Editors’ note: This essay is adapted from Leisure with Dignity: Essays in celebration of Charles R. Kesler, edited by Glenn Ellmers and Michael Anton, published by Encounter Books in 2024.
“Shakespeare knew everything.” Such was the judgment of the late Paul Cantor—a brilliant professor of literature and politics, who taught for many years at the University of Virginia. Cantor was right: nothing human was above, or beneath, Shakespeare’s penetrating gaze.
Most likely, the playwright would have been fascinated by the drama of our contemporary political scene, though one wonders whether he would have regarded the criminal conviction of Donald Trump as tragedy or farce. Whatever one may think of them, it is hard to see how either Trump or Biden rises to the grand, almost superhuman pathos Shakespeare exhibits in his greatest drama, King Lear. The play does not present a clear handbook to navigating our current difficulties, yet Lear does offer pertinent lessons about politics and its inescapably tragic nature.
The New Criterion readers are likely familiar with Lear’s general plot: a kind but aging monarch, planning to relinquish the throne, apportions his kingdom among three daughters, asking only that each publicly profess her love for him. The two eldest—scheming and ungrateful wretches—fulsomely comply. But the whole plan is upended when his beloved youngest daughter, Cordelia, refuses as a matter of principle to validate this contrived performance. Lear’s inability to understand or accept her refusal initiates a cascade of self-doubt and personal anguish, culminating in the famous scene on the heath, in which Lear rages against the cosmic tempest of his fate.
Lear’s confusion over Cordelia’s intransigent and perhaps imprudent attachment to natural justice reveals that while he may have possessed certain conventional attributes of statesmanship, he could not master the art of succession—as his failed experiment reveals. Lear does not comprehend that perpetuation, even more than founding, requires divine assistance, i.e., a civil religion that not only unites the people, but instills the virtues and opinions necessary for political vitality. Lear is blind to the role of political theology because he cannot distinguish nature from convention: “They told me I was everything./ ’Tis a lie” His hard-won insight into political reality, however, comes too late for him to save his kingdom or himself. He was, as the Fool notes, “old before he was wise.”
In the final scene, the future of the monarchy is in some doubt. Most of the major characters are dead, including the king and everyone in his immediate family. Shakespeare suggests that the crown might pass to Lear’s godson, Edgar—perhaps the noblest but also the oddest character in the play. Edgar is often misunderstood. Critics dismiss him as naive and feckless, because early in the action he is duped by his Machiavellian stepbrother. But, like Lear, Edgar undergoes an education—a turning of the soul—and achieves in the end a measure of wisdom as well as courage. After his transformation, Edgar is described by Lear three times as a “philosopher.” His claim to the throne after Lear’s death rests, therefore, on both moral and intellectual virtue. In the last act, he challenges and then kills his malevolent stepbrother. Shakespeare, like Plato, thought that philosophy and courage go together.
As the greatest Platonist of the modern age, Shakespeare induces perplexity in his readers; he invites us to wonder whether or how Edgar could rule. He declines, however, to show us a philosopher-king. Shakespeare offers only the suggestion that such a combination may be possible—but it is a possibility we can only wish for, not depend upon. King Lear ends by leaving us, as it were, on our own. This is also one of the lessons of Plato’s Republic. Philosophers—including philosophic playwrights—may instruct and inspire, and even show us what politics at its best can achieve. But precisely because (genuine) philosophers do not wish, and probably cannot be induced, to be kings, we are forced to moderate our expectations from politics and look askance at dubious claims to rule on the basis of intellectual superiority.
Philosophy and politics are distinct, perhaps even impossible to combine, rather in the way that comedy and tragedy cannot be combined. Comedy is the realm of the improbable or impossible. It shows us what life might be like if chance always favored us, and our foibles always turned out for the best. Thus, the unlikely utopia of Plato’s Republic—like Shakespeare’s Tempest or Measure for Measure—is ironic, even ridiculous.
Tragedy shows us the world as it actually is; it reveals the harshness of necessity and the iron limitations of even our “best-laid plans.” What this means, however, is that virtue matters, even if it isn’t always rewarded. If there are no assurances to be found in the serendipity of fortune or the superintendence of all-wise guardians, we have no choice but to behave like men. Only in comic dreams can we indulge the fantasy of being children or sheep. Comedy may charm us with wit, romance, and gallantry, but the higher qualities—prudence, nobility, honor—are displayed in all their splendor only in tragedy. The grim truth is that virtue sometimes fails, and many spectators have found King Lear deeply disillusioning. Lear and Edgar both endure terrible suffering in the course of their awakenings. The death of Cordelia in particular has struck many critics as almost unbearable.
Yet Shakespeare seems to have differed from the Greek tragedians in denying that man is merely a plaything of the gods. His tragedies are ultimately not a ground of despair but of hope. That hope depends in the first instance on giving up our illusions and acknowledging that, at least in part, our fate lies “not in our stars, but in ourselves.” We need to cultivate courage, nurture prudence, and cherish honor because, while Providence may sometimes smile on us, our freedom is meaningless without moral responsibility. Lear’s tragic fate reminds us that we have no choice but to take politics seriously, accepting its limitations, to be sure, but also, and especially, its always hopeful possibilities.