"Nothing will come of nothing, speak again." The nothingness of language and being in King Lear.

Does Cordelia's simple "Nothing" bring an entire kingdom to ruin? From Cordelia's silence to the Fool's relentless wordplay, language itself becomes the medium through which Lear's authority, identity, and kingdom are gradually hollowed out.

By: Coach Ken

Introduction:

Why does King Lear fly into a fit of rage when Cordelia answers his extortions of praise and love with nothing? What bearing, then, does language have upon Lear’s descent into nothingness and losses as the play develops? Nothing will come of nothing, for nothingness proliferates in surplus in the play: Lear, upon being destabilised by Cordelia's verbal paucity and "nothingness", is then set on a path of destruction that leads to the tragic conclusion of the play. Language, in this regard, enacts a series of losses even as the illocutionary agent (Lear) constructs narratives, boundaries, or identities about himself and others in an attempt to establish a stable sense of self. This essay argues that Lear’s insistence on the power of language and speech to constitute reality, and identity, only returns him to the central lack and nothingness that constitutes language and being itself - for power, identity, kingdom indeed dissolves into nothing in King Lear.

The hollow centre of language and Lear's power

King Lear is deeply suspicious of language in its ability to construct and present truth, exposing the inherent nothingness, or lack, that resides at the centre of language and Lear’s kingly authority that precisely demands verbal flattery to sustain itself. Particularly, the verbal performances of flattery offered by Goneril and Regan in the opening scenes are clearly viewed with suspicion by Cordelia and Kent, and lends itself to audience skepticism. Goneril’s profession of love is couched in paradoxical terms that invites a skeptical response from its auditor about the veracity of her speech, “Sir, I love you more than word can wield the matter/ [...] / A love that makes breath poor, and speech unable”. (1.1.54 – 60) Here, Goneril expresses an inexpressible love through words, waxes in luxuriating glibness, yet disavows the very potency and ability of language to capture her purported love for Lear. While paradox can enhance rhetorical effect by suggesting that Goneril’s love cannot be captured completely through language, thus precisely affirming the supreme magnitude of her love, one cannot help but detect the insincerity that lies within Goneril’s speech.

One can also consider other contextual clues in the scene which disrupts the veracity of this purported profession of love. Neither can the audience forget that Goneril’s flattery responds to a kingly instruction to perform speech, “Goneril,/Our eldest born, speak first” (1.1.53 – 60) , and produce a script in accordance with the signification structure that constitutes Lear’s authority. In contrast, Cordelia’s love is marked by silence or a parsimony of words. In her aside, “What shall Cordelia speak? Love, and be silent” (1.1.62) , Cordelia’s love is presented through a performative verb, conjuring an action in effect. Taken with the ontological affirmation of “be[ing] silent”, both features suggest a refusal to the verbal pronouncement of love. In this regard, to speak about love, to perform love through spoken language into the world, precisely undermines the very possibility and sincerity of love, for Cordelia “cannot heave/[her] heart into [her mouth]”(1.1.91–92). The hefty presence of the organic heart contrasts with the hollowness and absence of sincerity that Kent later observes in her verbose “empty-hearted” (1.1.154) sisters. As such, Cordelia’s refusal to flatter King Lear in asserting the inadequacy and negativity of speech, “Nothing” (1.1.89), paradoxically conveys the positive presence of substance and of love, yet resists any legible registration in Lear’s language and syntax of kingly authority which demands a verbal performance of sycophancy via false speech. In so doing, Cordelia refuses to partake in the king’s economy of power/authority that is reinforced through speech/language as currency, exposing the hollowness not only of words or language, but the words that constitute Lear's very basis of kingly authority. 

Nothing, indeed, comes of nothing: Dismantling King Lear's kingdom and authority

Indeed, Lear’s insistence on language and discursive construction of reality is a fatalistic task, for he enacts the nothingness of language that proliferates and begets more nothingness. In other words, nothing does come of nothing, the word "nothing" generates more of nothing(ness). Returning to Act 1 Scene 1, Shakespeare’s insistence on “nothing” by way of repetition is fascinating and seductive:

LEAR: [...] Speak.

CORDELIA: Nothing, my lord.

LEAR: Nothing?

CORDELIA: Nothing. 

LEAR: Nothing will come of nothing, speak again. (1.1.86–90)

Here, the seductive power of Cordelia’s assertion of the negative “nothing” lies in Lear’s desperation to clarify her words and construct meaning, to turn the negative into positive, to make something out of the word "nothing". When Lear insists on exacting Cordelia’s verbal performance of flattery and love to reinforce his kingly authority, his suggestion that “[n]othing will come of nothing” becomes a repetitive, ironic self-parody. Indeed, nothing comes of nothing, because when Cordelia asserts that there is nothing she can say, Lear’s replies to her negatory statement can only compulsively circle around the language of nothingness. In this regard, not only does Lear fail to exact the language of flattery which will reify his kingly authority, he momentarily becomes a vessel of linguistic repetition, reproducing Cordelia’s professed paucity as she declares that there is “nothing” that she can say. Hence, through the repetition of “nothing”, and Lear’s desperate overinistence on the power of language to construct meaning and substance, Shakespeare taunts of the hollow centre that lies in language and power, negatory/emptying as it is productive, tragic as it is comic. 

In this desperate insistence on the power of language to enact his will, Lear can only reproduce the disruptive, negating signifier – Cordelia’s “nothing” – that unsettles/dismantles his illusion of wielding total command over speech which affirms his kingly authority and identity.  His subsequent issuances of commands, including the banishment of Cordelia and Kent, are predicated on the performance of nothingness and ontological erasure as he indeed sows the seeds of his own undoing, banishing his loyal servant and only loyal, true-hearted daughter, no less through verbal commands and language itself. This is also seen when Kent’s substantive advice falls on deaf ears “on thy life, no more!”(1.1.164). The language of hollowness and absence, first articulated by Cordelia as “nothing” then transfigures into Lear’s destructive announcement of “no more”, a rejection of wisdom and perspectival clarity outside of Lear’s narcissistic subjectivity – an indulgence in blindness and the hollow nothingness that lies in his demands of sycophantic flattery through language.

If Cordelia first exposes the hollowness that lies at the centre of Lear's economy of speech, the Fool subsequently transforms "nothing" into an object of sustained linguistic play. Occupying the role of licensed truth-teller, the Fool repeatedly dismantles Lear's assumption that speech constitutes his kingly authority, reducing language instead to mere "breath", mocking his foolish dismantling and material division/loss of his kingdom:

KENT

This is nothing, Fool.

FOOL

Then ’tis like the breath of an unfee’d lawyer. You

gave me nothing for ’t.—Can you make no use of nothing,

nuncle?

LEAR

Why no, boy. Nothing can be made out of nothing.

Here, when Kent reduces the Fool's speech to "nothing", "nothing" is then compared to the "breath of an unfee'd lawyer" through simile, whereby the comparison reveals that speech without the material conditions that authorise is merely empty breath: An unpaid lawyer has no incentive to plead, and thus his breath produces no legal effect; his words remain idle utterance rather than performative action. The Fool's jest therefore exposes the contingency of linguistic authority: words do not possess inherent power, but derive their force from the social and political structures that legitimise them. This irony strikes at the heart of Lear's division of his kingdom - Having already relinquished the material foundations of his sovereignty, Lear nevertheless continues to demand that language alone affirm his identity and authority. Lear's insistence upon verbal professions of love thus appears futile, for he seeks to preserve symbolically, through speech, the very power he has already materially surrendered by dividing his kingdom. Indeed, it is thus apt, the very "nothing" that Lear repeats earlier returns to taunt Lear and the reader at this juncture, for Lear again repeats the earlier adage that "[n]othing can be made out of nothing". In repeating the maxim, Lear cannot escape the disruptive signifier that first unsettled his authority; instead, he compulsively reproduces it. "Nothing" thus proves strangely productive, proliferating through repetition and returning at each stage of Lear's political and psychological disintegration. What began as Cordelia's refusal of verbal performance now becomes the very language through which Lear's emptied authority can be articulated.

In this regard, language produces and (re-)enacts the destruction and dismantling of King Lear's very own kingdom and kingly authority. Through language, the play dramatises and enacts a series of divisions into nothing, reflecting in the very language of the play the political division of the kingdom. The Fool's invocation of the egg imagery extends this dismantling through a material metaphor of division:

FOOL

No, faith, lords and great men will not let me. If I

had a monopoly out, they would have part on ’t. And

ladies too— they will not let me have all fool to

myself; they’ll be snatching. Give me an egg, nuncle,

and I’ll give thee two crowns.

LEAR

What two crowns shall they be?

FOOL

Why—after I have cut the egg i' th' middle and eat up

the meat—the two crowns of the egg. When thou clovest

thy crown i' th' middle, and gavest away both parts,

thou borest thy ass o' th' back o'er the dirt. Thou

hadst little wit in thy bald crown when thou gavest thy

golden one away.

Having cracked the egg and consumed its contents, only the two shell "crowns" remain, just as Lear has hollowed out his kingdom by dividing it away. Yet this image also stages the paradoxical productivity of nothingness. The unified egg generates "two crowns" only through its own destruction: division produces a numerical surplus while simultaneously emptying the whole of its inner substance. The Fool's language thus reproduces, at the level of metaphor, Lear's political act of partition, dramatising how language itself enacts the hollowing-out of kingly authority into empty signs. That emptiness of the kingdom and between the egg-crowns then returns to indict Lear's own empty crown as well, for he "hadst little wit in thy bald crown when [he] gavest [his] golden/one away", shorn of wit (and perhaps a little bald on his crown/scalp). Here, for all of the fool's jesting of the king's foolishness and hollowness, we are yet again faced with the surplus of meaning that arises from the language of nothingness and loss, for the "golden one" ostensibly refers to Lear's relinquished crown, the phrase also recalls Cordelia, the daughter whom Lear has banished. Shakespeare's pun therefore performs the pluralisation/multiplication of loss through the very act of language: in dividing his kingdom, Lear simultaneously alienates the very daughter who embodies the substance and sincerity absent from his other children. The fool, through multiple utterances, reiterates through different linguistic, verbal expressions, that repeatedly enacts the productive nothingness of "nothing" itself.

FOOL [To LEAR]

Thou wast a pretty fellow when thou hadst no

need to care for her frowning. Now thou art an O without

a figure. I am better than thou art now. I am a fool.

Thou art nothing.

[To GONERIL]

Yes, forsooth, I will hold my tongue. So

your face bids me, though you say nothing.

Mum, mum,

He that keeps nor crust nor crumb,

Weary of all, shall want some.

[indicates LEAR] That’s a shelled peascod.

The Fool's numerous metaphors here relentlessly reduce Lear to empty forms stripped of their constitutive substance. The progression is significant: the emptied egg, the hollow numeral, and the shelled pod are all containers from which their animating contents have been removed. Lear likewise retains the outward signs of kingship—its name, title, and symbolic authority—while having surrendered the material conditions that once gave those signs force. Language therefore does not merely describe Lear's political dissolution; it performs and reiterates it, each metaphor enacting anew the evacuation of substance into nothing. Shakespeare's sustained chain of images thus reveals that language does not transparently represent reality but actively produces it through repetition. The Fool's verbal play continually returns Lear to the absence first articulated by Cordelia's "nothing", demonstrating that once this negating signifier enters the symbolic economy of the play, it proliferates through ever-new linguistic forms. Nothing, paradoxically, comes of nothing because "nothing" itself proves endlessly productive, generating the successive losses of kingdom, authority, identity, and finally Lear's very being.

So too do Goneril and Regan, through language and material, begin to chip away at Lear's very substance of being by stripping him of his soldiers:

LEAR

Made you my guardians, my depositaries,

But kept a reservation to be followed

With such a number.What, must I come to you

With five and twenty, Regan? Said you so?

REGAN

And speak ’t again, my lord. No more with me.

LEAR

Those wicked creatures yet do look well favored

When others are more wicked. Not being the worst

Stands in some rank of praise.

[to GONERIL]I’ll go with thee.

Thy fifty yet doth double five and twenty,

And thou art twice her love.

GONERIL

Hear me, my lord.

What need you five and twenty, ten, or five

To follow in a house where twice so many

Have a command to tend you?

REGAN

What need one?

Here, the Fool's description of Lear as an "O without a figure" earlier anticipates one of the play's most striking linguistic enactments of subtraction. In the dispute over Lear's retinue, language itself progressively diminishes his identity through numerical devaluation: "fifty" becomes "five and twenty", then "ten", then "five", before Regan's devastating and most hollowing question, "What need one?" Through this sequence of numerical reductions, Shakespeare enacts political dispossession into verbal form. Lear's authority is not merely stripped away in action but gradually counted out of existence through language itself, until even the singular "one" is rendered superfluous. In other words, this exchange is not merely a practical negotiation over the number of attendants Lear may retain, but a verbal dismantling of the symbolic and material structures that sustain his authority. Speech does not simply record Lear's loss but actively produces it, reducing the king to what the Fool had already named—an "O without a figure", an empty sign retaining only the outward form of authority after its substance has vanished into nothing.

The feebleness of Lear's own words and sense of self - An internal lack.

It is fitting then that Shakespeare reveals the impotency of Lear’s performative utterances. In the midst of the ongoing “[Storm still]”, Lear commands a series of performative verbs:

Blow, wind, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow, 

You cataracts and hurricanos, spout 

Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks! (3.2.1–3)

The directives issued at the storm suggests Lear exercising a form of verbal agency, or illocutionary authority, in commanding the storm’s destructive movement and force. Is the storm, however, not already raging without Lear’s illocutionary interpellations? One could consider storm’s force as external to Lear’s agency, as the stage directions that open the scene suggests that the storm and Lear’s contention with it begin in media res. Read this way, Lear’s commands only suggest his powerlessness, for the storm is external to his sovereignty, impervious to his linguistic power.

Conversely, Lear figures a narrative of struggle with the external world to preserve his sense of self. After all, the gentlemen’s earlier description of Lear’s struggle with the storm, “Contending with the fretful elements” (3.1.4), lends itself to polysemic richness and ambiguity, for “contending” suggests both a figurative struggle and a verbal exercise of argument and debate –  a struggle of words or a struggle using words, a struggle to be heard and then triumph. In this way, one can suggest that Lear’s verbal struggle with the storm constructs a script out of the storm, to fashion it into a narrative of personal struggle, and ascribe his existential struggles significance greater than his private self. To do so, he reads signs of his disrespectful daughters into the chaotic storm through language itself: 

... Why then, let fall

Your horrible pleasure. Here I stand, your slave—

A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man.

But yet I call you servile ministers,

That will with two pernicious daughters joined

Your high engendered battles 'gainst a head

So old and white as this. Oh, ho! 'Tis foul.

Here, Lear verbally/linguistically constructs binaries between Lear’s self and the externall world, narrativising a conspiratorial union of the natural world and his wicked daughters in opposition to his frail self. The maintenance of this divide between self and other thus affirms Lear’s existence, debilitated as it may be. 

He later finds strength in Act 3 Scene 4, in which he strengthens the association between the tempest and his treasonous daughters, and thus strengthens their opposition to his sense of self: 

No, I will weep no more. In such a night, 

To shut me out? Pour on, I will endure 

In such a night as this! O Regan, Goneril, 

…

O that way madness lies. Let me shun that, 

No more of that. (3.3.20–25)

Lear conflates Regan and Goneril with the disorderly “madness” and the enervating storm that “[p]ours on”, presenting them as external forces meant to be resisted by Lear, in order to define and construct himself as the subject of hardy endurance. This distinction is reminiscent of Lear’s earlier figuration of himself as the masculine subject assaulted by femininity earlier in the play: “And let not women’s weapons, water drops,/Stain my man’s cheeks!”. Here, Lear’s tears are figured as feminine and external – tears that are alien and "other" to his masculine personal self, thereby an unwelcome source of corruptive “stain”. In this regard, the feminine assault of tears, external to Lear, returns in the force of the wet storm which he resists verbally -- for the wet storm is an embodiment of the feminine threat against which Lear must resist to defend and legitimise his very own existence as a masculine, rational and kingly subject.

Yet, Lear’s entrapment in chaos exemplifies King Lear as a tragedy of impossible meaning and identity, in which the linguistic binaries that construct Lear’s identity collapse into nothingness. This essay suggested earlier that the feminised tears against which Lear struggles are external embodiments of the tempestuous, conspiratorial assault from his daughters-as-storm. What if the storm is instead made of Lear’s own tears instead, rather than external, feminine impositions of chaos and assault? Indeed, the linguistic binaries and differences through which Lear constructs himself are in effect false binaries, for the external, feminine chaos that destabilises his manhood originates from within:

But yet thou art my flesh, my blood, my daughter

Or rather a disease that’s in my flesh,

Which I must needs call mine: thou art a boil,

A plague-sore, or embossed carbuncle, 

In my corrupted blood. (2.4.243–247)

Here, Shakespeare destabilises the boundaries between the interiority and externality of Lear’s body, for he is now the source and host of his daughter-as-disease, complicit in constituting his daughters, having carried them into existence. Furthermore, the gendered binaries of masculine and feminine also collapse when Lear also locates the chaotic forces of femininity within himself as he grieves earlier over Kent’s imprisonment abetted by Cornwall and Regan : “O! How this mother swells up toward my heart;/Hysterica passio! Down, thou climbing sorrow!” (2.3.59–60). Like the plague-sore that bulges out of the body, so too is Lear’s overwhelming sorrow actively and uncontrollably expanding here. His sorrowful state is named, and feminised, as “Hysterica passio”, responsible for hysteria and melancholy that is associated with the diseased and wandering organ of the uterus. In this regard, King Lear occupies a fertile, generative body that is not only masculine but also feminised. He identifies his simultaneous vulnerability to, and ownership of, the maternal womb that is internal, rather than external, to his masculine body and self. 

As such, the feminised storm that blinds Lear in “impetuous blasts with eyeless rage”, returns as the feminised hell–womb of Act 4 Scene 6: 

Down from the waist they are centaurs,

Though women all above.

But to the girdle do the gods inherit.

Beneath is all the fiends'; there’s hell, there’s darkness,

There’s the sulphurous pit— burning, scalding,

Stench, consumption! Fie, fie, fie, pah, pah! (4.6.126–131)

Describing the feminine bodily sites of reproduction as hell, Lear finds himself subsumed in "darkness" and overwhelming, destructive "consumption". Here, it is also difficult to ignore the parallels between the destructive, consumptive threat of this hell-womb and the earlier descriptions of the storm that productively and unproductively “mak[es] nothing of” its blinding (and indeed disorienting) "eyeless rage". In this extract then, we see that Lear’s language still demonstrates an attempt to distance himself from the hell-womb that is assigned to the feminine other collectively, “women”, and verbally expels the hell-womb with impassioned plosive exclamations of disgust “pah,pah”. Yet in considering this essay’s earlier claims that Lear’s body is also beholden to the melancholic suffering of his wandering womb, the destructive power of the hell-womb in Act 4 Scene 6 is that internal lack which consumes him from within. In this regard, Lear's very own failure and inadequate sense of self, is indeed an endogenous hollowness -- a violent, destructive threat that originates from within. Alas, all boundaries that constitute Lear’s identity, and his external world, collapse, for nothing can be made out of nothing.