37 Days of Shakespeare, Day 22: King Lear

The Tragedy of King Lear, first broadcast September 19, 1982

• When was it written? We really don’t know. Sometime between 1603 and 1606. Possibly his 28th play.
• What’s it about? In ancient England, King Lear decides to retire early and divide his land among his three daughters, but demands they profess their love for him first. Cordelia, who actually loves him, is insulted by the request and refuses, so she gets nothing. Goneril and Regan falsely praise him and get everything. They instantly start abusing Lear after they get it. Meanwhile, Lear’s friend Gloucester has one bad son (Edmund) and one good one (Edgar), and likewise misunderstands which is which. Both old men end up wandering around outside in a storm. In the end, everybody except Edmund ends up dead.
• Most famous dialogue: One of these three:
• How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child
• I am a man more sinned against than sinning
• As flies to wanton boys are we to the Gods, they kill us for their sport
• Sources: First Geoffrey of Monmouth and then Holinshed told the story of Leir of Britain and his daughters, supposedly from the pre-Roman times of 800 BCE. Shakespeare moves it up just a bit, because they all swear to the Roman gods. But the names of all the dukedoms match 1600 AD, not ancient times. Miller, of course, puts them in Elizabethan dress, which only confuses matters all the more.
• Best insult: So many!
• You whoreson dog, you slave, you cur!
• A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking, whoreson, glass-gazing, super-serviceable, finical rogue; one trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pander, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch.
• And yet thou art my flesh, my blood, my daughter, or rather a disease that’s in my flesh which I must needs call mine, Thou art a boil, a plague sore, an embossed carbuncle in my corrupted blood
• You’re not worth the dust that the rude wind blows in your face
• Milk-livered man, that bear’st a cheek for blows
• A most toad-spotted traitor
• And finally we get the title of Taylor Swift’s next breakup album: “You base football player!”
• Best word: Yokefellow
• Best production of this play I’ve seen: I just saw it once, in Startford ON, which was good but Paul Gross was a fairly low-energy Lear.
• Notable Names in the BBC Adaptation: They had originally planned to do it with Robert Shaw but he died unexpectedly during the planning stages. As it turned out, the only familiar face is Penelope Wilton returning as Regan.

How’s the cast? 

• Michael Horden is excellent as a very haggard Lear. Everyone else is good but Miller did a bit too well casting for family resemblance, because I had a hard time telling the three daughters apart and the two sons apart.

How’s the direction by Jonathan Miller?

• The good news is that, after producing the last two seasons and making a lot of bad decisions (not the least of which was having a white Othello), a new season begins here and Miller is now out as producer. But on his way out the door, he does one last job, directing this play for the new producer. And he repeats a lot of the mistakes he made before, such as using Elizabethan dress and stagebound sets, but of course the real job of a director is to get great performances, and he does that here.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Great Plays Transcend Bad Politics

Many things made the England of 1603 unjust, but one of the worst was primogeniture. Basically, only the first born legitimate son could inherit anything and everyone else, especially daughters and illegitimate sons, was out in the cold. Shakespeare could have seen the injustice of this and protested it, but, to put it mildly, he does not do that here. 

Instead, this play could be seen as a paean to primogeniture, because it shows why it’s a bad idea to inherit your daughters and your bastard sons. Cordelia presumably would have done a better job if she had inherited some land, but she wisely rejects it and it’s made clear by several characters that the two daughters who do accept the land are particularly perfidious because they’re women. (“Women will all turn monsters.”)

And certainly Edmund does not paint a good portrait of bastard sons. (Has there ever been a good bastard son in literature? The most obvious answer is Jon Snow in Game of Thrones, but it’s the exception that proves the rule, because it eventually turns out that he’s not really a bastard, which explains his nobility.)

So the politics are bad here. But it’s a great play for lots of other reasons. Ultimately, once we begin condemning works for failing to stand up to power systems in place at the time, we’ll lose almost everything. We should still particularly praise authors who, in addition to their other gifts, actually were on the right side of history on whichever issues they address, and we should be hyper-aware of poisonous political messages lurking in the bosom of plays like Lear, but, given that, we should marvel all the more at Shakespeare’s ability to create something so emotionally powerful when coming from a politically dubious place.

Straying From the Party Line: Come Up With Complimentary Plots and Subplots

From a storytelling point of view, the biggest flaw of this play is that the plot and the subplot are too similar. Both Lear and Gloucester believe a lying child (or children) over an honest child, lose everything, end up howling mad in the same rainstorm on the same heath, finally figure it out only to keel over dead at the very end for no real reason (one of joy, one of grief).

Shakespeare usually does a much better job coming up with an A-plot and B-plot that compliment each other by approaching the same themes with different tones and plot turns. In the last play we looked at, for instance, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the teenagers in the A-plot and the fairies in the B-plot both had jealousies and love-potion shenanigans, but neither felt like a repeat of the other. They each resonate together richly.

At first, the two plots in this play are on different tracks and, while hitting the same beats, barely intersect, until the third act when Lear’s bad daughters both fall for Gloucester’s bad son. There shouldn’t be this much of a record scratch when we jump from one plot to the other, as is the case in the first two acts.

Worse, each story is precisely as bleak as the other. Both fathers suffer so extremely that we yearn for more tonal relief, and switching back and forth between these two plots provides none. (Lear’s fool provides just a bit of comic relief to his plot, and he’s my favorite character, but he doesn’t really try to alleviate the grimness)

Many consider this to be Shakespeare’s greatest play, but, for this reason, I must disagree. I would still put it very high, but not in the Top 5.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Express Love in Ways That Love Has Never Been Expressed Before

So do I have anything positive to say? Yes, obviously, there is much to praise in this devastating play.

The most powerful moment is when Gloucester, who’s had his eyes gouged out by Regan and her husband, wanders the heath and runs into his good son Edgar, who (as was the case with Hamlet) may have gone mad or may be feigning madness (or both).

Gloucester, not recognizing his son’s voice, asks this stranger to lead him to a cliff he can jump off, and Edgar agrees, then leads him to the middle of a flat meadow, tells him about looking down a sheer cliff and encourages him to jump forward. Gloucester stumbles forward but there’s no cliff. Edgar then switches voices, pretends to be someone way down at the bottom of the cliff who has just seen him land, and convinces his father that he has fallen from a great height and survived, so he should now embrace life. (“Thy life is a miracle.”) This works. It’s a truly bizarre way for a father to try to save his father’s suicidal soul, and makes for a delightful scene.

This is a play about human behavior pushed to horrific extremes by terrifying events. In such twisted times, love can only be expressed in twisted ways. The oddity of it makes it all the more transcendent.