King Lear in rehearsal

Squiggle Foundation, London, 11 March 1989⁸⁰

I find it quite hard to talk about a play which is actually in rehearsal, although that is the subject of this talk. When you are in the middle of it, it is very hard to see the wood for the trees. I will try and describe both the wood and the trees, but I will describe the wood first of all.

I think the great problem with King Lear is that it is a play which in production in the recent past – for I suppose the best part of a hundred years – has been bedevilled by certain ideas of the cosmic. It has been inclined traditionally toward a Druidical representation partly because of that damned storm that takes place in it. Because of the iconography of that storm, in which you see a figure with a long white beard ranting at the clouds and the thunder, there is a feeling that the play is about large cosmic archetypal issues. But it has always been my sense while doing the play, and this is the fourth time I’ve done it, that the cosmic is really the least important aspect of it.⁸¹ That doesn’t mean that its themes are not large and eternal, that they are not themes which repeat themselves constantly, or that they aren’t in fact deeply preoccupying themes, but I don’t think that the play has anything to do with storms at all. The storm is rather as it were a ground bass against which entirely human actions occur.

It’s also a play which people have been misled into thinking takes place in a sort of timeless antiquity, particularly a pre-Christian antiquity. People have been misled by its references to the gods, as opposed to God, and by what seems to be its conspicuous abstention from references to Christianity. But I believe at least one of the themes that has got to be brought out and developed in production cannot be understood unless you set the play in a period which is recognizably Christian.

In fact, although it makes no explicit references to the Christian religion or to God, and indeed it expresses a sort of quasi-atheistic nihilism by the time that it reaches its conclusion, King Lear is a play which I think is largely unintelligible unless you take into account certain Christian themes that would have been current and salient at the time when Shakespeare was growing up. We must remember that Shakespeare as a child, like anyone else in Elizabethan England, was a compulsory churchgoer – not a compulsive one, but a compulsory churchgoer. He was compelled to go to church as everyone was on Sundays. The reading of texts – of the Gospels and other passages from the Bible – was so repetitive, so unremitting, that their images and tenets recur as a central motif in almost all of Shakespeare’s plays. They come to the surface perhaps more conspicuously in King Lear than in any other play.

One central notion of King Lear which cannot be understood beyond the context of Christianity, and beyond the context of sixteenth-century Christianity, is the notion that it is impossible to enter the Kingdom of Heaven unless you have actually gone through the experience of poverty. I think that a central metaphor of the play is the metaphor of trying to get a camel through the eye of a needle, representing the idea that until you have lost everything there is complete impossibility of gain. One of the words central in the play, as William Empson emphasizes, is the word ‘fool,’ to which I will return presently.82 But I think that the word ‘nothing’ is the most central word, from which everything in the play develops. Lear has to learn in the course of the play the falsity of ‘nothing will come of nothing’ (I.i.90), as he says when Cordelia refuses to give him a protestation of her love. He has to undergo a rough tuition to learn, as so many of the other characters do, that it is only in the process of losing everything and gaining nothing that you actually are in a state to achieve everything. Nothingness and nullity are the centre of the play.

All sorts of losses are presented in the play: a loss of kingdom; a voluntary divesting of authority, power and privilege; an involuntary divesting of subjects’ love and the love of children; ultimately an involuntary divesting of sense, sensibility and sanity. The play shows that it is only in the process of divesting yourself of all these things – of shelter, of clothing, of warmth, of love, even of sense and intelligence – that you can actually build yourself anew. This process of complete reduction calls to mind the notion of liminality that Victor Turner develops at length in his various books.83 It is only by the process of undertaking the role of the ‘liminal’ – the person who falls between the cracks by divesting himself of all category and of authority – that you actually can restore your humanity and can develop a genuine sense of Gemeinschaft, as opposed to the formal structures of Gesellschaft.

Lear undergoes his losses without knowing that this is going to happen. He attempts to divest himself of authority and power while wickedly retaining all the privileges that go with kingship. He then enters a curious path which starts from a voluntary act of abnegation but leads on to a slippery slope where he has no control over the further things that are stripped from him, by virtue of the fact that he abdicates.

The issue of Lear’s abdication brings me to another reason why it is impossible to set the play outside the period in which it was written. King Lear is a play which resists transposition either backwards into the notional antiquity where it is so often set, or forwards into a more modern period because you have to take note in it of a constitutional and political theme which is central to the seventeenth century. That theme involves notions of kingship and sovereignty which give blasphemous connotations to abdication. In 1605 Europe was still shaking from the experience of the abdication of Emperor Charles V, 50 years earlier. This abdication was regarded by the literate population as something blasphemous as a usurpation: not only was it seen as blasphemous to usurp a crowned and anointed King, it was seen as blasphemous for a crowned and anointed King to pre-empt the decisions of God and voluntarily to give up the office which was assigned to him by virtue of being crowned and anointed. One still sees traces of this in the reluctance of the present Queen to give up the throne in favour of her ageing son. The reason for this is not that she is obstinately enjoying the privileges of power, which are extremely dubious, I would have thought, at this particular moment in history. I think she still retains some sort of belief that it is not within the gift of the officer to resign what in fact is given to the officer by virtue of the fact that she or he has been incorporated into the immortal corporation of monarchy by the act of being crowned and anointed.

I would like to remind you of a medieval theory of kingship which was still current in the seventeenth century, of an idea dealt with by Ernst Kantorowicz in The King’s Two Bodies (1957). That great work on medieval constitutional theory suggests that the King hath in him two bodies: a body politic and a body mortal. The body mortal was that part which died with the death of the officer, but the body politic was the immortal corporation of sovereignty into which he was incorporated by virtue of being anointed. By being anointed he was incorporated into an immortal pedigree of monarchs which had descended from the first act of anointing, which was of course the anointing of David by the priest Samuel. For the Middle Ages and for the Renaissance there was a fundamental theory that once the officer was incorporated into this immortal office of sovereign, it lay with him or with her until in fact his or her mortal life had been brought to an end by a decision other than his or hers. It was not within the sovereign’s gift to resign, it was not within his gift to abdicate, just as it was not within the gift of perhaps a morally better-qualified monarch – such as, for example, Bolingbroke in Richard II – to usurp a frivolous Richard. In other words there was some notion of the office being more important than the officer. Even though the officer could be either a villain or a ninny, as soon as he was incorporated into that immortal corporation of sovereignty he was there for life.

This thought is expressed clearly in two images. One is found in the royal tombs at St Denis outside Paris, where you see the double effigies of the King. You see the King in his regalia, kneeling with his eyes wide open, wearing his crown, carrying the sceptre: the figure which represents the immortal corporation of sovereignty, while in a balustraded canopy underneath lies the naked body of the mortal officer. This is often taken to be a memento mori to remind the proud and the mighty that they must return to the state of the worm-eaten and the mortal. But it is not really a memento mori; it is much more an emblematic representation of the constitutional theory that once an officer had been incorporated into this corporation of sovereignty he had a divine power and a divine sanction. A similar image is to be found also in the famous practice of the royal touch. The royal touch was thought to be a sacred power which was invested not in the person of the sovereign, but in his person as crowned monarch. He could exercise that power and touch for the ‘King’s evil’ (a tuberculous gland in the neck), could touch and heal this illness not by virtue of any particular shining characteristic that he had as an individual but by virtue of the power that was invested in the office that he was now a representation of after the act of anointing and crowning. It is almost as if the regalia were endowed with the power to heal, rather than the officer himself. You could see this ritual of the royal touch enacted year after year in the long line of French kings from the Capetian monarchs right the way through the Valois monarchs and the Bourbon monarchs. It was connected with the office of the King and, whether the officer was a villain or a ninny, his touch healed. He did not heal by virtue of his personal charisma, because he might have none at all; he healed by virtue of the charisma which was attached to the office.84 It was not within his gift to withdraw himself from that office until he had died. At that moment, then, when ‘the King is dead, long live the King,’ instantly the role was assigned to the successor who continued the unbroken line of this immortal corporation.

So that when Lear undertakes almost frivolously to lay down the burden and ‘crawl toward death,’ as he says in the first act (I.i.40), there should be in his court a sense that something exceptional has happened. This is not simply a casual incident in which a monarch has said, ‘Right, I feel my time has come to hand it on’; it’s not a resignation of a secular office as it would be if the president of a business said, ‘I am getting too old to do this properly.’ There is no way you can get too old to do it properly as a King. You only get too old to do it properly when you are dead. So, at the moment when Lear actually tells the Court his intention to ‘Unburdened crawl toward death,’ it should produce a frisson because all the Court know that in fact he should be, when crawling toward death, still with the regalia on his head at that moment. The power would still be invested in him, even though crawling toward death, because the power of majesty and the power of monarchy are undiminished and uninfluenced by the diminishing power of the officer.

Lear then compounds that particular sin or blasphemy by doing something amiss which has no place in constitutional theory, but has a place in psychological theory. That is that he offers to divide his kingdom in terms of the avowals of love which will be given to him by each of his three daughters in turn. It is this act that in rehearsal makes you realize that you have to present King Lear at the outset of the play as partly mad already, not as someone who goes mad. He must be presented as someone who is already on the edge of some sort of mental disorder, in a state of depression, or some condition which makes him do something which, once again, is not within the gift of human beings. Just as it is not within the gift of a monarch to renounce his office, so it is not within the gift of any mortal to ask other mortals how much they love him or her. Still less can avowals of love be purchased, and still less can they be obtained by offering gifts in return for which you will get a certificate from your own children of how much they love you. One becomes aware at a very early stage in the play that something very eccentric and anomalous is going on with the King. His decision at the outset can scarcely look like a decision, but must look like a sudden capricious outburst which should startle the court and indeed even startle the two elder daughters.

Too often, I think, in rehearsal and in production, the elder daughters give their ‘glib and oily’ speeches automatically (I.i.226), implying that they immediately have at their disposal the eloquence which will satisfy Lear. But his demand has to come as a surprise to them as much as it outrages and comes as a surprise to the younger daughter who fails to give the avowal which Lear demands. Too often Goneril and Regan leap into their speeches as if in fact they had already-prepared manifestos, which means that they have anticipated what he is going to ask of them. But the demand on them should come as a total surprise, so that when the daughters actually start their flattery they must be seen as beginning to formulate it, asking themselves, ‘How can I express this in a way which will convince this mad, eccentric father of mine that I do indeed love him?’ So I believe in rehearsal it is necessary to work towards some pregnant pause as the elder daughters seem to formulate their speeches. It is very interesting that in the first line of Goneril’s speech, when ‘our eldest-born’ speaks first (I.i.54), she actually anticipates in some way the thought Cordelia later expresses in saying, ‘I cannot heave/My heart into my mouth’ (I.i.91–92). Goneril is often condemned for being a glib daughter, but this is contradicted by her first line: ‘Sir, I love you more than word can wield the matter’ (I.i.55). In other words, she starts by saying that it is in fact difficult to utter such an avowal, that the demand is in fact as awkward for her as it later turns out for Cordelia. Cordelia actually follows through by refusing to meet the demand, but nevertheless Goneril announces that such an avowal is difficult for her and is not actually readily formulable. So she should pause in saying ‘I love you…more than…word can wield the matter.’ There must be pauses within the speech so that we see she finds flattery hard, although not as hard as does Cordelia, who actually withholds it. It must seem difficult for Regan too, for otherwise, as I say, you will presuppose that they both anticipate exactly what is going to happen, which makes the outcome of the play decided before the start.

This brings me to another issue which I think again often bedevils the play in production. That is, because we are so familiar with the play, and actors and actresses are so familiar with it, and because the outcome is ultimately so atrocious, there is a temptation to make these two wicked daughters who do such ultimately wicked things start out as wicked. If they start out as monsters, as they are perhaps most spectacularly in the Riemann opera version, as satanic punk monsters who cannot wait to humiliate and destroy their father, you might as well merely summarize the rest of the play and then say, ‘it turned out pretty badly as well.’85

The reason why evil in the play takes time to develop is that we must be able to witness something which in fact is more than ever apparent to us now in this part of the twentieth century, and that is the strange imperceptibility of the individual steps towards an atrocious outcome. Actually, for each of those daughters, and for each of those sons-in-law, it should become hard for them to say, looking backwards over the course of the action, at what point they started to do something which was so unacceptable and so outrageous that it actually culminates in the gouging of an old man’s eyes and the locking of doors to a demented father. It shouldn’t be apparent at the outset that this is what is going to happen merely because we, who have read the play, know that’s how it turns out. Too often when the theatre takes up this play it actually writes the end into the beginning, so that it seems to be already wound up like a piece of clockwork with an absolutely inevitable conclusion built into the first scene. So it becomes interesting in rehearsal to minimize as far as you possibly can the atrociousness, the wickedness, the expedience of these daughters, and to make them reasonable. We have to make them seem so reasonable that when we come to that wonderful scene before Gloucester’s castle (II.iv) – after the stocking of Kent, when Regan and Goneril arrive and both try to persuade Lear that he does not in fact need a retinue of the size that he has – their position should be so ordinary that much of the audience should feel: ‘My God, I’ve done exactly that to my parents in the recent past; I hope that this half is not going to be too long, I must get on the phone and see if Dad and Mum are all right.’

In other words, I believe it is the responsibility of producer and actors alike in doing King Lear to actually induce deep senses of uneasiness and misgiving in the audience vis-à-vis their own parents. They should not be able to distance themselves and say, ‘well, that’s what monsters do. We are unlike that.’ There should be a banality of evil in this particular case just as there was in the case of the Nazis. It should be very hard for us to identify any particular point during the plot when we could say, ‘that is when it happened, that’s when the thing became irreversibly atrocious.’ These steps should be minuscule and imperceptible, both for the protagonists and I think for the audience, so that they begin to feel merely a cumulative sense of a tragic outcome, rather than knowing at any particular moment that the predetermined outcome is now on its way.

In this particular production that I am working on I have tried to stress this by casting the children, for the first time, as grown-ups. Perhaps this is due to the fact I’ve been rehearsing the play on and off over the last 25 years, and have grown that much older in the time myself. When I first directed the play at Nottingham many years ago, I cast young daughters and young sons, a young Edmund and a young Edgar. Now I find myself quite inevitably, without actually consciously thinking of it, casting daughters in their fifties and sons in their fifties as well. This is partly because I have been struck by the curious discrepancy in the age of both parents and their children, which didn’t strike me earlier. Why is it that this man who is meant to be more than 80 so often has children of no more than 20? Why is there this 60-year difference between father and children? Might it not be more reasonable to assume that both sets of children, sons on the part of Gloucester and daughters on the part of Lear, are in fact the same age as I the producer, and have actually gone through experiences comparable to the ones that I have had with my parents and that people of my age have had with their parents, and perhaps also have had with children of their own?

As soon as you start to play the children at that age, suddenly the production starts to take on a different shape. I found certain lines which previously remained almost inaudible suddenly start to shine with a strange salience which had remained unnoticeable to me before. For instance, in the little letter that Edmund forges to persuade his father Gloucester that his brother is in fact a villain, there are things which until now simply remained inaudible to me. Edmund says in the letter:

This policy, and reverence of age, makes the world bitter to the best of our times, keeps our fortunes from us till our oldness cannot relish them. I begin to find an idle and fond bondage in the oppression of aged tyranny

(I.ii.46–50)

Now the fact is that this is a villain trying to present a letter which will convince his father that villainy is afoot. It’s a very peculiar choice of motive that he actually writes into that letter; he writes of the sense of dissatisfaction which is felt by children who in fact are growing old themselves, old enough to feel that even if they come by their patrimony they are on the edge of being too old to enjoy it, so that they are experiencing a ‘fond bondage in the oppression of aged tyranny.’ If you start to develop groups of children who in fact are old enough to feel that they cannot enjoy their full independence, cannot enjoy full self-determination until these ageing parents are out of the way, the play suddenly becomes much more interesting than it would be if these are merely Satanic youngsters who are destroying venerable old creatures.

So the casting of older children in this production has made a difference not simply by virtue of the fact that people in the audience of a particular age will recognize something common to us all at that age, but also because it makes it possible to avoid what I think is an impossible obligation to represent metaphysical wickedness, wickedness which is transcendental. You remember when Hannah Arendt wrote about Eichmann, she was puzzled by the fact that in witnessing him it was very hard to understand how someone who looked as ordinary, as commonplace as that, could have done something as monstrous as he did.86 The thing is that we want the monstrous to be visibly monstrous. We want those who perpetrate the outrages to look Satanic in some way so that we can, as it were, confidently identify them before they do it. But it is in the nature of human life that the atrocious creeps upon us imperceptibly, so that we cannot identify the moment when the process becomes irreversibly atrocious. Once you play these children as older – merely impatient, merely looking for what they believe is their due – you actually start to relieve yourself of the false necessity of presenting them as outrageously sadistic creatures.

This consideration of the children brings me to another issue which is related to the Christian theme. One recognizes around these grown children a range of relationships, motives and ideas which are very similar to the ones which ordinary people here and now still experience, and indeed hate themselves for, and would like to conceal and not to acknowledge. But there are also other aspects of the children which are I think emblematic of certain great Christian issues which I mentioned at the beginning. Without wishing to say explicitly that Edgar is Christ and Edmund is Lucifer, I think there are undoubtedly resonances to that effect. For instance, when Edgar gives an account of the whole course of his action to his brother at the end – when Edmund lies dying, and Edgar is describing the death of their father Gloucester – he says, ‘I asked his blessing and from first to last/Told him our pilgrimage’ (V.iii.194 –195). I think that the choice of the word ‘pilgrimage’ is very significant. The view that Edgar presents of himself, and that we have of Edgar, is only intelligible if you see it contrasted with a certain view of Edmund. This contrast lives in the light of the relationship, I think, between Christ and Lucifer. Again, I am not saying that Edgar is to be seen as Christ or that Edmund is to be seen as Lucifer, but nevertheless there are metaphorical affinities between these two pairs. The course of action that Edgar undergoes in the play – his pilgrimage, or ministry – culminates in an emblematic fight at the last day with Edmund. A challenger must come forth, if you remember, ‘by the third sound of the trumpet,’ and indeed Edgar appears ‘Upon this call o’ the trumpet’ (V.iii.112–113, 117). When Edgar answers the third trumpet, and throws down his brother Edmund, Shakespeare requires us to see some sort of metaphorical representation of the final struggle between Christ and Lucifer.

The way in which Edgar humiliates himself – becoming a Bedlam beggar, a wanderer in anonymity on the heath – and undergoes mockery, disdain and humiliation, only to return as this great soldier of Christ at the end, is I think unintelligible outside the mesh of Christian iconography. In contrast, Edmund is to be seen in some respects as a representation of a Miltonic Lucifer. Shakespeare represents in Edmund the pride of a rootless intelligence, an intelligence that is unrelated to life and to family affinity. Edmund is prompted entirely by expediency and commodity, like the bastard in Shakespeare’s King John. He is prompted by nothing other than pure ratiocinative self-interest, whereas Edgar is prompted throughout his ministry by the process of love, by the urge to reconciliation with his father, and above all by forgiveness. When you think for example how easy it could be for him to exult in his father’s misfortune, having gone through his terrible experience as a result of his father’s failure to recognize that he is in fact the loving son, you begin to see the extraordinary act of generosity on the part of Edgar.

This act I think is a transcendental one, and a prescription for a Christian type of love and forgiveness. Also I think it has relationships to the healing of the blind man in the Gospels. Edgar heals Gloucester of his blindness by actually making him go through that absurd self-mocking ordeal of the fall over the imaginary cliff. It is only when Gloucester ‘falls’ over the cliff and goes through the experience of total despair that he actually recovers the sight of which he has been deprived at the hands of Cornwall. Now if he does indeed heal a blind man, but restores to him not physical sight but moral sight, we see in the action of Edgar once again the exercise of a Christian ministry which is concluded and brought dramatically to its end when Edgar and Edmund encounter one another in a great emblematic battle.

This is rather like the great apocalyptic battles which are mentioned again and again in Norman Cohn’s book The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957). In these there will be a final struggle in the East when Lucifer and Christ will meet one another, and justice and the Last Judgement will in fact prevail. I think this is what we are being invited to consider in King Lear. Of course, in the context of a pre-Christian, Neolithic antiquity this falls apart; it simply has no meaning at all. It has to be rooted in something which inspires a Christian recognition on the part of the audience.

We also see in Gloucester and again in Lear the process of Christian renunciation. Lear starts by a spurious act of renunciation. He renounces nothing because he will keep everything: he will keep his hundred knights; he will keep all the respect due to a king; he is divesting himself only of the burdens of kingship, only of the duties. What he has to go through is the experience of being divested – as opposed to divesting himself actively – of being divested of everything. And so also does Gloucester, who, by his gullibility and by his failure to recognize the virtue in his son Edgar, must himself be robbed of everything before he gains anything at all.

In fact all in King Lear have to go through the experience of being reduced to nothing before there can be any gain. I believe the central metaphor of that diminution and reduction to nothing is contained in that wonderful moment on the cliff when Edgar describes the appearance of things from the top. This is often merely regarded as a prelude to a farcical piece of drama in which someone simply falls over a non-existent cliff, or as an opportunity for Shakespeare to word-paint a wonderful picture of what it looks like from the top of a Dover cliff. But something much deeper is going on in that Shakespeare is giving us in one image two versions of nullity and diminution, while at the same time he is giving us perhaps the finest representation in literature of Renaissance perspective. We see the gradual reduction of the appearance of things as they recede from the gaze down to the tiny fishermen that walk like mice upon the beach: ‘Half-way down/Hangs one that gathers samphire, dreadful trade’ (IV.vi.l4 –15). As we see these objects diminishing in size we actually are beginning to see in that a representation of shrinkage, of annihilation, and of progress towards nothingness. But at the same time, by choosing a vantage point at the top of a cliff in order to achieve that, Shakespeare provides another metaphorical resonance. That is the idea that from various kinds of great height all things look small, and never more than from the great height of social authority, of majesty, from the height which you enjoy by virtue of occupying office. We and Gloucester are being encouraged to consider what it is like to look down not merely from a cliff, but also what it is like to look down from a social cliff, at the people below who in fact look like nothing more than mice from that height, and with whom it is therefore impossible to sympathize. You feel how difficult it is to sympathize with things that look like mice when in fact you feel the size that you are and they look the size that they appear. Therefore Gloucester, even if only imaginatively and notionally, has to tumble amongst them in order to identify with their genuine humanity. Edgar correspondingly has to play two roles. First he has to play the role of a commentator on the top of the cliff. Then, when Gloucester falls down over the notional cliff, he has to play the role of one of the imaginary fishermen who previously were mice-like. He has to comfort the fallen victim and present him with the sympathy which Gloucester was unable to extend to the fishermen when viewing them from the great height of social authority.

I think I may have said this in public once before, and if any of you have heard it forgive me for repeating myself, but I believe that is very like what happens in The Third Man (1949) when Harry Lime takes Holly Martins to the top of the enormous Ferris wheel in the Viennese Prater Park. You remember that in order to justify his actions in dealing in diluted penicillin, Harry Lime pulls open the sliding door of the carriage and says, ‘Would it really matter to you, old man, if one of the dots down there stopped moving? A thousand dollars each one, tax free, old man – would it really matter?’ And indeed from that height, as those dots move stochastically below on the pavement, it’s quite hard even for you as a cinema spectator not to say, ‘well, perhaps it doesn’t really matter, if they are nothing more than dots after all.’ Holly Martins himself tumbles amongst them, or is made to tumble amongst them, when Calloway the Security Officer takes him into the hospital where he sees full-sized children dying of meningitis. It is at that moment, if you remember, that Martins decides to turn in his friend because he would be doing the greater evil by allowing him to continue his actions.

I believe that what we are seeing in that imaginary fall over the cliff in King Lear is something closely analogous to that. This brings up the way in which you actually stage it. I believe it is terribly important that when you stage that moment of the description, Edgar himself must be seen to close his eyes, in order to abstain from what is visible so that he can concentrate upon what is in front of his mind’s eye. So we should at that moment dramatically confront two blind people, one who is permanently blinded by Cornwall’s sadism, and the other someone who, as it were, is voluntarily abstaining from sight in order to be able to concentrate on something which he is imagining. There should be a paradox when Edgar says ‘how fearful/And dizzy ‘tis to cast one’s eyes so low’ (IV.vi.11–12), because he cannot, and does not, actually do this. He must stand there and give an imaginary account so that we see two differently blinded people standing side by side: one giving a commentary on something which is not in front of his physical eyes but which is in front of his mind’s eye, broadcasting it into the head of someone who will never have eyes at all, but nevertheless retains the capacity to conjure visions before his mind’s eye which is still intact. The moment then when Edgar says ‘I’ll look no more’ (IV.vi.22) actually, paradoxically, should be the moment when he opens his eyes.

‘I’ll look no more’ signals the moment when Edgar starts to look because he is actually saying, I will look no more at what I’m imagining. That moment seems to me to be the still centre of the play with respect to the trajectory of Edgar’s and of Gloucester’s pilgrimage. We are seeing two people who are going through the experience of loss and reduction, because not only is Edgar acting as a spiritual physician for his father, but also because he himself is undergoing a spiritual discovery.

I feel that in the representation of Edgar, not only should we have in mind a Christian image, but also some sort of vision of figures similar to the holy fools in Dostoyevsky. Edgar should present a Prince Myshkin-like figure who almost seeks the role which is forced upon him by misfortune. Indeed he shows a curiously rhapsodic eagerness when he anticipates how he is going to play poor Tom. Immediately after Kent falls asleep in the stocks, suddenly Edgar appears and simply announces that he is in flight. It might seem he is merely putting on a ‘base’ disguise for protection. But the way in which he chooses the disguise that he will assume makes it look as if he has sought all his life this particular form of self-humiliation, for he shows a rhapsodic, ecstatic excitement when he anticipates the role that he is about to undertake. He says:

No port is free, no place

That guard and most unusual vigilance

Does not attend my taking, Whiles I may scape

I will preserve myself,

(II.ii.174–177)

Up to that point it seems that this is merely expedient. But he goes on:

and am bethought

To take the basest and most poorest shape

That ever penury in contempt of man

Brought near to beast.

(177–180)

And it then becomes a scherzo of excitement:

My face I’ll grime with filth,

Blanket my loins, elf all my hairs in knots

And with presented nakedness outface

The winds and persecutions of the sky.

The country gives me proof and precedent

Of Bedlam beggars, who, with roaring voices,

Strike in their numbed and mortified bare arms

Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary;

And with this horrible object, from low farms,

Poor pelting villages, sheepcotes, and mills,

Sometime with lunatic bans, sometime with prayers,

Enforce their charity.

(180–191)

The excitement now culminates:

Poor Turlygod, poor Tom,

That’s something yet: Edgar I nothing am.

(191–192)

In the process of discovering what it will be like to be the most humiliated and basest thing in nature, he discovers the intense and euphoric excitement of suddenly annihilating his previous identity as Edgar. He as it were launches himself out into this act of self-discovery which he then reiterates, if you remember, in the scene on the heath immediately after the storm, after the blinding of Gloucester, when we actually hear him exulting in his nothingness. He says here, immediately after the blinding:

Yet better thus, and known to be contemned

Than still contemned and flattered. To be worst,

The lowest and most dejected thing of fortune,

Stands still in esperance, lives not in fear.

The lamentable change is from the best,

The worst returns to laughter.

(IV.i.1–6)

This is as if to say that only in the state of liminality, only in the state of nothingness where your own identity is completely obliterated, is there the chance of joy. Bertrand Russell once said in one of his essays, ‘only if you recognize that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible, can you begin to enjoy yourself.’87 I believe that in fact Edgar makes this wonderful act of self-discovery that in the process of paring yourself down to the minimum where you have nothing, not even what our basest beggars have, where you actually have reduced yourself below the level where you need anything, can you actually be safe from the ordeals of existence. But then of course he discovers that, when you think you are at the worst, you are likely to be surprised. In saying, ‘The wretch that thou hast blown unto the worst/Owes nothing to thy blasts’ (IV.i.8–9), Edgar says in effect, ‘here I am at the lowest level, and I can actually have euphoric enjoyment of being nothing.’ Then suddenly his new-blinded father appears on the horizon and he says:

But that thy strange mutations make us hate thee,

Lie would not yield to age.

O gods! Who is’t can say ‘I am at the worst’?

I am worse than e’er I was.

And worse I may be yet; the worst is not

So long as we can say ‘This is the worst.’

(IV.i.12–13, 27–28, 29–30)

In other words he says that there is no possibility of escaping from the worst while you are still able to formulate that you are at the worst.

Nevertheless there is this movement towards some moral asymptote at which you gradually approximate to zero but never actually reach it. Always you can be defeated by the practical jokes the world can inflict upon you which can make it worse than your worst anticipation. Even so, Edgar undergoes a strange euphoric self-discovery in finding that, in the process of ridding yourself of everything, you actually have the possibility of being in some respects invulnerable. This ridding is of course what all the characters in the play, certainly Gloucester and Lear, actually undergo. Although they don’t see it that way and are not regenerated by it, the daughters also discover that they are stripped of everything. All that Goneril can find in this is the fact that she has a ‘hateful life’; she actually uses that phrase (IV.ii.87). What we see in the play, and it is almost too self-evident to insist upon, is an elaborate symphonic development upon the notion of nothingness and stripping, of reduction to some sort of hypothetical zero which in fact is never reachable because there is always the possibility that the world will do something worse to you than what you have actually anticipated.

This happens to poor Lear himself at the moment when he has been reduced to nothing and is just about to be restored to his daughter. Then he loses his daughter and ultimately he must die, and one feels that Shakespeare actually punishes him for what he does at the beginning of the play. It is in fact a pessimistic ending because you do not get in Lear a recovery, a reconciliation, or a discovery. Or if there is one, it is never a discovery which enables him to say ‘I did wrong.’ He believes that he behaved wrongly to Cordelia but at no point does he ever seem to acknowledge how wrongly he behaved to all his daughters, and how wrongly he behaved to his society. He has glimpses of this and he occasionally glances at the fact that he has taken too little note of it, that pomp should ‘take physic’ and that he should encourage himself to feel ‘what wretches feel’ (III.iv.33, 34). But all his advances in this direction are tentative, and never complete themselves in the way they do with Gloucester, and with Edgar. So there is this marvellous death of Gloucester which is so unlike the death of Lear; we are told Gloucester’s heart ‘burst smilingly’ (V.iii.198). There is no sense in which Lear’s heart bursts smilingly. It bursts tragically and to no good purpose. He has learned nothing; he has picked up fragments of wisdom but has not achieved a comprehensive moral vision in the way that Gloucester has, or certainly in the way that Edgar has.

Let me say something briefly about interpreting the Fool because that is something that I have always remained fairly constant about in rehearsal. Once again there is an aberration which traditionally bedevils the play, and that is the capricious capering youngster who is so often cast as the Fool. People have been misled I believe by the word ‘boy.’ Because Shakespeare makes Lear refer to him as ‘boy’ (I.iv.105) he is often played as a young falsetto creature who crouches and clutches the calves of Lear and, rather nervously gnome-like, presents strange/wise formulae. But I believe that the things which the Fool says are so wry, so ripe in the sense of ‘Ripeness is all’ (V.ii.11), that they are inconceivable in the mouth of such a creature. I believe that we have been misled for years by the wrong connotation of ‘boy,’ and that in Lear it means no more than ‘garçon’ does to a waiter, or no more than ‘boy’ does when a Southern Colonel addresses his black body-servant. The ‘boy’ Fool is simply someone who is politically junior to Lear, or socially junior, and nothing more than that.

Indeed, I believe that the moral of the play becomes much more clearly recognizable if in fact you make Lear and his Fool two creatures who are nearly indistinguishable; two old boys. One of them has grown fond and foolish in his old age, and one has grown wiser and more mature with age, but they both must otherwise be absolutely on a par with one another. I was prompted to do this in the first production I did of Lear by reference to King Louis XIV’s body servant Bontemps, who was the only man in the court who was allowed to call Louis, ‘Louis.’ He had grown up with the monarch from the age of 12, had always stayed with him, had grown old with him, and knew him inside out. I believe that if the Fool is presented as an old man who is exactly the same age as Lear, who has grown up with him, every single one of his otherwise gnomic, runic formulae becomes understandable. He is like an ageing coachman who utters wisdom which would be incomprehensible in the mouth of an adolescent. If we put the Fool’s country wisdom in the mouth of an old man who has known Lear as long as he has been monarch and probably longer, suddenly we find an intelligible relationship. What you see is simply two people who differ from one another merely by virtue of the office that they have been assigned; one has been assigned the role of monarch, one has been assigned the role of numbskull, of nothingness, of someone who in fact means nothing. But by meaning nothing the Fool can say everything. Therefore he is in a position to have a reciprocal relationship with his master which actually allows him to be his conscience, and so allows him to say the things which go some way toward restoring Lear’s sanity.

It isn’t until Lear undergoes the restorative process of becoming completely insane that the Fool can disappear. People often ask, ‘why does the Fool vanish at the close as he does?’ and the traditional tedious answer, which is a purely scholastic one, says that ‘the Fool vanishes because he is actually played by the same person as Cordelia, and so when Cordelia comes back…’ and so forth. That is a boring piece of Mermaid Theatre mythology which simply doesn’t help one to rehearse the play at all. Merely knowing that the two roles might have once been played by the same person could lead you into the disastrous choice of following suit, which I think leads to nonsensical outcomes. It is much more interesting to ask psychologically, rather than as it were historically, ‘why does that fool disappear at the point that he does?’ He disappears at the point when Lear takes full leave of his senses, after the joint-stool scene in the farmhouse (III.vi). At the end of that scene Kent says to the Fool, ‘Thou must not stay behind’ (III. vi.98), and the next time we see Lear he has incorporated into himself all the wisdom that the Fool has had. Apart from those wonderful passages of completely demented discourse where he hallucinates brown bills and a mouse which he pursues with a piece of toasted cheese, everything Lear says afterwards is sane, and wise, and almost indistinguishable from the sorts of thing which the Fool had been saying in the previous act. So the Fool no longer has to be a ventriloquial presence who stalks King Lear through the action; he is now incorporated into a Lear who, through the process of fully taking leave of his senses, is beginning to take possession of them again.

The Fool has become incorporated into Lear in that moment of divine insanity on the cliff when he comes up with the wisest political insights which are in the play. All the wonderful things which he says then are folly:

KING LEAR: What, art mad? A man may see how this world goes

with no eyes. Look with thine ears. See how yon

justice rails upon yon simple thief. Hark in

thine ear: change places and handy-dandy, which

is the justice, which is the thief? Thou hast seen

a farmer’s dog bark at a beggar?

GLOUCESTER: Ay, Sir.

KING LEAR: And the creature run from the cur – there thou

mightst behold the great image of authority: a

dog’s obeyed in office.

Thou, rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand;

Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thine own back,

Thou hotly lusts to use her in that kind

For which thou whipp’st her. The usurer hangs the cozener.

Through tattered clothes great vices do appear;

(IV.vi.146–160)

These remarks are level-headed and sane, but they only acquire that sanity by virtue of the fact that Lear has acquired the wise folly which Erasmus praised in his “Praise of Folly” (1511). So we see that the Fool has vanished because he is actually present now in Lear, and is present there as a sane person. And so we see the restoration of reason through the loss of sense.

This is a much more interesting reason for the Fool’s disappearance than expedience. It leads to the question of interpreting one of Lear’s final lines: ‘And my poor fool is hang’d!’ (V.iii.304). All this week I have had a long and interminable argument with Eric Porter about what that line means. I believe it refers to Cordelia, and that Lear says ‘And my poor fool is hang’d!’ not because she once was played by the actor who played the Fool but because his term ‘fool’ is an endearment. Eric Porter doesn’t think that. He actually wants Lear to say that line because he is tying up a loose end and letting the audience know that his Fool has been in fact hanged. I actually think that Lear’s ‘my poor fool’ is a reference simply to the dead body of Cordelia which is in front of him, not that he sees her metaphorically as his Fool but that it is simply a phrase of great pathos when he confronts the body of his young daughter.

Which brings me to one final point about Cordelia. I have mentioned all the other daughters and haven’t talked about Cordelia at all, about how we actually rehearse her and present her. I in fact have cast someone who is very young to play Cordelia, so in this production there is a wide separation between the two elder daughters and the younger one. It is as if she really is an afterthought, someone who was produced from even another wife, for whom Lear has a rather peculiar and distinct feeling, and who is virtually unknown to the other daughters. If you play the other daughters as 50, so they have gone away and lived elsewhere and hardly know this child, they will have a natural sense of resentment about the larger part of the kingdom being given to someone whom they don’t know at all, who is in fact a step-sister.

There isn’t much more I can simply say now because, as I say, it is extremely hard to describe rehearsal when you are actually in the middle of it. I can only do what I have tried to do, which is to sketch some of what I believe to be the salient themes of the play.