What About Lear?

NOTE: Because I know that some of the actors who read this site may eventually audition for my Lear, I want to point out that all of my speculations about characters are arbitrary and unfixed. I’m not making hard and fast choices about my production, and I certainly don’t want to take actorial choices out of your hands. I’d rather be proven wrong than right anyhow, and the best way to prove me wrong is to come out and audition.

So: What’s the deal with Lear?

The best place to start is at the beginning, since that’s where nearly everything goes to Hell. More than any other tragedy, this play seems to hinge upon a single action—Lear’s “love test,” demanding that his daughters publicly declare their love for him in exchange for lands and titles. Once it’s done, there’s no going back; the die is cast.

Therefore the key to understanding both Lear the character and Lear the play must lie in that action, that decision. Why does he do it? To modern eyes (and to level-headed characters like Kent) it seems like a pretty stupid thing to do. If not the test, then certainly Lear’s attitude towards Cordelia (who fails the test, or just refuses to participate) strikes us as rash and reprehensible—behaviour unbecoming to any man, much less a father and a king.

But it is not enough to simply call Lear rash (although he is). We need a better explanation, since so much of what follows depends upon his choice. Audiences want an explanation; and the actor playing Lear needs an explanation.

(Well, I guess it might be possible to play this scene as though the love test simply occurred to Lear spontaneously, right at that instant. But he says it is his “darker purpose,” as though he’s been harbouring this secret for awhile. And Kent and Gloucester’s lines right at the top of 1.1 also suggest that the King has something up his sleeve concerning “the division of the kingdoms.”)

As usual, Shakespeare tantalizes us with shreds and patches of psychology, but staunchly refuses to provide a definite explanation for Lear’s act. This omission is even more glaring if one reads the anonymous play that Lear is based upon (King Leir, it’s called—you can download it here if you’re interested). In that version, we get a whole scene of set-up. Leir, we learn, is a recent widower (Actor’s Note 1: grief clouds his judgment), and he confesses to his councilmembers that he can’t decide how to allocate his lands because he has no male heir (Actor’s Note 2: Leir resents his daughters for being female). His advisors suggest marrying off all three of the daughters, but Leir points out that Cordella, his youngest daughter, refuses to hook up (Actor’s Note 3: Cordella is already showing signs of resistance). Then he concocts the love test as a trap for Cordella:

Euen as she doth protest she loues me best,
Ile say, Then, daughter, graunt me one request,
To shew thou louest me as thy sisters doe,
Accept a husband, whom my selfe will woo.
This sayd, she cannot well deny my sute,
Although (poore soule) her sences will be mute:
Then will I tryumph in my policy,
And match her with a King of Brittany.

This might still seem rather cruel to our eyes, but at least it’s a plan. And more importantly, this Leir shows us plenty of motivations for implementing the test, and for banishing Cordella when she mucks it up. You could try to adopt one or all of these actors’ notes when playing Shakespeare’s Lear, and probably find support and justification for them by combing through the text. But Shakespeare doesn’t foreground Lear’s motivations for us—he deliberately makes the love test sudden, puzzling, and therefore harsh.

And so he should. That is, after all, what everyone on stage besides Lear is feeling. It may even be what Lear himself ends up feeling—I rather like the idea that he starts to recognize the inherent folly in the situation, but is too stubborn to back down (he is king, after all). But it doesn’t help the feeling that the whole test (and, in consequence, the whole play) is just a random accident, as casual and meaningless as a Freudian slip or a misplaced prop. I’m reminded of the dead fly in the printer at the start of Brazil, a catalyst for an absurd fantasia of epic proportions.

Lear may be fantastical at times, but I refuse to believe that it’s inherently absurd. That old king needs something from his daughters—needs to hear that he is loved by them—and he bribes and punishes them accordingly. I don’t know why he needs this so badly—Shakespeare obviously didn’t want us to know, at least not at first—but it’s a real human need that leads to real human actions...and real human suffering.