- Ugly Sisters in King Lear - - PowerPoint Presentation

Slide1

-

Ugly Sisters in

King Lear -

or

-

Avoiding Love - or -

Devastating Masculinity - or -

The End of

Civilisation

(In which the King orders the division of the kingdom ‘that future strife may be prevented now’ and William Shakespeare foresees nuclear winter)

Slide2

‘[from] the discrepancy of degrees …

proceedeth

order: which in things as well natural as supernatural hath ever had such a pre-eminence, that thereby the incomprehensible majesty of God, as it were by a bright light of a torch or candle, is declared to the blind inhabitants of this world. Moreover take away order from all things, what should then remain? Certainly, nothing finally except … chaos’ (Thomas Elyot,

The

Boke

Named the Governor,

1530

).

‘Take but degree away,

untune

that string

A

nd hark what discord follows. Each thing meets

In mere

oppugnancy

’ (Ulysses,

Troilus and Cressida

1.3.109-111)

Slide3

King Lear

, RSC 1976 directed by Trevor Nunn (Donald

Sinden

: Lear; Judi Dench: Regan

‘tis now our fast intent / To shake all cares and business from our age / Conferring them on younger strengths while we / Unburdened crawl toward death’; ‘now

we will

divest

us both of rule/ Interest of territory, cares of state’ (1.1.49-50)

Slide4

King Lear

, RSC 1982, directed by Adrian Noble (Lear: Michael

Gambon

;

Gonerial

: Sara

Kestelman

; Regan: Jenny

Agutter

;

Cordelia

: Alice

Krige

; Pete

Postelethwaite

: Cornwall; David Bradley, Albany)

Slide5

King Lear

, National Theatre, 1990 directed by Deborah Warner (Lear: Brian Cox; Fool: David Bradley; Cordelia: Eve Matheson)

Slide6

King Lear

RSC 1993, directed by Adrian Noble (Lear: Robert Stephens,

Kent:David

Calder)

Slide7

Lear and Fool: NT 1990 (David Bradley, Brian Cox

‘now we will divest us both of rule/ Interest of territory, cares of state’ (1.1.49-50)

Slide8

Lear and Fool, RSC 1982, 1.4

(Antony Sher, Michael Gambon)

Lear:

Dost

thou call me fool, boy?

Fool: All thy other titles thou hast given away; that thou

wast

born with. (1.4.141-2)

Slide9

Lear and Fool, RSC

1982, Antony

Sher, Michael

Gambon

Fool: If thou wert my fool, uncle, I’d have thee beaten for being old before thy time.

Lear: How’s that? Fool: Thou

shouldst

not have been old till thou

hadst

been wise.

Lear: O let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heave. I would not be mad (1.5.38-44).

Slide10

‘Then let them

anatomise

Regan; see what breeds about her heart’ (3.6.70-71). RSC 1993. (Edgar: Simon Russell Beale; Lear: Robert Stephens; Kent/Caius: David Calder; Fool: Ian Hughes)

Slide11

‘Arraign her first; tis

Goneril

. I here take my oath before this

honourable

assembly, she kicked the poor king her father’ (3.6.43-4). RSC 1982 (Lear: Michael

Gambon

; Fool: Antony

Sher

; Edgar: Jonathan Hyde.

Slide12

Lear (Brian Cox) and soldiers on Dover Beach. NT 1990.

Slide13

‘Dost thou

squiny

at me? No, do thy worst, blind Cupid. I’ll not love’ (4.6.134). RSC, 2010, directed by David Farr. (Lear: Greg Hicks; Gloucester: Geoffrey Freshwater)

Slide14

Tell me, my daughters …

…

we

Have no such daughter, nor shall ever seeThat face of hers again.

Go you and

tell my daughter I would speak with her.

How now, daughter? What makes that frontlet on?

Methinks you are too much of late

i

’

th

’ frown.

Are you our daughter? …

Your name, fair gentlewoman.

Yet have I left a daughter …

Dost

thou understand me, man?

The King would speak with Cornwall. The dear father

Would with his daughter speak, commands, tends service.

Ask her forgiveness?

“Dear daughter, I confess that I am old.

Age is unnecessary. On my knees I beg

That you’ll vouchsafe me raiment, bed, and food”.

I

prithee, daughter, do not make me mad.

.

Do not laugh at me,

For, as I am a man, I think this lady

To be my child Cordelia.

Slide15

Goneril

and

ReganTalawa

2016

Rakie

Ayola

, Debbie

Korley

Goneril

and Regan, National Theatre 2014, Kate Fleetwood

Anna Maxwell Martin

Slide16

‘One side will mock the

another.The

other too’ (3.7.72). RSC 1976. (Gloucester: Tony Church; Regan Judi Dench).

Slide17

Blinding of Gloucester, RSC 1982 directed by Adrian Noble. (Gloucester: David Waller; Regan: Jenny

Agutter

; Cornwall: Pete

Postlethwaite

).

Blinding of Gloucester, National

Theatre, 1990 directed by Deborah Warner

Slide18

Blind Gloucester (David Waller) and Edgar (Jonathan Hyde), RSC 1982 directed by Adrian Noble.

Slide19

Prospect Theatre, 1978

Slide20

‘Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones’ (5.3.256). RSC 1992. Lear (Robert Stephens);

Cordelia

(Abigail

McKern

); Soldier (Peter

Bygott

)

Slide21

‘

A plague upon you, murderers, traitors all!

I might have saved her; now she’s gone for ever!

Cordelia.

Cordelia

! Stay a little. Ha! Her voice was ever soft

Gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman’ (5.3.268-272).

RSC 1990 directed by Nicholas

Hytner

. (Lear: John Wood; Cordelia Alex Kingston; Kent: David Troughton)

.

Slide22

Pray you undo this button. Thank you sir.

Do you see this? Look on her: look, her lips,

Look there, look there!

RSC 1976 directed by Trevor Nunn (Lear: Donald

Sinden

), Cordelia: Cherie

Lunghi

; Kent: Bob Peck)

Slide23

‘I am a man

More sinned against than sinning’ (Lear, 3.2.59-60).

‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods,

They kill us for their sport’ (Gloucester, 4.1.37-38)

Two men, two fathers, two households, two faults, two journeys …

The abuse of power, of language, of family, of children

Trip switches: slow burn vs. touch paper

Lear: ‘Thy truth then be thy dower…’

Gloucester: ‘The whoreson must be acknowledged.’

Slide24

Lay

him to rest, the royal Lear with whom generations of star actors have made us reverently familiar; the majestic ancient, wronged and maddened by his vicious daughters; the felled giant, beside whose bulk the other characters crouch like pygmies. Lay also to rest the archaic notion that Lear is automatically entitled to our sympathy because he is a king who suffers

.

A great

director

(Peter Brook) has scanned the text with fresh eyes and discovered a new protagonist – not the booming, righteously indignant Titan or old, but an edgy, capricious old man, intensely difficult to live with. In short, he has dared to direct King Lear from a standpoint of moral neutrality.

The

results are revolutionary. Instead of assuming that Lear is right, and therefore pitiable, we are forced to make judgments – to decide between his claims and those of his kin. And the balance, in this uniquely magnanimous production, is almost even. Though he disposes of his kingdom, Lear insists on retaining authority; he wants to exercise power without responsibility, without fulfilling his part of the feudal contract. He is

wilfully

arrogant, and deserves much of what he

gets.

… a

beloved character

[is] seen

from a strange and unlovely angle …

Gloucester, so

often Lear's understudy and rival moaner, has taken on a separate identity: a shifty old rake and something of a trimmer, capable of switching his allegiance from Lear to Cornwall and back

again .. Conversely, the daughters are not fiends (Kenneth

Tynan

,

The Observer,

11 November 1962).

Slide25

Lear: So young and so

untender

?

Cordelia

: So young, my lord, and true.Lear: Well, let it be so. Thy truth then be thy dower, For by the sacred radiance of the sun,

The mysteries of Hecate and the night,

By all the operation of the orbs

From whom we do exist and cease to be,

Here I disclaim all my paternal care,

Propinquity and property of blood,

And as a stranger to my heart and me

Hold thee from this for ever. The barbarous Scythian

Or he that makes his generation messes

To gorge his appetite shall to my bosom

Be as well

neighboured

, pitied and relieved,

As thou my sometime daughter…

I loved her most, and thought to set my rest

On her kind nursery. Hence and avoid my sight.

So be my grave my peace, as here I give

Her father’s heart from her (1.1.107-127).

[Lear: Nothing will come of nothing speak again.

Cordelia

: Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave

My heart into my mouth (1.1.90-92).]

Slide26

OED

DEMONSTRATE

: [stem of

demonstrare

to point out, show, prove; monstrare to show, point out.

1. To point out, indicate; to exhibit,

s

et forth. [Shakespeare

Henry V: ‘

Description cannot suit itself in words, / To demonstrate the life of such a battle’.]

2. To make known or exhibit by outward indications; to manifest, show, display. [Shakespeare,

As You Like It

: ‘Everything about you demonstrating

careless desolation’.]

4. To show or make evident by reasoning; to establish the truth of (a proposition, etc.) by a process of argument or deduction; to prove beyond the possibility of doubt. [Shakespeare,

Othello

:

‘This may help to thicken other proofs / That do demonstrate thinly’.]

OED

DEMONSTRATION

: 2. A display, show, manifestation, exhibition, expression. 3b. That which serves as proof or evidence; an indubitable proof.

OED

MONSTER:

from OF

monstre

, ad. L

monstrum, monster, something marvellous; originally a divine portent or warning, f. root of monere, to warn.

Slide27

Fathers who make their children monsters …

Cordelia

as ‘ugly sister’

‘This is most strange, / That she … should / Commit

a thing so monstrous, to dismantle / So many folds of favour

’ (1.1.217)

‘Sure her offence / Must be of such unnatural degree / That monsters it’ (1.1.219).

‘O villain, villain … Abhorred villain! Unnatural, detested, brutish villain – worse than brutish … He cannot be such a monster’ (1.2.74)

‘To

take’t

again perforce -- monster ingratitude!’ (1.5.39)

‘If she [Regan] live long / And in the end meet the old course of death, / Women will all turn monsters’ (3.7.102).

‘Tigers, not daughters, what have you performed? / A father … / Most barbarous, most degenerate, you have

madded

…/ If that the heavens do not their visible spirits / Send quickly down to tame these vile offences: / It will come: Humanity must perforce prey on itself, / Like monsters of the deep’ (4.2.41).

‘Proper deformity shows not in the fiend / So horrid as in woman…for shame / Be-monster not thy feature’ (4.2.60)

Slide28

A-voiding love

Devastating masculinity: ‘Speak’

Grotesque inversions: men who cannot see, cannot hear…

Losing language / Evacuating cultural space of male utterance

-- Kent: speech defused; borrowed accents; acoustic disguise

-- Edgar: multiple transformations, from Bedlam Beggar to West country ‘churl’

-- Lear: from commanding ‘Speak’ to learning to curse; becoming ‘woman’ : ‘how this mother swells up toward my heart!

Hysterica

passio

, down, thou climbing sorrow’, 2.2.245);

‘Deny to speak with me

?’ (2.2.277);

‘I will have such revenges on you both That all the world shall – I will do such things – What they are yet I know not but they shall be

The terrors of the earth!’ (2.2.468);

‘Howl, howl, howl, howl’.

Slide29

Do you see this? Look on her: look, her lips,

Look there, look there!

Slide30

Yet better thus, and known to be contemned

Than still contemned and flattered. To be worst,

The lowest and most dejected thing of fortune,

Stands still in

esperance, lives not in fear.The lamentable change is from the best,

The worst returns to laughter. Welcome, then,

Thou unsubstantial air that I embrace;

The wretch that thou hast blown unto the worst

Owes nothing to thy blasts.

But who comes here? My father, poorly led?

World, world, O, world!

But that thy strange mutations make us hate thee,

Life would not yield to age

…

O gods! Who

is’t

can say “I am at the worst”?

I am worse than

e’er

I was.

And worse I may be yet; the worst is not

So long as we can say “This is the worst”

(Edgar, 4.1.1-13, 27-30).

Slide31

‘Thy life’s a miracle…Therefore thou happy father,

Think that the clearest gods, who make them

honours

Of men’s impossibilities have preserved thee. … Bear free and patient

thoughts’ (Edgar, 4.6.55…72-74, 80).

[What are you?] ‘A most poor man, made tame to fortune’s blows,

Who by the art of known and feeling sorrows,

Am pregnant to good pity’ (Edgar, 4.6.216-218).

‘Men must endure

Their going hence even as their coming hither.

Ripeness is all. Come on’ (Edgar, 5.2.9-11).

‘The oldest hath borne most;

we that are young

Shall never see so much nor live so long’ (Edgar, 5.3.324).