PREPOTENTIAL CONSTRAINT: EXPRESSION AT A STANDSTILL

Once ‘constraint’ has become a fundamental theme, it is almost impossible to know where it begins or ends. If, in regard to composition, the term has now perhaps acquired a primarily technical signification, it should not be forgotten that it derives from the Latin for binding together, tied, inhibited or compressed. The Oxford English Dictionary gives such meanings as ‘the exercise of force to determine or confine action; coercion, compulsion’; ‘compulsion of circumstances, necessity of the case’; ‘confinement, bound or fettered condition; restriction of liberty or of free action’; ‘pressure of trouble or misfortune; oppression, affliction, distress’. Constraint implies pain, coercion and incarceration, with political, theological and even ontological overtones.

In the two major independent extant printed play texts of Shakespeare's King Lear, the first a 1608 quarto version, the second appearing in the 1623 First Folio – which make Lear a work with at least two different titles, each denominating a different genre – there are also a large number of other variations: missing, extra or different words, lines and punctuation. If the scholarly wrangling over the provenance and significance of these divergences is unlikely to find happy resolution in any foreseeable circumstances, following their vicissitudes returns us to the volatile and violent problematic of constraint.

Indeed, once one starts to ask such questions, it is difficult to stop: not only because we are lacking essential historical details, but because the principles which might enable a decision regarding these ever-differentiating differences are themselves lacking.