King Lear : Classical and Early Modern Intersections

Skenè Studies I • 2 Oedipus at Colonus and King Lear : Classical and Early Modern Intersections Edited by Silvia Bigliazzi Σ S K E N È Theatre and Drama Studies Executive Editor Guido Avezzù. General Editors Guido Avezzù, Silvia Bigliazzi. Editorial Board Simona Brunetti, Francesco Lupi, Nicola Pasqualicchio, Susan Payne, Gherardo Ugolini. Managing Editors Bianca Del Villano, Savina Stevanato. Assistant Managing Valentina Adami, Emanuel Stelzer, Roberta Zanoni. Editors Editorial Staff Chiara Battisti, Giuseppe Capalbo, Francesco Dall’Olio, Marco Duranti, Sidia Fiorato, Antonietta Provenza. Advisory Board Anna Maria Belardinelli, Anton Bierl, Enoch Brater, Jean-Christophe Cavallin, Rosy Colombo, Claudia Corti, Marco De Marinis, Tobias Döring, Pavel Drábek, Paul Edmondson, Keir Douglas Elam, Ewan Fernie, Patrick Finglass, Enrico Giaccherini, Mark Griffith, Stephen Halliwell, Robert Henke, Pierre Judet de la Combe, Eric Nicholson, Guido Paduano, Franco Perrelli, Didier Plassard, Donna Shalev, Susanne Wofford. Supplement to SKENÈ. Journal of Theatre and Drama Studies Copyright © 2019 S K E N È All rights reserved. ISSN 2464-9295 ISBN 979-12-200-6185-8 No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission from the publisher. SKENÈ Theatre and Drama Studies https://textsandstudies.skeneproject.it/index.php/TS [email protected] Dir. Resp. (aut. Trib. di Verona): Guido Avezzù P.O. Box 149 c/o Mail Boxes Etc. (MBE150) – Viale Col. Galliano, 51, 37138 Contents Silvia Bigliazzi Introduction 9 Part 1 – Being Classical 1. Stephen Orgel How to Be Classical 33 2. Carlo Maria Bajetta Elizabeth I and Sir Walter Ralegh’s Classics: The Case of Sophocles 61 Part 2 – Oedipus 3. Laura Slatkin Revisiting Oedipus at Colonus 89 4. Gherardo Ugolini A Wise and Irascible Hero: Oedipus from Thebes to Colonus 101 5. Guido Avezzù Some Notes on Oedipus and Time 119 6. Francesco Lupi Liminality, (In)accessibility, and Negative Characterization in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus 147 7. Anton Bierl Oedipus at Colonus as a Reflection of theOresteia : The Abomination from Thebes as an Athenian Hero in the Making 165 Part 3 – Oedipus and Lear 8. Robert S. Miola Lost and Found in Translation: Early Modern Receptions of Oedipus at Colonus 203 9. Sheila Murnaghan “More sinned against than sinning": Acting and Suffering inOedipus at Colonus and King Lear 227 10. Seth L. Schein Fathers Cursing Children: Anger and Justice in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus and Shakespeare’s King Lear 247 11. Anna Beltrametti Oedipus’ εἴδωλον, “Lear’s shadow” (OC 110, King Lear 1.4.222) 265 12. Silvia Bigliazzi Time and Nothingness: King Lear 291 13. David Lucking ‘More than two tens to a score’: Disquantification inKing Lear 317 Part 4 – Revisiting Oedipus and Lear 14. Nicola Pasqualicchio Happy Endings for Old Kings: Jean-François Ducis’ Œdipe and Léar 341 15. Barry A. Spence Shades of King Lear in Beckett’s Theatre and Late Work 367 16. Tamas Dobozy Sam Shepard’s ‘Body’ of Tragedy: A Particle of Dread (Oedipus Variations) 403 17. Eric Nicholson and Avra Sidiropoulou Opening up Discoveries through Promised Endings: An Experimental Work in Progress on Oedipus at Colonus and King Lear 413 The Authors 433 Index 443 11 Oedipus’ εἴδωλον, “Lear’s shadow” (Oedipus at Colonus 110, King Lear 1.4.222) Anna Beltrametti Abstract The essay analyses the principle correspondences between the themes of Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus and Shakespeare’s King Lear. The double plot of the Shakespearean tragedy reworks and expands Sophocles’ interwoven themes of sovereignty and paternity which simultaneously contaminate both the bonds of kinship and power relationships. Resorting to poetic retrieval or quotation, or to more elusive recollection – exclusion-vagrancy-resilience; blindness-madness; endurance-(re)action; dynastic and generation- al conflict – the possibility emerges thatKing Lear, though its per- spective is of course Elizabethan, takes up certain of the main ide- as behind Sophocles’ Theban plays, but with the specific intention of assuming and dramatizing the space-time of liminality and of the transformation of the aged king. This space-time, only presumed and never confronted by the surviving Sophoclean tragedies that fall between the end of Oedipus Rex and the beginning of Oedipus at Colonus, is the space-time of knowledge and consciousness that re-elaborates the shame and repudiates the guilt constantly evoked by the aged Oedipus, by now an anachronism to himself and about to undergo the miraculous consecration of his death. Keywords: Sovereignty; paternity; kinship; political compromise; fall; resilience; liminality 1. Sources, Models, Echoes Shakespearian criticism has accurately identified the sources of King Lear, a play whose title and main plot recalls the story of the aged king Leir and his three daughters, which has existed in var- 266 Anna Beltrametti ious forms since the twelfth century. It first appears in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historiae Regum Britanniae, and continues with variations until the publication of the anonymous play The True Chronicle Historie of King Leir in 1605, which is considered to be Shakespeare’s most immediate and direct source. In the same way, in Philip Sidney’s courtly and pastoral romance Arcadia, published in 1590, the main themes of the story of old Gloucester and his two sons are to be found (Melchiori 1989: xxxvii-xli). Parallel to this, textual analysis has discovered in the complex weaving of trag- ic dramaturgy the persistent presence of the language, techniques and clichés typical of popular theatre (Weimann 1988: 349ff. and 397). The origin of the dramatized stories in the Matter of Britain, in history, chronicles, legends and their more recent rewritten ver- sions, placed Shakespeare’s tragedy on Lear in direct continui- ty with its public’s shared knowledge and collective imaginary – de te fabula agitur. The incorporation of mimetic and expres- sive forms of dramatic tradition still very much alive at the time, from mimes to Moralities, satisfied customary expectations of en- joyment, guaranteed interaction between stage and spectator and aided the transmission of the new play’s more powerful and more complex quality. The Matter of Britain and the traditional techniques, which ensured that the tragedy of Lear complied with the most long- standing conventions of public taste, nonetheless seemed in the last analysis destined more to surprise and dismay than to satis- fy. King Lear is unanimously recognized as the most complex of Shakespeare’s tragedies, with its double plot structure from the formal point of view, its intricate selection and arrangement of subject matter from that of content (Melchiori 1989: xlix), and, fur- thermore, as the “greatest and most polyphonic” (Serpieri 2018). Right from the beginning of the first act, native sources and models fade into the background and become an integral part of the play. The sophisticated structure, where the sub-plot runs parallel to and often intersects the main plot may be considered as an advanced version of the multiple plot so often utilized by Shakespeare in the comedies. Nevertheless, the range of themes, developed with a great wealth of motifs and dynamics, bring to “WeOedipus’ were ῾eidolon᾽, there too”: “Lear’s Philosophers shadow” in the Theatre 267 mind those works of classical antiquity which Renaissance hu- manism had helped to disseminate.1 It is Sophocles, more than Aeschylus or Euripides whose shadow may be discerned behind the double plot of King Lear, and in particular the Sophocles of the three Theban plays. In these, Antigone, the oldest one, written without any doubt in 442, and Oedipus at Colonus written in 406/405, with Oedipus Rex some- where in the middle, probably belonging to the post-Periclean pe- riod 430-425 (Beltrametti 2012), Sophocles had come back again and again to working almost obsessively on the grandiose theme of regal and paternalistic sovereignty, twisted within the vicious circles of blood relationships and political covenants, the same theme of corruption which runs through both plot and sub-plot of King Lear. In the first tragedy, Antigone, composed in the most affluent years of Pericles’ democracy, Sophocles had staged the harshness and trouble of the beginning of Creon’s reign, found- ed on a political compromise (161-210) and obstructed by a tena- cious resistance on the part of the aristocracy, which was generat- ed by loyalty to the bonds of blood and kinship. With Oedipus Rex, he had created the tragedy par excellence of personal power, with its cargo of crimes of deadly transgression and life-threatening vi- olence dealt to one another by blood relations with the purpose of maintaining or gaining sovereignty. With the posthumous Oedipus at Colonus, he had returned to the figure of the aged king, exhaust- ed and destitute, but whose deeds are nevertheless once more ab- solute in their capacity not only to curse his male heirs, who are struggling against one another for the throne, but also to offer his devastated body as a promise and a gift of salvation for the city of Athens for not rejecting him, that city which had first and most drastically of all the others abolished the monarchy and de- monized the king into a tyrant. Shakespeare’s old, crazed, vagabond king, lost on the tem- pest-torn heath after dividing his kingdom between two of his three daughters inevitably evokes the aged Oedipus, ravaged, beg- gared and blind, at Colonus. Both of them are all that remains of 1 On the close relationship between the humanists, classical antiquity and Tudor politics, see Weimann 1988: 284-90. 268 Anna Beltrametti kings who have abdicated their power, and in this way have un- leashed a savage civil war between their sons or daughters, and thus the turmoil of dynastic crisis. But the double plot of Lear seems at many points of its dramatic resolution to echo Antigone.

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