Harvard ENGL E-129 - Lecture 5: King Lear - YouTube
Notes
appropriation - the word is used to describe the act of treating Lear as a family drama, where it's presented in its time more as a political drama. suggests that there is a more precise usage of the word in the theory.
point made - parents don't get mad at their children in lear.
past and misremembering. (is this a theme? - changeability, betrayal, blindness and lies, but also social rewritings of what happened?)
remember that this is also a hit piece against seemingly harmless trusted familial advisors
goneril and reagan
do they have dimensionality?
they seem to me to be trapped in the sauce
they're vying for attention from their father, and then from edmund
are they one-dimensional, or just unlikeable?
are they one-dimensional, or just presented shallowly by the persepctive they are being viewed through (lear, then edmund)?
are the knights actually rowdy? (do the elder daughters have justice in their claims?)
it's at least a little bit an exercise of power
edmund is a retvrner
what is lear without king? a study in identity and ego death
the relationship he's trying to establish between the domestic/personal and the political is one we're pretty fluent in - we just like to distance ourselves from it in the modern enlightened west. watch any of the Dynasty genre to see this.
discussions of public and private, ghare bhaire
audience comment: the replacement of the old by the young is so devastating, and I get why people wanted to rewrite it
does the play give you an emotional journey to this point? comedy, romance, dick jokes, mumming. it's sublime tragedy because it gives us enough color to bear it. the pathos is intensely present.
talks about the stuff that isn't there on the stage - on and offscreen. making the bits that are really realyl beautiful be offscreen. gloucester's great height, the buoy seen in the distance.
stage languages, metaphorical lanugages.
"sumptuous nihilism. "
let's talk about languages - the language constructed in the space of a play. in othello, grammar breaks down in the intensity. in lear, it's langauge itself.
audience comment - the sumptuous nihilism of the poultice made for the replacement of that vile jelly into the eye socket. reasoning by analogy proves insufficient here.
which version is it in?
fool scene sweet and bitter fool - Deixis
Ceremony and the fool. Lear stages the relationship of his daughters to him but allows subversions from the fool. Love is more easily enacted, intimacy more easily built, in his relationship with the fool. the jokes are fake but easier to feel good within. dollhouse playacting is so much more of a comfort.
edmund's invocation of nature in the face of custom is a direct allusion to the strictures of Ceremony
Contrast the subversions of norms of the fool and edmund - energetically different. antihero vs queer.
shakespeare's dead martyr girl