Emma Smith on 'King Lear'
For Emma Smith, King Lear is a kind of mirror for succeeding generations of audiences and readers. In the words at the end of the Lear chapter in This is Shakespeare, the attempts to ameliorate its desolation present us with a cultural history of just what it is we want from our tragic art: comfort, exhilaration or dissection.
The chapter leads up to that point by giving an overview of the shifting different points of view the play has prompted since its writing in 1606, starting with the oddness of a performance of this most desolate tragedy for James 1 in the Palace of Whitehall on a day of celebration, Boxing Day. Emma Smith regards its protean reception over the years as
An object lesson in attempts to understand the ethical value of Shakespearean tragedy.
Generations have tried to excavate something positive or optimistic from the evident misery, most famously in terms of performance in the notorious Nahum Tate rewriting 0f 1681, which lasted for a long time on the English stage. Tate was writing from the perspective of Charles II’s restored monarchy, and this is evident in his own doctored ending.
Emma Smith then surveys critics like Dr Johnson (Tate’s amelioration of the ending was welcome), August Schlegel (the Romantics began to discover the delicious terrors of the original), A.C. Bradley and G. Wilson Knight (the former saw the transformative powers of torment), Jan Kott in Shakespeare our Contemporary (for who it is a blank verse ‘Waiting for Godot’: inevitably, Godot never arrives, and the time between the curtains is filled absurdist humour, violence, abjection and grim bonding - I’d say that Godot is rather more consoling and tender) and Jonathan Dollimore (a more social critique rather than one based on individualist ideology).
Everyone gets the ‘Lear’ they need, rewriting as necessary through adaptation, criticism and also through performances. In fact Shakespere himself rewrote and revised the story between the History and the Tragedy. For example, the lines between the second and third servants after Gloucester’s blinding were removed from the darker ‘Tragedy’. What the playwright himself did was deepen the darkness.
Smith’s analysis here makes me think of a line from another tragedy, Hamlet, in which the protagonist asks the players to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature. King Lear does just that, showing us just what we are, and what we believe about human nature.
Emma Smith’s Oxford University lecture on the play from the ‘Approaching Shakespeare’ series.