Critics disagree about the source, severity, and significance of Lear’s madness. Some critics, like Shweta Bali, argue that “Lear’s mind begins to fail with age” (89), whereas Jerome Mazzaro claims that Lear’s insanity is a consequence of accumulating emotional “shocks” (108) from filial ingratitude. Danielle Hilaire interrogates Lear’s madness by investigating what seems to cure it, and she argues that Lear’s first moments of clarity in 4.6 correspond to freedom from his obsession of “giving people what they deserve” (488). Hilaire claims that Cordelia offers Lear this freedom by demonstrating “radical pity” (494) as an alternative to justice, causing Lear to abandon “the logic of justice” (496) because he knows he “is owed punishment, but he asks for a gift” (495). Hilaire thus argues that “pity emerges as the force capable of effecting social change” (483). I agree with Hilaire that Lear’s momentary sanity in 4.6 indicates that his obsession with giving people what they deserve is a major contributing factor to his madness. However, I would like to offer an alternative explanation to this relationship between justice and madness: I argue that Lear goes mad because he struggles with the task of knowing exactly what others deserve, and his madness begins to subside when he finally stops pursuing this impossible task. But this is where Lear and Lear diverge; Lear abandons his obsession with worldly justice in order to escape into blissful imprisonment with Cordelia, but Lear as a text painfully insists that we not abandon justice despite our limited ability to determine what others deserve. The play instead offers its audience an important lesson in the humility that is necessary in judgment, specifically in consideration of what others deserve or need. In contrast with Hilaire’s reading of the transformative power of pity and the failure of justice in the play, I believe that Lear utilizes skepticism to advocate for a justice system that acknowledges epistemic limits and empowers marginalized voices in order to prevent these limits from becoming barriers to justice. 

     The concept of justice as what is owed and one of its key flaws is clearly displayed in the love test of 1.1: Lear plans to divide his kingdom in proportion to the love expressed by his three daughters, but his misplaced confidence in his judgment leads him to divide his kingdom among those who do not love him and banish those who do. Lear does not wait for all of his daughters to speak before dividing his kingdom, which suggests that Lear begins the love test with a predetermined opinion of what his daughters will merit. However, Lear reasserts his commitment to give his daughters what they earn by stating that “Nothing will come of nothing” (1.1.89) after Cordelia initially refuses his love test, and though he admits that he “loved her most” (121), he revises his previous divisions of the kingdom by splitting it equally between Goneril and Regan to match what he thinks his daughters have merited. One of the most contested questions of the play is why Cordelia refuses her father’s love test, but what is clear is that her actions are not motivated by a lack of love. She demonstrates her concern for Lear’s well-being by asking her sisters to “Love well our father” (270) even after Lear’s rage causes him to banish her from the kingdom. In fact, Cordelia’s honest love for her father, along with her sisters’ dishonest flattery, seems obvious to every character on stage except for Lear. The King of France explains that “Love’s not love / When it is mingled with regards that stands / Aloof from the’entire point” (237-9), and though Lear refuses to give Cordelia a dowry, France chooses to marry her because “Thee and thy virtues” (251) make Cordelia “herself a dowry” (240). Lear’s loyal servant Kent also correctly identifies Goneril and Regan’s professions of love as dishonest and boldly asserts that Lear’s “power to flattery bows” (146). However, Lear’s violent response to Cordelia’s refusal suggests that he is not aware of these truths that are obvious to the rest of the characters; Lear is so tragically confident in what will be revealed as a false judgment of his subjects’ love that he swiftly banishes Cordelia and Kent. In this way, the love test introduces both Lear’s determination to give people what they deserve and its inherent problem: human judgment is limited, prone to error, and vulnerable to deception, especially by those who deny this fact.

     Lear responds aggressively when the love test does not match his expectations, but he begins to go mad when he realizes that his judgment in the love test was mistaken. The Fool primes Lear to accept his mistake by telling him “When thou clovest thy crown I’th’middle and gavest away both parts, thou bor’st thine ass on thy back o’er the dirt” (1.4.135-7), and Goneril and Regan prove the Fool right by refusing to house Lear’s attendants. Lear tries to persuade them by reminding them of “The offices of nature, bond of childhood, / Effects of courtesy, dues of gratitude” along with “Thy half o’th’ kingdom… Wherein I thee endowed” (2.4.167-170), appealing to what he is owed both as father and former king by telling his daughters “I gave you all” (238). When his daughters are not persuaded, Lear realizes that he has misunderstood those human relationships that he should know best: as a father, he misjudged his daughters’ affections, and as a king, he mistook his subjects’ flattery for honesty. Goneril and Regan’s cold refusal to house his men confronts him with both failures in judgment simultaneously, and he blunders in response to their filial ingratitude: “I will have such revenges on you both / That all the world shall—I will do such things— / What they are yet I know not” (268-70). As king, Lear wielded language to command his world to fit his judgment of it, but here he linguistically falters when he attempts to continue calling upon the power of the world to enforce his distorted sense of justice. His speech is interrupted when he remembers that he has given the power to command his kingdom to Goneril and Regan. Lear’s inability to procure the justice he feels he deserves reminds him of this mistake, causing him to admit to his Fool and to himself that he “shall go mad” (275). 

     Lear reveals more about his understanding of this mistake as he confronts the storm rather than be housed by his ungrateful daughters. He maintains confidence in justice as what is owed, and he even expands this justice to include the storm by saying “I tax not you, you elements… You owe me no subscription” (3.2.16-8). Lear is clearly bothered by what he views as filial ingratitude by all three of his daughters, but he specifically focuses on the “two pernicious daughters” (22) who have deceived Lear into giving them what he now recognizes that they do not deserve. Lear’s frustration with his vulnerability to this deception causes him to admire the “great gods” (49) who have the omniscience to “Find out their enemies now” (51), and he communicates his envy of the gods’ ability to see the “concealèd centers” (58) of “Thou perjured and thou simular man of virtue… That under covert and convenient seeming / Hast practiced on man’s life” (54-7). Interestingly, Lear describes himself in contrast to the gods not simply because he is a man, but because he is “A poor, infirm, weak and despised old man” (20), suggesting that his vulnerability to deception is a weakness that he has developed in his old age rather than a weakness that his age has made worse. This is perhaps why Lear blames himself for letting his “folly in / And [his] dear judgment out” (1.4.241-2); he views folly and judgment in opposition to each other, and he attributes his error in the love test to a lack of judgment rather than to a faulty judgment. He fails to recognize that his vulnerability to deception is not a temporary or personal weakness; it is a constant challenge to all justice systems that must judge what people deserve.

     Rather than adjust his conception of justice to work with fallible human knowledge, Lear seeks to regain the judgment that he feels he has lost. For this reason, he views his destitute situation as an opportunity to “Take physic” by exposing himself “to feel what wretches feel” so that he can learn how to “show the heavens more just” (3.4.33-6). This is also why Lear approaches the character Poor Tom with extreme curiosity. But, in this attempt to practice good judgment, he repeats the mistake he made with Cordelia in the love test by confidently making judgments that are clearly incorrect. He first attempts to decipher Poor Tom by projecting his own situation onto the destitute character, asserting that “Nothing could have subdued nature / To such a lowness but his unkind daughters” (66-7). Kent tries to explain that Poor Tom has no daughters, but Lear’s confidence leads him to violently respond to this correction by saying “Death, traitor!” in language that revisits the same repudiation found in the love test (66). Lear then rapidly cycles through vastly different comparisons to try to understand Poor Tom: Lear compares him to a dead person, an animal, and even a philosopher. Before undressing himself to match Poor Tom in his nakedness, Lear asks “Is man no more than this?” (95) and also suggests that, out of the three men present on stage, Poor Tom “art the thing itself” (98). If Lear views Poor Tom as the Platonic form or essence of humanity, he undresses to share Poor Tom’s experience not simply because he wants to understand the stranger, but because he wants to learn the mysterious fundamental truths that he briefly sees Poor Tom representing. Thus, Lear’s desire to remedy his poor judgment through these truths is why he finally settles on addressing Poor Tom as a philosopher, a “learnèd Theban” (145) who can teach Lear the knowledge that he seeks. 

     The futility of Lear’s desire to rehabilitate his poor judgment is communicated through the irony of giving a man who speaks nonsense the title of a philosopher, but this futility is also dramatically obvious to the audience in that “Poor Tom” is a disguise that Edgar uses to deliberately and successfully hide his identity. James Kearney argues that the play’s “thwarted expectation [of recognition] creates a character who is always more than he seems” (455), and “the dramatic irony of the audience’s knowledge of the identity of the figure in disguise renders visible the secret interiority, the unknowable excess of the other” (457-8). The audience’s awareness of Edgar’s secret identity emphasizes the distance between Lear’s epistemic reach and the internal qualities that determine what each person deserves. Unlike the love test, however, Lear is not the only one who is fooled by Edgar; no other character is able to identify Edgar until he chooses to reveal himself in the final scene. Edgar’s ability to hide his identity from the rest of the characters helps clarify that the true problem in Lear’s conception of justice is not only his own poor judgment or his particular vulnerability to deception; the problem is that that the ability to truly give everyone what they deserve requires a judgment that is beyond humanity’s epistemic limits. 

     Hilaire claims that Cordelia shows Lear an alternative to justice through “radical pity—that is, a pity that turns away from the judgments of justice entirely” (494) and that this pity, and only this pity, allows Lear to abandon his obsession with justice by asking Cordelia to “forget and forgive” (4.6.77) rather than give him what he is owed. However, I see the shift in Lear’s madness even before Cordelia’s example of radical pity. When he first wakes, Lear is assertive: he confidently judges that “You do me wrong to take me out o’th’grave” (39) and tells Cordelia “You are a spirit, I know” (43). Lear judges the people he sees more cautiously after admitting that “I fear I am not in my perfect mind” (57), stating “Methinks I should know you, and know this man, / Yet I am doubtful” (58-9). This shift from rashness to caution signals Lear’s return from madness, and this shift happens even as Lear restates his faith in justice as what is owed: Lear tells Cordelia “I know you do not love me, for your sisters / Have, as I do remember, done me wrong. / You have some cause, they have not” (67-9). Lear seems to derive this knowledge based on the judgment he has received from others rather than his own; he is confident that Cordelia does not love him because he believes that the daughters who he has treated well do not love him. If Goneril and Regan have determined that Lear is not worthy of love, it makes sense that the daughter who he has wronged would judge him at least as harshly. Lear restates his commitment to justice by telling Cordelia “If you have poison for me, I will drink it” (66), but such commitment seems less mad as Lear abandons his role as agent of justice; Lear asks Cordelia to judge him instead of trying to make the judgment himself. Rather than demanding poison, Lear confesses that he has wronged Cordelia and suggests that he will accept whatever punishment Cordelia thinks he deserves, even death. Lear’s madness lifts when he finally gives up the impossible task of knowing exactly what justice requires, and accepting the fallibility of his own knowledge finally allows him to approach the people around him with humility. However, Lear still attributes his fallible knowledge to the fact that he is “old / And foolish” (77-8), which is why he expects others to know and thereby to judge what he deserves. 

     My argument that skepticism rather than pity ultimately lifts Lear from his maddening obsession with justice undercuts the transformative power of Cordelia’s pity. This pity does cause Lear to fantasize about spending his life in prison with Cordelia in 5.3, but though no doubt emotionally captivating, this fantasy does not foster beneficial social change. Lear’s prison speech is a shallow response to the conflict in the world around him. Scholars like Jonathan Dollimore similarly observe that “Pity, like kindness, seems in Lear to be precious yet ineffectual” (193), and Jayne Sears likewise points out that “a life of love, a life with all the protections and accommodations and none of the struggle, is a life away from man” (283). Lear’s escape into Cordelia’s pity seems to put Lear in a regressive, child-like state, a consequence that lies at the opposite extreme of the rash and unrestrained action that is created by his overconfidence in his judgment during the love test. Importantly, both extremes seem to be rooted in Lear’s inability to accept or cope with his fallible knowledge; Lear acts rashly when he thinks his judgment cannot fail, and he recedes into a fantasy life when he loses hope in rehabilitating his faulty judgment. 

     It is difficult to judge which extreme of Lear’s battle with skepticism is worse, especially because both share the unfortunate consequence of silencing Cordelia. During the love test, Lear banishes Cordelia’s voice from his kingdom after what Janet Adelman describes as “her refusal to speak unless she can speak herself truly” (124), noting that Cordelia does not speak again after Lear’s prison speech. Adelman convincingly argues that the “asides through which we are initially introduced to [Cordelia] and her exchanges with her father and her sisters make us keenly aware of her inner life,” but though she is “[i]ntroduced to us initially as a subject,” she “returns as the creature of Lear’s need” and is reduced to “the object of our reverent gaze” (124). Lear shifts from radically denying skepticism to radically embracing it, and even if Cordelia’s pity is responsible for this transformation, it does not transform him for the better; Lear only changes by making the same error in a different way.

     When we move from a singular focus on Lear to consideration of the playtext as a whole, an example of mitigated skepticism emerges in Edgar. In act 1, Edgar demonstrates a vulnerability to deception that is similar to Lear’s in his manipulation by his brother Edmund. However, Edgar does not overcome this deception through the aid of any superhuman knowledge; there is no ghost to reveal injustice as in Hamlet, and there are not any witches to foretell the future as in Macbeth. Edgar very importantly works within but does not transcend the limits of his human understanding. He repeatedly interprets others, especially Lear, through the lens of his own experience, and though critics like Kearney are right to criticize Lear because one of his “fundamental responses to seeing Tom is to see himself” (458), Edgar does not project his experience onto others; he instead takes careful note of both the similarities and differences between his experiences and Lear’s. For example, Edgar observes that “that which makes me bend makes the King bow— / He childed as I fathered” (3.6.102-3), and he is moved to tears during the mock trial because he knows that he is only “counterfeiting” (20) the madness that Lear actually suffers. Edgar’s reliance on his own experiences to understand others is not selfish; rather, it demonstrates that he is aware of the limits of his own reason whereas Lear is at first convinced that his reason has no limits and later that it is entirely corrupt. 

     Lear is unable to reconcile fallible human knowledge with worldly justice, but Edgar’s awareness of his epistemic limits primes him for the difficult demands of political life. Edgar is the character who reestablishes some order in the play by stopping the chaos that Edmund unleashes. Hilaire fears that Edgar’s duel with his brother reduces justice to the benefit of the stronger, or “might determines right” (486), but I argue that the play encourages virtuous people like Edgar who are “pregnant to good pity” (4.5.217) to defend themselves against forces like Edmund who believe that “All with me’s meet that I can fashion fit” (1.2.164). Specifically, Edgar understands that worldly justice is imperfect and often messy, but that is the point: he seems to agree with Albany’s suggestion that the survivors of the play must “Rule in this realm, and the gored state sustain” (5.3.296) rather than fantasizing about the perfection of divine justice or abandoning political life because of its inevitable difficulties. 

     Though Hilaire disparages the violence with which Edgar imposes a new justice system, Edgar’s awareness of the limits of human understanding makes this justice system more conducive to the specific social change that Hilaire attributes to radical pity. Hilaire praises Cordelia for abandoning “the rational activity of justice, which would ask, ‘What does my father deserve?’” in order to “implicitly engage in a different calculation: ‘What does my father need?’” (503). However, both of these questions are posed by oneself and to oneself, meaning that they are limited by that individual’s ability to determine what another deserves or needs. For example, when Lear states that he has “ta’en / Too little care” of the “houseless heads and unfed sides” (3.4.30-3) in his kingdom, he does not suggest that he did not care for these people when he was king or that he refused care because he thought they did not deserve it; rather, Lear discovers that the care he offered was too little only after experiencing the conditions that these people face. Perhaps Lear did ask himself what his most destitute subjects need from their king like Hilaire suggests, but his calculation did not match their true need. Lear is not an apathetic king who ignores the needs of his subjects; his overconfidence in his ability to judge the needs of those in radically different situations than his own robs them of the opportunity to voice these needs. On the other hand, Edgar, humbled by a healthy dose of skepticism, concludes the play by encouraging the survivors to “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say” (300). Edgar’s awareness of the epistemic limits that make everyone’s thoughts, feelings, and experiences private to each individual motivates him to encourage honest communication, and he reminds the audience that it is better to ask others what they need rather than asking our own pity to answer in their place.

     Lear reminds us that we cannot rely on our limited reason or wait for common experience to teach us what others need. We can benefit from this lesson in our personal lives by empowering the people around us to voice their own needs as Edgar does, but Lear’s punishment of Kent and Cordelia in 1.1 warn that this honesty is futile if we are unwilling to believe it. We must listen receptively to those who face struggles that are different from our own in order to prepare ourselves to meet their needs. However, Lear’s personal failures are also political failures, and Edgar also recognizes the ramifications of his triumph over his brother for the gored state. In Lear, the personal is inextricably tied with the political, and the play challenges its audience to recognize the limitations of justice systems as much as it challenges them to recognize the limitations of each individual’s judgment. If we as individuals must encourage those around us to voice their needs, we as a society must especially empower marginalized groups to speak about their unique experiences and the social injustices that disproportionately affect them. Justice systems are especially conducive to this end because they—ideally—guarantee individuals the power to defend their own basic needs, their human and civil rights, regardless of whether anyone asks or cares. Lear demonstrates that pursuing just treatment on both a personal and political level is, at best, difficult and imperfect, but through Edgar’s final lines that function as an epilogue, Lear also challenges us to create spaces where people are not only free but encouraged to demand justice regardless of whether or not these demands are convenient for the rest of society.

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1. For an analysis of Lear’s concept of quantifiable and reciprocal love, see Cavell, “The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear.” 

2.  Unless otherwise stated, all quoted material is from “The Tragedy of King Lear,” the Folio published in 1623, rather than the Quarto published in 1608, “The History of King Lear.” 

3. Cavell argues, for example, that Cordelia refuses Lear’s love test because she is incapable of the false and measurable love that Lear demands. (“The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear,” 61-68).

4. These lines are from the 1608 Quarto, though the 1623 Folio preserves the meaning: the Folio replaces “concealed centers” with “concealing continents” (58) and also replaces “thou similar man of virtue” with “thou similar of virtue” (54). Rene Weis argues that “The difference between the two texts here is one of nuance, but rhetorically F’s version is more powerful” (203).

5.  Cavell similarly observes that “The final scene opens with Lear and Cordelia repeating or completing their actions in their opening scene; again Lear abdicates, and again Cordelia loves and is silent” (“The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear,” 68).

6.  Immediately before this line, Albany refers to Edgar and Kent as “Friends of my soul, you twain” (295). Adelman convincingly argues that Shakespeare often uses the word ‘twain’ “to register not simple two-ness, but unnatural or violent division in which what should be one is cleft” (“Suffocating Mothers in King Lear,” 308n49). Also, see Adelman’s discussion of the “two-ness of Goneril and Regan” that “makes them apt agents of division” (123). Shakespeare’s emphasis on division seems to validate Dollimore’s claim that the play insists on the gulfs that separate people rather than transcending them (“King Lear and Essential Humanism,” 192).

7.  There is relative interchangeability between Edgar and Albany in 5.3. Edgar restores order, and Albany is charged with maintaining the gored state. The 1608 Quarto even attributes the last four lines of the play, including the line “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say,” (316) to Albany whereas the 1623 Folio attributes the final lines to Edgar.

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