Lakhasly

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DONALD C. FREEMAN

consistently follows another, we hypothesise that the two events are linked by causation.In King Lear, Gloucester's cynical account to Kent of his sons' parentage establishes the play's competing schemata of BALANCE and LINKS.Links of divine ordination and divine love join the elements of the Great Chain which, shorn of its theology, is alive and well today (see Lakoff and Turner 1989: 160-213).The lion is still the king of the beasts, and gold is still the premier investment commodity, whereas platinum, rarer and more expensive, is merely an industrial commodity.Gloucester demonstrates that like Lear, he understands parental relationships through the CHILDREN ARE FINANCIAL ASSETS metaphor, one that the audience is shortly to see played out fully in the ritual of Lear's retirement.These two powerful perceptual structures give a local habitation and a name to previously unjustified and unrelated critical commonplaces.For example, it is a staple of Shakespearean criticism to say that in the opening scene the playwright establishes the atmosphere of a play's world.What are established, in fact, are the play's dominating schemata.

4

DONALD C. FREEMAN

consistently follows another, we hypothesise that the two events are linked by causation. Links of divine ordination and divine love join the elements of the Great Chain which, shorn of its theology, is alive and well today (see Lakoff and Turner 1989: 160-213). The lion is still the king of the beasts, and gold is still the premier investment commodity, whereas platinum, rarer and more expensive, is merely an industrial commodity.

These two powerful perceptual structures give a local habitation and a name to previously unjustified and unrelated critical commonplaces. For example, it is a staple of Shakespearean criticism to say that in the opening scene the playwright establishes the atmosphere of a play's world. What are established, in fact, are the play's dominating schemata. In King Lear, Gloucester's cynical account to Kent of his sons' parentage establishes the play's competing schemata of BALANCE and LINKS. Gloucester demonstrates that like Lear, he understands parental relationships through the CHILDREN ARE FINANCIAL ASSETS metaphor, one that the audience is shortly to see played out fully in the ritual of Lear's retirement.

His [Edmund's] breeding, Sir, hath been at my charge:

But I have a son [Edgar], Sir, by order of law, some year elder than this, who yet is no dearer to my account: (I.1.8, 18-19)

The 'charge' that Edmund's breeding constitutes for Gloucester is an analogy from estate accounting, which used the so-called 'Charge and Discharge' method, in which, Green (1930: 47) writes, 'the executor "charged" himself with the estate and "discharged" himself of disbursements properly chargeable to the estate. Edmund, a bastard, is not a financial asset but a cost item that it has embarrassed Gloucester to acknowledge; Edgar, though not an embarrassment (a cost to Gloucester's reputation) is no more highly valued in the balance sheet of his father's affections. From the start of the play, familial LINKS are debased; children are bastards or 'by order of law'; the relationship of child to father, an important source of LINK metaphors in the play, begins with what will result in Edmund's perversion of his filial duty. Charges and accounts, sons and daughters, bastards and legal progeny (and what ought to be but are not the same thing, natural and unnatural children) - these seemingly unrelated facts of language and plot spring from the same impulses: the BALANCE and LINKS

schemata.

These competing schemata structure a significant portion of the play's

metaphors that traditional accounts of the play's language leave unrelated. More

significantly, they and the analyses they make possible, constitute previously

undiscovered empirical evidence for relating the play's figurative language to

such other structural elements as narrative, plot, and particular constellations of

characters. For example, many critics have found parallel structure or balance in

the fact that while in the sub-plot Edmund gouges out Gloucester's eyes but