King Lear: Your Senses Grow Imperfect
Pictured: Kevin R McNally (Lear) and Burt Caesar (Gloucester). Image credit: Marc Brenner
Research Coordinator Jen Edwards considers what it means to trust the senses in King Lear.
Our senses, you will find, did first provide
The idea of truth, they cannot be denied
[…]
In what then should we place a greater trust
Than in the senses?
Lucretius, De Rerum Natura
‘In what should we place a greater trust than in the senses?’ asks Roman poet-philosopher Lucretius, considering the senses as the beginning and end of human knowledge. But early modern essayist Michel de Montaigne was not so sure.‘I have my doubts’, he writes, ‘whether Man is provided with all the senses of nature’. Questioning the possibility that we might ‘not still lack one, two, three, or many other senses’, Montaigne grows anxious that the senses might be limited, and that there might be something beyond those limits. ‘The senses’, he fears,‘are inadequate’.
Reading John Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s essays (published in 1603), these debates might have given Shakespeare pause. From Othello’s desire for ‘ocular proof’, to Hermione’s seeming warm-to-the-touch body in The Winter’s Tale, his plays are filled with moments that call into question whether or not we can rely on what our senses tell us.
This is perhaps most radically the case in King Lear, a play in which characters repeatedly place their trust in the senses only to find them to be tragically ‘untuned and jarring’, ‘stiff’,‘vile’, ‘broken’, and ‘bereaved’.
Pictured: Kenton Thomas (Ensemble). Image credit: Marc Brenner
Time and again the play makes clear the risk of placing too much trust in the senses. ‘I love you… dearer than eyesight’, answers Goneril to Lear’s love-test in the play’s opening scene, a claim that chimes with early modern anatomical thought which similarly placed significant value on sight: ‘Of these five senses, sight is held to be the most precious, and the best’, as the seventeenth-century writer Robert Burton put it. If we rank the senses according to the frequency with which they are mentioned in Lear, we uncover a model that reflects the early modern sensory hierarchy: sight is regarded as the most esteemed, followed by hearing, smell, taste and lastly touch.
Paying attention to the senses in Lear leads us to a key scene in Act 4, set on a cliff above Dover, where Edgar (disguised as Poor Tom) leads his blind father to believe that they stand ‘within a foot of th’extreme verge’.
Pictured: Joshua James (Edgar). Image credit: Marc Brenner
The scene contains almost a quarter of the text’s allusions to seeing, hearing, touching, smelling and ‘sense’ more broadly. But it is here that Shakespeare most explicitly unsettles the sensory hierarchy, and here that the now blind Gloucester’s senses are tried and tested, not only standing in for sight, but also coming under direct scrutiny:
EDGAR Hark, do you hear the sea?
GLOUCESTER No, truly.
EDGAR Why then your other senses grow imperfect.
In such a context we are forced to concede, like Montainge, that although‘the senses are the sovereign masters of our knowledge… they are [also] uncertain and deceivable in all circumstances’.
Longing to ‘live to see’ his son Edgar‘in [his] touch’, Gloucester finds himself in a world where he must learn to see ‘feelingly’. And so in moments where Lear urges Gloucester to‘see how the world goes with no eyes’ and ‘look with thine ears’, Shakespeare envisages the possibility of sight via touch and sound. In this he presents a synesthetic model, where one sense stands in for or merges with another. Shakespeare has taken Bottom’s comic jumbling of the senses in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (‘the eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen…’) and infused it with tragic potential.
And so while Lucretius rhetorically questions whether there is anything more trustworthy than our senses, Lear puts that question centre stage. The play might not provide an answer, but by exploring what happens when our senses fail us, or when we place too must trust in what we see and hear, Shakespeare dramatises alternative ways of thinking about his culture’s sensory hierarchy.
Pictured: Loren O'Dair (Fool). Image credit: Marc Brenner