SOURCE: Hawkes, Terence. “Something from Nothing.” In King Lear, pp. 52-7. Plymouth, U.K.: Northcote House, 1995.

In the following essay, Hawkes focuses on verbal and non-verbal communication in King Lear, contending that the play reveals a significant change in Lear's character through his movement from understanding only “explicit verbal statement” at the play's beginning to his ability to note unspoken emotions and ideas in the play's final scene.

That which is born out of Lear's experience takes us back to the play's beginning. Cordelia's refusal of his world of quantity and calculation had been met by the exasperated proposal that, ‘Nothing will come of nothing: speak again.’ But human beings never simply ‘speak’. Any utterance is always complicated, particularly in a pre-literate society, by the body. Its unignorable presence supplies a living and modifying context for the voice in all face-to-face communication. Drama is the art which is...