Conclusion: “Am I in France?”

Abstract

When Gloucester is being interrogated in King Lear, he at one point says, “I am tied to the stake and I must stand the course” (3.7.54–55). This line, alluding to bear-baiting, must make the audience uncomfortable. They may or may not attend bear-baitings, but here, they must recognize the parallel structure of tragedies and those spectacles of animalistic savagery. Animals themselves are not cruel, but we are if we pay to see them at their most savage, and Gloucester provocatively likens himself to one such animal, who can speak. In making this move, Gloucester sees, just before being blinded, himself from the outside; his ability to do so makes him human, and makes the spectacle of which he is a part considerably more complicated than the spectacle to which he alludes. Such a fleeting glimpse of a world outside only accentuates his own profound collapse, along with that of the Britain to which he belongs. Gloucester sees his local position from the outside, but the closest we get to a national exterior in that play is the idea of France. King Lear is deeply invested in the gap between England and France; that is the gap that separates Lear from Cordelia for most of the play, and France thus becomes even more important, symbolically, as England disintegrates. One might expect there to be a scene in King Lear that takes place in France. Macbeth has one scene in England; Romeo and Juliet has a scene in Mantua; Coriolanus has several scenes outside of Rome.¹ Shakespeare’s decision not to show us Cordelia’s court in France even briefly was surely a conscious one. We want to see it, but we are denied that. Instead, we are given a moment of confusion after Cordelia’s arrival:

Lear: Am I in France?

Kent: In your own kingdom, sir.

(King Lear, 4.7.78)