I marvel at the simplicity of you can never say it’s the worst as long as you can say it’s the worst as a piece of humor. Hard to imagine that it could be humor, given that it shows up in one of the unfunniest moments in King Lear, but Shakespeare is good for it. Edgar has just caught sight of his father, Gloucester, who had wronged him over nothing and rendered him a fugitive in his own country. Much has happened since then. Gloucester has been blinded by guests in his own house, and the way he has been blinded defies the English language—his eyes are not quite “clawed out” or “scooped out” or “put out.”
Edgar sees what has been to his father and exclaims, “O gods! Who is ’t can say “I am at the worst?” I am worse than e’er I was.” And then he says to himself, “And worse I may be yet; the worst is not so long as we can say, ‘This is the worst.’” Edgar will then proceed to escort Gloucester to the “cliffs” of “Dover” where he’ll trick him out of a suicide. And all that time he will keep up the impersonation he has taken on in exile, although, like Kent’s disguise, Edgar’s disguise is somewhat pointless. Gloucester can’t see and didn’t pay that much attention to his son in the first place–didn’t know distinguishing features, such as his handwriting, for example. And tricking him out of the suicide will also be somewhat pointless as we learn later that Gloucester dies anyway, later, by suicide or of a broken heart.
Edgar’s “the worst is not so long as we can say ‘This is the worst’” is low-hanging fruit as far as profundity and word play goes. It’s for the working man, a Kent of labors, requiring almost no wit, no delivery, no knowledge of who Renata Adler is. It’s even easier to remember than Gloucester’s shovel-ready flies to boys as we to the Gods. Still, Edgar’s exact wording still slips from my mind. I can never quote it correctly. I’d like to think that Lear is a play for people who can’t remember shit but who still want to do a thing or two with words.
With two friends I have kept up this joke for years now—doing some version of “you can never say it is the worst as long as you can say it’s the worst” in texts, emails, and phone conversations.
My friend Matt Hunter, who is an early modernist, tells me that while he sees in the lines the consolation of deixis (things are not at rock bottom so long as you can still say this is that), his students tell him it’s because you’re not dead. That’s why it’s never the worst so long as you can say it’s the worst, and not because language can never rise to the occasion of a true predicament blah blah blah. You can never say it’s the worst so long as you can say it’s the worst right now BECAUSE AT LEAST YOU’RE NOT DEAD. Who can even argue with that. Matt has written about Shakespearean characters in extremis, like Lear, who use words that are so far removed from what people normally say that the words are disbelieved and the situation is disbelieved. People think, this sounds incredible, not like real human speech, because this anguish is incredible, not like something that actually happens. That’s a real bitch, but still likely not the worst. That’s our running joke: every time we see a new bad take on Shakespeare, or a new darkness that Shakespeare unlocked, we say this is the absolute worst Jesus Christ, and then we say it’s not the worst so long as we can say it is the worst. And soon it begins to sound like you are not living the life you want to live because you are living the life you do not want to live.
My friend Jane Hu sneaks up on me with you cannot say it’s the worst as long as you can say it’s the worst. At the most unexpected moments they come. You’re happily living your life, having completely forgotten about the word, “worst,” and there she is. I’d sacrifice hecatombs for that kind of humor. Jane is also writing about Chinese sadness and the fact that some stories can only be told through literary criticism. Love’s Labors Lost is one of our communicating doors, between our rooms and between our rooms and history. We share a culturally-specific affinity for the very idea of it, of love’s labors lost, and a culturally-specific fear for the play’s argument that all respites are brief. Walk through Love’s Labors Lost and you end up in Lear. Jane and I talk about the way bullying works in Lear and its relationship to “crimes of negligence,” her coinage. Crimes of negligence, which is such an elegant phrase, show up in Lear in equal measure with bullying, a childish, porky word that somehow discredits those who use it to complain about what has been done to them. Bullying, Jane says, is a transcendental form: you have to transcend it. That would begin with the fact that this is one of those instances where the English word is not quite fit for purpose.
In my class we practice one-downmanship in our remembrances of the plot. A student of mine, Sajiv Metha, wrote a paper that called the Gloucester side plot a form of “pandering.” “Pandering” is a surprising choice but what he meant by that is that Gloucester’s plight is easier to “get” than Lear’s serves to make Lear’s plight more difficult to appreciate: blinding is much more severe and obviously injurious than being sent out into a storm (or, more accurately, than storming out and not being welcomed back, the doors simply closed behind you just as it’s about to storm). Having one good son and one bad son is “cleaner” than whatever you wish to call Lear’s relationship to his three daughters. “Pandering” is about making something easy at the expense of something else. Sajiv’s paper is then another example of it’s not the worst as long as you can say it’s the worst. It’s the worst when you’ve had a great unkindness done to you that somehow doesn’t sound that bad when you tell it to others. What’s worse than that? A pedagogically useful second example appears—a friendly twin, if you will—but the twin somehow discredits your situation and your situation somehow discredits theirs.
One way to double check one’s conclusions about a work of literature is to subject it to a worseness test. We may have judged Gloucester too harshly for not being able to tell what’s not his own son’s handwriting and falling for Edmund’s stupid ploy. Maybe, just maybe, the two brothers do have similar handwriting because they are brothers and are similar. That’s demonstrably worse than the other case, I think.
You cannot say it is the best so long as you can say it is the best. Does that work? It does not. “Worst” is a possible evaluation when there’s a finite set: among these five things, this is the worst. The word cannot signify itself with an infinite set. Why doesn’t the same logic extend to “best”? It might be because, in the other case, it’s because you’re not dead.
Nan Z. Da is associate professor of English at Johns Hopkins University and the author of Intransitive Encounters: Sino-US Literatures and the Limits of Exchange.
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