living with lear
Of all of Shakespeare’s plays, none is more replete with the potential for adaptation in the modern age than King Lear. Its mutability permits absorption of period context, lending the play a hue absent to the age immediately preceding it. Each interpretation ‘interacts’ with the enduring source-text emanating a beguiling latency which enables subsequent ages to view the last adaptation as an historical peculiarity. On both an individual and societal level, King Lear presents an ongoing, compulsive, cognitive ingestion of narrative simultaneously attracting and repelling the spectator (or reader) in equal measure [1]. The intertextual relationship between adaptation and source-text reveals not only the level of correlation between the two but also the identified theme of exploration - a mode of co-existence which propagates through verbal echo, recognition, and the degree of eristic content. The establishment of a causal relationship between source-text and adaptation ensures the intention of the more recent playwright resonates with contextual intertextuality.
In this post, I will explore the revelation of meaning through an intertextual critical lens applied to two adaptations of Shakespeare’s source-text of King Lear: Lear by Edward Bond and Something In It For Cordelia by Joan Ure. Both texts take an implied feature of historical kingdoms – walls - and extrude its power to a nested, encircling construct with which characters have to grapple. Bond’s Lear goes through an onerous process of self-realisation only to reach a belated epiphany where his reward is unnoticed death – an intertext of foresight. Ure’s text presents an ignorant Lear being enlightened by an experienced and knowledgeable Cordelia – an intertext of hindsight. Furthermore, both texts take the disappointment of present-day impasse to engage the source text: Lear suggests ‘message foretold’, Something In It For Cordelia inflects the prophetic quality of Cordelia. Both texts extrapolate the character of Cordelia to ‘realign’ her with the plausibility of the world as the playwrights perceive it: one as self-regarding pioneer of the new nation and its security; the other as erstwhile filial supplicant on the ascendancy.
Lear was premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in London to shocked audiences in 1971 [2]. Spectators were disconcerted as their expectations of an adaptation of King Lear were instead subverted by Bond’s intention of Lear as part comment on King Lear, part comment on current affairs [3]. Bond wanted to re-energise the play to resonate with political immediacy. He believed that present-day audience response to King Lear was focussed on an uplifting aesthetic experience to the detriment of the visceral message contained therein. Paradoxically, Bond sought a convergence of audience reactions, seated several hundreds of years apart, through a divergence from the inherent world-view inherent in the source-text. Such context for this was borne from Bond’s upbringing. Born in 1934 in North London, his education was interrupted as one of the many child evacuees to the countryside during World War II, a period when he was exposed to a continual sense of danger. Bond served in the army between 1953 and 1955, a period where his interest in writing emerged. This concomitant experience fused into a creative output reflecting his world view of war and politics.
The army’s a sort of parodied version of civil society – it’s without all the face-saving rituals and without all the social excuses and just the naked barbarism. It’s a very corrupt form of society and a very vicious and foolish form which is an amalgam of sentimental sloppy relevance for dead idols combined with real viciousness. [4]
Also in the late 1950s, a number of world events occurred which seemed to signal a changing of the guard: the Suez war in 1956 indicated beyond doubt the end of the British Empire; in 1957 the first Soviet space rocket (Sputnik) was placed in orbit, Castro took power in Cuba in 1959, Kennedy oversaw the build up of US arms between 1961 and 1963, and in 1964 Brezhnev ousted Kruschev in the USSR. It has been argued by Foakes that the conditions of the age where men blatantly and routinely abused power, often in arbitrary ways, ensured a critical reappraisal of Shakespeare’s King Lear [5]. The long perceived view of a renaissance King’s pilgrimage to redemption was now viewed through the lens of a period of profound political change in the 20th century which unearthed a subtext of suffering. The result was King Lear came to be seen as Shakespeare’s masterpiece (supplanting Hamlet). It is this context upon which Bond drew as he sought to adapt the source-text to echo the real-politik machinations of diametrically-opposed nations slipping from a world war into a cold war. Bond commented in a programme note to Lear:
Shakespeare’s Lear is usually seen as an image of high, academic culture. The play is seen as a sublime action and the audience are expected to show their depth of their culture by the extent to which they penetrate its mysteries…But the social moral of Shakespeare’s Lear is this: endure till in time the world will be made right. That’s a dangerous moral for us. We have less time than Shakespeare. Time is running out. [6]
As if to prove this, Bond takes an exegetical approach to the source text and compresses the full five acts of King Lear into the first act of Lear. Mimetical intertext rivals influence consequently lessening the opacity of the source-text. The whole of Act 1 uses an intertextual lens as a point of entry for engagement and abstraction predominantly to critically upbraid the King’s relatively effortless conversion from old-world tyrant, (‘Now by Apollo’ [3]), to renaissance redemption by adding an abstruse layer; and to reconfigure the one character in King Lear regularly criticised as being little more than a device for moral virtue: Cordelia. This compression of source narrative threatens to parody King Lear and is addressed in Bond’s preface to Lear: ‘Act One shows a world dominated by myth.’ The characteristics of both Goneril and Regan are amplified to the point of near caricature as Bodice and Fontanelle respectively. The former seemingly portrayed with a dissociative disorder reflected in the displacement activity of knitting; the latter infected with a veiled form of infantilism. This intertext of narrative displacement aerates the plot to accommodate a contemporaneous reading. The brittle remodelling of character to the elastic-limit permits Bond to explore the literal implications of the source text, denuded of poetry, and illustrate a stark vision of legalised brutality as referenced in Bond’s preface: ‘Act Two shows the clash between myth and reality, between superstitious men and the autonomous world’. There is no place for the spectator to avert their eyes.
This ‘intertext of hysteresis’ exhibits double-referentiality; where social reality lags literary pre-text. Sample points within the source-text are identified and interpolated with knowledge of latter-day world events to create a replicated future that can be recognised as a probable reality. Accordingly, King Lear’s exclamation of mental-torture ‘Beat at this gate that let thy folly in and thy dear judgement out’ becomes a physical instrument of torture calmly applied to mechanically and methodically extract Lear’s eyes with clinical precision to leave them undamaged [3]. King Lear’s exhortation ‘Then let them anatomise Regan. See what breeds about her heart’ of the source text mutates into an actual autopsy in Lear. This mapped visual intertext for metaphor serves a didactic vehicle to rouse the spectator from the languid torpor of poetic aesthetic into a furore of indignation that the best efforts of their leaders resulted in the dissolution of international diplomacy ensuing two world wars only to deliver them to the nihilistic impasse of the Cold War.
The recurring theme within Lear is the wall: an abstract visualisation of barriers between warring sides redolent of the Berlin Wall which divided Europe from 1961 to 1989. In Lear, the wall is a perpetual predator of minds and men. When Fontanelle recalls ‘Another time I asked you how high the wall would be. You held me over your head and said you still couldn't see over the top’, it is an allegorical illustration of the vice-like grip on mind-set from which springs forth the growth of a physical border as realised when Lear states:
I built this wall to keep our enemies out. My people will live behind this wall when I'm dead. You may be governed by fools but you'll always live in peace. My wall willmake you free. [2]
The irony of this speech is immediately clear to the audience: that which keeps the enemy out, keeps the architects in. Yet its power persists. The wall endures and those whom reside within walls become offenders. Perry argues that Bond makes the audience understand that the characters of Lear are inflexible ‘not because he chose to depict them that way but because the values they live by have made them inflexible’ [7]. Bond’s intertext demonstrates that an individual’s intent does not help the spectator to predict the social outcome, and reciprocally the difficulty therein to discern individual motives from the social outcomes they create. Lear’s attempts to eliminate suffering serve only to firmly embed it within the foundations of society (full concordance of correlation with the wider world, as Bond sees it). The key difference between the two texts is that King Lear focuses on shifting loyalty whilst no such loyalty exists in Lear, just habitual subjugation of human responsibility to an omnipotent automated bureaucracy. There is an unmistakable sense of the abdication of authority to a greater power - the wall – not only by Lear but also by Cordelia and their allied retinues. This absolves them of responsibility to a degree where the imprisoned Lear is able to say to his daughters’ ghosts ‘Stay here…we can stay here together’ without a trace of irony that what he is suggesting is that they hide from the ‘walled society’ behind another wall (prison) [2]. Having abdicated his authority as king, he now wishes to abjure the burden of the wronged prisoner.
Initially, Bond’s intertext makes grim reading. There is a sliver of hope in the source text when King Lear is reunited with Cordelia. Lear appears to portend the futility of society. Bond goes so far as to ‘use’ Cordelia as an intertext of paradox: instead of dying as a device for moral virtue (source-text), the unfilial Cordelia is clearly observed as the ‘real daughter’ of Lear and now acts as he once did – the more things change, the more they stay the same. Nonetheless hope exists. Bond’s wall is held up to reflect the walls which abound with the capacity to contain us all.
I left my prison, pulled it down, broke the key and still I’m a prisoner. I hit my head against a wall. There’s a wall everywhere. I’m buried alive in a wall.
Bodice and Fontanelle metamorphosed into prisoners due to unquestioningly accepting imposed boundary conditions. Bond seems to believe a wakeful audience, enlightened, can avoid this fate to impel an aperture and break through the impasse in which current society finds itself.
I believe this to be a particularly brave appropriation. Bond’s intertextual analysis reveals the source text’s capacity to subsume latter-day context and yield subtext. Through a fine balance of consonance and dissonance, a malleable textual framework emerges for fresh reading. Furthermore, Lear circumvents the recurring issue of distortion created by the substitution of historical for contemporary terms – a troublesome area for adaptations as often the reader’s understanding of the source text is achieved through interpretative foot-notes. This activity displaces the reader’s faculty for direct criticism, relying upon the poetic quality of text. Adaptations typically use modern vernacular dispensing the reader’s need for translation. Audience familiarity with both texts often creates a ‘poetic-gulf’ challenging suspension of disbelief. Bond avoids this.
The rapacious contagion of Bond’s Lear devours what is left of Lear’s kingdom without mercy. Redemption is uncertain; feasibly the conceit of memory in the mind of the spectator. In the last scene, Lear is observed confronting the stark reality of misplaced freedom and makes a token gesture of tearing down the wall; an action he knows full well will end with yet another death – his own. The cognitive dissonance which infects Lear manifests itself in a cruel uncompromising walled existence. The dissonance Lear suffers in Something In It For Cordelia is as much external as internal: the threat to Lear’s identity results in ontological dissonance [8]. As with Bond’s Lear, he is subordinated to an automated bureaucracy and is subject to progress via mechanical assistance. And as in Lear, he is subject to the authority of Cordelia who knows what’s good for him. Beyond the Edinburgh Fringe, late-night performances by the Dundee Repertory Theatre of Something In It For Cordelia ran from 25th– 29th October 1977 to packed audiences.
Joan Ure was born in 1919 but did not emerge onto the Scottish theatre scene until the 1960s. Like Bond, she lived through the tumult of World War II and was shaped by the society which subsequently emerged. Women’s contribution towards the war effort resulted in a considerable reduction of gender segregation where women were employed in industries which had previously been the sole dominion of men. However, unions’ insistence upon temporary terms ensured female workers were the first to leave employment as the country adjusted to peace-time requirements. Male craft unions disingenuously pushed for women to be paid the ‘rate for the job’ whilst simultaneously endorsing women’s employment in the male sphere on a temporary, ‘wartime only’ basis. As a result, by 1947 58% of women who had been employed in engineering in 1943 had been maderedundant. The tapestry of post-war Scottish society was not therefore benevolent to women and the dominance of heavy industry ensured that progress towards gender equality would be slow. This wider societal context acted as a backdrop to the world of theatre, an arguably harsher environment for female workers. Local writing was overlooked and there were few opportunities for females within Scottish theatre circles. The production of new plays by women was a rare event until the 1980s. It is, therefore, not surprising that in the words of historian Andrew Hook, Ure was seen as ‘perhaps the twentieth century's most outspoken critic of our culture's treatment of women artists in the field of theatre’ [9]. This provides an explanation to the existence of Ure’s series of plays related to gender politics.
The theme of gender is particularly apparent in Something In It For Cordelia where Ure agrees with Samuel Johnson’s assessment that ‘Shakespeare has suffered the virtue of Cordelia to perish in a just cause’ [10]. To counteract, Ure has infiltrated and sufficiently anthropomorphised the character of Cordelia to wrest control from Lear to purchase her destiny and his too. An intertext of identification is established for the purpose of revision driven by an exigent need within Ure to be heard. Such an approach places Cordelia centre-stage, dramaturgically reducing Lear to the confines of a wheel-chair.
In Something In It For Cordelia, Lear and Cordelia are decoupled from the source-text and a role reversal of sorts plays out. Cordelia is freed of the obligation to demur, to deny, to return and to die, ‘young women nowadays have noticed that there is nothing much for them to do in Shakespeare’s play - except die rather beautifully’ [8]. She can find redemption looking after her platitudinous father in old age. However, it is not a freedom Lear wished for himself. Cordelia’s action has opened up an irrevocable existential gulf between who they are now at Waverley station, and the text from which they’ve escaped. The Introducer suggests a ‘Steptoe and Daughter’ comedic quality which I believe does share the same air of detachment but I think the alignment is not quite true. Cordelia comes across as comfortable in her skin and even the irascible Lear does not seem entirely unhappy with his new lot. I would instead posit the interpersonal relationship between Statler and Waldorf of The Muppets, not least because like Cordelia and Lear, they too look upon a show they could’ve been in and are relieved by the distance that separates them. In Something In it For Cordelia, Ure has established a tangential intertext; reorienting the source-text via altercation on a platform before which people themselves are redirected. Nobody is watching this Lear and Cordelia – they are free from the chains of inevitability. The tangential intertext occurs in the first scene of the play when Cordelia questions her father
Why have my sisters husbands, if they say they love you all? Haply, when I shall wed, that Lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry half my love with him, half my care and duty. [3]
Cordelia is expressing her full understanding of patriarchy. Ure skilfully reconfigures Cordelia, not to circumvent this passage, but to illustrate that if she is in charge of her own destiny, it will be best for all parties concerned were she enacting it. There is no intent to shirk dutiful care.
Bond compressed all five acts of the source text into Act 1 of Lear. Ure, on the other hand, takes the first act of the source text to escape to a different play. She extrapolates the Cordelia in Act 1 Scene 1 of the source text and in so doing saves her father from the certitudes which await him up on the Mound: ‘It hasn’t been a life at all. You’re just beginning’ [8]. Lear of course does not see it this way: ‘I don’t approve of children going away and getting themselves an education; they’re sure to use it against their father!’. Fathers should hope that they do, is Ure’s implied response. For everywhere and all eternity are King Lears: ‘the older you get, the older you mean to continue getting’; ‘Never. Never, never die at all. That’s me.’ . All of them self-indulgent: ignoring their wives, displaying their disappointment, abdicating duty, expressing fury, demanding respect, raging on heaths, losing their minds, wallowing in self-pity, and belatedly finding redemption in the corpse of their youngest daughters.
Having found her freedom, Cordelia shows no tendency towards complacency. She will not yield to transports which she herself has not sanctioned. She will mount a bike, and she will steer each stage of her journey. Conversely, Lear’s mobility is doubly compromised: enclosed within a wheelchair aboard a train on a predetermined route with fixed stops. They both travel on wheels bound by time-honoured contrasting rules of disembarkment. Furthermore, by booking her father a seat on the train, the two part on her terms (cf. Act 1 of King Lear). Ure cannot resist Cordelia flexing her new-found powers to ask for allegiance when she suggests to her father he records: ‘Today my daughter Cordelia got the better of me’.
Finally, Ure (like Bond) uses the imagery of walls for the purposes of containment. Her husband, Donald, is marching his soldiers up and down the esplanade. I sense that Cordelia has no intention of releasing him and she has no intention of risking what happened to her being visited upon any potential daughters: ‘I realised this was no time for having children…with our hereditary it might – she might – have been a girl’ [8]. Ure is upbraiding the source text in the context of the present day under the auspices of belated encroaching feminism in order to engineer unease and awareness within the audience of still yet a male dominated society. As Bond did with Lear, Ure is confronting the spectator with a reflection of the existence of walls within which the unaware audience reside asking them to demolish them.
In summary, I believe an intertextual lens critically applied to an adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear tractions meaning and aerates a contemporaneous resonance with the source text where a subtext, hitherto lost, is refracted back into view. By contracting the narrative of the source text into the first Act of Lear, Bond was able to explore the true nature of humanity and continuance where, if misrule abounds, a redemptive end may never be realised. In this sense, I believe Bond, accurately recognised a society in thrall to its own technological achievements and inclined towards revolution. Lear suggests that enlightenment without influence is useless and that furtherance of society can only be achieved if the right lessons are learned from the past: evolution (not revolution) through a process of timely spectator enlightenment. Alternatively, through a process of critically upbraiding the source text for neglect of the full faculty of Cordelia, Ure has identified the same resonance of neglect in contemporary Scotland. Something In It For Cordelia acts as an interquel between Act 1 of the source text and the presupposed sequel upon Lear and Cordelia reaching Wester Ross. Ure manages to call into question the wisdom of Lear’s intentions providing a path to self awareness, not for the purpose of redemption, but reappraisal. Both adaptations use walls as a figurative barrier to progress. The spectator default-position is to consider walls as instruments defining nationhood. Ure and Bond urge the spectator to consider inner-walls: those which I live by to define me and preclude others; class, culture, race, and gender. The implication is as it was in Shakespeare’s time: if I listen, observe, and empathise, I will achieve greater wisdom than if I merely hear, see and sympathise. Society can be encouraged that this message is still as pertinent now as it ever was, or else be disenchanted that it is a message still being learned hundreds of years later. The intertext of Lear and Something In It For Cordelia accommodate both readings.
[1] Use of the term ‘spectator’ and ‘reader’ are considered interchangeable hereonin.
[2] Bond, E., (1971), Lear, London, New Delhi, New York Sydney, Bloomsbury
[3] Shakespeare, W., (1963), King Lear, New York, London, Victoria, Toronto, Auckland, Signet Classic
[4] Bradley, L., (2010), Adapting King Lear For The Stage, London, New York, Routledge, p.122
[5] Ioppolo, G., (2008), King Lear, New York, London, W.W.Norton & Company, p.242
[6] Spencer, J.S., (1992), Dramatic Strategies in the Plays of Edward Bond, Cambridge, New York, Victoria, Cambridge University Press p. 81
[7] Nodelman, P., (1980), Beyond Politics in Bond’s Lear, Modern Drama, (23:3), p.270
[8] Ure, J., (1979), Five Short Plays, Glasgow, Scottish Society of Playwrights
[9] Price, V.E., (2013), ‘Something In It For The Underdog: The Playwrighting of Joan Ure’, International Journal of Scottish Theatre and Screen, (6:2), pp. 22-41
[10] Johnson, S., (1765), The Preface to Shakespeare(Online), University of Adelaide
Bibliography
Beckett, A., (2009), When The Lights Went Out: What Really Happened to Britain in the Seventies, London, Faber and Faber Ltd.
Bond, E., (1971), Lear, London, New Delhi, New York Sydney, Bloomsbury
Bradley, L., (2010), Adapting King Lear For The Stage, London, New York, Routledge, p.122
Brown, I.,(2007), The Edinburgh History of Scottish literature, Volume 3, Modern Transformations: New Identities (from 1918), Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press
Burnett, L.A., (1998),The Argument Against Tragedy in Feminist Dramatic Re-Vision of the Plays of Euripides and Shakespeare, McGill University, Quebec, National Library of Canada
Cavendish, D., ‘Violent revival with a moral force’, The Telegraph, 17thMarch 2005, 20thApril 2016
Dornberg, J., (1974), Brezhnev, The Masks of Power, London, Andre Deutsch
Ioppolo, G., (2008), King Lear, New York, London, W.W.Norton & Company, p. 240-242
Gardner, L., ‘Lear’, The Guardian, 17thMarch 2005, 20thApril 2016
Hargreaves-Heap, S.P., Varoufakis, Y., (2004), Game Theory: A Critical Introduction, London, New York, Routledge
Johnson, S., (1765), The Preface to Shakespeare(Online), the University of Adelaidehttps://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/j/johnson/samuel/preface/index.html[Accessed on 21/04/16]
‘Late-night success’, Dundee Courier & Advertiser, 26thOctober 1977, p.5
Miola, R.S., (2004) ‘Seven types of intertextuality’, Marrapodi, M. (Ed.), Shakespeare, Italy, and Intertextuality, New York, Manchester University Press, pp.13-25
Price, V.E., (2013), ‘Something In It For The Underdog: The Playwrighting of Joan Ure’,International Journal of Scottish Theatre and Screen, (6:2), pp. 22-41
Shakespeare, W., (1963), King Lear, New York, London, Victoria, Toronto, Auckland, Signet Classic
Spencer, J.S., (1992), Dramatic Strategies in the Plays of Edward Bond, Cambridge, New York, Victoria, Cambridge University Press pp. 82
Ure, J., (1979), Five Short Plays, Glasgow, Scottish Society of Playwrights, pp.11-32
Walker, L., ‘Lear, Crucible Theatre, Sheffield’, The Independent, 22ndMarch 2005, 20thApril 2016
Weiner, A.D., (1991), ‘Sydney / Spencer / Shakespeare: Influence / Intertextuality / Intention’, Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History, Clayton, J., Rothstein, E. (Ed.), Madison, London, The University of Wisconsin Press
Yilmaz, S., (2010), ‘State, Power and Hegemony’, International Journal of Business and Social Science,(1:3), pp.192-205
