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‘Is man no more than this?’ King Lear and the Collapse of Civilisation The collapse of civilisation Freud: Civilization and its Discontents (1930) According to Freud, man is ‘a savage beast to whom consideration towards his own kind is something alien’ (1962: 59). ‘The word “civilization” describes the whole sum of the achievements and the regulations which distinguish our lives from those of our animal ancestors and which serve two purposes – namely to protect men against nature and to adjust their mutual relations.’ (1962: 36) ‘This replacement of the power of the individual by the power of a community constitutes the decisive step of civilization. The essence of it lies in the fact that the members of the community restrict themselves in their possibilities of satisfaction, whereas the individual knew no such restrictions.’ (1962: 42) The collapse of civilisation in King Lear Kenneth Tynan on Peter Brook’s Lear in the theatre: ‘The play is a mighty philosophic farce in which the leading figures enact their roles on a gradually denuded stage that resembles, at the end, a desert graveyard or unpeopled planet. It is an ungoverned world … a world without gods, with no possibility of hopeful resolution.’ (1967: 132) The collapse of civilisation in King Lear LEAR. Allow not nature more than nature needs,Man’s life is cheap as beast’s. (2.2.425-6) LEAR. Is man no more but this? Consider him well. Thou owest the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Here’s three on ’s are sophisticated; thou art the thing itself. Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. (3.4.93-8) The collapse of civilisation in King Lear Animal imagery: wolves, vultures, tigers, serpents, rats, bears, and a huge number of types of dog (bitches, curs, mastiffs, grey-hounds, mongrels, hounds, spaniels, ditch-dogs) Inhuman actions: blinding of Gloucester shutting out of Lear into the storm arbitrary deaths of Cordelia and Lear ‘Th