Speaker A (0:00)

The tragedy of King Lear continues to be the most emotionally overpowering work of literature I have ever experienced. The tragedy of Hamlet is cognitively overpowering and that play speaks right to and beyond our intellects, whilst Lear works its way into the core of our being and tears us apart from the inside out. If you imagine the works of Shakespeare as a crown, then these are the two jewels at the forefront. Though perhaps it's best to imagine Shakespeare's works as a mountain range. And if we do that, then we will see that Hamlet and King Lear are the highest, most sublime and awe inspiring peaks. Such was the power of this tragedy about an aging king foolishly dividing his kingdom, such was its power to emotionally overwhelm that it would not be performed as Shakespeare wrote it for much of its performance history. And many consider the play to be essentially unperformable. It was long considered too bleak, too depressing, too nihilistic. And even today, when performances are in abundance, the play continues to pose intense challenges. King Lear was first performed on Boxing Day in the year of 1606 in front of the new monarch, King James I. And this is actually the only specific performance we know of in Shakespeare's lifetime. Some 75 years after this performance, and after close to two decades of the theatre's being shut down under the Puritans, we see a rewritten version of the play by poet laureate Narhun Teit, who presented King Lear with a happy ending for the longest time. This was the version that was performed. By the time we get to the mid 19th century, we see that when companies do dare to perform Shakespeare's original, audiences end up vastly preferring the rewritten Nahum Tate version. The romantic poets, who owe an enormous debt of influence to the Bard, would find this upsetting. But many of them would also state that King Lear should be read, not viewed, and it should be treated as a closet drama where you, the reader in solitude, put on a performance in the theatre of your mind. Charles Lamb thought that the role of Lear himself simply couldn't be acted. Dr. Samuel Johnson was so shocked by the ending that he actually endeavoured never to read the play again, only finally doing when he edited the plays of Shakespeare. And Tolstoy railed against the play, calling it unnatural, which I think is actually a perfect word to describe the play. And Shakespeare would have been glad that this was the effect he had achieved, because we see that along with the word nothing and the word mad and words to do with sight and seeing, the word unnatural is one of the most repeated in the play. A.C. bradley thought King Lear to be the best of all of Shakespeare's works, but not his best play, which sounds like a contradiction, but he's essentially saying that Lear is an incredible aesthetic achievement, but it is unplayable. Such is the all consuming abyss that Shakespeare opens up in this tragedy that many have wondered and continue to wonder how it can ever be adequately produced on stage. Indeed, how could a performance compare to the endless darkness we can summon in our imaginations? Now, I'm personally a huge advocate for reading King Lear and I do so every single year. And I find it to be, along with Hamlet, one of the most rereadable and endless works of all time. One that will always show you more of yourself. But I have to say that there are indeed a strong handful of performances that have really impressed me. I was very fortunate to see the late, great Pete Postlethwaite at the Young Vic in the role of King Lear in 2008. He was 62 and he would sadly die just a few years later, but he completely fit the role of the 80 year old monarch. Many actors will say that by the time you're old enough to play Lear, you're too old to perform. And actors say a very similar thing for Hamlet too. By the time you're old enough to understand the Prince of Denmark, you're too old for the role. But Postlethwaite to me was and continues to be my Lear. And what a fantastic production that was. The special effects during the storm on the heath scene were incredible. And as we were close to the stage, we were in the splash zone. We were also in the flash zone as Lear ran butt naked through the aisles. We were also uncomfortably close when Gloucester's eyes were removed and we saw the eyeballs roll forward across the stage and squelch beneath Cornwall's foot. I'm also a huge fan of Sir Ian McKellen's masterful performance of Lear too, as he really brings the pathos inherent in the role out to an overwhelming degree. And then there's Paul Schofield in Peter Brooks black and white film adaptation, which may just be the performance that most embraces the nihilist that dominates the play. In my opinion, however, the very best. Lear is actually a film that doesn't faithfully stick to Shakespeare's words. And that is the masterpiece of Japanese cinema that is Akira Kurosawa's Ran. I don't believe King Lear is unperformable, but I do think it poses an enormous challenge for troops and it makes some heavy demands on the actors and the Director. To understand what a troupe needs in order to pull this play off, or to get close to approximating its power, we should consider the context in which the play was written. At time of composition, we're in the age of plague, and Will had taken a step back from acting and he was focusing on playwriting exclusively, which goes some way towards explaining the burst of productivity that led to the tragic procession. Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Anthony and Cleopatra, all hot on the heels of one another. It was incredibly demanding to act and write at the same time, and acting was a young man's game due to the energy it required. With Will removed from being in the midst of the troupe, indeed, they went on and they toured without him, and they left him to write by himself. With Will removed from that, we see he pens a play that is about as poetically dense and complex and intricate as possible. Typically, one would write whilst in the frenzy of acting. You'd have your fellow players around you. But here we see Will becomes more writer than playmaker. Now, the only way he could pull off a play as demanding as this was to have not only an exceptional troupe of the best actors, but a troupe that knew each other intimately and who had worked together for years. A troupe who trusted each other and who could bring out the best in each other. Shakespeare's troupe of royal players under James I. The king's men were in the mature phase of their careers. Will wrote Lear with Richard Burbage in mind, and these two were about as solid a creative relationship as you could get. Burbage was in his late 30s, which was not only old for an actor, but old generally speaking. Keep in mind that 30, 30 to 35 thereabouts, was the average lifespan at the time. Shakespeare was 42 when he wrote Lear, and he only had another 10 years on the clock. But Burbage's age and experience meant that Will could challenge him with older, deeper, richer roles like Lear. We also see the comic actor Robert Armin really come into his own in this play. He doubled up as the fool and Cordelia. And it had taken some years for Will to really get into the groove of writing comic roles for Armin in the wake of Will Kemp leaving the troupe. Often when you wrote a character, you did so with the actor in mind. But we see that something magical takes place when Shakespeare creates Lear's fool, one of the most unforgettable characters in the history of theatre. And we see that Shakespeare was also placing challenges on his younger actors, who would play the female roles by penning an Extraordinary amount of vitalistic, complex women characters during this period. Characters like Desdemona and Emilia, Gonoril, Regan and Cordelia, Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra. Now where did Shakespeare get the characters and the story of King Lear? As usual, he was working from school source material. And as usual he takes relatively dry, rather uninspiring source material and injects an unbelievable amount of psychological complexity and breathtaking poetry into the work. A few months before putting pen to paper, Will would have chanced across the chronicle history of King Lear. Lear spelt L E I R at his local bookstand. This was the published version of play that was performed in the late 1580s by a troupe known as the Queen's Men. And this would have jogged Will's memory as he had almost certainly been in the audience back then. It's also hypothesized that Will actually acted with them for a short while during the period known as the lost years. One only needs to look at the repertoire of this company to see that Will was consistently influenced by them. Their plays included Richard ii, King John and Henry V. I'm sure that going down memory lane also made Will recall one of his early plays which he penned around this time, Titus Andronicus. A horrific, stomach churning work and one that I'm in no hurry to read again anytime soon. But we see that there is much of that senseless ultra violence that we see in Titus in King Lear too. Now Shakespeare also knew Geoffrey of Monmouth's 12th century History of Britain in which he depicts King Lear's reign in the 8th century. And Lear is identified as the founder of Leicester. And he was the monarch with the longest reign of rulers recounted by Geoffrey of Monmouth. He ruled for 60 years. In the original ending, Lear with Cordelia and her husband of France successfully defeated the other two daughters. And Lear continued, continued to rule for a few years and then Cordelia succeeded him, which is the ending that audiences wanted, but not the ending that Shakespeare gives us. Another enormous influence was the sitting monarch himself. We can mark a real difference in tone, style, subject matter and so forth between the Elizabethan plays and the Jacobean plays. The plays written under Elizabeth are light, they're jovial, they're humorous. Then we get this difficult transitional period which is marked with problem plays. And then under James the dark plays come. James I of England and 6th of Scotland issued a proclamation in 1604 claiming by kingly power the name and style of king of Great Britain. And in so doing he was forming the first union between England and Scotland. And there was a lot of division debate around this. Those who wished to get in with the king would express support for the unification. But many would also warn of the dangers attendant upon such union. Scotland had historically often been allied with France during times when France was the enemy of England. And would unification really work when the identities of these countries were so different? One might have a shared king and a shared language, but that's not going to mean that a Scot and an Englishman are the same. King Lear is Shakespeare's way of entering this debate and showing his support. Some have wondered how Shakespeare could have penned a play about a mad king without dangerously causing offence. But this isn't the right reading. Shakespeare is showing how not to rule, that is dividing a kingdom, which is the opposite of what James was purporting to do. James had also written a political handbook prior to his ascension to the throne, which became a best seller once he was king. And this handbook was for his son, and warned him about the dangers of dividing territory among one's children. By dividing your kingdoms, he writes, ye shall leave the seed of division and discord among your posterity. King Lear implicitly supports James desire for unification. Whether Shakespeare, the man believed this himself, we do not know. But he's saying as much in this play. At the beginning of the play, we get a powerful physicalisation of Lear's splitting of the kingdom with the map, the prop of the map. And I've seen productions that bring on a map that nearly covers the entire stage itself. We see that borders, lines, divisions, territory are being drawn up by kingly whim, or should we say, by the whim of an aging man who is losing his faculties and susceptible to tantrums. Lear runs us through his darker purpose in Act 1, Scene 1, and he says, know that we have divided in three our kingdom. And tis our fast intent to shake all cares and business from our age, conferring them on younger strengths, while we, unburdened, cruel toward death. So he's using the royal we. He's referring to himself. Lear is 80 years old and he has ruled for 60 years. And he wants what we might call today a retirement. He's tired, he's run down, and he's not in his right mind. And yet. Yet he also wants to hold on to his authority and simply disburden himself of the obligations involved in rule. And we might wonder, does it work like that? How can you give away the kingdom or split the kingdom into three and still retain the rule and authority? Authority means responsibility. It means burden. You cannot keep authority whilst Unburdening yourself of the care, leadership, direction and rule of others. But then again, how can you care for others if you cannot care for yourself? How can you govern others if you cannot govern yourself? We cannot blame him for wanting a peaceful retirement. Absolved of responsibility. We take it that he must have been a strong king with a strong will. He must have been ruthless and respected to have ruled for six decades in the 8th century. But when he says that, he is revealing his daughter's dowers so that future strife might be prevented. Now this seems to be quite rashly coming out of nowhere. And even worse, the division is highly contingent upon who says they love him the most. Can you pass the love test to secure your reward? Daughters Goneril and Reed pour out meaningless platitudes. And there is a dark ironical foreshadowing in Goneril's assertion that she loves her father dearer than eyesight. But Cordelia, the youngest and the most favoured, resists these love games. She loves her father the most and she knows that her sisters do not. But true love means not enabling another when they are behaving poorly. So she refuses to speak. She refuses to be part of this ridiculous spectacle. 80 to 90 lines in to the first act and the first scene. After gonoril and Regan have spoken, Leah turns to Cordelia and asks, what can you say to draw a third more opulent than your sisters? Speak. So he's already divided the kingdom in his mind. He knows what he's giving to who, and he has already reserved a really bounteous part of the kingdom for Cordelia. But he just wants that assurance that she loves him. And Cordelia says nothing, my lord. And Lear says nothing. Cordelia says nothing. And Lear says nothing will come of nothing. Speak again. Notice how the word nothing bloats the text and fills the air. Nothing will come of nothing. Words like never, no, not recur. And everything is prefixed with. With un, unnatural, unmannerly, unfortunate, unmerciful. This is one of Shakespeare's most nihilistic plays, though we will see that Macbeth will compete for the title of most nihilistic when we get to that next. Whilst Hamlet felt like a Christian universe with nihilism butting heads with religious belief, here in King Lear we have a pagan universe in which the gods have either fled, are not listening at all, and so mere mortals simply trouble deaf heaven with their bootless cries, or they were never there in the first place. The gods that Lear calls on at the beginning of the play are all pagan. He swears by the mysteries Of Hekate he cries, by Apollo and by Jupiter. But, as Kent observes, thou swearest thy gods in vain notice, he says, thy gods rather than the gods. His whole life Lear's been a man invested with the grace of the gods as though they would do his bidding. But is that all an illusion? Do we see Lear struggling with the notion that perhaps he has ruled in an empty universe? Or has such a chasm opened up only recently from his speedy descent into senility and what seems to be dimension? I personally get a sense over the course of the play, and this is something best expressed by Edgar, that what we call the punishment of the gods is actually the vices of mortal men and women, or might as well be, as Edgar says, the gods are just, and of our pleasant vices make instruments to plague us. So nothing will come of nothing. And Lear tells Cordelia to mend her speech less she mar her fortunes, and when she does, he flies into a rage, and he disclaims all his paternal care, propinquity and property of blood. He does this when Cordelia speaks the truth. Thy truth then be thy dower. Similar to the absurdity of removing responsibility but not rule or authority, disburdening oneself of obligation but retaining authority. It's also ludicrous that Lear thinks he can simply declare that his daughter is no longer his blood, he is no longer her father, and it will be so just because she does not flatter when he wishes. And we think, of course, that this is not the first time that Lear has acted in such a fashion. But perhaps, though we receive no mention of her, perhaps Queen Lear, his deceased wife, I think perhaps she was the one that reigned him in whenever things threatened to spiral out of control. Perhaps her presence kept cohesion in the family, cohesion in the state. A king without a queen is a kingdom torn apart. A husband without a wife is a family ripped apart. This is the comment that Shakespeare makes when he conflates the political and the domestic in his high tragedies. When the family is torn apart, the state itself is sure to follow. Better thou hadst not been born than not to have pleased me better. Lear cries. And this is a painful assertion, one that perhaps we've all been on both sides of. We've all felt as though the ones we love have let us down. But we have surely also felt that the ones we love hold us up to impossible standards. And Lear says that nature is ashamed of Cordelia. But ultimately all of this, we might think, is incredibly unnatural. This is unnatural behavior. Or is it descent into senility is par for the course as far as nature goes. And we all degrade on our way to the grave. And perhaps what we call unnatural actually is natural. And we just use the word unnatural to refer to the cutthroat and brutal elements of nature and life that we do not like. Hobbes famously said that life in the state of nature was nasty, brutish and short, and a war of all against all. We might feel that as we read King Lear, Though it's interesting to note that there are very stark delineations, stark binaries between good and bad or good and evil. This universe is very dark and bleak, but it's not a universe peopled only by those who will and do evil. Characters we see are either virtuous and wholesomely good, or they are self consciously manipulative, scheming and murderous. We see that Lear disinherits Cordelia, and thankfully the king of France will happily marry her. Hence and avoid my sight, he says. So we get that theme of sight hit upon relentlessly from the start. Then when Kent tries to protest, Lear cries out, come not between the dragon and his wrath. I loved her most and thought to set my rest on her kind nursery. And then he banishes Kent, Kent says effectively, because he loves Lear so much, he can't just flatter and bow. But he must speak true. And all his life he has been but a pawn for the king to use against his enemies. If this is what Cordelia and Ken are both like, if this is their nature, then this surely, surely can't be the very first time they have spoken truthfully to the king. Do we think this is the only time they've spoken in this fashion? And if we do not, if we think that this is a pattern of behavior, then we take it that King Lear, when he was in his right mind, must have accepted those close to him speaking true. But then again, we might feel that the very love test itself contradicts that. That's a pattern of behavior, too. So if those close to him did once speak true, did he used to take it better? Or are they choosing now to speak frankly? We see that Kent tells Lear to see better. But he's not the only one who needs to learn to see better. Lear doesn't see that Cordelia's love is true, whilst Gonoril and Regan's love is false. But Gloucester also needs to learn to see better. He sees his bastard son as good and his legitimate son as evil and comes undone for it. And Gloucester will need to lose his eye in order to see see better Lear, Kent says. But what does the king do? He just strikes out at him, which prompts Kent to say, kill thy physician and thy fee bestow upon the foul disease. A metaphor that speaks to the all consuming despair that the Jacobeans felt during the age of plague. But essentially, this is the same thing as saying, don't shoot the messengers. Which, of course, is easier said than done. Friends turn on friends. Loved ones mistakenly lash out at those who want the best for them. And so often the truth teller is punished for speaking true, which can put someone like the fool in an uncomfortable position. Because, as the fool says, Lear's daughters will have him whipped for speaking true. Lear will have him whipped for lying. And sometimes I'm whipped for holding my peace. Now, as Kent is banished and as he leaves, he says something that recalls one of the nearly endless characters from the opening season at the Globe, from Shakespeare's lightest play, a light work that still carries some very dark undertones. As you like it, Kent recalls Rosalind when he says, freedom lives hence and banishment is here. Like with all of Shakespeare's great characters, it's very interesting to wonder about Lear's backstory, to wonder about the kind of king and father and man he used to be. And I think getting a sense of the old Lear. By old, I mean former, because of course, he is old when we meet him. So I suppose I mean the young Lear or the younger Lear. Getting a sense of the man who was Lear before the play began is more difficult than getting a sense of the old Hamlet. But I think we can put our finger on it. We can get a sense of who he used to be. If we believe in the goodness and sanity of a character like Kent, then we have to think that there must be a reason he still wishes to follow him with all his heart. What we see is that the good follow Lear. So we might think he is good. Because the good follow the good, and the evil are the ones who oppose him. In the words of Albany, wisdom and goodness to the vile seem vile. The good characters in the play want to follow Lear and protect him, and they still buy into his authority, and they want to do right by him. And these characters are struggling just as much as Lear with his senility, his failing senses as he is. Where has this strong leader, this father of the nation, gone? Lir surely wasn't always like this. Although the fool says something that makes us question whether there ever was a wise Lear when he says, if thou wert my fool, Nuncle, I'd have thee beaten for being old before thy time. Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise. And when we listen to Goneril and Regan speak, we think he probably was always at least a little bit like what we have before us. Tis the infirmity of his age, Goneril says, yet he hath always but slenderly known himself. Goneril and Regan's hatred for their father hasn't come out of nowhere. Nothing will come of nothing. It's come from somewhere. He clearly wasn't particularly paternal or overtly loving to them. When Ian McKellen came to the role, he gave a lot of thought to Lear's backstory. And he noted that Cordelia is in her 20s and she's only just about to marry, which means she's very old to marry for the time. And as she says, she's been pledging her love to her father all of her life. But Lear is 80, so this means he had to have Cordelia when he was 60 years old. McKellen wondered if his favourite daughter was of the same mother as Goneril and Regan, and he came to the conclusion that she wasn't. And so McKellen wore two wedding rings during his performance. Tragedy lurks in the backstory, in the ellipsis, in what is not being said, has the king suffered the death of two wives, two mothers of his children? Did his second wife die recently? Does his favor for Cordelia speak to his love of this wife? And how did she die? And how did Lear take it? Now I think we're getting the answer to that question in this play. We know that widowers don't last very long when their wives die, not typically. They often pine away. They lose their mental faculties rapidly and then they follow their spouse on soon after. They pass away soon after. Not always. But it's something that I think many of us have had sad experience with in our own families. When the fool tells Lear that he has made his daughters his mother, there is truth in that. And this old age is the second childishness that Jacques referred to in his Seven Ages of man speech in as you like it, the last age of man is one in which you sink into mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. So sans everything, without everything. That's another way of saying nothing. But I think perhaps what Leah's actually doing is he's trying to make his daughters take on the role of his wife, his deceased wife, who had been fulfilling that maternal, motherly caring role. In her absence, chaos is let loose upon the world. But is chaos not a part of nature? And do you know what's not natural art? Lear himself says that nature's above art. And we get constant metatheatrical reminders throughout the play that regardless of how compelling and immersive the drama is, we get reminders that this is art, not life. And in the Renaissance model of the world, the artist was one who holds up a mirror to nature. Art is an imitation of the natural world of humanity. It is a shadow, an image, a highly selective reflection, not real life itself. And we might consider this as we slide into the second scene of the first act with a powerful soliloquy from the bastard son of Gloucester, Edmund. What does Edmund say at the very beginning of that speech? How does he start his monologue? He says, thou nature art my goddess, to thy law my services are bound. Now this is pagan and neo platonic, yes, but this is also if we're thinking metatheatrically and we should, as Shakespeare constantly prompts us to, this is also a carrot, a self conscious construct who isn't real. He is art, representation, mimesis, depiction. This is a character bowing down to nature because that is the gold standard, that is reality. That is what the artist is trying to faithfully mimic. And the fact that Shakespeare makes his constructs so psychologically complex whilst he comments on their unnatural creation secures him as one of the most self aware geniuses who has ever put pen to paper. When Edmund strides on stage, we immediately reflect upon the line of Machiavellian protagonists that predate him in Shakespeare's career, but actually follow him, historically speaking. We meditate upon some of Shakespeare's other unforgettable villains, don't we? We think of Othello's Iat, we think of Richard iii. And Shakespeare really loves a good bastard, doesn't he? One wonders, of course, what Will's relationship with his own brothers was like. His brothers Richard Gilbert and funnily enough, Edmund Shakespeare. When we first meet Edmund, we see that he's thinking through the injustice of a world in which just because you were born 12 or 14 moonshines lag of a brother, I. E. He was born out of wedlock and a year later his brother Edgar was born in wedlock. Just because of this, you are considered a bastard. Why bastard? He asks. Wherefore? Base. So why am I considered base? Why brand they us with base? And then he starts to roll the word legitimate around in his mouth as though it is a curse. In talking about his brother legitimate, he rolls as though he is preparing to swap the meanings of bastard and bass with legitima. When Edmund talks, is he talking to us in the audience, or is he talking to himself? Or both? Why am I considered a bastard or base, he asks, when my dimensions are as well compact, my mind as generous and my shape as true as honest madam's issue. Who does this remind you of? Perhaps we think of Shylock from the Merchant of Venice, in which we hear the voice of a psychologically complex character. We hear the voice of a Jewish money lender unjustly branded a pariah in Christian Venetian society. If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you prick us, do we not bleed? And if you wrong us, should we not revenge? Now, the rewarding thing about reading the Bard chronologically is that you get to understand how these masterpieces came about. They are composites of everything Shakespeare has learned about the craft up until this point. And we can identify different strands, and we can see where he first hit upon them and explored them, and we can see how he refined them. And so we can see that King Lear was really a lifetime in the making. We see that Edmund, after outlining his plan to have his brothers land, and after crying triumphantly, I grow, I prosper. Now God stand up for bastards. We see his father. Gloucester enters, and Edmund makes quick, overt and deliberately suspicious dispatch of a letter into his pocket. When Gloucester asks what he is hiding, Edmund replies, nothing. To which his father says, the quality of nothing hath not such need to hide itself. Let's see. Come. If it be nothing, I shall not need spectacles. And this is another dark nod to what is to come, as when Gloucester is finally able to see truly, and by that we mean understand, he will be without his eyes, and therefore won't have any use of spectacles. The letter is, of course, a forgery, supposedly from Edgar, but actually written by Edmund, outlining plans to usurp his father's position. After reading it, Gloucester asks, you know the character to be your brother's? And Edmund says, if the matter were good, my lord, I durst swear it were his. But in respect of that, I would fain think it were not. It is his, Gloucester says. It is his hand, my lord, but I hope his heart is not in the contents. Has he never before sounded you in this business? Never, my lord, but I have heard him oft maintain it to be fit that sons at perfect age and fathers declined, the father should be as ward to the son, and the son manage his revenue. And Gloucester cries, o villain, villain. His Very opinion in the letter. ABH Villain. Unnatural, detested, brutish villain. Now what echoes do we hear in this dialogue? Because I could swear we're now getting some deja vu and we are flashing back to the play just gone, the play that Will had just written before King Lear. Do we not recall Iago's duping of Othello? Here the ocular proof is not a handkerchief, but it is a letter. And in addition to ocular proof, we have the auricular assurance of Edmund's ass. Now about a hundred lines into the second scene of the first act. Once Edmund says he will find Edgar for him Gloucester says these late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us, though the wisdom of nature can reason it thus and thus. Yet nature finds itself scourged by the sequent effects. Love, cool, friendship falls off, brothers divide in cities, mutinies in countries, discord in palaces, treason. And the bond cracked twixt son and father. This villain of mine comes under the prediction, there's son against father. The king fools from bias of nature. There's father against child. We have seen the best of our time. Machinations, hollowness, treachery and all ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our grave. Find out this villain Edmund, it shall lose thee nothing. Do it carefully. And the noble and true hearted Kent banished his offence. Honesty. Tis strange. Isn't that incredible? What Gloucester is outlining is the disheartening circular course of history. The rise and fall of kingdoms, states and families. And his observation is that the world has now been thrown into chaos. And that's what tragedy is. We are here living in a world where tis a fault to be honest. And with that assertion we once again get flashbacks to Iago in Othello. Whether we take the misfortunes that befall us to be due to the course of the stars, the sun and moon, or not. Whether we agree with Kent's assertion that it is the stars, the stars above, that govern our conditions. Or whether we take responsibility for our actions, whether we take responsibility for the part we play in this dismal cosmic drop. We have all found ourselves at times in our lives where it feels like love has cooled, friendship fallen off and brothers divided. Once his father is off stage, Edmund lambasts the foppery of the world that we assign our mortal vices to the movement of celestial bodies. When we are sick in fortune, often the surfeits of our own behavior, we make guilty of our disasters, the sun, the moon and stars, as if we, we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence. And all that we are evil in by a divine thrusting on. One of the most self consciously evil characters in the play overtly takes responsibility for his actions. He is a critic of his time and of all time. Why do people defer their responsibility? Oh, I'm a knave, a villain, a drunkard, a liar by compulsion, by planetary influence. Nonsense, he says. And then we see that legitimate brother Edgar arrives on stage and proving himself to be a machiavel through and through. We see that Edmund flips and then right after that speech, pretends to follow the skies, the eclipses, and to put stock in them. When he sees his brother coming, he, like the catastrophe of the old comedy. My cue is villainous melancholy with a sigh like Tom a bedlam. Oh, these eclipses do portend these divisions. We take him for a real human because he plays the character similar to how you believe in the frame of a story. When you have a story within a story or a play within a play, you believe in the reality of a protagonist. When they play a role, you forget that they are also playing a larger role. It's like a Russian dole of identities. We see that Edmund tells Edgar to run to get out of there because his father is angry at him and he will try to hold him off and talk some sense into him, but just go. And then in the third scene of the first act, we see that Goneril continues to rail against her father night and day. He wrongs me, she says, I'll not endure it. So we see that Lear has split his kingdom up, not in three, as he had wanted, but between his two deceitful daughters. He split his kingdom them up, but he's retained a hundred men, and he has basically told his daughters that he's going to put the onus of his care onto them, which one might think would have been accepted more warmly had their relationships not been as fraught with bad blood as they clearly are. And now retired, he and his knights are causing a riotous din. They're hunting and joking and merry making and making a right nuisance of themselves. So he basically says, I'm still king around here. I still have the authority. By the way, I'm splitting the kingdom up because I don't want to cause any strife and I'm not taking any responsibility. I'm disburdening myself. Oh, and you're gonna have to look after me, and I'm just going to drink and carouse and sing and cause mischief and play pranks day and night. Idle old man Goneril says that still would manage those authorities that he hath given away. Now, by my life, old fools are babes again and must be used with checks as flatteries when they are seen abused. We see also in the third scene of the first act that banished Khint has returned disguised, and he tells Lear that he will serve him because he has authority. And we're thrown in with quite the motley crew when it comes to Lear, Kent and the Fool. Before we meet the fool, we learn that Lear has not seen him for two days. And Lear is told that since the banishment of Cordelia, the Fool has pined away, which gives us some really beautiful but painful subtext. What does this tell us? It tells us that the fool and Cordelia have something of a positive relationship. Perhaps we think of young Hamlet and poor Yorick, and in this universe where characters are either good or bad, the fool and Cordelia are on the side of good. And so he sees her banishment as a portent of the unbelievable evil and chaos to come. And again, I find it interesting to note that historically in performances, the actor playing the fool, which double up as Cordelia, so they're not on stage together. And there's a little bit of a metatheatrical nod in there too. The fool is the one who can speak truth to power most safely. The King can hear wisdom that contradicts or criticizes his actions whilst saving face because you have the get out of it being just a joke. The fool is also the wisest character in the play, along with Edgar. And Lear's fool is the wisest of fools. We all have our favourite fools as we work our way through the plays of Shakespeare. Touchstone, Feste, name your own. But Lear's fool for me reigns supreme. And his wisdom is directly in proportion to the King's lack of it. And more fool Lear for saying that his jester's seeming nonsense verse and meaningless max maxims are nothing. That's what he says. Have more than thou showest, speak less than thou knowest, lend less than thou owest, the fool says. To which the King replies using his favorite word. This is nothing, fool. And this prompts the fool, quick witted and razor sharp, to respond in a manner that speaks to Shakespeare his negative experience with lawyers over the course of his life lifetime. Then tis like the breath of an unfeed Lawyer, you gave me nothing for it. Can you make no use of nothing, nuncle? Nuncle, by the way, means mine, uncle. It's a contraction of that term of familiarity and affection. But we also get a pun in the sense of the word none or no. No uncle, no man. Perhaps. Perhaps. Lear is a walking cipher, a personified zero. Indeed, the fool says as much. He says, now thou art an O without a figure. I am better than thou art. Now I am a fool. Thou art nothing. When the fool asks him, can you make no use of nothing? Lear recalling his own words earlier when speaking to Cordelia. And again notice he says the same thing to both fool and Cordelia. So they continue to be aligned. Lear says, nothing can be made out of nothing. So with this repetition, we. We see that Lear's caught in this spiral of obsession. He keeps repeating the same things. He's obsessed with this idea of nothing. And to this, the fool says to Kent, prithee, tell him so much. The rent of his land comes to we see. The fool chides Lear, and he calls him a fool because all thy other titles thou hast given away. And in an iconic scene, he takes a egg and he shows him how he can make two crowns. He splits it down the middle, eats up the meat in the centre, and then stresses the fact that Lear has essentially done this very thing. And his own crown, his head, is empty in the center, and his daughters are two halves of a shell. Now, in scene four of act one, we get this astonishingly sad and painful scene where we see Lear have a moment of terrifying dementia. And anyone who has had to care for an aging family member will find this element of the play to be the most tragic, the most unbearable. This is about 220 lines in to the fourth scene of Act One. Lear says, does any here know me? This is not Lear. Does Lear walk thus? Speak thus? Where are his eyes? Either his notion weakens. His discernings are less. Ha. Waking. Tis not so. Who is it that can tell me who I am? And the fool says, lear's shadow. Who is it? Who can tell me who I am? Have you ever had an existential crisis so debilitating and all consuming that you have helplessly thought something like this? Of course, only you can tell you who you are. But who are you? What is you? What does that mean? Who is Lear? Who is the identity we have been aligned with for so long? Is it really me? Is it really you? What happens when your sense of self goes, if we've not had the experience of total insanity, then we have at least had the partially relatable experience of doubting our decision making, doubting some facet of our identity, and we look to others to assist. But when has another ever been been able to tell us who we are or what we need to do? If the answer is hardly ever, then it's terrifying to contemplate what will happen when your life is in the hands of those around you. Will those who once looked to you for guidance, authority, rule, be able to be the ones you can look to? Tragically, Lear banishes the ones that he had a hope of relying, playing on. And he puts his faith in monsters of the deep. We see that Lear rails at Goneril for being ungrateful, for removing 50 of his retinue. And his caustic ranting at her makes us think again that this is not the first time she has suffered his wrath. In the McKellen production, Francis Barber, who plays Goneril, shows the eldest daughter to be frequently fighting back tears in response to her father. Typically, Goneril is portrayed as cold and unfeeling. But I really like this creative decision because it gives Goneril a very human dimension and makes us understand how all of this could have come about. Here's Lear's rant. He implores nature, dear goddess, here he cries. This is about 270 or so lines in to the fourth scene of Act 1. Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intend to make this creature fruitful into her womb convey sterility. So he's imploring the heavens, or he's imploring nature herself the goddess, to make his daughter sterile. Quite a nasty thing to say. Dry up in her the organs of increase, and from her derogate body never spring a babe to honour. Honour her if she must teem, Create her child of spleen, that it may live and be athwart disnatured torment to her. So if you must give her a child, make the child awful. Make the child as ungrateful as she is to me. Let it stamp wrinkles in her brow of youth with cadent tears fret channels in her cheeks. Turn all her mother's pains and benefits to laughter and contempt that she may feel how sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child. And in the final scene of the first act, scene four, we see Lear really teetering between the last remnants of sanity and full on madness. We see he has this lingering understanding that he has treated Cordelia badly. I have done her wrong, he says, but this glides by Us. And then he says, oh, let me not be mad. Not mad, sweet heaven, keep me in temper. I would not be mad. And these lines break my heart because it sounds like he's really fighting to hold on to his sanity. He's actually fighting, and he's actually doing quite a good job. And the insanity is so overpowering that he's not winning, he's losing, but he's not going down without a fight. As a man and as a king, Lear must have longed, had an iron will because he's fighting with a force of nature. He is fighting himself. He's fighting the degradation of his own mind. We see that Goneril and Regan continue to cruelly exploit their father and disregard his authority. Indeed, Regan and Cornwall put Kent in the stocks. And we see that Lear, upset at Goneril, complains to Regan that her sister has abated him of his train of men. And how does she respond? She responds by essentially saying, well, why do you need any men at all? And to this, as we see, Lear realizes that both of these daughters are not in his corner. They are not on his side. And when one goes against him, he can't go to the other. It's like he's got two parents and they're both against him. To this, Lear gives another extraordinary speech where we see his failing senses, his faculties slip away in real time. In a play filled with powerful speeches. I think this is one of the best. Act two, scene four. When Regan asks her father, why does he need any men? Lear says, oh, reason not the need. Our basest beggars are in the poorest things superfluous. Allow not nature more than nature needs. Man's life is cheap as beasts, and he turns to the heavens. He keeps imploring the heavens. This is something that keeps happening. You heavens, he says, give me that patience. Patience I need. You see me here, you gods, a poor old man as full of grief as age, wretched in both. If it be you that stirs these daughters hearts against their fear, father, fool me not so much to bear it tamely. So all his life the gods have been on his side, but all of a sudden they seem to be against him. They seem to be on the side of his daughters. And he's saying, if that is true, then at least give me patience to put up with it. Patience is definitely one of the traits that Lear needs and I think historically probably lacked. Touch me with noble anger, he says, and let not women's weapons, water drops, stain my man's cheeks. What's he saying? Saying, here he's begging the heavens. He's begging the gods not to cry. Women's weapons, water drops. Don't let them stain my man's cheeks. And of course, there is a ludicrous aspect to the choice of words. We think of the double meaning of cheeks. Not just the cheeks on our face, but the cheeks of our buttocks. He's saying, don't let me cry. So what does the actor have to do here? The actor has to be fighting back tears. This has to be painful and uncomfortable because there has to be an element of humor, but really pathetic humor. Humor where it's not funny at all. You're laughing from discomfort, but you also have to feel emotionally overwhelmed. And I think we start to lend our sympathy to Lear at the beginning. He's pompous and he's prideful, and he continues to be so here. But we start to get a picture that he's not in control of himself. And to kick a dog whilst they're down is the lowest thing imaginable. So he begs, do not let me cry. And then he bursts out. He cries out, no, you unnatural hag. So he's lost the war with himself. The gods have not given him patience. I will have such revenges on you both that all the world shall. And then we get a strange pause. We get a breaking off, we get a fractured sentence. I will do such things. And we get another fracturing. What they are, yet I know not. So he's threatening revenge, but he hasn't been able to imagine what he could even do. Do. I will have such revenges on you both. What they are yet I know not. But they shall be the terrors of the earth. So, of course, this doesn't sound very threatening, does it? I don't know what I'm going to do, but it's going to be awful. You think I'll weep. No, I'll not weep. I have full cause of weeping. And outside there is a storm and a tempest breaking. But this heart shall break into a hundred thousand floors or air. I'll weep. Oh, fool. I shall go mad. Anger's quite a simplistic and reductive emotion. And it's very often a guise. It is a cover up for deeper, more painful, more uncomfortable, more complex emotions, particularly with men. So this outburst, he's actually being quite direct. He's telling us that he wants to cry. Otherwise you wouldn't say, I won't weep. You're going to make me weep. I'm not going to weep. He wants to weep. His heart out he's wounded and hurt and he feels scorned by his daughters. Is he culpable and responsible? Yes, but he's also not in his right mind. So kind of not. And when Lear says I will take such revenges, but then fails to complete the threat with anything tangible, I think that anyone who has felt powerless in the face of injustice will find this relatable. What are you going to do? What can you do? Can you right this wrong, this injustice? We see in a high rage. Lir storms outside in a sublime moment of pathetic fallacy, which is when the elements of nature themselves, the wind and the rain, mirror what's raging within the characters. We see Lear storming into a storm. Gloucester implores Regan to have compassion, to not let her father go out and contend with the elements, to which she responds, oh sir, to willful men, the injuries that they themselves procure must be their schoolmaster masters. This sentiment would become a Nietzschean dictum. Nietzsche, who was a great reader of Shakespeare, would tell us that the man animal only learns through pain. Pain is our greatest teacher. And this is a very callous line given the circumstances. A daughter not helping her senile father, allowing him to go out into a storm where he could easily catch death. But there is a truth here. Pain is our teacher. We must lose everything we think we are to acknowledge everything we actually are. And we might say only after having our eyes plucked out can we see Lear raging into the storm on the heath is like a child petulantly throwing a tantrum. Yes, but this is also the pivotal point of the tragedy, the turning point. And it comes right in the middle of the play, in the third act. What we get here is the anagnoriasis. That's the moment of self recognition or realization. It comes too late, but it comes Lear's pride, his hubris. That's the folly that undoes the king and results in his fall from grace. But here, as he screams against the wind and the rain, he enters the metaphorical storm of his existential crisis. The storm storm is nothing compared to the tempest raging in his mind. We see as well, when Lear meets Edgar in the near naked form of poor Tom in solidarity, he strips down too. He strips all of his clothes off. And in this we get a stark visualization of an old folkloric trope, the royal reversal. Now, normally in Arthurian legend, for example, we see a low or beggar born individual. Individual is discovered to actually be of royal blood. A commoner can take the sword out of the stone, or they have the royal birthmark. Or they stumble upon supernatural abilities. In King Lear, this is the other way around. Lear has ruled for six decades and now he has to learn to be something other than a king, which means he must be a man. And what is a man? The fact that Shakespeare constantly explores this question, directly and indirectly in his plays, speaks to the fact that he must have been suffering through his own existential crisis. What is a man? As a king, you're akin to a God. But we see as Lear implores the heavens to rain down, we might think that Lear is finally learning that he's not like a God and he doesn't have the ears of the gods. He's learning, we think, that the heavens aren't raging because Lear is raging. He didn't command the sky to burst into a storm. The storm doesn't come when he beckons it. He can't control the elements. Can he even control himself? And so what does that make him? Not like a God? Does that make him a man? But is not man ultimately just a beast? A man who cannot control himself, we might think, certainly is. What am I when I am not king? This is the question on his fractured mind, who am I when I am but a man? So in the Storm on the Heath scene, we get a painful existential crisis and a transitional phase in which Lear has to come to terms with his mortality and everything. Up until this point, his behaviour, his decisions, has been a rash denial of death, to use a phrase from Ernest Becker. Here's Lear in the Storm on the Heath, Act 3, Scene 2. He says, Blow, winds, and crack your ch. Cheeks. Rage, blow. Notice that there isn't a sense of harmony in the meter. You've got stress, stress, unstress, stress, unstress, stress, stress, stress. So there's a lot of force here. This isn't delicate. This feels like a very ugly bass. Animalistic outpouring. Again, we get some schoolboy humor and a naughty play on words with cheeks. Crack your cheeks. This is the comedy in the high tragedy. There has to be a comic element, a pathetic comic element for the full force of the tragedy to be pulled out. A storm is very typically sublime and it's overpowering and it is frightening. But what if the storm is literally just the heavens above cracking its cheeks? You cataracts and Hurricane Os spout till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks. This is an incredible speech. And this was really important in the Jacobean things theatre, because there weren't any special effects. They might have had some aluminum sheet Metal that they could ripple to make the sound of thunder or some drums. But ultimately, everything really needed to be created by the actors and the words. But we see it, don't we? We see what Lear wants to see. The steeples aren't really drenched. The cocks aren't really drowned, but we see the potential for that. He wants destruction. What does this make us think of? I think this makes us think of the great flood in response to great evil. You, sulphurous and Thor executing fires. So the elements are contending with each other. They're working together. Water and fire together. Vaunt, couriers of oak, cleaving thunderbolts, singe my white head and thou all shaking thunder. Strike flat the thick rotundity of the world. Crack nature's moulds. All Germans spill at once. That makes in great man what has really happened. A father has had a falling out. Not with all of his daughters. Two of his daughters. One still loves him. He still has followers. He still has people who care for him and love him. He's made some bad decisions and he's losing his mind. But this is a domestic issue, of course. In the political realm, the domestic suddenly has very far ranging and devastating consequences. He's been scorned. And so he wants the entire world to be drowned. And not only that, he wants to be struck. He wants the world to be struck flat. And he wants his hair singed. Rumble thy belly full. Spit fire, spout rain. Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire are my daughters. I tax you, not you elements, with unkindness. So we should see the real pain of the scorned Father come through. I never gave you kingdom, called you children. You owe me no subscription. Then let fall your horrible pleasure. Here I stand, your slave, a poor, infirm, weak and despised old man. He's working through his pain. And this storm allows Lear to begin to see or glimpse momentarily, right in the midst of utter madness, who he really is. He's a weak old man, and he has been been wounded by his daughters. But this storm also allows us in the audience to do much the same thing and glimpse who we are, what we're struggling with. Have we been scorned of late? What is our position? Are we as powerful as we think we are? What is unaccommodated man? What is man without titles? Trimming clothing, housing. What are we when we strip it all away? When we remove everything? When we go out and contend with the other? What are we? We hear? Lear is very much feeling sorry for himself. He says he is a man More sinned against than sinning. And I think this is true. And he certainly didn't help matters much by his behavior. And he has been far from perfect. But I think he deserved a lot more love than he has received. Having weathered the storm and having stripped everything off, which is like a metaphorical and visual renouncing of his kingly rule, and having begun to come to grips with his mortality, we then get quite a picture. It's almost like a joke. We get quite a picture as king, servant, fool and mad beggar congregate together in a hovel and philosophize. Now, of course, poor Tom, the roaming Tom Obedlam beggar, is actually Edgar. For his safety, he has put on the guise a putting on that is, of course, a stripping off. He's put on the guise of a bedlamite, a madman who has gone out from St. Bethlehem's hospital. And he has caked himself in dirt. And Lear has taken him for a philosopher, which is very funny. But Edgar, along with the fool, speaks the wisest words in the play. Words which we can take into our daily lives. Words which ring out with proleptic grandeur. King Lear, the play is pure prophecy, disturbing prophecy because it's Shakespeare giving voice to eternal truths. If we take the warnings in the play as applying to our time, then it's because they have always applied and always will. Past, present and future. What is contained in King Lear is always true. When Edgar says that men must endure their going head hence, even as their coming hither. When he says ripeness is all, when will this ever not be the case? This particular strain of wisdom recalls Ecclesiastes. There is a time for everything under the sun. A time to reap and a time to sow, a time to live and a time to die. We must endure our going hence. Man is an animal conscious of his mortality. So when Lear said he will, unburdened, cruel toward death, once free of his obligations, we might think that the burden isn't the obligations, it's the awareness of death. Remove your obligations and you still have to contend with that. You still have to contend with the reality of your nature. And you might think it unnatural, but it's not. Now. Further wisdom that I draw from Edgar comes when he says, marking the suffering of the king in Act 3, Scene 6, about 100 lines in. When we our betters see bearing our woes, we scarcely think our miseries, our foes. So notice the rhyming couplets, which really stands out in a play that's quite ugly and Quite unbalanced. And there's a lot of disharmony and discord and strife in the syntax of the lines. Who alone suffers, suffers most in the mind, leaving free things and happy shows behind. But then the mind much sufferance doth overskip when grief hath mates, and bearing fellowship, how light and portable my pain seems now, when that which makes me bend makes the king bow. He childed as I fathered. This is the value of tragedy to the question of why an audience would go to such an overwhelming travesty and endure it for a couple of hours. This is the answer. We hope that the experience is not only cathartic, but also gives us a healing dose of perspective so we can leave the theatre, return to our lives and bear the ills that are thrust upon us too. Is our suffering increased or diminished with the awareness that it puts us in the company of kings? If we know that the king is suffering, can we bear our suffering better? Very often the answer is yes, because suffering unites us. It's the one thing we all have in common. Indeed, if we felt like we were suffering alone, that would increase our misery, would it not? Now, whilst we're talking about disturbingly prophetic power, how's this from Lear's Fool? For eternal words of wisdom that speak to all time and thus to our time today on stage by himself, in the second scene of the third act, the fool says, I'll speak a prophecy ere I go. When priests are more in word than matter, when brewers mar their malt with water, when nobles are their tailors, tutors, no heretics burned, but wenches, suitors. Then shall the realm of Albion come to great confusion. Does this not apply today? We could go through this list and one by one, we could modify each line slightly to fit the times. And when we do so, what do we find? Great confusion will come to the Realm of Albion. So, too Britain, when priests are more in word than matter. Do we not know of people who preach virtue? They need not be priests, of course. Do we not know of people who preach morality? But they're actually all words and no substance. Of course we do. Do we not know people who sell their products watered down? When brewers mar their malt with water, we might not think of brewers, we might think of. Well, think of anything. When things are cut and diluted and watered down, and when we have to tell those who should be the experts of their trade how to do their own job, when nobles are their tailors, tutors. So imagine a noble going to a tailor and Telling him how to measure and cut and fit the suit. It doesn't seem right. We need not talk of tailors specifically for this line to apply today. No heretics burned, but wenches, suitors. So we might wonder, are we today punished for courting? This list we can run through, and we might think yes to each of those lines. And we might ask ourselves, are we not already in this Albion of great confusion? The audience, of course, would have been nodding their heads. And we do so today, too. Now we see that Gloucester also has his own anagnoriasis, which comes in the most horrific scene of the play and the most ironic. Out vile jelly, Cornwall says, driving his nails into his eyeballs and gouging them out as punishment for treason. The blinding of Gloucester leads to his sight, his finally seeing, his realization that Edgar has been abused. Gloucester has done Edgar wrong. Lear has done Cord. Now, audiences don't know how to react when it comes to the blinding scene. There's shocked silence. Sometimes there are a few uncomfortable laughs here and there because it is so outrageous that we can't believe what we have just witnessed. And so after that, we might sympathize with Gloucester when he says, as flies to wanton boys are we to the glass gods. They kill us for their sport. Indeed, we might sympathize with Lear when he says he is stretched out on fortune's rack on a great wheel of fire. Of course, we keep in mind what Edmund, the self consciously evil Machiavel says. We blame the planetary influences. We blame the heavens, the stars, the moons for our own behavior. Do the gods really kill us for their sport? Or do men and women have that more than handled by themselves? Are we really stretched out on a great wheel of fire? Or are we stretched out on a rack of our own devising? We see that Lear has his epiphany moment on the heath, whilst Gloucester has his post blinding at the cliffs of Dover. He's reunited with his son Edgar. And though he knows he has done him wrong, he doesn't know that his son is the one who is leading him. He takes him for poor Tom, and he says, tis the times plague when madmen lead the blind. We see that Gloucester wants to kill himself. He wants to throw himself off the cliff. But Edgar isn't going to let that happen. And so he makes his blinded father believe he is ascending a cliff, when really he is not. And this is quite an extraordinary scene to see on stage. Extraordinary in how pathetic. Yeah, actually seems in Shakespeare's time, if you wanted to show a character climbing A cliff. You couldn't really do that in a realistic way. You didn't have great special effects or set design. You had to just tell the audience they were on a cliff. And you had to hope that their imaginations. Which were better than ours are today. Or indeed, those who don't read the way we read. At least you had to hope the audience's imagination would fill the scene in for you. Stage design in the age of Elizabeth and James. Literally meant telling the audience what you wanted them to see. And so there is a metatheatrical joke here. Because Gloucester is not ascending a cliff, though he believes he is. And yet it would have looked exactly the same. And it would have played out in much the same way. If he had been at the top of a cliff. The poetry creates the scene. And we see it all, even though it's not there in actuality. Which, of course, ties into the theme of sight. We see what is not there. And sometimes when we cannot see is when we can most understand. When we see feelingly. When we intuit. Acts 4, scene 6. This is incredible. I love the poetry here. Edgar says, come on, sir. Here's the place. This is about 11 lines in. Stand still. How fit, fearful and dizzy. Tis to cast one's eyes so low. The crows and choughs that wing the midway air show scarce so gross as beetles. Half way down hangs one that gathers samphire, dreadful trade. Methinks he seems no bigger than his head. The fishermen that walk upon the beach Appear like mice and yon tall anchoring bark. Diminished to her cock. Her cock a boy almost too small sight. And then we get this beautiful assonance and alliteration. When Edgar says. The murmuring surge. That on the numbered idle pebbled chafes Cannot be heard so high. Isn't that amazing? So we hear the murmuring surge. The waves. The murmuring of the waves. Because he creates it with the very words themselves. And yet we don't. So we're hearing what is not. The murmuring surge cannot be heard so high. And so we hear it. And we also don't hear it. I'll look no more, he says. Lest my brain turn and the deficient sight topple down headlong. And when he does topple down. This is supposed to be a rather pathetic sight. Gloucester tumbles down a cliff that is a creation of his mind and his living. His surviving the fall is a miracle. And we get more metatheatricality when Gloucester and Lear are reunited. And in the fourth act, I still, regardless of knowing how the play is going to end hold out hope for a happy ending. Our characters have seen the error of their ways. Cordelia is surely going to defeat her sisters and restore order. Everything feels like a happy ending is in store, doesn't it? This being a tragedy, of course, we know that cannot be. But we get more metatheatricality when Lear, who comically calls Gloucester Goneril with a white beard and who struggles to accept that Gloucester has no eyes, Lear turns. We take it directly to the audience. And still wounded from how his daughters have turned on him and lied to him. And in this, we see the damage of believing lies. We see why Cordelia refused to say more them what was true. They told me I was everything, he says. They are not men of their words. Lear turns directly to the audience and delivers this extraordinary metatheatrical speech. About 110 or so lines in. Gloucester asks if he doesn't hear the voice of the king. And Lear says, I every inch a king. When I do stare, see how the subject quakes? So he would turn to the audience and he would pick out a member of the audience and he would stare at them. And of course, the audience member is not going to quake. In fact, they might do the opposite. They might laugh. Because at this point, Lear is looking rather wild and he's looking rather ludicrous. When I do stare, see how the subject quakes. I pardon that man's life. So he points to another man in the audience. What was thy cause? Adultery. So he's interacting with the audience. It's very funny. Thou shalt not die. Die for adultery. No, what we see is Lear essentially making fun of his office, his title, what he has given his life to. Because he's every inch a king. But we know well he's not. What does his kingly status or his once kingly status matter as he crawls towards death? What did it ever matter? And then we get more evergreen commentary about 150 or so lines in. When Gloucester says that he can see feelingly, Lear asks him, what art mad? A man may see how this world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears. Now, this sounds ludicrous, but this is the constant Shakespearean preoccupation. We've seen this in A Midsummer Night's Dream. We've seen this in so many of his plays. This is the constant. And man may see how this world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears. Essentially the inspiration. Injustices of society. What's right, what's wrong, and what's reality Are Apparent. But we do not allow ourselves to see. Truly, we delude ourselves. We see projections of our minds. See how you justice rails upon yon simple thief. And he asks, gloucester, thou hast seen a farmer's dog bark at a beggar? Aye, sir. And the creature run from the cur. There thou mightst behold the great image of authority. A dog's obeyed in office. A dog's obeyed in office. When is that ever not true? Post storm, Lear is starting to see clearly. Even in his descent into madness, he is seeing clearly. And he says, when we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools. So we get more metatheatricality. And we wonder who is talking here. Is this not Will himself? Is this not Shakespeare? He sees the world in theatrical terms always. He's a playwright through and through. We cry when we come to this great stage of fools. Now the play builds to one of the most painful crescendos of all time, when Lear and Cordelia are finally reunited. Cordelia marches from France like a warrior goddess. And when they are together again, we see that Lear essentially apologizes sincerely. And he can see clearly now, even in the midst of madness. And so strong is his will that he can grasp onto reality and truth. He can fight through the fog of senility, and he can set things right with the daughter he wronged. He tells her that she has caused to be upset with him. And we see he is tender and raw and vulnerable. And at this moment, we see not, not the king, but the man, the old man. And we see the Father. Acts 4, scene 7. About 60 lines in, he kneels before Cordelia. And she says, no, sir, you must not kneel. And Lear says, pray, do not mock me. I am a very foolish, fond old man. Fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less. And to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind. That is very, very plain and very painful. I fear I am not in my perfect mind. He's been saying it throughout the entire play, but now he really says it. He says it directly. He admits it. He doesn't fight it. He knows what is happening to him. Methinks I should know you and know this man. Yet I am doubtful, for I am mainly ignorant what place this is. And all the skill I have remembers not these garments, nor know I not where I did lodge last night. Do not laugh at me, for as I am a man, I think this lady to be my child. Cordelia. So he's telling her, I don't recognize anything. I don't know even where I was last night. I don't really recognize you at all. But I know you. And I know you are my child Cordelia. And she says, and so I am. I am. And he goes on to say, and says, you must bear with me. Pray you now forget her. Forgive I am old and foolish. And then we see, once they are captured, that Lear dreams of what their lives could be in prison and what he summons, what he envisions, is a potential life that sounds more beautiful than the life of those who are free. And in this dream, we get some profound life advice from Lear, from the the aging no longer raging, once deluded, but now wise king. We get wisdom that we could apply to our lives right now, today, if only we were brave enough or could grab hold of enough sense. Captured by Edmund, Cordelia says we are not the first who with best meaning, have incurred the worst. And Lear says, no, no, no. Oh, no. Come, let's away to prison, we two alone. We'll sing like birds I the cage. When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down and ask of thee forgiveness. So we'll live and pray and sing and tell old tales and laugh at gilded butterflies and hear poor rogues talk of court news. And we'll talk with them too, who loses and who wins, who's in, who's out, and take upon us the mystery of things as if we were God's spies. And we'll wear out in a walled prison packs and sects of great ones that ebb and flow by the moon. This is very interesting. Like birds in the cage, they will sing. So it doesn't matter if they're imprisoned. They are free because they are together and their love is beautiful. They'll make a heaven of their hell. They'll pray and sing and tell old tales and laugh at gilded butterflies. And they'll even indulge in court news. And they'll buy into it just for fun. Who's in, who's out. They'll follow it like a drama. And I really love this. He says they will take upon them the mystery of things, as if we were God's spies. Notice that all through the work, all through the story, we have been in a pagan universe, an empty universe, an uncaring, unfeeling universe. Universe where gods plural are not present. But notice, he says God singular, as if we were God's spies. This moment sees a shift from the pagan to the Christian to a more monotheistic paradigm of the universe. And if you had asked me What? My one passage, the passage that stood out most profoundly to me. When we go through these plays, I'm always looking out with each new rereading for the one part of, of the work upon which everything else hangs, the one that speaks directly to my heart. If you'd asked me what that was when I first read King Lear, I would point to Lear's rage blow speech on the heath. But ask me today, and I say it has to be this part of the play, this father's loving words to his daughter. And they are all the more painful for what follows. And it hardly seems to matter that Edgar is able to confront and kill his brother Edmund. The end of the play is dominated by the all consuming abyss that opens up when Lear howls from the deepest pain imaginable. When Cordelia is killed, my poor fool is hanged, he says. And I have seen productions that show his actual fool as hanging in the background whilst he cradles Cordelia in his arms. But of course he uses the word fool with affection for his slain daughter. And Act 5, Scene 3, about 200 and sixty or so lines in. It's not hard to see why this version of the play was not performed for so long and why it was considered too emotionally overpowering to perform. Howl, howl. How Lear cries. And he is supposed to cry. This, this is his breaking point. Post Anagnoria. He's got his sight, he's got his forgiveness. He's apologized, he's been reunited. And now his whole world is taken away from him. Oh, you are men of stones. Had I your tongues and eyes, I'd use them so that heaven's vault should crack. She's gone forever. I know when one is dead and when one lives. She's dead as earth. Lend me a looking glass. If that her breath will miss or stain the stone, why then she lives again. We might think of that idea of the artist or the writer as holding a mirror up to nature. Of course, this is a representation. The actor still lives. And if you were to hold a mirror up under her nose or his nose, because indeed Cordelia would have been performed by a young man in Shakespeare's time, you will see it does mist up. And so we have to continue through and through, all the way through the play till the very end we have to. What is not. But very often what is not is more real than what actually is. Cordelia is dead. Goneril and Regan and Edmund are dead. Gloucester is dead. Indeed, nearly all of the major characters are dead. And Lear dies from overwhelming grief, leaving Edgar to rule in his place.