ABSTRACT
The preceding chapters of this book have considered the ideological basis of the market society, and this chapter asks if marketised relations are inevitable . Inspired by Lars Engle’s assertion that Shakespeare viewed ‘social interaction as an economy’ 1 and treated ‘truth, knowledge, and certainty as relatively stable goods in such an economy rather than gateways out of it’, 2 this chapter offers a critique of commodification through a reading of King Lear , and in so doing asks if it is possible to exit the market mechanism. For Colin Burrow, King Lear is an enactment of Seneca’s Stoical vision of a society ‘founded on a complex system of exchanges between emotions and material goods’; 3 a system that, if broken down, ‘could unleash the uncontrolled rage of a would-be tyrant who can control nothing, not even his own self ’. 4 According to this reading of the play, Lear’s madness is born from the breakdown of the system of exchanges between master and servant, parent and child – a phenomenon underpinned by Seneca’s theory on gratitude and the debt we owe those from whom we have derived emotional and material benefit. For David Hawkes, however, Lear’s error is to assume that subjective phenomena can be quantified in the same way that material goods can be quantified, as, he says, to view love in quantitative terms is to alter its very nature and degrade it to the level of exchange-value. 5 By assigning “cash value” to his daughters’ expression of gratitude for the paternal care he has shown them, Lear embarks upon a calamitous journey into the market system, making King Lear a useful lens through which to consider education’s direction of travel.
