King Lear

Noble: I think the director is free to do what he wants to do, but he must also be answerable for what he does. I’ve never been very interested in the textual variations. What I did, particularly in the first production, was skin the last three hundred or four hundred lines—I was absolutely brutal with the cuts there. And the impact of it was that, at the very moment of repentance, it was too late. There was no time to save Lear and Cordelia’s lives, because the people on stage had been chatting, talking all the time. That was all very much to do with the fact that it was a godless universe. The truth is on both occasions I created a world that seemed to me to be logical from all the different versions. I would then be responsible for that and I would stand by that.

Nunn: I don’t think that in 1968 when I first directed the play anybody was yet saying, “The Quarto and the Folio are two quite different plays.” I remember at the time consulting John Barton and arriving at a “best of both worlds” conflated text. That text became the basis of the text I used in 1976 with Donald Sinden, but then when I started out this time with Ian McKellen I did read a number of scholars who were telling me that I should be making a choice between Quarto and Folio. Alas, I found myself unwilling to lose rich and evocative material from either version, and so I worked with a slightly different conflation, but a conflation nonetheless. For me, the more important change since I first directed the play is not in scholarship, but in the simple fact that I am thirty years older now. Shakespeare’s engagement with ultimate questions about mortality, what we construct for ourselves to explain or to accept our mortality, of course speaks more potently to me now. The play, as I have said, is very hard on organized human society and institutions of every kind. There is very little Lear and Gloucester have left to believe in, before they must endure their going hence. Edgar is left to conclude the play, and I think deliberately, it is a conclusion of a man who has nothing really to say. He offers no positive, no beliefs, no journey to a better future. He is by then almost the only character left standing, and in the bleakest of all Shakespeare’s endings, he seems to know that all we can determine on is to “endure.”

SHAKESPEARE’S CAREER

IN THE THEATER

BEGINNINGS

William Shakespeare was an extraordinarily intelligent man who was born and died in an ordinary market town in the English Midlands. He lived an uneventful life in an eventful age. Born in April 1564, he was the eldest son of John Shakespeare, a glove maker who was prominent on the town council until he fell into financial difficulties. Young William was educated at the local grammar in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, where he gained a thorough grounding in the Latin language, the art of rhetoric, and classical poetry. He married Ann Hathaway and had three children (Susanna, then the twins Hamnet and Judith) before his twenty-first birthday: an exceptionally young age for the period. We do not know how he supported his family in the mid-1580s.

Like many clever country boys, he moved to the city in order to make his way in the world. Like many creative people, he found a career in the entertainment business. Public playhouses and professional full-time acting companies reliant on the market for their income were born in Shakespeare’s childhood. When he arrived in London as a man, sometime in the late 1580s, a new phenomenon was in the making: the actor who is so successful that he becomes a “star.” The word did not exist in its modern sense, but the pattern is recognizable: audiences went to the theater not so much to see a particular show as to witness the comedian Richard Tarlton or the dramatic actor Edward Alleyn.