Contracts of Love and Affection: Lear, Old Age, and Kingship

Summary

Imagining a legal context for Lear’s abdication and division of his kingdom plunges one into a morass of power and kinship struggles, and complicates what otherwise seems, perhaps too readily, a wholly foolish decision by him. Reading the play in this manner can help to bring out a degree of dilemma in Lear’s initial situation, and the ironies that result from his choices. The dilemma and the ironies may indeed concern not only family relations of love but the circumstances of both royal and paternal power. Moreover, there are indications that commoners in Shakespeare’s time, at least in rural areas, sometimes arranged for themselves a more modest legal version of Lear’s attempt to secure his final years while shaking off the cares of age.

A starting point, then, would be Lear’s announced purpose ‘To shake all cares and business’ either ‘of our state’ (Quarto) or ‘from our age’ (Folio).1 It is well known that kings cannot really dispose of their kingdoms to others in this way – or should not, in the thinking of Shakespeare’s time, at least by dividing the land. But commoners could reduce the cares of age by giving away their property (or by setting up a use, that is, a trust) in return for maintenance in their old age, though it is unknown how many did. There are forms in the oft-reprinted source for boilerplate legal documents (among them the preamble to Shakespeare’s will), the Symboleography of 1590 and later, by William West, of the Inner Temple.