King Lear

by Shakespeare, William

  Although Macready’s production, and the productions of his successors in the nineteenth century, continued to show traces of Tate (for instance, in keeping Gloucester alive at the end), if we speak broadly we can say that Macready restored the play to more or less its original form—“more or less” because even today almost all productions are somewhat abridged, and as the Textual Note suggests (page 146ff.), there is a good deal of uncertainty about what the original form of the play was. (For instance, the First Folio omits about three hundred lines that are found in the second Quarto.) Productions of Lear in the middle and later nineteenth century were given to emphasizing lavish spectacle that was said to be historically accurate. The aim (again, speaking roughly) was theatrical illusionism: the viewer looked, through the proscenium, at a highly detailed scene that was alleged to be an authentic reproduction of the past. Thus, Charles Kean’s production in 1858 was said to be set in eighth-century Anglo-Saxon England. Architecture (a great raftered hall for the palace), decor (skins and heads of animals on the walls, gigantic crimson banners with pictures of animals on them) and costumes (for instance, Lear in a floor-length robe of gold, blue and purple, and France in a blue and red robe decorated with gold fleur-de-lys) were based on historical research—though today it is recognized that the sources Kean drew on range from the sixth through the eleventh centuries. Because it could take ten or fifteen minutes to erect on the stage a highly illusionistic set, scenes employing the same set were grouped together, intervening scenes with a different locale were either transposed or completely omitted, thus seriously distorting the rhythm of the play.

  During the second half of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth, King Lear was rarely played, perhaps because Lamb’s essay was held to be authoritative, perhaps because the tragedy seemed too bleak, too savage—too resistant to any sort of moral interpretation. Henry Irving gave it a try in 1892, but his production was unsuccessful and he never revived it. Since 1920, however, Lear has often been staged, for instance by such major actors as Frank Benson, Ben Greet, John Gielgud, William Devlin, Donald Wolfit, Louis Calhern, Charles Laughton, Michael Redgrave, Orson Welles, Morris Camovsky, Paul Scofield, and Laurence Olivier. For these actors, as well as for some in the nineteenth century, we often have rather full reports of performances. Thus, we know that Irving, confronted with deciding whether the Lear who banishes Cordelia is tyrannical or is mentally failing, decided on the second option. In an immensely informative book, The Masks of “King Lear,” Marvin Rosenberg lets us know how actors have interpreted the play, almost line by line. Here, for instance, is a tiny specimen (page 319). Rosenberg is talking about Lear’s final gestures:The possible modes of Lear’s dying, from ecstasy through dread, must be expressed solely in visual imagery; words fail now. A wide variety of possibilities has been suggested by actors as well as critics: so Gielgud, dying grandly in joy at his perception of apotheosis in Cordelia; Forrest, frankly hallucinating her reviving, staring vacantly into space; Camovsky, shocked to death at the horror of Cordelia’s stillness.

  Obviously it is impossible in this short essay even to touch on all of the chief Lears, which range from conceptions of Lear as heroic to Lear as enfeebled and fretful (Gielgud and Wolfit, by the way, each did four Lears); rather, the rest of this space will be used, first, briefly to raise the question about how the play should be costumed and set, and second, at greater length, to discuss what probably are the two most praised recent efforts—the performances by Paul Scofield and Laurence Olivier.

  In Shakespeare’s day the setting was the bare stage, or, rather, the stage was adorned chiefly by the costumed players, banners, etc., and whatever portable furniture (chairs, a table, a throne) might be necessary for a scene. Although a play set in Rome would require some tokens of classical garb, most plays were performed by actors wearing contemporary clothing, i.e. Elizabethan or Jacobean clothing, not the clothing of the time of the action. The use of contemporary clothing persisted in the late seventeenth century and in the eighteenth. Garrick’s 1756 production of Lear was said to be somewhat unusual because the characters were “judiciously habited” in “old English dresses,” but the illustrations of the period suggest that only the smallest gesture was made in the direction of departing from modern dress. Some three-quarters of a century after Garrick, as we have seen, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the emphasis was on historical accuracy; and the illusionism this accuracy or realism aimed at could now be reinforced by spectacular effects (dawn, a storm, or whatever) made possible with gaslight and later with electric light. Henry Irving, in the preface to his acting edition for his version of 1892, reveals something of this concern for historical truth:As the period of King Lear, I have chosen ... a time shortly after the departure of the Romans, when the Britons would naturally inhabit the houses left vacant.

  The souvenir program shows courtiers wearing suggestions of Roman armor, sometimes combined with horned helmets that one associates with Germanic peoples. The women wear elaborate gowns, and Lear wears a highly ornamented robe, all allegedly derived from medieval pictures.

  Most productions of King Lear continue to evoke some vaguely medieval setting, usually by means of furs and leather, but one difficulty with this approach is that Lear’s society may seem so primitive to begin with that as the play progresses there is little sense of a stripping away of conventional codes of behavior, with a descent into the depths. Partly to avoid a sense of primitiveness or remoteness that a medieval setting may be thought to convey, an occasional production uses modem dress or something close to it. For instance, Trevor Nunn’s production for the Royal Shakespeare Company, in 1976, with Donald Sinden as Lear, was set in Victorian or Edwardian times: the King (smoking a cigar, to indicate that the division of the kingdom was a rather informal, private affair) wore a military uniform, with medals; Kent wore a frock coat, and others wore tweeds and riding boots. What is remarkable, and even paradoxical, is that this production was noted for its realism; real water poured from above onto the stage in the heath scenes. The idea behind the use of modern dress (in King Lear or in any other early play) commonly is that the play will become more real to the audience (presumably this means that the audience can more fully experience the play, can get more out of it) if the action is set in a real (easily identifiable) period. In practice, however, spectators often are distracted by the novelty of the costumes and occasionally by the incongruity between the action (say, a duel) and the later setting (say, 1900). If a detailed medieval setting (offered in the name of realism or authenticity) obscures what Maynard Mack calls “the archetypal character” of the play, so too—perhaps more so—does a modern setting.

  At the other extreme, the Lear produced by George Devine in 1955, with John Gielgud as Lear, and with settings and costumes by the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi, sought to avoid any indication of a specific time or place. The producer and the designer wrote that theirobject in this production has been to find a setting and costumes which would be free of historical or decorative associations, so that the timeless, universal and mythical quality of the story may be clear.

  The set consisted of blocks of contrasting colors and shapes, which on occasion seemed to move on their own power. There were also symbolic forms: thus, an arch represented Lear’s world, and a black shape stood for doom. The costumes were more troublesome. Noguchi had not previously designed costumes, and because of a misunderstanding he was forced to design these in a hurry. He settled on a style that has usually been described as “surrealistic,” though some of the costumes show (as one can see by looking at Plate 5 in Stage Directions, one of John Gielgud’s autobiographies) a considerable debt to the robes of Japanese Noh drama. Gielgud once remarked that the costumes looked like shower curtains. They were not only strange looking, but they also proved difficult to wear, and the performance was widely regarded as a disaster. If the costumes and the set freed the play from any specific historical time and place, the strange shape
s nevertheless evoked the world of science fiction, fixing the play in an unreal world, an atmosphereless world utterly remote from the spectators. This is not what tragedy is about.

  A similar charge—that the production was remote from tragedy—might be made against the version performed in 1962 at Stratford-upon-Avon, starring Paul Scofield and directed by Peter Brook. Later the company went to London, and then toured the United States. (The production became the basis for a film, but the film was not identical with the stage performance.) Brook’s version, and Scofield’s acting, were widely hailed by audiences and by reviewers in the popular press, though they evoked grum- blings among academic critics. Because Brook was influenced by the discussion of the play in Jan Kott’s book, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, we may begin with a glance at Kott’s book. Kott’s chapter on King Lear, called “King Lear or Endgame,” begins by juxtaposing a quotation from Lear with a quotation from Waiting for Godot. Briefly, Kott sees Lear as an anticipation of the work of Ionesco, Duerrenmatt, and Beckett. Lear is kin, in various ways, to Beckett’s Vladimir, Estragon, Hamm, and Clov; Shakespeare’s play is assimilated to the Theater of the Absurd and the Theater of Cruelty. Kott does say that “of the twelve principal characters [in King Lear], half are just, the other half unjust,” but perhaps because in his forty-page chapter he never explicitly mentions Cordelia or Kent, and never mentions Edgar’s devotion to Gloucester, he says nothing about love or voluntary sacrifice in King Lear.

  The set that Brook designed for his production was almost bare. The audience saw a grayish-white cyclorama, two movable white flats angled to the sides, three wooden benches, and a table with a few utensils. Over the table was a rusted bronze sheet, later used as a thunder sheet. The characters were dressed in leather. Charles Marowitz, Brook’s assistant director, comments on the set in “Lear Log,” Encore 10 (1963), reprinted in Tulane Drama Review 8 (1963). “Apart from the rust, the leather and the old wood, there is nothing but space—giant white flats opening on to a blank cyclorama.” Was attention being paid to the supposedly bare stage that many scholars have argued for? No. Rather, we were getting the angst-ridden stage of the Theater of the Absurd. At the opening of the play, Scofield’s voice was rasping, imperious—there was nothing in it to gain any sympathy for him, nothing to suggest that Lear had ever known what it is to express affection. To speak more generally: Brook took as his text Gloucester’s words:As flies to wanton boys, are we to th’ gods,

  They kill us for their sport. (4.1.36-37)

  To this end, he tailored the play, apparently with no less confidence than Nahum Tate showed when he tailored the play to a different pattern. Thus, after the terrible scene in which Gloucester is blinded (3.7), Shakespeare shows us two servants who denounce the monstrosity of the action, commiserate with Gloucester, and do what little they can to alleviate his terrible pain: “I’ll fetch some flax and whites of eggs / T‘apply to his bleeding face. Now heaven help him.” (107-8) These lines were cut, as were the lines in which Edmund, repenting his wickedness, goes so far as to say:Some good I mean to do,

  Despite of mine own nature. Quickly send,

  Be brief in it, to th’ castle; for my writ

  Is on the life of Lear and on Cordelia:

  Nay, send in time. (5.3.245-49)

  Some actors interpret Lear’s last words, “Look there, look there,” as words of joy (however deluded a joyous Lear must be), but, not surprisingly, Scofield spoke the lines flatly, looked blankly into the auditorium, and died with his eyes remaining open. (The end of the film version differed.) The critic Kenneth Tynan, who hailed the production, offered an apt summary of the interpretation:Lay him to rest, the royal Lear with whom generations of star actors have made us reverently familiar, the majestic ancient, wronged and maddened by his vicious daughters; the felled giant, beside whose bulk the other characters crouch like pygmies. Lay also to rest the archaic notion that Lear is automatically entitled to our sympathy because he is a king who suffers.

  Lay also to rest, Tynan might have added, the old idea that an audience is supposed to be moved to woe and wonder at the sight of the suffering humanity that it sees on the stage. This production aimed not at moving the viewers, but at alienating them.

  In his film version (1969), Brook retained his overall interpretation, but the film in some ways is more satisfying than was the stage version. Some of the landscape scenes (shot on location chiefly in North Jutland, Denmark) possess great beauty, though here too every effort was made to depict an inhospitable world, an effort reinforced by using a film stock that was grainy and that sometimes showed washed-out images. At the end of the film, Lear’s head, in slow motion, falls back, out of the frame, and we are confronted with bright white light—that is, with nothing. And yet at least one scene in this film was overpoweringly beautiful, the scene on the beach with Lear and the blind Gloucester. Perhaps in this scene alone one felt moved; during the rest of the film one merely felt (as with the play) interested, and perhaps distressed that Shakespeare’s play was so diminished. (A Russian film version of King Lear, made in 1970 by Grigori Kozintsev, is also fairly free with Shakespeare’s play, but its emphasis is different from Brook‘s, for it concludes with shots of peasants setting about the task of rebuilding the civilization that the aristocrats have ravaged. Kozintsev has said that King Lear belongs not only to the Theater of Cruelty but to the Theater of Mercy.)

  The version of Lear produced by the British Broadcasting Corporation and Tinte-Life Films in 1982 takes account of both Cruelty and Mercy, and is in this respect nearly an ideal presentation of the play. Jonathan Miller’s intelligent direction keeps the director off stage, giving precedence to the playwright Michael Hordern makes a comprehensive hero, running the gamut in his own emotions and attitudes and in those excited in the audience. Dictatorial at first and every inch a king, he is at last humbled to Fortune’s blows and becomes “pregnant to good pity.” Very little of the play is altered or omitted. The actors, not engaging in verbal pyrotechnics—if anything, they understate—still less in bizarre readings of character, speak the lines, one feels, as Shakespeare meant them to be spoken. There is one exception to this, the mad speeches of Poor Tom, which ought to suggest madness but make the mistake of imitating the real thing, degenerate to “wild and whirling words.” But the play recovers strongly from this lapsing into merely imitative form. Woe and wonder mark its conclusion, on the one hand almost too dreadful for report; on the other exhilarating in the rendering of human beings living their lives at full stretch.

  Finally, something should be said about the televised production, made in 1982, with Laurence Olivier as Lear, Dorothy Tutin as Goneril, and Diana Rigg as Regan. In 1946, when Olivier at the age of thirty-nine had played Lear for the Old Vic, his performance evoked chiefly polite reviews, most of the high praise being reserved for Alec Guinness’s performance as the Fool. Now, at the age of seventy-five, Olivier again took on Lear. He made some cuts—several on the authority of the First Folio—but the film nevertheless runs to two hours and forty minutes, and is far more faithful to Shakespeare’s play than was Brook’s production or film. But it is not a theater spectator’s view of a theatrical performance recorded on film; rather, it is a version created for television cameras. Thus, when at the start of the play Lear’s courtiers prostrate themselves, we get an overhead shot, a bird‘s-eye view. The set evokes Stonehenge, as did the sets of Henry Irving, Donald Wolfit, and Charles Laughton, but some viewers have found Olivier’s studio Stonehenge—well, to come out with it—tacky. The director, Michael Elliott, has explained that he and Olivier decided not to make the film on location because the camera can dwell too lovingly on surfaces, on the real and perhaps irrelevant. The camera, that is, has a way of reminding viewers of limitless space, and of the rich abundance of life, and can be thought to be fundamentally inimical to the concentration and finiteness associated with tragedy. But in this television version the sets are essentially realistic (illusionistic), and so instead of the set he
lping us to concentrate on the tragic figures it distracts us by its imitation of the details of the real world.

  What of Olivier’s depiction of Lear? Perhaps one can say fairly that this television performance is touching rather than harrowing. Olivier had undergone a decade of severe illness (gout, cancer of the prostate, thrombosis of the leg, and a dete- norating muscular disease), and apparently lacked the strength that the role requires. There is much in the performance that is admirable, but on the whole this Lear lacks tragic stature. To use Aristotle’s terms, Olivier evokes pity but not terror. In the beginning, in his dealings with his daughters at the love contest, he plays Lear as slightly eccentric, faintly senile, and even here one feels that Olivier the actor is drawing on his bag of tricks. Intimate scenes, notably the meeting with Gloucester and the reconciliation with Cordelia, are touching, but in the scenes calling for majestic anger it is evident that Olivier (whose voice has become shrill) no longer has the physical resources necessary for the role. One admires the skill, wishes that Olivier had attempted Lear a decade earlier, recognizes that this Lear (like many other productions) reveals qualities in the play that the reader otherwise might miss, but one also finds oneself wondering if, perhaps, when all is said and done, Charles Lamb may not have been right when he said that Shakespeare’s Lear is diminished in performance.