King Lear

Nunn: Shakespeare says that King Lear is the king of Ancient Britain. On the other hand, Shakespeare includes scenes involving dueling with swords, there are references to a graced palace, to women wearing gorgeous clothes that scarcely keep them warm, and Gloucester refers to wearing spectacles. Shakespeare is making clear that he doesn’t mind breaking the rules as far as historical accuracy goes. It’s very likely that King Lear was performed at the Globe, or indeed at court performances, with the actors wearing a mixture of contemporary Elizabethan/Jacobean clothing, with some additional elements of cloak and robe that would indicate an earlier period.

I think Shakespeare was interested in the idea that a history play should apply acutely and precisely to the age that the audience lives in, so he was keen to have it both ways. I’ve seen Stonehenge-based productions of King Lear, and frankly it does seem very odd that Lear should make such a fuss about being out on a heath in a storm when his normal domestic condition appears to be open to the elements.

Shakespeare is presenting the huge contrast between a man who has been encouraged to believe that he is the closest thing to a god in human terms, and the man who comes to perceive he is like a beggar “no more but this.” Lear is a conduit of the gods and he’s in totally autocratic authority. His smallest whisper is converted into law, and nobody, such as Kent, can question him. So, in this production, I have elected to set the play in a seemingly nineteenth-century environment with resonances of the tsarist order in Russia and/or the Austrian autocracy of Franz Joseph. The intention is to stress that Lear’s power is total and dictatorial like a tsar or an emperor, in all matters, political and social, and that it derives from god with whom he communicates. This, I think, allows us to encompass the requirements of the social structure of the play and, what’s more, the anachronisms make complete sense. Lear’s journey takes him from that autocratic power to somebody who, in the storm, asks himself for the first time, “How do wretches survive in conditions like these, if they cannot keep warm because they have no proper clothing?” And then, wanting to embrace that houseless situation, he meets Tom o’Bedlam (who happens to be a man going through the same crisis, another man who’s been used to comfort and is now, in order to survive, turning himself into a crazed beggar), and as he studies the beggar’s naked exposure, Lear urgently wants to place himself in that condition, so he can experience being the “forked animal” for himself.

Shakespeare had long been fascinated with the philosophical idea that a king can journey through the guts of a beggar. He has used the notion of king to beggar on a number of previous occasions, but in Lear he takes it to the extreme. I think Richard II is almost a sketch for King Lear; here we have a godlike king who in the end is sobbing, “I need friends and since I am ordinary like you—how can you say I am a king?” Shakespeare takes that king to a small prison cell, and then, alone and the lord of nothing, he grants him extraordinary self-knowledge. But in King Lear, the journey of the king is to a yet more extreme destination.

Why did your Lear react so extremely to Cordelia’s refusal to play the game of quantifying her love in words (or perhaps of quantifying her love all too literally—if I marry, my father will have 50 percent of my love and my husband the other 50 percent)?

Noble: In a way you have to go back a step from that to ask yourself why Lear loves Cordelia so much more than the other two girls. There are dozens of reasons why, and I think most families could find their own reason why one child is, or appears to be, more beloved than the other. If the character in question is an obsessive like Lear then it starts getting potentially dangerous. His little girl has grown up and defies him, and he can’t deal with that at all. He can’t deal with retiring, he can’t deal with getting old, he can’t deal with not being in control anymore. And as a consequence of all these things poor Cordelia gets it in the neck. And he regrets it almost immediately. Within a day he regrets it—probably within hours.