Knowing through Nursing: Edgar and the Exercise of Care in King Lear

ABSTRACT

In Shakespeare’s late plays, the arts of care push towards sublime horizons of value out of lived ecologies of virtue nourished by global wisdom traditions. To know by nursing is to intuit in and through the intimate tactility of tending to the birth, growth, healing, or dying of another person a sense of purpose and meaning, of telos or goal, yearnings that both sustain and are supported by philosophies, religions, or world views that gain value by being shared with others: ‘What is your study?’

KEYWORDS:

• Stoicism
• Seneca
• Oikeiosis
• virtue

Acknowledgement

My deep thanks to my partner in spiritual exercise, Unhae Park Langis; to Sheiba Kian Kaufman and Benjamin Parris for pointing me on the track of care; to Miriam Bender, for bibliography and conversations on nursing science; to the two readers and two Special Issue editors of this volume for their generous and helpful readings; and to my physical therapist Dawn Denny and my speech pathologist Teresa Dwight for their care and wisdom.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Citations from King Lear are from Kenneth Muir, ed., King Lear.

2 Markham, Country Contentments, frontispiece.

3 On Cordelia’s virtue ecology, see Sale, ‘Cordelia’s Fire’. For another ecological reading of the passage, see Archer, Turley and Thomas, ‘The Autumn King’, 518–43.

4 On Edgar as romance hero, see Beckwith, Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness, 85–9.

5 Murdoch, Metaphysics, 87, 120.

6 Ibid., 120–1.

7 Parvini, Shakespeare’s Moral Compass, 280–94. On care as a private virtue, see Dolven, ‘Besides Good and Evil’, 12.

8 Accessed 29 June 2020. http://www.latin-dictionary.net/definition/15255/cura-curae.

9 Heidegger, Being and Time, 184–6; 19; 121, 147; Dreyfuss, Skillful Coping.

10 Benner and Chelsea, Expertise in Nursing Practice, 19–20.

11 Dreyfus, Dreyfus and Benner, ‘Implications’.

12 Parris, Vital Strife, 16.

13 Gray, Shakespeare and the Fall of the Roman Republic, 58–9.

14 Cicero, De Finibus, 19:62.

15 Klein, ‘Stoic Argument’, 160.

16 Ibid., 162.

17 Martha Nussbaum tracks the medical analogy in ancient philosophy, which aimed to transform ‘the inner world of belief and desire through rational argument’ by managing the emotions in their cognitive and evaluative aspect, as ‘forms of intentional awareness’. Therapy of Desire, 77–8.

18 On Stoic epistle as preventative medicine, see Gill, ‘Philosophical Therapy’.

19 Foucault, Care of the Self, 44–5.

20 Sellars, Routledge Handbook to the Stoic Tradition, 1–2.

21 Benjamin Parris emphasises the laboring aspects of care in ‘Life and Labor in the House of Care’, 149–65.

22 On the wide domain of virtue before the Enlightenment, see Crocker, Matter of Virtue.

23 Allman, ‘Is caring a virtue?’ 467.

24 Seneca, ‘Letter 75’, 247.

25 Hershinow, Shakespeare and the Truth-Teller, 123–4, 131, 190.

26 Langis, ‘Humankindness’; on ancient scepticism and Buddhism, see McEvilley, Shape of Ancient Thought.

27 Langis links the passage to global wisdom traditions: ‘“Take physic” is the most compressed expression of the idea familiar in both Eastern (Ayurvedic and Buddhist) and Western (Aristotelian-Galenic) mindbody traditions of seeking wholeness in nature (physis)’. ‘Humankindness’, 220.

28 Strier, Unrepentant Renaissance, 50. Kelly Lehtonen argues that Shakespeare ‘violently shatters the philosophical opposition between passion and reason’ associated with Renaissance Neo-Stoic thinkers. ‘Intelligence of Negative Passion’, 261.

29 Sherman, ‘Shakespeare’s Embodied Stoicism’.

30 Heidegger, Being and Time, 185. Heidegger is citing Seneca, Letter 124.

31 Being and Time, 181–3; 185.

32 See commentary by Dressler, Personification and the Feminine, 35.

33 Benner and Chelsea, Expertise in Nursing Practice, 19.

34 Sharp, Midwives Book, 237–8.

35 On the dramatic character of the epistles as the portrait of a philosophical friendship, see Schafer, ‘Seneca’s Epistulae Morales’.

36 Elton locates the commonplace in classical as well as Jewish and Christian writings and argues that ‘Edgar’s remark has a demonstrable Stoic sense’. King Lear and the Gods, 101–3. Richard Strier notes that both Gloucester’s death wish and the ‘gentle’ death that he ultimately undergoes fit within the Senecan paradigm. Unrepentant Renaissance 50–2. Citing this line, Sidney Shankar calls King Lear ‘the apogee of Shakespeare’s Stoicism’, Shakespeare and the Uses of Ideology, 104.

37 Pierre Hadot writes that Marcus Aurelius ‘used writing as a technique or procedure in order to influence himself, and to transform his inner discourse by meditating on the Stoic dogmas and rules of life’. Inner Citadel, 51.

38 Cited by Foucault, Care of the Self, 50.

39 To care is ‘to help that other person come to care for himself, and by becoming responsive to his own need to care to become responsible for his own life’. Mayeroff, On Caring, 13.

40 Annie Loui defines the skills of the physical actor: ‘His or her movements are generated by a complex of internal emotional rhythms, kinetic responses to scene partners, and by the content and rhythm of the text’. Physical Actor, 34.

41 Lupton, ‘Trust in Theatre’.

42 ‘Nursing requires situated cognition in open-ended and underdetermined situations’. Benner and Chelsea, Expertise in Nursing Practice, 413.

43 Suparna Roychoudhury calls it ‘both a compassionate therapy and a “theatre of cruelty.”’ Phantasmatic Shakespeare, 130. Simon Palfrey argues that Gloucester ‘will leap not into forgetfulness, but into memory and recognition’. Poor Tom, 169.

44 Schleiner, ‘Justifying the Unjustifiable’.

45 Thumiger, ‘Therapy of the Word’, 5.

46 Adkison, ‘Voice, Virtue, Veritas’.

47 Thumiger, ‘Therapy of the Word’, 12. On Galen and Stoicism, see Gill, Naturalistic Psychology; and Tieleman, ‘Wisdom and Emotion’.

48 Seneca, Natural Questions, 3.137–8.

49 Cicero, Republic, 89.

50 On taskscapes, see Ingold, ‘Temporality of the Landscape’.

51 Strier, Unrepentant Renaissance, 133.

52 ‘This virtuoso instance of the emptiness of persuasive speech occurs at the cliffs of Dover’. Zitner, ‘King Lear and Its Language’, 30.

53 Murdoch, Metaphysics, 120. On Shakespeare’s Augustinian rejoinder to classical virtue ethics, see Gray, Shakespeare and the Fall of the Roman Republic, 24–7.

54 Harrison, ‘John Donne’.

55 On prudence as Shakespearean virtue, see Unhae Park Langis, Passion, Prudence, and Virtue.

56 Letter 95.44: 386.

57 On care and caritas in nursing science, see Watson, Nursing.

58 Langis, ‘Humankindness’; Kaufman, ‘Care’, 121.