the Goodreads Team asked Elizabeth Nunez:

Can you a come up with a deleted scene from your favorite Shakespeare play?

Elizabeth Nunez The two older daughters in King Lear are unforgivingly wicked. My book, Even in Paradise , which is set in the Caribbean, unearths the source of their resentment of their youngest sister and their cold disregard for their father’s wellbeing.

In Holinshed’s Chronicles , Shakespeare’s source for King Lear, the husbands of Lear’s two daughters are the cruelest of all the characters. It is they—Albany, the husband of Lear’s eldest daughter, Goneril, and Cornwall, the husband of Lear’s middle daughter, Regan—who conspire to take over Lear’s reign and to strip him of his lands and fortune.

In Shakespeare’s King Lear, however, Goneril and Regan are the evil ones, though one of the husbands is just as bad. Why the women? one might ask. But that’s for another discussion. Still, the pivotal scene that sets off the action in Shakespeare’s play is not much different from the Holinshed source. King Lear decides to distribute his property and power to his three daughters based on whose declaration of love for him proves that she loves him best. Most writers and scholars (mainly male, it seems to me) sympathize with Lear for his intemperate decision. Lear is advanced in age, they argue, and his actions are not inconsistent for an elderly man approaching senility. Female writers, though, are more interested in the daughters’ reactions than in Lear’s folly or lack of it. What seems to be missing in that early scene when Lear disinherits his youngest daughter is tension between the two older sisters and the youngest one.

Though far be it for me to edit the grand master playwright, for this exercise one could conceive of a quarrel among the siblings after the two older ones extravagantly swear their undying love for their father and the youngest offers him only half her love.

Such a quarrel would go somewhat like this: Regan, the middle daughter, mildly chastises her father for coddling his youngest daughter, Cordelia, as if she were still a baby. Lear responds that he regrets making that mistake, but his youngest daughter was a baby when her mother died and he was trying his best to comfort her. His eldest daughter, Goneril, chimes in sarcastically that Lear got what comes from spoiling and pampering Cordelia for years. She says that Cordelia took advantage of her father’s goodness and sweet nature. Cordelia protests that she loves her father very much, but she cannot give him all her love. She adds that even the Bible cautions a wife to leave her parents behind and cling to her spouse. She points to Ruth who abandons her family and goes to live with her husband’s family, staying with them even after her husband dies. Goneril accuses Cordelia of spouting sanctimonious mumbo jumbo, but the die has been cast, and Lear falls for the flattery of his two older daughters and disinherits Cordelia.

I set my novel Even in Paradise in the twenty-first century Caribbean, allowing me to implicate the post-colonial world in a tragedy that nevertheless ends happily for some of the players.

flag