To tell the truth in modern theatre: Richard III, Hamlet and King Lear

Abstract

Following what was proposed by Michel Foucault in his seminar "Le gouvernement de sois et des autres", this paper analyses three Shakespeare plays that allow for a discussion on "forms of governability" and veridiction, ideas developed around the concept of "parresia" by the French thinker. In an interesting movement between History and Literature, the literary discourse enacts the political game and its problems: in Richard III we have an usurping king: if lies are what bring him to power, they are also what will deprive him of it. Hamlet needs to do something to avenge his father's death but he will see his efforts come to nothing: nobody wants to listen to the truth and in the end his stage-madness gets more attention than the truths he insists on repeating. In King Lear both the onset of the discourse of truth and its relations to power are further refined: among his three daughters, only Cordelia will openly say the truth to her father. We can come to interesting conclusions about the denial of one absolute truth and the option for ambiguity as complexity sought by modern literature, or, even more daringly, we can conclude that modern governability depends on the relativization of the truth, as Machiavelli would have it.