Shakespeare Lecture Notes ⅗

How’s everyone dealing with the lack of heat/power outage?

King Lear
- Been called the play that is unplayable - can only live in the mind
- Very problematical text
- Folio and Quarto versions have about 400 line difference - huge!
Act 5 Scene 3: one of the saddest things in literature, some of the most pathetic last lines
- Quarto Line 301: Very sad
- Folio Line 281: Scene has been cut
- Profound change: bleakest line in English literature
- DId he die in an illusion? Did he see her ghost?
Folio: Edgar says the lines on who will inherit the kingdom
Quarto version (History of King Lear)
- Likely based on Shakespeare’s manuscript 1604/05
Folio from prompt book which would reflect from the performing years of the play
- Performance changed the play
Which do you read?
- In graduate school, both, and note the changes
- Here, we read the conflated text
- Combines the two and picks out best lines from each while eliminating weaker
People have not known what to do with King Lear
- Difficult to perform but also difficult to endure
- One of the bleakest visions of human experience that we have
- Forced through a sadistic experience aimed at the audience
- “Glaring absurdity”
- The only reason we watch it is because the characters are titanic (huge)
- Called ‘essentially impossible to be performed on stage’
Completely surprises his audience
- King Lier, and other stories published at that time have a happy ending with him as king
- Blindsided the audience that was expecting a happy ending
- Cordelia won and saved Lear, then she ruled as queen
- Shakespeare has Lear come in with a dead Cordelia
Rewritten in the 17th century by Tate who civilized it
- “Civilized it” genius but didn’t frame his plays in ways that suited a cultivated audience
- More of a relationship with Cordelia and Edgar which made it a gamos at the end
- Onstage blinding: how do we feel about that guys?
- Would have done this very realistically
- Calf eyes from a slaughterhouse and lots of fake blood
 - Shakespeare’s forcing the audience to SEE the horrible things that happened offstage in
other plays
A play that is hard to hold
- Shakespeare using fairytale motifs (lots in his later writing)
- This is the play that has three daughters and two are evil
- A Cinderella narrative
- No wicked stepmother
- Love tests
- Trials of human experience
- As soon as we go down to the human unconscious, eye gouging happens
- Fairy tale gets us to that place right away
- Whole of human activity is performance
- “Off off ye lendings”
- Taking off his costume - taking off his humanity
- “Peculiar things that work through you”
- Everything is fine until Cordelia screws up and doesn’t say the lines that she should’ve
- As soon as that happens, the show that King Lear is directing/writing/producing is ruined
- This ruins the show of the chain of being
- This play shows the chain of being as an elaborate construction
- Sacreligious play in its own time that draws into question this existence
- Carefully placed in pre-Christian Britain
- These people overtly don’t believe in Christianity
- In 1605, some of these things are close to blasphemy
- Very dangerous, especially if taken literally
- The metatheatricality is something that we can follow easily in 2018
Act 1 Scene 1
- Great big trumpet: people are here to pay attention to King Lear
- Everyone knows that this is a performance
- They know that nothing real is supposed to be happening here
- King has already divided his kingdom between three sisters - done deal
- It’s over right?
- This is a ceremony: it has to work right to be performative
- Performative in the linguistic sense: performative language makes something
happen, usually language doesn’t
- Right now, Joe is not changing anything by speaking
- Traditional example of performative language is marriage
- Made something occur that didn’t exist before
- Performance that you and I know that supposedly separates Britain into three
parts
- Look at the language
Line 61:
- He’s claiming absolute power over space and time forever
- Who can do that? A King is a representative of god, but isn’t that taking it a little far?
 - Perpetual? Mankind has no power over the perpetual
- Spatial? It tends to not be eternal, but very very temporary and really arbitrary
- Bronxville didn’t exist 100 years ago, but those rocks did
- A kind of convention where we think things are changing but they aren’t
Line 39: (?)
- Written up a speech and memorized it
- Uses all sorts of abstractions which are lies that we’re fine with because we know it
- Abstractions are used by actors
- The court politely applauding - this is clever and fits
- Cordelia is breaking the rules - either an idiot or purposefully doing it - why?
- Who is in control here? Looking for control or else it’s scary and near chaos
- She’s become Desdemona - same speech
- That’s right, but it’s the wrong speech
- She’s aiming this speech at her sisters: calling them frauds
- This is the plot
- In this fairy tale, the youngest sister fights the wicked older sisters
- Language doesn’t serve any purpose but ornament
- Turns it into something dangerous
- Towards an end we don’t know
- If Cordelia is the one that speaks to the audience and she says nothing, maybe that’s
why this play ends with nothing
- That final scene is a reproduction of the first scene
- Same characters
- Matches structurally
- It all come to nothing
- Nothing is pronounced “noting” and the audience is the one seeing this
- Nothing as slang for female genitalia
- Why are women disappeared or turned into weird functions for chaos?
Gloucester
- He too has a world that breaks down around him
Lear
- The opposite of what happened in the Henry IV & Henry V plays
- Watched a human being struggled through his humanity and move towards hypostasis
- Becoming an idea
- After Kate marries Hal she will disappear; a womb
- Lear begins in hypostasis and breaks down from there
- Shakespeare is taking a very frank look at that convention
Great villain in this play
- Edmund - vice character
- They all talk to us; confidants
- He tells us from the word go, who and what he is
Line 11:
- These men are making jokes about his mom and her vagina
 - Vaginas were called “faults” as they were fissures
- Edmund was probably a bit pissed off
- He’s a good boy
Act 1 Scene 2: after great scene of ceremony, we have Edmund come out and talk
- Worships nature as his goddess
- Nature is unkind to the old - kills them off
- The reason this doesn’t happen is because of custom and of law
- Greek had two words for this:
- Nomos - done that way in the household because it’s always been done that way
- Oikos - home in its biggest sense
- Logos - laws that people agree on that are written down in language
- Province of the “polis” - the city
- If you break these laws, human beings become like beasts
- See Worcester as nomos and Lear as logos
- Actor in chaos - not on stage, because that’s where order happens
Act 2 Scene 4 Line 278:
- Specific stage direction summoning a storm
Act 3 Scene 4: Storm still (all through this scene/act)
- How were storms achieved in the globe?
- Loud rolling balls or sheets of metal
- Shakespeare is telling us that the actors have to speak over the storm and their
communication is going to be challenged by the storm
- The audience may not even be able to hear the actors
- Oral interference
- Shakespeare is getting at the very nature of the experience of theatre itself
- Chaos - the thing that can happen and is happening onstage
- No matter how they fight, they are never going to be heard perfectly
Getting at why it’s so hard to perform
- If it’s difficult to understand them, then it’s hard to listen
- Go into a space where nothing has meaning
- Still symbolic acts with meaning because human beings, regardless of where they are,
want meaning
- What if this idea of a symbolic act goes nowhere?
- Imitation of an imitation of an imitation
- If meaning cannot be found in the heath, then what methods do we take to find it?
- How do we find meaning through the storm?