Chapter 2 - Voice, Virtue, Veritas: On Truth and Vocal Feeling in King Lear

Summary

At the end of William Shakespeare's The Tragedy of King Lear, Edgar surveys the devastation of the final act and offers what could be a personal reflection, a public elegy, a religious homily or the play's epilogue: ‘The weight of this sad time we must obey, / Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say’ (5.3.330–1). Bruce R. Smith summarises the contrasting ways critics usually read these lines: either as a woefully inadequate conclusion to such consequential tragedy and loss or as emotionally truthful in all its inadequacy to what the experience of loss is. Drawing out a middle ground in these readings ‘between gesture and words, between feeling and saying’, Smith traces the play's attention to the tactility of language for listeners and audiences and the interplay between the perception of touch and the cognitive sense that something is ‘touching’. Amanda Bailey further reads this moment as an expression of political sympathy, ‘the shared acknowledgment that the juridical-political order is founded on the principle that one never affects without being affected’. And, in his essay for this collection on the virtue of grief, Michael Bristol proposes that these ‘enigmatic’ lines are ‘roughly equivalent to saying that we in the audience are among those who are bound to carry the burden of grief’, a burden that Bristol understands as a ‘duty’ that ‘asks us to undertake the task of mending the torn fabric of our social life’. Each of these critics crucially theorises the potential at the heart of the tension between speaking and feeling, putting words to a collective sense at the end of the play that to speak of how we have been touched, of what it is to feel together, of the grief we carry, is politically urgent and emotionally vital – even as we sense that any words we might have will not be enough. Truly, in forcing an audience to grapple with the ever-entangled and yet never-quite-aligned relationship between vocalised language and embodied sensation, Edgar's speech appears to posit an unresolvable problem. If the feeling that something is beyond words paradoxically compels us to tangle with that something in language, and if, as Brian Massumi observes, one cannot speak of a feeling without changing its felt quality, then how can we reconcile speech and feeling in order to ‘speak what we feel’?