ABSTRACT
I argue that in King Lear, the transformation of the language of love into a rhetoric of power and manipulation results in tragic outcomes for the human and material world alike. The fracturing of word from gift culminates in a situation in which relationships between self, other and world are reduced to a ploy for power in a hostile universe. The play’s language, I argue, creatively reaches beyond such limitations to find a kind of doxological expression that can re-weave a bond between human beings, words and world.
