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King Lear_intro_essay_21.html
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<div><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Introducing<i> King Lear</i></span></div><div><b><i><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span></i></b></div><div><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Part I: “This is most strange”</span></div><div align="center" style="text-align: center;">-What makes <i>Lear</i> so hard?-</div><div> </div><p> <span style="font-size: larger;"> </span><span style="font-size: medium;">The English critic Charles Lamb wrote an essay in 1812 that considered Shakespeare’s tragedies “with reference to their fitness for stage representation.” He wrote:</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;"> It may seem a paradox, but I cannot help being of opinion that the plays of Shakespeare are less calculated for performance on a stage than those of almost any other dramatist whatever. Their distinguished excellence is a reason that they should be so. There is so much in them, which comes not under the province of acting, with which eye, and tone, and gesture, have nothing to do.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">When it comes to <i>Lear</i>, Lamb finds that the drama is so far outside the realm of the actor as to be un-performable. “The Lear of Shakespeare,” he writes, “cannot be acted.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> Lamb isn’t the only one to write, in effect, that<i> Lear</i> is too good to be performed. There’s something about the perfection of the tragedy of <i>Lear</i> along with the unpredictability of Lear’s madness – operating fathoms below the surface of the text – that make the whole Lear an elusive thing for the actor. “The whole Lear” means the Lear who exhibits the inconsistencies of his character but is not inconsistent as an individual. He does unbelievable things and yet we believe him. Still today, when an actor pulls off a good Lear, critics shake their heads in disbelief (at the very believability of the whole thing). Ben Brantley wrote of Christopher Plummer’s Lear at Lincoln Center:</span></p><p><span style="font-size: 10pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;">This is an organically complete Lear whose end is glimpsed in his first majestic appearance…This achievement is all the more impressive when you consider that even the greatest actors, including Laurence Olivier, have stumbled in taking on Lear. Often they come to the role too young to understand it or too old to have the strength for it. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> So that’s one problem: Lear is hard to act. Another problem is that Lear is hard to understand.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> It’s almost impossible to say with any certainty, for instance, why Lear divides his kingdom in the way he does (those who jump to the simple answer – “Lear’s deceived!” – will be especially interested to read below about Stanley Cavell). Why must Gloucester be <i>blinded</i> (and not, say, burned or beaten)? Why, when she survived in Shakespeare’s sources, does Cordelia have to die? We’ll look at these questions and others in the annotations.</span></p><div><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> This introduction will present a summary of the play, its textual history, and some of the difficulties of the play along with a few of the major critical responses to them. </span></p><div> </div><div> </div><div><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Part II: “As I am ignorant…”</span></div><p align="center" style="text-align: center;">-Understanding the setup-</p><div><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> When <i>Lear</i> begins, the old king, who has no male heir, has decided to give up his throne and divide his kingdom between his three daughters. But he doesn’t plan to divide it in three equal parts; he will give the largest portion to the daughter who loves him the most. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> The problem is that the daughters who express their love most eloquently are also the ones who love Lear the least: Regan and Goneril, the monstrous older sisters to Cordelia. Cordelia, the youngest, seems to love Lear sincerely, but she is unable to express her love to him, and winds up losing her share of the kingdom.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> This is the single event – the wrongful allocation of the kingdom to Regan and Goneril – that animates the play, releasing what Stephen Greenblatt calls the “force of evil” that rages unstoppably through the following acts. It’s worth considering why on earth Lear makes such a catastrophic error. Some critics have called Lear’s behavior in scene one evidence of a kind of infantile solipsism that is characteristic of all Shakespearean monarchs, and, perhaps, of all monarchs in general. Perhaps this is true, but if we agree with Stanley Cavell and say that infantilism cannot be the <i>reason</i> someone does something – it can only be a description of what they do – then we have to look for another reason. Is it that Lear has already begun to go mad? Is it that he is genuinely deceived by Regan and Goneril’s shows of love? Is it, as Cavell suggests in an essay that we will discuss below, that he actually doesn’t <i>want</i> to be loved sincerely? These are the kinds of questions that we have to ask of Lear every time we return to it.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> After she loses her share of the kingdom, Cordelia accepts the King of France’s offer of marriage, the Duke of Burgundy having refused her after seeing her disinherited, and takes off across the channel to live in France. This sets up the invasion of England by France.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> So, from its earliest moments, <i>Lear</i> is a play about parents and children. The Gloucester subplot runs parallel to the main plot of the play in that it deals with these questions of family loyalty and deception.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> The Earl of Gloucester has two sons, Edmund, who was born out of wedlock, and Edmund, who is legitimate. Gloucester has a terrible habit of reminding everyone in the court that Edmund is not his legitimate child (“His breeding, Sir, hath been at my charge: I have so often blush’d to acknowledge him, that now I am braz’d to’t,” he tells Kent in 1.1). Edmund is keenly aware of the slight, as well as the looming injustice that will befall him when, after his father’s death, Edgar inherits most of his land. The famous speech he delivers – “Gods, stand up for bastards!” – sets the tone for his tactics in the rest of the play. By hook or by crook, Edmund intends to right the wrong that Gloucester has inflicted on him. Tragically, Gloucester misjudges everything: when he should be sensitive to Edmund, he mocks him; when he should be suspicious of him, he trusts him. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> Gloucester and Lear suffer badly for their mistakes. Gloucester is betrayed – Edmund exposes his collusion with the invading French army (that is, with Lear) – and for that he loses his eyes. Lear is thrown out by his daughters into a terrible storm, where he wanders, his madness at its height, with his fool, and will suffer much more before the play is over. Both men are acutely aware that the “natural” bond of obligation between children and parents has been broken. As Gloucester tells Edmund:</span></p><p><span style="font-size: 10pt;">These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend</span><span style="font-size: 10pt;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: 10pt;">no good to us: though the wisdom of nature can</span><span style="font-size: 10pt;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: 10pt;">reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself</span><span style="font-size: 10pt;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: 10pt;">scourged by the sequent effects: love cools,</span></p><p><span style="font-size: 10pt;">friendship falls off, brothers divide: in</span><span style="font-size: 10pt;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: 10pt;">cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in</span><span style="font-size: 10pt;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-size: 10pt;">palaces, treason; and the bond cracked 'twixt son</span></p><p><span style="font-size: 10pt;">and father.</span></p><div> </div><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> And, Lear would add, between father and daughter.</span></p><div> </div><div> </div><div><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Part III: “Disordered Rabble”</span></div><p align="center" style="text-align: center;">-Textual history and the history of the Lear story-<span style="font-size: medium;"><br type="_moz" /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> By the time Shakespeare wrote his version of it, Lear was an old story in England. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s <i>Historia Regum Britanniae </i>(c. 1135), which included both popular legend and history, recounts the story of “old King Leir.” The King Leir in Monmouth fares better than the Lear of Shakespeare; he escapes to France to live with Cordelia (“Cordeilla” in Monmouth), and stays there for three happy years after the end of the story. Those who read the Monmouth version will notice that Shakespeare cut a number of characters, notably the evil cousins Cunedag and Margan, Goneril and Regan’s trouble-making sons.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> Other appearances of “King Leir” include:</span></p><p style="margin-left: 1in; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Symbol;">· </span>Holinshed’s chronicles, a source of so many Shakespearean plots. Holinshed, like Shakespeare, got rid of Cunedag and Margan.</span></p><p style="margin-left: 1in; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Symbol;">· </span>A 1590’s play called <i>The True Chronicle History of King Leir</i>, which was performed in London.</span></p><p style="margin-left: 1in; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Symbol;">· </span>Spenser’s <i>Faerie Queene</i>, published at the same time as the above, includes an account of “King Leyr” that is very much in the mold of Monmouth’s, in that Spenser doesn’t kill Leyr before his throne is restored to him; that was an invention of Shakespeare’s, and would come to be one of the features of the tragedy that audiences and directors considered too unbearable to present on stage. (Even good old Charles Lamb, who found Lear so difficult to swallow, would have seen the 1681 version by Tate – although he may have seen others, too - in which Lear and Gloucester survive and Cordelia marries Edgar.) From Spenser:</span></p><div> </div><p><span style="font-size: 10pt;">He to Cordelia him self addrest,</span></p><p><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Who with entire affection him receau'd,</span></p><p><span style="font-size: 10pt;">As for her Syre and king her seemed best;</span></p><p><span style="font-size: 10pt;">And after all an army strong she leau'd,</span></p><p><span style="font-size: 10pt;">To war on those, which him had of his realme bereau'd.</span></p><div><span style="font-size: 10pt;">So to his crowne she him restor'd againe,</span></div><div> </div><div><span style="font-size: 10pt;">In which he dyde, made ripe for death by eld,</span></div><div> </div><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> It should be clear that the Lear story would have been fairly well known to Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences. Greenblatt tells us that it wasn’t unusual, in fact, for parents to tell their ungrateful children: “Remember the story of old King Leir.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> Shakespeare leaned heavily on Monmouth and Holinshed, but, as is typical of all of Shakespeare’s adaptations, the things that are most memorable about <i>Lear</i> are those which do not come from other sources. It’s impossible to imagine <i>Lear</i> without the hideous blinding of Gloucester, which many people consider to be the cruelest scene Shakespeare ever wrote. And yet Gloucester doesn’t appear in Holinshed or Monmouth. He plays a role in Philip Sidney’s <i>The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia</i> (1590), but of course the blinding is Shakespeare’s. Imagining a <i>Lear</i> in which the king doesn’t go mad is also impossible, yet the “Leir” of old didn’t suffer from madness. Noticing places in which Shakespeare departed from sources can help us uncover Shakespeare particular interests and intentions at the moment of a play’s composition.</span></p><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><b> </b></span></div><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> Lear has a complicated textual history, with many different versions and significant variation among them. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> Shakespeare probably wrote <i>Lear</i> in 1605 and 1606, but a printed version didn’t appear until 1608. This was the First Quarto version, a junky copy often referred to as the “Pied Bull Quarto” after the imprint on its title page.</span><a title="" href="#_ftn1"><span style="font-size: medium;" target="_blank" class="standard">[1]</span></a><span style="font-size: medium;"> No other copy appeared until the Second Quarto of 1619, which was a reprint of Q1 disguised as an improvement upon it. Both copies had lots of errors and are now considered to be corruptions.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> Finally, in 1623, the Folio appeared. The F text of <i>Lear</i> was so different from both Q1 and Q2 that it was almost an entirely different play. For one thing, the F version was 200 lines shorter than the Quarto versions. This is pretty significant when you consider that, in <i>Hamlet</i>, Hamlet speaks less than 400 lines in total: 200 lines do matter. Certain characters seemed also to have changed from the Q versions to the F. J. Halio notes that Goneril actually seems <i>meaner</i> – closer to Regan, presumably – in Q1 than she does in F.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> Then there are big differences in individual lines that are worth looking at in their own right. One notable one is the great 5.3.307, from Lear’s final monologue: “Never, never, never, never, never.” This moving, memorable line appears truncated in Q1 – “Never, never, never” – leading us to ask what happened between the Quartos and the Folios to effect such a change. Did Shakespeare go back and make changes?</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> One theory is that both the Q versions and the Folio are corruptions of an original, now lost, that was reprinted with varying degrees of accuracy. Many modern critics think that Shakespeare did in fact make corrections on Q1, some of which made it into the Folio version. Q2 is largely disregarded at this point.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> If, on the other hand, we stick with the theory of the lost original, which would have been part of Shakespeare’s lost “Foul Papers,” then we give ourselves permission to conflate Q1 and F. This is the tack taken by many modern editions, which pick the best lines - like F’s 5.3.307 – from each version. </span></p><div> </div><div><b> </b></div><div><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Part IV: “What mean'st by this?”</span></div><p align="center" style="text-align: center;">-Critical and interpretative history-</p><div><b> </b></div><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> <b>Samuel Johnson</b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> Let’s begin with Dr. Johnson’s “Notes from the plays of William Shakespeare” (1765).</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> At the time Johnson was writing, his friend Thomas Warton published an essay in the magazine <i>Adventurer</i> in which he wrote that <i>Lear</i> was “too savage and shocking.” Johnson wrote in response that the violence in <i>Lear</i> was perhaps shocking, but that the overall effect of the play was to “fill the mind with a perpetual tumult of indignation, pity, and hope.” Nevertheless, he found it difficult to explain to Warton why Gloucester’s eyes needed to be taken out. “I am not able to apologize,” he wrote, “with equal plausibility for the extrusion of Gloucester’s eyes, which seems an act too horrid to be endured in dramatic exhibition.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> Dr. Johnson reminds us that the violence in <i>Lear</i> was really unlike most of the other fare to be found on the Elizabethan stage. “I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia’s death,” Johnson wrote, “that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor.” Reading Johnson, it’s no mystery why some directors chose to alter the ending of the play to make it suitable for more squeamish theatergoers. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> Johnson also recognized the barbarity of Lear’s decision in 1.1. “Such preference of one daughter to another, or resignation of dominion on such conditions, would be yet credible if told of a petty prince of Guinea or Madagascar.” In other words, King Lear’s behavior is jarring, strange, and in some ways not even English. If we cut through the colonialist nonsense of Johnson’s remark and get at the emotion behind it, we see that Johnson really was onto something by comparing Lear to the princes of countries thought to be heathen and barbaric.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> Greenblatt calls <i>Lear </i>a kind of inversion of the Hobbesian state of nature, meaning that it presents a world in which the “brutish” life is what humanity moves <i>towards</i> rather than <i>from</i>. By evoking Guinea and Madagascar Johnson hints at the uncomfortable proximity of the barbaric to the civilized that is evoked by this play.</span></p><div><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"> <b>Samuel Coleridge</b></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> Coleridge’s unpublished “Notes on King Lear” (1817), is too short to get into the play very deeply. It does contain some valuable insights on the character of Edmund, though, which are notable for their sympathetic attitude towards him.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> Edmund suffers, Coleridge wrote, from the “gnawing conviction that every show of respect is an effort of courtesy which recalls while it represses a contrary feeling.” In other words, because Edmund is treated dismissively by his father and the rest of the court, he comes to assume that any gesture of respect is in fact a gesture of derision dressed up and disguised. Edmund is the play’s great skeptic, doubting astrology, Christianity, love, and family, and Coleridge’s observation can be useful in connecting the philosophical skepticism that characterizes Edmund intellectually with the emotional circumstances that may have contributed to it.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> As for Lear himself, Coleridge hands down the usual king-as-infant diagnosis, writing: “The inveterate habits of sovereignty convert the wish into claim and positive right, and the incompliance with it into crime and treason.” By this point in time, readers of Shakespearean criticism (and of Freudian separation-from-the-mother psychology) have heard enough of this kind of thing to last a lifetime. It’s still good to keep it in mind, though, because Stanley Cavell, in an essay which we’ll look at below, will pick it up and run with it.</span></p><div><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>William Hazlitt</b></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> Hazlitt really liked <i>Lear</i>. “It is the best of Shakespeare’s plays,” he wrote, “for it is the one in which he was the most in earnest. He was here fairly caught in the web of his own imagination.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> Other chestnuts from Hazlitt include:</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> Of Goneril and Regan: “We do not even like to repeat their names.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> On genius: “The greatest strength of genius is shown in describing the strongest passions.”</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> And, finally, on Lear and Edgar: “Nothing can be more complete than the distinction between Lear’s real and Edgar’s assumed madness.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> As with Coleridge, Hazlitt’s criticism will find itself thrown under Stanley Cavell’s buss more than a hundred years later, and for that reason it’s useful to us. Much of Cavell’s effectiveness in addressing the problems of <i>Lear</i> comes from his ability to dismantle the myths about the play that have grown up and become entrenched throughout the course of its critical-interpretive history. When Hazlitt says of Lear’s behavior in act one, “It is his rash haste, his violent impetuosity, his blindness to everything but the dictates of his passions or affections, that produces all his misfortunes,” we can imagine Cavell putting up his finger – “wait just a second, now” – and reframing the whole debate.</span></p><div><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>John Keats</b></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> Keats didn’t write much about <i>Lear</i>, but he did leave us an excellent sonnet that bears reprinting. Keats sent the sonnet to his brother with a letter, in which he wrote, “The excellence of art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with beauty and truth.” </span></p><p> “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again”: </p><p>O golden-tongued Romance, with serene lute!</p><p>Fair plumed syren, queen of far-away!</p><p>Leave melodizing on this wintry day,</p><p>Shut up thine olden pages, and be mute.</p><p>Adieu! for, once again, the fierce dispute</p><p>Betwixt damnation and impassion'd clay</p><p>Must I burn through; once more humbly assay</p><p>The bitter-sweet of this Shakespearean fruit.</p><p>Chief Poet! and ye clouds of Albion,</p><p>Begetters of our deep eternal theme!</p><p>When through the old oak forest I am gone,</p><p>Let me not wander in a barren dream:</p><p>But, when I am consumed in the fire,</p><p>Give me new phoenix wings to fly at my desire. </p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Let’s now move ahead to two 20<sup>th</sup> century interpretations, Stanley Cavell’s and Stephen Greenblatt’s.</span></p><div> </div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Stanley Cavell</b></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> Stanley Cavell is a film critic and philosopher whose essay on <i>Lear</i>, “The Avoidance of Love,” considers the problem of evil in the play.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> The essay is well worth reading in its entirety, but I will summarize a few of the most mindblowing points below.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> His reading of the blinding of Gloucester is a good place to start. Cavell looks at the blinding not as a scene of “torture” in the abstract but rather as a scene of “blinding” specifically. The significance of this is not initially obvious. Johnson called the blinding “too horrid to be endured,” but he did not consider why Shakespeare might have chosen that form of torture specifically, rather than any other. The representation onstage of a character being garroted, or burned, or whipped, might well have elicited the same response from Dr. Johnson – the point, for him, was that the violence itself was somehow unbearable. Cavell goes one step further, and asks the all-important question: what does the blinding <i>mean</i>?</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> He writes, in answer, “The physical cruelty symbolizes the psychic cruelty which pervades the play; but what this particular act of cruelty means is that cruelty cannot bear to be seen. It literalizes evil’s ancient love of darkness” (Adelman 72). Evil, that is, cannot bear to be seen. Regardless of whether or not this is true across the board (and of course it is not; evil always devises ways of making the sight of itself terrifying, and of putting itself in plain view), it is absolutely true of the evil in <i>Lear</i>, which, as typified by the awful Cornwall, does seem to have an instinctive desire to be invisible, or at least to do its work without having to suffer another character’s recognition. Why blind Gloucester? Because Gloucester can see.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> Carrying this notion of recognition over to Lear himself, Cavell uncovers a similar fear of recognition as a driving force behind Lear’s character. The $100 question about this play is, “What makes Lear mess up so badly in act one,” and Cavell’s answer is: “[Lear] feels unworthy of love when the reality of lost power comes over him…and he wards it off for the reason for which people do ward off being loved, because it presents itself to them as a demand” (Adelman 82). Real love does make demands on us. It demands, firstly, that we reciprocate the love (though, of course, we may not reciprocate it at all), and secondly that we are recognized as the object of the love. This second demand is nearly inescapable, and it is the one that Lear finds most difficult to accept. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> For this reason, Regan and Goneril’s love is easier for him to live with than Cordelia’s: “Their <i>not</i> offering love is exactly what he wants” (Adelman 83). Lear is a man who does not want to be known, and, because loving is a form of knowing, this means that he does not want to be loved. Cavell connects the end of Lear’s rule over England as a source of his anxiety and fear about love. Because he is no longer a powerful man, he can’t endure the loss of power symbolized by a woman’s love and a woman’s knowledge of him as a man.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> Here we are beginning to get into Freud and the problem, for the male child, of separation from the mother. Briefly, this is the idea that the infant doesn’t differentiate between subject and object because all of his or her desires are fulfilled by the mother, who therefore constitutes an extension of the infant’s subject. Only later, when old enough to have agency of his or her own – and therefore to have desires that cannot or will not be fulfilled by the mother – does the child differentiate the subject from the object. For the male child, this is a necessary step to “becoming a man,” but it is also sexually confusing, because the initial object of our love, the mother, is an inappropriate sexual object for us. Cavell writes, “Men do not just naturally not love, they learn not to. And our lives begin by having to accept under the name of love whatever closeness is offered, and then by having to forgo its object” (Adelman 86). As the fool will observe, Lear has made his daughters his mothers, and so has connected them with this confusion of female categories. Perhaps Cavell’s insight here can also help us understand Lear’s revulsion at female sexuality generally, and at the blurring of these categories of mother and daughter more specifically.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> The final moments of the play, in which Lear and Cordelia retreat to the tower to become, in Lear’s words, “God’s spies,” then becomes a moment of non-recognition by Lear that affords him the only real love in the play. It’s tempting to read these lines of Lear’s as a kind of lovely acceptance of his fate and an acceptance of Cordelia; they can love despite their circumstances. But Cavell rejects that reading, and with good reason. “[Lear’s] tone is not: we will love <i>even though</i> we are in prison; but: because we are hidden together we can love” (Adelman 84). Only when he doesn’t risk recognition can Lear surrender himself to love. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> Cavell’s fascinating takes on Edgar and Gloucester are included a number of times in the annotations, as are many of the insights we have discussed above.</span></p><div><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Stephen Greenblatt</b></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> In 1603, a man named Samuel Harsnett published a pamphlet called “A declaration of egregious popish impostures.” The pamphlet was meant to debunk the performances of those who claimed to be possessed by the devil; it was a how-to manual to detect fake exorcisms. Much of Edgar’s mad speeches as Tom O’Bedlam are lifted directly from this manual, and Greenblatt, in his essay “Shakespeare and the Exorcists,” unpacks the significance of exorcism for Shakespeare and for <i>Lear</i> in particular.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> In early Renaissance England, exorcisms were spectacles. You could go to a church and watch one just like it was a play. Exorcisms were part of the culture of the time, and Greenblatt notes that many mad characters in Shakespeare are often mistaken for the possessed, as in <i>Twelfth Night</i> when Maria says of the crazily dressed Malvolio, “Pray God he be not bewitched” (Halio 105). And Hamlet is well aware, when he follows the ghost, that it might be a demon in disguise.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> So, exorcisms haunted Shakespeare’s world. But Greenblatt writes that Shakespeare “had clearly marked out possession and exorcism as frauds” (Halio 105). So what’s the role of exorcism in <i>Lear</i>?</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> Greenblatt reads Edgar’s deception of Gloucester, making him believe that he is on the cliffs of Dover, as a kind of metaphor for the artifice of the theater. When Edgar pretends to “discover” Gloucester after Gloucester’s “fall” from the “cliff,” he essentially describes having seen a demon depart from him (Halio 108). “Edgar tries to create in Gloucester an experience of awe and wonder so intense that it can shatter his suicidal despair and restore his faith in the benevolence of the gods: ‘thy life’s a miracle’” (Halio 108). </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> In this light, Gloucester is a metaphor for the audience and Edgar a metaphor for the playwright, or for the theater more generally. When we see a play, we are being asked to dismiss the sensory evidence that we receive and simply believe what’s being shown to us. We’re asked, in other words, to mistake a flat stage for a steep cliff (108).</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> Greenblatt then moves on to discuss ritual in <i>Lear</i>, and suggests that the play “is haunted by a sense of rituals and beliefs that are no longer efficacious, that have been <i>emptied out</i> (Halio 108). One such ritual might be the transfer of sovereignty, and one such belief would be the obligation of the parent to the child. There’s also the sense that Gloucester’s wishy-washy astrology is an inadequate response to the crisis at hand, and, in that vein, that Lear’s madness is purely natural rather than supernatural. Greenblatt always favors a reading in which the supernatural is reserved for the characters and the natural for the playwright.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> Shakespeare’s double take on Harsnett, then, is like this. Whereas Shakespeare doesn’t believe in exorcisms for a minute, he is well aware that other people do believe in them, and that characters who can play off the beliefs of others wield power. Edgar’s possession is a fake, but he fakes it because he needs to disguise himself in order to survive. The idea of the supernatural is manipulated by the naturalists in <i>Lear</i> in order to achieve practical, worldly ends.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> Finally, Greenblatt considers the question of meaning, as in, “What does this story <i>mean</i>?” One of the things that makes <i>Lear</i> so difficult to watch is that it refuses to give up meaning in the final scene. Lear and Cordelia are both wronged, yet they are the ones who have to suffer. Goneril and Regan get off just fine. How can this be? If Cordelia survives, as she did in the sources, then Lear’s suffering could be interpreted as significant in that a kind of supernatural equilibrium would have been restored (Halio 111). Not so in <i>Lear</i>. </span></p><div> </div><div> </div><div><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Part V: “Good sir, no more.”</span></div><p align="center" style="text-align: center;">-final words on the annotations- </p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> In the annotations of <i>Lear</i>, you’ll find all of these critical interpretations considered alongside each other. There are also many ideas of my own, with which you may disagree. My hope is that disagreement will be as intellectually rewarding as agreement.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"> I’ve also included lots of links to maps, Youtube videos, and other images. Because <i>Lear</i> has inspired a long tradition of wonderful visual interpretations by great painters, I’ve included lots of images here. The mix of old, time-tested insights with new, untested ones, should make these annotations rewarding for new readers and returning readers alike. Curtain up.</span></p><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div><div>Further reading (works cited)</div><div> </div><p>Halio, Jay L. <u>The Tragedy of King Lear</u>. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.</p><p>Adelman, Janet, Ed.<span> </span><u>Twentieth Century Interpretations of King Lear</u>. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1978.</p><p>Halio, Jay L, Ed.<span> </span><u>Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s King Lear</u>. New York: G.K. Hall, 1996. (“Shakespeare and the Exorcists” is included here.)</p><p>Muir, Kenneth, Ed.<span> </span><u>King Lear: Critical Essays</u>.<span> </span>New York: Garland Publishers, 1984.</p><div><br clear="all" /><hr width="33%" size="1" align="left" /></div><p><a title="" target="_blank" class="standard" href="#_ftnref"><span>[1]</span></a> It reads: “London, / Printed for <i>Nathaniel Butter</i>, and are to be sold at his shop in <i>Pauls</i> / Church-yard at the signe of the Pide Bull neere / St. <i>Austins</i> Gate.<span> </span>1608” (Muir xiii). </p>