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”.
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