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
• 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 – pre-
historic, 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
• 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 . .
.
• . . . 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.