"Of all these bounds, even from this line to this": Shakespeare and His World Testing Us to our Very Limits

Of all these bounds, even from this line to this,

With shadowy forests and with champaigns riched,

With plenteous rivers and wide-skirted meads,

We make thee lady. To thine and Albany's issue

Be this perpetual.

(King Lear 1.1.61-65)1

One of the most familiar loci in the Shakespearean canon, Lear's fractionalization and gifting of his kingdom to his variously unruly daughters offers a key point of entry into a discussion played out vigorously in the cultural debates of early (and late) modernity: the imperatives of bounds, limits, edges in establishing the necessary conditions of human existence.

Paradoxically, but in a manner all too familiar to early modern and more recent audiences, Shakespeare's beleaguered patriarch seeks to assert his own authority by unpicking ancient Britain's political integrity. This ill-fated bid for his own solace is strategically supplemented by the knowledge that the king's own mental integrity has already begun to unravel even before Shakespeare's dramatic narrative is set in motion: "'Tis the infirmity of his age, yet he hath ever but slenderly known himself" (King Lear 1.2.28889). In this way, we are thrust into a readily identifiable environment characterized by concerns with political polarization, cultural fragmentation, porous frontiers, threatened boundaries. indeed, within a short space of time, Lear's spectacular acts of misgovernment unleash a whole host of inexorable powers throughout a tragic universe extraordinarily receptive to diverse sources of chaos and malevolence.

More generally, however, it soon becomes apparent that Shakespeare and his contemporaries returned seemingly compulsively to this anxiety concerning the configuration or, rather, troubled reconfiguration of bodies politic. Such enquiries clearly had the potential to excite frictional energies in audience choices between sympathy and judgement and to probe the often-thorny dilemmas of life lived in society. This persistent querying of the nature of political integrity might be conducted under a host of different terms-geographical, historical, social, legal, racial, somatic, linguistic, soteriological-and made its presence felt in a wide range of genres. It is clearly in evidence in the antecedents to Shakespeare's tragedy, for example, Gorboduc and King Leir. Indeed, the pressing of questions regarding political justice, moral probity, and the bounds of state jurisdictions is frequently associated with the artistic undertaking of tragedy itself, from the practice of ancients to notable early modern examples of...