Fifteen years ago I sat next to a boy who had just turned 3 and read Lear's words aloud: Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks. I didn't expect him to be interested; I just wanted to hear the rhythm, the urgency. "Read it again, Mama," he said. "And again." So I did.
Today I read those words aloud again: You sulphurous and thought-executing fires, / Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts, / Singe my white head!
Did people complain more about the weather in Shakespeare's day, since they had to be out in it more often in an Gore-Tex-less age, or did that spur them to adapt? I suspect the former. Lear's complaint is not with the weather.
I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness; / I never gave you kingdom, call’d you children, / You owe me no subscription: then, let fall / Your horrible pleasure; here I stand, your slave, / A poor, infirm, weak, and despis’d old man.
In Act III Lear moves from wrath to derangement, wrecked by injustice and lack of love. I love the phrase "thought-executing fires." Make it so I don't have to think about this any more, Lear says. I can't keep thinking about this; I can't stop thinking about it.
In this act his elder daughters are descending too, not into madness but into savagery. Regan looks at the maimed and bleeding Gloucester and spits: "Let him smell his way to Dover." Wickedness begets wickedness, for Regan and for Goneril as for Lady Macbeth. And the costs of their wickedness are painful to see -- Edgar is so moved by Lear's agony that he struggles to maintain his disguise.
I was trying to imagine how one might stage Act III, with its rain and lightning and wind, its mangled snippets of nursery rhymes and its litany of fearsome devils. It would be a wild ride, one in which it's clear that the wheels are coming off. How did things fall apart so quickly? I scribbled a little note to myself as I was reading: Maybe it's only love and kindness holding us together. Betrayal from someone you love is enough to unman the manliest.
Any Shakespeare in your reading pile this week? I'd love to hear about it!
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