Act 2 Scene 4 Psychoanalytic Criticism

"Down, Wanton, Down!" is a very famous poem by Robert Graves that alludes to Shakespeare's King Lear, Act 2, Scene 4, line 139-40. Wantons, in Shakespeare's version, are playful animals, and, also, a pun for "lewd persons," that is, with sexual and libidinal connotations. This is what Grave's poem is about, a poem that picks up on the sexual themes in Shakespeare.

The fool, who by some critics is read as Lear's conscience, not an altogether wrong interpretation, but a limited one, may also be considered as an archetype for the ego, in the Freudian-Lacanian sense of the term. The libido is the primordial, natural part of man, the 'id' in Freudian thought. Shakespeare speaks of the dynamic between the id and the ego, the animalistic, natural aspects of man, dominated by the ego through the fool: "Horses are tied by the heads, dogs and bears by the neck, monkeys by the loins, and men by the legs. When a man's overlusty at legs, then he wears wooden-nether stocks." (ln. 10-14). This is a demonstration of taking control over one's body, over one's impulses, which leads to Lacan's Ideal-I, a ficitious 'I', an ego that seeks to normalize the libido/id.

Notice that once the theme of the libido has been raised, Shakespeare's metaphors about money and the Marxist themes within the text are constructed with sexual imagery, "Fortune, that arrant whore, / Ne'er turns the key to th' poor." (58-60). This condensation of two different themes within King Lear, through Shakespeare's choice to personify 'fortune' as a whore rather than something other, is not indicative of Shakespeare's own psyche, but insightful in how the manifest elements of a text may be condensed to produce potent and latent effects, like Robert Grave's "Down, Wanton, Down!"

"We are not ourselves when nature, being oppressed, commands the mind to suffer with the body," says King Lear (ln. 121-3). This is also the dynamic of Freud's theory, summed up by Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh, "In repression, a psychical representative - an idea attached to an instinct - is denied entry into the conscious mind because its impact would be too disturbing, too painful, and the idea then becomes fixated as a measure of energy in the unconscious." (14 MLT). King Lear will lose this sense of "self" when his unconscious repressions of Cordelia will manifest themselves in his neurotic behaviour (like taking all his clothes off in the storm - something that may be read as a loss of ego, or the ideal-I) as well as his ultimate journey into madness.

Lear, represses his conscience, "O me, my heart, my rising heart, but down!" and in doing so helps create what will lead to his own mental demise. The fool intensifies this scene, Lear's repression, by telling a story about what a cockney did to the eels, as she put an end to sleep (the unconscious), "she knapped 'em on th' coxcombs with a stick and cried, "Down, wantons, down!"

Repression of nature, as seen in King Lear, and theorized by Freud and Lacan, leads to mental disturbance, and sometimes, psychic breakdowns.