Screen Adaptations: Shakespeare's King Lear

A close study of the relationship between text and film

Yvonne Griggs

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781408105924
• eBook ISBN: 9781408144015
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This close study of film adaptations of King Lear looks at
several different versions (mainstream, art-house and cinematic
`offshoots') and discusses: the literary text in its historical
context, key themes and dominant readings of the text, how the text is
adapted for screen and how adaptations have changed our reading of the
original text.

There are many references to the literary text and screenplays and
the book also features quotations from directors and critics. There is
plenty of discursive material here to support student work on both film
and literature courses.

PART 1: Literary contexts

‘The wheel is come full circle’:
origins and new directions

Recycled narratives

King Lear draws upon an amalgamation of existing narratives, and has been interpreted as both a redemptive morality tale and a vision of apocalyptic doom. Throughout its performance history, it has been constantly reworked and radically edited to realise interpretations that suit the mood and values of its contemporary production climate.

The tale of King Lear and his daughters is one that has become part of the literary landscape of Western culture, and the skeleton of the narrative is familiar to many. At its most basic level, King Lear tells the story of a monarch who has tired of the demands of leadership and, consequently, decides to relinquish governance to his daughters, who must ‘earn’ their share of his kingdom by performing public declarations of their love for him. It is the youngest and most favoured daughter’s refusal to comply with his request, and Lear’s petulant response to her refusal, that sets the narrative in motion. Goneril and Regan (and their respective husbands, Albany and Cornwall) assume control of Lear’s divided kingdom; Cordelia, having disobeyed her father and voiced her doubts about the sincerity of her sisters’ love for him, is exiled along with Lear’s trusted adviser, Kent. From this point onwards Lear’s powers diminish whilst those of his remaining daughters increase. Throughout the course of the narrative we witness his mistreatment at the hands of Goneril and Regan, his physical disintegration, his descent into insanity, and his ultimate redemption in the play’s closing moments as he is reconciled with the exiled Cordelia. King Lear’s subplot serves to amplify the play’s exploration of the roles of fathers and their offspring. Gloucester is easily duped, his fatherly love and trust misplaced; yet, like Lear, he eventually learns the error of his ways. For many, King Lear is a tale of moral redemption: by journeying through the depths of despair and emerging as a man who is ready to acknowledge and learn from his mistakes, Lear exemplifies the possibilities of Christian forgiveness. However, the very dark and violent undertones embedded within Shakespeare’s verse also invest the text with a less hopeful message. Lear, the man, may be ‘saved’ but humanity is still left to ‘prey upon itself,/Like monsters of the deep’ (4.2, 50–51).¹ Law and order are seemingly restored but we doubt both its longevity and human-kind’s capacity to reject greed and corruption, or to refrain from acts of cruelty.

The many narratives from which Shakespeare’s King Lear borrows are less well known. These range from the play’s basic affiliation to fairy tales concerning fathers and daughters, to the populist historical account of King Leir found in Holinshed’s Chronicles. The plot line of the Lear story is particularly similar to that of the fairy tale, ‘The Goosegirl at the Well’: in this fairy tale, a king asks his three daughters to declare their love for him, and the size of their inheritance is decided in accordance with the measure of their love. Whilst the elder daughters acquiesce, delivering lines which please their egotistical father, the third fails his ‘love test’; she claims that she loves her father ‘like salt’, since ‘the best food does not please [her] without [it]’.² But such a claim is considered an inadequate expression of love, and she is cast out by her petulant father who learns to repent as the tale unfolds.

In addition to the similarities shared with such fairy tales, Shakespeare’s play builds upon the historical narrative of King Leir, first recounted in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (c. 1135), and retold by Raphael Holinshed in The Chronicles of England, Scotlande and Irelande in 1587. Though commonly viewed as historical accounts, both have greater affinities with folklore and mythology than with fact. In Geoffrey’s account, the love test and the allocation of dowries revolves around the broker-age of marriages for all three of Leir’s daughters; the story concludes with the suicide of Cordeilla, who, after restoring her father to the throne, succeeds him, only to be overthrown and imprisoned by her nephews. Holinshed’s version follows a similar narrative and both writers focus on the civil wars that ensue, the Dukes of Albany and Cornwall leading the attack against Leir.

As an adapter, Shakespeare refocuses the narrative lens, moving us away from the warring factions at the heart of earlier historical accounts and towards a closer examination of the protagonists at the centre of the story. The Mirror for Magistrates (1574, Folios 47–54, 211–217) relates in poetic form ‘The Trageodye of Cordila’, detailing her desperation as a result of her imprisonment by her nephews:

In spiteful sorte, they used then my captive corse, No favour shewde to me, extinct was mine estate.
Of kindred, princesse bloud, or pere was no remorce,
But as an abject vile and worse they did me hate,
To lie in darksome dungeon was my fate.

In a final act of desperation, and prompted by the ghost of ‘Despaire’, Cordila commits suicide. Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, 1590 (Book II, Canto 10, 27–32), also traces the history of King Leyr and envisions Cordelia’s death by hanging:

So to his crown she him restored againe,

In which he dyde, made ripe for death by eld,

And after wild, it should to her remaine:

Who peaceably the same long time did weld:

And all mens harts in dew obedience held;

Till that her sisters children, woxen strong

Through proud ambition, against her rebeld,

And ouercommen kept in prison long

Till wearie of that wretched life, her selfe she hong.

But it is not until Shakespeare’s version of events that her hanging is tranformed from an act of suicide to one of murder, ordered by Edmund, son of Gloucester, who enters the story line as part of a subplot grafted onto the Lear narrative. The subplot introduced by Shakespeare allows for further illumination of the main plot’s examination of filial love and matters of loyalty.

Nevertheless, whilst inventively woven into the play’s overriding themes by Shakespeare, it too is a story line which has, in part, been appropriated from elsewhere. Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1590) tells of a blind Paphlagonian king, deceived by his illegitimate son, Plexirtus, yet saved by his other honourable and legitimate heir, Leonatus. Robert Greene’s Selimus, published in 1594 and relocating events to early sixteenth century Turkey, replaces daughters with sons in a tale of political intrigue and filial wrongdoing, this time perpetrated by the youngest son who murders both his father and his siblings. Notions of filial duty, of disloyalty and sibling rivalry resonate throughout this text and Shakespeare’s King Lear.

However, it is the anonymous True Chronicle History of King Leir, published in 1605 but performed from 1594 onwards, that most closely resembles Shakespeare’s tale of fathers wronged by their offspring. Richard Knowles notes ‘almost one hundred details common to these two plays but found in virtually none of the other sources’.³ In both we have dead queens, and kings who wish to ‘Unburdened crawl toward death’ (1.1, 40); the details of the reconciliation scenes between Cordelia and Lear are also strikingly similar. Yet one text emerges as an iconic work of literature of tragedic proportions, whilst the other remains a relative unknown, consigned to the realms of ‘pleasant historical romance’.⁴ The extent to which Shakespeare was familiar with this, the only other contemporaneous, dramatic reworking of the Lear story line, remains debatable, but his knowledge of it and of numerous previous renditions of the Lear story cannot be denied. In the true spirit of the inventive, creative adapter, Shakespeare owns the version he eventually distils; he recycles the narratives and plays with the thematic concerns explored in existing texts. Most significantly, his text owes nothing to its predecessors in terms of its versification and dramatic realisation.

Considerations of textual ‘fidelity’ are further complicated by the existence of several posthumously generated substantive versions of Shakespeare’s King Lear, none of which can be categorically regarded as the definitive text. Kiernan Ryan notes that the Quarto of 1608 and the Folio of 1623 share no fewer than eight hundred and fifty verbal variants; furthermore, he questions, firstly, whether either represents a ‘reliable transcription of the script as performed by Shakespeare’s company’, and secondly, whether we can be sure that Shakespeare was involved in the editing of the 1623 Folio.⁵ Whilst the textual solution for some editors has been to bring elements of the two texts together to produce a conflated version,⁶ others have adopted a bi-textual approach. The 1986 Oxford edition, printing both Quarto and Folio versions side by side, claimed rather contentiously, that ‘for the first time, King Lear is printed both as Shakespeare originally wrote it and as he revised it, some years later in the light of performance’,⁷ despite the difficulties of proving that either text represents conclusively what Shakespeare originally wrote or later revised.

However, this search for a definitive text has become of far more concern to readers of the text than to those involved in its production on stage or screen, and remains an anathema to the film industry because of the collaborative and financially-driven nature of film’s production processes. Renaissance scholar Allardyce Nicoll, writing in 1936, points out that, in Elizabethan and Jacobean times, the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries was similarly collaborative and financially constrained: their creative output ‘once paid for by the management, ceased to be their property, might be used in any way that that management saw fit and was not likely to view the light of day in printed form’.⁸

‘This great stage of fools’: King Lear in performance

First performed in 1606, Shakespeare’s tragedy emerges as a play which, unlike those of his contemporaries or his own earlier tragedies, subverts the tragedic conventions of the genre, moving away from the accepted formulaic elements of Greek tragedy and into new dramatic territory. In the creative spirit of adaptation, the convergence of certain elements of the aforementioned texts and Shakespeare’s own narrative and linguistic interventions result in a rendition of Lear’s tale that is marked out as being different to its predecessors in both content and form. Resisting a connection to any geographical or chronological framework, King Lear builds instead upon the narrative’s mythical properties and, throughout its performance history, has continued to accommodate the cultural and social preoccupations of each production era. Shakespeare’s play is, like its screen successors, a form of adaptation, constructed from a range of existing narratives that have not only evolved over time but in response to the more pressing concerns of each production’s ‘moment’.

During the course of the last four hundred years, Shakespeare’s plays have been amended and interpreted to suit the mood of contemporary production. Nahum Tate’s 1680 version of King Lear became the accepted version of ‘Shakespeare’s’ play for over a century, despite the liberties taken with the text’s story line and its thematic preoccupations. The morally ambiguous elements of the text were eliminated, tragi-comic moments were cut, and a romantic liaison between Cordelia and Edgar was inserted to ensure restoration of order, resulting in a long series of productions which – in addition to omitting central characters like the Fool and radically altering the narrative outcomes – had no qualms about operating outside what is often ambiguously termed the ‘spirit’ of the source text. The preference for Restoration comedies and its aversion to the play in its Shakespearean form reflected the period’s unwillingness to engage with some of the fundamental questions it raises. It was not until the era of the Romantics that Shakespeare’s version of the Lear narrative regained prominence. By 1838 the melodramatic leanings of Tate’s adapted text were excised; William Charles Macready’s King Lear reintroduced the Fool and restored Shakespeare’s tragic ending, Tate’s version becoming a ‘derisory footnote to the history of the masterpiece’.⁹ Macready’s heavily edited rendition played to its Victorian audience’s desire for spectacle, and again in response to Victorian taste, later cuts reflected Victorian sensibilities, with Gloucester’s blinding being removed from Henry Irving’s 1892 King Lear.

Dominant readings of King Lear: a tale of redemption or fall?

King Lear is one of Shakespeare’s most complex texts, presenting a range of themes for exploration on both stage and screen. Its concerns are often cited as universal and timeless, its locale seen as being open to a multitude of interpretations. Similarly, its chameleon-like properties mean that its dominant thematic preoccupations vary from one stage or screen production...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Timeline: cinematic adaptations of King Lear
• Part One: Literary contexts
• Part Two: Production Contexts
• Part Three: Readings of key versions
• Part 4: The Afterlife . . .
• Select Bibliography
• Select Filmography
• Footnotes
• Imprint