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The Performance of Madness in King Lear

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The Performance of Madness in King Lear THE PERFORMANCE OF MADNESS IN KING LEAR BY RONALD J. BOLING A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 1988 [UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA LIBRARIES . To the Memory of my Mother, Sara Jane Stanley 1933-1984 The Lord watch between me and thee When we are absent one from another. Amen ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to thank Professor Daniel Cottom for reading an early manuscript and offering me helpful suggestions about it. I wish also to extend my thanks to Professor David Leverenz for his efforts in helping steer me through the qualifying examinations with an enthusiasm for my work which I found contagious. And to Professor John Sommerville I am grateful for his bibliographic assistance and for his subtle influence which helped temper my early uncontrolled Foucauldian raving. I have always held my dissertation committee in the greatest esteem and affection. It has been a real pleasure working with them, and their warm reception of my ideas has immeasurably strengthened my confidence as a fledgling scholar. Professor Norman Holland has regularly offered practical and incisive suggestions based on a panoramic view of the scholarly profession which continues to astonish me. Immersed in projects as he always is, his prompt and careful reading of manuscript material has been impressive as well as helpful. I find his enthusiastic endorsement of my work, quite simply, exhilarating. Professor Robert Thomson has been intrigued with my project since its inception and has continually engaged me in its details. He has been extremely generous in furnishing me with materials and, more importantly, with ideas and feedback which have both stimulated and refined my thinking. His extensive knowledge of the folk culture of the period has proven invaluable to a project such as mine, and the influence of his anthropological critical approach will be evident throughout the study. Professor Ira Clark has helped me more than anyone in bringing order out of chaos. If the rhetoric, for better and worse, is unmistakeably my own, any coherence which the presentation possesses is largely the result of his penetrating analysis of whatever it is that I am doing; any disorder which remains is assuredly my own. I feel moved to reveal here in public a very private sentiment, that Ira Clark is, outside my family, one of the two or three most important role models whom I have determined (and I hope have already begun) to imitate. Professor Sidney Homan is the inspiration for this whole project, the one who ignited my zeal for Shakespeare, for metadramatic and performance criticism, for role-playing and persona-adopting, for the philosophy of theatricality. He has taught me more than anyone I know about my own teaching, about theatr icizing the classroom experience, about following Shakespeare in the classroom as well as in the study. And I cannot imagine a more encouraging or nurturing dissertation director than Sid Homan. He has always believed in me more than I do myself IV and has constantly been a healthy stimulus and a seasoned guide to pull me off the shoals of maudlin diffidence. In his profound but unpretentious knowledge of Shakespeare, in his humane theatricalizing of the academic life, in his matchless energy and graciousness, there is and always will be only one Sid Homan. Finally, I wish to thank my family and my friends for humoring my obsessive scholarly behavior and for providing me love and encouragement. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii ABSTRACT vii INTRODUCTION 1 NOTES 13 CHAPTER 1: MADNESS PERFORMED 16 NOTES 88 CHAPTER 2: FOLLY IN MADNESS 90 Fathers and Sons: Ritual and Metadrama 90 An Obedient Father 108 Lear's Resumption of Shape 122 NOTES 212 CONCLUSION 213 NOTES 234 BIBLIOGRAPHY 235 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 250 Vi Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy THE PERFORMANCE OF MADNESS IN KING LEAR By RONALD J. BOLING August, 1988 Chairman: Sidney R. Homan Major Department: English The mad scenes in King Lear comprise for Shakespeare a dramatic opportunity to produce extending and evolving spectacle which creates continual interpretive crises for the characters onstage as well as for the audience. This study examines the mad scenes in terms of the construction of verbal/visual spectacle and the concomitant hermeneutic struggle waged both onstage and off; it highlights the characters' appropriation of roles and performative personae, especially those of madness and folly; and it describes the play's exploitation of the tension between mimesis and metadrama. The analysis proceeds by the reconstructing of a theoretical performance which emphasizes a semiotics of stage emblems. The introduction "places" the study amongst other performance and metadramatic approaches to the play. Chapter 1 explicates Poor Tom's tour de force performance of madness in 3.4, with emphasis upon the warping of formal vi i representative modes to def amiliarize the figure. Chapter 2 analyzes the 4.6 scene, commencing with a discussion of the ritual and performative relationship between Edgar and Gloucester. It then provides a detailed account of Lear's appropriation of the performative modes of madness and folly in his own search for a strategically favorable role to assume. The conclusion describes the relationship between Lear and Cordelia late in the play primarily as a struggle to determine the genre of the play itself. It outlines Lear's metadramatic attempts to fabricate the miracle which will alter the nature of the play. vii i INTRODUCTION This study provides what I hope will be useful ground- work for approaching the larger problem of theatrical representations of madness on the English Renaissance stage. Its theoretical aims are modest, since it offers a detailed scenic explication following the general procedures of performance and emblem criticism, but its topic is challenging--the two lengthiest mad scenes in King Lear , the 3.4 scene which features Poor Tom's tour de force perform- ance, and the 4.6 scene, Lear's solo mad performance. These scenes are arduous to read or even to follow in a live or filmed production. However, I am assuming that the mature Shakespeare would not be content to portray madness as mere gibberish, but would both exploit its latent spectacle and fashion it for artistic ends. I shall engage in a detailed scenic examination which explores the composition of stage tableaux, the donning by characters of multiple personae for immediate performative ends, the use of props, gestures, and stage movement, and the exploiting of the tensions between mimetic and self-reflexive theater. Props and acting gestures and movement are to performance criticism what poetic imagery is to New Criticism--a fundamental source of argumentative evidence, the "existence" of which is rarely challenged. I assume I need not explain or justify my use of 1 2 such evidence. But these other considerations, stage tableaux or emblems, assumed personae and roles, and mimetic and metadramatic theater, might require clarification and hence merit a brief discussion before we turn to the exeget- ical body of this essay. When Ann Pasternak Slater shows how Cleopatra thoroughly subverts prior hyperbolic poetic descriptions of her by the "palpable stage fact" of a violent gesture, she is arguing that the imagery of stage action can easily be more powerful 1 in its effects than verbal imagery which is only declaimed. When she argues that a vital topic in studying Shakespearean drama is "the emblematic significance of much of Shakespeare's stage action, and its crucial relationship to 2 his verbal imagery," she is placing herself in a critical tradition which David Bevington observes is "now firmlv 3 established," and which he traces from its inception in the 1950's, when it constituted a reaction against the New Critical privileging of poetic imagery over stage images, up to the early 1980 's, when it could claim a burgeoning number of proponents. Slater is bolder in her claim that "in so far as stage action is concerned, the author's intentions are clear enough, though their further interpretation is another 4 . matter " In an era when critics shy away from appealing to the authority of authorial intent, such a claim (over the objections of textual critics) provides powerful justifica- tion for the kind of study she proposes. But Slater makes 3 another claim which is even more remarkable and provocative: "Shakespeare thinks in images, but their form depends on the 5 moment." If she is right, her claim would ultimately support a semiotic, frame by frame analysis in which the verbal is but one among many communicative codes. For the purposes of the present study it provides a rationale for meticulously explicating certain scenes of King Lear in terms of the sequence of stage tableaux and verbal/visual emblems with which its ongoing spectacle is "constructed." David Bevington, while acknowledging that "the universal language of emblems appeared in mottoes, coats of arms, mummings, street pageants, morality plays, Lord Mayor's 6 shows, and sermons," judiciously cautions us not to take emblematic and iconographic readings to an extreme. He offers an assessment of the playwrights' perception of their own craft which is entirely contrary to the "thinking in images" assertion of Ann Slater: "Elizabethan dramatists [speak] of their art as chiefly verbal, acceding to the view of Aristotle's Poetics that spectacle in drama is inferior to 7 character and plot." If the dramatists plunder the icons and emblems available to them, they none the less insist upon differentiating their drama from the merely "symbolic and stereotypical" emblematic devices used in public pageantry and from the "visual sententiousness" of the staging devices of their immediate Tudor theatrical 8 heritage.
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