The Shakespeare Code

  [It’s best to read Parts One, Two and Three of Trixie the Cat’s Interview with Stewart Trotter first]

How embarrassing, Brothers and Sisters of The Shakespeare Code……

……to fall in a dead faint to the floor of the Café Laville!!!

But Your Cat was soon revived in the strong arms of Chief Agent  Stewart Trotter….

…and the divine Marco….

…also brought her a saucer of Bailey’s Cream…..

 …which she LAPPED UP.

As soon as she had her wits about her…….

……Your Cat returned to her Interview…..

…to question Stewart’s EXTRAORDINARY CLAIM!!!

TRIXIE

Shakespeare!

Evil?

Boss!!!

How can you say such a thing?

STEWART

I didn’t say Shakespeare was evil.

I said the evil in the play comes from Shakespeare’s own heart.

He has looked at his dark side with complete honesty….

…..and is trying to work out the implications of this in dramatic form.

It must be said, it’s not always to the advantage of the play….

TRIXIE

Give me an example!

STEWART

Take Lear’s great tirade on the heath against society….

…..when he has gone completely ‘mad’……

See how yond justice rails upon yond simple thief. Change places – and, handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? Thou hast seen a farmer’s dog bark at a beggar….And the creature run from the cur? There thou mightst behold the great image of authority: a dog’s obeyed in office.

How, Trixie, has the King acquired this perspective on life?

He admits, in the storm, that he has taken….

…..too little care….

…..of the poor and oppressed in his Kingdom…..

….but this is a far cry from the satirical outburst of……

.…..a dog’s obeyed in office….

TRIXIE

Well, a cat certainly isn’t!

STEWART (ignoring Your Cat’s observation)

Where has this view of the world come from?

It bears only a marginal relationship……

……..if any relationship at all……

…….. to anything Lear himself has experienced in the play.

It DOES however bear a COMPLETE RELATIONSHIP to Sonnet 66……….

…….in which Shakespeare……

…….disgusted by the unfair ills of society under Queen Elizabeth….

……and her imprisonment of the Third Earl of Southampton for treason….

…….contemplates suicide……

 

As the concluding couplet tells us…….

…..the only reason Shakespeare does NOT commit suicide is that he would leave his lover…..

…..the Third Earl of Southampton….

…..alone in the Tower of London…..

…..a true case of…..

…..gilded honour shamefully misplac’d…..

Shakespeare is appalled by a system in which some people…….

……through no fault of their own……

…….are…..

….born….

….into beggary…..

……while others……

…..through no merit of their own…..

….. are born into the aristocracy…..

Shakespeare in the Sonnet describes these ‘noblemen’ as….

……needy nothing trimm’d with jollity…..

And Lear, in the play, describes them as…

……gilded butterflies….

Shakespeare is clearly using the King as a mouthpiece for his own anarchic ideas…..

……and so is stretching DRAMATIC credibility.

He stretches this even further with Lear’s ‘mad’ rants about female sexuality……

Behold yond simpering dame,

Whose face between her forks presages snow;

That minces virtue, and does shake the head

To hear of pleasure’s name;

The fitchew, nor the soiled horse, goes to ‘t With a more riotous appetite.

Down from the waist they are Centaurs,

Though women all above:

But to the girdle do the gods inherit,

Beneath is all the fiends’…..

There’s hell, there’s darkness, there’s the sulphurous pit,

Burning, scalding, stench, consumption; fie, fie, fie! pah, pah!

Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to sweeten my imagination: there’s money for thee.

NOTHING that Lear himself experiences in the play justifies this attack on women.

He does not know, as we do, that Goneril and Regan have been lusting after Edmund…..

……..in fact Lear still believes at this stage in the play that Edmund is Gloucester’s good son.

Lear’s sexual disgust, though, is……..

….. IDENTICAL…….

…… to Shakespeare’s OWN sexual disgust in Sonnet 66…..

……when he writes about….

……maiden virtue…..

……being…..

……rudely strumpeted….

And in Sonnet 129 which begins…..

Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame…..

Is lust in action; and till action, lust

Is perjur’d, murderous, bloody, full of blame,

Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;

Enjoy’d no sooner but despised straight…..

And again in Sonnet 144 where Shakespeare makes……

…… EXACTLY THE SAME COMPARISON…..

……that of female genitals with Hell….

……. as Lear does in the play.

Shakespeare describes in the Sonnet how his mistress, the Dark Lady……

….. has seduced his patron and lover…….

And whether that my angel [Southampton] be turn’d fiend

Suspect I may, yet not directly tell;

But being both from me, both to each friend,

I guess one angel in another’s hell.

TRIXIE

So, Boss, you are saying Shakespeare’s……

…….. PERSONAL AGENDA……

……. threatens to wreck the play……

Are there any other examples of this?

STEWART

Yes. A very famous one. The dreadful curse of Lear……

…..on his daughter, Goneril….

…..when he asks the Goddess, Nature, to…..

…..convey sterility….

….into her womb.

You’ll need some background first…..

TRIXIE

Your Cat’s all ears!

STEWART

In my Grosvenor Chapel talk on King Lear…….

[See: The Background to ‘King Lear’]

…….I argued that in the original, ‘Armada’,  King Leir play……

 

‘Gonorill’ was a satirical portrait of Mary Tudor….

…..the Catholic ‘Bloody Mary’……

…..who burnt hundreds of Protestants to death…..

…..and who, in a desperate wish  to produce a son for her husband, King Philip II of Spain…..

…..and, indeed, King of England….

…..experienced a whole series of phantom pregnancies.

These pregnancies are referred to in the old play by King Leir……

……. who says of ‘Gonorill’….

…….poor soul, she breeds young bones,

And that is it makes her so touchy, sure.

‘Young bones’ was the phrase the Elizabethans and Jacobeans used to describe the foetus in the womb…..

I discovered in rehearsals for King Lear that…….

……GONERIL IN THE LATER PLAY IS PREGNANT AS WELL!!!

TRIXIE

Proof, Boss, proof!

STEWART

The proof shall be yours, Trixie the Cat!

In a scene with Regan and her husband Cornwall……

……Lear curses Goneril in her absence….

……and says..

All the stored vengeances of heaven fall

On her ingrateful top! Strike her young bones,

You taking airs, with lameness!

‘Young bones’ is EXACTLY the same phrase that Leir uses in the old play……

The King is WILLING Goneril to give birth to a disabled child….

To make the point clearer, I hobbled round the stage….

 TRIXIE

Did this shock the audience?

STEWART

Well it certainly shocked my son-in-law, the Duke of Cornwall…..

He responds with…..

Fie, sir, fie!

TRIXIE

Hang on a minute! 

This must mean that when Lear calls on Nature to sterilise Goneril….

……or at least to make any child born to her….

A thwart disnatured torment to her…..

…..HE KNOWS SHE IS ACTUALLY PREGNANT!!!

STEWART

Yes. And to point up the horror, I struck her across the womb with my whip….

TRIXIE

That is truly horrible….

STEWART

I agree, Trixie….

….but it seemed something Lear……

…..in his highly charged state……

….would do.

But NOTHING in the play has justified……

…..or remotely provoked….

…. this extreme behaviour.

…..Goneril has simply asked him to…..

…..disquantity…..

…..his train of a hundred knights!

HE IS NOT ONLY CURSING HIS OWN DAUGHTER…..

……HE IS ALSO CURSING HIS OWN POTENTIAL GRANDCHILD…..

HE IS, IN FACT, CURSING THE WHOLE WORKINGS OF NATURE!!!

Lear’s……

……strong emotions….

….in the words of T.S. Eliot….

…….in an essay he wrote about Hamlet……

…..exceed the facts of the play…….

And they exceed ‘the facts of the play’  because they proceed from Shakespeare himself…..

As I explained in the SECOND PART  of my Grosvenor Chapel talk on Lear……

……Shakespeare’s heart had been broken in 1605……

……when the Third Earl of Southampton’s wife, Elizabeth Vernon……

……gave birth to a son.

Fifteen years before, working to a commission from The Third Earl’s mother, Mary Southampton….

…..Shakespeare had written seventeen sonnets on the Third Earl’s seventeenth birthday……

…..to encourage him to get married and have an heir……

See: THE BIRTHDAY SONNETS.

But, following a love triangle with the Dark Lady……..

……Shakespeare had embarked on a passionate affair with the Third Earl himself.

This affair survived Southampton’s courtship and marriage to Elizabeth Vernon……

……and survived the birth of daughters to the Countess…….

But the arrival of a BABY BOY led to Southampton’s rejection of Shakespeare.

Southampton had hoped to be King James’s lover when he came to the throne in 1603…..

….and had even sent him a wooing portrait…..

See: THE EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON AND TRIXIE THE CAT.

But when he was rejected…..

…..and excluded from the King’s gay inner circle….

……Southampton turned bitterly homophobic.

He wanted to set a ‘manly’ example to his son….

So Shakespeare, the player, had to go.

Shakespeare responded with the poisonous  Sonnet 126………

…….which I decoded in my Grosvenor Chapel talk……

(See: The Background to ‘King Lear’. Part Two.)

…..in which Shakespeare describes how Southampton’s affection…….

….. and pre-occupation with his baby boy…….

…… had led to Shakespeare’s own…..

…..withering….

……while Southampton’s…..

……sweet self…..

……his son….

……grow’st…..

Shakespeare is so devastated by this neglect that he wishes Southampton dead…..

…..and rotting in his grave…..

….. like meat that has been….

…..rendered….

…..by Nature herself….

For a dark, bleak period in Shakespeare’s life, Shakespeare became…..

AN ENEMY TO LIFE……

AND TO ALL THE FUNCTIONS OF LIFE.

TRIXIE

Knowing this, do you still love Shakespeare?

STEWART

If anything, Trixie, I love him even more…..

The great American playwright Tennessee Williams……

….admitted that all great artists were……….

…. monsters….

And Shakespeare has acknowledged his own monstrosity.

As  the great magus, Prospero, says of Caliban…..

…This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine….

 

Shakespeare has looked at himself with devastating honesty…..

…..AND MADE HIS BRUTALITY WORK FOR HIM IN HIS ART…..

……AS PROSPERO MAKES CALIBAN WORK FOR HIM ON HIS ISLAND…..

TRIXIE

So do you think we need to reconsider ‘Shakespeare the Man’?

STEWART

Yes. 

When Charles Darwin………

…….challenged conventional religious belief in the nineteenth century……..

……..people needed a new divinity. 

Shakespeare fitted the bill.

He  became the guru who……..

…….in the words of Matthew Arnold…..

…out-topped knowledge…..

….like a great mountain whose top could never be seen.

And if you look at Shakespeare’s statue in Stratford-upon-Avon….

…….you see a man contemplating life from afar…..

…….as though he were a philosopher rather than a playwright…..

But anyone who has read the Sonnets finds a man completely engaged with life…..

 …..full of contradiction, lust, obsession, self-doubt, loyalty, violence, tenderness and jealousy…….

…..just like the characters in his plays…

……and just like humanity itself….

He was probably the most fully HUMAN writer that has ever lived…..

TRIXIE

But how did the audience respond to your own performance as King Lear?

Could you keep their sympathy AT ALL as you hit your pregnant daughter with a whip?

STEWART

I only acted the part, Trixie!

I’m in no position to judge….

 Just then there was a roar of a Harley Davidson outside….

…..then Tom ‘X’ came bounding into the caff…….

….. brandishing a piece of paper in the air…..

Tom ‘X’

Chief, guess what?

You’ve just had an e-mail about King Lear…..

……from the Revd. Susan Allman!!!

(Susan, as many will know, is the highly respected and dynamic Vicar…….

…..of  the thriving St. Peter’s Church in Titchfield)

You Cat grabbed the e-mail before Stewart could take it……..

…. read it….

……. then said……

We have the answer to my question here, Boss!

And what a glorious answer it is!!!

Susan writes…..

I don’t know whether you realised but we were sitting right at the front at the Great Barn, partly because I forgot my long-distance specs. We did enjoy the intimacy of the performance and had a real sense of being transported back to the Shakespearean era. I studied Lear for my A-Levels many years ago but had forgotten some of the subterfuge and sexual jealousy which was so vivdly portrayed. When you carried in Cordelia at the end it was truly heart-rending and brought a tear to my eye. I always had a soft spot for her. 

Your Lear was very human; infuriating at times but mostly lovable, with occasional glimpses of the powerful bearing he once had.

Our local community is truly blessed to be able to access drama of this high standard – and in such a special place!

 

After such an endorsement…….

……. from such a person……

……. there was little left for Your Cat to do…..

……..except bring this Interview with Stewart to a tactful, silent, close……

‘Bye, now….

 

Brothers and Sisters of The Shakespeare Code….

Our Chief Agent, Stewart Trotter…

…..recently played King Lear for….

The Titchfield Shakespeare Festival Theatre.

Your Cat is in the process of interviewing him…….

…… about what it’s like to play the King………

(For Part One of the Interview, click: HERE and for Part Two, click: HERE)

Your Cat asked him the question:

 ‘Where does the evil in ‘King Lear’ come from?’

He paused for what seemed an age…..

…. then replied….

Let’s go for a walk, Trixie the Cat!

And so we did: Stewart grabbed a couple of books from the floor of The Code…….

…..why do men ALWAYS leave books on the floor?….

…..and we walked into heady Maida Vale….

…..the highly-desirable……..

…..leaf-strewn……

…..celebrity-rich…..

……district of West London.

STEWART

You’ve been writing well,  Trixie……

…..and The Code Rehabilitation Programme is certainly working for you….

Let me take you as a reward to your favourite caff!

Your Cat……

……taking her lead from Her Majesty the Queen…..

……PURRED with pleasure…..

She knew EXACTLY where Stewart meant….

……the world famous…….

……canal-straddling…..

…….haunt of the international Bohemian set…..

…..the NOTORIOUS Café Laville…..

Your Cat has said that Maida Vale is celebrity-rich….

…..but that day The Vale outdid itself!!!

Guess who we saw walking in the street…..

…..as though she was just like everyone else?

Shakespeare Code Fellow….

….and SUPERSTAR IN HER OWN RIGHT…

MAGGIE OLLERENSHAW, F.S.C.

 …..celebrated……

…..as the world well knows……

…..for her wonderful portrayal of Wavy Mavis….

……in the CLASSIC B.B.C. T.V.  sitcom…..

……OPEN ALL HOURS….

…..a NEW PILOT of which was screened last Christmas……

Modest as ever, Maggie asked Stewart how King Lear went in Titchfield….

…….THEN BROKE THE SENSATIONAL NEWS…..

MAGGIE

Open All Hours is to be REVIVED…….

FOR A WHOLE NEW SERIES!!!

Please be my guests at the recording…..

 Before we could reply a B.B.C. stretch-limo screeched to a halt by Maggie’s side…..

…..and a leather-clad chauffeur in shades leapt out…..

…..and opened one of its many doors…..

CHAUFFEUR

Sorry to trouble you, Miss Ollerenshaw…..

The BBC’s gagging for an in-depth interview….

MAGGIE (pointing to Your Cat)

But I’ve already given an in-depth interview to Trixie…….

It’s been read the world over…..

CHAUFFEUR

That’s the problem…..

The Beeb says everyone knows it by heart…..

Everyone, that is, who lives in the……..

……. ONE HUNDRED AND NINETY TWO COUNTRIES…

……. which make up The Shakespeare Code!!!

STEWART

Monsieur le Chauffeur, you exaggerate..

……It’s only one hundred and ninety one…..

CHAUFFEUR

Haven’t you heard?

…..Benin has just joined! 

The Beeb are besides themselves with jealousy…

 TRIXIE

Benin? Where the bronzes come from?

CHAUFFEUR

No less than that, Trixie the Cat.

At this point Maggie stooped to give Your Cat a loving, sisterly kiss…

MAGGIE

You are a victim of your own success, dear Trixie……

But I’ll NEVER give another interview as profound as the one I gave to you…..

You delved to the bottom of my heart…..

And with that Maggie was off……

…..whisked away by the leathered chauffeur……

….. like the great star that she is….

[If you would like to read Your Cat’s LIFE-CHANGING interview with Maggie, then click: HERE! ]

Stewart and I continued on our way to Café Laville….

…..where we were IMMEDIATELY spotted…….

….. and led to prestigious canal-side seats…….

…..by the lovely Marco…….

……the new waiter friend of Tom ‘X”s…..

We both settled down to complementary froth-coffs as Your Cat got out her pad……

…..and continued her Interview with The Code’s Chief Agent…..

TRIXIE

So, Stewart, what IS the source of the evil in King Lear?

STEWART

This is the question Lear himself asks in the play…….

…… when sheltering in Gloucester’s outhouse in the storm…..

Then let them anatomise Regan, see what breeds about her heart. Is there any cause in nature that make these hard hearts?

But there is no reply to his question……..

As I said in my Grosvenor Chapel talk…..

(SEE: The Background to ‘King Lear’ )

…..King Lear is a play that asks QUESTIONS rather than gives ANSWERS….

In the last scene alone…….

…… the characters onstage ask a total of THIRTY QUESTIONS….

TRIXIE

Does that mean we’ll never know where the evil comes from?

STEWART

Well, I think I know…..

…..but I’d like to approach it bit by bit…….

Don’t want to shock you, Trixie!

TRIXIE

You CANNOT shock Your Cat…..

Please proceed!

STEWART

I argued in my talk  that Shakespeare’s portraits of Goneril and Regan……

 …..are a Roman Catholic’s attack on Protestant Queen Elizabeth….

Shakespeare is satirising Elizabeth’s lust for power….

….her dominance over men….

….her elevation of minions….

….her rampant sexuality…..

….and her delight in cruelty and torture.

Elizabeth had died a few years before the play was written….

…..and so could be attacked with impunity…..

And remember, King James VI and I……

…..who had come to the English throne in her place…..

…..wouldn’t have minded a bit…..

Elizabeth had chopped off his mother’s head…..

During rehearsals at Titchfield, I found another coded reference to the dead Queen…..

Lear refers to his…..

…..pelican daughters….

The mother pelican was thought to peck at her own breast to feed her young with her own blood…..

This had been an old symbol of Jesus Christ…….

….. who had given his blood for his church…..

Dante, for example, calls Christ…..

Nostro pelicano…

Elizabeth, as well as appropriating the Catholic Church in England for herself……

…..had also appropriated the symbol of the pelican.

Nicholas Hilliard painted a miniature of her……

…..with a pelican pendant round her neck…….

…..and she also possessed a pelican cup…..

Elizabeth was implying she was giving her own life-blood…..

……both to the Church of England….

……and to her subjects.

But in the satire of the play, Shakespeare reverses the image…..

Goneril and Regan are the pelican DAUGHTERS…..

…..who drink the blood of their parent….

So, by association, Elizabeth becomes a pelican daughter as well….

……who drank dry the symbolic blood of the Catholic Church…..

…..and the literal blood of the English Catholic martyrs….

Edward Arden…….

…….Shakespeare’s own relative on his mother’s side………

…….had been hanged drawn and quartered in 1583…..

…….and St. Swithin Wells…….

…..an intimate friend of Shakespeare’s patrons, the Southampton family….

….had been hanged near Southampton House in London in 1591…..

But satire is primarily a ‘cool’, intellectual medium……

….and this play is ‘hot’ and passionate…..

There ARE satirical elements in it……

But the play is not primarily a satire….

TRIXIE

So where does this heat in the play come from?

Stewart paused for a moment, removed some of the coff-froth from his Lear-beard and said….

STEWART

Well, Shakespeare does toy with the idea of planetary influences....

TRIXIE

You mean astrology?

STEWART

Yes, but he called it….

…..astronomy…..

He never used the word….

…..astrology…..

Science and Art had not yet split asunder…..

He examines the idea……

……that the planets govern our actions and emotions….

…… in other plays like The Winter’s Tale…….

……..where Hermione…….

…..the victim of her husband Leontes’ mad, jealous fits…..

…..says, in way of explanation….

There’s some ill planet reigns….

And remember, Trixie, the Elizabethans and Jacobeans were much more comfortable with Astrology than we are…..

Queen Elizabeth had consulted her magus, John Dee…..

…..on the most auspicious date for her Coronation…..

And even the historian, William Camden……

…….speculated that Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester……

……. and Queen Elizabeth……..

…….. had such an intimate relationship because their birth dates were the same.

In Lear the Bastard, Edmund…..

…..denigrates astrology……

At this point Stewart started flicking through the copy of ‘Lear’ that he had brought with him….

STEWART

Ah! Here it is….

Edmund says….

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we a re sick in fortune, often the surfeits of our own behaviour, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon and stars; as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves thieves and treachers by spherical predominance….

….etc., etc,….

….but he then goes on to say……

My father compounded with my mother under the dragon’s tail. and my nativity was in Ursa Major; so that it follows that I am rough and lecherous. Fut! I should have been that I am had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardising…

…..So, despite himself, Edmund VALIDATES ASTROLOGY!!!

Astrology certainly provides a good REASON for the fact that Cordelia…….

….. can be so different from her older sisters….

As Kent says…..

It is the stars, the stars above us govern our conditions,

Else one self mate and make could not beget,

Such different issues…

Astrology also explains why such catastrophe should hit two seperate households at once….

But my gut feeling is that for Shakespeare astrology was a bit of a theatrical device…….

He used it to explain away implausible events and behaviour….

Stewart then began to leaf through his well-thumbed copy of Shakespeare’s Sonnets….

STEWART

It’s true that in Sonnet 15 Shakespeare talks about…..

…..the stars….

…commenting…

…..on life with their ….

….secret influence….

But in Sonnet 14 he states that he never consults them…..

……all he needs to consult are two eyes of the Earl of Southampton……

……to know that truth and beauty will always be bound together…..

…..AS LONG AS SOUTHAMPTON PRODUCES A SON!!!!

And in Sonnet 107 he points out that astrologers got the fate of the Earl of Southampton…….

…… COMPLETELY WRONG!!!…..

They prophesied that he would die in the Tower of London…..

…..after he had been imprisoned for rebelling against Queen Elizabeth…..

….and….

….supposed…..

….that he was…

…..forfeit to a confined doom….

 

But as Brothers and Sisters of The Code well know……

……Harry Southampton was freed from imprisonment when James came to the throne…..

……and became the hero of the hour because he had fought for the succession of King James…

As a consequence…..

…..the sad augurs now mock their own presage…..

My own belief is that Shakespeare ultimately sides with Cassius when says in Julius Caesar…..

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars

But in ourselves….

TRIXIE

So where DOES the evil in the play come from?

Out with it, Boss!!! Your Cat can take it….

Stewart paused for a moment…….

….then looked Your Cat straight in the eye….

STEWART

From the heart of William Shakespeare himself….

(This Interview will continue as soon as we’ve managed to revive Trixie the Cat)

TRIXIE HAS NOW RECOVERED!!!

Click the above for the Final Part of Stewart’s interview: ‘Goneril is Pregnant.’

 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!)

 

 

 Brothers and Sisters of The Shakespeare Code……

Before you read Your Cat’s interview with Stewart Trotter…….

……it’s best to look at ‘The Original Ending to King Lear’ Parts One,  Two  and Three.

•

The Agents of The Shakespeare Code have been examining William Shakespeare’s ORIGINAL ending to King Lear..

 As part of this research, the Code’s Chief Agent actually PLAYED the part of the King….

…..at the HIGHLY PRESTIGIOUS Titchfield Shakespeare Festival…..

….to find out how this ending works in performance.

Stewart is now back……

…..recovering…..

….. in The Code’s Headquarters in West London…..

…..where he finally consented to give…..

…..AN INTERVIEW TO YOUR CAT!!!

AND HERE IT IS…….

(Stewart is the Chief Agent, so this Interview is rather more verbatim than is Trixie’s wont…..)

•

TRIXIE

So, Boss….

…..you don’t mind me calling you that, do you?

STEWART

Not at all, Trixie…..

TRIXIE

Tom ‘X’ and I LOVED your new ending to King Lear…..

…or should we say your OLD ending as it hasn’t been performed since 1608…..

Can you please explain to people who weren’t there what happens?

And how it differs from the ending that is normally played….

STEWART

Well, the BEGINNING of Lear’s last scene is exactly the same..

..It’s only at the end that it’s radically, gloriously different.

TRIXIE

Talk us through the whole scene….

STEWART

Offstage, Lear discovers a soldier is hanging his daughter, Cordelia, in her cell….

He kills him and cuts down Cordelia…. 

But it’s too late…..

In one of the most shocking moments in the whole of drama…….

…..Lear enters with Cordelia dead in his arms…..

TRIXIE

Not bad for an eighty year old!

What’s he on? Celtic spinach?

STEWART

Remember, Trixie, the King is ill…..

….with a disease called ‘The Mother’.

It’s his illness gives him supernatural strength….

TRIXIE

Of course! You mentioned that in your programme note!

(To read the note, Brothers and Sisters, please click: HERE!

To read more fully about Lear’s illness, please click: HERE!)

STEWART

Another symptom is suffocation in the chest…….

……. and choking in the  throat…..

That’s why, when Lear enters……

……..he commands the men on stage to…..

Howl, howl, howl, howl…..

This is because…..

……HE IS TOO ILL TO HOWL HIMSELF!!!

When  this command is met with shocked silence…….

…….he attacks the soldiers for being…....

…..men of stones…..

…..and adds….

Had I your tongues and eyes I’d use them so that

Heaven’s vault should crack…..

TRIXIE

So all those hammy old actors…….

….. who come on bawling their heads off…..

…… have got it wrong!

STEWART

You might say that, Trixie the Cat….

…..but I couldn’t possibly comment…..

TRIXIE

What happens next……

STEWART

Lear, trying to accept that his daughter is dead, says…..

I know when one is dead and when one lives…..

She’s dead as earth……

But as T.S. Eliot says in The Four Quartets…….

TRIXIE (showing off)

Humankind cannot bear very much reality…..

STEWART

Brava, Trixie the Cat!!!

Lear’s sick, old mind instantly rejects the truth…..

……and he asks the soldiers for a looking glass…….

TRIXIE

…..about the last thing a soldier would ever take into battle…..

STEWART

……to see if Cordelia’s breath will…..

……mist or stain the stone….

Instead he finds a feather…….

……in our production, part of Cordelia’s dress….

TRIXIE

Looks a bit like Ginger Rogers’ dress in Top Hat…..

STEWART

Trixie!

TRIXIE

Sorry, boss…

STEWART

Lear holds the feather to Cordelia’s mouth and cries…..

This feather stirs…..

But the feather only stirs because Lear’s own hands are shaking so much……

The loyal Earl of Kent…….

……..who has followed the King in disguise as his servant Caius….

…….tries to introduce himself…..

But Lear thinks he is one of the ‘murderers’ and ‘traitors’ who have plotted to kill Cordelia…

He then begs Cordelia to…..

…….stay a little….

…..and imagines she is talking to him…

But when no-one else can hear her, he explains….

Her voice was ever soft, gentle and low….

An excellent thing in woman…..

TRIXIE

Bet the feminists love that!

STEWART (ignoring Your Cat)

Lear then boasts to Cordelia that he has……

……killed the slave that was a hanging thee…..

……and immediately becomes a proud, young warrior king again….

I have seen the day with my good biting falchion [short sword]

I would have made them skip……

But then……

……in a moment of heart-breaking pathos…..

…….confesses……

I am old now, and these same crosses spoil me….

For a moment he recognises Kent……..

…..but cannot understand that Kent is the same man as his servant Caius…..

……a good fellow….

……who will…

……strike and quickly too….

Then he confuses Caius with Cordelia….

……and says….

He’s dead and rotten…

Lear then goes on to confuse the Fool with Cordelia as well…..

And my poor fool is hanged……

In his bewildered state, all the people he has loved……..

……..and who have loved him…….

……..are present in the dead body of his daughter.

Lear finally accepts that Cordelia has…..

…..no, no, no life….

……..then asks the great, unanswered……

……..and unanswerable……

……..question of the play…..

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life

And thou no breath at all?

In an act of SUPREME MORAL HONESTY…..

……Lear admits to himself that he will never see his daughter again….

Thou’llt come no more,

Never, never, never, never, never…..

He then asks Kent to undo a button on his tunic……

And it’s at this crucial point that our version of Lear…..

…… and the one that’s usually played……

……. part company…..

TRIXIE

What happens in the usual version?

STEWART

The King suddenly reverts to his old delusion that Cordelia is alive……

……and believes he can see her lips moving….

Do you see this? Look on her! Look her lips,

Look there! look there.

He then dies……

Like the Earl of Gloucester, earlier in the play, Lear’s heart has….

…burst smilingly…..

TRIXIE

Now tell our Brothers and Sisters what happened at Titchfield!

STEWART

As Lear utters those hammer-blow words to his soul…..

 Never, never, never….

…..it provokes a final attack of The Mother…..

….which Shakespeare’s contemporaries believed was a fatal disease.

The King, suffocating and choking……

…..asks Kent to undo the button at his neck…..

He then gives a great cry of agony as he collapses on the body of Cordelia….

….indicated in the text by an extraordinary…..

O,o,o,o,o….

 

Edgar cries: 

He faints! My lord! My Lord’….

Then the King raises himself up and says….

Break heart, I prithee break…..

He has spent the whole of the play trying to CONQUER his illness….

When he sees his servant has been put in the stocks by his daughter and son-in-law…..

….. he cries out….

O how this Mother swells up towards my heart….

Historica passio, down thou climbing sorrow,

Thy element’s below….

Now, in the full, dreadful, knowledge that his daughter is dead……

HE LETS HIS ILLNESS CONQUER HIM!!!

He CONTROLS his destiny by SUBMITTING to it……

As he COURTEOUSLY ……

……but HEROICALLY……

…..IMPLORES HIS HEART TO BREAK…

It is a suicide which is NOT a suicide……

It follows the flow of the universe itself……

 At this point there was a knock at the door…

..It was Tom ‘X’….

 …..brandishing a print out….

TOM ‘X’

Thought you might like to read this, Chief….

It’s Ian Burleigh writing in The Portsmouth News….

STEWART

Tom! You know it’s very unprofessional to read reviews…..

….you might start to believe them!

As dashing Theatre Colossus, Sir Peter Hall……

…….once remarked to me….

…….when I was working as his ‘Assistant’ on productions at the National Theatre and Glyndebourne…..

Today’s review is tomorrow’s fish and chip paper….

…….except, of course, no-one wraps up fisn’n’chips in newspapers any more…

TOM ‘X’

But this is NOT like a review, Chief.

It’s more an appreciation…..

TRIXIE

Let Tom read it to you…

…..pleeeeeeeease Boss!!!

STEWART (reluctantly)

If it makes you happy, Trixie…

TRIXIE

Hooray!!!

TOM ‘X’ (reading)

Where has Mr Trotter been hiding all these years?

He is obviously made to be on stage! His anguish came from the heart and I have NEVER been reduced to tears by Shakespeare before.

I expect to see much more of him on the London stage.

This Fool played by Kevin Fraser is not to be missed either……

…he really understands what he is saying and knows how to interpret it for us.

The fight scene between Josh Coates and Sam Goodall as brothers Edmund and Edgar is truly spectacular – I have not seen better in a live performance.

[To see a video of the fight filmed from the audience, click:

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=926678037351929&set=o.812371435457710&type=2&theatre ]

 

The production is staged in a barn that Shakespeare almost certainly knew.

Were he in the audience today, he would be amazed and alarmed by the lighting and the sound effects…..

……but he would certainly have recognised the honesty of the set……

….. and the passion of the company of players.

There is so much that is good and not to be missed about this production.

TRIXIE

Well, Boss, it seems to me that Ian Burleigh  ‘got it’…..

STEWART (brushing away a tear)

I’ll drink to that Trixie….and to him. He’s a real professional.

TOM ‘X’

Thought you might say that Chief!

 That’s why I’ve got a bottle of Dom Perignon outside…..

TRIXIE

Time for a little break, Boss?

Stewart nodded.

So it was….

‘Bye, now…

(To read the second part of Trixie’s interview with Stewart, click: HERE! )

 

As Brothers and Sisters of The Shakespeare Code well know…..

……The Code will always put its money where its mouth is!!!

We have all been examining Shakespeare’s original, 1608 ending of King Lear……

[See: Shakespeare’s Original Ending to King Lear Parts: One and Two]

……and many of us began to speculate about how this ending might work in performance.

There was only one way to find out…..

……TO PERFORM THE PLAY ITSELF…..

……..WITH THE ORIGINAL ENDING INTACT!!!

To that end, our Chief Agent, Stewart Trotter…..

………in an act which Shakespeare Code Fellow,  Charles Sharman-Cox……

…..branded as…….

….. fearless…

……undertook the role of King Lear…..

……for the Titchfield  Shakespeare Festival…..

…in the Great Agincourt Barn….

As Brothers and Sisters of the Code well know……

…….Titchfield in Hampshire is where Shakespeare really fell in love…..

…..both with the Dark Lady,  Aemelia Lanyer….

(See: How Shakespeare’s Dark Lady Found God)

…and with the wayward, gay, teenaged, cross-dressing Third Earl of Southampton…..

Henry Wriothesley…..

(See: Just how Gay was the Third Earl of Southampton.)

The Titchfield Shakespeare Festival is run by the dynamic Kevin Fraser……

….who also played the Fool in the production.

Stewart first played King Lear in a school production…..

……SOME TIME AGO!!!

Here he is on the right – with John Lyall, F.S.C., playing Gloucester on the left.

Agent Tom ‘X’ and Your Cat biked it down to Titchfield…..

……..MOTORBIKED it down….

…….to catch Stewart’s Lear…..

…and stayed in the village’s beautiful South Street…..

As we waited, expectantly, for the performance in the Great Barn, we read Stewart’s Programme Note…..

•

‘Historica Passio’ – the King’s Disease.

There are two different versions of King Lear: one is a ‘pirated’ Quarto-sized version printed in 1608…….

…….and the other is from the ‘authorised’ Folio-sized collection, published in 1623, seven years after William Shakespeare’s death……..

For this production we have drawn on both versions. The Folio version cuts the ‘trial’ of Goneril in the storm scene when the King is going mad and we’ve done the same.

We have, though, restored the original ending to the play – which probably hasn’t been seen since 1608! We don’t want to spoil your experience, but warn you that this ending is even MORE uncompromising than the Folio ending.

It does, however, display the King’s final, Stoic control of his own destiny.

We have also emphasized a theme that was more readily understood by Shakespeare’s audience. The King, as well as ‘suffering’ from old age, is suffering from an illness called ‘The Mother’ – or what Shakespeare calls ‘historica passio’ (though everyone else called it ‘hysterica passio’).

The symptoms of ‘the Mother’ were: acute pain in the stomach, a feeling of suffocation in the chest, choking in the throat, mania and superhuman strength. Michael Drayton….

…….(the poet friend of Shakespeare’s) compared to illness to the Severn bore – a huge wave that bursts into the river from the sea and, as its force is constricted by the narrowing banks, smashes all before it.

This illness was very ‘fashionable’ when Lear was written….

Catholic priests (‘massing’ in England illegally) had interpreted the symptoms as demonic possession and had performed exorcisms on recusants…..

‘Scientific’ Doctors had argued that the ‘the Mother’ was not the work of the Devil – it was simply a disease.

Shakespeare, in the play at least, goes along with this.

It is fashionable to present the King as a fascistic, mittel-European tyrant…….

– but this production sets the play where Shakespeare intended it – in Celtic, pre-Christian Britain.

We’ve also tried to see events from Lear’s point of view (as well as everyone else’s!) He IS in many ways an impossible, unpleasant old man. (Would YOU want him turning up at your home with a hundred knights?)

But he has managed to hold his turbulent kingdom together by the force of his personality and, in doing so, has earnt the undying love of his followers, Kent, Gloucester and the Fool.

Like King Henry VIII at the beginning of his reign………

…….Lear does not have a son to inherit the kingdom

This stress, we believe, has soured his relationship with his daughters, Goneril and Regan, who must have known their father wanted a boy………

……..By the time Cordelia came along, Lear had given up hope. So she got all the love….

Lear is old and he is ill, probably terminally ill as ‘the Mother’ was thought to be fatal.

Unlike Henry VIII’s daughter, Queen Elizabeth……..

……Lear does all he can to avoid Civil War at his death. He divides his Kingdom, with meticulous fairness, between his three daughters and their husbands.

A war can only occur if two daughters make an alliance against the third. However, Lear suddenly decides on a silly –and in our production, drunken – game: he suddenly decides his daughters must all tell him how much they love him.

In reality, the kingdom, as Shakespeare makes clear, has already been divided.

Cordelia, full of love for her father, but as stubborn and as spoilt as he is himself, refuses to play this game.

And the rest is ‘The History of King Lear’.

•

And then we stopped reading the notes as the devastating play began……

•

Stewart is now  back at Code Headquarters in West London……

…. where Your Cat found him sprawled on The Code’s famous sofa…..

….comatose from his Thespian exertions…..

Your Cat pounced on him…..

……and pinned him down….

……… till he finally agreed to be interviewed….

(His modesty is legendary)

To read his extraordinary interview…..

CLICK: HERE!

 

‘Bye, now…

As Brothers and Sisters of The Shakespeare Code well know…..

 …..Your Cat Trixie…..

…..DEMOLISHED Shakespeare in Love: the Play……

…..in her now celebrated…..

….feared…..

…..and HIGHLY INFLUENTIAL….

…..review….

A DREADFUL WARNING FROM TRIXIE THE CAT!!!

Sadly, the majority of English reviewers……

(…..we cannot in all honesty describe them as…..

critics….)

……fell for the tosh…..

Bouncing Czech, Tom Stoppard…….

….who collaborated on the screenplay of Shakespeare in Love………

…..which re-told Caryl Brahms’s story from No Bed for Bacon

…… is still revered in some middle-brow circles…..

HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN, BLESS HER, EVEN AWARDED STOPPARD THE ORDER OF MERIT!!!

(It might look trashy, but it’s highly coveted in Britain!)

So perhaps it’s not surprising that the obsequious hacks went down like nine-pins….

HOWEVER, THERE IS LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL……

AND IT’S NOT – IN THE WORDS OF ROBERT LOWELL…….

The light from an oncoming train…..

TIM WALKER…

…..A TRULY INDEPENDENT THINKER…

(he refuses to join the Critics’ Circle……..

…….. or take ‘expenses’ from Producers for out-of-town assignments the way members of The Circle do)

…..wrote a brilliant attack on the production in last Sunday’s Sunday Telegraph  (26th July, 2014)…..

……entitled……

Do we really need this production of Shakespeare in Love?

He likens the show to…..

………a group of old bores in a pub laboriously re-enacting an all-too-well-remembered film – scene by scene…..

….and adds….

…..it seems to go on for hours….this show is far too long and far too boring and needs to be cut. And a lot.

Walker describes how the actors seem to have been chosen simply…….

………..because they look a bit like the characters in the film……

…….and describes the Director’s staging of a scene between Will and a Boatman on the Thames as….

frankly pathetic…..

He concludes……

I found myself wondering what on earth the real Shakespeare would have made of it all…..If there were a cabbage to hand, I have a pretty shrewd idea of what the Bard would have done with it.

(To read Tim Walker’s complete review, Click: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/10986397/Do-we-really-need-this-production-of-Shakespeare-in-Love.html )

THERE IS ALSO INTELLIGENT LIFE OVER THE WATER IN AMERICA……

BEN BRANTLEY

……THE CELEBRATED, DAZZLINGLY BRIGHT AND OPENLY GAY AMERICAN CRITIC…

…….writing in the New York Times on 23rd July 2014…….

……..observed…..

Many people, it must be said, prefer the idea of Shakespeare’s plays to the reality of them. Whether they admit it or not, such souls feel that Shakespeare is great for seasoning but indigestible as a main course. They’re often the ones you hear promiscuously peppering their conversation with the canon’s best-known lines or speaking of failed politicians as “truly Shakespearean.”

[Shakespeare in Love: the Play] seems to have been created expressly with this audience in mind. It might best be described as Shakespeare-flavored, in the way that some soft drinks are advertised as fruit-flavored. Like many such beverages, this show is moderately fizzy and leaves a slightly synthetic aftertaste…..

The imitation Shakespeare dialogue now sounds more of Hollywood manufacture than it ever did in the movie. The presence of the line-feeding Christopher Marlowe in the balcony scene where a tongue-tied Will courts Viola now feels less like a harbinger of Romeo and Juliet than a steal from Cyrano de Bergerac….

Shakespeare in Love is Shakespeare for Sophomores……

And there is a remarkable stylistic coincidence between Ben Brantley’s review and mine…..

On 3 July 2014 Your Cat wrote…..

[Shakespeare] is writing Romeo and Ethel the Pirate’s Daughter (big laugh from knowing groundlings….)

On 23rd July 2014 Brantley wrote:

Shakespeare has promised the script for a new play, tentatively titled Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate’s Daughter (more knowing laughs)

IT JUST GOES TO SHOW…..

…..GREAT MINDS DO THINK ALIKE!!!

 ‘Bye now…..

To read Ben Brantley’s complete review, click:

If you would like to read Trixie the Cat’s game-changing review of Shakespeare in Love: the Play, please click: HERE.

…….FROM THE AGENTS OF THE SHAKESPEARE CODE…..

Brothers and Sisters….

Many of you have RIGHTLY complained to Head Office….

 ….that the……

…..INTELLECTUAL RIGOUR….

……of the Code’s pages has been sullied with…..

NAFF, INAPPROPRIATE ADVERTISING.

Whilst the Agents of the Code well understand the…..

 ….COMMERCIAL APPEAL….

…..of The Code’s pages to Advertisers…..

…..(It has enjoyed over 156,000 Views)…..

…..they have decided to take…..

DRACONIAN ACTION.

At an EXTRAORDINARY, MIDNIGHT MEETING of The Code’s BOARD…

….it was decided to go ahead and….

….PURCHASE THE BLOG’S DOMAIN!!!

From this moment…..

ALL ADVERTISING ON THIS SITE WILL BE IN THE HANDS OF THE AGENTS AND FELLOWS OF THE SHAKESPEARE CODE!!!

…..AND WILL BE WORTHY, WE SWEAR, OF ITS AUGUST PAGES….

IN VINCULIS INVICTUS!!!

Here’s a start:

To Read Part One of ‘The Original ending to ‘King Lear’, click: HERE!

To Read ‘The Background to ‘King Lear’, click: HERE!

To read Trixie the Cat’s review of ‘Shakespeare in Love Live Onstage’, click: HERE!

To read ‘The Code’s Top TWENTY POSTS’, click: HERE!

In PART ONE…

……of SHAKESPEARE’S ORIGINAL ENDING TO ‘KING LEAR’…….

……The Shakespeare Code argued that the 1608 Quarto version of the play……

 

…..represents Shakespeare’s original intention.

Lear, filled with grief at the death of Cordelia, kills himself…..

……BY AN ACT OF WILL!!!

He begs his heart to break….

……and his heart obeys.

THIS POST WILL SHOW HOW SHAKESPEARE PREPARES US FOR THIS EXTRAORDINARY ENDING……

•

SHAKESPEARE IN THE PLAY CONTINUALLY DRAWS OUR ATTENTION TO THE KING’S HEART….

HE USES THE WORD….

‘HEART’

…..FIFTY-NINE TIMES!!!….

………..MORE THAN IN ANY OTHER OF HIS WORKS….

Richard III

…… comes closest with 53……

….but even Romeo and Juliet..

…. has only  27….

For Shakespeare and his contemporaries………

……the heart had more of a ‘poetic’ function than it has today…..

It was the seat of the emotions…..

……and held the ‘essence’ of a man or woman’s ‘personality’.’

One of Lear’s most profound questions is about ‘the heart’ of his daughter Regan…..

Then let them anatomize Regan, see what breeds about her heart. Is there any cause in nature that make these hard hearts?

And other characters in the play, experiencing extreme emotions…..

……CONSTANTLY REFER TO THEIR HEARTS!!!

In the storm scene, when Kent begs Lear to enter the hovel…..

…..the King says….

Wilt break my heart?

….and Kent replies….

I had rather break mine own…..

Gloucester, learning of the supposed treachery of his son Edgar, says to Regan….

O, madam, my old heart is crack’d, it’s crack’d!

And a Gentleman describes how Cordelia…..

once or twice….heaved the name of ‘father’

Pantingly forth, as if it press’d her heart.

Edgar, witnessing the spectacle of Lear’s insanity……

….says….

I would not take this from report; it is,

And my heart breaks at it….

And Albany says to Edgar….

Let sorrow split my heart, if ever I

Did hate thee or thy father!

Edgar also wishes…...

……that my heart would burst!

But for Shakespeare in this play…….

……and his contemporaries……

……there is no difference between the ‘poetic’ function of the heart……

…….AND ITS LITERAL FUNCTION AS AN ORGAN OF THE BODY.

For Shakespeare, emotions and thoughts can affect the heart just as much as disease can!!!

 Edgar describes how, when he presented himself to his father……

…….the blinded Gloucester’s…..

flaw’d heart,

Alack, too weak ,conflict to support!

‘Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief,

Burst smilingly.

And, earlier in the play, Edgar is worried that Gloucester’s……

…… mere THOUGHT….

…….that he has jumped off a cliff…..

……would be enough to……

…..rob the treasury of life……

….i.e. kill him…..

 The play shows King Lear himself a under massive pressure…..

….both intellectual and emotional….

…….BUT IT ALSO SHOWS HIM SUFFERING FROM A POTENTIALLY FATAL DISEASE……

….CALLED…

The Mother…..

….A DISEASE WHICH ATTACKS HIS HEART!!!

 In the First Act, furious that his servant Caius (the Earl of Kent in disguise) has been put in the stocks…..

……Lear cries…..

O, how this mother swells up toward my heart!
Historica passio, down, thou climbing sorrow,
Thy element’s below!

 ‘The Mother’…..

……was the common name for the disease…..

…..but its ‘medical’ name was generally….

…hysterica passio…..

……i.e. suffering which eminates from the womb….

….. from the Greek ὑστέρα –  hystera or uterus.

King Lear, however, in all the Quarto and later Folio editions…

……calls it…...

……historica passio….

……..because (1)…..

……hysterica passio…..

….. was a version of ‘the Mother’  which was, strictly speaking, confined to women……

…..and because (2)…

……Shakespeare wanted to imply that Lear’s illness was  a long-established one….

[Modern editors of Shakespeare, with no justification at all, have replaced ‘historica‘ with ‘hysterica‘…..

…..thereby loosing a flood of Freudian analysis on the play……]

Shakespeare, we know for certain, read about……

……the Mother……

…..in a pamphlet by Richard Harsnett entitled A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures….

……published in 1603…..

(We know this because……

….. being a ‘snapper-up of unconsidered trifles’….

……Shakespeare lifted many words and phrases from it for King Lear)

Harsnett, a Protestant, attacks Roman Catholic exorcisms……..

…… carried out on English recusants in the mid-1580’s…….

….. by Catholic missionary priests…..

Harsnett describes how one of the exorcised, Richard Mainy……

……himself a Catholic priest manqué …..

…..had a spice of the hysterica passio, as seems, from his youth; he himself terms it the Mother (as you may see in his confession) and saith he was much troubled with it in France, and that it was one of the causes that moved him to leave his holy order whereinto he was initiated, and to return into England.  

In his Confession to the Privy Council in 1602, Mainy himself said:

Whether I do rightly name it the Mother or no , I know not. But it is well known to the Physicians of London  that may be alive and were then of any name, that my eldest brother Thomas Mainy had the same disease, and that he died of it; and Master Edmund Peckham (as I have been credibly informed) was like wise troubled with it. When I was sick of this disease in France, a Scottish Doctor of Physic  then in Paris called it , as I remember, Vertiginem capitis [Vertigo of the head]. It riseth (as he said, and I have often felt) of a wind in the bottom of the belly, and proceeding with a great swelling, causeth a very painful colic in the stomach, and an extraordinary giddiness in the head. With this disease  I am still once in four or five years troubled, and I do greatly suspect that it will end me, as it did my brother.

……Then they, the exorcists, told me what extraordinary strength I showed in one of my pangs which moved me little. For the nature of that disease is to cause one’s belly to swell in such sort as two or three are not able (using any good discretion) to keep down the wind that seeketh to ascend, as is very well known to those who have seen either a man or woman in that fit.

•

In 1602, there was also a famous witch trial……

A fourteen year old girl called Mary Glover accused an older woman, Elizabeth Jackson, of bewitching her….

….and claimed that Jackson had used her supernatural powers to give her choking and fits….

 But Edward Jorden – a Doctor – stated at the trial that Glover’s symptoms were not those of possession……

 …….they were symptoms of a disease called…..

……..Suffocation of the Mother…..

Jackson, controversially, was found guilty of witchcraft……

……..and sentenced to a year in jail…..

…….but was released shortly after her imprisonment.

Dr. Jorden, to prove he was right, published a book called……

A Brief Discourse of a Disease called the Suffocation of the Mother…..

……in the following year, 1603.

Jorden wrote:

The disease is called by diverse names amongst our authors, Passio Hysterica, Suffocatio Priefocatio, and Strangulatus uteri, Caducus Matricis i.e. in English, the Mother or the Suffocation of the Mother, because most commonly it takes them with choking in the throat; and it is an effect of the mother or womb, wherein the principal parts of the body by consent do suffer diversely according to the diversity of the causes and diseases therewith the matrix is offended.

He also states that the symptoms could be brought on by….

…….the stirring of the affections of the mind.

Four years after the 1608 production of Lear…..

Michael Drayton……..

……….refers to the Mother…..

…….in the VII Song of Polyolbion…

…..a topographical, anthropomorphic poem….

…..which describes Wales and England…..

…….and was going to cover Scotland as well…..

(But no trace of the Scottish section survives.)

Drayton began the work in in 1598…..

……..but the first section was not published till 1612.

According to the journal of John Ward…..

……who became the Vicar of Stratford-upon-Avon in 1662…….

…….(less than fifty years after Shakespeare’s death)…..

…….and who mugged up on the local folklore about the Bard.

…..Drayton, he wrote, had been at the…..

…..merry meeting…..

…..with Shakespeare and Ben Jonson….

…..when the three men….….

…drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted.

So, it is highly probable that Shakespeare, as a friend of Drayton, saw the Polyolbion poem in manuscript.

Drayton, in Book VII,  refers to the famous Severn Bore…..

……or…..

…higre….

……a gigantic surge wave that comes in from the sea and up the Severn river at certain times of the year…..

……and becomes ferocious and noisy as its makes its way from the estuary of the Severn…..

 

……through the narrowing channels and bends of the river….

 

Drayton describes how when the…

…….tumultuous waves……

…are…

…….shut up in narrower bounds, the higre wildly raves;

And frights the straggling flocks [of sheep] the neighbouring shores to fly,

Afar as from the main it comes with hideous cry,

And on the angry front the curled foam doth bring,

The billows ‘gainst the banks when fiercely it doth fling;

Hurls up the slimy ooze, and makes the scaly brood [fish]

Leap madding to the land affrighted from the flood;

O’erturns the toiling barge, whose steersman doth not lanch,

And thrusts the furrowing beak into her ireful panch…

The Severn Bore seems more sedate now than it was in Drayton’s time….

……but the bore on the Qian Tang River in China still erupts with terrifying fury…..

Drayton, in Polyolbion, goes on to use an epic simile to describe the Severn bore…..

…..and choses for his imagery a woman in the throws of ‘the Mother’….

As when we haply see a sickly woman fall

Into a fit of that which we the Mother call

When from the grieved womb

She feels the pain arise

Breaks into grievous sighs with intermixed cries

Bereaved of her sense: and struggling still with those

That ‘gainst her rising pain

Their utmost strength oppose

Starts, tosses, tumbles, strikes, turns, touses, spurns and sprawls

Casting with furious limbs her holders to the walls

But that the horrid pangs

Torment the grieved so

One well might muse from whence

This sudden strength should grow….

•

So, from Mainy, Jorden and Drayton we learn that ‘the Mother’…

(1) Can be brought on by situations of stress and emotion…..J.

(2) Manifests as an acute pain and swelling in the stomach or the womb….J. M. D.

(3) Travels upwards…M. J. D.

(4) Produces a suffocating sensation in the chest….J.

(5) Produces a choking sensation in the throat……M. J.

(6) Leads to acute dizziness….M. J. D.

(7) Leads to loss of reasoning powers….D.

(8) Brings on fits, groans and cries….D.

(9) Brings on an extraordinary increase in physical strength…..M. D.

….and…

(10) Often culminates in death….M.

IN ITS NEXT POST….

…..THE SHAKESPEARE CODE WILL SHOW HOW KING LEAR…..

……DISPLAYS EVERY SINGLE SYMPTOM….

……OF…..

‘THE MOTHER’

…..AND FINALLY KILLS HIMSELF BY ENLISTING…..

……THE POWER OF HIS OWN DISEASE!!!

•

To Read Part One of this Series, click: HERE!

To Read ‘The Background to ‘King Lear’, click: HERE!

To read Trixie the Cat’s review of ‘Shakespeare in Love Live Onstage’, click: HERE!

To read ‘The Code’s Top TWENTY POSTS’, click: HERE!

Brothers and Sisters of The Shakespeare Code……

BEWARE, BEWARE…..

Just when you thought the dread movie……

….. Shakespeare in Love…..

 

….was dead and buried….

….it morphs into an even more dreadful….

…..PLAY FOR THE STAGE!!!

TWENTY-EIGHT actors and musicians have been hired to tell the story…..

…….first told by Caryl Brahms and S. J. Simon in their 1941 novel, No Bed for Bacon….

……..repeated by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard in the movie, Shakespeare in Love….

 

……..and now repeated AGAIN by Lee (Billy Elliot) Hall in his stage adaptation of the movie….

……..of Shakespeare’s affair with the stage-struck aristocratic Lady Viola…….

……..who dresses up as a boy and acts in Romeo and Juliet…..

What’s wrong with that, Trixie?

 …..Your Cat hears you cry…..

What’s wrong with a bit of romantic tosh in the West End of London?

NOTHING!!!

……except for one thing…..

…..the Producers are palming the whole thing off as an……

…. EDUCATIONAL EVENT……

…..as though the whole preposterous story were somehow…..

 REAL!!!

They are even producing Educational Packs for schools…..

…..and have inveigled a SERIOUS ACADEMIC, Dr. Natalie Mears….

……a Senior Lecturer at Durham University….

…..to produce an essay for the programme……

….. portentously entitled……

 Elizabeth I and the World of Shakespeare in Love….

(THE WORLD OF SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE!!!)

The programme also provides us with a thumb-nail gallery of

 The REAL LIFE FIGURES AND PLACES in Shakespeare in Love…..

‘

But perhaps the story IS real, Trixie!

……Your Cat hears you desperately cry…..

Let’s examine the facts….

Dr. Mears tells us that the play is set in 1593…..

……something the programme itself confirms….

…..and adds that it’s LONDON, 1593….

It HAS to be 1593……..

……because that is the year in which Christopher Marlowe….

…..who plays a big part in the evening’s proceedings…..

…..was killed in a tavern brawl in Deptford….

(In the movie version, Shakespeare is responsible for Marlowe’s death……

In the stage version, he is more honestly exonerated……

The Producers must have been thinking about their Education Packs)

But by FIXING the date as 1593……

…which neither the novel nor the play does….

……you are IMMEDIATELY into problems….

As Dr. Mears admits, there was a plague raging in London which killed thousands of people….

What she DOESN’T say is that……..

 ALL THE THEATRES WERE CLOSED!!!

NONE OF THESE EVENTS COULD HAVE HAPPENED IN LONDON AT THAT TIME!!!

Worse, we are shown a Shakespeare writing Romeo and Juliet……

BUT NO SERIOUS SCHOLAR PUTS THE PLAY BEFORE 1595……

TWO YEARS AFTER MARLOWE WAS STABBED!!!

Poetic Licence!…..

…..Your Cat hears you cry….

…..with even more desperation….

But believe her, it gets even worse….

Shakespeare isn’t writing Romeo and Juliet …..

He is writing Romeo and Ethel the Pirate’s Daughter…

(Big laugh from knowing groundlings….)

It is Marlowe who gives Shakespeare the idea for the play we now have…..

But as ANY Shakespeare Scholar knows..

…..and most A-Level students…

SHAKESPEARE WAS RE-WRITING AN ALREADY ESTABLISHED STORY…..

Arthur Brooke had written HIS version……

…… called The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Iuliet……

…….in 1562.

And William Painter had written his……

…….included in The Palace of Pleasure……

……..sometime before 1580.

Shakespeare’s habit was to work from old plots…..

….and even from old plays…..

But though he was in the habit of collaborating

…..Shakespeare in Love….

…..(or this play version, anyway)…..

…..DOES SHAKESPEARE A MASSIVE, PHILISTINE DISSERVICE.

IT IMPLIES HIS SONNETS

WERE WRITTEN BY CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE!!!

No-one can BEGIN to understand the complex nature of Shakespeare’s emotional life without reading his 154 Sonnets……

…..indeed, William Wordsworth……

……said the Sonnets were….

…..the key with which Shakespeare unlocked his heart…..

So to have the sublime love Sonnet 18…..

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day……

…..presented on the stage as a piece of plagiarism…..

…..is a vulgarity of such wickedness…..

YOUR CAT IS ALMOST SPEECHLESS…..

EDUCATIONAL PACKS INDEED!!!

YOUR CAT WOULD SEND THEM PACKING!!!

And it gets WORSER….

The Sonnet, in both the play and the film, is inspired by the beauty of Lady Viola…..

……and addressed to her….

There is not a serious Shakespeare scholar ON EARTH who believes that Sonnet 18 was written to a woman…..

It was written to a man…..

…..or at least a….

….lovely boy

…..and MORE and MORE Scholars…….

…..around the world….

…. are coming to agree with The Shakespeare Code…….

….that this man was……

Henry Wriothesley, the Third Earl of Southampton

 

a.k.a.Harry Southampton…….

See: Just how gay was the third Earl of Southampton.

Harry was Shakespeare’s patron….

And on good evidence gave him the colossal gift of £1,000 to….

make a purchase

Dr. Mears has the good grace to write:

There is no evidence of court ladies having affairs with poor players…..

…….and at least she mentions the Earl of Southampton…….

…….even if she does claim…….

……. WITH NO EVIDENCE AT ALL…….

……..that Elizabeth Vernon deliberately made herself pregnant……..

…..to MAKE Southampton marry her.

Indeed, there is every evidence that Harry and Elizabeth adored each other…..

…..so much so that there is an oral tradition in Titchfield……

…..the Earl of Southampton ‘s stately home….

 ……that their love was the inspiration for Romeo and Juliet….

….and the ambiguity of Mercutio’s reaction to the events in the play……..

….. would certainly have mirrored Shakespeare’s OWN ambiguity about the courtship of his lover, Harry, and Elizabeth….

See: Shakespeare in Titchfield.

But there is also LITERARY evidence that links the Southampton family to Romeo and Juliet……

  …..an entertainment for a wedding celebration in 1572……

….written by George Gascoigne.

Harry Southampton’s mother was Mary Browne, the 2nd Countess of Southampton…..

Her father was Anthony Browne…..

…..who became Lord Montague when he was elevated to the House of Peers in 1554.

Two of his children got married in 1572 ……

…..Anthony, Mary Browne’s twin brother –

…..and Elizabeth, her half sister…..

…..and Lord Montague commissioned Gascoigne to produce an entertainment……

…..BASED ON THE MONTAGUES…..

….AND THE CAPULETS…..

Two Famous Italian Families…

In the story, a Lord Montague……

……who in this version of events lives in Venice rather than Verona…..

 ……saves a little boy……..

……..(who wears a token of the Montacutes in his cap)……

……  from the clutches of the Capulets…..

……and a wind blows them to England and the wedding celebration…..

As the ‘pretty boy’ says:

This grave Venetian….

Gan straight with many courteous words in arms me to embrace.

And kissed me on the cheeks, and bade me make good cheer

And thanked the mighty hand of God, for that which happened there…

Originally all the wedding guests were to dress as Venetians…..

But this proved too costly, even for the Montagues…..

So the Romeo and Juliet story was dear to the Southampton family…

….especially the Countess of Southampton……

…..who may even have commissioned it…..

…..and it was, in all likelihood, first performed at Titchfield….

…..as local legend says.

It was, after all, Mary Browne who commissioned Shakespeare to write seventeen sonnet for her son’s seventeenth birthday….

TO TRY TO GET HIM INTERESTED IN GIRLS!!!

See: The Birthday Sonnets.

She could well have re-inforced the message of the Birthday Sonnets with a decidedly HETEROSEXUAL play!!!

 

At the end of Shakespeare in Love, Queen Elizabeth………

….. commands Shakespeare to write Twelfth Night…..

Shakespeare must have suffered another writer’s block…..

In reality, Twelfth Night did not appear till eight years later…….

…. in 1601!!!

But by this stage in the evening, reality is abandoned altogether……

The entire company perform a patriotic jig to the words of…..

…Vivat Regina….

….Long live the Queen…..

…..to the roaring delight of the modern groundlings….

Again, pure hokum……

Dr Mears insists that…..

Shakespeare in Love does not obviously reflect many of the tensions and problems of Elizabeth’s later years…

But as Brothers and Sisters  of The Shakespeare Code well know….

Shakespeare, a Catholic, loathed Elizabeth, a Protestant……

…..even in 1593!!!

But if Shakespeare COULDN’T have been in London in 1593…..

….because of the Plague which claimed 20,oo0 lives….

(thanks for this figure, Dr. Mears)

– …..where was he?

Click: SHAKESPEARE IN ITALY  to find out!

Bye, now.

 

To read about equally dazzling, subsequent reviews of Shakespeare in Love: the Play by Tim Walker and Ben Brantley –  please click: HERE!

THE SMART MONEY FOLLOWS TRIXIE THE CAT!!!

Note: To read Part Two of ‘The Original Ending to ‘King Lear’ – ‘The King’s Disease’ – click: HERE.

To read The Shakespeare Code’s new ‘Top Twenty Posts’…..

….click: HERE!

 

 

 

 

 KING LEAR….

…..was first published as a single play…….

….. in a small, Quarto sized, edition in 1608……

…..eight years BEFORE William Shakespeare’s death.

It was later published as part of a collection in a larger, Folio sized edition in 1623..

 

……seven years AFTER Shakespeare’s death…..

This FIRST FOLIO edition, as it has come to be known…….

….(there were to be later Folio editions)….

……..was edited by two of Shakespeare’s friends…..

……the actors, businessmen and petty crooks….

 

…..who claimed this was the AUTHORISED version of the plays….

…..designed to replace the…..

…..diverse stolen and surreptitious copies maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious impostors….

……of which the 1608 Quarto edition of King Lear, by implication, was one!!!

As a result of Heminge and Condell’s self-declared painstaking editorship…….

…..the plays now emerged…..

cur’d, and perfect of their limbs and….absolute in their numbers as [Shakespeare] conceived them…..

Thomas Heywood had made the same claims for himself eighteen years earlier in 1605……

…when he published his own version of his play……

….designed to replace a…...

……most corrupted copy…….

…..which had been…..

…..published without his consent….

In a new Prologue, Heywood describes, in similar language to Heminge and Condell, how he…..

…..took the pains…..

…..to put his play….

….upright upon its feet

To teach it walk….

He also recounts the method by which plays were stolen…..

STENOGRAPHY!!!

(Heywood’s own word!!!)

‘Pirates’ would lurk in the audience……

…..which…..

….thronged the seats, the boxes and the stage…..

….and take down the entire play……

BY HAND!!!

As a consequence, Heywood claims, their edition of the play had…..

….Scarce one word true….

But it must be remembered that Heminge, Condell and Heywood had a product to sell…..

…..their own new versions of existing plays….

…..so they exaggerated…..

…..and, in the case of Heminge and Condell, actually lied!

They claimed to have…..

….scarce received from [Shakespeare] a blot in his papers…..

…..but one glance at the manuscript of Shakespeare’s contribution to The Play of Sir Thomas More……

…..shows that Shakespeare certainly did blot his papers!!!

(Heminge and Condell were propagating the myth that Shakespeare wrote his plays ALONE…..

…..but as Brothers and Sisters of The Code well know…..

 ……..Shakespeare COLLABORATED throughout his career…..

…….and was constantly updating and re-writing his work.)

The stenographer of the 1608 Quarto version of Lear, it is true, DID sometimes mishear the words the actors were saying….

He wrote down…..

The mistress of Hecat, and the might….

…..wheras the Folio edition of 1623 has….

The miseries of Hecate and the night……

[The SECOND Folio of 1632 is DIFFERENT AGAIN ! It has ‘The mysteries of Hecate and the night’.]

The 1608 stenographer also heard as  PROSE…..

…….some passages that were later to be revealed as VERSE in the Folio edition…..

 

HOWEVER…..

The pirated Quarto edition has supplied us with lines from King Lear…..

….INDEED A WHOLE SCENE…

……WHICH WE OTHERWISE WOULD NOT POSSESS!!!

In the Quarto Version, King Lear, losing his wits, conducts a mock trial of his daughters……

…..in which he mistakes a joint-stool for Goneril….

 

THIS SCENE DOES NOT EXIST IN THE FIRST FOLIO EDITION!!!

(It was clearly cut from performances after 1608)

So, for all its faults….. 

THE 1608 QUARTO SHOWS US WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED ON THE STAGE….

MOSTLY this is the same as the Folio Version..

…except when it comes to the LAST SCENE of the play….

WHERE IT IS RADICALLY DIFFERENT!!!

•

In the First Folio version of the last scene…….

…….Lear comes across a soldier who is hanging his youngest daughter, Cordelia, in her cell…..

Old as the King is, he manages to kill him…..

…….then enters, carrying the body of Cordelia, in his arms…..

He COMMANDS everyone to howl in grief…..

….. if he still had a voice and eyes as strong as theirs are, he would…

……use them so that Heaven’s vault should crack….

Lear is a warrior king who has experienced death in battle…..

He KNOWS….

……when one is dead and when one lives…..

Cordelia is…..

…..dead as earth…..

But, in desperation, he clings onto the idea that she might be alive….

He asks for a looking glass to see if her breath will….

….mist or stain the stone….

He holds a feather to her mouth which….

…..stirs….

….probably because his hand is shaking….

….but Lear WANTS to believe that Cordelia is alive….

It is a chance which does redeem all sorrows

That ever I have felt….

The faithful Earl of Kent presents himself to Lear…..

…..but Lear doesn’t recognise him.

Lear then tries to convince himself that Cordelia is speaking to him…..

……and explains that the reason that no-one can hear her is because…

……..her voice was ever soft

Gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman….

The Duke of Albany……..

…..who has finally taken a stand against his evil and disloyal wife, Goneril….

……promises that….

What comfort to this great decay [King Lear] may come

Shall be applied….

He gives up his right to the throne to the old king…..

……..and promises to reward those who have behaved honourably.

Lear has returned to Cordelia’s body…..

…..and finally forces himself to accept the truth…..

And my poor fool is hang’d! No, no, no life!

Why should a rat, a dog, a horse have life,

And thou no breath at all. Thou’lt come no more,

Never, never, never, never, never!

Lear feels he is choking and asks for help….

Pray you, undo this button. Thank you sir…

He then turns back to Cordelia, looks at her and cries:

Do you see this? Look on her, look her lips,

Look there, look there….

He believes Cordelia’s lips are moving!

He thinks she is alive!

So all the sorrows that Lear has ever felt ARE redeemed….

And at this moment of supreme happiness, he dies.

The great Shakespearean, A.C. Bradley……

…….writes……

To us, perhaps, the knowledge that [Lear] is deceived may bring a culmination of pain: but if it brings only that, I believe we are false to Shakespeare, and it seems almost beyond question that any actor is false to the text who does not attempt to express, in Lear’s last accents and gestures and look, an unbearable joy.

So, like the Earl of Gloucester in the play……

……reunited with his loving, loyal son, Edgar….

……Lear’s heart has….

…..burst smilingly……

Edgar hopes that the King is still alive….

But Kent wills him to die…..

Break heart, I prithee break….

……explaining….

……he hates him

that would upon the rack of this tough world stretch him out longer.

Edgar concedes that the King is dead….

…..and Albany now offers his throne to the….

….friends of my soul…..

…….the Earl of Kent and Edgar, the new Earl of Gloucester…..

But Kent whose….

…..strings of life….

…have……

…. begun to crack….

…..knows he must soon join his master in heaven.

Edgar, however, takes up the responsibilities of kingship with a new resolve to…..

….speak what we feel, not what we ought to say…..

But he acknowledges that the times are so bad, the world must be coming to an end….

The oldest hath borne most. We that are young

Shall never see so much nor live so long…..

•

The last scene in the 1608 Quarto is almost exactly the same as the 1623 First Folio……

……up to Lear’s last speech….

……FROM WHICH POINT IT IS RADICALLY DIFFERENT!!!

This is a reprint of the FIRST FOLIO ending….

This is a reprint of the 1608 QUARTO version:

 

LEAR IN THE QUARTO VERSION DOES NOT BELIEVE HE SEES THE LIPS OF HIS DAUGHTER MOVE.

In fact, with his repeated ‘Never’ he drives home to himself…….

….THAT HE WILL NEVER SEE CORDELIA AGAIN!!!

As in the Folio version, this terrible truth stifles his breathing…..

…….and again he asks someone to undo his button.

He looks back to the body of his daughter…..

…..but this time he utters a terrible cry……..

…o,o,o,o….

…and faints.

Edgar goes to his aid…..

……but with an heroic effort of will, the King commands his own heart to stop beating…..

Break heart, I prithee break…..

And his heart obeys.

As in the Folio edition, the Duke of Albany offers his throne to Kent and Edgar……

But in the Quarto version, not only does Kent refuse it…..

…..EDGAR REFUSES IT AS WELL!!!

So the last speech in the play is spoken by Albany.

Left ruling a Kingdom he does not want to rule…..

….. employs for the first time the royal ‘We’…

….and rebukes himself for not speaking out against evil earlier…..

…Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say….

(What is a glimmer of hope on Edgar’s lips becomes an admission of complicity on Albany’s)

Albany, finally, comes to the same conclusion that Edgar comes to…..

……THAT THE WORLD IS SO CORRUPT IT MUST BE HURTLING TO ITS END….

The Quarto conclusion to King Lear…..

……Shakespeare’s first revision of the play since he collaborated with Thomas Kyd on the old King Leir….

See: The Background to ‘King Lear’.

…….is one of unremitting despair.

•

Kenneth Muir……

….whose Arden edition of King Lear my generation grew up with……

 ……claims that all these differences in the Quarto were down to compositors’ errors.

But in the next Posts, The Code will demonstrate………..

(1) How this bleak ending to the play was thoroughly prepared for by Shakespeare…..

(2) How it ties in with Shakespeare’s other work….

….and….

(3) HOW IT TIES IN WITH SHAKESPEARE’S LIFE ITSELF!!!

TO READ PART TWO, ‘THE KING’S DISEASE’, CLICK: HERE.