Lears

Did I mention that the reason I managed last week's move so quickly was because someone (my coteacher C) had an extra ticket for the RSC’s King Lear at BAM, with Ian McKellen in the title part? Truth be told it took me a while to get into it, sleepless and frazzled as I was, but by the third hour I was gripped with pity and terror. (If it took me a while to get into it it wasn’t entirely my fault; all three daughters were played terribly, Gloucester was hollow and Edmund shallow.)

I don’t think I’ve ever seen Lear performed before (not in English at least: I saw it in Tokyo once). And it’s been a good long while since I reread the play, so I got me to the library and found a fantastic edition of the play “with theater commentary” from the Applause Shakespeare Library: on pages facing the text, you can read about the different ways in which scenes, characters and lines have been played in famous productions of the past. An example; Goneril and Regan have joined forces to strip Lear of his retinue, and Lear has turned against them.

LEAR …
You see me here, you gods, a poor old man,
As full of grief as age, wretched in both.
If it be you that stirs these daughters’ hearts
Against their father, fool me not so much
To bear it tamely; touch me with noble anger,
And let not women’s weapons, water drops,
Stain my man’s cheeks.—No, you unnatural hags!
I shall have such revenges on you both
That all the world shall . . . I will do such things . . .
What they are, yet I know not; but they shall be
The terrors of the earth. You think I’ll weep.
No, I’ll not weep.

Storm and tempest.

I have full cause of weeping, but this heart
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws
Or ere I’ll weep.—O Fool, I shall go mad! (Act II, scene iv, 267-80)

Here’s some of the theater commentary:

With the words “O Fool, I shall go mad!” (l. 280), Henry Irving’s Lear fell on the fool’s shoulder and “sobbed aloud”; another observer called this a “wild wail” (Lear at the Lyceum [1893]). John Gielgud in 1931 said the words “in a voice become suddenly flat and toneless, quickened only with a chilling, objective interest in their no longer contestable truth” (Spectator). Another interpretation was Paul Scofield’s in 1962; his Lear lost “his wits purely in order to punish [his daughters]: ‘I shall go mad!’ [was] a threat, not a pathetic prediction” (Observer).

William Shakespeare, King Lear, Edited with a Theatre Commentary

by John Russell Brown (NY & Tonbridge, Kent: Applause Books, 1996), 97

Reading the play this way is electrifying. It’s making me aware in a whole new way of the extraordinary richness of Shakespeare’s language and characterization. It’s also helping me understand something I’m registering in many students in “Religion & Theater.” Actors and directors read plays differently than academics do, though — as this edition makes clear — there’s much each approach can learn from the other.