SOURCE: “Entitled to be King: The Subversion of the Subject in King Lear,” in Literature and Psychology, Vol. 42, Nos. 1-2, 1996, pp. 100-12.

In the essay below, originally published in 1994, Van Pelt applies the theories of Jacques Lacan to King Lear.

Lacan, like Freud before him, continually finds in Shakespeare those revelations which invigorate theory. In this spirit, then, the following study explores not only what the Lacanian idea of the dynamics of desire can tell us about Shakespeare's King Lear, but also what Shakespeare can tell us about the theory of signification. King Lear invites the theoretical reading of kingship as signification because Lear's dynamics of mad desire and prodigious suffering derive from the discovery that his own kingly signifier signifies nothing. As a drama of signification, Lear implicates all its characters in the construction of the madness that the foolish, fond old king enacts.

No one, not...