Abstract
About King Lear there is no historical unanimity. Shakespeare’s original, in whole and in perhaps every detail, is greater than Nahum Tate’s adaptation, yet against the unanimity of this modern verdict for Shakespeare must be set 150 years of seeming unanimity against him. Tolstoy preferred King Leir. Complicating this dissension over the relative merits of three versions of the myth is the fact that Shakespeare’s play itself exists in two versions, the Quarto and Folio, between them containing about 400 lines included in one text but not the other, plus variants great and small in what seems every line, often conspiring to agree only on what is to us inexplicable. To this confusion has been added a third, conglomerate text, the object of all modern criticism, but boasting no authority greater than Theobald and the timorous inertia of his descendants. But even those who agree on the text and greatness of Shakespeare’s play agree on little else. There is no unanimity about the effect ofthis play or its parts, and, if you deny even the existence of a particular effect, you will hardly be persuaded by an analysis of its causes.
The dramatist through working in the theatre gradually learns not merely to take account of the presence of his collaborators, but to derive advantage from them; and he learns, above all, to organize the play in such a way that its strength lies not in appearances beyond his control, but in the succession of events and in the unfolding of an idea, in narration.… The theatre is unfolding action and in the disposition of events the authors may exercise a governance so complete that the distortions effected by the physical appearance of actors, by the fancies of scene painters and the misunderstandings of directors, fall into relative insignificance. It is just because the theatre is an art of many collaborators, with the constant danger of grave misinterpretation, that the dramatist learns to turn his attention to the laws of narrative.
Thornton Wilder1
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Notes
Thornton Wilder, ‘Some Thoughts on Playwriting’, in The Intent of the Artist, ed. Augusto Centeno (1941) pp. 85–6.
For recent challenges to the conflated text see Michael J. Warren, ‘Quarto and Folio King Lear and the Interpretation of Albany and Edgar’, in Shakespeare, Pattern of Excelling Nature, ed. David Bevington and Jay L. Halio (1978) pp. 95–107; Steven Urkowitz, Shakespeare’s Revision of ‘King Lear’ (1980); P. W. K. Stone, The Textual History of ‘King Lear’ (1980); Gary Taylor, ‘The War in King Lear’, Shakespeare Survey, 33 (1980) 27–34; Peter W. M. Blayney, The Texts of ‘King Lear’ and Their Origins, I (1982); and The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare’s Two Versions of ’King Lear’, ed. Gary Taylor and Michael Warren (1983). In what follows I generally quote (in modernized spelling) the Folio text, as representing Shakespeare’s final version; however, relevant differences in the Quarto are discussed, either in the text or notes. (At the time this chapter was drafted, only the first of the above works was in print, and I was chiefly indebted to Peter Blayney for my awareness of the textual and bibliographical arguments for the distinctiveness of the two versions. The critical arguments in this chapter are, however, entirely my own.)
E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols (1923) u, 309. Though no one seems to have suggested this, the passage makes clearer sense if repunctuated: ‘what a world are dead, / Which he revivd, to be revived soe / No more: Young Hamlett …’.
Thomas Davies, Dramatic Miscellanies (1783–4) II, 280; Joseph Pittard [=John Shebbeare?], Observations on Mr Garrick’s Acting: in a Letter to the Right Hon. the Earl of Chesterfield (1758) p. 7.
Randall McLeod, in an essay in The Division of the Kingdoms (‘Gon. No more, the text is foolish.’), argues that the Folio presents a consistently more sympathetic picture of Goneril; in particular, he feels that the Folio cuts in I.iii remove lines of ‘shrillness’ and ‘hypocrisy’, so that in the Folio Goneril’s actions are more ‘measured’ and sympathetic. The Folio cuts Goneril’s Not to be overruled. Idle old man, That still would manage those authorities That he hath given away! Now, by my life, Old fools are babes again, and must be used With checks as flatteries, when they are seen abused. These lines probably would alienate an audience, in a scene where Goneril makes an otherwise convincing complaint, and her strongest bid for our sympathy. But in the long run the cut does Goneril little good, because as a consequence the Folio puts a much stronger emphasis on the line just before the cut: ‘Let him to my sister, / Whose mind and mine, I know, in that are one’ — so that the impotence of Lear’s later threats is the more likely to be noticed. Also, the Folio’s omission of the description of Lear as clinging to the authority he had given away is crucial to our interpretation of the following scene (as indicated by the frequency with which critics quote or allude to it). If the line is kept, it strongly disposes us to criticize Lear’s commands there, which we might otherwise be inclined to regard less ironically. After all, unless we are specifically told that Lear’s conduct disregards his abdication, we have no reason to see anything unnatural in a father and ex-king still wielding considerable domestic authority. The Folio alterations to I.iii thus seem to me to help Goneril here, but to hurt her later. More generally, though I accept McLeod’s contention that many of the variants (particularly in Il.iv and after) do cohere in shifting our perception of Goneril, McLeod seems to me seriously to overestimate the structural significance of some such variants, in contributing to an audience’s total image of Goneril’s behaviour. This caveat applies especially to his analysis of Act I, which depends heavily upon changes to single words (hit/sit, not, then/thou, graced/great). Though he is right in claiming that the apparent patterning in such textual variants argues for their authenticity, it by no means follows that a handful of variants always radically transforms the larger structures common to both texts.
S. L. Goldberg, in An Essay on King Lear (1968) p. 23, says that we first begin to feel for Lear and to judge Cordelia at ‘But goes thy heart with this?’; H. A. Mason, in Shakespeare’s Tragedies of Love (1970) p. 174, makes a similar claim for ‘I loved her most, and thought to set my rest / On her kind nursery’.
Nahum Tate, The History of King Lear, ed. James Black, Regents Restoration Drama Series (1975).
Michael Long has also noted, for different reasons, the prosperity of Kent and Cordelia at the end of this scene — The Unnatural Scene: A Study in Shakespearean Tragedy (1976) p. l 67.
A. L. Soens, ‘Cudgels and Rapiers: The Staging of the Edgar-Oswald Fight in Lear’, Shakespeare Studies, 5 (1969) 149–58.
Alexander Schmidt, Shakespeare Lexicon, rev. edn (1886), Go (1) and (2). Other dictionaries and glossaries add nothing to Schmidt’s account.
John Kerrigan discusses the effect of the Folio omissions and alterations in this passage in ‘Revision, Adaptation, and The Fool in King Lear’, in The Division of the Kingdoms.
Emrys Jones, in Scenic Form, p. 167, compares this with a scene in 2 Henry VI, when the Duke of Gloucester exits without warning or explanation, and upon returning excuses himself by saying, Now, lords, my choler being overblown With walking once about the quadrangle, I come to talk ofcommonwealth affairs. (I.iii.150–2) Jones comments that ‘The sudden exit and re-entry are visible signs of lack of self-control. [King Lear] contains exactly the same stage effect: Lear exits (I.iv.289) and abruptly re-enters, so making a similar impression of uncontrollable passion.’ But, though the comparison is typically stimulating, it seems to me that the two scenes create very different stage effects. Gloucester’s exit at first seems unmotivated; his subsequent explanation retrospectively motivates it. Both moments seem, as a consequence, contrived. Moreover, Gloucester’s exit, and especially his re-entry, testify to a controlled passion. Lear by contrast leaves the stage not primarily in order to calm himself, but to go to Regan’s: Shakespeare carefully prepares an external as well as ‘psychological’ motive for the exit, so that it produces an effective ‘moment’ in itself, and then implicitly motivates the re-entry, at once, with the news ‘What, fifty of my followers at a clap?’ — thereby creating another effective ‘moment’, which like the first does indeed suggest ‘uncontrollable passion’.
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© 1985 Gary Taylor
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Taylor, G. (1985). Revolutions of Perspective: King Lear. In: Moment by Moment by Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07544-7_5
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