Human Insufficiency and the Politics of Accommodation in King Lear

Abstract

hakespearean scholars interested in political thought perennially return to the middle scenes of King Lear, an episode that seems to lay bare truths about sovereignty and subjection by staging their dissolution. A crisis of authority permeates every line of the tragedy; fromLear’s love test to Albany’s failure to establish a successor to the throne, the play frantically searches for an anchor on which to ground the state. But no moment more urgently interrogates these central themes than the scenes on the heath. The king has given away his land yet demands that he retain the royal title. In his fall, he also mirrors the abused bodies of the masterless men to whom he apostrophizes at the start of act 3, scene 4. In examining the problem of authority, scholars home in on the trope of the “unaccommodated man.” A human being stripped of political, social, and familial ties raises questions about sovereignty, natural law, and the effects of social hierarchies. This trope could provide a materialist critique of political structures. Or it might reflect philosophical developments, anticipating seventeenthcentury contract theory. King Lear engages political thought at a moment of ex-