"King Lear" by William Shakespeare

I saw a stupendous performance of King Lear by the Royal Shakespeare Company in the Barbican Theatre on 26th November 2016 with Anthony Sher as the King and a magnificent performance by David Troughton as Gloucester. I also saw Lear on BBC2 on 28th May 2018 in a superb TV adaptation with the wonderful Anthony Hopkins as Lear, Emma Thompson and Emily Watson stunning as Goneril and Regan, Jim Carter stupendous as the Earl of Kent, Jim Broadbent brilliant as Gloucester, great performances by Fool (Karl Johnson) and Oswald (Christopher Eccleston) and a spell-binding performance as Edmund by John Macmillan.

King Lear is the classic Shakespeare play about a King, retiring, who gives his kingdom to his daughters after asking them to tell him how much they love him. The older two flatter him and please him, the younger cannot and, in a rage, he cuts her off without anything. But then he discovers that the older two won't look after him now they have his power. He runs off into the teeth of a storm on a heath, accompanied by his Fool, and the Duke of Kent (whom he earlier banished but has returned disguised to serve him). In the storm, Lear goes mad.

This is the only tragedy with a full sub-plot. Edmund is the bastard son of the Earl of Gloucester and fools his father into disinheriting his half-brother, legitimate Edgar, and then betrays his father to Lear's harpy-like daughters who blind Gloucester. The sisters then fall out over which one of them should take Edmund to their bed.

The madness of Lear is a remarkable piece of Shakespearean theatre when, for perhaps the only time, Shakespeare leaves the formality of verse-drama far behind. Act 3, Scene 6, almost at the dead centre of the play, contains a remarkable three-hander in which Lear is going mad, Edgar pretends madness, and the Fool is making fun. 

Nothingness is a motif. In the first scene, when Cordelia the youngest daughter is told to tell Lear how much she loves him, because she lacks "that glib and oily art? To speak and purpose not", she says: "Nothing, my Lord." Lear replies "Nothing?" and she repeats "Nothing." He then states "Nothing will come of nothing". And, in the end, this is what happens. When Edgar is pretending to read a forged letter from his brother he tells his father that it is "Nothing, my lord" and Gloucester says "The quality of nothing hath not such need to hide itself." When Kent derides a poem by the fool as  "This is nothing, fool", the Fool asks Lear "Can you make no use of nothing, nuncle?"; Lear replies "nothing can be made out of nothing"; later the fool will tell Lear that Lear himself is "Lear's shadow." A Gentleman tells Kent that he has scene Lear upon the heath:  the wind "tears his white hair/ Which the impetuous blasts, with eyeless rage,/ Catch in their fury, and make nothing of". And when Lear meets Gloucester, who has had his eyes plucked out, he says sadly: "This great world/ Shall so wear out to nought"

Edmund's anger at being a bastard. He thinks that love-children, because they are born in passion, must be better than children born from dutiful marital sex: 

"Why brand they us

With base? with baseness? bastardy? base, base? 

Who in the lusty stealth of nature take? 

More composition and fierce quality

Than doth, within a dull, stale, tired bed, 

Go to th'creating a whole tribe of fops,

Got 'tween asleep and wake?"

Later, he is in the position of having to decide which queen to marry:

"To both these sisters have I sworn my love;
Each jealous of the other, as the stung
Are of the adder. Which of them shall I take?
Both? one? or neither? Neither can be enjoy'd
If both remain alive"

But at the end, defeated and dying, he can still reflect that he was loved by two queens:
"Yet Edmund was belov'd: 

The one the other poison'd for my sake,

And after slew herself."

Edgar, fleeing the battle with his father, helps him rest beneath a tree. They need to go further off to be safe but Gloucester just wants to stay there and die. Edgar refuses: "Men must endure/ Their going hence, even as their coming hither:/ Ripeness is all."

And in the final scene, Lear enters bearing the body of Cordelia. But is she dead? He can't decide:
"Howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones!
Had I your tongues and eyes, I'd use them so
That heaven's vault should crack. She's gone for ever.
I know when one is dead, and when one lives;
She's dead as earth. Lend me a looking glass;
If that her breath will mist or stain the stone,
Why then she lives."

There is a great explanation of this play in James Shapiro's 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear.

Other Shakespeare plays reviewed in this blog may be found here.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"1606 William Shakespeare and the year of Lear" by James Shapiro

What is brilliant about this Shakespearian scholar (James Shapiro) is the way he roots each play in its context.

King Lear was borrowed from an older play called King Leir which was printed in 1605. With numerous quotes and including the fact that in Shakespeare's first version Lear is spelt Leir several times, Shapiro demonstrates how Shakespeare rooted his play in the old one. But then he goes on to demonstrate Shakespeare's brilliance in the improvements that he made,for example using a line that mentions nothing to make nothing a motif for the entire play: "Nothing comes of nothing."

Intriguing stylistic aspects of Lear include:

• the remarkable part of the Fool: "a role unlike any Shakespeare ever wrote before or after - witty, pathetic, lonely, angry and prophetic"'; 
• the subplot of Edmund and Edgar and the Earl of Gloucester which "would be the first and last time that Shakespeare ever included a parallel plot of subplot in one of his tragedies;
• the  "highly experimental" passage at the end of Act Three when Lear's madness "shifts in and out of lucidity, from prose to blank verse to snatches of song" and which is "closer to Samuel Beckett than to Jacobean drama";
• the use of not one but "two powerful recognition scenes: the first between Lear and Cordelia, the second, soon after, where the two plots converge, between the mad Lear and the blind Gloucester";
• and the biting irony: "We hear, time and again, a version of 'The Gods are just'. But the Gods are not just; as the blinded Gloucester has learned, 'As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods; / They kill us for their sport."

And then we discover that the device of the mysteriously delivered letter by which Edmund throws suspicion on his half-brother Edgar by letting his father Gloucester read it was mirrored a few days after it was written when a mysterious letter was delivered which contained sketchy details of the Gunpowder Plot; the 'recipients' of the letter similarly allowed King James to divine its meaning. Suddenly we are into the most famous conspiracy of English history: Guy Fawkes and his fellows. And Shakespeare is in the thick of it, living in both London and in Stratford-on-Avon, very near where the conspirators are massing (Ben Jonson, fellow playwright, was also involved, having recently dined with the conspirators at a London pub). Can a history book get any more exciting?

The Gunpowder plot was close to the London theatre scene. On 9th October 1605, less than a month before the discovery of Guy Fawkes, Ben Jonson, playwright, Shakespeare's friend and a Catholic, dined on the Strand in the company of conspirators Robert Catesby (ringleader), Francis Tresham (most likely author of the mysterious letter) and Thomas Winter.

And of course a major theme of Macbeth is equivocation ('Fair is foul and foul is fair') which was a controversial talking point in the immediate aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot. 

Macbeth also has interesting stylistic points: 

• King Duncan is killed offstage ... and so is Macbeth!
• In the 'Hell's Porter' scene "Shakespeare offers us, in the most down-to-earth scene in the play, the closest thing to an evocation of hell itself." It is also a comic interlude (perhaps the only moment of humour in this dark play) which comes immediately after Duncan's murder, the point of no return.

Shapiro discusses the discovery of an old beam, scorched and marked with mesh design based on a pentagram. The symbols are towards the fireplace because "fireplaces and chimneys were thought to be rapid transit systems favoured by hellish spirits." And so to Harry Potter?

And finally, Shapiro deals with Antony and Cleopatra. In this play:

• Shakespeare virtually abandons the soliloquy
• He "never lets us see Antony and Cleopatra alone together on stage"
• "His account of Cleopatra is suffused with paradox and hyperbole: ... 'she makes hungry Where she most satisfies'" (A2 S2) (Shapiro 2015 1606 William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear; p 280).

In Titus Andronicus there is a mad scene in which Marcus Andronicus kills a fly and Titus first reprimands him and then attacks the dead body of the fly; this scene was introduced between the Quarto version of the play and the First Folio and dhows that Shakespeare revised his works. I wonder whether the famous 'Fly' episode of Breaking Bad when Walter White spends a whole episode trying to kill a fly that might conceivably contaminate his meth cook (ironic since Crystal Meth is not known for customers who worry about the possible harm it may do) is based on this scene.

The genius of Shapiro is that he lets us see how the plays were constructed by an ordinary man who was writing in the context of his company, the limitations of his theatre, and the context of events happening at the time. He tells us of the sources for the plays, the dates when they were published, the extensive borrowings Shakespeare made and the changes he made, and why he made them.

Other books about Shakespeare reviewed in this blog can be found by clicking here.

November 2015; 359 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God