‘STATE’ AND SELFHOOD

“To shake all cares and business off our state,
Conferring them on younger years, while we
Unburthen’d crawl toward death”

          Throughout the first speech, Lear makes claims about both age and statehood. His central concern, his “darker purpose,” is the dividing up of his kingdom. But he is concerned as well here with aging and death. One of the brilliant elements of the play, and of this speech in particular, is the way in which these two worlds become related or even confused. Using the 1608 Quarto’s “off our state” in place of the Folio’s “from our age” lets us play on the different meanings of the word “state.” On the one hand, the word has the sense of nation, “the body politic as organized for supreme civil rule and government” (OED 29a). Taking this meaning, it appears that Lear wants to remove the worries that may upset his kingdom and government; this is similar to his wish a few lines later, “that future strife / May be prevented now” (43-4, 1623 Folio text).

          Yet we also read “state” in its more general sense, referring to a “condition or way of existing” (OED I). In this view, Lear refers not here to his kingdom’s government but to his own state of being. This state of being on one level may be inflected by age, as the following lines emphasize (“younger,” “death”). Lear is at a particular stage of life in which he no longer wants to be burdened by such cares. It can also refer to Lear’s mental or emotional state, a fact that will take on greater significance later in the play, as Lear’s connection to reality and to his own emotions begins to unravel.

          This double meaning is important because it puts statehood and age into dialogue with one another. Indeed, if one includes “off our state,” I believe it is best to preserve the Quarto’s “younger years” and the Folio’s “Unburthen’d crawl toward death;” Lear reaches for weighty goals, but he can articulate them only in regard to his own mortality and age. This shift occurs again at the end of the speech, when Lear cites the “Interest of territory / cares of state” (49, 1623 F text) in asking his daughters about their love for him. Statehood occupies his mind, but it is inextricably bound for him to more personal anxieties about death, fatherhood, and love. The personal and royal realms overlap for Lear, and he conceives of his self and his kinghood as essentially the same. As we will see over the course of the play there is wide disconnect between these two identities.