About

Towards the end of Shakespeare’s King Lear, Lear and his daughter, Cordelia, are arrested and taken to prison. Contrary to expectations, Lear finds utopia in imagining the forms their lives might take in prison. “We two alone,” he tells Cordelia, “will sing like birds i’ th’ cage”: they will “live, / And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh / At gilded butterflies.” The play ends in an almost unspeakable tragedy, but in this moment, we are suspended—if briefly—in the possibility of a good life, one shaped by laughter, creativity, forgiveness, and love.

Such is the aim of Laughter at Gilded Butterflies. Not wholly uniquely, but no less tragically, we exist at a historical moment in which crisis has become the norm and decline and loss have become the conditions of everyday existence. Like the Beautiful World, Where Are You? conference held at Duke University, from which this journal springs, Laughter at Gilded Butterflies hopes to create a space for undergraduate students to envision and articulate a good life at this moment of global crisis.