wish to travel into the terrifying world that it discloses will need a guide, and Palfrey’s book is the one to lead them there.