King Lear Read online

  The RSC Shakespeare

  Edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen

  Chief Associate Editor: Héloïse Sénéchal

  Associate Editors: Trey Jansen, Eleanor Lowe, Lucy Munro,

  Dee Anna Phares, Jan Sewell

  King Lear

  Textual editing: Eric Rasmussen and Trey Jansen

  Introduction and Shakespeare’s Career in the Theater: Jonathan Bate

  Commentary: Penelope Freedman and Héloïse Sénéchal

  Scene-by-Scene Analysis: Esme Miskimmin

  In Performance: Karin Brown (RSC stagings), Jan Sewell (overview),

  Jonathan Bate (captions)

  The Director’s Cut (interviews by Jonathan Bate and Kevin Wright):

  Adrian Noble, Deborah Warner, Trevor Nunn

  Editorial Advisory Board

  Gregory Doran, Chief Associate Director,

  Royal Shakespeare Company

  Jim Davis, Professor of Theatre Studies, University of Warwick, UK

  Charles Edelman, Senior Lecturer, Edith Cowan University,

  Western Australia

  Lukas Erne, Professor of Modern English Literature,

  Université de Genève, Switzerland

  Jacqui O’Hanlon, Director of Education, Royal Shakespeare Company

  Akiko Kusunoki, Tokyo Woman’s Christian University, Japan

  Ron Rosenbaum, author and journalist, New York, USA

  James Shapiro, Professor of English and Comparative Literature,

  Columbia University, USA

  Tiffany Stern, Professor and Tutor in English, University of Oxford, UK

  2009 Modern Library Paperback Edition

  Copyright © 2007, 2009 by The Royal Shakespeare Company

  Interview responses by Deborah Warner in “Director’s Cut”

  copyright © 2009 by Deborah Warner

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of The

  Random House Publishing Group, a division of

  Random House, Inc., New York.

  MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks

  of Random House, Inc.

  “Royal Shakespeare Company,” “RSC,” and the RSC logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of The Royal Shakespeare Company.

  The version of King Lear and the corresponding footnotes that appear in this volume were originally published in William Shakespeare Complete Works, edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, published in 2007 by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

  eISBN: 978-1-58836-828-7

  www.modernlibrary.com

  v3.1_r1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  An Old Man Tottering About the Stage?

  The Division of the Kingdom

  Ripeness Is All?

  This Great Stage of Fools

  About the Text

  Key Facts

  The Tragedy of King Lear

  Act 1

  Scene 1

  Scene 2

  Scene 3

  Scene 4

  Scene 5

  Act 2

  Scene 1

  Scene 2

  Act 3

  Scene 1

  Scene 2

  Scene 3

  Scene 4

  Scene 5

  Scene 6

  Scene 7

  Act 4

  Scene 1

  Scene 2

  Scene 3

  Scene 4

  Scene 5

  Scene 6

  Act 5

  Scene 1

  Scene 2

  Scene 3

  Textual Notes

  Quarto Passages That Do Not Appear in the Folio

  Scene-by-Scene Analysis

  King Lear in Performance: The RSC and Beyond

  Four Centuries of King Lear: An Overview

  At the RSC

  The Director’s Cut: Interviews with Adrian Noble, Deborah Warner, and Trevor Nunn

  Shakespeare’s Career in the Theater

  Beginnings

  Playhouses

  The Ensemble at Work

  The King’s Man

  Shakespeare’s Works: A Chronology

  The History Behind the Tragedies: A Chronology

  Further Reading and Viewing

  References

  Acknowledgments and Picture Credits

  INTRODUCTION

  AN OLD MAN TOTTERING ABOUT THE STAGE?

  “King Lear,” wrote the early nineteenth-century Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in his Defence of Poetry, “may be judged to be the most perfect specimen of the dramatic art existing in the world.” For all the Romantics, Lear was Shakespeare’s most “sublime” and “universal” play. John Keats wrote a sonnet “On sitting down to read King Lear once again”: having burned his way through the play, he would feel somehow purified and regenerated. For Keats’ contemporary Charles Lamb, Shakespeare’s anatomy of the human condition was so profound and tempestuous that the play seemed too vast for the stage. It is the centerpiece of his essay “On the tragedies of Shakspeare, considered with reference to their fitness for stage representation”:

  So to see Lear acted,—to see an old man tottering about the stage with a walking-stick, turned out of doors by his daughters in a rainy night, has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting. We want to take him into shelter and relieve him. That is all the feeling which the acting of Lear ever produced in me. But the Lear of Shakspeare cannot be acted. The contemptible machinery by which they mimic the storm which he goes out in, is not more inadequate to represent the horrors of the real elements, than any actor can be to represent Lear: they might more easily propose to personate the Satan of Milton upon a stage, or one of Michael Angelo’s terrible figures. The greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension, but in intellectual: the explosions of his passion are terrible as a volcano: they are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that sea his mind, with all its vast riches. It is his mind which is laid bare. This case of flesh and blood seems too insignificant to be thought on; even as he himself neglects it. On the stage we see nothing but corporal infirmities and weakness, the impotence of rage; while we read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear,—we are in his mind, we are sustained by a grandeur which baffles the malice of daughters and storms; in the aberrations of his reason, we discover a mighty irregular power of reasoning, immethodized from the ordinary purposes of life, but exerting its powers, as the wind blows where it listeth, at will upon the corruptions and abuses of mankind. What have looks, or tones, to do with that sublime identification of his age with that of the Heavens themselves, when in his reproaches to them for conniving at the injustice of his children, he reminds them that “they themselves are old.” What gestures shall we appropriate to this? What has the voice or the eye to do with such things?

  For Lamb, the technical necessities of the theater—the backstage machinery that creates the storm, the actor’s repertoire of gestures, looks, and vocal variations—are exterior and superficial distractions from the play’s inward and remorseless exploration of reason and madness, humankind and nature, the corruptions and abuses of power. Few theater lovers would agree with Lamb, but few would deny that the role of Lear presents perhaps the greatest of all challenges to the Shakespearean actor. There is a theater saying that by the time you’re old enough to play it, you are too old to play it.

  A generation before the Romantics, Dr. Samuel Johnson confessed that even reading the play was almost too much to bear: “I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia’s death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last
scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor.” The shock for Johnson was both emotional and moral. The death of Cordelia—Shakespeare’s boldest alteration of his sources, in all of which she survives—was an extraordinary breach of the principal that Johnson called “poetical justice,” whereby “a play in which the wicked prosper, and the virtuous miscarry, may doubtless be good, because it is a just representation of the common events of human life: but since all reasonable beings naturally love justice, I cannot easily be persuaded, that the observation of justice makes a play worse; or, that if other excellencies are equal, the audience will not always rise better pleased from the final triumph of persecuted virtue.” It had been in order to impose poetical justice on the play that during the 1680s Nahum Tate, author of the hymn “While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night,” had rewritten King Lear with a happy ending, in which Cordelia was married off to Edgar. Johnson had some sympathy with this alteration, which held the stage for a century and a half, whereas for Lamb it was yet one more indication that the theater was not to be trusted with Shakespeare’s sublime vision of universal despair.

  THE DIVISION OF THE KINGDOM

  Written soon after King James united the thrones of England and Scotland, and performed in his royal presence at Whitehall, King Lear reveals the dire consequences of dividing a united kingdom. In principle, the aged Lear’s decision to take voluntary retirement does not seem a bad thing: he is losing his grip on matters of state, his daughters and sons-in-law are “younger strengths” with more energy for government, and, most important, the division is intended to prevent a future civil war between rival claimants, which would have been a definite possibility in the absence of a son who would automatically inherit the whole kingdom. But can an anointed king abnegate his role at will? If he does, he certainly should not expect to retain the trappings of power. Goneril and Regan have a case for stripping him of his rowdy, extravagant retinue of one hundred knights.

  Lear’s mistake is to link the division of the kingdom to a public show of affection. The two older sisters, well versed in the “glib and oily art” of courtly flattery, tell him what he wants to hear, but Cordelia cannot. She is one of the play’s truth tellers and simply lacks the capacity or the experience to dress her love in fine rhetoric. Lear knows that she loves him best, but we may assume that until this moment her love has always been expressed privately. As youngest and unmarried daughter, Cordelia has probably never spoken publicly before the court. Lear’s intention for the opening scene is that it will be Cordelia’s coming out: she is supposed to give public expression to her great love and in return she will be rewarded with the richest portion of the kingdom and the most prized husband. He does not bargain on her inability to play the role in which he has cast her. Kings and earls do not necessarily have to be blind to true virtue—witness the examples of Kent and France—but Lear, too long used to having his own way and hearing only the words of flatterers, has blinded himself. Only when he has been stripped of the fine clothes and fine words of the court, has heard truth in the mouths of a fool and a (supposed) Bedlam beggar, does he find out what it really means to be human.

  Where Macbeth and Othello are focused tightly upon a single plotline, the action of Lear greatly extends the technique of parallel plotting with which Shakespeare had experimented in Hamlet, where Laertes and Fortinbras serve as foils to the hero. In Lear, the Gloucester family plot is a sustained presence. Gloucester is another father who is blind to the true nature of his children; that blindness leads, in Shakespeare’s cruelest literalization of metaphor, to the plucking out of his eyes. Edmund corresponds to the wicked daughters; several of the play’s many letters pass between them. It is wholly appropriate that he should end up promised to them both. Like the king’s favorite daughter, Cordelia, Edgar (who is the king’s godson) is unjustly exiled from home and excluded from parental care. It is fitting to the parallel structure of the twin plots that the play ends in the Folio version with him returning to take the reins of power, just as there is a certain, though very different, logic to Nahum Tate’s infamous Restoration-period rewrite.

  RIPENESS IS ALL?

  Shakespeare never takes one side of a question. In the very opening lines of the play we discover that it is Edmund who has previously been unjustly exiled from home and excluded from parental care. Kent, the play’s best judge of character, initially describes Edmund as “proper”: he has the bearing of a gentleman, but his illegitimacy has deprived him of the benefits of society. His first soliloquy makes a good case for the unfairness of a social order that practices primogeniture and stigmatizes bastardy; his discovery near the moment of death that “Edmund was beloved” is curiously touching. He is not, then, an uncomplicated stage “Machiavel,” an embodiment of pure, unmotivated evil.

  Astrology and astronomy were synonymous in the Elizabethan age: the signs of the times were read in the signs of the skies. King Lear is a play about bad times. The state drifts rudderless, child turns against parent, the clouds of war gather, the king and all around him totter on the brink of the abyss. So it is that Gloucester blames it all on the stars: “These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us.” Edmund, however, disputes this: “an admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition on the charge of a star!” He argues that things often regarded as the product of the “natural order” are actually shaped by “custom”—for him, primogeniture and legitimacy would come into this category. The position articulated here is close to that of the sixteenth-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne in the closing section of his Apology of Raymond Sebond: any custom abhorred or outlawed by one nation is sure to be praised or practiced by another. But if you have nothing save custom, no divinely sanctioned hierarchy, then where does your value system come from? Montaigne’s answer is blind faith in God, whereas Edmund, like an apologist before the letter for the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, commits himself to “nature” as a principle of survival and self-seeking.

  Gloucester’s philosophical orientation, meanwhile, turns toward the classical Stoic idea of finding the right timing for death. After his mock suicide, he says “henceforth I’ll bear / Affliction till it do cry out itself / ‘Enough, enough’ and die.” But he cannot sustain this position: when Lear and Cordelia lose the battle, he is found in “ill thoughts again,” wanting to rot. Edgar responds with more Stoic advice: “Men must endure / Their going hence, even as their coming hither: / Ripeness is all.” But this idea of ripe timing doesn’t work out: by mistiming the revelation of his own identity to Gloucester, Edgar precipitates his father’s death.

  The play’s pattern, then, is of Stoic comfort not working. At the beginning of the fourth act Edgar reflects on his own condition and cheers himself up with thoughts about the worst, but then his father comes on blinded and he is instantly confounded—things are worse than before. If the case of Edgar reveals the deficiency of Stoic comfort, that of Albany demonstrates the inadequacy of belief in divine justice. His credo is that the good shall taste “The wages of their virtue” and the bad drink from the poisoned “cup of their deservings.” This scheme works for the bad, but not for the good. In the closing scene, Albany tries to orchestrate events, to make order out of chaos, but each of his resolutions is followed by new disaster: he greets the restored Edgar, then immediately hears the news of Gloucester’s death, then the news of the two queens’ deaths; then Kent comes on, dying; then in response to the news that Cordelia is to be hanged, Albany says “The gods defend her!,” only for Lear to enter with her in his arms already hanged. The gods have not defended her. Then Albany tries to give power back to Lear—and he promptly dies. Then he tries to persuade Kent and Edgar to divide the kingdom, and Kent promptly goes off to die.

  The final lines of the play—given to different speakers in the Quarto and Folio versions of the text—suggest that the lesson has been learned that Stoic comfort will not do, that it is better to speak what we feel than what we ou
ght to say. The Folio’s ascription of this speech to Edgar makes more dramatic sense than the Quarto’s to Albany, since Edgar’s stripping down in Act 3 is an exposure to feeling, occurring in conjunction with Lear’s feeling with and for the poor, which makes him the character better prepared to voice this sentiment.

  THIS GREAT STAGE OF FOOLS

  The Stoic philosopher tries to be ruled by reason rather than passion. But for the great sixteenth-century humanist Desiderius Erasmus in his Praise of Folly, there is inhumanity in the notion that to be wise you must suppress the emotions. The most important thing is to “feel”—as Gloucester has to learn, to see the world not rationally but “feelingly.” Erasmus’ personification of Folly points out that friendship is among the highest human values, and it depends on emotion. The people who show friendship to Lear (Fool, Kent disguised as Caius, Edgar disguised as Poor Tom and then as Peasant) and to Gloucester (Servants, Old Man) are not the wise or the rich.

  We are ruled by our passions and our bodies; we go through life performing a series of different roles of which we are by no means in control. “All this life of mortal men, what is it else but a certain kind of stage play?” asks Erasmus’ Folly. Lear echoes the sentiment: “When we are born, we cry that we are come / To this great stage of fools.” In the great theater of the world, with the gods as audience, we are the fools on stage. Under the aspect of Folly, we see that a king is no different from any other man. The trappings of monarchy are but a costume: this is both Folly’s and Lear’s discovery.