July 18, 2012

            I forgot to mention that on Saturday, on our way back from Gettysburg, Rob T had to pull over to get some gas. Kim asked if she could pump the gas because apparently New Jerseyans can’t pump their own gas. This ban on self-service emanates from a law in 1949. How quaint, I thought.

Today, I want to talk about King Lear, and about why it is my favorite play. I had taped a response to the question, “What is your favorite Shakespearean play to teach?” for the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Education department. This response is what I came up with. This written response is longer than the one I taped.

First and foremost, King Lear is a family drama. While the wife of Lear, and mother of Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia, is dead, the play still has a father with three daughters and a father with two sons (Gloucester with Edgar and Edmund). In addition, Lear has two figuratively adopted sons in Kent and the Fool. (One possible reason for the depth of Lear’s love for Cordelia is to imagine her mother’s death. For example, did her mother die in child-birth? If so, Cordelia is Lear’s last attachment to his dead wife, the last breathing organ of his queen. There is one line which stands out to me about the way Lear loved (loves through Cordelia) his wife: “I would divorce me from thy mother’s tomb” (2.4.124). Lear still envisions his union with his wife as a single entity, that he needed her to complete himself, because king and queen will be interred, literally or figuratively, in “one” tomb. Cordelia fills in the gap for now.) Furthermore, Lear is a play of extremes--extreme sorrow, extreme pity, extreme cruelty, extreme terror, extreme pain, but also extreme love. Shakespeare takes us on a journey of, as Jay Halio says, “waste and sorrow,” but also of love. In Lear, you have parents who should have known better. In short, they are parents with haunting errors on their souls and/or beings. It is left to Cordelia and Edgar (Edgar is underrated as one of the Bard’s greatest creations), not only to redeem themselves, but to redeem their respective fathers. But there’s more. Shakespeare takes us on a journey through old age, through senility, through madness, and again at its core, through love. There is a compassionate love embedded in the play--servants who place egg whites on Gloucester’s eyes, Cordelia’s forgiveness of Lear: “O my dear father! Restoration hang / Thy medicine on my lips; and let this kiss / Repair those violent harms that my two sisters / Have in thy reverence made!” (4.7.26-29), and Edgar’s forgiveness of Gloucester: “Sit you down, father; rest you. . . . / Give me your hand. / Come, father, I’ll bestow you with a friend.” (4.6.250, 279-81). These lines alone make me cry every time because of the depth of love and compassion of child for parent. Furthermore, Edmund, at his end, asks for redemption (asks for compassion): “Some good I mean to do, / Despite of mine own nature” (5.3.242-43). Edmund tries to save Cordelia but fails. King Lear, because of its emotional depth, because The Bard puts the value and deepest recesses of love on trial, is Shakespeare’s greatest play.

In the evening, some of us went to an Italian restaurant called 2 Amy’s to celebrate Sarah’s birthday. Sarah is an incredibly erudite woman who studied Shakespeare in London. All of us had a good time.