Forgiving the Gift: The Philosophy of Generosity in Shakespeare and Marlowe

3. “Nothing Will Come of Nothing”: Avoiding the Gift in King Lear

83 THREE “Nothing Will Come of Nothing” AVOIDING THE GIFT IN KING LEAR Mauss insists not only upon the ubiquity of exchange but also that a belief in pure generosity obfuscates it.1 This assumption governs a number of readings of King Lear. William Flesch, for instance, cites both George Battaille and Pierre Bourdieu making much the same point, concluding, “Culture...is formed by the repression of the fact of equivalent exchange.”2 The characters of King Lear, however, like those of The Merchant of Venice, make the opposite repression, denying the possibility of a free gift under the pretense of exchange, self-interest, or social convention. Stanley Cavell famously argues that Lear “cannot bear to be loved when he has no reason to be loved, perhaps because of the helplessness , the passiveness which that implies.”3 One is reminded of Faustus, refusing the saving love of God in favor of maintaining his position as an agent, even if only an agent of his own damnation. Cavell notes that when Gloucester offers Lear love in act 4, the latter tries to label it as a solicitation.4 Lear’s response may serve as an example of how the characters reduce offers of 84 Forgiving the Gift affection and kindness to reciprocal terms. S. L. Goldberg declares that Goneril as “rampant ego can see personal relationships only as power relationships.” Most characters, however, share Goneril’s tendency to view human relationships in such impoverished terms, because they share a need to, as Goldberg says, “keep the world at bay,”5 and render it comprehensible. Dollimore accuses critics of obscuring “the awful truth” that “power and property” exist “somehow prior to the laws of human kindness.”6 However, both critics and characters make the opposite mystification, ignoring the possibility of kindness by treating all relationships as relationships of power and property. Exchange is normative to the play’s fictive society, as to that of The Merchant of Venice and perhaps to every society, insofar as societies offer themselves to a Maussian ethnology. If, in a Maussian analysis, “The cycling gift system is the society,”7 then generous acts can only appear as antisocial and countercultural. While some critics may, as Dollimore accuses, participate in a “mystifying closure of the historical real,”8 at least as many show themselves to subscribe to a view of the world characterized by the logic of exchange and therefore foreclose the possibility of truly generous action. Leonard Tennenhouse writes as a new historicist rather than as a cultural materialist like Dollimore, but he nevertheless reads Shakespeare’s plays as vehicles of “Renaissance debates concerning the nature and origins of political power.”9 Some critics draw implicitly on Mauss’s anthropology . In a fascinating feminist argument, Stephanie Chamberlain describes how Cordelia functions as “a gift to the foreign power that would receive her, creating future obligations to Lear and England.”10 William O. Scott argues that Lear’s “expectations of reciprocity that go with his gifts resemble the social constraints of the gift economy” and compares Lear’s gift of the kingdom with the contemporary practice of establishing a trust.11 While not all critics refer to Mauss’s anthropology, most nevertheless accept the ubiquity of exchange. Avoiding the Gift in King Lear 85 The importance of such a belief extends beyond literary criticism, and indeed King Lear evokes broad questions about whether the characters’ understanding of their world is justi- fied and whether their world represents a fair model of the world in general. In a retrospective of criticism published in 1980, G. R. Hibbard notes, “The very nature of the world we live in has much to do with the interest the play excites.”12 More recently, Lionel Basney remarks on “the philosophical and even theological reach” of Lear criticism, relating it to “our understanding of the world.”13 Lear evokes philosophical questions more reliably than any other play in Shakespeare’s canon. Readings drawing on presuppositions similar to those of Mauss, therefore, reinforce a particular view of ourselves and other people. Certainly the characters assume the ubiquity of exchange relationships, whether commercial or feudal. Lear premises his disastrous division of the kingdom on the assumption that every donation stakes a claim to reciprocation, thereby providing himself with a retirement plan and the play with its tragedy. King Lear, like The Merchant of Venice, illuminates the horrifying results of Mauss’s a priori...