A happy ending for King Lear? Trauma of plague caused Shakespeare to change it
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
...written during a plague. How prescient.
"Get thee glass eyes,
And like a scurvy politician seem
To see the things thou dost not.[1]"
Totally made the play.
[1] https://www.sparknotes.com/nofear/shakespeare/lear/page_244/
He specifically goes to town on King Lear and gets into some interesting discussions on how he thinks the earlier Lear Shakespeare referenced is structurally better.
Also reveals Tolstoy's own perspective on writing as a moral endeavor which he feels Shakespeare failed at, as if Shakespeare had a morality it was "people should be good, but not too good"
> It is a mistake to write Tolstoy off as a moralist attacking an artist. […] But his main aim, in his later years, was to narrow the range of human consciousness. One's interests, one's points of attachment to the physical world and the day-to-day struggle, must be as few and not as many as possible. […] Indeed his whole theory of ‘crazes’ or ‘epidemic suggestions’, in which he lumps together such things as the Crusades and the Dutch passion of tulip growing, shows a willingness to regard many human activities as mere ant-like rushings to and fro, inexplicable and uninteresting. Clearly he could have no patience with a chaotic, detailed, discursive writer like Shakespeare. His reaction is that of an irritable old man who is being pestered by a noisy child. ‘Why do you keep jumping up and down like that? Why can't you sit still like I do?’ In a way the old man is in the right, but the trouble is that the child, has a feeling in its limbs which the old man has lost. And if the old man knows of the existence of this feeling, the effect is merely to increase his irritation: he would make children senile, if he could.
His perception of King Lear's true moral, of Tolstoy (or Gandhi) as “saint”, and of “creeds […] which seem on the surface to imply a complete renunciation of power” — in all of this Orwell hits the nail on the head IMO.
Full recommendation for the book, even if only for the Zamyatin chapter collapsing everyone from Rand to George Lucas in to twenty pages or so.
>It is doubtful whether the sense of tragedy is compatible with belief in God
I understand politics better already.
I couldn't agree more, which is why I like Shakespeare so much better than Tolstoy.
As I get older, I have little patience for flawed characters, and love it when I see someone act good all the time in fiction.
Edit: Tintin, for example, is one of my favorite fictional characters of all time. He is smart, athletic, capable, dependable, and, most importantly, always acts in good faith.
For similar reasons, I don't enjoy reading about the good works of (Western) holy people. (Buddhism and Hindu stories, the small exposure I have, seem to contain nuanced characters.)
I've got only limited patience for people being stupid and/or mean. Can't we tell stories about good and smart people? Those stories exist, but they're depressingly rare.
I have ways of turning Shakespeare's text into a story that I think you will want to hear. Or at least, trying to. It's the hard part of my job as an artist.
I don't think there are good or bad people. Every person contains both within them.
Because that is not real. Real people have flaws. Or not, depending on perspective and subjective morals.
I guess I don't consider myself as much an expert on Shakespeare to critique his side though.
Holy shit.
"... nevertheless I will endeavor, as well as I can, to show why I believe that Shakespeare can not be recognized either as a great genius, or even as an average author."
Shakespeare isn't even an average author? Who knew Tolstoy was a grade A hater. Tolstoy is like a hater trying to convince you that Brady is an overrated below average system quarterback who lucked out in NE.
I think Tolstoy missed where much of Shakespeare's greatness lay - his use and command of the english language. Not just coining words, but how he said so much with so little. Brevity is the soul of wit. Tolstoy seemed oddly focused on the morals and realism of shakespeare's works.
My guess is that it was a language barrier. No matter how "fluent" Tolstoy was in english, it's hard to appreciate word play if english isn't your native language.
But man, tolstoy would have loved social media. He would have fit right in. Haters for life.
So I concur with you. I haven't read the original King Leir, but I have read Nahum Tate's happy-ending rewrite of Shakespeare, and the ending just reads false.
The Tempest--which is one of my favorites--was one of his very last plays and certainly his last great one; it's hard not to see the ending, e.g. the breaking of the staff, as symbolic in a way that his other play conclusions were not.
>his most widely regarded plays
I guess I agree. Comedy doesn't get a lot of love at the Oscars either. I certainly appreciate plays like A Midsummer Night's Dream. But I have admit a lot of the gender-switching and mistaken identities in many of his comedies tend to blend together for me after a while.
I directed Pericles myself, and it was actually a hoot, albeit with a cheat. The plot is such a mess that I literally put the two writers, Shakespeare and Wilkins, on stage, and pretended that the play's bizarre plot twists were the result of the two fighting over control.
Our Winter's Tale was less of a farce. We set it in the 1960s, with the Bohemians as "bohemians". It was lovely -- still not anybody's favorite Shakespeare play, but a worthy project.
We're doing Zoom shows to keep ourselves occupied until we can get back on stage. And when we do I'll finally get to do a version of Midsummer I've been prepping for years, lit mostly with black lights. It'll be beautiful. (I've directed it twice before, and my troupe has done it several other times as well. Audiences do love that play.)
> directed Pericles myself, and it was actually a hoot, albeit with a cheat. The plot is such a mess that I literally put the two writers, Shakespeare and Wilkins, on stage, and pretended that the play's bizarre plot twists were the result of the two fighting over control.
Love this!
>We set it in the 1960s
One of the things I've come to appreciate as I've seen more Shakespeare and, perhaps, gotten older is that I better appreciate alternative settings and interpretation rather than wanting the "authentic" version. One favorite of mine a few years ago was that Bedlam out of Brooklyn did two completely different versions of Twelfth Night.
A mess in which sense? Theatrical? Could you elaborate. I'm genuinely curious.
That said... two of the films I mentioned are of plays considered barely better than these. Titus is literally a horror play, but Julie Taymor was the director of the Broadway Lion King, and turned it into achingly beautiful and horribly tragic art. The Coriolanus is less of an artistic achievement, but they resolved the play's terrible pacing problems to make it a thrilling political action movie.
The real reason the plays I listed are rarely performed isn't the plot, but the fact that there isn't anything else great to recommend them. They don't have great poetry or engaging characters. They're just kinda limp.
But who knows? Maybe they just need somebody to find the magic in them. A couple of years ago I had a wild success with a production of Timon of Athens, a kind of reverse Chrismas Carol where the Scrooge starts off as a good, generous man who spends the whole second half of the play complaining about how badly he got screwed over. Then he kills himself. I edited it to keep the pace up, found the dark comedy in it, and people said that they didn't know why it's not performed more often.
So any of these plays could have a great rediscovery at some point and change how people think about them. But we're also very aware that even the best of Shakespeare's plays have deep flaws, both intrinsically and in the way expectations have changed in 400 years. We find that they mean something to us, and even the terrible ones contain something that adds to the work as a whole. I can report what most people think, but the real wins come when somebody takes a fresh look.
We know rather little about Shakespeare’s biography or inner life, and after two centuries of people combing over every scrap of archival evidence they can find we are not likely to discover much more. Which is fine by me really - just read the plays! But it doesn’t prevent these kinds of rather clickbaity claims to have uncovered something.
>just read the plays!
And watch them!
Better, I think, is to see a good film adaptation. Shakespeare was never intended to be read, but to be performed. There's a lot in the text that isn't apparent until you've studied it closely, but a good performance will bring it right out in the open.
A few films that I'd suggest to get started with:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_V_(1989_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Much_Ado_About_Nothing_(1993_f... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_III_(1995_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titus_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coriolanus_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romeo_%2B_Juliet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamlet_(2000_film)
These are all good, accessible versions of his plays. You don't need to be an expert to understand and enjoy them. (They're very roughly in order of my favorites, if that matters to you.)
I won't guarantee you'll like them. There's really nothing wrong with that. People get snobby about Shakespeare, and they shouldn't. It's OK to say, "Yeah, it's not for me". But under all the snobbery, there really is great text and great performances that people genuinely enjoy. If you're interested in that, these films are the places I'd start.
There are also tons of Macbeth productions, although the best is probably Polanski's which some will have an issue with.
Ignore anyone who may look down on using this. The “plain English” version is often redundant, and of course the language in the original has metre and sometimes rhyme (take a look at the opening of Macbeth: https://www.sparknotes.com/nofear/shakespeare/macbeth/page_2...), but the “plain English” version is occasionally genuinely useful, and overall I find it valuable. Most of the time (at least after you get the hang of the language, if you haven't read anything from that period before) you'll be reading just the original, but having the “translation” right there can help.
Covid 19 is 0.4% and really that is heavily skewed by those over the age of 70 and especially 80.
Covid 19, while enormously disruptive due to its infectiousness and tendency to put a big chunk of people in hospital, doesn't even begin to compare to what the plague did. Not far off of half of western Europe died. It was unimaginably catastrophic.
It's pertinent because people are not learning the biggest lesson of covid - this was nothing but a trial run for a serious pandemic. Bird flus can get up to the 40% mark or more and without the age variation.
The reality is if a black death like disease hit the modern world civilisation would likely more or less totally collapse.
The fact people are so incredibly lackadaisical about the origins of and behaviour around the outbreak not to mention any future efforts to at least reduce the odds of another novel virus pandemic seriously scares me.
We may have a disease that'll be just as lethal, but this time nearly everyone in the world knows the basics about diseases. The global response to COVID hasn't been particularly heartening, but I think that's because it's in that "sweet spot" (more like sour spot...) range where the fatality rate is low enough that many people are not sufficiently cautious and allow it to spread widely, but high enough that it does kill a lot of people.
If we someday have a much more serious disease, like with a black death fatality rate of 30%, I think it's likely to disappear very quickly unless it has an extremely long contagious incubation period. It might to do some serious damage at ground zero, but people will freak out and hide at home if a huge, visible percentage of people die. And this time, (I hope) people won't be running around pointing fingers and spreading the disease in the process.
But what we also have today, to mitigate the bonus of medicine and hygiene, is fast global travel and very, very crowded cities, compared to the medieval times.
So a highly infectious and deadly disease, we can not treat with antibiotics, would still fuck us up pretty bad.
So I agree, covid was a good trial run for a real epidemic.
Why do believe that? It didn't collapse medieval European civilization.
I mean, mankind would probably soldier on, but civilization would take quite a hit.
Ehhh, depends what you mean by "like". The bubonic plague itself is not rare today; it is more or less expected in wild armadillos, for example. But it is not the calamitous disease to us that it was to medieval Europeans. Modern whites have seen a certain amount of selection for resistance to the plague.
> Why do believe that? It didn't collapse medieval European civilization.
On the other hand, I can't support this. The plague very much did collapse medieval European civilization; the accepted structure of society completely disintegrated. Wages for poor laborers skyrocketed. Panicked nobility passed new laws forbidding peasants from leaving the land they worked, and the peasants ignored them. The total loss of so much of the labor force meant that those who survived were much richer -- wheat fields didn't suffer from the plague! -- and radical adjustments to society followed quickly.
The nobility still remained the nobility for centuries afterward. The church retained most of its power for another century, until the reformation. Standards of living declined for some time but not that long. A collapse (to me) would have been rather more drastic.
For example, look at how we have handled Ebola outbreaks - despite it being incredibly infectious and deadly, we've never had an outbreak kill even a fraction of the number COVID has.
Wonder if there is a 'good' novel on those days?
Rather than a novel, it is a collection of 100 short stories of people during the plague. Enjoyable to this day.
Except that we have way better mitigation tools like medicine/hygiene compared to middle-ages. It's not a one variable comparison.