Authors: William Shakespeare
Real and assumed madness play an essential part in the plot of
King Lear
. In a program note by Michael MacDonald, author of a historical study called
Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety and Healing in Seventeenth Century England
(1983), Adrian Noble’s 1993 production
was contextualized by means of the suggestion that the audience
is presented with three kinds of madness: real in Lear himself, assumed in Tom/Edgar, and professional in the Fool. To its original audience, in a population largely uneducated, unable to distinguish between epilepsy, demonic possession and a skilful beggar on the make, the spectacle of an old man and a half-naked creature railing at the weather and babbling about demons would not have been especially unusual: like the unemployed and other vagrants the countryside teemed with, they were a fact of life.
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Lear is very rarely played as being driven mad exclusively by the cruelty that is inflicted on him, but is often portrayed as being dangerously unhinged from the start. In Nicholas Hytner’s production,
the early household scenes are honeycombed with … micro-sequences, which take you inside Lear’s head, showing his hunger for affection, his need to play the strong man, his short attention span, and his helpless descents into blind rage. These are an embarrassment to the court and they give the sisters every pretext for saying something to keep the old man happy. But it is only when they try to draw the line that you really see what they have had to put up with. At the suggestion that he should shed a few knights, all hell breaks loose in the Albany dining room, with Lear emptying his gun into the ceiling, crushing Goneril to the ground like a blubbering child, clearing the space for carnage by hanging the Fool on a coat-hook: and finally vanishing into the night leaving his shaken hosts facing each other down a long table for their solitary dinner.
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Very clearly a man with no control over his own emotions, John Wood’s Lear was also an emotional vandal to his daughters, and his influence could be seen in their learned behavior.
In Buzz Goodbody’s 1974 production, to be a sane man in a cruel world was to be part of that cruelty. Lear’s madness became the transitional stage from cruelty to humanity:
Tony Church did not play Lear as a virtuoso acting part, but as a down-to-earth king, a patriarch who got his pleasure from hunting. He is out in the cold because of who he is—not a mighty monarch fallen from grace, but an old man on the point of death, facing himself and his life.… When he is “sane,” he represents the cruel world, arbitrary and aggressive, and only when he is “mad” does he embody human values.
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In the stunning visual sequence that started Adrian Noble’s 1982 production, lunacy not only led to virtue but was linked to it through the characters of the Fool and Cordelia:
On Lear’s throne the Grock-like Fool and Cordelia sit facing each other, with their necks at opposite ends of a taut halter (resembling a noose), as if lunacy and virtue were inseparable.… What follows is a delirious descent into a world of barbarism in which farce and tragedy are umbilically linked.
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Antony Sher played the Fool as “Lear’s alter-ego, the visible mark of his insanity. His Master’s Voice as he perches on his lap like a ventriloquist’s doll, the conscience of the King.”
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In the words of the reviewer in the
Jewish Chronicle
, “There is a strong sense in which, just as the great comic double acts are like watching a schizophrenic trying to pull himself together, Antony Sher’s red-nosed clown and Michael Gambon’s violent old man are two warring parts of one psyche.”
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The poet and critic James Fenton, writing in the London
Sunday Times
, pushed the point further:
Michael Gambon’s Lear was a man all too willing to cast off his role as king, and his relationship to the Fool pointed to this uneasiness.
Lear’s foolishness and his love for his Fool are the points of
departure for the interpretation. In all his madness, his anger and his suffering, we do not forget this. Indeed, I wonder if Lear has ever fooled around so enthusiastically.
Imagine a production in which the King, though condemned to kingship, would clearly love to have been a comedian, while the Fool, although unable to stop jesting, is transfixed by the horror of his true perception of the tragedy. This is the version which Adrian Noble has directed.… This is not the Fool of criticism, not an A-level “assess-the significance-of-the-Fool” fool. This is your genuine professional fool. Inside whom is a man in a panic, the Cassandra of the play, whose raving prophesies terrify the prophet himself.
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Sher described how in rehearsals they came up with a solution to the disappearance of the Fool after the arrival of Tom o’Bedlam.
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During the mock trial scene the Fool picked up a pillow to represent Regan. On the words “anatomize her,” Lear stabbed the pillow in a frenzy of rage. In his insane and violent outburst he fatally stabbed the Fool accidentally. With all the attention on Lear leaving the hovel, the others did not realize what had happened. The Fool slumped down dead into a barrel in which he stood.
The emphasis put on the Fool in this production (the program cover featured a fool’s face with a red nose that appeared to be an amalgam of Lear and the Fool), along with Sher’s magnificent performance, led many critics to feel that the play became unbalanced, losing impetus in the final acts after the Fool was killed.
At the end of the hovel scene Edgar has replaced the Fool as Lear’s spiritual mentor. Lear takes Edgar off in one direction as the Fool exits in another. According to director Adrian Noble,
That happens accidentally. He doesn’t plan that.… For some reason he decides to take on the sins of others … in exactly the same way as a pilgrim, monk or nun … dedicate their lives in a particular way that enables other people to have a richer spiritual life. It is a gift of humanity to God. This is exactly the same thing with Edgar.
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Lear’s journey into his own fooldom takes him from the enclosed mental space of the court out into the world and the secrets of humanity, to emotions denied and hidden from him by dint of his position in society. This awakening by the Fool and Poor Tom leads to a political and spiritual epiphany that is life-changing and possibly world-changing. Many directors have seen the following lines—often quoted in their program notes—as the core of the play:
Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your lopped and windowed raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp,
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them
And show the heavens more just.
The political dimensions of
King Lear
are most clearly evidenced in the king’s interaction with the mad beggar. Edgar, the abused son, and Poor Tom, the forgotten citizen of Lear’s England, embody both familial and national neglect. Edgar’s disguise as Bedlam beggar is also crucial to Lear’s spiritual journey. In Noble’s second production of the play for the RSC in 1993:
[Lear’s] growing obsession with this emblem of “unaccommodated man” causes the displacement of the Fool … was brilliantly visualized in the image of Ian Hughes clinging forlornly to Poor Tom’s hand at the end of a human chain that Gloucester led across the stage.
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Visually Edgar has variously appeared as a Caliban-type figure, the poor bare-forked animal spouting obscenities but in need of the world’s pity, as Christ-like with a crown of thorns, bloodied and suffering for the world’s sins, or alternatively as demonic, as in the RSC’s 1982 production when “Jonathan Hyde’s Edgar as a virtually naked Poor Tom [burst] through the splintering floor like some infernal
demon born on to Lear’s ‘great stage of fools’.”
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“It was the modern equivalent of the entrance of a devil from the pit of Hell, and Tom’s demonic side, which actors so often miss as they go for shivering pathos, was established at once.”
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Thrown to the wilderness by his family, Edgar evolves from “worm” to potential king. His suffering appears as a barbaric initiation rite designed by the toughest of gods. It is a trial of cruelty fitting for the evil world that is unleashed in the play.
King Lear
is a play rich with vicious bestial images, all symbolic of the barbaric capabilities of man and woman. Goneril, for instance, is described as having a “wolfish visage.” Edward Topsell’s
Historie of Foure-footed Beastes
(1607) mixed scientific fact, folklore, and classical allusions to animals and mythological creatures, giving them often exotic and fantastic attributes. It describes the customary attributes associated with the wolf in animal lore: treachery, deceit, hypocrisy, ravenousness, and cruelty. These associations gave Shakespeare’s audience an accurate idea of Goneril’s character and her subsequent behavior. However, for modern directors, “Another interpretative decision that must be faced … is whether to accept the moral polarity of Lear’s daughters as a fact of the story or to suggest more naturalistic reasons for their behavior.”
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In recent years patriarchal repression and child abuse of one form or another have often been regarded as the defining reasons for evil in children. Lear has accordingly been portrayed as physically and mentally abusive or neglectful, demanding, cantankerous, a bully who has created so much pent-up anger in his two elder daughters that it erupts when they are given the opportunity to release their feelings without recrimination; that is to say, when they are in power.
In the influential 1962 production, Peter Brook portrayed Lear’s knights as rowdy and destructive, while Irene Worth’s Goneril was self-contained and cool, remonstrating with Lear in measured tones, speaking as somebody with cause to complain. Some critics thought such a treatment a distortion of the text, but most modern directors have followed this interpretation to some degree. Though it helps to humanize Goneril, it does make the descent into evil very difficult to portray.
Janet Dale, who played the part in 1993, admitted that “I am trying to play her with a conscience, but I suspect the lines won’t support it.” Rather than an outright evil woman, she wished to portray her as a woman “of moral degeneration.”
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By focusing on the psychology of these extremely dysfunctional families, the violence in Nicholas Hytner’s 1990 production became rooted in explainable terms:
The production is about confused people destroyed by their incomprehensible emotions or, as with Wood’s massively erratic Lear, struggling through new ones.… The effects of long abuse are evident in his daughters. Alex Kingston’s Cordelia has become rebellious, bloody-minded and rejects Lear almost more than he does her. Estelle Kohler’s Goneril and Sally Dexter’s Regan, seem still to want the love of this old, impossible man.… It is fashionable nowadays to allow us to see the “bad” daughters’ point of view, but rarely as strongly as here. Both of them seem badly in need of Valium, psychoanalysis, or both. They are frustrated, exhausted, at the end of a tether which finally breaks, liberating all that suppressed anger and barely contained madness. Their evils proliferate, but they, like Goneril and Regan themselves, are ultimately Lear’s fault.
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Order opens up to reveal chaos. And the same pattern is visible in erratic human behaviour. Lear, having cursed Goneril with sterility, rushes back to embrace her. Astonishingly, Regan first conspires in the blinding of Gloucester and then tenderly asks him, rather than her wounded husband, “How dost my lord?” Mr. Hytner ushers us into a morally topsy-turvy universe in which good and evil frequently cohabit within the same person.
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One cannot escape the fact that what Regan and Goneril do is evil and unnatural. In Buzz Goodbody’s 1974 production, which cut the role of Cornwall, “Regan put out Gloucester’s eyes unaided, with a broach.”
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Modern stagings of the blinding scene nearly always show Regan’s active participation in the mutilation of Gloucester.
Emily Raymond, who played Goneril in 2004, felt that Goneril and Regan “had a brutal upbringing—[with] smacks of physical violence and mental abuse. I think Lear probably took his daughters to hangings and taught them the brutal way to deal with traitors—you don’t hang them, you pluck out their eyes and let them live, to serve as a deterrent to others.”
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What impact does it have to turn the violence and evil in
Lear
into something psychological instead of metaphysical? Does the implication that it is somehow the “natural” result of a bad, neglected upbringing diminish the epic nature of the play and the horrific impact of the sisters’ monstrous acts? Lear’s world is thrown out of order by his inability to be an adequate father
and king
. James I, in his publication
The True Law of Free Monarchies
, underlined the divine right of kings and the duty of all monarchs to treat their subjects as a caring father would do his children. Lear’s misunderstanding of his role as a fixed point in the natural order of things and his irresponsibility in relation to his position in society unleash unnatural chaos.
In 1993 Adrian Noble emphasized violent cosmic forces prevalent in the play by use of an abstract but symbolic set:
When David Bradley’s superlative Gloucester, his eyes gouged out, staggers away from the scene of atrocity and from Simon Dormandy’s chillingly, psychopathic Cornwall, the focus clears at last. Noble used the Folio edition of the text, so cutting the aid of Gloucester’s servants after the blinding. The sightless Bradley gazes in the direction of a blue and white model of the globe, fixed above the stage. As he stares, a crack runs across the globe’s circumference and the sands of time begin to pour out of it. The society of King Lear, with family life collapsing in warfare and inhuman cruelty … is ominous of all civilized human life ruined and coming to an end.
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