Poor Naked Wretches
Shakespeare's King Lear...
which first appeared in the Quarto edition of 1608...
is a tragedy which has provoked great debate over the centuries.
King Lear has been described by academics...
as a 'Jacobean dramatic tragedy'...
and it does seem to have a universal quality which allows it...
to transcend the barriers of space and time.
It deals with the quintessential nature of man.
Shakespeare manages to open up the huge question...
of what it means to be a human being...
Iooking at how people relate to one another.
The drama revolves around one man, Lear...
and his lack of insight leads to a series of tragedies.
In his declining years Lear, the central tragic hero...
fails to understand his relationships with those closest to him...
and he makes a series of fatal mistakes...
which plunge his entire society into chaos.
In recent decades King Lear has come to supplant Hamlet...
in the popular imagination I think, as the greatest of Shakespeare's plays...
in the sense, I think, that it presents the greatest challenges...
to audiences as well as the performers...
and also in some ways the greatest rewards.
I think King Lear perhaps is the greatest of Shakespeare's tragedies...
because it faces so directly...
the fundamental questions about human existence.
It never pulls any punches...
it goes, as one might say, for thejugular time after time.
I think this is because it is so clearly a play...
that's profoundly concerned with very serious issues.
It's a very earnest play. It's a play which is concerned with old age...
which comes to everybody if they're lucky...
it's concerned with filial ingratitude, to use the phrase in the play itself...
that's to say with relations between parents and children...
which again is something of universal interest.
And ultimately, it's concerned very profoundly with death.
It asks the fundamental questions in the middle of the play...
when Lear is thinking about the evil that his daughter Regan has done to him.
He says 'Let them anatomise Regan, see what breathes about her heart...
is there no cause in nature...
that makes these hard hearts'.
We'd love to know the answer to that question still today...
and there's the play asking it directly.
When the mind's free...
the body's delicate;
this tempest in my mind doth from my senses...
take all feeling else, save what beats there...
Lear is a moving play because it involves the audience...
in the suffering of Lear himself, especially.
It involves us in his progress through the play.
We recognise perhaps initially that he is a faulty man...
he's not a perfect man at all. We recognise the folly...
of his actions which is very much pointed up by the fool in the play.
Tell me, my daughters, since now we will divest us both of rule...
interest of territory, cares of state...
which of you shall we say doth love us most?
Lear's daughters, Goneril, Regan and Cordelia...
are essential to the plot.
It is their responses in the opening scene of the play...
which set the story in motion.
The sisters must publicly declare their love for their father.
If they respond well he will award them each a third of his kingdom.
Goneril and Regan are only too happy to flatter their father.
However, Cordelia's refusal to compete with her sisters in this way...
is unacceptable to Lear, and he banishes her to France.
Let it be so!
Thy truth then be thy dower!
For by the sacred radiance of the sun...
the mysteries of Hecat and the night...
by all the operation of the orbs...
from whom we do exist and cease to be...
Here I disclaim all my paternal love.
Propinquity and property of blood...
and as a stranger to my heart and me...
hold thee...
from this...
forever.
The women set the play in motion, by their response...
to Lear's extraordinary request for a declaration of love.
Goneril and Regan are...
eloquent and elegant in telling lies.
Cordelia actually finds it impossible to tell the truth...
because the truth is that she does love her father...
and she can't say so in public.
She cannot, as she puts it 'heave her heart into her mouth'...
whereas her sisters have the glib and oily art...
again Cordelia's phrase...
to make persuasive and convincing something which doesn't exist.
Cordelia is the more clearly virtuous character.
Of course, it's possible to fault her as it's possible to fault most people...
perhaps she should have been a bit more tactful in that opening scene...
perhaps it wasn't very kind of her to say simply nothing...
in response to Lear's request for an expression of love...
but ultimately she does stand very much for goodness in the play, I think.
Whether it's possible to say that they reflect aspects of King Lear himself...
is a matter of interpretation, I think. You may say that...
there is harshness in Lear as there clearly is.
He banishes Cordelia and that perhaps aligns him with Goneril and Regan.
There is also great gentleness in Lear...
as we see in the later part of the play, particularly...
in the reunion scene with Cordelia and that aligns him with Cordelia.
But the gentleness in Lear comes in the second part of the play...
and may be felt not to be any herent part...
in the Lear we meet in the earlier scenes...
but perhaps the result of the experiences...
that Lear undergoes during the course of the play.
In other words, that Lear himself may be regarded as a learning character...
as a man who develops in the course of the play...
and that part of the experience that the audience undergoes...
in seeing the play, or reading it...
is in watching Lear turn from one sort of man into another sort of man.
The play focuses on Lear, and thejourney he makes.
Thisjourney of understanding takes place out on the heath...
in the middle of a chaotic storm...
which reflects the state of Lear's mind.
He descends into madness...
but ironically, becomes aware of the frailty of man.
King Lear is very much a play about an elderly man...
who has misjudged and miscalculated throughout his life.
Filial ingratitude!
I will punish home.
No, I weep no more!
In such a night to shut me out! O Regan, Goneril!
There are key speeches on the heath...
which show Lear as a learner...
somebody who has begun to be able to see...
through his own sufferings how much other people suffer...
and the recipients of his compassion, of his sympathy...
are the fool and Edgar.
'Poor naked wretches, wherefore ye be', he says...
'that bide the pelting of this pitiless storm'.
He wishes that he were able to, as he says...
'shake the superflux to the poor'. He wishes he were able...
to take excess from those who have too much...
and give it to those who have too little...
and this is a point at which we sense Lear is learning a social lesson...
and that he has done so partly as result of suffering.
I think in the later part of the play...
Lear is shown as somebody who is much more capable of...
compassionate behaviour to people outside himself...
than he was in the earlier scenes of the play.
Wheresoe'er you are...
that bide the pelting of this pitiless storm...
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides...
Your looped and windowed raggedness...
defend you from seasons such as these?
O, I have ta'en too little care of this!
Take physic, pomp...
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel.
He suffers so much, in the storm for example...
he suffers so much both internally and externally.
Externally because of the storm but internally because of...
what he himself calls 'the tempest in my mind'...
and the tempest in his mind causes greater suffering...
than the external tempest. The audience can easily identify with that.
Throughout the play Lear is shadowed by characters...
who feel a very strong loyalty towards him.
They counterbalance characters such as Goneril, Regan and Edmund...
who are all busy trying to further their own ends.
Kent and the fool repeatedly warn Lear of the mistakes...
he is making with his daughters.
Kent even pays the same price as Cordelia...
for his forthright opinions and is banished.
He returns disguised, to help Lear.
Royal Lear, who I have ever honoured as my King.
Loved as my father, as my master followed...
as my great patron fallen of my prayers.
The bow is bent and drawn. Make from the shaft.
Let it fall rather, though the fall convey the region of my heart.
Be Kent unmannerly, when Lear is mad!
I think both Kent and the fool...
are loyal to Lear because they love Lear.
It's very basic, but I think there is a political dimension...
to Kent's loyalty which is entirely absent from the fool's.
It's Kent who in the first scene protests...
at the political folly of dividing up the kingdom.
It's Kent who comes back to serve Lear...
because, as he puts it, 'Lear has in his face...
that which I would feign call master, authority, authority'.
It's Kent, it's sketchily shown in the play...
but enough for us to understand what's going on...
who obviously has some sort of spy system...
or system of messengers getting information to and back from Cordelia...
when she has invaded the kingdom with the French Army.
So I think Kent, although his loyalty is fundamentally...
one of personal affection, has that political dimension...
which is completely absent from the fool.
Modern audiences may find it difficult to relate to the fool...
because he had a particular social function in Shakespeare's time...
that doesn't exist today. The fool was a professional entertainer...
kept in royal courts, there in order to entertain the King or the Queen...
but also, because the fool often became very intimate with his master...
he was able to say things which the more official counsellors of the King...
the statesmen around him, were not able to say.
He could speak home truths in a way that was very valuable for the ruler...
and that's what's happening in this play, I think...
the fool is able to say things to Lear that people like Kent, for example...
wouldn't be able to say, but he says it obliquely...
he says it not through direct statement often...
but through little stories, little parables...
'that sir that serves for gain', and so on.
He has these little snatches of song...
and if Lear can listen to them he'd able to learn about his own situation.
So I think the fool is an important character...
in helping Lear to understand himself.
What's was thou so full of music cilia.
I have used it nuckleever since thou made'st thy daughters, thy mothers.
For when thou gave'st them the rod...
and putt'est down thy own britshes...
"Then they for sudden joy did weep...
and I for sorrow sung...
that such a king should play bo-peep...
and go the fools among."
King Lear has a sub-plot, which virtually mirrors the main plot.
Gloucester, one of Lear's old, faithful servants...
has two grown-up sons, Edgar and Edmund.
Gloucester also fails to understand the true nature of his children.
The similarity in the mistakes they both make...
strengthens the main themes of the play.
They have both been blind to reality...
and pay a high price for their lifelong mistakes.
What paper were you reading?
Nothing, my lord.
No?
What needed then that terrible dispatch of it into your pocket? Let see!
Come; if it be nothing, I shall not need spectacles.
I beseech you, sir, pardon me.
It is a letter from my brother that I have not all o'er-read;
and for so much as I have perused, I find it not fit for your o'erlooking.
Give me the letter, sir.
I think Shakespeare has constructed the play...
on a sort of parallel fathers theme, King Lear and three daughters...
Gloucester and two sons, both of them expecting...
absolutely as of right unqualified duty from their children...
and both of them getting a very sharp surprise and rude awakening.
It's very typical of the self conscious design, of this play...
that one of them, Lear, suffers primarily in the mind...
partly of course he suffers in the body certainly...
but he goes mad putting it simply and the climax of Lear's suffering...
is mental suffering, the madness which overtakes him on the heath...
which results in that deeply moving scene between Lear and Gloucester.
Gloucester also goes through what we might call...
a purgatorial experience, but the climax of Gloucester's suffering is physical.
It is the blinding, that horrible scene of the blinding...
which many of us prefer not to watch...
but which is part of the fundamental unsentimentally of the play I think...
that Shakespeare forces us to experience...
the results of evil in the blinding of Gloucester.
He that will think to live till he be old. Give me some help!
I think both of them go through...
a kind of learning curve which is sort of paradoxical at it's essence.
Gloucester loses his sight and then...
and thejoke is the play'sjoke, it's not a very savoury joke...
having lost his sight he begins to see things clearly.
'Then Edgar was abused'. And Lear, equally paradoxically...
Ioses his reason, goes mad...
and then begins to understand.
They are both following those parallel courses I think in that sense.
Gloucester might be regarded as being morally responsible...
for his suffering in the sense that...
as is clearly brought out in the opening passage of the play...
his illegitimate son, the bastard Edmund...
and a lot is made of bastardy in the play...
was begotten after the legitimate son Edgar.
In other words he was begotten after Gloucester was already married...
and this point is rammed home at the later point in the play...
when it's said, 'the dark and vicious place where...
thee he got cost him his eyes'.
That's the actual drawing of a moral point in the play.
Now the play is not simplistically moralistic...
but nevertheless it does have a very firm moral basis...
and that is part of it, I think.
Edmund is illegitimate, leaving Edgar as Gloucester's sole, legal heir.
Edmund isjealous and resentful.
He hatches an evil plot to lead Gloucester to believe that...
Edgar means to murder him in order to gain his inheritance more quickly.
The brothers' characters are very different.
Thou, Nature, art my goddess;
to thy law my services are bound.
Edmund is the character in the play who gets to talk to the audience...
and we always enjoy characters who talk to us.
Hamlet and Macbeth are built on that very principal, as plays...
and when he does talk to the audience in those earlier soliloquies...
'Thou nature art my goddess, I should have been what I am...
had the maidenly star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardising'...
he really is making us laugh, making us understand...
the kind of determination that this outsider, this outcast...
of society, has to make a space for himself.
Wherefore should I stand in the plague of custom...
and permit the curiosity of nations to deprive me...
for that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines lag of a brother?
Why bastard?
Wherefore base?
When my dimensions are as well compact, My mind as generous...
and my shape as true, as honest madam's issue?
Why brand they us with base...
with base, bastardly base.
As the play progresses though...
the emptiness of that...
purely selfish mode of living, grows more and more clear.
There is nothing at all...
beyond the self for the Edmunds, Gonerils and Regans of this play.
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...
that father should be as ward to the son, and the son manage his revenue.
Shakespeare rarely is completely black and white in his portrayal of people...
and Edmund has his moment at the end of the play...
when he repents in time to send a messenger...
to try to save Cordelia.
It fails, but Edmund does have his moment of penitence.
Edgar of course is in obvious contrast to Edmund.
Edgar is the good son whereas Edmund is the bad one.
Edmund tricks his father, Gloucester, into believing that Edgar is...
disloyal to him, that thrusts Edgar into disguise.
He disguises himself as a beggar, a bedlam beggar as they were known.
He takes on the persona, he takes on the identity of Tom o'Bedlam...
the sort of man who would go around...
begging, hoping to receive alms.
There is a tendency to some extent to over simplify.
There is something, this is perhaps unfair...
but there is something almost culpably naive...
about Edgar not seeing what's going on at the beginning of the play.
He almost deserves what's happened to him for being so stupid.
Perhaps that's to put myself slightly in the Goneril/Edmund/Regan camp...
to say that stupidity...
deserves what it gets, but there's a touch of that, I think.
In cunning I must draw my sword upon you.
Draw! Seem to defend yourself!
Now quit you well!
Yield! Come before my father! Light, ho, here!
Fly, brother!
Finally, there is an element of reconciliation.
There is goodness as well as evil in the play...
and the central good figure in the play is Lear's youngest daughter, Cordelia.
And the most moving scene in the play to my mind...
is the scene of reunion, of reconciliation...
between Lear and his daughter when Lear, who has been mad...
attains a tenuous sanity, he comes back to sanity...
though his grip on reality seems rather slight at this point in the play...
but there he is, reunited with Cordelia...
there is Cordelia forgiving him, there is him forgiving her.
It's a scene of incredible emotional power.
Do not laugh at me; For, as I am a man...
I think this lady is my child...
Cordelia.
And so I am, I am.
Be your tears wet?
Yes!
It's a frequently harrowing play and it remains so till the end...
After the blinding of Gloucester there is...
the terrible news of the death of Cordelia...
which is another shocking blow for the audience...
and of course Lear himself dies.
Nevertheless I think there is something of a counterpart...
there is some consolation in the play.
There is the consolation in the reunion of Lear with Cordelia...
but also it depends a lot I think what you make of the very end of the play...
of Lear's end as he looks at Cordelia...
and Cordelia is dead. It's horrible that she's dead...
it's very sad that's she's dead. On the other hand she is there...
Cordelia has existed, and it seems to me that at the end of the play...
we may be conscious of the good that Cordelia could embody...
as something of a consolation...
and also of the out pouring of love that Lear gives to Cordelia...
which he hadn't been able to give in the earlier part of the play.
At the beginning of the play he is not capable himself of expressing love...
he banishes Cordelia. At the end of the play he looks into that face...
which earlier he had banished from his sight...
and he looks on it, it seems to me, with an outgoing of pure love.
'Look there, look there', he says, 'look her lips'...
- and he dies. - It looks at one point...
as though things are going to resolve themselves...
we are going to sort out an ending...
which is in some sense reassuring...
and then this terrible direction of Lear with Cordelia in his arms...
the old man with the corpse of his daughter...
and any hope of arriving at some sort of resolution...
is destroyed, I think, completely.
'Why should a horse, a dog, a rat have life and thou no breath at all'...
a question that I was thinking about earlier...
is unanswerable actually, it is unanswerable.
Why should a dog...
a horse, a rat...
have life, and thou no breath at all?
Thou'lt come no more;
Never, never, never, never.
Never.
Pray you undo this button.
Thank you, sir.
Do you see this?
Look on her!
Look, her lips!
Look...
there!
Look...
there!