In Our Time - Lear

Episode Date: February 28, 2008

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss King Lear. Around the turn of 1606, a group of London theatre-goers braved the plague to take in a new play by the well-known impresario, Mr William Shakespeare. Packed into the Globe Theatre, they were treated to a tale of violence, hatred and betrayal so upsetting that it thereafter languished among Shakespeare’s less popular plays.The story of Lear – of a man who divides up his property and loses the love of a daughter - is an ancient and ultimately happy one. But in the hands of William Shakespeare it became a shocking and violent vision of a broken family in a godless universe. So shocking that after the playwright’s death it was shunned and rewritten with a happy ending. Only in the 19th and 20th centuries did Shakespeare’s bleak, experimental and disorientating drama attain the status it has now. But why did Shakespeare take a story from the deep history of Britain and make it so shockingly his own and when, from the Civil War to the Second World War, did this powerful and confusing tragedy emerge as Shakespeare’s greatest? With Jonathan Bate, Professor of English Literature at the University of Warwick; Katherine Duncan-Jones, Tutorial Fellow in English at Somerville College, Oxford; Catherine Belsey, Research Professor in English at the University of Wales, Swansea

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, around the turn of 16006, a group of London theatre-goers braved the plague to take in a new play by the well-known impresario,

Mr William Shakespeare. Packed into the Globe Theatre, they were treated to a tale of violence, hatred and betrayal, so upsetting that it languished, among Shakespeare's less popular plays until rewritten about six years later with a happy ending. The play was King Lear, a drama on the folly of age, the cruelty of families and the futility of ambition in the wilderness of ancient Britain, a place where, as a Duke of Albany declares in the play, humanity must perforce prey on itself like monsters of the deep.

But why did Shakespeare take a story from the deep history of Britain and make it so shockingly his own, when, from the Civil War to the Second World War, and when did this powerful and confusing tragedy emerged to be thought of as Shakespeare's greatest. With me to discuss King Lear at Jonathan Bate, Professor of English Literature at the University of Warwick. Catherine Duncan Jones, fellow in English at Summer Mill College, Oxford, and Catherine

Balsy, Research Professor in English at the University of Wales, Swansea. Jonathan Bate, Kingley was first performed on Boxing Day for King James I. Can you give us a sense of the opening scene of the play and how it would have played in front of James the New King, relatively New King, Yeah, that's right. The first performance we know about was the court performance in front of King James and all his court in the banqueting hall in Whitehall Palace, Boxing Day 1606.

Now, this is very early in King James's reign. You know, Shakespeare's earlier plays have been written when Queen Elizabeth is Queen of England and Scotland, and Scotland, Scotland's a separate country, King James, King of Scotland. 1603, James, after Elizabeth's death, becomes king of both England and Scotland. And he begins to think about the idea of Britain, the idea of uniting not just for thrones, but the states of England and Britain. So along come the king's men, Shakespeare's acting company, and perform a play set in ancient Britain. And it begins with the king coming on and saying, I'm getting old, I'm 81 years old, I'm tired, I'm going to retire,

but I haven't got a son to inherit my kingdom. I've only got three daughters. So I'll divide my kingdom, the kingdom of Britain, into three. Say, he says to his daughters, which of you doth most? Whichever of you loves us most will get the best bit of the kingdom. So the two older daughters, Goneril and Regan, give very fulsome speeches about how much they love him. I love him, says Goneril, more than word can wield the matter.

And so he gives them a good portion of the kingdom. And then Cordelia, the third, the youngest daughter, the most loved, the only one as yet unmarried. She can't think of anything to say. She says nothing. And Kingley is furious. He banishes her. He divides up the kingdom between the other two, Goneril and Regan, and the tragedy begins from that point. Well, she does say something.

She says she loves him according to her bond, no more, nor less, and she criticises her sisters for saying they love him all. She says, how can you love your husbands? She says it better than this, of course. how can know your husband if you love your father all? So she does say something. Yeah, what she seems to be doing is criticise... But he thinks it's nothing, and he says nothing will come of nothing. The nothingness starts with him, doesn't it?

That's right. I mean, she refuses to play the court game of speaking effusive, flattering language. And in a way, she's almost sort of over-literal. He says, quantify your love for me. And she says, okay, well, you can have 50% and my husband, when I marry, you can have the other 50%. how can my sisters who are married give you all their love

when they have husbands? And he causes a darker purpose that's interesting, isn't he? Why he sends the Herald Way to bring in the courtiers, sorry, the two kings who are courting Cordelia he says now to my darker purpose. So he's breaking up Britain and as you say, he's James the 6th of Scotland

which is a very different country from England which is now James I. Wales has been as it were absorbed in nearly 100 years ago. Ireland has been congregate. He wants it to be a Great Britain, and what he sees is a man slicing up Great Britain. In that sense, do you think that Shakespeare was writing to the condition of the King's thoughts? I think he must have known that James had this project of uniting the kingdoms, but the parliaments in both London and Edinburgh were very resistant to this.

So the idea of going back to the old Chronicles of Ancient Britain and writing a play about the dire consequences of dividing the kingdom, clearly would play to James' interest. What's more there in the audience were James's two sons, Prince Henry and Prince Charles, Charles, who would eventually become Charles the first, Prince Henry, who would die. Like most

royals and aristocrats, those princes had a string of titles. Among their titles were the Duke of Albany and the Duke of Cornwall. And those were the names of the husbands of Goneril and Regan, the older sisters. And Cornwall is clearly representative of the Celtic West, of Wales and

the West country. Albany was an old for Scotland. So there's a sense that the three kingdoms are there. Lear's plan is that Cordelia will inherit England the richest prize, but that, because of her refusal to play the game, that doesn't happen. Finally, before we leave this part of it, the James, the first and six, seems to have been very admiring of Shakespeare. They were the king's man. He wanted them, he wanted to see the plays. And he clearly seems to got involved in this. And also in Macbeth, that was a different programme. And so we're talking about something that is happening in the court about the court and made for the court.

Yeah, I mean, one of the first things that happens within six weeks of James taking the crown is that Shakespeare's company, who had been called the Lord Chamberlain's men, meaning their patron was the Lord Chamberlain, who was in charge of all court performances. They were renamed, given a patent, to become the king's men. Now, we don't know how closely James himself was involved with it, because I think what probably was happening was there were a group of courtiers who were, very close to Shakespeare and were also

sort of jostling for position to get the patronage of King James and the two brothers, the Earl of Pembroke and the Earl of Montgomery were crucial figures here. So I think in a way it's to do with one group of courtiers wanting

their players to be the king's men. Another group of courtiers got their players to be the Queen's men. But there's no doubt that in those early plays of the early part of King James's reign such as Lear and Macbeth and Mejiviv measure. Shakespeare is absolutely writing to the interests of King James,

who was a great intellectual king. Indeed. Catherine Duncan Jones, can we take the story, just before I ask her other questions through from where Jonathan left out, the kingdom has been divided into three. Cordelia has not gone overboard in her love for her father, but although it proves she

is the one who loves him most as the play goes on, and he in effect banishes her. She's taken without a dour, she herself is a dour by the king of France and away she goes for quite a duration. Can you just take us towards the end of the play briefly

what the main things had happened? Yes, well we've already established that a big theme throughout the play is parents and children and love indeed and love in word. Goneril and Regan say they love their father in words but very rapidly from what Jonathan has described it becomes clear they don't

of him. Indeed, in fact, they are thoroughly fed up him up with him and find him and his retinue a complete nuisance. And then in parallel, there was a second plot which has the same theme treated differently. The kings, one of the kings' leading courtiers, King Lear's leading courtiers, not King Jameses, the Earl of Gloucester, has two sons, one of whom is a bastard genetically, that is, he was conceived out of wedlock and he is also a bastard in the modern slang sense of the word and is often a very entertaining and charismatic character in the theatre. No, God stand up for bastards. And his virtuous brother is a bit sort of null and dull initially, though that doesn't continue.

So what happens from then on is there seems to be a plan that Lear alternates residents, first with his elder daughter, Groneril, then with Regan month by month. It unravels almost at once. Goneril finds Lear and his retinue of 100 drunken knights and his fool absolutely intolerable in a well-ordered household. Because Lear's given to that way, but he's kept a hundred knights. He's going to move from court to court months to month between these two courts. And really, his role model in British antiquity,

a theme in which James was greatly interested was Old King Cole, that merry old soul, who this one didn't have fiddlers three, but knights 100. And initially we may feel a bit sympathetic with Groneril, depending on how the play is staged, that actually a hundred drunken nights on top of all the servants she has already and a new marriage and possibly pregnant does make life difficult, but in fact she is horrible. Lear feels is rejected by her and feels very rejected by her and curses her.

Goes to Regan, who he thinks will be lovely and sweet and let him have exactly what he wants. Regan, as the fool, warns him, is even worse. And then finally both of them, Gonerwell arrives at Regan's castle and they both agree that he shall only be cut down from 100 nights to 50, but to 25. There's all this about love and measurement that Jonathan has already mentioned, the idea of love being measured either in words or in numbers. Can we stop with those two sisters?

Because it depends how you read the play, doesn't it? It does. When you read Godoridding, you're turning up, this is me obviously with a gun, obviously, right, you're turning with a hundred nights, they're riotous, they drunk, they won't listen to what my people tell them to do. There's an awful lot of people, 100 nights with their squires and their horses and there's something else.

There's some of you that think, well, they've got a point here. In some productions, I think, one does feel they have a point, but things unfold in such a way that I don't think it's possible to go on thinking Gonerwill and Riegel. That is a wonderful turn that he makes, that you begin to feel sorry for him because of what, even though they claim. I mean, they might be lying.

Are they lying? You can't tell, can you? Because he says these knights are very civil people. They're well brought up. They're well bred. So who do we believe? It partly depends how it's staged. There was a production. The only production I've seen where one rarely had a sense of the drunken knights and what a real pain in the neck they might be

was at the globe, I think in 2001 with Julian Glover was Lear, where the drunken knights came in through the groundlings with a tremendous amount of weaponry, very drunk, very booted and big and noisy. crashing their way through these hapless roundlings, including, you know, toddlers and push chairs and so on, rushing onto the stage and being an absolute nuisance. And I thought, gosh, I wouldn't want them in my house. But actually, even so, as the play developed, it did become clear that, like father, like daughter, Lear is very irascible, very easily inflamed to rage and bitterness, but his daughters are, if anything, worse.

They're chips of the worst part of the old block. Catherine Balser, can you tell us where this story came from? the Lear story. Yes. It comes originally from an old folk tale. Could I tell you the story? I'll tell you very

briefly. It's a story known as love like salt in which an old rich father asks his three daughters which one loves him most. This is in Geoffrey de Monmouth that's talking about high middle ages, yes. Geoffrey of Monmouth

appropriates this story and calls the central character King Lear and names the daughters. But we think that his origin was this widely circulated European folk tale. The story is, as I began it, he asks his daughters which loves him most. The first says, more than life itself. And he says, excellent, take some land and a rich husband. The second says, more than all the world. And he says, very good, take some land and a rich husband.

And then he turns to the third. And she says, I love you, as fresh meat loves salt. And he says, that's not good enough. You can do better than that. No, she says, I love you as fresh meat loves salt. He banishes her disgusted by this feeble response. And she disguises herself and goes down the road to the next household where she becomes a scullion. Naturally, the master of the house falls in love with her, as is guaranteed in folk tales.

And at the wedding feast, to which her father is invited, of course, no one knows who the bride is. She's still in disguise. She sends word to the kitchen, not to put any salt in the cooking. And the guests, of course, find it disgusting. We have to bear in mind this is the middle edges, and salt was how you preserved meat. At this point, the father gets the message, understands the mistake he's made and bursts into tears, thinking it's too late.

Nothing can be, the situation can't be redeemed. But she recognises him, comes down from the high table, takes him to join her, and they all live happily ever after. And they did in that story, because there was a leer going on before, as let us call it Shakespeare's time, before Shakespeare erode his leer. it ended happily. Now, can you just briskly tell us how Shakespeare changed the ending of the story that it inherited? Yes. Because that changed the play utterly. It's true. It was a very well-known tale in its own time, and all the versions of it had previously had happy endings.

One of the noticeable things is that the first published version of the play in 1608 is called the Chronical History of King Lear, so that the audience would not necessarily. be expecting an unhappy ending. And it certainly seems when Cordelia comes back and restores Leah to sanity as if everything is going to go fine. It doesn't. The elder sisters kill themselves in desperation. Leah is willing to go off to prison with Cordelia, but Cordelia is hanged in prison.

He comes back on stage with her in his arms, and I think this is the most unbearable moment for the audience because this is like a parody of the embrace he should have given her at the beginning. And he is clearly now senile. The lear who's been so fluent, so eloquent, so poetic, is now reduced to a very bare, sparse and austere language of total, total despair.

Although another change was in Shakespeare version, that throughout the play from very near the beginning, he was frightened that he would go mad. Don't let me go mad. Give me that patience, patience I need. Fear of madness. It precedes fear of senility. I mean, I would have thought there's the two big differences. So there we have the play. There we are the folk tale. Jeffrey of Monmouth and Middle Ages found it, we think, rather than invented it. It was played a little, then Shakespeare took hold of it and changed the way you've described. What about the world, briskly, Jonathan Bates, under Lear? It's as flies to wanton boys. are we to the gods they kill us for their sport.

It's pre-Christian. What governs it if an outside does anything government? Yeah, this is a really interesting question because the old King Lear play, the anonymous play that Shakespeare inherited, has a very strong Christian providential structure. At various points something terrible is going to happen,

and people appeal to the Christian God, and God intervenes, and everything's okay. Shakespeare very strikingly strips all that away. He makes it this pagan world. In one sense, it imagines a godless world, world where there is no order, there is nothing there. And then at other times, as you say, there seem to be moments that if there are gods, they're these malicious figures who just

treat us as pawns, as toys. And we're governed by weather, we're governed by speculations in astrology, and so and so forth. How shocking, Catherine Balsy, would this have been, this version of Kingley? After all, the Elizabeth and Jacobian audience were used to an awful lot of shocks and they went to the London theatres. That's true, and presumably that's what they went for. They like them. But this is a brilliant theatrical coup, it seems to me. We, all of us know that King Lear is a tragedy,

even people who've never seen it and never read it, know that it's a tragedy. But the original audience would not necessarily have known that. And I think would have been propelled by the folktale structure to expect that the reconciliation, which takes place after all, would last. but when that's snatched away finally and it's done with tremendous suspense

because you're not even sure that Cordelia is really dead Leah thinks maybe she's not if that her breath will stay in this mirror then she lives and he dies possibly believing she is still alive but it's quite clear that he's deluded clear from the reactions of the other characters that he's deluded in that belief

but talking about the audience of the time Catherine Duncan Jones. Were they shocked... I mean, I was also explained that they'd be shocked because they would expect a different sort of leer. They'd expect the lear of the sort of almost like Cinderella, two ugly sisters and the nice sister,

and away you go at the ending, and that's fine. But would they have been shocked at the thing itself, at a king going mad, at the gouging out of gloucestous eyes, out vile jelly, at the daughter's turning on the father in such a vicious way, at the Cordelia being hanged and that sort of thing. Would that in itself have shocked outside the actions themselves?

I think it would have been extremely shocking and more informed readers, perhaps ones who were familiar with Harrison's description of Britain in Holland Shed that Shakespeare drew on, would be aware that described, as Catherine Belsier said, as a true chronicle history on the Quoto title page and when registered with the stationers, it was again called a history,

it wasn't called a tragedy. Shakespeare wasn't being historically accurate in terms of narrative. He was being historically accurate in terms of ideology, as Harrison makes it very clear that in this period, hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, religion in Britain was superstition, devil worship, deeply confused, mixtures of astrological predictions, muddled version of the Greco-Roman gods,

and of course Lear very early on, curses by Apollo and he invokes names of Roman gods and is almost always checked by Kent for doing so. It's ideologically true as a picture of a world in total chaos,

moral and physical chaos in which the virtuous characters who are more surprising in many ways even than the evil ones are searching for some kind of providential pattern, something redemptive, not finding it. The last example is one example of how they search for it.

They don't find it. Albany in the very few lines from the end saying the heavens defend her, having suddenly been reminded that Lear and Cordelia the order has been given by Edmund that Cordelia is to be killed and then she's brought in dead. I mean that as well his appeal to the heavens

is answered visually. That's what the heavens do for you in this world. And there are confusions and contradictions violent ones, inside speeches aren't there, that they will do such things, but then they know not what. I will have such revenges on you all what they are, yet I know not, oh fool,

I shall go mad. And of course, incoherent, brilliantly, richly, evocative, but incoherent. Muddled speech is one of the features of the play, particularly in its central scenes. Which makes it brilliant and unlike anything else, Shakespeare or anyone else wrote. Yes, Edgar and the fool. Jonathan Nogne- What he's doing there

with Lear's speech breaking down is he's dramatising what it's like for the mind and the language to be under the stress of the worst possible things. You think the worst is happening and then something worse happens still. I mean, in many ways of all Shakespeare's plays, it's the one closest to ancient Greek tragedy. He didn't know Greek tragedy directly, but he certainly knew the Roman tragedian Seneca, who inherited all sorts of gouged out eyes and bloody murders from Greek tragedy. But the shocking thing is that Shakespeare represents

those things on stage. In Seneca, it's all narrated and off stage. and this word nothing comes in again and again and again nothing will come up nothing you're a cipher without a number right through and the sort of nothingness of existence itself is shoots through the play doesn't it? Catherine Balser. I think it does but it seems to me that that's possibly under the pressure

of what happens within this family one of the things that comes across in this play and makes it still powerful in our own time, is the way it demonstrates that the family is the place of the most intense emotions, of demands for love, and

of love itself, but also of the most passionate hatreds and cruelty, psychological cruelty, almost beyond any other possibility. Once those family intensities are muddled up with, the

question of property, once what's at stake is land, which is why the sisters lie to him because they want land. It's why Edmund cheats his father. Edmund the bastard. Edmund the bastard cheats his father. He says, legitimate, Edgar, I must have your land. That's what the motive is.

And the names are the names of lands, aren't they? Cornwall and Kent and Gloucester. All of them. Exactly, exactly. So what's at stake is quite clearly possessions. And if you conflate the intensities within the family, with the intensity of the desire for land and the power that goes with it. Then I think you see very clearly how a kind of nothingness invades this space of the family and is unbearable.

One thing that's interesting in the switch from what he inherited and what he did was the ending, but that's the most of the beginning is also quite fascinating. Because in the, as I understand it, in the story inherited, Leah's wife had died, he was full of grief, it was time to give it. None of that, we get none of that in Shakespeare. comes on, he has a darker purpose and that's it. His motivation is never discussed. He wants to go unburthened. I think

that is the motivelessness of it, gives it a, and the device of the beginning. Can you talk a bit more of that, Catherine, Duncan Jones? Yes, there's a lot that isn't explained and, of course you're absolutely right, the old play actually opens with Lear's queen having just died, and Lear, rather

sensibly knowing he's an old man, thinking now his wife is dead, his daughter's time, his daughters were married off, and he doesn't have to worry about them because being their father, not their mother, he's not really so good at guiding them. All of that is excluded. There is so much we are not told,

and if we are reading or studying the play, as so many school children and students are, we ask these awkward questions. Who was their mother? If there were three children and two are very different from the other one, then we might think, well, did Lear marry twice? Was Cordelia, perhaps?

But I mean, the play doesn't, particularly as performed, doesn't permit us to ask such questions. It takes us straight into an unexplained situation, which is a mystery to some extent even to Lear's immediate courtiers and councillors. Earlier you mentioned the fool who accompanies Lear, until, for a considerable part of the play, Captain Duncan Jones, and he isn't the fool in the sense of performing tricks and saying silly thing,

but all he says witty things, but he does go into language which is very, very hard to follow, not as hard as Edgar, but Edgar on the Heath, who decides to disguise himself by becoming a beggar, let us say, a naked beggar roaming the Heath. But he is an extraordinarily important and compelling character of the fool. Can you say a few words about the fool and where he stands in this play? Yes, the fool is of several blunt truth-tellers. Kent is the other great blunt truth-teller. The fool is the bluntest proof-teller.

Kent is the courtier who is banished and then disguises himself. Or telling the truth? Or saying to Lear, you must not banish your daughter, you're a fool, yeah. Yes. And the fool tells the truth through riddles and rhymes and teases. And one of the things that he almost never is, is funny. He has a lot of lines and he's on stage a great deal until he just disappears after Lear is persuaded to go into a hovel

and have some sleep after he's been waging on the Heath. We never see the fool again, and we have to assume that the fool has been complaining of being terribly cold just dies of hypothermia as he vanishes. But in the scenes in which he will, figures. He is a very, very prominent and key figure in terms of alerting us to certain

themes to do with folly and love misunderstood love, Lear's actual love for the fool who becomes a kind of surrogate child, is alienated from his three children, but this boy who calls him nuncle, it's as if he's banished his physical children, but sometimes

the fool, and I like it done that way, is quite small and childlike and even sits on Lear's lap and it's as if unconsciously, he's banished the children he couldn't control, and now he has this childlike figure whom he can slightly more control, but actually is also a truth-teller. I love the idea of him as a child,

because the core of this play is that as Lear's family and his court collapses, he goes out onto this heath in a storm, and there he develops this, he finds this sort of alternative family, the fool, Edgar, who's also been exiled by his father and is now disguising himself as a mad beggar on the run from Bedlam. And then along comes Gloucester,

and he's been thrown out of his lands by Goneril and Regan. So it is like this sort of alternative family, but there's none of the ritual and the finery of the court. They're all stripped naked, and there's this extraordinary scene where Alia confronts Edgar as poor Tom dressed in nothing but a loincloth and says, thou art the thing itself. Unaccommodated man is such a bare-fought thing as thou art.

it's absolutely... And he rips his own clothes off. And then he stays in the storm and starts thinking about the poor, exposing himself to feel what wretches feel. I mean, for a king to go on that journey, it's quite, quite extraordinary. Catherine Balsy, as you've mentioned,

and you've discussed, the story was originally what we could call a folk tale, and there's still obviously a lot of that in Shakespeare's layers. It's instructive to remember that in approaching the characters in this play? I think it would be extremely helpful. One of the things that worries people is exactly that opening scene.

Why do they all do what they do? Why does Lear divide up the kingdom? Why doesn't Cordelia just be a bit nicer to him? Why doesn't he just give him what he wants to hear? But I think if you remember the folktale structure, then those are not the questions we need to ask. The ritualistic nature of that first scene is very striking. and in the recent Trevonanon production with Ian McKellen,

they brought out, Trevonan beautifully brought that out by having a lectern. And the three daughters were required in sequence to go and stand behind the lectern and make their speeches. The text ritualises the proceedings by having Lear say, Goneril, our eldest born, speak first, and then she has to make her speech. Regan again. Yes, I've taken...

that at the opening and we've discussed that. I was just thinking more of, sometimes when you're reading it, you think every, every speech almost is connected with everything else, but there isn't the usual sort of run of psychology. It's almost like everyone does a set piece which has connected, I mean the fool we've been talking about, he does set pieces. Very hard to penetrate some. Edmund begins, Edmund the bastard who is in the tradition of Yago and he comes

on with a set piece and then does set piece. Rages are set pieces which don't add to the plot they add to the tone the intensity is there something

in that coming out of folk which is not in other plays I think I think very much that the notion of the type

the generic type in folk tale there are villains and there are good people and that's about all we know about them there are daughters and fathers

and that's all we need to know about them and what I think Shakespeare's play does is to exploit that possibility so that what we're looking at is not individual characters in the modern sense or in the Victorian sense of

that term, but generalised figures of the king who goes mad, the daughter who betrays. But what Shakespeare does so brilliantly is he subverts the types, he undoes the expectation. So to begin with, Edmund is the bastard and behaves like a bastard. But by the end of the play, both Goneril and Regan, the two queens, have fallen in love with him. And for a moment, it almost looks at it he might become king. and he finally at the end he tries to get Cordelia saved having ordered her murder but it's too late

and he dies on the word yet Edmund was beloved and you suddenly think all this bad behaviour is because he's been treated so badly by his father that sense of humanising the villainous type is fantastic Catherine Nankan Joff. Yes there's a tremendous amount of the unexpected type and what you were saying in a moment ago Milvin

about the sort of speechifying of the characters in those key scenes on the Heath these extraordinary multivocal scenes in which Edgar as poor Tom is talking about animals and eating frogsporn and newts and committing crimes and living in ditches and drinking ditch water. Lear is ranting on about the only problem in the world being his daughters, his cruel daughters and his sons-in-law

and the cruelty of the elements. The Fool is coming out with his extraordinary and increasingly pathetic and yet always meaningful patter rhyming and riddling. Kent occasionally says something that's more common-sensible, but there's no dialogue, just all these voices. And then the unexpected goes right on through the play, where as I see it in the final act,

when we have things that would normally seem in other history plays by Shakespeare, for instance, rather interesting and important, like a French troops arriving in England, or rather charismatic, though very unpleasant young man carrying on a double love affair, seems as if these things are fighting for our children. attention. We're not interested. Leah's not interested. We only want to know what's happening to

Lea and Cordelia. Leo hasn't learned much. All he has learned is Cordelia loves him. He loves Cordelia. That's what matters. And it's this curious thing. There's so much going on. And as an audience, I think we're excited by, but we don't really want all that. It's a sort of force of language, I would suggest, I'd hesitate in front of usury. But it's just the force and the intensity of the language drives you through. And if you say, well, why did that happen after that? You think, well, Well, it did, and away it goes again, and the links aren't, and don't need to be made.

In that sense, it seems to me, is most radical. The development of the language from this very formal court language to an incredible sort of simplicity of, you know, Lear's closing speech is where he says, you know, thou'll come no more, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, to make averse line, and I am a bit pentameter line out of repeating the word never five times, it's astonishing. Yes, that and going via the storm scene that Catherine described so well just now, where these three voices are interacting with snippets of madness and snippets of relevance to the current situation so that you never know quite which is which I think it's like a modernist poem. I think the wasteland would be the nearest thing there is to the storm scene in its all sorts of bits and pieces of culture, the Bible, Harsnet,

and so on. It collects up the culture in order to make a poem which does and doesn't make sense at the same time. How was the play received? There's James sitting there and there you go. How was it received? Yeah, it's one of the great gaps in our knowledge is unfortunately we don't have, you know, the equivalent of theatre reviewers. We don't have people noting in their journals how King James reacted. So, We really can only speculate on that. Shakespeare didn't get sent to the tower, isn't it? Shakespeare didn't get sent to the tower, which considering how extraordinary bold the play is with the Mad King,

but it is notable that in the next few plays that he writes the next few years, he turns back to that mode of romance to, I mean, it's plays like The Winter's Tale that he goes on to write, and Symboline is another ancient British play, playing to King James' interest, but with a kind of a lighter, more romantic ending. So that might suggest that he did push it too far and that it wasn't frequently revived.

But it was received as a play in terms of its ongoing performance, one assumes, very well, Catherine Duncan Jones. As you pointed out, when you came in making this programme dangerously topical, that this was a 300th anniversary of the 6080-C quarto version which came out, which you say in some of the... in some passages you prefer to the folio. So if it was produced that quickly, it was therefore popular enough

for people want to do it again and so on. So we have a feeling that it kept being played. And it was even performed by touring players. I mean, we have a record of it was performed in Yorkshire, for instance, using the printed text, and records of touring performances with actual titles of plays are so rare. We should conjecture that it was,

it enjoyed quite a lot of repeat performances, particularly once it had reached print, so it was easy to get hold of a text of it, even if you were not the king's men you could get hold of attest to act it from. But rather unusually, I think you tell me, please, you will tell me if I wrong, of course you will. Some things in the quarto

were you think are better than DeFolia, which is more often than not of the case. I think, well, just to give one but very important example, Leah's death, Catherine Belsier was saying, perhaps he dies of joy. I have him, the quarto has him speaking a line, break heart,

I breathe a break, on which the old Arden editor Kenneth Murrow had a ridiculous note saying this line cannot be Lear's because he is already dead. Well, who knows whether he's dead? The Quoto text doesn't have him dead then. And who wrote the Quoteau text? And if Lear does speak the line, Breakheart, I Prithee, break, his death exactly parallels that of Gloucester, which has been described by Edgar, some scenes before,

in which his heart burst smilingly, after being reconciled with his child. In this case, the child lives on, he succumbed willingly to his own death. That's another way in which the ending, the horror of the ending, can be ever so slightly mitigated. I've never seen it performed with Lear speaking the line, Breakheart, I prithee, break.

The Corteur also has more O's and groans in that speech. But you could argue that the fact, you know, of all Shakespeare's plays, it's the one where there are most differences between the two published versions, the Corte version published just after the early performance, the folio in Shakespeare's collected works. And as you say, Lear has different dying lines in each text.

and a different person inherits the kingdom at the end of each text. In the Corteau it's the Duke of Albany. In the folio it's Edgar. Now you could argue that those differences are signs that this was a play that Shakespeare and his acting company had trouble with. It wasn't quite working and they needed to go back and rework it. We've got to bring in, there's not quite enough time, Naham Tate, because whatever Lear's force and impact at the time

or near the time, it clearly went out of fashion massively and at the time the restoration Charles I came back in a bauderized version with a happy ending Cordelia comes back she gets the crown she marries Edgar the legitimate son of Gloucester Lear lives comfortably with them forever after and it is a happy end. This version was played

for something like 150, 160 years 150 years yeah this was the version of Lear that our ancestors wanted to see and some of their greatest minds Samuel Johnson applauded, saying this was better because it didn't have the horror and the vulgarity of the original version, which he could. How do we account for that? It's a big thing to ask you to be brief about Catherine Bosley, but I have no option. I'll do my best. It seems as if half a century after its first production, it had become virtually unintelligible, to a culture that expected poetic justice. So there is no poetic justice. There is no poetic

justice in Shakespeare's King Lear. What Neum take does is to restore the fairy tale happy ending. He would have been horrified to know that that's what he was doing. He believed he was introducing probability. He says, I found a heap of jewels, but unstrung

and disordered. So I strung them together. And he gives Cordelia a motive for saying nothing, which is that she doesn't want land and her rich husband because she's already in love with Edgar. And probable it is not in our terms. I think

there's a rape scene and Edgar rescues Cordelia from ruffians and most extraordinary things happen. But this poetic justice was what Johnson latched on to. He said every play is better for poetic justice. I've never seen any reason

against it. It came back as the real play at the time in period you specialise in particularly John McVey which is the time of the romantics. Let's use Keats as an example of that. Why, how did his enthusiasm and arrive, briskly, and how did it influence others?

Yeah, above all from reading the play, because actually when Keats was around in the Regency period, 1810 to 1820, Old King George III was mad, and so the theatre managers did not put King Lear on, it wouldn't do, so Keats couldn't see King Lear, he could only read it, and

he had a facsimile of the folio, and he actually wrote his great sonnet on sitting down to read King Lear once again, he wrote it in his copy of the play. The play for him was the ultimate example of Shakespeare exploring the dark inner recesses of the human spirit. And all that kind of strange and passionate language that in the rational 18th century people

didn't like for the Romantics, it was really getting back to the thing itself, but reading it, not seeing it. Catherine Nungan, it swept in, let us say, I'm sorry about the generalisation, but in the 19th century, Hamlet was the great Shakespeare play. Hamlet proved that Shakespeare was the genius that he was thought to be then. In the 20th century, more than the 20th century, more than the 20th century, and more became Lear. Now, what's your explanation for that? War, chaos, breakdown of society. Can I actually move into the 21st century and say why I think Lear should be a very, very powerful and frequently performed and considered text now? Something we haven't mentioned is nature in Lear. There are two themes which I think are absolutely alive and with us today. One is what happens.

Well, how do we deal with extreme longevity? How do we deal with people in... positions of authority who lose their power through old age and people don't really want them around. They may not even want themselves to be around, but there they are still living on the way that James' predecessor, Elizabeth First, lived longer than most of her subjects really wanted her to. The other one is the place of the human race

in the natural world, the human race in a world of animals and plants and weather and the interaction of human beings with that world, which is constantly referred to, And as well as nothing, the other thing that runs through the play's questions, is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts? Are human beings actually an aberration in nature? Are they more cruel than sharks, say, the sea monster that preys on itself?

Are they actually the bottom of creation rather than the top? And constant references to animals, and often particularly in the heath scenes, a sense there are little dogs on stage, rats, mice. I mean, they're constantly being referred to by Edgar's Port-Ommas, as if they're actually there alive. And Leo in his madness, of course, it's often as if he's going hunting or he's surrounded by animals,

this sense of a world full of non-human nature. How do we interact with it? Well, you've just, Catherine Duncan-Jones, just given us the queue for a second programme of equal length, which I hope we can return to. Thank you both. Thank you all three. Very, very much indeed, Catherine Duncan-Chairns,

Catherine Ballasley and Jonathan Bait. Next week, Ada Lovelace, Trubloid Byron mathematician. Thanks for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at bbc.com.com. UK forward slash radio 4.