The Arden

Walterdale’s board meets to deliberate on the season in a week’s time. I’ve been reading up a bit, so as to give myself some sharp (but by no means definitive) ideas about Lear, in case they ask me questions like “What will your Lear be like?” I find the best place to start when I’m getting acquainted with Shakespeare plays to be the introductions to the Arden editions. The Ardens are so thoroughly researched, it makes my head spin. In the past, Arden introductions used to talk about the plays in exclusively theoretical terms, as if they were poems or novels, not living, performable scripts. That’s changed a little bit with the Third Edition Ardens, but they’re still pretty print-focused.

However, that’s a good thing in my case, because I don’t really want to start out by reading all about other people’s productions of the play. It’s not that I object to borrowing clever tricks and tactics from other people’s shows—great artists steal and all that—I just don’t want my first impressions of the play to come from other people’s productions. And so, I’ve chosen a text which sees the play in abstract terms, focusing not upon the question of “how,” but more upon “what” and “why.”