Shakespeare's Tragic Skepticism by Millicent Bell

Author:Millicent Bell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2002-10-19T16:00:00+00:00

3

“Unaccommodated” Lear

In that dimly lit, unlocalized purgatory in which the characters in King Lear approach and address one another, nothing is so difficult as recognition. Their challenges to one another multiply the “Who’s there?” with which Hamlet opens. Beyond any ordinary requirement of stage identification, they ask, continually, “Who are you?” or “Who is he?” and even demand, “What am I?”—as though they were struggling to see or to be seen through the mist of some primal indefiniteness. Their uncertainty is felt also by the reader or playgoer who may find himself unable to retain a clear sense of anyone in a play that has often been called incoherent. Disconnected moments accumulate as cruelty and suffering escalate and the action rolls forward like a barrel down a hill instead of progressing to a climax in the ordinary way. After the chief personage’s preposterous single act of sentimental egotism that occurs right at the beginning, a force outside of the human actors seems to bring them to the absolute of disorder represented by the storm Lear goes out into at the end of the second act and that lashes him and his companions for five scenes. After this, it looks as though the playwright was unable to bring things to a stop. He permits the audience to expect from one moment to the next either the death of the chastised Lear and Cordelia or their survival (so allowing, structurally, for that “happy ending” provided in eighteenth-century productions), but arbitrarily, finally, he closes down all hope for the good as well as the bad.

The peculiar challenge to the stage of this great, mysterious work has always been acknowledged. Lear has no prehistory for the method actor to imagine. What kind of a ruler had he been? What kind of father? Or husband (his queen, the mother of his daughters, is never mentioned)? Others of the play’s characters must make an initial impression that is contradicted later. Gloucester, who makes a very poor appearance at the start, is graduated with difficulty to the company of the worthy in the play. Not only the justly resentful Edmund but the drearily literal Cordelia prove to be something else than they first seem. Even Goneril and Regan seem florid rather than hypocritical at first. Also—the characters seem detached from one another rather than interacting. Particularly in certain scenes, like those on the storm-swept heath, they often seem not to hear what others say and speak past each other to the unlistening skies—the madness that overtakes Lear and the simulated madness of Poor Tom having added to the suspension of true interaction and the effect of disjunction between cause and effect. It is not always evident that what they say or do must lead to what happens next.

Nahum Tate’s rewrite, which supplanted Shakespeare on the English stage from 1681 to 1838, is generally remembered because it eliminated the scene of Cordelia’s death that made Dr. Johnson unable to read it again until he came to edit the play years after.

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