Dispossessed and Unaccommodated

Abstract

Abstract In this chapter, we analyse the torture scene in King Lear, arguing that metaphors of animality and enslavement attach to Cornwall’s unnamed servant in order to mitigate his attempts to intervene and stop the violence. Though a minor character, the servant’s fate reveals a wider map of power than the play is invested in representing. Furthermore, the insults hurled at him by Regan and Cornwall symbolically link animals with enslaved people and both with precarity and superfluity. Called both a dog and a slave by Regan and Cornwall, killed and tossed on a dunghill outside of Gloucester’s home, Cornwall’s servant’s death provides a useful opportunity to connect recent scholarship in premodern critical race studies with critical animal studies and critical disability studies.