We decided to see a version of King Lear that was being
staged in New York. It starred Glenda Jackson and the
write-up in the Times emphasized what an amazing actress and then labor party
leader she was. We YouTubed her lambasting of
Margaret Thatcher and were excited to see her. After we had made our travel plans, the play
opened to mixed reviews and was to close the day after we saw it. Oh, well… perhaps we should have waited until
the reviews came out? Actually, it was
good to see a flawed version of the play – I think it revealed some of the
fault lines in it. And, flawed
though it was, there was some very fine acting and it is, after all, one of
Shakespeare’s great plays…
The first lines of the play involve the Duke of Gloucester
introducing his bastard son Edmund to the Earl of Kent. In his introduction, the Duke pays particular
attention to the pleasure he received in fathering the child, but the
excruciating quality of the introduction rankles Edmund (no surprise) and he reacts
by providing the first soliloquy of the play. This particular Edmund was played by Pedro Pascal whose read
on Edmund is that he is exasperated in an adolescent way about his forever being
libeled for something that he did not participate in – his parent’s
coupling. He swaggers through the play,
gleefully playing at pitting this person against that person in order to
achieve his desired ends, but there is no moment when he seems to really feel
what it really means to be a bastard – to hate himself for that (I imagine) and, as a
result of this hate, to hate the world that cares most about this aspect of
himself that he had no part in forming. I think that this part could have been
played with the gravitas as well as the absurdity of the bastard perspective
more in mind.
In prepping to see the play, I read Harold Bloom’s criticism
of it. He said that he has never seen a
good version of the play because there are three critical roles – not one. And he has never seen the other critical
roles – Edmund, Gloucester's bastard son and Edgar, Gloucester’s legitimate son, well played when there is a good Lear. That was certainly
true in this performance as well. But, if
this is always the problem, could it be that the roles rather than the players
are the problem? Or, even more deeply,
is there something about this play that is too deeply disturbing about us for
us to be able to enact – certainly it is the case that Lear is among the least
self-aware characters in the Shakespearean canon, and, despite Edmund’s and
Edgar’s soliloquys, they don’t seem particularly self-aware either, though each
in different ways.
After this play, we saw a presentation on a very different
book and film, Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild. The book is an account of the life and death of
Christopher McCandless.
The film version
of the book is told from the perspective of Chris’s sister Carine
McCandless whose position is that Christopher chose to leave civilization
because of his discovery that his parents never married. His father was married to another woman, when Chris was born to his mother and his father had a child with his wife after Chris was born.
Though the father ultimately left his wife, he never divorced her and he
never supported his other son. Christopher
was mad at his father both for making him a bastard and for failing to provide for his half brother, and was distressed that he was
illegitimate. The irony of the
comparison is that Edmund tries to heal his wound by grabbing for legitimacy,
while McCandless tries to erase his wound by leaving civilization and its
judgement of him behind. Neither of them
is successful.
The thesis of the presenter at the Krakauer event, Alex Menrisky, was
complex, but included the idea that going into the wild represented a reversal (in
fantasy) of the developmental arc articulated by Freud in Civilization
and Its Discontents. Essentially the
fantasy is (and here I am committing a sin – Dr. Menrisky worked very hard to
avoid reducing ideas to two dimensional pastiches) that the damage done by
civilization to the individual – the destruction of the primal person that we
are – can be reversed by leaving civilization and going into the wild. The idea is that nature is a better parent
than any we can find in the human world.
Menrisky was suggesting that Krakauer saw this as a long standing
fantasy played out by various nature writers in our American history – going back to
Thoreau. If we want to carry it even
further, Lear might be the first example of this, with his wandering madly onto
the heath when the humans who professed love for him failed to follow through
on that love within two weeks of his bestowing his kingdom on them.
But I am getting ahead of myself. In that first scene, after we are introduced
to Edmund, we are introduced to Lear and his three daughters. Lear is most connected to his youngest
daughter. He promises, pretty much out
of the blue, to reward his three daughters with lands proportionate to their
praise of him as he has decided to retire from being king. The elder two daughters, Goneril and Regan, falsely
praise him, and he gives them their lands, each after their respective speeches (which undercuts the proposed
apportionment strategy – he decided ahead of time who would get which lands and
simply expected them all to say he was wonderful), and then when Cordelia, his
youngest and the only child who actually does love him, refuses to make false
claims about her love and explains why not, Lear becomes enraged, divides her
portion between her sisters, and asks her two suitors if they still want to
marry her. The Duke of Burgundy backs
off, but the King of France, one of the few stand up guys in the play, accepts
her and she is whisked off to France.
So, Lear becomes a king without a kingdom. He expects that his two daughters, who have
professed their love for him, will support him, and his party of 100 knights,
as she shuttles back and forth between their homes. Well, that lasts for about two weeks, then
Lear is out in nature – who turns out, just as she did for McCandless, to be a
cruel mother and not very hospitable.
Lear survives her which, (spoiler alert) McCandless does not. Lear seems to misunderstand that a king is
loved not for himself – not because he is such a wonderful guy – but because he
embodies the state. In psychoanalytic
terms, the people project onto him something of the paternal – something about
taking care of them – and love him because he is doing that – he is caring for
them. I suppose in the same way,
daughters (and sons) care for their fathers – love their fathers – because they
are loved by them. Lear loses the love
of his country and the love of his daughters when he abdicates from his role as
their king and as their father - as the one who loves and cares for them.
By chance, we have also recently seen a wonderful production of Mozart’s
opera The
Marriage of Figaro. In
it, the Duke has rescinded the law where he had first right to have sex with
any woman who was married in the Dukedom (before her husband would). This may sound strange to our ear, but it was
a right in various places – including a right exercised by priests in some
places. The Duke gets it that this is a
bad law, but he also lusts after Figaro’s bride to be, Susanna. Serious hijinks follow as the Duke's wife ends
up dressing up as Susanna to catch him trying to woo another woman and the
Duke, who is really the cad in this play, asks forgiveness of his wife –
something that seems out of character – and something that fixes the rupture
between him and his wife – but also between him and Figaro, who is his servant,
and, most broadly, between him and those he governs. He returns to being a Duke of integrity.
Reparation is part of what is missing from a tragedy. Acknowledging a wrong doing and setting things
straight does not occur. Cordelia tries –
she returns from France to fight Regan and Goneril who, before she showed up,
intended to fight each other, and do fight over Edmund as each has fallen more
in lust with him than the other. The
sense of entitlement that each has – Lear for affection unearned – and greater
than is warranted, as Cordelia points out; Edmund for the love that he has
never received – but (I think because he did not know true love from his
father) can’t recognize that the sparring sister’s lust for him has nothing to
do with love; Gloucester, who feels entitled to fealty from Edmund despite his
abuse of him, so that his being blinded in the play is a playing out of his
being blind to the impact of his treatment of Edmund and to Edmund's not surprising duplicity; Goneril and Regan, who
feel entitled to love in much the way that Edmund does – and who, like Edmund,
have not felt their father’s love, and feel entitled to look for love wherever
they might find it and to break the oaths that they have made to their fathers, and even Cordelia, who feels entitled to tell her father the truth even though she knows he can't hear it – things end very badly for all of them.
Lear’s time upon the heath, unlike McCandless’s romanticized
time in the Wilderness (especially in the movie, but apparently by the readers
of the book), is brutal and he is saved from the savageness of nature only by
the love and caring of Kent, the fool – who also despises him, and Edgar – who
knows the value of a father, perhaps because, as the legitimate son, he did
feel loved by Gloucester. But Edgar cannot
reveal himself to Lear or to Gloucester, when he comes upon him, nor can Kent
reveal himself to Lear. Both Lear and
Gloucester have rebuked and disowned Kent and Edgar respectively – turning
against those who genuinely love them to depend on those who would abuse
them. After they have lost their power
to harm their caregivers, they are pitiable, and it would be shameful to them
to have their state be known by those who love them; so, out of love, Kent and
Edgar keep their identities hidden and help as they might.
Unlike the Duke in Figaro’s marriage, the realization that
they have done wrong comes to Lear and Gloucester only after they have lost
their power to repair things, so they are doomed. Unfortunately, they bring down those they
love as they do this – Cordelia is sentenced to death by Edmund, acting in
Goneril and Regan’s name, and Edmund’s repentance for having ordered the death
of the legitimately loving daughter comes too late to save her. Lear dies of a broken heart after finding
her. Edgar is left (along with Regan’s
husband) to reign over a kingdom whose concept of ruling has been corrupted.
Menrisky, in his interpretation of Into the Wild, maintains
that what is underlying the romanticization of McCandless is the idea that
undergirds psychoanalysis: that the process of civilizing us – the process that
leads us to have an ego – is undoable.
We can return to a natural state and rebuild ourselves. Menrisky sees this as a false promise. But it is a promise – a promise that I felt and
wished for in my own analysis. I
remember a supervisor commenting that the people she saw coming out of
psychoanalysis (co-workers at a psychoanalytically oriented hospital – people
she knew well before and after their analyses), were more like themselves after
the analysis than different. She saw them as better versions of themselves - but still very much themselves. The analyst
and the analysis do not erase what has come before and start over with a blank
sheet – going back somehow to the beginning of time and (despite the claims
of some treatments) reparenting the person in a new and healthy manner. Our task is to figure out how to take who we
are and become better at being ourselves.
Lear and, I think in the mind of Menrisky and Krakauer,
McCandless abdicate from the responsibility of being themselves, of becoming the
executives of the lives that they were meant to live. The fool was played wonderfully in this (and
other productions) by the same actress who played Cordelia (Ruth Wilson
– the only Tony nominated element in the production). Doubling the role allowed us to see that the
love that Cordelia holds for Lear is filled with disappointment as well as
reverence. The fool is downright
disdainful of the king, who seems to be too self-involved to be aware that he is
being made a fool of – or more accurately – that he has made a fool of himself. But I also think the fool is the tiny voice
of self-awareness that we sometimes hear but disregard. I think this play, not
unlike Hamlet, may be hinting at something about the arduous process of coming
to know oneself – and the tragic character of that process inevitably involves
significant pain – and despite Edgar’s trying to protect Gloucester from that
pain, it will come home – despite Cordelia’s love, Lear will despair – and despite
his best efforts, Edmund is still a bastard.
Accepting our role and playing it, accepting what life has dealt us, is
difficult – and we rail against it. But
all of our ranting and raving doesn’t change the paths that are open to us.
The exception to this, of course, is the path laid in the
comedy, The Marriage of Figaro. Here the
Duke recognizes the corruption of his position – the ways in which it imperils
others – including his wife, whom he loves – and his citizens – whom he
ultimately cares for and about – to a certain extent in spite of himself. Mozart seems to be telling the Austrian King
that if he wants to avoid the fate of Lear – and that of his sister Marie
Antoinette – he needs to value the lives of those he rules. This caution is an important one as the
governments of the world made the transition from despotic, Middle Ages rule to
a rule that the enlightenment would ultimately make possible, the rule of the
people. But the people would have to
step up. So: a couple of notes about
this particular production of Lear.
 |
| King Lear in Trump Style Gold Leaf... |
This Lear was set in Trump Tower – the set was floor to
ceiling gold paint. If the point wasn’t
driven home by that, the fool pointed to his American Flag socks when
delivering a soliloquy on the corruption of Lear and the country and the blood
money in Act five were ruble notes. OK,
we get it, when we are hit on the head.
Trump is Lear – he has abdicated from responsible governing and all
kinds of malarkey is going on when his hand is off the tiller as he wanders from
Washington to Palm Beach to enjoy games of golf, and even more goes on when he
shows up to “govern”. And we get it, the
American people abdicated their responsibility when they elected this
Lear. We are the Gloucesters of the
world who are blind to the foibles of those we serve who should be serving us –
we are the Gonerils and Regans who offer the fawning message of false love and
then proceed to do what we need to do to have the government serve our
needs. Will Trump wake up, though, and
realize what he has done and mourn the death of Cordelia? Who among us is Cordelia?
I found it much more compelling, in our conversation about
McCandless, when a fellow conversant noted that while McCandless imagined the
wild as a nurturing presence, it really was a repetition of – not a replacement
for – the hardships that he suffered at the hands of his father – hardships that
went beyond fathering him out of wedlock – hardships that included locking him
in a closet with his hands bound above his head for hours at a time. The speakers point was that the European
taming of this continent is written as if we were all Daniel Boone’s who loved
the challenge of the wilderness when the wilderness was, in fact, a traumatic
place to live. So, when we say “Make
America Great Again”, we are asking for a return to a time when we had to be
brutal in order to survive – and thrive – and we were brutal to each
other. In this sense, Trump is the return
of the father who never has to say he’s sorry – the return of the unapologetic –
the man who will be neither a tragic hero – nor a comic one – but one who will
simply continue a tradition, not alter it – in the ways that both tragedy and
comedy can do that. He is, then,
artless. I think this play fails as a referent to him because we have no evidence that he will ever realize his folly - though of course we had no evidence that Lear would either. But I do wonder if Jackson's Lear here was less sympathetic than the Lear she played in London to rave reviews because she was also playing a man for whom she has nothing but disdain.
The second point is that the cast included a woman as Lear –
and also as Gloucester (and, yes, as the fool, though that is not so
unusual). Maybe there is something about
our aging that makes us less gender bound.
Both actors were convincing in their paternalism without pretending to
be men. But certainly we are discovering that we can be less gender
bound than we have led ourselves to believe.
And, perhaps, as we emerge from a gender bound past, we can become able
to be blind to ourselves (and discover those blind spots) in manifold new and
interesting ways…
The third point is that this casting included a deaf actor as Cornwall, Regan's husband. This necessitated including an American Sign Language translator on stage. In a play that includes blindness - it was interesting to have that blindness instigated by a deaf man - one who was deaf to the true nature of his wife.
Finally, to return to the beginning, I think that portraying our blind (and deaf) spots; whether we are Lear and don't realize how pompous and vain we are, or Edmund and don't realize how our sense of being uncared for has made us uncaring, or Edgar and we don't realize how our fear of doing the wrong thing keeps us from doing the right thing - are difficult to portray. We are beings with an unconscious for a reason - we need to not know. To ask three different actors to portray to the audience who they are without somehow knowing themselves and to do this simultaneously and in different ways, may simply be asking too much. And, since each of these characters springs from the mind of one man (or perhaps a small group of men with a lead author), that these aspects of known and unknown should reside simultaneously in the mind of that one man and interact with each other on the stage (or not - Edmund and Lear never actually communicate directly with each other) becomes a representation of just how complicated it is to be human - to try to transcend that which we are and, in the process, to discover that who we are limits our very ability to do that thing that we would most desire being able to do - to become something greater - something or someone that is not bound by our own nature and by nature itself - and to fail at that in not just one arena but several simultaneously - perhaps that is just too much for us to take in at one moment.
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