The Shakespeare Code

(It’s best to read Parts One, Two and Three first.)

As part of the Lent 2014 Lent Course at The Grosvenor Chapel…..

…. Trevor Nunn’s 2008 production of King Lear was screened on 12th March.

 

It stars Ian (‘Gandalf’) McKellen……..

…..and Sylvester (‘Dr. Who’) McCoy…..

…….as King Lear and his Fool…..

The production has some fine things in it…..

….McKellen’s willowy grace as the King…..

…..and the knowing innocence of McCoy’s Fool……

However……

NUNN’S PRODUCTION CHEATS!!!

How?

IT SETS OUT TO SHOW THAT SHAKESPEARE WAS AN ATHEIST!!!

Why?

BECAUSE NUNN HIMSELF IS AN ATHEIST!!!

In the Daily Telegraph, on 16th March, Nunn stated:

Shakespeare is my religion. Shakespeare has more wisdom and insight about our lives, about how to live and how not to live, how to understand out fellow creatures, than any religious tract.

Nunn goes on to say that Shakespeare does this….

…..one hundred times more than the Bible. Over and over again in the plays there is an understanding of the human condition that doesn’t exist in religious books….

Nunn may not be interested in religion……..

But Shakespeare certainly is!!!

As I have shown in the three ‘Background to ‘King Lear’ Posts…….

(See Parts One, Two and Three) 

…….Shakespeare wrote with a Roman Catholic sensibility.

This is not to say he didn’t express the darkest, most nihilistic thoughts in the piece….

…..and paints Ancient Britain as a wasteland neglected by the Pagan Gods…..

…..abused by them, even.

But he also shows the redeeming power of love…..

…..even in the vilest and most brutal of circumstances….

…..and how Christian values arise naturally in men and women….

…HUNDREDS OF YEARS BEFORE THE TIME OF CHRIST!!!

To drive this point home, Shakespeare in the play employs blatant……

……deliberately anachronistic……

….. Christian language….

…..and Christian imagery…..

……as the ‘decent’ characters experience redemption…

So how does Nunn cheat?

Well, for a start he sets the play in Edwardian times……

…..in a sort of mittel-European ‘Ruritania’…..

Lear is first shown crowned …….

…..like a Patriarch in the Russian Orthodox Church….

…..and in the dim light he appears to be making signs of the cross with his fingers…..

Immediately Nunn equates the Pagan Gods with the Christian God…..

……so when the one is discredited, so is the other…..

And in pursuing his atheistic agenda……

…..Nunn deliberately robs the play of all its spirituality.

…..SO POOR ROMOLA GARAI…..

……WHO PLAYS CORDELIA…..

……..suffers most.

Shakespeare shows  Cordelia to be in a mystical bond with the earth…..

She says:

All bless’d secrets,

All you unpublished virtues of the earth

Spring with my tears….

How does Nunn get out of this?

HE CUTS CORDELIA’S LINES!!!

Returning from France……

…… to save Lear from the savagery of Goneril and Regan……

…….Cordelia says:

O dear father!

It is thy business that I go about…..

…..a direct quotation from the Gospel According to St. Luke, 2.49….

When the boy Jesus goes missing and is found by his frantic parents in the Temple, he asks them….

How is it that ye sought me? Know ye not I must go about my Father’s business?

How does Nunn get out of this?

HE CUTS CORDELIA’S LINES!!!

Lear is spiritually re-born in the hovel…..

…..and Cordelia evokes the birth of Christ in the manger when she says…..

And was thou fain, poor father,

To hovel thee with swine and rogues forlorn,

In short and musty straw?

How does Nunn get out of this?

HE CUTS CORDELIA’S LINES!!!

And when Cordelia prepares to restore the senses of her deranged father….

…. by drawing on the spiritual power of her love…..

….she says:

O my dear father, Restoration hang

Thy medicine on my lips, and let this kiss

Repair those violent harms that my two sisters

Have in thy reverence made….

How does Nunn get out of this?

HE CUTS CORDELIA’S LINES!!!

ROMOLA GARAI SHOULD HAVE BEEN ON THE PHONE TO HER AGENT!!!

AND IT’S NOT JUST CORDELIA WHO SUFFERS……

When Lear goes mad and is found…..

…Crown’d with rank fumiter and furrow weeds,

With hardocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo flowers,

Darnel and al the idle weeds that grow

In our sustaining corn….

…..Shakespeare clearly wants to suggest Christ crowned with thorns…..

And to make his point, he has Edgar say of the King…..

….in pity…..

O thou side-piercing sight

…..a reference to Christ’s agony on the cross when…..

…..one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and forthwith came there out blood and water. (Gospel According to St.John, 19.34.)

How does Nunn get out of this?

HE CUTS EDGAR’S LINE!!!

And even King Lear is not exempt….

In expressing his sublime happiness at being with Cordelia in prison, Lear evokes the image in Joseph’s dream in Genesis (41.35) of the seven ‘good years’ of plenty Egypt would experience….

And let them gather all the food of those good years that come and lay up corn under the hand of Pharoah for food, in the cities and let them keep it

He says to Cordelia….

Wipe thine eyes,

The good years shall devour them flesh and fell

Ere they shall make us weep: we’ll see ’em starv’d first.

Cordelia’s eyes CANNOT be starved in the Biblical time of plenty…..

It is a beautiful, oblique, sophisticated way of saying that the good-hearted Cordelia will never make Lear unhappy….

How does Nunn get out of this?

Yes, you’ve guessed it…..

HE CUTS KING LEAR’S LINES!!!

But even more pernicious than what Nunn leaves out…..

….IS WHAT NUNN PUTS IN!!!

Edmund has ordered that Lear and Cordelia be killed in prison.

He repents – and an officer is sent to stop the executions.

At this point in the production, Albany says:

The Gods defend her!

…..and the whole company kneels in silent prayer……

…..a silence which is broken by Lear’s howls of grief as carries on the dead body of his daughter….

The prayers were all in vain…..

No God – or Gods – are listening…..

All very effective….

….BUT NOTHING TO DO WITH THE TEXT OF THE PLAY!!!

Immediately after Albany has said ‘The Gods defend her’ – he gives orders for Edmund to be taken away…

Bear him hence a while….

…and Lear immediately enters with Cordelia…..

WITH NO PRAYER MEETING AT ALL!!!

Perversely, what this screening did for me was to ENFORCE the Catholic perspective of the play……

In Elizabeth’s time, Roman Catholics believed that the queen was an evil, usurping tyrant…..

To be true to England, they would have to back Mary Queen of Scots’ claim to the English crown….

…..and as such they were considered traitors…..

…..and tortured and executed…..

THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENS TO THE ‘DECENT’ PEOPLE IN KING LEAR!!!

To back King Lear means they must be disloyal to the reigning monarchs of England….

…..suffer victimization and persecution just as the recusants did…..

…..and look to liberation from the French army landed at Dover…..

……just as Catholics looked to liberation from the Spanish Armada…..

But why Dover?

Dover is mentioned a staggering ELEVEN times in the play……

……and often as a haven of friendship, warmth and love…..

Kent says:

To make your speed to Dover, you shall find
Some that will thank you, making just report
Of how unnatural and bemadding sorrow
The King hath cause to plain.

Gloucester says:

Dover, friend, where thou shalt meet
Both welcome and protection.

And Oswald says:

Who, with some other of the lord’s dependants,
Are gone with him towards Dover, where they boast
To have well-armed friends.

Dover isn’t mentioned in any of the King Lear sources…..

…. or in the original King Leir play…..

It was while I was watching this screening that the penny dropped…..

IT IS ANOTHER CATHOLIC REFERENCE!!!

Dover was the landing place for many of the Jesuit missionaries…..

…..Englishmen, often young……

…..who had been ordained abroad at Douai and Rheims.

Edmund Campion, Cuthbert Mayne, Robert Persons, Henry Garnet, John Hart landed at Dover……

…..and Shakespeare’s ‘cousin’…..

… the mystic poet, Robert Southwell……

…..not only landed there……

…..he was also later arrested there as well….

Dover for Catholics was a place of hope and martyrdom…..

Exactly as it is, for the ‘decent’ people, in Shakespeare’s play……