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3 - Reversing Good and Evil: Counterfactual Thinking and King Lear

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2016

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Summary

From a position of post-facto hindsight, Cordelia has to die in order for the tragic effect to take hold. To ask ‘what if Cordelia had lived?’ would be to erase King Lear's tragedy. Yet Cordelia's death is not necessary within the world of the play. Indeed, Edmund's conversion in Act 5, his desire to take back the writ on her life, exposes the stark possibility of her living. Yet just as Hamlet's delay and Claudiuse's confession are linked, so too is Cordelia's death intimately related to our perception of Edmund's desire to take back the writ on her life. What if Edmund had not done so? The play, at least prima facie, would seem to make more sense. Shakespeare's insertion into the play of Edmund's change of heart risks the play's intelligibility. The question which follows is not necessarily why does she then die, or what sort of play would we have had Cordelia lived, but why would Shakespeare tempt us with the possibility of her living in the first place? To heighten the sense of devastation at the end?

As an act of radical contingency, seemingly arbitrary, Edmund's conversion seems to be placed in the play as a functional placeholder designed to elicit hope, only then to stifle it for the sake of greater tragic effect. Moreover, both Edmund's conversion and Cordelia's death can be ‘explained’ by appealing to something outside of the play itself – once again, to convention, or the conventions of tragedy. But such appeals counteract the power of these acts as contingent by anchoring them to something we can (only later) interpret as necessary. By an appeal to convention, the possible intelligibility of these acts within the world of the play is denied. Edmund's conversion becomes implausible at the very least, impossible at most. But Lear, having no access or appeal to convention, does not mourn the loss of his daughter any less. He must face the possible unintelligibility of her death, the gratuitous randomness of it.

Moreover, we don't know, or cannot conceive fully of, Cordelia's goodness until the play is over. This play is not like Hamlet, where we intuit some semblance of good and evil from the start and await verification.

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Shakespeare in Hindsight
Counterfactual Thinking and Shakespearean Tragedy
, pp. 67 - 88
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2015

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