Sexing up Goneril: Feminism and Fetishization in Contemporary King Lear Performance
Oxford College of Emory University
In April 2007, just prior to its opening Press Night, Trevor Nunn’s RSC Stratford King Lear suffered an unexpected mishap. The production’s Goneril, Frances Barber, broke her leg while cycling. Her accident left the RSC in a quandary. Do they ‘open’ with the official understudy, Melanie Jessop, stepping into Goneril’s role, or do they delay Press Night and risk the raised eyebrows of suspicious theatre critics? As one commentator noted at the time, ‘it’s the understudy’s dream […] or nightmare’:
Twenty-four hours ago [Jessop] was Second Gloucester Servant, handing Edmund a glass of wine. Now she’s Goneril.
(Hopkins, ‘Anecdote’)1
The RSC’s response to this change in Gonerils was calculated if not predictable. The Press Night of Lear was delayed six weeks to allow Barber’s recovery. Jessop acted as stopgap daughter to Ian McKellen’s Lear before returning to her minor role in the play.2
When Barber did eventually resume playing, Lear received its ‘delayed critical plaudits’.3 Nevertheless, Barber’s return prompted a Leader comment in The Guardian that asked readers to ‘spare a thought’ for understudies like Jessop, who do ‘most of the shows but [receive] none of the critical accolades’ (Guardian). Similarly, Susannah Clapp of The Observer notes that, ‘though the public had been paying full price for tickets,’ they were unaware that the production was ‘deemed not to be ready for critics’ because Jessop had ‘apparently never rehearsed with McKellen (why not?).’4 Clapp’s parenthetical question is understandable in the context of one not directly associated with theatre practice. In reality, understudies seldom if ever benefit from rehearsal with the principal actors. Understudy rehearsals traditionally begin after Press Night, once rehearsal room experimentation has ended. By then, the director has ‘blocked’ the play (decided precise onstage positions for the cast and properties), such ‘blocking’ being recorded for nightly reproduction to guarantee actors (and understudies) ‘hit’ pre-set lighting states. The presence of McKellen, Barber, or any other principal actor at an understudy rehearsal is unprecedented.
The RSC does, however, impose additional requirements on its understudies. As one 2007 employee confirms, the ‘bulk’ of RSC understudy rehearsals might occur ‘after the main show has opened’, but understudies also rehearse ‘during the main rehearsal’ period.5 In addition, RSC understudies are expected ‘to be on their lines [to have memorized their parts] very early on just in case’, and to be ‘present in the [rehearsal] room during all of the main blocking generally.’ This was the case with Nunn’s Lear. The RSC’s unusual foresight (and its privileged finances that accommodate mirror casting) ensured that Barber’s last-minute misfortune did not affect Lear’s performance schedule. Nevertheless, Jessop’s readiness to ‘take over such a substantial role with less than six hours’ notice’ is impressive, though her efforts were denied critical recognition (Hopkins). Jessop’s Goneril remains therefore an apocryphized theatrical anomaly.
In itself, this anecdote might appear an insignificant footnote to theatre history were it not for the critical issues it highlights. The male ‘star-centricity’ of Nunn’s Lear, evidenced by the RSC’s much advertised ‘reunion’ of Nunn and McKellen, might account for the ‘traditionally, conservatively, commercially staged world tour’ that followed (Hopkins). Even so, it was the loss of Barber’s Goneril that most affected the play’s star-centric promotional identity. Without Barber in her allotted role, this Lear seemed, to the RSC publicity machine at least, incomplete. Such prioritizing of Goneril might appear surprising in the light of Valerie Wayne’s 1991 collection of essays, The Matter of Difference, which includes Ann Thompson’s wryly titled essay, ‘Are there any women in King Lear?’6 Thompson’s question highlights the apparent disappearance of Goneril and Regan from late twentieth-century criticism. Nonetheless, as this chapter suggests, it also heralded alternative critical analyses that invited revisionist reinterpretations of Goneril and Regan. In tandem, productions either anticipated, paralleled, or (in some instances) consciously manifested this shift in critical focus, with the Barber/Jessop anecdote providing final tangible proof that, in the theatrical context, there are indeed ‘women in King Lear’.
The disappearance of Goneril and Regan from 1980s scholarly debate is blamed in part, Thompson argues, on the phallocentricity of new historicist and cultural materialist criticism. These relatively new (in 1991) practices demonstrate a ‘preoccupation with institutional forms of absolute male power [that] represents a drive for “mastery” which goes beyond the text’ (Thompson, p. 118). Predominantly male new historicist and cultural materialist critics, who seemingly ignored ‘the specific oppression of women within social and political structures,’ were obviously at fault (p. 127). Thompson’s dismay at the masculinization of new historicist criticism is accompanied by a disappointment with feminist critics who appear ‘reluctant to allow that men as well as women are ideologically inscribed in the past as well as in the present’ (p. 127). By focusing on the perceived misogyny of Shakespeare, feminist critics stood accused of reifying the concepts of ‘polarization’ and mutual exclusivity into the critical canon, which in turn compounded the disappearance of Goneril and Regan from scholarly discourse (p. 127). This, despite Thompson’s call for feminist critics not simply to ‘give up on King Lear’: ‘we must not be content to turn our backs on such a powerful text’ (p. 127). Feminists, new historicists, and cultural materialists unknowingly collaborate, so Thompson implies, in materializing Albany’s Act V dismissive command. The recently empowered widower might call to ‘Produce [Goneril and Regan’s] bodies’ (KL 5.3.229), only to ‘cover their faces’ (KL 5.3.240), but 1980s critical gender divisions went further in erasing these women entirely from the play.
In the years since Thompson’s essay, Goneril and Regan have gained an alternative status as political victims rather than misogynized aberrations. Such politicization is accompanied, however, by an apparent over-sexualization of Goneril and Regan in performance. This foregrounding of the sisters as sexual predators seems counter to their serious re-examination in a feminist context. Nevertheless, their sexuality also highlights the dramatic currency of the characters as fetishized commodities for twenty-first century stage consumption. This shift in theatrical status, from unseen entity to sexualized commodity, offers the most convincing explanation for the star-status concern of the RSC, with the loss of Barber’s legendary sensuality sufficient to delay opening night for nearly six weeks.7 What Thompson calls the ‘drive for “mastery”’ of new historicist criticism seems uncomfortably manifested in the predominantly masculinized theatre industry, in which primarily male directors and producers seem preoccupied with ‘star-centricity’ and sexualization, rather than characterful performance.
A 1988 essay by John Turner highlights a peculiarly British reason for the critical neglect of Goneril and Regan, one potentially lost on an American audience.8 When asking if critics like Turner are ‘conspiring to erase women’ from Lear, or if they are ‘simply noticing the extent to which Shakespeare has already done so’ (p. 122), Thompson quotes Turner’s description of Goneril and Regan as ‘the Wicked Sisters, the Ugly Sisters’ (Turner, p. 111). Derived from the British pantomime tradition of Christmas children’s entertainment, this localized reference projects a dismissive trope of humorous malice onto Goneril and Regan’s personalities. By associating them with the Ugly Sisters – pantomime villains traditionally played by outrageously unconvincing female impersonators – Lear’s daughters become inconsequential ciphers, more at home in vaudeville entertainment than Shakespearean tragedy.
The relegation of Goneril and Regan to the role of comedy fiends, by critics who seem intent on erasing these ‘sea-monsters’ from serious study, highlights a growing divide between literary and performance studies of Shakespeare. Nevertheless, this divide also invites study of the sisters as twentieth- and twenty-first century performance constructs, in analyses that combine the best of new historicist and feminist critical rigour. By way of example, Carol Chillington Rutter’s 1997 essay, ‘Eel Pie and Ugly Sisters in King Lear’, offers performance inspired evidence that reinvigorates serious study of the sisters, even if it too bears the mark of pantomime analogy.9 Rutter observes the generic similarity between the sisters’ deviance, as ‘imagined in sexualized metaphors’, and concludes that these characters conform to a universal Shakespearean ‘nexus of ideas’, whereby male ‘transgression may be sexual, may be political, but man’s sexual transgression is always politicized’:
Female transgression is only sexual, is always sexualized. Even when a woman acts politically, the act is imagined sexually.
(Rutter, p. 197)
The uncomfortable truth of Shakespearean social politics, whereby ‘men who betray men’ are called ‘traitors,’ and ‘women who betray men’ are called ‘whores,’ underscores Rutter’s appraisal of Lear’s daughters as sexualized, as opposed to wilfully sexual, transgressors (p. 197).
Rutter’s comments confirm the value of performance criticism in offering alternative readings of Goneril and Regan, which in turn invite contextual acceptance, rather than condemnation based on anachronistic bias and Ugly Sister ciphering. Significantly, in the light of the RSC’s Press Night postponement, Rutter views the overbearing predominance of male directors as a colluding factor in such misogynistic posturing (p. 175). For example, Peter Brook’s 1962 film presents the on-screen suicide of Irene Worth’s Goneril; swaying and creaking in leather-bound frenzy, Goneril dashes out her brains on a nearby rock with the intensity of a Marlovian Bajaseth. Although Brook’s interpretation furnishes Goneril with a dramatic exit in keeping with Worth’s malevolent portrayal, it also removes her corpse from the bleak closing scenes. The demotion of the dead sisters to unseen offstage referents is more stark in Jonathan Miller’s 1982 BBC production, in which Albany’s command, ‘Produce the bodies, be they alive or dead’ (5.3.229), is immediately followed by Edmund’s dying speech, ‘I pant for life’ (5.3.241). Gillian Barge’s Goneril and Penelope Wilton’s Regan never reappear, with their deaths ignored for the remainder of the play. Only Nunn’s 2008 film accords Barber’s Goneril and Monica Dolan’s Regan their post-mortem re-presentation, their faces exposed as the stretcher-bearers await Albany’s dismissive command. Between 1962 and 2008, therefore, the reinstatement of Lear’s daughters as significant onstage presences (albeit in death) suggests a renewed recognition of their importance as women in the play, especially when transitioning from malicious harridans to sensual temptresses.
Rutter’s 1997 performance study, with its appraisal of Goneril and Regan as ‘sexualized metaphors,’ appears isolated in its reconsideration of the sisters. Indeed, Cristina León Alfar, writing in 2003, still argues that the ‘troublesome’ Goneril and Regan remain ‘among the most neglected of Shakespeare’s women in academia’ (p. 17).10 Alfar blames feminist criticism, which seems fixated with the ‘problem of the absent mothers’ in Lear, for the sisters’ relegation ‘to the margins’ (p. 206n.). Alluding to Thompson, Alfar also confirms their continued victimization by prejudiced, misogynistic scholars, who still view them as ‘evil’ and ‘unnatural’ because they ‘behave like men’ (p. 19). This ‘entrenched’ attitude to ‘female evil,’ Alfar contends, masks what is truly ‘unnatural’: Lear’s tyrannical and ‘grossly self-indulgent system of monarchy’ (p. 80). Read not as ‘evil’ women, as Ugly Sisters of comic pantomime, but as daughters of an egotistical monarch, Goneril and Regan’s underwritten, unsoliloquized agendas become clear.11
For Alfar, the ‘logic’ of Lear ‘requires Goneril and Regan to rebel against traditional feminine passivity to become cruel tyrants, to become monarchs’ (p. 109). Jena Said Makdisi, writing about the compromises women make when embarking on a political career, echoes this sentiment.12 Offering Goneril and Regan as exemplars of political expediency, Makdisi asks: ‘Can women enter politics without playing by the rules set by the existing system, and therefore becoming not only tainted by it, but an integral part of the game?’ (p. 108). Neither ‘evil’ natures, nor subversive gender transgressions, compel Goneril and Regan to behave so monstrously; they are forced to become ‘monsters by playing the monstrous game of power’ (p. 108). Although Makdisi’s and Alfar’s respective studies demonstrate the continuing appeal of ‘power’ modelling in a post-Foucauldian critical environment, their responses are less polarizing, and certainly less judgemental. Goneril and Regan are, at the very least, now fully visible.
A renewed critical visibility, which accords with the tangible visibility of Goneril and Regan in twenty-first century performance, is likewise evident in Marguerite A. Tassi’s 2011 study, Women and Revenge.13 When considering the gender, generic, and ethical implications of Lear, Tassi argues that the ‘returning of harm for perceived harm’ is essential for understanding the sisters’ anger and vindictiveness (p. 149). Goneril and Regan might be ‘dogged female revengers’, but they are mere shadows of their earlier King Leir counterparts (p. 152). In the anonymous Leir, Gonoril and Ragan share the ‘conventional stage role of villain-revenger’ (p. 160) when plotting against that ‘proud pert peat,’ Cordella (Leir 1.2.2).14 Shakespeare’s shift of attention to the vengefulness of Lear renders the king, and not Cordelia, vulnerable to these ‘irrationally’ empowered older sisters (p. 152).
The revengeful turning point might be Lear’s vicious cursing, but its importance is significantly highlighted, so Tassi argues, in performance.15 Focusing on the historical and social consequences of ‘parental curses’, Tassi considers Richard Eyre’s 1998 BBC production, in which Barbara Flynn’s Goneril ‘turns her back to Lear with tears in her eyes as she endures the assault of his curses’ (p. 72). Similarly, Nunn’s 2008 film shows Barber ‘steel[ing] herself against the emotional trauma involved in confronting Lear and withstanding his curse’: ‘Yet she nearly cries while he is unleashing his fury, and once he departs, she is wracked with sobs, which she must work fiercely to control’ (p. 72). These pre- and post-millennial visions invite consideration of the devastating effect of parental curses, and offer if not an explanation, then at least an emotional impetus for Goneril and Regan’s subsequent malice.
In line with Tassi’s commentary, Barber explores the trauma of Lear’s curses in an interview published prior to her accident.16 Describing how, when McKellen’s Lear first cursed her in rehearsals, she ‘burst into tears,’ Barber explains:
I’ve never seen Goneril do that in a production, but then I thought, why not, she wipes away her tears and then swears never to forgive him, and only becomes very hard faced after that initial outburst.
(Ansdell)
Unaware of Flynn’s emotional response in Eyre’s 1998 production, Barber nevertheless reacts in accord with Alfar’s description of inevitability in Goneril’s hatred. Similarly, Barber’s comment, that she ‘love[s] how Goneril describes her husband as a “milk livered man” [4.2.51] because it’s the perfect way to describe this lily-livered idiot who she unfortunately had to marry’, confirms how strident female behaviour seems justifiable in performance, if not necessarily in the (male) literary critic’s mind (Ansdell).
In the years since Thompson first commented on the absence of Goneril and Regan in Lear criticism, feminist and new historicist attitudes have, almost imperceptibly, changed. Gone is Shakespeare as wilful misogynist; in his place appear Goneril and Regan as victims of a political regime dominated by a patriarchal tyrant. In this male domain, the sisters must negotiate the minefield of male intrigue using whatever wiles at their limited disposal. Sexuality and guile, deemed aberrations and subversive tactics by male commentators, offer these women their only hope of survival. Feminist critics, influenced by new historicist practice, explore the political and sexual implications of this subversive behaviour, but such studies remain few and far between. On stage and in film, however, the sexuality of the sisters has acquired its own currency, so much so that Goneril offers its star vehicle status to actors famed for their sexually nuanced performance styles.
Nunn’s Lear, with its stellar cast, is indicative of this sexualization in a performance context. So important has Goneril become that, with the unexpected absence of Barber, and despite her successful replacement by Jessop, press coverage of the play was delayed to accommodate the ‘star’s’ return. The favouring of the sexualized star over the skilled understudy actor, rather than suggesting a feminist reappraisal of Goneril as a victim, actually suggests a return to the invisibility of Goneril as a cipher, not for pantomimic evil, but for sexual deviance and illicit pleasure. The expunging of Jessop’s feat from theatre history suggests an inherent chauvinism in the collective relationship between male directors, producers, and leading performers, who knowingly or unknowingly collude in manipulating audiences and journalists for commercial ends. There are indeed women in Lear, but invisibility through masculinization appears no longer to apply to the literary critical domain; instead, it has transferred seamlessly to the profit-driven world of theatre and film production. Only in death need we ‘cover their faces’; in theatrical life, Goneril and Regan accommodate their new roles as sexualized, politicized victims, whose subversive sensuality guarantees the renewed exposure of these traditionally neglected Shakespearean women.
Notes
1Justin B. Hopkins, ‘An Anecdote from the Archive’, supplement ‘Abstract and Brief Chronicles: Creative and Critical Curation of Performance’, Liminalities, A Journal of Performance Studies, 8, 1 (2012), 1–22. http://liminalities.net/8-1/anecdote.html (accessed 27 January 2013).
2Jessop declined all requests to discuss this incident.
3‘In praise of … understudies’, Leader, The Guardian (3 June 2007). http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/jun/04/theatre.comment (accessed 27 January 2013).
4Susannah Clapp, ‘A Crowning Glory for McKellen’, The Observer (2 June 2007). http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2007/jun/03/rsc.theatre (accessed 27 January 2013).
5Private email between Kevin Quarmby and RSC employee, who insisted on anonymity.
6Ann Thompson, ‘Are There any Women in King Lear?’, in Valerie Wayne ed., The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare (New York, 1991), pp. 117–28.
7For Barber’s sexually malevolent performance, see Kevin A. Quarmby, ‘Review of King Lear for Rogues and Vagabonds’ (2007). http://quarmby.biz/reviews/review_Klear1.htm (accessed 27 January 2013).
8John Turner, ‘King Lear’, in Graham Holderness, Nick Potter and John Turner (eds), Shakespeare: The Play of History (London, 1988), pp. 89–118.
9Carol Chillington Rutter, ‘Eel Pie and Ugly Sisters in King Lear’, in James Ogden and Arthur H. Scouten (eds), Lear from Study to Stage: Essays in Criticism (London, 1997), pp. 172–225.
10Cristina León Alfar, Fantasies of Female Evil: The Dynamics of Gender and Power in Shakespearean Tragedy (Newark, 2003).
11Claudette Hoover, ‘Goneril and Regan: “so horrid as in woman”, San Jose Studies 10, 3 (1984), 49–65.
12Jena Said Makdisi, ‘War and Peace: Reflections of a Feminist’, Feminist Review 88 (2008), 99–110.
13Marguerite A. Tassi, Women and Revenge in Shakespeare: Gender, Genre, and Ethics (Selinsgrove, 2011).
14King Leir, ed. Tiffany Stern, Globe Quartos (London, 2002).
15Lynn Bradley, Adapting ‘King Lear’ for the Stage (Farnham, 2010).
16Caroline Ansdell, ‘20 Questions With … Frances Barber’, Whatsonstage.com (2 April 2007). http://www.whatsonstage.com/interviews/theatre/london/E8821173718472/20+Questions+With…+Frances+Barber.html (accessed 27 January 2013).