King Lear Stoicism Analysis

Insofar I only take Lear as the counter-example of stoicism. It is because the other side of Lear – Albany and Edgar, serve for a more important example: the frustration of stoicism. From Frye’s point of view, Albany and Edgar stand for the moralist side, preaching the morals and seeing the world as harmonious cosmos. However, as Jonathan Bate suggests in chapter 22 of Soul of the Age, their stoic belief does not earn them what they expect: Gloucester does all one can enduring his suffering, but still fails to sustain his will to live in the end: “No further, sir; a man may rot even here”; and in Edgar’s case, his stoic moral of enduring to Gloucester: ‘Men must endure/ Their going hence even as their coming hither. / Ripeness is all.’ ironically

echoes the word “ripeness” with Gloucester’s death in the end, which is partially caused by Edgar. Albany shows how ridiculous he is when he believes in justice of god and concerns with reform the kingdom in the very end of the play.
On the other hand, Lear questions this presupposition of orderly cosmology. His attitude presents himself as a much more skeptical figure in this play. When confronting Edgar-Tom, Lear utters his famous lines: “thou art the thing itself,” which refers to a being of non-stoic nature. That is, stripped of the “social” nature. The animalilty, or the bare life, shed light on the understanding of Lear and Edgar’s situation and of the tragic end.

The anti-stoicism: Corporeality
For discussing the contradiction between the Stoics’ standpoint and Lear’s, we must clarify the stoic cosmology.

The world, as the stoic imagines, is a wheel driven by nature, a wheel which gods neatly control. In King Lear the summoning of gods is not only rhetoric of prayer, the name of gods shows that there is a systematic world-view for men to follow. The efforts of learning astrology, as Seneca suggests, is a path to, ultimately, caring oneself. We must not learn the useless knowledge like history of foreign heroes, or the conquerors, because these stories may exaggerate the power of human and subordinate the drive of nature. The true greatness lies in the soul, the calmness of the soul that understands the power of nature and surrenders to it, that is, to know ourselves as a human being, no more no less, and thus we reach the truth of our subjectivity (Foucault 273). By this principle we might interpret the stoic world as oppressing, however, it still has some difference when comparing with the world in King Lear. The reasoning still plays a major role in the stoic world; although nature is powerful, it operates itself by reason, and thus human can through proper practice reach to the ultimate calmness, and gain the peace. That is why Lear and others often resort to gods for comfort. The stoic world has its own logic of cause-and effect, through which human can have their justice. By this token, the reaction of Kent, Albany and Edgar has a well explanation: they remain calm because they think the world wheels in its correct path, in hands of

gods.