Rescripting: The Rebel Alliance

I’m still rescripting, and so far I’ve encountered the most difficulty with a small but crucial thread of information in the second and third acts: the invasion of Britain.

In the original text, act two contains nary a mention of the French army which will appear in act four, led by Cordelia. The first disclosure is in Act 3, Scene 1, after Lear has run off into the dark and stormy night. It’s a weird, short scene between Kent and an unnamed Gentleman. It starts and ends with understandable concern about the king (and, in the Quarto, a lovely description of Lear raging against the elements, to whet our imaginations for the “Blow winds, and crack your cheeks” speech), but Kent changes the subject to give us some expository dialogue about spies in England and armies from France.

It’s strange that Kent would know this. It’s even stranger that he would take time out in the middle of a desperate rescue operation to divulge it to some stranger (a stranger to us, at least). And, to make matters worse, the Folio and Quarto give us different accounts of this speech. In the Quarto, Kent goes into some detail:

From France there comes a power
Into this scatter’d kingdom; who already,
Wise in our negligence, have secret feet
In some of our best ports...

In the Folio version (supposedly the revised text), this is cut, and all we get is this bit of mealy-mouthed foreshadowing:

What hath been seen,
Either in snuffs and packings of the dukes,
Or the hard rein which both of them have borne
Against the old kind king, or something deeper,
Whereof perchance these are but furnishings...

That’s too ambiguous for an audience to associate with the invasion which will suddenly appear to play a major role in the play’s climax. What is missing is a strong sense of conspiracy – something which Kent himself can be swept up in, just as Gloster is shortly, and at the cost of his eyesight.

Therefore, I’ve decided to embark upon an ambitious rescripting project, and spread the information contained in the one Kent/Gentleman scene across several scenes in acts two and three. Right now, I’m imagining something like this:

1) A servant at Gloster’s castle recognizes Kent (“Sir, I know you”), and deduces that he’s loyal to the king.
2) When Kent is in the stocks, that servant sneaks back in to give us some more tantalizing info (“Make your speed to Dover” ... “If you shall see Cordelia, as fear not but you shall...”). Perhaps he also tries to free Kent from the stocks, but is interrupted by the arrival of Lear and his train.
3) Now Kent knows that something serious is happening at Dover, but he doesn’t know exactly what it is. He therefore sends a Knight (not a Gentleman, but one of Lear’s remaining faithful knights) to Dover, to find out what’s going on.
4) After the majority of the storm scenes have come and gone, we may see that servant again. This time, he’s giving letters to Gloster (and a bit more information to the audience: “From France there comes a power into this scatter’d kingdom...”). This exchange will get stitched into Act 3, Scene 3, where Edmund decides to betray his own father. I’m picturing a bit of eavesdropping, here; perhaps Edmund has ducked behind the arras to have a quickie with one of the wicked sisters, and pops out for an aside at the end: “This courtesy, forbid thee, shall the duke instantly know...”

That all sounds like a lot of work just to deal with a fairly typical Shakespearean plot hole. But I think it makes the world a lot richer, more complex, to see how secret information is exchanged and built upon. I suppose it’s possible that the subversive servant is the same one who tries to stop Gloster’s blinding, and gets killed for his trouble. Then you even have a miniature tragedy in the centre of the play: the Rise and Fall of the Rebel Alliance.

Lear's Motivations for the Love Test

I’ve been reading a discussion thread on the Shaksper Listserv, where scholars, theatre practitioners, and other Shakespeare fanatics trade thoughts about the Bard. This discussion concerns the culpability of characters in the opening scene. In a non-Academic nutshell: When things go wrong, is Lear to blame, or is Cordelia?

Some contributors blame Cordelia, either for failing to “honour her father” enough (an Old Testament interpretation) or for lacking enough tact to flatter him the way she obviously is expected to. Lear, of course, has lots to answer for as well. One contributor, Edmund Taft, blamed Lear, and went on to speculate about the King’s reasons for creating the love test to begin with. To quote him:

“...if, as Lear expects, she announces that all her love belongs to Daddy, then he can quote her own words back at her, stop her from marrying, and have her all to himself. That's what he thought would happen, as he himself says in a quasi-aside.”

Taft thinks Lear wants to trap Cordelia into not marrying. I’m not sure what line the “quasi-aside” refers to, although it might be this line: “I loved her most, and thought to set my rest / On her kind nursery” (1.1.123-124). What I find interesting about this explanation, besides its heavy Freudian tone, is that it is almost exactly the opposite of the reason I found in King Leir, the source of Lear. In that play, Lear explicitly says he will use the love to test to make her marry. “If you really love me as much as you say you do, you’ll choose the suitor I pick for you.”

I guess either one works. The approach Taft suggests has a nice echo in Lear’s later speech, when he and Cordelia are prisoners of war, and he imagines the two of them singing alone, “like birds i’th’ cage.”

But the second approach works with Cordelia’s immediate response to Lear (especially in the Folio version): “Sure I shall never marry like my sisters.” That would be Lear’s chance (if we believe Taft) to respond with “Fine! Don’t get married then! See if I care!” But perhaps they hadn’t invented reverse psychology in Lear’s time.

What About Oswald?

Oswald is Goneril’s henchman. In Act One, he gets beat up by Kent and mocked by the King and his knights. In Act Two, Kent beats him again, threatens him at sword-point, and subjects him to the longest, most outrageous litany of insults ever penned:

"A Knave, a Rascal, an eater of broken meats, a base, proud, shallow, beggerly, three-suited-hundred pound, filthy worsted-stocking knave, a Lily-livered, glass-gazing super-serviceable Rogue, one-trunk-inheriting slave, one that would be a Bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a Whoreson, Begger, Coward, Pandar, and the Son and Heir of a Mongrel Bitch, one whom I will beat into clamourous whining, if thou deny the least syllable of thy addition."

Later, Oswald is attacked and killed by Edgar while trying to deliver love letters across a battlefield (from the obsessive Goneril to the sociopathic Edmund). With his dying words, he asks Edgar to kindly deliver the letters, if he gets the chance. In his heart, he always wanted to be a postman.

What did he do to deserve all these indignities? He was rude to the King. Of course, Goneril asked him to do it, so he was just following orders. Except...he was really good at being rude to the King. He liked it.

I have to say, I love Oswald, and I think he’s an underrated bad guy part. He usually gets played as oily and effeminate, but I kind of see him as a seedy Basil Fawlty, a butler or steward who has to put up with the noisiest, rudest, most evil and/or insane guests in history. He never makes it onto the side of angels, but he squeezes into the “more sinned against than sinning” category because his only real crime was snobbery.

Mind you, it was armed snobbery...and, some of the later scenes near the battlefield might even count as highway snobbery.

What About the Bastard?

“Thou, nature, art my goddess.” That phrase echoes across the years as it is repeated in thousands of playhouses and millions (if not billions) of audition halls. It’s how Edmund introduces himself when he’s not under the watchful (yet totally unseeing) eyes of his father, Gloster. He muscles onto the stage after Scene One, as if wrestling the plot away from the King and his family and demanding, everyone pay attention to me!

And boy, we do. There are few villains as fun as Edmund. Richard and Iago are the only comparable fiends who spring to mind. But we get so swept up in his diabolical charisma that we quickly forget his first words to us. What does he mean, “Thou, nature, art my goddess?”

The problem is mainly with “nature.” This play uses that word many, many times, and each time it seems to mean something else. Here it seems to mean some sort of Gaia spirit—what we would think of as a pagan prayer, except that Lear is set in pre-Christian times...so, strictly speaking, everyone was pagan. Nevertheless, Edmund’s prayer was meant for Renaissance ears, and they would probably have associated it with atheism, at the very least.

What does it mean, or what can it mean, today? When a modern audience hears “Thou, nature, art my goddess” unexpectedly, from the lips of a character who, up till now, has been practically invisible, what do we think? What if he said it while he was flipping a coin, or playing with a dagger? Or while he was looking at Regan, or Goneril (who are heading offstage as he enters)? Or what if he said it directly to a lady in the front row of the audience?

These all have meanings, and they all play upon the meanings of “nature,” spinning the word in different directions. The coin makes “nature” sound like luck, fate, happenstance. It becomes a comment on his bastardy: because he is “some twelve or fourteen moonshines/ Lag of a brother,” he is under the thrall of Bad Luck. The dagger puts a sharper edge on luck: Edmund will make his own luck, and no one will stop him.

Looking at the ladies makes “nature” a bit more physical, and makes “goddess” a lot more specific. It’s an ironic way to foreshadow the lust and attention that both sisters end up lavishing on him. The actor who chooses this interpretation will have a rich opportunity for humour when he says “My mind as generous and my shape as true / As honest madam’s issue.”

But I think my favourite is the brazen charm of the fourth choice: directly addressing the house. Here, we meet a Bastard who not only knows how to make an entrance, but also doesn’t give a damn about the tired old conventions of tragedy or even theatre. He’s laid his plots, and his fun’s just about to start, but Edmund pauses—just for a line or two at the top of the scene—to flirt with an audience member!

The most interesting thing about this moment, though, is that an actor can determine the direction of the whole character, and in some ways the whole play, by how he chooses to deliver “Thou, nature, art my goddess.”

Thematic Flip-Flops

It’s been nearly ten days since I’ve had any Lear thoughts, which is odd. It’s partly because I’m getting geared up for the first few shows of the Walterdale season (The Rez Sisters is first, and it’s going to be spectacular!). I’ve also been catching up on some of my own writing projects, which forces Shakespeare into the backseat of my brain for a bit (sorry about that, Will).

I also confess I’m still finding it hard to wrap my mind around the play. I’ve pretty much decided to have my production focus on the family theme, or possibly the conflict between family and politics (ie. kingship, land, war, power). I can see several brilliant moments when that conflict comes into focus in the play—moments when the characters onstage seem to be inhabiting two different worlds. In one moment, Goneril feels like a daughter while Lear tries to lord like a king. Then, lines later, everything flips, and Goneril is the one in power, and Lear is a wounded father. The trouble is, I’m not sure how to clarify those moments on the stage. Actors tend to cohabitate within the same “world”, ie. the stage.

Well, more mulling is clearly in order. My earlier attempt to deal with each character in turn seemed to be working well, though, so in the meantime, I’ll go back to that. Starting with...hmm...how about the Bastard?

Set Design: First Thoughts

Last night I confirmed the first member of my design team: Matt Odrobny, who will design Lear’s sets (and possibly lights). Matt designed a show for my last company, and his visual work has the right combination of elemental impact and creepy darkness. I think he’ll be a great match for the show.

Some of the things we talked about: I emphasised the need to have a lot of open space on stage, because Shakespeare’s characters like to move, and don’t like to be encumbered by unnecessary set pieces. But I also admitted that it would be great to find some way to transform the Walterdale Playhouse stage entirely—to really shock the long-time subscribers who have become accustomed to seeing stories played out in that venue.

I talked a bit about incorporating musicians into the play, and how they would need some kind of niche apart from the action—possibly on platforms above the main playing area. This is where the musicians would have sat in the Globe, and I think it’s an especially nice touch to have them up there for Lear—hovering above the characters like silent gods, involved but impassive. But it would mean constructing platforms from scratch, which would blow most of our budget.

Finally, we talked about specific images and metaphors that could be culled from the play. I told Matt about the vortex image, and we agreed that it was a pretty mind-boggling challenge to try to construct a whirlpool onstage (or a black hole!). And on a whim, I mentioned cliffs, too. There are no literal cliffs in the play (Edgar describes the cliffs of Dover to his father, but they’re not really there), but having some clifflike scenery might help allude to the whirlpool movement, in a metonymic sort of way. I just like the idea of erosion, of having a set that looks as though it may crumble to dust at any moment—but which will be, of course, completely up to safety standards. Ah, the illusion of theatre.

What About Gloucester?

Since I’m on the subject: Gloucester. Or Gloster, as it’s pronounced (and as Shakespeare wrote it most of the time). Funny old guy. Seems a bit randy in the first scene, joking about whores with his son in earshot. Then, in scene two, he becomes a stock character, the befuddled father, the absent-minded gull. Polonius on ritalin. Later he becomes more self-righteous, and even a bit political. He sticks his neck out to help Lear, and gets his eyes gouged out for his trouble. Spends the rest of the play moping. Tries to jump off a cliff that isn’t there.

It makes us puzzled: why is Gloster so inconsistent? Why does he perform so many different functions in the play? The blinding scene is so horrific, so memorable, that the “suffering” Gloster strikes us as the most real: a flesh-and-blood human, not a character sketch. Constructing a real character, then, would seem to revolve around that moment, when Gloster’s sight is destroyed. You bend and twist the early scenes so that they seem to foreshadow it, and you milk the later scenes for all the pathos you can get. It’s not difficult, really; Shakespeare put in tons of not-so-subtle references to eyesight and blinding, so all you have to do is dwell on that motif. Right?

Wrong. Gloster starts his stage life as a lecherous buffoon, and I think it’s a greater disservice to the play to try to hide that fact. His references to eyesight (for example, from 1.2, “If it be nothing, I shall not need spectacles”) are not fraught with anticipated torment or loss. They are throw-aways—the sort of comments one makes about the things one takes for granted.

I think the whole point of Gloster is that tragedy can strike anyone at any time. Gloster has flaws, but they aren’t tragic flaws, and he’s definitely a man more sinned against than sinning. I think, in nearly every scene Gloster has, he is confronted with evil and guile far beyond his understanding. He struggles to understand, but by the time he starts to see things clearly, he’s trapped in the thick of it—and his sight is torn from him.

But I do think that those early references to eyesight are valuable, because the audience knows what will happen to poor Gloster’s eyes. The more he fumbles with his spectacles onstage, the more the audience will want to reach out to protect him from the unspeakable fate that awaits him. Lear is the play’s grizzly bear, and we want him to survive because he is a rare, majestic creature. Gloster is the play’s teddy bear—disposable and valueless, yet precious in a way we can’t articulate.

Blocking: The Blinding of Gloucester

Gloucester must be bound to a chair for this scene. Cornwall and Regan are his torturers, and they circle him like dogs. When Cornwall puts out the first of G.’s eyes, he says, “Fellows, hold the chair!”, so there must be at least two guards there to help him. I imagine that he lowers G. backwards (“Upon these eyes of thine I’ll set my foot.”), with the two guards supporting G.’s weight.

Then the most remarkable thing happens. A servant intervenes. This shouldn’t be one of the guards, but rather an ordinary servant who just happened to be in the room while all of this was going on. It was probably a male servant, but for some reason I envision a chambermaid, somebody so low that none of the dukes and queens even notice her presence until she speaks up.

Seeing the horror of G.’s blinding, she impulsively steps forward and grabs the dagger our of one guard’s belt. She holds it ineffectually, but the move is so unexpected that it still makes everyone stop and stare. Cornwall laughs and starts circling the terrified girl. “How now, you dog!” Shouts Regan. Emboldened in the moment, the Servant chides back at her mistress. Behind her, Cornwall gets a step closer. He mocks her. “My villain?” She is torn between fight and flight; Cornwall has no doubt that he can overpower her, and neither does the audience.

Regan is infuriated and grabs a sword (from the other guard), causing Servant to swing around again. Cornwall swoops in, but not quite fast enough; Servant swings back and he runs right on to the dagger. She is horrified—she never thought she’d have to kill her master—and she drops the blade and turns around.

Regan is agog (as are the guards), but after a beat, she recovers and raises her sword like it’s an axe. The Servant runs, and a brief chase begins—perhaps it involves the Servant tripping over the prone Gloucester (to add insult to injury?). Meanwhile Cornwall recovers enough to intercept the Servant. Hands locked around her throat, he expends nearly all his energy in choking her to death. When he is carried off stage ten lines later (“Regan, I bleed apace”), it is the last time we see him alive.

Choking the Servant would prevent her from saying her final line, which is both a blessing and a curse, as it begins with “O, I am slain” (good riddance), but concludes with this, to Gloucester: “My lord, you have one eye left / To see some mischief on him.” That’s a nice line because G. loses his one remaining eye almost instantly (“Out, vile jelly!” says Cornwall). Would that be adding injury to irony?