King Lear and the Duty to Die

Abstract

n The Old Law (1656), a play coauthored by Thomas Middleton, William Rowley, and ThomasHeywood andfirst performed around 1618, theDuke of Epire has decreed that all men arriving at fourscore years and women at threescore yearsmust be put to death. The justification for such a dehumanizing law—what ethicists todaymight describe as “generational cleansing”—appeals to utilitarian values: oldermen are too feeble to bear arms or propagate issue, while olderwomen are beyond their childbearing years. The aged, nomatter howhealthy or functional, have become “fruitless to the republic” (1.1.110), consumers rather than producers of social goods and hence liabilities to themselves, their children, and the state. The play thus takes to its (il)logical extreme what disabilities scholar Hailee M.