Clad in rags: eco-psychology and trans-textuality in the Lear stories

Résumé 0

The analysis is based on a limited dramatic and historic corpus meant to show how clothing and environmental intra- and extra-dramatic contexts determine different analytical perspectives and interpretations. The study focusses on the episode describing King Lear’s escape from his royal court and from his two elder daughters’, his passage to France, and his return to England. These sequences are narrated in various chronicles, and in the anonymous play performed during the 1590s by the Queen’s and Sussex’s Men, at the Rose Theatre. In his refashioning of hypo-texts, William Shakespeare chose to cut them off, and to replace them by the Gloucester scenes, by Lear’s and Cordelia’s deaths and their consequences. His textual and clothing stripping and patching, entailed new genre and denouement. Reshaped and refashioned, W. Shakespeare’s tragedy excluded Lear’s survival, his regeneration and rehabilitation. Metaphorically and physically deprived of proper clothing and protection, made naked or bare, W. Shakespeare’s tragic king is condemned to be subjected to appalling weather conditions and ordeals. By stripping the story from these episodes, Shakespeare also divested Lear from sartorial reparation, as he was doing away with a well-set protocol based on the Franks’ medieval ‘habits’ (in the double sense of garments and rituals). His tragedy undid Lear’s initial Man-to-Nature and Man-to-Culture relationships. King Lear is the story of a king who is reduced to nothing through the process of his being divested of his clothes and his regal status. Changing his environment on his landing on the French soil also transformed his comportment and temper, and changed his lot.