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King Lear
by William Shakespeare
by William Shakespeare
I think this was my second time reading Shakespeare's King Lear. When I started it, I couldn't decide if I had read it one time already, or three, which seems like a pretty weird mix-up. I think it was one. Though I saw it in Stratford, performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company, which was an inspiring and amazing production.
I think the oft-repeated maxim that Shakespeare's plays are best seen and not read is most true for his sex jokes and for King Lear. Because, in seeing King Lear, I felt for the foolish needy King and the painfully blind Gloucester much more than I did in reading it. I didn't really have that problem with Hamlet, Othello, or Shylock. But these silly old stubborn men were only sympathetic characters for me when I saw them there, on the stage, broken by their age. Which I don't think Shakespeare would blame me for, since the text is littered with appeals to characters' pity based on the old men's white beards: the dignity that the appearance and triumph of age should lend them.
Cordelia, as an Elizabethan heroine, falls flat for me. It seems like she's the Victorian Angel of the House shoved onto a Renaissance stage. She needs a bit of the spunk and schemes of Merchant of Venice's Portia or the agency and cleverness of As You Like It's Rosalind. Even the bitterness of A Midsummer Night's Dream's Helena would be something. But instead she is like the dutiful Agnes Wickfield, Esther Summerson, and Amy Dorrit--all heroines in their own century, but out of place in a world where men get their eyes poked out and loyal servants are dispatched like flies. SPEAK UP, Cordelia! SPEAK UP!
It's interesting that Shakespeare, master of language that he is, uses the medium of language to hint at the failure of language. Words lie. Someone should have told a few characters that early on. And then when there is truth to be said, words fail. (SPEAK UP, Cordelia!) Or get rejected. (Oh Kent.) The Fool and "Poor Tom" are forced to speak truth in riddles and songs and jokes. Kent must disguise his language, deceiving to be true. And yet we, the audience, like poor poor Lear, hang on every word before us, because that's all we have.
Now, to the words:
"The art of our necessities is strange / And can make vile things precious" (3.2.76-77).
"'Tis the time's plague when madmen lead the blind" (4.1.54).
"When we are born, we cry that we are come / To this great stage of fools" (4.6.200-201).
"Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say" (5.3.393).
And there, perhaps, is the solution to language's failure. Maybe it's not language that is lacking--just sincerity.
Though not my favorite of Shakespeare's tragedies, King Lear is undeniably a triumph. Each line--each word--is bursting with meaning, and old age... is just terrifying.
I think the oft-repeated maxim that Shakespeare's plays are best seen and not read is most true for his sex jokes and for King Lear. Because, in seeing King Lear, I felt for the foolish needy King and the painfully blind Gloucester much more than I did in reading it. I didn't really have that problem with Hamlet, Othello, or Shylock. But these silly old stubborn men were only sympathetic characters for me when I saw them there, on the stage, broken by their age. Which I don't think Shakespeare would blame me for, since the text is littered with appeals to characters' pity based on the old men's white beards: the dignity that the appearance and triumph of age should lend them.
Cordelia, as an Elizabethan heroine, falls flat for me. It seems like she's the Victorian Angel of the House shoved onto a Renaissance stage. She needs a bit of the spunk and schemes of Merchant of Venice's Portia or the agency and cleverness of As You Like It's Rosalind. Even the bitterness of A Midsummer Night's Dream's Helena would be something. But instead she is like the dutiful Agnes Wickfield, Esther Summerson, and Amy Dorrit--all heroines in their own century, but out of place in a world where men get their eyes poked out and loyal servants are dispatched like flies. SPEAK UP, Cordelia! SPEAK UP!
It's interesting that Shakespeare, master of language that he is, uses the medium of language to hint at the failure of language. Words lie. Someone should have told a few characters that early on. And then when there is truth to be said, words fail. (SPEAK UP, Cordelia!) Or get rejected. (Oh Kent.) The Fool and "Poor Tom" are forced to speak truth in riddles and songs and jokes. Kent must disguise his language, deceiving to be true. And yet we, the audience, like poor poor Lear, hang on every word before us, because that's all we have.
Now, to the words:
"The art of our necessities is strange / And can make vile things precious" (3.2.76-77).
"'Tis the time's plague when madmen lead the blind" (4.1.54).
"When we are born, we cry that we are come / To this great stage of fools" (4.6.200-201).
"Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say" (5.3.393).
And there, perhaps, is the solution to language's failure. Maybe it's not language that is lacking--just sincerity.
Though not my favorite of Shakespeare's tragedies, King Lear is undeniably a triumph. Each line--each word--is bursting with meaning, and old age... is just terrifying.
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