1
00:00:00,610 --> 00:00:04,350
Thank you for coming. Today's lecture is on King Lear.

2
00:00:04,350 --> 00:00:15,420
So King Lear has its first recorded performance at court on Boxing Day 69 six and Stephen's Day 16 06.

3
00:00:15,420 --> 00:00:20,340
As we go through the lecture, you'll be able to judge for yourself how suitable it is for festive.

4
00:00:20,340 --> 00:00:31,170
Entertainment is published as a quarto in 60 No.8 and in a substantially different version in the Folio in sixteen twenty three.

5
00:00:31,170 --> 00:00:39,330
Part of what I'm going to be talking about today is some locations of difference between those two early texts.

6
00:00:39,330 --> 00:00:45,480
But the question I'm structuring at the lecture around today is just how sad is King Lear?

7
00:00:45,480 --> 00:00:52,200
Just how sad is this play? So as usual, we'll start with a brief synopsis.

8
00:00:52,200 --> 00:00:58,860
The play is the story of an aged king of ancient Britain who decides to abdicate and

9
00:00:58,860 --> 00:01:04,950
who sets his daughters a rhetorical contest to see which of them loves him most.

10
00:01:04,950 --> 00:01:10,770
Inevitably, of course, he picks the bad ones to flatter the flattering ones, the insincere ones.

11
00:01:10,770 --> 00:01:22,020
His elder two daughters, Reagan and Goneril, and banishes his loyal younger daughter because her death declaration of love is brusque and unwelcome.

12
00:01:22,020 --> 00:01:25,710
She leaves for France with her new husband, the king of France.

13
00:01:25,710 --> 00:01:31,640
The older daughters turn against their father, his cast off into a storm accompanied by his fool.

14
00:01:31,640 --> 00:01:38,970
And he becomes increasingly mad when Cordelia returns with French armies to reinstate her father.

15
00:01:38,970 --> 00:01:48,640
They are reunited, but the battle turns against them, and she is captured and at the end killed, whereupon her father also dies.

16
00:01:48,640 --> 00:01:57,180
And this story of filial ingratitude is interwoven with a parallel story in which Edmund, the bastard son of Gloucester,

17
00:01:57,180 --> 00:02:06,300
attempts to discredit his half brother Edgar and the suffering caused to their father at the end of Gloucester.

18
00:02:06,300 --> 00:02:11,790
He is blinded, quite literally, by Goneril and her husband, Cornwell.

19
00:02:11,790 --> 00:02:17,160
Edgar disguises himself as Tom of Bedlam to accompany his father and in the end,

20
00:02:17,160 --> 00:02:26,370
Edmund Goneril, Reagan, Lear, Cordelia, Gloster and apparently the Fool are all dead.

21
00:02:26,370 --> 00:02:33,750
So I'm conscious that, as always, this question around which I am working is an inadequate one,

22
00:02:33,750 --> 00:02:39,660
asking just how sad is King Lear teeters or perhaps tumbles into the banal.

23
00:02:39,660 --> 00:02:47,970
But Terry Egerton's observation on tragedy. Here is a useful one in his book, Sweet Violence.

24
00:02:47,970 --> 00:02:51,810
The title of the book comes from Sydney's Defence of Poetry.

25
00:02:51,810 --> 00:03:00,720
Eagleton, in an introductory chapter called A Theory in Ruins, surveys the great critical and philosophical history of attempts to define tragedy.

26
00:03:00,720 --> 00:03:10,740
Concluding that the only shared, robust definition of tragedy is very sad and sometimes very, very sad.

27
00:03:10,740 --> 00:03:18,120
So the critical history of King Lear, I think, circles around this idea and has often been desperate to excavate something

28
00:03:18,120 --> 00:03:23,490
positive or optimistic from Shakespeare's play the first half of the lecture.

29
00:03:23,490 --> 00:03:27,570
I'm going to try and talk about how the critical history approaches this question and

30
00:03:27,570 --> 00:03:34,290
tries to rework the play in order to find something positive or optimistic in it.

31
00:03:34,290 --> 00:03:40,050
The critical history of the play that I'm going to outline goes broadly in three movements.

32
00:03:40,050 --> 00:03:48,630
One, Shakespeare's play is just too cruel to Shakespeare's play is actually quite hopeful at the end.

33
00:03:48,630 --> 00:03:53,250
Three. No, it really is cruel. And so is life.

34
00:03:53,250 --> 00:03:57,450
So that's the movement of kind of critical history that I'm going to try and amplify.

35
00:03:57,450 --> 00:04:05,490
Now. The earliest responses to King Lear are in the 17th century.

36
00:04:05,490 --> 00:04:11,820
As you know, the restoration period sees a number of Shakespeare's plays restored to the stage,

37
00:04:11,820 --> 00:04:18,240
all tidied up to suit the aesthetic and political tastes of the new age.

38
00:04:18,240 --> 00:04:30,690
And a version of King Lear is exemplary here as an example of restoration rewriting version is by name taped written in 16 81 taped rewrites.

39
00:04:30,690 --> 00:04:34,830
The play. Most notoriously, he rewrite Shakespeare's ending,

40
00:04:34,830 --> 00:04:41,010
leaving both Lear and Gloucester alive and the marriage of Cordelia and Edgar as the

41
00:04:41,010 --> 00:04:45,320
final culmination of the parallel plots which are implicit in Shakespeare's plays.

42
00:04:45,320 --> 00:04:51,900
So Shakespeare has Cordelia and Edgar as parallel figures named tape.

43
00:04:51,900 --> 00:04:56,490
Kind of takes up to his logical conclusion by having them join together at the end.

44
00:04:56,490 --> 00:05:03,750
Lear's invitation at the end of Tate's play is to pass our short reserves of time in calm reflections

45
00:05:03,750 --> 00:05:09,960
on our fortunes past cheered with relation of the prosperous reign of this celestial pair,

46
00:05:09,960 --> 00:05:12,600
the pair being Cordelia and Edgar.

47
00:05:12,600 --> 00:05:21,240
When we come at the end of the lecture to think about the ending of Shakespeare's play, we might bear in mind how very, very different types is takes.

48
00:05:21,240 --> 00:05:26,130
Revision is partly a question of aesthetics, but it's also partly about politics.

49
00:05:26,130 --> 00:05:32,370
The theme of restoration the king being reinstated is clearly a big, late 17th century theme.

50
00:05:32,370 --> 00:05:45,930
It's easy to see why, but takes rewriting is also a response to a play that is too horrible and too comfortless to be enjoyable.

51
00:05:45,930 --> 00:05:50,230
The perennial question, why does tragedy give pleasure?

52
00:05:50,230 --> 00:05:57,060
The question that since Aristotle has disturbing suggestions of perversity in our

53
00:05:57,060 --> 00:06:03,330
enjoyment of misery and becomes even more pressing in relation to King Lear,

54
00:06:03,330 --> 00:06:12,140
Tate's answer implicitly is that tragedy does not give pleasure. What gives pleasure is a kind of tragicomedy, which is what he rewrites he.

55
00:06:12,140 --> 00:06:22,050
We cannot enjoy the play's ending. His revision indicates, and therefore we need to have it altered in order to make it more palatable.

56
00:06:22,050 --> 00:06:26,610
And I think we can think of Tate's play as a form of criticism,

57
00:06:26,610 --> 00:06:31,860
not least because it's a very explicit example of something that all literary criticism does.

58
00:06:31,860 --> 00:06:37,770
To some extent or another, it rewrites its object. Criticism is an act of rewriting justice.

59
00:06:37,770 --> 00:06:42,810
Revision or adaptation is here in this case.

60
00:06:42,810 --> 00:06:53,020
Now, Tate's view of an unbearable ending to Shakespeare's play has its most famous early critical counterpart in Samuel Johnson.

61
00:06:53,020 --> 00:07:05,110
In his general introduction to his edition of Shakespeare, published in 1765, Johnson is famously outraged by the ending of King Lear.

62
00:07:05,110 --> 00:07:11,500
Shakespeare, he says, has suffered the virtue of Cordelia to perish in a just cause.

63
00:07:11,500 --> 00:07:22,600
Contrary to the natural ideas of justice, to the hope of the reader and what is yet more strange to the faith of the Chronicles.

64
00:07:22,600 --> 00:07:27,320
And Johnson, therefore endorses name types adaptation instead.

65
00:07:27,320 --> 00:07:32,600
So it's one of very few critics to think that tape is better than Shakespeare. This is Johnson,

66
00:07:32,600 --> 00:07:38,480
a play in which the wicked prosper and the virtuous miscarry may doubtless be

67
00:07:38,480 --> 00:07:43,700
good because it is a just representation of the common events of human life.

68
00:07:43,700 --> 00:07:52,340
But since all reasonable beings naturally love justice, I cannot easily persuaded that the observation of justice makes a play worse,

69
00:07:52,340 --> 00:08:01,640
or that if other excellences are equal, the audience will not always rise better pleased from the final triumph of persecuted virtue.

70
00:08:01,640 --> 00:08:08,690
So Johnson says, you know what gives us pleasure is the triumph of persecuted virtue in the present case, says Johnson.

71
00:08:08,690 --> 00:08:15,110
The public has decided Cordelia, from the time of Tate, has always retired with victory and Felicity.

72
00:08:15,110 --> 00:08:22,400
And if my sunset sensations could add anything to the general suffrage, I might relate that I was many years so shocked many years ago, sorry,

73
00:08:22,400 --> 00:08:29,900
so shocked by Cordelia's death that I know not whether I ever endure to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them.

74
00:08:29,900 --> 00:08:35,870
As an editor. So I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia's death that I do not know whether I ever endured

75
00:08:35,870 --> 00:08:41,030
to read again the last scenes of the play that I undertook to revise them as an editor.

76
00:08:41,030 --> 00:08:47,420
So Johnson locates his objection to Lear in the figure of the figure of Cordelia,

77
00:08:47,420 --> 00:08:54,200
who he imagines to be an entirely innocent victim of an unjust, tragic plot.

78
00:08:54,200 --> 00:09:05,330
And he argues that Shakespeare has overstepped the boundaries of something, perhaps audience expectation, perhaps taste, perhaps natural justice.

79
00:09:05,330 --> 00:09:11,540
And further, he argues that Tate has reinstated these boundaries.

80
00:09:11,540 --> 00:09:18,080
So Tate and Johnson, I'm having as representative of a group of early readers.

81
00:09:18,080 --> 00:09:25,940
There are more of them than these two famous examples who subscribe to the idea that Shakespeare's play is too cruel,

82
00:09:25,940 --> 00:09:34,910
it's too difficult, it's too bleak, it's too sad, and therefore it needs amelioration.

83
00:09:34,910 --> 00:09:39,160
So the next stage is to outline a shift in that perception.

84
00:09:39,160 --> 00:09:45,890
And it's a shift which has a good deal to do with changing attitudes towards suffering in the romantic period.

85
00:09:45,890 --> 00:09:57,830
A new valorisation of suffering, we might think, in the 18th, mid, 18th century, and that involves a more positive view of King Lear.

86
00:09:57,830 --> 00:10:03,010
Let's take one of the romantic critics, the German writer Schlegel.

87
00:10:03,010 --> 00:10:12,280
And these romantic critics are all taken from Jonathan Bates Anthology of Romantics on Shakespeare, really highly recommended book.

88
00:10:12,280 --> 00:10:22,330
Schlegel describes the trajectory of King Lear as a fall from the highest elevation into the deepest abyss of misery,

89
00:10:22,330 --> 00:10:33,500
where humanity is stripped of all external and internal advantages and given up a prey to naked helplessness.

90
00:10:33,500 --> 00:10:38,390
It's the scale of this decline for Schlegel, which is something terrible,

91
00:10:38,390 --> 00:10:46,210
terrible in the sense of awful, sublime and therefore beautiful by interspersing.

92
00:10:46,210 --> 00:10:56,540
The story of Gloster and his sons with Lear and his daughters, Schlegel says the picture becomes gigantic and fills us with such alarm as we should

93
00:10:56,540 --> 00:11:03,180
entertain the idea that the heavenly bodies might one day fall from their appointed orbits.

94
00:11:03,180 --> 00:11:07,690
So Schlegel allows that the play is miserable, sad.

95
00:11:07,690 --> 00:11:13,060
And does that quotation suggests that it is even potentially apocalyptic?

96
00:11:13,060 --> 00:11:19,180
He partly puts this down to the pre-Christian world in which the play is set.

97
00:11:19,180 --> 00:11:24,460
So are arguments about why Lear is so miserable sometimes rest on the idea that,

98
00:11:24,460 --> 00:11:32,430
of course, it was in that miserable time before Jesus rescued sinful mankind.

99
00:11:32,430 --> 00:11:39,610
And that could bring pre-Christian world of ancient Britain. You might recognise if you've seen Lawrence Olivier's film version,

100
00:11:39,610 --> 00:11:46,540
which has the opening division of the Kingdoms and made a kind of Styrofoam Stonehenge.

101
00:11:46,540 --> 00:11:54,160
It may echo the critic G.K. Hunter's rather more subtle description of the play as a Stonehenge of the mind.

102
00:11:54,160 --> 00:11:57,130
Stonehenge of the mind.

103
00:11:57,130 --> 00:12:07,540
So Schlegel Legal's explanation of how we understand the play's misery is partly its pre-Christian context and partly that the play

104
00:12:07,540 --> 00:12:18,130
shows us that belief in Providence requires a wider range than the dark pilgrimage on Earth to be established in its whole extent,

105
00:12:18,130 --> 00:12:22,510
a wider range than the dark pilgrimage on Earth to be established in its whole extent.

106
00:12:22,510 --> 00:12:26,830
So the sense of scale and the sense of the play having an awesome scale,

107
00:12:26,830 --> 00:12:32,920
which has a terrible beauty, is a keynote of romantic reinventions of King Lear.

108
00:12:32,920 --> 00:12:36,430
That's the way to understand the play rather than being sad.

109
00:12:36,430 --> 00:12:48,400
It is big. It's it's sublime. Coleridge returns to this point in his commentary on the play, which characterises Ragle, Reagan,

110
00:12:48,400 --> 00:12:58,900
Goneril and Edmund in a context which it once ties into contemporary politics and to the nature worship we associate with romanticism.

111
00:12:58,900 --> 00:13:05,170
He this is Coleridge now. Shakespeare had read nature to hatefully, not to know that courage,

112
00:13:05,170 --> 00:13:11,890
intellect and strength of character are the most impressive forms of power and that power in itself,

113
00:13:11,890 --> 00:13:17,290
without reference to any moral and an inevitable admiration and complacency,

114
00:13:17,290 --> 00:13:27,040
pertains whether it be displayed in the conquest of a Bonaparte or a Tamburlaine, or in the foam and thunder of a cataract.

115
00:13:27,040 --> 00:13:31,900
So Coleridge, his idea is a completely amoral one, kind of Nietzsche and one in the way.

116
00:13:31,900 --> 00:13:36,070
It's about being in love with power.

117
00:13:36,070 --> 00:13:40,540
Power itself. Power. Power always is attractive no matter what.

118
00:13:40,540 --> 00:13:49,550
It's what its end. An analogy with the forces of nature also animates Haslet commentary on the play.

119
00:13:49,550 --> 00:13:57,320
This is Haslet. The mind of Lear is like a tall ship driven about by the winds, buffeted by the furious waves.

120
00:13:57,320 --> 00:14:03,320
But it still rides above the storm, having its anchor fixed in the bottom of the sea.

121
00:14:03,320 --> 00:14:09,110
Or it is like the sharp rock at circled by the Eddine whirlpool that foams and beeps against it,

122
00:14:09,110 --> 00:14:13,700
or like the solid promontory pushed from its basis by the force of an earthquake.

123
00:14:13,700 --> 00:14:20,810
So those or Claus's different sort of big scale natural events piled in the haslet is trying

124
00:14:20,810 --> 00:14:28,900
to think about real world analogies for what he sees as the scope and force of King Lear.

125
00:14:28,900 --> 00:14:39,790
So natural forces are key to the scale and effect of King Lear in these very quintessentially romantic appreciations we might see.

126
00:14:39,790 --> 00:14:48,580
As you can actually see in romantic rehabilitation of Shakespeare, more generally, a kind of microcosm of romantic aesthetic theories.

127
00:14:48,580 --> 00:14:50,820
Is that something you're interested in? And it's really worth,

128
00:14:50,820 --> 00:14:58,470
if I understand what keeps or Shelley or Wordsworth or Coleridge or somebody thinks about their own poetry

129
00:14:58,470 --> 00:15:04,450
that they're writing about Shakespeare in relation to Shakespeare is often a really clear way to see that.

130
00:15:04,450 --> 00:15:06,490
So for the Romantics, then,

131
00:15:06,490 --> 00:15:16,480
it's the monumental and awesome scale of nature and of King Lear that cannot be constrained by bourgeois social notions of morality or justice.

132
00:15:16,480 --> 00:15:22,450
It's an idea which you probably recognise as being really the idea of the sublime.

133
00:15:22,450 --> 00:15:32,450
That's why the romantics love the Alps and love, you know, all those extreme kind of extreme nature.

134
00:15:32,450 --> 00:15:42,020
So it's a skit from this to an idea that King Lear could actually endorse some large version of an ultimately ordered universe.

135
00:15:42,020 --> 00:15:47,300
That's the skip that romanticism kind of struggles with about its depiction of nature.

136
00:15:47,300 --> 00:15:53,850
Is nature the prime mover or is the prime mover behind nature?

137
00:15:53,850 --> 00:16:00,320
It is a skip to the idea that the play actually endorses some larger version of an ultimately ordered universe,

138
00:16:00,320 --> 00:16:07,300
where critics argue that Lear shows us the workings of a Christian world view.

139
00:16:07,300 --> 00:16:13,850
And this is it for this hour argument I'm going to think about too early 20th century critics.

140
00:16:13,850 --> 00:16:27,900
Bradley and G. Wilson Knight. Bradley's essay on King Lear is part of his monumental and influential book, Shakespearean Tragedy Lectures,

141
00:16:27,900 --> 00:16:38,840
which were delivered during his time as professor of poetry in Oxford at the beginning of the 20th century and published in 1984.

142
00:16:38,840 --> 00:16:50,030
Bradley argues that the catastrophe, the ending of King Lear is unlike those of the other mature tragedies because it does not seem at all inevitable.

143
00:16:50,030 --> 00:16:53,570
It is not even satisfactorily motived.

144
00:16:53,570 --> 00:17:02,780
In fact, it seems expressly designed, he says, to fall suddenly like a bolt from a sky cleared by the vanished storm.

145
00:17:02,780 --> 00:17:07,760
So he's still got that kind of nature, unpredictable nature idea there.

146
00:17:07,760 --> 00:17:13,100
A bolt from the fence, from a sky cleared by the vanished storm.

147
00:17:13,100 --> 00:17:17,600
Bradley argues that we all want Lear to settle down comfortably.

148
00:17:17,600 --> 00:17:23,820
He says to enjoy peace and happiness by Cordelia's fireside. But that is denied him.

149
00:17:23,820 --> 00:17:31,070
And Bradley argues it's denied him because of the play's particular depiction of a wild and

150
00:17:31,070 --> 00:17:41,070
monstrous world and its interrogation of what makes that world so wild and so monstrous.

151
00:17:41,070 --> 00:17:51,120
Bradley notices that references to religion or irreligion and to beliefs in general are more frequent in King Lear than in any other play.

152
00:17:51,120 --> 00:17:55,500
And also discusses the way in which the play forces on its characters.

153
00:17:55,500 --> 00:18:00,270
The question, what rules the world? What rules the world?

154
00:18:00,270 --> 00:18:04,980
So it's a classic question of agency. What makes things happen in King Lear?

155
00:18:04,980 --> 00:18:13,210
Something about that that I was talking about in relation to Macbeth in the lecture on that play.

156
00:18:13,210 --> 00:18:18,240
The plane's final result. Bradley argues, is one in which pity and terror.

157
00:18:18,240 --> 00:18:25,030
So we see those to be Aristotelian elements of catharsis and an Aristotelian framework is really important to Bradley.

158
00:18:25,030 --> 00:18:34,990
One in which pity and terror carried perhaps to the extreme limits of art are so blended with a sense of law and beauty that we feel at last,

159
00:18:34,990 --> 00:18:44,710
not depression and much less despair, but a consciousness of greatness in pain and of solemnity in the mystery.

160
00:18:44,710 --> 00:18:50,050
We cannot fathom consciousness of greatness, in pain and of a solemnity and the mystery.

161
00:18:50,050 --> 00:19:00,110
We cannot fathom. So in a reading of the play, which has become almost commonplace and therefore critically rather unexamined,

162
00:19:00,110 --> 00:19:09,620
Bradley argues that kingly is not fundamentally sad because it depicts the transformative powers of torment.

163
00:19:09,620 --> 00:19:17,180
There is nothing more noble, says Bradley, nothing more noble and beautiful in literature than Shakespeare's exposition of the effect

164
00:19:17,180 --> 00:19:24,770
of suffering in reviving the greatness and eliciting the sweetness of Lear's nature.

165
00:19:24,770 --> 00:19:29,050
Should we not be as at least as near the truth if we called this poem?

166
00:19:29,050 --> 00:19:35,780
Brett Bradlees inherited a kind of romantic suspicion of the play as performance.

167
00:19:35,780 --> 00:19:39,710
He uses the word poem as a mark of high praise.

168
00:19:39,710 --> 00:19:45,020
Should we not be at least as near the truth if we called this poem the redemption of King Lear and declared

169
00:19:45,020 --> 00:19:51,080
that the business of the gods with him was neither to torment him nor to teach him a noble anger,

170
00:19:51,080 --> 00:19:56,750
but to lead him to attain through apparently hopeless failure the very end and aim of life.

171
00:19:56,750 --> 00:20:04,550
So this idea that the play should be called the redemption of King Lear, rather, it's a rather hard one and short lived redemption,

172
00:20:04,550 --> 00:20:11,370
one might think, but to lead him to attain through apparently a hopeless failure at the very end and aim of life.

173
00:20:11,370 --> 00:20:19,100
Not sure whether a Bradley means that Palm on end has both termination and purpose.

174
00:20:19,100 --> 00:20:24,860
So that's a view of Lear, which owes much to the parallel with the Old Testament book of Jobe.

175
00:20:24,860 --> 00:20:27,740
If you don't know that story in the Book of Jobe,

176
00:20:27,740 --> 00:20:37,940
God tests his faithful servant Joe by taking everything he has from him his family, his wealth, his camels.

177
00:20:37,940 --> 00:20:46,520
He sends him boils and casts him into objection despite the discouragement of his friends.

178
00:20:46,520 --> 00:20:55,070
The original Jobe's comforters, Joe, remain steadfast in faith through this trial.

179
00:20:55,070 --> 00:21:02,960
What Bradley cannot entirely account for in this parallel is that what happens at the end of Jobe story is that he gets everything back,

180
00:21:02,960 --> 00:21:08,780
he gets back his camels, his sons and his prosperity twice as much as he had before.

181
00:21:08,780 --> 00:21:17,300
The story doesn't seem to say whether he loses the boils, but I suppose he must do because Lears losses are irrevocable.

182
00:21:17,300 --> 00:21:21,850
He doesn't get anything back. So that's where we would think this is a difference.

183
00:21:21,850 --> 00:21:27,470
It might be worth comparing with Winter's Tale, for example, where bounties does get things back.

184
00:21:27,470 --> 00:21:31,610
Things that have been lost, but lives losses are irrevocable.

185
00:21:31,610 --> 00:21:40,310
His stoicism, therefore, and in Bradley's terms, his spiritual development through suffering may seem to us rather pointless.

186
00:21:40,310 --> 00:21:47,510
But Bradley does consider that Lear dies in an ecstasy ecstasy, thinking that Cordelia is still alive.

187
00:21:47,510 --> 00:21:55,460
We'll come back to that point in a minute. So Bradley then finds a Joe Bish comfort in the story of Lear.

188
00:21:55,460 --> 00:22:02,360
And it's he who has given to us the rather miserable doctrine that through it, through suffering,

189
00:22:02,360 --> 00:22:14,540
suffering is worthwhile because our characters or or we ourselves gain self knowledge and gain insight, spiritual awareness.

190
00:22:14,540 --> 00:22:21,320
Let's look at a different Christian reading of the play more extensively elaborated in the work of Jean Wilson.

191
00:22:21,320 --> 00:22:30,100
Knight Wilson Knight is clearly bonkers, but in some quite interesting ways, I think.

192
00:22:30,100 --> 00:22:35,510
So I wouldn't suggest reading him without a sense that he is bonkers.

193
00:22:35,510 --> 00:22:45,440
But in a collection of essays called The Wheel of Fire, based on articles written during the 1920s and 30s, Knight discusses King Lear.

194
00:22:45,440 --> 00:22:54,800
And for him, the play's suffering is part of a purgatorial progress to self-knowledge, to sincerity.

195
00:22:54,800 --> 00:22:58,880
So is suffering. There is purging him towards something better.

196
00:22:58,880 --> 00:23:09,410
That's why it's not a miserable play, because it's a terrible journey of a purgation which which results in self-knowledge.

197
00:23:09,410 --> 00:23:17,070
King Lear says Knight shows us the spiritual evolution of man.

198
00:23:17,070 --> 00:23:24,570
And he goes on to say that goodness is the natural goal of man and the aim of evolution.

199
00:23:24,570 --> 00:23:29,160
Therefore, at the end, the danger of evil doers in the play is crushed.

200
00:23:29,160 --> 00:23:36,150
The good forces, not the evil win, since good is natural and evil, unnatural to human nature.

201
00:23:36,150 --> 00:23:43,860
So the good forces, not the evil win, since good is natural evil, unnatural to human nature.

202
00:23:43,860 --> 00:23:47,460
What Wilson like can't quite account for is that winning and losing in those

203
00:23:47,460 --> 00:23:54,090
terms in this plan seem to look actually disturbingly similar for Wilson night.

204
00:23:54,090 --> 00:23:59,100
The play emerges as an allegory of redemption through love.

205
00:23:59,100 --> 00:24:07,440
Love is its fundamental theme, and death in love brings serenity and tranquillity.

206
00:24:07,440 --> 00:24:13,050
The play is implicitly Christian because it encourages us to endure life,

207
00:24:13,050 --> 00:24:24,970
to turn a stoic ally on its pain and suffering, and to look not for pleasure on Earth, but to a life after death.

208
00:24:24,970 --> 00:24:28,690
So Wilson, that acknowledges the cruelty of the play,

209
00:24:28,690 --> 00:24:38,300
but suggests that that's a sign to us that we should look beyond this earthly world to better things elsewhere.

210
00:24:38,300 --> 00:24:43,300
And I want to think now about a group of kind of critical group which is conscious

211
00:24:43,300 --> 00:24:47,680
of the cruelty kind of existential point about the cruelty of the play,

212
00:24:47,680 --> 00:24:54,550
but less secure in a kind of spiritual elsewhere which can redeem that.

213
00:24:54,550 --> 00:25:05,590
The 1960s saw a major knock to the attempts to recuperate King Lear as a comforting just or even a religiously orthodox play.

214
00:25:05,590 --> 00:25:17,470
An important in that are an article by Barbara Everett, the new King Lear, and a book by W. R. Elton King Lear in the Gods, both in the 1960s,

215
00:25:17,470 --> 00:25:25,150
each concluding that attempts to read the play as a parable of meaningful suffering were self deluding and

216
00:25:25,150 --> 00:25:34,310
wilful misreadings of a play which actually takes out every opportunity to snuff out our hope and optimism.

217
00:25:34,310 --> 00:25:46,250
So I want to develop a sense about the play being deliberately cruel as a as a feature of late 20th century criticism.

218
00:25:46,250 --> 00:25:51,680
So we've gone through yet. The play is cruel. The play perhaps is more redemptive.

219
00:25:51,680 --> 00:26:00,030
And now we're back to a kind of existential cruelty. So first thing and to think about young Kott.

220
00:26:00,030 --> 00:26:09,120
Cot was a Polish data director who's writing in English, who's writing on Shakespeare, first published in English in 1964.

221
00:26:09,120 --> 00:26:19,620
In the book Shakespeare, Our Contemporary has done much to influence British Shakespearean directors, particularly Peter Brook.

222
00:26:19,620 --> 00:26:28,290
We've talked a bit about Cock's views on history plays as an endless staircase or an endless succession cyclical repetition.

223
00:26:28,290 --> 00:26:36,510
When thinking about Richard, the third heroine to think about Kott on King Lear can get an idea of the thrust of his chapter.

224
00:26:36,510 --> 00:26:41,760
By looking at the title, it's called King Lear or End Game.

225
00:26:41,760 --> 00:26:50,970
So it's clearly making a connexion between Shakespeare and Beckett, taking an existentialist view of tragedy,

226
00:26:50,970 --> 00:26:58,380
showing us the absurdist machinations of a world drained of any providential intent.

227
00:26:58,380 --> 00:27:02,850
So the parallel in the parallel with Samuel Beckett that Kott develops through his essay,

228
00:27:02,850 --> 00:27:08,730
Lear emerges as a Waiting for Godot type drama in which inevitably Godot never arrives,

229
00:27:08,730 --> 00:27:21,460
and where absurdist humour, violence, objection and grim bonding merely use up the time between the play's opening and its close.

230
00:27:21,460 --> 00:27:30,340
Kot argues that the kingly, which had been so problematic for previous critics and readers in which it required such effortful rereading, has now.

231
00:27:30,340 --> 00:27:35,320
In the 1960s found its moment for the first time.

232
00:27:35,320 --> 00:27:42,850
The cruelty of Lear was to the Elizabethans, he says, a contemporary reality and has remained real since.

233
00:27:42,850 --> 00:27:50,710
But it is a philosophical cruelty. Neither the romantic nor the naturalistic theatre was able to show that kind of cruelty.

234
00:27:50,710 --> 00:27:56,110
Only the new theatre, the theatre of the absurd can.

235
00:27:56,110 --> 00:28:04,630
In this new theatre, there are no characters. And the tragic element has been superseded by the grotesque.

236
00:28:04,630 --> 00:28:17,060
The grotesque is more cruel than tragedy. So by realigning the play with the grotesque rather than with the morally charged genre of tragedy, Carter,

237
00:28:17,060 --> 00:28:24,490
who's able to develop his view of a deterministic or mechanistic universe in the world of the grotesque, he says.

238
00:28:24,490 --> 00:28:28,970
Downfall cannot be justified by or blamed on the absolute.

239
00:28:28,970 --> 00:28:38,220
The absolute is not endowed with any ultimate reasons. It is stronger and that is all the absolute is absurd.

240
00:28:38,220 --> 00:28:47,370
Kott imagines the play performed in the style of Beckett, Ionesco and the other mid century European absurdist in King Lear.

241
00:28:47,370 --> 00:28:54,840
The stage is empty throughout. There is nothing except the cruel earth where man goes on his journey from the cradle to the grave.

242
00:28:54,840 --> 00:29:04,690
The theme of King Lear is an enquiry into the meaning of this journey into the existence or non-existence of heaven or hell.

243
00:29:04,690 --> 00:29:09,210
Let me just cut through to the end of that. All the remains at the end of this gigantic pantomime.

244
00:29:09,210 --> 00:29:17,910
Is the Earth empty and bleeding on this earth through which a tempest has passed, leaving only stone stones.

245
00:29:17,910 --> 00:29:26,410
The King, the fool, the blind man and the madman carry on their destructive dialogue.

246
00:29:26,410 --> 00:29:33,040
So if a cop, then Lere, it's a play of the European avant garde theatre of Bacquet and Danisco,

247
00:29:33,040 --> 00:29:43,170
it has found its time in its coincidence of values with the existentialist modes of mid century modernism.

248
00:29:43,170 --> 00:29:51,310
And in one last critique I want to talk about, I just want to move that paradigm just slightly forward, just just to finish this survey.

249
00:29:51,310 --> 00:29:53,880
The last critique I want to talk about is Jonathan Dalibor.

250
00:29:53,880 --> 00:30:04,180
More Moore's book, much reprinted, first printed in nineteen eighty four, was called Radical Tragedy.

251
00:30:04,180 --> 00:30:16,690
So if if court is bringing Lere forward into the mid 20th century, Dolly Moore is concerned to specify it in its Renaissance context.

252
00:30:16,690 --> 00:30:21,760
His work on Lear insists on the material aspects of a tragedy which he sees as,

253
00:30:21,760 --> 00:30:30,730
above all, a play about power, property and inheritance, power, property and inheritance.

254
00:30:30,730 --> 00:30:37,060
So this play is not at all about suffering. Purgation spiritual development.

255
00:30:37,060 --> 00:30:44,530
All that kind of mumbo jumbo, which we've seen. It's not about waterfalls and the sublime.

256
00:30:44,530 --> 00:30:53,250
It's about the real world. It's the stuff of power, property and inheritance.

257
00:30:53,250 --> 00:31:01,830
For Donald Moore, the crucial dynamic of the play is property selfhood attained and destroyed through the possession of property.

258
00:31:01,830 --> 00:31:06,960
And in the end, he argues that the play endorses Edmunds scepticism.

259
00:31:06,960 --> 00:31:12,120
Men are asked, the time is. There are no solid, transcendent values.

260
00:31:12,120 --> 00:31:18,540
There are no there's nothing beyond that. That's just the kind of pragmatism of this sceptical view.

261
00:31:18,540 --> 00:31:29,280
Men are as the time is. Dorenbos critique of the play is also an extended critique of previous criticism of the play

262
00:31:29,280 --> 00:31:37,050
for being committed to mystifying philosophical abstraction rather than material realities.

263
00:31:37,050 --> 00:31:43,080
He sees the play as less about man or mankind and more about society,

264
00:31:43,080 --> 00:31:53,070
less individualistic and more concerned with self Marxist interrelations off base and superstructure.

265
00:31:53,070 --> 00:31:58,650
So I've spent some time so far on these critical responses to layer on a kind of potted history

266
00:31:58,650 --> 00:32:06,960
of Labour criticism to show how the issue of how sad it is has been constructed by critics.

267
00:32:06,960 --> 00:32:14,490
And then to trying to just how these critics are themselves constructed by their historical, cultural and aesthetic biases.

268
00:32:14,490 --> 00:32:22,260
Just as we are, we get the layer we want or need by rewriting it through criticism.

269
00:32:22,260 --> 00:32:29,660
And although I haven't much time to say anything about it today, also through performance.

270
00:32:29,660 --> 00:32:40,400
So a history then of rewriting the play to try and come to terms with its its take on the world.

271
00:32:40,400 --> 00:32:45,930
Perhaps, though, we are not the only ones doing the rewriting.

272
00:32:45,930 --> 00:32:51,830
And in the last bit of I want to think about Shakespeare writing and rewriting.

273
00:32:51,830 --> 00:33:03,860
King Lear. We can see from the sources of Shakespeare's play that he has taken existing versions of the King Lear story by the scruff of the neck,

274
00:33:03,860 --> 00:33:09,840
perhaps with the express aim of making the story saga.

275
00:33:09,840 --> 00:33:20,580
So King Lear has historical sources in Holland, Chadds chronicles literary sources in Sydney's Arcadia, to a lesser extent, Spenser's fairy queen.

276
00:33:20,580 --> 00:33:24,870
There is a previous anonymous play called King Lear.

277
00:33:24,870 --> 00:33:32,670
L e i. R probably performed in the early 15 nineties and printed in 16 05.

278
00:33:32,670 --> 00:33:39,480
Quite possibly the immediate stimulus for Shakespeare to write his play.

279
00:33:39,480 --> 00:33:44,570
So there are these written sources are Hollingsworth's Chronicles and the literary ones.

280
00:33:44,570 --> 00:33:51,900
There is also a circulation of gossip in the Jacobean court about an elderly nobleman called Brian Annesley,

281
00:33:51,900 --> 00:33:56,130
whose elder daughter Grace wants to have him declared senile.

282
00:33:56,130 --> 00:34:03,480
So she and her husband can have all his property and whose younger daughter significantly called Kordell,

283
00:34:03,480 --> 00:34:08,190
strives to resist it and to look after her ailing father.

284
00:34:08,190 --> 00:34:15,000
So there are a number of converging stories here, as well as, of course, a kind of Cinderella story.

285
00:34:15,000 --> 00:34:24,190
The ugly sisters. The the the the the struggling or the tested younger daughter, the king's favourite.

286
00:34:24,190 --> 00:34:33,880
All that kind of thing. So like many of Shakespeare's works, then, this is an already well-known story.

287
00:34:33,880 --> 00:34:38,880
And one of the things that's well known about it is that it has a happy ending.

288
00:34:38,880 --> 00:34:43,650
In Hollinshead, the arrival of the French army reinstates Lear to his throne,

289
00:34:43,650 --> 00:34:51,000
where he rules for a further two years before dying peacefully and being succeeded by Cordelia.

290
00:34:51,000 --> 00:34:53,670
The story does darken later on in Holland shed.

291
00:34:53,670 --> 00:35:00,720
The sons of Goneril and Reagan disdained to be under the government of a woman and rebelled against her taking her prisoner,

292
00:35:00,720 --> 00:35:05,610
whence she commits suicide with manly courage. Rather unlike the Cordelia.

293
00:35:05,610 --> 00:35:09,780
Perhaps we get Shakespeare. But the shape of the story is quite different.

294
00:35:09,780 --> 00:35:12,960
What happens in Hollinshead is that Lear is reinstated. That's what's important.

295
00:35:12,960 --> 00:35:21,600
And then he's succeeded by Cordelia Cordelia's succeeds her father rather than, as in Shakespeare, predecease and him.

296
00:35:21,600 --> 00:35:30,840
The same is true of that earlier anonymous play King Lear Ali hya, which ends with the old king reinstated to his throne.

297
00:35:30,840 --> 00:35:33,060
So we can start to see that name tapes.

298
00:35:33,060 --> 00:35:39,080
17TH Century Revision with which I began, has some clear parallels with the sources from which Shakespeare took his own play.

299
00:35:39,080 --> 00:35:46,110
We can see Shakespeare rewriting his sources and in some ways, Tate, I think, independently writing them back.

300
00:35:46,110 --> 00:35:52,980
So like Dr Johnson, that's to say the play's first audiences would have been expecting Cordelia's survival.

301
00:35:52,980 --> 00:35:58,950
That's what happens to Cinderella. Suffering is short term and she's rewarded in the end.

302
00:35:58,950 --> 00:36:02,910
So there would have been expecting Cordelia's survival if not Lears,

303
00:36:02,910 --> 00:36:10,070
and that therefore there would have been surprised, perhaps even abused by the play's final twist.

304
00:36:10,070 --> 00:36:17,930
It's an interesting take on the play's final tableau when Lere Cup walks in carrying the lifeless body of Cordelia.

305
00:36:17,930 --> 00:36:24,190
If we, too, are bewildered because this is not the way the play is supposed to turn out.

306
00:36:24,190 --> 00:36:33,320
Kent's remark is this The promised end takes on a kind of metal theatrical quality.

307
00:36:33,320 --> 00:36:43,850
There's more to say, though, about the ending of kingly as a rewriting, not just of Shakespeare's sources, but of Shakespeare's own play.

308
00:36:43,850 --> 00:36:49,700
I said at the beginning that King Lear exists in two early and distinct texts.

309
00:36:49,700 --> 00:36:54,950
The 60 No.8 a quarter and the sixteen twenty three folio.

310
00:36:54,950 --> 00:37:04,550
Over the last 30 years, Lear has become the test case for issue for the theory that Shakespeare revised his plays.

311
00:37:04,550 --> 00:37:11,270
You may think that's a very strange thing to be arguing about. What writer does not revise his or her writing?

312
00:37:11,270 --> 00:37:15,240
Nabokov, the author of Lolita, said that his pencils lasted longer than that.

313
00:37:15,240 --> 00:37:26,120
It raises dead and it does an interview in which Ernest Hemingway says he rewrote the end of a farewell to arms thirty nine times.

314
00:37:26,120 --> 00:37:30,980
What was it that had stopped, you? Asked the interviewer. Getting the words right, replied Hemingway.

315
00:37:30,980 --> 00:37:34,330
Quite a good argument about why you do any revising.

316
00:37:34,330 --> 00:37:41,230
So getting the words right in Hemingway's terms, I think, is something we can see Shakespeare doing here.

317
00:37:41,230 --> 00:37:44,900
When I was thinking about poetry as a couple of weeks ago,

318
00:37:44,900 --> 00:37:49,430
I was talking about the ways the First Folio has shaped the kinds of questions and the kind of things,

319
00:37:49,430 --> 00:37:52,560
the kinds of assumptions we say about Shakespeare.

320
00:37:52,560 --> 00:37:59,740
And one of the things, the marketing spiel which prefaces the First Folio has given us is an unwillingness to believe that the God,

321
00:37:59,740 --> 00:38:01,580
like Shakespeare wrote in any way,

322
00:38:01,580 --> 00:38:12,110
like any other person who was also written, Hemings and Kandal tell us, as he was a happy imitator of nature, he was a most gentle express out of it.

323
00:38:12,110 --> 00:38:23,450
His mind and hand went together. And what he thought he uttered with that easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.

324
00:38:23,450 --> 00:38:28,600
So the idea that this just came so gushing forth, fully formed.

325
00:38:28,600 --> 00:38:31,480
It's one of Ben Johnson's rather nice acidic remarks.

326
00:38:31,480 --> 00:38:38,750
And his conversations with Drammen would he had blotted the thousand so that Shakespeare uniquely did not revise his works,

327
00:38:38,750 --> 00:38:43,550
was held as a tenet of Shakespearean editing until the 1970s.

328
00:38:43,550 --> 00:38:52,160
And editors and editorial theorists had offered all kinds of other explanations for why texts exist existed in discrepant forms.

329
00:38:52,160 --> 00:38:59,570
Editions of King Lear before the 1980s typically represented a so-called conflated text

330
00:38:59,570 --> 00:39:03,980
in which the editor picked and chose from the two early versions to produce a text.

331
00:39:03,980 --> 00:39:09,230
He felt best represented that elusive item Shakespeare's own manuscript.

332
00:39:09,230 --> 00:39:13,970
Of course, the one thing we don't have, or one of the many things we don't have,

333
00:39:13,970 --> 00:39:19,000
but the idea that the two texts of King Lear represent authorial revision.

334
00:39:19,000 --> 00:39:29,720
So a play at different stages of its evolution. But but but bearing Shakespeare's imprint on it at both points is now commonplace.

335
00:39:29,720 --> 00:39:36,170
And most critics surmise that the Folio text represents Shakespeare's revision.

336
00:39:36,170 --> 00:39:45,020
His second thoughts of the Korto and that that revision was probably undertaken in 16 10.

337
00:39:45,020 --> 00:39:53,780
So Folio Lear becomes a play of the romance period alongside Winter's Tale, Cymbeline and The Tempest, for instance,

338
00:39:53,780 --> 00:40:02,930
other plays which are interested in this dynamic of the ruler and his daughter, but which turned that story in in a rather different way.

339
00:40:02,930 --> 00:40:11,390
Collected editions of Shakespeare since the Oxford Edition, first published in 1986, have printed two distinct plays.

340
00:40:11,390 --> 00:40:18,770
The History of King Lear. That's the play as it's titled In the Quarter and the Tragedy of King Lear.

341
00:40:18,770 --> 00:40:21,640
The play's title in the first one.

342
00:40:21,640 --> 00:40:28,850
Now, I'm not going to get into the bibliography of the differences between the texts and still less why or how they might have come about.

343
00:40:28,850 --> 00:40:31,860
I think where textual issues are interesting,

344
00:40:31,860 --> 00:40:41,480
they are interesting material facts rather than as pieces in a kind of a jigsaw where a broader narrative of how they were,

345
00:40:41,480 --> 00:40:49,220
how they've come about can be traced. I think that's a really quite a dangerous or tendentious line to go on.

346
00:40:49,220 --> 00:40:52,820
So I wouldn't bother to try and work out why the tax are different.

347
00:40:52,820 --> 00:41:02,480
But just to say that they are different and this is the this is the impact the differences make on the ah on a reading of the play.

348
00:41:02,480 --> 00:41:09,510
So some of the detail of the differences between the two texts is minor, although it is potentially interesting that.

349
00:41:09,510 --> 00:41:15,570
In the quarto, lere promises to express our darker purposes.

350
00:41:15,570 --> 00:41:20,160
And in the Foleo to express our darker purpose singular.

351
00:41:20,160 --> 00:41:24,810
That's got a small point, but not problem, insignificant one.

352
00:41:24,810 --> 00:41:34,790
But on a broader scale, it's sometimes been argued that the Foleo revisions create a bleaker view of the play's events than pertains in the quarter.

353
00:41:34,790 --> 00:41:41,850
And I did that. Shakespeare rewrites the play to make it sadder in our terms and in Egerton's.

354
00:41:41,850 --> 00:41:45,930
One example of this might be the detail around the torture of Gloster.

355
00:41:45,930 --> 00:41:55,590
At the end of Act three, having been brutally tortured on stage where cluster's eyes gouged out by his tormentors,

356
00:41:55,590 --> 00:42:02,790
he describes the world as all dark and comfortless, all dark and comfortless.

357
00:42:02,790 --> 00:42:15,000
He's thrust out to smell his way to Dover. In the quarter, though, there's a intervening small sequence of about 10 lines at the end of that scene,

358
00:42:15,000 --> 00:42:21,320
which shows two unnamed servants preparing to care for the wounded Gloster.

359
00:42:21,320 --> 00:42:26,430
They're going to get him flaks and white of eggs to apply to his bleeding face.

360
00:42:26,430 --> 00:42:37,800
They pray together. Heaven help him. It's a moment of tenderness, which seems to suggest that not everyone is indifferent to Gloucester's suffering.

361
00:42:37,800 --> 00:42:43,200
It's interesting to think that when the play is revised for the Folio, that material is left out.

362
00:42:43,200 --> 00:42:53,220
There are no servants and therefore no tenderness. But what I really want to do in the last few minutes of the letter is to look at the play's ending,

363
00:42:53,220 --> 00:43:03,750
to see how this idea of authorial revision might have a bearing on our central question about the play's bleakness.

364
00:43:03,750 --> 00:43:10,950
There are a number of differences between the ending of the King Lear plays in their two early versions.

365
00:43:10,950 --> 00:43:17,520
Only the Folio, for instance, has a stage direction indicating that Lear dies.

366
00:43:17,520 --> 00:43:21,420
He dies on the line. Look there, look there.

367
00:43:21,420 --> 00:43:27,150
A line which doesn't appear in the quarter. So a line that is added in the revision.

368
00:43:27,150 --> 00:43:35,370
What is Lear looking at? He's been, you'll remember, trying to find signs of life in Cordelia's body.

369
00:43:35,370 --> 00:43:41,310
Does he think he sees them? This is Bradley's point, that Lear dies.

370
00:43:41,310 --> 00:43:45,510
Then like Gloucester does in a kind of rush of joy.

371
00:43:45,510 --> 00:43:53,280
We hear of Gloucester that his heart burst smilingly because Lear believes Cordelia is still alive.

372
00:43:53,280 --> 00:44:00,660
And if if that's the case, if that's what. Look here. Look here means if that's what he's looking at and that's why he dies.

373
00:44:00,660 --> 00:44:11,910
Is that a happier ending? Is it better in literary tragedy or indeed in life to die deluded or comforted in the quarter?

374
00:44:11,910 --> 00:44:17,800
There is no stage direction for Lehr's death. He could die willingly.

375
00:44:17,800 --> 00:44:21,600
The quarto gives Lear the line break heart.

376
00:44:21,600 --> 00:44:29,310
I prefer the break, which could be interpreted as his own renunciation of life as he realises that although a dog,

377
00:44:29,310 --> 00:44:36,210
horse and rat can live, Cordelia cannot. He could die in response to Kentz.

378
00:44:36,210 --> 00:44:40,450
Let him pass his instruction to add God not to intervene.

379
00:44:40,450 --> 00:44:49,050
But He could die. In fact, at any point in those last lines of the play, the Folio, on the other hand, gives the line break heart.

380
00:44:49,050 --> 00:44:53,770
I pretty break to Kent. It's not entirely sure.

381
00:44:53,770 --> 00:44:59,250
It's not entirely clear whether he is referring to himself in anticipation of that ominous journey.

382
00:44:59,250 --> 00:45:05,670
He cites later as reason he cannot take up office or whether he's referring to Lear.

383
00:45:05,670 --> 00:45:06,870
Another speech.

384
00:45:06,870 --> 00:45:17,040
The play's final one in which it echoes the crisis of speech, truth and flattery, with which the play began, is also transposed between speakers.

385
00:45:17,040 --> 00:45:23,670
What difference does it make if the play's final moralising couplets are delivered by the Duke of Albany,

386
00:45:23,670 --> 00:45:28,050
Lear's son in law and the play's most senior survivor?

387
00:45:28,050 --> 00:45:34,770
On the one hand, but tainted by his association by being married to the murderous Goneril on the other.

388
00:45:34,770 --> 00:45:39,120
Albany is given the speech in the quarter text.

389
00:45:39,120 --> 00:45:48,450
But why does Shakespeare revise in the Folio to have those lines delivered by Edgar, the survivor of the wronged younger generation?

390
00:45:48,450 --> 00:45:55,140
The play's second most significant character by proportion of line spoken after Lear.

391
00:45:55,140 --> 00:46:03,990
These are argument, these places where you can see Shakespeare changing his mind or reworking the play with a particular aim, presumably in mind.

392
00:46:03,990 --> 00:46:13,750
We don't know what the aim was. We can only deduce it by looking at the looking at the changes and some readings of those changes altogether.

393
00:46:13,750 --> 00:46:21,310
Cumulatively is to make a more miserable and more sad, a more bleak play.

394
00:46:21,310 --> 00:46:25,340
So I've been suggesting that the question of just how sad King Lear is,

395
00:46:25,340 --> 00:46:30,550
is a preoccupation of the play's critical history that critics have rewritten the play,

396
00:46:30,550 --> 00:46:43,900
particularly their interpretation of the ending, in order to support different philosophical glosses on its redemptive or its unmitigated harshness.

397
00:46:43,900 --> 00:46:53,500
And I've suggested, I hope, that this is a process that Shakespeare has invited by changing the ending of the story as he found it in his sources,

398
00:46:53,500 --> 00:47:02,110
doing his own act of rewriting, but also revising the play in in the Folio version.

399
00:47:02,110 --> 00:47:09,010
So I've tried to indicate some of the ways in which a study of Quarto Folio revisions might show as a writer at work

400
00:47:09,010 --> 00:47:16,540
revising his work precisely to bring out that bleakness that the critic that criticism is often wanted to explain away.

401
00:47:16,540 --> 00:47:23,530
And I've suggested that we might look to the play's conclusion for one particular locus of that work.

402
00:47:23,530 --> 00:47:24,891
Thank you.