King Lear I.i.146-160
Unmannerly Kent
KENT [Let it fall rather, though the fork invade The region of my heart.] Be Kent unmannerly When Lear is mad. What wouldst thou do, old man? Think’st thou that duty shall have dread to speak When power to flattery bows? To plainness honor’s bound When majesty falls to folly. Reserve thy state, And in thy best consideration check This hideous rashness. Answer my life my judgment, Thy youngest daughter does not love thee least, Nor are those empty-hearted whose low sounds Reverb no hollowness. LEAR Kent, on thy life, no more. KENT My life I never held but as a pawn To wage against thine enemies, nor fear to lose it, Thy safety being motive. LEAR Out of my sight! KENT See better, Lear, and let me still remain The true blank of thine eye.
”Be Kent unmannerly / When Lear is mad”: this is a nice small-scale instance of Shakespeare’s rhythmic subtlety. The parallels between the two clauses underscore the difference between them. Kent is “unmannerly” — rude or inappropriate — but the four syllables of unmannerly emphasize all the more starkly the violent monosyllable mad. (This is perhaps an example of a feature of English rhythm called “stress timing.”) The word is shocking.
But probably not as shocking (at least to a seventeenth century audience) as what comes next. Kent, who has just catalogued all the ways that he is subordinate to Lear now becomes unmannerly indeed when he addresses him, at length, in the informal second person singular: “What wouldst thou do, old man?” This is not how you address a king, not how anyone else in the play addresses him — except the Fool. Lear may go back and forth between the first-person singular and the we of majesty, but no on else is supposed to do that. When Kent does, he reduces Lear to an “old man” indeed — the opposite of the formal and majestic state that Lear is failing to retain. Lear thinks his age makes him venerable, but there’s nothing remotely respectful (nothing Confucian) about Kent’s address to this soon to be almost literally stateless person, exiled to the exterior but also a bare particular unprotected by some abstract Platonic status. Unaccommodated man, the lone “thing itself” (III.iv.104) is a token without a type, stripped of any germ of meaning, no longer a representation of a grand universal, no longer the manifestation of some timeless ideal or general being, of which the grandeur of majesty would be the highest form.
Through his language Kent tries to draw Lear’s fire away from Cordelia. He intervenes to make himself the focus of Lear’s anger. Doubling down on the word Lear introduced — plainness (“Let pride, which she calls plainness, marry her”) — he asserts: “To plainness honor’s bound.” The line could be read simply as a defense of Cordelia’s assertion that she is a plain speaker. But it’s important to note that Cordelia never used any form of the the word, never appealed to plainness. It’s Lear who claims that she did. So Kent’s rejoinder may also mean — and Kent makes this its primary meaning — that it’s Kent who is bound by his own honor to be plain. (In I.iv, when he reappears in disguise, he will list, among his attributes, the fact that he can “deliver a plain message bluntly.” And Lear will finally speak “plainly” when he achieves understatement in Act IV, again addressing both Cordelia and Kent: “To deal plainly / I fear I am not in my perfect mind” [IV.7.62-63])
Using abstract nouns like duty, power, flattery, and then honor as the subjects of his clauses makes those nouns metonymies. The majesty that falls to folly is clearly a metonymy for Lear, but honor might refer to himself — he’s the one bound to speak plainly — even as it might refer to Cordelia, if her own honor required her to speak plainly when Lear asks for her declaration of love. He means, by the ambiguity of the metonymy (or at least by the abstractness of his words) to make this a moral issue that he is now the one to exemplify, rather than a personal issue about Cordelia’s behavior, and her honor or lack of it. Majesty can only mean the king himself, but duty and honor are more general, referring to all who do their duty, all who behave with honor. This is another reason to singularize Lear — “What wouldst thou do, old man?” This single, lone individual opposes himself to the more universal abstract quality manifested in the behavior of anyone else, anyone who can show duty, honor, plainness, or indeed flattery. And because more than one person can be plain or dutiful or honorable, Kent can replace Cordelia as the representation of the things that Lear is wrongly condemning.
Kent is willing to stake his life on the accuracy of his judgment — but whom is he to answer to? “Answer my life my judgment” means if his judgment is wrong he’s willing to give up his life. Lear picks up on that when he threatens him with death if he continues, “On thy life, no more” (no more echoing the way Cordelia loves him “according to my bond, no more nor less”), but Kent is willing to cast away his life as ‘twere a trifle in order to save Lear from his enemies — his primary enemy now being Lear himself.
Lear’s vicious but also half helpless response — “Out of my sight” — elicits Kent’s great line: “See better Lear.” Remaining the true blank of his eye is an odd but clear metaphor: the blank is the target or bull’s eye an archer shoots at, so the blank of his eye would he the target Lear’s vision should focus on. Kent’s image continues the archery metaphor at the start of their interchange: “The bow is bent and drawn,” and Kent keeps up the binary metaphor of archer and target. No matter which one is which, the confrontation he insists on is between himself and Lear, so that Kent can distract him from Cordelia.
Much more significant in the long run, of course, is the intensification of the imagery of vision here (which began with Goneril’s saying she loved Lear “dearer than eyesight”). This pattern will continue in the next scene when Gloucester makes his silly joke about not needing spectacles to see the letter that Edmund declares is “nothing,” heading towards its grim culmination in Gloucester’s blinding. But the greater blindness in the play is the self-isolating refusal of the truth — blank1 though the truth will become.
Shakespeare usually uses the word blank to mean target, but will also uses it in the more modern sense you’ll find in Milton, or Wordsworth’s “solitude or blank desertion,” as when Aeneas calls Achilles “blank as nothing,” as opposed to Hector’s infinitude in Troilus and Cressida.