Faced with the problem of concluding a book which has tried to set out the values and virtues of open-endedness, I would like to close by looking briefly at King Lear, a text which, in its orientation toward a style of court and kingship very different from Elizabeth's, appears to meditate long and hard on the strategies of courtship at court.

At the end of the play, Edgar (or Albany in the Quarto text) looks out over a corpse-strewn stage and admonishes us to ‘Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say’ (V. iii. 325). At one level, these words carry all the resonance of a lesson learned, fulfilling an emotional desire to see vindicated and restored those truth-tellers who have been penalized at every turn throughout the play. But at another more ironic level the final, caption-like statement strikes a discordant note. For it is spoken over the ruins of a family and a court that has been devastated precisely by individuals speaking what they feel. In failing to subordinate what she felt to what the circumstances required her to say, Cordelia's well-intentioned tactlessness in the opening scene constitutes a grievous sin against courtesy – a skill of which her sisters, for all the ‘glib and oily art’ of their hypocrisy, at least maintain an outward semblance (I. i. 224). In book VI of The Faerie Queene, Sir Calidore's automatic use of white lies, half-truths, approximations, and euphemisms is shown to be the essence of courtesy.