Jonathan Miller, the director of a new production of Shakespeare’s Lear in New York, declares his intention in an interview that comes included with the program. (I owe this intelligence to Geoffrey O'Brien in a brilliant review in the March 25 of The New York Review.) Miller says: “I feel there’s nothing epic or mythic about it, in exactly the same way that I don’t think there's anything cosmic about it. . .The desire for the archetypal—it’s so simple-minded and sentimental, you know?” Miller’s “crucial decision has been to drop the play back into the time and space-its own time and' space, England in the seventeenth century-from which it has so often been abstracted. Abstraction itself, no matter how harrowing its intended effect, might itself be seen as some form of consolation, a way of rarefying the suffering of the characters by situating it elsewhere, in a realm of pure art. If Peter Brook's influential production of Lear in 1962 famously presented Shakespeare as (in Jan Kott's phrase) "our contemporary," Miller presents him as the only slightly older contemporary of Thomas Hobbes and John Webster. It is a momentary shock to find King Lear reinserted into the ambience of a Van Dyck or Rubens portrait.”
.
At the time I read that I happened also to be reading “Persons and Mask of the Law” by [now Judge] John T. Noonan, Jr. It appears that the law, too, finds some form of consolation in abstraction, in “a way of rareifying” the very existence of the person, of “situating it elsewhere in a realm of pure art.”

“Rules, not persons, are the ordinary subject matter of legal study,” Noonan writes. “Legal reasoning is by analogy or example, as the classic introduction of Edward Levi describes it; and the problem addressed is, "When will it be just to treat different cases as though they were the same?" But the cases are classified by the rules they exemplify, and judicial decisions come in the form of rules stated so as to be applicable to all similar situations. What atoms are to chemistry, such units of discourse are to the study of law. Rearrangements and permutations of them are the normal way of legal development and the normal center of legal scholarship. The cataloguing work of the digest-makers, encyclopedists, and annotators consists of their analysis and arrangement. The evaluating work of treatise writers and law reviews consists of their analysis and criticism.

“Little or no attention is given to the persons in whose minds and in whose interaction the rules have lived-to the persons whose difficulties have occasioned the articulation of the rule, to the lawyers who have tried the case, to the judges who have decided it. No key reporting system is keyed to counsel. No encyclopedia is arranged in terms of judges. The prime teaching tools, the casebooks, have been composed to shed light on the life of a rule, not upon the parts of the participants in the process. Those in the classic mold, with snippets of appellate opinions arranged to display variations and contradictions of a principle, carry the indifference to the participants to the maximum. “