There's Nothing in "King Lear"

As is so often the case with graduate studies, what I spend studying one day becomes a big part of one my teaching the next.

I’m working on Shakespeare’s King Lear with my grade 12s at the moment, and commenting on the use of the use of the word “nothing” in the first couple of scenes. At the beginning of the play, Lear makes the mistake of dividing up his kingdom between his two wicked daughters and sending his good daughter, Cordelia (which is also the name of my cat, but that’s another story) into exile because she won’t play along with his “love test” and tell him how much she loves him.

“What can you say to draw/A third more opulent than your sisters?”, asks Lear.

“Nothing, my lord”, Cordelia replies.

“Nothing!”, he counters.

“Nothing.”

And then come his fateful, and particularly intriguing words: “Nothing will come of nothing: speak again”.

Lear, of course, is dead wrong about a lot of things at the beginning of the play – this is a tragedy, after all, and the tragic hero has much to learn – but this year, for the first time, I saw that he is also wrong about “nothing”.

According to the reading I did the day before class, in constructionism, “meaning is not discovered, but constructed” (Crotty, p. 9). This means that by articulating the notion of “nothingness”, Lear gives thought, intentionality and substance to it. As soon as it is identified by him, “nothing” becomes “something”.

And of course that’s absolutely right, because “nothingness” has enormous consequences throughout the play. Lear gives up his crown, and the “nothing” at the centre of the kingdom leads to war; he loses his reason and the “nothing” that fills up his mind leads, ironically, to greater insight.

Shakespeare seems to articulate the constructionist point of view. He understands that “nothingness” is a very real and active part of the world – if it appears in government, chaos reigns; if it appears in the mind, wisdom can be achieved.

Much comes of “nothing”.