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The Notorious Astrological Physician of London: Works and Days of Simon Forman (review)

implying that reference to the local, though “quite relevant” to his claims, would clutter rather than complicate the picture he is drawing. Critics and scholars of literature trained to be suspicious of such assumptions may react skeptically. Whether such skepticism is justified depends on specific aspects of the argument, and these cannot be considered here. Kahn’s insistence on the “large conceptual block,” however, does become a problem where the block in question is the play itself. He acknowledges in his preface the ongoing critical attention to the Folio and Quarto texts of the play but insists that the textual differences do not in the end make a difference to the book’s argument. Kahn’s implicit assumption throughout is one textual critics of the past twenty years have been at pains to disprove, namely that there is one true Lear that can be extracted somehow out of the two texts. If this were so, there would be no necessary difficulty in preferring, as Kahn does, both Edgar’s assumption of responsibility for the kingdom at the end of the play (an assumption implied only in the Folio) and the version that offers the “mad trial,” present only in the Quarto. And yet, as far as we know, until the nineteenth century these two were not performed—certainly they were not printed—as part of the same play, so that we must conclude that the play that is the subject of Kahn’s book is not the Quarto or the Folio but the modern composite presented as the Arden edition. Hence the self-confirming assertion that “Where [textual issues] do have some significance, I have nearly always found the Arden version of the text supportive of my general reading of the play” (xx). Kahn wants Lear to function as a large conceptual block in the overall design his book seeks to establish. The legal imagination, operating “within the culture of law’s rule,” identifies three forces opposing it: nature, revolution, and love. Law, Kahn says, “appears triumphant over nature, coordinate with revolution, and subordinate to love” (172). King Lear illustrates the last of these; it makes us recognize “that a fully realized love moves in dimensions of sympathy, forgiveness, and mercy that negate the distinctions of friend and enemy, as well as judge and wrongdoer, that are necessary to the legal order. Love stands outside all political order. No program of law can bring love into the state” (173). And law in this respect cannot be rehabilitated; the state and its bureaucracy will always demand the sacrifice of the souls of its members. It is easy to see that this is true, in a way, at least of King Lear, and at the same time to recognize what must be omitted to permit assembly of this large conceptual block: not only the play’s own resistance to this and other, similar generalizations but also many of the most remarkable and invaluable argumentative turns of Kahn’s book.