‘I’ll able them’

In King Lear, virtue is something that can be ‘tasted’ (1.2.45). It is also something that can be faked: one can be a ‘simular man of virtue’ while in fact being an ‘incestuous caitiff’ (3.2.54–5) as Edmund demonstrates in the opening act of the play when his forged letter so easily convinces Gloucester that Edgar might wish to kill him. This kind of viciousness derives from and drives a culture of division that severs ‘nature’s’ bonds or the bonds of kinship, as Lear does in the opening scene when he ‘unfriends’ Cordelia and tells her it would have been better had she not been born ‘than not t’have pleas’d [him] better’ (1.1.234). The play's dire opening scene implies that we are to find virtue in conduct that is the opposite of Lear’s: in those who make bonds, rather than break them, or those who seek to make kin with others, and not just within any family unit. Lear's narcissism, which would require others to supply him with a ‘kind nursery’ even as he refuses all reciprocal obligations, makes him a destructive autopoietic figure: a person focused, that is, on the making of the self to the exclusion of the need to meet reciprocal obligations in processes of what Donna Haraway calls sympoiesis, or a making-with others. Pitting those who would sow division against those who would resist it, the play pursues an idea of virtue that is not about the making of the excellent self or the autopoietic, but the making of kin or the sympoietic.

In Haraway's terms, the Shakespearean drama, at least in the form of this play, is ‘tentacular’: it seeks to create filiations that support forms of virtue that are not merely individual, but always also urgently oriented to the interdependence of life forms. As Alasdair MacIntyre notes in After Virtue, in Aristotle's conception, ‘[t]he virtues are precisely those qualities the possession of which will enable an individual to achieve eduaimonia [‘blessedness, happiness, prosperity’] and the lack of which will frustrate his movement toward that telos’. It is, however, ‘the telos of man as a species which determines what human qualities are virtuous’. As several of the other essays in this collection in different ways suggest, virtue is not properly virtue unless its ends are communal or oriented to a shared flourishing.