King Lear

Edition: Arkangel Shakespeare

King Lear had been one of my favorite Shakespeare dramas ever since I read it for the first time in my early teens in Bulgarian (I read it a few years later in English as well) Back then I never realized that there is a problem with its texts - for all intents and purposes, there are two separate King Lear plays - while most of the plays suffer from this, Kind Lear has the largest differences (or one of the largest) between its Quatro1 and Folio texts (in addition to the inevitable changes and rewrites the Q has 285 lines that the F does not have and F has 115 completely new lines). And they are not just fillers - there are crucial differences between the two - including the end (oh, Lear dies - that does show more not change but what he believes when he dies is a different story). Each editor picks up their own way through the two texts although a conflated text had become the norm -- but that conflation can be very different between editions.

But let's talk about the play itself: Shakespeare takes a existing story from various sources (including Holinshed's Chronicles) and gives it a new life - and a new ending.

The king of Britain is getting old and has no sons so he decides to split the kingdom between his three daughters: Goneril, Regan and Cordelia - nothing unusual in this and for anyone in 1606 that would have sounded absolutely correct - primogeniture had been the law of the land and when there is no son, the daughters are equal heiresses under the law. Except that Lear decides to test his daughters and asks them how much they love him - and as his youngest, Cordelia, refuses to pay lip service to him, she is disinherited and leaves with her new husband for France. Except that as usual, lip service and real attachment are different things and as soon as they get the power, the two older daughters try to take away everything else from Lear - who is not very happy about that and flees.

But the play is not just the story of one family - it is the story of two of them - Gloucester and his sons (the legitimate Edgar and the illegitimate Edmund) and the dynamic between them is parallel to the dissolving of Lear's family. The two sons of Gloucester and the 3 daughters of Lear exist in parallel but scarily similar lines. Evil and choices become important for the downfalls of both men - the betrayals always having their own blood. But so do the redeemers.

And that's where the story of the two men diverge - Gloucester gets his son back early on (even if he does not know it), Lear needs to wait a lot longer. Both learn about their mistakes before they die and both try to make up for them but at the end just one of the children will be still standing.

I used to think of King Lear as the play where everyone dies. Not that this does not happen in other Shakespeare dramas but here the number of the survivors at the end is extremely low, even for Shakespeare and a lot lower than it is in the sources of this play.

The double end I was talking about earlier comes almost at the end - when Lear dies. In one version he is the cause for Cordelia's death, he knows and he knows that he had not managed to save her; in the other he dies before the final confirmation that she is dead, just when he thinks he sees her moving. One of the ends hints at redemption (Lear is the one who saves her even if he is also the reason for her being killed to start it), the other one is eternal damnation. While this may mean like not much of a difference now, the 17th century drama goer would have considered that a huge difference. The rest of the differences between the versions of the play are less impactful (even though some well known scenes such as the fake trial of the daughters is nowhere to be seen in the later versions). And then there is of course the Victorian version of the play that decided that the play is too dark so gave it a happy end...

The two older sisters and Edmund are evil personified - and in the case of the sisters, it has no explanation. The sources do - so one wonders if Shakespeare had relied on people knowing the story so decided not to add the scenes needed to explain it. And at the same time some of the positive characters (Kent, Edgar and even the Fool (who is the moral compass of the story for the first part of it... and then disappears altogether)) are almost one-tone as well - too good to be true. But then... it is a play, what more can you do in such a short time. The play works -- especially because being good or bad does not spell your end - you are as likely to have a "he dies" queue regardless of where you are on the good/bad scale...

Almost 3 centuries later, a novel will begin with a now well known sentence: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way". King Lear makes me think about that exact sentiment.

The Arkangel Shakespeare version of the play uses the Pelican text of the play (the one from the now older edition - they are reissuing again and I am not sure how much the current text is changed compared to the old one). It is a conflated text so most of the missing scenes are added and the end is the one with hope - Lear thinks that Cordelia may be alive. It is a masterful performance led by Trevor Peacock and with a host of other known actors including David Tennant as Edgar, Samantha Bond as Regan and Clive Merrison as Gloucester. If you had never listened to the play before, this is a good version although if you do not know the play, it can get a bit confusing - too many characters with somewhat intersecting goals can lead to confusion.

And if you are going to listen and read along, picking up the correct version of the printed play is crucial, especially in this play - or you may get a bit lost. show less

Lear divides his kingdom among his daughters. Or rather, he cuts his best-loved daughter out of the will because she is not as good of a suck-up as her two elder sisters are. She marries the King of France, Lear ends up being rebuffed by his ungrateful daughters, people variously go insane and are killed.

My rating of 2.5 is based on my personal experience reading this play. It may have been influenced by the weather or by other factors in my reading context. Your mileage may vary, and I hope it does.

Now that that disclaimer is out of the way:

I had little to no patience for many of the characters in this play. Lear was an idiot, cutting off Cordelia without a penny just because she couldn’t come up with sufficiently flowery language to show more justify her love for him, even though he already loved her best of his three daughters. Goneril and Regan were terrible human beings who showed no gratitude for their expanded fortunes or even offered any assistance to Cordelia. And the Fool’s speeches were somewhat headache-inducing.

I did enjoy very much Kent’s Malcolm Tuckeresque insults in Act 2, but then had all my buzz very much killed by the removal of Gloucester’s eyes in Act 3. I had heard about this but assumed it would happen offstage, rather like Oedipus Rex. Nope! This play prolongs the agony AND it happens on stage. Eye things make me queasy so I was very nearly sick while reading this. And then I couldn’t read any more.

I may try Acts 4 and 5 in another decade or so, but I am never reading Act 3 again. show less

When people want to rank Shakespeare's plays, usually Hamlet comes out as number one. This, in my experience, is the only other of his plays that I have seen mentioned as his greatest. If I were to rank his plays solely based upon their impact upon the world, I would probably agree with the usual placement of Hamlet as number one. However, were I to rank them based upon their impact on me, Lear gets the nod. Lear accurately and horrifyingly portrays the primal nature of man like few other works of literature; the only other to come to my mind is Lord of the Flies. Yet it's more than that; Lord of the Flies can afford to ignore the effects of sexual attraction and familial ties upon our nature, but Lear (the work, not the character) show more meets these head-on and uses them to devastating effect. This play alone would guarantee Shakespeare a place as one of the greatest English authors. With the rest of his body of work, there's no question that he is the greatest. show less

I enjoy the Folger editions of Shakespeare - to each his own in this matter. Some find Lear to be overblown, I am tremendously moved by it, and haunted by the image of the old man howling across the barren heaths with his dead daughter in his arms. 'I am bound upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears Do scald like molten lead.' Lear 4.7.52-54

The play begins with Lear relinquishing his crown, resigning from his position as ruler, and dividing up his kingdom between his three daughters; in other words, the play begins with the title character’s retirement. Although Lear seeks to ‘unburden’ himself of responsibility through this act, it leaves him uncertain of his place and identity. He wants to ‘retain/ The name, and all th’additions to a king’, but as he quickly discovers, this is easier said than done. Lear finds himself suddenly powerless, at the mercy of his cruel daughters Goneril and Regan. He travels between them, dependent upon them for food and shelter, until he is eventually forced out into the rain, weathering a terrible storm on a bare heath because show more his daughters will not let him keep his train of knights.

As well as charting the aftermath of Lear’s retirement, King Lear also explores the character’s mental and emotional instability. Throughout the play, Lear fluctuates between extreme anger and childish vulnerability; as Goneril comments to her sister Regan, ‘You see how full of changes his age is’. In the very opening scene, Lear demonstrates his irrational rage by banishing his youngest daughter, Cordelia, because she refuses to elaborate her filial affection in exchange for a portion of the kingdom. Following his night on the heath, meanwhile, Lear’s vulnerability is touchingly apparent, as he awakens in Cordelia’s care confused and afraid, seeking forgiveness, reassurance and support from his loving daughter. King Lear tells the story of a disintegrating identity, and of a man who fears he is going mad: ‘Who is it that can tell me who I am?’ he asks at one point in the play, later adding ‘O, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven!’.

King Lear is such a powerful play on so many levels - it explores all the negative relationships we humans experience and exposes them in a very raw way - from jealousy, cruelty and hatred through abandonment, loss and desolation leading to ultimately a loss of what makes us human. Lear's journey can be seen as an illustration of what it is like to lose all mentally and spiritually and physically and makes one wonder what Shakespeare had seen and endured to tap into in such depth the human condition. show less

Wow. Finally got to this, glad I waited, since one of the facets of the plot is the difficulty of aging with dignity. I'm impressed with the way the play got me engaged, since it opens with the old man rashly making the most foolish decisions of his long reign, as he himself quickly learns. For me the Gloucester subplot worked, too, offering a variant on the theme of inter-generational ingratitude. It ends bleakly, yet I felt ennobled through the experience; I realize I'm not the first one to feel that way. Unreservedly recommended.

This is especially devastating because (sorry, Aristotle's Poetics, but indeed because) it departs from the conventions of good Greek tragedy. Nobody's led astray slickly by their tragic flaw;* Lear's ennobled by suffering perhaps but at the start he's no philosopher king (as I'd envisioned) but a belching, beer can crushing Dark Ages thug lord who definitely brings it on himself, but not in any exquisite "his virtue was his fall" way. Cordelia is, not an ungrateful, but an ungracious child whose tongue is a fat slab of ham and who can't even manage the basic level of social graces to not spark a family feud that leaves everyone killed (surely a low bar!!). Goneril and Regan are straight-up venial malice, Shakespeare's Pardoner and show more Summoner; Edmund, obviously, charismatic, but a baaaad man; and the default good guys, the ones with the chance to win the day and transform this blood-filled torture show into two hours' pleasing traffic of the stage, obviously fumble it bigly (Albany, unbrave and too subtle; Kent, brave and too unsubtle; Gloucester, a spineless joke; and what is Edgar doing out in that wilderness when he should be teaming up with Cordelia and Kent to plan an invasion that's a MacArthuresque comeback and not a disaster, to go down as the plucky band of good friends who renewed the social compact with their steel and founded a second Camelot, a new England). They're not all monsters, and there are frequent glimmers of greatness, but they fuck it all up; in other words, they're us.

And then Lear's madness has much too much of, like, an MRA drum circle meeting, with the Fool and Kent and Edgar/John o'Bedlam (that's a name, that) farting around the wastes going "Fuckin' bitches, can't live with em, can't smack em one like they deserve" (though of course this is a Shakespearean tragedy, so everyone pretty much gonna get smacked one sooner or later). Not tragic flaws, in other words, but just flaws, with only glimmers of the good, and all the more devastating for that because all the more real. It's haaard to keep it together for a whole lifetime and not degenerate into a sad caricature of you at your best, or you as you could have been, and I wonder how many families start out full of love and functional relations and wind up kind of hating each other in a low key way just because of the accretion of mental abrasions plus the occasional big wound and because life is long.

This seems like a family that just got tired of not hating each other, standing in for a social order that's gotten tired of basically working from day to day, and everyone's just itching to flip the table and ruin Thanksgiving. I have little faith, post-play, that Edgar or Albany in charge will salvage the day--historically, of course, their analogues did not--and it's gonna be a long hard road to a fresh start (we don't of course try to find one such in the actual history--I mean, 1066?--pretty sure fresh starts don't happen in actual history--but I trust the general point is clear). This seems like the most plausible/least arbitrary of Shakespeare's tragedies, I am saying here, and thus also the most desolate, and one with lessons for any family (cf., say, Hamlet, with its very important lessons for families where the mother kills the dad and marries his brother and the dad's ghost comes back to tell the son to kill his uncle, a niche market to say the least), and one that I'll revisit again and again.

*Side note, my friend Dan calls me "My favourite Hamartian," and I'm recording that here because we may grow apart and I may forget that but I never want to forget really and so, hope to find it here once more show less