King Lear

New Critical Essays

Jeffrey Kahan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415775267
• eBook ISBN: 9781135973643
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Is King Lear an autonomous text, or a rewrite of the earlier and anonymous play King Leir? Should we refer to Shakespeare's original quarto when discussing the play, the revised folio text, or the popular composite version, stitched together by Alexander Pope in 1725? What of its stage variations? When turning from page to stage, the critical view on King Lear is skewed by the fact that for almost half of the four hundred years the play has been performed, audiences preferred Naham Tate's optimistic adaptation, in which Lear and Cordelia live happily ever after. When discussing King Lear, the question of what comprises 'the play' is both complex and fragmentary.

These issues of identity and authenticity across time and across mediums are outlined, debated, and considered critically by the contributors to this volume. Using a variety of approaches, from postcolonialism and New Historicism to psychoanalysis and gender studies, the leading international contributors to King Lear: New Critical Essays offer major new interpretations on the conception and writing, editing, and cultural productions of King Lear. This book is an up-to-date and comprehensive anthology of textual scholarship, performance research, and critical writing on one of Shakespeare's most important and perplexing tragedies.

Contributors Include: R.A. Foakes, Richard Knowles, Tom Clayton, Cynthia Clegg, Edward L. Rocklin, Christy Desmet, Paul Cantor, Robert V. Young, Stanley Stewart and Jean R. Brink

1 Introduction

Shakespeare’s King Lear

Jeffrey Kahan

Like virtually all of Shakespeare’s plays, King Lear is now thought of as a masterpiece. As of this writing, it is safe to say that in the public’s mind the story of Lear’s physical and spiritual suffering, and, above all, his heartbreaking end, aptly sum up the human condition:

• When we are born, we cry that we are come
  To this great stage of fools.

(Scene 20.171–72)¹

However, King Lear has not always been considered a profound, if bleak, meditation on the human experience. The Poet Laureate Naham Tate thought that the play was so deeply flawed that it could only be staged after radical revision. In his new and improved version, King Lear did not die but reigned victorious over his vanquished foes, an oddly happy conclusion for a tragedy! Whereas we would today think that any attempt to modify Shakespeare so fundamentally should have been met with contempt, audiences embraced Tate’s version, which held the stage from 1681–1838.

Even with the return of Shakespeare’s play, many very respectable artists and critics have continued to voice some unease. As Jan Kott (1964)² wrote: “The attitude of modern criticism to King Lear is ambiguous and somehow embarrassed…. King Lear gives one the impression of a high mountain that everyone admires, yet no one particularly wishes to climb” (87). Over the last four hundred years, many writers and artists have tried to scale its heights, and each essay has left its mark. In this Introduction, we will retrace these scholarly and theatrical paths, some of which are still fresh, others well-trodden, and still others now all but forgotten. Let’s start with what we know about Shakespeare’s source materials and what he did with them, and then turn to what various poets, novelists, academics, directors and actors have made of King Lear.

Origins

Setting the stage: Shakespeare and his actors

Because we often think of Shakespeare as ageless and his plays as timeless, it’s sometimes difficult to remember that many of this man’s most famous plays were written during the short span of 1599 to 1609. In that period, he—aided in various ways by his fellow actors—built the largest playhouse in London, The Globe, secured the protection of the king, and embarked upon a decade of playwriting that has never been equaled: the classic comedies such as As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, and All’s Well that Ends Well; the historical war epic: Henry V; the Greco-Roman plays: Julius Caesar, Troilus and Cressida, Timon of Athens, Pericles, and Coriolanus; and the great tragedies upon which much of his posthumous reputation has been built: Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and, of course, King Lear.

In short, when composing King Lear (ca. 1605–6), William Shakespeare was at his peak, but so too were his players. Richard Burbage, one of the chief tragedians of the era, played the part of Lear. Burbage came from an acting family. His father, James, owned The Theater, Renaissance London’s first custom-built playhouse, and Richard’s elder brother Cuthbert, who died in 1597, was an actor of some note. Burbage himself is often described as short and stocky, although his portrait shows he was in later life thin of face. The parts he played he made his own, so much so that when Shakespeare died in 1616 audiences hardly noticed, but when Burbage died in 1619, one poet lamented that the world had lost a whole host of tragic heroes:

• No more young Hamlett, ould Hieronymoe;
  Kind Lear, the grieved Moore, and more besyde
  That lived in him, have now for ever dy’de.

(Qtd. in Stopes 118)

The reference to “Kind Lear” and to “the grievèd Moor” may suggest that Burbage played these tragic roles in the key of a victim. Certainly, “Kind Lear” sees himself as unjustly treated:

• I will forget my nature. So kind a father!

(Scene 5.32)

• Who comes here? O heavens,
  If you do love old men, if your sweet sway
  Allow obedience, if yourselves are old,
  Make it your cause!

(Scene 7.347–50)

• No I will weep no more.—
  In such a night as this! O Regan, Gonoril,
  Your old kind father, whose frank heart gave you all….

(Scene 11.17–19)

• I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness.
  I never gave you kingdom, called you children.
  You owe me no subscription. Why then, let fall
  Your horrible pleasure. Here I stand your slave,
  A poor, infirm, weak and despised old man….

(Scene 9.16–20)

• I am a man more sinned against than sinning.

(Scene 9.60)

Likewise, the references to Hamlet and Hieronimo may tell us something about Burbage’s histrionics. Both parts call for fits of madness, whether feigned or real. In Lear, Shakespeare played upon audience expectations by noting not the king’s madness, but his repeated efforts to retain his fading sanity:

• O, let me not be mad, sweet heaven!
  I would not be mad.
  Keep me in temper. I would not be mad.

(Scene 5.45–47)

• You heavens, give me that patience, patience I need …

(Scene 7.430)

• No, I will be the pattern of all patience.

(Scene 9.37)

• O, that way madness lies. Let me shun that.
  No more of that.

(Scene 11.20–21)

It seems clear that Richard Burbage was a master of pathos, but, when circumstances dictated, he could also be downright menacing. On 16 November 1590, his father, James Burbage, found himself embroiled in a legal dispute with his sister-in-law, Margaret Brayne, who had hired one Robert Myles and some muscle to intimidate the family. When Myles presented the Burbages with what appeared to be legal documents on Margaret Brayne’s behalf, James Burbage told him he’d sooner “wipe his tail” with the paper than read it. And how did Richard Burbage react to all of this? No doubt emboldened by his audience—he was, after all, performing before his father—Richard Burbage picked up a broom and, using it as a staff, marched up to the hired gang and threatened to take them all on. He then “scornfully and disdainfully” grabbed Robert Myles by the nose and said he “would beat him also, and did challenge the field of him at that time.” He then began to beat Myles with a broom and called him a “murdering knave” and “other vile and unhonest words” (Wallace 115).³

The action is that of an experienced and gutsy street fighter—Richard Burbage literally getting in Robert Myles’ face, insulting him with coarse language, grabbing and twisting the man’s nose and daring him to do something about it; then, sensing Myles had no real fight in him, humiliating him physically. But the passage also has a theatrical edge to it—“challenge the field of him” sounds like something out of Henry V. Certainly, Burbage must have used his command of both voice and body to intimidate Myles and his gang, and he was successful in playing the part. Faced with Burbage’s violence, Myles, bloodied and browbeaten, backed off. To be sure, this passage does not tell us anything about the costume he wore when playing King Lear, nor does it suggest the way he addressed Cordelia, nor the way he raged against the gods themselves in the heath scene, nor is this vignette as evocative as, say, Coleridge’s description of Edmund Kean—“To see him act is like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning”—but it does suggest some of his fearsome power in King Lear. Recall, for example, the king’s daunting, dramatic command:

• Come not between the dragon and his wrath.

(Scene 1.114)

or his grim promise of sword and fire:

• I will 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.

(Scene 7.438–41)

or, still later, Edgar’s awestruck reaction when looking upon the infuriated king:

• Look where he stands and glares.

(Scene 13.19)

The part of the Fool was most likely performed by the dwarfish Robert Armin, for whom Shakespeare had already written the parts of Touchstone and Feste.⁴ Armin had been trained in the art of fooling by the famed Court jester, Richard Tarlton (Chettle 22).⁵ As for the casting of the other parts, including which—if any—character Shakespeare himself played, we know nothing, though it has been suggested that he played the ever-truthful Albany (Ackroyd 234). What we can say is that even the minor actors who played in the original production of Lear—think of the boy actors who were called upon to play the female parts of Regan, Goneril and Cordelia—must have been extremely skillful.

Then again, calling these actors “boys” is something of a misnomer. Some of the “boy” actors of the era were older than Shakespeare when he got married. William Barksted was still performing in boys’ companies at age twenty, Hugh Attewell was at least twenty-one; Joseph Taylor was twenty-three. Moreover, many of these actors were highly seasoned. Some had been performing professionally for over ten years (Munro 40–41).

The point is that, given the skills of his company, Shakespeare was free to write to his actors’ strengths, though defining exactly how receptive Shakespeare was to his players remains unknown. The theater historian G.E. Bentley (1981) rather comically imagined Shakespeare as deaf or indifferent to his company’s complaints. Roars Burbage: “Aw, come on Will! You can’t expect me to do that!” Armin, equally upset with his role, chimes: “What the hell! Don’t I come on in the last two acts at all?”(60)

King Leir and Shakespeare’s early works

Surprising as it may seem to many, Shakespeare and his contemporaries did not value originality. Whereas we might dismiss a work as derivative or unoriginal, Shakespeare’s audience saw no issue with someone taking wellknown materials and revising or updating them. Before Shakespeare wrote King Lear, Elizabethans were familiar with another play called “king leare.” On 6 April and then again on 8 April 1594, a troupe of actors at the Rose playhouse performed this play. We have the details from Philip Henslowe’s records, which we often refer to as “Henslowe’s Diary.” Henslowe was a practical man, who tracked his business with precision. He regularly commissioned new plays and dutifully noted their premières. Since he did little more than record the title, dates and earnings of “king leare,” we can assume that...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of figures and acknowledgements
• General Editor’s introduction
• 1 Introduction: Shakespeare’s King Lear
• 2 The reshaping of King Lear
• 3 The evolution of the texts of Lear
• 4 King Lear and early seventeenth-century print culture
• 5 “The injuries that they themselves procure”: justice poetic and pragmatic, and aspects of the endplay, in King Lear
• 6 What does Shakespeare leave out of King Lear?
• 7 The cause of thunder: nature and justice in King Lear
• 8 Hope and despair in King Lear: the gospel and the crisis of natural law
• 9 Lear in Kierkegaard
• 10 The smell of mortality: performing torture in King Lear 3.7
• 11 Some Lears of private life, from Tate to Shaw
• 12 If only: alternatives and the self in King Lear
• Notes on contributors