King Lear

The political dimensions of King Lear are most clearly evidenced in the king’s interaction with the mad beggar. Edgar, the abused son, and Poor Tom, the forgotten citizen of Lear’s England, embody both familial and national neglect. Edgar’s disguise as Bedlam beggar is also crucial to Lear’s spiritual journey. In Noble’s second production of the play for the RSC in 1993:

[Lear’s] growing obsession with this emblem of “unaccommodated man” causes the displacement of the Fool … was brilliantly visualized in the image of Ian Hughes clinging forlornly to Poor Tom’s hand at the end of a human chain that Gloucester led across the stage.⁴³

Visually Edgar has variously appeared as a Caliban-type figure, the poor bare-forked animal spouting obscenities but in need of the world’s pity, as Christ-like with a crown of thorns, bloodied and suffering for the world’s sins, or alternatively as demonic, as in the RSC’s 1982 production when “Jonathan Hyde’s Edgar as a virtually naked Poor Tom [burst] through the splintering floor like some infernal demon born on to Lear’s ‘great stage of fools’.”⁴⁴ “It was the modern equivalent of the entrance of a devil from the pit of Hell, and Tom’s demonic side, which actors so often miss as they go for shivering pathos, was established at once.”⁴⁵

Thrown to the wilderness by his family, Edgar evolves from “worm” to potential king. His suffering appears as a barbaric initiation rite designed by the toughest of gods. It is a trial of cruelty fitting for the evil world that is unleashed in the play.

The Absence of Humanity

King Lear is a play rich with vicious bestial images, all symbolic of the barbaric capabilities of man and woman. Goneril, for instance, is described as having a “wolfish visage.” Edward Topsell’s Historie of Foure-footed Beastes (1607) mixed scientific fact, folklore, and classical allusions to animals and mythological creatures, giving them often exotic and fantastic attributes. It describes the customary attributes associated with the wolf in animal lore: treachery, deceit, hypocrisy, ravenousness, and cruelty. These associations gave Shakespeare’s audience an accurate idea of Goneril’s character and her subsequent behavior. However, for modern directors, “Another interpretative decision that must be faced … is whether to accept the moral polarity of Lear’s daughters as a fact of the story or to suggest more naturalistic reasons for their behavior.”⁴⁶

In recent years patriarchal repression and child abuse of one form or another have often been regarded as the defining reasons for evil in children. Lear has accordingly been portrayed as physically and mentally abusive or neglectful, demanding, cantankerous, a bully who has created so much pent-up anger in his two elder daughters that it erupts when they are given the opportunity to release their feelings without recrimination; that is to say, when they are in power.

In the influential 1962 production, Peter Brook portrayed Lear’s knights as rowdy and destructive, while Irene Worth’s Goneril was self-contained and cool, remonstrating with Lear in measured tones, speaking as somebody with cause to complain. Some critics thought such a treatment a distortion of the text, but most modern directors have followed this interpretation to some degree. Though it helps to humanize Goneril, it does make the descent into evil very difficult to portray.

Janet Dale, who played the part in 1993, admitted that “I am trying to play her with a conscience, but I suspect the lines won’t support it.” Rather than an outright evil woman, she wished to portray her as a woman “of moral degeneration.”⁴⁷

By focusing on the psychology of these extremely dysfunctional families, the violence in Nicholas Hytner’s 1990 production became rooted in explainable terms:

The production is about confused people destroyed by their incomprehensible emotions or, as with Wood’s massively erratic Lear, struggling through new ones.… The effects of long abuse are evident in his daughters. Alex Kingston’s Cordelia has become rebellious, bloody-minded and rejects Lear almost more than he does her. Estelle Kohler’s Goneril and Sally Dexter’s Regan, seem still to want the love of this old, impossible man.… It is fashionable nowadays to allow us to see the “bad” daughters’ point of view, but rarely as strongly as here. Both of them seem badly in need of Valium, psychoanalysis, or both. They are frustrated, exhausted, at the end of a tether which finally breaks, liberating all that suppressed anger and barely contained madness. Their evils proliferate, but they, like Goneril and Regan themselves, are ultimately Lear’s fault.⁴⁸