James Shapiro on 'King Lear'

James Shapiro’s outstanding 1606: Shakespeare and the year of Lear, is a great resource for teachers of the play, as well as of the other two plays Shakespeare wrote in that extraordinary period, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. Here are some notes that refer to Lear, especially from the chapter ‘Leir to Lear’, in which Shapiro examines how Shakespeare reshaped the main source text, King Leir.

• King Leir 'was fixated on royal succession (and) spoke to a nation fearful of foreign rule or the outbreak of civil war after its childless queen's death.'

• In 1599, King James VI of Scotland wrote a political handbook, Basilikon Doron, for his eldest son Prince Henry, warning him about the dangers of dividing territory about children.

• 'For Jacobeans inundated by pageantry, polemic and gossip about the proposed Union, any play that turned to Britain's distant past to explore the consequences of a divided kingdom would have been seen as part of this conversation.’

• King James's warning about 'dividing your kingdoms' is closely echoed in the opening lines, which have a 'contemporaneous feel'. James's own elder and younger sons were the Dukes of Cornwall and Albany. This was 'an uncharacteristically topical start' to a tragedy.

• In Shakespeare's Elizabethan plays, 'England' appears 224 times, but in the decade after James's accession, only 21 more times. 'English' appears 132 times pre-James, 18 after, and…

• 'Shakespeare had never found an occasion to use the word 'British' before James's accession; the first time audiences heard it in one of his plays was in King Lear, where it appears 3 times.' 'Britain' appears only twice in the Elizabethan plays, 29 times in the Jacobean ones.

• The crown (before Union): should there be a single British one? Lear says to Albany and Cornwall 'This coronet part betwixt you.' 'How exactly are the dukes to split a metal coronet in two? As with Union, each potential solution seemed to introduce a host of fresh difficulties.'

• 'From its opening scene, when a map of Britain is brought on stage, Lear wrestles with what Britishness means, especially in relationship to the longstanding national identities it superseded.'

• The sub-plot was introduced by Shakespeare, since 'the story in Leir lacked a counterpoint, a way to highlight Lear's figurative blindness by juxtaposing it with something more literal'; he found the story in Philip Sidney's Arcadia.

• 'Each Shakespearean play has its own distinctive music and, not unlike a symphony, its themes are established at the outset. At an early stage of recasting the old play, he seems to have decided that 'nothing' would be the motif of Lear's score.'

• Brilliantly, Shakespeare used the word 'nothing' to 'suture together the Lear and Gloucester plots'. There is Cordelia's famous 'Nothing' response, echoed in Edmund who says to his own father there is 'Nothing, my Lord' in his forged letter.

• Negatives: 'Never' and 'Nothing' appear 30+ times, 'no' 120+ and not twice as often. The prefix 'un-' 60+ times. 'This insistent and almost apocalyptic negativity becomes a recurring drumbeat, the bassline of the play.'

• In Leir the love test was a trick, a deliberate stratagem to resolve a succession problem. But 'Lear's love test is no stratagem; rather, it is a pro forma confirmation of each daughter's worth.'

• 'One of the most significant changes Shakespeare makes to the old play is all but silencing Cordelia, who in his version speaks fewer than 100 lines - for in King Leir she consistently undercuts her appeal by going on at length.

• 'Leir doesn't really do anything terribly wrong; Lear does.'

• 'Calling Lear 'Old man' is insulting enough to modern ears, but Kent addressing his king as 'thou' would have struck contemporaries as even more extraordinary and foolhardy'...

• 'Superiors (or members of the upper class speaking to each other) were addressed as 'you', inferiors as 'thou'. It is truly shocking that Kent says to Lear, 'I'll tell thee thou dost evil.'

• 'Those in the audience who had seen King Leir or had read any of the other versions of Lear's reign in circulation already knew how the story ends ... nobody dies and all that is lost is restored'...

• 'Audiences in 1606 would have expected Shakespeare's play to end in much the same way, with Lear restored to his throne and Cordelia spared.'

• At the point of the reconciliation between Lear and Cordelia, we are 3 hours/2,800 lines in ('the typical length of one of Shakespeare's plays')...

• but King Lear, which has another 500 lines to go, doesn't end there, and when it does and they are both dead; we are confronted with a desolate scene that is all the more crushing, denying us not only what we wish for, but also what we expect.'

• The result was the darkest tragedy that Shakespeare ever wrote - and for audiences in 1606, whose expectations would have been so upended, all the more wrenching and bewildering a theatrical experience.'

THE END:

• Quarto and Folio: ‘the endings of the two versions of the play diverge sharply in their handling of how Lear dies and in who speaks the final words… For what was likely to have been staged in December 1606, we are left with the sometimes muddled testimony of the quarto, dervied from Shakespeare’s handwritten copy, and we find in that text the most painful and apocalyptic ending imaginable.’

• ‘For those at the court performance familiar with earlier versions of the story in which the king is restored to the throne and reconciled with his youngest daughter, this must have been shocking, the image and horror of the collapse of the state and the obliteration of the royal family akin to the violent fantasy of the Gunpowder plotters a year earlier.’

• The closing lines: in the Quarto they are spoken by Albany, 'the highest-ranking nobleman left alive and possessor of half the kingdom’, but ‘the widowed and childless Albany offers little prospect for the renewal of the kingdom… the play ends with the frozen tableau of the dead king holding his murdered daughter - a mockery of the pieties expressed moments earlier’ by Albany (‘All friends shall taste / The wages of their deservings.')

• The play proved ‘too dark, too unbearable’ and so the Folio version ‘pulled back from the abyss’, reassigning the final speech to Edgar (‘the possibility of a less grim future, as a younger generation is empowered’).

• And another ‘pulling back’: ‘In the Folio, those ‘O’ groans are gone, as is Lear’s final cry asking for his heart to break; that line is reassigned to Kent. In its place is a Lear who dies believing in his last moments that Cordelia’s lips move, that she yet breathes.’ ‘The Folio version … offers playgoers the consolation of a Lear who has suffered enough and is allowed to die deluded.’

For a rich conversation on the book, listen to James Shapiro with Fintan O’Toole at the Borris Festival, below.