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The Tragedy of King Lear (Shakespeare Project Lecture) (Patreon)

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2024-04-04 21:07:52
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‘When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.’

Our journey through the works of William Shakespeare continues, and we have now arrived at one of the most sublime peaks in all of literature.

We’re discussing dark prophecies, tragic backstory, art vs nature, speaking truth to power, authority, existential crisis, sympathy, anagnorisis, seeing truly, the value of tragedy, and much more.

Timestamps:

0:00 the emotional demands of King Lear

1:00 on the performance history of the play

2:00 is this tragedy essentially unperformable?

4:00 my favourite productions of this play

7:00 Shakespeare’s life at time of writing

9:00 Richard Burbage & Robert Armin

10:00 Shakespeare’s source material

13:00 unification under King James

15:00 Lear’s division of the kingdom

16:00 ‘we unburdened crawl toward death’

17:00 what kind of king was Lear?

18:00 ‘nothing will come of nothing’

20:00 the pagan universe of King Lear

22:00 what happened to Queen Lear?

23:00 is the unnatural actually natural?

24:00 the banishment of Cordelia & Kent

27:00 whipped for lying & for speaking true

28:00 musing upon the backstory of Lear

30:00 Sir Ian McKellen on King Lear

31:00 tragedy implicit in the backstory

32:00 when daughters become mothers

33:00 ‘thou, Nature, art my goddess’

35:00 Edmund & machiavellian tradition

37:00 reading Shakespeare chronologically

38:00 ocular proof & auricular assurance

40:00 ‘these late eclipses in the sun and moon’

42:00 blaming our behaviour on the stars

44:00 managing authorities given away

46:00 the wisdom of King Lear’s Fool

48:00 ‘nothing can be made out of nothing’

50:00 ‘who is it that can tell me who I am?’

52:00 sympathising with Goneril & Regan?

53:00 the terrifying descent into madness

55:00 how our sympathy for Lear develops

57:00 ‘I will have such revenges on you both’

59:00 anger, grief & complex emotions

1:00:00 pathetic fallacy, pain & anagnorisis

1:01:00 King Lear in the storm on the heath

1:02:00 existential crisis & denial of death

1:04:00 ‘blow winds and crack your cheeks’

1:06:00 working through our own pain

1:08:00 the prophetic power of King Lear

1:09:00 ‘men must endure their coming hence’

1:10:00 Edgar teaches us the value of tragedy

1:12:00 the Fool’s eternal words of wisdom

1:14:00 on the blinding of Gloucester

1:16:00 the metatheatricality of the cliff scene

1:19:00 Lear as every inch an king

1:21:00 beholding the great image of authority

1:22:00 coming to this great stage of fools

1:23:00 the reunion of Lear & Cordelia

1:25:00 singing like birds in a cage

1:26:00 taking on mysteries as God’s spies

1:27:00 how my one passage has changed

1:28:00 the overwhelming ending of the play

1:30:00 what did you make of King Lear?

Recommended Resources:

Film Adaptation: For an adaptation that captures the sublime sentiments of King Lear, I highly recommend the masterpiece of Japanese cinema that is Akira Kurosawa’s 1985 Ran. For a more faithful adaptation, Sir Ian McKellen's Lear in Trevor Nunn's 2008 film is excellent. There's also Peter Brook’s 1971 film, which captures the bleakness of the play, and the more recent Anthony Hopkins 2018 film.

Edition: The Arden edition of this play is excellent. The critical introduction and annotations are incredibly insightful. If you would like a slimmer volume, then the Penguin paperback is a great choice too, with a fantastic introduction, and is the edition I personally used for my most recent reread.

The Year of Lear: James Shapiro has a phenomenal historical and biographical work here that makes the time in which Shakespeare penned the tragic procession really come alive. You can also enjoy Shapiro discussing the work here. And if you would like another great discussion about the play, I also recommend this conversation between Sir Ian McKellen and Jonathan Bate.

Critical Appreciation: I have recommended G. Wilson Knight's The Wheel of Fire before, but this time I would like to direct you to a couple more incredible essays contained within it: 'The Lear Universe' and 'Tolstoy's Attack on Shakespeare.' If you would like some Harold Bloom, then I highly recommend his Lear: The Great Image of Authority. And, if you haven't read it yet, A. C. Bradley's chapter on King Lear in Shakespeare's Tragedies is excellent.

Our Journey Thus Far: If you want to jump into any specific play, you can check out the works we've enjoyed thus far as part of our read-through here.

Questions for You:

1) Which character do you sympathise with the most?

2) Can you see why some consider this tragedy unperformable?

3) What line, passage, or idea resonated with you the most? And what is your personal grading for King Lear?

Happy reading, Bardolators!

Files

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Comments

Jessica

Just bought tix for early Dec to see Kenneth Branagh in NYC play Lear. Wahoo!!

Vickie Kokkalenios-Prieto

What a heartfelt post. I agree about Ran. My mother told my brother and me to sit down and get ready, and then she played it on the DVD player. Wow. That was so powerful. I think because we three were together it was a bit easier to handle. King Lear, however, rips my heart out and throws it on the floor and squashes it and destroys it.... every single time. When you said you felt sick, yes, yes, yes, that is what I felt reading Lear. Anyway, all the best in your reading.

Donna F.

I really enjoyed reading King Lear, even tho the language is hard for me to get through. I decided not to watch the Ian mcKellen movie version at this time—instead I watched the Anthony Hopkins version. from the library I also have the Patrick Stewart version, “King of Texas” and the Japanese version, “Ran”. Plenty to focus on

mariah schneider

I'm late on commenting on this play because I'm still mulling over it. Like Othello and Hamlet it deserves an A, though I will say I like Othello and Hamlet better. I listened to the Arkangel audio version of it which didn't quite line up with the version that I read, though it was fairly close. The Oxford Complete works has two versions of the play and I read the one that was published in a folio. The Arkangel dramatized audio version had some longer passages that I wish I had in print. I've never seen a version of King Lear, but listening to it is probably the best performance that I can get. There are scenes I really only want in my head.

Paul Meunier

There are parallels for me in the characters of Charles Trask, Iago and Edmund. The evil done by each is triggered by jealousy and a sense of being wronged unjustly. In each case, the perpetrator considers himself equally (or more) deserving than his rival. Trask’s response, however, is visceral blind rage. Iago and “Iago light” (Edmund) are cunning schemers in seeming control of their emotions. All three may be contrasted with Cathy Ames who seems evil ab initio.

Brock Eldon

GRADE: A This is my fourth read through of the play and the first where I sought out adaptations. I agree with the Romantic poets: this is a closet drama. And it should be one. I would not say that the adaptations altered my perceptions of the play for the negative but I would say that none left me satisfied in relation to the work I had built up in "the theatre of my mind." Tolstoy is especially vicious to the scenes of Lear and his fool "trotting about on the stage" and I can see why now. "Lear" is an inexhaustible work and it IS one of the greatest in Shakespeare’s Canon, though I know it so well as this point that I think the FRESHNESS of plays like "Henry IV" and others that I have encountered here, with this epic read through, have moved me much more. A bit baggy in the third act . . . TOP 5 PLAYS SO FAR: 1.) Hamlet; 2.) Othello; 3.) Henry IV, Parts 1-2; 4.) King Lear; 5.) A Midsummer Night's Dream; 6.) Twelfth Night; 7.) The Merchant of Venice; 8.) Richard III; 9.) Much Ado About Nothing; 10.) Julius Caesar.

Brock Eldon
>>136564515

Yes. Absolutely. I would include "King John's" Bastard as the FIRST such character we see as well - which (as his first character leading to Edmund and Iago) elevates my view of that play a great deal.

Brock Eldon
>>135656367

Wow. Lucky you!! Branagh as "Lear." Wow . . . I hope he makes a film version. I miss Branagh's Shakespeare films. Watching them all through this project, I appreciate so much all that he gave to a generation of Shakespeare readers.

Ylva

Roughly 20 years have passed since my last contact with a Shakespeare play in English. Yet yesterday I felt like I needed a brain teaser that wasn’t Genji, and with Ben's lectures and fantastic introduction, I felt I had enough support to tackle any possible problems with the text. I surprised myself by tearing through it in a single-sitting read that got briefly interrupted by changing locations because the balcony air got too cold and the daylight ran out. Only pausing for what couldn’t have been 30 seconds was physically painful. Lear swallowed me up, and reading the last line left me with a sense of incoherent awe that follows me still. Despite my expectations not to understand the text, or at least to find long passages I'd struggle with, the words I couldn’t accurately translate weren’t nearly as hindering as I’d feared. The overall meaning and emotional undertow came through so fiercely that halfway through I didn’t even need to read the speaking characters' names anymore to know who was talking—which I noticed when I realised how the text formed some rhythmic chanting in my head. I could FEEL every detail and I fell in love with this play, for all its harrowing ugliness and despair. I’ve always liked stories that are so emotionally intense that reading them feels like a physical assault. So this is clearly an A-grading for me. I'd even go higher if I could. I agree with Brock’s mention of King Lear feeling like a closet drama. Its emotional complexity is so overpowering that any adaptation would be like a movie version of a beloved novel or a translation to me—an interpretation that can try to do the original justice but can never actually reproduce it—and thus almost certainly will settle for compromises in one way or the other. Which may make it funny for me to say that the stage in my head was entirely blank during reading, with only the characters—no props, no sound or other effects—surrounded by black. I felt with Cordelia, naturally, but couldn’t help but feel compassion for Lear himself. His agony was too raw for me not to. The storm scene with Lear and the fool is certainly my favourite. That wording! Though the flower crown scene I found fantastic as well. “When I do stare, see how the subject quakes,” especially resonated with me there. As did, “Robes and furrowed gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold, And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks.”

Harry Summers

Best lecture yet in this series Ben.

Steven McVicar

Thank you for another brilliant lecture, Benjamin. Your insights into the characters’ natures beyond what we’re told in the play were fascinating. To answer your questions… 1) Which character do you sympathise with most? Edgar. This was my first encounter with King Lear and I knew next to nothing about it. I didn’t know where the plot was going, and I wasn’t quite sure who to trust as I made my way through the play. For some reason I had faith that Edgar would come good in the end and pinned my hopes on him. Ultimately everyone loses but I kept hoping until the end. 2) Can you see why some consider this tragedy unperformable? Yes. Sympathy for Lear flickers on and off so rapidly that I think it would be tremendously difficult for an actor to sway audiences’ emotions as deftly as the play demands. 3) What line, passage, idea, or character most resonated with you? And what is your personal grading for King Lear? I’d never heard of the concept of pathetic fallacy before joining this group and I’ve never seen it used more powerfully than in King Lear. Lear raging into the storm is an incredible scene. Grade A.

Gholson Lyon

I had written the below on the thread about film adaptation, but expanding this further here: Having now read King Lear, watched both lectures from Ben, and watched this film adaptation clip, I still struggle to fully understand Edgar and his transformation in the play, particularly many of the "crazy" lines that he utters. Is he faking all of that just for the disguise and to not be recognized? Some of these lines are truly wild, though, making it very hard for me to believe this is all faked.... Is he himself somehow going a bit insane, having been rejected and exiled by his father (Gloucester)? I find Edgar to be the hardest one to understand. I was deeply unsatisfied by the response about this from ChatGPT (which I posted in my other comment), so I looked around and found this insightful commentary online: https://www.reddit.com/r/shakespeare/comments/dzzrhn/can_we_talk_about_edgar/ It definitely seems that Edgar is worth exploring more, perhaps in future lectures or essays, and the commenters on reddit have interesting ideas!

Ylva
>>163330159

Great discussion you shared there, Gholson, thank you. I had my second reading of Lear this last weekend and found myself focussing in on Edgar, interestingly. I believe there's great stuff in that post you linked. I also wonder if there's some existential self-searching going on underneath in Edgar's ramblings, like him trying on a different coat and seeing if it can be worn in well.