From Parable to Parody

...The response was magical, as if by beating your hands you could keep the hammer blows -never, never, never, never!away...

...By this I do not mean changing the text so much as softening its effect by refusing to take it literally...

...After all, one man's homily is another man's subtext, and the vision of Kott and Brook seems as wideranging and relevant as the hint of a sermon we sometimes get from Mack...

...This is King Lear's time, as the last age's was Hamlets...

...It was a time in which the nerve of the imagination snapped...

...I find the first statement vague and the second unsupportable...

...Not only is the Pastoral Romance turned inside out, so is the Morality play tradition...

...GLOU.: Alack, alack the day...

...It does, however, lead us to an important question: If King Lear is not naturalistic in any workable way, what is it then...

...I remember particularly the end of his talk on King Lear, when his voice, building a tower of virtues to shine against the blackness of the play, became gentler, faded, died out altogether...

...Nor do I suppose that King Lear, above all other plays, fulfills such demands...

...which drove its only poets mad, or made them write prose, like Pope...

...Best haste to bring Cordelia back alive in her father's arms, or, even better, in Edgar's arms...

...and finally the Pastoral Romance, whose traditional pattern, from artifice to Arcady and back, Lear turns upside down into an anti-romance...

...We do not sink in a stream, singing, under the weight of flowers...

...re-enter Lear, Cordelia dead in his arms) into ideas...

...but, clearly, a shrug and a "Why not...

...The mark of a play arriving to its time is when an audience cannot be bored with it on the stage...

...I would, too briefly, suggest that King Lear does not break into parable but into parody...

...This does not attack the subtext itself, so much as Blau's silly and simplistic application to King Lear of a technique designed for the naturalistic theater...

...Mack tries to build toward a system of social inter-relatedness, a "deeply metaphysical metaphor, or myth, about the human condition, the state of man, in which the last of many mysteries is the enigmatic system of relatedness in which he is enclosed...

...Now the most important thing about the history of King Lear is that for half its stage life it did not exist...

...instead it slides off into a discussion of technique...

...It is the business of tragedy, as it is of all arts, not to turn ideas into incidents, butthrough a process of crystallization -to turn incidents (this meeting of old men...

...And rather than admit chaos into that reality, it transformed itself into a society which remained the easiest place in the world, as Orwell pointed out, to shoulder your neighbor off the sidewalk into the street...

...If that tradition has proved, after all, to be insufficient, it is no fault of the man who has represented it here so well...

...we came crying hither: Thou know'st the first time that we smell the air we wawl and cry...

...Hamlet, considering Yorick's skull is an anachronism now...

...He feels that the attempts by contemporary directors like Irving Blau and Peter Brook to bring out a subtext, reduce the play at best, and at worst distort it-in a way fully as debilitating as Tate's-into a vehicle for asserting the director's conception: "Shakespeare's text unquestionably includes the arabesque on Nothing that Blau notes, together with many cognate allusions of the same character...

...That is to say, action is not psychological...

...He gingerly skirts the inanities of O. J. Campbell's Christian allegory and hops the Charybdis of Kott's non-cathartic interpretation by citing what is, surely, irrefutable: the elation we feel at the end of the play, or when Cordelia says, "No cause...

...Good, bad and indifferent, we are all blown off the white cliff with one blind sweep of the paw, or a puff of air...

...It is the best of our best traditions -humane, good-hearted, optimistic...

...a man is what he does, and performs what he is, in a way that I should say was more Greek than Elizabethan...

...Lear's, answer to that is not a clenched fist and a thunderous "Unfair...

...In fact, Mack argues, it is the homiletic quality of King Lear, its constant tendency to break from action into emblem, play into parable, that explains those exaggerations and absurdities (the one dimensional characters, the unmotivated passions, the impossible disguises, the discrepancy between cause and effect) that have bothered all those who do not or cannot respond to King Lear as a play...

...People no longer die one by one on the tips of poisoned swords...

...And so the final, flimsy barricade is set up, far back, almost out of sight-set up before the fact that though suffering is without meaning, and perhaps even grotesque, yes, even funny, still: "It is a greater thing to suffer than to lack the feelings and virtues that make it possible to suffer...

...Thou must be patient...

...Cordelia, we may choose to say, accomplished nothing, yet we know it is better to have been Cordelia than to have been her sisters...

...The wide-ranging vision of King Lear, its myth, is the World's End...

...the playwright's own histories and, less convincingly, comedies...

...To borrow a term from Lionel Abel, this is no meta-drama...

...For there he stood, his chin jutting ever more forward, using those very qualities of wit, charm, intelligence, scholarship, and grace that the play had annihilated, and told them that perhaps it wasn't so...

...They are not extrapolated out, as here [in Blau's production], to suffuse the whole with one hue...

...If one were to believe these men, the drama would consist of nothing but a heap of absurdities, improbabilities, exaggeration, and lunacy...

...It solidifies ideas into incidents This is the mistake the 18th century made, and which Swift parodied when he forced the figures of his imagination to carry things upon their backs...

...no cause...

...But the drama has one thing in common with ideas -to each its time does come...

...I will preach to thee: mark...

...The immediacy and completeness with which the gods do reward Lear and his daughter suggest that, if anything, they are the victims of a terrible joke...

...The gods do not throw incense on Lear's sacrifice, as they do on Everyman's...

...I do not doubt that a society intent on calling itself just will demand poetic justice in its plays...

...and finally the standing, endless applause...

...This version was performed until 1823, and its effects linger to this day...

...Death is indiscriminate...

...And the efflorescence of the theater of the Absurd, and of the productions of Lear inspired by that theater, suggests that systems of logic and belief are no longer viable...

...It was one of those moments to go to school for and which almost never happen once one is there...

...Cordelia will not rise to be a spouse of Jesu...

...The characters in King Lear are in fact different from those of any other Shakespearean play...

...I also think it unique in the way it balances its concern for King Lear as a play and as a piece of literature...

...He goes on to add that "We face the ending of this play, as we face the world, with whatever support we customarily derive from systems of belief or unbelief...

...the students getting to their feet, the first handclaps...

...Is not his title...

...Though Mack offered reassurance, it was not cheap and had to be fought for...

...No society, either of family or degree, endures in this play...

...I have said that plays are not concepts in costume...

...thy name is Gloucester...

...The religiosity that once tinged his responses to the play (and which still, of course, affect his discussion of the play's nomile tic structure) has been extruded...

...It, too, kept the passion of Lear at a distance by isolating it in time beneath a mass of historic details, and in space behind that vicious proscenium which has almost succeeded in destroying the theater of the West...

...Mack has traced four "general shaping influences" on Shakespeare's elaborate sermon: folk sources such as the Abasement of the Proud King...

...But Mack's argument does not squarely confront this interpretation of the play...

...Why should an epoch accept and relish this schoolgirl's romance...

...Yet there is something warming not only in the subtlety and intelligence of this book, but in the sense of the presence that informs it...

...But what are we left with, what is the vision of the nature and destiny of man...

...In 1681 Nahum Tate rewrote the play with a love interest between Edgar and Cordelia, a happy ending, no fool, no leap from Dover cliff, no blinding of Gloucester, and with many of the metaphors thrown out or flattened into prose...

...Now, the world is flooding and death is miscellaneous...

...This is not so...

...then the silence, like a gasp, in Linsay-Chittenden Hall...

...the Morality play-the moral spectrum from unrelieved vice to unfaltering virtue, the Summons of Death, the Spiritual Journey, etc...

...The 19th century restored Shakespeare's text but retained Tate's spirit by hopelessly sentimentalizing the figure of Lear into what Lamb described as "an old man tottering about the stage with a walking stick...

...The barricades have been pulled back, and the darkness prowls like a bear against them...

...In King Lear in Our Time, his essentially humane vision of the play has not dimmed, but it has become enormously refined and subtle to the point of mysteriousness...

...but in the play itself all these must struggle for lebensraum with other allusions and patterns of widely different colorings and contrasting implications...

...The answer-given in Mack's second and certainly most successful section-is homiletic...

...LEAR: When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools...

...King Lear in Our Time a deliberate challenge to Kott's famous Shakespeare Our Contemporary...

...As for Lear's supposed inability to assimilate the import of Gloucester's suffering into his consciousness, listen to what the old King has to say: LEAR: If thou wilt weep my fortunes, take my eyes: I know thee well enough...

...For example, Mack argues that the Gloucester subplot cannot be understood in relation to the Lear story because "the relation of the two plots remains homiletic rather than dramatic: Gloucester's story is never permitted to discharge its full energies into the consciousness of Lear...

...Whether because of recent Lear productions, or simply under the impact of his own thoughtfulness, the quality of reassurance that Mack used to offer has been considerably strained...

...If the 18th century made King Lear a romance and the 19th a melodrama, then the 20th is threatening to' make it a drama of the Absurd...

...which lost the ability to make or bear connections, or recognize any reality other than the one it trod upon...

...As Aristotle would say, our souls are returned to us lightened and delighted...

...it speaks equally, and equally well, to the viewer and reader, the director and scholar...

...There is no introspection, no interior self, no soul or essence hidden behind the surface of personality...

...Cold comfort you will say...

...Characteristically, Samuel Johnson was more honest: "I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia's death that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play The age turned from King Lear because it could not stand it, just as it could not bear horror, tragedy, or unreason in any form...

...Yet they are not down...

...In the BrookScofield production whose moral nihilism Professor Mack takes such pains to undermine, it was at precisely the point (Act IV, scene vi) where these two plots crossed, and joined (the two men sitting together like old boulders, then hanging together like old vines), that I was most moved...

...While Mack mentions this, he saves the force of his attack for what he feels are the more serious nihilistic exuberances of the modern stage...

...Professor Mack has divided his book into three sections: the history, sources, and interpretation of the play...

...There is much to admire in this analysis...

...If one finds it difficult to accept the anguish of what Lear knows and says here, or the literal intensity of Gloucester's leap from the cliffs of his mind, then one says something like, "This doctrinal relationship of one thing to another embraces almost every aspect of the play...

...the leap...

...Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life And thou no breath at all...

...Yet I thought then-and this book confirms me in that thought now-that what those Yale students were applauding was not the play itself or their teacher's insight into it, but the defense he erected for them against it...

...The reasons most 18th-century critics give for disliking Shakespeare's play do not concern its lack of justice so much as its irrationality...

...Perhaps...

...Reviewed by LESLIE EPSTEIN Department of English Queens College It has been nine years since I heard Maynard Mack's series of Shakespeare Lectures, and it is clear now that they will remain unforgetable...

...There remains the statement of Professor Mack's vision, in his third section...

...And while I intend to pursue my quarrel with his attitude toward the play, I want to state clearly at the outset that the book is as wonderful (I have chosen the word carefully) a piece of Lear criticism as has yet been written...

...I am not saying that Mack is wrong to look for "dazzles of significance" or for a "wide-ranging vision of the nature and destiny of man...

...it makes us restless...

...Mack's answer, "the eighteenthcentury King Lears with their benign ending were perhaps the natural product of an age which held that under the appearances of things lay an order of justice which it was the job of literature to imitate, not to hide," is incomplete...

...I do question whether the kind of shying away from the text that the homiletic interpretation represents is the way to find that vision...

...Is this not a newer and subtler form of Tateification...

...If this book is the precursor of six or seven others, we shall have a critique of the tragedies as significant as Bradley's...

...But is it true to say that the way to make sense of these strange things-along with the play's mysterious recapitulations, reversals, its preaching, and its imperative mood -is to think of the action in terms of information, and character in terms of archetype...

...In that respect, King Lear uses the Morality tradition only to ridicule it: After all, it is the first modern play...

...Mack points out the inappositeness of the actors' speech and character, as if language were "in the service of the vision of the play as a whole.' Similarly, in a most un-Shakespearean fashion, action is never qualified by thought...

...I cannot help thinking that these complaints against irrationality are themselves rationalizations of an interior failure of another sort...