Transcript for:
King Lear Lecture Notes

it's rather humbling to try to talk about king lear in two hours we'll do what we can but i will begin by saying that this is really an impossible and hubristic task and maybe you know all too appropriate to the humbling that one is supposed to feel in the context of a text like this uh as we begin and i wear some various ways of trying to streamline what it is that we're going to do or at least to focus in on the things that seem to interest you most since we could spend the entire semester on it and maybe someday we will i wanted just to take a moment uh since this is a play that is especially problematic from the point of view of its text to talk a little bit about shakespeare's texts and how they come to us there were some questions in terms of previous plays that we looked at as to whether shakespeare had really written these plays uh how do we know what's a shakespeare play and what isn't a shakespeare play so let me say just a couple of things about that in general about these these specific questions um we we have um quartos and the first folio of shakespeare's plays we have nothing handwritten by shakespeare uh that that we have for sure we don't have personal letters we don't have uh we have signatures but we don't have any of his so-called foul papers we don't have his manuscripts in the way that that you would might hope to have uh so what we have are things that have been set in the print house and then sold either as courthouse official or unofficial this small printed version or published after his death by members of his company in the first folio of 1623. the typesetting in this period is done by hand and is done by individual people with individual practices setting type uh the how the words came to be set into type also we can imagine a manuscript written by shakespeare we can imagine a manuscript that was written and then had additions added to it from what worked on stage and what changed from the point of view of its first production until the time that it was printed uh plays in this period are often produced collaboratively which is to say that there is not necessarily only one author that a a line or a scene might be augmented by another another mother playwright uh the our notion that shakespeare is an individual universal genius who writes in a little room by himself is very contrary to how plays are produced in this period i want you to think more about how hollywood scripts are produced how speeches are produced for for politicians these are often collective efforts which doesn't mean that there isn't a lead author and it doesn't mean when we have no evidence to say yes or no in cases like this that uh line scenes the whole play uh could well be by william shakespeare whoever he was uh in the case of measure for measure i know that there were people who thought well gosh you know does shakespeare really write about and brothels and does he write so much prose and yes he does and there is no evidence whatever to make make us think that the play of measure for measure is not completely shakespeare's the only text that we have of it uh is the text that we have in in the first folio um it's there it is and uh the the versions of it are um are are developed uh with with editorial commentary the uh so that what we need to do really is kind of open our minds to what it is that shakespeare might do rather than say this isn't like 12th night or this isn't like the merchant of venice and so probably it's not shakespearean uh but rather to widen our notion of what what shakespeare is and isn't now in the case of the play that we're looking at right now it's a far more interesting textual situation because what we have and you if you looked at your your edition carefully you will have seen this is basically two different plays uh that there are two strongly different versions of the same play let me put it this way again this is not at all uncommon even in the modern theater that you could try out a play in a certain way and then you would improve it or change it as it was produced but there are two published versions of the play uh one one at quartile and one the folio they really differ very substantially to one another there are whole scenes that are different some are ian and some are out there are lines that are different in some cases whole speeches are given to different people in one version the last speech is given to albany in another version the last speech is given to edgar and so forth and for many many many years uh what playwrights do what sorry what what editors did was to blend the two texts say taking what they thought were the best lines or way might make the most sense and so you had a text that was neither purely the folio nor purely the quarter this gave you a shakespeare which was really had no had no claim to authenticity at all because it was in fact put together by an editor i should say even to complicate this further that uh the the century after shakespeare wrote this utterly brilliant and utterly devastating play looked at this play and said well it's pretty good play but of course you know he lived in a barbarous age and if he lived in a more sophisticated age he would have written a better play and so name tate a playwright of the period and a poet of the period revised shakespeare's king lear in 1681 uh to give it a happy ending so cordelia lives and she marries edgar and it's much less horrible uh the dr johnson dr samuel johnson editing this play at the beginning or the middle of the 18th century i should say said about the death of cordelia i am glad that i have finished my editing of this terrible scene it is not to be endured and so what the revised the improved version of king lear did was to to make it more adorable to make you suffer but also make you glad at the end and before you laugh at this let me inform you that this was the only version of king lear that was performed on the english stage from 1681 into the middle of the 19th century so if as opposed to reading it if you actually went to the theater what you saw was tate's king lear uh and uh these this is all the history of king lear these are all so that when you have critics writing about performances of king lear they're writing about a version of king lear which is quite different from what you have read and i'm betting that even if you own the norton edition which actually the the big norton shakespeare which prints three versions of king lear the 1609 quarto the the sorry the the the quarto the uh folio and also uh the blended version uh that you will not have read all three and will have not come here prepared to sort of compare or contrast all three versions of this this makes some people uneasy because they want there to be a text but in fact king lear is a field of texts rather than only one and what the same way a producer or a director or an actor will select out things in performance that you often will go to a production of any shakespeare play and find that scenes are cut not that the editor or the the the director has decided that this should be burned and never exists again but that the playing time is too long or he or she wants more emphasis on cordelia and less emphasis on the war or whatever it is so that you often see in production a version of the play which is is is not identical to what you would read if you went to the store and bought yourself a copy of it uh there are certainly cases in the modern theater uh the tennessee williams caught an attack cat on a hutton roof is a good example in which the play went into production and people said we don't like the ending we want more of big daddy the character bring him back and so williams rewrote the ending uh and so we have then two versions of the play one of which became the playing version uh so here too we have we have a version that is published as the history of king lear and we have a version that's published as the tragedy of king lear uh but they are not you know so easily assimilated to one or another of these genres uh what the the the and and scholars have been very interested in this problem of the multiple king lear partly because again it get gets rid of that or brackets that question about shakespeare never having blotted a line of shakespeare having you know written exactly what he meant to write and no more and so forth and instead replaced this with the idea of shakespeare the working playwright of the difference between a performed version and a published version to be read which is always the case some improvisations by characters will make it into the printed version and some will not uh that the play then exists really more as an artifact of its own time and as a truer um example of how it is that playwrights at this exciting time for for english writing actually did their work uh so so i i say this to you in order to give you some sense that the the text that we have goes through goes up through the print house it is printed it is published it is purchased it is sometimes censored it is rewritten it is reperformed a lot of things happen to it none of which make it not shakespeare shakespeare is the totality of the things that have happened to this play shakespeare is not only the origin shakespeare is also the name that we give to the authorship of the play that we have uh let me just pause for questions yes ma'am um does does that sort of uh broad definition of shakespeare does that include the conflated version of the two texts or do you think it's more quote unquote purely shakespeare to read one or the other it's a very good question and it's hard to answer because so many critical works and so forth have dealt with the conflated version of the of the play which is neither the one thing nor the other with king lear in particular i think you have textual notes at the bottom of your page it'll say f for folio or q for quarto uh but in in any modern version which i'm sure you all are reading you'll find bracketed things or things with asterisks or in quotations uh making it actually quite hard to read transparently the the performing version is often a conflated version there's not any particular feel that larry correct me if i'm wrong about this but there's not any particular fealty to performing one pure version or another uh so that what what you have is from a is a is an impure uh muddling of the two to a certain extent based upon somebody's editorial judgment about whether uh two versions of the scene should both be there because one's in the quarto and one's in the in the folio or whether in fact uh the second version seems to replace the first and then it would slow down the text to include both of them so so shakespeare here is the author of this text but this text is in fact a conflated text there are other questions about this this is very different from from our modern notions of how copyright functions uh yes sir wait just wait for the microphone please i'm just wondering if there's any idea about who might have collaborated with shakespeare or who might have been in collaboration in some cases in the case of the late shakespeare plays sometimes it seems as if he collaborated with fletcher or i mean there are some cases in which there seems to be a kind of joint authorship which is quite common in the period in general for shakespeare we don't have that we have the suggestion that some of the scenes of pericles were written by peel uh but but we don't have a a strong sense of that you have to have to think think of think of it as like a dormitory think of think think of all of these playwrights as existing in a small part of london which they're running around you know hanging out and drinking and showing each other exciting things and so forth and or or think of it if you like in it with the analogy of reuben's painting studio in the same period where you've got you know somebody doing the hands and somebody doing the faces and somebody doing the scenery and somebody doing the dead game and so forth because they're specialists in one thing or another and uh the so so you you some people have tried very hard to say aha this is a phrase that i detect from sounds like marlo it sounds like peel it sounds like decker or whatever it is i think for our purposes this is really unusual because because the point i want to really make to you is that this play is not only a shakespeare play but maybe the quintessential shakespeare play and to start saying well but i don't like this line it's probably not shakespearean is uh that should be the last last line of resort what we should do instead is to sort of say this surprises me i didn't see this in shakespeare's paint box or toolbox this expands my notion of the the range of interests that the shakespearean corpus produces yes one last question on this and then let's turn to king lear among the educated people at the time that shakespeare is living um how well known was he outside of the direct people who saw the place i mean would you would people read the plays or you only knew shakespeare if you saw the plays well they very often the playwright's name is not on the title page it's the bookseller or the stationer that that that makes the money and sometimes the name's on the title page and sometimes not different people have different notions about how well-known he was there was a lecture here a couple weeks ago about the question of his celebrity in or the question of whether he was celebrated in his own time most of the information that we have about this comes after his death when people tend to sort of think backwards and to to lionize someone uh there are a few famous little contemporary jottings there's somebody saying he thinks of himself as the only shake scene in the country and in which which is suggested that rival playwrights thought of him as successful but remember he that he is successful as running a theater that made money to his company was very successful whether it's the plays or the success of the theater company that was being envied or talked about it's hard to say uh certainly our notion of greatness uh is again a a it's not a contemporary notion for them the great authors were the classical authors not any living authors and our notion of shakespeare's greatness is a fairly contemporary i would say you know 18th century 19th century notion not a notion that would would function at all in the 16th or 17th centuries okay but he's great to us so and and this surely is an extraordinary play uh let's so let's let's see what we can do with it in the time that we have there there um there are a number of different ways that we can approach it one is to approach it thematically one is to approach it scene by scene in speech by speech or in terms of character relations uh and also in terms of keywords so let us start with keywords just just so that we make sure that we're dealing a little bit with language what are some of the thematic actual words that show up throughout this play words that appear again and again patience patience excellent okay what else sorry old oh sir you are old in the back there yes please fool okay good how many different people get called fool so who are they the character called the fool king lear cordelia cordelia for sure uh um edgar when he's poor tom i think no i don't know i don't know but but quite it becomes a disseminated term that's that's for sure we've got a character who embodies it and who is like most court fools uh a mirror of those things what else what some other key words sight and blindness you bet absolutely okay nature capital n and the small n okay good what else nothing okay madness okay mad and madness oh fool i shall go mad okay what else conceive okay who conceives give me some examples oh i mean uh um the mother that rises within him i'm not sure he uses the word conceived there but maybe he does maybe he does certainly the when when when uh gloucester is talking about edmund the bastard he talks about conception in that way and the consummental conceit is also very much an issue here what else bond okay great comedy accommodate accommodate okay and unaccommodated man of course who is unaccommodated man an accommodated man is just such a poor bear forked animal as thou art it's edgar as poor tom absolutely uh who says this whose line is it it's lyrics great chill okay okay daughter father son where are the mothers son sister excellent okay indeed brothers okay yes sir and everything else which are out there that are controlling things uh don't know what term you want to put together why don't you just say eclipse because it's where these are these are then uh celestial events meteorological events events that that okay so this is this is an offshoot of nature but it's actually also paranature as you're suggesting yes what else yes hand give me your hand absolutely yes gods and who talks about them [Music] yes they name them but it's also kind gods and oh ye gods and so forth theory is this this uh what what's what's the what's the setting of the play when's it set it pagan that pagan that is to say pre-christian supposedly uh though obviously it's written in a very christian age so to speak remember that we have always with a play with a historical setting it's apparent time of setting the time which is written and our own time and the play really has been understood in very different ways in different modern periods but there's already a tension between the ancient king lear leir 800 bc supposedly um bce we should say um and the the the time in which it is actually performed uh which uh seems to many people to have a specific relevance to the history and politics of king james's time we'll talk about that in a second any more of these thematic words that you want us to notice yes fortune okay and uh maybe the capital f to smile once more turn my wheel but remember fortune's wheel that uh mankind is at the top and doesn't know it and falls and so this is kind of the medieval notion of tragedy yes heart heart okay whose name has heart written all over it cordelia okay is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts with the hard hearts the other daughters the other daughters yeah good yes and what constitutes strength or power um thank you um it seems to me that there are a lot of words associated with being weak um tears and and and and weeping and a lot of words associated with power and strength and what those and they are kind of inverted in the play in some ways yes that's right these become the power positions that that that that precisely i'll not weep and then he does weep and then that wonderful scene toward the end of the play in which kent and an anonymous gentleman are talking about cordelia's tears off stage that her smiles and tears were like a better way that her tears were like pearls from diamonds dropped and so forth that's one of those things that i call in my book an unseen something that takes place off stage that we seem to be present for and the fact in this case that it takes place offstage allows it to be this fabulous passage of poetry uh so yes exactly that these the the these what what seemed to be the weak positions turned out to be the strong positions what seemed to be the strong positions turned out to be the weak positions what would be so these would be the the weak slash old or female behaviors so to speak what would be some of the supposedly strong or empowered positions at the end that then turn out to be by contrast disempowered can you think of any specifically yes hey the fathers the patriarchs the kings good all right so we've got we got let's let's say it we've got patriarchy that's what we've got we've got fathers we've got kings and dukes we've got rank we've got a play that in which that you i think you want to imagine the great procession at the beginning of the play as involving the men of rank before the women uh here's king with three daughters um the daughters are in this situation that we've seen in other kinds of plays in which the traffic in women is going to take place that these are alliances that are happening that the daughters are being married and so one of the topsy-turvy things here is that these women become empowered and they become so empowered that king lear says you know uh the about goneril uh that that she uh dry up and her the organs of increase that she's so male that she really should no longer bear children and this this this this dangerous crossover between maleness and femaleness which we see in the weeping in the tears is also emblematized in these in the in what seems to be the empowered daughters especially honorable and we'll see when we get to lady macbeth we'll see the version of this as well so the question about what real strength is uh is is is thematized here and is related in some interesting way to gender as well as to social hierarchy and to power uh because the disempowered figures are peasants country they're all the all the the people in in edgar's repertoire all the different people whom edgar acts out uh but also the the old also the either literally or or uh metaphorically blind uh these these become not only for us as readers of the play but even within the play the figures of of a surprising power uh so all right these so this is this is so we could i could erase the board we could fill the board with with another set of words like this uh but i i i this is a very good selection to deal with this is a play uh which is which in which metaphorical language is very much present that the long passages of poetry will look at some of them in which the the the uh the eyeless storm for example will be discussed uh and and and this will you know then be thematized in the blinding of gloucester later on see better lear kent will say to him at the beginning of the play and this this theme of of of blindness of uh not being able to see when you actually can see turns into the paradox that that that uh when the minute gloucester is blinded remember he says where's my where's my son edmund and the answer is what yes they indicate that uh he is the one who has uh betrayed him exactly you speak of one who hates you exactly then oh oh a kind oh oh some kind of gods then edgar was betrayed that that that i i mistook my son edgar so he he has a revelation at the moment of his blindness and that i mean it doesn't say it is so powerful a structure that it seems ridiculous to call it merely a paradox but it is one of the functions of of of reversal in this play that uh when people think that they see most they see least when people think that they are that that lear wants so much to feel patience and cannot at the beginning of the play and then the ultimate figure of patience in the play becomes gloucester who suffers and endures uh ripeness is all uh again the the play has so imbued our time that it's certainly like hamlet in that that all these lines seem to us unbelievably familiar and powerful uh i let's talk a little bit about structures within the play so we took the this notion of fortune's wheel for example could be thought of as one of the the over over arching structures of the whole play that that that just when you think you're at your strongest point so you reach your your your lowest point who gives voice to that sentiment in the play the fool does when does he do that well maybe just at the end of act one i can't remember he's saying follow the wheel let the wheel carry you up yeah yeah the the uh you know first he doesn't want it first phrase well first he says you know uh that that you should attach yourself to the man whose wheel is going up not the man whose wheel is going down um and the fool does try at certain points to say you know don't go into the storm going to where it's warm don't experience this this uh this this cataclysm that happens in the storm scene but ultimately there is a sense in which yes go ahead please [Music] to that subscribe not in the stocks for says the the so the question again is which handy-dandy which is the fool which is the wise man which is the king which which is the highest which is the lowest this is the duke of kent after all first disguised and then imprisoned it's very clear that being put in the stocks is a is a is a a a very low-class punishment uh not something that you do for noble people yes um the wheel of fortune um edmund at the end of the play yes um that was spoken right is true the wheel has come full circle i am i am here yeah i am here absolutely that's that that uh this and but but also i want to add to this that moment when edgar sees the blind gloucester and says who who is it who can say i this is the worst i am worse than er i was uh you you you're not at the worst so long as i can say this is the worst solution you put a whole sentence together so he is conscious of being at the bottom and of realizing that he's probably not yet at the bottom so that there's a way of of inhabiting that wheel as well as referring to it so to speak and both of those things are happening in this play uh at the same time this is not so much a play about retribution it's not a play about cycles so much as it is about about losing and finding about the necessity to lose in order to find about the uh the the the question of making of doing exactly what what what lear says he cannot do to make something out of nothing uh that's in a certain way what happens throughout this plan especially toward the toward the end of it um in order for there to be fall there has got to be an established position let me ask you whether you see yourselves uh this play as predominantly if you had to code it as a tragedy or as a history play or or what do you see as it's its primary field of reference is it is it for you a play about england and france uh about uh king james about what what what what do you see is it being about we talked about its themes a little bit yes i really see it as a relentless um downhill slide for a man who makes a decision that we call heroic but in in in he's accommodating to coming to terms with dying eventually this is so so so for you the notion that he is a king is so to speak a metaphorical thing that by king king to you in your response to the play means man at the height of his powers right rather than person who is employed to run a country [Music] this is very much how the last century has tended to respond to this play uh and and i want to put it in balance with the political reading of the play because a lot of people read the play really about either the man coming to terms with his own mortality uh about the father and the daughter about the question of the family and so forth but but it's also important to bear in mind that this is very much a play about british politics and about about about history that albany and cornwall described that these titles do describe parts of england that albany is is nominally the part called scotland and that cornwall is the the west of england that uh the ancient story your footnotes will tell you that the ancient story about king brutus the first king of britain involved sons who were who not daughters but sons who represented these two parts and that also it's the case that king james who had two sons uh gave them titles of cornwall and albany and that that there's a sense that there's this kind of notion of thickness of things happening over and over again uh and of the pathos of the play the the the human drama of the play which we respond to so powerfully also being in dialogue with history so that it's not uh forgettable that this is also a play about it's about union and disunion to to british politics in this period of course disunion the division of the kingdom and that when i read through the play again in the last couple of days i was very struck by the repetition of the word division which i'd never noticed before as repeating itself over and over again that it begins at the very beginning of the play but then we hear in the middle of the play there is division between cornwall and albany that the division here meaning divisiveness as well as as as geographical sundering but this so so this is very much a a play in its own time about the dangerousness of asking people to part a car net between them of trying to split up a country yes [Music] in in addition it seems to me that the vulnerability of and the artifice of uh the established um [Music] hierarchy or a power itself how how easily it um is vanquished by by the natural like edmund or primarily or a bad decision well oh no yeah okay there so there'd be two things remember this is well to remind us that there are two plots going on here this is a play of double plot that we have the gloucester plot and the lear plot and the the play really begins with with kent and gloucester talking about how they think the king felt about albany and and cornwall uh but we very very early on get the story of what's going on in the last gloucester family with the two sons as well as what's going on in the lear family with the three daughters and the the what happens to what happens in the gloucester plan is actually different from what happens in the lear plot because as you said in the case of lear he makes a decision or he seems to make a decision in the case of gloucester he is actively hoodwinked by the plotting of edmund that that you remember the whole scene with the letter what are you doing with the letter uh oh nothing the quality of nothing has not such a need to hide itself and so forth that that that edmund is is the machiavell figure the iago figure the figure who is planning who conceives of this this usurpation so what happens in the two households is slightly different uh in fact it's very different uh and if one wanted to look at it as a kind of moral fall uh you could say that maybe that gloucester is not skeptical enough but it but it's but it's not it's not at all the same as his making a uh i mean it's a snap judgment but it's not the same kind of judgment that that lear makes um so how would you how are you tying those two things together edgar and the and lear's decision well it seemed to me that that lear's initial decision to break up the kingdom i mean was it you or somebody else asked the question was he mad at the beginning to have initially proposed this breakup of his kingdom and it seemed to me that he very quickly understood how that bad decision um destroyed him destroyed everything that he believed in um it's certainly it's presented as a there are two bad decisions there's the division of the kingdom at all as you're suggesting and there's his uh rejection of cordelia or his refusal to to hear what she is saying as an affirmation rather than a negation so these are two kinds of decision uh and one to to say that he's mad at the beginning seems to vitiate the whole question of his his growth or change throughout the whole play would make it much more static if he were merely performing the same thing over and over again what what i try to argue in my my writing about this play is that what begins metaphorically then becomes literal that that when people are using figures of speech like eyeless and nothing and that then what happens in the middle of the play in the storm scene is that all those things become literalized and that that what seem like extravagant figures of speech become horrible visual truths yes um when you were talking about the um british um historical situation i thought of another couple of words that didn't make it up there but might have made it up there which is uh chaos and order um and that those again are both external and internal things that we see in play right remember that that when we're looking at toilets and crested we spent a lot of time on on ulysses speech on degree this is very much a play about what happens when degree is shaped when when when the the sons rule the father when the daughters rule the father when the nature takes over in every possible way and you get wonderful passages about that yes i think part of the reason that there's that it's so hard to find a clear line between the the political or historical and the personal more personal and tragic aspects of the plays that um we don't see any of lear's subjects or former subjects we we hardly see any of them who are not very closely connected with his household in some way you know kent was not a member of his household but was we get the impression a trusted adviser and similar with uh gloucester i believe and so you know there's not um it the um the context portray i think portrays lear more as more within it's more within the context of his family than within the context of his kingdom and it's sometimes i think for people not living in a monarchical society it's hard to look beyond that and look at the political and historical aspects of it well but suppose that this play were about george w bush and cheney and rumsfeld instead of about leader and gloucester and kent these would be also people or about about gonzalez or about i mean these would also be people that you would think of in very intimate relation to the ruler who are his advisors whose personal quirks he takes on board for whom there might be and and we wouldn't we wouldn't say well this is just a family drama we might say that but but but it has consequences it has political consequences because of who they are so i i think i i mean i think it is a a modern appropriation of the play to see it as a family drama and that we don't lose anything by also restoring to it this this other dimension i think it's really our unfamiliarity with these figures or with the political discourse at the time but if we think about our own political moments if we think about about nixon or about clinton or about you can see how the political and the personal are really very hard to divorce from one another yes down here please um i was just thinking about language and the double um meaning of mad um and that when somebody is in a blind rage they are crazy and it seems to me that um that happens to lear that happened to othello and i was just sort of playing with that notion and cordelia and edgar never get angry they're forgiving they don't get mad and lear and gloucester um it's like one strike and you're out um and their children are banished well when do they have the power to that that that this is an example of what i was talking about about the sort of unmetaphoring of things happens when in a little in a little in the quarrel between kent and lear when when uh kent says to him what would thou do old man and lear reproves him for this reference and and lyrics and kent says be can't unmannerly when leery is mad now he's not mad in the dissociated sense in which we see him in the middle of the play in the storm taking people for stools and stools for people and so forth he is mad in our more modern sense of of uh not making good judgments behaving in a way that's that that's very inappropriate and the but it's still a figure of speech so to speak when when when kent addresses it to him i understand that but the notion of people getting angry happens a lot in this play people are very quick tempered and they get angry they get mad right a lot right and i thought that was interesting um that the children um treat the parents like children they forgive them right um they don't get mad well you're right they don't they don't i mean the the other um goneril and reagan are mad all the time well yeah she doesn't know what they're impatient i mean i think this notion of patience plays into this idea of madness when you say you know one striking you're out or whatever it is but but but i mean notice how quickly uh the power shifts from the end of that that that ceremonial scene uh we hear the two elder daughters saying you see how full of changes his age is but he's ever but slenderly known himself and that you suddenly get the back story about they never did respect him or think that he was so powerful now that that's that's a slight we don't know whether we if we've been a scene before scene zero before the play began they would have said our father is full of changes we can't wait till he gives away the kingdom this is something they say after this happens and it's as if they're misremembering i mean he may have been changeable before or not but they now have the power and they can reposition him as the child and that's what they do basically they infantilize him they make him play tricks they make him kneel they they they they and and he begins to act out really in front of them to get their attention uh so that that losing the the position of father patriarch king and these things are they're not the same except allegorically they're not the same except mythologically uh but they're they're they're stuck on top of one another when when when fairy tales or when freud talks about princes and kings we often forget that they're written by people who actually lived in societies with princes and kings that these aren't merely allegorical figures for fathers and children these are also things that have a political relevance or reference these references have dropped out for us and we think of these as merely a king must be an empowered man and so he is but it's true that that that that uh that certainly the whole first scene is very much a scene of the impatience of of his uh partly because i mean we talked a little bit when we talked about a fellow about the degree to which the play was a play about scripts and playwriting and designing scenes and so forth and this is very much a scene or a ceremonial that has already been pre-designed uh in some productions of the play the map already has the divisions marked on it there's some productions in which you get a little piece of the map that's already you know the little mapquest section of the map that is being given to you uh there's there the uh she's supposed to play her part she's supposed to say and and and everything seems very very rehearsed and so her her refusal to participate in this scriptedness is also something that infuriates him it's also a sign immediately his lack of control loyalty and the self-advocacy ground guardsmen of what you call egotism you know whether it be um the bastard who wants his legitimate rights because he feels he's left out of the daughters but these are human conditions they're not i mean um they're human things rather than historical i mean they don't have to do it how can we distinguish the human from the history i don't but you were i thought i thought you were you know because you said somebody who said it was a family thing of which these things definitely come in right um and you say no it's really sort of historical you know because it's it's part of kingship it's part of patriarchy i mean loyalty the system works on loyalty patriarchy all these things um and you break it down you know when you start thinking about yourself mainly um well it doesn't matter what your family is begun with the political i would have said but it's also familial but my point is not to say that it's this not that but rather to say that it's very hard to take these things apart from one another that well that they are are uh layered upon one of their many different levels so to speak on which you can encounter what happens in these scenes and that the history of law the history of politics is not is not an unhuman his not like this nature outside things that that i mean the the when edmund gives his wonderful speech thou nature aren't my goddess to thy law my services are bound uh this is you could well find a footnote in your book that talks about the the the refusal of the law at the time to give uh lands and power to people illegitimately born uh how we feel about that this is up to us maybe but but but his this is not motiveless malignity in quite the same sense that we might have talked about it in terms of hiago although there is the same kind of sense of of i must make myself into a powerful figure because i have nothing to authorize myself except except my own wit and my own rhetorical cleverness but it's i i'm not myself a particularly historical or historicist critic i would never say it's just history in this sense i just want you not to forget that the particularities of the plot uh also have a historical resonance and that there are some moments when that remember we talked the other day about about the the transparencies the anatomical transparencies that show you the the inner organs and the bones and the that if you look at you know the frog or the human body in your encyclopedia that you'll find that but that here too these these are different layers of of signification that go into making the play as powerful it is as it is it's about this play in fact that yates used this wonderful phrase emotion of multitude that that seems to me to to explain very much why it seems so resonant precisely because it is not merely local and not merely historical and not merely transcendent but somehow all of those things at once i guess picking up on the the feeling who owns anger and who doesn't in the play i'm struck by the trajectory of leah's life that he gets to have all of the feelings and his daughters there's the angry you know primitive goneral and reagan and there's cordelia who's very loving and yet this lear who has just about you know he goes through everything his anger his rage and he finds his love i'm just struck by it as as to the the legacy to his daughters who died that they were never complete in a way well we don't see the play so directly from their perspective one could imagine a production that wanted to that let's imagine a production in which began with a spotlight and the spotlight was on gonorrhoea not even on cordelia but on goneril so that you were by a trick of staging really made to it to vocalize as they say in the reading of novels to look at what's happening in the play from the point of view of a character who wasn't the title character or the supposed major character of the play there would be and if you were the actress playing goneril you presumably have to imagine all of these relations from your own point of view it's uh certainly true that lear is in in most scenes and is talked about a great deal and that and that the the the lear of the daughter's imaginings is really their imagination of him not necessarily the hymn that we see uh but is it that you think that that that this is a a flaw in the play or a it's something that just came to me that you know that they did not fully develop do you think they're not do you think that that that there are things about goneral and regan that uh that we don't that dimensions of of the female characters in the play say that we don't see where we see dimensions of we're pleased there doesn't seem to be other than the fact that we might feel sorry for them because their father favored their sister other than that there's nothing good about them and to have characters be so one dimensional maybe that's what you're suggesting i don't know do you does everybody agree that these characters are one-dimensional i mean they for example how about their relationship to edmond how about the moment when they're both in love with edmond and when they you know first they're both in love with the father and this fails then they're both in love with edmund they persons they're not in love with their husbands who are accessories in my mind it's not really love but what do i know their relationship to edmund isn't really love so well this is certainly qualitative distinction so so so is there any love in the play i don't think there's any love in them i think there's love in the play and i think maybe that's the point that that it's so distinct the lovelessness of those daughters and the loviness of cordelia well supposing i say i think cordelia's a complete wimp and it's a terrible part um and that the the only good scene she has is the scene with the the you do me wrong to take me out of the grave scene in which she gets to replay i wrote this in my chapter you get to replay the speak don't speak scene of the opening where we're in the in the first scene uh he says what can you say she says nothing my lord in the second scene in act four she has learned that she actually must speak and she speaks still in the negative he says you know your sisters have done me wrong uh you have some cause i they have none and she says no cause no constitution she speaks again in the negative but her negative is a positive her negative was a positive to begin with he just didn't understand that it was a positive so he becomes a better reader uh as he as he uh but but she also becomes a better speaker but i would say that i mean i love the speech and i i moves me to close to tears myself when i actually perform that that interaction but it's you know it's because of the pathos of his position you do me wrong to take me out of the grave and so forth and with a little pause where she says no cause no cause but but i i i you know for character give me regan any time it's a more interesting character i think uh which doesn't mean that she's a better person yes well um i think part of the reason that they appear uh one-dimensional is that they are they is that the play does the the audience does see the play primarily or the play ha the parts of the play that have to do with them primarily through lear's perspective um and partially through kent's perspective and he's obviously very closely tied to lear i mean what if general really is just worried about these you know these big loudy knights who uh who are you know trampling all over her house and getting into fights in the great room and you know i'm very glad to bring this up because this is one of the undecidables in the play that some productions will emphasize again the footnotes in my audition are full of you know ex-director had lots of knights on the stage and they were rowdy no no these other ones are the depending upon whether or not you believe them when they say that the knights are disruptive um i mean here you are you have taken your aged parents into your home and they have brought with them their you know 12 dogs and their you know this is not a completely unimaginable scenario and they're you know canasta partners and they're they want to watch their own television programs not your television but that they're in your space that there's this sense in which they're it so this would be again the the the the might be a legitimate appropriation of the play into the the modern period but it's not clear about these nights whether they are rowdy or not and they're performed in slightly different ways what is striking however is it is that wonderful scene in which which uh and again i talk about that in my in my chapter when when when when he quant once again is quantifying love and you know you're 50 or more than the double her 5 and 20 and thou art twice your her love and not all together so my lord uh the the the kind of cutting and cutting and cutting and cutting down what need once you wind up with none again uh so that the the knights have again a a function to under to explain he the the degree which he's trying to quantify love rather than to to to understand it but this question about whether the the elder daughters have any justice in their claim that this is a disruptive situation is is not explicit in the play is is a is something available to be developed by performance we're gonna have to pause and then we'll come back in five minutes when we do i'd like to look at some scenes as well just so that we can look at some passages i'm going to erase all the stuff on the board and we're going to try to collect some scenes so welcome back um so we had a little some unfinished business we had a few questions left over which let's let's do those and then i will want us to look at some yes my question has more to do with the historical background of the play james was actually trying to unite scotland and england right so why this is the battle this is this is once upon a time king lear divided the kingdom and you saw how terrible that was so i am reversing it's the the the it's like like a a tape in reverse of you what the of a uh i want to say a tidal wave that you see the tidal wave and then you see it undo itself and so so he he used this as a moral example and historical example of i because not everybody wanted the union of scotland in england this he obviously wants it because he's the king of scotland and also now the king of england so he wants to unify the two countries so this is a political argument appealing to history as we might appeal to the founding fathers or something like this but in this case it's a bad example from the past that we are going to try to undo thank you for your question uh well now we can a moment ago you had this in your own hand okay yes um i was thinking with the uh that great scene where the numbers of attendance were reduced from 100 to 50 to 25 to 10 to five that that really went to the political slash historical versus family question because you can look at that at one side that the daughters didn't want all these raucous uh nights in their house but it's also an indication that they they're just expressing talir we're taking your power away from you if you're a king you have a hundred attendants but in fact you don't need any well the the the again when he says that he wants to unburden crawl toward death this this inadvertent image of himself as a child that he does not see that as i mean the the irony of the opening scene is partly that he does not understand the implications of the imagery that he is mobilizing here and when he says that only we will name retain the name and the addition of a king now an addition is again a title so you'll see we'll see when we come to corey elena's that that coiliness because he's a roman has many different parts to his name one of many the name corey elena's itself means the guy who won the town of coriolis like you know desert fox or something would be an addition would be a nickname that describes your your exploits so in this case the edition is the name king lear and the problematic of the play is what is lear when he is not king lear um and he turns out to be nothing or everything he did that he first he learns that he is nothing as was said to him and then he learns that nothing is everything that in fact in this in the scene where he and cordelia the third scene the third scene which features them so prominently in which he he talks about how we two alone will sing like birds in a cage he has this fantasy of their being alone together in prison away from the world abandoning the world again and where they will constantly perform this you know you'll you'll i i'll ask of the forgiveness and so forth and we'll sing and tell old tales that he has this fantasy of of leaving the world all together but which obviously can't come true and and turning is is the sequel to this of course is for death the the uh the political and the personal here are both for the characters in this play and differently for us tied together and i i've oversimplified a little bit but i want to repeat my oversimplification that it could well be that in the 17th century so to speak the uh political is the first level at which you encounter it and the the human domestic the next one whereas for us we and we we enter through the human domestic and then recover the political but the question of the domestic let me just say a word about this too the question of the domestic comes in is thematized in this play in the in the crucial question of hospitality uh of the the extraordinary violation of gloucester's hospitality uh that which again is a question that we'll see repeated in macbeth when the murder of the king happens when he's a guest uh it's a double violation of hospitality here and here too it's he's in his own house that he is treated so badly and this question of the of the the domestic and the household versus the world out there so that the the the great third scene the third act of this play is cross cut between the scenes in the storm and the scenes in the house of gloucester and the i think there's not even any question as to which are the cruel or more painful scenes it's the scenes inside not the scenes outside the scenes of human cruelty not of natural encounter so that this this this question of what's the public and what's the private or what's the inside and what's the outside uh is as we say problematized in this play from the very beginning yes um i just i just wanted to speak to the the kind of visceral reaction one has of either reading or seeing this play yeah because i over the course of my life i've done it in various stages and i'm aging myself now and it it it hits you differently but it's so horrible you know it's it's so cruel it's so kind of bleak uh you know i mean that's obviously it's many other things as well but that that part of it is so amazing to me every time i read it i'm so struck by i was thinking it just the kind of planet earth thing of the you know the predators and the prey and that it's so much this kind of well the old generation's gonna it you know you're old you're done get out of here you know i mean to even that out out bile jelly thing i mean it's it's unbearable i can see why someone would rewrite the ending or want to rewrite the ending because even though you know lear sees finally and there's this you know this is reconciliation and everything he's he's not allowed a moment to kind of you know appreciate that before cordelia's hanged and he's he dies i mean it's it is devastating i just wanted to kind of speak to that reaction because but it but but it gets to this tragic core so to speak through among other things moments of comedy the the when when he uh uh talks about the new pranks of his daughters and and and they or he they talk about his new pranks and his mumming and so forth that uh with the fools various either scatological or or pornographic puns and jokes uh the uh the there are there are many moments of either comedy or romance in the play romance in that sense of fairy tale of you know the the lost is found and the reunion and the the again the the extraordinary scene at dovercliff the the scene in which gloucester is led to the edge of something he thinks has got dover cliff and he's blind and he jumps and again how do you perform this so that it's not charlie chaplin or if it is it's pathos through charlie chaplin but in fact the fact that he is that it's not so blind makes it sublime the fact that it is not in fact a leap from a great height but that the sublimity is inside that is the it's the the idea that he has fallen from a great height that that that converts him and that wonderful scene again it's an unseen it's a it's a it's a passage that describes something that we do not encounter in which the disguised edgar says you know look up to the first he says look down first he says i i i see the the one halfway down hangs one that that gathers sampler dreadful trade and the the i see a boat in the distance it's it's buoy almost imperceptible to me and so forth that he he evokes in language this this this vista of great distance uh which is absolutely not there on the stage that this is the effect of sublimity that happens as a result of it not being sublime so to speak of it being actually uh a mental act to encounter the sublime and uh and and so the the play has lots of it has romance moments as comedy moments it has historical moments it has battles and it has has challenges and fights in which edgar at the end is is is masked and it seems to be like apocalypse and it seems to have a kind of biblical resonance and so forth the play mobilizes many different stage languages and and metaphorical languages in order to get to in order to paint you this picture of of of encountering with the thing itself uh it's not i mean it's it's nihilism is is so to speak a sumptuous nihilism it's a it's it's it's not emptied out it's the it's it it gets to this nihilism through language and when you get finally as remember othellos break down everybody knows his ears and lips and so forth when you get never never never never never or kill kill kill kill kill uh when you when when in fact again syntax breaks down for lear you're at the verbal thing itself from which again the play will recover into language as happened again with othello now so ever could i just add to what you were just saying a bit too getting back to the uh vile jelly out out file jelly which is one of the most terrible things in it in a terrible play um i don't remember is it in the if it's in the um is it in the folio or the corridor where we have the additional scene with the servants afterwards um where gloucester is put out of doors and then the servants actually follow him and say they're going to take care of him and i don't remember for those of you that have the norton if professor lewalsky's uh conflated version has that is it in there i mean that's such a fascinating instance of the redemption of nihilism at the same time that you have nihilism going on because when you think about the substance of an eye and what it would be like once it's disembodied from the human head it's it's awful and then the servants take upon themselves the task of redeeming that materiality in some way by saying well we'll make a poultice and we'll we'll make it out of flax and egg whites very viscous substances that are quite like the human eye and their attempt is so futile on the one hand because where do you put a poultice on an absence are they putting it on the eyelids are they putting it where the eyes were supposed to be but at the same time there's a great restoration of humanity in their attempt to just do something for him even though there's really nothing that can be done and also just just to add to that there is of course the the lonely heroism of cornwall's servant who attempts to intervene and who who again has an appeal to the fealty of the servant you know that i've i have served you all my life but greater service did i never do than now to bid you hold that this this this rebellion against service in a which is it's a version of what kent did it's a version you know that the loyal servant sees better and uh that but the fact that this is a servant not a nobleman that again the scene is is very visceral rather than merely the loss of a kingdom it's the loss of an eye uh and the the the death of the of the servant also leads to the death of cornwall and therefore too many of the political things that happened at the end of the play uh let's let's can we uh localize a couple of scenes we've talked a little bit about the dovercliff scene we've talked a little bit about the opening scene uh we i but i'd like for us to look at at least one or two of these great passages together and see how they work yes i think probably i think probably uh you would have a better um idea of this but can we talk about a scene that sort of exemplifies what i've seen that you think exemplifies the fool and he's he's sort of a um he's he's such a many sided character um that i just think that i find myself re-reading the scenes that he's a part of well all right let's let's let's look at the fool early then in act one scene four um at the moment when the fool is performing his court function before he becomes uh himself a sublime figure about line 125 act 1 scene 4 about line 125 in at a point when he is still performing a little bit uh and uh have more than thou show us speak less than thou knowest lendless and they'll always ride more than they'll go is learn more than that truest set less than they'll throw us leave thy drink and thy and keep you endure and now shall have more than two tens to a score two tens are a score of course it's twenty this is nothing fool says can't fool vent is like the breath of an unfeet lawyer you gave me nothing for it can you make no use of nothing nuncle and here's he's addressing lear why no boy nothing can be made out of nothing fooled kent prithee tell him so much the rent of his land comes to he will not believe a fool we're a bitter fool fool dost thou note the difference my boy between a bitter fool and a sweet one where no lad teach me so he still prepared to be entertained that lord that counsel thee to give away thy land come place him here by me do thou for him stand the sweet and bitter fool will presently appear the one in motley here the other found out there so what's the fool doing in this scene what what what's the when he says when he uses this this dice is this and that place him here by me do thou for him stand who's the fool in this exchange clear clear does that call me fool boy all thy other titles thou has given away that thou wast born with can't this is not altogether fool my lord so this is this is one of these early moments in which inversion handy dandy topsy-turviness uh is uh is still a a a part of the professional apparatus of the allowed or licensed fool it's still something that lear can approve or disapprove it's still in the realm of the political slash domestic that is to say he is hired to do this in the household he's hired to be the the one figure who can presume to undercut royalty without i mean contrast this to the other person who is called fool at the end of the play cordelia who made the same set of representations to lear and was punished for it in this case this the the uh the fool is not punished for it but what happens to the fool when he is removed from the court setting is that that whole notion of what a fool is changes and because the counterpoint that was involved in high low king fool master servant uh wiki versus you know the the the the social corrective involved in having a uh a staged employee who's able to speak truth to power here uh is very different once they're actually thrust out of doors once they once once lear himself learns this lesson firsthand rather than just in this analogizing way and that's the point when one could say uh that the fool in the the storm scenes becomes an aspect of lear rather than his on-stage counterpoint that there's a sense in which the the full uh or the full persona becomes appropriated by or or identified with lear um is this a help in in terms of so that that when when you get to the storm scene and the the he he's shivering and the wonderful moment where they find this this this this straw and uh this this unregarded kind of hovel that lear suddenly is attracted to and he says to the fool in boy go first so again here i mean this the theme is the last shall be first it reminds us of cordelia the last at least but but but it reminds us of the bible but it's also uh a a humanizing of that relationship in which you'll notice in the passage that i just read to you uh the the the the cheeky voice of the fool calls the king boy pretending to exchange their their status here yes this is uh this is just a small thing really but um i you're bringing a boy there i thought is interesting because you have uh the fool through the entirety of the play refers to lear as uncle and right uh lear in return refers to him as boyce you have that sort of reflection of the sort of theme of family and of course the inevitable inversion of that yeah this nuncle is a kind of nursery term for uncle it's a familiaris again the fool's allowed to be familiar in a way that nobody else can be so that the the the transfer of the term fool from from the court fool to cordelia is something that many critics have noticed some people think that the same actor who played the fool plays the part of cordelia so that when the fool departs from the play in the middle i'll go to bed at noon that's when cordelia re-enters from france certainly we're told that since my young lady is departing into france the fool has most much pined away whether or not it's the same actor there's some kind of relation to them so that when you have this extraordinary scene at the end which is almost almost always played like a pieta uh where where lear says my poor fool is hanged he's talking about cordelia but there's a sense in which the intimacy of his relationship with the fool is far more so than the rather formal relationship that he has with his beloved daughter or daughters at the beginning of the play that he stages their affection for him in a way that that makes that affection a demand rather than a gift and i mean this this is the demand for love and the demand for love can never be offered in quite this way it never is met it's never going no matter if she'd said this the script right he would not have been enough for him she in fact says what's behind these other things but it's never enough it's never enough because the the demand for love at the beginning of this play is is endless the and and when she says why have my sisters husbands if they say they love you all this is not only i mean as it clearly is since we i mean we see in many shakespeare plays the necessity for the young woman to as we see perfectly in desdemona saying she sees her divided duty you are my the lord of duty but here i see my husband to whom i now own duty this growing up gesture that young women in the play often do in which they they turn away from the father and choose the the husband she's claiming that the sisters are either lying or being infantile and saying that they love their father all but he doesn't even hear it at all he hears it only as part because for the part the part that's missing is the is the cordelia part and i you know if one could imagine her saying something that would over top regan i would guess that there would still be some residue of thing something unsatisfied for him because what he what he's demanding is not only obedience but perfect love and that the play is suggesting is it will always escape somehow uh so that the intimacy with the fool and the and the and the familiarization of the fools this familiar language this nursery language is very different from the language that he uses with them at the beginning of the play now again remember that we're talking about a sixteenth seller and a century or sixteenth century uh royal household in which daddy doesn't come home from work and play with you with your in your your dollhouse uh that these are the children are fostered out that they are they're that they're raised they have their own apartments and so forth and we're not one is to expect uh a 1950s family here but uh the nonetheless the formality of this relationship it seems very much at odds with his with with the the the demand for the intimate at the same time that is the demand for the political let's look at um look at emin's speech for and and then maybe at one of lear's in act one scene two uh let's look at edmonds thou nature art my goddess speech the very beginning of is the all of act one scene two um thou nature art my goddess to thy law my services are bound wherefore should i stand in the plague of custom and permit the curiosity of nations to deprive me whether i am some 12 or 14 moonshines lag of a brother why bastard wherefore base when my dimensions are as well compact my mind is generous and my shape is true as honest madam's issue why branded us with face with bassness bastardy bass bass when the lusty stealth of nature take more composition and fierce quality than doth within a dull stale tired bed go to the creating of a whole tribe of fop scot tweet sleep and wake well then legitimate edgar i must have your land our father's love is to the bastard edmund as to the legitimate fine word legitimate well my legitimate if this letter speed and my invention thrive edmund the base shall top the legitimate i grow i prosper now gods stand up for bastards what's what's what's happening rhetorically in this speech first of all tell me about the um about the style nothing will come with nothing speak again it's a soliloquy big one it's a salil it is a soliloquy absolutely and he is that's his form yes and he is explaining to the audience he speaks directly to the audience not to another character but in fact he does that throughout the play mostly right now he at the beginning of this of the speech he purports to be addressing somebody who might be the audience but but it is an apostrophe thou nature aren't my goddess uh so there isn't a purported speaker but it's a it's an abstract speaker rather than what else he's also addressing um a cultural issue that that bastard children are are put in this negative light and he's addressing nature and saying you know we're the same thing and what's what's this that culture is doing to us and he's flipping upside down all the language that's used so based and legitimate and you know what does all that mean um and i also like it i don't maybe i'm off with this but i feel like at the end you know stand up for the bastards the groundlings and the theater would particularly like this and see something in him for doing that there's something very energetic about the whole whole speech why why they ask with bastards with base bastard debate space i mean there's something enormously self-generated about this he he in a way performs the energy that he's describing here you can see why these lear girls would find him attractive there's something well i can see that because he's very energetic he's very self-starting he's uh he's a self-made man and he his invention will thrive i want you to think about the the the end of the first scene of our first act i should say of othello in which you see uh iago saying i have it helen knight shall bring this this monstrous birth to the world's light where it's again the engendering of an idea the invention of an idea he's got a plot he has a letter he's written something down he has scripted something which is gonna have some effects and is he's gonna it's gonna have an effect by his first pretending that it's nothing and then showing it and say it says nothing but the truth he says it's nothing i'm sure he didn't mean it uh everything he says taken straight so to speak uh would would would disallow the value of what it is but in fact he performs it in such a way as to suck his father into this so once again it's about interpretation shakespeare bringing the alarm bells i mean just sort of saying well here's another iago i mean this guy's you know a dreadful character because he's in that same speech i mean you're reading it in a positive way you can also read it in a very negative way this is he's turned everything around he's um he's trying to make good out of evil and and um and justifying um things which are coming i mean we almost know having read that that later on this guy's gonna be up to lots of bad things well the i would i would say that to a little extent you're reading backwards from what we do know i mean for you read the whole play if you just get to this there's certainly a sense in which he's up to something and he has a scheme and he's going to turn things upside down the base is going to top the legitimate and so i mean we're going to the the the handy-dandy inversion theme that we see with the fool that we see with the last unleashed and so forth is also present here but the question of what he's going to do now well my legitimate i must have your land that's that's the moment of plotting uh so precisely he's an anarchic energy there's no question about that but whether he is yet a figure of evil i mean he maybe he's a figure of evil in the sense that we talked about with with the speech on degree in ulysses that his his energy he's like the appetite of universal wolf we'll will will turn upon itself uh but but i i there's i theatrically speaking there's something very appealing about this character i think uh he i mean wicked though he is let me just hear from some other people on this question now please that we have so over here in front of reading it today he seems very modern very modern because he's he sounds like an individual standing up that's a good class that's good there's he he's railing against his face he will not be be pigeonholed he will not you know the fact that he has no uh cultural baggage means that he's an independent operator there is that sense of self-invention here i'm not trying to make him the hero exactly i just want to show you something about his energy at this moment in the play as contrasted with the scriptedness of the of the division of the kingdom and a different moment of taking land because the theme is the same take land who's going to take land right in front no no no sorry the lady and then the gentleman please no right there yes yes deleting the white sweater please she says no okay sorry i'm sorry i've seen nothing will come with nothing there we go this notion of uh the anti-hero though it i'm wondering how modern that idea is and i'm wondering whether how shakespeare's audience would have responded to this character and his proclamation at the beginning of the play i sense it edmond's humiliation his public humiliation with his father's discussion of his reading and ken tries to smooth that over saying well he's he's a pretty pretty good looking guy for for all of that you can see why edmund's angry uh but this statement god stand up for bastards i'm curious to know what what uh the contemporary response to that assertion would be they would see that as an interesting negative energy or something abhorrent well it depends upon the context i think uh so there there are a lot of bastards in this culture some of them are there there there are actually very positive characters in shakespeare's play is called the bastard uh so an illegitimate birth is not i mean they're the so the horse son must be acknowledged is what what gloucester says he hasn't hidden this guy away this is the foundling story where ed edmund has to come through all kinds of obscurity and say you're my father and you've been disinherited me uh he's acknowledged he's just not given a a um an inheritance here the these figures of negative energy in plays of this period are very popular figures this is the character of the machiavell or the vice uh the jew of malta begins by talking about how he likes to go about about at night in poison wells these were enormously powerful and popular theatrical characters so it's not as if people ran in horror from them it's the fascination of evil that you see in almost any kind of of text how they would have morally judged his position is a different question i think now behind you please the gentleman green yeah luciferian it's like he's like a lucifer uh character in paradise lost i mean that would be like a kind of an archetypal figure already in in the tradition well the the satan or lucifer and paradise lost it partakes of this notion of machiavelli and paradise losses in fact was the original version of paradise lost was a drama rather than an epic poem and was very much influenced by precisely these these figures uh so so um yes it is it's a figure who precisely because he's self-invented uh do anything or not but but think of think about him in for example in contrast with the fool who also is self-inventing but itself inventing within a different kind of script behind you please no right there um yeah i think that edmund is appealing because he feels wronged he's not just doing evil there's um you understand why he is and gunner and regan feel wronged no wonder they love him um and lear feels wrong everybody feels wronged and um do you blame the gods or do you blame your family does cordelia feel wrong just do you think except her she she she right as as you said right yeah right but she we never when no cause no come and she's never like desimone at the end of the play nobody i myself farewell that she refuses to assign blame and if she blames anybody it's herself i didn't speak however in desdemona's case i must have done something inadvertent here please yes um i just wanted to surface in edmond's speech that he suggests that bastards are not only as good as legitimate children but even better because more energy went into their begetting than um than the legitimate child where it was kind of boring every day business exactly yes and then that at the end that that famous line at the end now god stand up for bastards that's so non-iago i think that that um edmund is usually played by an extremely appealing and energetic young man and when he says now god stand up for bastards you all feel like standing up in the audience and cheering for him you know yeah that's part of my point in trying to draw your attention this is a very rousing speech just the whole scene is this speech and and you're quite right about this dull tired tribe now when we heard uh gloucester talking about was sort of like that too uh there was good sport in his making and the horses must be acknowledged that there's there's there's actually more description of gloucester's mistress than of the duchess of gloucester or of queen lear i mean both of these figures get mentioned very very peripherally and only functionally only as sort of it if if you were not if you were not legitimate then my my wife is an adulteress you know uh yeah well isn't isn't also part of um edmond's appeal that anyone who was not born into this anyone who is not born into um sort of a life of nobility or just a life of knowing exactly what's going you know know exactly what your future is what you're going to get and what's going to come to you anyone who doesn't have that can in a sense sympathize with edmund yeah again this is a noble bastard that's a nobly born bastard uh there are actually you know morally noble bastards elsewhere in shakespeare so to be bastard is not automatically to be hello uh yes thank you email very much we're we we have class here until 7 30. okay um thank you thank you let's let's look at another couple of passages in the time that we have left let's look at lear's uh reason not the need speech in act 2 scene 2 line 4 50 just about uh this is at that moment of stripping where where they say 50 you have to double five and twenty dollar twice twice for love uh what needs you five and twenty ten or five to follow in a house where twice so many have a command to tend you regain what need one i mean it's a fabulous play and it's wonderfully wonderfully staged and now we have not another superb shakespearean set piece can i read it first okay oh reason not the need our bassist beggars are in the poorest thing for superfluous allow not nature more than nature needs man's life is cheap as beasts thou art a lady if only to go warm we're gorgeous why nature needs not without gorgeous wares which scarcely keeps thee warm but for true need you heavens give me that patience patience i need you see me here you gods a poor old man as full of grief as age richard in both if it be you that stirs these daughters hearts against their father fool me not so much to bury it tamely touch me with noble anger and let not women's weapons water drops stain my man's cheeks know you unnatural hags i will have such revenges on you both that all the world shall i will do such things what they are yet i know not but they shall be the terrors of the earth you think i'll weep no i'll not weep i have full cause of weeping but this heart shall break into a hundred thousand flaws or air i'll weep oh fool i shall go mad notice that in the midst of the ending of this speech nature chimes in with the storm and tempest just at the point where he says you think i'll weep no i'll not weep the rain begins to fall the nature does weep for him what do you given what we've been talking about uh throughout this this hour or so what words leap out at you from this speech that seem to have now a renewed richness unnatural um you are natural hacks um why why does unnatural have a specific resonance for you now i think it's this is a very good word to observe because it as he says it all nature breaks loose around him right well remember the speech begins with reason not the need uh uh the allow not nature more than nature needs man's life is cheap as beasts but also remember that we just had edmunds an evocation to nature as well so that we have the end what is natural here what is a natural relationship between uh what is a bond now we've taken that word off the board what else what other works words what about this word superfluous where where else in the play do we hit this word superfluous gloucester thank you what does he say he says that um uh we should we should distribute our wealth uh yes when he's in in his extremity in act four to shake the superflux to them to show the heavens more more just so this notion of superfluity of having more than nature needs again this question of less and more of accommodation and unaccommodation and a big fancy word like super flux here superfluous a superflux means and when gloucester uses it means we have extra we should give here uh it's the superfluous and the less dieted man it has that modern sense of superfluous too somehow like your fops that that that that that because he's so wealthy uh and privileged he actually uh is a caricature of himself that that this notion of superfluous has taken on a kind of moral edge to it or a kind of ethical edge to it the superfluous or less dieted man here are our basis beggars are in the poorest things superfluous what does superfluous mean in this context even even beggars even beggars have more than they need that it's not only the wealthy but everybody that their their need is not what we're talking about here it's not about need and this quite when we talked earlier about the demand for love here we could talk about need and how it's not about need it's about gifts generosity it's about something that has nothing to do with an equation nothing to do with need and want here uh i mean this this whole speech about why need is the wrong why do you need one night why do you need 50 nights it's not about the need it's about a different kind of accommodation true need you haven't give me that patience patience i need by this point notice that he has already become a poor old man he's become stripped in this way and he's looking at himself as on that age divide and that gender divide at the same moment what about this this request for revenge shear i will have such revenges on you both that all the world shall and that's the point at which she breaks off and can't think of what it will do it points up his utter helplessness in the situation but to me i mean he's he's making threats he knows he can't he can't uh follow through on but he i think that's right but if he had been able to revenge what kind of play would it have been it would have been a revenge play obviously but but what what what uh what would be lost if he had been able to revenge according to what he says here okay yeah a kind of holocaust i mean a kind of leveling of everything that's what would that that's yes he would have the revenges would have have so what what is it what's the other way what is gained by not revenge i i don't understand your question what happens to lear as a result of he's not taking this path that he at this moment claims that he wishes to be able to take he's forced to learn a lesson that is to say he has no power so he has he has to deal with life in a different way than he's dealt with it before he hasn't to come to some he has to come to some accommodation with his own right helplessness what's the stage sign of of fealty in this play what do people do on stage in order to show where power is yes they kneel yes so who kneels to whom in this play sorry to cordelia she says do not kneel uh they both kneel at the in the in the scene with with the two daughters this the stripping scene uh there's a sense in which they they seem to sort of mock him by kneeling um that this question of who kneels to whom and of whether a physical sign of uh and the stage sign here of fealty is something that needs to be turned upside down is also functioning in this scene this this speech why does it break off the way it does that um all the world shall i will do such things what they are yet i know not uh why why these self-interruptions do you think i'm not sure if this explains it fully but they are still his daughters and he's not um i guess he hasn't gone quite mad to the extent that he um that he can come up with all these awful things that he wants to do with that due to them well it is we talked about his in this is a kind of this is going to be an overstatement but kind of rhetorical impotence that he does not have the power to do these things and he's he he's desperate to not fall into this category of weeping woman and so forth and then he goes into the storm scene where he encounters aspects of his own persona and he he submits himself to a different kind of patience to a kind of of human experience that is different from the king has revenge or the god has revenge yes back there please um i i was struck and kind of to dovetail into what you're saying i was struck by all the plural nouns in this that that it's the drops of the revenges and then and then it ends on you know his heart this heart shall break into a hundred thousand flaws and it's just so beautiful like all those it's it's like shrapnel it's like everything's coming apart and and then then taking it to the whole division of the kingdom and everything's dividing everything's like just spraying apart and so i think that perhaps it ends there for almost for that emphasis as well that he kind of drops it off because nothing's going to be complete anymore it's all fractured even as i think that that's extremely good that's extremely powerful all right so quick question why does cordelia have to die why his name kate wrong to keep her alive okay she seems almost too good for the world so she needs to i mean so that is is it is the effect then upon us upon weir or upon [Music] her death completely completes the uh the the tragedy and in the sense that the the whole world has been shown to be so fraught with with evil uh and her her existence her continued existence seems impossible okay good and behind you please cordelia represents the hope for redemption she is the heart of the play as her name says her latin name says and in the beginning king lear is just a powerful king he has authority but he lacks heart and he will achieve heart after his uh little daughters after his little daughters dies and in this way he will receive a heart just by losing his heart okay all right i like that good gentleman here in the switcher well in the way that uh she's described too where there she shook the holy water from her heavenly eyes and sunshine and rain at once her smiles and tears were like a better way it's like the death of a martyr yes it is it is or and i i think i probably raised this question a little bit when i wrote about it what happens when there's sunshine and rain at once there's a rainbow so there's this promise of something else too that that it is like the death no more that that her her death you really do hope that she's not going to die and then he thinks he can bring her with this feather stir if she lives that that you have this and keep your eye on this attempt we saw it in desdemona the attempt to resurrect her we see it here this attempt to resurrect her we will see it in the romances again the attempt to resurrect the dead woman and what will happen in the romances is that it actually will occur before you go just let's look at the very very last lines of the play sometimes assigned to to edgar and sometimes assigned to albany i just want to read you these last four lines and say just one word about them the way so first first we have kent the the idea is that that kent should remain no no i have a journey sir shortly to go my master calls me i must not say no so not only is he continuing to follow lear has he done through it throughout the play but his last word is no i must not say no never never never never no cause no cause nothing my lord to not say no is to is is both to say no and yes edgar the weight of this sad time we must obey speak what we feel not what we ought to say the oldest hath born most we that are young shall never see so much nor live so long so i want to know who are we that are young and edgar ed edgar edgar certainly uh who else us us this is definitely the we that speaks out to the audience that's we speak of speak what we feel not what we ought to say this is definitely that gesture out to the audience in which we are the survivors and we are the diminished survivors and this is the kind of greatest generation phenomenon in which the the the the those left on the stage those left in the audience can only have an extremely scattered and shattered notion of what has taken place and the only that way that we can encounter it is by speaking what we feel and not what we ought to say which is after all the request that was made at the beginning of the play by lear to cordelia where he didn't mean it when he asked her for it so this is the return of that question again speak what you feel not what you ought to say um macbeth next time i'll see you then