Every Turn of the Wheel: Circular Time and Cordelia's Revolt: from William Shakespeare to the British Enlightenment
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.33919/esnbu.17.1.1Keywords:
William Shakespeare, King Lear, Tudor history, Stuart history, English Civil War, David Hume, Enlightenment, political pluralism, secularism, theocracyAbstract
This article argues that William Shakespeare's King Lear anticipates core political dynamics of the English Civil War (1641-49), and philosophical tenets of the British Enlightenment in John Locke and David Hume. It analyzes three principle and competing paradigms of public authority in King Lear: theodicy, nature, and the autonomy of thought. The play is historically contextualized within the 16th century. King Lear, moreover, portends revolutionary new thought patterns: the centerless universe of modern astronomy, and human embeddedness in fluid nature without fixed identity. Three variants on the concept of 'nothing' - existential, social, and philosophical - interweave the cosmic and political threads, based on a circular temporality. Shakespeare's character, Cordelia, affirms the everyday over the cosmic, and the sociological over the metaphysical. King Lear depicts a profound moral trans-valuation in early modern history, whose shifting temporal horizons remain central also to contemporary politics.
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