In a speech of the Chorus in Antigone, by Jean Anouilh, there are these lines:
"The spring is wound up tight. I will uncoil of itself. That is what is so convenient about tragedy. The least little turn of the wrist will do it."
One of the best examples of how this works occurs in the first scene of King Lear and the "turn of the wrist" is Cordelia's answer: "Nothing."
It is accepted that this refusal to play the game set up by Lear to award her the best share of his kingdom is what triggers the horrific chaos that follows. What is often overlooked is the exact wording of the question to which that is her answer.
Lear does not merely ask her to state her love; his precise words are:
"what can you say to draw
A third more opulent than your sisters? Speak."
Although there is a line break, the requirement is for her to make an effusive speech in order to get more wealth. It is a request for more flattery to obtain more land - and that is what Cordelia cannot do. There is something of the tight-lipped schoolgirl about her and she is disgusted at her sisters' florid pronouncements but what she rebels against is the demand that she, too, should be meretricious. She rejects it at the level of the question itself.
Lear continues and underlines his message by stating that, "Nothing will come of nothing." If she does not speak, she will receive no land. Her response, that she loves him according to her bond, is not cold and heartless - since the concept of a bond ran very deep in the idea of a Chain of Being in which everything was held tightly its place in a hierarchy. She obeys him as King, loves him as father and honours him as an elderly man: that is profound and resonant. It is a triple and tenacious bond.
It could be argued that the spring of tragedy is uncoiled because of the wording of the question. Lear asks the one person who could truly express her love in the one way that she could not fulfil.
