Transcript King Lear - UCSB Department of English

King Lear
First lecture
Lear in the 21st century
• After all the warfare, bloodshed, genocide of the 20th
cent., not to mention what we’ve already achieved in the
fledgling 21st, Lear has come to seem Sh’s most
profound tragedy.
• A dark, almost hopeless tragedy, lots of cruelty and
suffering, even absurdity.
• The death of Cordelia, and maybe of Lear too, may
seem almost gratuitous.
• And what could be worse to witness onstage than the
blinding of Gloucester?
• “Theater of Cruelty” of Antonin Artaud.
• But a play that has depths that open further every time
one reads or sees it.
• It starts out with the theme of families, but quickly
becomes more . . .
• . . . and reaches a strangely symbolic character.
Lear in 1606
• First recorded performance of the play is St. Stephen’s day, 26
December, 1606, before King James!
• Mind-boggling to think that a play that shows a king giving up his
rule . . .
• . . . going mad and thrown to the mercy of the elements . . .
• . . . and learning about the completely arbitrary nature of all human
authority (“a dog’s obeyed in office”) . . .
• should be played before the King of England and Scotland!
• A play that shows the dark side of the world over which James ruled.
• There was a recent case in law, in 1604, of the eldest daughter of
Brian Annesley, a wealthy gentleman pensioner of Queen Elizabeth,
who tried to have her father declared a lunatic, so she and her
husband could control his estate.
• His youngest daughter, Cordell, protested and appealed
(successfully) to Robt. Cecil (James’s minister). Annesley left his
estate to Cordell at his death in 1604.
• And from June, 1604, to June 1606, a well publicized case in Star
Chamber saw Sir Robert Dudley, bastard son of Robt. Dudley, earl
of Leicester (Elizabeth’s favorite), trying (unsuccessfully) to have his
bastardy overturned.
• He lost, partly because of James’s intervention.
Texts of Lear
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A quarto was published in 1608.
And a quite different text in the folio of 1623.
Quarto has almost 100 lines not in the folio.
And folio has almost 300 lines not in the quarto.
So essentially two different versions of the play.
Our text conflates the two, as has usually been
done.
• We get the folio text with the quarto “additions”
in square brackets.
• The folio may have been the playing text.
Performance and source
• Richard Burbage played Lear in the original
performances, the actor who had played Hamlet
and Othello.
• And Richard Armin played the fool. He had
played the fool in Twelfth Night (which he quotes
at III.2.75-78), and the grave-digger in Hamlet.
• The setting of the play is very generalized – prehistoric, pre-Christian Britain. The story in
Holinshed’s Chronicles goes back to 800 B.C.
• Actual source of play is an old play, King Leir,
which had been performed in 1594 (by another
company), and apparently staged again in 1605,
when it was printed.
• Shakespeare clearly knew the text of that play
and used it in his version.
The strange, fairytale-like opening
of the play
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Clip of the Olivier film (1984).
The opening with Gloucester and Kent: insists on Edmund’s bastardy, and a
violation of a taboo here?
If “realism” were the mode of the play, we’d wonder why Lear is doing this . .
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. . . and why Cordelia can’t simply tell Lear what he wants to hear.
Lear speaks of “our darker purpose.”
He wishes to retire, conferring royal duties to younger strengths, “while we/
Unburdened crawl toward death.”
The highly ornate, rhetorical flourish of Goneril’s speech, I.1.55-61.
Which Regan tops!
And of course the exercise is all symbolic, since Lear has already
determined the shares.
Do we feel some sort of taboo is being violated? Lear was obviously
intending to favor Cordelia over the others: “what can you say to draw/ A
third more opulent than your sisters? Speak.”
So why does Cordelia say, “Nothing, my lord”?
And goes on to a non-rhetorical, flat statement of what daughters owe their
fathers and their spouses.
Why is Lear doing this? And why won’t Cordelia play along?
Lear’s rage: 109ff.
Kent’s banishment
• Kent’s intervention: begins ceremoniously: l. 140ff
• But Lear demands plainness.
• So Kent lets him have it: “Be Kent unmannerly/ When Lear is mad.
What wouldst thou do, old man?” Note the familiarity of thou.
• And his rhyming at 185ff seems to round off the exchange.
• The play is dividing characters according to their language and
rhetoric.
• The Burgundy/France “test”; Cordelia becomes more desirable to
France because of her dowerless poverty.
• When Kent returns in disguise in 1.4, plainness becomes his middle
name.
• And this defines his quarrel with Oswald, whom he calls a “base
football player” (1.4.85)
• And his opposition to Oswald at II.2: his wonderfully inventive list of
insults at l. 13ff.
• “No contraries hold more antipathy/ Than I and such a knave.”
• And even to Cornwall: “Sir, ‘tis my occupation to be plain./ I have
seen better faces . . .” (89ff).
• Characters seem to run to the moral poles of the world of the play:
Cordelia vs. her sisters, Kent vs. Oswald, Edgar vs. Edmund.
The moral poles of the play
• Goneril and Regan’s opposition to Lear at first
seems commonsense.
• Their brief dialogue at the end of I.1.
• Goneril’s objections to the Fool, her problems
with the hundred knights (1.4.195ff).
• Her desire that he “a little to disquantity your
train.”
• Lear’s terrible curse of Goneril: 1.4.271.
• But Albany’s reaction complicates.
• Regan’s sympathy with Goneril, II.4
• And they whittle down his 100 knights.
• “Oh reason not the need!” What gives us our
grip on life?
• By this point their opposition seems moral.
Moral poles (cont.)
• Edmund and Edgar
• Edmund’s role as a sort of renaissance “new
man”: his soliloquy at 1.2.
• With a new sense of “Nature” – almost
Darwinian?
• His opposition to Edgar and Gloucester.
• And his eventual alliance with Goneril and
Regan.
• Edgar’s choice of disguise – “Poor Tom”
• Why? He’s the son of an earl.
• His feigned madness in stark contrast to
Edmund?
The Fool
• One of the most wonderful conceptions, and wonderful roles, in the
play.
• He’s a jester, Lear’s “all-licensed fool,” who’s allowed to say
anything.
• Court jesters were sometimes mental defectives, retarded adults.
• But sometimes professional entertainers, comedians allowed to
enliven court proceedings.
• King James had a jester, Archie Armstrong, who was well known for
an impudence verging on arrogance.
• Lear’s fool has an almost filial relation with him.
• Calls Lear “nuncle,” uncle; Lear calls him “boy” (even though Armin
was in his early 40s).
• His strange link with Cordelia: the Fool has grown sad after Cordelia
went to France: “Since my young lady’s going into France, the fool
hath much pined away.”
• “And my poor fool is hanged,” Lear says in the last scene; he seems
to mean Cordelia, but speaks of the fool?
• It’s the Fool who needles Lear mercilessly about the foolishness of
what he has done in giving up his kingdom.
• And the fool disappears from the play after Act II, scene 6.