ABSTRACT
Borne along around allegories, or dragged behind them like a shadow, is a structure of attitudes, a trailing history of demands which follow them, like a company of faithful retainers, even into the wilderness. A cosmic, yet portable theater crystallizes around even small traces of allegorical expression, forcing the world into new forms around them, hollowing out or animating spaces once solid. Allegory in the end comes to compete with its own creations; it does battle with its own residues. The demon of allegory must sometimes “course his own shadow for a traitor”—to quote the fiend-haunted Edgar in King Lear, who, despite his desolation, his manic and mantic gestures, offers fragments of personification and Aesopian emblem such as let us take him for an allegorist: “Who gives anything to Poor Tom? Whom the foul fiend hath led through fire and through flame, through ford and whirlpool, o’er bog and quagmire ... false of heart, light of ear, bloody of hand; hog in sloth, fox in stealth, wolf in greediness, dog in madness, lion in prey.”1 Here, allegory seems to belong, if only for an interval, to the domain of derangement, the fiction of demonic possession. Allegory is a mask of madness.
