King Lear: Everything Comes of Nothing and the Great Stage of Fools
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13136/sjtds.v5i2.249Abstract
The tragedy of King Lear has a unique relationship to ‘nothing’. The word is used more frequently in this play than any other in the canon. ‘Nothing’ as a condition of humanity and the universe itself is the driving concern of King Lear, and indeed has a presence in almost all of Shakespeare’s ontological discourses into the nature of the human. But Shakespeare’s ‘nothing’ in Lear is never powerless: it is never nihilistic or negative space. In fact, nothing gives birth to everything. Lear must painfully learn through the stripping of self and the re-evaluation of language, that his maxim “nothing will come of nothing” (1.1.99) reveals that the “nothing” that transpires are the subsequent actions and thoughts in the play. Coming to terms with our nothingness is entangled for Shakespeare in our comprehension of human connection and of alleviating human suffering by sharing it. This paper examines the value of ‘nothing’ in Lear and in Shakespeare’s concept of the world being a great stage, where humans navigate between being sublime, but also fumbling, fools.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Open Access Policy
This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.
This Journal is a CC-BY 4.0 publication (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This Licence allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this Journal, providing a link to the Licence and explicitly underlining any change (full mention of Issue number, year, pages and DOI is required).
- The Author retains (i) the rights to reproduce, to distribute, to publicly perform, and to publicly display the Article in any medium for any purpose; (ii) the right to prepare derivative works from the Article; and (iii) the right to authorise others to make any use of the Article so long as the Author receives credit as Author and the Journal in which the Article has been published are cited as the source of first publication of the Article. For example, the Author may make and distribute copies in the course of teaching and research and may post the Article on personal or institutional Web sites and in other open-access digital repositories.
- The Author is free to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the Journal’s published version of the work, with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this Journal and explicitly underlining any change (full mention of Issue number, year, pages and DOI is required).
- The Author is permitted and encouraged to post their work online after the evaluation process has been successfully passed, as it can lead to productive exchanges as well as to a wider dissemination of the published work.
