¹ A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Macmillan, 1905); Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary (London: Methuen, 1967). Apart from specific works cited later, I shall make no effort to survey the vast body of writings about the play. Citations of King Lear will be to the revised Arden Edition by Kenneth Muir (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1957).

² The following would make good starting points for the Marxist interpretation of Shakespeare and his time (though I am not always in agreement with them): Paul N. Siegel, Shakespearean Tragedy and the Elizabethan Compromise (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1957); Shakespeare in His Time and Ours (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1968); Arnold Kettle, ed., Shakespeare in a Changing World (New York: International, 1964); Roman Samarin and Alexander Nikolyukin, eds., Shakespeare in the Soviet Union (Moscow: Progress, 1966).

³ Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848; rpt. Moscow: Progress, 1971), pp. 34-35.

⁴ Past and Present (London: Chapman & Hall, 1843), pp. 250-51.

⁵ The seminal, though eccentric, treatment of this theme is by Wyndham Lewis, The Lion and the Fox: The Role of the Hero in the Plays of Shakespeare (New York: Barnes & Noble, n.d.).

⁶ Shakespeare's History Plays (New York: Collier, 1962), pp. 278-99.

⁷ Shakespeare's Doctrine of Nature: A Study of King Lear (London: Faber & Faber, 1961), p. 205.

⁸ Attitudes toward History (Los Altos, Calif.: Hermes, 1959), p. 29.

⁹ After a previous version of this paper was completed, my attention was drawn to Rosalie Colie's “Reason and Need: King Lear and the ‘Crisis’ of the Aristocracy,” in Some Facets of King Lear: Essays in Prismatic Criticism, ed. R. Colie and F. T. Flahiff (Toronto & Buffalo: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1974). The late Colie analyzes the play's social oppositions along lines similar to mine; she draws illustrations, as I do, from Lawrence Stone's magisterial The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558-1641 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965). Our conclusions, however, differ radically in that she views Shakespeare as taking an evenhanded, detached stance toward the social struggles of his time: “Like Shakespeare's other great plays,” she observes, “King Lear deals in problems and problematics: neither way of life is sanctified, neither is regarded as an unqualified success” (p. 196).

¹⁰ There are minor, anachronistic exceptions, such as Kent's denunciation of Oswald as a “hundred-pound …knave” (ii.ii.15). Marx's famous disquisition on “The Power of Money in Bourgeois Society” takes the form of a commentary on Timon's address to gold as the “common whore of mankind” (Tim. Ath. iv.iii.42): Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (New York: International, 1964), pp. 165-69.

¹¹ Goldmann, Le Dieu caché: Etude sur la vision tragique dans les Pensées de Pascal et dans le théâtre de Racine (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), pp. 35-38. Quotations from this work are in my own translation.

¹² Georg Lukacs, Die Seele und die Formen (Berlin: Fleischel, 1911), p. 332; quoted in Goldman, p. 45.

¹³ I borrow this apt term from Eric Bentley's A Century of Hero-Worship (Boston: Beacon, 1957), where it defines the tradition of Carlyle, Nietzsche, Shaw, and D. H. Lawrence.

¹⁴ This point has already been touched on by Edwin Muir in his brief but suggestive study The Politics of King Lear (Glasgow: Jackson, 1947), p. 19. On the later development and legitimization of Edmund's opportunistic premises, see the standard treatment by C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962).

¹⁵ The issue of Lear's retinue is apparently Shakespeare's invention; in his probable major source, the anonymous 1605 work The True Chronicle History of King Leir, ed. Sidney Lee (London: Chatto & Windus, 1909), Leir lives unaccompanied in religious retirement with Gonorill.

¹⁶ My account of maintenance is based on Lawrence Stone, pp. 201-17, and sources there cited.

¹⁷ Gervase Markham, Honour in His Perfection (London, 1624), p. 20; quoted in Stone, p. 214. “Guarded liveries”: frilly, overornate costumes. “Painted butterflies”: cf. Lear's reference to “gilded butterflies” (v.iii.13). The spendthrift seventeenth Earl of Oxford, a contemporary of Southampton's, also sported a retinue of “100 tall yeomen in livery” (Stone, p. 211).

¹⁸ Goneril's use of the word implies a further contrast between service as recognition of a legitimate authority and as mere opportunism: “To thee [i.e., Edmund] a woman's services are due: / My Fool usurps my body” (iv.ii.27-28). She wishes to serve (in more senses than one) the virile Edmund, rather than her squeamish lawful husband.

¹⁹ Cf. Orlando's praise of Adam, the old servant in As You Like It, who serves “for duty, not for need” (ii.iii.58).

²⁰ Shakespeare reverses the situation in The True Chronicle History, where Leir irritates Gonorill by criticizing her spendthrift tastes in food and clothing.

²¹ Cf. the argument of the like-minded Troilus against any abatement of Priam's, absolutism: “Weigh you the worth and honour of a king, / So great as our dread father, in a scale / Of common ounces? Will you with counters sum / The past-proportion of his infinite?” (T&C ii.ii. 26-29).

²² In English political history, such coalitions have often been based on an alleged community of rural interests against urban commercialism or, later, against manufacturers. This was the basic division of forces in the Civil War: the more economically developed Southeastern part of England for Parliament, the more archaic and feudal North and West for the King.

²³ Phrases by Maxim Gorky and Alexander Anikst: Shakespeare in the Soviet Union, pp. 12, 113. Compare Swinburne's comment: “A poet of revolution he is not, as none of his country in that generation could have been: but …the author of King Lear avowed himself in the only good and rational sense of the words a spiritual if not a political democrat and socialist” (A Study of Shakespeare, London: Chatto & Windus, 1902, p. 175).

²⁴ The Death of Tragedy (New York: Knopf, 1963), p. 342.

²⁵ Le Degré zéro de l'écriture (Paris: Seuil, 1953), section on “Ecriture et révolution.”

²⁶ Engels, letter to Lassalle of 18 May 1859; quoted in Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski, eds., Marx and Engels on Literature and Art (St. Louis: Telos, 1973), p. 110. Marx's analysis of the play, which is similar to Engels', is given in a letter to Lassalle of 19 April 1859.

²⁷ “Toward the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law: Introduction,” in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, ed. Loyd Easton and Kurt Guddat (Garden City, N. Y.: Anchor-Doubleday, 1967), pp. 253-54.

²⁸ Baxandall and Morawski, p. 150.

²⁹ It is listed among the bequests in his will.

³⁰ Phoenix (London: Heinemann, 1936), p. 226.

³¹ Shakespeare in the Soviet Union, p. 140.