The Shakespeare Code

 To read the First Part of Trixie the Cat’s Interview with Stewart Trotter….

…..click: HERE!

Brothers and Sisters of The Shakespeare Code…..

We finished the Dom Perignon at Shakespeare Code speed…….

……and Tom ‘X’ left to work on a new Sonnets’ project……….

……inspired by our visit to beautiful Titchfield.

Your Cat then began the Second Part of her interview with  The Code’s Chief Agent, Stewart Trotter…..

…..about what it was like to play King Lear….

TRIXIE

What have you learnt about Lear…….

…….by playing the part……

…… that you didn’t know before?

STEWART

Two main things.

The first……

….how much Lear relishes life!

Not only do I think actors and directors get the last scene of the play wrong…….

(See Part One  of this interview)

….I NOW THINK THEY GET THE FIRST SCENE WRONG AS WELL!!!

It’s normally all foreboding and gloom….

…….BUT NO-ONE IN THE PLAY KNOWS WHAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN LATER!!!

For Lear, this should start of as the happiest day of his life……..

He is retiring from the cares of state…..

…..he is bestowing the gift of his kingdom on his daughters……..

…..and he is giving away the hand of his beautiful, youngest daughter in marriage.

Goneril and Regan actually COMPETE with each other to tell the old man how much they love him….

And it’s ONLY when Cordelia refuses to play the game that things go wrong…..

Lear is then furiously hurt by her rebellion against his authority……

…….and by the plain talking of his old friend, the Earl of Kent……..

…….whom he banishes in a fury…..

But the next time we see him he has returned from a vigorous hunt…….

 

 

………can’t wait to have his dinner…….

…….. and orders up a knockabout session with his Fool.

Lear’s LAUGHTER at the Fool’s jokes is actually written into the script…….

……but is never, ever played….

Rather the relationship is presented as some sort of bitter competition…..

…..and in a moment of STUPENDOUS MISJUDGEMENT……..

….. in the Royal National Theatre production of the play…..

……LEAR ACTUALLY KILLED HIS FOOL!!! (sic)

At Titchfield, we tried to suggest that the Fool was a surrogate son to the King…….

…….the son that the King never had to inherit his Kingdom….

The other side of the King’s jollity, though, is his frequent lapses into depression…..

The Fool is well aware of this………

 ……and uses to his jokes to try to cheer up the King….

……rather in the way the jester Richard Tarleton…..

…..used to…..

……undump…..

…..Queen Elizabeth I…..

…..who notoriously suffered from…..

…..melancholy….

But the problem is that the Fool..

…..like the young George Washington…..

 ….GENUINELY cannot tell a lie.

So sometimes, when he is trying to make the King laugh………

………the Fool makes things worse by letting slip the truth…..

……..and so, without meaning to…..

……..helps push the King into madness….

But even that madness brings the King happiness….

When he rushes into the storm and cries…..

Blow winds and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!

You cataracts and hurricanoes spout

Till you have drench’d our steeples, drowned the cocks…..

….he is not…..

……defying the storm…..

…..HE IS ENCOURAGING IT!!!

TRIXIE

So that’s another trap for hammy old actors….

STEWART

It certainly is, Trixie!

TRIXIE

Name other ways in which Lear’s madness makes him happy….

STEWART

He ADORES his new friendship with ‘Mad Tom’……

……Edgar in disguise…..

……whose improvised ramblings, he believes, hold ‘the meaning of life’…..

And on the heath……..

……dressed in a crown of wild flowers……..

……he becomes like a child again……

 

…..full of anarchic games…..

……and fresh insights into life.

He does, it’s true, go through agonies of rage and pain…..

……. as his daughters strip him of everything that he values…..

But losing everything has the effect of lightening him…..

……and liberating him…….

Even the language he speaks changes in the course of the play….

At the beginning…….

……when he is improvising a retirement scheme….

 …..he says to his sons-in-law, the Dukes of Cornwall……

….and Albany….

I do invest you jointly with my power

Pre-eminence and all the large effects

That troop with majesty. Ourself, by monthly course

With reservation of an hundred knights

By you to be sustained shall our abode

Make with you by due turn.  Only we shall retain

The name and all th’addition to a King. The sway

Revenue, execution of the rest

Beloved sons be yours….

Lear is using the compact, clotted, language of politics…….

……manipulative and threadbare……

……with clauses within clauses……

……. that cannot be questioned or challenged.

But when he has gone mad….

……and is later reconciled with Cordelia…

……. and experiences an ecstasy beyond anything he has ever felt before….

 

 …….his language becomes transparent, sweeping, graceful and lyrical….

Come, let’s away to prison. We two alone will sing like birds i’th’cage,

When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down

And ask of thee forgiveness.  And so we’ll live

And pray and sing and tell old tales and laugh at gilded butterflies

And hear poor rogues talk of court news, and we’ll talk with ’em too,

Who wins, who loses, who’s in, who’s out….

And take upon’s the mystery of things as if

We were God’s spies….

He concludes with the sublime…

Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia, the Gods themselves throw incense…..

No wonder W. B. Yeats……..

……the most lyrical of poets, calls Lear…..

….gay….

TRIXIE

I beg your pardon?

STEWART

In the old-fashioned sense of the word, of course.

TRIXIE (not convinced)

Mmmmm……..

Now what was the second thing you learned about the play?

STEWART

Just how RADICAL its politics are.

The play is a massive critique of Kingship…

As I wrote in the Titchfield programme note…..

(To read Stewart’s note, click: HERE!)

…….Lear is in many ways a very good King.

He has kept a potentially turbulent country together….

….and is trying his best to ensure that peace will follow his death……

He has inspired complete loyalty in his close follows…..

…..has massive personal authority…..

…..and can make quick, decisive and irreversible decisions.

Now all this is great on the field of battle…..

…..BUT IT’S NOT SO GREAT IN THE HOME….

…..ESPECIALLY A HOME FULL OF DAUGHTERS!!!

Lear is a……

……man’s man…..

……happy in his rough and tumble relationships with the Fool and Kent and his knights…

……but insensitive to the feelings of Goneril and Regan……..

…..especially when he openly favours his youngest daughter, Cordelia….

Very early on in the play, he recognises how wrong he has wronged her…

But he cannot revoke this decision……

…..BECAUSE HE MADE IT AS A KING….

Kingship………

……for all its seeming power……

……puts Lear into a straitjacket.

IT IS ALSO DELUSORY….

King’s are vulnerable to flattery…..

…..and because they possesses the power and wealth that other people want…..

…….THIS FLATTERY HAS COMPLETELY UNDERMINED LEAR’S HOLD ON REALITY….

He has to go ‘mad’ to realise that Goneril and Regan….

……far from loving him….

flattered [him] like a dog…..

Also,  because Shakespeare deliberately sets his play in Pagan times…..

…..LEAR BELIEVES HIMSELF TO BE A PRIEST KING….

……..able to call on the powers of the Sun and Moon and the planets….

……..and even Dame Nature herself…..

…….. to enact his will….

He needs to be exposed, bare-headed, to a furious storm……..

 ……. to realise he has no control WHATSOEVER over the universe……

……..or even the rain……

He is just a poor old man……

……..pitifully grateful for the shelter and straw of a hovel.

In the storm, though, he stops being a King…..

…..BUT HE BECOMES A HUMAN BEING INSTEAD…..

He starts to empathise, for the first time, with the poor and the homeless…..

….. and admits……

……in one of the greatest passages in the play….

……that he has….

…..ta’en too little care of this….

The rich MUST share their wealth with the poor…..

….. and, in so doing, prove……

…….more just……

……than….

……..the heavens…..

…..  themselves.

This thought is so shocking and new to the King that it flips him into madness……

……..a place where the Fool can no longer reach him with his jokes.

TRIXIE

So what’s Shakespeare’s final position on Kingship?

STEWART

I don’t think Shakespeare has a ‘final position’ on anything, Trixie…….

That’s why we are all so fascinated by him….

But at the end of the 1608 version of King Lear…….

…..Kingship has become so degraded that Albany….

……who, as the only surviving Duke, is the rightful heir to the Kingdom……

…….doesn’t want the throne……

He offers it JOINTLY to Edgar and Kent…..

….but BOTH Kent AND Edgar refuse it……

…. and Albany is stuck with it….

…..a burden rather than a glory.

This is a society aching for some other kind of political structure…..

But what that structure might be……

……no-one has a clue……

TRIXIE

As Tom ‘X’ and I watched the Titchfield Shakespeare Festival production of the play……

……there was a real sense of growing evil….

……lustful evil…..

….. an evil that overwhelms everyone and everything…..

Where does it come from?

STEWART

That, Trixie the Cat, is the ultimate question of the play….

Can I think about it a bit before I answer?

TRIXIE

Of course.  Take your time, Boss….

Take your time…..

(To read the next part of Trixie’s Interview, click: HERE!)