ABSTRACT
Various scholars in recent years have worked toward situating Shakespeare’s works within the context of early modern political philosophy, thereby developing our understanding of his preoccupation with politics and political ideas. In this essay, I would like to continue and expand on this line of work by concentrating on King Lear (1605-6), a play that offers one of the dramatist’s most profound and complex interrogations of the political idea of sovereignty. This idea gains special currency in the framework of the titular character’s decision to divide his kingdom, an action that gives way to an intense moment of political crisis likened by scholars to what Thomas Hobbes defined as the ‘state of nature’; a condition of brutal conflict in which there is no common power to keep all in awe and thereby to restrain human nature. Shakespeare’s play may indeed be said to foreshadow a number of the questions that were later to be scrutinized by Hobbes in his works, especially in his Leviathan (1651). At the same time, as I suggest, Shakespeare appears to have been conversant in King Lear with a much broader set of ideas, especially those found in the political philosophies of Jean Bodin and Robert Filmer. Bringing Shakespeare’s play into dialogue with the work of these philosophers, I wish to trace his engagement with a shared set of questions about such central politico-philosophical issues as the origins and limits of political power and authority.
