We just got home from a production of King Lear, in which Sam A. Mowry portrayed a very fine Lear. This has always been one of my favorite of Shakespeare’s plays and I actually memorized chunks of it, back in the day.
The way Sam was playing his Lear, made me aware of the number of times Shakespeare sets up a happy ending and then yanks it away. Lear and Cordelia reconcile; she’s got an army with her. All he would have had to do was to let her win the war. Does he? No. Edgar has all the pieces to restore his father and destroy his lying brother. Does he get to? Almost! And then his father dies.
I think that’s why this is such a successful tragedy, not because of the horrible things that keep happening to Lear, but because Shakespeare keeps teasing the audience with hope. It’s like that moment in a horror film where you think the protagonist has made it safely through the door, only to realize that she’s locked the demon inside with her.
There’s only so far you can beat someone down before they have nothing to lose. Shakespeare was doubly cruel because he kept promising to restore order to his characters but only so he could cut them down again.
Note to self: Horror and tragedy work better when there’s something at stake and the possibility of surviving.
King Lear is one of my favorites too. When I was in high school, I saw an awesome outdoor production of it. (Twice, actually. The first time, the performance got cancelled due to, ironically, a thunderstorm.) I was stunned when I took Shakespearean Tragedies as a undergrad to learn that for *centuries*, theaters ignored Shakespeare’s original ending and substituted a happy ending in its place. (The king is restored to the throne. The lovers get married. Very traditional and predictable. Bleagh…) Apparently, the original ending was controversial at the time (and for some time after).
The lesson I realize thinking back is that the writer can’t flinch. It is so easy to wimp out and end up with a diminished story. The version for ages, the acknowledged masterpiece has the ending that follows through on everything Shakespeare set up. The play is allowed to end as tragically as it opens. (Talk about a heart-breaking mistake for the ages. Yikes…)
Really? I had no idea that there was a version of Lear with a happy ending. How bizarre. Now I want to read it, just to see what it is like.
Have you read Fool, by Christopher Moore? It’s Lear, told from the viewpoint of his jester Pocket, and well worth a read. You’ll certainly never look at the play the same way again.
I have not, but I can imagine he would be a good viewpoint character. I’ll keep an eye out for it.
It is a comedy (mostly)…Christopher Moore also wrote ‘Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal”, so he’s definitely coming from a different place than most authors.
Fool is vaguely like Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead- the same actions are occurring, but with a much different emphasis. It’s a fun read.
Oh, that does sound like fun.
I wrote my thesis on Lear, back in the dark ages. My theory was that it’s structured like a fairy tale or a romance, but psychology (and fate) keep getting in the way of the happy ending promised by the rhetoric. Shakespeare lets you get all comfortable, thinking you know what’s going to happen next, and pulls the rug out. By the time Lear dies, we agree with Kent. Enough, already, let the poor old guy go. He deserves a rest.
The best Lear I’ve seen is Alvin Epstein, who is himself in his 80’s, in Boston. When he tore his clothes off in the storm scene, it was heart-rending. The production was mezzo-mezzo, but Lear and the Fool were remarkable.
Lear as a fairy tale… Yes, I think that is a lot of it. Did Shakespeare borrow the basic story from anyone else, the way he did for some of the other plays? I’m thinking about the Grimm tale of the princesses, one of whom loves her father more than salt although that post-dates the play.
The best production of Lear I saw was at the Ashland Shakespeare festival. The stage was largely bare, just three steps that stretched the length of the stage. But the opening scene had all the cast members seated in thrones which stood in a line in front of the stairs. They did the entire opening scene, seated and staring straight out at the audience, until Cordelia was cast out.
It made the formality and order of the kingdom apparent in ways no other version has done. Of course, they could only pull it off because the cast was really strong.
Have you read Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres? It’s both amazing in its own right and an amazing take on Lear from the middle daughter’s perspective.
No! Good heavens, there are all sorts of Lear variations…
Wasn’t it made into a modern era movie? Or was T. Acres all ready set into this era.
Yes I know, I’m commenting online and should look over at IMDB.
I wrote several papers on this play in college, and I’ve seen many live productions over the years, so I’ve wanted to be in a production FOREVER. Unfortunately, I’m probably too old to play the role I always wanted to do (Edgar), and I never had much appreciation for the one I’m doing (Albany) but doing him, I’ve grown to understand his arc so much better and to love him. Someday maybe I’ll get to do Kent and maybe even the Big Guy. Some of my thoughts on the play:
Lots of others have made the connection — that shot of Lear and Gloucester as tiny black specks struggling across a huge blank white space on the beach at Dover (hmm, a faint mental echo of Matthew Arnold’s poem there, too!) in Peter Brook’s film is unforgettable — but it really does seem as if Shakespeare managed to set his play in Samuel Beckett’s universe (with a lot of added verbiage and passion, of course, but just as bleak), 300 years before Beckett.
I’m sure someone must have made this observation, somewhere, but I don’t recall ever having seen it: There’s a sense in which Lear’s story is the story of every human being in our post-Freudian, existential universe. We start out as infants with the Illusion of Centrality (can’t remember the exact phrase, but I read about it in one of Robert Ardrey’s books — perhaps _African Genesis_) … the assumption that the entire universe revolves around us, and must answer to our needs, hungers, demands. There comes a time when we are psychologically weaned from the one with whom we totally identified, the one who seemed to love us most (Cordelia as the mother who inevitably must disappoint us and break away), and as we learn about more of our limitations and ultimate mortality, the knowledge can be devastating — we can feel as stripped as Lear on the heath.
“Redemption” comes only from truth and love — so very limited, yet all-encompassing to our tiny, mortal selves before we die.
Oh, and everybody, the “happy ending” Lear was written by a guy named Nahum Tate, and was largely produced as “Shakespeare’s” Lear in the 18th and first part of the 19th century. Lear survives, Edgar marries Cordelia, etc. The idea is so goofy, I’ve sort of wanted to see somebody actually produce it somewhere.
Don’t be too surprised. If you read up on stagecraft and production history, directors and stage companies were very liberal about changing ALL of Shakespeare’s plays throughout that period: huge witches’ choruses in Macbeth, whole new characters and scenes added to the plots, etc.