King Lear [antikvár]

In spite of Charles Lamb's notorious pronouncement that Shakespeare's tragedies, and especially King Lear, could not be acted,1 the proper place for the play is not the study or the classroom, but the theatre. Lamb, indeed, had been irritated by the fact that Garrick's admirers had placed him beside Shakespeare; but it is not always realized that Lamb had never seen Shakespeare's play performed but only Nahum Tate's adaptation of it, which held the stage for a century and a half and was banished only after Lamb's death. Tate omitted the Fool; and at the end Lear is restored to the throne and Cordelia is married to Edgar, whom she had loved all along. There is, however, an element of truth in Lamb's argument. Many productions, it must be admitted, are disappointing: So to see Lear acted - to see an old man tottering about the stage with a walking- stick, turned out of doors by his daughters in a rainy night, has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting. We want to take him into shelter and relieve him. That is all the feeling which the acting of Lear ever produced in me. But the Lear of Shakespeare cannot be acted. The contemptible machinery by which they mimic the storm which he goes out in, is not more inadequate to represent the horrors of the real elements, than any actor can be to represent Lear The greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension, but in intellectual: the explosions of his passion are terrible as a volcano; they are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that sea, his mind, with all its vast riches. In the Commentary on Act III (p. 76), we shall see that it is possible to perform the storm-scenes without betraying the poetic conception. The 'contemptible machinery' of which Lamb speaks has been transformed by the invention of electric light and by the revolution in staging brought about by the scrapping of representational scenery. There are still a few directors who vulgarize the play by attempting to be naturalistic or too clever by half, but anyone who has seen Gielgud, Olivier, Redgrave and three or four other Lears will know that a stage performance can be profoundly satisfying, and need not send us away feeling that the secret performance in our mind was more in tune with Shakespeare's conception of the play. It is necessary to read the play to understand it fully; but it is equally necessary to see the play performed, if possible in a live performance in the theatre. If none is immediately available, one has to make do with