tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post5136539400636810749..comments2024-03-10T20:46:19.274-04:00Comments on In the Middle: On Teaching King LearCord J. Whitakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06224143153295429986noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-65942876095592460812010-11-18T08:48:26.653-05:002010-11-18T08:48:26.653-05:00Steve: agreed. Beautiful as the famous speeches ca...Steve: agreed. Beautiful as the famous speeches can be in any Shakespeare play, they carry a weight that can, perversely, be a burden. _Throne of Blood_ is my favorite way for knocking at the gate of _Macbeth_ and finding a freer way into its fortress.<br /><br />Eileen, I admire your sustaining that redemptive reading until the end of both Shakespeare's play and Kozintsev's film, something I have not been able to accomplish myself. While I get Johnston's reading of the film's end as offering potential hope via citation of the siege of Leningrad (in the rebuilding by the peasants; Kozintsev limns his film with peasant bodies, crowding almost every outdoor scene with their mute and ever-moving presence) and the haunting music played by the fool, I don't find these small glimmers of what could be hope especially compelling. The bodies of Lear and Cordelia are carried by cart across an apocalyptic landscape. It's not clear to me that the peasants are rebuilding in harmony: they could be just as well dealing with the unbearable aftermath of a war not theirs. We don't exactly see buildings rising, just rubble cleared so that some minimal existence can endure. The fool playing the flute also seems devastating to me: it's not a song of hope, but some lonely notes of grief, a small, brave front against falling dark.<br /><br />I'm with you on Edgar's closing words as embracing what has been a movement throughout the play, towards affect over expressibility (no coincidence that this isn't a play known for its beautiful poetry), but the lines you quote are not the end of his speech. They are followed by "The oldest hath borne most; we that are young / Shall never see so much nor live so long." I'm left dumbfounded by this vision of the future: could it be more bleak, more distressing? Devastation, again.<br /><br />Jeremy: I don't know this series but it sounds terrific. Thanks so much for the reference.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-29284075349018465082010-11-17T19:29:20.960-05:002010-11-17T19:29:20.960-05:00Jeffrey:
Great post, as always. I was wondering if...Jeffrey:<br />Great post, as always. I was wondering if you have seen any of the Canadian TV series called _Slings and Arrows_ that ran a few years back. It is this wonderful show based on the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario and is (according to one of my actor friends) now a show so revered by actors and Shakespeare lovers that it exists as something like Holy Scripture for many. Each season focuses on the acting company's attempts to put on one of the great Shakespeare plays: Season One is Hamlet; Season Two is Macbeth; and Season Three is King Lear. The last season on Lear is particularly interesting because the actor (William Hutt) who plays the actor playing Lear supposedly did this legendary stage run as Lear that was never captured and preserved on camera. Hence, his recreation of the role for Season Three is the only record we have of that great Lear performance. You should check the show out sometime, if you haven't already.<br /><br />-JeremyAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-22320146197716831002010-11-16T22:00:40.907-05:002010-11-16T22:00:40.907-05:00[continuing]
So this leads, also, to my own readi...[continuing]<br /><br />So this leads, also, to my own reading of the play, which, to a certain extent, follows Kozinstev's instinct, or experience, of reading the play within a particular historical context. As I tell my students, whether in Monmouth [where Cordelia actually survive, at least initially], or Shakespeare, the bastards always win, but that does not, at the same time, means goodness loses. As Levinas once argued, goodness can never be a "regime"--it can't have institutions, armies, and the like, but can only be achieved through small, singular acts, thereby holding out spaces of light in what is often an encroaching darkness [in "Lear," these spaces of light are maintained by Edgar and Kent, especially, but also the Fool and Cordelia]. So, for example, when the unnamed servant [a character I dwell on at great length when I teach the play] tries to stop Goneril's husband from blinding Gloucester, although he doesn't succeed, still, it shows us that goodness is possible even in the worst of times & situations.<br /><br />Also, I read Edgar's closing words differently, I think [and I also think we had this discussion once before on the blog, a couple of years ago!]: when he says, "The weight of this sad time we must obey; / Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say," I take that as a counter-move against all those stuttering moments in the play when words fail, when nothingness looms, but also when people speak at great length, but their words mean nothing at all [are deceptions]. In this sense, the play tells us that language has a singular power: although the persons in this fictional world move within realms of great political power and have armies and weapons and lackeys at their service [in other words, they have a certain amount of brute force at their disposal], mere words could have made all the difference toward a better outcome [this also means Cordelia is partly to blame for what happens, too--I've always viewed her as a part of the problem in this respect]. <br /><br />And finally, although the relations between love and politics may be finally untenable [a lesson we also learn in Plato's "Symposium"], the play seems to insist nevertheless that filial affections [which I, in my own quirky way, have decided to interpret broadly as affections between those who have *chosen* each other as family] are of the highest value. Also, that singular *bodies* matter and that we need those bodies, those Others.Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-13952716798379227392010-11-16T21:46:37.646-05:002010-11-16T21:46:37.646-05:00Thank for this post, which is very helpful to me s...Thank for this post, which is very helpful to me since I have taught "King Lear" pretty much every year since about 2002 in my early Brit. Lit. survey. But I want to propose, too, that there are 2 ways of producing a more hopeful ending for the play, one by way of the Russian film [and I also want to say that I don't think one HAS to go for the hopeful interpretation nor does it need to be forced in there as I think it's implicit in some ways]. Here I quote Ian Johnston, a professor in Canada who teaches a "great books" course and makes his lectures available online [I really love them], talking about how Kozinstev stages the ending of his film [and keep in mind that in the play, the Fool disappears at Act III, scene vi]:<br /><br />"Kozintsev has, throughout the film, associated the Fool with music, specifically with playing a small wooden flute. In the closing moments of the film, we hear the Fool playing his music above the desolation, and as he plays, we see the crowds of people (including, significantly, women) slowly and tentatively start to pick up things and move towards the beginning of some reconstruction.<br /><br />Incidentally, the music in this film (composed by Shostakovitch) is truly memorable, one of the most eloquent reminders in the history of Shakespeare film production of the importance of music in shaping and sustaining a particular interpretative mood.<br /><br />This final image of the common people initiating a process of rebuilding has important implications for the political sense we take from this play (something I will not be discussing in any detail). For it suggests that the old order of patriarchal feudalism has now gone. Most of its leading members are dead or about to die, and the few remaining (Edgar and Albany) are so isolated that there is no rich social hierarchy for them to repair. The aggressive self-serving individuals are also dead. Hence, the future of the community is going to be in the hands of the people, the ones who earlier in the film looked to the imposing figures of the court for security and guidance. Such a vision would, of course, accord well with any Marxist view that this play envisions the destruction of both the feudal aristocracy (which lacks any intelligent sense of virtue) and the new individualism (which turns everyone loose against everyone else). Any hope for the future thus rests with the common people working, as they are here, together, in harmony.<br /><br />At the presentation of his film, Kozintsev spoke eloquently about how his vision of Lear had been shaped by the experience of the siege of Leningrad, the site of particularly painful and sustained suffering in World War II. And, as I recall, he referred to how a sense of the recuperative powers of humanity, as presented in King Lear, had sustained him during that horrific time."<br /><br />[to be continued]Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1173191084683029722010-11-16T07:37:09.960-05:002010-11-16T07:37:09.960-05:00Great stuff, indeed. Makes me think that one of m...Great stuff, indeed. Makes me think that one of my usual pedagogical responses to Kozinstev's great film, emphasizing the politics of suffering and collective action, esp in the hovel scene but also in that tableau with Cordelia's body, may be another way of avoiding the "nothing" at the play's heart. Those trapdoors keep opening...<br /><br />I also think about the richness of non-English language Shakespeare films. I just took my students to a stage play of "Throne of Blood," back-formed from Kurosawa's great 1957 black and white version of *Macbeth*. Sometimes it helps to get out from under those great speeches, much as I love them.Steve Mentzhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02927244468764583378noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-25157971144420514142010-11-15T16:11:09.297-05:002010-11-15T16:11:09.297-05:00GREAT stuff. Thanks for this.GREAT stuff. Thanks for this.Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.com