King Lear

King Lear by William Shakespeare

Introduced by Mr Anthony

King Lear begins and ends with a cautionary note on the dangers of speaking. Cordelia, realising that the currency of language has been debased by her sisters’ inflated rhetoric, refuses to extemporise on her love for Lear and instead explains that it is Goneril and Regan who have used language to say 'nothing'. At the play’s close, Edgar advises those still standing to 'speak what we feel, not what we ought to say', reminding us that language is always performative, that social context often strangles self-expression, and that the spoken word is, like Wilde’s truth, 'rarely pure and never simple'. 

And who would know this better than a community of aristocrats knelt anxiously at the feet of a king whose capriciousness precedes him? In this, Shakespeare was merely reflecting the mechanics of the Stewart court, an obsequious sequence of meta-events in which courtiers were repeatedly called upon to demonstrate their proficiency in what they 'ought to say', in exchange for patronage and influence. James I was notorious for promoting handsome male favourites, men such as Robert Carr and George Villiers, who publicly flattered the king; for his efforts the previously cash-strapped Carr was gifted Sherbourne Castle and the post of Lord Chamberlain, whilst Villiers (when Carr fell out of favour) was made Earl of Buckingham and referred to by the monarch as 'my sweet child and wife'. When Elizabeth I’s one-time favourite Sir Walter Raleigh married without telling her, he was banished from court and had to wait five years before the queen consented to see him again.

No wonder, then, that emotional honesty and the very act of speaking is so frequently policed in King Lear. Indeed, the play is bloated by the absence of conversations its characters fail to conduct: Lear provides scant reasoning for his abdication and refuses to explain his rejection of Cordelia to either France or Burgundy; Oswald denies Lear conversation, following Goneril’s instructions to ignore him; Lear discourages both Kent and the Fool from voicing ideas he does not wish to hear; Edgar is prevented from communicating with his father and godfather during his time as Poor Tom; Edmund refuses to confirm his romantic and political allegiance to either sister (when Goneril raises the subject, she then instructs him not to respond); Regan and Goneril repeatedly refuse to discuss their poor treatment of Lear with Albany (who, when his wife openly demonstrates her love for Edmund, threatens to stopper her mouth); and, at the play’s climax, Lear balks at his daughter’s suggestion that they debate their fate with her sisters. 

This reticence even permeates the theatrical experience itself: unlike Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard III, Othello, Leontes, Timon or the Duke in Measure for Measure, Lear never addresses the audience directly, never entrusts us with his thoughts. It is left to the subplot’s warring brothers to keep us posted on their position within the play’s fractured cosmos (Edmund, like Iago before him, swells with Machiavellian pride whenever he breaks the fourth wall but is often circumspect in dialogue with others) for, when it comes to the groundlings, Lear refuses to 'cleave [his] heart into [his] mouth' and instead says 'nothing'. 

On the heath however, shorn of social context and the responsibility of public performance, Lear loosens his tongue to voice a series of political and personal truths but is, ironically, condemned to monologue. Surrounded by a cast of characters adopting falsified voices (the disguised Kent, the performing Fool, the possessed ‘Poor Tom’) dialogue becomes impossible; the stream of words spewed forth by each speaker is exposed as a dislocated tributary, unable to pool into a communal conversation which could replenish their emotionally arid kingdom. The storm is awash with wasted words and it is not for nothing that Shakespeare personifies the source of the tempest as a human mouth.  

In transposing King Lear to the London of the 1970s, I hoped to tap into the spirit of an age in which communication between a government and its populace was strained to breaking point. From rising unemployment to the random atrocities of the Irish Republicans, from trade union strikes to the three-day week, Britain in the 1970s became a country 'as governable as Chile'/ in the populist view of one US politician. Inspired by the images of bin bags piled high in London’s Leicester Square during the ‘Winter of Discontent’ I sought to place Lear in a visual context where his shortcomings as a ruler were made abundantly clear, whilst also forcing him to haunt the fringes of the metaphorical scrapheap on which his daughters are so determined to discard him.

In her 2004 study of classical and Shakespearean tragedy, Mocked with Death, Emily Wilson suggests that the idea of ‘overliving’, living beyond the point where life has any value, is an experience common to many tragic heroes. King Lear, she argues, uses 'parodic and perverted versions of the Resurrection to suggest the horrors of an unending life in the body' so that 'excessive life is presented as a kind of living death'. On our dilapidated stage, choked with litter, Lear begins the play in a state of frustration and is soon propelled to exhaustion by his inability and unwillingness to communicate with those around him (and vice versa); this verbal stalemate is indeed a kind of 'living death' or, to put it another way:

When the feeling’s gone and you can’t go on, it’s tragedy. (Bee Gees)