"Time and Nothingness: King Lear"

Lear’s division of the kingdom among his daughters splits his own time into a before, when he was a King, and an after, when he is no longer one. The action of cutting, separating, allotting is symbolically aligned with measuring affection quantitatively within parental relations. It brings about the subversion of roles, power, and meaning, precipitating time into the nothingness of death and unbelief in both the future and the transcendental. Taking up a topic which he had already dealt with in such an early play as Richard II, Shakespeare deals once again with the effects of abdication on both the socio-political and the private levels. By divesting himself of the title of King, like Richard before him, Lear reduces himself to nothing within the symbolic system of the power signs he has handled until then. Once reduced to an “O without a figure”, as the Fool tells him, he discovers the meaning of being a ‘thing’, the ‘real thing’ in fact, outside that system. Lear’s famous interrogation of what is a man, chiming in with Montaigne’s own identical question, passes through an experience of nothingness which looks back at the story of Oedipus, and, at the same time, raises questions about how one’s choices determine one’s ‘being’ or ‘non-being’. This essay discusses ideas of nothingness in relation to a subjective experience of time and to its dramatisation on stage, and considers the many ways in which the play echoes and seems to respond, conceptually and performatively, to issues Sophocles had raised centuries earlier.